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You laugh until you cry, you cry until you laugh. _Ask _Likes _Articles _Music collection I've created & abandoned (sorry!) fan pages for the following tv shows: _Rectify _Transparent _The Americans _Parenthood _Enlightened You can do anything, but not everything.

[emmerrrrrrr]

Plans and hopes for 2020

- A reunion with my chosen family from the time I lived in France

- Clarity about the future of my job

- A permanent place to live that I can call my own

- Setting aside time to be creative

- Getting more involved in my political party

- Writing?

- Getting more artwork framed

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Dear whatever,

-My head is on overdrive so let’s see if 15 minutes of rambling will help at all.

-Today on the way back to work I caught myself wondering: when does it all go back to normal?

-The weird thing is that I don’t even really know what that means. I don’t know what normal would imply. I guess this just made it clear that a big part of my brain is still busy Adjusting to a bunch of changes. Saying goodbye to the project and my new friends that I met in France was one thing - getting started on a full time job that I will probably have for at least a year is another. And I guess neither feel normal at all, to me. Not yet.

-Three summers are coming back to me.

-One year ago I had just made the decision that I would go to France. I was terrified and worried but also comforted by the thought of having something to dive into, leaving the uncertainty of jobseeking behind.

-Two years ago I was in India, being a researcher, discovering beautiful places with wonderful people that I haven’t seen since.

-Three years ago I had just heard that I could start my internship at the most interesting and wonderful organization at the end of the summer.

-This summer I am working. I’m really getting into it. It’s starting to feel like My Place that I feel defensive about it. Especially in July so many people started to involve me in their projects and it feels so very satisfying.

-This summer I am looking for a place to move to. I am so open to anything that is within an hour of Amsterdam by public transport and that has a little kitchen and shower just for me but that is apparently still A Lot To Ask For. Trying my luck in a literal lottery for social housing in four different regions. Leaving it all up to a bit of luck. Imagining all these possible futures.

-This summer I’m travelling to Rome to catch up with one of my roommates from the France project. Maybe that will feel the most like going back to normal. Because a tiny part of me, I have to admit, is still standing in our kitchen in Lorient, Brittany, making tea, looking out the window to see who is coming home first today. A tiny part of me still lives there.

-Just like a tiny part of me is still talking with Maria, my Airbnb host in Bangalore, at her breakfast table.

-That’s okay. That’s how you grow, right? 

-Okay. 15 minutes basically up. This helped. I should write more. But there’s so much to do and so little energy. Oh well.

-Thanks, whatever, see you whenever.

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For future reference

-I want a job that contributes to a better world*

-*better = with more equal opportunities for everyone to develop themselves, more sustainable, where success is not measured with money but with basically the stuff I just mentioned

-I want a job that invites me to be a critical and inquisitive thinker

-I want a job in which the working environment is geared to learning from each other - where hierarchy is not an end in itself

-I want a job with a good balance between individual work and collaboration (i.e. this introvert needs time to recharge to do her best work)

-At 70 years old I want to be excited about the job I’m about to leave.

At the internship interview they asked me where I see myself in ten years. I have no idea. It’s crazy to think that I will be 32 at some point, when right now I still don’t know where I’ll be in, say, two months. But these are some things I know for sure. I didn’t get the internship. I’m still fucking aimless and my dad just lost his job and things are chaotic. But here are some things I know. The advice for tests at school applies to life as well: start with the things you do know. Write those down first. You can worry about the rest later.

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Dear me from 3 years ago,

I think you found it.

I clearly remembered that I had written this post.

I thought I had written it right after finding my internship (August 2016), which ticked all these boxes - the time I spent there was so nourishing and helped me to define so much of what I wanted to do professionally. It’s where I met mentors and made good friends. But I made the above list in June 2016, even before any of that ever happened.

And now it’s June 2019, and I landed my first real job back in April, and it feels like it also really matches the criteria I came up with back then.

So have faith, me from three years ago. You will get there. I’m so glad I believed in these criteria and I feel so lucky and privileged to be able to build a career path on my ideals. Sometimes it’s so hard to define what you want, I think I also struggled with that in all the interviews I was going 3 years ago. But I do think there are core values that you can always come back to.

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Dear past 6 months,

-My heart lives in so many places now and I’m feeling the good kind of fuzzy and sentimental so I will ramble here a little bit.

-Before moving to France I was mostly focused on the things I thought I could objectively count on - a challenging project to work on, and improving my French. There would be five other volunteers. Maybe I would get along with them. Maybe I would get annoyed with them. I thought I had to protect my alone time and that the eight months would pass no matter what.

-Then, as I met them and got to know the details of the project, we’ve become, to each other, the only reason we’ve made it this far. I’ve stayed for them. They’ve stayed (in part) for me.

-I know all the circumstances that we found ourselves in were prequisites for bonding. Living together. Working together. Getting that sense of ‘us against the world’, or at least us against shitty organizations that make you wait and give you useless tasks to do. Spending a week on an extremely useless seminar surrounded by strangers with only five familiar faces. But I like to think there’s more than just those circumstantial things to connect us. Like our political convictions. Common interests. Attitudes. I’ve become so close to three of these people, and it’s felt like this incredible gift to spend all this time together. Cook together, eat together, throw parties together, travel together, go to the movies together. And all the while not feeling like I desperately crave alone time too often. It’s so comfortable.

-Now there’s a deadline to this. It was always there, on a calendar, but as we’re nearing it and making plans for our return to our respective homes all around Europe, it’s becoming something so real. Something tangible, breathing down my neck and counting down the days.

-June 6. We’ll be saying goodbye on June 6. In seven weeks it will be over. I can try not to think about it, but at the same time I think I feel better seeing it coming and preparing myself. Putting together goodbye gifts, drafting personal notes to write for everyone. Looking at pictures from the very beginning and realizing how far we’ve come, and remembering things that I was already about to forget. Making plans for the time that remains.

-Sometimes I get so frustrated in this globalized world. There’s this incredible opportunity to meet people from all over the world. To realize that you can find people like you everywhere you go. But at some point you have to say goodbye and the geographical distance is there again, as a barrier. Of course our goodbye does not have to be forever. We’ll make the promise that it won’t be. But it’s also clearly never going to be exactly like this again. Things will not be self-evident again. A reunion takes planning, harmonizing different schedules. Different lives.

-Mine is already changing. I landed a job back in the Netherlands two weeks ago, and while I’m on a short break back home, I’ve met my new colleagues and started the induction process.

-Once again I jumped off the deep end and hoped for the best. And it worked out; I landed in this small international team of ten people who feel committed to working on trying to make the world a bit better every day. I could see the bonding process starting again, establishing all the things we had in common and getting more comfortable as I spent more hours in an imposing but stunning office in the capital city.

-In the same city I found my old colleagues, from the internship I did and then later a short assignment before leaving for France. I can almost feel the roots pulling me to the bright red carpet there, I’m so grounded. One of my two internship supervisors (in one way they will always be my internship supervisors, in another way that term is definitely not suitable anymore) told me that she is dating the other one. I’ve always thought they had cute chemistry. It feels like seeing that my ‘work parents’ finally decided to be together and I can hardly contain my excitement. Things seem so right.

-In the same city I catch up with friends and with family and I’m rooting so much for them.

-My heart lives in so many places. I wish I could live in an imaginary, impossible, hypothetical street with all these people. And with my friend in the US, and the one from the UK, the friends I made in India, and maybe even the girl who was my best friend back when we were kids, who reached out to me on Linkedin (of all places) just last month. Is that how village life used to be? Shit is way too fragmented now.

-But maybe it makes it more special when things do work out. Precisely because it’s not self-evident, but people are putting in effort. That’s what I’ll tell myself, I think. That imaginary street doesn’t exist, but there are many places that I can come home to.

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Dear August,

-Well well well.

-Looking back at this month, there are the first 8 days, with their blissful ignorance, me looking after the house, going on a second hand book shopping spree, enjoying an open-air cinema event, preparing some stuff for my mom’s birthday, sending off another job application for a research assistant position..

-And then there’s August 9 when I randomly sent the email about the volunteer project in France, and when I had the interview, and they said I was in and gave me a few days to think about it.

