I probably should have expected this.
Of course I miss home. How can I not? There was great food, a welcome house, people who I loved; all providing me with a sense of belonging and warmth and comfort. Daily displays of affection becoming the pattern and nothing but Love, Love, Love! Family and Friends and Food: the great triumvirate.
It didn’t take long for the thoughts to seep in.
Walking along and noticing the differences: speech, dress, food, architecture, how people move from one point to another, and how they spend each moment with a pace that’s set between apathy and anger.
At times you think this is the reality and then you remember your drive in with the man whose name you couldn’t really understand and the way he casually talked to you and the two other students (one from Alaska, another from Taiwan) about the stories of the Kelpies and why that one town smells awfully of sulphur or about his wife’s friend who was rather large (two meals for everybody else’s one) but was then caught embezzling and went to jail and left a couple years later leaving half of himself behind. You think of the way he answered his phone during a roundabout and solemnly looked behind us to mouth, ‘I need to take this.’ You remember the way the three of us in this truck-car-bus hybrid seemed so eager and wide-eyed and wanting to get this underway. And you feel better. I feel better.
Going to school in Scotland means so much more to me than just school or travel. It means taking a risk, and becoming comfortable with that risk even when it’s a situation where the anxiety can roam and feed and where eventually, hopefully, it becomes nothing more than what it is.
Time for the new and uncomfortable and wonderful and sad. It’s all here, waiting, in Scotland.
It’s nice out.
I can actually see a little bit of the sun through my window and the stone and the concrete. It’s there, it’s not always overcast here. I mean, it was freezing and damp and dreary when I arrived and continued to be that way for the following 10 hours as we waited on the steps for (SOMEONE/ANYONE) the Porter to arrive and let us into our dorms.
But at least it’s nice out right now.
Better not lose it.
I didn’t actually go outside. Maybe you thought I did but actually I just enjoy line-breaks.
I couldn’t right now anyway. My head feels like I’ve been up for 30 hours which is quite true. If anything, I’m enjoying the peace and quiet ala Thistle Chambers Flat 3 Room 4 as nobody else has arrived (except for the PhD guy [he’s getting it in aquaculture and finds it very boring] who was already living here for the past year). I’m thinking about the stuff I still need to buy: pots, pans, crockery, utensils, like, one bowl probably–oh, and toilet paper, and a shower caddy, and a garbage pail, and food that isn’t fruit or smoothies or water or leftover Canadian brownies that I will save and store like the wine your grandma leaves in the cellar for when the Pope comes calling.
And I need to get the BRP, obtain my student ID, and finally become enrolled so that I can access the Portal/Library/School-work thing and get to work doing what I’m supposed to be doing here. Which I guess amounts to reading. And watching.
It’s called The Gothic Imagination. My program is the study of Gothic literature and film and everything in-between. The weird and wacky and wonderful and slightly off-centre genre (I will find a better word in the next few weeks) that encompasses everything from the horrific and slightly sad works of Mary Shelley to the terrifying and slightly sad works of Stephen King, et al.
I mean, it can’t all be Robots and Rainbows around here. Eventually, when you get enough young people together who all seem to have the hots for one another and you’re in a cottage on a lake in the early 19th century in late spring and someone mentions that you’re all going to have a ghost story competition you’re bound to come out of there with two (at least) great novels that just so happen to be cynical and sad and romantic and creepy and emotional and all of the above, again, and again, and again until you’re left with something new and uncanny and not of this world and maybe just a little bit sexy.
We’re also going to watch movies; some Horrific, some Romantic, some so Horrifically-Romantic you just have to call it Love.
Oh, and I’m paying and doing all of this so that I can eventually learn how to become Gary Oldman–er, I mean a Vampire.
This will be a blog for some of this and some of that, maybe some traveling here and there, some pictures, some food, some people. A blog for me as much as it is for you.
P.S: Hopefully not all of them will be done on 30 (now 31) hours of no sleep and a diet of pure fruit and smoothie and water and more fruit.
OverseasAndThen? 