"Life comes first, an art not rooted in human experience is not worth a damn, but different kinds of minds have different kinds of experience, and all I ask of any man is validity; and there should be a place for every type and kind of mind. I don’t want to lose any testimony; it may be necessary for one man to sit wound up in his own vitals in order to find out what he needs to know, and his discoveries will be valuable if he is capable of telling the truth. Another must be wound up in the world around him . . . some must be active, and some contemplative."
Katherine Anne Porter
In “Old Mortality” Miranda and her sister Maria struggle to exert their individuality while dogged and pressured by family history, particularly that of Aunt Amy. Part 1 shows the two girls learning that the family demands unthinking acceptance of its legends, even in the face of contradictory facts. They are astonished, for instance, to hear their father claim that there were never any fat women in the family, when they know full well the size of their great-aunt Keziah, “who quite squeezed herself through doors, and who, when seated, was one solid pyramidal monument from floor to neck” ( CSP 174). The two girls see that “something seemed to happen to their father’s memory” ( CSP 174) when he talks about the family; they soon realize that the family legends dictate “truth” no matter what contradicts them. It is analogous to Porter’s witnessing the Germans claiming Mozart as German—the legend has become fact. If Maria and Miranda at first find the family stories intriguing and mysterious, they eventually understand the extent to which the stories restrict their lives. Rather than infusing the world with mystery, the legends sap mystery from it.
"Ah, but there is my own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. I don’t want any promises, I won’t have false hopes. I won’t be romantic about myself. I can’t live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don’t care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance."
From The Fourth Ghost
Because literature is psychotherapy for those who can't afford it.
Y'know, expatriates, on the run from their nationality and the officiaries of family, England and the Church of England.
[My father] "did a wonderful thing - he forgot his hearing aid". http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/13/my-mother-insisted-i-was-gay-but-im-not
First he took the piss out of my wording - "How did it land?" despite its being directly borrowed from the catchphrase of his favourite preacher, the ebullient youth man Mike Pilavachi with the Greek hair and the Nigerian shirts. Unlucky word to be the target this time. He picks at things to redirect the attention, reroute his discomfort. He picks at the skin to distract from the meat.
When that didn't work he simply went, 'I've forgotten'. What we talked about. Forgotten. "I didn't find it all that significant."
A wonderful thing.
I'm almost 30 now. I'm knocking on the sills of their window on the world, for the first time. I was going in to establish a meaningful relationship, or communicate, or both. The things I've intuited - their incapacity for that - i've seen demonstrated. I knew it was a windowsill, but it's the first time i've heard it thunk, i suppose. I suppose if you spent 60 years living in a spaghetti western set, without once walking round to the other side, so physically simple, just to keep your eyes open and walk, so psychically untenable. To see it's all cardboard and kickstands, you wouldn't want to start now. Is this the threat of regret? 60 years wasted on insubstance, worth wasting the rest to avoid the realisation. Surely such a complicated act, refusing to see without acknowledgement of refusal, compared to just - seeing what's there? It's mind-boggling. What do you do if your life, your whole life, has had no substance?
The Saloon has liquor and brigands, the brothel is full of whores, and the dust is the soil of the great USA, not some Italian backwater, no i've never been in, i don't have to, i can hear it and see it, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, Arwen, you idiot, it's a terrible thing to speak from ignorance
Friday, 19 December 2014
Wednesday, 15 October 2014
Today I found out my masters is free. What does that mean for education?
When I applied, the website listed fees of €2000 (£1600) – a hefty sum. But compared to the UK's £6-9000, it was tokenistic.
My application was already in when the information disappeared.
Today, three weeks into the course, I found out that it is in fact completely free. It’s amazing; it improves my life. I can work more on my course, and less to pay rent. I can get enough sleep.
Of course I have a vested interest in free education –I am a direct beneficiary of Prague’s free education system– but if that were not the case, I’d stand firm on its ideological necessity. Free education means freedom of movement - physical, social, cultural.
And if the ‘trickle-down theory’ actually operates anywhere, it’s in education – from education, down into society, into culture. It deepens my understanding of the people in the world, and even a little understanding can send ripples a long, long way.
It’s not just me who understands this; it makes up the marginalia of my lectures; is presupposed in every word from my Head of School. It precipitated the Velvet Revolution – who started it? The students, naturally; free thinkers in a time of unfreedom.
My Head of School looks a bit like Saint Nick; ruddy, twinkly, Czech, an elfish pointy beard, and a vivacious, kindly manner; shrewd politics, profound cosmopolitanism, a capacity for righteous fury I can only estimate. I’d be entirely unsurprised if he kept a phoenix in his office.
I have been accused – and he has defended me - of coming here to exploit the system. As the UK allegedly fills up with Poles, Romanians, and other Europeans stealing our jobs, scrounging our benefits, and clogging up our NHS, I am here, blessing the EU daily for my freedom of movement, to scrounge a degree.
Irony aside, what’s interesting about this apparently universal tendency to dichotomise society into ‘us’ and ‘them’ (to put it another way, ‘entitled’ and ‘foreign’), is that it always presupposes the objective superiority of the native system.
Why would ‘they’ come here, if we didn’t do things better? The mere presence of the alien justifies the nationalist ego. And in doing so, also justifies resenting that presence.
