a belated merry christmas from cornwall

As is hopefully obvious to everyone by now, I made it back to London safe and sound about a week ago. The plane landed at Gatwick at 12:15am or so, my friend Kirsty (kindly) met me at the train station at 1:30, and we finally hit the sack a little before 3am. I spent three days with Kirsty and her family and it was great. Maybe it’s proof that I’m not ready to be a grown-up yet, but I always feel so relieved when I get to stay with families, and especially ones as welcoming and generous as the Borthwicks and Farnhams. Sure, I could manage on my own, but there’s nothing like having a real live mommy take you in, cook you dinner, do your laundry, and send you adventuring for the day with her Oyster card. I was (and am) immensely grateful.

For two of those three days I barely made it out of my PJs, but on one of them– the only sunny one this week, in fact– Kirsty and I went into central London to explore. Mostly that meant a lot of walking around, which seems to be my default travel activity. I thoroughly enjoyed it. On Christmas Eve I made my way to Heathrow to rendezvous with the Farnhams, who were there to pick up Kezia after her flight back from Kansas City. A few hours’ drive and a grocery store stop later, we made it home to Polzeath, and I haven’t budged since. We’ve been celebrating Christmas (of course), playing games, watching movies, and eating loads of chocolate. They’ve basically adopted me as one of their own for the week, and it’s been wonderful!

Most everyone is out shopping this afternoon, so I’m attempting to catch up on life and maybe write a post or two about Israel (but not making any promises! we’ll see what happens).

the beginning of travels

The posts on Michaelmas are coming, but it didn’t seem to right to skip over the fun things I’m doing at the moment– namely, wandering around the Old City in Jerusalem to my heart’s content. I’ve only been here for six hours, give or take a little, but most of it has been spent meandering, and it’s been awesome. I’m realizing, though, that I know remarkably little about what’s actually in the Old City or how it came to be there (apart from the Haram, thank you Dr. Armstrong). I stumbled into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre just as evening prayers were starting, and if I’m not mistaken, there were three or maybe four different groups all doing different liturgies at roughly the same time. Didn’t exactly know what to make of that, but I think I’d rather experience first and read later. So that’s the plan for this evening: retrace my steps on a map, read up on the places I’ve been, blog, work on photos, plan more, Skype with the fam, all that good stuff.

The journey from England was relatively painless, with the exception of screaming children on the airplane, long waits, and dehydration. I left my flat in Oxford at ten till 4am, and by 10:15 had made my (cold, sleepy) way through London to Gatwick Airport. Nice place, but the English don’t seem to believe in public water fountains or electric outlets, so it was an unproductive and thirsty wait. The EasyJet check-in line was enormously long, which is no big deal, but it gave me ample time to eye the luggage sizing bins and watch as person after person ended up having to check their carry-on bags. It was a bit disconcerting, and by the time it was my turn I was almost positive I would be doing the same; I had forgotten to check the dimensions of my pack. Thankfully, it slid right in with plenty of room to spare.

first term down, two to go!

My first term at Oxford ended on a rather weak note.

I cycled into college four minutes before the tutorial was supposed to begin, frazzled and stressed about leaving town that afternoon, and not at all caught up on sleep. I curled up on the staircase to speed-read my essay, but promptly discovered that, for various reasons, I couldn’t access it. After a whole lot of frowning and attempted thinking, I remembered the topic. But unfortunately, my tutor found me there before I had managed to remember the actual prompt. Our meetings usually begin with me giving a two-minute recap of my argument, but as I had no earthly idea at this point what my argument actually was, that obviously didn’t happen. There followed an hour of me incoherently making numerous attempts to salvage a bad argument, based on an essay whose contents I barely remembered. I could give quotes, but that might be taking the embarrassment a bit too far.

It wasn’t my finest moment, to be sure, but– I’m done.

