Raining sideways.

It hasn't rained this hard since January. I'm hoping for brighter, warmer, sunnier days in the upcoming weeks--'cause, um, it's June--but for now I'm holing up in Hoogeveldt with Grizzly Bear's latest album, microwaveable falafel, and all the Foucault I can stomach. Exams call, and I must answer. Bleeeeaarrrrggghhhh.

Another brilliant display of incompetence.

Sorry, this one's going to be a rant.

For about four weeks, I've been emailing my French professor and trying to catch her before she scurries out of the classroom to set up a new time to take the final exam. (I'm leaving this godforsaken country--praise Allah and the seventy-two virgins--before it's scheduled to take place on July 9th.)

In the meantime, I've made plans. Like, oh, I don't know, A TRIP TO BERLIN.

I finally get an email back from her this morning going on and on about how we'd already decided (we? where is this we coming from?) to have the exam on June 19th, and it simply can't be changed. All with an undertone of "you just think you are SO entitled that you get to have an exam whenever the hell you want".

So it looks like I'm not going to Berlin. Think she'll reimburse me for my plane tickets?



This is honestly the final straw in my dealings with this university. Everything I have done or have tried to do while I've been here--getting papers signed, faxing things to my advisor at home, registering for classes, checking out books from the library, blah blah blah ad infinitum--has been frought and unnecessarily complicated and nobody wants to take any responsibility for what is, in essence, THEIR JOB.

For instance, some moron in the cogs of the BRILLIANT Dutch bureaucratic machine managed to screw up the date on my €500 residence permit. So I went to the International Office on Friday to see if someone could call the immigration office and triple-check that it'll be okay for me to leave the country in a couple weeks, despite this hopelessly bungled document.

The woman REFUSES to call. And I'm like, um, you know, I would do it myself, except for that little nagging fact that I DON'T SPEAK DUTCH. AND YOU WORK IN THE INTERNATIONAL OFFICE. SO YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT.

But her colleague handles those questions! And said colleague isn't in the office today! SHOCK! AWE!

So...could you call IND? Pretty please? With a cherry on top? No. Of course you couldn't. Because that would be Too. Friggin'. Simple.

So could I have your colleague's email address? Maybe a phone number?

Shock registers on her face. "Oh no, you'll have to come by the office."

Abortion providers may be getting murdered and state courts may be depriving gay men and women of their basic civil rights, but hey...in America, you can get a goddamn phone call made if you need a phone call made. Twenty-five days, ladies and gentlemen.

One month left.

Yep, folks. You read that right. Thirty more days and I'll be somewhere over the Atlantic. And hopefully not disappearing in an electrical storm before I get to breathe the sweet polluted American air. (Too soon? Sorry.)

Someone asked me today if I'm excited to go home. Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. Yes x 10^29380291.

But then I look up at the insanely blue sky and down at the collected letters of Hunter Thompson in my lap, and I think, when will I ever have the time to appreciate these things again?



I wonder if this sensation of comfort in burgeoning familiarity, of nine-thirty sunsets over the city from the bike bridge and the (nasty, nasty) taste of warm wine in a blazing late afternoon outside Piecken, will end up coloring how I felt about this whole experience.

At the risk of beating that dead horse a couple more times, it's worth re-stating that my first couple of weeks here pushed me into depths of misery that I didn't think possible for a normal human being to bear. Sometimes I'm re-stocking on groceries at Albert Heijn and I'm struck dumb lifting a bag of muesli into my basket just thinking about how far I've come. Was it really only five months ago that I retreated into the dark space between the bread shelves and the employee door, reduced to embarrassing (loud, snotty, mascara-drenched) American tears because I couldn't tell the difference between fabric softener and bleach and regular detergent?

I think the magnitude of this whole experience just hit me now. Daaamn. I am a different person.

I won't be that girl who returns from abroad tanned and beaming and full of stories and just ACHING about how much she misses where she was and her brand-new [insert nationality here] boyfriend. Not to diminish the awesomeness of that experience. I would have given my right arm and maybe a couple fingers from my left hand to have a relatively painless, joyous, perpetually Facebook-friendly time abroad.

But the things I've done--and the things those things have done to me (yeah, just try to straighten that one out)--have showed me who I am at my core. Ecstatic ups, horrendous downs, and now I think I'm starting to get a general idea of who I'm going to become. And it's not too bad.

Bring it on, June.

Brevity on a sunny day.

I just stumbled upon this on the NYT website. It perfectly sums up how I'm feeling right now: living in the present here, but at the same time using what I'm doing here to inform how I feel about and experience the United States when I get back. The fact that it's pretty bad-ass photography for the most part is just the icing on the cake...apparently the collection was done in conjunction with the FOAM museum in Amsterdam, which was doing an amaaaaazing Avedon retrospective when I visited at the end of April.

Okay, getting too pretentious. Moving on...

I spotted some insanely cheap tickets to Berlin on Ryanair's website this week, and five of us are heading there on June 18th for one last huzzah. Pretty excited.

I'm off for a run and potentially a nap. Something about today lends itself to sleep.

Word of the Day #2

So it isn't Dutch, but here it is:

Angstschweiß (pronounced angst-shviess) - sweating due to nerves

...and on that note, I'm off to drink a liter of Coke Light, crank up the Chet Baker, and write this damn paper.

Odd.

Last night, I experienced my first pangs of not wanting to leave. (I know, right?)

A whole bunch of us internationals were out on the patio at Odessa, schvitzing and drinking rapidly warming Palms, to celebrate Martina's last night in Nijmegen before she heads back to Switzerland. As she left, some part of me was like, damn. The people are what make Nijmegen tolerable for me. And quite honestly, I have no idea when--or if--I'll see them again. Not a pleasant thought.

And I turn 21 in less than 2 weeks? Honestly, WTF?

The signs of London

And just for a little weekend pick-me-up, some charmingly worded signage from around London town:

(Fortnum and Mason)

(Tower of London)

(Tower of London)

(St. Bartholomew's Church)

Oh, those Brits. I just can't get enough.