The past few weekends saw me staring at the blank pages of my blogging notebook. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't fill them with words about street art, comic books or upcoming trips abroad. I realized there was only one thing I wanted to write about: my experiences at university. I've hesitated multiple times, put my pen down countless times, told myself it's not interesting for the audience every single day. But hey, my blog, my rules. We're gonna talk about that student life of mine.

As you might know, I started studying English Language and Culture at Utrecht University after an involunaty gap year. I spent most of my time in the first few weeks worrying if I'd be smart enough to pass my classes, if I wasn't too lazy. Now, after the first out of four blocks is disappearing in the rearview mirror rapidly, I can confidently say that I am capable of dealing with whatever information university throws at me.

I took three classes this first block: literature, linguistics and German. I passed all three with flying colors. Linguistics is a bit of a touchy subject for me though, because my teacher accused me of plagiarism. He also said I have an obvious Dutch accent (apparently those Americans in Jordan didn't think I was American, they were just dumb?), but I've already upgraded my accent to "passable" without changing a single thing about my pronunciation. Apart from that, I've been told my way of speaking is unnatural and unpleasant for my audience. Thanks mate.

Despite my "problems" with linguistics, I'm not extremely worried about academics anymore. I'm currently in the fourth week of block 2, in which I'm taking three classes again. So far, everything is going fine. It's quite different from block 1: I'm now wisdom toothless and actually know my way around Utrecht. Every Friday I rent a bike to race through the city center on my way to class. I'm enjoying every day in university, though I'm aware of the challenges ahead. I've been playing with the idea of doing a double bachelor (English/German), but I'm not entirely sure about that. My tutor says it's impressive that I'm already thinking about doing the double and taking extra classes; she has no idea I've studied German for three years, so getting that double bachelor wouldn't be very difficult for me.

The biggest challenge I'll face in the near-distant future is boredom. Even though I'm already taking an extra class, I'm bored out of my mind. Sometimes I think I could have done this entire course in half of the time if I'd been allowed to work at my own pace. Since I'm stuck at this snail's pace, I'm looking for other things to do. One of them is blogging. I haven't paid as much attention to this place in 2018 as I would have wanted, but that actually gave me time to think about what I really want. I've come to the conclusion that I'm not above rambly posts like this one, or pictures that aren't perfect. Over the past couple of years, blogging has gone from a hobby to a desirable career for many people. I'll be the first to admit that I'd like to make money doing what I love, but if that means I can't ramble anymore, I'm out. University has given me the chance to spend more time doing things I like and I don't want to start hating the things I like because I turned them into a competition.

Anyway, I have a bunch of sonnets to read. I don't know about you, but for me it was quite refreshing to write a life update the way every blogger ran their online space back in 2013. I might make this a thing. Or, you know, disappear again for a month or so, because that's what I've been doing all year. That's a joke. I'm actually working on a lot of writing projects at the moment. My Instagram feed is coming along nicely as well. So watch this space. There's some interesting stuff up ahead.