I’m pleased to report, however, that my first break in Europe has gotten off to a great start. I hopped on a bus to London, wandered around for a while trying to find the next bus, and rode it for seven hours to Newquay, a town on the north coast of Cornwall. It sounds like an unappealing thing to do first thing after the end of term, but in reality, sitting for hours doing nothing and saying nothing was just what I needed. Esther and I stayed up until 3am, chatting by candlelight and eating chocolate, and late this morning I woke up to sunshine and ocean! Esther had described the scenery to me plenty of times, but I still kind of freaked out when I pulled back the curtains. Think rolling headlands, beautiful blue sea, rocky islands, a little village of white houses, and a beach just below. Lovely family, lovely view, lovely weekend.

So I’ve been a rather dismal failure at keeping people updated on my life, with perhaps the exception of the photo blog. Rather than promising reform, I’m settling for a series of posts recapping Michaelmas Term. Check back for more over the next week or so!

all-nighters [oxford edition]

I don’t actually have much to say about all-nighters in Oxford, because this is my first one and the night is still young. But it’s the first paper of the school year, and I will inevitably blog about it, because blogging is a wonderful form of procrastination. Two things are apparent, however. 1) I am a little bit obsessed with printing drafts of my work as I go along and editing in stages. But if I work at the flat, the printer is over a mile away, and it’s not free either. 2) So far, America wins on energy drink selection. I’m currently drinking this, and it’s only mildly better than Red Bull (ie, still kind of gross).

That’s all for now. I only get 64 mg of caffeine out of this guy, and I need to make it worthwhile.

first post from Oxford!

I didn’t buy an adapter before I came, and have somehow managed to forget it every day since I got here. My ever-dying battery has been the excuse for not writing, but really, it’s time.

There isn’t much to be said about the traveling. It was easy and uneventful, and on the flight over I found myself seated next to a fellow Oxford-bound American student. That was nice. The exhaustion hit all at once on the bus from London, and despite my best efforts I slept for two hours in the afternoon. I don’t remember the name of anyone I met that day; I received my Bod card (library card/all-things-university card) and promptly left it in the IT office in college. Embarrassing. But I made it through that day without epically failing at anything else, and had virtually no jet lag afterward, so it all worked out.

The days since then have been full of wandering all about the city, meeting up with friends and making new ones, and sorting out all the logistics of Oxford– there are many. Oxford is beautiful. You walk and walk and walk and expect the architecture to revert to normal at some point, but it doesn’t (not that I’ve seen). And the weather has been gorgeous, so I’m sure that’s helped with the general impression. Everyone is eager to tell us that this has been the nicest stretch of sunshine and warmth since March, and that it will soon become wet and cold and nasty, and that the sun will set at 4:30.

Oh well, it will be easier to write papers that way anyway.

In other news, there are pictures on the photo blog! Not anything spectacular, just bits and pieces of everyday life here. I’m expecting to update that one more frequently and this one less so. It’s so much easier for me to take a decent picture and write a paragraph photo caption than to be an entertaining blogger. Plus it’s always more fun with something visual.

Check it out here.

on packing

I love packing, usually.

Spontaneity and surprises are nice, but half the fun for me is the anticipation. Packing for a trip is an excuse to anticipate all sorts of things, while figuring out how to fit x stuff into x space in a way that is convenient, efficient, etc. A delightful little puzzle, it is. And for this particular journey, I get to factor in money, too (ditch the shampoo in favor of an extra bottle of Clear Care contact lens solution, that sort of thing).

I loaded up my bigger piece of luggage just beautifully. I’m pretty sure there was zero air inside. I even sat on it a couple times. And it worked; everything fit.

The most compactly packed suitcase ever

But I forgot to factor in weight, and it turned out to be a beastly sixty-six pounds. No good. So last night I set out to pack the rest of my stuff, like toothpaste and towels and school supplies, in the smaller red suitcase (courtesy of Maggie. Thanks Mags!), and also to get the big one down to fifty pounds. The latter task involved removing all my shoes, jackets/coat, and several clothing items. The pile of stuff for the red suitcase was big enough already; now it was huge. One look at it and I was stressed out and not at all excited to be packing.

t-minus three weeks

I should start taping a Post-it note to my forehead that says, “I leave on the 29th.” Really, I should. It would save people so much trouble. The answer to the next question, though, wouldn’t fit on a Post-it, and I feel like I could give a different answer every time.

