Another sleepy Sunday almost gone... for a while I was keeping track of Sundays gone and Sundays yet to come, but I lost track right around when school started getting heavy. I should count them up again, since now that school is heavy and socializing is occasionally blurring the distinction between one day and the next, I have completely lost track of whole weeks. I've been here for over two months! Where the heck did all that time go? Into books and glasses of Belgian beer, that's where it went. Not that I'm bitter, I only regret a few moments here and there--a much better ratio than at many other times in my life. Nonetheless, I wish I had about 60 more hours between today and tomorrow, hours wherein I didn't have to sleep or eat if I didn't want to. So many freakin' constraints, where's the manager! I have something to say about this! (The Young Man in Repetition has a temper tantrum against God at one point, very funny.)

Yesterday Marianne and I went on a hella shopping trip to Antwerp. Originally I had planned to go to a lecture, but I misunderstood the time slot, so I didn't make it. I needed new shoes badly, and I wanted boots so I could wear skirts in the winter. I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone out there how infuriating shopping can be for anyone who doesn't fit the fickle and changing standards of the fashion industry, with whatever mysterious means they have of producing such simple stereotypes. I alternately seethed with indignant rage and sunk into a pit of self-pity and loathing. If anyone out there thinks I'm exagerating, we need to get to know each other better. I HATE shopping. Even when it works I consider it the exception that proves the rule. Such a simple thing on the face of it: find a pair of boots that are both functional and not helatiously or hilariously ugly. I can't even talk about it it makes me so angry-slash-sorry for myself.

The great part about spending the day in Antwerp was really hanging out with Marianne. She staid my nerves and didn't dote on my helplessness, I could follow her along on her missions and still have the courage to stop in every GD boot store in the city. At a few points we got to laughing so hard my sides hurt, so that was another nice counterbalance to my otherwise abyssmal mood. I did get a nice pair of boots from Puma, in the last shop five minutes after they officially closed. I also got a really nice grey jacket that I really like and Marianne gave me a great red scarf that's way warmer than my plain old brown scarf, so really, I made out like a bandit. Antwerp is also really beautiful, I'll go to take pictures sometime. The train station in particular is stunning.

In other news I had a little visitor today, she got off the train and we went around and did stuff and took pictures, here she is having a hot chocolate in the Grote Markt. She's a great guest, doesn't say much, but not everyone's a conversationalist.

Anyhoo... I'm going to have my sleepy Sunday supper now, Indian food, Taj Mahal... again. It's good and cheap, what more can one ask?
At any rate I hope everyone is well and not too busy, it's almost paper writing season again. May God have mercy on us.

Me

Happy belated Thanksgiving everyone!

Despite the fact that Belgium passed over our hallowed holiday without any ceremony whatsoever, I managed to have a thoroughly fulfilling celebration (minus my family and absent friends, of course, which always weighs heavily on me). My friends Chris (a.k.a. Frenchy) and Dave threw a very lavish celebration in their thoroughly lavish apartment last night, and many people feasted, talked, feasted, drank and feasted some more. All the usual all-stars were there, and also a bunch of cool people I didn't know, so I got to broaden my horizons as well as enjoy my already opened one. Originally, Chris' idea was to stuff a duck wrapped in bacon inside the turkey, but the farmer talked the butcher out of it, and then the butcher talked Frenchy out of it. We were all suitably dissappointed at first, but the bird came out wonderfully, and along with a complement of luscious sides (and a really tasty tempeh dish for the veggies) we were all groaning with an excess of thanksgiving. I made Mr. Sumnauth's famous sweet potatos, even though I had to use Marianne's only two sweet potatos since there were apparently no other sweet potatos in Leuven. I remember passing hoardes of North Americans in the vegetable section bemoaning the unseasonable lack of traditional thanksgiving foods, but such is the luck of the displaced I suppose.

Tomorrow is Dr. Rodemeyer's talk, which happens at the ungodly hour of 9AM, but I am looking forward to it nonetheless. Marianne and I might go shopping in Antwerp after that, since I am desperately in need of new shoes and some other things... Marianne's a really great person and we get along famously, plus she's incredibly together and industrious, so she exercises a much needed good influence on me.

In the meantime, I've been working on my Aristotle summary, which is (predictably, to those gifted with foresight) a lot harder than I thought it would be. The various connections I have to explain just to get to luck and chance is taking several pages out of ten, so maybe I won't fulfill my ambition to talk a little about Lacan's appropriation, but such is life. The end of semester classes looms just over the horizon (I have an exam in three weeks!) and I'm scrambling to make sure all my ducks are in a row. I have alas not started writing my thesis yet, but between the summary, the various readings, a certain essay, a new editing job and the revision of the workshop paper, I have a lot of writing on my plate, so I'm not being too hard on myself (yet). I'm hoping that once the summary is done I can dedicate a larger block of time to the other things, but to tell you the truth, my optimism is hanging by a thin shred of self-delusion, so my next blog may just be a series of unintelligible frustration expressions, but we'll see. There just aren't enough hours in the day, what with sleeping and eating on top of everything else.

