An Explanation

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax

Of cabbages--and kings--

And why the sea is boiling hot--

And whether pigs have wings."

--"The Walrus and the Carpenter," from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll

But really, the time has come, so Katherine says, to talk of many things. Those things she likes to not talk about, because they call her general habits of scholarship into question.

Those things like why has she not blogged in weeks (even though she was waaaaayyy behind on blogging even then), and why she has not gone ahead and finished her Jane Austen essay which is due in January (even though she's had the time to do it), and why she got a B- on an essay for the first time EVER, and why she has not done laundry since mid-November and no longer cares.

Okay, so maybe that last one doesn't need any explaining, because we've already had the laundry chat on this blog. It's too cumbersome and too expensive, and with much airing-out, a bit of hand washing, and rotating jeans daily, I promise I don't smell too bad.

The others though, need addressing. (Rather, I feel terribly guilty about all of them, and need to spew something out here to feel more justified in my actions.)

The blogging...oy. It adds up. Trip to Wales, trips to London, trip to Ireland, trip to Paris, trip to Chawton, plain old trips into town--heck, I haven't written about going to the Globe Theatre, or going to the Hundred Aker Wood, or going to Scotland, and those were all in September! The problem is that I'm wordy, and hate having to condense my thoughts/memories/what-have-yous into manageable chunks, so I sit around and wait for a big enough chunk of time to record one adventure--and in the meanwhile, off I go on another. It quickly becomes overwhelming. I remember all of it, and still can/could/will(?) write about it...but there's SO MUCH. There are about fifteen unposted posts in my drafts folder right now, waiting to be continued, and there's always time to start a new one, it seems, but never time to finish an old. The uploading pictures thing on the slowest internet connection this side of the Atlantic is sort of a deterrent, too.

The academic part is another oy. First of all, can I just say here that I like England. I do. I like the places I've been to see, and I like Brighton, and I like the cute British accent, and hundreds of other things about this nation. And, that said, I absolutely loathe this school. I dislike the way it's structured, the way you hardly ever have class, the way you never have assignments, the way you depend entirely on your TA and barely have any contact with the professor, the way the campus is structured...everything. The University of Sussex + Katherine ≠ Friends. And because there are never any assignments, and nobody cares if you come to class, and you're so terribly anonymous here, I find it dreadfully hard to be focused on schoolwork. Let's just be honest--none of the study abroad students here came here to study anyway. We all came here to travel. Some people came here to drink legally and party in Brighton's famous clubs. We came here to be able to say that we've lived abroad. We all put the words "the experience" in our Sussex applications multiple times. My political science classes are frightfully dull, and I really have learned very little. My Jane Austen class has been wonderful, but I'm a procrastinator and am not about to start on an essay due in January until after Christmas. It's just a fact.

Tonight my family (plus my Aunt Tonnye and Uncle Shane!) Skyped with me while they decorated the Christmas tree...and I very, very much wished I could have been there. It's the first time I've ever not trimmed the tree. Fortunately, I will be home exactly a week from today, and it can't come soon enough. So far as I'm concerned, in fact, finals are just forms I have to fill out in order to leave campus. Once one o'clock in the afternoon rolls around on Thursday, nothing can stop me from packing up, spending one last night in this old dorm, then turning in my room key and getting to the coach station and heading to Heathrow, so that I can go back to the USA, where I'm supposed to be, and to North Carolina, where I belong.

SIX DAYS LEFT.