Another effing growth experience??? November 29, 2007

That’s right, as Lauren would say: another f***ing growth experience. Seriously, all this so-called “learning” and subsequent “growing”–it’s freaking relentless! Personal learning, professional learning, academic learning, emotional learning… Basta, ya!

Except, yeah, I can’t really say “basta” two weeks before finals, can I? Yeah, didn’t think so.

Today’s growth experience was definitely a new one. Group therapy. Oh yes, you read that right: Group. Therapy. (What??) I had a group “coaching” session with my team and my LEAD coach today. I was nervous. I was apprehensive. I was downright scared when Viqui and Valentin almost had a knock-down drag-out 10 minutes before we were to meet with our coach (who, admittedly, I have a MASSIVE crush on–clearly, this didn’t help my feelings going in). Above all, I was thinking, why the HELL do we have this now, 2 weeks before finals, when there are 99 other things I could (and should!) be doing??? However, despite all of my nerves, fear, and apprehension: it was GREAT. Tense at times, and definitely not pretty, but all in all, completely productive! (I definitely credit our awesome coach for being an incredible mediator–which didn’t make my crush on him any smaller, that’s for sure!) We even managed to end the session laughing, and went to the caf’ to get a beer together. I’m definitely feeling better about the next two weeks, and all the work we have to do, because I feel like whole new channels of communication were opened up. Awesome.

The other place I’ve been excited about growth is in my personal/emotional life. I had started to form a crush on a boy here (no, not my LEAD coach–I do actually have SOME sense of decorum about these things!), and it seemed like things might be going well, and poof! He disappeared off the scene. Okay, that’s not true, he’s still on the scene, I just don’t SEE him, which leads me to believe that he might be avoiding me. And guess what? I don’t care! Ha! I’m so freaking proud of myself for not caring, I can’t even express it. As I have commented to several of you: after a solid year of chasing after a (ridiculously unavailable) man (of my dreams) in Boston, and then torturing myself about his uncontrollable unavailability, I just don’t have any chase in me. Especially now, when I’m busy and stressed and have better things to do with my time than worry about whether or not a boy (who I’m frankly not even THAT interested in) is going to call. HA! It’s so damn liberating!! A boy doesn’t like me, and I DON’T CARE!!! Wheeeee!!!!

On the academic learning front: I actually understood my quiz in financial analysis this morning. Yay!!! This in no way means that I did well on said quiz, but I am SO excited that it’s starting to sink in a bit. Whew! What a relief!

And seriously, these are but a small sampling of the lessons of the week. Others include: the alarm clock MUST be set across the room (and not in my bed) or I simply will not wake up; business law might just be passable the second time around; I suck at case interviews, and will need a LOT of practice; Spider Man 3? not a bad film, but unwise to start it at 11:30pm on a school night; the Borne continues to be my favorite neighborhood in BCN; the Reagan years were even more heinous than I had thought (read an article about the IMF and the World Bank this week that made my skin absolutely crawl); it is actually possible to make time to cook simple dinners that beat the crap out of ramen noodles; there are more internship opportunities to explore in Portland for the summer; Mara has TWO nephews; Patrick M has exciting surprises in store for me in London next weekend… Etc, etc, etc… The list goes on…

And all of these just add up to: yet further f***ing growth experiences–which, don’t get me wrong, are excellent, but also thoroughly exhausting, and sometimes, I just don’t feel like I NEED more learning/growth experiences, but they keep coming and coming and coming… Thank GOD it’s almost Christmas Break, during which time the only things I hope to learn are: who’s going to hire me for the summer, exactly what IS the human limit on intake of hollandaise sauce, and what does my beach house look like during the winter. Y basta, ya.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas… November 25, 2007

Well, even though Thanksgiving doesn’t exist here (sniff, sniff), it does seem that the third week of November is a universal benchmark for the beginning of the Christmas season–I mean, one month out, I guess that makes sense. This means that the city is completely decked out in lights, local businesses sport Christmas trees and red carpets, and yes, even here, there is already an abundance of cheesy Christmas programming on the tele. Today, I watched Elf in Spanish with Raul (turns out “ooooh, you’re an angry elf” is almost as funny in Spanish as it is in English!), and yesterday I watched some terrible, clearly made-for-TV movie about Santa being some kid’s neighbor. Awesome. D’you suppose I’ll be able to watch “A Christmas Story” here? And if so, can we assume that “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid” will have the same kind of resonance in Spanish that it does in English? Big life questions, I know.

