What an epic week. Full of Adventure! Scandal! Drama! This week has been host to a grand coincidence of both potential and kinetic brands of fun. They are properly correlated for the first time in a while, and I am reaping the rich bounty of this fun-harvest. These are solid plans that turn out to be better than already expected, which makes them pretty much the best kind of plans.
I feel like I have found the core to this whole experience, my social kernel, from which I can weather the shitstorm of gossip and snakkeligt that pervade my living situation. Really it's all you can expect when people of such vast difference in attitude and action are placed in direct contact for hours and hours a day without much in the way of reprieve. Every action and conversation is threaded through with a venomous strand, and the net it weaves covers the entirety of experience here. It isn't really that different from being at, in a purely hypothetical sense, going to a school of 1,400 in a town of 9,000. Not that I have much experience in that kind of situation. But still, at Grinnell people have the time and leisure to get settled in before the shenanigans really start. Also, living on a floor for a whole year at college impels your signature onto a sort of contract that forces you to care what other people think, in what turns out to be a really uncomfortable dance. Here, there isn't quite enough time to care about that stuff, and it really shows. On the bright side, the group size at the hojskole is just right such that there's breathing room between people.
So the band last night, a blues quartet strangely entitled Tutweiler, was comprised of 4 Danes who look like they could be a Weezer ska cover band that had a horrible lab accident involving the Dave Matthews Band and Chuck Berry's ghost. Short sleeve button downs, the SuperCoif slickback hair, cowboy-Europop pointed boots. The whole 9 yards (8.2296 meters). It was a truly awesome experience, drinking whiskey and listening to the "gammel amerikansk blues." I hesitate to call it authentic, but it sure sounded a hell of a lot like it was.
And so it was written in the book of Rage. Parts of this week just pissed me off. Couldn't really tell you why. Maybe it was my bipolar Danish teacher who told the class that I wasn't in good shape because I had not one but two grammatical errors on my homework. I think I've already belabored the point that the Danes have a different sense of what is public or private than we do. Maybe it was that we watched United Flight 93, a movie as cheesy (at times) and morally dubious as it is discomforting. Maybe it was the fact that it's been cloudy in this country since before human memory, or the 3 flakes of snow that managed to hit the ground without melting that prompted all buses to stop service. I fucking hate that bus so much I have dreams about it getting ripped apart by large machines with no remorse.
Maybe it was my bitch computer, which stopped taking a charge from the wall for about an hour this morning. I think that episode was the closest I've come to axe-kicking a piece of technology through a solid floor, but luckily I was able to restrain myself. Luckily, being a badass of unfathomably epic proportions, I happened to narrow down where the power failure was happening and -- get this -- have the spare part to fix it with. This is the second time this particular part of my AC adapter has failed, so this time I came prepared. Yae, and on this day it was acknowledged my dominion over all things technology.
Maybe it was this runny nose, which is pretty much a never-ending cockblock but for fun. Wanna go out? Sniffle. Were you thinking about being somewhere without a tissue box for more than 15 seconds? Drip. Had you planned on not feeling like shoving your head through a wall at least once an hour? Throb. What the fuck do sinuses even do? They just sit there all day, smug in their power over you and your olfactory senses, drizzling hideous slime out of two holes in your face. Why can't the cavities in our skulls be filled with something cool, like chocolate syrup? Why can't we just use it as storage space? It all just seems like a big sham to me, and the festering mountain of sodden tissues sitting next to me is all the proof I need.
Some days, you just have to be angry. Hell, most people hardly even need a reason. I haven't figured out how to get around it except to let it out. If I try to talk myself down I always just end up depressed. The good news is it never lasts very long, and there always remains my one true outlet for emotions that I have no clue how to deal with: humor. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is tonight's word.
"I fucking hate that bus so much I have dreams about it getting ripped apart by large machines with no remorse."
ReplyDeleteYeah, the commute pretty much ruined the DTU experience for me, especially after the day where I took train, then bus, then train, then bus (one bus normally covers the last three steps), and the person I was meeting for class was still super-late.