What I like about living on my own

Hm. I found this in my journal, written in February. And it’s all still more than true. Enjoy.

AKA what I like about being a student away from home.

I moved out of the family house at the end of August last year to go to university in another town. My life moved 185 kilometers south, from Tallinn, the capital, to Tartu, the second largest city in Estonia.

So what do I like? To put it briefly: I, and no one else, am the boss of me, which, unfortunately, is not always as wonderful as it might seem (and commas for the win). So here are some of the best (and worst) aspects of the mess I call my life.

1. No one drags me out of bed in the morning.

If I don’t want to go to school on a particular day, I can choose not to. I can switch off the alarm, turn a side, and fall back asleep to enjoy another splendid dream about potatoes. Or whatever rocks my world that particular morning. Some days, though, we all need that someone who will go to unbelievable lengths to get us out of bed and make sure we get educated. Every day. Some mornings it takes a little push to get up and go to class. I don’t get that anymore, and I find myself missing it just a little on those mornings when I know going to class is in my best interest but I just can’t be arsed to.

2. I make my own coffee.

I make it just the way I like it. Yeah. *puts on sunglasses and thinks she looks cool*

3. I get to buy my own food.

When I want a bag of chips, I buy a bag of chips, and no one looks at me patronizingly saying it isn’t good for my health. Not that I eat chips that often. But still. Also, I get to choose the brand of sausage, I get to choose the brand of cheese, I get to choose what kind of bread I want under my sausage. Even though I still eat mostly the same stuff I ate at home, it feels good to be able to choose for myself. I do eat a different kind of macaroni, though. Yeah, I’m a rebel.

4. More free time.

University doesn’t eat up as much of my time as high school did, so I have more of it to do nothing. Yay!

5. I rule my own schedule.

I can do (almost) everything at the most convenient time for me. More free time means I can be flexible, which allows me to meet other people’s needs and expectations better. It allows for greater productivity. Productivity all around!

6. No more chores!

Well, that’s not true. I still have to clean up after myself, even in this apartment (just like everyone else). BUT… No more: washing floors (we have carpets eeeeverywhere), firewood drama, furnace duty (for heating, you know), other tiny annoying stuff. I still have to do all those things when I go to Tallinn for a visit, but they’re not as infuriating anymore, because I don’t have to do them every day.

7. More responsibility.

It’s great to be trusted – my mom had no choice but to trust me with all the stuff that she had always thought I was incapable of handling: cleaning up, paying bills, buying my own food and planning my expenses. This experience has brought my relationship with my mother to a whole new level – she can see now that I really have grown up and can take care of myself. Then again, more responsibility isn’t always fun. Somehow it came to pass that ALL the financial responsibilities in the household fell on my shoulders. I pay ALL the bills, and the rent, and talk to the landlord, and make sure all the contracts with various providers are up to date (and that we have enough toilet paper, salt, soap, dish washing liquid, you name it). Okay, I overdid it in the parentheses a little bit, but generally that’s the way things work around here, and it can get stressful. I have to keep a million deadlines in mind all the time, and make sure I get the right amount of money from everyone at the right date. Then I have to make sure said money goes where it should. And if it doesn’t, it’s all my fault. Not awesome. Nevertheless, I have managed to handle these responsibilities decently enough for the past months. Self-confidence, here I come.

All in all, I’m convinced moving away was the right thing to do. From day one in Tartu, I felt like everything was falling in place. I had been dreaming about leaving home for a while, mostly because I was feeling suffocated in Tallinn – by high school, by my home – so this was literally a dream come true. It hasn’t always been easy or pleasant, but it’s definitely rewarding.

I’d drink in honor of this, but I’m out of beer.

Young and Selfish (And Proud of It)

I just made myself a TypePad account. We’ll see how that works out.

So I am finally back home. The last few days in Finland passed without much ever happening, but I did do a lot of thinking about why it is so difficult for me to write even though I love it with all my heart, and I think I found the answer: maybe I just don’t have enough to say (yet).