And are we better? (-Wait, am I ‘us’ or ‘them’ now? It’s confusing…)
The British are very proud of their NHS - never mind, for example, that the Czech Republic has Proton Beam radiotherapy, which the UK won’t finish installing until 2018.
The UK’s benefits system is also unjustifiably generous, a system of flat-rates capped per household, notwithstanding the rest of Europe which in some places ties unemployment benefit proportionally to previous household income, and in others has not capped it per household as in the UK, but provides a guaranteed minimum income per household.
We should also disregard the opinion of organisations like the Red Cross, which has rolled out a food aid programme in Britain for the first time since the Second World War, largely due to falling welfare payments in a time of rising costs.
But the UK university system – No competition, right? We’ve got Cambridge! I’m only doing my MA in Prague because I wasn’t good enough to get funded.
Well, no.
Now I am the alien, I cannot entertain for a second the idea that immigration or emigration is driven by a desire to exploit.
Yes, it is driven by a desire for a better life. That’s why I came to Prague. But I’m not here because life in the Czech Republic; is objectively better; I’m here because experiencing different ways of living in itself makes life better.
The question is wrong. It’s not ‘where is life better?’, it’s ‘how can I better my life?’
Today Františka (native Czech, perfect American-inflected English and enough German to take classes taught in German) told me she’s probably going to take three years to finish her masters, so she can take all the interesting classes.
She’s already 23. Many of the classes she’s taking won’t count towards her degree.
A masters in Europe usually takes two years, but assuming you do all the work, there is twice as much of it. It’s not the same workload at half the speed. I saw Františka’s timetable; she’s taking extra classes for no extra credit.
So she’s studying because she wants to gain understanding. A degree is just a happy consequence.
Why have I never met a student like this in the UK?
And where’s that terrible gnawing anxiety, tapering to existential panic as The End nears, about what comes after? Why isn’t she comparing her CV unfavourably to Mark Zuckerberg’s, aged 23? Why isn’t she, right now, eating her own hands over her viability on the job market? Why aren’t people talking about a ‘youth mental health crisis’ in the Czech Republic?
Could it be because in an environment where education is not priced, and is therefore not thought of as a market product, the students don’t understand themselves as products?
Oops, leading question. Let me try again.
Because a fee-paying system does not allow this type of student to exist within the university environment.
Students who are paying for their time at university are predisposed to avoid wasting their time. Time is money.
So they take safe bets. They don’t go off-piste, so they never get to discover anything for themselves. Our fee system has crippled ground-breaking research at the grassroots. Commodification has, ironically, crippled real growth.
In contrast, the freedom in Prague is dizzying.
There are pressures. The organisation is a bit of a joke. The staff looks like the cast of Last of the Summer Wine. Every document has to be officially stamped by at least five different people. Digitised documents are regarded with fear and confusion, as one would regard a child out of reach, with car keys. Nobody is well paid.
But you don’t need to know where you’re going before you’ve set off. If you make a wrong turn, you can just turn around, without being screwed for time and funding. You can take the time you need. You can follow your interests freely.
It's incredibly refreshing.
Some of the Czech students are less sold on the idea. Born the same month as my younger brother, post-communist Prague has the millennial character, and is still optimistic about the freedoms of the free market.
As someone on my table murmured into their subsidised cafeteria soup, “people don’t value the education if it’s free”.
A cautionary tale exists in the university Apocrypha of the perpetual undergrad: supposedly circling the system for ten years or more, he accomplished nothing but immortality as the Univerzity Karlovy bogeyman of existential irrelevance. At the end of my second week I’ve already been warned twice.
But no amount of temptation to drift, obsolete administration, or nationalist resentment outweighs the value of this breath-taking opportunity. Free thought!
In 2006 in the UK, I matriculated into the first year of ‘top-up fees’.
Only today did I realise that I’d quietly internalised something about education which I now understand to be a profitable lie; that it must count towards something concrete and quantifiable. Time, money, talent, and effort go in; a degree and job prospects come out. That’s the deal.
The Czech system doesn’t buy into that. Education is celebrated for its own sake, as a means of sharing in and contributing to the enrichment of the complex web of society and culture through which all of us move and live. It is cultural currency.
Introduce fees at any level, and you transform this social and cultural exchange from a qualitative interaction to a quantitative process. You dehumanise the young studying, and you move intellectual exploration onto rail-tracks. I know, I’ve studied in both systems.
It may be too late for the UK: instead of raising standards, fees have changed the meaning of education.
The Czech Republic must not make the same mistake.
My application was already in when the information disappeared.
Today, three weeks into the course, I found out that it is in fact completely free. It’s amazing; it improves my life. I can work more on my course, and less to pay rent. I can get enough sleep.
Of course I have a vested interest in free education –I am a direct beneficiary of Prague’s free education system– but if that were not the case, I’d stand firm on its ideological necessity. Free education means freedom of movement - physical, social, cultural.
And if the ‘trickle-down theory’ actually operates anywhere, it’s in education – from education, down into society, into culture. It deepens my understanding of the people in the world, and even a little understanding can send ripples a long, long way.
It’s not just me who understands this; it makes up the marginalia of my lectures; is presupposed in every word from my Head of School. It precipitated the Velvet Revolution – who started it? The students, naturally; free thinkers in a time of unfreedom.
