They Don't Give Degrees in Metallica!

Metallica came up in one of my conversations with the missus and, one thing leading to another, I ended up telling my girlfriend how my passion for Metallica and their music began. The story got the dear thing so worked up that she decided on the spot that I had no right, before all of humanity, to let a story like that go to waste, and she made me promise I'd write it down and publish it. So tonight I'm going to tell you how I became a die hard Metallica fan.

The story begins no earlier and no later than 1991, the year Metallica released Metallica. Which is to say the thing known to those in the know as "The Black Album."

Why so late... I don't know. Metallica had been making music since 1983, they'd already put out four superb albums, but I had no idea they existed. This time I can't blame it (entirely) on communism: there were people listening to Metallica in Romania even in Ceaușescu's day, but I never had anything to do with them and, though I loved music in general with a sincere passion and sang in my child's voice "Un copac cu flori" or "Dimineți cu ferestre deschise" wherever I went... I'd never heard of Metallica.

Like any normal person with two working eyes in Romania, I had of course seen the Metallica logo written in various shades of charcoal on various walls in various shades of grey, but I'd never have suspected that the thing with the hooks was the name of a band.

I'd sooner have believed it was the name of a cult that would kidnap me and drag me into the woods to drink my blood if I stayed out playing football after dark — the way it happened to "bad children" — or that it was the name of a football, hockey, rugby or other macho-sport team, or that it was the name of a gang of delinquent kids who'd made a way of life out of playing cops and robbers... but it would never in a million years have crossed my mind that Metallica was a rock band.

I wasn't even interested in what that complicated logo actually stood for. I saw no point in deforming letters and making them hard to read, nor could I understand how anyone could be so forgetful as to forget they'd just drawn an L and go and draw another one right next to it, in the same word. It even annoyed me that some people had nothing better to do than dirty the walls drawing hooks that made no sense anyway.

That was roughly where I stood. I should add that I was in ninth grade, personal computers had started showing up in the shops in my town — an HC-85 was about eleven thousand lei, I think — I was writing my first BASIC programs and constructing algorithms in my head as I walked down the street, using IF, THEN and GOTO, to the despair of my parents, who sent me to the market to buy cabbage with their hearts in their throats, hoping deep down that I'd watch out for cars when crossing the road, and who breathed a sigh of relief that nothing had happened when I shouted up at the window an hour later: "Dad, Dad, what was I supposed to buy?"

Two or three of my friends back then were luckier: they had an HC-85 or a CIP at home, their parents did the shopping, and they sat all day in front of a television that couldn't pick up anything anyway, playing BRUCE LEE, ROAD RUNNER or FLAG.

A few times a year, someone would take pity on me or on my father and lend us a computer for two or three days, "so the engineer's boy can see what it's all about too, and whether it's worth him buying one." Or maybe because that was the last manoeuvre that let them watch the news in peace, and they were actually glad to part with their computers for a few days and pack their brats off outside to play football.

On one of those days I'd "got hold of" a CIP and a tape with a new game on it, with spaceships — I can't remember what it was called. I was dying to try it and all I still needed was a cassette player to load the game from.

My father hated cassette players and record players; we never had a cassette player, nor a record player in the house. My father had a reel-to-reel and he was proud of it, he felt superior. He didn't have much music, ten reels at most, but they were carefully sorted, selected, recorded, catalogued. My father liked Deep Purple, and above all he liked pronouncing the band's name. He pronounced it with an (exaggeratedly) strong American accent every chance he got, and he was delighted when he managed to pronounce it while paddling off after a cold beer, while we romped around the house laughing happily because Dad was "tipsy," which meant he was in the mood for jokes, all's well and life is beautiful.

Aurora, my sister, knew those reels by heart. A song would barely finish before Aurora was already humming the beginning of the next one. She amazed us for years with her musical memory. I couldn't do that. What I could do was look out of the window when we drove to the countryside in summer and, going by the trees running backwards, tell my father exactly what speed he was doing, without so much as a glance at the speedometer. That was my speciality. But the order of the songs I could never remember. Aurora, on the other hand, knew exactly when a reel was about to end and would warn me in time to pay attention and flip it over, so we wouldn't be left too long without music. Without music we always felt strange... as if we weren't in our own home.

