It really tied the room together

There it is - a Venn Diagram of part of my world view or more specifically {Things ∉ My World View}...

Four years of Chemical Engineering followed by another four doing a PhD [, which I have successfully defended; I will be graduating at the soonest convenience]²... I wasn't ready for this.

In the week leading up to "Mission In Furnishing," I kept having the exchange between Walter and the Dude go through my head. Well, that and the montage of Edward Norton's nameless character furnishing his apartment in Fight Club.

Thanks a bunch pop-culture.

Linen, towels, beds, shelves, tables and ladders and chairs [oh my].¹ It's a f**kin' mystery to me. The whole week I was thinking through what I needed, and a triage on the order to get them in.

It took three visits to Ikea to get the essentials [plus dealies I simply had to have]. The first time was tough going. Halfway through my Ikean trek, I was done, mentally. It was purgatory. Chairs, followed by bins, followed by shelves, followed by office desks, followed by office chairs, follwed by stools, followed by dining tables, followed by beds, followed by light bulbs... I just wanted it to be over. I strongly advice using the website to decide what to get beforehand and just go straight for the chosen items. Otherwise, you'll feel like this, but without the laugh track.

To cap it off, my poor choice in timing - stepping out of Ikea on a Friday at 1700 - meant that my taxi was "25 minutes away" for about 2 hours. The next two visits went far more smoothly, except for waiting over 30 minutes at the warehouse for oversized items.

So, Ikea, a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't live there.

At the beginning of my furnishing travails, I balked often at the cost of things, particularly in Ikea, since I was expecting "rock bottom" prices. Being the neophyte that I was,³ I had no point of reference for the costs. But when I took the time to think about it: compared to the amount I am prepared to pay for shoes, clothes and PC parts; the cost of having things to sit on, sleep in, eat off, hide under, etc. daily for years is very reasonable.

My favourite discovery has been Hema. It's just a few minutes from my apartment and it's got a sh*tload of housing stuff, almost everything a man about town could want.

Almost.

Up until yesterday I had not been able to find baking trays. What the hell, Antwerp? How hard is it to provide a planar piece of heat-conductive metal for the purpose of baking? There was no end to bread-, tart-tins and cupcake trays, but the most geometrically trivial of baking vessels... I never had this trouble in Ireland. Luckily, I found an Arnotts-like department store that has them, understandably a tad more expensive than Tesco.

Up until now, I wrapped my oven shelves in tinfoil.  My oven is going to take a while to get used to; The fan is weak so the forced convection isn't great, and the baking times are longer than I'm used to.  The first batch of cookies were OK, but a bit harder/crunchier than I'd like. The second batch worked out a lot better. Plus, the Nestlé cocoa powder I got in the supermarket is like a party in my nose where everyone is invited,^3.5 and yields a richer flavoured cookie than the Cadbury's cocoa in Ireland.

There isn't much to report in work. On my first day we had quite a time finding a lab coat that fit me because of my apeish armspan; I now sport the largest labcoat size we could find in the building. Sure, the sleeves go to my wrist, but it's like some kind of monk robe the way it is cinched across in front and goes down to my knees.

Much like Walter White⁴ I will sometimes need to have a full-face mask with a filter for my work with powders. During my safety training, the instructor, in broken English and gesturing with his hands, told me that I have a small face, which may be a problem [for getting a seal on the mask]. It turns out that it was not a problem, but I can't help feeling insulted by being told I have a small face. :-(    :-(

[Edit: it has since been pointed out to me that trays are available in Ikea:
http://www.ikea.com/be/nl/catalog/products/10196662
http://www.ikea.com/be/nl/catalog/products/00133043

This only serves to annoy me further... Ikeeeeeaaaaaaaa!]

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¹Mick Foley's classic quoteⁱ from when he was the general manager in WWE, no youtube or soundbite of it... but trust me, it happened. Also, the ladder was "poetic license", i.e. "a lie" because I don't need one.

²"I didn't go to evil freakin' Chemical Engineering School for four years to be called Mr McNamara."

