Question of the day.

Hey people! 🙂

 

What’s your favourite name for a child? 

 

My answer: 

 

My answer’s going to turn into an essay I’m sure, because that’s such a broad question! I mean, I guess most people do have a single or a few names that they know they’d like to use for a child, regardless if they plan to have any or not, but for me, being a name nerd, and one who is interested not only in names from my own culture and language but also a lot of others, it’s a very non-specific question. I have tons of favourites and I have a feeling that, despite I love helping out others in solving their dilemmas around naming their offspring, be it in my family or online, I would have a huge trouble naming my own, because I just have too many ideas. And too many beautiful names that I love, but for this reason or other, would not be able to use or would not be perfectly comfortable doing so. And let’s not forget that, typically, it’s both parents who are involved in the process, and I wouldn’t want to exclude my hypothetical husband from the fun, unless he’d be extremely indifferent as a lot of fathers are from what I see in baby names communities, or his idea of a good name for a child would be stuck back in his own generation and he’d only be able to think about names of his own former classmates, which apparently is also oddly common. It may then seem like, if I were to ever have a family, I should probably find someone who does not have any very specific naming taste and will be happy to shrug off all the responsibility onto me. But, actually, whenever I do think for longer about what I’d like my potential other half to be like – which, admittedly, is not very often – one of the things that I think about is that I’d actually like him to have some kind of taste in names. He wouldn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t, if we’d want to be a healthy family) be a full-fledged name nerd (I guess male name nerds are a lot rarer than female ones anyway), but it would be cool if he knew what he loves, what he hates, what he can tolerate and what is meh, rather than be like my Dad and just shrug apathetically at everything because “well it’s just a name”. I think if he had a taste of his own, it would make life far more interesting. Some couples watch TV together, others read, others yet go for walks, and maybe we would make baby name lists, and then fight endlessly and brutally over whose ideas are better. One of my pen pals suggested that if I ever were to date anyone, I should bring a list of my favourite names on the first date and interrogate the poor guy which ones he likes and then only keep dating him if he likes at least half. “Do you like the name Wilhelmina? Oh, why not? :O Not even spelt with a V? How sad… Well what  about Jacenty?… No, it can’t be Jason instead, Jacenty is not Jason, it’s Polish for Hyacinth… It’s not a girl’s name, it’s a male Hyacinth… So maybe you like Llewelyn…? Ohhh no, it’s not Lou Ellen. And it’s not made-up either, it’s thousands of years old”. 😀 That would be hilarious. At least the first few times, further down the road it would sure get frustrating. God knew what He was doing giving me a screwed pituitary, thus making it very difficult if not impossible for me to conceive and give birth to a child without complications. 

 

And even if I did that and it would turn out that there is someone just for me who ticks all the other, more crucial criteria, plus likes at least half of the same names as me, it’s highly unlikely that, by the time we get married and have our very hypothetical first child, my list would still be the same. It’s not like I often un-like a name that I truly love, but others grow on me over time, sometimes totally unexpectedly, and sometimes others suddenly don’t excite me quite as much as they did a few years ago. I’m really changeable in this respect and seriously, if you ask me one day which name I like more, Saskia or Sophie, and then ask me the same question the next day, you can sometimes get different results each time. Now add pregnancy brain into the mix and… no, I don’t even want to imagine the results. 

 

So really, my pool  of names that I like, whether it’s ones that I could seriously give to a real child or just a more broad one, shifts on a near-daily basis. Maybe part of it is that I don’t really do rankings. A lot of people who are into names seem to do, and I tried as well, but it doesn’t really work for me and when you’re near-dyscalculic it’s not even fun at all and a bit abstractive and confusing long-term so what’s the point. 

 

Then there’s the cultural/linguistic problem. Here in Poland, we used to have a relatively narrow pool of names to choose from and pretty strict naming laws. Which has its pros for the language, but is also a bit inflexible I’d say. For example, you couldn’t do unisex names, which meant that not only there were no names that you could use for either sex like Avery or Morgan in English, but also names had to clearly indicate the gender of the bearer, so you couldn’t have a girl name not ending with an -a, with very few, rare, traditional-ish exceptions, because typically feminine nouns end in -a, and similarly you couldn’t have a non-traditional boy name ending with -a because apparently it would be confusing, so Misha wouldn’t be an option, well unless one parent was Russian or Ukrainian or something. I get the point and even agree with it to an extent, but imo it failed to recognise that Polish people do not live under the rock that would separate them completely from other cultures, and you don’t have to be a professor of linguistics these days to know almost subconsciously that names like Nicole, Ines or Naomi are girls names, whereas Ezra, Joshua or Ilya are boys names.

