Homeless

I’ve got two Hungarian ‘kids’ sleeping on my couches. A boy and a girl. It’s funny how you start seeing everybody that’s a bit younger than yourself as kids. These two are around the 20s and they’ve just become homeless.

That’s not the smelly, begging for money kind of homeless; nor the drug fucked sleeping in your own vomit kind of homeless either. It’s the kind where even though you’re working you can’t pay the rent and your land lord kicks you out – then you end up squatting in some cellar (with no running water and no electricity) to be chased out in the middle of the night by a man and his madly barking dog kind of homeless.

I’ve never had it that bad. I’ve never had to squat in a place with no running water and no beds before. I’ve had it in a bad way, but I’ve never let it get that bad. Maybe it’s because I’m more careful, or maybe I just have more of a safety net (that I call in earlier).

The quote that comes up in me is, ‘an intelligent man can get himself out of problems that a wise man would never have let himself get into.’

Or is that just being arrogant?

Maybe it’s because I’m a little older. When I was in my twenties I was safely tucked away in university. I had food every day, I had a roof over my head and I had classes to attend. I still made some big mistakes (the debts of which I’m in the process of paying off now), but I never really had a chance to fuck it up badly.

Of course that isn’t exactly true, as the overdose of one of my fellow students testifies to (Heroine, for the interested ones among you), but still the scope for mistakes was relatively limited.

These guys left their country to try and find work here. It’s pretty admirable. I don’t think they’ll be able to stick around much longer, though. Not having a home (or a shower, or clothes) makes life a bit of a challenge. Possibly more of a challenge than it really needs to be.

If you’ve got people back home that are willing to pick you up, get you going again and give you a fresh start, maybe you should take it.

But then, maybe I’m not as brave (reckless?) as them.

Sleeping Out

A couple of days ago I was forced to sleep at my work. The reason? The keys to lock up with had been lost. You see, there’s only two sets of keys. One is always with the owner and the other set is passed to the opener in the morning and thrown into the mailbox at night – when everybody’s out. This second set of keys was somehow split and the most important keys lost (they ended up being behind some beer kegs in the owner’s hallway).

So we tried to find the owner and, by extension, the first set of keys. It was, however, a Saturday night – her kids weren’t home and she’s smart enough not to give us her mobile number (then she’d never be left alone!) So the result was that the first set was also not to be found. There was two choices. 1. Close the door, but not lock it and hope for the best. 2. Stay till the cleaners show up.

The problem was, option one, if it would have gone wrong, would have cost the owner a fortune. Imagine the damage that a couple of drunken louts could do to a café that they found open and unwatched? Especially one stocked with a wide variety of liquor bottles and a number of beer kegs? And that’s just assuming the people that found it open were drunken Brits (mind you, I have nothing against the English, but in Amsterdam they do seem to form the vast majority of the drunken tourists).

So I ended up drinking a few at the neighbours (who stay open much later) and then passing out on the couch, till the cleaners woke me up with rather surprised looks on their faces. I assume they thought I was a drunken tourist that had wandered into the open café (We never meet the cleaners, they start after we finish and finish before we start). I mumbled some explanation to them (I doubt they got it, their Dutch wasn’t very good and my explanatory ability at 4:30 in the morning isn’t very good either), got my stuff and left.

But not before writing in till when I had been forced to stay as hours; l though that was only fair. After all, it wasn’t me who had lost the keys and yet it had been me who had suffered the consequences. A couple of extra hours of pay seemed a fair exchange for my discomfort. Besides, I can now say that I was once paid for sleeping. That is most certainly another item off my ‘Bucket List’.

So how do I feel about the experience? Ambivalent, I guess. Which means that no doubt in a few months it will be a very positive experience. It was no fun waking up in the middle of my sleep cycle to bike home (which took longer than necessary because I lost my way), but on the other hand I did meet the neighbours – who seem young but cool (but? Am I getting that old that I need to use the word but there?!) and I did get paid for sleeping.

And, most importantly, it will make a decent story. ‘You know, I once had to sleep at my work’. Okay, maybe I need to work on my opening sentence a bit, but it’s a story and, as all of you know, I do love to tell a good story!

Lying in the rain

It was only when it was too hot today to wear my sweater that I realised ‘You know what? I’m wearing an awful lot of sweaters lately.’ Which isn’t really saying much, seeing as I hadn’t worn a sweater for about seven years, minus a short (or should I say skinny) interlude in Australia.