³I'm a paleophyte now. Whatever.
^3.5Don't do drugs kids.
⁴Breaking Bad shout out! What! I'm getting a buzz just recalling the season gone by.

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ⁱItself a corruption of "Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my!" from Wizard of Oz

Vakbondsactie

I'm going through the process of registering with the Antwerp municipality.

It begins with notifying the police that you are living in the area. They drop in to your place to make sure you live there. If, as in my case, you are in work at the time, they leave a note for you to come to the local police station.

Mired as I am in pop-culture, I found myself thinking of any instance in a film where going into/dealing with continental police ended well... In Kiss of the Dragon and Taken the cops were crooked; in the Bourne films they were patsies/cat's paws.⁰ I can't think of cases where they've come off well.

Needful to say¹, I was carried away with flights of fancy.² What actually happened was a cursory glance at my papers and I was asked to sit in the waiting area until I was brought to have a quick chat with a pleasant middle-aged woman.³

As it happens, on the same day, I had my internet connected. The technician that turned up was, I must admit, good looking and stylishly dressed – sporting a fashionable square-faced, silver-framed wristwatch. Coming from Ireland it was rather incongruous, where technicians generally have jeans or overalls with the company logo. As usual, I was thinking "spy."

It reminds me of the holiday I took in Iceland a couple of years back. Two of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen were selling hot dogs at a tourist trap called the Blue Lagoon. These, these blonde goddesses selling hot dogs... it made no sense. If they were doing this job in a film, there would have been complaints about suspension of disbelief or lack thereof. As usual, Shakespeare and Hamlet got to it a couple of years before hand:

Hamlet: Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end [...] is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature [...]⁴

Hamlet was cautioning against hamming⁵ it up, but I think my anecdote illustrates the "ham" line is farther away than we actually think. 

No doubt, everyone is having what amounts to the revelation at the end of The Usual Suspects with cup dropping and all when you pore back through your life and see these people that don't fit. But don't worry, it's normal.

In other news, I feel settled enough to focus on learning Dutch. I have started listening to vocab on the way to and from work. And I have a handy pocket dictionary, which I take out now and again for key words. It was really useful on Friday morning when I arrive to see that my bus wasn't at its stop....   vakbondsactie - or trade union action - means I wait 40 minutes for a bus in the morning and 60 minutes in the evening.

Anyway, I really think I am getting the hang of it...

Gellukig Kerstfeest!

*****

⁰Imagine those poor unsuspecting cops trying to get some vagrant off of a park bench; they were just doing their jobs, and they get their asses kicked.
¹I know that the phrase is needless, but that is an apparent contradiction, since I am writing and I have decided that it needed to be said. It's like that phrase - "it goes without saying." What is really being said is: "I do not trust you to figure this out on your own, so I am going to prelude the information with a lip service to my belief in your competence....  'no offence'ⁱ."

²"Sorry sir, your papers... they are no in order. I just have to make a call, if you will wait in this room." At which point two burley 6 footers in riot gear come in with tonfas/night sticks. But then I clean house, and someone walks by going,"are you a special forces guy or something?" And I am all like "I'm just the crystallization expert."

³One thing that has bothered me about English language films set in Europe is how native languages would be used intermittently for filler and minor developments. but plot-critical information is relayed in English, no matter what nationality the source is. A month living and working in Belgium has made this perfectly reasonable to me because I have yet to meet someone that could not tell me in clear English what I needed to know.

⁴Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 17–24 - granted my editing has ruined the iambic pentameter...

⁵The words are unrelated - hamming comes from the first syllable of amateur. [ORIGIN late 19th cent. : perhaps from the first syllable of amateur ; compare with the slang term hamfatter [inexpert performer.] Sense 2 dates from the early 20th cent. - from my Mac Dictionary]

*****

ⁱWhich happens to be another doozy, for carte blanche insulting. I think the best outrage against these veiled maneuverings is Jack Bristow (Victor Garber) on Alias: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0qaIvb3bGA^a

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^aMy former "study buddy [one lab removed]", John, pointed out that I forgot about the gold standard in thinly veiled condescending insult: "With all due respect."