feelin' fine

Before my stylistics class today I was sitting out in the "mixing bay" reading a little, eating my lunch, and listening to a girl talk to her friend about her nieces and nephews, and suddenly I thought, "Wow. This is weird. Here I am in England, sitting here surrounded by British people, on an MA course in Linguistics, and feeling very much at home. How'd I get here anyway?"

Same thing happened a little later, during the stylistics lecture. "Gee, I'm sitting in a class in England, listening to a lady from Italy talk about a theory of metaphor that was developed in California."

Other than that weirdness today, I'm doing very well. In fact, the weirdness wasn't a bad thing, either. It was simply a realization that I am doing something that I dreamed about for literally years of my life, and how comfortable I feel doing it, and how great that is.

Tomorrow I don't have any classes, so I am planning to head to the library for a little while and do some reading. There are a few books I don't have that I need/want to look into. I wish I could use it to start some serious work on a writing assignment. But they haven't given us the assignments yet ... grr. They don't give them to us for another two weeks, in fact. Oh well, maybe I'll do a little work on one of my ideas anyway.

Yesterday in our pragmatics class, the tutor used a clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to demonstrate performative verbs. :)

Also yesterday, I met a girl from Montana (Missoula, to be exact). She is doing her PhD in Linguistics, and she lives in the house next to me in the Graduate College. We chatted for quite a while, and we decided we'll have to do something this weekend. I know the Graduate Students' Association (GSA hereafter) have organized a trip to Liverpool this Saturday, and the Students' Union (LUSU) have organized a trip to Kendal, so maybe we'll do one of those. One of the ladies on my course also ... invited? ... me to come into town this weekend, so she could show me where some of the good shops are (I had asked her where she found a hole-puncher). So hopefully I'll have something to do this weekend, other than sitting around, reading, IMing, and playing games on the internet (all while listening to OTR shows on Live365.com).