Oh, sweet procrastination...

Sometimes it just feels nice to do nothing. Watch an episode of The L Word, watch dozens of YouTube videos of Tatiana and Jordan dancing west coast swing (I might have to dedicate a whole post to this one), read a short story of Roald Dahl, write facebook messages to friends, feed my virtual fish, water the plants, cut my fringe etc. But I've got the feeling that I've been taking this let's not do anything thing a bit too far in the past couple of days. And I have a reason for that. I've been procrastinating to avoid writing a motivation letter.

There's a short (a couple of days long) training programme I would like to take part in, the deadline to submit the applications is slowly approaching and it's not that I didn't have any ideas about what to write, but I just couldn't get myself to write it. So, I started it today but I still have to finish it. Then, I'll have to touch up my CV. (See, the beauty of this post is that I am procrastinating right now...)

I hate that I need some pressure to work. It's good that I'll have to go to Utrecht tomorrow and that Jani is coming in 3 days (yes, yes, yes, finally!) because this gives me little time to do the things I need to do: write the motivation letter, rewrite the CV, deal with the yeti-legs (it's not that bad, actually...) and to clean this place completely. See, Jani is very neat. No dust, not a single hair on the floor (haha, that's quite easy to maintain when he's alone) everything is where it's supposed to be and every dish has to be washed up right after being used. Well, my attitude is slightly different toward these things - and he knows this very well - but I'll clean anyway because I don't want to start these couple of days with "how can you live in such dirt?" and because I know that he would feel much more comfortable in an absolutely neat and clean apartment. So, let's make him happy. It's actually not supposed to take that long because if on a 10 point scale where 1 is completely clean and 10 is "fuck, you're a pig", I'm now somewhere around 4. Kind of... "nicely casual".

Okay, I guess it's time to get back to my motivation letter :)

A good idea

Couchsurfing I.

When I realized that I wanted to do my fieldwork at UC, what I saw as the main issue (apart from convincing the Dean that this is a good idea) was where I would live. I have to keep my room in Amsterdam because I have a one-year contract and regardless of whether I live there or not, I must pay for my studio for a full year. So, I can't afford to rent another room in Utrecht because I'm already spending 500 euros a month on rent and even with the scholarship, another rent would be just too much. I have the option of commuting back and forth between Amsterdam and Utrecht every day, but without an OV card (a public transport pass) that's also at least 250 euros a month. (I could get a reduction card but with the prospect of a job - which means that I can apply for stufi, which means that I can get an OV card - I don't really feel like buying one just yet.) Another option would be to sublet my studio - which I'm not allowed to do, of course, although lots of people told me that this is what everybody does - but then I'd face the difficulty of finding student accomodation in Utrecht, which is almost impossible if you're not on the waiting list. And this is how I ended up with the idea of couchsurfing.

I started on campus at David's place 2 weeks ago (that was only one night because there wasn't much happening) and I spent the last week at Dávid, Lynn and Jens' place last week. They moved into a very cool apartment quite close to the Janskerkhof not too long ago. Their apartment has a large living room/dining room, a bedroom upstairs, a small loungish area next to the bedroom, a study, a roof terrace (so cool!), a nice bathroom and a fully equipped kitchen. I liked everything about the place except the usual narrow Dutch stairs and that there was no heating in the kitchen. Dávid sleeps in the living room (on a big double bed) and so did I - on a couch, which was reasonably comfortable.

The great thing about staying with friends is that you can actually catch up with them in person, cook together, eat together, watch movies, go out... It was a really nice week. Dávid and I cooked paprikás krumpli, Lynn and I had tea all the time, we had mangos and watched lots of Two and a Half Men. Saturday, they had a housewarming party, and I went to Amsterdam Friday evening so that I could do my laundry before returning for the party with my bag filled with clean clothes for the next week. The party was great although it was only a group of about 10 people. After two glasses of wine, I went for the tequila with Dávid and we both had 8 shots, I think. Obviously, we were quite merry :) Around 2.30, we decided that it was time to go out, so Dávid, Jens, a friend of his and I went out to the Havana, where we had to bribe the security guard to get in, and danced till the place closed, which was after 4 am. I didn't feel drunk till we got there, but as soon as we started dancing, I realized that 8 shots might have been a bit too much. Apparently, I managed to smash my head into Jens' lips somehow, so when he asked the next day whether I remembered, the pain in my forehead was explained. (No, I did not remember.)

