Skip to main content

Hello to my new student life

I really am quite weary today. Blasted jet-lag. Managed to struggle through by means of lots of caffeine and sheer bloody-mindedness, although think I offended at least two mothers on the school run by 'ignoring' them (was in fact so damn tired could barely see). Oh well.

The exciting thing is that I am a student again. Yes! A student! At my age! Hurray.

I received the happy news that I'd been accepted by Middlesex University in Dubai for their postgrad MSc in Applied Psychology just before I had to rush off the States. Today was the first day of term so off I trotted this morning to fill out a bewildering array of forms and wait in endless queues, all part of the official enrollment process apparently.

There I was, the token old bird surrounded by hundreds of giggling teenagers literally off their faces with excitement. It all felt quite strange. Or maybe that was due to the cotton-wool jet lag head. Who knows.

What was undisputedly strange were the gaggles of 18-year-old boys walking around in jeans so enormous their a*ses were on full display (thankfully none were going commando - small mercies etc). Now, I may be wrong but I really thought that look was totally over by 2005... or am I missing some kind of teenage-tribe retro irony here?

But the really embarrassing thing was that whilst waiting in one of many queues one of these backside-baring youths mistook my look of utter bemusement for something else. Yes, hands up, I was looking in the general direction of his rear end (acid washed denim, WTF?) but in bewilderment, certainly not what the young whippersnapper obviously misread as Cougar-esque longing. The cheeky sod then proceeded to throw me a saucy wink and had a little giggle with his similarly attired mate. I proceeded to bury my head in my student handbook in a suitably scholarly fashion whilst trying hard to project a general aura of 'Mummy-ish-ness'.

God help me. I suspect I may be avoiding the Student Union like the plague. 

Comments

expatmammy said…
hahahahahaha, so funny!!! Welcome back to the sandpit hotstuff ;-)

Popular posts from this blog

Apologies for being incommunicado this week and hope none of you out there are too distraught not to be receiving the usual almost-daily MotV missives. The reason for the silence is that I'm up to my neck, metaphorically-speaking, in research papers for my first grad course assessment. This experience has made me realise how rigorously un-academic I am in my thinking. It has also illuminated how reliant I am on red wine in order to get through endless evenings typing furiously on my laptop, not to mention the fueling of increasingly colorful curses that I feel obliged to aim at the University's online library system which consistently refuses to spit out any of the journals I'm desperate for (I refuse to believe this is 100% due to my technical incompetence...) Oh well, if this is the price one has to pay in order to realize a long-cherished dream then it's not all that bad... No one ever said a mid-life career change would be easy. Wish me luck!

Environment

Being an expat, a favorite topic of conversation is 'where I/you want to go next?' or 'When do you plan to go home?' It's a good question. I'm not sure I want to stay in Dubai for ever, but I'm also not sure about how long I want to be here for or where else I would like to live. For almost the first time ever, I have no fixed plans apart from keeping my eyes and mind open to interesting opportunities. And as to going 'home', I have no idea where that is. Constantly moving around as a child left me with the feeling that 'home' is wherever I am right now, so in effect 'home' could be anywhere. The longest I've ever lived in one fixed place was 18 years in London, on and off, but that doesn't feel like 'home' either - I love going back to see family and friends, and it's a great place to shop, but that's about it. I have a great love for California, which is where my extended family is from (and where most of the