And this is the middle of the Dutch summer. Hurrah, I get to take off my sweater for one day, while I was forced to wear it on and off for months now. I didn’t even have sweaters a few months ago!

People always ask me, ‘so why did you leave?’ and I have always answered ‘the weather’ and then they laugh and I laugh and the question is generally over and done with (unless you’ve got somebody really persistent, or really bad at the social thing – which is often the same thing). It was an easy way out. It was a quick, off the cuff answer that didn’t take a great deal of thinking, or explaining. After such a long time away, though, I wasn’t certain if it was true.

Well, I’m starting to suspect that it was really a vital part of my departure. I have this memory of standing in front of this big window in my room at university (I lived on campus) staring out at the drizzle which hadn’t stopped for weeks and saying ‘that’s it, I’m leaving’. The memory continues with me then boarding a plane a few months later and heading out to warm, warm Thailand. Of course, it’s not a very accurate memory because I had already been out of university for six months when I did leave, plus that room (which was my nicest room in university) was a room I occupied in my second year and my entire university education took three years.

Still, sometimes it’s okay to stuff the truth in the broom closet for a while (just as long as you feed it the occasional crust and bit of water) and let aesthetics take the reigns. For example, when you get yourself a daughter and she says she wants to be a princess, you don’t really want to sit down and explain to her that princesses can only really become princesses in two ways, one of which is obviously closed to her in all our cases (unless royalty has started reading my blog, which seems unlikely because then directly afterwards there would have been a jump in other people reading my blog, as the paparazzi try to figure out why royalty is reading my blog) and the other which isn’t really inviting, as she’d have to marry a pompous ass – which is not all that unusual in all countries where women have to marry men, but royalty does have the added disadvantage that the royalty's pompous assishness is thrown all over the front of the tabloids.

Another good example of where the truth should be embroidered is taxes.

No, that’s it, no witty remark, no clever jokes about taxes. Taxes are boring and I’m not going to waste anymore time on them here.

So where does that leave us? I have no idea really. I think I can sum it up as: when the weather sucks, lie like hell to get somewhere where the weather is better.

New Couch

I’m sitting on the couch in my new home. The entire place is empty, seeing as the owner (who I’m renting from) left on holiday yesterday morning for three weeks. It’s certainly quite a turn around from living with all my stuff in one corner to spreading it all over a house. It’s also quite a difference from being in the centre of it all. Now I’m about five kilometres from the heart of things. I feel like I’m living among the tribes.

Quite fitting really, seeing as most of the people out here are of definitely quite non-Caucasian skin tone. Does that sound racist? It’s most definitely not PC, but then I have no problem with being un PC. Fortunately fewer and fewer people enforce PC. The majority has long since accepted that PC talk taken too far actually becomes an attack on freedom of speech.

I rather like freedom of speech.

On the other hand, I also fully accept that some things should not be said. There is a balance that has to be struck between being able to say what you want and not provoking hardship, violence and hatred by saying those things. It is, of course, a very difficult balance to strike. Who gets to decide what is necessary and what is inflammatory? It would be great if the individual could monitor him or herself. Unfortunately each individual’s judgement differs about what belongs to the first and what belongs to the latter.

So that creates the necessity for an overarching organisation to administer a general standard. The problem is then; how is this general standard arrived at? The obvious answer would be to take an average of the people at large. What the people at large find acceptable or not should be taken as a standard for what the overarching organisation would find acceptable or not. The only problem with that is that people are rather fickle. That is why the PC rage first took off, for example. That was also why if you look at movies from the sixties and the seventies you could see naked women and sex – in the eighties and nineties that suddenly disappeared (thought the violence heavily increased) – and now it’s back again.

What’s really necessary is an objective measurement – applied by people trained in applying such a standard. The big problem with that is that the people as a whole will feel disenchanted and ignored. They will say, as they always do when the academics disagree with the common man, ‘what special powers do these people have that I don’t personally possess? Why should I believe these people and not my gut instinct?’

And in many cases they’d be right. After all, the trained people are still people – liable to be biased, corruptible and easy to trick. They will make mistakes and they will be influenced by trends. You’d hope their standards would be slightly more objective, but that too is created by man and therefore not completely safe from subjectivity and bias. These people might exhibit less extreme fluctuations of applied standards – but they would still fluctuate.