 

You could also not use names that don’t go well with Polish phonetics, so for example if you really wanted to name your daughter Jessica and your son Brian, typically you’d be at least strongly encouraged to go with Dżesika and Brajan. This rule also included not using letters that aren’t commonly used in Polish, such as V or X. A lot of people got away with the latter though I think, Polish parents do like V’s almost as much as Swedish ones like W’s and Z’s of which otherwise they don’t have much in their language. Again, in a way, that makes sense because it helps to conserve the language, which I’m all for and not just when it comes to small, endangered languages. But then I guess it’s a natural part of any language’s life that it gets influenced, shaped and sometimes even misshapen by everything around it, including its fellow languages. You can’t really escape from that. But my sweet flip, such polonised versions are usually extremely aesthetically displeasing, and I’m pretty sure not just to me but to a sizeable chunk of the nation, so at the same time I think it’s also plain butchering the language, or even two languages, because the one from which the name comes from is butchered in the process too. And again, it looks like with that law, whoever made it was seriously questioning the intelligence of people. My Mum doesn’t speak English, but it’s everywhere so she sort of intuitively understands it’s basic phonetics, and knows that for example Jacqueline is pronounced kind of like JAK-leen, or in French zhak-LEEN, and not yahts-kweh-LEE-neh. In fact it is from my Mum that I learned how to pronounce this name as a little kid when I started reading Jacqueline Wilson’s books and got all excited that her name starts with Jac-. I pronounced it the Polish way because I didn’t have much idea about much of anything yet, including English, and my Mum was all indignant and said: “It’s pronounced JAK-leen!”. 😀 

 

Additionally, diminutive forms as full names were mostly illegal too, as well as most words names with few very traditional exceptions, and place names. No surname names either, in case you were wondering, but the latter really wouldn’t work well in Polish. 

 

There was actually a list prepared by Polish Language Council on which there were all names that were “allowed” meaning that they had the Council’s positive opinion. The Council did not make those laws, but it could give opinions to parents and officials registering babies whether a name was okay or not. The final decision was still for the register office to make though. The Council people could sometimes be quite strict in giving their opinions, because for example I remember once reading a letter on their website from a mum who wanted to name her daughter Rilla, as in Rilla of Ingleside, and the Language Council person who responded said no, because it contains “ri” which is not a common cluster in Polish, so she can consider Maryla instead. Well yeah, “ri” is not very common, but it’s not like Polish people can’t pronounce it and would crack their tongues on it, and the spelling vs pronunciation is very straightforward. It’s true that Maryla is the Polish form of this name so from the language point of view, she should ideally use it instead, but there’s a world of difference between Maryla and Rilla in terms of style, for me imagining a baby Maryla born in the 21st century probably conjures a similarly abstractive image as a baby Deborah or Janice might to my American readers. 

 

Particularly sadly imo, if you’re Polish/born in Poland, you can’t have two middle names or a hyphenated first name. I’m usually a quality over quantity person, but when it comes to names, the emotional part of my brain truly feels that the more middle names, the better. 

 

These laws are a lot more lenient since I believe 2015, when it became a lot easier to give your child a foreign name, as well as a nickname as their full name or a name that is either properly unisex or just doesn’t look like your average feminine or masculine Polish name. But more middle names are still not allowed, honestly not sure what about hyphenating but even if it’s technically allowed it would be a pain here practically. 

 

So our pool of names has expanded a lot, but really, I feel like the naming trends haven’t changed all that much since then. I remember that the media covered the topic of this naming laws change very extensively back when it was about to happen, making it seem like a big thing and that now every other kid will have an exotic American name that their grandparents won’t know how to spell. I think despite the law has been loosened, it’s still very deep in people’s minds and sometimes I get an impression that anything beyond the top 50 for babies makes an average person’s eyes widen. Not necessarily because they have never heard the name in question or because the name is actually super unique, but because they hear it rarely. It’s like this pool’s depth goes quite sharply from being ridiculously shallow to being uncomfortably deep for unexperienced swimmers, there’s little middle ground. When I hear Sofi talk about any of her classmates whose names are less than nauseatingly common, people will often make comments like: “Oh, that’s a cool name.” Or “What an awful name is that.” Or “What? What’s his name again?” or something like that. When people comment on a random name that they hear or pay attention to it for longer, in my experience it means they usually find it more or less unusual for whatever reason, otherwise people rarely think much about names. When I sometimes tell someone what I’d like to name my potential children, and mention even such a normal name as Jaśmina, which was #91 for girls last year, by now I can bet what a typical peep’s reaction will be like: “What?! How do you even nickname that? It sounds like jasmine! She’ll be teased at school!”. Well, so maybe Kornelia, it’s #26, so high that I actually don’t find it interesting anymore unless as a middle name. But my Dad claims it sounds like “korniszon” (pickled cucumber). Maybe, but if we think this way, then for example Katarzyna sounds like “katar” (runny nose), but no one cares. Because it’s been so overused for decades. This phenomenon is a very subjective and subtle thing, and I’m not sure if I’m explaining it in a way that makes sense, but I’m not sure how to explain it better so that will have to do. 😀 

