Hi! I've started a blog

I've decided to start a blog. It'll be a journal of the feelings that I have, observations that I make, and experiences I've experienced. I feel this is particularly important since I'm in a foreign country, and my experiences will be new and different from anything I've previously experienced. I hope you're looking forward to the journey as much as I am. Or should I say experience.

Oxford is an extraordinarily old place, and I think if I were to choose anywhere in the world that's different in virtually every respect from my country, yet still speaks my language, it's here. Other than the fact that they all watch 24 and drink Coke, there's really not many similarities. I have sat in chairs that are older than my country. I have seen people walking down Broad street in flowing black robes on a windy day, looking for all the world like big, black flying squirells. I have been in buildings where the buttresses not only buttress, but fly, in addition to their buttressing. It's weird.

One interesting surprise has been the candy. I'm consistently surprised by it. The other day I tried a Twirl bar, which is a bar of flakey, dry chocolate, almost like little wittled chocolate shavings rolled up and smushed together. This all then covered with another layer of regular milk chocolate. The only real way of describing this is like a big, violent chocolate explosion inside your unsuspecting mouth. And I don't mean that in a positive, fun kind of way, like how an "ice-breaker" is a burst of cool freshness or something like that. Imagine the actual mechanics of chocolate exploding in your mouth. Imagine your jaw hanging by a single hinge. Imagine feeling some hot, gooey substance running down your neck, thinking its blood, only to discover its gobs and gobs of rich, hot, liquidy milk chocolate. Imagine it flowing into your sinuses and coming out your nose. Imagine crying chocolate. That's what eating a Twirl bar is like.

The classes here are structured in an odd way. At Skidmore (and, I think, at most American colleges), you have about four to six subjects that you take each term, meeting two to three times a week, for an hour to an hour and a half, in a discussion/lecture style period with twenty or so other students. Here you have two subjects, each meeting for an hour once a week, where you're expected to read anywhere from five (me) to ten (other Oxford students) books per subject. For each tutorial you're expected to write an essay anywhere from 2000 to 3000 words (about seven to ten pages double-spaced).

It's very work intensive, very self-motivating, and also very isolating. Without living with the other students, and kind of being dropped into things at the middle of the year, I'm having trouble getting to know British kids. I've started trying to integrate myself, though. I'm in a play called "Infernal Machine" by Jean Cocteau, which is a re-imagining of Oedipus Rex. I'm Oedipus. Yeah, crazy, right? This is gonna be my first lead in college, and it's gonna be in a foreign country where none of my friends or family can see it.

I think I might have been miscast, though. I got a direction the other day that disconcerted me. The director asked me if I'd ever seen the movie Gladiator. I told her yes. She said "Think of Oedipus like Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Try and do it like that." Now when I look in the mirror I see many things, but none of them even remotely resemble Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Gawky teenager, perhaps. Sensitive intellectual. Indie-rock star, on my better days. But a muscle-bound Epic Hero I am not and, unless I hit the gym with extraordinary frequency, will never be. I'll do my best, but somehow I think this production isn't going to exactly work.