And then, what is so bad about that fluctuation? Yes, on occasion it might draw people to an extreme, but if these standards do not fluctuate, then before you know it what is being said and what is allowed to be said will be in different eras. Then people will get hassled by the organisation – while the people at large have no qualms with what is being said.

I really don’t actually have an answer. These were just my musings while sitting on my new couch in my new home. All I do know is that it’s better to err on the side of caution and give too much freedom rather than too little. After all, it seems to be much easier to take freedom away than to give it back.

Fragments

For the final papers to get into my new university I needed a certified copy of my university degree. I tried showing them my actual degree, but they said that that wouldn’t do; as they wouldn’t accept that as it could get them into trouble if they lost it. So I said, well I’ve shown you my original copy, can I just let you photocopy it and then you have a copy? No, it needed to be certified. Okay, I asked, so how do I certify it? Well, only the university can certify it.

So I contacted my old university. They said they would send me a copy. Then they told me they couldn’t two days later. They apparently didn’t have a copy of my degree on file. I had graduated too long ago. So how do I get a certified copy from you when I have the only real copy? Well, you need to come here. I wish I could at this point admit that I lambasted them with a clever retort and they visibly cringed, but I did it over e-mail, so I couldn’t see them, besides I’m not all that brave (After all I still needed that certified copy). Instead the strongest word I used was ‘inconvenient’.

It took all of five minutes, once I was there. Getting there and back cost me a grand total of three hours. Three hours and five minutes for a stamp and a signature, not bad for a bureaucratic process – but still pissingly annoying on a personal scale. No wonder people can only work such short weeks here, they need the rest of the time to deal with the red tape and the paper pushers!

Tomorrow I’m definitely moving into my new house (I hope) the greatest obstacle currently in my way is not having a bicycle. In the centre of Amsterdam you don’t need a bicycle (it’s handy, but it’s not necessary). So far I’ve survived without a bicycle for two reasons. Walking worked and I already had my feet and hadn’t yet bought a bicycle. Now one of those reasons falls away. Walking will no longer work, as the bicycle ride to and from the ferry will already take 10 minutes, so the walk would be at least twice as long. I’m not that rich in time.

I might have lost my poetry book. I possibly left it on the train. The idea of thousands of good ideas disappear into the world of the lost and found is quite agonising. I do have a lot of final or near final copies of the poems on my laptop, but it wasn’t just the end results that were in that poetry book, it was the actual process. How I got there.

Hopefully the book will shop up somewhere during the move tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll have to contact the central NS office in Utrecht. Fortunately the title of the book is unusual (brutally honest, might be a better way to describe it). What’s more, I doubt anybody else will really be interested in what the book contains. It’s a treasure for me, but nothing more than an oddity for another.

Let’s hope it comes back because it’s probably one of my most treasured possessions.

Dance Valley

I’m not allowed to say ‘Sorry for not writing for so long’. It has been forbidden. So I won’t say it. Instead I’m going to say ‘It seems that my life has got a bit too busy for me to post every other day, but I’ll try to post when I can’. So here goes, it seems that my life has got a bit too busy for me to post every other day, but I’ll try to post when I can.

Yesterday I went to Dance Valley. It was my first electro festival ever. You see, as far as I know they don’t really do these kinds of festivals in Asia. Not on this scale, anyway. There was something like 40,000 people there. About 39,999 were drug fucked. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration; I think there were two other people in our group who didn’t participate in that aspect of the party.

It was all sunglasses, rectus smiles, huge pupils and endorphins. There was also a great deal of vomiting, nonsensical mumbling and people who no longer knew their heads from their asses. Yes, even if you didn’t like the music you could still have a great deal of fun just people watching. In my case I consumed a huge amount of beer. I like beer. Have I mentioned that before? Well, if I haven’t, I like beer. Hmmm…. Beer…

Right, where was I?

Anyways, we decided that the weather was as shite as it was because otherwise the first festival I went to would have been too good and it would have made all the following festivals have to try to live up to too high a standard. It was better this way as then the next time I went to something like this I could look forward to a festival in the sun and out of the mud. Small consolation.

It was the worst just when we arrived. The sky opened up and drizzled us (it never really drenches outside the tropics – what ever the Dutch might think) just as we walked into the ticketing office. Then we walked onto the terrain and were made aware of one of the biggest problems with valleys, namely that water collects in them.

