116 days

Since I last wrote. Apologies. What do I have to show for those days? A few photos, (see below), some great memories and 12 assignments (well, 11 essays and 1 presentation to be precise. And I've written another essay since I've been home this vacation...that's another story!). In addition to a Neon yellow vest (for dressing as a Bumblebee) and what feels like about 10 hours sleep (across the entire 8 weeks)...

Not that I can talk now, it's the middle of the night here, and rather than genuinely get a good night's sleep, I'm updating this blog. Why? Because in the long term I'll be thankful, even if right now I'm stumbling in the half-light (don't want to wake the rest of the house up by turning on my bedroom light, which is non-energy efficient and the equivalent of a mini solar-flare) and trying to remember what I've just written, so that I don't repeat myself.

Actually, this is quite a good frame of mind to be in, I've decided. Good in the sense that this is an accurate representation of how I feel 99% of the time I'm at university. For 1% of the time, I function like a normal teenager/ student, I eat, sleep and socialise. For other 99%, I am an Oxford student. I work whilst other people sleep, I study whilst they daydream (well, I attempt to, is the point) and I (often accidentally) laugh at anyone who tells me they've done less than an essay a week (usually people I know at other universities...I don't mean to, I'm just so tired).

So last term. Went by so quickly (much quicker than the first term!) that I can already hardly remember it (this is promising for my exams...) but I found it less overwhelming and so more enjoyable. Like I was ready for the flood of work (though it still came) and I was better at locating myself (though I still took time to get lost in the architecture...you can tell I'm back in my hometown!)

It's going to be weird going back and seeing the college in a different season completely. When I left it had been snowing, and looked like the middle of winter. My life's like that though, all these snapshots in different places, different times. Seeing as I'm at home approximately 50% of the time and at university 50% of the time, I get this strange, disorientated sense of having somehow missed things in both my worlds, as though they move slightly out of sync with each other. In reality, fixed places remain the same, like rocks against the tide. It's that's changed, but I just don't feel it, like the fact that currently the earth is spinning and keeping us on it, but I can't feel it, and I doubt you can either.

So, next term. It's a longer and harder term than previously (not sure how I feel about this...) my exams are after term ends too. I have more hours of exams this year than I have for the past 2 years of A-levels. I haven't sat more than 7 hour's worth of exams since GCSE. Now I'll have to sit 12 hours of exams, probably in the timeframe of about a week or two. Fantastic.

As soon as exams end I'm hopefully going away, literally within 2 days, (ok probably 3 days, I don't have a timetable yet but it seems unlikely that even Oxford would put exams on a saturday...but hey, it's Oxford, they do what they want. I've already made travel arrangements, so the exams had best not continue into July!) for six and a half weeks. Basically, seeing as I last wrote 116 days ago, what I'm saying is, it's probably going to be over 116 days until I write again. If I'm busy now, I can only imagine what I'll be like for the duration of next term, and the weeks that follow! In 116 days from today I'll be in the middle of my vacation, and so I shall return to Blogger some time at the end of August! Time flies! A year ago last August I was still waiting for my A2 results!

Scary thought.

PS, I'm now a year older!

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

- Niccolo Machiavelli