What's been happening since my last entry? Not as much as you might thing. Taking the TOEFL test went rather well. Although I was extremely nervous and the temperature in the room where I had to take it was uncomfortably high, I managed to score 287 out of 300 in total and 5.5 out of 6 on my essay. When I was done with the test I didn't feel very good about it, particularly about the essay. Once the nice lady who was supervising the test (with video monitoring and everything) handed me my score indication I felt a little better though. My score indication was between 233 (I needed a minimum of 237) and 290. As it turned out a couple of weeks later I did pretty damn well :-)

I did end up taking some pictures in the city where I had to go to take the test, but my camera accidentally popped open a few days ago and I'm afraid all the film got exposed. There's a good chance all the pictures on it are ruined, which sucks a lot, because I had a couple of other series on there as well :-(

I'm finishing up my second week at the university tomorrow. There has already been a bit of a bump in the road. I have this one math course and I don't understand it at all. I don't know how big a deal it is if I don't pass it.

Me and this other guy from my previous school talked to a councilor about it, but she was convinced that we should be able to do it. "We've never had problems with students with your background." Figures. What can I say, we're special. Or rather, I'm special, because I'm betting that other guy will pick it up eventually. It's been over eight years since I did any math. On top of that it feels like they skip a few steps in class when explaining something. It feels like they're assuming I know certain basic stuff when in fact I don't.

We were told just to try and stick with it. There's a possibility this first topic gives us trouble while the rest of the topics might not. I'm skeptic though. Very skeptic. I can contact someone for extra "attention", but I think that someone doesn't quite get what I don't understand about the course.

University is a completely different world. In stead of having to travel 5 minutes I now have to travel an hour and a half and sometimes I have to get up at 6am. That's turning out to be not as big of a problem as I thought it would be though. I don't really mind the traveling. The train station I leave from and the train station I arrive at are both pretty big and nice. There are always lots of people. Somehow that makes it easier. Constantly being around that many people makes me feel a little less alone I guess.

I haven't made any connections with the people I go to class with yet. They seem different from me. I think many of them are a lot younger than me. I can't connect with any of them. I'm probably being shallow, but none of them strike me as the kind of people I could connect with. At an introduction last week I signed up, or at least I think I did, with sort of a student ... I'm not sure what it's called in English (Dutch: studentenvereniging). But I haven't heard anything back yet. I filled out some form, but now I'm not sure that actually meant I was signing up. It could have just been a form about whet ever I was interested in joining. Anyways, they sell books a lot cheaper and they organize parties and what not. I think it's about time I involved myself with something like that.

Emotionally I'm still not doing very well. Earlier this week I had to fight against my tears even when I was still in (math) class. On the way home I kept thinking of ways to end it all. Thinking about what my last words on a piece of paper should be. Overly dramatic? I don't know. For two years now every day I'm less certain of my place in this world. Whet ever there's a place for me in it to begin with. Grabbing my future and giving it some form seems ... impossible. It's like trying to grab water. It keeps getting away from me. Flowing away in a hundred different directions.

I think the problem is that there's nothing I really want. Or to be more exact; there's nothing I want bad enough for that desire to activate me. I don't have any ambition. Although I can think of one, maybe two things, I want to accomplish during my existence they seem either pointless or impossible to attain or accomplish.

At the university, and even while traveling there, there are thousands of girls passing me by. I think having someone would help give my life some direction, but that doesn't really seem like a very good basis for a relationship. Never mind the fact I lack the skills to actually bump into someone.

"Tortured soul looking for that special someone." Yeah, that'll work.

Oh, the picture is the aquarium with the fish that me and L (other female roommate, the nice one) adopted. When L was cleaning it yesterday she threw away the plants, the plastic corral cave and all the sand on the bottom. I rescued the plastic corral cave from the trash and bought some new plants and some stone that's supposed to give off oxygen to the water. Without those the fishies didn't seem very happy. All they did was hide in the cave, but now they're a little more active. There's even a new inhabitant. A little algae (is that how you spell that?) eating snail that accidentally came with the new plants. I named him Jacques after that shrimp from Finding Nemo, since he also cleaned up all the algae.