Magdalena O!

On the 501 Neville Park Queen Streetcar I’m clutching onto the tiny copy of The Metamorphosis. I’m nearly done, it’s the moment where I know that Gregor is most likely going to die. “Excuse me,” the guy behind me, donned in a leather jacket and a drunk lisp says, holding his deli plastic wrapped meat, “Is this meat Kafka-esque?”

I turn around wondering how he managed to sneak such a glance at the back cover to realize it’s Kafka.

“Are you trying to imitate the Squid and the Whale?”

“No, it’s from this TV show, Mission Hill, some guy points to a piece of meat and says, Is that Kafka-esque?”

We chit chatted and he confessed he didn’t know what that even meant but he’s been waiting for a moment to repeat the phrase. Most of what I knew about Kafka until yesterday was the references of things being just that, Kafka-esque. The strange drunk viking revealed to me he was from Moldavia, which I questioned because it seemed too clever, but he seemed to know a lot of details that only someone either really interested in Moldavia or a citizen would know. Have you ever meet anyone from Moldavia?! This was my first time. Maybe I should engage in more conversations with strangers.

Reading Kafka in between getting back to Murakami. I feel unease with my body, with everything around me. Where is the deep well? I need to find one, a deeper one this time, one that I can scurry across and leave my sticky mess all around. My body, the structure holding it, has been turning to jelly, soft, tender and unable to hold itself in.

I am still homeless with no prospects of finding a home for October 1. Why is it so difficult? And then there is those deadlines for scholarships, you know, to apply for PhD’s because I see nothing but black outside this tunnel vision of academia. I accept it, I need to hold onto this tenaciously to pull me through, to get me there. Because academia is the best thing in my life, the bringer of happiness, yo!!

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.

Sooooo… I am seriously considering doing either a second MA or PhD. The latter is obviously more appealing, as a. I don’t want to take more time in an MA course based environment and b. get on with my scholarly career (har har). But maybe I might have to in order to do what I want more specifically. I don’t really get why, but I notice a lot of people do that.

To make it more fun and complicated, I really want to do this in Europe. I am a EU citizen, however there’s all these laws saying I have to live in the country for a certain amount of time before I can pay home fees.

But, then there’s scholarships and fellowships and possibly funding from Canada too.

I will be 40K in debt by the time I’m done my MA, and my whole family is poor, so there will be no support there. Is this just ridiculous? I just can’t live in Canada anymore, at least for a bit ya know? I need to shake up my growing tunnel vision.

Anyone have any advice, whether you studied in UK, Denmark, Ireland, etc or you wanted to, or you know someone??

What is the level of academic rigor in Europe as opposed to in Canada. I know Erasmus Mundus is a bit of a joke. I have a friend in the Communication MA and he’s done nothing but travel around Europe and get paid for it. So obviously this is not what I want, but I am also not super ultra super genius, so there is that fear too.

I’m a Cultural Studies MA hoping to graduate summer/fall 2011. Want to further do Cultural Studies/New Media Studies PhD.

Maybe suggestions for programs? Suggestions on what to do? I am totally open to all at this time.

A series of interviews with a Polish ex-pat living in Toronto and a Parisian newcomer to Toronto, Canada where we, the philosophizing wanna-be’s, discuss the acquisition of language, and how that that gets manifested in our own consciousness and interactions with the self and the Other.

I hope to also make more videos about the intersection of language and psychoanalysis, particularly the coalescing of French and English, to help with my own frustrations and anxieties as the subject-in-process in language.

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We have been wanting to do interviews for so long because we have these ridiculously long discussions about language all the time, and now I had access to a camera and we just did it. It’s really helpful for me, especially working through editing interviews in post-processing including the negotiation of deciding what is important within the YouTube 10 minute time frame. Maybe some people will enjoy it, or relate to it, and hopefully give me feedback.

I’ve lost my ability to write coherently. I’ve lost my ability to express my thoughts coherently. No! Ha! Actually I’m realizing that I just cannot and have not yet been able to express what is inside me and the anxiety is growing within me. So, no blog posts, just 140 characters on Twitter. Language is giving me anxiety. I know there is other ways for me to get around what I am living right now, but I don’t know what that is because I don’t have the language to go there. I want to go to there. I really want to be a better writer. Like, actually, a good one.

I have been sucked up by a self-referential spiral and so I just think about words and structures and concepts. I think about Polish (my first language) and my relationship to it and then my relationship to English – then the coalescing of the cultural contributions to my identity that form based on those languages.

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?

I can’t write anything here because what is there to write? All I do is write for school. Only a few more weeks before the semester is over. I am anxious. I want to excel. There is so much to complete. I feel unwell thinking about it all. I hate all my photos. I hate everything I’ve done so far. I don’t know anything anymore.

Yuula said it best. It’s exactly how I’ve been feeling  –  “my mood alternates between psychotic moments of ‘enlightenment’ and MURDEROUS RAGE.”