My Head of School looks a bit like Saint Nick; ruddy, twinkly, Czech, an elfish pointy beard, and a vivacious, kindly manner; shrewd politics, profound cosmopolitanism, a capacity for righteous fury I can only estimate. I’d be entirely unsurprised if he kept a phoenix in his office.
I have been accused – and he has defended me - of coming here to exploit the system. As the UK allegedly fills up with Poles, Romanians, and other Europeans stealing our jobs, scrounging our benefits, and clogging up our NHS, I am here, blessing the EU daily for my freedom of movement, to scrounge a degree.
Irony aside, what’s interesting about this apparently universal tendency to dichotomise society into ‘us’ and ‘them’ (to put it another way, ‘entitled’ and ‘foreign’), is that it always presupposes the objective superiority of the native system.
Why would ‘they’ come here, if we didn’t do things better? The mere presence of the alien justifies the nationalist ego. And in doing so, also justifies resenting that presence.
And are we better? (-Wait, am I ‘us’ or ‘them’ now? It’s confusing…)
The British are very proud of their NHS - never mind, for example, that the Czech Republic has Proton Beam radiotherapy, which the UK won’t finish installing until 2018.
The UK’s benefits system is also unjustifiably generous, a system of flat-rates capped per household, notwithstanding the rest of Europe which in some places ties unemployment benefit proportionally to previous household income, and in others has not capped it per household as in the UK, but provides a guaranteed minimum income per household.
We should also disregard the opinion of organisations like the Red Cross, which has rolled out a food aid programme in Britain for the first time since the Second World War, largely due to falling welfare payments in a time of rising costs.
But the UK university system – No competition, right? We’ve got Cambridge! I’m only doing my MA in Prague because I wasn’t good enough to get funded.
Well, no.
Now I am the alien, I cannot entertain for a second the idea that immigration or emigration is driven by a desire to exploit.
Yes, it is driven by a desire for a better life. That’s why I came to Prague. But I’m not here because life in the Czech Republic; is objectively better; I’m here because experiencing different ways of living in itself makes life better.
The question is wrong. It’s not ‘where is life better?’, it’s ‘how can I better my life?’
A question of motivation
Today Františka (native Czech, perfect American-inflected English and enough German to take classes taught in German) told me she’s probably going to take three years to finish her masters, so she can take all the interesting classes.
She’s already 23. Many of the classes she’s taking won’t count towards her degree.
A masters in Europe usually takes two years, but assuming you do all the work, there is twice as much of it. It’s not the same workload at half the speed. I saw Františka’s timetable; she’s taking extra classes for no extra credit.
So she’s studying because she wants to gain understanding. A degree is just a happy consequence.
Why have I never met a student like this in the UK?
And where’s that terrible gnawing anxiety, tapering to existential panic as The End nears, about what comes after? Why isn’t she comparing her CV unfavourably to Mark Zuckerberg’s, aged 23? Why isn’t she, right now, eating her own hands over her viability on the job market? Why aren’t people talking about a ‘youth mental health crisis’ in the Czech Republic?
Could it be because in an environment where education is not priced, and is therefore not thought of as a market product, the students don’t understand themselves as products?
Oops, leading question. Let me try again.
Because a fee-paying system does not allow this type of student to exist within the university environment.
Students who are paying for their time at university are predisposed to avoid wasting their time. Time is money.
So they take safe bets. They don’t go off-piste, so they never get to discover anything for themselves. Our fee system has crippled ground-breaking research at the grassroots. Commodification has, ironically, crippled real growth.
In contrast, the freedom in Prague is dizzying.
There are pressures. The organisation is a bit of a joke. The staff looks like the cast of Last of the Summer Wine. Every document has to be officially stamped by at least five different people. Digitised documents are regarded with fear and confusion, as one would regard a child out of reach, with car keys. Nobody is well paid.
But you don’t need to know where you’re going before you’ve set off. If you make a wrong turn, you can just turn around, without being screwed for time and funding. You can take the time you need. You can follow your interests freely.
It's incredibly refreshing.
Some of the Czech students are less sold on the idea. Born the same month as my younger brother, post-communist Prague has the millennial character, and is still optimistic about the freedoms of the free market.
As someone on my table murmured into their subsidised cafeteria soup, “people don’t value the education if it’s free”.
A cautionary tale exists in the university Apocrypha of the perpetual undergrad: supposedly circling the system for ten years or more, he accomplished nothing but immortality as the Univerzity Karlovy bogeyman of existential irrelevance. At the end of my second week I’ve already been warned twice.
But no amount of temptation to drift, obsolete administration, or nationalist resentment outweighs the value of this breath-taking opportunity. Free thought!
In 2006 in the UK, I matriculated into the first year of ‘top-up fees’.
Only today did I realise that I’d quietly internalised something about education which I now understand to be a profitable lie; that it must count towards something concrete and quantifiable. Time, money, talent, and effort go in; a degree and job prospects come out. That’s the deal.
The Czech system doesn’t buy into that. Education is celebrated for its own sake, as a means of sharing in and contributing to the enrichment of the complex web of society and culture through which all of us move and live. It is cultural currency.
