Day 18

Day 18

It has been a while since I have written anything.

I have started with my accounting studies at the University of Pretoria. I am studying in English, which is not my home language, and all my subjects (only seven, but still that’s a hell of a lot compared to other courses) are business oriented.

I really do enjoy them though. It feels as though my plan to become an academic success has had a good start, since I have serious and interesting modules with forward thinking lecturers. The types of lecturers that I would one day like to be a part of.

Now the hostel. I wrote a piece that I did not publish which I completed during Orientation Week. It praised the hostel I stayed at for being full of nice traditions and being completely decent and respectable. I thought I would stay there with pride in my heart as the people seemed culturally balanced and just a little bit intimidating to the other residences, and they are.

What I did not realise was that their way of keeping that image was to treat the first years like s**t, making them do mundane tasks, swearing at them and making them greet each senior like a soldier greets the President, except if a soldier mucks up the President's name I’m sure he would be treated more fairly than the way I was treated by groups of at least 30 drunk second-year students, when I fucked up the name of someone I only ever saw once. Other “traditions,” I was told, were even less humane and the swearing, drunkenness and labour was only the start of a seven month “initiation.”

They do this to form a bond between the first years, and while I could, on some level, understand it, I could not let myself be broken, just so that I could become part of something I no longer agreed with.

So I went home.

I tried out the hostel and decided it wasn’t for me. Such is life. My family was excited to see me and since we live very near to the University it doesn’t cause a lot of problems. I now feel free to do what suits me, and that includes studying until I become the most irritating little know-it-all s**t that my friends and family have ever known and writing interesting stories for my worthless little journal, which I will gift to my father when it is finished, since he has no choice at all whether he wants to read it or not, because I can make him. I can also go out partying since my class schedule gives me, and I love saying this, Fridays off! Last night I drank, and I s**t you not, 16 double brandy and cokes and a lovely beer in a matter of 3 hours. I should be dead, but it seems the world needs someone like me, with great insight and a liver made of diamonds, to continue fuckoff forward for a little while longer.

I am happy to oblige.