Not Much

Not much has been happening. I'm in limbo, and don't have much to do. My English class was cancelled due to low enrollment (or, rather, it will very likely be cancelled), I was deemed "not-Russian-enough" for the Finnish class (I'm joking!), and I'm left sort of twiddling my thumbs, waiting for my life to begin. Although Rami and I have plenty of fun together, I'm getting very restless and very bored.

 After discussing this dilemma with my dad a bit, he suggested that empty times like these are precisely what college is for; you learn the discipline necessary to accomplish tasks without someone hovering over you as they did in preschool. Since I have all this free time, it's up to me to fill it with important and meaningful things. What have I been doing, then? Well, I've been writing. Since arriving in Finland, I hadn't written much other than this blog -- certainly no fiction -- and I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever open my word processor again. I just felt so empty, a direct result of my empty days. The trick with writing is, though, you can pick it up feeling "uninspired" and most of the time you'll manage to get something on the page. It might not be any good, but at least you can scrap it later when something decent begins to materialize. I've made it my "assignment" to write at least a page a day. I've got some good stuff cooking, I must say.

 The other major project I've got going is studying Finnish here at home. I was actually pretty vigilant about studying it when I got here, but after taking the placement test for that class I became really discouraged. I mean, I did so horribly. It was abysmal. No one seemed terribly surprised by this given the short time I've been in the country, but I felt as if all the work I'd done in the weeks prior had been for nothing. At that point, I gave up. "Guess I can't do this on my own," I thought. But, since I don't know when my next opportunity to take a Finnish course will be, I feel as if I have no real choice. Okay, so maybe it'll be slow going here at home without the best resources and the knowledge of an instructor, but what else can I do? It can't hurt (anything other than my ego).