Of course, now that it’s starting to feel like Christmas (not like in Boston, though–no snow here!), I’m discovering a whole new kind of homesickness. For instance, I just had my first Thanksgiving since 2001 without Mary and Doug and the kids, and man, there was a sort of dull ache in my chest ALL day. (That could also have been caused by the anxiety of trying to get my first summer internship application emailed off, though, and spending the majority of the day helping other people fix their cover letters rather than working on mine–good LORD am I an accomplished procrastinator…) And now I’m staring down the barrel of, arguably, the most challenging 3 weeks of my ENTIRE academic career, and what am I thinking about? Spritz cookies. And presents. And sleeping on the couch in the den while watching Discovery Channel with Maman. And the internships I hope to interview for in Portland. And being on the West Coast for the summer, if I can.

And all of this is making me wonder, really wonder, where I want to be after I finish grad school. I had sort of assumed (sorry, dad!) that I’d want to stay in Europe for a while after I finish my MBA. It’s actually sort of logical–most of the companies that come to recruit are looking for people for Europe, and the Euro is CRUSHING the dollar right now, and have I mentioned 24 paid vacation days off a year??? LOTS of advantages. And yet, and yet, aaaaaah, I find myself getting excited about the possibility of being on the West Coast for the summer, which makes me excited about maybe moving back after school, which makes me excited about being closer to my beloved family, which really, just makes me ready for CHRISTMAS!

Ooooh, man, but really really, I should be doing schoolwork. Big time. I’ve been engaged in a 2-day long battle with a case about the airplane manufacturing industry, and it seems to be winning. (Seriously, what is WRONG with me? All I had to do was read the damn thing, and write a summary for my group in Spanish. Two days later, I’m only 1/3 of the way through the freaking summary, have accomplished NONE of my other homework for the weekend, and it’s already about to be Monday again. Sheesh.)

But Christmas? 26 days, three major papers, three major presentations,  two minor presentations, four final exams, at least 10 summer internship applications, and counting…

Birthweek: the celebration (and BCN insanity!) continues November 17, 2007

Last year, I made a HUGE deal out of my birthday. I took two days off, one of which I spent at the spa with Becky (learning that there is almost nothing better in the universe than a hot stone massage!), one of which I spent being a delighted bum with MF, and the weekend of which was all about dinners and drinking with my favorite people in Boston. My 27th was a birthday bonanza. In retrospect, I wonder why I made such a big deal, but I suspect it had to do with the fact that I was negative excited about my life–work was going very very poorly, I had let myself get totally derailed with my b-school applications, and I was just feeling generally kind of stagnant.

This year: totally different story. I have more going on than I can handle, and there is NO lack of excitement about my life in general. So I’ve had a totally different attitude about my birthday, and it’s been, so far, one of my best ones ever! (I say “so far” because the official celebration is tonight at the Irish bar around the corner from my house, which is in no way a sub for the JJ, but I still care for it a good deal.) But seriously, given the week I’ve had, I could pretty easily do nothing tonight. My actual birthday was International Career Day at school, and I didn’t have to be at school until 11, so I went out for dinner Tuesday night with a bunch of the ladies from my class, who surprised me with a bunch of desserts at midnight, to kick of my birthday celebrations–how sweet! Wednesday, at school, everyone in the universe knew that it was my birthday (thank you, Facebook!), so I got about a million birthday kisses and pretty much felt like a total celebrity. Then, that night, Anthon and Jorge, the Danes (both of them are filmmakers, and Jorge is living in my apartment until the end of January, and they’re tons of fun), took me out for birthday mojitos. So nice! And of course, I can’t escape mentioning, again, the contribution of the Patricks, who have managed to perfectly bookend my birthday this year. I can definitely say this birthday has been completely excellent so far, and I hope it bodes well for the next year!