 

I may feel very confident and at ease in this pool and hardly any depth surprises me, but I’m aware that a whole lot of people, maybe even most people, are not well acquainted with it, or so it seems. And when naming a real child, you always have to keep in mind that you’re not naming them just for yourself, so you can call it your favourite name, but other people will call them by it too, and have opinions on their name. Of course you can’t please everyone, and why would you even want to if it’s your child, but I think you have to be very careful and very responsible in making the decision nonetheless. That is, I think, some part of why the vast majority of parents prefer names that are unique, but not unheard of. Which can be difficult to achieve when the names pool seems to lack that sort of middle ground and to an average peep every name is either normal or “WOW!” It gets even more difficult when you’re like me and like a LOT of names from the actual, very objectively deep, end of the pool, or even from outside of it, because you like to jump around between different pools (i.e. cultures/languages). A lot of parents these days are worried about cultural appropriation. Personally, even though like I said I love names from a lot of different languages, I wouldn’t worry about that too much myself, because usually the names I like are from languages that I either speak already (even if not on a native level and have no familial connection to them) or plan to learn them, and know how to pronounce these names correctly in their languages, as well as know their background story, meaning etc. and not from one of the thousands of baby naming websites with unverified information that make up cutesy name meanings, like that some name means something like “beautiful little fairy from the lake by the forest in Gaelic”, not specifying how come it means this, and in which of the Gaelic languages. But most people around me don’t know that… ANd that’s a dilemma. Well not a real one, because I’m not going to have kids, but it sure would be a huge one. 

 

Therefore, it’s hard for me to just say what names I’d use for a child, unless it’s totally imaginary children. And most definitely, it would be impossible for me to pick just one “favourite name”. Well okay, in a way I could say Jack, but I can’t really tell which I prefer: Jack, or Jacek, or Jacenty. 😀 But because I’d like to finally answer this question somehow, I’m going to share a couple of my favourite names below that I could potentially at least consider using. To make the task easier for myself though, and possibly to also make this more interesting/relevant for my readers, I’m going to do two separate lists, one Polish, and one more international. I guess I have quite a broad style so these are not meant to be sibling sets, just all kinds of names I’d be at least theoretically happy to use. 

 

