Only three more days to go . . . .

[Music - The Dodos]

Since the morning is still new here, I figured I can update my blog without feeling too convicted that I should be doing something else. It's the last week of full term. That means that the regular Oxford students are going on holiday soon and we have Spring Break and then our British Landscapes course. Ultimately, the whole structure is going to be different now. No more tutorials (bye, Josh and Emma.....sad day). This second half is more like what Americans are used to -- lectures every morning Monday through Friday. Fewer papers. Etc.

We're just all ready for our brief Spring Break -- it's like the end of an academic marathon. I just have to finish my last C. S. Lewis paper and write my last Shakespeare paper (on King Lear). Then I will be done with Oxford tutorials forever. Weird.

So last night I made jambalaya!!!! Mom sent me some REAL jambalaya mix in the mail and I cooked that stuff UP. It was like a little taste of heavenly home. My food group was delighted by the taste of real Cajun food and everyone was happy, New Orleans style.

The other day I accidentally left my driver's license on the kitchen table and Sam Brewitt-Taylor (our Junior Dean) found it the next morning. He made sure to tell me about it and said, "Yes, well, I found a little identity card that said 'U.S. Department of State' and had your face on it. All I could think was 'What has she done now?'" HAH.

Thom Yorke lives in our neighborhood. For those of you who don't know him, he's the lead singer of the band Radiohead that in the '90s pretty much changed rock music forever. It's basically like living next door to Bono or something. (Only better.) We haven't sighted him yet, but hope never dies. Also in our neighborhood: Richard Dawkins. We have sighted him. And the neighborhood next door to ours is where Tolkien lived when he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

So this house we live in, being full of people who are crazy enough to want to study at a place like Oxford, is, as you may imagine, interesting. I keep a Word document open most of the time to write down things people say that make me smile. Here's a sampling. Hopefully you'll get some idea of what it's like here.

Me: "Everyone in this house is eccentric in some way."

Kate: "Yeah. Sometimes I'm just like . . . this place is so weird."

Nick: "Listen to what I'm studying this semester -- how B.A. is this??! *reads a piece from Beowulf* I can read that to you in the Old English, too."

Katie Powell: "Boys are people, too!"

Hutton: "No. They're different."

"Calm down, it's not like it's Oxford or anything." -Everyone

"I'm gonna do Sporkle while you finish editing my paper." -Hunt (and only if you know what Sporkle is can you fully appreciate the utter nerdness of that comment)

"That's what makes this country so great!! And when I say this country, I mean America." -Daniel

"I swear I'm more articulate than I seem." -Daniel

"Jen, I need your help pronouncing this Latin. I have to read it in my tutorial tomorrow and I don't want to sound like a dingo." -Jay

"I almost just told Dr. Kreuze that I love him." -Hutton

"Except the more I look at him the more I don't think he's attractive. Because I think I hate him." -Alison about her tutor, Tom (it was a bad day -- don't worry, she got over that outburst)

"I'm watching a video on how to make meatballs." -Nick (oh, the adventures of college students trying to cook meals for each other)

"Has anyone seen Augustine's Confessions lying around?" -Jay

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Tim Keller (a personal hero of mine) was in Oxford last week and we went to hear him speak in Town Hall. Two things:

#1 - His American accent and Americanisms were music to our ears. It was so great to finally be on the "I get this" end of things. The Brits said when he read quotes sometimes they couldn't understand him at all. WE COULD. Wow. It's amazing how the same language (i.e. English) can be in so many ways a foreign 0ne. At one point he was like, "Oh, am I being too American? I'm showing my feelings, I'm sorry." I laughed so hard.

#2 - His message was glorious. He talked about faith and reason (so appropriate in this bastion of reason), arguing that it takes just as big (or bigger) a leap of faith not to be a Christian as it does to be one. He talked about the faith it takes to doubt God and the rational problems of explaining life without God. But then he was like, "All this is great, but reason will never ultimately move us. Only beauty and love will ultimately draw people in." And then he goes on talking about the beauty of the Christian story and the exquisite and intoxicating love of the Creator who wrote himself into our story. He quoted C. S. Lewis saying that it would be like Shakespeare wrote himself into Hamlet and then died to save them all. I was like, "He's speaking my language." C. S. Lewis + Shakespeare = My Life the past two months.

Ultimately, I am a Christian not because the prophets have shown me the way to find God but because Jesus says instead "I'm God come to find you." Hallelujah.