“Are you familiar with the effects of this product?”

“Do you know how to use this product?” The cashier of the Kruidvat (a drugstore in the Netherlands) points at the boxes of aspirin my mom just layed on the counter. The dose of all these pills together is probably enough to anaesthetize a hippo... To comfort everyone; my mom is not an addict, but she’s starting to get the flue and she doesn’t have time to be sick. And I don’t have time to catch it to.


“Are you familiar with the effects of this product?” They never ask such questions when you buy a bottle of whiskey, or six bottles of wine. And I’m pretty sure that they don’t even think about asking such things when someone buys drugs (and with drugs, I don’t mean medicines). In my opinion are those two way more dangerous than accidently taking two aspirins too many.

“Did you have this product in your house before?” Eh... they’re aspirins, not a bomb! When you take too many without being used to it, you may have a funny afternoon but it will be weak in comparison to half a bottle of alcohol or a good joint. And nobody ask questions about those while on a yearly basis, a lot more people die of alcohol poisoning than an overdose of aspirin. Pure technically is that even impossible. For an overdose of aspirin, you would have to take more than 100 pills right after each other, and after 20 of them your stomach turns inside out because of some emetic in it.

“I advise you to read the instructions before you use the product!” Alright, I will. Now can you check out these three bottles of wine, two bottles cognac and this bottle of Armagnac please? Thank you, have a nice day!

Spring

Spring has finally arrived in the Netherlands. We were afraid it got lost somewhere in its journey, but it finally did find our weird and small country. And you can feel the vibration of it in the air. Birds are waking you up in the early morning, clouds and rain fade away when the sun arrives (I wish actually, because the last couple of days I fell asleep to the sounds of rain falling down from the sky), and people decide it is time to get all that winter dust out of the house. And with winter dust, I mean layers and layers of grey, smothering dust. Moving furniture only clears up more and more dust, but it is absolutely necessary that you do move it. Dust does attract dust, so not moving it and cleaning even in the hardest to reach spots means that you can do this entirely again in two or three weeks. Not that attractive to look forward to…

And spring also means big changes, and with that I don’t mean the trees that chance from brown and depressive to green and full of life, or guys who are grumpy and obnoxious for one entire season and suddenly chance into full of life and hormones and being even more obnoxious (sorry, I have some truly annoying classmates…). No I mean changes at home, like the kind of chance that parents decide the entire house has to be painted or that it is time to switch rooms. Because by switching rooms, you have to lift up furniture and by doing so, you’ll find another hundred layers of dust. We changed bedrooms last Friday and I’m still finding dust in my hair and I think there is also way to much dust to be considered healthy in my lungs…

Get up!

You’re laying in the sun, simply enjoying it’s lovely warmth when suddenly a weird annoying noise reaches your ear. You look up, annoyed, what is that terrible sound? And then, suddenly, the world becomes dark, except for a small amount of light. The light is shaped like numbers. Numbers? And suddenly you realize, that terrible annoying sound isn’t a bird or a hurt animal. No, it’s your alarmclock, brutally waking you. You take a swing at the o so hated clock and miss twice, hurting your hand on the table where the thing in standing on. The third time you decide not to hurt your hand even more and just press the off-button slow and gently. The thing is finally silent but unfortunately, you don’t have time to roll on your side one more time. With a angry growl you get out of bed, it’s still terribly dark outside, as well as inside your room. You stumble your way to the bathroom, meeting way too hard and way too many things with your feet, only because human eyes are nothing like the eyes of cats or owls, which would be handy right now...
And then there is the point where you finally are under that nice and warm shower, it ends when you have to force yourself out of it because you don’t have that much time to get to school. Great... In lightning speed you dress yourself, pack your back and stuff breakfast inside your mouth. A toothbrush across your teeth and finding your shoes can be done at the same moment (no, going to school without shoes is NOT an option!!). When you finally won the battle to get your arms inside the sleeves of your jacket you have just enough time left to grab your bag, rush down the stairs and jump on your bike/train/bus/whatever you take to school.

Every morning the same ritual. The question isn’t how you are able to get yourself out of bed every morning, the question is why your teacher is an actual morning person...