-That was pretty intense. Pretty stressful. Having to make this decision that felt so big and also kind of vague. But it was also exciting. Someone just offered me this opportunity I had only just discovered about, and it just seemed to be a little too good to pass up.  Actually the key word for me was ‘growth’ - something I wrote on the ‘Pro’ side of my Pro/Con list, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that word. Like, it was so obvious that this new experience is going to lead to personal growth in so many different ways. So I’m going, on October 1st, to move to France for eight months.

-There are going to be five volunteers from all over Europe and we’re going to organize activities around sustainability and culture (right up my street) as well as some English language stuff for 15-18 year old high school students. Isn’t that so terrifying? Lol. Everyone’s been saying that French kids are more disciplined and they’re more respectful of authority. Yeah, I hope so. But anyways, I already have some general and some specific ideas and I hope I can contribute a little bit in helping these people grow up to be conscious, politically engaged global citizens. Yay!

-A bunch of bureaucracy followed, including having to find a Dutch organization to ‘represent’ me and arrange a contract, and attending a meeting with some other Dutch people who were going to do other European volunteering projects elsewhere. It was okay. At least it feels good to know that a lot of people have thought about ensuring that ‘we’ have a good experience.

-I’m going to be fluent at French! Thus far French has felt like a slightly magic skill to me, like, whenever I manage to communicate effectively I’m just amazed, like, where did that come from? But after these eight months it’s going to be a different story - I have to believe so.

-All of a sudden things started to get into motion again because I thrive with some clear frameworks around the stuff I’m doing. So I met my university thesis supervisor again after quiiiite a while to talk about the article I was supposedly writing, I stopped postponing visits to some exhibits I had wanted to visit, and notified the two organizations I’d been doing volunteer work for that it was time to say goodbye (which was kind of a long time coming).

-I saw Lady Bird for the second time (the first time I saw it was in France! Did I say that when I was there, in Rouen, for a couple of days I thought: I think I could live here? Because I did!), this time with my mom, and luckily she enjoyed it as much as I did. Then my volunteer privilege at the cinema earned me two posters from the movie and I want to take one with me to France to put up on my bedroom wall.

-Oh, yeah, I still haven’t started reading the French novel I bought in Rouen back in March. Now it sits on my shelf like a promise of things to come.

-So let’s talk books. I finished reading The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I’d been excited to find a copy of the book in the local second hand shop, because the title had popped up time and again when I was looking for interesting novels related to India in preparation of last year’s research trip. But unfortunately the writing style did not really work for me. Never really got into it. The Underground Railroad, on the other hand, now that’s a stunner. I loved it and it broke my heart. One of my favorites of the year so far. Then I read a non-fiction, real document written by a woman who worked as a maid in Rotterdam households in the early 1900s. The Dutch title is ‘In betrekking’. It was quite a nice read but ultimately a bit repetitive. 

-Films: La Pazza Gioia was wonderfully raw and sweet. Nice to rewatch Burn After Reading. Love & Friendship was nice enough on a scene by scene basis but I had a hard time remembering all the different characters and their relationships to each other. Wyrm is a very original short.

-TV: As I said in the previous entry I started rewatching Mad Men so probably 90% of my viewing activity was Mad Men. So many plot lines I had forgotten about, but not because they were not interesting. It’s almost as if I’m able to watch it with fresh eyes again. Also sooooo excited to have Better Call Saul back. I love the attention to details and creative ways to frame shots. In addition to the tragic origin story of Saul, obviously. Oh and finally, I’m watching The Handmaid’s Tale and wow it’s so bleak. It’s really well made and the actors are brilliant. But some of these episodes are very heavy with little room to breathe. I will definitely finish the first season, though.

-Ok that’s all for now I think. I’m probably forgetting about some amazing podcasts or music but I can’t remember it right this second. I’m a bit fuzzy and tired. Because of work. Wait, what, work? No, we’ll save that for the next post. Because that’s September. And this is August. Look at me being structured again.

-Bye August, see ya in 2019!

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Dear.. July?

-I guess?

-These months are starting to blend into each other. I blame the summer. Like if you ask me, it was sunny and hot all the way through from my birthday in early May to early August. It’s not exactly true but it’s close.. this summer has been hot and bright and demanding I sit outside in the shadow and read a book or listen to a podcast. So I obliged.

-Ohh yeah Wimbledon was in July. OK so that took up my time also. There were some really intense matches. I don’t remember any of them and barely remember who won the tournament (as always, lol) but it was fun while it lasted.

-So the journalism proposal didn’t get accepted. And I didn’t hear back about jobs. And I didn’t find all that many interesting and appropriate vacancies. And part of this Productivity culture that we all live in is that people keep asking about it, and that I’m definitely looking to label myself as well to prove that I’m contributing to some Purpose.

-So I’m going to cheat my own system a little bit by already including some of August in here because I found out about this website in July that lists vacancies for different volunteering activities across Europe that are subsidized by the EU (funding living expenses and travel to another EU country for the volunteers). And I thought it sounded pretty cool and I looked at the offers for France.

-I’ve said a thousand times that ideally, at some point in time, I would want to live in France for a longer period of time to solidify my French skills to the point where they’re not going to slip away from me that easily anymore.

-A project stood out to me about organizing workshops and activities for high school kids about sustainability and culture. I bookmarked it and it said the deadline to submit applications was August 20.

-I’m usually a big procrastinator with this stuff and wait until the deadline. But I wanted to get it over with, anything to get the feeling that at least I was trying to get somewhere.

-So I wrote the letter last Thursday. It was a surprisingly easy letter to write. It often takes me so much time to convince myself that I can fulfil all the requirements of a job description (part of the problem with this is how vacancies are always exaggerating, describing superhumans, and that everyone knows this and that we apparently accept it

yes this is still part of the same detour - another problem with job vacancies is that many NGOs are always getting interns to do what someone in a Junior Position should actually be doing - and getting paid for)

-Back to the letter, it was easy to write and I sent it off with my CV.

-Now get this: pretty much half an hour later I got a reply saying I “made it through the first round” and they actually have to make the decisions today (not August 20, apparently) so can I do a Skype call?

-We do a Skype call not one hour later and it’s pretty fun.

-Another thirty minutes go by and they get back to me to say I’ve been accepted. Congratulations!

-At this point I’m baffled. That’s all. Like: wait, what? Is this even real?

-So, yeah it’s real and they want me to confirm by Monday that I want to do it.

-OK yeah I’m still processing a lot of things. I could still say no because of that part of me that is freaking out a little bit. But.. I think my intuition has already decided for me. I think this is happening.

-I think I’m going to move to France for eight months in October.

-!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-Getting all the flashbacks to when I was about to leave for India. The excitement about the opportunity and then also the stress and the uncertainty. ‘How is that going to work out? Can I handle that? Is it going to be fine?’ And yeah, it went really well, so that’s what I’ve been telling myself but obviously there’s part of me that goes: no wait, this is different! - and that’s exactly why I don’t believe people really ever learn from history - they’ll always convince themselves that this time will be different.

-Ok I got so into this whole thing that I almost forgot the trip to Hamburg I made with my parents in July, before they went on to spend another week or so further east in Germany. It was lovely, I really liked the city. Lots of parks, lots of art, lots of alternative / sustainable initiatives and shops.. Delicious vegetarian food.. Checked all my boxes. Oh and the Airbnb had two cats! Part of the deal. The most low-maintenance, cuddly cats ever. I hadn’t spent this much time around cats since my own cat died so it was somewhat bittersweet but mostly sweet. Also to see that their personalities were completely different from our cat.

-I’m listening to an old Kate Nash album. I haven’t listened to this stuff in probably 5 years or more? It holds up. For me, I mean. I don’t believe about ‘facts’ in this kind of subjective evaluation. “The best movies”. “Her greatest song”. There’s nothing definitive about any of that. I stick to “The ones I think are great”, “My favorites”, “I loved this” because it’s clearer. And yes I will feel offended if someone I look up to decides they hate it. Still working on that. But I think I’ve written about this before - how it’s probably even worse to discover that they love it but for a completely different reason you can’t relate to.

-Like when I was at this clothing store and I said I was so glad they had started selling a fair trade, organic brand and the woman at the counter said: yes, I know right, it feels so good on your skin! And I’m like: ...no? There’s literally no difference between how organic or non-organic cotton feels? That’s not the point? But I didn’t say that out loud and just kind of nodded because there was a line.

