academia

While I was in Brighton at the end of April I sent off a three page application to the Digital Methods Program Summer School at the University of Amsterdam. Earlier this week I washed my hair and put on my freshly dry cleaned blue Maje dress shirt for a Skype interview with the program after I got shortlisted! The peeps emailed me back less than an hour later saying I GOT IT. I am totally making the biggest deal out of this. I’ll be leaving at the end of June to study and work alongside researchers and designers for two months until end of August. I have a break in July in between and I might go WWOOF again. I was wanting to go to Europe this summer, for various exciting projects but knew I could not justify the expense without a concrete need and then it happened! I’ve been going to Europe a lot because I want to move there, but like with everything I dance around on the edges of committing and think and think about it until I believe it to be actually happening even though it totally hasn’t. When you think about something so much, you get exhausted before you even begin. I hope that this program will give me what I need and push me to apply for a PhD for September 2011. University of Bergen and University of Edinburgh are top contenders. They both have really well funded and serious digital culture PhD’s.

Although I wasn’t fond of Amsterdam when I first visited, I’m excited to re-live it. I was 19 and missing my boyfriend at the time way too much. I’m mostly excited because I know people in many big European cities, I know no one in Amsterdam. This makes it way more difficult to find a place and have help adjusting but that’s what I want. To just be alone.

Have you ever lived somewhere for a short time?

Now comes the great apartment hunt. If possible I want to live in a box, but live alone.

I am so excited here.

I hate the start of a semester. Today I am going crazy. I get home and realize I forgot to do and get all these important things at school. I have this pulse in my chest about to pop when the semester starts, because there is always a class I don’t think I can handle and then I start to lose it. I can’t do that meditating and calming down breathing stuff. I can’t do it properly for it to be effective.

Sometimes I feel everyone is happier than me, and I will always be in agony. Then other moments I don’t think about happiness or misery at all, I think this is when I am happy. Today my close friend at school was very tense but then she apologized and we talked about getting therapists. As I open up to people, I realize many of us in graduate school take to the use of therapy. I’ve had therapists off and on for many years, and only came upon one that was able to give me a new vocabulary to think through my issues and anxieties. She introduced me to a language that I could work in. But then she got really sick and stopped practicing. I still yearn for her constantly. I had a string of therapists after her but was unable to make sense of them. I am going to look for a Gestalt therapist again because it’s too painful to do this. Gestalt uses a phenomenological approach which makes the most sense to me.

From Wikipedia: Gestalt therapy is an existential and experiential psychotherapy that focuses on the individual’s experience in the present moment, the therapist-client relationship, the environmental and social contexts in which these things take place, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of the overall situation.

Hey, if you read this I’m sorry! I have to let these feelings out somewhere and I don’t have time for friends anymore, not even my close ones, not that I’d actually articulate my anxieties anyway. Maybe some more secret ones that I can’t talk about online.

I lost a bag of my underwear. I have no idea how, but it just disappeared in my house. It was ALL my underwear in a plastic bag after I washed them. Just like that, they are all gone. We have looked everywhere. What the fuck does that mean?