Testing... Testing... 1,2,3...

Sorry for my unannounced absence.  I have had a hectic and stressful several weeks, by my standards.  I completed a series of four Dutch language exams over the course of eight days.  That was bookended by visits from my brother-in-law, The P's brother, The PB, both on his way to and from meeting their parents in Poland.  None of that is actually too bad, but I have been dealing with some background noise that has had my stress level cranked up way beyond baseline.  I am in the midst of a consumer dispute and am possibly about to be sued for a couple thousand euros by a vendor, actually a collection agency now.  That might not sound like too much money, and it's not.  And it's not something I can't afford.  But my whole approach to life is living simply, and that involves consuming little, which means spending little.  A hit for €2,000 erases literally hundreds of very conscious, very reasoned, very deliberate decisions considered, made, and executed over the course of many months.  In the big scheme of things it's not a big deal, but it shall smart sharply if it comes to pass.  

And of course that is the situation that would provide the absolute best material I could possibly provide in this space at this time.  I can't share it though, obviously.  Perhaps a post including the texts of many dozens of emails, written in Dutch, between first me and the vendor, and then between me and the collection agency, will be someday forthcoming.  Don't wait on it.  Do ask me about the situation if you see me in person though.  It is stupid, absurd, Kafkaesque...all that stuff.  And I am absolutely in the right.  And the dispute is over an amount of money that is just about at the border where it becomes more valuable to pay an attorney to defend my honor than to pay a completely unjust penalty to utter scoundrels to make the annoyance go away.  

So yeah.  I'm sorry I can't talk more about that.  Luckily the stress level has decreased.  I finally talked to a lawyer, an advocaat, last week.  They agreed that the claim is absurd, and recommended that I absolutely not pay these parasites.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that now I have no options but to just wait and see if they have the gall to take me to court.  The people who are threatening to sue me are not responding to emails asking if we can just end this nonsense.  Could be worse.  

I can talk about my Staatsexamen Nederlands als Tweede Taal - NT-2 Prograamma 1, my Dutch as a Second Language Exams.  I've taken all of those now, Spreken, Luisteren, Lezen, en Schrijven...Speaking, Listening, Reading, and Writing.  I knew I was ready, and engaged in very little preparation.  And my language is at the appropriate level for these exams, but I should have spent more time engaging with practice exams for both the speaking and listening, to become more familiar with the formats.  I could have benefitted from that.  I can easily pass all four exams, but am not confident that I did so on my first try.  

All of the exams were conducted on computer, in a large testing room which holds a maximum of one hundred test takers.  As a white dude I was in the minority.  As a native English speaker, I was nearly the only one.  There were more women than men.  The majority of the women wore headscarves.  It was mostly Turks, Syrians, and Moroccans.  The next largest group was an amalgamation of Eastern Europeans.  Each exam's group was rounded out with the rando here and there, me, a Chinese lady, a guy from England.  I made a friend accidentally, a Kurd from Syria.  My southern friendliness, a cultural phenomenon which I am slowly coming to learn is mostly entirely fake and superficial, comes off here as legit friendliness.  And if you're going to talk the talk then you have to walk the walk, as far as I'm concerned.  So now this Kurd dude has my number.  I expect him to contact me in the near future for "a drink or something to eat"...  

I did the Listening exam first, on a Wednesday morning.  It was a tough one, the second toughest out of two tough ones in four.  The exam lasts ninety minutes.  It consists of forty multiple choice questions.  There are three choices, so right there you've got to like your chances of passing if you are at all prepared.  In what three choice, non-math, multiple choice question can't you eliminate one of the three?  And that held for the most part here, but I'm not at a point in my life where I want to be making a bunch of 50/50 choices in an exam, even though this is not exactly high stakes testing.  I can take the exam again before the end of the year if need be.  The exam fees are reasonable.  We are in no danger of being deported.  But, passing each of these four exams will guarantee my right of citizenship here, and guarantee my family's right to remain.  So it's not exactly fooling around either.  I'm ready to get this done, especially if the empire might be launching a war of aggression on Iran in the near future, because I'm going to be spouting some seditious-assed shit if that comes to pass.  