-This post is a somewhat random collection of thoughts. Do you think a robot wrote it?

-Moving on to the pop culture (yaaaay). ‘King of Peking’ is a movie that’s on Netflix over here and it’s adorable yet realistic. I watched ‘Hairspray’ with my mom and we both hated it. ‘Oh god they’re not going to sing another song are they? Oh yeah they are.’ ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ and ‘Crimson Peak’ made a nice double feature (watched them on two subsequent nights).

-Kate Nash builds up these songs so well (on Made of Bricks) She was like 20 when this came out? Wow.

-Books: Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine had been on my bookshelf for a long time, all of its 600+ pages waiting for me or the right moment. I decided to go for it and it was good. There’s a lot in there that was never part of my history lessons. I think it helped me to connect some dots although I’ll also lose some of the facts pretty soon because there’s no solid framework in my mind for them to stick to.. But yeah it’s good. And capitalism is bad, guys. There, I said it.

-From the big imposing non-fiction I went on to read another of Arthur Japin’s works, Een Schitterend Gebrek and I loved it and I really like his writing style, how he captures people’s Intense Emotions on the page. Plus you can clearly tell a lot of research went into figuring out the background details for this story (about Casanova’s first love).

-Podcast shoutouts: In The Dark season two is addictive, well-reported, heartbreaking.. Really good. There’s an official podcast for The Good Place (the goooooooooood TV show) now and it’s a really nice bonus for fans. There’s this crazy new podcast series called Everything Is Alive where they interview inanimate objects (’Maeve, Lamppost’) about their lives. Oh and I binged on Caliphate and I thought it was going to be about Big Things And Intense War Scenes but instead it was much more.. human-sized. Which is my thing. A thing that In The Dark and Caliphate have in common is that the reporters find information by seeking out abandoned buildings and scavenging through documents.

-TV: I saw all of Atlanta season 2 which is a little treasure, and then Good Girls which is like a fun hangout show with some of the vibes that Parenthood used to have.. but combined with crime. Then everything was finished and I was like: okay, whatever, I’m just going to rewatch all of Mad Men now. So that’s the only show I’ve been watching lately. It’s a good show. It holds up.

-There, that’s plenty. See you next time, July. Wherever.

[emmerrrrrrr]

Dear June,

-Quick note: I think I wrote this around a month ago but never hit the Post button so here it is:

-I don’t really feel like writing this but I also couldn’t figure out what else I felt like so let’s just get it over with already.

-I wanted to write a little bit about political heartbreak.

-I don’t feel like politics are moving towards the right direction anywhere near me. Everything feels like it’s becoming harsher, less accepting, more racist. It‘s going directly against what I stand for, hope for, wish for. And sometimes in the name of ‘The People’ which theoretically includes me. Defending ‘our culture’ which does not represent my values at all. I find it exhausting and frustrating. People make jokes about it to release those feelings I think but in the end I’m left feeling powerless. Then I move on to other things to occupy my mind with. I’m not in this mindset all the time, mind you, not at all. But maybe that’s what worries me sometimes, too: shouldn’t we all panic right now? Freak out and take action? When are they crossing My Line? 

-I hear stories of people being killed in Gaza, people being despised for fleeing dire circumstances. I see powerful people ridiculing ‘identity politics’ because their identity has never been a political issue. I’ve said - out loud - “if I ever take a moment to really think about this and let it get to me, I would just want to hide in my bed forever.”

-The thing is, I know I’m not the only one feeling like this and I know people often ask, in response to some report or discussion about a problem in the world: ‘What can I do?’. I think some are too quick to answer, probably because they have a vested interest in a solution they offer. ‘Buy these local organic vegetables’ they say, or ‘Do volunteer work for this NGO’ or ‘Sign this petition’. But maybe these tiny puzzle parts, navigating them, are also exhausting and distracting us from coming up with systemic solutions.

-OK that was my half-baked essay that I might rework into something more solid some time.

-June was pretty uneventful I guess. Wrapped up the teaching job. I also had to monitor about 70 students as they took their exams. Who gave me permission?! And then I had to grade part of said exams and the assignments they made and woooow that’s not the fun part of the job, oh my. It made me question the very notion of grades. I could not defend any difference between a 7-out-of-10 or 8-out-of-10 answer any day of the week, it’s all so subtle and also frankly slightly arbitrary (was that too many adverbs? whatevs)

-I worked on a proposal for this journalism competition to write a long reported story about economic insecurity. I don’t think I’ll get it. That’s the spirit, Emma.

-Apart from that the weather has been very hot and sunny for a long time so I’ve also spent a lot of time in the sun with books and podcasts and a hint of guilt for not spending that time writing emails to organizations where I’d like to work. But let’s dive into that some other time (can we do it once I’ve managed to find a job?)

-Books: Death with Interruptions by Saramago is a good concept but got a bit boring for me in the end. Unaccustomed Earth is a beautiful collection of stories by Jhumpa Lahiri and I don’t even like short stories that much!

-Also watched quite a few movies. Standouts (positive) are: The Shape of Water, Outside In, The Meddler, The Florida Project, Children of Men

-TV: I introduced my mom to the delight of Queer Eye and yeah she likes it! Yay! However, we both agreed the S2 final episode was pretty boring.

[emmerrrrrrr]

Dear May,

-Yes, hello. I’m buzzing with energy so let’s do this thing.

-Listening to Andrew Bird’s latest record and wondering how he made the bird sound on ‘Black-Crowned Night-Heron’, like, is that just a sound recording of a bird, or..? Pretty intriguing either way. I just misspelled intriguing. Anyways, let’s do this thing.

-May was mostly centered around my job as educational assistant at the university. While the diploma ceremony in late April was all about saying goodbye to the place, now your time as a student is over, blah blah blah, it must have been about two years since I spent as much time on the campus as I did over the past four weeks. Like, seriously, I barely went there during my internship and then once every two months or so on average when I was doing my thesis. So returning in this new role both marked the definitive end of my status as a student and also completely took me back to the same routine that I had roughly two years ago.

-I also turned 24. Does it matter? No, it doesn’t matter. According to my own very scientific calculations I am no longer in my early twenties, this is going to qualify as mid-twenties now. Does it matter? Not at all. I can say that being 23 was pretty lovely though.

-I explored different options in May, in terms of my Career. Applied for an internship for a PODCAST (!!) and was invited for an interview in Hilversum, the Dutch epicentre of media. It was really quite nice but in the end they could not hire me because I’m not a student so I’m not supposed to work as an intern. Then I applied for a hiiiiighly competitive masterclass for young investigative journalists (the 4 who are selected are basically trained with the purpose of working for the organization). Did not get it. Pretty disappointing although the thought of taking 5 months to participate in an unpaid masterclass also stressed me out slightly. Still, the whole ‘Exploring Options in Journalism’ is not working out as well as I’d have liked. I know there’s this impulse or whatever inside of me that will want to write, tell stories, be creative, wherever I end up, so I’ll have to trust that I’ll work out a way to engage with that.

-Anywayss, about that teaching job that was just handed to me on a silver platter. I really enjoyed it - it’s pretty much finished now except for the evaluation & grading (which is going to take.. more than a while). At first the thought of teaching a bunch of people who are, on average, older than me, was a bit daunting, but it turned out to be really nice. It took a moment of realizing that Teachers Are Just Humans Too but then, since the teacher gave me a lot of freedom and trusted every workshop supervisor to figure out the best way to approach their job applying their own style, it got really fun. The course was about research methodologies and I just loved introducing people to ethnographic methods, like participant observation and interviewing, because I find them so useful and fun. I used a bunch of examples from my own thesis research and then got to engage with all the ideas that the student teams came up with. And I learned to just say ‘That is a good question, but I don’t have the answer’ every once in a while and that was okay, too. Well, unless they burn it all down in the course evaluation, lol (nahh I doubt it).

-Pentecost marked the fifth time everyone from my dad’s side of the family got together (not everyone, to be honest, because my aunt wasn’t there and maybe I’ve written about it before but it’s a whole thing and the only issue that keeps me from saying that my parents are both from Perfect Families). I also took the fourth annual group photo and I’m semi proud that that has become a Thing now where everyone expects it. This time we actually trespassed to take the picture, but we only found out about that after the fact.. Worth it though. We spent the day in a national park in Drenthe and by the end of the afternoon we met a sheep herder and we got to walk alongside the sheep and it was The. Best. I love sheep. It was so much fun being surrounded by 600 of them and experiencing the herd’s interactions with the sheepdogs and everything. I loved it. And yes, spending time with the family was also nice.

