Sometimes I Do Things That Don't Make Sense

Stop the press.

Sure, my actions don’t always appear logical...	...and they're not.
Pretend I don’t care when I’m trying to get an electronic device to work.	My computer is both telepathic and has a weakness for reverse psychology.
Worry about dying whenever my life is going well.	I used to read a lot. When things go well in the middle of a book (or life), something bad is going to happen soon. I don’t have an evil wizard archenemy, so I make do with suspicious moles.
Think worrying about things will make them less likely to happen.	That’s how worrying solves things.
Practice an in-depth responses in case someone interrogates me on my religious, political, or dietary beliefs.	This has happened a lot, actually. Maybe I need to stop interrogating myself.
Justify my life choices to an imaginary Oprah. Sometimes out loud, sometimes in a mirror.	I don't care that her show was cancelled,  I need to be prepared.
Decide to make lists like this when I should be studying.	I don’t want to study.

This list is incomplete.

Some things that I like about my life right now

The community kitchen: I love having a community kitchen. Sure, sometimes the dishes don’t get washed or put away. Sure, I’m using passive voice to avoid indicting myself. Sure, we almost grew a pet fungus in some old spaghetti. But it’s very gezellig. 

International food corroboration: A group of us take turns cooking in the evening - socialism in real life! It’s a win-win-win situation, even if all the wins go to me. I get to learn how to cook, I get to eat much healthier than I normally would (which considering that we eat desert everyday is saying something), and it’s easier and cheaper to cook once a week. Plus the people in the group are okay, I guess. 

Claude Francois: According to iTunes, I’ve listened to  “Comme d’habitade” 154 times. The reality is much worse, since I also listen to it on my mp3 player on repeat. (It’s the original “My Way”) I can finally combine my inablitity to speak French, my inability to sing, and my inability to act in one song. It’s very exciting. I’d be happy to sing it to anyone who asks, but so far, oddly enough, nobody has.

Biking: Okay, I know I’ve talked about this before, but I can’t help feeling like I’ve found the solution to obesity, foreign oil dependency, and pollution all in one go. It’s a panacea! 

Here’s an informative video on biking in the Netherlands (thanks, Mark)  and an informative article on how I’m wrong about helmets (still wearing one anyway) .

The classes: I might change my mind after I get my grades, but so far I really like all my classes. They’re quite long, I often have class from 8:30 to 5:30, but the lectures are informative, the practicals are well organized, the assignments are educational; so what more can you ask? I’m also very impressed with how involved the professors are with even the freshman classes. They’re very friendly and approachable, and not at all patronizing, even when, based on my questions, they have every right to be.

Dutch: My classroom Dutch is improving, even though it’s a bit humbling to have to look up the definition of a word every other sentence. I wish I could just pick it up from context, but I’m a little slow with that. (For the longest time, I thought incumbent meant idiot because that was always the context it was used it. True story) For example, after hearing things like “Is Joreom aanwezig?” for six weeks, I only recently realized that “aanwezig” meant “present” instead of “paying attention”. In a very egoistic manner, I find myself thinking why they can’t just say “present” like a normal person.

My name is Marjolein, but I may be saying it wrong...

I have no head for sounds even in my own language. I once went through an entire speech in debate club pronouncing fanatic, “fan-a-tick”. My sister regularly catches words that I pronounced incorrectly and kindly corrects them by smirking and asking me to repeat what I said and smirking again. My mispronunciations may be due to spending more time in my youth reading than talking to other human beings.

Anyhow, this is relevant because I’m now living in international housing. C’est merveilleux! Going by my history, a third language seems as unlikely as the Dutch winning the world cup, but hope springs eternal. I’m listening to a lot of “French for Dummies” and butchering everybody’s beautiful language with “Inglorious Basterd” level gruesomeness. In the meanwhile, I’ve also learned some fun facts on other people’s languages. Keep in mind that everything on the list should be disclaimed with  “in general” or “the one guy in our house from that country”

1.     Germans have word for being happy because somebody else’s good fortune. And you thought they were just sitting around feeling schadenfraude.

2.     Scandinavians speak ridiculously good English, better than a lot of English speakers, myself included.

3.     It’s hard to differentiate if a Greek is saying “beach” or “word that rhymes with witch”. I can only hope that, in real life, context will help.

4.     Some very-bad-words in English aren’t very-bad-words in Dutch. I'm sorry, but I can’t be more specific.   

5.     Portuguese people think that English sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher talking.

6.     Germans think Dutch sounds like little children talking.

7.     Spanish has a word for being somewhere between sober and drunk (No, I’m not counting tipsy as a word)

8.     Belgium’s say “if you’re hot” sometimes instead of “if you want to”. It’s very funny.

9.     Half of the words I learned in China are only appropriate when addressing babies. What a waste of a word.

10.  In most of the world, “bilingual” is prefixed with “only”. 

Mostly on Biking

The next post will be on languages. I cleverly transition to it in the last section. 

Biking:

Fact: Dutch people look effortlessly cool while biking.

Fact: I look like I got my head stuck in a bowling ball, and am still dazed and confused from the experience.

Conclusion: I’m not Dutch.

And because simply biking would just be too easy, the Dutch also often travel two on a bike. I tried to do this once. Basically, if I had been deliberately trying to make the other person as late as possible while destroying all their possessions, I really couldn’t have done a better job.

Helmets: That should probably be in the singular, as I seem to have the only helmet in all of  Holland. It result in comments such as “Going for a marathon, eh?”, “Careful you don’t fall now”, and very, very sarcastic whistles. If you look ridiculous, a certain portion of the Dutch population will consider it their personal responsibility to let you know. We will see how long I continue to value my prefrontal lobe over my dignity. Right now, a winning tactic is pretending I don’t understand Dutch. Yeah, my dignity never even had a fighting chance. 

Getting places:  Currently, my propensity for getting lost is cancelling out my propensity to over-consume anything with sugar. For example, yesterday I biked to visit my family. It’s about 40 miles as the crow flies, so I figured it would take me four hours. It took me ten hours. Partly it was my slowness (my grandma is faster than me), but mostly it was the fact that I took the very, very scenic route.  It was truly beautiful, but after the sixth hour, my appreciation for the grazing cows, the thatched-roof farm houses, the random castles and manors began to diminish, and I started to wish I had considered that fact that I regularly got lost in Richland, Washington.

Thankfully, on a sunny day in Holland, the entire population embarks on biking odysseys of their own, though presumably planned and not forced by lack of orientation skills. During the wandering course of my own biking odyssey, I asked about the entire population for directions. The people were amazingly kind and helpful, often taking a good ten minutes to make sure their directions were correct and clear. That and the fact that I was only mocked for my helmet once during the whole ten hours was very faith-in-humanity restoring experience.

Learning Dutch: About half of the Dutch people I asked for directions yesterday in Dutch answered in English. In fact, I had several conversations where my entire side was in Dutch and their entire side was in English. Although I am very impressed with how accommodating the Dutch are to foreigners, I also want to improve my Dutch, as unnecessary as Dutch is turning out to be in the Netherlands. It would be tres lame to be the only mono- in a land of bi-, tri-, and quad- linguals. (And I'm already doing such a great job at being tres lame by saying things like tres lame.)