October 15

Killed the facebook page last week. I had just emerged from seeing the new Blade Runner 3D at Eye Film museum. It was a long film, 2h40m. It was a treat. €11 with my student ID. I felt righted, mellow. I love post-apocalyptic stories for putting my troubles of today into perspective. That perspective being: it's really all just bullshit so bide your time til its over.

Lately when I get up the only thing I look forward to is bedtime.

I was rounding off from a meltdown, a sort of crisis of intellectual faith. Did I even have what it took to do this program? I had yet to receive a grade on any of the work I turned in from the same professor who rejected two of my proposals. I weighed in on quitting and what my options were - should I quit and return to the US? Only cos I refuse to learn another language right now and without that I could either (maybe) work in the UK or get some kind of grunt work off the books here in Dutchie land. Neither sounded appealing. But if I am wracking my brain to absorb this material, and not getting it (little is clicking, it is all uphill) then what's the point of dragging it out?

As a last resort to the challenge of that day I emailed a couple of classmates asking how they came up with their term paper topics, as I was hitting dead-ends. One mailed me back the next day, expressing shock that I doubted myself, that the prof told her that I am one of the two strongest students in the course.
What?

Long story short, I got through the readings for that week, and thank christ the next weeks topics were something I could relate to. I was able to pull myself out of the funk by killing off everything save reading and my morning & evening walks. I turned in a weekly assignment that actually had some fire under it (I gave a shit about the topic matter) and yesterday saw the grades list posted on the course website. I do indeed have the highest grades in the class. Go the fuck figure. Even though the assignment he returned to me was chock full of advice on how it could have been better,  got a high score.

Then I saw that the assignments from past courses he uploads for us to use as examples of high-scoring papers are ALSO filled with only comments on How This Could Have Been Better.

I heard that the Dutch are "very direct". Prior, I took this to mean that they say what's on their mind without all the pussyfooting around like polite society in the U.S. Imagine my state then when a couple of my typically blunt comments were met with expressions of shock. I have a new understanding of this "very direct" thing. I think it just means that they say whatever they want and give no fucks whether it is logical or matches their actions at all. Like, subjective and void of accountability. Fair enough.

This upcoming week is rest week. Well, the university calender calls it study week before exams week beginning the 23rd but for me, it is rest week because I have only one class. I get to work mostly from home, without my thought flow being interrupted by going to campus. Of all the adjustments I have made, the hardest has been a return to a campus-environment after three years of online school. I still hate being on campus. When no one is around (late Friday afternoons) it is bearable. Well, I wanted to see if an on-campus environment would be any different for grad school then it was in community college Fresh-Soph levels. It is not.

In other news Mata Hari has begun at the National Opera and Ballet. My student ID gets me rush ticks for €15 day of show. That is my next treat to myself. Today and all this week (and most of last week) there is no rain. Today is sunny and gorgeous. I have taken my walk, rode to get groceries, am now back in my cave with the curtains drawn, and happy to spend a couple hours working on an annotated bibliography for a term paper whose topic I am pulling together by threads.

I have a goal to finish this course by June 30th and travel this continent for at LEAST a month. If I go back to the US it will be to California. Where I belong.

I still haven't figured out how to reply to comments on this thing, so I am afraid it is a bit of a one-way conversation for now. Which sucks as I look forward to actually engaging with people. One help page I found suggested that since this blog is a part of G+ that I can only respond to those comments by persons who have me included in their G+ circles. What a piece of crap. O well. Nothing is free.

A good deal of my grumpiness has to do with the drastic reduction in physical well-being tools at my disposal. Back home I had an acupuncture clinic 5 minutes from my doorstep, at 10 treatments for $175 it was user friendly. My chiropractor was $48 a pop and the gym ten minutes from my house was where I could plunk into the jacuzzi for ten minutes. To top it all off, the Chinese massage place up the road was $30 for an hour. Bear in mind I was earning $3k/month. Now I've roughly €500 per month to live on, chiro is $80 (haven't gone) cheapie massage is €40/hour (went once), no jacuzzi in site. Living without a car is mostly OK but after a treatment I do not want to get on a bike and huff it back home. Whatever. In my grumpy state I come up with a lot of reasons why I cant do something, but the reality is that I dont have the money I used to. So, I do more stretching, foam rolling and tennis balls under my feet.