It was disgusting. There was only one entrance that everybody had to use. The result was 80k feet crunching up the sparse grass and the soggy ground underneath. It wasn’t even good enough for pigs.

Fortunately, we soon found a dance hill that was slightly more to our liking and stayed there for the rest of the festival. The sun only broke through once, but nonetheless it was spectacular seeing about 20 thousand people (there were several stages) enjoying computer generated sound. It made the parties we organised in Goa (which were quite big already) look like dinner parties.

Will I go again? I’m not exactly sure. The getting to and from the party was absolutely terribly organised. We ended up spending seven hours to get there and away again – while we were only at the party for a total of nine hours. Was the fun worth the price in travel time and ticket costs? Apparently for 40,000 people it was.; but then I’ve never really been one for going with the majority.

Sunlight and Frostbite

It’s such a cliché, he remarks, as overdone as a sailor in deep space. Find something different, find something worthy. Leave this to the creatively underdeveloped, the cranially restricted, the emotionally retarded.

He sneers

Hunched up, my voice conveys pain by tone alone. I scream as I do battle – a civil war between north and south.

Shall I remain a prisoner in this gilded cage? Shall I seek freedom in the desert of the lone? Lune, Lunar, Luna – goddess of the temptation – your servant seeks absolution from your sins.

Thought plays chess while Feeling dances. They compete with each other according to different rules. They both believe they are winning – they both believe they are in control.

Trembling skeletal branches reach towards the writhing sky. For a moment sunlight spills through the cracks; then the clouds close rank. It ought to be a paradise – it remains a waste land.

Cocooned in razor wire.

As soon as the stirring stops oil and vinegar separate. These feelings will slip away. Dead leaves on the autumn wind. Then what? Why try to change each other, when we know we can’t even change ourselves? Sacrifice today to tomorrow.

His footsteps fade. Her mascara runs.

Home

I’ve started to explore Amsterdam proper. Friday night I went out with a colleague from work to this weird ass club for an hour – where I proceeded to drink too much (that seems to be my specialty) and meet the brother of one of the few friends I actually do have in Amsterdam, which is quite amusing. After all, it was the second time I went out in this town and I really do know only a handful of people, yet right there, into my path, stumbles one of them. I’m pretty sure that if I wasn’t hung over today I could say that in a much more flowery way, but I’m hung over today as well.

But first Saturday.

Saturday I was going to go home early (as it’s not a lot of fun working on a hangover) but then this dude suddenly stopped outside of my café just as I was closing shop and yelled my name. I didn’t recognise him, but I assumed (fairly I believe) that if he knows my name I might well know him as well. I did. It turned out to be my cousin, who I hadn’t seen in seven years. They were going out. It was rather hard for me to say ‘naw, I gotta work tomorrow in the afternoon, so thanks but no thanks’. So I went out again. Again came back at some unspeakable hour, again drank too much.

Then Yesterday was supposed to be the day where I got to go home early. I had all my work done at a quarter past twelve and was really looking forward to hitting the sack. I go down into the kitchen and ask ‘how much time do you guys still need?’ the answer was ‘another hour and a half’

Apparently the look of defeat on my face was quite comical, I was told later. You see, I can’t leave until everybody is finished. As the guy in charge I’m the last out of the shop. So I had to hang around and wait. Fortunately, some of my serving colleagues decided to wait with me (with friends) and we sat around and talked shop. I didn’t drink too much – but with the exhaustion from the other two days added up (and the problem with still sleeping in other people’s living room) I am as good as hung over today.

It is nice though that I’m slowly, but certainly meeting more and more people. I hadn’t really had the time for that when I first arrived and now I can finally start to build up a proper life here. After all, a house, a job and an education are nice – but they don’t make a town your home. It’s the people that you know that make it your home. If you don’t know good people, then you won’t really have a good time. It’s also ultimately the people that get you where you want to go.

Right now I’d really like to go back to sleep. I go snooze on the couch.

Boundaries

Does anybody else ever have the feeling that their lives are divided into chapters? That you could really sit down with a pen and your timeline and draw lines where you can say ‘there is a boundary here, this is where things change’? Obviously I do – otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about it.

