In the middle of January the fall semester ended. I had a huge exam in hydrology and hydrogeology and am still amazed that I really made it through that course. With quite a good grade aswell. I’m not as stupid as I feel sometime.
Since then, I have spent my days doing almost exclusively two things: learning how to drive a car and working in an archive. The first, because I think it might be useful someday, and the second because some extra money can always come in handy in North America. But now, with four weeks gone and a little more than three weeks still to go before I leave, I kind of think I misjudged my own capacities and needs somewhere along the way.
Firstly, we have the driving. I honestly think that I have the totally wrong kind of intelligence to handle a car in traffic. I can focus, no problem, my abilities of concentration and determination are amazing. That’s how I’ve made it through fifteen and a half years of school with discustingly good grades. But when you drive, that kind of concentration is of no use. While driving, you have to be able to take in impressions from all around with your senses, continually sift through them to see which ones are important for this specific situation, and then physically act in accordance with them. There is no time to analyze, concentrating on one thing can be downright dangerous.
I’m sure that this ability to see what’s important is something that you learn with time and practice, but right now it’s making my brain confused and irritated, which leads to my driving being perfectly smooth and careful one day, while I the very next day can’t even park the car correctly. My teacher said that I could book my driving test after one of those very smooth lessons, but already the next lesson, I think he regretted it and now I think he’s almost as nervous as I am. And really, I’m not sure if I would trust myself, all alone in a car, if I managed to do well on my test. Cars are dangerous things. If I could choose, I would use a horse for transportation, any day. It’s a much more sympathetic way to travel.
And then we have the archive. As I’ve written before, it is a job that I don’t hate. In controlled doses, I actually enjoy it. I like sorting papers, putting them in neat piles, coming up with new, more effective routines for the different sorting processes. I’ve been working at the same archive, belonging to a government department, for a year now, and just as my semester ended, some reorganizations in the department meant that the archive had to add a new section to itself and re-sort documents that were sent in from other offices in other parts of the country. The head archivist has seen my abilities of neatness, and so I was offered to be a part of the small team that would take care of this new section in the archive, and help create new routines there. Which actually means that I can work almost as much as I want, and get the feeling that I am part of creating something new, not just sorting papers.
This new feeling of importance is dangerous. I loose the sense of when I should call it a day, and when I finally get out of my archive, days might have passed without me ever seeing the sun. Not even through a window.
The combination of these two, the driving lessons and studying for the theory part of the driving test (which I aced, by the way, as if that ever was in doubt) and the job at the archive, leads to my days being quite lacking of the more social part of human interaction. Sure, I talk cars with my driving teacher and archive stuff with the head archivist and my collegues, but even those conversations are very limited both in subject and time. For me, who am used to university life with seminars and lunches and study groups and all the meetings I used to go to in my capacity as president of the geosection student council, this is like being teleported into the middle of a desert – and not the kind of desert that amazes me.
This became extremely obvious to me the day before yesterday, when I went to the university to meet the president of one of the councils that I used to be part of to discuss a few issues for the next meeting that I won’t be able to attend. What probably could have been finished in half an hour, took two – and mostly it was me having a monologue and he listening. This particular person took it very well, but when he finally had to leave I went on to search for other people to attack – and I found quite a few. And all of them did not have the same kind of patience as the above mentioned president. Once I get going, I loose all self control and might say just about anything. Some might find this funny, in a way not very flattering for me, but that’s okay – while others simply don’t have the time in their busy lives to help me relieve myself of four weeks worth of words. And still, after talking to two of my old teachers, three former classmates and a friend who just happened to call and got a lot more than what he asked for conversationvise, I didn’t feel satisfied.
So, the combination of my two occupations these last four weeks has made me feel inadequate (the driving) leading to an unusually big need for attention and a dam of words that just keeps filling up more and more and more until I meet someone, and then – BAM – the dam breaks and I just can’t stop talking. This is not healthy. I am starving myself. Soon I’ll start talking to my piles of paper.
Katja Malmborg 