Wednesday, October 4th, 2000, 0.28

Finally! The olympic games are over. I mean, at least the closing ceremony has been held. The olympic games won't be over for a long time - they will keep harassing me on my tv screen probably for the next 3 or 4 months.

They have been harassing me (on radio and tv, in newspapers, magazines etc.) since a few months ago, I think July or August. Then a few weeks ago there was suddenly this newsreporter on the radio who said "and next Friday, the olympic games will finally begin!" Yeah right. Then what is it that I had been seeing on tv all the time?

For the record: I have nothing against the olympic games - as long as I'm not bothered with them. I was happy to hear that they would be held in a far away place this time, but unfortunately it turned out that even Australia has radio, tv and electricity these days :-)

Now don't go telling me that those games are really such a big deal, okay... I mean, if sports like running, swimming and horse riding would take themselves any seriously, then why would they call it the olympic games? Why not the olympic sports?

I mean, monopoly is a game. Memory is a game. Snooker is a game. American football is a game. (Remember, Al Bundy scored four touchdowns, not in one match, no, in one game.) :-)

Let's see... what was the worst tragedy. Was it the fact that there was actually a soccer tournament belonging to the olympic games? Hmmm.... only for players younger than 23, plus a few dispensation players, but even some Roda JC players had no interest (Bernard Tchoutang, Cameroon). That kind of describes the not-so-enormous honour that rests on a tournament like this.

No, that was not the worst thing. What comes very close, was the fact that a certain soccer magazine had dedicated pages to the olympics; not just the soccer tournament, no, also the games. I thought that would be the worst tragedy; it couldn't get any worse than that, right?

Wrong. Last Wednesday, the 27th of September. After PSV's legendary victory over Man United in the Champions League, I'm watching the other matches that were played that night. I'm enjoying the prospect of seeing Arsenal vs Lazio, and Bayer Leverkusen vs Real Madrid. But they weren't showed on tv. Why? Because there was some equestrian game at the olympics. In other words: "These are the matches you've all been waiting for, but we're not gonna show them, 'cause down there in Sydney, a horse has jumped over a fence."

Only comfort is that there won't be any summer olympic games until 2004. But the bad thing is that those will be a lot closer, in Athens. Greece, the perfect country for an event like that! Greece, the country where the final score of the entire soccer league can be predicted perfectly before the season has even started. Because they have a lot of soccer experts? Possibly. Another reason could be that Greek sport clubs, referees and sport associations are a little corrupt.

(1. Olympiakos Piraeus - $ 70,000,000...... 2. Panathinaikos - $ 55,000,000...... 3. Aris Saloniki - $ 40,000,000...... etc. (in money spent on bribes)) :-)

By the way.... Inge de Bruijn, Pieter van den Hoogenband, Mark Huizinga and Leontien Zijlaard-van Moorsel are not from here; they're from that *other* country called the Netherlands. You know, that country where the Vengaboys, Alice Deejay and Frank & Ronald de Boer are from, and from which the expression "Dutch treat" was derived. :-)

1.11

 

 

Saturday, 14 October 2000, 0.34

So, I've had the first part of my big psychological test today. (Or actually it's called something like "psycho-diagnostic examination", but my therapist just called it psychological test and I think that sounds better.)

First, this woman who was going to examine me asked me some standard questions, like how did I end up at the riagg, what was wrong with me, did I study, did I have a job, things like that. Then she explained to me what the examination was going to be like, and then we started.

The first thing was a memory test. She read a list of words to me, and then I had to name as many words from that list as I could remember. Then she would read the list again, and again I had to name as many words as I could remember (also the ones I already named the first time), and that was repeated five times. I think the first time I only knew about four words (out of a total of approximately 15), so I guess that's not too good. (They were really simple words, all just consisted of only one syllable.) The last time I knew more, I don't know exactly how many but she didn't seem surprised, so I guess it was average.

