Just in case anyone thinks it’s all work, all the time for me here at Georgetown, I thought you might like to see that we also play… board games! The lovely Adam decided to institute “Game Night” on Wednesdays, and this evening the four souls who weren’t bogged down with work camped out in the grad lounge to play Risk. Kara, that is the yellow army, might have been new to the game, but she knew what world domination was all about. And I held Australia safely from the first round onwards…

My first birthday away from home, and it was a success. I spoke to people from home—mum and dad, Pete, Joanne and my brother Paul. I started celebrating on Friday night, because it was already my birthday in Australia, and I drank my first Cosmopolitan. It was delicious, which makes me slightly bitter, because I don’t want to seem like it’s a drink of choice just because of Sex and the City.

And, since I’ve made it to the ripe old age of 28 without missing out on a birthday celebration of some kind, I had a party on Saturday night. Thirty or so people crowded into my apartment, many of them bringing Australian wine. When I made my (brief) birthday speech I had to explain that the extremely loud exclamation of “OI!” that I made was an indication that it was now time to pay attention to the birthday girl.

Lisa, who I take “The New 18th Century” with, ended up staying on the futon and Sunday almost-still-morning we went “Le Pain Quotidien”, a glorious French bakery/café on M Street for a late breakfast. Proper café au lait in bowls, delicious pastries, organic soft-boiled eggs with fresh breads. It’s my new favourite place to eat, to drink coffee, to sit and scribble.

And presents! A few people brought me presents, the angels! I know I’m meant to be getting close to a grown-up age, but I still get incredibly excited to receive presents. Annie was away for the weekend, so missed the party, but was very pleased to see the marble cheeseboard that Sheena and Jeannine gave me, and we’re planning future cheese-eating ventures to give that cheeseboard a good workout.

The busy weekend meant that I got a little behind in my working routine, but I’m steadily catching up. I have 70 pages left of Bleak House to read for the week, and am halfway through writing my Dickens paper for the week (on the effect of Esther Summerson’s voice as the co-narrator of Bleak House). I’ve just written up a brief overview of Gothic literature for my 18th century class. I have two articles to finish reading, and a proper paper and a note (the note is something on Petronius, as I object to the way Ian Watt treats The Satyricon in his history of the novel, but it’s not completely relevant to the class, so it won’t do for a paper) to write for 18th century still. But: it will all be done.

Then this coming weekend—heaven!—is the National Book Festival. Every time I think of it I get excited, as Charles Simic is going to be in DC on the Mall. And Annie’s having a party for Adersh on Saturday night, as he leaves for India on Sunday. There’ll be wine tasting galore, from what I understand.

I’m planning to get out of the city for at least a day the following weekend. I’ll be curious to see if that plan works out for me!

I’m starting to get into a routine, which is a relief. The first week or two of classes I was finding it difficult to approach everything with the necessary organization and, I suppose, discipline, to get through everything comfortably. The result was that I was up late a lot of nights reading—and I’m still up late reading most nights, but I’ve managed to put a division in place such that when it comes to reading in the evening, I’m reading things that aren’t related to my classes—at the moment that consists of Edward Hirsch’s anthology The Poet’s Choice, Marianne Moore’s Complete Poems and some essays by Cynthia Ozick. Those three will most likely keep me busy for a little while, but it’s good to feel like I have some kind of time to myself to remember that, as well as being work, reading is also a pleasure.

I live very close to the M Street Barnes and Noble, so I’ve settled on that as my work place in the mornings. I read an interesting article about ways digital literacy impacts study, and one point that struck a chord with me is the fact that when you work directly onto the computer, you are more likely to interrupt yourself—either checking things online, or playing some addictive game that came with the operating system—such that the task at hand never gets your full attention. I’m now trying to go back and make a plan for essays and response papers by hand before working through them. When I’m at Barnes and Noble I don’t pick up internet (well, not without paying—which I don’t do) so it takes away one of those distractions. On weekday mornings the café isn’t too crowded, so there’s ambient noise but not the kind of bustle that makes me lose my train of thought.

Before I had an office on campus earlier this year, I found that my best way of working was “constant change of location”, so I’ve gone back to that work method. One to two hours in Barnes and Noble are followed by one to two hours back in my living room, before I go into university, where I work a little and socialise a little before classes or Writing Center work start.

Starting this Thursday I’ll also be spending an hour a week at Duke Ellington High School as a volunteer writing tutor. Duke Ellington is a local school for the arts, with streams in Music, Dance, Fine Art and Drama. I’ll be interested to see how the program functions, and fit in another piece of the puzzle that American education is for me at the moment. I think it will be another nice complement to the subject I’m taking, Approaches to Teaching Writing, which I’m starting to get very interested in.

I did make it to the gallery last week (then later the same day nearly passed out from sheer exhaustion). I spent about two hours there only, as I really just wanted to get a feel for the collection (I viewed sections of the West building only—so I haven’t gone into the twentieth century selections yet) and to find some paintings I want to come back to. There’s a wonderful Rubens painting—the first I have been really engaged by—of Daniel in the Lion’s Den. The lions were wonderful: especially their big velvety paws. I sat in front of it for a while, and will revisit sometime soon. The bus across town from M street only takes twenty minutes or so when it’s quiet, so I should be able to dash across to the mall more often now that I have scheduling somewhat sorted out. But obviously my next trip will be devoted to the East Building… and there are so many other museums and galleries to catch up with. All in good time.

I feel that I’ve started to disappear into the tunnel of graduate student life. People keep telling me that I’m very organised, and all I can say in reply is that I have to be organised, or I wouldn’t be able to get anything done.

