Vermont is Shocking

I somehow find myself in a small but pleasant room in a strange white house on a tiny green hill surrounded by a plethora of trees encircled by mountains in the middle of nowhere.

Hello Marlboro.

It is quite disorienting to be back on campus. I keep wondering how the time went by so quickly, and what the heck I'm doing here already (RA training, primarily).

Each day I get a little more used to my beautiful, bizarre surroundings. Today I baked three loaves of bread and went running. That is the most functional I have been thus far.

I can't exactly describe how I've felt this week. Just odd. Unsure of where the time went. Floating around the paths of campus like I've stepped through a looking glass. Definitely socially awkward.

So, I do not have much to report on the Plan front. I ran into one of my advisers and spoke to him briefly - it went well. I haven't picked up a book since I've been here - 10 hours of training every day is pretty tiring. I have a goal tomorrow to take out a book from the library - Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt.

Mostly though, I've been freaking out about everything and watching In the Loop on Netflix.

Alack! Shakespeare Isn't Everything

^This is the discovery I have made in the last month. 

Easing myself back into reading on a regular basis is not an easy thing. When I was sick for those delightful eight months, my brain felt clouded and dull. I read everything I needed to for school, but only because I've never missed a school deadline in my life, and to do so would be so painful that I made myself read and write. Still had to do extension, but at least I finished on time for that.

Anyway, reading critically is not easy. It's THE thing in college you have to learn to do well. Reading Shakespeare critically is really hard. But I'm a Shakespeare major so...alack, alack!

At the end of July, I tried to start seriously reading again. I poked through some Shakespeare biographies, a couple essays, and attempted to start a play. But my brain didn't want any of it, and I just felt more inadequate than before.

But then!

I picked up a book that had absolutely nothing to do with Shakespeare.  "When Everything Changed" by Gail Collins. It was a book I had been meaning to finish for a year. And you know what? Everything changed!

I delved into Gail Collins' account of the history of American women from the 1960s to the present. I ate up the history of the ERA, birth control and abortion, and feminism as a whole. It's an incredibly well-written book, and I really dug it. As I read, my brain seemed to shake out the cobwebs and slowly turn back on. I enjoyed reading again.

This made me realize that Shakespeare isn't everything for me. Yes, it's what I'm studying for my Plan, and for the past year at Marlboro I convinced myself that being a Shakespeare scholar was what I was destined for. But reading Ms. Collins' book reminded me that although I love reading and thinking about Shakespeare, I also just love reading and thinking. Literature in general. I'm finally understanding when my adviser told me that Plan is just something you like and study for a year. It isn't your life.

So while Shakespeare is definitely going to be important to me in the next year and a half, I'm going to try to balance myself and read some other books. The Bostonians; Inifinite Jest; more Gail Collins. We'll see what else makes it onto my reading list.