The stubborn language whore in the attic

Here in the Netherlands you can take virtually as long as you like to finish university. Where I live, it’s not unusual to run into guys – they’re usually guys – in their late twenties who’ve been studying for eight years and still haven’t obtained their bachelor’s degree. (They obtain beer bellies instead.) The Dutch government tried to do something about this by implementing a langstudeerboete, a fine for students with a study delay, but it got dismissed almost the minute it went through.

This reminded me of the following. In the center of my hometown, there’s an alley which used to be a no-bike zone. The Dutch are big on cycling, obviously, and when it comes to cycling, traffic laws tend to be ignored. Red lights? One-way lanes? Don’t make us laugh! Similarly, the idea of a ‘no-bike zone’ simply does not exist in the Dutch conceptual system. Flocks of school kids, students on rattling hand-me-downs, mothers with toddlers front and back, elderly couples on tandem bicycles; everyone cycled in the no-bike alley. Cops used to guard it on either side to fine every single culprit, but to no avail. We persevered in our fundamental right as Dutch people to turn the world into one big bike lane until, one day, the cops were replaced by this sign:

Cycling permitted; bonus points for not knocking people off their feet.

There’s a Dutch proverb, de aanhouder wint – literally ‘the one who persists wins’. The Dutch are stubborn. We do not bend to legislation; legislation bends to us.

To return to the topic of studying: 

Curriculum vitae imaginationis

#5 on the list of Required Documents for Application to a Master’s Program: an updated curriculum vitae (résumé). According to the explanatory note, a CV is “an overview of your personal details, and your educational and professional background”.
I wonder: should someone who doesn’t know what a CV is even be allowed to apply for a postgraduate degree? Also, why specify that the résumé has to be updated – isn’t that kind of obvious? No, prospective student, don’t send us the Comic Sans MS document you wrote in Microsoft Word 97 with nothing but some babysitting to boast. We want experience! We want extracurricular activities! We want sweat, unpaid internships, after-school jobs in shoe stores and downtown cafés—anything to prove your dedication to responsibility and hard work!

When I was five or six years old, it was my life goal to own a petting zoo. I penciled meticulously designed floor plans into the margins of my primary school notebooks. Rabbits would go here; goats there; horses would get a pasture of honor in front of my house. Countless drawings and frustrated teachers later, I had perfected the farm’s architecture to a point where I had no idea what else to add.

Five favorite movies of 2012

While the world is celebrating the birthday of Baby Jeebus, as my brother calls him (merry Christmas everyone!), I’m secretly looking forward to New Year already. It’s thé holiday for people who like lists, clean slates, and philosophical pondering. In recent years, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing an ‘end of year report’ just to have a coherent overview of what happened my life over the past twelve months. This report invariably includes an ‘art’ section – hey, I have to live up to the Bachelor of Arts title I’m receiving in a few weeks – with my favorite movies and books of the year. I thought, why not share?

1. Intouchables
Back in March, I called Intouchables “the most hilarious and heartwarming movie I’ve seen in 2012 so far”. And when I go through the list of movies I’ve seen in 2012, this was the one that really called out to me. It’s just so good. Everything about it is right – the story, the cinematography, the acting. It’s fantastic. 

Return of the maudlin tales

If you ignore the fact that I’m not a rabbit, this drawing could not be more accurate. Blogs are like diaries for adults, really. When I was about nine years old, I wanted nothing more than a diary.Preferably one with a lock. I’d give it a dependable name such as Annie and divulge to her all my secrets, hopes and fears in epistolary entries – the way girls in historical novels do it. But even though I got my hands on the most beautiful notebooks, I never managed to fill up more than a few pages before I started slacking. Eventually, I’d forget all about them.

Brand new shoes

It’s a string of loosely unrelated bad decisions(not all of them yours) (in fact, uncharacteristically few of them yours) that lead up to this event: you sitting by the side of a bicycle path one warm summer evening, shaking rainwater out of your new pair of shoes.
It hasn’t rained all day.
Figure that one out, you silently challenge the people cycling past you—an old couple, a man and his safely helmeted daughter—who stare in puzzlement at your bare feet and the drenched sock in your hand. You cast them an insipid smile. What do they make of it, you wonder; a prank? An act of bullying? A girl steering into a ditch because she was distracted by her iPhone? Their minds’ attempts at working this image into a coherent narrative could very well be more imaginative than what actually occurred. 

What’s in a name?

Names. Though not an extremely frequent conversation topic, my friends and I do like to talk about them from time to time. Granted, we may not discuss names as often as we might discuss the weather, our future plans, or the alleged escapades of our peers (ours is a small campus), but they’re definitely higher up on the list than, say, international politics, or peonies.

This is Tow Truck Pluck.

What’s peculiar about names is that they are often such a perfect fit for the person they belong to. Take my little sister Faye. ‘Faye’ derives from ‘faith’ and is pronounced like the Dutch word ‘fee’, which means ‘fairy’. Though I would not exactly consider her fairylike, my sister—despite being almost fifteen and therefore having every biological right to be terrible—is one of the sweetest people I know. (This is not me being biased. This is me divulging a fact.)

In defense of Dark Shadows

I should know better than to follow the masses. After all, quantity of consumers does not guarantee quality of the product. If it did, I would listen to Justin Bieber’s music; I would have spent hundreds of bucks I can’t spare so I could type this on a MacBook Air instead of on my dad’s laptop, whose internet connection dies every five minutes (which he swears “totally never happened when I used it!” and “is all your fault”); I might not have used ‘whose’ to refer to an inanimate object in the previous clause; and I would have jumped the Fifty Shades of Grey bandwagon, which, just, no.

But, as it’s impossible to personally verify everything in the world, sometimes you have to let others’ opinions guide you. And thus my decision to skip Dark Shadows—Tim Burton’s thousandth dark comedy starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter—was easily made. Sure, the trailer was amusing, but I care about as much for Tim Burton as I care for Justin Bieber, and besides: a movie that fails to impress so many critics and normal moviegoers could not possibly be worth watching. Right?

Wrong.