I realize that in these accounts I haven't actually given much space to daily life-type things, so I'm going to do that now, while it's on my mind.
I finally met my fourth flatmate, who is very friendly and studying graphic design and advertising. So hooray, another artistic type! She, like Summer and Fiona, hails from China, though she didn't say whereabouts. Anyway, nice to know someone's actually living in that last room. I was beginning to wonder. What has also become apparent is that I'm probably the least competent cook of the bunch, or simply don't plan ahead as much. Fiona and Summer make a habit of doing various soups every few days from scratch, and I'm pretty sure Yetande makes some awesome stewlike concoctions which she can freeze and reheat all the time. I'm very much a sandwich person--I've never really gotten used to making things in bulk. I'll have to work on that. I think the problem is that I never think of buying the basic ingredients and things when I'm at the store, so I never have the supplies. I'll amend that at some point, hopefully. If I don't continue to be absentminded about it. Food is not terribly expensive here if one sticks to raw ingredients, so I really have no excuse.
My locale is sort of wonderful, in that I'm not so far down the hill from campus that it feels like a trek, but I'm also far enough from the city centre for the atmosphere to be suburban, rather than urban. Also, since the apartment complex is in a ring shape, and my room faces outward, it's very quiet for me even when various revelry is going on in the middle recreation-type area. In the afternoons, at least a few people let their dogs run around on the field outside my window, which is fun to watch. Beyond the field is a panorama of the city, which is even better! There are also quite a few families in the apartments just outside the complex, so there are a lot of kids running around, in addition to students.
Other random thing: I love having a washbasin in my room! It's totally random, and yet makes complete sense. I can do my makeup and things without hogging the bathroom. I also love that there are actually bookshelves provided in my room. In general, despite the overenthusiastic installation of fire doors everywhere, accommodation is pretty sweet here. It seems consistently true as well, from what I've seen of the other dorms and complexes.
I think I've gotten the timing on getting to class down now, and it's not bad unless I have to go towards the science block. 15-25 minutes of walking will get me just about anywhere, I estimate, including down to the city centre. I can't say that I've been terribly adventurous in terms of moving beyond the parts of the city I know I can get back from, but I'm hoping that on some free days I can get someone to get on the bus with me to the other side of the city, along the river. I hear there are some killer restaurants over there, as well as some nightclubs that aren't as clogged with students as the ones on the main drag just beyond campus are.
On the academic side, I've devised a new note-taking system that's working out fairly well, and makes me feel weirdly official. The essentials store at the union sells these nice black notebooks that look like actual books, rather than spiral bound ones, with just the right amount of pages for a semester of both preliminary notes and topics during seminar. So I have one for each module. All handouts are paperclipped in. I don't think I've been so organized in ages. It's enabled by the uniformity of my subjects, but the written work's corresponding uniformity has, I think, made me more consistently productive.
Also helpful? I've gotten totally awesome at speed reading. I can do a 500 page novel in about a day, and now that I have my good note-taking system in place and write down all the themes and ideas I come across in a neat and consolidated place (and not in the margins--I can never find my work in the margins) I actually remember things to say in seminar. I probably should have come up with this system ages ago, but somehow I didn't. Maybe I'm finally getting over my slacker tendencies. I'm still a procrastinator, but I've been led to believe that that's genetic...I guess the point is that while I still tend to leave things until the last minute, I'm at least producing better-quality rushed things. Ergh, that doesn't look quite as good on screen as it did in my head. But I think my mind is a bit better organized now as well, so maybe I won't need to rush things as much as usual anyway.
I think that's covered most things for now. One last random thing, though: I had a dream the other day, very vivid, that I had rediscovered this very long and involved fantasy book series that I had loved as a kid and remembered the plot of quite well. It had been adapted to a film I actually liked and rewatched part of, and I even managed in the dream to scrounge up copies of most of the books involved...anyway, it all felt very real. I woke up wanting to reread the whole series, only to realize that I'd entirely fabricated the whole thing. It was rather depressing. It isn't the first time I've envisioned a book in a dream that was just awesome beyond belief, that I even knew intimate details of down to the fonts used and the illustrations on the covers, only to find it wasn't real. I can never write them either, because they're never my style and, you know, only make sense in the dream. I'm fairly sure this most recent one was extremely meta, in that many of the characters were actually authors who I happen to like. Neil Gaiman showed up at one point. Anyway, thought I'd share. I have no idea why I have dreams like this--the next stage up from my wild and epic ones? I do not know.
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