I am going to take a moment and put myself in your place, dear reader. I shall, in fact, quite rudely impose myself into your position, and make some rather unsubstantiated assumptions about your intentions. Might this be overstepping my boundaries? Gettin' all up in your personal space? Perhaps.
Enough drivel. Without further ado, my Unsubstantiated Assumptions:
You, oh friendly reader, probably fall under one of these following two categories:
-a friend, family member, or acquaintance curious as to where my journeys are taking me
-someone interested in studying in or visiting Edinburgh
If you fall into the second category, you likely have no idea who I am, in which case you are probably imagining me as a wrinkled hermit with round, copper spectacles and a knee-length beard, curled in the annex of my extensive personal library, surrounded by butterflies pinned to cork boards, and perplexed by this newfangled devil box called a computer.
Not the case. This is me:
A Bit About Myself:
-I’m a playwright, a poet, and an actor—hence my enjoyment of a good wordy babble.
-I make a lot of crafty things and enjoy cooking, so you’ll probably see some recipes in this blog from time to time.
-The ukulele is my instrument of choice. You'll hear a song or two perhaps.
-I hail from Brattleboro, Vermont, a small artsy town in the United States.
Anyway, to the point. I will be jetting off across the gleaming Atlantic in just under two weeks to spend my junior year in Scotland, studying literature at the University of Edinburgh. As I usually attend school a mere forty-five minute drive from my hometown, I have never actually been away from Brattleboro for more than six weeks in my entire life. Once I leave for Edinburgh, I won’t see my home again for a solid nine months. This is both terrifying and exhilarating, but I am eager to throw myself into whatever grand adventures may await me.
I've been preparing for my impending UK invasion in a number of ways. For example, reading The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. As a child, my mother would read to me from A Child's Garden of Verses, Stevenson's book of children's poetry. It is a volume full of sweet poems about children sick in bed and having to go to sleep too early, sentiments instilled in Stevenson during his own very sickly childhood. Stevenson edited both A Child's Garden of Verses and Doctor Jekyll simultaneously. It is a tad disconcerting to me that his poem about swing sets was floating around in his brain right along side the image of Mr. Hyde beating a man to death with a cane, but I suppose that is the whole nature of the Doctor Jekyll story-- each man's ever-teetering balance between good and evil.
Well, it seems as if I am approaching the end of my word limit, and thus must start to wrap it up. Next time you hear from me, I will be traversing the streets of Edinburgh, trying to break out of my vegetarianism enough to try some haggis and tiptoeing in and out of theaters with hopes of finding a new home in the billow of red curtains.
Until then,
-GennaRose