-OK so one last thing before sleep. The teaching experience has me rethinking the option of a PhD a tiny, tiny bit. Like, I casually browsed some vacancies. I still don’t think I should commit to this academia for another four years right away because I know it has felt really good to be outside that environment and get fulfilment from other things (like my internship).. but... there’s also things that are attractive about spending so much time being a full-on ethnographic researcher (which probably isn’t going to happen anywhere else). Then again, I have not seen a single vacancy in the organizations I like that requires a PhD. Oh well. Food for thought. For life, maybe. Hopefully more options will pop up on my horizon so I can consider it all with a bit more perspective. And now, sleep.

-No, wait, actually, just a little bit of pop culture before I go because this is the only time to say that The Americans series finale (like, last episode of the show ever ever ever) completely destroyed me because it was SO good and focused SO much on emotional impact which is amazing and has consistently surprised everyone who still thought it was Some Spy Show. Loved it. Will miss it. I don’t think I’ve felt this intensely about a finale since maybe Mad Men in 2015? Or the Looking movie, if you count the movie, in 2016. Good stuff. I feel like doing a Mad Men rewatch. On the other side of the spectrum I watched season 2 The Crown with my parents and really didn’t like it. Like, what’s happening in the writers room? Do they not know how to construct a season? It lacked cohesion and character development, felt more like really pretty history lessons about England. Now I’m all out of TV series but will start The Handmaid’s Tale soon and discover whether I can actually bear it.

-Five movies in May: Jackie Brown, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Beaches of Agnès (got the DVD for my birthday!), The Homesman and Isle of Dogs. The latter is probably one of my least favorite Wes Anderson movies. Too bad.

-OK two more books before I go, The Power by Naomi Alderman is intriguing and compelling but her style bothered me. Carolijn Visser’s Selma tells a fascinating non-fiction story but is a bit judgemental about her characters at times. ‘Ghana Must Go’ is still the best book I’ve read this year.

-See ya next year, May.

[emmerrrrrrr]

Dear April,

-Well, hello.

-Given that I’d declared March my month of freedom, no obligations, the start of April was not great news for me so on April 1st I was totally in this ‘fuck, it’s April now, why don’t I have a job yet??’ stress mode. Yeah, arbitrary social constructions like ‘months’ can really have an impact on you if you let ‘em.

-Then luckily I was able to do some stuff, like send out some job applications, work on the academic article based on my thesis, put all my old study books up for online sale, basically, stuff to make me feel useful. Then my thesis supervisor (the best!) casually recommended me for a teacher’s assistant job to assist in a social sciences methodology course, and as soon as I got that, April did not look so daunting any more.

-The whole job space is super confusing to me though, I gotta say. At one moment someone can just offer you a paid assignment like that, while for other positions I compete with 350 other applicants. It does not make sense. And in the middle of that I’m still figuring out what I want. It seems like responding to vacancies may not yield the best results so I’ll probably have to focus more on a proactive strategy (Putting Yourself Out There) which feels so random, like, this is not what they taught us in high school! I have no real resolution to this except it’s pushing me to try different ideas on for size, like, would I do an internship? Could I go into journalism? All this also comes down to the question of what my time is worth. At one moment it’s a lot, and at another it’s nothing and I’m supposed to feel lucky to be invited somewhere. Makes you do a double take in the mirror, like, I’m still the same person, right? With the same skills and motivation and competency? Where am I going to get the chance to prove that?

-The quest for a stable income continues and meanwhile I’ll stay where I am, collecting as many accessories and furniture pieces For When I Move Out as my room can hold.. This is like the number one reason I want to move out: I soooo want to decorate a new space. Meanwhile I’m binging the Great Interior Design Challenge on Netflix and getting so jealous of these people and their Blank Canvases. Yes, I do have the Pinterest boards. Yes, I’ve thought about color schemes. It’s become such a strange hobby. Like, I like thinking about this stuff, but it’s also this ongoing reminder that I have no idea where this hypothetical house is going to be..

-On the 24th I got my diploma at the official university ceremony. I was not really looking forward to the nonsensical pretend-important atmosphere around these pieces of paper, but it was fun enough in the end. I received my diploma from the professor who Could Have Given Me A 9 For My Thesis Had He Not Been On Holiday - something he was not aware of and never will be, so he was all like “Emma got an 8,5, isn’t that great, congratulations” and obviously in my head I was like: ohh yeahh if only you knew..

-The bigger milestone on that same day came when I received an email from a Dutch journalism platform that they were interested in publishing an article about my thesis research. It felt so good crafting the piece and then getting the recognition for my writing as something legit - I guess the imposter syndrome was trying to convince me I was probably going to sound too ‘academic’ but I was fine, yay!

-I got a new phone in April which kind of felt like betrayal because it’s not a Fairphone and I so love and support the Fairphone project.. But I decided to make a more pragmatic and selfish choice and got a refurbished LG V30. The camera on this thing is infinitely better than the FP1 and I’ve been enjoying that so much.

-OK moving on to pop culture (and sleeeeep). I don’t think I actually saw any movies worth mentioning, which I guess is somewhat disappointing... TV was pretty good though. Finally watched all of Queer Eye and it’s so fun. Superstore is lovely. The final season of The Americans is absolutely top notch and the tension is unbearable. And then there was a Flemish series about a young medicine student being diagnosed and living with cancer, ‘Gevoel voor tumor’, which is instantly up there with my favorite Dutch language series.

-OK this is random but I’m going to sleep. May is wellllllll underway so see you sooner than later, April.

Byeee.

[emmerrrrrrr]

Dear March,

-Yaayy, you were a good one!

-I had declared the first month after graduating from university for ever (for everrrrrrrrrrrr - I know I’m not supposed to say this because I’ll probably become nostalgic for academia within the next 5 years and who knows? But just for this very moment it is extremely freeing to mentally yell ‘forever!!’) my month without obligations, celebrations only. March was for spending time with friends and family and professional mentors. And for a little trip to France.

-As soon as I discovered that my two favorite French-language artists were both going to be touring France at the same time, I started to look up their destinations on Google Maps to figure out when they would be closest to each other and to me in their tour schedule. Then I decided I would start practising my French skills again as soon as I had graduated. So in March I did a ton of Duolingo exercises (the ‘Stories’ are really fun!) and watched a French show on Netflix with French subtitles. That resulted in kind of being able to converse with my Airbnb hosts although I still need a lot more practice.

-So I saw Camille in Béthune - I’ve been listening to her music at least since 2012 (and I distinctly remember that because I had a song of hers in my head when I was taking my French high school exam that year) and finally seeing her perform live was amaaazing. It was visually really stunning, and there was this elaborate choreography for each song for Camille and the other singers and musicians. One of the best shows I’ve been to. Then I saw Klô Pelgag in Sotteville. I only discovered her music last year and was instantly hooked. Her gig was much more straightforward and the crowd was smaller - but it was still awesome.

-Finally, I spent a day in Rouen and visited the Musée des Beaux-Arts which is huge, beautiful, has such a wide range of art, and was completely free to visit! I loved surrounding myself with all kinds of culture - also spent time in a French bookstore and was amazed by the range of affordable photography books and novels. And also by the displays highlighting feminist books! I felt like I could live there one day, maybe, and I know the Tourist experience can be very far from the Resident experience, but still.. One can dream. Also went to the cinema to see Lady Bird (with French subtitles lol) and it was so good. I’m so glad I got to see it on a big screen surrounded with like ten other French people who laughed at the right moments.

-March also marked my dad’s birthday. I baked a vegan chocolate cake and it was delicious. Next year I should quit the ‘I can’t guarantee that this will turn out well, so you better buy a cake too just in case’ attitude and just own it. On the other hand, it meant we ended up eating cake for days after the party which is obviously not such a bad problem to have.