I’ve started my Writing Center position—that is, I’ve started the work that surrounds the my position. This Sunday will be my first night in the Writing Center itself, and as such it’s my first opportunity to get hands on. I don’t know how exactly to prepare myself for this, simply because I don’t know what to expect from the students I’ll be working with. I’m sure there will be a lot of different levels of expertise.

At the same time, one of the subjects I’m taking is “Approaches to Teaching Writing.” I still feel a little mystified about what is expected of us as students in this subject, but nonetheless have already read essays on pedagogy that are going to be helpful to both the way I work through texts and which I’m sure will also be able to assist me in helping students with their work.

The book that has so far “grabbed” me the most is "The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty", which not only makes the point that difficulty is itself a normal experience, but also makes the assertion that the point at which you experience difficulty is also a possible point of greater illumination: thinking out the implications of why something is itself difficult will allow the reader to see the layers that are in front of them, without the demand that everything be immediately clear.

I’ve also taken an introductory session to a series of Apprentice Teaching workshops which will give me both theoretical and practical experience that should be translatable to many different types of classroom. I need to register for other workshops now.

On Monday some emails I had written to introduce myself to students and staff in the Liberal Studies program with whom I will be working: by the end of the day, I had received at least a dozen replies to these emails—some were from staff outlining areas they believe students in continuing studies may need some extra help with, some from students keen to participate in support groups or to just ask some quick questions. I’ve also been to two MA thesis workshop classes during the week to introduce myself as someone students can come to with some of their concerns about the practical elements in writing a thesis.

One of my teachers said a fortnight ago that an expert is someone who feels confident working at the edge of their competence. It’s funny, because what I’ve already completed on my Melbourne thesis is actually longer than the thesis I will have to write at Georgetown next year—so I do already have a degree of experience such that I feel I can help other people. At the same time, I do sometimes watch myself planning this work and remember the time I used to find it difficult to speak in a class, for fear of being wrong. In my case, what I really needed was to accumulate a base of knowledge so that I could begin to see the connections between things, in addition to just developing confidence. I’m getting interested in how people learn, in how people listen. My Liberal Studies experiences will tie in nicely to the teaching workshops, and, hopefully, my classes in “Approaches to Teaching Writing.”

I’m really interested in some of these questions surrounding approaches to teaching and learning styles, as well as how other people approach organization for researching a longer work like a thesis. I’d love to hear from anyone who has any thoughts on this material.

The wonderful Annie, my housemate, had probably begun to think I would never emerge from my room, where I am usually either in or on bed, sleeping or reading, or at my desk, typing or playing Scrabble online with all and sundry. Thankfully, this isn’t the whole picture. Last weekend I went out to hiking with Annie and her friends at Great Falls in Virginia for a few hours, which was nice. We went out for Mexican food in the evening as well. On Sunday Annie and Adresh (her boyfriend, who is moving to India shortly) cooked up a feast, with fondue, mushroom tart, stuffed tomatoes and potato gratin, followed by baklava. Then they settled in with their friends Lindsay and Nikki for a Monopoly rematch—apparently the previous game had been very intense, which I can easily believe after witnessing some of the deal-making going on, while I wandered in and out of the room in between studying. And I’m determined to get to the National Gallery tomorrow, having failed to make it there several times already. I WILL see some of this town, other than the library, soon.

This is updated to say only that I have just finished writing my first paper. Oliver Twist and I, we go way back.

Things are getting busy—I turned into a social butterfly over the weekend, although I must say by the end of the whirl I wished I’d stayed in the cocoon. It was lovely to see everyone, but it was overwhelming—and everyone I know here is so new, that I don’t have the reassuring silences with them yet that I have with people from home.

First of all: the parties. Friday night was a Kennedy Orphans housewarming, for Fergus, Alex and Dave. This has since become known as the FAD event. They’re all in the government studies/international studies/security studies end of the spectrum, so I expect life gets a little acronym-heavy for them. The highlight was talking to a second year student in security studies for about half an hour about the illegal breakaway state Transnistria, a wedge of land between Moldova and the Ukraine with a population of half a million people. He didn’t believe Inga and I—didn’t even believe that it existed. I told him he should look it up, especially if he’s in the security business, as it’s believed to be a big black market for former Soviet weaponry and nuclear matter. Eventually he got out his laptop to look it up. We all sat and looked at the Transnistrian website.

Saturday was English department grad students meeting for drinks—I was there from 7 til close to midnight. I heard that some went on to 3 or 4 in the morning. Meeting more of the people I’ll be studying with, getting to know them a little bit more.

Sunday night Inga had her housewarming party—another Kennedy Orphans affair. It was also a belated celebration of Moldovan independence day, which was the previous Monday, August 27. There was much hilarity surrounding Onur’s assertion that he needed to buy waterproof candles.

Yesterday was the English Department barbeque, for grad students and staff. This is apparently now an annual event at the head of department’s house in Virginia. There must have been at least fifty people there, and it was probably the one gathering at which it seemed completely normal that my trapeze lessons would lead me to a desire to write about the circuses in Dickens’s novels.

In between all of these events it’s basically been sleep and study—other than an excursion to Ikea to pick up my last piece of furniture: a chest of drawers. As with all the Malm range, it was on the complicated side to construct, so Aga, who thinks that other than her love of wearing dresses should have been born a boy, came to assist with her many handyman skills. She was good at the logistics of it, but doesn’t much like using a hammer, so I still got to have the fun of putting the 29 nails into the back of the thing. (Sadly, I bent the 30th nail.) Now that that’s done, I’m keen to settle into a routine of work. Once each class has met a few times I’ll really be able to gauge the workload, and from there I’ll be able to plan to do other things—get out of DC, see more sights, appreciate this whole living-in-the-States lark. At least I’m settled, which has taken less than a month. I’m happy with that.