Up at the crack of dawn and off to Belgium. We are
staying at a beachside resort, Bruge. Brendan and
Kylie are staying at a youth hostel to which we are not invited but we have a
good hotel with a full smorgasbord breakfast.
Narda’s entry for Saturday, June 18, 2005
It’s so much fun to be
in Holland. I
love the food especially. And riding bikes is the best. Now I have the extra
bonus to see my darling boy again, with his sore foot, which worried me so
much. That foot was a saga; he spent nearly 2 weeks in the Royal Adelaide with ‘Cellulitis” ..blimey..have to look that up. It must
have been serious and he said it was extremely painful. If I could have taken
the pain from him to me I would have. Such an emotional thing, mothering…sometimes
I don’t know how it is possible.
We’ve just returned
from visiting Tante Willy; she’s lending us her car
for a few days and we’ll drive off tomorrow, through Scheveningen,
then on to Bruge in Belgium. We’re enjoying a beer and
some blue cheese. Reink is sleeping on the boat these
days. He’s completely given us his place, very generous. We spent some time
NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today in Utrecht
looking for the connections to get our video camera working again. It’s 10 pm, and still light outside.
Nearly
time for bed.
Friday, June 17, 2005
I realize this is out of sync with the actual days of the
week but when I uploaded to our blog earlier in
the day at the local Utrecht Internet Café I left off the file for Friday, June
17, 2005 and the only reason I wanted to include it is because it is about a
moment I had been wondering whether it would ever happen. Of course as Narda says no one would ever read any of this anyway except
maybe a couple of our family members but this does serve another purpose.
Because of all that happens in life we forget what happened at different times
and where it was at that. Just NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today we struggled to remember where in the
world we were when we walked to a small town near a place we were staying and
had dinner. The more places we go to the more difficult it is to remember where
different passing thoughts of something that happened actually occurred. We
have been on the road since we met four years ago. In that time we have lived
in two places in Adelaide and three in New York. I don’t know
if it is Narda or me, I did live in ten houses in ten
years with my children between 1985 and 1995 and Narda
was a bit more stable in her life but we have only seen a small part of the
world.
Finally feel alive after almost twelve hours of sleep. Hello
Holland.
The four of us were to ride bikes for a day into the old
town but Brendan broke the chain last night so he and Kylie rode bikes and we
took a bus. I had my big moment to contend with – to find the result of
something I began at the beginning of 1991. Back then, living in VictorHarbor
with Sacha and Leigh and wondering at the age of
forty-four what I should do in life. I had sent in an application several
months before to begin university at Deakin in Melbourne. At the time I
thought I would give a bachelor of arts a go, never really believing I would
complete it. 1995, after too much work for any human being; raising kids and
studying and finding money to live on, I thought ‘why stop now?’ I had a BA in
journalism and decided not to ever do anything with the degree after seeing how
dishonest the media really was so I applied for an honour’s
degree in children’s literature and by the end of 1995 I was applying for a
Masters.
I thought I was pushing the envelope going for a Masters. At
the same time I started my BA of computing science at Flinders because now I
was becoming obsessed with school and learning. Furthermore, with the World
Wide Web starting to become a way of life (having been ‘invented’ a mere four
years earlier) and not being able to afford a new enough computer to get online
I needed the university system to be a part of this new world. At the beginning
of 1995 FlindersUniversity had two computers online then
soon after a room with ten of them. I was spending more and more time at
university to use this wonderful new way of being connected with the world. My
master degree was on ‘The influence of the Internet on literature’.
Toward the end of my Masters in literature and computers I
had the strange and far out notion of getting a PhD. I even got a book out of
the Flinders’ library on what a PhD was and what the procedure was for getting
one. I remember one evening shooting hoops with Sacha
in our backyard in Hackham and explaining to him that
I was going to apply for a PhD which would mean, if successful, I would be a
doctor. I was doing a lot of picture poems at the time and I jokingly said I
would be a Doctor of Picture Poems. I was concerned what my title would be
thought; would my Doctor of Picture Poems be shortened to Doctor of P P or even worse would I become Doctor PP or even the P
Doctor?
I completed my Masters and applied for a PhD at the University of South Australia. The only catch was that
I could not continue my BA in computing science at Flinders. The choice was
either to have a degree that I could get employment with, like a BA in
computing science or a PhD which was an academic degree and probably not as
employable. I started the PhD thinking I would do it on my art-writing and it
all seemed so simple. However, my supervisor, Jackie Cook, (and yes I did make
the mistake once of actually calling her Captain Cook to her face as that is
what I said when I was not with her and it slipped out unintentionally but she
just laughed and said she was called that at school) thought that it would be
best to do my PhD on something else and I came up with the idea of doing it on
online communication; “Conversational analysis of chatroom
“talk” would become the next seven years of way too much labour.
I was soon not only raising two children alone but I was working two jobs and
doing my university research.
I often thought not only that I would not complete but that
I was not capable of competing. It had only been seven years earlier when I
started the university game and back then my ex-wife confidently informed that
I would never finish my BA as I was not smart enough. This all begin in March
1998. Seven years later, NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today to be exact, at the Internet Café in old town Utrecht, I received an
email saying that at the meeting of 14 June 2005, some committee gave the final
approval for me to graduate. Far away from NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today and this place all this began.
Back when I started this educational trek I never considered finishing it or of
living anywhere else than I was at that moment, in Australia. I thought by the year
2005 Leigh would be a major league baseball player and I was not sure what Sacha and I would be doing. Leigh’s future was the only
sure thing, perhaps it still is.
We went out to dinner tonight to celebrate my completing
this PhD. It must be the time of year we do these journeys but it did not get
dark until after ten PM. Of course I did not get up until after 9.30 this
morning so now at 11 PM it seems time to wrap up a day that had some sort of
closure following so many years of work. I should find out in the next couple
of days whether I will graduate on the sixth or on the seventh of September and
considering I need to be back at work on the seventh in New York I am hoping it is the sixth.