What happened
When the world is too much to take in one bite
So I’m back in my hometown now. Same old place, except for the fact that everyone is super hyped over the city being promoted to a type-II urban area.
It’s also that time for grad school applications. Everything is fun and games until you found that being a Vietnamese student equals no scholarship equals paying full tuition equals digging your momma’s wallet again. That’s why I’m seeking fellowships instead.
I’m not lying when I said educational institutions going full-speed on neo-liberalization before, and how that'll become a nightmare for those who still want to play by the rules. The most recent casualty is Konsfack after the Swedish government decided to withdraw all forms of financial support in their 2023 admission policies for international students. The current Konsfack folks are apparently not happy with that (cause how can they be?) And the States? I’m sorry, did I hear: the States? After Biden ejected some 40000 Haitian, Cuban, and Nicaraguan this month and capped the entry threshold at 30000? I don’t wanna sound misleading but it is what it is. We should be afraid of literally everything.
There were times when I was extremely down bad, like i’d-take-any-form-of-pity kind of down bad situation, to continue my education. I’m almost halfway through Lauren Hough’s Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing (again), currently stopping at the part where she and her gay friend Jay shared the same apartment bedroom in D.C, how they barely had enough space for a partition made out of cushions, how Jay’s “hairy ass” occasionally landed on her face every once in a while at midnight; the way the ex-airman held a bag of raisin bagels so close to her chest and almost broke down in tears even though she ain’t no fan of raisin. What I’m trying to say here is that I understand what poverty looks like. I’ll be okay with free raisin bagels 365 days for the entire year as long as I can shit daily (the current program I’m applying to is based in suburban London, to which my prof said I’d have to share an apartment with somebody and work extra hours and still barely manage to pay the rents).
Unpopular opinion: middle-class people never escape poverty, or at least the shadowy traces it leaves behind. And me? I only wanted to get out of here for a while. I apologize if you expected a deeper, more thought-through reason.
Speaking about gay and middle-class (yes these two terms can exist in the same sentence), I remember almost unsubscribing to Jay Mcculough’s YouTube after watching his conservatism plays out on his sub-channel “Gay 2 Gay” where he discusses the topic of queer relationships with his friend Adam. A proud and gay Canadian upper-middle-class and a Conversative he is (yes he did indeed identify as so), Jay was really strong-mouthed about queer relationships being established based on their heterosexual counterparts BECAUSE we, as social participants, needed order and governance to function effectively and properly (he’s pointing towards the statistics regarding AIDS transaction among gay men). Honestly, he was the person that got me interested in Canadian politics in the first place (apart from the fact that Canada literally built a landing pad for extraterrestrial beings [in other words, aliens] as part of their multicultural nationalism promotion, even though the split between Quebec and the rest of country in terms of language, culture, education, and politics is on-brand when one speaks of Canada anyways), so I was somewhat disappointed. For a long time in a while, I was forced to side with someone (Adam, and probably Foucault) and disregard someone else on behalf of political beliefs. It’s not a good feeling. There are so many structural orchestrations that you have no authority over, or worse, you are part of them and cannot escape.
This post is a rant, of course. But I’m also being more serious about learning French, cause who knows I might better be off doing a Master, or a Ph.D. in Quebec (even though making out a Quebec French convo is like listening to two Scottish men’s English over 10+ shots of whiskey, or so I heard). I’m more intrigued about Canada right now above all else, might as well do a little more research on what they’re offering at the moment.
[Also, the picture attached to this post is a “camouflaged road in Finland during WW2. The trees are hung up in rows, with rope, so enemy scout planes can't see the road from low angles, at a distance. June 27, 1941. http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2022/10/camouflaged-road-in-finland-during-ww2.html). I just thought this was sort of mind-boggling to look at.]