I’m young and stupid and naive. I read books too fast, make decisions too quickly, base my opinions on too little information. (I’m pretty sure I do it better than a lot of people my age, but there is definitely room for improvement.) I’m egoistic and like to talk about myself (see what I mean?). I have a vague idea about what I want to do and an even vaguer idea about how I am going to do it, yet I am frightened of the enormity of the task before me. The world in general scares me shitless sometimes, because I know I will have to take it on one day. Take on the world. How the hell am I supposed to do that?

I’m reading Orwell’s 1984 right now.

I’m also out of tea.

I have thoughts, but am afraid to put them out there because of the fear of them sounding immature.

I need a father, but I will never have one. That’s just the way life is. It really is time I got over it.

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Snow and Cottage Cheese, the Secret Life of

I just dropped a needle on my crotch. No, seriously. A needle. Fortunately it was pointing up and did not pierce my pants. That would have been sort of… painful, I guess. *is tired and has the dumb*

I recently discovered my life has become full of little things to tell and discuss, things to write about and just notice. I have my jaw trouble, for example, and the snow storm that hit the country a few days ago, school is always a good subject, too.

I have made numerous observations of the philosophical kind lately, mainly because of the snow and the beauty it brought with itself. I do not only mean the storm with this, because we had some modest snowfall before that. I was waiting for the bus last Friday when I noticed how beautiful the snow looked, spread out on the branches of the dark tree branches. White on black, something young and virgin and fragile touching hands with a most endurable, silent watcher above the humans that walk by under it every day. At that particular moment I found it miraculous how the world has given us both things we can rely on to persist through most of the storms of life and history, and things fragile and evanescent that disappear soon after we’ve had time to acknowledge their existence, but always return, even if for the briefest moment.

Poetic, much, not.

Why the hell don’t the English/Americans/whoever have a word for ‘kohupiim’? There is ‘cottage cheese’, I know, but it completely fails at grasping the real essence of what I am actually talking about right now. It’s a (sweet(, or tasty at the least)) thing that you make from milk, it looks a LITTLE bit like cottage cheese and feels a LITTLE bit like cottage cheese in my mouth, but it. Is. Not. Cottage Cheese. It’s kohupiim! Argh! And another word the English should invent in the near future, because it is one of the best things a human being can eat during its petty, impermanent existence, is ‘kohuke’, or some equivalent of it. Because it is made of our special kind of cottage cheese that is not really cottage cheese. It is a bar of (not)cottage cheese wrapped in chocolate, it sometimes has jelly or other cool stuff inside and is about the best food EVUR. EVUREVUR.

And with that I am done. Capish. Time for bed. Bedtime. Almost midnight. One more day and then it’s weekend and I will be off to Tartu to learn about biology and be generally totally awesome in my own not-awesome way. I pwn everyone at failing to be awesome. Yeah.

So good night, everyone. I hope this was not the least informing.

Triinu

P.S. My thumb hurts. I have been sewing for two hours.

P.P.S. Hah. I’m just going to call the tasty Estonian thing (not)cottage cheese. We have cottage cheese, you know, and the thing I talked about is not it. As you probably already realized…

Sleep Deprivation and Other Fun Stuff

It has been a while since I last wrote anything in this blog, so here goes me being all tired and stressed, but generally happy.

I’ve been strangely sleep deprived these last few days. I am not exactly sure what is causing the stress I’m under (school is not even half as horrible as it used to be), but it is there and it keeps me from getting any proper sleep. As tired as I may be at the end of the day, I simply cannot fall asleep when I go to bed. I keep thinking over everything that happened during the day, everything that is going to happen tomorrow, and – in the name of all that’s holy and unholy – my stupid goddamned characters always find that particular time to be the best to start talking to me. They arrive and wave, sometimes even jump up and down on the spot just to let me know they are there and they have something HUGELY important to tell me. They reallyreallyreallyreallyreallyREALLY need to talk to me RIGHT NOW!!!!!111one. And what about, you might ask? (Well, I’m sure you don’t, but that will not stop me.) About some friggin dress that they want to wear to a friggin party where they will friggin show how friggin politically important and fashionable they can friggin be at the same friggin time. Friggin.

