Welp, the time's here. I'm gonna be heading off to the UK in a ricketty steel box with engines in just over 24 hours. And I won't lie, it's stressful.
I'm justified in being freaked out. After all, I lived with my family until now. I studied at a local university. Now I'm skipping the masters step, going to a somewhat more prestigious university, and getting away from mah folks at the exact same time. If that's not a leap, what is?
There's the stress of "will I be adequate academically". I downed a ton of articles. I read them. They were scientific logorrhea hiding behind barbed-wire formulas. As such, I familiarized myself a bit with how stuff works from an extremely basic standpoint to not come in empty-handed. I'm usually quick to grasp stuff that's presented in a friendly manner, and they know I'm an interdisciplinary weirdo, so my rational side is telling me all will be well. My irrational side is scared.
And, obviously, I'll miss my family. There's times when we quarrel, but who doesn't. Mom's concerned whether I'll be able to handle being in charge of my life, but I think that's not really a problem. I'm asked to make Excel cells red (from within a program), I manage to learn to do it and pull it off, even though it's only for visual purposes. Whenever I'm home alone, I don't wreck up the place, I feed myself, I clean up, I know how to operate a laundry machine and use an online bank account (to pay stuff). So I guess I'll do fine.
The world is doing everything its might to make me feel better. It's feeding me good music (new Bucket trio of discs is his best thing in ages, new Biffy is surprisingly un-shit by their major label standards, and I discovered Voivod's awesomeness three years too late). It's letting me socialize with people, "closing the pages" of my life here. Slowly saying farewell to everything and everybody. Already said farewell to the mountain house, my good friend from down south, Lillien... ugh. This is pretty damn tough. But, excluding the nerves from the leap, I'm in surprisingly good psychic condition. So, I'll have to use it to my advantage and have a good start there. The good friend from down south reminded me of a happy time from around 2004-2005, when I could walk up to anybody and go "I don't know you, I'm Rumpy, who are you?"... it was a different time. But I'm reconnecting with some of those vibes. The meetups with fellow bronies helped, as did all those gatherings and some inner mental closure.
Signing off, almost certainly for the last time from Poland for a while. Anxious like shit, but rather confident in the end. Rumpy.
