It can't possibly...

This last Tuesday was one of those days on which you think 'It can't possibly get any worse...' more than once per day. Hence, this is the kind of days you perceive as truly distastrous, when you feel at war with the universe and wonder what you've done wrong to be punished by the heavens in such a way...

To begin with, I felt quite literally punished by the heavens when I woke up early on Tuesday morning, because rain was pouring out of the sky again... I wonder why the weather has such an influence on my mood, but I know I'm surely not the only one - 4 years of bakery shop experience will teach you that. The pouring rain was just a forebode for a less than perfect start of the day. I took a shower, that started more or less warm and got colder and colder, until I had to rinse my hair with cold water! I got out of the bathroom, shivering in my towel, only to find out one of the boys had unplugged the boiler the previous night... Grrr! My sympathy towards my flatmates further cooled when I found out they had drunk my pineapple juice, so I had to drink water for breakfast. More grrrr.

I went to class, enduring the rain on the way there. When I sat down and started unpacking my stuff, I reached for my glasses... only to find out I had forgotten them on my desk! And the professor showed a bunch of graphs on slides during the class, which I couldn't see! So between classes I hurried back to my apartment to get my glasses, because without my glasses I'm really worthless (and enduring more rain while hurrying back to my apartment). The second class of the morning went a lot better with glasses, up until the end of the class when the professor said: 'Oh, by the way, some of you don't seem to have understood that you have to prepare a paper due tomorrow on currency boards.' I, poor erasmus student, was among those who had not at all understood that we had to prepare a paper on currency boards for the next day! So instead of doing all the things I had planned for Tuesday afternoon, I spent all afternoon writing the last-minute paper for the next day.

At 7pm, half an hour before my evening class - I skipped capoeira, by the way - I went to a print shop to print the paper I had just written and some slides and other stuff I still needed to print. While sending the documents from the shop computer to the printer, the computer got stuck and had to get fixed, and when I finally got to send the rest of the documents for printing, the printer printed half of the stuff double and the woman behind the counter made me pay for it! As I was already 5 minutes late for class (how can printing possibly take more than half an hour? In Spain it can!) so I didn't discuss, paid for the printouts and hurried to class.

By the time I got to class, I found out that the slides for that class were not among all the stuff I had printed. At the end of the class I was so tired and frustrated that I didn't even hear what the professor was saying so I left early. As I left, it started raining softly. I went to the supermarket to get cornflakes and some other essential foodstuffs and it started raining a little harder. Then I still had to get money from the ATM to pay rent the next day. By the time I left the bank, it was a full-grown rainstorm. I came home SOAKED. 15 minutes later, the rain had stopped. Those were the 15 minutes I had left earlier from class... Talk about godly punishment for skipping 15 minutes of class!

As I awoke today, Wednessday, I really thought it couldn't possibly get any worse than the previous day, but the weather did seem to want to bet on that: this morning, it was not only raining, but there was also lightning and thunder! I almost turned around and stayed in bed, but in the end decided to defy fate and give this day a go anyway. It turned out to be a way better day than Tuesday. The paper I handed and commented on in class was very good according to the professor, I caught up with some reading in the library, went to a presentation of two classmates, had lunch with my Italian classmate Simone, and saw a movie in the afternoon class. The movie thing is less positive than it might appear, because it was dubbed in Spanish, which means I only got 50% of what was being said, and I have to write a comment on the movie, but what the heck! After class I had tea with Lena and we finished our group work for tomorrow. The rest of the evening I spent quietly in my room, reading course notes, cleaning up my stuff...

Anyway, the bottom line is (because I feel I have to give a bottom line in order to finish this post elegantly): things can always get worse, but... I'm still surviving! (That's a horrible bottom line, but I'm too tired to think of anything more philosophical right now...)