Wait a minute, can we slow down?

While I was away for the past two weeks, lots of things happened. Enough things so that when my parents showed up to pry me out of the coast house and haul me back here, they also shouted at me for not leaving my phone on (you can understand the wonderful irony here when I tell you that my parents feel that cell phones exist only for making outgoing calls, and should be left off at all other times so that people can't talk to you). They were all good things, but they have combined to reduce me to a state of nail-biting panic.

My loan got approved. You have no idea how relieved I am. If it had been rejected, that would have put an abrupt stop to all of this. It pays all my tuition and I need every cent of it. I'm hoping the exchange rate will improve and I won't need all of it, but I'm not holding my breath. If I work 10 hours a week (my last work-study job will give me glowing references) we can just about afford everything else. I'm trying not to think about the part where I have to pay it all back. I'm hoping to pay for my PhD by some other means (grants, prostitution, bank robbery - I'll worry about that when I get there.)

I got a housing offer. They gave me one of the cheapest single rooms they have. I have to share a kitchen and a bathroom (alas, there are no heated towel rails in my future) and the dorm was built in the 70's, but I nearly wept with gratitude because I do not have to share my room. I would like to never share a bedroom with anyone ever again as long as I live. (It's a darn good thing I aspire to be single.) There are currently two people in the world I would happily share an apartment with, and I am capable of sharing a bedroom for up to about two weeks, but if I had been assigned a double, I'm afraid I would have had to kill and eat my roommate during the first week. That would probably have gotten me thrown out of the program and shipped back to America. (Okay, so actually, in reality, it is almost impossible to get a double room, but this is a big point of concern for me and I am highly paranoid about it.)

I got my International Student ID card. My mother had a fit of hand-wringing while I was away the last time and applied for it (pretending she was me) but it was actually a pretty good idea. It comes with travel and basic medical insurance (and if I die there, they have to send my body back) and it also works as a phone card. I'm also supposed to go to the AAA and get an international driver's license. This was my dad's idea. I really have no idea why he is so set on it. I have no business whatsoever driving a car in England. Some days, I'm not even sure I should be allowed to drive a car in America. Even if some catastrophe occurs and forces me to find a place that will rent me a car, I'm not sure I could anyway, because apparently the British like stick shifts (I don't really blame them, their gas prices terrify me) and I couldn't drive a stick shift if my life depended on it. And finally, I'm allowed to drive all I want with my US driver's license for a full year. Since the only time I might actually want a car is when my family is visiting and wants to look at things, my dad may as well rent the car and drive it while I cower in the back and cover my eyes. But whatever, it will take me 5 minutes.

While I was at the coast house, I had to go get passport photos taken. I need one for the visa application, one for the ISIC, and the school, for no discernible reason, wants me to show up with six more in my carry-on luggage (along with my diploma, which would cost me $100 to replace, and some sealed transcripts. I wish they said why, but I'm afraid to question them in case they take a closer look at my file and realize they didn't actually mean to admit me). Anyway, the woman taking the passport photos used a digital camera, and showed me the picture afterwards to see if it was okay. I didn't appear to have a double chin or chunks of hair standing on end, so I said something along the lines of "That's fine; it doesn't have to look good." I honestly think she would have reacted less strongly if I had said "That's great; you can't see the oozing sores at all." But anyway, the point I meant to make when I started this paragraph was that my mother, after having spent a good three hours nagging me about having to get this done before I came back, took my photos and promptly lost them the next morning. After tearing through the house for three hours and actually going through all the drifts of mail stacked precariously on the dining room table (in which she found a Netflix movie we had reported lost) she found them stuffed in the book she was reading. This would be the first phase of the nail-biting anxiety I was talking about earlier - we wouldn't have had time to go out and get more, because tomorrow morning I have to go to Newark to get my biometrics data done.

The second part of the nail-biting anxiety came when I said to myself this evening "Well, damn. The school has taken two deposits and isn't going to give them back, my flight is booked, I have a fixed address over there, my government has actually agreed to give the school a whole lot of money to take me, which means that my visa will almost certainly be approved, and consequently it looks as though I'm actually going to get put on a plane in late September and sent over there. Maybe I should take another look at the course requirements." I have to admit, I didn't look too closely at them before I applied. There wasn't any reason to. At the time, I gave myself about a 5% chance of getting into this particular school, and now that they've accepted me and I've gone back and looked at them more closely, I think in retrospect I had well under a 1% chance of getting in (particularly as I never finished my application.) I'm still not convinced there wasn't a catastrophic error in the admissions department; they're British, they might be too polite to tell me. Anyway, I wandered on over to their program website, and then spent the next 15 minutes biting my kneecaps in terror. One of the reasons I assumed I wouldn't get in was that they had written on their front page in letters of fire that I MUST HAVE A RELEVANT UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE. Consequently, they are assuming that I'm going over there with some sort of clue what I'm doing. And besides that, I didn't check their ranking in the field of archaeology, and now I find that it's ridiculously high - high enough that it kind of makes sense to just stay there for my PhD rather than try for Oxford like I was thinking I might do. So now, I'm afraid that I will get kicked out in my first week for complete incompetence. I mean, I'm smart and I work hard, but I simply have no idea what I'm doing. But, if you recall, I predicted this would happen earlier in the summer, so I'm going to tell myself to chill in a stern voice and spend a day or two in the library.