Pieces of What (Lily)
My Loves,
I am alive. Don't fret. You must remember that the reverse is also true, I spend most of the days I don't hear from you guys panicking that you are all dead. And I did send you all Christmas cards, so you got a little of my chat then!
But thank goodness for group emails, I don't have to pack 5 black dresses for my trip home in March.
I know I am bad with contact but I've been busy. If I gave you a detailed account of all that I've been doing since New Years it would take weeks, plus you would all get very bored of my ramblings. But here's the 'short' (actually ridiculously long) version.
There are 8 piles of paper on my bedroom floor. They mock me with there endless need to be read and organised. They greatly out number me and frequently encroach upon my personal space, some mornings I wake to find them lying next to me in bed. This morning Judith Butler was plastered to my face. They belong to the following components of my life. Four are classes, one more than the required amount. They consist of Foucault, Kant, Marx, Deleuze, Zizek, Derrida, Barthes... everything from Adorno to Baurdillard, Freud, Iriguray, Lacan... The list goes on and on, who knew there was so much theory on our existence. Still it makes me happy, I am safely settled up in my Ivory Tower able to debate the possibility of agency outside of discourse and argue about what should follow deconstruction. I read the work of great philosophers and then discuss it with my genius professors and fellow over-achieving students, while never encountering any of the discomfort that plagues the so called masses. Ahh academia.
Actually, I feel very removed from the world as most people know it and this unsettles me, which brings me to pile five. I've started volunteering at a primary school on Monday. I teach the 3rd grade (or p.4 as we know it), and it's pretty intense--the schools a public charter school specializing in arts education for children with learning difficulties, so 60% of the kids are diagnosed with a 'disability'. It makes everyone a little off the wall and simple social interactions become entirely perplexing. The kids just do some weird shit that definitely isn't 8/9 year old behavior. It's a pretty eye opening experience, it just makes you realize how little can be done from an education stand point, the stuff we all learnt at home- to sit still, say thank you, ask nicely, don't interrupt, don't hit- these kids never learnt, but its not the school's job to teach them that stuff, the teacher is there to teach them to read and write! Anyway, I'll tell you a whole bunch of stories when I come home in March.
By the way, I've been writing this email for 10 days now. Every time I get a spare minute I jot down a couple of sentences... so I guess reading it may seem a little jarring, sorry!
Anyway, piles 6 and 7 belong to my two campus jobs. One 20 hours in the College Deans Office, which I love because its a wonderful office and all I have to do is file stuff and fetch stuff and man the front desk sometimes. It's like being paid (really, really well) for being helpful. And the office is so lovely, because its the Dean's Office and its Georgetown its very fancy, and the people are so friendly. It's just a really nice place to be at 9am Tuesday through Friday! Which I know sounds like an odd thing to say...
Okay- an aside- this is why I love my office job, I just got up to go get my morning cup of coffee and there's an invitation for the Dean to a chocolate shop opening and its made of chocolate. And this kind of 'surprise chocolate' is a regular occurrence. So now I have fresh coffee and chocolate and I'm getting paid to enjoy them. Nomonomnom...
My other job is as a Teaching Assistant to one of the professors in the program. I'm pretty pleased with myself for landing this as I'm the only first year student (in a class of 70 or so) to get a TA position, they're almost exclusively for second years! Anyway, I work with two undergrads who are writing their thesis(es?), around ten hours a week (again for a very generous amount). They are American Studies students and I love them both, they're both doing kind of crazy unconventional thesis('s?) but that fits in with my interests. I've decided I've written enough papers so now I pretty much only make academic films or 'digital media projects' for my classes, but that's another story.
