When I write like that, my friends would say, “Paul, you’re so funny when you’re emo.” Anyways, back to you. First, a mistake is a wrong way to think of it. At our point of life, we should be trying out different avenues of life. Since that’s what you did, it’s perfectly fine in the grand scheme of things. It’s actually great you made the decision, in your mind it may be too late, but in contrast it was correct. There are other things in life that would require this, whether to find, stay, move on from a girl/family/friends/major (career paths)/job, etc.

Though now that you have done it, you can now say, you can now say,”Hey, I tried it and it didn’t work.” That is actually better than saying, man I wish I just tried (it)…

Money thoughts are normal. People who say, “Money can’t buy you happiness”…don’t have money. Though you can use that motivation and turn it to positive energy to do something about it.

BTW, I had to quit Santa Clara University before starting any classes. I requested for more financial aid, got declined and decided getting a bachelor and a $100,000 USD student loan on my record, wouldn’t be the brightest of future, even though it would be from one of the possible nice private universities. Though I did get my $400 deposit back. (Funny, I would end up going to that school almost 6 days a week…not as a student but as a mailman…delivering and picking up mail in the school’s little student post office right around the girls-only dorm) Also at the time, I decided to change majors as I didn’t like the votality of being a Computer Scientist…Programmer.

So…Life is like a river, it always flows forward. Your current path isn’t a straight one, so it is not a U-turn but a slight diversion around a hard spot.

Last, you’re way younger than me xD You visited more places than I can dream of, have a brain that can absorb different languages and have a 2+ year old blog. Last thing…I wish I had the opportunity to study aboard. Since, school is vacation. Vacation is when you don’t have to go to work.

Anyway good luck to you in Beijing!

And I raged about TD 19, more about it in the next post ^^

I might be in the UK 2009-2010.

TD19 is a turning point - and the events were exactly as spoilered by my best friend reading novel summaries.

@Will: That’s great, and I wish you good luck in any of your plans, whatever they might be. May you find more fulfillment in this project than I have.
(Quick note, taking part in an exchange project (mostly ERASMUS in Europe) usually comes with grants and/or scholarships, and should not last longer than one year (6 months for most), so the conditions are much different from mine now. But who knows, maybe I would actually have enjoyed this experience, had I been an exchange student and not an independent one?)

Of course, this is just me talking, I didn’t even made it to college yet, and in my country it’s extremely hard to get to one (almost like in Japan). At least, if I get there, it’ll be free.
And I still have a language (English) to perfect before I start another one.

By the way, thank you for adding my site to your blogroll.

TJ, RyanA: Thank you guys for your support, I’m sure I will soon recover from this event, perhaps stronger and more motivated than ever. Actually, Ryan, before going to Venice, I already had considered going to the US to study either English, Japanese, or both. California sounded quite interesting back then, too. I even had gone to the US embassy to gather relevant information about enrollment procedures, visas, and what-not (btw, lol @ their tight security there). But I realized that enrollment fees were quite horrendous, as well as all the other expenses concerning traveling to US and living in Cali. I quickly gave up that idea. Hmm… now that I think of it, back then, my university had an agreement with the Miami University… in Ohio, but a friend of mine who had been there for a year said it was not really all that great, and still expensive despite the scholarship.

—

So, today, I went to the university pretty early in the morning to get it over with as quickly as possible. But, being redirected from office to office, always being forced to join the new, endless queues, it took me almost three hours to finally be able to formulate my wish. I filled out all the forms, and could already have handed them over, but I needed a stamp of 14,62 Euros from the closest tobacco shop to complete the request. Of course, with the usual Italian bureaucracy, the queues did not vanish at all, and since offices would close anyway, I decided I should return on Tuesday (they don’t open on Mondays, nooo) and finish it once and for all. I will get back my secondary school diploma, and be gone from here.
Oh and of course, I will get no refund whatsoever from my ~800 Euros enrollment fee, even if I did not take any courses at all. Well isn’t that just easy money, I certainly paid someone’s salary in there! Ah well, I’m joking, it was quite ridiculous to think there was a refund policy in the first place anyway. (But they could have mentioned it somewhere, like on the enrollment form for my university, “once the money has been transferred, no refund will be possible”)