The weather has been absolutely depressing. It rained for four days straight and the only reason I don't count today is because it rained only for about two hours, which is a vast improvement. I haven't been taking a lot of pictures, taking the camera out in the rain seems like a bad idea, but I did manage to get a couple of very blurry pictures of a bunch of us hanging out at Amedee on Wednesday night.
This is (from left to right): Phil, his girlfriend Julia and Arnis, with whom in particular I have had some very interesting discussions. Phil is a really good friend of mine here, we hang out and study all the time, despite the fact that he thinks I'm just a big angry reactionary leftist.
From right to left this time: Phil, Shane's friend Adam (visiting Belgium to give a Kierkegaard paper in Antwerp!) and Shane himself. Shane, Phil and Marianne all live together in their beautiful apartment. So with the addition of Shannon and Frenchy, these three make up pretty much my whole circle. There are a lot of people I really enjoy talking to and hanging out with, but these are the ones I go out and drink beer with night after night. You will perhaps notice two glasses in front of me, both Westmalle Dubbel. I love this beer, but the reason I have two is because it's a pain to get out from behind this particular table, so I was just trying to exercise my foresight. Amedee is a great bar, lots of board games and decent (though flourescent) lighting, and they only play classical music. So when you picture me studying in a bar, this would be it.

Anyhoo, I have to go to bed, get up early.

All my love,

Cake

Hmmm, well... I really don't have much to report, but let's give it a shot anyway.

I met with Dr. Moyaert on Tuesday, finally. He was still 25 minutes late, but I count myself lucky. It was an interesting meeting, though now that I look at my notes, I don't think he told me anything I hadn't already learned in class. But on the other hand, it's always good to hear it one more time, and in response to a specific question. It did help to tie it all together and see where I'm just chasing Lacan's terminology in a circle. The more interesting part came when I asked about the Aristotle Lacan sites in the 11th seminar with regard to tuche and automaton, which is a subtle (and not always consistent) distinction between luck and chance. Moyaert asks me (for the third time): "Are you doing a research paper or a thesis?" A thesis Dr. Moyaert. "Okay, good, good. Write me a ten page summary on this section of Aristotle, due in two weeks."

I'm actually excited about it, although I know he won't remember asking me for it. It's a good chance to get to know Aristotle a little (yet another gaping hole in my education) and to do some concrete writing, which hopefully will transcribe itself into a chunk of my thesis, though honestly I'm not sure how it relates yet. Since Moyaert won't remember, I might do 5 pages on Aristotle and 5 pages on Lacan's appropriation, which I'm sure requires some serious documentation of its own. Then I'll include some little note like: "My name is Ashley Cake, I'm doing a thesis on Kierkegaard and Lacan, we met on Tuesday two weeks ago, you asked me for this paper, here it is." I think it'll be good.

In the meantime, I'm planning a trip to Maastricht again on Sunday, which should be fun. I've been saving up to go. I need to start planning some other, bigger trips, but for now it's all I can manage to do to get to Holland and back. I need to go to Copenhagen specifically, get back in touch with my Danish (if there's any left). I've been working hard and enjoying myself, anticipating a visit from Dr. Rodemeyer from Duquesne, who's coming next week for a Husserl conference. She's really been such a huge help to me in the last year and a half, and her Husserl seminar last fall was really one of the highlights of my time at Duquesne, so it'll be really good to see her in this new context.

I've been trying hard to save up some money, but studying in my room is getting pretty old. It doesn't help that my computer is right here, which means everyone I miss is just a few keypushes away. But also there's the bed, and I always think I can read in bed, but I can't, I just fall asleep. I am reading Alexandre Kojeve's (pictured) introduction to Hegel as nighttime sleepy reading, and it actually keeps me up because I'm beginning to understand how completely pervasive it was for Lacan and a bunch of other people in the same line. It's an interesting book for sure, though it's completely obvious that the guy thought a great deal of himself, as did the students who helped to put the published volume together. When you make a claim like: "This is THE book..." You can mean it, but meaning doesn't make it so, you know?

Anyway, I hope all is well with everyone. I hope to have more interesting things to report soon. Otherwise ya'll are going to be submitted to chunks of my thesis.