-Towards the end of the month I got to present my thesis findings at the organization where I did my internship and it was so much fun. They really understood what I was going for and were so supportive and welcoming. As I was preparing the presentation I kept telling myself to manage my expectations about any possibility to work there, like, don’t get your hopes up don’t get your hopes up don’t get your hopes up.. And it’s not like they offered me a job on the spot or anything, but several people did say they’d love to work with me, and there may be the possibility for me to work on an upcoming project, temporarily, which is already such a nice vote of confidence regardless.

-So yeah, I took the advice that several people gave me, to Really Celebrate This Moment, to heart in March. And it worked out well. I think generally, we (myself included) tend to focus too much on the future in moments like this. As soon as someone has graduated, one of the first questions people ask is: ‘So, what’s next?’ Which implies that you have to move on to the next thing right away, you have to find your new label to replace the ‘STUDENT’ tag you had been wearing. It may be just as interesting to ask ‘So, looking back, what was most exciting for you? What have you learned? How have you grown, in your thinking and as a person? What will you miss about this experience?’ But we rarely focus on these reflective questions. I want to try to become better at that myself.

-In March I received this newsletter in my inbox, from Lee Crutchley, on The End, but really, the future. It contains a thought experiment about yourself in the future, and the way he describes it, I find it so interesting and relevant to where I am right now, even though I usually hate the question “Where do you see yourself in X years?”. I guess I usually hate it because it’s asked at job interviews and I get caught up in trying to figure out what they *want* to hear. Whereas, if I really start thinking about Emma at 54 years old, I do have some ideas, I do see something, and it’s based on some principles, some ambitions, some dreams.. Like the blog post I made earlier about the kind of job that I want, I think it’s a helpful exercise to figure out priorities, and I started a Google doc with some notes.. Maybe I’ll make a proper blog post out of it some day (do you think 54-year-old Emma would appreciate that?)

-OK OK so time for some movies and books talk and then it’s bed time. So Lady Bird was really good, as I said. Probably my favorite of the month. The Brand New Testament was also really something, such an original film. Watched Annihilation to see what all the fuss was about but was underwhelmed. Rewatched I Am Not Your Negro and liked it even more the second time. PEEPLI Live is a pretty good Indian satire. The Women on the 6th Floor was alright, gorgeous interiors in any case. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles was.. well, something. And I fell asleep watching Loving Vincent, but that was probably my fault.

-Books: Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi is my favorite of the one’s I’ve read this year (so far). Beautiful, gorgeous, heartbreaking reflections on family, migration, feeling at home.

-OK I’m tired. Thanks March. You brought lots of good memories. See you next year.

[emmerrrrrrr]

Dear February,

-Whoops it’s almost March 9th, well, I blame it on you being the shortest month of the bunch.. OK here we go. This was a good one. Life-changing in hindsight, maybe? More hindsight than right now, I mean. Far into the future. Because it marked the end of my time as a student and the beginning of something else entirely.

-I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I edited and the process was frustrating and stressful but also so good.. I feel like I have a little bit of an idea of what it’s like to be an author writing a book with an editor and I like that process. I completely trusted my supervisor - she’s been so helpful and so open to my vision while also offering all this advice on how to make it clearer, better, to add value, to take it further.. It’s been great. And then by the end I really wanted to ‘throw it out there’, like, shout it from the rooftops, ‘I wrote this thing!! Read this!!’, like the egg I had been breeding had just hatched and I had to show everyone how the bird had turned out.. I’m still kind of in that phase. It’s making me impatient, but excited.

-After the thesis defence I got really good feedback and my supervisor and the other examinator (?? not sure about all the official jargon) thought it was worth a 9 out of 10 except they are not authorized to give a mark that high. Then there was some back-and-forth about who is allowed to do so, and it turned out it is literally one man (sigghhhhh of course) who was on holiday that week. Then the choice was mine to either graduate by the end of February or wait another week and pay another month of tuition for the chance of a 9 instead of 8.5. No guarantees. And they suggested that I could slightly improve the conclusion as we discussed during the defence, to improve the chances of his approval.

-The whole proposition made me super anxious, to be held responsible for something I didn’t want to be responsible for, to be given the option to either say ‘this is enough’ or ‘I want more than this’. But after a few hours I realized that the feeling I had had right after the defence, the knowledge that the two women I spoke with told me they thought it was great, and the knowledge that I had completed the whole process, that I was done, had to be enough. So there you go. It’s an 8.5 on the official documents. It’s great.

-So I didn’t do much other than writing this month, really got into the routine that people seem to want you to believe they can keep up for the entire duration of the writing process but I only kind of got into under the deadline pressure of the final month.. Used different studying discipline/focus tricks that I’ve learned over the years, like: put on the Relaxing Sounds of the Jungle track on Spotify, bribe yourself with episodes of a TV show you’re binging (iZombie!), set goals for the end of each day.. And also give in to the silly shit that comes to mind sometimes.

-This month I had to negotiate? Maybe not negotiate but clearly state what I expected as a reward for another full day of representing my university course to prospective students and presenting. Because they were like: ‘OK it’s going to be complicated to pay you since you won’t be a student any longer, are gift cards OK?’ And we all know gift cards are not okay, come on, especially since you’re always praising me about my presentation and so are the visitors. So I really pushed myself to say: no, that’s not okay actually, I want real money. Took me some cringing to write that email and feel OK about it. But it worked! There’s a lesson learned.

-I went to see a really cool exhibition with a friend in February, of different photo series by Michael Wolf (Wolff is the guy who wrote the Trump book, Wolf is a photographer). His photos of cities and how people live in incredibly monotonous urban environments are really impressive. Somehow everyone started to imagine themselves living there.

-Applied for a job. Didn’t hear ANYTHING. And it’s not like I didn’t have anything better to do with finishing up a thesis and everything. So yeah I do feel offended a bit, even though I was also dreading being invited for an interview on the same day as my thesis defence. Right now I’m feeling OK about the job stuff, because I can still say “I just graduated!” but I guess that’s going to be different in a couple of months. I have no idea what my chances are. One moment I feel like ‘they’ (future employers) would be lucky to have me, the other moment I’m like: what do I know? I’m 23 with little working experience, who’s going to want that? Oh well. I think I have to focus more on what I want first because that really helped when I was looking for an internship as well. Not letting it depend only on what other people are looking for.

-OK time for pop culture talk. Movies: Trading Places was great fun. Fallen Flowers, Thick Leaves and Sami Blood were really good and both have very specific perspectives that are pretty underrepresented.

-TV: As I said earlier, I watched a lot of iZombie and I just cannot talk about the plot because it sounds so ridiculous on paper, not at all like something I would care for, but then again that’s not really what I look for in a show - I love the characters, they’re so layered, have interesting developments, and the show is really good at making connections between characters in unexpected ways. I was told season 2 was the best one so far and I really liked that a lot. Watching Call the Midwife with my parents, this season has been kind of uneven and I really didn’t like the most recent episode, but it’s (depressing) comfort food at this point. Jane the Virgin also aired one episode this month I guess? Overall it was a pretty empty TV slate. I have said that The Good Place is a great show, right? It is. I don’t do rewatches often but I feel like watching it again.

-Books: just one, Arthur Japin’s Vaslav, the second novel of his that I’ve read, he chose another interesting (real life) main character and I really enjoy his writing style.

-OK that’s it for this month I think. See you next year, February!

[emmerrrrrrr]

Dear January,

-Thank you for being so unbelievably long. I really thought you were over by the end of January 30th and then boom, there you go, one more day. This is not even cynical, I needed all the January days I could get so it worked out pretty well for me. As long as it was January, I was in the sweet spot of feeling the urge of the new year to be productive but not being too close to the thesis deadline to feel very stressed about it yet. And I used that to my advantage.

-January meant several family meetings where plenty of people asked me when I am going to graduate and plenty of them responded all surprised, like, ‘oh, that’s pretty soon!!’ and me being all: ‘I.. guess...?’ and wanting to say ‘well, it’s about time, to be fair’ but also being relieved that it seems so soon to other people.

-Graduating is going to be pretty weird. Cancelling my enrolment at university and not following that up with anything. But I also don’t feel like following courses again, at all so it’s probably time. I’m at the point now where I’ll read pieces of text that I’ve written for my thesis and thinking they’re pretty neat pieces of writing, and I want to release them into the real world - the world beyond my thesis supervisor, who is great. So I’m starting to feed bits and pieces to people to test the waters and trying to be super casual about it as I can feel myself getting so impatient to know what they think. And then the only thing that helps to get over that feeling is to know: This Is All Part of The Process. The process I’ve been in for, well, pretty much exactly a year by now.

