My 20th Birthday, life so far…

I kind of gave up on birthdays a while ago. Nothing terrible or anything, I just prefer not to get my expectations set too high and then be disappointed. But there are some birthdays I consider more or less important, or at least relevant, and I like to do something special on those.

The last important one was my 18th, because it was sort of a turning point. I was about to start attending University, about to start the journey that would lead me into independence. My mother, brother and I went to this wonderful Italian restaurant, called Capricciosa, and then for a walk at night, as there’s a sort of fair nearby around this time, something related to Saint Peter. We met some family there, and it was nice. I remember mostly the cake, which was delicious.

This 20th birthday was supposed to be special too. I was really excited about it in the beginning of the year. 2009, the year I’d turn 20. By that time, I though I’d be finishing my second year of University and starting my last, which would have meant I’d survived the first two years; this seems to be the only thing that’s going according to plan. I thought that I was going to learn how to take care of myself too, kitchen wise specially but also with handling documents and similar stuff, so as to be able to be on my own (I think that was in my New Year’s resolutions actually…) I thought that this year would be the beginning of my decade, because independence seems so close now.

My decade. I know it sounds dramatic, but I was really surprised I’d made it that far, with all things considered throughout my life. I’m hoping I’ll have better decades ahead of me of course. But on the beginning of 2009, that was my thought.

I’m even more surprised I made it this far now. I didn’t celebrate this year though. I spent the day in my bedroom mostly. I slept, listened to Franz Ferdinand on my iPod with the volume limit on maximum, and then slept some more. I don’t even remember my mother having wished me a happy birthday. The one person/being I really wanted here anyway isn’t here anymore. I miss my Luna, with whom I’d always share some of the whipped cream from my birthday cake. Not very surprisingly, that’s what was on my mind most of the day.

For the record by the way: I’m not just sulky, I’m also irritable and aggressive. And so no, I’m still not “over that Luna thing yet”, please don’t ask again. People these days, how hard can it be to fake a little empathy?

Continuing. I did try forcing myself to plan a birthday dinner with some friends, but it didn’t work out. And I have to admit, I was kind of relieved it didn’t. Not because I didn’t want to see the friends in question, mostly because being happy is tiring right now. The feeling I had on the beginning of the year just isn’t there anymore.

University is killing me too. Last semester had left me in high spirits, since I did wonderfully. This semester, I’m actually afraid I might fail some subjects. Terrified is more the word. Some out of pure disinterested with whatever was being taught, some because of my high rate of absences. I’m hoping I don’t fail anything. But either way, I’d been doing really well before. Having done my math, and having been passing everything, I can actually fail over three subjects and still finish University next year with a nice and not too busy schedule.

I need to finish University next year. The idea of a Master’s Degree is tempting, but I’m not sure of anything anymore. I feel so horribly trapped in this house, two more years of University seem too much at times. I’m always locked in my bedroom, as it seems to be the only little place that belongs to me, the only place where I feel slightly comfortable. But in what concerns the house and family as an entirety, I had Luna before, and now I’m alone. And that doesn’t make things easy. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m never going to be fully comfortable here. That’s fine. But it’s not easy. And it’s becoming less and less easy as months go by.

I have made a little progress with that bedroom redesigning thing lately though, one that’ll make the comfort better, specially if I don’t leave the room at all. Because one year of three years more of University, I need this little space of mine to be mine. I don’t think it’ll change my feelings or state of mind, but it’s a distraction, and I’ll be needing those with Summer vacations coming. I’ll let you know next week.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

Things have been rough, and I’m not doing much better. I continue to being tired of my family and of this house all the time, feeling clueless at university, missing my cat who would snuggle with me, even in this sickening Summer heat, and make it all better, and so on.

And I’ll be turning 20 years old next Sunday, on the 28th. I was really excited about it in the beginning of the year, the year I’d turn 20. Not so much anymore though.

But I’ve started trying to arrange a small dinner party/get together thing with a few friends anyway; small mostly because I have an important exam the next day. I’m not sure it’ll work out though, I did get a couple of responses from people who said they’d be up for it, but most don’t seem very eager. I have been somewhat negligent, so I can’t really blame them. We’ll see.