All my love,

Cake

You would not believe what I just went through with this computer. I got cut off by KotNet (KULeuven's ISP network) the other day, and they told me I had a trojan. So I go through the exstensive rigamorole to get the McAfee's yada yada and scan my poor little comp, and lo, 20something Trojans and over 4,000 viruses!! Poor thing, she must have been struggling in that sick state for some time, since I've been really bad about testing and firewalling pretty much since I got her. But, two OS restores and seven scans later, she's clean as a whistle and running better than ever.

In the meantime, I've been on this budget kick--wherein I try to stick to my budget--so I've been kicking around my little room, doing work and cleaning. Feels pretty good to sit down to work and have a nice empty area to fill. Even though Brad was very wonderful and cleaned my whole place and bought me flowers before he left, I've done a pretty good job wrecking the place since he flew back.

I guess besides the various modes of cleaning and working, I don't have much to report. I went to see Children of Men with Cordelia and Mark last night, which is only the second time I've indulged cinematically since I've been here. The last time was to see Science of Sleep, which I thought was excellent. Children of Men wasn't so good, I thought. Your standard pseudo-post-apocolyptic thriller with tons of shocking violence and many, many totally unbelieveable transitions and plot points. The best part though was Michael Caine's rendition of the standard enlightened-hippie-hiding-in-a-beautiful-house-in-the-woods character. As so many of these characters are for me--and I suppose are meant to be--his was an oasis in the otherwise dry and predictable movie.

Otherwise I'm just tired and feeling a bit overwhelmed I guess. So much to do, so little will to do it. I've been working pretty constantly, but I took this weekend off just to do nothing and fix my computer, which took most of the weekend anyway. At any rate, I did write out my research bibliographies for my thesis today, and I have a lot of really interesting reading to do, so I suppose that's something to look forward to.

I'll leave you on an upbeat note. This is my favorite stupid cat photo of the moment, second only to the Kitty Lime Helmet, which never gets old. She's a bit pixelated because I resized her to post on Phoebe's Myspace page, but you get the idea.


As if to say: "what?"

The man had a gift for understatement.

I'm a little weepy today, I'll be honest. The moontime's coming on and I don't feel much like my self. I spent three days preparing hard for a meeting with a professor, then was stood up without ceremony. Granted, I didn't make an appointment, but I made the (apparently typically American) mistake that the office hours on their doors actually mean the professors will be in their office between those times. So it's all my fault, but I'm still pissed about it. This would be the first thing (and relatively minor really) that I've found to be annoyed with K.U. Leuven over, so really we're still getting along fine. That kind of thing gets under my skin though, reaffirming my sense that I really have no idea what I'm doing here. Which doubt fits nicely into my personal theme of feeling that I don't really know what I'm doing anywhere, at any time. Bor or or, Ashley's paranoiac knowledge is getting the best of her again.

Nonetheless, I am thinking hard about what I want to do next year. I have this amazing offer to do an assistantship with my mentor, and I have the opportunity (the expectation really) to go back to Duquesne and teach, but somehow I still have hard choices to make. The sense of being somehow incompetant in some important way is really getting to me, and despite all my hard work, it isn't getting any better here, except that I am developing a sense that when I'm done with Leuven I will be a better person and a better scholar. Once I leave, I know I won't have another bar so close or attainable, that there will be a period of time stretching far into the distance wherein I will not find any bars at all, except for those I make myself. Self-determination is one helluva drive... no roads, no signs, no GPS, just the ceaseless forward. I'm going to burn bridges, go against advice, follow some call that could be coming from heaven or hell, and the only consolation I have is that ultimately, it was all my choice, my responsibility. Cold comfort if I end up flipped over in a ditch, or running out of gas in the middle of nowhere.
Funny how everyone goes through this, and has to go through this, all on their own.

In other news, I'm getting closer to understanding what my thesis is about. Of course I knew beforehand that Kierkegaard's repetition is a religious movement, and that Lacan's is not, but that didn't become clear in all its ramifications until just this week. Hopefully I'll start writing sometime this month, but I'm having increasing difficulty forcing myself to overcome the various neurotic boundaries that separate me from my goals and aims, but that's neither here nor there, it's always everywhere. Part of what is becoming clear to me is that this constant struggling with desire is somehow a permanent structure of me myself and there isn't anything I can do to escape it, it's just a fact of human life. So I have a long road ahead of me. The forever ironic coupling is of course how much I hate driving and how I refuse to let anyone else take the wheel. Meh, this is just the way it is.

Hello all,

So the prophecy came true didn't it? As soon as I'm immersed in the school life the bloglife slows way down. A lot has happened in the last two weeks actually, but I'm not sure exactly what to write about. I had a friend come and visit from New York for about two weeks, we went to Amsterdam, Brugge and Maastricht, which is this medium-sized Dutch town just across the Belgian border.