The next day was the most chilled day ever. I woke up with a completely clear head at around 10 and had eggs for breakfast with the whole group that stayed over. I was fairly surprised at the lack of a hangover. Well, it was still to come... We watched 5 episodes of Two and a Half Men, just to get started. Then, we watched V for Vendetta. Then, since that movie has references to The Count of Monte Cristo, we watched that too. During the day, it became quite clear that I wouldn't go out to the Winkel van Sinkel to dance salsa, like I originally planned, because every sudden move felt quite torturing. So, a bit later, Dávid and I decided to make pancakes for the four of us. Then, just because we haven't been lazy enough the whole day, we watched Slumdog Millionaire in the evening. One thing is sure: it's much nicer to be lazy in the company of others than alone.

Things I came across

I was sitting on the train from Utrecht to Amsterdam last night and I opened the Spits that was lying around. The Spits is a daily paper, quite similar to the Metro and definitely not of better quality, but good enough to read through a couple of pages during your trip. I found a page that was full of Valentine's day wishes. I think the idea was that you could use the Jamin website to write a message to your loved one, it would get published in the Spits and the most creative message would get a price. This is where I found the following:

"Lieve sous, na 8 jaar samen zijn. Een kindje, en een koophuis verder, wordt het tijd voor de volgende stap... Dus bij deze: wil je met me trouwen..."

I was quite confused. Is he really proposing in the Spits, on a page that has about 90 Valentine's day wishes on it and 3 ads of Jamin? Are they going to frame this or what?! Strange...

Another thing I came across lately is a blog of a Hungarian girl. She's a PhD student in sociology and she wanted to study the clients of prostitutes. She figured that since it was too expensive to pay prostitutes to get the data for her (and wouldn't have too much control over her data) and since she actually likes having sex with strangers, she would become a prostitute herself for about 14-16 weeks. She advertises herself in some paper, satisfies her clients (she's doing anything including anal and oral sex, using strap-ons on men, having sex with couples etc.) and instead of accepting money, she asks them to fill out a questionnaire. Obviously, one person can only see her once and no one can find her through her blog. So, essentially, it's a surprise when people find out that they don't have to pay and no one can contact her for a free fuck.

Her blog is about her experiences and the outcomes of her research. She describes the people who came to see her, what they asked her to do and what she learnt from the questionnaire. It's quite interesting :) It's not a sex blog per se, but includes quite some detail on sex, and the most interesting part is, of course, why people come to see her. Her blog is titled "Répamese, avagy egy majdnem kurva naplója" (Carrot tales: the diary of an almost-whore) and you can find it here, if you're interested: lurva.blog.hu. It's in Hungarian, but if you don't speak this lovely language, I'm sure Google Translate will give you an idea of the content.

When life happens...

I find facebook more and more freaky. It's not actually facebook, but my friends, but I learn these things through facebook, so let me blame facebook.

It all started with Anne-Thora, my co-year from AC, getting married. Her wedding pictures appeared online all of a sudden. Then, my ex-roommate, Ingvill had a baby. Then, Catherine, a housemate from AC got married. Then, I looked at one of the status updates in my news feed and the last name of a friend of mine looked weird. I was quite sure she was used to be called Breanna Skinner. Well, she got married, too. Another status update today, another weird last name: a girl from my Psycholinguistics class at UC got married too.

What's going on, people!? Aren't we too young for these things? Babies and marriage...

I met Misi during the break for a hot chocolate (we had been going out for approximately a year before I left for AC). He told me about a former classmate of his - whom I also knew because we were in the same year in the same high school - who had a baby some time ago. I think by now the little boy must be at least a year old. So, apparently, the guy has been trying to convince everybody around him that they should have children because it's such a wonderful thing. Then, at New Year's Eve, he was drunk and he started explaining how horrible it is actually, how he hates the whole thing and that he hasn't planned his life like this... Now, THIS SUCKS.

I talked about this with a friend of mine and he said that he was really approaching the age (33) where only very few of his friends were not married. He found it scary. So do I. Maybe I'll get used to people getting married around me. After all, it was also strange when I first sat next to Irma and Sali driving a car. But I got used to it. Now, I'm driving a car, too. This shouldn't be too different.

It's just life happening.

Het is mistig. Will I finally be learning Dutch?