Anyway, I was feeling a bit worse than sulky today, and needed some sort of distraction. Something that’d keep my interest for a while. I decided to force myself to watch a movie. Even if not in the mood for it, I knew I’d probably end up enjoying whatever I decided on. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas it was; it had been on Amazon’s bestseller lists for a while, but I never really paid much attention to it. It was a book to begin with, by an author I’d never heard about before, John Boyne. I don’t remember ever seeing the book anywhere to be honest, but the movie showed up on all lists and on all emails I got from Amazon. Since I’ve been proven wrong on my cynicism towards bestseller lists on Amazon before, I decided this would be a good time to get into something from there, specially something thought-provoking.

I knew it was going to be a sad story, about the holocaust. The image on the cover of the DVD itself shows two boys – one clean and well dressed and the other with a prisoner type suit – separated by a barb wired fence. Of course it was going to be a sad story. But I thought it’d be a hopeful one as well… I mean, two boys from two very different sides, friends despite everything going on around them. Sad, thought-provoking, and hopeful was what I was expecting.

And the movie was great.

The main character’s innocence was almost sweet at times, even in that context. For example, he saw a terrain surrounded by a big fence from his bedroom in the new house his family had moved in to, and thought it was a farm. Sweet, but saddening as well of course, because we know better. Of course it wasn’t a farm, it was a work camp.

That’s where the story begins anyway, with the arrival of the family to that new house. The boy – Bruno – is told not to explore, but does anyway, and eventually gets close enough to the “farm” and starts interacting with a lonely boy who lives there, Shmuel. The story starts unfolding and the two boys – always separated by that fence – become friends.

And throughout most of the movie, I thought that was it. That the boys would remain friends in all that adversity, that Bruno would realize what was actually happening, that there would be either a revolution or some drama with Bruno’s father, who was a Nazi officer himself. After all, it’s fiction, not historical fiction. And I thought that, whatever the outcome, it’d be fairly simple.

Until the last five minutes of the movie that is. I’d never spoil this for anyone, so all I’ll say is that I couldn’t breathe right for a while, and that there was a lot of sobbing. Never expected it or saw it coming, never. I still feel stunned by the outcome of the movie. Talk about distracted, I hardly did anything else during the day. This story is going to stay with me for a while. Both the movie and the book are more or less affordable at Amazon, so I’ll be getting them as soon as possible, specially the book.

In the meanwhile, do get the movie and watch it, whether you’re planning on reading the book or not. Totally recommend it here.

“Robot Boy”

Having finished some other assignments I was working on, I got to my translation homework. My course doesn’t really have any translation subjects as requirements, but it does have some “free credits”, as they call it, we can spend on whatever subjects we want, even if they’re from different courses.

Translation sounded useful for my future professional life, so that’s mostly where I’m spending my free credits on. I was going for a minor in German Studies at first, but that didn’t really work out. Anyway, I took on another translation subject last semester, very general about social sciences, and it went fine. But this one is about literary translation, from English to Portuguese. Not easy. We started with prose, but have moved on to poetry now. The last few classes were about translating Limericks by Edward Lear, which was kind of fun but very time consuming as well.

This poem here was given to us as homework, with no bibliographic reference so we’d translate it without knowing anything about the author, so as not to be influenced in our own translations I suppose.

The poem was this, named “Robot Boy”:

Mr. and Mrs. Smith had a wonderful life.
They were a normal, happy husband and wife.
One day they got news that made Mr. Smith glad.
Mrs. Smith would would be a mom
which would make him the dad!
But something was wrong with their bundle of joy.
It wasn’t human at all,
it was a robot boy!
He wasn’t warm and cuddly
and he didn’t have skin.
Instead there was a cold, thin layer of tin.
There were wires and tubes sticking out of his head.
He just lay there and stared,
not living or dead.

The only time he seemed alive at all
was with a long extension cord
plugged into the wall.

Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor,
“What have you done to my boy?
He’s not flesh and blood,
he’s aluminum alloy!”

The doctor said gently,
“What I’m going to say
will sound pretty wild.
But you’re not the father
of this strange looking child.
You see, there still is some question
about the child’s gender,
but we think that its father
is a microwave blender.”

The Smith’s lives were now filled
with misery and strife.
Mrs. Smith hated her husband,
and he hated his wife.
He never forgave her unholy alliance:
a sexual encounter
with a kitchen appliance.

And Robot Boy
grew to be a young man.

Though he was often mistaken
for a garbage can.

