7:30 p.m. - 2007-09-01
Reasons to be happy and less happy
I had my third maths lesson today. And it was fun. I don't know what's happening, but I'm actually looking forward to those lessons and learning all that stuff that I missed in high school (and more). It's just.. I seem to understand most of the things with such.. ease that I'm more than a bit surprised. In high school I never understood asymptotes, I mean, NEVER, even if I tried. You have no idea how hard I tried, but I just couldn't do it alone. When I came here, the professor assumed that everyone knew what asymptotes are, so she just told us when to try to find them, wrote some weird and pretty scary-looking formulas on the blackboard and moved on. Then today, my instructor explained them to me and within 5 minutes I had understood it. Where was she 3 years ago when I was failing my maths courses one after another?
Today I actually wished that I could study only maths because it seems to be the easiest one of my exams at the moment. Not easy, but easiest. I don't have to read anything, I just have to let the information soak in. And I actually feel happy when I think of all the stuff that I've learned about maths. It's the complete opposite of what I feel when I think of petrography and ecoclimatology.
I just wish I could stop worrying about things. Exams, my weight, things like that. The weight thing really bothers me. Hm, maybe it'd be more truthful to say that it drives me crazy. I just don't understand why I seem to hate myself so much sometimes. I mean, I'm not morbidly obese, not even close (my BMI is kinda normal). But there are days when I hate everything about my body, it doesn't feel like mine. I still hate eating in front of people, especially my brother, and I feel terrible every time I do it. It's like I become a bad person if I'm not strong enough to say no to food. I can't even be on a diet now because my dad is here and he cooks the food, and I have to eat the same stuff as he and my brother do. When dad leaves to Finland, then I can start.
My dad asked me maybe a week ago whether I've become a vegetarian since before that I hadn't eaten any meat here in Belgrade. I'm not a real vegetarian yet, because I can eat some meat, but if I eat too much of it (like, more than 2 cevapi), I start feeling sick. That's for minced meat. I've never liked pork that much and now I like it even less, it just won't go down my throat. Chicken goes sometimes but again, too much is too much. And sometimes my stomach starts aching after eating meat. I don't know (yet) how I'll get enough proteins if I stop eating meat, but I guess it's not that difficult since Vilja can handle it so well. I think one of the reasons for my brother being so skinny is that he doesn't care about proteins because he doesn't know much about healthy nutrition. No proteins, no muscle. I personally don't want any extra muscle mass but my brother could use some.
Anyway, I'm not a vegetarian - yet.
Listen to Air's 'You make it easy', it's so soothing. Just what I need in the middle of all this stress.
11:41 a.m. - 2007-08-31
This interesting life of mine
Not much is going on. Should go to the uni today to check some exam dates. I know them already, actually, but I just want to make sure that the people who take care of publishing the dates on the internet know what they're doing and have entered the right dates, because for some funny reason I don't trust the locals' computer skills. They might've entered last year's dates and then it'd kinda suck if I had the wrong dates and everything. And I don't like going there, it reminds me of how difficult my September is going to be.
I can't think of anything interesting to write. Maybe I should jus go to the uni.
7:05 p.m. - 2007-08-27
I crave for diet coke
The maths lesson went pretty fine, even if last weekend I had just skimmed through the contents of my pile of notes, theory and exercises (over 150 pages, whee). Also, I didn't feel as stupid as I thought I'd feel, because even if I didn't remember everything immediately, all that stuff that I learned last winter and spring came back to me eventually, and I was, like "this isn't that difficult after all". It was a very nice feeling, I can tell you that.
My teacher has a good/bad (it depends) habit of talking about her students to other students. Like, she tells me about her former students sometimes and I like it, because they're funny little stories. Some years ago she had some Greek guy as her student, and he went home quite often to visit his parents, and every time he went home he took his laundry with him so that his mum could wash it for him. I heard he also had difficulties with learning Serbian, though a bit more than I do. Maybe my situation isn't that bad after all. Anyway, my point is that today she started talking about some guy to whom she had talked about me, since I'm from Finland and such an interesting person - as if - but anyway, she talked about me to that student. He's some years older than I am, and if I understood correctly, he tried studying in Belgrade but apparently things didn't go so well so he decided to take some time off and moved to London for some time to "relax a bit" or something. Then eventually he returned and started studying again here, in Belgrade. Apparently he thought that someone from Finland might be interesting (I'm not sure what my teacher blabbered about me to him) because he tried to ask my number from the teacher, and when she wouldn't give it to him (because it would be rude to give the number without asking me) he tried to peek in her notebook to check if the number was there. I guess this is why my teacher said he's more like a child than a man. Anyway, it's strange that he wanted my number, don't you think? Especially when he doesn't even know me. BUT, because I am known to be a bit strange sometimes, I decided to give my teacher the permission to give the number to him if he needed it. I mean, I don't have anything to lose. If he calls, nice. If he doesn't, so what? I don't even know the guy, and he might turn out to be nice. Maybe not, but who knows, I don't mind possibly getting a new friend.
After getting home I did my maths homework and studied some petrography (boring, I like maths better) and ate. And felt a bit nauseated by the meat, but I'll enter this "I might be turning into a vegetarian" subject some other day, you know, to keep this entry long enough to be informative but also short enough so that people have the nerves to read it. Anyway and all in all, today was a good day.
