The Ball Gown

It’s so windy outside I swear I can feel my third-story bedroom shake with the particularly strong gusts. It’s a low murmur of fierce air, a thrash of rain against the glass. The windows are closed but the draft is enough to ruffle my drawn curtains. If I pull them aside to look out into the night, my breath steams.

I am beginning to understand how stupid I am.

I met with my academic advisor today. We began talking about my primary tutorial—which was too broad to do me any service in the tutorial setting—and he started spouting out other options. He himself is an expert on Beowulf, and admittedly not an expert on Tolkien or Lewis. Despite his lack of expertise, he still listed off the names of tertiary characters from both series that I could barely remember, let alone recall their narrative purpose. It seems that “being an expert” on something in Oxford means something a little bit different than I am used to.

Rather than finding the encounter insulting, I found it invigorating. While they all talk very quickly in very attractive and well-enunciated accents, and while I am extremely intimidated by their blasé depth of knowledge, I am extremely excited to see what I can glean from these people.

On Wednesday, we have a formal dinner with a variety of professors at the “high table” in St. Catherine’s dining hall. Our programme instructor said, casually, “Gentleman, if you do not have a tuxedo, you can rent one from the formal wear store near Gloucester Green.” Unfortunately, I left my ball gown at home, shucks….

Let’s just say I feel enormously under-dressed. I was packing for warmth, not for style. The two “nice” cotton dresses that I brought may do, but I am rather afeared of what everyone else is going to show up in. I anticipate that I will look something of the schmuck.

The other joy: Nicole discovered that from our house to our college—where this dinner is being held and to which I must walk in heels over cobblestone streets and uneven sidewalks, dodging buses and bicyclists alike—is a grand 1.6 miles, one-way. I practiced wearing said heels today to go much smaller distances, and let’s just say I have blisters in places on my feet I wasn’t aware you could garner blisters.

I shall prevail.

Since I could not for the life of me get our dryer to work, I have socks hanging over my radiator and pajama pants and other items hanging over my suitcases, desk, chair, TV stand (with, of course, no TV), and dresser drawers. My room is rather colorful at the moment. And it is a sad testament to the state of my radiator that my socks have been hanging on it for several hours and are in a similar state of dampness as when I first put them there.

I realized today how bad I am at making friends. All of us American students had to show up at the same office today to pay certain fees and sign up for internet and take dibs on the borrowing of free hair dryers and flat irons and umbrellas and whatnot. Mike, one of my housemates, greeted half of the 40 students by name. I, well…didn’t. Perhaps it is a male thing to be more social, or perhaps it is a me thing to not. Later, we’d all shown up at the same café to use the same free wifi. I ended up at a table alone, while both of my male housemates ended up at a table with two other girls. This amused me—not because they were with girls, but because I was with no one. How typical of me.

I finally found soy sauce today at Sainsbury’s. Instead of buying the small gobbet of Kikkoman’s for ₤2.48, I bought the off-brand “dark soy sauce” for 99p. I feel that soy sauce cannot be called soy sauce if you have to ADD salt to taste any of its flavor. I probably should have squashed my thrifty instincts and gone for the Kikkoman. Alas, I am now shackled to a bottle of soy sauce that is an imposter.

Also, I tried making rice today, to go along with the soy sauce-that-is-not-soy-sauce. It turned out looking something like what I imagine gruel to be. Kind of squooshy and damp. I ate it anyway. The rest is forming into amino globules in the fridge.

Tomorrow we are to be given a tour of the Union building, of which we are members, and in which there is purported to be a bar called “The Purple Turtle” (side note: hearing British people say “purple turtle” is one of the small joys in life of which I will never tire.) Being a member of the Union, we get the cover charged waived. Ah, the advantages of being a student of Oxford University.

My head feels fuzzy. I am inexplicably tired considering I woke up at 10 am and it is only 9pm. At least I am feeling better—I think I managed to skirt a full-blown sickness.

I am honestly trying to come up with some brilliant insights and failing on account of my head keeps saying, “Lay me down, I want to dream, stupid.” I am very tired.

I have these lists of stories, either novels, short stories, or scripts, that I have started, staring me in the face from the peg board on the wall directly opposite my headboard. They are daunting. I have no creative impulse at the moment, but they are looking at me and seeming to threaten, “I am not finished. You are a terrible creator. You started me years ago and you have no intention whatsoever of finishing me, do you? DO YOU?!”

They are irritable little works. I should burn them.

Speaking of, have I told you about my fireplace? I probably did, but here it is again. In our living room, there is a beautiful mantelpiece and place for a fire. This place is filled with a fake fireplace. The fake fireplace is not, like I first thought, a gas-lit fireplace. No, in fact, the “coals” are actually a thin plastic covering, underlit by a 40-watt bulb. If I want to place it on the “heat” setting, a neon tubes glows orange and radiates a bit of warmth. The entire thing amuses me much, much more than it should. It’s just so silly. I’m in Oxford and I have a plastic fire.

I am afraid I will be friendless this semester. There is absolutely nothing to make me socialize with anyone past the dinner this Wednesday. I can go straight from home to my tutorial to the library to the grocery store and back home again without ever having to talk to anyone besides my professor and maybe, if I’m lucky, the cashier at Aldi’s. And the British students that I’ve seen so far in cafes terrify me. I want to become invisible, so they won’t notice and immediately deride the stupid American student who doesn’t belong here in the first place. I’m projecting. But their accents make them sound so smart.

Speaking of cafes, an older gentleman sat and drew me for two hours while he was eating lunch. It was an odd experience. I honestly didn’t notice him for a good while, but when I did, it was so strange that I immediately pretended I hadn’t noticed him. When he was finished later, he held it up to me with an incredible and proud smile. It was a colored-pencil sketch of someone vaguely resembling a short-blonde haired girl. I smiled broadly back and returned to looking up scholarships online. For some reason, he is incredibly endearing to me, like Don Quixote to his niece.

I learned that Oxford has no creative writing professors. “In that aspect,” my academic advisor told me, “Oxford is about 150 years behind APU.”

Which is funny, because I don’t think APU is 150 years old.

What I don’t understand is how on earth so many writers came out of this school. The big 3 come to mind: Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Apparently they did not study creative writing. And yet their creative writing hugely impacted not only the world as they knew it, but the world after they left it. I have been touched by them all. I came to Oxford hoping to get some sort of writing guidance by studying contemporary narrative fiction and epic fantasy literature, all with a writing application, but apparently that sort of thing is just not taught. Which means they came by their talent naturally or were otherwise smitten by God with great ideas and better literary agents.

I feel somewhat put out. Maybe I should figure out what their emphasi were and do those, instead. It would probably be something boring, like the history of medieval spoons. And, staring into those spoons, Tolkien came to the natural conclusion that, “the true son of the last king must forsake his crown, only to have the Great Broken Sword reforged so that he may wield it against the Darkest Enemies of Man in a Final Bid for the Peace of Middle Earth.”

I look at spoons and think, “Should I be concerned about the amount of sugar I am putting into this cup of tea?”

What does “wax on, wax off” even mean, anyway?

My socks are still damp. And I found a small bug on my wall.

I want to go to bed. But that would require getting out of bed to go wash my face and brush my teeth and put on pajamas. So much effort just to pass out.

I am wandering, mentally. My bum is asleep.

I assure you, I shall return to my brilliant insights tomorrow.

Good night.

She-Who-Is-Not-Tolkien

P.S. Naturally, I stayed up until midnight writing out two scripts for two separate music videos I suddenly had the urge to create. And I had another cup of tea. And my bum is still asleep.