you've got to breathe - in and out
I have packed approximately half the stuff I'm taking and regardless of the ditherings about the course I really need to post this:
Oh My God. In eight days - probably, to be more exact, seven days and seventeen hours - I will be in Oxford. As a student. In a lovely old college with creaking doors and forgotten history, where the portraits on the walls in hall are by people mostly forgotten except for in this tiny nook of the world. I will have access to the Bodelian library and will be around the corner from Blackwells. The place will be full of that magic of learning which you sometimes glimpse here but then lose. People will actually want to learn for the love of it, and not just to get a job in some far-distant future. I'll be able to join the OU (in itself worth another paragraph of squeeing - you get to question THESE PEOPLE on your own level?!!) which I've wanted to go to since I was seven and have drunken conversations about Plato and superstring theory and God. I'll be able to go down the road to the Botanical Gardens and pretend I'm Lyra and maybe run into Phillip Pullman/Richard Dawkins/Roger Penrose in the street or at least see them and go all fangirlish... Serious extracurriculars, fundraising before summers of working in Africa and South America and politically related places like the Adam Smith Institute. EEEEEEEE.
It's funny to see what you were interested in when you were fourteen. Logging into old Y! Groups accounts is very revealing indeed.
Oh My God. In eight days - probably, to be more exact, seven days and seventeen hours - I will be in Oxford. As a student. In a lovely old college with creaking doors and forgotten history, where the portraits on the walls in hall are by people mostly forgotten except for in this tiny nook of the world. I will have access to the Bodelian library and will be around the corner from Blackwells. The place will be full of that magic of learning which you sometimes glimpse here but then lose. People will actually want to learn for the love of it, and not just to get a job in some far-distant future. I'll be able to join the OU (in itself worth another paragraph of squeeing - you get to question THESE PEOPLE on your own level?!!) which I've wanted to go to since I was seven and have drunken conversations about Plato and superstring theory and God. I'll be able to go down the road to the Botanical Gardens and pretend I'm Lyra and maybe run into Phillip Pullman/Richard Dawkins/Roger Penrose in the street or at least see them and go all fangirlish... Serious extracurriculars, fundraising before summers of working in Africa and South America and politically related places like the Adam Smith Institute. EEEEEEEE.
It's funny to see what you were interested in when you were fourteen. Logging into old Y! Groups accounts is very revealing indeed.