Month: October 2014

I feel as if I just walked onto a train and landed here sometimes. It was a rough journey with stops and bumps, but now I’m dumped here. That’s how I feel sometimes with life. As if I can see clearly the steps I’ve taken to get here, but have this sense of being deposited here with no idea where to step next. It was always the next step, like the next stop. It was finishing my thesis, graduating college, moving to Germany, getting into school, and now that I’m here, at this stop, I don’t know where the train is going. Where am I going now? I feel as if I am just waiting on the platform now, wondering where. Do I stay here? Do I try to get a job here? Is this where it ends? It’s so disconcerting.

I start to ponder where will I go once this masters is done. What are my job prospects? And that hits like a five ton brick. It’s weighty and heavy and like an elephant sitting on my chest. Because for the first moment in my life, I don’t think I know where it goes from now. I’ve planned in my life, a lot of things, as far as life plans. And yes, they’ve changed a lot in my life, but there was also a vague sense of the plan. I always knew where the next stop was, felt a crumbling path beneath my feet till I found the one. But maybe this is, was, my first step onto grass.

I thought I would start doing these. It’s too much I think to bombard people with a daily account, but a weekly one would be good.

Monday: Ugh, this will be very difficult. My memory is pretty bad, but maybe this will be a unique memory exercise. It’s gone, I’ll update if I remember. Oh! Monday we made delicious steak. It was a bit expensive, 24 euros for the both of us, but it was much cheaper than a restaurant and it was delicious. Like cutting through butter and fantastic.

Sunday I went to Oktoberfest.

Tuesday: A friend of ours came over and brought lunch. We played for a bit and then he left. We also went grocery shopping. I like this.

Wednesday: I went to pick up some required reading, we ate some delicious lunch at the same place we went Sunday and came home. I had to have the Goat Cheese burger again and I did! It is around the corner from my university as well. I found a natural ingredient supply store.

Thursday: Today is a work day, and I am trying to organize a set of schedules. I as well want to set up a list of 30 things I want to do in my life, from totally simple (to brushing my teeth twice a day) to reading more books. It’ll be wild.

My memory is pretty bad, so it might be a semi-weekly thing. Let me know if it’s too much!

I was walking around the mall downstairs and encountered someone wearing the same shirt. What was my first instinct you ask? Hide! I didn’t want to confront them and didn’t want to see them. I felt a stab of panic, like I didn’t want to be found out.

But I guess that’s the brutal reality of us here, if we don’t make all our clothes ourselves, the chances someone has bought the same exact thing is high. There will be someone walking around wearing the same thing as me, and it threatened me on first instinct. I felt like I was not original, an imposter walking around, a reproducable clone.

Upon coming home, I thought about it a lot more. No one really likes the idea that they aren’t original, that their clothes and look (which for me is supposed to reflect who I am and identify as) is something that others use as well. But that’s also reality. It threatened who I was, my individuality, because I felt reproducable and not original.

And I guess that resonated with me on some level, because I felt somehow like that revelation meant something to me. I couldn’t, and still don’t, know how, but it stuck a pang within me.

But having experienced that, now it’s just something that will rattle along in my head. Has something like this happened to you?

I just wanted to write this post to say that I ended up getting the seminars and exercises I wanted! I count this extremely lucky and it makes me feel a lot better about the whole system. Maybe this will happen each semester. I have no idea yet how many people are in my program and who might want seats. It makes me happy to know things are more solid. To reading those books before Monday!

I was talking to my mom the other day and she wisely suggested that when you have those dreams as I have had, the one about the bee, I should assume that everything in my dream represents me. Everything from the table, to the bee, to me. She said that maybe the bee is about being afraid of getting hurt. She also clarified that I’m probably afraid of wasps, since bees usually don’t attack unless motivated.

I think she’s right. I feel so vulnerable here sometimes and I am really afraid of being hurt. Aren’t we all? But how do I protect myself?

In the case of literal wasps, how?

There are so many differences in the education attitude and atmosphere and it could be for a large range of reasons.