Pile 8 is the pile for the future... or the miscellaneous pile. It reminds me that I should get a linkedin and fix my resume, but that all kind of crumbles to the bottom of my priority list. Especially as I'm set for the summer, the Dean's Office offered my a full time job and it pays better than anything I could get in the UK, even with the exchange rate, so it makes sense to stay here. Sorry guys. I would love to go home over the summer, especially for my birthday and the festival and everything but it just doesn't make economic sense. So I think after my March visit I probably won't be back until Christmas... boo. It'll be my first summer where I'm not at home at all! Thinking about it, it feels very weird. Maybe I'll crack and come back for a couple of weeks at the start of August.
So there's a summary of my life, 4 classes, 2 jobs, 1 volunteer position. Except, that's just my life during the daytime. At night its a whole other story. I think I've consumed more alcohol in the past two months than I did during my entire first year at UEA. It's disgusting. But a lot of fun. It's funny, every weekend I'm like, 'oooh the weekend I'll take it easy and get some rest' and then I stumble into bed at 4am. FAIL. Or epic success depending on how you look at it, I guess? I like DC, there's a lot of great bars that we can just hop around until the wee hours of the morning and Roxie is usually out with me so we just share a cab back. I've made an executive life decision though to stop drinking so much and instead just smoke a little before going out so I'm nicely buzzed and don't need to drink so much, Roxie was like 'why don't you just go out sober?' I didn't really have a good response. But anyhoo, its cheaper to smoke than to get drunk, so plan 'save money and drink less beer while not being sober' (I need a better name) will begin tomorrow. I think we may have a game night. Also its meant to be 22'C tomorrow, which I am so excited about! So there may well some beer garden happy hour action in the late afternoon. YAY.
Okay, that was a very long explanation of my life, sorry. I will tell you all the specific stories of me being unintentionally hilarious when I return. But I am in a very happy place right now. I've created a little cocoon of awesomeness to live in for a couple of years. I'm sure I'll have a melt down in a year when I'm writing my thesis and deciding what to do next, but until then I'm just enjoying living a kind of crazy wonderful life.
I miss you all very much and am so looking forward to coming home! If you've made it through this email. Congratulations. I promise this was the abbreviated version, believe it or not! Here are your personal bits:
Annie: Hello, I owe you a letter (Thank you!), congratulations on the CELTA and on the dissertation- just finishing something that monstrous is worth a well done, and it's not like you did badly! So YAY. I'm excited about your life adventures. It'll be amazing wherever you end up, I'm sure. And I'm glad you're happy, it's always good to lift weights of your mind! And I will be in London for part of my stay, did you ask me that or someone else in the south?
Ellie: Um, perseco afternoon tea? Yes please! Even if we missed the offer we'll just go to Peckhams buy the stuff (cos that will be better value) and then get tipsy in a home of our choosing! yep yep yep. I'm glad your Birthday was fun I'm glad Berlin is fun too-- I'm very in to the balancing work with play as the only way to stay sane during a masters! Also, this email was kind of a repeat of your Birthday letter, so sorry for boring you twice!
Megs: WHAT WAS THE BOXING DAY INCIDENT?! Man, I am so out of the loop. I'm always coming home at Christmas from now on so I don't have to miss out on this stuff. And you're in New Zealand, which I gathered from facebook (and then your email- I'm smart like that), sounds amazing! Tell Skye I say hello (from the past, I guess), unless you have left her, I can't remember your exact travel plans. We will have to have a mass catch up session when I return.
Hannah: Hows the squat going? That sounds amazing! Just an incredible thing to be part of! And I guess if the University doesn't want to get involved then you can keep it going, which would be fantastic. Maybe if it's still around in March I'll pop across and give you a wee visit! It sounds like you should form some sort of Neo-Frankfurt School, except anti-elitist and way more optimistic! Man, so jealous.
Zoe: Thank you for being slow on the group email uptake! It makes my ten day attempt to write to you guys seem much less lazy! You didn't send one right? Or did I just miss it? Anyway, I hope you are very well an enjoying studying all the wonders of media and culture. I also hope you are taking care of Edinburgh since all of us seem to be away at the moment.
With that, I leave you! I love and miss you all very, very much.