(For the sake of precision of language I feel that I must interject that of course I know that amerikkka has already launched a war of aggression against Iran...and Syria...and Venezuela....and North Korea...and  Yemen...and Somalia...and Cuba...and Russia...and dozens of other sovereign nations over the past century or more.  For starters, economic sanctions are an act of war.  Period.  They are also a war crime, as defined by international law, because they target civilian populations.  From my perspective that makes everyone who supports or implements sanctions guilty of war crimes.  That includes the executive, the legislators, the people at state, the people at the treasury, the people at justice, and all of the contractors working at law firms, consulting firms, and banks helping to implement these unethical, illegal, and inhumane measures.  In a just world they will all be strung up, every last one of them.  But for the sake of easily-read prose and broad-stroke political opinions let's just say that I'm going to lose it if a shooting war breaks out in Iran.)  

So for each of the forty questions you hear through your headphones a bit of conversation lasting between half a minute and a minute and a half.  There are vignettes which last from three to five questions at a time.  The last section includes videos along wth the audio.  After each snippet of conversation you get 25 seconds to read the question and select one of the three answers.  The test just keeps rolling along.  You can't pause or go back.  If you don't understand it the first time then you are relegated to guessing.  There are no dialects used, but there are different accents, and the variance between accents in this small nation is something that still boggles my mind.  And there are some Dutch accents that I understand almost perfectly, and there remain some that are nearly unintelligible to me, and I encountered some difficult ones during this exam.  

That's about it.  That one was challenging.  A passing grade is sixty-something percent.  I'm not confident, but I probably muddled through.  It wasn't a fun way to start though.  

Three days later, Saturday morning, the day after The P returned from her two week-plus work trip, I had my second exam.  This one was the writing.  Dictionaries were allowed.  Het schrijven examen bestaat uit drie delen en duurt 110 minuten.  The first part consists of ten exercises of writing one sentence.  For example they give you a short written description of a situation, and show a brief email with the first sentence already written.  You must compose an appropriate second sentence to complete the email.  The second part of the exam consists of filling in two short texts.  That meant filling in two middling-length forms, including several descriptive sentences for each.  In one of the vignettes we had to choose two out of four areas we would like help from the employment bureau.  I chose preparing for a job interview and creating a better resume.  My reasonings, stated as required, were that I have never understood why a resume is such an important thing and that I am not good at job interviews because I approach them too casually and with too much confidence, because I can obviously do the job as good as anyone else, and probably better.  Both resumes and job interviews are largely performative in my view, and I don't play that shit.  I am intelligent, competent, and extremely hard-working, not to mention punctual.  Resumes and job interviews are contrived methods for incompetent and under-qualified people to masquerade as all of those things.  Dignity has never allowed me to jump through those hoops, or maybe it was excessive pride, whatever.  For these sorts of tests they say just to tell the truth in simple language and don't try to make stuff up.  I'm not sure if that strategy should be employed by me.  

The third part of the exam involves writing two short texts, each a paragraph of maybe four to six sentences.  It wasn't too tough.  The difficult thing about this exam was that you had to watch your time.  After checking everything over for grammar and spelling I finished with a bit more than ten minutes to go.  A fair number of the people in the room either did not finish or did not get to review their work to their satisfaction.  I'm quite confident that I scored well on the writing exam, and I have perhaps the many emails that I have composed in my consumer dispute over the past several months to thank for it.  

My next exam was the following week on a Tuesday.  It was the speaking one.  That's the one I might have failed.  My spoken Dutch is not great, but I communicate.  The format of this exam was tough though.  It was very rapidly-paced and did not give you much chance at all to think of what you wanted to say.  It's totally doable, but I should have approached it with a game plan.  The exam lasts thirty minutes and consists of eight short exercises and eight medium exercises.  The short exercises require answers of as little as one word and up to the length of a sentence.  The medium-length exercises require answers of two or more spoken sentences.  You hear a recorded description of a situation and then are allowed twenty five seconds to read a question about the situation.  Then the program begins recording automatically.  You have twenty seconds to speak for each exercise in the first section, and thirty seconds in the second section.  

