Just a random selection of recent happenings

I decided to celebrate having finished my interviews by going to the salsa party at the Le Noir. I haven't been there since the end of the break because something always came up: the preparations for Bartenders' Weekend, the editing of the Chief Guidelines, the stress of the interviews. At the same time, our lovely UCSA Board has been trying to convince me (and everyone else) to go to the Multi-Association Party in town that they were throwing together with some other student associations from Utrecht. I bought a ticket last minute after Sabine had said "what?! you're not coming? but we always go to your bar events!" - she had a point there.

The Le Noir was closed... There wasn't even a Le Noir sign there anymore. I'll try to figure out what happened with the parties via Enrique or Raja. I didn't bike to the Multi-Association Party on purpose. I was so early anyway. When I arrived, only the boards of the associations were there, but the place slowly filled up with people. It ended up being a very nice evening of dancing. I was biking through Utrecht early morning, I crossed the Wilhelmina park when the birds were already chirping and I opened the campus gates at 4 30 sharp.

I bought daffodils last week! I've been missing having plants in my room and now that I saw some in front of a shop, I just decided to get them. They were still small and green, hardly taller than 5 cm. Since then, they've been growing and blooming. Now they are on my tea table, beautiful, cheerful. They remind me of the spring at AC.

Tea corner with daffodils.

We've also been renovating the BarCo office. We threw out a lot of trash, painted the office and rearranged the furniture. It was quite an operation. It was a lot of work and also a lot of fun. By the end of the weekend, we were all covered in paint, and luckily some got on the walls too... Of course, Fede was bitching about it. We spent money on the paint, we didn't consult the chiefs, while they could have been involved, it wasn't absolutely necessary etc. After listening to him for half an hour in Dining Hall, I just felt like punching someone in the face. Paul sensed the escalating tension and at a short break he quickly interrupted the discussion: "soooooo, what was the weather like today?" and being obvious or not, the trick did work. The rest of the chiefs do seem to appreciate the positive change in the office.

In front of the office...

In the office...

No, I haven't heard from Brown yet but they should be making their decisions this week... I was very pessimistic this weekend and I spent hours on the web trying to figure out what I would do with my life if they did not accept me. (According to Rosemary, "not accepting" is a more appropriate expression then "rejecting" and I wouldn't argue with her, or she might say I was as mad as a fish...) I love Europe but it seems to be such a disappointing place to be in the field. I'm still hoping.

I'm finally starting to work. I'm presenting the results of our first cross-cultural psych project in class tomorrow and I have 3 more assignments to finish this week. On the side, I am practically the tea dealer of campus. I already had tea with Caro this evening and Frerk should still drop by today. No guests for tomorrow yet, but I'm sure I'll find someone interested to share a cup of tea with.

Future's music, i.e. let's not drink for the skin of the bear in advance

I started to write this note yesterday but then something distracted me, so I didn't finish it. Here's the part from yesterday:

The days are finally getting longer. I'm sitting at my desk, the curtains are open, and the sky is not entirely dark yet. Soon there will be even more sunshine and the Quad will once again be filled with students enjoying the weather. I wander whether any of my teachers would be willing to teach outside, but I don't think so. Those are mostly the philosophy and language teachers....

I am so completely out of it all. Today I mixed up my schedule and thought that I had statistics when I in fact had an empty timeslot, which means that I accidentally missed Cross-Cultural Psychology, because that was when I thought that I did have a break between classes. The 5 hours of sleep yesterday wasn't enough, it seems, so I made use of my real empty timeslot by sleeping for an hour and a half.

Most of my interviews are done by now. I talked to 5 faculty members and I should still have one phone call on Wednesday. Most of them went fine, I think, and there were a couple that I really enjoyed! I am very excited to hear from them next week! Their Open House is at the end of this week, so they will soon have all their interviews done and then they only need to decide. Fingers crossed. (You too!) They only take a handful of people every year, so it would be a real honor to get accepted. And if they say yes, I say yes too. But this is still the future (or to use a Hungarianism, the music of the future), so let's not drink for the skin of the bear in advance (just to use another one).

And now back to real time, I'm writing this today, on Wednesday. All of the interviews are over by now. I cleared my desk from the papers that covered it. It feels a bit sad. Whatever happens, I learnt a lot from the process. If I had to do all of this again, I would do several things differently, starting from the statement to the information I would have at hand during the interviews. But I'm not going to share all of that with you now. I learnt my lessons and if it doesn't work out this time, I'll have plenty of explanations to account for it.

