University expects a lot of you. The deciding factor is, of course, how much you are willing to give. For somewhere with such a reputation, you can get away with a remarkable amount of slacking off; you can sleep until noon, drink until your vital organs beg for mercy, recover with an eleven-hour Farmville session and knock out an essay in an afternoon and your tutor might still think it's ok. A good deal of first-class essays actually come directly via this technique (although unfortunately, never in my case). The tutors slack off too, which is the most surprising thing. They might forget to actually mark your essay, or tell you to figure out your own reading list via the Wikipedie footnotes, or if you are a year-abroader they might even forget that you exist. Not that anyone around here might be bitter about that...
The thing is though, you can. You can do all this stuff and remember your uni days as a hazy and wild time of intensive work and more intensive play, you can have a Withnail-and-I style living situation and subsist entirely on bacon, but for some of us (the boring ones) we can't take that kind of high-octane living. We need to sleep, and wake up while it still counts as technically 'morning', and have time to brush our hair every so often. The most important thing we need is to actually do good work, because if we aren't doing good work there's no point to the whole thing and we might as well put down the tome on post-postmodernism and go out and drink a wellie-boot full of gin and tonic. So we achieve alright results and we live an alright life. We are the slow-and-steadyers, we burn the candle at one end and have the other end cemented in an appealing and minimalistic Ikea candle holder.
Whatever your style is, however, you spend a lot of time reading. That's what it comes down to, reading and typing and then reading some more. And the typing, too - my fingers are now blaze-fast, I can type in two languages at a million words a minute only ever looking at the book I am writing about or the magpie on my windowsill but never at the screen or the keyboard. I can tell if I make a typo because it sounds different. And, like crisp-lovers working as Crisp Tasters in a crisp factory, at the end of the day we don't want to set eyes on another crisp. Or something. Essentially reading and writing seems like the worst thing you could ask us to do.
It doesn't matter, anyway, because you don't have time or energy to do either of those things. You want passive and stupid entertainment like online telly, or you want to sit with your guitar for a while and make up songs about how many feelings you have, or you simply want to go and drink a gallon of Lady Grey with your friend and spend the evening hating your tutors together.
What I am trying to say, in sum, is that I have little space in my mind or battery for writing this blog, which crushes me because I love to write and I had really hoped this blog could be established and regular by this point. I thought it might work to get an entry out three times a week, but now I see why so many student blogs get left coughing in the gutter. I don't know what I'll do yet; maybe I'll just write an article now and again to keep me going, maybe I'll bite the bullet and realise that just for this year all I have to concentrate on is a roll of paper and a flat, square hat at the end of it otherwise the whole thing will have been for nothing. At any rate: I apologise. But my fingers ache and it's time to go to bed.
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