dear leslie and stephanie,

i realize that the only way you'll have any idea what i'm doing these days is if i blog, sad as that statement may be. ya'all left here 3 weeks ago but it feels like 3 years already. how can i wait until next summer? sigh.

in the meantime, what have toni and i been doing?

1. being happier than ever. no joke - no words. full stop.
2. growing a nice herb garden on our kitchen windowsill - even with the grayness of oxford!
3. i stare at kenyan government files with big SECRET stamps on them all day long. even if they're 60 years old, i still feel quite spy-ish. it's for work for an old professor ours, and it is fascinating and thrilling and i'm stoked i'm getting paid to do it.
4. toni tries to make sense of some other work our professor has tasked him on, that i'm not going to talk about more - you can ask me later. the point is that...
5. ....we work across from each other in our professor's office, and it is absolutely ideal. our prof goes on and on with advice on writing up our phds, publishing, finding jobs, getting into academia, all that good stuff. he's the most well-connected man in the universe, utterly brilliant, and an absolute God-send to us both as we scope out our (exciting!) futures (ah!).
6. we take lovely lunch breaks at our favorite old spots - the woodstock road deli lentils live on!
7. we're starting to feel utterly british, having watched a great deal of "jeeves and wooster," and me discovering persephone press, an amazing little british publishing company that reintroduces forgotten and lesser known authors, mostly women, and mostly from the early 20th century. i've already breezed through a couple novels and am itching for more.
8. we also drink lots of tea and eat digestive biscuits. thus the britishness descends.
9. generally we're just revisiting old colleges, old streets, old libraries (got our "bod cards"/university ID cards this week!!!), old gardens, old everything from four years ago and feeling perfectly content and happy to be nestling into old oxford again for a good long stint. after all the moving about continents the last years, aaaaah how relieving it is i could not say....

and

10. i love this photo - look how happy we all were there on dear broad street! yay! thanks elliott for taking it.

miss everyone tons. still can't get over that you were all HERE! it feels like a dream.

love,
jooj.


p.s. toni shaved his beard today and he looks like he's 18! hehehe he also kind of has a superman chin :)