And obviously I’ve just passed such a line. Of course, it might be easier for me to have these lines since moving from country to country is a very good way to close one chapter and open another. Still, the line was there and I passed over it – pretty specifically when I crossed the border from India into Holland (yes, Germany is getting ignored in this case, but I invoke poetic licence plus – obviously – that it’s Germany and they can be safely ignored as Mr. Chamberlain proved so aptly just before the second world war).

This line has made my life a great deal more serious. Suddenly it’s all about money management, people management, debt management and career management (and I’m not even really in management!) You could say I managed to pass a management line. (I obviously didn’t pass any humour line, but thanks for pointing that out Bradley).

I have to say, I actually enjoy it. Slowly I’m getting into the swing of actually doing my ability some justice. Or rather – I think I’ve always done my ability justice, but now I’m slowly starting to get other people to sit up and take notice. I’m starting to learn how to sell myself.

People are actually starting to listen to me.

Scary, isn’t it? Well don’t worry yourself too much, though some people might be listening to me now – most still laugh sardonically directly afterwards. So the big question now becomes, will this trend continue? Will I someday in the future actually have an audience when (if) I have something important to say?

Secretly I always hoped that this blog would be a place where slowly but certainly more people would accumulate and read my ideas. That didn’t happen. My audience has stopped growing and hovers now continuously just below the 10 hits per day. No complaints, of course. I’m happy that it’s above zero. At least my ideas and adventures have always been at least interesting to some.

Still, as I reiterated a few days ago once again (not here, mind you, but I did reiterate it) my ambition is to make a difference in this world and the only way that I can ever make a difference is to have people listen to me. I realise now that the best way to accomplish that is to not just be good at what I do, but excellent. It is that drive towards excellence that has been sharpened by my journey back ‘home’.

That breakthrough I’ve been waiting for might happen in a moment, but it takes decades of work. I started late – so I have to work twice as hard to catch up. I’m willing to put in the hours every day, let’s hope that therefore people will someday soon give me the time of day.

Accepted

I have been accepted into university. As you can probably guess I'm quite thrilled. I said a few weeks ago that if I got in I'd post my motivation letter, so here it is, the motivation letter that got into the VU Social Psychology program: (Maybe you can find the two grammar mistakes in there?)

Re: What motivates me?

The first time I was asked to write a motivational letter for university I never even mentioned what motivated me, not once; yet the letter, according to the selection board, was essential in getting me accepted.

Now, eleven years later, I’m being asked to do it again. The assignment is the same, the purpose is the same, shouldn’t I therefore behave the same? Pavlov and his behavioural psychologist would answer ‘yes’. For me the answer is ‘no’. It’s therefore a good thing that behaviourism is no longer a mainstream psychological philosophy – something that the request of a letter of motivation by a psychology department testifies to.

The big disparity between then and now is indeed internal; then I didn’t care that much about whether I would get in or not, this time around I came back to the Netherlands – after seven years of absence – to get into the VU Social Psychology program. So the difference between the letter now and the letter eleven years ago is encompassed in one word: motivation.

I’ve become fascinated by people. This wasn’t always the case. For the longest time I was far more interested in thoughts than in the people that had them. That changed when I read about Antonio Damásio’s research in which he suggests that emotions are a fundamental part of every decision. Suddenly my entire world image flip – I realised that thoughts can’t be considered separately from the people that have them.

For that reason I want to learn about us and add to our understanding of ourselves. Though I’m constantly reading about and observing the human condition, there are limits to how much you can do with just books and anecdotal evidence. That’s why I want to join the Social Psychology Research Masters program at the Vrije Universiteit; where I believe I’ll be able to both take from and add to the field of Social Psychology.

There is a big difference between wanting to contribute and being able to contribute, however; so how do I think I can contribute? There are a myriad of ways, but I will only discuss a few here.

Since very young I’ve lived all over the world, which makes me the quintessential outsider. The constant exposure to other cultures has forced me to re-evaluate my assumptions over and over again. I believe – an assumption, of course – that this has forced me to always be objective and open minded.

While my time as a writer and a teacher has given me an analytical and critical mind. The reason for that is that any serious student or editor will not let you get away with mistakes or omissions. You must learn to explain things both clearly and succinctly. The best in both professions can make complex things appear simple; since the beginning this is the skill I’ve strived to learn.

These skills and more I want to bring to the field of Social Psychology; initially in the capacity of a student and eventually in the capacity of an educator. And that brings me to the end of my answer – which is a question of my own: will you have me?

Best Regards,


Jelte ten Holt