The first section I did okay.  I wasn't completely satisfied with my performance.  The rapid-fire nature of the exam, and having to give answers quickly and in one take is difficult.  You state your answer in the first five or ten seconds of recording, and then spend the next ten seconds silently and retrospectively tallying your grammar and pronunciation errors.  In the second part of the exam I really mangled a couple of them.  The last long form question of the exam I completely botched.  Again I was a victim of getting a question that I actually have a really strong opinion about.  The gist of the question was, "Do you think it is a good or bad thing that people with differing levels of education earn differing levels of income?  Give two reasons why."  

So I was like, "I am going to kill this one!"  And then the beep sounded, and I proceeded to launch a screed so righteous that I talked myself right out of my vocabulary and into a grammatical corner by the first clause of my second sentence.  I did manage to say that I believe all labor to be of equal value, and that I find it unfair that people should have differing income levels.  I was unable to coherently back up my argument.  I spent the remaining seconds stammering and sputtering.  The exam ended a few seconds later and I released an exasperated exclamation.  I might have to do that one over.  We'll see.  

The following day, two Wednesdays ago, I sat for the reading exam.  That was a nice way to end it, forty multiple choice questions covering thirteen written pieces of increasing length and complexity over one hundred ten minutes.  Dictionaries allowed.  I will be disappointed if I did not get a perfect score.  Unfortunately that is neither here nor there.  Though one does receive a score, for all intents and purposes the exams are pass/fail, and the scores are not cumulative.  A perfect score in reading does not improve my deficit in speaking.  I will get my scores in six weeks or so.  

In the meantime The P pointed out that my strengths and weaknesses in Dutch correspond to my strengths and weaknesses in my mother tongue.  I'm really strong in reading and writing, and weaker in speaking and listening.  And her observation is accurate, and also kind of a sick burn, as she intended it to be.  

The Women's World Cup is in full swing and I have made time to watch a fair chunk of games.  I'm not following as closely as I do the men's tournament, but I watched all or part of probably more than half of the forty four games through the round of sixteen, so probably quite a lot by nearly anyone else's standards.  I can't support the USA ladies, but am happy to have a dog in the hunt with the Netherlands, the Leeuwinnen, the Lionesses.  I don't have much to say about lady football.  Top tier women athletes are not as fast or strong as their male counterparts.  That's just the way it is.  The first thing I see is a lack of sharpness, power, and precision in the passing.  Everything else follows from that.  There seems to have been a conscious choice made to allow it to be more physical than the male game.  Perhaps to make it more watchable?   And that's not a dig.  I am the guy who has spent a couple dozen hours of my life watching the tournament over the past couple of weeks.  I'll take criticisms of my analysis from anyone who has watched as much or more than me.  

I got to see Wilco play here at Paradiso two Saturdays ago.  That was a surprise.  The P returned from her long work trip that Friday.  The tickets were hers.  She is a fan and I am not so much.  I find them okay.  I had noted months ago that they were coming and that she would want to secure tickets right away.  Even though they were €50 tickets I advised her to buy two, because she's not comfortable going to shows alone like I am.  Sure enough the show sold out almost immediately.  Then they added a second date, and that also sold out.  Then we didn't think about it for a while.  I assumed that she had invited someone to go with her months ago.  Not true.  She arrived on a Friday, exhausted and jetlagged, and spent Saturday alternating between saying she didn't have the energy to go and frantically messaging everyone she knows to invite them to the show.  In the end she couldn't find any takers, and didn't really feel like going herself.  

So I went.  Despite not being a big fan of the band, I recognize their talent.  I know a lot of people, The P included, that think they're the bee's knees.  And I enjoy complex rock compositions performed by talented musicians in any case.  At around 17:00 I invited one of the other fathers in the neighborhood, a German, to join me.  It turned out that he is a big Wilco fan, and was really grateful and excited to go.  And it was pretty good.  And Amsterdam is always a great place to see any band.  And now I've seen Wilco.  

Peace!  




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