...fear not! Dissertation proposal due this weekend, plus an outline for my major end-of-the-term paper due next week. And that's without mentioning the piles of books I still need to read for both. The enjoyable part is that I got to spend most of today reading Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland (yes, for one of the aforementioned classes); I truly admire her style and always enjoy reading her prose, so it's a treat to get to do that for "assigned" schoolwork. Toni Morrison's Beloved is up next, and is also a book I've always held in high regard. I'm hoping to start it tonight, and the next few days will likely involve some combination of sitting in libraries, drinking tea, and trying to crank out some actual academic writing for the first time since I graduated from Stanford.
And just in time to flex those writing muscles, too, since I've also got to start thinking about which academic program I want to do next year, since I'm currently enrolled in a one-year MSt -- yikes! It seems like I've just arrived, but one can never stop thinking one step ahead for those kinds of things. Options currently include a DPhil in English or a second MSt degree in a different subject, but my thoughts on this issue change from day to day (sometimes from hour to hour) and I'll need to sit myself down and do some soul-searching about what I want to do. More on that later.
More to follow in a future post, too, about the structure of classes here (and their differences from in the US/at Stanford), but it's buckle-down time in Oxford. This eight-week term does get ridiculously short at times, and the time crunch is looming now that it's week five... gogogogogogo.
Never doubted why you were there and the great things you were going to do! It is fun to live vicariously through your experiences.
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