One thing I can’t fail to mention, though, is that I had one of the crazier BCN moments I’ve had so far this week. Raul told me that there was going to be a “performance” at our house this week, which meant, you guessed it, performance art (bleh!). If I had any doubt before that performance art is mostly weird, those doubts have been handily dispelled. Raul asked me to be in the apartment at 3 on Thursday, so that they could come and set up. Fine, no problem, I owe him about a million favors, so I said I’d do it. Of course, this is Spain, so they didn’t come until about 5 to set up for the performance, which was supposed to be at 6. And dude, it was a freaking entourage of people, the centerpiece being a little Chinese guy who, I understood, would essentially be hanging himself out of Raul’s bedroom window, while the crowd below watched. (What?) Let me also add, here, that the week has been COLD by Barcelona standards, and my apartment, well, doesn’t exactly have any kind of heating system. So the “artists,” if that’s what we can call them, show up, close themselves in Raul’s room with a ladder, lots of ropes, lots of lights, lots of cameras, lots of people, and of course, both of his floor-to-ceiling windows WIDE open. Oh, and they barely say hello to me (as I’m freezing my toosh off on the living room couch, doing my best impression of someone studying geopolitics, but really, just being cold). This goes on for HOURS, and finally, around 8, it seems like they’re going to start. By this time, there are a fair number of people in the street below, so I go downstairs with Anthon and Jorge (aforementioned Danes), and we stand there, in the chilly, chilly night air, as they throw down a rope to the crowd below. The rope goes all the way to Raul’s bedroom window, and the people in the street are all holding on to it. The little dude appeared in the window, with his back turned to the crowd, standing on top of something, with many ropes attached to him, a mighty wind ablowin’, and the other end of the rope that the people in the street were holding wound around his neck. At intervals, we would lean way back as though he were about to fall, and I could feel everyone in the crowd wondering what was going to happen–was he going to jump? crawl down? scale the side of the building? What was he going to do??? However, after about an HOUR of this, the crowd started to get restless–I, for one, was both bored AND cold, and more than ready to reclaim my now frozen apartment. So what did the little guy finally do? NOTHING! They threw the rope down to the street, thanked the crowd for their participation, and that was it! Oh, man, was I irritated–and deeply, deeply cold. I went directly upstairs, made myself a hot toddy (first one of the season!), and crawled in to bed with ALL of my clothes, coat, hat, and scarf still on. Anthon took this picture of me in my room (and now you can finally see my blue lady!):

Alright, I have work to do before my birthday celebrations begin, so I should get back to it. But I have to say that, even though the performance art crap was annoying, this week has been mostly great. Hurray for my 28th birthday, and thanks to everyone for the awesome birthday wishes!!!

Midterm motivation slump November 12, 2007

I’m pretty sure this is quite normal, but man, I am struggling with motivation. Apparently I really do live and die by deadlines, because I technically don’t have anything due for the next couple of days, and I have spent a LOT of my day attempting to study and accomplishing absolutely nothing (read: sitting in front of the computer with a million tabs open and halfway downloading things that might be relevant to my job search or economics project, but largely just spacing the eff out–much like now, writing my blog instead of doing actual work–I rock). A couple of good things about today are that I might have found the most perfect internship ever (in CA nonetheless!) but I don’t want to say anything else about it for fear of jinxing it. (However, J&L, if it did work out for me to be in CA next summer, I’d probably be able to swing a week in LA for your wedding, making myself as useful as possible! How cool would that be?!) Also, I signed myself up for the committee that’s planning the annual ski trip to Andorra in Jan/Feb, so I’m about to get my feet wet managing a pretty major project. Wheeee! Of course, this means that I’ve started to read the case for Financial Analysis about 10 times now, and have mostly accomplished reading the same paragraph 10 times–it doesn’t become totally urgent to read it until Wednesday night, so, yeah, I think we know when I’m probably going to actually get around to it. Man, some things never change…

Outside of my b-school life (I know I know, I don’t really have a life outside of school, but for about 38 hours this weekend, I felt like I did!) Paddy came to visit me for the weekend. We had a BLAST, and it was SO cool to be able to share my beautiful new city with one of my very own people. (Aim, I’m even more excited for you to come, because this city has a LOT to offer, and I can’t wait to squire you around and show you why I love it so much!!) We ate, we drank, we were very merry (definitely related to said eating and drinking), and the people rejoiced. ‘Twas grand. Between the two Patricks, they’re doing a hell of a job of making my 28th birthday–Paddy for visiting right before my birthday, and Patrick for buying me a flight to spend a belated birthday weekend in London. Man, don’t I have the best friends in the world?

Wow, so I’ve successfully procrastinated my way to bedtime. Man, seriously, I rock…

Whoa November 11, 2007

 (I actually wrote this on Friday, but couldn’t convince the servers at school to let me post it…)