One of my father's friends had a cassette player. I run over to his place and inform him that I need his cassette player UR-GENT-LY and AB-SO-LUTE-LY, for half an hour, no more, so I can load said program into the computer I was planning to leave switched on for the next two or three days. Total success. I get the cassette player on loan for two or three days, a Ghetto Blaster bigger than any cassette player I'd ever seen, I run home with it in my arms, careful going up the stairs not to trip and fall on top of it, I get home in one piece, take out the tape with the game, go to put it in the cassette player and... whoops: there's another tape in the cassette player.

"He forgot to take his tape out," I tell myself, "I'll go and give it back to him." But then I reason further: "He can't listen to it anyway, because he's got nothing to play it on, seeing as his cassette player is at my place." So I quickly take out his tape and toss it in a corner, put in the tape with the game, switch to mono, load it, listen with boundless pleasure to that characteristic whistle, everything's going fine, the game has loaded, the adventure begins.

Big event: we have a computer and Octavian is shooting everything in sight! The friends gather, the family gathers, they all stand behind me and watch with eyes like saucers what's happening in the fantastic pixelated universe on the screen.

And I play, and play, and play, I shoot malevolent aliens, collect points and fuel, become an expert, astonish everyone around me by getting to level two hammering the keys without even looking at the screen, because I'd worked out the pattern the alien bastards fell from the heavens in. (Uncle Viorel can confirm this — he was by far the most amazed by my skills as an intergalactic warrior and I'm sure he remembers to this day how I killed every last invader with my back to the television!)

After a while everyone gets bored and goes off about their business, and only my sister Aurora is left beside me, waiting for me to let her have a go at the killing too. We play a few rounds each. After a while the game becomes routine, it almost starts to bore me. I say to Aurora: "Hey, wasn't there a tape in the cassette player? Where did I put it? Go on, have a look, let's put some music on while we play."

Aurora finds the tape immediately, puts it in the cassette player, presses PLAY and... ooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhh, aaaaaaaauuuuuuu, dear God!!! What the hell is that??? A terrible noise fills the room. "Oh no, I've broken the neighbour's cassette player!" flashes through my mind. The noise is enormous, it's unbearable, it shakes every cell in my body, I have the feeling the windows are about to shatter and the plaster is starting to fall off the walls. Aurora freezes for a few moments, then tries to cover her ears with one hand while groping for the STOP button with the other, as I shout at her in desperation: "Turn it off!!! Turn it off!!! Turn it off!!!"

After an eternity, Aurora finds the STOP button. She hits it sharply, forcefully, almost hysterically. Silence. All at once there's silence. I can't believe it. My heart is pounding. The aliens have found my ship and are firing at me in a general frenzy, but I can't hear them any more, their bombs and lasers don't impress me. Baffled, I stare at Aurora, trying to work out what the hell just happened.

"I didn't do anything!!! Stop looking at me like that!!!" says Aurora.

"Did I break it?" I ask, frightened.

"Just you wait and see what Dad does to you if you've broken it!" she answers, adding after a short pause: "How much does one of those cassette players cost, anyway?"

I don't know how much it costs, but I think I heard something once, the last time I talked to the lads about cassette players, when we were resting at the spring, after we'd drunk cold water even though we were still sweating from football.

"About as much as a motorbike," I answer.

"Oh God!"

Silence. A long pause.

"Let's try it again!"

"All right, but turn the volume down!"

PLAY. The same horrible noise comes out of the speakers, but quieter this time. It's clear: it isn't the cassette player, it's the tape. We don't have another tape to try, to make sure. But the cassette player seems OK.

"Turn it over!"

She turns it over.

PLAY. Music. Muuuuuuuuuuuusiiiiiic!!! At last! There's music.

"Turn it up!"

"God, that scared me!"

"Me too!"

"Yeah, me even more!"

The cassette player is OK, the tape is OK, we calm down, we listen to music.

But what strange music... I've never heard anything like it in my life. What kind of music is this? I look at Aurora. She looks at me. We listen. The music flows smoothly, ever so smoothly. I like it. I think. I'm not sure. I'm not sure, because I've never heard anything like it in my life. So smooth. Smooth, but strange somehow... Even though it flows smoothly... it doesn't calm me, quite the opposite! Instead of sending me to sleep or making me daydream, the way it usually does, it wakes me up. It makes me feel more awake than ever. It's soothing and unsettling at the same time. What on earth is this music?