Introduce fees at any level, and you transform this social and cultural exchange from a qualitative interaction to a quantitative process. You dehumanise the young studying, and you move intellectual exploration onto rail-tracks. I know, I’ve studied in both systems.
It may be too late for the UK: instead of raising standards, fees have changed the meaning of education.
The Czech Republic must not make the same mistake.
Thursday, 2 October 2014
Status report: it's my birthday
Lost passport, EHIC, and £400
- I have travel insurance through my bank
- I didn't know either
- Just need to get a police report for the money (this might be hard)
My toe
- Seems to be getting better
Xenophobic abuse from faculty staff
- Head of UALK is complaining to Dean of Faculty of Arts for me
- He is lovely
- He was appalled by their behaviour
- He is awesome, I want him to adopt me
Kitten
- I'm getting a dog from a shelter instead
- It was always the plan
- They're killing dogs in shelters!
I need someone always pleased to see me, who will get me out of the house in the winter.
And an older creature, to whom I can give a new lease of life
Birthday things
- I had my first lecture yesterday and it was bloody interesting!
- I'm so happy to be here
- Someone invited me to a William S. Burroughs event tonight. I think it's in Czech but yay friend-making!
- Going for a birthday bike ride now (can still cycle with bad toe)
- Party on Saturday. If no-one shows up, I have a great excuse
On reflection
I'm getting better at listening to myself. When I've made bad decisions, it's because I haven't listened to my own misgivings.
What's the use of academia? I'm still not sure, but I'm good at it and it feels like sex for my brain. It's been a long dry spell. Thank god I'm back!
No matter how old I get, I will never stop drinking and cutting my own hair. I did it again last night! I actually think it looks good this time!
Happy Birthday, Me. Whoo!
I wish Max was here to share it. Summer holiday is July-October. Next summer, I've got to get myself to South America.
Wednesday, 1 October 2014
Toe shots; I would really like my EHIC back
I didn't have any cotton wool, so I taped my toe with half a tampon. Hey, it's made it a lot easier to walk.
Saturday, 27 September 2014
Max I just had the most amazing experience
A convoy of rigs closed all the streets through Prague, through Letensky tunel with lasers, dogs barking, up the dual carriageway, dancing with the rigs down the motorway at night!
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlNg8W87kCs&feature=youtu.be[/embed]
Then rave
Old factory out in Praha 9 - concrete and lasers, small like a bunker, then doorways doorways, tunnels, a woodland with a big fire going, dirty lit caravans.
My first in Prague
Better than anything in London, equal to the Kentish nights. Free parties here are still free. Prague feels like it just turned 19.
Suddenly at 3.45 the djs - average, couldn't beatmatch, possibly too wasted - suddenly went transcendent, an hour and a half of the most world class mix
And I dropped a table on my foot, and now my toe is black. I can't get it x-rayed because I lost my EHIC...
I'm not gonna lie to you it hurts a lot right now and I'm preeeetty wasted, I am a bit concerned. It's hurting a lot for someone who is very stoned. And quite drunk. You'd think it would hurt less if you were very stoned and quite drunk.
J thinks it can't be broken because when she poked it I didn't punch her in the face.
I think it's less reliable than an x-ray.. but it'll have to do! :D
P, Baileys & J, me
It was fucking amazing; I've been so lost. Fuck London, fuck London forever, have you seen this place?!
Praha, thank you. Arwen, you're welcome. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti
Friday, 26 September 2014
Propaganda Bar
Staroměstské náměstí (Old Town Square) again today, this time in the dark, to meet G for drinks. He's a gay Irishman who teaches French in an English school in the Czech Rep, and coincidentally my airbnb host from the summer. I loved him from the moment he waved me through his bedroom to shower because he was too hungover to get up.
We hit the Propaganda Bar. Consider this a fair review.
What?
Band:
A two-piece on tonight, probably both about 19. They were very enthusiastic. That's all I have to say, really.
Look out for: visual song references, such as the ‘two minutes to midnight’ clock #WoopIronMaiden
I was tired, and the place was loud, and also maybe I’m old now, so I went home about 11pm. Sorry.
We hit the Propaganda Bar. Consider this a fair review.
What?
- Rock and metal bar
- Crazy warren of basement rooms
- Covered in old communist slogans and posters
- Motorbikes mounted in wall niches, because Why Not
- Cheap beer, like everywhere in Prague
- Nooks available for tongue-tennis
Band:
A two-piece on tonight, probably both about 19. They were very enthusiastic. That's all I have to say, really.
Look out for: visual song references, such as the ‘two minutes to midnight’ clock #WoopIronMaiden
I was tired, and the place was loud, and also maybe I’m old now, so I went home about 11pm. Sorry.
Another tyre exploded
Second this week. Turns out the pressure gauge on my bike pump is broken.
Meant to get an ISIC (student card) today, but it was closed when I arrived. Turns out they close two hours earlier on a Friday.
My flatmate said to me last night, ‘lol you said you felt so lucky'
Ha!
But this afternoon I walked through the old town square in the autumn sunshine, good smells and buskers blowing bubbles, and wonderful tourists and gilded buildings and cobbles, and holy shit, have I been so lucky.
Meant to get an ISIC (student card) today, but it was closed when I arrived. Turns out they close two hours earlier on a Friday.
My flatmate said to me last night, ‘lol you said you felt so lucky'
Ha!
