One Must Work and Dare if One Really Wants to Live

"One must work and dare if one really wants to live."

-Vincent Van Gogh

For me, Vincent Van Gogh is quite possibly one of the most brilliant painters of all time. For the world, really, he's one of the most revered artists that we have, and he's extremely well known for his art. In fact, his painting, Starry Night over the Rhone is my favorite painting, and it is also my desktop background (the more you know!). But beyond art, Van Gogh was really wise, and he said some pretty brilliant things. Among them was the quote above, which I've also chosen as the title for this post.

"One must work and dare if one really wants to live." I think this is probably one of those things that as you get older, you get more meaning out of it. Life experiences and tragedies and joys make these sort of things more relevant and deep, I think, but at the moment, I think I am gaining a pretty good understanding of this. Especially the whole 'work' part. I seem to be doing nothing but working my cutie patootie off to reach dreams and become "successful." Whatever successful really means. After taking my literature class this year, I believe Dickens would argue that successfulness and happiness is born from one's usefulness to society. Personally, I think that being "successful" is looking at your life and realizing that you're happy and content with where you are, where you've been, and where you're going. As far as I'm concerned, up until this point in my life, I've been a very successful person, and I believe that I will continue to be so.

That is, if I can figure out what classes to write down on my application for Sussex, so that I may be happy with where I'm going.

I think I've determined that selecting courses is the most difficult thing in the universe. With the semester coming to a close, I'm just days away from starting my application for the program, which means selecting the courses I want to take while abroad. At UT, we have all these courses that seem to go on for pages and pages with so many options! At Sussex, they have just one page of courses, and two sections of modules that I can select from, with about ten courses per semester in the school of English. Somehow, having fewer choices is far more overwhelming than having what seems like endless choices at the tips of my fingers.

I guess that's the sort of thing that changes when going from a university with a population of over 51,000 students to a university with 13,000. It's sort of crazy and makes my jaw drop a bit. That sounds so tiny! I have no idea how large the campus is, but my current campus is 40 acres. I'm curious as to the size of the University of Sussex, which is located in the Downs National Park. I'm sorry, but a national park? How cool!

Speaking of courses, today, mine came to a close for this fall semester at UT. So of course, my answer to the last day of classes and start of dead week is not "Well, Tayma, get to studying!" it's "Let's procrastinate and make a blog post!" Sigh. Luckily, all that's left for me are two finals (one in Phonetics and one in Italian), and a paper for my 19th Century Literature class. It doesn't sound like much, but I have over 10 hours of lecture to listen to, 10 chapters to master, and a 5-6 page paper discussing different discourses present in Middlemarch and Mayor of Casterbridge. Why am I studying English again? If you can figure it out, please let me know.

I'm actually pretty thrilled for the end of this semester, and - I can't believe I am saying this - but the start of next semester. I'm so stoked to be taking Art History (Neal Caffrey, anyone?) and I'm pretty pumped for my two lit classes. It's going to be another busy semester, but I guess being in school is more productive than sitting on my behind watching White Collar  and Glee, right? Unless White Collar can teach me all that I need to know about being an upstanding citizen, rather than a conman turned upstanding citizen while wearing an ankle bracelet and working as a consultant for the FBI. Which it can't. So alas, university for me.

Alright, pulling my head out of the clouds now, and grounding myself firmly back on Earth...ish.

In other news, my fiction writing class ended on Wednesday, and I have to say I'm relieved. I ended the class with a B+, which is pretty damn good in my opinion, but still I am so glad that class is finished with. I walked into that class firmly believing that one day I could be a writer who changes lives and writes something with immense meaning. I walked out of that class wondering if maybe I should leave the life-changing novels to J.K. Rowling and John Green (still haven't read his books, but from what I hear, they've got a pretty great impact). We'll see. Maybe I just haven't found the right story to tell yet...

So I know in my last post, I promised information about the cost of the program, as well as donations and sponsors and all of that, and it's still coming! I've messaged my adviser, but she's out of the office and hopefully I'll be hearing back from her soon. Once I have all the information, you'll have the information, and we'll see how God works from there.

Alright, well I think that I should probably cut this off now before I start rambling off some sort of nonsense. I know that my posting has been a bit widespread, but with finals ending next week, that will all change - instead of 12 days between posts, I'm hoping to post weekly at a minimum. I hope you all have a marvelous weekend, and if you have finals next week, best of luck to you! Or, in bocca al lupo, amici! (There's a little Italian for you ;) ) Until next time!

Keep Calm and Brighton on!

-Tayma xx

P.S. Hi, Dad! Yes, guys, my dad reads my blog. Cool status right there. He was a drummer and stuff.