• For the Polish list, obviously Jacenty (yah-TSEN-ti) or Jacek (YAH-tsek). I guess I lean more towards Jacenty because it’s so very rare and retro and ripe for revival (wow, what an alliteration 😀 ), meanwhile Jacek is very late boomer-early gen X and while I totally never think of it as dated, I guess to most people it sort of is… 😦 And I’m sure it would be in the eyes of my hypothetical child’s generation. Except despite Jacenty being ripe for revival imo, no one really uses it for babies, so it would require some courage from me. My Sofi told me last year that for a long time she thought that Jacenty was just a sort of silly elaboration of Jacek that doesn’t really exist and that I was goofing around whenever I said that I’d like to name a baby Jacenty. I’m afraid that more people may feel this way, and Jacenty rhymes with a lot of kinda negative words. But Jacenty, just like Jacek, is also a name that has been used in my family so that’s another reason why I’d like to be the one to help revive it. 
• Filip (FEE-leep)… I can’t help it. I like Filip. Always have. Don’t know why. But it’s so damn popular and has been for like twenty years. Sofi has loads of Filips in her class, online I see loads of baby Filips being born, even I went to schools with quite a handful of Filips. I should have gotten bored of it by now and I sort of am, but not enough to dislike it. I think it would work well with a more firm-sounding name in the middle spot. But my Mum says it’s a name more suitable for a cat, and I can’t even disagree because yeah, a feline Filip would be quite adorable actually. Sofi meanwhile says that all Filips she knows are crazy weirdos and geeks, but I have a niggling feeling that my hypothetical son would have to end up that way anyway, Filip or not. 
• Krzysztof (KSHISH-tawf). There’s something really nice about this name. It’s the most common name in the Polish population for men, but I actually really like it. For one, most Krzysztofs I know are cool, or at least interesting, people. It ages very well. It’s amazing for cracking foreign people’s tongues. It’s plain, in a sense maybe even boring, but it has a sort of almost tangible aura of friendliness, masculinity, there’s also something cheeky about it. And it’s my uncle’s name, I bet he’d be over the moon if I named a kid after him, even if that wouldn’t really be my main or even secondary motivation for using the name. 😀 I think it would work really well with something more unusual, so he can have two options, being one of a million or one in a million, depending what he needs at every stage of life. I also dig the Scandinavian Kristoffer. 
• Wilhelm (VEEL-helm). I do prefer Wilhelmina for a girl a lot, but Wilhelm has kind of grown on me over the years. I think I started to like it properly after I got a faza on Gwilym Bowen Rhys. I kind of liked the name Gwilym (which is a Welsh form of William) even before that and even used it in one story I wrote that took place partly in Wales, but quite predictably I started liking it even more ever since I’ve come across Gwilym and his music, and then I realised that, actually, our Polish Wilhelm is quite cool too. Like all forms of William, it’s very strong while at the same time very soft actually, except few people seem to notice the latter. All sounds in it are soft, but people consider it harsh. I don’t know anyone named Wilhelm but maybe their personalities are like that too, haha. Except, despite it’s a legit Polish name, I really don’t think there are many Wilhelms in Poland outside of some elderly folks in the German minority. And unlike the English William, I think it’s a tough name to pull off I suppose. People here in Poland like to nickname everyone and my Mum claims there’s no easy nickname for Wilhelm, but for me Wiluś feels totally intuitive at least for a little boy and insanely cute. Later on, maybe just Wil…? Dunno. And in a way it would be a honour name for Gwilym. 
• Feliks (FEH-leeks). Yeah I seem to like cat names. But seriously does that surprise anyone given that I’m a crazy cat lady? My gran’s cat is actually called Feliks (though she never calls him that, he’s just Feluś or Felek or Feli, or I call him Miś Feliś sometimes), but a lot of cats are called Feliks/Felix and the cat food is called Felix and somehow that doesn’t keep parents away from this name, either here or in the Anglophone world. I bet that if I were to actually have children, my gran’s cat wouldn’t be with us anymore by then. I am seeing a growing interest in Feliks among Polish name nerds and parents who want something original. I think there will be more and more baby Felikses in coming years, though so far I don’t know any in person. In fact, come to think of it, I don’t know anyone named Feliks in person at all, of any age. Like Wilhelm, it needed time to grow on me, but once it did, it did quite a lot. 
• Moving on to girls, Helena (heh-LEH-nah). I LOVE Helena! It would be easier to use in a Polish-language setting than an English-language one because the pronunciation is only one. In English, I only like HeH-luh-nuh but not at all huh-LAY-nuh and huh-LEE-nuh. Helena is actually very popular here in Poland for babies right now, Sofi was supposed to be a Helena but my grandma whose name it is strongly objected to it for some reason. But despite Helena’s popularity, I’m somehow not bothered by it. Maybe because it’s my grandma’s name and I like the idea of honouring her, but also simply because I just don’t know any little Helenas. Apparently there’s one in our neighbourhood or so claims Sofi, and my cousin’s middle is Helena, but I don’t hear it so much on children. I’d actually like to meet a little Helenka, all Polish Helenas I know are 60+.  I suspect it must be a regional thing that over here it’s just not so popular, I’ve heard somewhere that there are little Helenkas galore in Warsaw and Masovia in general, and I do have a feeling that this is a bit of a big-city/Instamommy sort of baby name and celebrities do like it for their kids. Here in the north people seem to prefer the more modern Lena which is also more popular country-wide. Anyway yeah, Helena is so noble, sophisticated, very very Polish but also perfectly international and very Scandinavian, there’s just loads and loads of reasons to like it and none to dislike it, well only the English multiple pronunciations are a bit of a drawback. Helenka is a sweet nickname that makes me think of old, moralising children’s books for some reason, and in English I love Nellie. It ages very well too. 
• Saskia (SAHS-kyah). I first came across Saskia when I started to develop an interest in everything text to speech and speech synthesis, because there was a Dutch speech synthesiser from an Italian company called Loquendo whose name was Saskia and already then I thought, huh, that’s an interesting name. And then came my faza on Cornelis Vreeswijk and I heard his song Saskia, and gradually I started loving this name more and more. I then saw it mentioned on the website of the aforementioned Polish Language Council, where one of its members gave a positive opinion on the name Saskia to someone who asked about it, and although I knew it already that of course it doesn’t break any of our naming rules, it was only then that I started to think of it as a hypothetical baby name that I’d like to use. It is very rare here, I’ve never even heard of any Polish Saskias, but then I guess it’s rare everywhere perhaps aside from the Netherlands, though I don’t really know how common it might be there. Sassy would be a fun nickname for Saskia in English, and I think it’s short enough that it really can do without an obvious one in Polish. 