Yeah.

Well, I cannot really be angry at my characters for telling me these things, because they might prove important later on, but must they really pick the most inconvenient time out of them all to come and tell me those things? Argh, I tell you!

Well, now that I have got that out of my system, it is time to move on to what I really came here to say. And what I really came here to say is that I read from some smart website that keeping a journal to write down everything that has happened during the day to get it out of my head might be a good idea. So I thought I should try to get some thoughts out of my head. I sincerely doubt I am going to start writing every single day, but I do feel I should do it more often. Just in case.

I hate how much I use ‘I’. I am such an egomaniac.

Aren’t we all?

: )

Nighty.

P.S. Not going to read this one over. So yeah. It is probably half way there to Horribleville.

What the Hell Is Going On in Battlestar Galactica?

I noticed a peculiar thing while watching Battlestar Galactica some time ago. It was the beginning of the first episode of the Pegasus/Admiral Cain story arc. Starbuck had just returned from an unauthorized recon mission in the Blackbird, and the Vipers from both Galactica and Pegasus, who had been on the verge of opening fire against each other, now turned towards Starbuck who, at that point was an unrecognized intruder. After clearing up some misunderstandings Starbuck sent a text message to Apollo saying, “What the hell is going on in here?”

That message is what caught my attention, or to be more precise, it was the word “hell” in it. If I have missed something very important or am yet to see it (I’m still in the middle of season 3 with watching BSG), then smack me in the head with a rake, but at this moment I am definite I have never seen or heard anything in the show refer to a Hell, or even a similar concept. Why would Starbuck use or even know of a word so tightly connected to the Christian religion and the idea of chaos and havoc (which would imply the use of it in such a context). I find it highly illogical that “what the hell” should exist as an expression in the Battlestar Galactica universe unless there is a religious base to it, one that we are yet to be demonstrated (unless, I repeat, I have missed it somehow).

I did some googling on it, but didn’t get an answer, instead I happened upon a bunch of spoilers which, from my brief glance, failed to explain this issue.

This might seem like something insignificant and nitpicky, but I like nitpicking, and I feel kind of proud to have noticed a little thing like that. So go ahead and hit me in the head with a rake if you like, I won’t feel any different for it.

Blogging is hard.

I’ve been having trouble blogging for two major reasons recently. One is the middle finger of my right hand. It hurts. Something happened to my nail and it got very ugly and painful and went all I’m-gonna-come-off-mwahahahaha-you-suck on me. It’s quite annoying since I don’t even know what really happened; I have no idea why it suddenly got so bad. So now I’m in pain. (I would have written “pain” in capital letters, but I didn’t want to be a drama queen.)

The other major reason is that I don’t really have that many things to share. At least not about my personal little world. About the way it works. I have everything figured out, all the tough stuff: birth, death, life (at least enough of it to let me sleep at night), the meaning of life, the Ultimate Truth. Little things like that. I have my views on them which have hung around for quite a while now, and that could, in my opinion, be regarded as a proof that they are right for me, that they work. They really do work. These ideas and convictions change little by little without even my noticing it sometimes, but they do not alter themselves so much as to contradict with what they used to be.

It is because of those little barely noticeable changes that I don’t have much to say or rant about when it comes to those ideas. They just are. I don’t even think about them much anymore; they have become practically a part of me, a part of who I am. I ma still open to change, just like those ideas are, but they are a part of me just as much as I am a part of them, and we change together, constantly triggering each other’s metamorphosis. So, how am I going to write about something that I am not even conscious about most of the time? (Yeah, yeah, I know it can be done, but I just don’t feel like it ould take me or anyone who read it anywhere. Understand?)