I don’t know what that says about me, but I’m pretty hooked. So of course I cheated, and went ahead and looked it up. It turns out it’s a poem by Tim Burton. I didn’t even know Tim Burton wrote poetry in the first place. I found the little book on Amazon.co.uk at an affordable price (and of course it’s on my wishlist now), but the whole thing is available online too. Both versions have simple drawings illustrating the poems, like the one above.

I know I’m procrastinating, but I genuinely enjoyed going through those… Going back to work now anyway.

End of the semester: warning, stress approaching.

I was talking to a friend about this 15/25 pages paper I have to do. At first, it was due on the beginning of the month, but then the professor decided to give us two more weeks. I like papers, they can be interesting and enlightening about whatever topic it is you’re working on. It’s almost exciting, going through the different resources you come across to find good, reliable information. And then you feel proud of yourself when you hand them in, knowing you did a good job.

But with this particular paper… The professor didn’t give us any guidance at all, and the topic I managed to come up with wasn’t very good, but getting him to agree to a topic at all was difficult enough as it was, so I didn’t really argue at the time. To be honest, I have no idea what I’m doing here, I feel like I’m just recycling information I find through Wikipedia and GoogleBooks, and then stretching it out to fit that number of pages. I’m sure he’ll know, it’s impossible not to. Also, both the paper’s due date and the exam for that subject are on the same week – next week. Before that I have a big debate I haven’t even started preparing for. And I know I have a couple more exams afterwards, but I’m too terrified to look at my calendar right now and check. I can’t wait for this semester to be over.

In the meanwhile, I’ll continue destroying – redesigning, remodeling, whatever – my bedroom as a stress relief. I still feel smothered in here, there’s still too much crap. Although there’s a bit of an echo now, which strangely makes me happy. The big CD holder is gone and most of the stuff I had lying around has been thrown away too, so I have most of my desk empty organized now. The white board though, that is seriously getting on my nerves. I think it might be the next thing to go.

And I don’t think I can procrastinate any longer, I’ll go back to my paper now.

Redesigning my bedroom, more or less…

I’m thinking about redesigning my bedroom. Within my limitations, of course, and keeping in mind I won’t stay around for long. But the truth is, it’s where I spend most of my days for now. I only finish University next year, and even then… Point being, all this clutter is getting to me. I feel like I’m suffocating in this place, so I want to change it make it simpler.

I just have so much stuff I don’t need or even like. A huge white board, for example. It’s fun and it goes with the bedroom/office look I wanted, but it’s not very useful. I can’t even reach the whole thing, since part of it hangs over my desk. And on top of that desk I have this very tall CD holder. It has a very large capacity for CDs, of which I only use about half, and not regularly at all. My chair is disgusting, completely destroyed by Luna’s claws (not that I minded, I didn’t get it in a very good condition in the first place anyway). But now the insides are coming out and it just looks gross. I won’t even go into the stacks of papers and random junk I have lying around. Even the little post-its that seem to be everywhere are annoying me. I feel so smothered by all of it.

My walls are disgusting too. I was thinking about repainting them. Not all of them, just two, with slightly darker tones than the light cream I have now. I think that’ll look good. How I’ll get that done, I have no idea, but we’ll see.

I’ve been looking at Ikea’s website. I had a very good experience the first time I went there, and continue to be absolutely satisfied with my customized Pax closet. And now I found this pretty chair, the black version that is. It looks so nice and simple and its name alone, “SKRUVSTA”, makes me want to have it. The price is an issue, but I’ll look into it.

Besides disgusting, my walls are all very naked too. So I’ve been looking at these “RIBBA” frames that come in several different sizes. Simple and clean, they go with my color scheme (browns and silvers, for that bedroom/office thing). I could really see a bunch of them displayed neatly across the room.

I honestly don’t know where this energy is coming from, and I’m sure half of what I’m planning will end up being forgotten and dropped along the way (as it happens with most of my projects). But while I’m feeling like this, I’m going for it. I need distractions right now, and this seems good.

The huge CD holder in my desk is going today. As most of the crap on my desk. The white board will stay for now, mostly because it’s a bit too heavy to get rid of as an impulse.

Luna, three months today…

Today marks three months since Luna had to be put to sleep. I’ve mostly been keeping to myself about this, so I want to apologize for the following emo-rant. Since this is my personal blog and I’m allowed to unburden and vent though, I’m just going to be honest: I’m not doing very well.

I finally got the letter from the psychiatrist setting up my appointment, the one in which I’ll ask him for a letter so I can go to yet another psychiatrist, a specialist in ADHD. Apparently there’s a long waiting list, and the date is set to September. We’re in May. I sent the letter asking for the appointment in February, shortly before Luna got sick. February, May, September.

