Pestilog

Why Am I So Irritable? Let Me Count the Ways...

So, a lot of the rioting nonsense of the last few weeks has died down, at least in public. November 4th was supposed to be a big day of mayhem. My University even shut down its facilities because it expected trouble in the 5th district. Nothing like that happened though.

There was a huge, candle-lit march down Andrassy Utca, which went right by our front door. People crammed shoulder to shoulder on a 4 lane road for at least 45 minutes. The local news put the number of people at about half a million. It was pretty amazing. It was supposed to be a FIDESZ march, but most people said that they came out in support of a democratic government (ie, not Gyurcsani) and in protest of police violence of the past few weeks.

Police violence. There has been a lot of it. More and more videos keep popping up from the inner city here, and they are really kind of mindblowing. Like this one, where the cops swarm a single guy, beat the holy crap out of him, and leave him there:

What? Seriously...what? What the hell is that? How are people not being stripped of their badges right and left? The government is even backing police behavior, saying that they acted within their scope and with discretion to serve the public order. My ass.

There was also an incident that I found totally unbeleivable the first time I heard about it, until I found an article on Chew.hu about it.

Around 7:30 p.m. [on October 23], a police van stopped in front of the building and between eight and ten officers jumped out. Two attacked guests sitting on the terrace, the others entered the restaurant, shouting, "We'll beat up everyone's heads, you rotten filth!" They attacked the guests, including foreigners, and also the cook working at an another restaurant next door...[T]eargas was then fired into the restaurant, the door was shut in the face of the owner, a woman, and the officers left.

There is even a paragraph at the end of the article about two Americans who ended up hiding in the bathroom for hours to keep away from the police attacks. Good gravy.

AND to top it all off, I have been sick for like 4 weeks now. Its mono. Its not mono. Its bacterial. Its not bacterial. No one can tell me what is wrong with me. They only tell me to go home and rest, which I dont do. I do not rest. I do not stop and slow down. This is not my bag. And during midterms no less. I have already been to campus twice today, despite my house arrest, and that is another part of why I am in such a bad mood.

I asked David Berliner to advise my thesis project this year. He's rad. He's an old school, Malinowskian, emperical, field-work driven anthropologist. And he's hilarious, and smart, and great to work with, and totally loves me. AND he's fully skipping out of Budapest in January to pick up a tenure track position back in Belgium. I almost threw my coffee mug out the window I was so mad. Working with David was really going to make my year (and my project for that matter).

He is being really kind and generous and helping me work out another reasonable advisor. He's helping me piece together my whole thesis board actually, which is really helpful, especially since his pending sorti means he can talk shit about the department and tell me who to go to and who to avoid for this or that. He's also offering to edit my drafts as the year goes on. I am totally taking him up on this. If I can't list him on the official page, I at least want to mark his involvement in the acknowledgements.

But, as they say in Belgium, c'est la vie. At least I got to meet the guy. He was part of the reason why I decided to come here. I got a good semester out of him, I guess. And he described me as "a brilliant student" who is "really promising" today. I don't know if that was consilliatory pillow-talk, but hopefully that means he's down to keep in contact in the future as I go back to school and keep returning to Europe for fieldwork. We'll see. In the mean time, I'm too busy brooding about it. And I have midterm papers to write.

Ok, no more stalling. I have a long date with Appadurai for the next few hours, then I am proverbially drinking myself into a proverbial stupor when the election returns come in. Stephen and I are going to gather around the streaming NPR broadcast and cry into each other for the political sake of Texas and Ohio. Have I mentioned that Rick Perry is a major jerk wad? Well, now I have. And I mean that in the most academic sense possible. I think the term was coined by Gramsci, but don't quote me on that.

Oh, but one good thing did happen in the last week. We had Kate. Have I mentioned Kate? Probably not, cause I suck. She's in all of our Halloweed pictures. She's from Australia and is backpacking her way through Europe. She stayed with us for nearly a week. She was so rad. She became housemate #5, and its really odd and kinda sad not to have her here anymore. She got to put up with us being big ninnies who couldn't go out to see the city with her because of mid-term work, but she did manage to spawn adventures to Kerepesi Cemetary on All Saints Day, which was pretty bad-ass, as well as a trip to the flea markets by Keleti Palyaudvar, which we hadn't made it to yet. She left a big mark on the house. Not the least of which is one of my favorite pictures ever taken in our living room.

My god, we're hilarious.
We miss you Kate!

Labels: Budapest, grad school, hospitality club, Kate, photos, procrastiation, rabble rousing, riots, thin justification for my existace, video

posted by Veruka2 @ 10:01 PM