But this afternoon I walked through the old town square in the autumn sunshine, good smells and buskers blowing bubbles, and wonderful tourists and gilded buildings and cobbles, and holy shit, have I been so lucky.
Thursday, 25 September 2014
Nothing nothing nothing
I have no cash – the £400 I lost was all the cash I brought – so I can’t get a toaster or anything else. I booked a place on an orientation lecture on student finances.
It was scheduled in Czech but I thought I could pick up any leaflets and translate them at home. I didn’t go.
Guess I’m depressed today.
Moving: I thought the life part would be hard, and the uni part would be easy. it’s pre-organised for you, right? In fact, both are kinda shit. Hope this gets better.
It was scheduled in Czech but I thought I could pick up any leaflets and translate them at home. I didn’t go.
Guess I’m depressed today.
Moving: I thought the life part would be hard, and the uni part would be easy. it’s pre-organised for you, right? In fact, both are kinda shit. Hope this gets better.
Wednesday, 24 September 2014
Please take this document and stick it up your arse
Enrolment today.
I’ve been struggling to pick up my ‘nostification’ (nostrifikace) documents since Monday.
Monday my bike inner tube exploded, so I couldn’t cycle down.
Tuesday I did start cycling down, and lost my passport and £400.
Since enrolment is today, at 9am, and the nostrification office only opens at 9am, I have resolved to be in two places at once and everything will be fine.
Later:
I have enrolled! That’s the good news.
Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them.
Through a series of wrong offices and non-English speaking office staff, I valiantly prevailed to take my photocopies to the lecture theatre at Filozofická Fakulta. I was half an hour late, but this didn’t matter.
Good old fill-in-this-form-and-queue format.
My degree documents have now been 'authenticated' by five separate official bodies, in two countries, but apparently I was missing yet another official stamp - on the documents I had just picked up.
A committee of Faculty women, one by one, in Czech, explained this to me, and then one of them alluded to my only being there to get out of paying fees in my own country.
So that was charming.
For the record, since my course is taught in English I am paying fees. I also completely smashed their marking criteria for admission. Not to be a dick about it, but they should probably be paying me to be there.
A Czech student interceded, and I didn’t understand at the time why he seemed so irate. Quietly. Quietly intensely angry.
Then he took me for coffee, and the missing stamp, and told me what they said.
Mercifully I was at the end of the queue (deliberately, so I wouldn’t hold anyone up with my language barrier) so there were only a few Czech students left to witness my engineered humiliation. It’s so much worse that I didn’t understand what was happening until afterwards.
I hadn’t even enrolled. Not even my first day - the day before my first day. My -1st day.
I don't know how to process this. Eventually I went home and cried for a long time. I’m afraid this has been a big mistake. Is this a representative experience? I feel hated.
I miss Max.
I’ve been struggling to pick up my ‘nostification’ (nostrifikace) documents since Monday.
Monday my bike inner tube exploded, so I couldn’t cycle down.
Tuesday I did start cycling down, and lost my passport and £400.
Since enrolment is today, at 9am, and the nostrification office only opens at 9am, I have resolved to be in two places at once and everything will be fine.
Later:
I have enrolled! That’s the good news.
Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them.
Through a series of wrong offices and non-English speaking office staff, I valiantly prevailed to take my photocopies to the lecture theatre at Filozofická Fakulta. I was half an hour late, but this didn’t matter.
Good old fill-in-this-form-and-queue format.
My degree documents have now been 'authenticated' by five separate official bodies, in two countries, but apparently I was missing yet another official stamp - on the documents I had just picked up.
A committee of Faculty women, one by one, in Czech, explained this to me, and then one of them alluded to my only being there to get out of paying fees in my own country.
So that was charming.
For the record, since my course is taught in English I am paying fees. I also completely smashed their marking criteria for admission. Not to be a dick about it, but they should probably be paying me to be there.
A Czech student interceded, and I didn’t understand at the time why he seemed so irate. Quietly. Quietly intensely angry.
Then he took me for coffee, and the missing stamp, and told me what they said.
Mercifully I was at the end of the queue (deliberately, so I wouldn’t hold anyone up with my language barrier) so there were only a few Czech students left to witness my engineered humiliation. It’s so much worse that I didn’t understand what was happening until afterwards.
I hadn’t even enrolled. Not even my first day - the day before my first day. My -1st day.
I don't know how to process this. Eventually I went home and cried for a long time. I’m afraid this has been a big mistake. Is this a representative experience? I feel hated.
I miss Max.
Tuesday, 23 September 2014
Police: Czech yourself
Today I learned about Czech police stations.
Czech local police stations are very nice:
Czech 'Foreign Police' (immigration) stations are not very nice:
It was like an apocalypse video game except the guys with guns weren’t shooting at me. At that moment.
And there were no zombies. That I could see. Hey, it was after office hours.
I have a suspicion that this two-tier policing system is not unique to CR.
Wait, so why was I there?
Well, I lost my passport. And my EHIC. And £400; CZK14,000, aka two-months' rent or a heart-breakingly enormous sum of money.
It fell out of my pocket cycling through Letna Park. When I went back almost immediately it was gone.
I need to simply NOT get hurt in a cycling-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road incident; need to ENROL ON A DEGREE PROGRAMME TOMORROW; or eat or pay rent.