Now, when I asked for that appointment, my main concern was getting help for my focusing and daydreaming issues. But now, this sadness and angst and general disinterest with everything seem a bit more crippling. I’m not sure I can call it depression. I do have good days, when I feel okay. But most of the time I’m either sad or anxious or irritable or just completely tired of everything and everyone. The pressure university brings is not helping. Neither is my family.

And now there’s no one to lick my tears away and snuggle with me and purr me to sleep.

I feel like I’ve done all the ‘crying for help’ thing, and that no one listened, and that now I’m on my own.

Nobody in my everyday life seems to notice. Which is good when I really think about it; that’s actually what I’m going for. I don’t like being the center of attention, and specially not for being sulky. Also, I think that if someone really confronted me about this in real life, and if I tried to talk it out seriously, I’d just end up bursting into tears. With a psychiatrist, that sort of release might be good; with friends and colleagues it’d just be weird and awkward. I guess I’m just not there yet.

On a related note, I finally got a memory box for Luna’s things. She didn’t have that many things really, just a couple of blankets and two stuffed animals she adopted as a result of her psychological pregnancies. Putting them away seemed disrespectful, considering how important she was to me. But so did leaving them lying around the house. After a while of searching, I finally found something suitable, this creamy white box. It’s simple but solid, has two magnets to keep it closed, the lid unfolds gently backwards, and it’s just the right size.

So that’s where I’m keeping her things now. They’re put away, but in a dignified manner, I like to think. Deep down I know it doesn’t matter, that they’re just things. But they do make me feel a bit better, so I’m holding on to them.

I miss her.

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

This semester, I had to read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini for English C1.1.2. At first I didn’t like the idea. I’d seen the book in bestseller lists, as well as others by the same author. And to be honest, I’m usually a bit cynical in what concerns bestseller lists. So I ended up never reading anything by him.

But now I had to. There’d be tasks and tests on the book, and not reading it would be academic suicide, for that subject at least.

So I got myself a .pdf version of the book and started reading it. I do that a lot, first read a few chapters of a book online, and then if I like it – and only if I like it – buy the book in paper form. Most books are easy to find, sometimes even through Amazon with their “Search Inside” feature. I mean, my money and time are limited, I can’t just go around wasting money on things I won’t enjoy or even get to read. So, I think I read about two chapters of The Kite Runner that way. And that was it, I decided to buy the thing from Amazon.

Really big surprise there, I didn’t expect the book to be what it was at all. When you first start reading it, you think it’s about this cute friendship between two boys who live in a not so stable environment in Afghanistan. And then everything changes and it ends up being about guilt and, ultimately, redemption. A roller coaster between heartbreaking and heartwarming, considering all the twists the story has. It’s not exactly a light read. It is in the sense that the writing is very nice, fluid, with nice use of symbolism. Accessible to non-English native speakers too, I thought. But the story is incredibly sad, even if it ends in a sort of redemption, more or less.

It was very insightful too. The book itself mentions and explains several cultural aspects of Afghanistan and Islam, its official religion. Things I was completely ignorant to. Also, my work group and myself had to give an oral presentation on Islam and other religions in Afghanistan. It didn’t go very well for me, I think I had too much caffeine that morning and ended up shaking and stuttering like crazy through the whole thing. But it was definitely very enlightening.

I definitely recommend this book, and actually feel a bit silly for not having read it sooner.

Also, there’s a movie adaptation. I usually enjoy reading books and then watching them made into film. I love comparing what my imagination did as I read the book with what other people’s imagination did as they read and adapted the book. This movie in particular, however, makes me sad. There was just so much potential in there. Important facts were simply omitted, the emotion on certain parts plain disappears… In my opinion, it’s worth the watch if you’ve read the book, but otherwise, it’s not really that great.

The same principle I have for books goes for movies as well, I can’t afford to go around buying things I might not enjoy. Yay for YouTube!

I’m on Twitter now!

Twitter has become very famous. I never really got into it, or better yet, I never really got into it enough to make an account there. I mean, I enjoy blogging, and microblogging just seems… less. So I’ve been watching from the outside. But you know, my brother is there, some friends and acquaintances of mine are there, one of my best friends is there. Even Oprah is there. So I finally made an account on Twitter.

We’ll see how this goes.