Yesterday I went to the Psychology Masters Information Evening and the prospects made me completely disappointed. Whatever I'll do, I should do it somewhere else. Preferably, in the US. I need to get in. Brown would be perfect. At the same time, I can see how, if they have candidates who have already done imaging studies etc., they would rather pick them. And it wouldn't really be my fault, but that of the system here.

Now I should shut up about Brown and before going into all kinds of hypotheses about where life will take me in the next year, I'll wait for their answer. In the meantime, I'll think about what Jean has said: It will happen that the place you love loves you when it is right.

And while I'm waiting and thinking whether it is right now, I can just as well start doing some coursework. I fell a bit behind because of the interviews. Not that they took up so much time, but you need to mentally prepare beforehand, and a lot of other activities seemed to interfere with that. Except listening to music. I could feel the amount of tension lessening since the first interview. Before that, I kept on eating constantly. But for quite a couple of days now I've been eating completely regularly and not munching on chocolates and cooking noodles constantly.

I don't think I'll do much tonight.

This post is really being written in fragments :) It's half past 12 now. I just had a long tea session with Bram. So, now I really won't do much, just go to bed, sleep, and tomorrow morning I can finally work on my creative writing piece.

5 minutes to go...

5 minutes to go :)
Jean is keeping me company on Skype and is easing my tension.

Peace

Till now I was very nervous. Now I'm just excited. I wish I could do the interviews right now :)

A night of debauchery - BarCo installation

Let's conspire against new BarCo!

They were still sober here...

No, that was not water :)

New BarCo: Bojan - Building Manager, Sanne - Chair, Flipo - Vice Chair

Ready to be installed. Just a bit drunk...

Old BarCo Chair handing keys to new BarCo chair.

Old Building Manager handing the keys over to Bojan.

Me giving the keys to a very happy Vice Chair.

And the new (half of) BarCo was installed :)

The free keg.

BarCo 2008 Spring: Paul - Inventory Manager, Dávid - Treasurer, Dia - Human Resources Manager, Sanne - Chair, Flipo - Vice Chair, Bojan - Building Manager

Happy new BarCo!

"B....... zitten aan me p......"

Party till closing time.

Interview anxiety

I am so nervous. My last interview was for UC. I remember waiting for the phone call in Gareth's office, and the call was late. Then, at the end of the interview, I had to peel off my fingers from the phone. Hm, at least there is no way that a cramp would fix my head in a headset. :). Long live Skype - if it works.

I am happy that David Badre will be the first one I will be talking to. He's the one I had correspondence with, his research area is very interesting (a variety of functions connected to the prefrontal cortex, control of memory, conflict monitoring) and based on the couple of e-mails we exchanged he seems very nice. He's setting up his lab at Brown. It would be wonderful to work with him. Immediately after my interview with David, I'll have another interview with Steven Sloman. His research deals with causal reasoning, categorization and probability judgment. I'm just reading an article of his on bilinguals' naming patterns. Later during the week I'll have two other interviews. Maybe by then I'll feel more at ease.

This is THE big opportunity to convince them that I am the one (or at least one of the few people) they want. I'm trying to be optimistic, but I feel really stressed because this is way too important to fail it. Last week Caro said the following: "Why wouldn't they want you? You are smart, you are an Eastern European female interested in science and educated in Western Europe; what else would they want?!" Last night in the bar an American exchange student from my Cross-Cultural Psychology class came up to me with a friend of hers and started to talk to her about how smart I was and that she doesn't dare to say anything in class because of me. (She was a bit drunk.) I never thought I scared people with what I say in class... Ok, it has to be added that it is not too hard to be smart in a Cross-Cultural Psychology class if you know some statistics and if you are aware of the general methodological issues...

Anyway, the bottomline is that my first interviews are on Monday and I feel too aware of their importance to think of them as entertaining chats with professors/researchers. But probably that is the only way to get the interaction right, so I'll have to force myself to relax.

Relax.

Relax.

Valentine's present

This year I gave myself a present. I went through everything in my room and threw out everything that has ever had something to do with Joram. Everything that I ever got from him. Everything that I could still find that was once his. It's all in the trash now.

Then I went through all my pictures from the past two years. I keep them quite organized so it wasn't hard to find those of him. I deleted all of them. Their (K)bits and pieces off my harddrive...

He is not anymore blocked on Skype, MSN and Gmail. He is deleted. So is his phone number from my phone.

No pictures, no contact details, no objects. Not even my piercing.

It's as if he never existed.