I saw the most incredible mullet on the way to school today. I’m not sure if I’ve commented on this previously, but there is a serious abundance of non-ironic mullets in these parts (not like the cool kids in Williamsburg who want to be ironic and hip but seem to fail to notice that, despite whatever trendy point they’re trying to make, it’s still a freaking mullet–possibly the ugliest haircut ever in the history of man). Will wisecracked to me recently that he’s going to come to visit me and I’ll have a mullet and wear wrestling boots–an apt observation of the fashion here which I nonetheless wholeheartedly reject. In any case, about this mullet: so, from the front, it was like a regular spiky teenage boy haircut. Not like layers or anything, just a normal, if somewhat dated, haircut. And in the back? Yeah, starting at, like, the crown of his head and falling behind his ears: a totally regular head of long brown hair, not layered or anything. It was the weirdest thing, and I wish I had a picture, because it was more like two haircuts in one than anything else, and it was laughably terrible. I find myself thinking, often, good LORD the people here make odd fashion choices–not that I’m any kind of fashion maven myself, but seriously people, mullets??? In particular, the teenagers all have the craziest half-shaved haircuts that are totally asymmetric and bizarre. On Halloween, I had more than one moment where I wondered to myself, is that a costume, or is that just the way that person dressed today? Hm. Anyway, this mullet was ridiculous and I had to comment.

One of the kids in my classes has decided to start a Club de la Cerveza on Friday afternoons here, which means, after we finish class at 12:30 on Friday, the people who feel like staying and drinking a beer all go to the cafe and sit outside and have a drink together. What an excellent way to kick off the weekend, right? It’s one of the many things that makes me appreciate being in the Spanish section, rather than the English section (I don’t see them organizing a weekly beer together to kick off the weekend, somehow–they’re very serious over there!). Anyway, when he sent out the email this morning to remind us, he attached this link, which I found immensely entertaining and thought I’d share (hurray, beer!): http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=3id22e-3nLM

Interestingly, while enjoying time with my peers today, I was graced with yet another insight about how American I am, and what it means to be an American, according to one local, at least. (I remain unclear about what it really means to be an American, but anyway…) Apparently, we’re a very closed, very conservative society (even those of us, ahem, who consider ourselves quite liberal and open), and above all, incredibly concerned with security (he said we’re all convinced that we’re going to be attacked). I pressed him about what all of those things mean, but he gave me very few details. Interesting. I always appreciate these little insights, because it’s so interesting to me to discover what the US looks like when you’re on the outside looking in.  I’m quite certain that we look as crazy to them as their crazy haircuts look to me. Luckily, none of this really bothers me (okay, it bothered me when my favorite Fascist told me I was being an imperialist). Mostly I just find it educational. But it’s incredible to me how much people like to generalize when they have very little information or evidence to back up their (sometimes very strong) beliefs.

Anyway, just a couple of cultural observations while I wait for my Consulting seminar to start. (Case interview practice, hurray!)

Grades? Stress? Nah. November 7, 2007

Oh, man, we are in FULL swing now. Whew! This week I’ve got 2 presentations, a quiz, 2 cases, group meetings, tons of reading, and then Pat gets here Friday, so there will be very little time for homework over the weekend, so I *should* technically, be reading for next week as well. The thing is, my list of “shoulds” gets longer every day, because I should also be revising my resume to apply for summer internships, I should be practicing case interviews regularly, I should be getting ahead on my economics project (30 page group paper, due in December, first presentation on it in 2 weeks), I should be studying for my finance, quantitative models, and accounting classes, because they’re freaking hard, I should be making a better effort to get to the gym and cook a real meal once in a while, I should clean my room before Pat gets here because, let’s be honest, it’s a freaking embarrassment right now… See? Lots going on.

Anyway, today I had my review session for Business Law (did I mention that I failed that class in pre-term?–yep, failed it, spectacularly, by bombing the final exam–which, to be fair, was almost more of an accounting exam than a law exam, and we already know how I feel about accounting!). I’ve been mostly pretty relaxed about Law, because, to be honest, I knew that the test had gone badly when I took it, so I’ve just been waiting to hear what I need to do next. The reason I hadn’t been worried was that I figured that the make-up test would be different (given that 20/55 people in the Spanish section failed the exam, I thought maybe, just maybe, it might be the exam that screwed us, and not the other way around, eh?). Not so! The make up exam will likely be pretty similar. Great. So now my list of “shoulds” gets even longer, as in, “I should be studying for my effing derecho make-up.” Ugh. (Alex M, wish you were here to help me!)  And man, I’ve never failed a class in my life. Don’t get me wrong–I was no  straight A student either, and of course, we already know that I didn’t have grades at UCSC (and I did, admittedly, “no record” a couple of classes there, if you know that I mean, heh–but that was deliberate!) but I’ve never outright failed a class. So, yeah, I failed it. And I even liked that class, a LOT, but the final was super super super hard for me (language definitely played a part). The crazy thing is, I ended up doing extremely well in my other classes (including a 9.0 in statistics!). And my classes this semester are hard (freaking hard, in fact), but I’ve gotta say: I had better not fail anything this semester.