“What are you most excited about?”

First of all, school. Just being in school again will be wonderful. It will have been five months by the time our first term begins! I’m excited about getting my tail kicked, and learning a lot, and reading lots of books that smell good. And I’ll be studying topics that are interesting and important, topics that brought me to school to begin with (if indeed I can get the tutorials I requested. let’s hope that’s the case). Potential subjects: Middle Eastern Politics, War Ethics, Christian Moral Reasoning, Theory of Politics, Philosophy of Education, C.S. Lewis, others that I can’t remember right now.

But if you catch me on a day when I’ve been daydreaming about traveling, I might say that I’m most excited about our two five-week breaks. Of course, funding it will be… interesting… but we’re drawing up tentative itineraries nonetheless. I’m planning on jumping into the world of CouchSurfing, and hoping to be able to stay in a monastery over Christmas (wouldn’t that be SO COOL?!). Potential locations: Israel, Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Scotland.

the day after

Most of my Google hits come from searches for how to survive the day after an all-nighter. Apparently people are crazy enough to do these things all through the summer as well as during the school year.

Don’t feel bad, I did it am doing it too.

So how do you make it through the day after? For me, it comes down to three things: 1) stay busy, 2) stay sensitive to caffeine, and 3) get enough sleep on the other nights.

christian zionist views are like a spider’s web

Well, there is a paper before me that I currently do not want to write, so here I am! Why do I not want to write papers, you ask? It generally comes down to one of three things: a) I think the topic is stupid and fluffy, so fluffy that I cannot possibly manufacture anything to say about it. b) I think the topic is quite important, and that I cannot possibly write anything that will do it justice, so why bother? c) I’m lazy, or maybe just tired of working. Tonight it’s somewhere between (b) and (c). This picture, in a more enlarged state, will perhaps illustrate why I feel that I cannot do it justice.

A person could claim that:

- the Abrahamic covenant is still valid and so the land belongs to Israel

- but then turn to Deuteronomy and say that the Jews aren’t actually exercising their God-given right to the land, because they are currently in disobedience

- but then acknowledge that 1948 was a partial fulfillment of prophecy anyway

- but since Israel doesn’t have its biblical borders yet, there’s no reason they can’t give up land

- and then make some scary claims about what the Palestinians actually want to do to Israel

- but then assert that Israel has a moral obligation to seek peace even with people who probably want to destroy them

- but then turn around and denounce Obama’s current policy because America is pressuring Israel to do something it doesn’t really want to do, and we shouldn’t do that.

And this hypothetical person is actually not contradicting himself. Nor does his logic address all the possible considerations that Christian Zionists can take into account. It’s all just very complex, kind of like a spider’s web (minus the spider) that has about a thousand possible paths to the middle. And my job in this paper is to explain the web. It’s a little daunting.

[Also, if the web analogy was lost on you, don't feel bad. My professor didn't really go for it either. Just know that Christian Zionism is way more complex than people give it credit for, and I don't want to write about it right now.]

halfway

I think the reason I haven’t blogged in the past five months is because I just haven’t had that much schoolwork. And as we all know, I have to reach a certain level of overwhelmed-ness before I bail on it all and decide to blog instead. Don’t get me wrong– I’ve still pulled all-nighters and spent my share of Friday evenings in White Science Center. But I’ve usually had at least one whole day a week with no homework, and also (with the exception of three weeks of Israel-Palestine negotiations practicum) gotten about eight hours of sleep a night. That, my friends, will probably never happen again as long as I’m in school.

Two weeks left and I’ll be halfway done with college. Oddly, I’m not freaking out about how quickly the time has passed. The England preparation has reached the point where we are actually doing things (immunizations, passport, looking at plane tickets, choosing tutorials (!!!) and oh so much paperwork), and I just feel ready to move on with it. Sure, I love Jewell, but a year away sounds fantastic.