Fulbright Nightmares

Author's Note: I meant to post this before I left for Germany; however, I was a bit short on time so you get it now!  Please enjoy my clear distress.

Annelise
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Part 2 of the "What I'm doing the summer before my Fulbright" Series

I think I'm going insane.

No, really.  Straight jacket, maniacal laughter, padded walls insane.

Because I hate WAITING.  And that's all this summer feels like: a gigantic waiting game for August 3rd, which -- just a friendly reminder -- is exactly seven days from now.  I feel like I'm in a never-ending line at a water park, waiting forever for something REALLY SUPER exciting while getting sunburned and increasing frustrated in the process.

It's gotten infinitely worse as time has passed.  On the surface, I may seem pretty cool and collected about the whole Fulbright process.  In fact, I seem too laid back, according to family and close friends, but that's been my way of dealing with the stress of preparing to move to a different continent.

1. Close eyes.
2. Ignore progression of time around you.
3. Slowly gather items necessary for survival in the great (not so) unknown.
4. Internally, FREAK OUT

This internal freak out has come to a head recently as it has been seeping into my dreams.  I usually don't remember my dreams, but the ones I have about the Fulbright are particularly vivid and terrifying.

The most recent found me sleeping on a plane to Europe.  Pretty benign, right? (Sleep-ception!)  Well, as dreams do, we then jumped immediately to customs.  I was suddenly in the Berlin airport, waiting to talk to an official and get my passport stamped

BUT I DIDN'T HAVE MY PASSPORT.  I had a copy of my sister's and my mom's passports but not my own.  I didn't even have an ID of any sort.  In fact, I couldn't prove to anyone that I was who I said was.  An adrenaline-induced panic and terror hit me.  Everyone was staring at me, and I just knew that they ALL knew.  They were all judging me and waiting for the customs official to laugh in my face and send me home.

The reaction of the customs official?  He stuck a barcode on my arm and gave me a sign to wear around my neck...a sign that said, "I'm not allowed to leave the airport."  The Germans, it seemed, were prepared with the perfect form of punishment for trying to sneak into their country.  The remainder of my dream saw me wandering miserably around the deserted airport with this sign around my neck, waiting for the Germans to ship me back to the US.

When I woke up around 2 AM to fling my covers off and stop this terrible dream, my immediate reaction was to look frantically for my passport.  But, as it was 2 in the morning, instead, I blearily rolled over into a much less frightening dream about blueberries that I've been having on and off for the past month.

In retrospect, my dream is an interesting conglomeration of pre-Fulbright stress and commentary on my views on capitalism...

Forgetting my passport is obviously every international traveler's worst nightmare.  Good news is, unlike in my brain, they don't actually let you get on a plane to a different country (at least in the US) unless you have a passport.  But the barcode and sign?  I attribute that to my fear of public embarrassment and my father's obsession with labels (Thanks, dad).  He got a label maker a couple years ago and proceeded to label all inanimate objects and anyone who stood still for too long.  Or maybe the label is my commentary on society as a whole.  THE MAN only sees you as a barcode!  A number!  A cog in the great machine of life!

Or it could be, ya know, crazy stress brain being crazy.

Either way the STRUGGLE IS REAL (in my head).