The end of our first semester, called “Michaelmas Term” for some unknown reason (Matthew Term if you’re my mother over text), is rapidly approaching along with those essay deadlines. And let’s just say, we’re not holding up well. As of yesterday, a third of our program has dropped out, we’re down to six survivors at this point. I watched one of us have a mental breakdown while describing their note-taking system and any self-confidence we had disappeared a long time ago. To quote my mother again, “They have to break you first.” She’s the best at pep talks. It is true that they are succeeding in breaking us, but I expected no less from a Trinity College History grad school program. Luckily my PhD student roommate told me to take the night off after watching me manically eat ramen so I could get back to my papers. Because who doesn’t want to spend all day writing about British political caricature in the French Revolution?
This topic sounded great when I first picked it because I thought to myself, it’s visual media, surely that’ll be easier to just bang out for this cursed class taught by Beethoven (the resemblance is uncanny, little red scarf and everything). Only problem is…I hate studying politics. Turns out “political” caricature has a lot of that. I tried to change my subject last minute and instead of saying straight no he asked me like ten questions I didn’t have the answer to and then just kind of walked away. Touche Beethoven. It is this class in particular that has done a majority of the breaking, but I love that in our historiography class the professor’s response when someone’s answer is incorrect is just: “No.” Let me tell you, I’ve gotten my fair share of “no”s. But I’m taking the fact that I haven’t dropped out as enough of a win for now. But did I almost start crying at the art history lecture I attended for fun last night when the speaker said “that’s a good question” to me? Absolutely.
Now that I’ve explained the mental state of us grad students, I hope you will understand why I had a meltdown last night over…missing American toilets. Right as I was about to climb into bed I went to use the bathroom, or the “toilet” as Europeans crassly call it, to find that the flusher had broken. But this not your average toilet as instead of a manual flush you have to press buttons implanted in the wall and there is no tank, so any hope I had of trying to fix it enough myself was gone. Every single toilet here is different, there is no such thing as a “standard” toilet like there is in America. I swear European toilet sellers operate like a pizza place: instead of a build-you-own pizza, it’s build-you-own-toilet.
So let’s be real, I miss the toilets more than you.
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