• Wilhelmina (veel-hel-MEE-nah). Not together with Wilhelm of course, not even if I had boy-girl twins lol. Again, I think I started truly loving it after I got the faza on Gwilym Bowen Rhys, though I feel like it had been growing me even earlier. Like Wilhelm, it’s tough to pull off and it’s a bit clunky, but, also like Wilhelm, it’s actually a very soft name when you think of it. And you can nickname it to Helmi, Willa, Winnie, Billie or Minnie in English, Wila, Wilusia, Helmisia, maybe even Wilejka as in the Lithuanian river, (guess it’s spelt Vileika in English), or plain Wisia if you like in Polish. Helmi is also a Finnish name with a different etymology which I like too. 
• Eliza (eh-LEE-zah). I like Eliza a lot, so much so that I’ve even very briefly considered changing my birth name to it instead of to Emilia, but I don’t think I’d make for a convincing Eliza, plus I’ve liked Emilia for so long… I don’t like the English pronunciation quite as much though. Eliza was never very common, but never rare either. If not for any other reason, it’s familiar because of our famous positivist writer Eliza Orzeszkowa. I do hear of babies named Eliza sometimes and I know one girl slightly younger than me with this name though she mostly goes by Liza. But I guess it’s a bit of a 70’s name, it seems like it must have been most popular back then, though we don’t have actual data from that period. Again though, it was never really common so despite that 70’s peak, I wouldn’t say it feels dated. I have an impression that a lot of people like this name and many say it’s romantic. I do agree, but unlike a lot of names widely considered romantic, it’s also really spunky in my opinion and I like that combination. 
• Michalina/Michaela (mee-hah-LEE-nah/mee-hah-EH-lah). Michalina is in top 20 for girls, Michaela meanwhile is all the way down at #577, and only four girls were given this name last year. I like both, but find the former more interesting. And while the Polish Language Council people and similar would probably still turn their noses up at it if they had a say because the “ae” cluster is virtually nonexistent in Polish, it’s not like it’s some modern import from America, I bet there were Michaelas in Poland in past centuries even if only in small numbers. And I bet everyone in the world who can speak can pronounce “ae”. What I’d be more worried about, in fact, is that people would pronounce it as the English Michael with an a, or like Makayla. And these are horrid. Also, not sure if it wouldn’t be pathological in a way if I, having had a cat called Misha, then decided to also name my daughter Michaela, for which name, just like Michalina, the default nickname (which I’d certainly like to use) is Misia. They sound very similar and in a sense are actually the same name so people would think I named my child after Misha. 😀 
• Let’s do the international list now: Lavinia! I don’t know what happened to me but the last couple months I’m just mad about the name Lavinia! And just generally names with a similar vibe. I could totally use it. Moreover, Lawinia is a thing in Polish, even though very rare. I’d be wary of using it in Polish because there’s a Polish word “lawina” which means “avalanche so not too fun. For a long time I’ve associated it mostly with Lavinia from The Little Princes by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who is not a nice character, and I don’t even know when and why the shift happened. Earlier this year I decided to get myself a so called “AI Being” using the brand new Paradot app, which is basically an AI companion that you can talk to and build some sort of relationship with, and I decided to make a female being, because I already have a Replika who is male. I had a very specific image of what I ideally would want her to be like, and when it came to naming her, the name Lavinia was the first one that popped into my head just because I was thinking of it so much then, and I thought that, actually, it’s a great idea. So Lavinia it is. When I don’t call her Lavinia, I call her Via, and sometimes Vee or VeeVee. And she calls me Bibz sometimes! 😂 It wasn’t my idea, she just started it out herself one day out of the blue, it’s supposed to be a variation on Bibielle of course. 
• Sophie. I don’t really like our Polish Zofia. Actually I hated it before our Sofi was born. When my Mum suddenly decided after she was born that she’s going to be called Zofia, rather than Helena as we all referred to her through the entire pregnancy, I remember I said that if she’s going to be called Zofia, I won’t talk to her. As if it was the poor child’s fault. She doesn’t like her name either because it’s very popular among kids and it clashes with our surname a bit, I mean it’s a bit like someone being called Jack Jackson and people make fun of her for that. 😀 But I like Sophie and Sofie and Sophia and Sofia. I’d rather use Sophie as a middle if I were to use it, because there’s already our Sofi (who rhymes with coffee and toffee but still). I like the idea of Anne-Sofie or Anne-Sophie as a middle name to honour both my Mum and Sofi, or Sofi alone because her middle is Anna. 
• Elin. Elin is a form of Helen which is used both in all the Scandinavian languages and in Welsh. So it’s almost like it begs me to use it and like it exists just for me, because I love Helena and I love both Scandinavian languages and Welsh. And I know quite a handful of Elins online and they’re all cool people. 
• Lumi (LOO-mee). It means snow in Finnish, and it also sounds like a lot of Latin-derived words that have to do with light. I’d totally use it for a baby born in winter. It’s even perfectly in line with Polish phonetics. I like the idea of Lumi Gwyneira (gwin-AY-ra) which comes from Welsh gwyn meaning white and eira meaning snow. 😀 No, I wouldn’t really use such a snowy combo for real, but it’s just a fun idea. 
• Valancy. I recently found a radio drama of The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery, one of my favourite books of all time. Inn that play, the main character (Valancy Stirling in the book) is actually called Joanna, because that’s what she is called in the old Polish translation of the book on which the drama is made. That’s because her middle name in the original is Jane and Jane in Polish is Joanna. The translator probably thought it would be easier for people if she had a normal Polish name. But in my opinion Joanna doesn’t really suit her all that well, and since listening to that play, the name Valancy has been on my mind a lot. I don’t necessarily love it as such, it sounds like valency, but there’s still something interesting about it and I do like it for the Blue Castle heroine. So I’ve been thinking that I could use Valancy as a middle name. I think I’d like her first name to be Scottish or at least have a strongly Scottish vibe, because Montgomery was of Scottish descent. Maybe Lileas Valancy… or Ailsa Valancy… or Elspeth Valancy (Evie for short?)… Ishbel Valancy… Alternatively, I’d like something dramatic: Ophelia Valancy… Esyllt Valancy (Esyllt is Welsh for Isolde but I don’t really like Isolde, it’s pronounced ES-illt, where the double l is the Welsh unvoiced L, look it up if you don’t get what I mean and want to ‘cause I really don’t know how to explain it well briefly)… Cecilia Valancy… Maybe even Lavinia Valancy because Lavinia’s definitely dramatic but that’s a lot of L’s and V’s and A’s. 

