Tintin au pays de stresse

So, I recently had one of those great epiphanies. You know, the kind when you look at your calendar and/or your to-do list and it dawns on you: it is only half filled! You did not write everything down from one calendar to another! "Wash laundry" is not the only thing you have to do all week!
After you euphorically write down the new list of tasks (I like making to-do lists, like all typical type A personalities), you look at it. And then your belly sinks and your head gets all foggy and you can only whisper "zuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut."

Because that is an elephant's worth of stuff to do.

On the topic of elephants: I just finished Tintin au Congo last night. There are many distressing things in it, including the length of Tintin's shorts (waay too much knee, boy reporter! down boy! you are not a Rockette), and the fact that apparently Herge couldn't get any real Congolese to pose for him so he found a bunch of twelve year old Belgian boys and put them in blackface instead. It also occurred to me that while I really liked the Spielberg movie, Tintin himself is a bit of a priggish jerk, not to mention fanatically racist. And his relationship with Milou/Snowy the dog borders on the bizarre. They talk to each other? In French? That is worse than Lassie. The fact that Tintin is Belgium's national hero/icon is making me think very long and hard about this country again. And has made me more aware of the hemlines of men's shorts than ever before.

Back to the to-do list. The grim reality that EXAMS are coming, and coming quickly (okay, after Christmas, but still pretty soon), and that they're getting added to the papers, presentations, Christmas markets (!), holiday concerts, internship applications, and travel plans we've already got dotting our calendars has thudded among us all like the aforementioned elephant. Since we are decidedly lacking in Tintins at ULB, it continues to live and prod us with its scary ivory tusks. Exams are coming, and since we don't get evaluated basically at all during the semester that means that our entire academic fortune is on the line come January 7th. Yay. Merry Christmas to us, and a happy new year.

I like how Belgians handle stress though. There is the moment of blood-draining panic; "zut, l'examen/l'expose, il vient vite, quoi!" Then there is the glance at the others: "ben, oui." Then, a short discussion: will it be difficult? will it be different than last time? will we need to read that bibliography he handed out at the beginning of the year? This is all done very calmly, however; and the conclusion is always that it will be challenging but, "benh, ca va, ca va aller." Perhaps we will photocopy a few more articles; perhaps we will discuss this a bit more later over a beer; but ultimately, everything will be okay. I don't see the same existential stress on my classmates' faces here that I saw at Davidson or Sciences Po. This may be because I'm hanging out with philosophers and ethics majors, who spend so much time thinking about the meaning of life and death that everything else seems of relative unimportance. This may also be because I'm at a huge state school, where yearly tuition is about the same price as my school books for one semester at Davidson (if you're Belgian), so retaking a year isn't a big deal. But I think it's also pretty darn Belgian: things will be hard, and, hey, you may not be the best at them, but you'll probably get through them. And if you don't, you'll still survive. Chill out.

Makes sense, I guess, for a country that's survived the carnage of two world wars fought on its soil; that constantly fights internally with itself; that's only gotten breaks by breaking its colonies; and that remains an afterthought, a passing-through point from Paris to Berlin, a city and a country presumed to be grey, soulless, messy, bureaucratic, bizarre. Brussels knows it's never going to be beautiful enough to compete with Paris; will never have enough financial force to compete with London or even Antwerp or Amsterdam; will never be punctual enough to give Berlin or Munich a run for their money; will never have rich enough history to rival Rome or Madrid. But, that said, it is also confident it will survive; it will  remain intact, a hodgepodge of colonial-era excess, bullet-pitted suffering, crumbly industrial ghosts, sterile bureaucratic infrastructure, and postmodern architectural essays, long after the factory smog, the red rubber, the mustard gas, the Nazi tanks, and the diplomatic eco-exhaust have dissipated. Brussels has survived since the Roman empire was still jangling swords around Europe; and while it's probably never gotten an A (and never made it on Rick Steve's must-see list for sure), it's still around. Like Tintin, whose gun never seems to work, whose outfits are always tragic, and whose hairstyle is dubious on good days, it's kind of a misfit; it will probably get cornered by a scary bearded man; and it will probably say stupid culturally insensitive things on a regular basis; but when there's an elephant's worth of work or danger charging, it will probably take care of it (maybe by having a monkey shoot it, as Tintin does in the comic book, inexplicably).

As someone born and raised in America's can-do, must-do workaholic society, a funny mix of Calvinist work ethic and suburban overachiever culture, I don't understand the type-B mindset towards work, stress, and achievement. Thriving and exceeding, not surviving and existing, have always been standard to me and my peers. But it's nice to see people who don't collapse into bundles of nerves and stress and coffee when exams roll around; who are quietly confident that things will be okay even if they're not; who afford themselves and their professors the "quart d'heure academique" in which one is on time as long as one is not more than fifteen minutes late. While I don't know this for sure, I get the sense that not everyone at ULB is doing everything they do (drinking beer after class?) for their resumes, or to build a network, or connections (though they are often doing just that). I think sometimes they do it just to chill. Just for fun. And they do it even when there's an elephant in the corner, staring them down with trunks of stress.

That's something I didn't see at Davidson. It's a special breed of courage or at least insouciance.

Final thought on Tinitn: He is a journalist. Apparently people are clamoring to give him tons of money for his stories. But he doesn't take it. He stays with his little Belgian newspaper. And he never seems to worry about deadlines. He just goes on the adventure, says some racist stuff, makes some poor sartorial life choices, gets saved by an airplane (lots of deus ex machina, and that machina is always an airplane, for some reason), and comes up with a great story. He probably spends an hour writing in the whole story each time. He never stresses about work, just about giant cobras.