Interestingly, I made the (recently life-changing!) decision, after the stress of pre-term, to adjust my attitude–taking a SCORE!-esque approach, I’ve decided to be Relentlessly Positive (with caps, because it was actually part of my job description there, and I wanted to be sure to give the right emphasis, you know). Or maybe it’s more like a Mary-esque approach, and I’m just swatting away my stress. In any case, I’ve also decided to take a step back, and not own other people’s stress, and not give them mine. All I have to do is pay attention to my to-do (or my should) list, try to stay one day ahead, minimum, all the time, and focus on making it to December 20th (which is to say, my last day of class) as well as passing my law exam (part deux) as positively and stress-free as possible. How do you like my chances?

Nostalgia! November 4, 2007

I just stole this from Laurent’s Facebook page, and it pretty much encompasses everything that I miss about Boston. If Will and Becky were in the photo, it would pretty much be perfect. This picture is St. Paddy’s Day at the JJ last year–a particularly memorable evening for me, because I officially started my love affair with Guinness. But in this photo are some of my very favorite people in the whole entire universe–Sean and Laura, Jen and Laurent, and Alex (all of whom have blogs linked to this page), and, oh yeah, it was taken at the Jeannie (my bar in Boston, lovingly referred to as an extension of our living room!). Obviously, I’m living in Barcelona, one of the best cities on the planet, and I’m making an (incredibly expensive and hopefully worthwhile!) investment in my future, leaving me very little room to complain about my current situation (okay, I could complain about the work load–good LORD have I got a lot to do before I can go to bed tonight!!), but, man, sometimes I get homesick for Boston. And when I mean I get homesick, I mean I’d like to pretty much transport myself straight back to *this* picture. Okay, enough nostalgia!!!

Halloween, yay! November 3, 2007

So, obviously, (at least, I hope it’s obvious!) I went with a group of friends as The Addams Family.

Scary stuff November 2, 2007

Well, I can definitely say that school has officially picked up momentum. All six (six!) of my classes are keeping my on my toes. More than that, I’m definitely struggling in my Finance class, my Accounting class (though this one is definitely easier than the last one!), and my Quantitative Models class–in short, all of my numbers based classes. My other three classes, Geopolitics, Organizational Behavior, and Economics, are a total pleasure–of course.  But it’s Friday afternoon, and my classes finished at 12:30, and I’m still here, why?, because there’s a tutorial session for Accounting today that I really can’t afford to miss.

However, none of that is what scared me today. And no, it’s not the pictures from the Halloween party the other night that have scared me, either. (Though I will post those as soon as I can–due to a glitch with the server at school, I won’t be able to upload them until I’m at the Arc Cafe again, which is where I go on the weekend to use the interwebs.) No, what scared me to death today was my Geopolitics discussion. We read this (admittedly, alarmist and perhaps somewhat exaggerated) article about global warming–a concept which, by itself, is scary enough. But in a room of 20 people, it became quickly apparent that there was no kind of consensus either about the cause of global warming or even its mere existence, let alone any kind of agreement about what we should collectively do about it. And I think to myself, man, we’re in a world of trouble if a room of 20 people from my generation, the next generation of leaders in the world, who are all intelligent, educated, and mostly from middle to upper class families in the first world, can’t come to a consensus, what’s going to happen to our planet in the coming years? (I definitely made the whole room laugh when I went on my usual tirade about why I hate Hummers–man they make me angry, because to me, they’re an indicator of all of the irresponsibility, self indulgence, and outright excess that the people of our fine, fine nation are so addicted to.) I have actually heard people say, in seriousness, “the myth of global warning,” and “we’re in a warming cycle,” and there’s one guy in my class who’s convinced that sun spots are what’s causing global climate change. But even if we can debate about global warming and its causes, it remains painfully clear that we, as a planet, are running out of sustainable, renewable resources, and the world is changing because of it. And still, STILL, there is no consensus about possible solutions. I, of course, don’t have one either, but I think that, as GI Joe would say, “knowing is half the battle,” and as painful as these truths are, I’d way rather know about them, and acknowledge them to be true, than debate in class about whether carbon emissions and ethanol gas in the atmosphere are what’s creating the greenhouse effect.  So it seems to me like we have, as a global community, a big, big battle to fight. And I wish I had more faith in global leadership to begin to make those changes.

Anyway, ranting aside, if you’re interested in some more information about climate change and resource sustainability, here are some good sites:

www.myfootprint.org (the quiz is pretty interesting)

http://www.pthbb.org/natural/footprint/ (resource usage–whoa, US…)

I’ll post Halloween pictures soon, promise!!!