Winter has begun

[scottishlass]

We went for a walk in the icing rain today and it was wonderful. I don't know why but recently I have felt really removed from this world. It was as if I was watching us walking the dogs in the cold and rain like a movie and I was one of the protagonists. Strange and yet interesting.

Had a lot of those moments recently, I guess these come from the fact that I have been thinking about and meeting quite a lot of folks from my university days. Thinking back, most of the time - when a particular scene appears in my memory - it seems it is always summer.
These lazy long days where we sat outside our faculty, skipping classes and just drinking and talking and singing (our English student department was notorious for its repertoire of folk to pop to rock songs). I have been thinking a lot about those days and in looking back on them, I think I would do a lot of it differently now - not because I'm older (yet not wiser) but because I seem to have squandered a lot of valuable time with stupid things. Like passing up the opportunity to become friends with some of the Japanese and Chinese students because I had to talk to a (at that time) friend from the student body. Or the time I sat totally drunk on a parapet and let myself get kissed by totally the wrong guy (and still knowing it in my drug and booze induced haze). Oh well, at least I didn't fall off that parapet.
The things we got up to beside studying *shakes head* University indeed is a kindergarten for twens. :)
Timo and I singing songs from The Fantasticks with Helge joining in. Helge ... I wonder where he is now. Is he still the lionhaired blonde guy? Oh, and don't forget the drama group ... almost all of the student representatives of our English department (Fachschaft) were in that group. Hiss & Boo!! The name of our drama group - what a hilarious bunch we were. Helge and I professing our love on stage, always the ones to play the love birds. And gosh, we had chemistry and we were easily the best actors in that group. We were so carefree and careless in so many ways. Do some ppl still feel a grudge against us? The pack I ran in ... we seemed like the golden boys and girls of our department. We were student union folks, we were known by name by our profs (and mostly sought out during lessons by our teachers). We had it all ... but I think we made a lot of ppl mad, real mad. A more serious student union was elected when we graduated. No more fun, no more games and most of all no more songs for them.
One of my mates from back then is now a prof at the Medieval English department. The biggest drunk of us all and now he is so serious and sedate. Unbelievable if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

It's 3 AM already and I should go to bed now .... I don't know hwy an account of the walk with the dogs through the rain all of a sudden turned into me rambling on about my student days which are so long gone now ... and yet only a blink of an eye and a trip down memory lane away.
Good night! Oh Yasumi minna.

Comments

[little-witch27.livejournal.com]

Lovely trip down memory lane - thanks for sharing. I very nearly sent you a text the other night - every time I watch Kuch Kuch Hota Hai I want to text you! ;) Maybe there's something in the water. I've been having those melancholy moments too lately. Especially longing for my university days and, sadly enough, the one person I never wanted to feel melancholy for - Anne.

[scottishlass.livejournal.com]

I really need to dig out my cell phone. I know I have it somewhere but where? :) As I only use it for emergencies, it is always somewhere buried :(

I guess Yuletide is the time for trips down memory lane. These long nights and short day light invite to think about the past.

I always feel weird when reading about people's uni experiences.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

I was kind of brought up believing it would be a wild, exciting time (my parents were students in the 60s, and while not in the thick of things, did have their share of 'adventure' then, and listening to their tales, our family myths, certainly makes it sound like they had the time of their lives), and reading other people's recollections always makes it sound a bit like that, too. All that partying and socialising... Yet my own experience is so different. I'm spending very little time at all at uni, I know nobody there (how *do* you make contacts in a department of hundreds, with each seminar group consisting of different people you mostly never see again?) Uni is just a place I go to learn - and most of the serious learning is done at home, really. And the only parties I've ever been to (no more than two, I think, early in my studies) were mind-numbingly boring - huge affairs with hundreds of people, none of which I knew, and music so loud you couldn't communicate (so you couldn't really *get* to know anybody).

I must be doing this wrong. *g*

Re: I always feel weird when reading about people's uni experiences.

[scottishlass.livejournal.com]

I don't think you are doing anything wrong. Most parties at uni ARE mind-numbingly boring affairs with loud music and drunks everywhere.
It all depends on what you are studying ... History and those of the History department have always been very remote kind of ppl. In all my years studying History at uni, I haven't had any connection to my fellow History students who were all about studying and not much fun at all.
With the German students it was long nights and burning the midnight oil over the discussions of life and dreams with lots of tea - also not my kind of thing but still a whole lot better and easier to deal with than the History folks.
Now with the English folks ... I guess I was lucky back when I started to study. We had a very small yet reactionary English department. They were rebels (they were the ones who pressured the dean into naming our university after Heinrich Heine). As we were still a small department where you got to know each other no matter what, we had student tutors who greeted the newbies, and we were also asked to do something for our department, be it student work or helping our profs (we never had money for sturdent tutorials so we students did it ourselves for free).
Getting into the Fachschaft (Departmental student union), was an easy step and from then on all the fun started (and my studying deteriorated). If I hadn't done the politics (newbies tutorials, student unions = Fachschaft & AStA) I would have finished my studies a lot earlier than I did :s