Rent and eating are arbitrary social constructs, right? I mean we don't need them.
Fuckit.
Czech local police stations are very nice:
- Clean
- Mood lighting
- Comfy chairs
Czech 'Foreign Police' (immigration) stations are not very nice:
- Flickering lights
- Dead flies
- Holes in the plaster
- Lots of men with gun
- Chipped beige-painted bars everywhere
It was like an apocalypse video game except the guys with guns weren’t shooting at me. At that moment.
And there were no zombies. That I could see. Hey, it was after office hours.
I have a suspicion that this two-tier policing system is not unique to CR.
Wait, so why was I there?
Well, I lost my passport. And my EHIC. And £400; CZK14,000, aka two-months' rent or a heart-breakingly enormous sum of money.
It fell out of my pocket cycling through Letna Park. When I went back almost immediately it was gone.
I need to simply NOT get hurt in a cycling-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road incident; need to ENROL ON A DEGREE PROGRAMME TOMORROW; or eat or pay rent.
Rent and eating are arbitrary social constructs, right? I mean we don't need them.
Fuckit.
Monday, 22 September 2014
Punny names
Getting a kitten! Via flatmate’s girlfriend’s cat. They’re four weeks old right now! :3
Possible Names:
Franz Katka
Alphonse Mouser
Possible Names:
Franz Katka
Alphonse Mouser
Sunday, 21 September 2014
We went to Ikea, and nobody broke up
But I did accidentally buy £6 of deep-fried cheese in breadcrumbs. I thought it was priced by the plate. I heaped that plate high.
Don't worry, I got a doggy-bag.
Don't worry, I got a doggy-bag.
Saturday, 20 September 2014
ARRIVED!
My quixotic Czech cabbie spoke only German to me. I wish I lived in a world where there is only 'us' and 'everywhere else'. Aber ich bin auslander, und spreche nicht gut Deutsch.
Fireworks from my window, 10pm. I don't know why!
Then this happened:
That's right....
Roman 'Humbert Humbert' Polanski is now available en-hammock.
And the seagull?
Miss you Max x
Fireworks from my window, 10pm. I don't know why!
Then this happened:
That's right....
Roman 'Humbert Humbert' Polanski is now available en-hammock.
And the seagull?
Miss you Max x
Friday, 15 August 2014
'to be, or not to be?' is not a fair question if you're mentally ill
In the summer of 2007, at the end of a long, rainy week incidentally filled with free cocaine, I made a serious attempt to take my own life.
Either I am alive now, or I am a poltergeist. Let’s clear it up quickly: I am alive. In fact I live an incredibly happy life. But the memory of depression remains vivid, and my depression will return. On depression and suicide, I feel qualified to speak up.
Robin Williams, that wonderful man, completes suicide, and suddenly everyone has an opinion.
“Genie – you’re free”, some said. No, he isn’t. He’s dead. He is exactly the opposite of free.
This is something I know a lot about. I’m a ditzy, garrulous English grad who likes cats and goes to festivals – relatively normal, you might say.
Yet I was only 12 when I learnt to really hate myself. At 15 – when I was still getting gold stars at school for writing stories – I gave away my best CDs just before half term, planning to use the timeout of teachers’ and parents’ attention to get away with suicide.
I finally did it aged almost 20 because – and I remember this very clearly – an inviolable realisation came upon me that nothing would ever change. I would always be this person, and that meant I would always feel this way. The only sensible thing I could do was end my life.
It certainly felt like a rational choice. I thought it would free me. At the time I was Christian, and I was pathetically eager to ‘go home’, to God, where I would be loved and there was no more pain.
The problem with depression is it robs you of perspective. It creeps up on you: you are gradually engulfed by a huge tarpaulin of self-disgust, and it all seems perfectly objective and normal.
Nobody suddenly wakes up one day thinking of themselves in totally different terms – thinking that killing yourself might be a legitimate option, and often, eventually, the only option – but one day you do wake up and there it is, and the next day too, as far into the future as your myopic mind’s eye can see. Then at some point, usually with treatment, it may lift just as gradually as it came.
Albert Camus’ famous question, “should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”, will be familiar to anyone with severe depression. I'm certain Robin Williams will have found himself frequently considering his answer, as I have.
Is this really a choice? Only someone with a seriously skewed perspective, in which literal life-and-death decisions and inconsequential options assume equal significance, could even entertain such a question.
But ‘suicide is a choice’ is a myth which refuses to go away. It continues to be discussed as if the options – coffee or death? coffee or death? – were in any way equal, or the question legitimate.
I lost two of my friends to suicide last year and I do not believe, as a third (also suicidally depressed) friend said, that it was “a choice they’ll never have to live to regret”. Only the myth of an “easeful death”, and a culture which cannot cope with conceptualising the loss of personal agency – of actual choice – could create a space where this logic survives and flourishes.
My friends did not choose; they died from treatable illnesses, because their illness had temporarily removed their capacity to sense the worth in living. And part of our response as a culture is to discuss the ‘choice’ they made? Well-intentioned as it may be, I find it obscene.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s gorgeous line “I have been half in love with easeful death” tells you everything you need to know about the seductiveness of suicidal ideation. This romanticisation of suicide as the ‘other option’, the alternative to the ignobility of human suffering, is preserved in the literature, art and myths of every people throughout human history.
