Brussels - Week 1 - Making Friends With Ducks

So, I live in Belgium now.

 

Let’s catch up: three weeks ago, I accepted an offer to work for a large international organisation in Brussels. I’ll be here until I go back to university in September, working in publishing reports on international politics, which is very much my jam.

 

Work is fun, people are nice, there’s a proper coffee machine with a milk-foamer, and I have a lovely view from the office. I am learning a lot of things. So far I have learnt that if you look at a page of text, and think it looks fine, you’re wrong. The text looks terrible. You need to move the text. There’s too many spaces between the characters. Or maybe not enough. The text is ‘loose’. This means something, apparently. I have started calling text ‘loose’ a lot, and I’m pretty sure if I keep using it I’ll eventually figure out what it means.

 

I have also learnt WAY more than I ever thought I would about the ups and downs of local conflicts in Tajikistan. Don’t even get me started on Tajikistan, we’ll be here for weeks.

 

The work offer happened pretty last-minute, so I didn’t even have time to find a place to rent. Fortunately, I stumbled arse-backwards into a housesitting position in a wooded, quiet suburb on the edge of Brussels, and will be here for the next few weeks until I find somewhere more permanent. I like it here, but I’m looking forward to moving somewhere a bit more central. I’m sure it’s a lovely place to raise small children, but the height of excitement here is going to Burger King.

 

Having said that, living in the middle of nowhere - and when I say ‘middle of nowhere’, I mean ‘a convenient thirty-minute tram ride to the city centre’ – does have its perks. I’ve lived in city centres for most of my adult life, and while you can’t deny the benefits of always being within walking distance of everything you need, it does get a bit tiring. Last weekend, I took a midday stroll through the MASSIVE local park, smiled at the many cheerful dog-walkers, and made friends with ducks. (I’ve only been here a week, I don’t have many other friends here yet). I’m also near the Flanders border, where mainly Francophone Brussels drifts into Dutch-speaking territory, so it’s fun to hear Dutch become more and more common the further east you walk. (Also, as it turns out, those ten years I spent learning French weren’t a total waste of time! Who knew!)

 

I can’t say I ever had desperate childhood dreams of living in Belgium, but now I’m here, I’ve been surprised by how much I like it. I’m aware that six months can sound like a lot but be very short in practice, so I’m going to try and make the best use of that time that I can. ‘Best use of my time’ here means speaking French, going to museums, and drinking large amounts of beer. My god, the beer. I had my first a few days ago, picked at random, and it smelled like a bouquet of fresh fruit and flowers.

 

Here’s to many more.

Calm The Shit Down About Free Speech on College Campuses

The furore around “free speech on college campuses” is the dullest, most inconsequential political topic of the last five years and I would rather put kebab skewers in my eyes than listen to another discussion about it.

Young students – people who have just come out of school, are still discovering politics and their place in the world, and whose brains are still not even fully developed yet – sometimes do politics in a way that is counterproductive, or overzealous, or crude. This is not new. This has been the stereotype of students since students have existed. If anything, the ‘overreaching’ activism seen on today’s campuses is utterly mild compared to previous decades – go look at how much bombing, rioting and property damage happened on college campuses in the early 70s. In the 1920s, the Klan tried to hold a rally in a mainly Catholic college town and the students responded by beating the crap out of them en masse and ripping the clothes off them. In comparison, inventing a couple of new pronouns and yelling at the occasional demagogue is really nothing to be shocked about.

Even if you don’t agree with every decision made by every young political group, this is the normal process of becoming politically aware; you are pretty much guaranteed not to get it right first time. This is the double-edged sword of youth radicalism; it has its ups and downs, its good ideas (which stick around) and its bad ideas (which fall out of favour)…and twenty years down the line it generally turns out they were ahead of the curve and right on 90% of whatever they were on about, even if they were ridiculed by the ‘sensible’ media of their day. To act as though the students of today are some new threat – and not just a new threat, but the hot topic that we apparently have to discuss over and over again – suggests an ignorance of history and a cheap intellectual laziness. The more I think about it, the more I become convinced it's nothing more than the regularly scheduled moral panic about young people we are required to have every generation. 'Kids these days' dressed in the language of Sensible Discourse.

Honestly, I just wish certain media outlets could find another hobby horse and talk about one of the fifty other issues that matters more at the moment. Even for those whose pet issue is free speech, there are so many other free speech issues – prisoners’ voting rights, anti-protest laws, restrictions on the speech of non-citizens, libel laws, kettling, anti-union measures, protection for whistleblowers, government clampdowns on criticisms, elevation of marginalised voices – that never get a look-in, because people would rather talk about the 19-year-old pink-haired boogeyman. I am very, very bored of it and would like to move on to the new Thing, please.