Bartenders' Weekend 2008

You have no idea how hard it is to coordinate 70 people, most of them drunk, and make them play silly games. But it is so much fun :)

On Thursday Sanne and I stayed up until 3.30 to make a schedule for the weekend. At one point we were so tired and unfocused that we started checking out Umbilical Brothers videos on Youtube and that was the point of no return... We did meet for breakfast though! We spent the morning taking photos in the bar for an instruction slideshow to replace the old instruction video that so many people seem to have but no one can recover. We set as a task to ourselves to make a new video this year but that is a long term project, so we came up with the idea of the slideshow. It was pretty funny and worked out really well! Sanne played the chief, I played the customer and Paul was the bartender. We didn't write a script for the presentation so I just got the mike and improvised.

I was, by the way, totally impressed by my administrational ability. Ok, I did ask bartenders to confirm twice, to send me their phone numbers and preferences for working days in advance, but still, the turnup was amazingly good! Every single one of those people who were on my final list came and we only lost 4 people on the second day. And we're starting with a total of 63 bartenders... Last semester we had 120 signups, I expected 90 people, of which about 60 actually turned up and I remember that only 19 people were there at the big bar cleaning, including chiefs and BarCo. This year, we cleaned the bar with 65 people! So so good.

I did freak out a bit in the beginning. The beamer didn't want to work, and when the kissing game started (it's a bit like the murderer game, you kill people by kissing their face if you have their name on a piece of paper, and then you get their paper and move on to the next victim) the whole bar was a big mess of whirling bodies and screams. When people managed to overcome the state of 10-year-olds, we moved on to the competitive games, the boat race (I made my team win the finals by simply pouring the contents of the glass on my head without drinking a sip - yes, that it allowed if you were about to ask), the pitcher chugging (with straws!), musical chairs (always ending in a fight) and twister (we covered the whole dancefloor with colorful circles drawn using chalk). The atmosphere was lovely. Although we traditionally finish off the evening with chill-out drinking games, this time everybody was enjoying the music so much that we just ended up having a huge party in the bar. We didn't open afterwards anyway.

The second day the weather was really beautiful, so we took the chair race outside. While the rest of the team was training the new ones in the bar, I was playing the chair race with the groups that were outside. Then we sent every group on a treasure hunt. They had to collect the most random collection of things from campus (handcuffs, cactus, rake, tent, dildo, street sign etc.) and then they performed a play about the bar. We've seen some creativity there :) We could not leave the traditional cocktail competition out of the program, and one of the nice things in being BarCo is that you taste and decide. Big bar cleaning, the quiz, ordering pizzas, the end.

I think it was a success. Someone said to Sanne that this was the best organized Bartenders' Weekend that she had been to. Some people said that they liked that there weren't as many drinking games as in the previous years, and some said that there should have been. But I think that the Friday night atmosphere suggested that we aimed at the right amount. There were some sober people, some very drunk ones (but this year no one fell asleep on the toilet, like last year) and most people were somewhere in between. The most important aspect of it all was that everyone was having fun.

This was the only weekend that I didn't take pictures myself. Usually I was THE photographer of the weekend, but it would have been too much this time. I had a great idea anyway. I thought we should ask someone to film all the activities so that we could make a Bartenders' Weekend Video. Adine and Bojan were filming the whole weekend, so we'll definitely have enough footage for the film. Once it's edited, we should organize a big viewing event in the bar for all the bartenders and chiefs. I think it would be marvellous!

So, this was the last one... I think I'll really miss the bar once I leave. People are sometimes sceptical about working in the bar. You are doing long hours, you don't get paid and bar politics are sometimes nasty (the only part that I don't like; I wish we could all be just a happy bunch of people working together). But when you look around on a party night and see everyone enjoying the place, the company, the music, you have this feeling of "yes, we threw this party". And what can replace the early morning cleaning sessions and walking through the sleeping campus at 5 am... And the people. Oh, yes, the people.

Girls Go Bald in Mahindra UWC

A somewhat atypical note. I got this e-mail from my national UWC committee, and they got it from the Hungarian boy who is now studying at Mahindra, in India. Read on and support the HIV clinic if you can, or just spread the word. It's for a good cause.

"Hello,

At the Mahindra United World College of India we are
organizing a fundraiser to support the Deep Griha
medical clinic in Pune, India. This clinic provides
medical care for patients living with HIV and who
otherwise would not be able to afford treatments.

The Girls Go Bald. On March 2nd, twenty girls from
sixteen different countries will shave their heads to
raise awareness for, and show their commitment to Deep
Griha. People from all over the world will be able
sponsor the girls who are sacrificing their hair and
help provide essential medical care to HIV+ people in
Pune.