For some reason now though, I feel as if a heavy boulder just got lifted off my shoulders. I’m not really sure why, but the noise in my head is now gone, and the fever from yesterday almost disappeared. And as I walk through the now familiar streets of Giudecca, Zattere, and up to the university, I finally find the Venice of my dreams back. Now that I know I will be gone in a few days, I relearn to appreciate these surroundings. Sitting in the waterbus station, seeing the sunlight reflections on the surface of the water, watching the boats come and go, observing the people, young and old, living their life as usual here… yes, I probably should just have remained a tourist here.

Either way, I just filled out the online enrolment form for uni.lu, I will be doing yet another semester of English here. I will attend all the courses regularly, so I can get back in shape and prepare myself accordingly to my university career in the UK. However, In order to avoid redundancy with what I already completed one year ago, I will only be taking the exams I did not take back then. It’s pretty facultative, but that’s what makes most sense.
(This is also the compromise I made with my mum, because she thinks she is not strict enough with me and keeps blaming herself for my misfortune here; so now she’s forcing me to do some serious work at uni. Can’t blame her for guilting out like that, although in effect, it’s I and I alone who has to decide everything for myself.)

And what will I do until Wednesday now? Well… I don’t know. Take a stroll, wander around all day long with my camera in hand, like the tourist I have reverted back to? Oh, I forgot.
Carnival is starting tomorrow, so I might actually enjoy the beginning of the celebrations while I’m still here! Should make the best of this trip now.

Okay, I suppose that should be all from my angsty self. Once again, I am very grateful to everyone who put up with my endless walls of text and offered their support in this tumultuous period of my life.
I am pretty tired now, slept from 8 till midnight yesterday, and then talked with my roommate all night long, been awake ever since. I suppose I could take a small nap now. (Poor guy, hasn’t slept in 30 hours and he’s being dragged to the Airport by his girlfriend to pick up her father.)

Many among us strive to be creatures of perfection, but that’s simply impossible. It’s impossible because there are times when we need to make mistakes. To experiment.

Scientific process, as it is. To make a blind assumption based on our own biases and what we know. Perform an experiment to prove the assumption, then observe and report what really happens.

By the same process, everything is a “theory”. Nothing’s completely absolute. The physics major’s golden rule, string theory, and many other studies built on shaky foundations might all be a house of cards. To be completely blown away and thrown in the wastebasket by some future discovery.

Hey, did you hear any of those economic theories about the strength of free market capitalism? HAH! Glad my dad didn’t live to see that all he learned in Law School was a bunch of hooey.

So let me leave you with this, then. You may look at this as an expensive vacation, but I see more to it. You saw a slice of the world for what it really was. You came to realize where your real priorities should lie. You have a plan. A PLAN! That’s something few people are able to piece together when they’re down in the dumps.

Oh, and don’t get too hung up about the money thing. Money… in excess, it truly warps people. While there’s some wealthy, charitable folks out there, I find that most rich kids grow up to be man-children. Old folks without any sense of what it’s truly like to live, of what qualities really should be appreciated.

“I’d rather trust a countryman than a townman,
You can judge by his eyes, take a look if you can,
He’ll smile through his guard,
Survival trains hard.”

(Yes, I love Peter Gabriel just a little too much. “The Chamber of 32 Doors” really is a marvelous song…)

Also, it’s perfectly natural to think MY GOD I’M 21 MY LIFE IS PASSING ME BY, but it’s one of those silly obstacles that you shouldn’t get too hung up on. You’ve accomplished plenty thus far.

Take it from a person that dropped out of public school due to family circumstances and had to hoof it with home schooling. What you do now doesn’t matter as much as you’d think. Oh, it’s important, but… it’s not like everything has to be perfect.

You’re YOUNG, dammit! You’re supposed to do these things before you’re old so you can get them out of your system! ; )