The fact that depressed people, searching for an alternative to their present suffering, find themselves thinking more easily of death than of change, is at least partly a result of our cultural attitudes to suicide, which we invoke and perpetuate every time we murmur ‘they’re in a better place now’.
In truth, if your interior life feels like total irreconcilable shit, or even just grey, mundane, vague pointless awfulness, death still offers no real alternative. You need to look for a balance of treatments or strategies which can assuage or cure those feelings, or you need to hold on, until it lifts, until it passes. Those are your alternatives. Suicide is not a way out of mental illness, but the opposite: it cuts off any route to recovery.
It is usually horrible and is almost certainly final, and if we found unnatural death as abhorrent as we ought to, we all might work a damn sight harder to stop killing each other.
And if we did – if the government and the press did – what then? My friends, who deserve to keep and enjoy their lives, would not be dying because there are ‘no beds’ in psychiatric hospitals; keeping people alive would be valued more highly than avoiding annoying millionaires with taxation; we would not act like confused vultures picking through an emotional carcass every time we lose someone; and perhaps ISIS or the occupation of Palestine would never have come into being.
Robin Williams’ life should have been his own. Depression ensured that it was not, not fully. Voyeuristic empathising and speculation in the press and elsewhere only serve to rob him once more of full ownership of his life. Let him keep the darkest feelings of his own mind; they died with him. He is dead. He was a wonderful man.
But we who are left, how do we survive? Thanks to campaigning in recent years, we have a new understanding of mental illness; we are more aware that it can happen to anyone.
Consequently it becomes even scarier: when it was something that happened only to freaks, victims, or ‘the weak’, you (not me, I’ve been there and got the T-shirt) could still imagine you were safe.
Well, has my experience ‘made me stronger’, at least? Was there a silver lining to my suicide attempt? Was it at least, as the Independent suggests, a cry for help which DID come in time?
For a long time, no. Nothing was gained, only lost: time, a boyfriend, a perfectly good tent.
Trying to kill myself did lead me to a kind of freedom, but not freedom from life, or freedom from suffering: those ideas are not possible or real.
My freedom was the realisation that, if I have decided to die, if I have even semi-seriously considered killing myself, then from that point on, my life is my own.
I can unhook myself from the societal sausage machine and pursue health, wealth and happiness on my own terms, because what’s the worst that can happen? It can’t be worse than being dead. Suddenly no shame, no stigma, no pressure, no comparison with others, no humiliation, no failure, exists. Why shouldn’t I take antidepressants? Why shouldn’t I go through another day? Why shouldn't I, now I'm no longer depressed, move to Prague? Why shouldn't I have a life that feels amazing to me?
This freedom is only accessible if you corporeally survive.
So, don’t kill yourself! Things may be shit, and you will definitely think you’re being totally objective about it, but you aren’t, trust me. And whatever our mythology has led you to believe, you’ve got nothing to gain by ending it now. Do something else instead.
If you don’t like coffee, have tea. Hey, it’s not even you asking that question – coffee or death? – it’s depression, and when’s he ever made you happy?
These are the things that helped me: mirtazapine, cycling, lovers, pets, a great GP and a great CPN (community psychiatric nurse). A quiet home. Forgiving myself. Allowing bad, better, and okay days, without panic about their implications.
- Though to be honest, it was mostly the mirtazapine! That’s right, Daily Mail, I’m ‘hooked on antidepressants’ and you’ll never get them off me!
My depression is going to come back; it’s the nature of my brain; and when it does I may not see the upside for quite a while – that’s the nature of depression. But don’t believe the hype. In my experience, life with a mental illness gets better, not worse, as you get older. Life gets better.
This article first appeared 16 Aug in an edited form at ThePlatform.org.uk
Either I am alive now, or I am a poltergeist. Let’s clear it up quickly: I am alive. In fact I live an incredibly happy life. But the memory of depression remains vivid, and my depression will return. On depression and suicide, I feel qualified to speak up.
Robin Williams, that wonderful man, completes suicide, and suddenly everyone has an opinion.
“Genie – you’re free”, some said. No, he isn’t. He’s dead. He is exactly the opposite of free.
This is something I know a lot about. I’m a ditzy, garrulous English grad who likes cats and goes to festivals – relatively normal, you might say.
Yet I was only 12 when I learnt to really hate myself. At 15 – when I was still getting gold stars at school for writing stories – I gave away my best CDs just before half term, planning to use the timeout of teachers’ and parents’ attention to get away with suicide.
I finally did it aged almost 20 because – and I remember this very clearly – an inviolable realisation came upon me that nothing would ever change. I would always be this person, and that meant I would always feel this way. The only sensible thing I could do was end my life.
It certainly felt like a rational choice. I thought it would free me. At the time I was Christian, and I was pathetically eager to ‘go home’, to God, where I would be loved and there was no more pain.
Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
The problem with depression is it robs you of perspective. It creeps up on you: you are gradually engulfed by a huge tarpaulin of self-disgust, and it all seems perfectly objective and normal.
