Bud's feeling like a chicken in a coup, or rather, a lion chained up in a zoo. Can you blame him, living with the student-who-can't-finish-this-bloody-paper? Yep, I'm here again at the computer, delaying the start of what's supposed to be the final day of wrestling this Thing into some sort of shape. Why isn't it done yet? Combination of factors:
On Thursday night, Bud exploded over an incident in a bar which he puts down to blatant, white Dutch discrimination against anyone with a brown skin. I can't blame him. The feeling that apartheid has come home to its roots - Holland - is something I share with him. The Dutch, even at government ministerial level, are rapidly developing two distinct classes of Dutch citizens. They call one lot 'autochtoon' - 'born here' of 'native' - and the other lot 'allochtoon', meaning (in theory) 'born elsewhere', i.e. outside the Netherlands. But, in fact, 'allochtoon' translates as 'anyone born inside or outside the Kingdom of the Netherlands who isn't white and could be taken for a Muslim'. So brown-skinned Dutchmen born in the Caribbean islands that form part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands are lumped in with the foreigners. There's even been an attempt to pass a law that makes it possible to DEPORT this 'Class B Dutchman' if he/she gets into criminal activity here. Fortunately, I think it's just been thrown out but the trend is scary. People - and I'm talking about the law-abiding ones now - like Bud, who've been fullly integrated in Dutch society for decades suddenly find themselves treated like outsiders. The same happened to the Jews here, Bud tells me. You don't want to know how many were sent from here by train to Germany, never to return....
I digress. Thursday's little incident wrecked most of our evening. He did shake it off later and the sun came out again. But, anyway, I was already exhausted from a busy week at work, tackling all these new, exhilerating (oh god...) challenges. Friday was a write-off. Brain switched off. Just complete refusal. Couldn't LOOK at The Paper, let alone DO anything with it. Tried piddling around with one or two paragraphs but after half hour just gave up and went and watched some mindless TV.
So here we are again. Think I'll stop blogging till I've got the damn thing done! Making my failures public is just too embarassing.
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