LP’s excellent staycation – Day 6

by LP

At first I thought it was just the regular “I’ve worked so hard on something so important for such a long time and now that I’m done I don’t know what to do with myself and I keep thinking that there is something that I’m forgetting to do”-mood that I always get into after having accomplished something that seemed impossible (or at least highly unlikely) until I managed to do it.

I still remember how lost and confused I felt after I’d graduated from the VWO. Since I did the exam organised by the state and not the one at my high school, I got my results and my diploma right after my final test. In practice this meant that after two weeks of sleep, study, sleep, exam, sleep, study, sleep, exam, some person I’d never met before went “Congratulations!”, gave me a diploma and ushered me out the building. And there I stood, diploma in one hand and a red rose in the other, completely bewildered. Upon coming home I couldn’t think of anything better to do than to return the 35 books I’d borrowed from the library. And I then went and bought Beck’s Odelay album. Which sounds a lot less weird if I tell you that I graduated in 1996.

Wow, this whole trip down Memory Lane just to say that I’m no stranger to those feelings. NaNoWriMo has seriously forked up my capacities of being brief and concise, that much is clear. So, yeah, I’ve felt that way before and this time even planned outings and activities to ‘ease out’ of study mode. But the nagging kept going on. And on. And on. I checked my calendar to see if I’d missed an appointment: nope. I called The Big Kahuna to ask her if she had a clue what I could be forgetting: nope. It was only this morning, when I took my public transport chip card out of my wallet and saw the receipt that I realised that I’d completely forgotten to pick up my shoes that I left at the cobbler’s two weeks ago. Mystery solved!