See you soon.
Lily xx
I am alive. Don't fret. You must remember that the reverse is also true, I spend most of the days I don't hear from you guys panicking that you are all dead. And I did send you all Christmas cards, so you got a little of my chat then!
But thank goodness for group emails, I don't have to pack 5 black dresses for my trip home in March.
I know I am bad with contact but I've been busy. If I gave you a detailed account of all that I've been doing since New Years it would take weeks, plus you would all get very bored of my ramblings. But here's the 'short' (actually ridiculously long) version.
There are 8 piles of paper on my bedroom floor. They mock me with there endless need to be read and organised. They greatly out number me and frequently encroach upon my personal space, some mornings I wake to find them lying next to me in bed. This morning Judith Butler was plastered to my face. They belong to the following components of my life. Four are classes, one more than the required amount. They consist of Foucault, Kant, Marx, Deleuze, Zizek, Derrida, Barthes... everything from Adorno to Baurdillard, Freud, Iriguray, Lacan... The list goes on and on, who knew there was so much theory on our existence. Still it makes me happy, I am safely settled up in my Ivory Tower able to debate the possibility of agency outside of discourse and argue about what should follow deconstruction. I read the work of great philosophers and then discuss it with my genius professors and fellow over-achieving students, while never encountering any of the discomfort that plagues the so called masses. Ahh academia.
Actually, I feel very removed from the world as most people know it and this unsettles me, which brings me to pile five. I've started volunteering at a primary school on Monday. I teach the 3rd grade (or p.4 as we know it), and it's pretty intense--the schools a public charter school specializing in arts education for children with learning difficulties, so 60% of the kids are diagnosed with a 'disability'. It makes everyone a little off the wall and simple social interactions become entirely perplexing. The kids just do some weird shit that definitely isn't 8/9 year old behavior. It's a pretty eye opening experience, it just makes you realize how little can be done from an education stand point, the stuff we all learnt at home- to sit still, say thank you, ask nicely, don't interrupt, don't hit- these kids never learnt, but its not the school's job to teach them that stuff, the teacher is there to teach them to read and write! Anyway, I'll tell you a whole bunch of stories when I come home in March.
By the way, I've been writing this email for 10 days now. Every time I get a spare minute I jot down a couple of sentences... so I guess reading it may seem a little jarring, sorry!
Anyway, piles 6 and 7 belong to my two campus jobs. One 20 hours in the College Deans Office, which I love because its a wonderful office and all I have to do is file stuff and fetch stuff and man the front desk sometimes. It's like being paid (really, really well) for being helpful. And the office is so lovely, because its the Dean's Office and its Georgetown its very fancy, and the people are so friendly. It's just a really nice place to be at 9am Tuesday through Friday! Which I know sounds like an odd thing to say...
Okay- an aside- this is why I love my office job, I just got up to go get my morning cup of coffee and there's an invitation for the Dean to a chocolate shop opening and its made of chocolate. And this kind of 'surprise chocolate' is a regular occurrence. So now I have fresh coffee and chocolate and I'm getting paid to enjoy them. Nomonomnom...
My other job is as a Teaching Assistant to one of the professors in the program. I'm pretty pleased with myself for landing this as I'm the only first year student (in a class of 70 or so) to get a TA position, they're almost exclusively for second years! Anyway, I work with two undergrads who are writing their thesis(es?), around ten hours a week (again for a very generous amount). They are American Studies students and I love them both, they're both doing kind of crazy unconventional thesis('s?) but that fits in with my interests. I've decided I've written enough papers so now I pretty much only make academic films or 'digital media projects' for my classes, but that's another story.