What your favourite public intellectual says about you

What your favourite public intellectual says about you:

Michael Foucault – you smoked three cigarettes before breakfast this morning. When people encourage you to quit, you tell them that being healthy is reactionary. You unironically own a beret.

Noam Chomsky – if you are unsure of whose side to take in an international conflict, you argue for the opposite of whatever your dad thinks. You have at least two self-diagnosed anxiety disorders. You are secretly terrified that your leftist friends will catch you in a Starbucks one day.

Jordan Peterson - you consider yourself ‘somewhat of an intellectual’ because you have read Nineteen Eighty Four, a book that is often assigned to ninth-graders. The message you got from the book is that socialism sucks; when a friend points out to you that Orwell was a proud socialist, you get embarrassed, then write an extended rant about them on Reddit the following evening. You have no idea what postmodernism is, but it’s definitely the reason your life is bad.

Slavoj Zizek – you once had an extended argument with your friends where you insisted you could win a fight with a gorilla. You have never combed your hair.

Richard Dawkins – you have, at some point, called a good 60-80% of your immediate family “sheep”. You may also have made baa-ing noises at them. You’re not quite sure why people seem to dislike you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson – you correct people on their use of the word ‘literally’. Your social media feed is entirely made up of reposted material from “SCIENCE IS MUTHAFUCKIN AWESOME” and recipes that feature “epic” amounts of bacon. You have never gone longer than nine hours without making a derogatory comment about the social sciences.

Germaine Greer – all your relationships ended because your partner didn’t rub your feet enough. You tried to be a lesbian but could only manage the above-the-waist stuff.

Sam Harris – you call yourself a ‘sapiosexual’ in your Tinder bio. You sincerely believe that sapiosexuals are the most oppressed sexuality there is, and have considered taking a case to the Supreme Court about it.

Trevor Noah/John Oliver – you are incapable of reposting a video without adding a comment such as “This is so important”, or possibly something involving the handclap emoji. You are passionate about politics, just not to the extent that you would attend a protest, or sign a petition, or anything more involved than watching a Netflix documentary. You have a folder full of gifs of sassy black women, which you post automatically in response to any Trump tweet.

Pope Francis – you are a Catholic. That’s all.

The Hedge: Week 6 - The Essay Is The Ultimate Form of Self-Hatred

In my final year of my undergraduate degree, I had a 5000 word research paper to write. This was supposed to take about seven months.

Today I'm working on a 4000 word research paper, which is supposed to take about a week and a half. This should give you some clue as to the difference in workload between the two programmes.

Right now I have twenty tabs open on my browser. Only one of them is something other than an academic article (if you're curious, it's a delicious-looking recipe for a rustic sausage and cider stew). Words are blending together in front of my eyes and slowly starting to lose any real meaning. I keep clicking from one journal to the next, as if this were some valuable work in itself and not a pathetic attempt to delay having to do any more reading. I maintained enthusiasm for my research topic right up until I finished my outline, at which point I immediately hated it. Every sentence I complete is the worst sentence I've ever written; a symbol of my utter paucity of talent. I expect to continue to hate everything I write, right up until it's finished. Then, inexplicably, I'll read through it and decide it's actually good.

This is pretty standard essay-writing procedure for me, or at least one part of it. The other parts vary, but usually involve some combination of poor sleeping patterns, junk food, innumerable cups of tea, and listening to the national anthems of former Soviet states in an attempt to rouse my spirits. (I'm not a Stalinist, by the way. They just have the best national anthems. This is not up for debate.)

There is, thankfully, a silver lining to all this: I've noticed how much easier it is now than it was four years ago. The hardest part of these kind of projects is getting started, sticking to a plan, and simply having the self-confidence to know you are capable of reaching the finish line. When I did my final-year research paper at the undergraduate level, I still felt like I had no clue what I was doing. That, in itself, was enough to make me put off the work for far too long, agonising over how to even start rather than actually starting, and left me panicking and rushing in the final weeks. Today, I still have no clue what I'm doing, but I at least believe I can...figure it out somehow. And if I don't, I can at least pretend I know what I'm talking about, present my professors with something that looks a bit like I know what I'm talking about, and who knows, maybe even convince them that I do. I'm pretty sure that's how PhD students do it.

Will update again when the stupid essay is over. Now, back to the Kazakhstan national anthem.

The Hedge: Week 1

In my last update, I was freaking out about the stresses of moving house, moving countries, and leaving my job to start a degree in the Netherlands.