This was the first sentence that came to mind when I opened the curtains this morning. "It's foggy." There's a whitish, opaque colour to the air and when I went to the AH, I could almost feel the tiny, levitating water droplets hitting my face. And why in Dutch? I don't know. I talked to David on the phone before leaving his room and he said that he wanted to say goodbye so I decided to hang out in his room before leaving campus. I started reading my Dutch wordbook. If you are Hungarian, you are probably familiar with the "Kezdők angol/holland/francia (etc.) nyelvkönyve" series, well, I have the Dutch edition of that. If you're not familiar with it, you have to imagine it as a comic book, with (usually funny) pictures on all pages and with words written next to them. It contains more than 2000 words and expressions and I'm a great fan of it because I find that the illustrations really help me remember the words. The cover gives a good idea of what's inside:

David thought it would be a good idea to ask me to translate a couple of English words to Dutch and he was impressed by the number of random words I knew and I was embarrassed by the number of words I did not know... My Dutch is something I will be working on this semester. I decided that I needed something apart from fieldwork, which is basically going to meetings, talking to people and typing up my notes. Later during the deskwork period I will have a lot more things to do and especially to write. But till then, learning Dutch seems like a good idea to me. After all, I've been here for 3,5 years, and sure, I can do my groceries in Dutch, ask for directions, I bought my bike from a guy that didn't speak English, I understood the old lady who asked me to help her get the pudding from the shelf, I can have a basic conversation about dancing, but I wish I could express myself better. If only for the next half a year, then for the next half a year. Just for my own satisfaction.

This plan might be slightly compromised by an opportunity that came along. I was contacted by a company that is looking for a translator who would work on translating video games to Hungarian. Sounds like fun, I said and sent them my CV. We'll see whether they get back to me... They are located in Utrecht, which is convenient, considering that I'll spend most of my time there anyway, but I have no idea how much time their translators need to spend on translating per week or whether they want their translators to do their jobs in the office or at home, for example.

Message from the field

I'm finally in the field! It's a bit strange to be in the field instead of a lab or in front of the computer, but I'll get used to it. My final research proposal was accepted Tuesday afternoon and I was already attending an MT (Management Team) meeting the very same morning. It's so difficult not to say anything during a meeting! You have ideas that you'd like to share and you just can't say a word... Then, I went to the CC (College Council) meeting yesterday and I had the same frustrations, spiced with the fact that I knew the answers to some of their questions because they were discussed in the MT meeting the day before. Knowledge is frustrating when you can't share it with others. Today, I'll go to the H4 meeting (the Heads of Departments plus the Director of Education) and it will be exactly the same - I'll know everything they don't and I won't be able to allowed to say anything. It's exciting.

Being back feels nice, even though I still have to arrange a desk, a way to use the internet (since I don't have a solis-ID anymore) and get an Xs card. I had to wait for like 10 minutes in front of Voltaire for someone to come by and let me in. Then, I had to ask a friend to sign me in on a computer. I hope to get rid of these inconveniences soon. I slept at David's place (not the Hungarian one, but a Dutch ex-BarCo) in a huge double bed while he slept in his girlfriend's room. We had a very nice evening, catching up, doing groceries for the evening, taking part in his unit dinner, having a couple of drinks and spending some time in the bar. I'm still looking for a room for tonight and then I'll be heading back to Amsterdam for the weekend.

Once in a while...

... things work out in a way that makes your life easier. This is one of those days. When the deus ex machina says "okay... okay... let's give you some time".

Yesterday, I spent the whole afternoon/evening/night with rewriting my proposal. I e-mailed Sietse, who's The Authority on statistics (at least among friends) and he wrote very smart things and ways to do the analysis, which all pushed me in the direction of not wanting to do quantitative research. I'll spare you the description of why (for those interested it's all about assumptions and number of data points and control over my data). So, I was back where I started from. Trying to find a way to solve the issue in an interpretive way.

Yanow - very interesting woman, one of our COM teachers - said that when you have a writers' block, you should write a letter: "Dear Grandma..." Instead of that, I chatted with Sietse on GTalk and while trying to explain my problems, the solution appeared out of the blue. There it was, a question still about meeting practices but with a different focus, and much easier to analyze my data!

I spent the rest of the evening writing. And writing. Since Sietse also had a paper to write, we "met" every two hours online to discuss how far in the process of writing we are. At one point he said that it's like sitting in Locke or Voltaire, and really, it was like sitting in Voltaire, walking up to someone to chat for a couple of minutes to relax before continuing your work. It was fun :) I called it a day at 1:55 and decided to get up at 7:50, so that I would have an hour to make adjustments to the piece before the deadline.

I woke up at 7:45 (before my morning alarm!), took an hour to finish the piece, uploaded it to BlackBoard and started writing my next paper, which I have to hand in and present tomorrow. And this is where something good happened. Originally, I should have gone to a CC meeting in Utrecht tonight and an MT meeting tomorrow morning, which means that by now, I'd pretty much have to be done with everything. And then, an e-mail came from Jos, the Chair of the CC. The meeting is going to be on Wednesday!

Oh yes, I said, and jumped into bed immediately, slept another 3 hours, wrote this post, now I'm going to go to the AH to get some food, cook something nice and then, I'll have all the time in the world this evening to write my review paper and prepare my presentation, sipping tea and listening to music :)