Monday was a strange day. I started off the day by checking out Pitchfork.tv, the new Pitchfork video site. I watched loudQUIETloud, the documentary about the Pixies reunion tour in 2004. It was pretty decent, but I wish there had been a little more tension and confrontation. There was a little when Dave Lovering, the drummer, begins to take valium following the death as his father, but over all it wasn’t very rock’n'roll.
Afterward was Film Theory in Practice. We learned about interview technique or something. I surfed the web for most of class.
After class I came back to my apartment to find that the Lollapalooza lineup had been announced. Radiohead! Rage Against the Machine! Nine Inch Nails! Bloc Party! The National! Okkervil River! Girl Talk! Grizzly Bear! I could go on. Needless to say, I briefly thought things through and purchased a ticket, perhaps a little rashly. I was then very productive for a while, only not in regard to the PowerPoint presentation on Buddhism in the Netherlands I should have been working on. I began to figure out my schedule for next semester, emailed Don about making him my advisor, emailed Peter about making him my honors advisor, traded emails with Daylanne about classes that would fulfill by pre-1900s American literature requirement. Mostly I just sent a lot of emails.
Sometime in the evening my brother got online back in Virginia and IMed me, asking about the post I had left on his wall that read, in short, “We’re going to Lollapalooza.” Apparently when he mentioned this to our mom, she started yelling pretty loud. About me. Fun stuff. About an hour I receive an extremely irate email from her. In the email, she lists off nine specific points about how insensitive I was for buying a ticket to the festival and how I’m not making the most of my time in the Netherlands. Clearly things must have been boiling under the surface for a while and this had just been the tipping point. Mostly though, I didn’t know where the anger was coming from. I think my mom is probably a lot like me in that we tend to bottle up whatever is annoying or bothering us. I guess all that suppressed rage finally reared its ugly head over something silly like Lollapalooza tickets.
I immediately got to work writing a logical and even-tempered, if somewhat snarky, response. For each of her nine points, I offered a retort. An excerpt:
2. You are in the Netherlands. Why are you sitting at your computer looking for ways to spend money you don’t have? You need to get out of your room and interact with the Dutch people and culture.
Yes, I am in the Netherlands and yes, I still spend time on the computer. It is unfortunately part of my nature. As for getting out of my room and experiencing Dutch culture, I refer you to the email I sent earlier today, in which I detail my time in Maastricht.
After sending the email, I felt pretty agitated and like a bit of an asshole, so I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood to clear my head. This was around 1am. I grabbed my iPod, threw on a sweatshirt and ventured out, flipping up my hood and turning my iPod to Kid A. In many ways this mirrored the contemplative walks I’ve taken from time to time at Macalester, walking down Summit Ave. to the Mississippi River in the middle of the night. After about an hour and a half of walking I decided I was about as calm as I was going to get, so I returned to Funen and finished my slides about Buddhism.
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