And what a strange voice this bloke has! You'd think it was a song from a cowboy film, except those seem different too, more normal, not like this one. Is that a guitar? It sounds so strange, I have no idea what it is. I look at Aurora, but all I see in her eyes are the same question marks. Neither of us says a word. We're in a trance. As if we'd been hit by an express train. And the music flows smoothly on. Then the song ends. There's silence. We look at each other wide-eyed.

I'm about to say something when all of a sudden... horror! The terrible noise from before erupts out of the speakers again. Oh God! Aurora reacts like lightning, like a reptile, and hits the STOP button so hard it becomes EJECT in a single press.

"Rewind it!" I tell her, but there's no need: Aurora has learned the buttons and the tape is already running back. Whatever that great music from before was, it ended too fast for me to categorise it, to file it in one of the little drawers in my head — maybe under "easy listening," harder to believe under "folk music," maybe under "country," I have no idea. It doesn't fit anywhere.

PLAY. Noise. Fright. Horror.

"You rewound it wrong! You fast-forwarded it!"

"No I didn't, I rewound it right!"

"Then you rewound it too far! Turn it down!"

We search in desperation. This tape is full of rubbish. Maybe it's demagnetised. Or something. There's only one song on it. Where is it? Maybe we'll find it again on the other side... No, no, it must be here. We find it, we listen to it again. God, it feels good. I've never felt this good in my life! Not when my father bought me a bicycle, not when my father let me drive the Dacia across the field, out in the country, after we'd finished picking the corn, not when I got my hands on that nice redhead from Oradea, two summers ago, at the seaside.

"Play it again!" I tell Aurora once more, though there's no need. Aurora is an expert now: she rewinds, turns the volume down, listens carefully for where that terrible noise ends — a noise in which we've already begun to make out what sound like inhuman screams, and rhythmic noises that, although they resemble music, cannot possibly be music, that much is clear — or maybe it was music once, but something happened to the tape in that stretch; no human being could record something like that on purpose.

We listen endlessly and never get enough. Eventually the weekend ends and we have to go back to school.

We go back to school. On the way I try to hum the song that raised every hair on my head, my arms, my legs and the rest of my worldly possessions. I can't manage it at all. I can't remember even two notes in a row. I have a vague feeling the song is inside me, but I can't reproduce it in any way. I can't whistle it, I can't hum it, I haven't retained a single word of it. I know a bit of English, but from that strange way of singing I understood nothing and retained nothing.

"Aurora, how did the song go?"

Aurora can sort of hum something, something — she has a better musical memory than mine — but she's a long way off too. Even though she feels exactly what I feel: that the song is ringing loudly in her head.

We arrive at school. The two of us board there, far from our parents. The boarders' rooms are on the second floor, along a shared corridor divided in two by a chipboard partition.

At the boarding house, sharing a room with me, a real character is waiting: Cosmin. Cosmin Butnar. We called him "Butnărel." (Cosmin, if you ever read this, do me a favour and get in touch, because I miss you badly and I have no idea where you are!)

Cosmin is a year older than me, he has a girlfriend he's been with since two summers ago, a really great girl, inseparable from him ever since we met at summer camp at the seaside, without knowing that two years later we'd end up roommates and good friends. Cosmin has a fine, virgin moustache he has never once shaved since hair started growing on his face. I have three hairs under my nose that I cannot call a moustache with all the goodwill in the world. I am a kid. In Cosmin you can already see the future man clearly.

Cosmin has been around and seen things. He's a bit off his rocker, but he's good at maths and physics (his physics teacher, and mine, is called Miron; we called him "Mironel"). Cosmin is unbeatable at trigonometry and can't understand why anyone finds it hard. And above all, Cosmin is a walking musical encyclopaedia. He has a cassette player, he has tapes, he knows hundreds of bands, if not thousands, and he's always up to date with what's going on. I'm not like that. I'm an ignoramus. I like the music on the reels I listen to at home with my father; the rest leaves me more or less cold.

Me, I like Iris and Compact, I know their lyrics by heart and I hum them constantly, when I'm chopping wood for the winter with my father, for instance. Every so often my father asks me: "Hey, son, have you had some sort of disappointment in love? Or what's wrong with you, that you only sing these miserable songs!" Love? Ha, what a bold thought. I have no idea what love is, it's something from the sort of films I fall asleep during, but I love these sad songs to death. As for foreign bands... apart from Deep Purple I don't know them and I'm not interested. I don't really understand the lads who listen to foreign bands either, to be honest, but it doesn't matter: what counts is that we get on fine at football.