And while little about Tintin is realistic, and most about him is not worth emulating, there's something to that: to letting the adventure happen to you, to letting the present preoccupy you, to letting the story come to you, rather than stalking it like a great white hunter. It probably will: that great epiphany when the research clicks, the problem makes sense, the thesis statement solidifies, will swoop down on you like a prop plane driven by cheery Brits. Just hope it's before the water buffalos get you.


Okay, that's enough. Tintin's metaphorical possibilities are well worn out now. And I have got some elephants to tame (or, perhaps, some prop planes to hail).


Tintin and Milou being nice and racist (in scandalous shorts):

Les changements

It has come to my attention that I have not blogged in quite some time. This is thanks to some very good things: parents and a good friend visiting from the US, and moving. That's right: I am now a resident of the commune of Ixelles, near gritty-but-artsy Place Flagey, in a quirky, sunny apartment haunted by a refrigerator ghost named Terrence. I couldn't be happier; I'm closer to ULB, to student life, and to Matonge, where Congolese immigrants and pretentious Avenue Louisistas meet, mingle, and regard each other with bemusement.

Moving is challenging; I've learned about shopping at IKEA (it always takes at least an hour more than you think); about constructing a European-style bed (there is no such thing as a box spring, just a sommier, a thing with slats that look like balsa wood but are mercifully a little sturdier); about putting curtains on a stubborn curtain rod (scrap fabric is our friend); about whether or not your Vespa poster not matching your duvet is a problem (it is not). It's disorienting to change addresses, commutes, grocery stores, routines. Disorienting, but good; the challenge forces you to think about how you divide time, about where your priorities lie, about how you want to invest the always-limited resources at your disposal. Moving, like having company for dinner, forces you to clean, to rearrange, to reconsider the things you've accepted as inevitable in your daily life. You see things as an outsider, because for a brief moment you are an outsider; and your life invariably changes as your perspective shifts.

Outsider-vision and its incipient, almost-imperceptible life changes happened yesterday morning during the VUB-ULB concert du St. V, an orchestra concert to celebrate Paul Verhaegen, the founding father of both universities, the first non-Catholic-affiliated schools in Belgium. St. V's day is a joke, a mock saint's day for the man who declared that the Church should not dictate what and who was taught in this fledgling country. This concert, however, was not really a joke: though VUB, the Flemish-speaking university, and ULB, the Francophone university where I study, are about 15 minutes away from each other on foot, this concert was one of the only opportunities French and Flemish students have to collaborate with one another. Most courses in the Flemish language at ULB are, incredibly, taught by Francophone professors with a background in Flemish studies; likewise, most French courses at VUB are taught by Flemish speakers who minored in French. Though both universities conduct high-level research in law, business, and the social sciences, their efforts are almost always divided; there is little dialogue between the two vibrant academic communities who are quite literally a stone's throw away from one another. In many ways, VUB and ULB embody the redundancy that results from the politico-linguistic divisions that hamstring Belgium in so many ways. They spend double on resources, facilities, faculty, when they could easily accommodate their students and research and more in a shared, bilingual campus.

Thus it was particularly special to have the opportunity to play alongside VUB's orchestra as part of ULB's orchestra yesterday. Most of the concert was divided; VUB played Broadway standards, we played a Bizet overture. However, the last piece was a symphonic suite from the movie The Prince of Egypt. Each stand contained a VUB and a ULB musician, playing side by side; the ULB conductor directed, as ULB students translated for their stand partners when necessary. Halfway through the piece, Zofia, our director, stepped down, grabbed the VUB conductor, and let him finish conducting the piece. The two joined hands and bowed together on the podium at the end, as the swells of the oh-so-metaphorically-powerful piece "(There Can Be Miracles) When You Believe" died away in the auditorium. The music was schmaltzy and the execution good but not extraordinary; the fact that the crowd leapt to their feet in the loudest standing ovation I've ever received as a member of a symphony had much more to do with political symbolism than with musicality. They demanded encore after encore; they took photo after photo. This concert, coming just over a week after Belgian politicians finally signed a (hopefully) working political accord and formed a (hopefully) stable parliamentary coalition with a (hopefully) mutually agreeable prime minister, was in many ways a metaphor for changements: for learning to see things as an outsider; for stumbling through a second or third language in order to communicate with one's neighbor; for laughing as one shared power; for universal things, like music or national identity (or the ever-present beer served after the concert :) , that unite otherwise disparate people.

In other words, the concert was pretty cool.

I am now on a mission to understand more about Belgian history. Most of what I know about Belgium comes from colonial history; I've learned the bare minimum about Leopold II in order to understand what happened in Congo. But I think the secret to some of the seemingly incomprehensible acts Belgium committed in its colonies may lie in its own, complicated, divided identity and history. The more I see of this country, the more complex, convoluted, and fascinating it seems. It's a strange, interesting mix of North African immigrants, Central African refugees, Eurocrats, left-leaning students, stodgy Flemish, droll Walloons, and a decorative monarchy; a place where trilingualism is expected and five languages is nothing extraordinary; a place where Egyptian wraps coexist peacefully with traditional moules-frites; a place where there is little definition of "normal," because everyone is profoundly, fascinatingly different. A place constantly struggling with "changements," constantly shifting boundaries and identities and perspectives; a place blessed and cursed with perpetual outsider vision.

The finale of the VUB/ULB concert, filmed by one of the ULB parents.