9 june 2005

So it’s 3:30 in the morning at the end of a good day. A good day that comprised a few hours sketching and reading by the canal, two conversations with random strangers, a beer with a near-stranger, a sandwich on a picnic blanket in Oosterpark, a coffee on the patio of the Kriterion, a tasty soup-and-stirfry dinner prepared by Maria, an Austrian murder mystery screened in the closed-except-to-friends-of-the-bar-staff Doos, and a short round of kicky dancing at a punk club. Not bad considering it started at noon after six hours of sleep.

And despite all that I am feeling reflective and anxious with so few days left in Amsterdam: did I do this the best way I could have? I know that I didn’t. I didn’t stick with the Dutch the way I wanted to, and I didn’t call as many people as I might have for interviews about Dutch design, and I didn’t get to quite as many Dutch cities as I had hoped, and I didn’t sketch and paint as much as I might have. And most of all I regret the hours I spent fucking around online. Not the hours of blogging or i.m.ing friends, but the random hours of surfing, which is no better than sitting in a foreign country watching television… the random hours when it was too cold out to hold a pencil and my brain felt too full for language or literature.

But I didn’t do THAT bad. I got to just about every museum on my list, I got to know some fantastic people, I got to Utrecht and den Bosch and Schiermonnikoog and Leiden and Haarlem and Arnhem. I played on the Amsterdam Women’s Lacrosse Team and spent Queen’s Day on a boat and took at least five landscape architecture PowerPoint presentations of photos. I got to Spain and Belgium and Paris.

Mostly I wish my project hadn’t been such a wash, which I consider to be about 25% my fault. Though (early on) I made some good progress with my thesis research, the side project I was actually here to do was almost wholly disappointing: it changed at the last minute to a less interesting and relevant problem, I had little supervision and no collaborators, and it was impossible to produce meaningful results in the allotted time. That said I could have taken more initiative. When the choice was between roadside management technique lit searches and an afternoon of Van Gogh, Van Gogh won every time. Which I feel ok about. The times when fiction at the café won out are a bit more ambiguous.

In any case, I have about one more week. I am going to try to end this with grace instead of with sleep-deprived over-emotional heel dragging, but I’m not making any promises.