A Short Account of the Week: Dinner, Party and Play
Its been a few days since I last blogged, so here is a summary of events. The past fews day have been rather unproductive. I have not really managed to get very much done, and it has been a mixture of just staying around in my room, reading and randomly surfing the internet, or else hanging about in the college bar and the common room, which in itself is not totally useless, but somehow seems to be a waste in the context of the multitude of things that one can do in Oxford.
With regards to last weekend, the evenings were occupied firstly by a dinner at YY's place which was an early reunion of sorts for all the people who went on the trip to Ecuador. YY and Mary cooked us a wonderful meal, and we also got a great chance to take a look at the edited video that YY did which was also really fantastic. We definitely owe him a debt of gratitude for all the fantastic work that he has put in. Sunday night was the birthday of Sam, a friend from the Quiz Society. I went down with a number of medics from Trinity who knew her since Sam is a medic is well. It was a nice party, as she had booked out the entire Grand Cafe on High Street, and I met some fun people. Though I did enjoy myself, I was forced to come to the conclusion once again, that I am perhaps just not the best person in terms of making small talk. I do tend to find large gatherings, with large numbers of people whom I do not know tiresome after awhile. I think that I work much better and build up my friendships through long term contacts - going round a room fist pumping, remembering names, is just something that I don't find at all fascinating, or do very well.
Tuesday invovled my first tutorial with Dr James Piscatori for Middle East politics. I must say that I was quite intimidated as Dr Piscatori is a big expert on the Middle East, and I definitely felt that the essay that I had written was not very good. I was greatly surprised and very much relieved to find that he was a wonderful tutor, very encouraging and endlessly patient, and I greatly enjoyed the tutorial and definitely look forward to a term's work with him. I also met my other tutor for IR in the era of the two world wars for the first time, and though he seemed very enthusiastic, he seems to expect quite a lot from me, and set me an essay for the coming friday immediately.
One other thing I did was to review a Harold Pinter play - The Lover for BBC Oxford. It was definitely an interesting, if puzzling play, and very much typically Pinter. The review is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/oxford/stage/2005/04/the_lover.shtml for those who are interested in reading it. I must admit that I found it very difficult to write out even a short review of the play, and I did look at the opinions of some other critics with regards to the play in my writing of it, neither of which bodes well for my career ambition (or should I say dream) of being a movie, book and arts critic.
One bad thing: Borders had a 20% off student discount day. Damage done quite significant including Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, James Joll's Europe After 1870 (which to be fair is on my reading list), David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (which I might be doing next year), and Roy Jenkins monumental biography of Gladstone which I had been meaning to get for a long while.
Also, I got my Political Sociology collection back and was presently surprised that I did not do too badly, despite minimal revision. I got an average of about 64 which is a decent 2:1 and that mostly because I messed up one essay, with two of them getting pretty good marks.
Currently Reading: Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban. I randomly picked it up at at the Oxford Union library and read it in an evening. It was definitely a very lyrical book and explored the lines that we have been dreams and reality. Despite working with a theme which had been explored countless times, the book still seemed relatively fresh, which was definitely a credit to Hoban. It is also quite apt that I read this just the day before seeing the Pinter play which deals with the fine line between reality and imagination, albeit in a much darker context.
With regards to last weekend, the evenings were occupied firstly by a dinner at YY's place which was an early reunion of sorts for all the people who went on the trip to Ecuador. YY and Mary cooked us a wonderful meal, and we also got a great chance to take a look at the edited video that YY did which was also really fantastic. We definitely owe him a debt of gratitude for all the fantastic work that he has put in. Sunday night was the birthday of Sam, a friend from the Quiz Society. I went down with a number of medics from Trinity who knew her since Sam is a medic is well. It was a nice party, as she had booked out the entire Grand Cafe on High Street, and I met some fun people. Though I did enjoy myself, I was forced to come to the conclusion once again, that I am perhaps just not the best person in terms of making small talk. I do tend to find large gatherings, with large numbers of people whom I do not know tiresome after awhile. I think that I work much better and build up my friendships through long term contacts - going round a room fist pumping, remembering names, is just something that I don't find at all fascinating, or do very well.
Tuesday invovled my first tutorial with Dr James Piscatori for Middle East politics. I must say that I was quite intimidated as Dr Piscatori is a big expert on the Middle East, and I definitely felt that the essay that I had written was not very good. I was greatly surprised and very much relieved to find that he was a wonderful tutor, very encouraging and endlessly patient, and I greatly enjoyed the tutorial and definitely look forward to a term's work with him. I also met my other tutor for IR in the era of the two world wars for the first time, and though he seemed very enthusiastic, he seems to expect quite a lot from me, and set me an essay for the coming friday immediately.
One other thing I did was to review a Harold Pinter play - The Lover for BBC Oxford. It was definitely an interesting, if puzzling play, and very much typically Pinter. The review is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/oxford/stage/2005/04/the_lover.shtml for those who are interested in reading it. I must admit that I found it very difficult to write out even a short review of the play, and I did look at the opinions of some other critics with regards to the play in my writing of it, neither of which bodes well for my career ambition (or should I say dream) of being a movie, book and arts critic.
One bad thing: Borders had a 20% off student discount day. Damage done quite significant including Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, James Joll's Europe After 1870 (which to be fair is on my reading list), David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (which I might be doing next year), and Roy Jenkins monumental biography of Gladstone which I had been meaning to get for a long while.
Also, I got my Political Sociology collection back and was presently surprised that I did not do too badly, despite minimal revision. I got an average of about 64 which is a decent 2:1 and that mostly because I messed up one essay, with two of them getting pretty good marks.
Currently Reading: Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban. I randomly picked it up at at the Oxford Union library and read it in an evening. It was definitely a very lyrical book and explored the lines that we have been dreams and reality. Despite working with a theme which had been explored countless times, the book still seemed relatively fresh, which was definitely a credit to Hoban. It is also quite apt that I read this just the day before seeing the Pinter play which deals with the fine line between reality and imagination, albeit in a much darker context.
posted by Caleb Liu | 5:31 AM
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