I have no idea where I’m going with this.

Blogging has become harder for me during the past few years. I remember how I used to pour everything out into my blog, that big blotch of yellow on the computer screen that I made use of to let the world know how much I really needed someone to reach out for me. I used it to let out steam, to connect to complete strangers who happened to take the trouble to read through what I’d written and comment on it, maybe even have a conversation with me. I was so lonely in the real world and in myself that I turned to an empty white box on the computer screen to give me comfort, to listen to everything I said as I typed it full. I just didn’t have anyone to talk to about the things that were bothering me at the time so I wrote them in my blog for the whole world to see.

This is exactly what has changed. I have grown closer to a lot of people in these couple years’ time, and found those whom I can connect with. I don’t need to turn to the Internet, to a blog or a message board for support and understanding anymore. I have real people for that. I have friends to talk to about all my crazy ideas, emotions, hopes, fears, irrational phobias and whatnot. And thus, there seems to be nothing left for the blog.

Makes sense, sort of.

Wow, this is the first thing in a very long time that I have figured out while writing about it. I just hope I’m not too embarrassed by it once I re-read it, and will still publish it.

I also just now realized there are a number of things that I could write about, if only I took the trouble. I simply need to think it all through and stuff.

And on that note I am going to leave. At least for tonight.

So,

G’night.

P.S. The Mac is back in action. With a whole new keyboard. *loves the crunchiness*

About saying things

Strange. Recently I’ve been feeling more and more like I don’t have all that much to say to other people. I don’t write in my Estonian blog at all, anymore. I only use it to proclaim some of my more intense emotions or thoughts or finds, but I don’t really… talk about anything. For example, in my last post I just copied and pasted some lyrics from a song I like which was basically my idea of telling the world how much in love I am. The person the lyrics were meant to got the hint, but I doubt anyone else made too much out of it. All they saw were some lines that had rhyming words at the end.

Maybe it’s just a phase I’m going through in which I need to sort my thoughts out for myself before feeling able or simply confident enough to present them to the world. Maybe I just think better when I’m talking to other people. I already know I generate better ideas when I can bounce them off other people’s words or thoughts or whatever. My brain works best in a conversation. I guess I’m very much a woman that way – I work my own problems and ideas and concepts out while talking about them.

I’m only able to write about this in here, because I know I’m doing it for myself. I did not create this blog for other people’s entertainment or to show off my cool ideas and writing skills (which are pretty much nonexistent, when English is concerned – just look at my syntax and punctuation…). I made this blog for myself, so I would have a place to come to and just have fun or work out thoughts and problems that I might have, and to simply practice writing in English. I need it. I need a little corner of my very own, we all do.

Blah. I don’t feel like writing anymore.

P.S. Wow, my English really sucks in this one. Well, I could edit it, but I’m not feeling like it right now. It won’t stop the point from getting through anyway.

This blog is going private

Reading my previous two posts I feel they’re not really that bad. Still, the effort I put into writing them should be smaller, seeing as I’m intending to start writing in English regularly one day. I should be better at it, even though I know I’m already way above the average level of people my age for whom English is a foreign language. However, I still worry. I guess it’s natural.

I just started thinking that it may actually be a good thing no one sees and reads this blog. That way I don’t have to worry about how my linguistic skills and I myself come across. I can just write and not bother my mind with concerns about the opinions of others, and I believe that is exactly what I need right now, at least for a while – until I feel more comfortable and self-confident using English. So I guess I’ll make this blog private for a while to prevent anyone even accidentally seeing it, and republish it when I feel self-assured enough.

I suppose the biggest problem with my English lies with the vocabulary. I know very few synonyms to the words and expressions I use. Fortunately, though, I have the Oxford dictionary in my MacBook, so I can search it and use the words I find here, so I would be able to memorize them by frequent use.

Yay!

But I’m off now. I need to study.