In the second part of my blog post I’ll be spilling my guts with the utmost eloquence, or at least that’s what I think I will be doing (for, you see, I suffer from delusions of grandeur). It will be quite boring and uninteresting but at least I’ll get to quell my inner urge to write about stuff. Plus I’ll be able to make up for all those posts I didn’t make, even if most of this text makes no sense whatsoever.
It is now March and the final part of our journey has reared its ugly head from the distant pit of inevitability. Admittedly we do have a little more than a month ahead of us, but we all know how the saying goes: time flies. And time has flown fast – faster than I had ever expected. When I first I arrived I was filled with doubt and insecurity. I found it hard to accept that I will be taken out of my normal everyday routine and thrown into unexplored territory, even if it was my decision to participate. But it has been a good experience and will undoubtedly change the way I look at life and the way things are from now on. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll still be a pessimistic, sarcasm-loving, cynical a-hole, but something inside me has learned to feel happiness more intensely, to feel hope, even if hope is but a fool’s comfort.
From the sound of it, it seems as if I’m leaving next week, but one must always think ahead of time. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past two weeks. I’ve been in a weird state of consciousness. It’s almost as though I cannot experience the present as much as I could before, if that’s in any way understandable. Everything that’s going on around and in my life is giving me reasons to smile, but the future is looming ahead of me with its bloody axe of departure, filling me with melancholy and a profound thoughtfulness, while the past is also egging me on to really do what I came here to do before it is too late – study. But things haven’t exactly gone the way I had expected and though studying is still in the back of my mind all the time – thanks to our nonsensical education system with its policy of pressuring young adults with unreasonable expectations, therefore turning them into little machines and whatnot (we’ll get to that later) - , matters of the heart and soul have finally taken a stronger hold on me, something I thought could never in a million years happen to a person like me. And you know what, I’m happy because of that. I feel like I’ve been pulled out of a hole. A manhole filled with bad vibes and probably somebody’s feces.
That’s about enough of my gushing emotions into your horrified, confused faces. It’s time to deal with some of the more mundane, unspiritual, down-to-earth, no-mumbo-jumbo things that I’ve been aching to write down and forget that I’m leaving for the duration of the following month.
Well I mentioned something about studying before and I have a confession to make regarding that. I haven’t exactly been too keen on keeping my promise to study as much as I can. The fact that I don’t really know what it is that I need to be studying isn’t really helping as well. Up until this moment I’ve been trying to scrape a little knowledge together here and there but I’ve also realized that only people who have almost nothing else to do can study and do well in all subjects. I’m happier now, so I guess that explains a lot. But that doesn’t mean I’m not scared of coming back and suddenly becoming the village idiot. I’ve taken a few steps to avoid that.
Whenever I’m in a lesson in which I can’t follow what the teacher is trying to get through to my thick skull, I open up Google and look for articles about, well, stuff in general. For example, I read about the effects of LSD during my last Danish lesson, along with a bunch of eyewitness accounts of the destruction of Hiroshima. Yeah, I admit that it’s more of a form of entertainment with no more educational merits than watching two flies f***, but it sure as hell beats staring at the teacher with a look of bewilderment in my eyes, lulling myself into a state of stupor by listening to those strange, throaty mantras he/she keeps repeating which are collectively called the Danish language.
And whenever I have a lesson which I can somewhat follow with the help of, say, Google translate or hyperphysics.com or some other magical invention, I just grab a notebook and get cracking. This method has its flaws, especially since I’m not nearly getting information at the same rate or level as the rest of the class but, again, it sure as hell beats sitting on my buns and doing next to nothing.
As for Danish, I’ve decided and promised to speak only Danish to my family for the whole duration of March. I’ve set some rules and goals up for myself and I hope I follow through, we’ll see how that goes later on but remember that it’s only my family that I’ll be speaking Danish to and probably nobody else. But that’s okay because I have enough people to communicate with on a daily basis.
I promised before to write about education somewhere in this blog post, but I think it would be best for me to write some sort of essay on it some time in the near future when my head is clearer. Nothing beats whipping up another 1000-worder, right? Right???
Well, time for something serious again.
Last Thursday
I was riding my bicycle back from Hinnerup to Århus (a distance of circa 15 km), my feet aching from the cold winter air and the physical exertion I forced myself to endure, until I saw a thick pillar of pitch-black smoke rising to the sky in the distance. By the looks of it I assumed that some farmer was burning trash, but as I came closer I realized that that couldn’t be the case.
Then the sirens started wailing. Two cars with blue-ish yellow emblems, if I remember correctly, rushed off towards the rising smoke as I stopped to wonder what might have happened. A traffic accident. That was the only reasonable thing to assume and as soon as I came close enough to observe the event, my assumptions were proven correct.
From where I was standing I could see a small car right next to the highway, engulfed by flames – smoke crawling up from underneath the fire like some sort of twisted vine. The car was completely smashed but there was no ambulance nearby. If somebody was indeed hurt, they must have been taken away before I got to the scene of the accident, or worse.
A woman with a brown cloth draped around her shoulders standing in front of another car was surrounded by some men. The firemen observed the burning car as if trying to find the best way to deal with the problem. And there was a silence in the air that could only be described as oppressive.
I couldn’t see much from my position since I didn’t have my glasses with me. What happened was not really any of my business, after all. I hoped that everything turned out fine, that no people were hurt but one must not forget that this is reality and not a Hollywood movie. A car accident is a horrible way to die.
I continued my journey back home while still thinking about the thing I had just witnessed. I wasn’t shocked, but a sort of thoughtfulness took hold of me instead. Have you ever had one of those days where you wake up expecting just another regular day? You fix yourself breakfast - some sandwiches or Froot Loops and milk – and you head off to school or work or wherever you need to go. And then, as the day goes on just as you expected, something out of the ordinary happens. You get into an accident or somebody in your family gets into an accident and you receive a message or something you forgot long ago resurfaces in your life, the possibilities for unwelcome things to happen are nearly endless. The people in that car were probably having one of those days.
With this in mind it isn’t at all too extreme to say that death is right around the corner. Death in the form of a broken car; a broken man under the influence of alcohol behind the wheel of a broken car; death in the form of a psychopathic killer, a drug-addict in need of some easy money and so on so forth. Sometimes it seems as if everything and everybody out there is trying to get you. But what can one learn from this?
Even if death is just around the corner, choosing to ignore it will not make it go away. There is always a risk for something to happen and in the end it won’t matter whether you’re afraid of it or not. What matters is what you can give to this world and how you can make your brief stay on this tiny planet a little more enjoyable for your own self. One mustn’t fear living a little before one dies. I could elaborate on this a little more, but due to the shortage of time, I will just add a slightly relevant quote from one of my favorite writers, Albert Camus (even though I hate quoting people, because only pretentious hipsters do that): "If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
Well, I hope that if my post wasn’t enjoyable, it was at least good enough to waste time reading. I didn’t have too much time to edit it or change things in it, so you’ll have to take it for what it is – a schoolboy’s pathetic attempt at writing.
So yeah, there you have it.
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