It seems like a lifetime ago now, but back before I lived in Norway, I would crack up upon hearing stories from Erik about what life in Holland could be like at times. It all sounded too nutty to be true. Well, guess who's laughing now, that's right, Erik. One time he told me he took out the garbage "on the wrong day" [wtf??], cause he was headed out of the city, the garbage men "caught" him, they literally went through his garbage and found a piece of paper with his name on it [WTF???] and fined him for the "infraction" [please stop, I can't take anymore]. bwahahaha. Oh dear, couldn't hold it in. No, but seriously, whaaat? Dude, where is my car?

Ok, so I move into this historical monument (I kid you not) in the very center of Utrecht that the university painstakingly secured for me. The house is a ruin, it's literally falling apart. There are rumors about it being demolished once the last tenant moves out of it. In fact, there are rumors that it was supposed to be demolished years ago already. I won't dwell on the house, it deserves a photo album of its own. But rest assured it utterly sucks and looks, as one visitor called it, like "a hell hole". Anywho, I live with 4 other internationals here. That's right, big surprise they ripped off the international students and put them in probably the crappiest premises in the whole of Utrecht, charging us a steady fee. But where was I, oh yes, garbage, the recurring theme of this entry.

So the way they organize the garbage collection here (please hold your outburst of laughter till the end of this paragraph) is that they put out garbage containers. But, you won't find them just any time at all. No, they only appear on TUESDAYS and FRIDAYS. So if you have some garbage you really want to get rid of, you have to wait up to 3 days. But pay attention, because on WEDNESDAYS they put out the *paper* container. Although people throw a lot of crap in there, *technically* it's only for paper. Got it?

Time for a story. Picture a Tuesday night. In fact, a CL night. Jake and I are in the kitchen watching the game (can't remember which one). Our garbage is full, Jake ties up the garbage bag, heads out to toss it in the dumpster. Hang on, there is no garbage container outside, just the paper one. The garbage service must have screwed up the schedule. He brings the bag back inside, it will have to wait until Friday. The next morning, at 8.30, Melissa is headed to school. She grabs the garbage on her way out. Seeing that the dumpster is full, she leaves the bag outside by the staircase and goes to school. 11am that morning, I hear the doorbell ring. I reluctantly open the door to find two funny looking guys with a van parked in the street, blocking the street completely. On the van there's a title of some kind that I can't read. After the usual "oh, you're *not* Dutch, you had *me* fooled", I'm wondering what they want. "We are the...uhm...what is it called...the environmental police". Aha...(?) "We found this envelope with your address in the garbage.." He shows me the envelope. "We found the garbage outside your house." He didn't actually make it clear what the problem was, but I could see where this was going. "Well, it's not mine, there are 5 people living in this house." They obviously wanted the culprit. "Are they home now?" Yeah, pal, it's 11am on a Wednesday, of course we're all home, noone has anywhere to go. So I go to check who's home, only Cassandra is. Cassandra and I come back to the door and continue the chat, concluding that it wasn't any of us and noone else is home at the moment.

Well that's that. Or is it now. A couple of weeks later, Jake gets a letter from the local authorities. It's in Dutch, we can't make it out. The garbage cops are fining him €50 for putting out the garbage on the wrong day. Why Jake? Because they have him on record as the tenant living here the longest. Riiight. Well, we didn't know that was what it said, Jake went down to their office to find out. He also found out he can fight the fine and he has 30 days to file a complaint. Not only that, they told him they *scan* all "evidence" like this so they have proof of these "crimes". Who said unemployment was a problem? Not when you can hire people to scan garbage. A letter of complaint? Will do. We don't know anything about the form that it's supposed to be in, not even where exactly it should be sent, so Jake calls the garbage cops and they tell him the garbage "detective" is out. "Well is there someone else I can talk to?" "No." "And you don't know anything about this?" "No." "So what can I do?" "Call back tomorrow, please." What they did tell him was that usually in these cases, the garbage cops knock on your door because someone tipped them off. Let's see, Melissa took out the trash at 8.30, at 11 they were already at our door. Yeah, that sounds about right. In fact, aside from a tip off, there is no way they could possibly know that the trash was taken out on Wednesday morning, not Tuesday night. So one of our neighbors ratted us out. How Orwellian. [Feel a laugh coming on yet?]

Of course, it would not have happened in the first place had the garbage service not put out the wrong dumpster. But as always in this country, you *will* be charged for every small infraction, whereas noone generally feels responsible for anything they may have done wrong.

Ps. The original names in this story were replaced with soap opera names so that tv addicts will feel right at home.

I was thinking "how can I visualize my emotional condition over the last month or so". My level of happiness is roughly the inverse of that graph. It's so much easier to be happy about simple things, about the status quo, because life is not bad at all. It's when you start looking ahead to something you would like to achieve that the feelings of anxiety, fear and depression hit you. Me anyway. Wanting more is a calculated risk, if I forget all about what more I could do in life, then I'm safe in my environment. If I start wanting, then inevitably I face the fear of failure. And fearing failure can actually be worse than failing itself, because failing immediately puts it in the past, whereas fear is anxiously expecting the future to unfold in your disfavor, it saps your strength.

