Monday morning

Woke up at 8.08am this morning. In order to get on the train and be in class at 9, I usually have to leave at 8.10.

"Oh, sh*t!" I thought to myself as I read my watch. The sun was already up and bright, but I was feeling pretty miserable for having such a wonderful start to Monday morning. Within 10 minutes, I washed my face, brushed my teeth, tried to get my hair in order ( realising again that it was a bad idea to shower and then go to bed...), got dressed, and got on my bike. I cycled as fast as I could, but it was exactly those moments when you're in a hurry things get in the way to slow you even more. Traffic lights, slow cyclists, cars...

I missed my regular train, but thankfully there was a slow train a couple of minutes afterwards, which would get me into Leiden (where I study) a little before 9. I ran and skipped through the streets, and managed to complete a walk that would normally take 20 minutes in around 10. Sweaty, hungry, out of breath I got into class, ten past nine. We have this unspoken rule at the university, the so-called 'Leiden quarter' (Leids kwartier)... usually classes don't officially start until a quarter past the hour, so I was technically still on time.

It was a slow and boring class, even more so because the weather, in what seemed like the first day of spring, was so lovely outside. The lecturer asked questions from the 150+pages of readings we had to read to prepare for class, but nobody seemed to have read anything... because frankly the text is so tedious and technical that you'd have to read two, three times to understand. A grueling two hours, and class was finally dismissed.

Almost the rest of the day I spent in the library, working on this paper due for next week. The topic is up to us to decide, as long as it's related to a theme of international law. In my undergrad studies I had come across criticism of international law as Eurocentric and as something simply forced upon the rest of the world. And more recently I came across literature about how international law was used in the 19th Century to justify colonisation and imperialism under the banner of 'humanity' and 'civilisation'... so obvious, with my flair and attraction for the critical, this was what I chose my topic to write about. There's more and more talk of liberalism's virtues of human rights, democratic governance, rule of law, and more and more you see certain states preaching these idea(l)s, or even setting these conditions for other states if they want to be accepted as a member of the (so-called) 'international community'. Well, it occured to me that perhaps today we are not that far away from the slogans of 'humanity' and 'civilisation' as we presume to be... that perhaps today international law is not something that can be applied universally because it appears to be so neutral and so accepted by all. So in my paper I'm going to try to draw the links between 'civilisation' then, and liberalism now, and how through time and different contexts, the (neo)colonial tendencies and inequalities of the international system have not shifted away from the hegemony of the few over the many. Fascinating, mind-boggling stuff... at least I find! :)

Anyways, after sitting in the library reading (and getting distracted by cute people walking around...), I took a break and went to see an old colleague of mine. We've not seen each other for almost a whole year, since she's been on fieldtrip to a far, far away land called Angola. It was like old times, we sat down to dinner, and two hours later were still sitting there, leaving only because the waitresses were wiping the tables around us in a subtle sign telling us to go. She's one of the few close friends with whom I can talk to about anything and everything. We chatted,I told her about my (love-less) life, family, studies, my disgust of bourgeois pretences like the gala I attended sometime ago... and she told me about her adventures in the 'bushes', about being phone-tapped (possibly followed), and the extremes of poverty and super-rich-dom in Angola.

I cycled home, not in a hurry like I was while leaving home his morning, and admired the beautiful stars on this wonderful, calm evening.