An elementary Math problem: The mail with my 1st Bachelor's diploma shows its status as "delivered" as of October 5th.  Today's date is October 26th. The International Evaluation department of the Licensing Association I'm working with are claiming they are still processing mail delivered on October 1st. As of Friday last week - they were processing mail delivered on September 28th. I started evaluation application process in July.
Question: will I get my license in hand before I retire?




In good news: Taekwondo lessons are great. That exact feeling that you're at your place despite not knowing what you're doing and even doing... n'importe quoi. A little crazy to follow the instruction in 2 languages: given I've already picked up - purely by listening - some Slovenian and Latin, trying to repeat Korean makes me forget what planet I am on. But hey - as soon as I realized I will be training in a studio that's part of World Taekwondo Federation - or WTF, which is a very precise summary of my life - I knew I was at the right place.


Looks like the vein treatment went well, and if it did indeed - I may have to put off another surgery for now.


Another dozen of Shakespeare works left. I'm of course, a lucky witch, whose Bookworm-ing goal fell for exactly the time when my commute to and from work takes about 2 hours every day. A once-in a lifetime opportunity, if you're a looking at going through dozens of serious and sophisticated works that require you to understand the subjects and conflicts raised, appreciate the language and to get fully submerged into the literature style.

Friday night, around 9.15pm. Putting Arthur to bed.

- Mom, we forgot our Human Body outside! We need to bring it in!
- ???
- Mom, we left our HUMAN BODY at the lawn! Outside! Somebody may take it!
- Erm… Uh… What?! What body?!
- The HUMAN BODY we put at the lawn today!!!
- Sunshine… it’s not a Human Body, just a skeleton. It’s for Halloween. It’s supposed to stay there for now.
- Yeah! So when a bad person comes to our house, he sees the HUMAN BODY, gets scared and runs away!
- Yep. That’ll work too.

I seriously can’t wait for Arthur’s English vocabulary to catch up. Can’t wait for him to start sharing his wisdom with kids and teachers at Kindergarten:

- Um… Arthur was telling me you put a HUMAN BODY at the lawn by your house?... To scare away bad people?...
- Yeah, our home security provider raised our fee again, so we just thought: oh, screw this!...

Passionarity then, huh? :)

"... the ability for and urge towards changing the environment, both social and natural, or, physically speaking, towards the disturbance of inertia of the aggregative state of an environment"
http://creativity.netslova.ru/Passionarity.html


A politically correct synonym for the yet another Russian "awe up in the ass".

After a long week...

Doing 3K on elliptical, full speed and high resistance. Sweating like nobody's business, going backwards to catch breath on the peak of the "hill" and finishing up Coursera course. Predictably, nearly all theories on self growth, success - subjective success and achievement revolve around the idea of constant improvement, focus and adapting way of life to the vision of ideal future. A well formed and expressed idea of the course though was that "success" in modern terms of way of life refers more to a "well balanced" life than to the life where just one part of it is taken to the extreme. That's extremely close to my definition of a  successful life, and the way I try to arrange mine.

In such thoughts worked my abs, biceps, hips. Came home winded up, cleaned the kitchen.
Wrote 3 thesis for the article on fear.
Looked through my goals for the week, realized I never made an attempt to draw an elk this year, and it's  already October. Put on an elk drawing online lesson, took a pen and legal pad, drew an elk:

Saw that I never opened the DALF study book, took it, opened it, put on the CD, listened to the comprehension text. To my great shock, understood the text was about an ex-IT guy who was not fulfilled with his job, so he quit and became a carpenter and is much happier with his job and workplace environment now.

Realized I'm behind on Shakespeare. Downloaded all remaining works according to my list from Librivox and put a note in agenda to buy blank CD-RWs.

Saw that I never went back to Taekwondo this year. Put a note to the upcoming week - to call the Taekwondo studio next to our King Soopers and inquire about schedule and membership fees.

Had some wine, but was still too wind up to go to bed. Cleaned the bathroom and closet. Cleaned the shelves in the bedroom. Ordered kids' poem books in the library.

Wrote a page-long list of stuff to do for the coming weekend.

Two shoe boxes full of my diaries have been stashed in a secure place for months.

For months I have had no time to get back to the contents of the box, glimpse through the diaries, see once meaningful little things from friends and lovers, finally go through the piles of the paper, pictures and cards and see what's all that was about. I anticipated some feeling of nostalgia of the kind of girl I used to be, I thought the memoirs of the days, of all the problems I had would be "cute and sweet", and how I would feel disappointment - yet again - for wasting time in my adolescence and childhood, and not being able to stand up for myself. And then - since past is not going anywhere anyway, there're no rush in getting my hands on the archive, right?


Expectation vs Reality.


I could not make my way through 3 note pads of diaries. Some of those events would come back to me other than from my diaries, but in hindsight - it was one big endless groundhog day, which I'm trying to dilute with escaping to books and my own world as much as possible. There were occasional trips to very nice places, but they still left me feeling like inside of a fish tank: you're in a wonderful place, but fully dependent on family's agenda, mood swings and perception of comme il faut behavior. Except, perhaps, two trips to summer camp where if I saw an opportunity within hand reach - I could actually grab it.
 Hundreds of pages - probably -  talking in very details, although never directly,  about dead ends, solitude, sickness, sadness, rejection, lack of support, lack of direction in life.

Needless to say that brought up no nostalgia and no sweet feelings of younger self. It definitely raised some immediate anger, frustration and intention to push forward harder now, to use all the resources I have and to make sure I do not waste a day. Since I have already lost so many of them in first 16 years of my life, and you never know, in what... Afganistan I could be born in my next life :)