But this song is killing me. I AB-SO-LUTE-LY have to find out who's singing, what the singer or the band is called, and what the song is about! So I'm burning with impatience to meet up with Cosmin. I've barely unpacked and my first question is: "Cosmin, do you know this song?" — and I try to hum something at him. He's slow to catch on, I'm humming it badly, but at some point he says: "I'm not sure, but I think it's Metallica."

"Metallica????"

I look at him in disbelief. No, no, no, what nonsense are you talking, you didn't hear it right, let me hum it for you again: "Naaa naa na naaaa na naaaaa!"

"Yes, man, it's Metallica. The song's called Nothing Else Matters."

"Cosmin, man, how can it be Metallica? Metallica is a band? Metallica is some kind of cult, isn't it?"

"No, man, you idiot, Metallica is a band."

"Man, I don't believe you."

"Suit yourself. I've got a mate who has the tape, I'll ask him for it tomorrow and show you."

The next day the two of us listen to Nothing Else Matters. He likes it just as much. I'm still struggling to accept that Metallica is a band, trying to picture how many of them there are, what they look like; suddenly I'm dying to know what the hell this Metallica business is, and above all what those terrifying screams on the rest of the tape are. A dreadful thought starts circling: "Are they doing that on purpose?"

"Yes, man, of course they're on purpose, that's how they sing!"

Now I'm scared out of my wits. What have I got myself into? Any day now I'll end up writing Metallica in charcoal on the school walls myself and falling in with the longhairs and the great unwashed. And yet I'm dying of curiosity.

The following weekend Cosmin is going to a bikers' meet. I like motorbikes; when I was little I used to cry when my father took me off the motorbike, I loved sitting on it and frothing at the mouth through imaginary corners among my grandmother's chickens.

Cosmin has some biker friends who know everything about Metallica, and he's going to ask them whether they like them, whether they're a good band or some cult that makes strange music to recruit its victims from among the psychologically fragile, from broken homes — in which case I'd steer well clear of them, being a child with a sound mind, a happy childhood, from a family full of love, understanding and mutual respect, in which my father doesn't get drunk and beat my mother but merely "gets tipsy," is in the mood for jokes and smiles at everything — or whether they really are, quite simply, a band whose music we can listen to as well, without being ambushed by assorted dangers at every verse.

The following week, naturally, Sunday evening at the boarding house, Cosmin is priority number one. And Cosmin tells me:

"I was in this big group of bikers, and they were talking about everything. And music came up. Those blokes knew band names I'd never heard in my life. But mostly they talked about Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Megadeth, W.A.S.P., and each one said his band was the best."

"And Metallica???"

"Hang on, let me tell you!"

"So tell me!"

"Nobody said a word about Metallica."

"No waaaaaaaay!!!"

"I swear!!!"

"Nothing at all?"

"Hang on, let me tell you!"

"And you didn't ask anything?"

"Hang on, man, let me tell you!"

"So tell me already!"

"So I sit there a while, I see nobody's saying anything about Metallica, I move over next to one bloke I found sort of likeable, and I ask him quietly: 'Listen, but... Metallica... do you like them?' — at which the bloke looks at me, smiles, and says: 'Who doesn't like Metallica?'"

And that was that. That was the end of our anxieties. Mine in particular — Cosmin didn't worry himself half as much. That evening we both decided, tacitly, that we had to find out everything there was to find out about Metallica.

I had two big questions:

1. How is it possible to write a song like Nothing Else Matters — one that knocks you flat, that turns your veins inside out, that makes you float and forget yourself, that makes you cry and laugh at the same time, that you never tire of no matter how often you play it; one that, when you play it after a week of not playing it, feels so fresh, so new, so full of surprises, as if you were hearing it for the first time in your life; in which you discover with every listen a new harmony, a new little melody, a chime, a rhythm that, although you've already heard the song hundreds or thousands of times, you'd never noticed before?