The trip to Amsterdam was nearly a disaster, one small part of which was the fact that I forgot the memory card for my camera, so I don't even have pictures of the many good things that happened. The hostel we stayed in was horrible, as in hor-ror. It was called D u r t y N e l l y's, write it down, because you don't EVER want to stay there. The bathroom (singular) was disgusting, I won't even go into how disgusting, and there wasn't hot water (or even warm water) the entire time we were there. It was like they had a kegorator underneath the pipes that actually refrigerated the water. We didn't get a single good night sleep while we were there--being interrupted twice by some sleep-deprived staff member confused about whether or not we were in the right beds--and the downstairs was this played out Irish pub that had nothing but loud sports events and even louder British rugby teams (or some other strapping congregation of young "old boys"). As cheap as it was, we paid too much to be so uncomfortable.

BUT, it all came together in the end. We decided to leave a night early, because we had to leave in the morning on Monday anyway, and another night in that horrible place was more than a mostly shut Sunday night in Amsterdam could compensate for. So we go grab our things out of the lockers, not intending to check out--just in case we can't get back to Leuven--but rather to get the 10euro deposit back in case we can. I hand the guy the lock, he hands me a 50. I look at it, I look at him, he hasn't noticed, I deliberate for a split second... I put it in my pocket and walk out the door. 40 euros bought us a train ride home, and we were back in Leuven by midnight. I know maybe I should have given it back, and perhaps I'm giving the fates a chance to make me by actually putting the name of the place on the wide open intraweb, but I would gladly give it back just to be able to tell the people why I decided to take it in the first place. Maybe the whole thing could be a learning experience for everyone. The worst case scenario is that that poor bartender got fired or fined or something for his mistake, in which case I would apologize to the best of my ability. Trouble with wearing a uniform is that you're obscured inside the identity of the institution, occupational hazard, in the broadest sense.

The good things of course were plentiful. Myself, Shannon, Brad, Corry and his friends Andy and Ivanna (sp? pronounced "ee-wan-na") all hung out and spent the night wandering around looking for various things, a good chance to see the city all lit up. Mostly it was the usual for Amsterdam: museums, coffeeshops, museums, coffeeshops. I enjoyed myself. I highly recommend getting the Museumkaart the next time you're there. 33euros for a 24hour transit pass and free admission to all the big museums. You have to start EARLY though, time flies looking at art and historical stuff.

In the Van Gogh museum's contemporary photography exhibit I saw that photograph of the woman in Italy walking through the gauntlet of leering men. I'm sure you've seen it, it was a woman photographer but I can't remember her name. Someone has it in their apartment, who is that? I wanted my friend Taine to be there so bad, I think she's the only one that would know where I was coming from when I looked at it, strange a thing as that is to say. I've seen it many times before, it's actually painful for me to look at, because the woman's face is distorted with fear, as all these dapper (and otherwise) men lean over banisters and motorbikes to harrass her. You can almost hear the whistles, sneers and tongue clucking. It makes my skin crawl even thinking about it. But I noticed this time, or at least I hope I saw, since I was so close to it, that there are three men who are standing in front of her and can see her face. They aren't whistling, or sneering, and their posture is almost confrontational, like they're ready to spring on whoever crosses the line to touch her. The one nearest to her looks surprised and concerned, like he's just on the threshold of figuring out what's happening, the second looks ready to whisk her out of there, and the third is an older man, maybe in his late 60s, who has his hands in his pockets and is watching the whole thing like he's seen it a thousand times before. I actually held up my hand to cover the rest of the photograph so I could just focus on their faces. I'm sure it wasn't the kind of nobility that would confirm all my fading ideals about the human race, but there was something there that was complicated enough to assure me that we are not entirely abandoned to the strange human propensity to view living things as objects, with all the cruelty that that brings out in us. I was happy I saw it, or at least wanted to see it badly enough that it seemed real to me.

Since then (more than a week ago now) I've just been visiting with my friend and trying, trying to get a handle on my work. It's crazy how the time just goes and I haven't done what I set out to do. I think I have a planning problem, gotta work on that. In any case I am getting closer to a fully in-charge position. I read the entire second book of Malebranche yesterday and besides the werewolf stuff, I think I have a handle on the imagination as far as he's concerned. A lively imagination is contagious, you know, and of course it is also a temptation to sin, so watch out on both counts. If anyone wants to have a good laugh, read the chapter on Montaigne in the last chapter of the third part of book two, I haven't even read Montaigne, but Malebranche sure hates him.

I'm off to the central library now, the boulder awaits.

All my love,

Cake