Final thoughts

I'm trying to keep the excitement for Cannes/Oxford/life going the past month, so every time I hit a wall with a paper or with the umpteenth novel I'm reading I make myself think of Jude Law. Mmm. I'm a pretty grounded person, but I take no responsibility for what might happen if I see him on the red carpet...

I signed up for Variety (the freebie newsletters, not the real deal because I'm too po' to afford it), and I get a kick out of checking my e-mail these days. "Cannes?! Where?!" (In the south of France.) Making some plans for the films I'm willing to ho' it up to get a ticket for (definitely My Blueberry Nights, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, A Mighty Heart, maybe Sicko just for the spectacle that will be Michael Moore), but it looks like I'll have a ton of new things to try! I'm hoping that some films have subtitles, at least in French if not in English so I can understand every other word, but otherwise it'll be fun to see how much I can understand of a film just by the images.

My literary life is looking up as well. I had a lot of success this week geeking out with Keats for my final paper in ENGL 4590--so many overflowing thoughts that I've actually begun a "save these for the thesis" file! I might graduate with Honors in English after all!

I also got oriented for my fall semester at Oxford yesterday! All right! They showed us a lot of neat pictures of Keble College (kind of like how Grady College is a part of UGA--this is the part of Oxford where we'll be staying and working), our under-construction residential center, the bookstore in town... I will definitely be Harry Pottering around as much of Oxford, and England, as I can without a broomstick and invisibility cloak.

I also got really pumped up about my classes! Dr. Eberle, one of the Romantics profs at UGA and hopefully my future mentor if we get along, seems adorable and so smart, which will help me get through Austen and the Brontes (and Woolf?! Eeew, modernism... But I'm sure I'll change my mind about it once I understand it better). And I'm not too worried about all of the crazy accomplished dons who may or may not spray you with water if you're dumb in tutorial. I am, honestly, incredibly excited to go read a ton of novels/plays/poems and write my heart out for 12 months. I've struggled a bit with stress in the past, but I know that the hyper-intensity of Oxford tutorials will force me to ingest/produce the amount of literature I'll need to be able to if I ever want to study English at a higher level.

I know, "only an English major," right? Right. And a journalism major. And a film minor. We'll see which one wins by the end of the year...? Until them I am one eccentric, idiosyncratic quirk person and trying to just go along with it.

Disoriented is more like it...

Just got back from my Cannes program orientation in the ridiculously posh Peabody suite (seriously, it makes the Journalism building look like the big cinder block it is) and am feeling a strange mix of tired/excited/headachy/loud/nervous/privileged.

Generally things went well. I showed up right about on time and got over feeling awkward and like I didn't know anybody by perusing my 1/2 ton of info papers. It was kind of fun looking around the room to see which faces I remembered from Facebook and putting heads with shoulders. (By the way, there are a LOT of gentlemen going on this trip! I heard from some friends of previous Cannes programs that there are usually only a handful, but females were definitely the minority in the room. How refreshing in the Grady College building!) Alison did a great job of letting us know how it'll be at the actual Festival: crazy and on-your-own! I felt abandoned and empowered to make my own way at the same time. An hour and a half later, we filled out various forms, I met my JLP roommate (she worked with my sister at Regal? small world!), and scooted out of the suite to "go write a paper." I can't think straight enough to write a paper, and at the same time I can't remember half of what we talked about because I'm that damned excited!

Generally, what I got from the orientation is that I definitely need to make the Cannes experience for myself. I'll have to hold a sign and hook a bit on the corner to get tickets to the best premieres, and I'll have to act natural around a lot of high-power people--big change from my usual modest, polite, homebody ways! But how exciting that I'll get to try out a new side of myself on the Riviera! No one knows I'm not Miss Personality, so why not be her? :)

In other, non-Cannes news, I got my official acceptance to the Franklin at Oxford Fall 2008 semester today! I am positive that I will have the travel bug after I go to France (hell, I start thinking "let's just drive on to Mexico and live it up" when I take the occasional road trip with my sister), so how convenient that I'll be hopping on another plane three months later. And it'll be more of my typical scene, a.k.a. geeking out about literature in the oldest English-speaking university on the planet. We'll have to see how much I like that after a frantic month in the film industry, not to mention two months after that in a swank Buckhead magazine internship... Excitement! Barely explainable excitement!

Fools rush in...?

So I think I'll give this blog thing a try. I've been running on the idea that my mind's pretty sharp and that I'll remember what I need to (I'm definitely the type to say "Why do I need to take a picture? Eventually the pictures will be the only things I remember about this trip/concert/high school graduation!") But, as I've found with essay-writing, it never quite works that way: the brilliant word or transition or paragraph I think of and think is so brilliant that I have to remember it later is lost to the recesses of my incredibly strange brain within minutes, and any attempt to reconstruct it results in bad imitations and anger at myself for neglecting to write it down in the first place again. It's time to swallow my pride and admit that I'm forgetful, and no admission worth its salt isn't accompanied by some measurable resolution that will guilt one into sticking to it! So I hereby resolve to keep a journal and to write some of these memorable things down.

I've got a lot coming up in the next half-year! After dreaming about it for the 2+ years since I decided to come to UGA, I was accepted to Grady College's Cannes Film Festival study abroad program a few weeks ago. It's just about all I think about these days. I also did the adult thing and got a real job for the summer as an editorial intern at The Atlantan magazine. I'm definitely excited to hobnob with (hopefully not) snobs in Buckhead, but of course I won't be getting paid and will need to take up my less-glorious job as a morning manager at Hollywood Video in Johns Creek in order to pay for gas, get some fancy new clothes at Lenox, and generally be worthy of hobnobbing. And then in the fall I'm studying abroad again, this time in my capacity as English major at Oxford! What a busy little bee am I.

I look forward to this half-year of frenzied jetsetting and commuting, shmoozing and hump-busting. I'll hopefully make some great friends and memories, learn a lot, and somewhere in there find the time to figure out where I'm going for the next however many years I'm living. Very anxious about that last one--more to come later as, per usual, I'm feeling a bit too confused to make any sense of it right now. And too confused to write a pithy conclusion to this journal entry. So, uh, that's it for now.