-It’s a fascinating process altogether, the whole journey from making up a research idea in your mind to checking the report you’ve written for footnote formation errors.. And now that it’s almost done I’m starting to reflect on the fact that I’ll never get to do it again with this much freedom, this much time, this much room to rethink, rework, grow.. And I know I’m going to be chasing different elements of this process, but it’s never going to be like this again.

-It’s been weird trying to explain the research to other people. I know I’ve really taken up the ‘academic’ identity, because I immediately start trying to simplify things as I don’t want to bore people, and then I see they’re not really following the train of thought, and it makes me feel incompetent, like, I can’t even explain the relevance my own research? But I guess it just shows just how much I got invested into this topic, way beyond most people on earth, and it’s not like I have a solid idea of the intricate details of what they’re doing at their jobs.. so I’ll let it go.

-My thesis supervisor suggested we turn this into an academic article (this = the thesis. not this very blog post. obviously) and that’s exciting, feels like the stamp of approval I’m secretly chasing as a student all the time (this is one of the reasons why it’ll be good to leave that place - when I was doing my internship, it was this big revelation that I could get the same level of satisfaction about my work without waiting anxiously to get grades and refreshing a webpage with test results every hour). Anyways, exciting to get to see how the academic journal sausage gets made (from what I understand, ‘veeeeeeeeeery slowly’ pretty much covers it).

-I bought a trial subscription to an audiobook platform in January (€1 for a month of Storytel) and I’m telling you it’s revolutionary. I cancelled because it’s not really a necessity (like Netflix is lol) but at some point in a more financially secure future I’m going to get back to it. I ‘read’ 6 books in a month! Was honestly amazed by that. I listened to five English titles: ‘Tell Me How It Ends’ (admittedly just an ‘essay’), ‘Swing Time’ (my first encounter with Zadie Smith, not going to be the last one), ‘Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember’ (got a little bit bored with this one towards the end but it’s a fascinating topic), ‘Breath, Eyes, Memory’ (Danticat is gooooood), ‘A Good Country’ (really broke my heart a little bit, the classic car-crash-in-slow-motion kind of book where knowing how it ends is sort of the point).

-Speaking of heartbreakers: ‘Manchester By The Sea’. Wow. Best movie I saw this month.

-TV: The Good Place. This show has everything right now and everyone should watch it and I don’t know how long they can keep this up but the first two seasons are already a gift.

-OK, I’m gonna call it quits. Another Skype meeting with my thesis supervisor tomorrow. It’s all happening. See you next year, January. Can hardly wait to see where I’ll be.

[emmerrrrrrr]

Dear 2017,

-I didn’t write about you for some months. I didn’t forget, don’t worry. I just spent time differently, processed events through different mediums.. didn’t see the need to come here for a do-over.

-But as 2018 begins I want to get back into the monthly write-ups, and here’s a small attempt to wrap you up and put you away.

-I’ve been back from Bangalore for about 2,5 months now. Everyone asked me if I had gotten used to home again. It’s the wrong question, to be honest. Home didn’t change. I’ve been here most of my life so it wasn’t hard to adjust at all. What takes getting used to is the feeling of having left a place behind that is so far away. Working hard to feel at home somewhere else and then leaving it cold turkey is weird. To be clear, I don’t mean that I wish I could have stayed there. I was longing to come home and it’s been great to ‘come home’ in so many ways, to different places and people. But there’s also this tiny part of me that feels restless, knowing that going back to either place means leaving the other, and that neither place will still be the same as how I left it. It’s strange.

-I think also miss the ‘easy’ sense of accomplishment that I had in Bangalore. Being there was a big step in itself, feeling healthy, doing the things that I set out there to do and making friends in the process, all of those things were achievements that were so tangible and so satisfying and comforting. Here, I’m counting the new pages I wrote for my thesis, counting down the days to graduation, and even though the two are the natural outcomes of me going to Bangalore and coming back, they feel much smaller in comparison. Plus there’s the big question mark at the end, once I’ve graduated: I’ve never not been in an education system since I was four years old, and it‘s going to be over in a few months and what’s going to happen then? A job, Emma, that’s what’s going to happen. But of course the how, the where, the when are still open, and I think it’s clear by now that I’m not great at accepting that. I can shout ‘WE’LL SEE, WE’LL JUST HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE’ into the void a hundred times like a mantra but it’s meaningless because I really don’t want to wait at all. I want to magically know.

-This post sounds pretty desperate and I just misspelled ‘desperate’ and ‘misspelled’. OK, so first some celebrations for 2017:

-I got more engaged in politics, I got a better sense of how I want to position myself and what I want to stand for, and joined a political party. I also joined an anti-blackface demonstration because siiiiighhhh it’s still a thing in the Netherlands. Politics can be so frustrating but I’m so glad people still put in the effort to make a real difference and if I can amplify other people’s voices that’s great.

-Being in India was really reaffirming in terms of being able to feel at home so far away from home and being able to Figure It Out there. Lots of great memories. Being able to bring my research plan to fruition was pretty incredible too. I’m so grateful to my university supervisor who encouraged me to plan the research exactly how I wanted it, and to worry about the possibilities or impossibilities later. It worked out so well and I think there’s a lesson in there about not being afraid to ask for what you want.

-2017 also brought me new and renewed friendships that I’m really thankful for :)

-I read a bunch of books. Two favorites: Rohinton Mistry - A Fine Balance and Edwidge Danticat - Brother, I'm Dying

-I saw a bunch of movies. Sweet: Visages, Villages / Maison du Bonheur / Kedi. Intense: Moonlight / Jackie / Get out / Toni Erdmann. Refreshing: 20th Century Women / Aquarius / Lipstick Under My Burkha / Machines. Heartbreaking: Divines / Le Passé.

-Saw a decent amount of TV but I’m not as on top of it anymore as I used to be so there’s a LOT to catch up with later. But anyways, Feud, The Americans, The Good Place, Better Call Saul, Jane the Virgin and Bojack Horseman have all been great. Yes, Bojack Horseman. I was lukewarm on that show up until this season when it finally revealed a soft spot and now it made me cry <3

-Shows I stopped watching halfway into a season: This Is Us, Orange Is The New Black, Orphan Black, GLOW, The Get Down. Don’t really miss them (yet). Master of None had some great standout episodes, but unpopular opinion, a fairly boring second season overall.

-My cat died this year, November 15. It was fucking awful to watch her die. Seeing a body struggle, dead stare in eyes that used to follow your every move. It was so intense witnessing that and so exhausting - more so for us than for her, because she was just slowly fading into nothingness. In the first week I wanted to write about grief and how it made me so tired and feeling guilty, thinking we could have done more for her, make her life last longer.. And if I could magically get her back healthy for a few more years I would not bat an eye over it, not ask questions. But I’m OK now. And she was OK, too.

-I want to go to sleep so I have to wrap this up. 2018 is going to be graduation, looking for a job, moving out to.. who knows? It’s scary but it’s going to be okay and 2017 has given me a lot to feel more confident about what’s to come this year.

-Thank you 2017. See you never again, obviously. But I won’t forget you.. don’t worry.

[emmerrrrrrr]

Dear July,

[Editor’s note: I wrote a big chunk of this and then never posted it - figured I’d still post it in September anyway]

-Phew. I mean, it’s good not every month is like this one. I’d succumb to the stress pretty quickly. But sometimes you need those big scary jumps to land where you want to be. OK wait, why don’t I quit this blog to join a fortune cookie note company? Moving on..

-I’m on my bed in my Airbnb apartment in Bangalore. Listening to old favorites on Spotify because apparently I’m really not in the mood for new music - and I think that’s because everything around me is still so new.

-Breakfasts are different. The streets are different (walking on a random street seemed like a really brave act to me in the first few days because of all the traffic + lack of continuous sidewalks). The sun is different. The sounds are different, the smells are different. And the culture? It’s so different.

-But then I’ve also spent a lot of time with people I relate to. Because we speak the same language. Because we share a curiosity about the world, or because we’re both outsiders looking in. Because we believe in the same ideals for women. And with each of those encounters, the city becomes more friendly.