1:45 p.m. - 2007-08-26
The prototype survivor or not
I have my first maths lesson tomorrow, the last time was in.. May, I think. I'm horrified. I didn't want to call my teacher in the first place but dad made me. So, I reluctantly called her on Friday and was prepared to explain why she hasn't heard of me in 3 months. What I wasn't prepared for was her warm attitude towards me. I almost dropped my mobile when she said "Honey, where are you? Of course we can meet on Monday." Then I heard her whispering to someone who she was teaching at the moment, whether he/she can come some other time than on Monday. I like her, but I can't help feeling so utterly stupid whenever I go to her place to study maths. Tomorrow's lesson will be horrible because I have forgotten some (read: all) of the stuff she teached me last spring, and I'm screwed. She doesn't like it when I don't remember anything. And then I feel like an even bigger idiot. It's just that I want to prove to her that I'm not dumb, that I can learn and remember that stuff. Understanding all of it isn't a problem for me when there's a good teacher who doesn't get angry at me when I don't understand the first time, but remembering all those mathematical.. things, that's the problem. Always has been and probably always will be.
One of the reasons why I like my teacher is that she said that I'm smart, but I'm also lazy. True, I mean the lazy part. And it feels good when someone says you're smart, it really does, especially when you hardly ever hear it plus you end up failing half of your exams during the first year at the uni. She reminds me a bit of my descriptive geometry teacher (remedial instructor or whatever) who said that I learn d.geometry so much faster than my brother (who went there too). All she needed to do was show how it's done and I would do it. She thought that I should've tried enrolling the same uni as my brother and become an architect, but I would've never passed the entrance exam and the maths course is more difficult at my brother's uni. But still, that felt good too.
I feel a bit like I'm losing my faith, because my chances of getting the rest of the credit points that I need to enrol the second year are really really slim. I just want to go home and do things the easy way. People said that I was brave when I had the courage to move abroad to study landscape architecture, but I wasn't brave, I was just stupid. It's like one of those unpleasant things that happen to me in my life, I close my eyes and don't think about them. I just do them because they have to be done, but I don't think about them. That's my defense mechanism, I close my eyes and pretend the bad things don't exist. It works for a while but in the long run I'm just cheating myself. And nothing good can come out of that.
Now I'm off to drink my super strong cup of coffee that looks more like machine oil than any drinkable material, and then I'll mentally prepare myself for some maths studying.
5:38 p.m. - 2007-08-25
A bit cranky
It's still hot. We haven't had running water since morning, and I think I might be dying soon. My cousin has her 17th birthday party (for relatives) tonight and my hair is either sticking to my face or sticking out in a funny way (depends on which side of my head we're talking about, I just woke up from a nap) and I need to wash it because I'm afraid to go out looking like this. Probably even the stray dogs would roll on the ground laughing at me and my funny hair, and then they would die because it's so hot and they would burn themselves on the hot concrete when they rolled on it.
I'm beginning to be on a bad mood, but not like I was last night. Last night I was just really homesick (3rd time). Now I'm just plain pissed off, dehydrated and dirty. If someone can stay happy when the conditions are like this, then he/she should deserve a damn Nobel prize or some I'm-so-serene-that-I-should-be-called-Mother-Teresa award.
I'm going to check the taps if there's still any water coming out of them. Where there is hope, there is life.
12:43 p.m. - 2007-08-24
Skin deep
This heat. It's something unbelievable. I can't take it anymore. I wilt like a flower, I mean, if I was a tall and slender delicate kind of a flower with fragile petals. In reality, if I was a flower, I'd probably be some short and sturdy little plant with minuscule flowers that you wouldn't normally even see, and I'd probably attract weird-looking insects (30-year-old men who live with their mothers and wear socks with sandals). The weather forecast says it's going to be +39 degrees (celsius) today. OUCH. I wish I was in Finland, mum told me autumn has already begun there. I want to be able to wear my jeans, but I can't because it's so hot. I didn't think my skinny jeans could be more glued to my legs than they normally are, but try putting them on in this heat and they'll be so glued you can't take them off, unless you are willing to fight with them for a couple of minutes and endure excruciating pain.
I've been watching Zone Reality a lot lately, and it has the most interesting reality shows about normal people who go under plastic surgery. They show them late in the evening (I can almost guess why), and in a sick way I'm interested in how they do tummy tucks, breast implants, lipo, facelifts and the removal of excess skin. It looks so gross and I usually close my eyes when they do tummy tucks, because I really don't want to see what people look like from the inside (and I can't stand blood), but the people look so good afterwards that it's amazing! They're not exactly Penthouse models after the operation but when compared with the problems they had before, I just.. you just can't imagine that it was possible to get rid of their unwanted features that easily. I'd probably never have the guts to do anything like that, though if I was assured that there would be no complications and that my body would look just the way I had imagined it (and if I could afford it), I might want to do something after I have possibly had kids, assuming that I will have kids.
I just don't understand women who want their boobs to be bigger. If I was to do something with my boobs, I'd probably want them to be smaller. I'm quite sure I'd be a lot more confident then about my body and I could wear clothes that I can't wear now, like cute tees with small cleavages. Talking about plastic surgery, lipo wouldn't be that bad either, but.. I'm not that brave. And not that rich. And it's not totally risk-free.
There's also this one program called Birth Stories, it's maybe even more interesting than the plastic surgery stuff. Giving birth looks extremely painful and I can't help looking horrified every time they deliver babies in that program. It looks so.. horrible. I can't understand that my mum went through that agony SIX times, and all that because of us. I like children but I wish there was some other way of delivering them, something less painful, something that you could preferably do under general anaesthesia. A caesarean? That leaves scars, though (and it's done when you're fully conscious). But scars are nice. They're really nice indeed if you have to compare them with pushing a baby out of your womb.
Adoption is good, too.