For information about the event and the cause, or how
to donate, please visit our website.
www.smartgive.com/funds/thegirlsgobald

Help us reach our goal!

Thank you for your consideration,
Teddy Swenson and Angelika Adensamer

Black tea and Red Bull...

Is it a good idea to drink half a liter of black tea and a Red Bull on the same evening? Absolutely not. Now I won't fall asleep for at least 2 more hours, and considering that it is almost 1 a.m. already, that will be a pretty late evening. But I have lots to do. I should finish my statistics assignment for tomorrow (the instructors said it should be 2 pages, but whoever I talked to was already on the 3rd), which is the report of four separate analyses using 2 separate programs, none of which is installed on my laptop. Yay. So I just ran to Voltaire to open the outputs and copy&paste everything into Word, so that I could work on it later. I should also look at the comments my groupmates made on my creative writing piece and correct the text. I have to hand that in tomorrow. I should also write another e-mail to the people who signed up for Bartenders' Weekend. I really have to write an e-mail to David too, the guy from Brown, letting him know the times I am available for the interviews and the people I'd like to talk to. I already started writing that e-mail but then I had to go to the BarCo meeting... And I should think about the schedule for at least the Friday of the Bartenders' Weekend. Sanne and I have to agree on the final version tomorrow evening. By then, I should also have the group distribution available (also done by me). Once this is done, all the information has to be transferred to the chiefs, preferably the same night. I get the feeling that I'm going to miss salsa tomorrow again...

So, why I am I writing this entry now? No, not to try to make you empathize with me. I'm fine, I quite like this "running around" mode of existence. But I expected to be in Voltaire until kicked out by security at 1.00, and I was done earlier :) And I had to do something easy and light before plunging into my assignment again. Which I will do right now.

I have a double bed!

Yes, oh yes. Not considering the fact that it is assembled of two almost identical and therefore almost equally high UC "hospital" beds, it is pretty good. I still have to figure out a way to lift one of the beds (or mattresses) 5 cm to reach a smooth transition from one bed to another, but this is a minor issue. I also have to rearrange the room a bit, because now my salsa practising space decreased significantly. But I have a double bed! Not that I have someone to use it with, but it makes me happy.

NONE of the printers work on campus. Argh. Voltaire: paper jam, Locke: no paper, Newton: "close locker" message, but whatever I tried to close, nothing worked. How annoying. I wanted to print 4 papers from the guy who called me from Brown. I'll probably do it tomorrow and get started on my creative writing assignment now. It's making me nervous that someone is going to evaluate how I write as a writer and not as an academic. We'll see how it goes.

Week 1

The first week of the semester is always either too slow or too fast. When I am in my cross-cultural psychology class, time moves waaaaaay too slow. (Flipo: "Come on, give him some more time". Me: "I already gave him 4 hours of my life!!!)When I think about how much I have read or how many meetings I have been to, the week seemed to have rushed by. Take the average, and I'm fine. I did miss one class because I felt very ill. I could have missed the one right after that one too, but I was too interested in what the teacher would say during class.

I don't think this has ever happened, but one of the best parties of the semester was organized during the first week. I dropped by later than I expected to, after my shift in the bar, but it was just the right time to arrive. Sandwiches in the oven, vodka-cranberry on the table, around 20 people sitting in a circle and chatting, under the influence of a variety of legal substances. Maybe an hour later, Flipo started to play music with a volume that would be appropriate for our beloved bar, and within two minutes, the tables and chairs were put aside and everybody was dancing. Still totally sick, I spent half of the night on the balcony, without my coat on, dancing and jumping around to avoid freezing into an ice sculpture, talking to first years and exchange students about UC, California, the upcoming Bartenders' Weekend, sex on the beach and the categorical perception of chinchilla rabbits. It was not surprising when Security showed up, and whoever they would ask they would say that they did not know who the organizer was... This is how the guy playing the music promised to turn the volume down, and the party went on well into the next day of UC. (My first class was at 13.45; I love my new schedule!)

Bartenders' Weekend is next week and so far, I've been doing most of the thinking about what to do with it. The fall BW is much bigger, of course, but it is nevertheless quite a challenge to entertain 60 people for two days. Half of BarCo is new, they still need to find out what to do and how to do it most efficiently. But I hope that we'll manage to organize a great weekend once again. I'll surely be running up and down the whole time, trying to make sure that it goes as smoothly as possible. My very last Bartenders' Weekend... oh dear, we got here too. Yet another place to say good-bye to very soon.