Fortunately, since that last update I have sorted everything out and become a calmer, newer, more organised me.

For example: last weekend I went to a talk by a UN official and managed not to be late, even though I'd just woken up twenty minutes before. I was dressed way too scruffily but I cleverly sat in a way which hid the hole in my jeans. I inexplicably had a satsuma in my pocket, which meant I didn't need to worry about breakfast.  I didn't spill any coffee on myself. I managed not to ask the very important UN guy any stupid questions. And even though on my way home I got the wrong tram three times, it DID lead me to walk home, which meant I got plenty of exercise. (In the rain.) And on the walk I found a very nice cafe. (Which protected me from the rain.)

So as you can see, I am entirely put-together in my new life.

***

Let's back up: three weeks ago, I was pushing a very heavy suitcase down a suburban road in The Hague - my new hometown. A woman started giving me a stern telling-off because, as it turned out, I was walking in the cycle lane.

It had not been a good morning.

I'd been up since 5am and hadn't even had anything to eat or drink. (I'd bought a scalding cup of tea at Gatwick but after twenty minutes it was still hot enough to burn my tongue, and I ended up having to leave it behind.) I'd had to pay an excess charge to easyJet for my big fat overweight suitcase, I'd almost lost my laptop at security, and the electronic passport readers at Amsterdam's airport were broken, leading to a massive queue of customers all as grumpy as I was. And now a woman was chastising me for not knowing appropriate lane etiquette. In my travel-induced delirium, I was starting to wonder what on earth I was even doing here.

Fortunately, things got a little better after I'd had some lunch, a nap, and met some of my fellow students on our orientation programme. Everyone was very nice and made me feel thoroughly ashamed of my language abilities, since despite being from all around the world, they could all speak English better than I could. With two weeks of free time until classes started, I had a little bit of space to get my bearings, download all the necessary apps, figure out how trains work (the answer is: better than back home) and all the other little necessary things. The feeling of "what on earth am I doing here" didn't entirely subside, but it did get noticeably quieter.


***

I'm typing this on Sunday night, as my First Official Week As A Masters Student draws to a close. (I notice *none* of you have sent me a card or a balloon, but don't worry, I'll get over it.) I'm feeling a lot more settled in now - I have an apartment, I have a vague sense of how to get to my classes, and I can order coffee in Dutch if the server is patient and doesn't ask any questions. I also have an essay due ALREADY, but I'm actually working on it rather than leaving it to the last hour, as I would have done five years ago. Progress!

I'll let you know how things go.

I'm writing this on my phone because my screen is cracked

I've come home from a long day at work and opened up my laptop to find the screen cracked. Fortunately this was ten minutes before my nearest reputable repair shop closed, so I was able to bolt down there and I should have it back tomorrow. But quite frankly, it was not what I needed. Planning one move is hell, let alone two (I have to move from my flat this week - the flat which, as it happens, just had its roof burst open - and then move countries at the end of the month). I have no university housing and looking online from another country is a minefield. I'm at the point of considering living in a hostel or airbnb for my first month of study, and just hoping to God I find somewhere. Moving out of my flat is stressful. Getting rid of furniture is stressful. Wondering why your university hasn't been in touch to confirm you are actually on the course is stressful. The various other emotional stressors going on are stressful. I am in a constant state of mild panic, even when asleep. And yet I've just returned from eight hours of dealing with people who are in much worse situations than I am, and feel guilty even taking up digital space.

Don't bother reading this. Just...argh.

Panic

You would think that I would remember that I'm supposed to move out of my flat in two weeks. And that I'm moving out of the country three weeks after that. But this morning, in the shower, I suddenly remembered: I'm moving next weekend. Not some indeterminate time in the future. Not a couple of months from now. Next weekend. Everything has to be packed into boxes, furniture disassembled, rubbish thrown out, skirting boards dusted. Freezer defrosted. Next weekend.

Somehow, I'd forgotten about this. Of course I knew in the abstract, but it wasn't in the forefront of my mind. I've been getting on with work and projects and dealing with various things that have cropped up. So I've sort of surprised myself. You have masses to do and you aren't prepared at all! SURPRISE!

There's also the small matter of not having anywhere to live when I get to the Netherlands. The university very kindly offered to set me up with housing, and then very unkindly retracted that offer. I've been handed the unfortunate task of having to flat-hunt online, without ever getting to see the place in question, and wondering if a) I'm ever going to find somewhere and b) if, when I finally get the flat, it's going to smell of cigarettes and sulphur, and have a floor that's actually just painted dirt. You never know until you see somewhere in person, do you?

So, yes. I am panicking. Just a little.