The next part was drawing. She gave me a piece of paper and asked me to draw a tree. So, with my incredible drawing skills, I managed to get something on paper that, with a little fantasy, could be interpreted as a tree. The next thing I had to draw was a fantasy tree. Well, I have had fantasies about lots of things in my life (but let's not mention those things here), but never about trees. So I was thinking, what should I draw, and in the end I decided to just draw another tree, just one that looked different from the first one. This time my drawing was really a work of art; I even had to explain to her "look, these tentacles you see here are the branches." I think she could hardly see a tree in it. But the purpose of this part of the test was not to make a perfect drawing of a tree, so it was okay. The next thing was a dream tree. Since I have never had dreams about trees either, and my second tree wasn't much of a success, I decided to draw one exactly like the first one. After that I had to draw a human being, then "the other human being" (I guess they can derive a lot of information from someone's personal interpretation of those words, but I didn't know what to make of it so I just made it exactly like the first human being, only this time without forgetting the face and the hair (on top of the head).), then the last two drawings had to be a bycycle and a cube. The last one was easy, but I think the doctors won't be able to agree on which one of my drawings is the bike, and which one is the human being.

When I got home, my brother had a quite interesting story about this: he had heard from one of his teachers that the more details you put into your drawings, the less sane the psychiatrists will think you are. Something like that. My brother has a strong tendency to exaggerate, and so does his teacher I think, but anyway, my brother said that a friend of his teacher was diagnosed as completely nuts, mainly because when the doctor had asked him to draw a tree, he drawed (drew?) sixteen little birds in it. But, like I said, I think we'll have to take that story with a grain of salt. Although I think it does have a sense of truth too; I guess the amount of detail you put into those drawings does show something about your mind. However, I don't think everyone who puts details in them can be called crazy.

Anyway, after making these drawings, the doctor asked me to mention as many words as possible from that list we did before the drawing. I knew about 4 or 5. Then she read a bigger list of words to me, and with each word she said, I had to tell her if it was in the first (original, real) list or not. I think I had them all correct.

After that was done, she gave me a whole pile of questionnaires to fill out. One of them had 567 questions; I'm not exactly sure about the other ones but I think the total number of questions will be in the area of 700. She explained to me how I should fill them out, then she left me alone in the room so I could have all the peace quietness to answer the questions. The first questionnaire was a "list of complaints", they just asked "in the past week, have you experienced....." 1) dizzyness, 2) depressive feelings, 3) headaches, 4) the need to get into a fist fight with someone, etc.

The second questionnaire was a "right / wrong" test. For example, it said "I have a tendency to give up very easily." And I had to answer right or wrong. Right, of course. And then it said "I make friends just as easily as most other people." Wrong, of course. And so on and so on.

The third one was a paper with unfinished sentences, which I had to finish. Like "I love....." , "the happiest moment of my life was.....", "the prettiest girls are.......", "when I was young,......", "when I am in bed, I......"

I had to write down the first thing that I thought of, but pretty often there was no such thing. With most of the questions I had to think first. After that I came to the big questionnaire, the one with 567 questions. I didn't finish that one. And we also have to do a lot of other stuff, so I'm gonna have to come back at least once, but probably even twice. See this test is so big, it's not weird that I couldn't make it in one day; my therapist had already said that most people took it in two times. Well today I was at the riagg from 13.00 'til 16.30, so that's 3 and a half hours. The next time will be Monday October 23rd; the examiner didn't have time sooner than that, and that time will only be for 2 hours, from 15.00 'til 17.00. She said that the rest of the test would probably take about 3 hours, so I'll probably have to come back a third time too. Well, I don't mind. As strange as it may sound, I liked it.

So on the 23rd, first I'm gonna have to finish that big questionnaire, and then I will have to do an intelligence test, a "neuro-psychotical test", or something like that (I don't remember exactly), and a concentration test, and maybe some other things too. She told me so many things, I can't remember all of it.

Well I guess this was all for now, so, and thank you all for coming to this page, and my thanks to some of you (you know who you are) for always giving me support. Good night............

1.20