2. How is it possible that a bloke or a band capable of such sensitivity is the same bloke or band that screams non-stop for an hour, without the faintest trace of harmony or musicality, simply making an infernal racket and producing those inhuman screams? And if the bloke who sings Nothing Else Matters is the same one who screams, what on earth can have happened to him, what kind of terrible experiences can he have lived through to be capable of screaming like that, as if someone were skinning him alive? How much pain is hidden in those screams and where does it come from, because he's certainly not screaming with pleasure? And what on earth does he hope to achieve by it, why doesn't he go and scream somewhere in a forest where nobody can hear him? And what do the bikers and the other oddballs — whom I don't understand but, I admit, secretly rather admire — what do they find good, or pleasant, in this "music," if I can call it music? Or rather: how are they able to listen to an hour of howling and bellowing without earplugs and without smashing the cassette player on the ground?

A year and a summer holiday later I was back at the boarding house with Cosmin. In the meantime I'd been listening to the Black Album ten to twenty times a day. I had my own tape and I listened to it at night at the boarding house. While the others slept, I listened on headphones, on Walkmans borrowed from classmates.

I got the tape... incredibly... from my grandmother. Walking around the market with her, during the summer holidays, I stopped in front of a stall selling audio cassettes. I was scanning listlessly through titles like "Albatros," "Wedding Songs," "Songs of Good Cheer" — and I froze when I saw, on the spine of one tape: Metallica. I nearly fainted. Metallica? At the market? I pick it up, turn it over and over. Instead of a title or album cover there was just a black-and-white photo. This one:

The whole summer holiday I terrorised the neighbours one by one, begging them to let me listen to my tape on their cassette players. People talked about me. I was behaving strangely. I'd come into their house, say two words, sit down next to the cassette player and stay there until night fell or until my grandmother came to fetch me.

That summer the Black Album got into my blood. Every day I discovered something new. And I loved the surprises: now a drum sound, now a scream that had been hiding behind the bass drum, now a guitar trill audible only in the left speaker, which made me deeply grateful to my father for keeping me up at night beside the reel-to-reel and teaching me the difference between mono and stereo.

Every time I discovered something new I'd jump for joy, stop the tape, rewind and play that one segment again. I'd listen to it until I was sure nothing else was hiding alongside it, that I'd heard everything there was to hear, that I'd squeezed every last drop of music out of that poor wretched tape.

"You'll break it if you keep messing about with the buttons like that," someone would tell me, while I swore under my breath that I'd put aside my bread-roll money and buy myself a cassette player. "Buttons are made to be pressed, they break if you don't press them!" I'd reply, and watch them spit in their collar, cross themselves three times and go about their business.

Back at the boarding house, first term, tenth grade. To my father's despair... I don't give up until I've brought along my Reghin guitar with the nylon strings, given to me as a present when I was 6 and gathering dust behind the wardrobe from roughly the age of 6 years and two weeks — with a brief interruption in fifth grade, when I joined the "guitarists' club" and learned to play "Oda Partidului" in A minor.

Once I'm at the boarding house with the guitar, to the despair of the housemistress, I don't come out of the showers (where I wasn't bothering anyone) until I've found the three notes that open the signature riff of The Unforgiven.

A few weeks later Miki gives me Kill 'Em All as a present. I digest it in a week flat and realise I can retain quite a lot of passages from it fairly easily, which I then hum whatever I'm doing, wherever I go.

I start looking for the notes on the guitar and I find more and more of them, more and more easily. On Motorbreath I'm amazed at how well two different riffs fit together when (to my mind at the time) they have nothing whatsoever in common.

Then I find, among my classmates, a photocopy of an extract from a Western music magazine, in English, with a segment of the score for Jump in the Fire printed on it. I spend a few nights in the showers with music books borrowed from the younger boarders in years five to eight, and I learn the main riff.

It's hard going, but for the first time in my life I'm certain that what I'm playing on the guitar is right. The next challenge, however, is bigger still: to sing the lyrics at the same time. It takes me about six months, and I never manage to actually sing them, but I do manage to mumble them well enough. Well enough to convince my classmates that I'm lost forever, beyond all hope of recovery.

Then comes Ride the Lightning, borrowed from Mishu, devoured without pause. Master of Puppets and ...And Justice for All finish me off completely. Just when I thought I had everything Metallica had ever put out, someone lends me Garage Inc., their covers album. I like it almost more than the originals. Helpless keeps me awake night after night, for weeks on end:

I can see the stars
But I can't see what's going on
Every night alone
I sing my song just for fun.

