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.