It's a Saturday morning. I woke up at 9, it's now 13 and so far today I've done...nothing. Nothing good, nothing bad, I'm not happy, I'm not sad, I don't have to be anywhere, I don't intend on going anywhere, I didn't plan anything for today, it's entirely my "free time". How I loved free time in the past, free time meant doing everything I wanted to do when I couldn't. Nowadays, free time has become polarized. When I don't have free time, I wish I had free time, I have ideas about what I could do with it. When I do have free time, I have no ideas and I basically waste it on nothing. And nothing illustrates that outcome better than the summer. If I do have something planned for the summer, I end up doing that. Otherwise I end up doing nothing. And it's much the same kind of feeling that has filled many summers as I have right now, a feeling of nothing at all.

What happens is that I methodically reject every option open to me. I try to get some work done, half an hour into it I'm bored with it, I have no drive to work. I start a book, I get sick of the book. I watch some tv, I get sick of tv. I run through the bookmarks in my browser, exhaust everything of interest there in 40 minutes. I check my email, nothing new there. I start randomly clicking through my filesystem, hoping to find something interesting, but of course I've seen it all before. And so on and so forth. Instead, I wish there were *something* meaningful that I would like to do right now. It doesn't mean there isn't anything worthwhile to do, there just doesn't *seem* to be anything. It's a problem of being entrenched in my own world, people try to help and suggest things to do, but of course those suggestions sound no more interesting to me than the things I've already conceived and rejected myself. And someone trying hard to sell an idea that isn't actually very good, piling on false enthusiasm, just makes me want to ignore them.

When I was a kid and I got in this situation, sometimes I would ask people for suggestions. Invariably, those suggestions rarely opened my eyes to anything I hadn't thought about before, or they would be variations and combinations of my own ideas, things that were already painfully obvious. What I'm really looking for is new impulses, distractions maybe, to guide me in a direction I hadn't seen before, that I didn't know existed. That's the only way I get interested in doing something.

Is it a necessary part of life to feel emptiness ever so often?

Well, trying to understand the mind is a oxymoron in the first place, granted. But do we ever let that stop us from trying understand ourselves, at least the general patterns which guide us? What seems to be self-contradictory from our point of reference may as well turn out to be perfectly logical from a higher perspective. With that limitation stated up front, the scene is set for this entry.

Do you ever find yourself thinking at opposite ends of the spectrum in cases which really do not seem very different? Most of the time, when facing a significant problem, I don't buy into quick solutions, easy fixes, tweaks. I analyze the situation and draw conclusions which factor in a range of small things that affect it, knowing that no one little thing can tip the scales in the long run. When I'm stuck and I present my reasoning to someone who's eager to help, they will almost always pinpoint the small, simple steps that I could take immediately to lighten the load a little for the time being. Well, I know about them, they are already part of my analysis, I know that they solve nothing in the long term. It's like if you struggle to motivate yourself for a test in high school, it does little good to come up with some solution to get past that one test if you recognize that you still have several years of college ahead and you need some more reliable method of motivation for that. Now you're thinking long term strategy, looking for solutions which will stand the test of time. And most of the time, I do just this, I'm skeptical to solutions which only work this one time. Cynical if you like.

But then the opposite happens sometimes. It is rare, but in some cases I do see a facet of life in terms of one single problem. And for some reason I think if I can get past this issue, if I can conquer this obstacle, suddenly everything will be within reach. As if to say that the first step is the hardest one, then gradually everything becomes easier. And that's completely unrealistic, it's completely incoherent with reality. Whenever I do solve that first problem, inevitably I face the next problem, which is just as challenging. And once that happens once or twice, I do begin to see that my view on this was all wrong. But why do I believe that in the first place? Why do I stray from my realistic approach and buy into a fairy tale? I don't understand why this happens.

Is this some kind of fantasy we have that we want to believe in a fairy tale until reality puts a stop to it and we can no longer convince ourselves that it's true?

• suffering a temporary loss of hearing
• taken hostage for a day with 3 other people whose language you don't speak
• moments before your imminent execution

Perhaps you could help me think of more scenarios in which a game of cards sounds like a wonderful idea? Seriously, in our generation, which grew up with computer games, how could you possibly sell card games to a person? Yeah, I know what you're saying, you spend half the day playing solitaire at work, but that's because you have few [no?] options. I'm not talking about dead time you *have to* kill anyway, I'm talking about free time. Who the hell would play cards in their free time, my god how dull! Invariably, from time to time we are trapped in a situation where there's nothing happening, let's say a rainy night in a tent [/caravan/hotel room/whatever], and playing cards seems to be the only option. But why would you then ignore the sparkling imagination and intellect of the mind as a means to a fulfilling conversation in favor of switching to a mechanical, sleep inducing process? It's like trying to convince people that hand sewn clothes are much better than factory made clothing, and we should thus all sew our own clothes. I'm sure you'll find some romantics even in that area who'll be happy to rain some of their gospel onto you, but would you really take to that approach? I think not.

To top it off, they recently introduced poker on tv as a means of entertainment. As if playing poker yourself wasn't boring enough, now you can relax from all the stress and just sit and watch as someone is doing it for you. Clearly a sign that your bed time is overdue.

Ps. I will give an allowance for bridge. I don't know anything about bridge, I've never played bridge and so it may just be an exception.