1) You pay a ton less here. I pay about one hundred euros for a semester, comparing to upwards of 20/30thousand

2) Because of this, there are tons more students here and there aren’t, usually, stiff hard entrance qualifications (this depends on the university and field of study)

3) There may just be a general cultural different attitudes towards education

For these and many, I am having trouble adapting here. I’ve heard stories where classes aren’t mandatory, some of them (mainly large lectures), and where your grade largely depends on one exam at the end, with not that many assignments during the semester. This may create an atmosphere where there is less incentive for continual learning or less accountability.

The course process for selection of courses is very different than I am used to. You rank the classes that could fit into a certain requirement and you do this for all classes, even if there’s only one option. Then after the course deadline for registering passes, a computer raffles those who selectred priority one. There is no first come first serve, and it’s more or less all to chance.

I’ll state first my reactions. I think it’s frustrating to say the least. I like to have a schedule and order, and by keeping me on my toes until 4 days before the semester starts to tell me which courses I will be taking is like telling someone they have just received a job (for which they chose by selecting a priority) and they start after the weekend (with required reading of course). It seems unfair to me. I don’t know if it’s a perpetuating cycle between the attitudes of the students, or the system, but it’s frustrating to me. I feel in flux, all the way to the end, where then I get thrown into a pit of sharks where all I have to protect me is a life raft and a bag of supplies, for which I have only had a couple days to make and prepare.

And this brings me to my next reaction. I feel uncomfortable with it and it frustrates me. But for a larger reason. I feel I have lived my life with the assumption that when I work hard enough, stay up to register, study the whole year, I get results, whether that be in grades, priority, whatever. I have operated under the mindset that when I truly work so hard that all I do is work, I will get what I have worked for. It seems like a fair mentality to me. When someone works hard enough, they can get what they have worked towards. I realize that there’s flaws, there are factors you can’t get around, where you can work your hardest and you will never get what you want. It’s a mentality that supports when you are diligent, know when the course registration opens, stay up till midnight, and are ready to input the course numbers, you get the ones you have signed up for. There isn’t a lot of chance. You can assess which courses you will get by a running current count of how many spots are left over, you can make a schedule for yourself. There is a certainty to it. There’s an element of punishment as well, if you miss it, if you aren’t prepared, then you don’t get exactly what you want. I know this is too black and white.

And this all ignores the reality that life isn’t fair. There are things I can work my whole life towards and never achieve. But maybe I can’t accept a life where things are up to a raffle, up to chance, and where I can’t influence my life. Maybe I am a control freak, maybe I am too wound up. But I want to have the agency to control an aspect of my life, one that makes a huge deal to me, that affects the rest of my life. I know life isn’t fair, but, to me, this should be. And if not completely fair, but more so. I can’t change it, I can’t change that life isn’t fair, but I can notice the things around me, and work to make it more fair for others.

I was thinking about a couple more things last night regarding cultural differences.

1) Gift Receipts

I asked one of my friends if we should include a gift receipt in a gift for a friend the other day and they looked at me as if I had two heads. After I explained what one was, they remarked that that isn’t done here. There is, apparently, a market for gift exchange (somewhere except I have no idea where). Additionally if you get a gift you have the same of or have no desire for, people don’t return it, they might try to regift it or, in rarer cases, tell the gift giver, because it’s the thought that counts. I get that, I do, but I also get that the person, the gift giver, wants to give the gift receiver something they truly want, shouldn’t they want to make sure the person gets that?

2) Returns

To start with, the US has a much more expansive return policy than here. For example, I could return my pair of tights or nail polish bottle or lipstick if, upon returning home, I find I have the exact same by accident. Not the case here, not to mention I have no idea where I would even find a return counter to do this. Perhaps you can return at the normal registers, but I don’t even know because it’s not really done here. For some items, due to hygienic reasons, you cannot really return here and are mostly rejected. But for example, I bought hair styling wax the other day and came home to find it had two gigantic finger holes in it from someone else! If hygiene is a concern, which it should be, there should be assurances to the quality. Such as a seal or sufficient watchfullness of staff to make sure that such a thing doesn’t happen. I think it’s just a cultural thing. In the US the idea, the customer is always right, may just not fly here.