Pile 8 is the pile for the future... or the miscellaneous pile. It reminds me that I should get a linkedin and fix my resume, but that all kind of crumbles to the bottom of my priority list. Especially as I'm set for the summer, the Dean's Office offered my a full time job and it pays better than anything I could get in the UK, even with the exchange rate, so it makes sense to stay here. Sorry guys. I would love to go home over the summer, especially for my birthday and the festival and everything but it just doesn't make economic sense. So I think after my March visit I probably won't be back until Christmas... boo. It'll be my first summer where I'm not at home at all! Thinking about it, it feels very weird. Maybe I'll crack and come back for a couple of weeks at the start of August.
So there's a summary of my life, 4 classes, 2 jobs, 1 volunteer position. Except, that's just my life during the daytime. At night its a whole other story. I think I've consumed more alcohol in the past two months than I did during my entire first year at UEA. It's disgusting. But a lot of fun. It's funny, every weekend I'm like, 'oooh the weekend I'll take it easy and get some rest' and then I stumble into bed at 4am. FAIL. Or epic success depending on how you look at it, I guess? I like DC, there's a lot of great bars that we can just hop around until the wee hours of the morning and Roxie is usually out with me so we just share a cab back. I've made an executive life decision though to stop drinking so much and instead just smoke a little before going out so I'm nicely buzzed and don't need to drink so much, Roxie was like 'why don't you just go out sober?' I didn't really have a good response. But anyhoo, its cheaper to smoke than to get drunk, so plan 'save money and drink less beer while not being sober' (I need a better name) will begin tomorrow. I think we may have a game night. Also its meant to be 22'C tomorrow, which I am so excited about! So there may well some beer garden happy hour action in the late afternoon. YAY.
Okay, that was a very long explanation of my life, sorry. I will tell you all the specific stories of me being unintentionally hilarious when I return. But I am in a very happy place right now. I've created a little cocoon of awesomeness to live in for a couple of years. I'm sure I'll have a melt down in a year when I'm writing my thesis and deciding what to do next, but until then I'm just enjoying living a kind of crazy wonderful life.
I miss you all very much and am so looking forward to coming home! If you've made it through this email. Congratulations. I promise this was the abbreviated version, believe it or not! Here are your personal bits:
Annie: Hello, I owe you a letter (Thank you!), congratulations on the CELTA and on the dissertation- just finishing something that monstrous is worth a well done, and it's not like you did badly! So YAY. I'm excited about your life adventures. It'll be amazing wherever you end up, I'm sure. And I'm glad you're happy, it's always good to lift weights of your mind! And I will be in London for part of my stay, did you ask me that or someone else in the south?
Ellie: Um, perseco afternoon tea? Yes please! Even if we missed the offer we'll just go to Peckhams buy the stuff (cos that will be better value) and then get tipsy in a home of our choosing! yep yep yep. I'm glad your Birthday was fun I'm glad Berlin is fun too-- I'm very in to the balancing work with play as the only way to stay sane during a masters! Also, this email was kind of a repeat of your Birthday letter, so sorry for boring you twice!
Megs: WHAT WAS THE BOXING DAY INCIDENT?! Man, I am so out of the loop. I'm always coming home at Christmas from now on so I don't have to miss out on this stuff. And you're in New Zealand, which I gathered from facebook (and then your email- I'm smart like that), sounds amazing! Tell Skye I say hello (from the past, I guess), unless you have left her, I can't remember your exact travel plans. We will have to have a mass catch up session when I return.
Hannah: Hows the squat going? That sounds amazing! Just an incredible thing to be part of! And I guess if the University doesn't want to get involved then you can keep it going, which would be fantastic. Maybe if it's still around in March I'll pop across and give you a wee visit! It sounds like you should form some sort of Neo-Frankfurt School, except anti-elitist and way more optimistic! Man, so jealous.
Zoe: Thank you for being slow on the group email uptake! It makes my ten day attempt to write to you guys seem much less lazy! You didn't send one right? Or did I just miss it? Anyway, I hope you are very well an enjoying studying all the wonders of media and culture. I also hope you are taking care of Edinburgh since all of us seem to be away at the moment.
With that, I leave you! I love and miss you all very, very much.
See you soon.
Lily xx