-Since many of the streets are so hectic, exploring the city’s parks has really helped me to appreciate the place more. Look, this is where people find their peace and quiet, where they forget everything that’s going on out there, the honking cars, the barking street dogs, the beggars knocking on car windows.

-My study advisor told me that she had been to India, and had found the contrasts between poverty and wealth really astonishing. Maybe she primed me by saying that, but it’s really something I recognize here, something I don’t think I will get used to. It feels unjust to see advertisements for skyscraper apartments with private pools and ‘ten themed parks’ and then look down to see the informal settlements that people have built under those advertisements. To enter a mall to see a film in a luxurious cinema with one of the biggest screens I’ve ever seen, while some people are still working on constructing the last few shops in that mall once the film is finished at 11PM. People live such wildly different lives here.

-And it’s weird to simultaneously feel very rich and privileged (which I am!) while also feeling so far removed from those who are considered rich here. I think it’s mainly because I don’t feel like I really have the power to change things here like those rich local people do.

-OK these have been some India reflections. I’m going to try to briefly summarize July:

-Last visits to hairdresser, dentist (multiple times, ugh), and my GP.

-Submitted my visa application in The Hague. Found out that some of the papers I worked really hard to arrange were not really necessary for this visa. Sighed. Crossed my fingers.

-Went to Amsterdam to see the world press photo exhibit, visited my old internship place and had dinner with a friend.

-Got my visa! Stopped by my granddad to show him and say goodbye. Ran into a girl I did a masterclass with back in 2015.

-Got the final approval from my university (they reviewed the risk assessment I made and it was all okay)

-Spent the whole day frantically comparing flight ticket costs. July is the most expensive month to fly.. Booked my flights.

-Visited my university one more time to see my supervisor and share all my good news, and to print a bunch of documents (who has a printer at home? That’s why you have a job or pay tuition money, right? So you don’t need to get a printer?)

-Met my language buddy for the last time - my mom will take over temporarily.

-Bought some Dutch cookies and some nice tins to put them in. Bought more stuff to pack. Packed.

-Woke up at 3AM. Went to the airport with my parents. Said our temporary goodbyes. Flew to Frankfurt. Spent a few hours at the boring Frankfurt airport. Flew to Bangalore. The guy next to me complained that it smelled bad, like someone’s sweaty feet (my mind had just translated the smell into ‘cheetos chips’ but when someone introduces the image of smelly feet you can’t really go back to thinking that it’s cheetos) and I was so surprised by the serious reaction from the cabin crew. They brought their flashlights and walked around checking whether everyone was wearing their shoes! Then they checked some luggage for anything smelly, and they distributed hand towels that smelled like lemon. I think it took like an hour to satisfy this guy and a few other people. That was awkward, but admittedly the guy did help me to find me uber once we reached Bangalore.

-On the plane I watched La Fille Inconnue (pretty good), Mein Blind Date Mit Dem Leben (fun) and a documentary about the founder of Zara.

-Then I was here. It’s weird to be here. It’s good to be here. There’s still a lot of time left, but in a good way. It gives me peace of mind to know I have time to figure things out, step by step.

[Editor’s note: this is where I stopped writing - some rough impressions below, looking back at July in September:]

-Being in Bangalore was really overwhelming for the first few weeks, and I also found it pretty hard to define my position at the NGO where I was doing my research/internship. A lot of people felt like they needed to be involved but at the same time everyone was really busy. Meanwhile, I wanted to get to know people and fit in, but also maintain my independent, ‘outsider’s perspective’. Add to that the challenge of trying to memorize everyone’s names and the fact that many of the rooms in the office are just really uninspiring spaces.. and yeah, I had some pretty shitty days there in July (also early August but we’ll get to that).

-Whatsapp and being able to call my parents and a friend from back home helped a lot. I don’t think I would have even considered making this kind of trip without the technology that makes the distance disappear for a few minutes, or even for an hour and a half.

-Staying with my Airbnb host family has also been a great experience. They’re so friendly and helpful, and we’ve exchanged so many stories and perspectives over different meals. And in the meantime I still have my own room to be alone and really recharge from everything I’ve heard and seen in a day.

-Movies watched in India in July: I Am Not Your Negro (<33), Dunkirk (nah), Marjorie Prime (meh), Aquarius (loved it).

-Finally, a movie I watched just before leaving for India: Queen. It’s such a blast.

-Okay, I’m writing this with a very different perspective, too late to make any resolutions for August, but in any case, thanks for the adventures, July, and see you in 2018!

[emmerrrrrrr]

Pre-India thoughts

-We’re at T minus 32 hours. Suitcases pretty much packed. Goodbyes pretty much said. Me, pretty much ready to leave for Bangalore.

-Except I should probably write an application letter for that job posting that got me excited. Except I need to write a birthday card for my mum (who turns 60 in August and I won’t be here). Except I should probably learn a few more words in Bangalore’s local language. Except I should go and buy a refill for my ballpoint pen which is running out of ink.

-I’ve never left home to travel this far for this long. It’s an exercise in trust and commitment to jump off the deep end and believe things will work out the way I hope.

-What I’m hoping for: That my Airbnb hosts and I will get along. That I won’t get too sick. That the city will not be overwhelming to me anymore after a few weeks. That the people I’ll work with will have time and energy to help me with my project. That I’ll get to feel rooted there. That I’ll feel excited about living abroad and will be ready to try it again some day (for work?).

-I feel so grateful that I’ll get to do this. I’ll be able to talk to women garment workers. Their stories and experiences have fascinated me for a long time now, and there’s an undeniable connection between my life and theirs because of the goods that they make. That I’ll really get to make the connection tangible is so special. That a local organization gave me permission to come and set up a little project of my own is so special. I didn’t really expect that it would work out like this.

-It has been really good to tell lots of people about my plans and see how there are different reactions that are equally valuable. People I know from my study are mostly like: oh, India, that’s cool, have fun! Then there are people who are amazed I’m going to this faraway place on my own. “I could never do that!”. Both of those sentiments are inside me as well and, although you can never do something like this for the first time again, I hope I won’t become totally blasé about it. Like, being on a plane is also still a magical experience for me (I’m not constantly *in awe* for 8 hours straight but there are moments..) and I feel like it should be.

-I want to give myself explicit permission to have uneventful, boring days in Bangalore. Not every day has to be a Stunning Experience. There can be Orange Is The New Black binge days. After all, I’ll be there for three months. There’s plenty of time.

-Three months is such a big chunk of time in my mind. I can’t really break it into parts yet, I don’t know how I’m going to spend my weeks. And that’s the kind of uncertainty I’m not really comfortable with, and that’s exactly the reason why I should just go there, and find out the answers. Three blogs about what my month was like seem to follow each other pretty fast on here. Thirteen weeks sounds okay. One week at a time.

-I’m going to wrap up because I’m setting an alarm to check in to my flight and pick my seat. Please remind me never to say “When I was in India..” when I get back. India is way too fucking big for me to make generalizations about it after basically staying in one city the whole time. Those people are annoying.

[emmerrrrrrr]

Dear June,

-Fuckin’ finally.

-Things started moving forward again in June and I feel really really thankful.

-The month started with our yearly family gathering with aunts and uncles and cousins from my father’s side. It felt good being there, I was glad I didn’t have to miss it and I was there to take the annual family photo. We played Kubb, which most of us had never done, and it was pretty hilarious and laid back. Appropriate even for people with terrible hand-eye coordination like me.

-Of course I talked about my India plans and all the waiting and the uncertainty. My aunt asked (like my university supervisor had before) how long I was going to wait before moving on, taking a different approach. And it was exactly the right question, the one that was floating around in my head all the time. I couldn’t really answer her. I didn’t want to set a deadline because I didn’t want to give up.

-Two days later I got the e-mail with the good news, that I was welcome to work with the organization in India I’d been corresponding with - that it was actually happening. A short e-mail lifted the weight of so many months of waiting off my shoulders, and I felt as excited and surprised as I had been when I’d gotten the call about my internship back in August of last year. It’s the shout-it-from-the-rooftops feeling. It’s the best.

