Week 3: Time

Time has been on my mind a lot lately in a couple major ways: (1) the amount of time I've been here and (2) how I'm using my time.

Today (Tuesday/Wendesday/Whatever) marks three full weeks of being in London! It also happens to mean that this field study is a full quarter of the way over. I don't know if I believe it; it seems impossible somehow that such a huge chunk of it can be done already. And next week, it'll be a third of the way complete. That being said, I'm still in the I-can't-wait-to-go-back-home phase, so time can't possibly pass quickly enough for me. Thankfully, I'm pretty much over the misery hump, and I'm actually starting to enjoy my time here. I feel pretty comfortable for the most part, and I feel like I've been able to somehow miraculously adjust (more or less) to living in London.

I think part of the reason that I finally feel like time is starting to cruise is that I put together a full calendar for my field study, complete with (almost) weekly goals for having drafts of my essays and sections of my research paper completed. There's nothing I dread quite like an academic deadline, and let me tell you, having a deadline to stress about means that it's flying towards you at the speed of light. I couldn't be happier about this. I've also set some exercise goals, which I'm really excited about. It's nice to have things to do ... which brings me to my next point.

Life is harder when you don't schedule your time, especially when doing a field study. There have been more days than I'd like to admit where I've just found myself thinking, "I have nothing to accomplish today and I don't want to wander aimlessly through London again. I'd rather just sit home." The vast majority of the time, I talk myself into working on things, but self-motivation can be so difficult when you don't have any person or any plan to feel responsible to. I think this has been one of the things that made the first few weeks being here so hard—I didn't know what to do with my time. And, granted, a lot of that had to do with where I was living the first week; I didn't have keys so I had to be very careful about when I decided to leave the flat. I didn't have a library card, and I honestly was so miserable and culture-shock-y that I didn't even want to think about working on my project, which just made everything worse! What a mess!

All that being said, the difference it has made to have things I'm trying to accomplish every single day, to have goals I'm working towards every single week, has helped turn things around. Yes, there are still days that I just don't want to have to get on the Tube and go all the way across London just to sit in the library until my eyes hurt (in case you can't tell, this week has been especially library heavy, since I'm trying to finish up the first draft of the first section of my paper); there are days when I'd just as well not leave my bedroom, except for the occasional snack. I don't know how I've made it through three years of college without learning this lesson (possibly because I'm a little too Type-A to ever let myself get truly behind on my coursework) ... but I've suddenly realized how much happier I am when I use time wisely. I don't know that I've ever been as aware of my own agency in the time usage department as I have been the past week or so. But it's terribly apparent to me right now that, at least in Field Study Land, a good schedule is the recipe for happiness.

This week has been so different from the previous two. Still hard sometimes, of course, and still some tears. (Though these ones were prompted by a TV show finale and then perpetuated by listening to a song whose lyrics are "Dear Mama, here's a letter from your girl. Well I think my city days are done, and it ain't been three weeks since I came..." You get the drift—way too close to home there.) But all in all, it's been a lot better. Yes, my brain still hurts from all the library time I've had over the past couple of days, but I've got so much material to work with that I feel totally fine. I spent about twenty or thirty minutes just writing a pre-rough-draft and got three full pages of text written, which is incredible speed for me for an academic paper. I  can already tell it's going to be a lot of work getting all the information I have to fit down into a smaller space. I also found out today that John Donne is someone I want to place a little more emphasis on; apparently he was someone who really struggled with trying to accept the new cosmological system, and so his poetry is very reflective of how he worked through the switch. I might have to jump him up in my schedule a couple of weeks, just because I think I'm going to want to spend more time on him. And since he was also the dean of St. Paul's. Granted, he was a pre-1666-fire dean, but he just seems to be cropping up a lot, and I've been a fan of him for several years anyways, so I feel like there has to be just a little bit of justification in giving him a little more attention than I'd originally expected.