h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, that was that.

It seems that one huge section of my life has come to an end. On Friday, July 21st, I had my last ever university examination. As of that date, I am no longer a university student. Well, technically, I still have the benefit of being a student until the end of September, but there are no more classes, no more exams, no more papers - I am done.

It took me 10 years to get to this point.

What a lazy @$$ I must have been!

In October 1996 I started my university education attending technichal college. I use the terms "education", "technical," and "college" in the loosest possible way. Two semesters (one year) at Alice Salomon Technical College for Social Work and Social Pedagogy were a waste of time and talent. That is not to say that social work and all that is a bad career (unless you start thinking in terms of money). It may be indicative of my experience in that school, however, that I neither learned any facts, nor acquired any skills, whatsoever.

So during many a sleepless night and assisted by my then-girlfriend I slowly came to the conclusion that I had to get out of there. This was more difficult than it sounds because it involved admitting to myself that I had made a mistake in enrolling at that school.

In October 1997 I quit Alice Salomon School and started studying at Humboldt University. My majors: English Studies, American Studies, German studies. Add to that classes in pedagogy, psychology, and just to meet some requirements, Latin. I had decided to become a teacher. A teacher for the upper levels of what Brits might call Grammar School.

A good decision. I found that being a teacher for English and German might just be what I a) might be good at and b) might enjoy.

Still it took me much, much longer than most of my fellow students, and certainly much longer than the authorities project, to finish my degree.

Why?, was a question that came to me more and more frequently. Was I lazy? Was I stupid? Was I just not good enough? The answer to all those questions is, mostly, no. Not stupid, no. Good enough? Better than most, actually. Lazy? Not generally, though there have been days... well, there are always such days, I guess.

So what kept me so long? I think the butt-honest answer is that I was simply scared of the future. Or rather, that I did not expect to have much of a future. Not that I thought I was not gonna live. Life with my then-girlfriend was deteriorating. Slowly, but unstoppably. Too slowly to actually notice at the time, but there came a point when the emotion "happiness" was no longer part of my experience. Replace "happiness" with "positive outlook". And the more I found that looking ahead was not giving me anything positive to look at, the more I avoided thinking about the future. Even to the point that I did not arrange my class schedule anymore. I simply went to the U during the first two weeks of term and had a look at classes that sounded interesting, and kept returning to those that were fun - neglecting to actually think about what classes I needed to take.

In 2000, there came a turning point: I was given the chance of going to the US for a year. This was going to be my make-or-break run. My main reason for going to the States was not for the educational experience, not for the chance of learning stuff that I could not learn at home. No, it was simply this: Go and see if life can be better than what you have back in Berlin.

I went and saw that life could be better than what I had back in Berlin.

In late August, 2001 I took off to Minnesota, where I stayed to see the 9/11 attacks, the military action in Afghanistan, the fear of anthrax attacks. My then-girlfriend soon became my ex-girlfriend, and I found that this only filled me with excitement. At 26, I was experiencing the combined joys of freshmen stupidity, grown-up responsibility as a teaching assistant, and observer of a culture both appealing and repulsing. And I fell in love.

The most important thing about this was that I found that love is not just for fairy tales. That I could fall in love and be happy, even after the scarring experiences back in Berlin.

I don't know whether this new love ever had any chance of growing into a solid relationship. It lasted less than a year, and at the end of that time I had been, once again, dropped. This time it did break my heart. Badly. I was back in Berlin when the girl in question called me up at night to tell me that she could not go on with me. That what I could give her was not what she needed. That she had been unfaithful to me almost from the moment I was back in Germany. Not very good for the exam I had to take next morning, either.

I was determined not to let this bring me down. I tried work, I tried dating, I tried sports, I tried and tried and tried and at the end of the day I was still alone and my work still was not accomplished.

There are ways to distract yourself from feeling lonely and a loser. They don't work, of course, but while you are at it, you think you'll be fine. I went to bars, not to drink much, but to pass time. I went to the movies. I went to concerts. I got myself a job teaching, and another one translating.

And one day I realized that if I ever want to get anywhere in life, I probably should finish my degree. I had kept going to classes all this time, but aimlessly so. It was sometime in 2004 that I finally took a look at what I had to do to get there.

Getting the kind of degree I was going for is a three-step procedure. You need to write a thesis. You need to pass exams in your two majors (English and German, in my case). You need to pass an exam in pedagogy. The exams in your two majors consist of written tests and oral examinations, while the pedagogy exam is an oral exam, only.

With all the official paper work and official registration deadlines and timelines, all this took a while. I registered my thesis paper in January 2005. From then on, the times and dates were more or less fixed. There was nothing I could have done to accelerate the process.

I handed in my paper in May. I registered for the English and German exams right after that. The written exams would begin in December, the oral exams sometime after that. After those exams I registered for the pedagogy exam, which took place in July, 2006.

The summer of 2005 saw the release of the sixth Harry Potter book. It was in an internet forum discussing the book that I was found out.

While I was writing my thesis paper and beginning to prepare for my exams, my feeling of loneliness was strong as ever, but punctuated by a new nuance: I don't know whether I had given up hope, or whether I had accepted some kind of stupid fate thinking I would forever be alone, or whether I had simply become a little calmer. I was no longer trying to hit on women. I found that I could actually have conversations without thinking from the outset that this might, but probably will not, come to a sexual episode. Is that a sign of maturity? Or simply an excuse for being a chicken when it comes to women?

In September 2005, I recieved an email message from one of the users of that Harry Potter forum, asking whether my screen name had anything to do with a river in Mongolia. While I generally disregard spam, this email had me wondering. Mongolia??? I replied in the negative, asking what had caused the other user, whose name translates as Baron of the Mice, to think my name (Yelbakk, as here on hootoo) had Mongolian roots.

Soon, our occasional emails became a full time job. Soon, those emails were replaced by phone calls. Very quickly, it was decided that the Baron of the Mice, who really has to be called "Baroness of the Mice", just had to visit me in Berlin.

On November 26th, 2005, less than a week before my first written examination, the Baroness of the Mice, also known as Strangeorange (for her orange hair), came to Berlin, and within seconds, things fell into place. Everything I ever believed in concerning relationships turned out to be wrong. People don't have to destroy each other in relationships. People don't have to look around at others all the time. People can indeed simply love each other, without even having seen more than one or two photographs. People can indeed wake up in the morning excited about a new great day ahead of them. People can lie in bed all day, cuddling and talking and kissing and talking and and cuddling and kissing. People can indeed decide to buy groceries at ten in the morning and then find themselves having to call pizza delivery services because suddenly it is almost midnight and they never stopped looking each other in the eye.

With love and hope and happiness in my life, totally unexpected but welcome like only love and happiness can be welcome, everything else just happened on the sidelines.

I aced my English exams.
I did well in my German written exams, but blew it in the oral exams.
I did well in the pedagogy exam.

All in all, I finished my degree with a 1.9, which is a result I am proud of. It could have been better had I performed better in my oral German exams. It could have been much much worse. My goal had been to finish my degree with a 1.something, and I did. I am proud and happy and excited about the future.

My days as a student are over.
I no longer live in Berlin, having moved in with my girlfriend already in May. I had kept my Berlin apartment so that I would have a place to stay for the last exam, but on Monday, July 24th, I handed the keys over to the new tenants.
My girlfriend is no longer my girlfriend. She is now my wife. The world is ours for the taking. Watch out, world, here we come.