Nobody suddenly wakes up one day thinking of themselves in totally different terms – thinking that killing yourself might be a legitimate option, and often, eventually, the only option – but one day you do wake up and there it is, and the next day too, as far into the future as your myopic mind’s eye can see. Then at some point, usually with treatment, it may lift just as gradually as it came.
Albert Camus’ famous question, “should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”, will be familiar to anyone with severe depression. I'm certain Robin Williams will have found himself frequently considering his answer, as I have.
Is this really a choice? Only someone with a seriously skewed perspective, in which literal life-and-death decisions and inconsequential options assume equal significance, could even entertain such a question.
But ‘suicide is a choice’ is a myth which refuses to go away. It continues to be discussed as if the options – coffee or death? coffee or death? – were in any way equal, or the question legitimate.
I lost two of my friends to suicide last year and I do not believe, as a third (also suicidally depressed) friend said, that it was “a choice they’ll never have to live to regret”. Only the myth of an “easeful death”, and a culture which cannot cope with conceptualising the loss of personal agency – of actual choice – could create a space where this logic survives and flourishes.
Death is a lot worse than coffee
My friends did not choose; they died from treatable illnesses, because their illness had temporarily removed their capacity to sense the worth in living. And part of our response as a culture is to discuss the ‘choice’ they made? Well-intentioned as it may be, I find it obscene.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s gorgeous line “I have been half in love with easeful death” tells you everything you need to know about the seductiveness of suicidal ideation. This romanticisation of suicide as the ‘other option’, the alternative to the ignobility of human suffering, is preserved in the literature, art and myths of every people throughout human history.
The fact that depressed people, searching for an alternative to their present suffering, find themselves thinking more easily of death than of change, is at least partly a result of our cultural attitudes to suicide, which we invoke and perpetuate every time we murmur ‘they’re in a better place now’.
In truth, if your interior life feels like total irreconcilable shit, or even just grey, mundane, vague pointless awfulness, death still offers no real alternative. You need to look for a balance of treatments or strategies which can assuage or cure those feelings, or you need to hold on, until it lifts, until it passes. Those are your alternatives. Suicide is not a way out of mental illness, but the opposite: it cuts off any route to recovery.
We’ve got to start facing the horror of death. And if we did - what then?
It is usually horrible and is almost certainly final, and if we found unnatural death as abhorrent as we ought to, we all might work a damn sight harder to stop killing each other.
And if we did – if the government and the press did – what then? My friends, who deserve to keep and enjoy their lives, would not be dying because there are ‘no beds’ in psychiatric hospitals; keeping people alive would be valued more highly than avoiding annoying millionaires with taxation; we would not act like confused vultures picking through an emotional carcass every time we lose someone; and perhaps ISIS or the occupation of Palestine would never have come into being.
Robin Williams’ life should have been his own. Depression ensured that it was not, not fully. Voyeuristic empathising and speculation in the press and elsewhere only serve to rob him once more of full ownership of his life. Let him keep the darkest feelings of his own mind; they died with him. He is dead. He was a wonderful man.
Depression is a treatable illness
But we who are left, how do we survive? Thanks to campaigning in recent years, we have a new understanding of mental illness; we are more aware that it can happen to anyone.
Consequently it becomes even scarier: when it was something that happened only to freaks, victims, or ‘the weak’, you (not me, I’ve been there and got the T-shirt) could still imagine you were safe.
Well, has my experience ‘made me stronger’, at least? Was there a silver lining to my suicide attempt? Was it at least, as the Independent suggests, a cry for help which DID come in time?
For a long time, no. Nothing was gained, only lost: time, a boyfriend, a perfectly good tent.
Trying to kill myself did lead me to a kind of freedom, but not freedom from life, or freedom from suffering: those ideas are not possible or real.
My freedom was the realisation that, if I have decided to die, if I have even semi-seriously considered killing myself, then from that point on, my life is my own.
I can unhook myself from the societal sausage machine and pursue health, wealth and happiness on my own terms, because what’s the worst that can happen? It can’t be worse than being dead. Suddenly no shame, no stigma, no pressure, no comparison with others, no humiliation, no failure, exists. Why shouldn’t I take antidepressants? Why shouldn’t I go through another day? Why shouldn't I, now I'm no longer depressed, move to Prague? Why shouldn't I have a life that feels amazing to me?
This freedom is only accessible if you corporeally survive.
So, don’t kill yourself! Things may be shit, and you will definitely think you’re being totally objective about it, but you aren’t, trust me. And whatever our mythology has led you to believe, you’ve got nothing to gain by ending it now. Do something else instead.
If you don’t like coffee, have tea. Hey, it’s not even you asking that question – coffee or death? – it’s depression, and when’s he ever made you happy?
Different things help different people.
These are the things that helped me: mirtazapine, cycling, lovers, pets, a great GP and a great CPN (community psychiatric nurse). A quiet home. Forgiving myself. Allowing bad, better, and okay days, without panic about their implications.
- Though to be honest, it was mostly the mirtazapine! That’s right, Daily Mail, I’m ‘hooked on antidepressants’ and you’ll never get them off me!
My depression is going to come back; it’s the nature of my brain; and when it does I may not see the upside for quite a while – that’s the nature of depression. But don’t believe the hype. In my experience, life with a mental illness gets better, not worse, as you get older. Life gets better.
This article first appeared 16 Aug in an edited form at ThePlatform.org.uk
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