-Then all the practical preparations started. Figuring out all the steps I needed to take to apply for a visa was really complicated and confusing, and I read so many guides on different websites, each of them recommending different things. I took a 2,5 hour train ride (2,5 hours *one way*) to get my bachelor diploma legalised by the national education office and the court. I arranged letters from different people with varying degrees of difficulty and filled in forms, took pictures, and all the things I was supposed to do. I hope this whole thing is like giving birth, where women say that they forget about all the pain once the baby is there, because this baby definitely took a lot of energy and endurance.

-(Random tangent: I always find the whole ‘this is my baby’ expression about things that are not actual kids a bit cheesy, but I think I understand it a bit better now. Even more random tangent: even though I don’t really think I want to have kids of my own, there have been some moments where I’ve imagined the excitement of being pregnant. But I’ve never imagined myself actually giving birth - which is kind of the logical consequence).

-Do you ever feel hungry, not for food but for new sounds, new music, new stories? Like you want to listen to three songs at the same time even though it’s not physically possible (or at best it would be confusing, more than anything)? I’ve felt like that a lot in June. I always go through these phases of sticking to songs I already know I love, listening to familiar voices on podcasts and being reluctant to start watching a new TV show, and then at some point it changes and I want to have new stuff. Not saying one of the two phases is better. I think they complement each other.

-I met a student who had already been to the south of India for her studies, and she was so generous in sharing her experiences and putting stuff in perspective. It was really reassuring that she had enjoyed her time there so much.

-My mom turns 60 in August and I won’t be in the country to celebrate with her. It’s a bit strange, even though I’ve made sure she’s okay with it, and we both know I was always going to miss one family occasion or another, no matter when I would leave. I did help pick the location where she’s going to have her big high tea party, and worked on the invitations with her. June marked the one year anniversary of the day my dad was fired, and so much is changing in our family, still. My mom is almost retiring from her job and my parents will start their work-free life together, while I’m working my way to graduating and choosing my path. I’m really happy with the way we’re sharing these experiences, even though I’m a bit freaked out at all the changes sometimes.

-Despite all my talk and thought about materialism and sustainability I bought quite a lot of stuff this month, all for my trip to India. Shoes, books, Dutch souvenirs, hand sanitizer, and all the things that I know are readily available to buy in India but that the control freak inside me really has to buy before she leaves. I’m just looking at this as the best learning experience. It’s my first big long distance and long time trip, I’ll have to make my own packing mistakes and learn from them for the next trip.

-OK, let’s talk some music. Camille released her new album OUÏ in June and I love how creative she is with her lyrics and the compositions. Je ne mâche pas mes mots (I don’t mince my words) is probably my favorite track. Valaire’s song I Wanna is sooo catchy and addictive. Feist’s Pleasure is getting better and better every time I listen to it, it’s really one of those albums that I want to take in completely and get lost in. I’ve also started exploring Ani Difranco’s music a little bit, and it’s really fun to see (hear) how Regina Spektor was influenced by her on her earlier work. I also love that Ani is really explicitly tackling social issues in her lyrics.

-Films: quite a lot compared to some other months. Good: Okja, 20th Century Women, Ilo Ilo, A Bronx Tale, Thelma & Louise. OK: My Queen Karo, Changeling, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

-Books: Birds Without Wings (Louis de Bernières) and Just Kids (Patti Smith). I really enjoyed both of these, although I think I probably enjoyed the first halves of both books a bit more than their latter halves.

-Podcasts: I found the ‘Student Loan Secrets’ episodes of Death, Sex & Money really interesting and moving. The Pitch is a pretty solid new Gimlet show.

-TV: Lots to love in Better Call Saul. I binged on Fresh Meat because it was an easy watch on Netflix, and I would recommend it as comfort food. The Same Sky is a solid German spy drama with some interesting characters, but the short season doesn’t really do them justice. I gifted my dad the first season of The Sopranos on DVD for father’s day and we’ve started watching. In some aspects it’s really obviously from the 90s (’Look, we can show you violence and strip clubs, we’re on HBO!’) but I’m enjoying the interpersonal dramas and psychological aspect of the show.

-Gonna leave it at that. July is going to be an exciting month (it already is but the biggest moments are yet to come). See you next year, June!

[emmerrrrrrr]

Dear May,

-Nah. I don’t feel like writing this one.

-I look back at May and it feels like most of my days were spent admitting defeat. Nope, it’s not working out, I’m not going anywhere. I’m writing this knowing that June is turning out a bit better, but that doesn’t take away the fact that May had some really shitty moments, a lot of second-guessing and feeling incompetent.

-And yet, in between all that noise, there was another thought floating around in my mind: but still.. if this works out.. maybe it was worth all this.

-The feeling incompetent definitely had to do with me turning 23 in May, and feeling like I had not reached whatever I was supposed to reach in all that time, suddenly feeling really Old.

-OK, I think I’ve set the dark backdrop for you there. There were also plenty of good days in May so I’ll move on to those now so I can say goodbye to May on a positive note.

-The first day of May I met up with a friend to have dinner and went to a documentary about a textile factory in India (second-best thing to actually being in India, right?) called ‘Machines’. It was a really nice night and I can definitely recommend the film - it really puts you, as a viewer, inside the factory space. It’s a bit experimental, and I really liked that, because I’ve already seen a lot of different documentaries on the same subject, but this still felt fresh.

-Currently listening to: Hungry Ghost by Hurray for the Riff Raff. I had never heard of this artist until like a week ago but I’m really digging her latest album.

-This was the first birthday where I baked my own cake and it turned out pretty good! Also saw one of my very favorite comedians perform that night so the day itself was actually not bad at all.

-In early May, my mom caught our cat with a small duckling.. When we discovered it was still alive, we decided we would try to save it, and made a whole rescue operation. The duckling went from being almost non-responsive (except that its eyes were blinking) to jumping around and making all kinds of adorable noises in the box we’d furnished for the occasion. It was sooo cute so it was almost hard to let go of the little bird when two people from an animal rescue center came to pick it up. But it’s also a good thing we did not keep taking care of that duck for like three weeks straight, with a cat in the house at the same time.

-I became a member of the newly established political party that I had voted for in the latest general election, and they held their first general assembly in May. It was a really energizing and inspiring night, where ‘politics’ began to mean much more to me than it ever had. It felt really tangible and more human than ever. I hope I can make my contribution to their growth in some way.

-The partner of my late grandma (who passed away last November) turned 90 this month. 90! Of course we had to celebrate, and it was nice to catch up with my aunts and uncles and cousins. Plus, my ‘grandpa’ (I have never really seen him as my real grandpa but it’s pretty close, so hence the scare quotes) decided to put some of his early memories on paper. He got his typewriter off he shelf and started writing about how he met his first wife, his time in the army, and how he met my grandma after he had become a widow. Everyone at the party got a copy, and his kids gave him an iPad for his birthday. He has never used a computer or smartphone and he’s learning at ninety! This is the kind of future we all like to imagine.

-OMG, I saw Get Out and it was everything I had hoped for except maybe a bit more horror than I would have liked (but yeah it’s a horror movie, I know). So good, and the puzzle pieces kept falling into place a few days after I had seen it. Other films I saw and liked: The Patience Stone, Like Father Like Son, Under the Sun, Amreeka, Hidden Figures. Plus it’s going to sound weird that I ‘liked’ Schinlder’s List but I watched that for the first time as well, and I’m glad I did.

-TV: The Americans and Jane The Virgin are basically two of the very few shows left that can make me feel really intensely for its characters. So many of those have ended already (Please Like Me, Looking, Mad Men, Rectify, Enlightened). But fortunately both The Americans and Jane were really good again this season. 

-I think the opinions about Master of None season 2 are pretty mixed? I think my expectations may have been too high as the memories of the standout episodes from season 1 really dominated in my mind.. and I was expecting to see highlight after highlight. Instead, there is a pretty boring overall ‘Plot A’ throughout the second season, with some amazing detours like New York, I Love You and Thanksgiving.

-Better Call Saul has delivered some thrilling episodes this season and it’s not done yet. When I grow up I want to be as cool as Kim Wexler. Yes, a fictional character, you got it.

-Books: Maya Angelou’s I know why the caged bird sings, and Elspeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika. The first is so much more interesting, although I wish I had read it in English instead of the 1980s Dutch translation that I bought in a thrift store.

-That’s it. See you next year, May.