Only time will tell
If I'll make it myself someday
This stage is mine
Music is my destiny.

Cannot squeeze the life from me!

Helpless
Helpless
Helpless
Helpless

And Crash Course in Brain Surgery gave me an appetite for life in any circumstance:

Look inside and you will see
The words are cutting deep inside my brain
Thunder burning, quickly turning
Knife of words is driving me insane
Insane, yeah

Raven black is on my track
He shows me how to neutralize the knife
Show to me in surgery
The art of fighting words to conquer life
Conquer life, yeah
...............

"The art of fighting words to conquer life" — that was probably my guiding motto throughout secondary school.

An academic secondary school, incidentally, which I finished acceptably, meaning far below my father's expectations. Two weeks after my final exams I'm sicker than ever. If I hear the word "Metallica," I jump. If I hear Metallica on television, I drop whatever's in my hand and charge, trampling over corpses, through doors, walls and windows, into the room with the television to watch the video. If anyone changes the channel, it means war.

I finished secondary school, but I'm unfinished myself. I can't start anything and, even if I could... I wouldn't know what. I did the maths-and-physics stream, but after writing MATHEMATICS with the hooks from METALLICA on every wall and on all the maths exercise books and textbooks (mine and my classmates'), nobody takes me seriously any more anyway.

(Except my form teacher, and even she only long enough to whack me over the head with the class register, after which she too forgot about me. Incidentally, out of sheer nerves... I let out a fart at the exact moment my form teacher hit me over the head with the register. Nobody heard it, because the crack of the register was much louder, but if you still remember, dear classmates, that smell nobody could trace: it came from my fart! And it wasn't my fault, because I could still have controlled it if my form teacher hadn't hit me over the head with the register!)

So two weeks after my final exams I go with my father to the woods to pick raspberries. The father worried that his offspring has gone down the wrong path; the offspring worried that he suffers from acute colour blindness and simply cannot see the red raspberries among the green leaves. "There it is, look, can't you see it!!??!!" "Where, Dad?" "Right under your nose!!!"

I can't see it and that's that. To hell with the raspberries. Anyway... we have more important things to discuss. For example, what I intend to do, now that I've passed my exams.

"What do you mean, what do I intend to do?"

In a way... like in Forrest Gump:

Jenny: Do you ever dream, Forrest, about who you're gonna be?
Forrest Gump: Who I'm gonna be?
Jenny: Yeah.
Forrest Gump: Well, ain't I going to be me?

I didn't intend to do anything except tell the raspberries where to go, since I couldn't see them anyway, and go home and play the guitar — because in the meantime I'd learned the riff from The Four Horsemen and I loved it to the point of madness. If I could play it for three days without a break, I wouldn't need food or water for three days without a break. But unfortunately I had to go and pick the invisible raspberries from time to time.

And so, one sunny day, picking raspberries, putting the world to rights, discussing my uncertain future with my father, listening to him tell me I could do whatever I wanted with my life but that I had no chance unless I went to university, talking about various degrees, learning that History "bores me," Economics "repels me," and Computer Science is too competitive... my father, at the end of his patience, was moved to exclaim with enormous exasperation:

"They don't give degrees in Metallica!!!"

...and then flung the bucket to the ground, scattering a good quantity of invisible but very tasty raspberries.

That point once settled, it became suddenly and perfectly clear to me that I had to do something, anything, that would let me go on studying Metallica passionately, by correspondence.

By correspondence, without teachers, without fellow students, without examinations and without a diploma. Which is why, from then until this very day, I still haven't finished my studies, although I study diligently every day.

A lot has changed in the meantime: I no longer go without food to buy CDs and DVDs, but to buy sheet music, which I read purely to reassure myself that I heard correctly what I heard back when I sat in the showers or on the toilet with my guitar and my International cassette player in my arms, winding back and forth until the buttons popped out of the machine (they do break if you press them too many times, it's true!), learning note by note, song by song, album by album.

In the meantime I've seen them live four times, and the last time I stood two metres away from them. Word around town is that this year, (almost) on my birthday, I'll see them for the fifth time. (Guinness, anyone?)

All I still need in order to complete my studies is a bit of luck and two or three fellow students to work with on my final project. Unfortunately, in this town I have no luck whatsoever, so I think I'll be transferring to another town in the near future. But give up I will not. No, no! Not a chance!