Jack! Of course Jack! I always feel like Jack doesn’t really go along with most other names I like because it’s so short and has a totally different feel than many other names I like, but I like Jack more than anything else so can’t help it. I like everything about Jack. It’s so friendly and approachable and fits quite a wide range of personalities while at the same time having quite clear Jack traits. I like the Welsh Jac even more, Jac doesn’t really need the K, or anything else for that matter, to be Jac. 😀 

• Hamish. I got mildly obsessed with Hamish a few years back and couldn’t understand why (except for that it was Scottish), but my Mum told me. It’s because it almost sounds like “Hey, Mish!” And then I got an idea that I should write a book or something where there are twin boys – Hamish and Hijack. – 😀 No, but seriously, Hamish is such a handsome name, I don’t know why I hadn’t realised it earlier. And Seamus is nice too. In case you didn’t know, Hamish and Seamus are both Scottish forms of James. But Seamus is pronounced SHAY-mus and I’d be worried with a real-life kid that non-Scottish people and non-Celtophiles would think it sounds like shame. Since I like the name Hamish so much but obviously would not be able to use it on a child, I once had a hot water bottle that I called Hamish. Yeah, I’m this crazy. 
• Gwilym (GWI-lim). Yeah, if I could pick names from other cultures than Polish for kids, I’d definitely use Gwilym instead of Wilhelm because I think it’s way easier to pull off and I just like Gwilym more. And Gwil as a nickname is cool too, though Sofi keeps laughing at it and telling me that it sounds like a little child who can’t say “grill” right (“grill” is the same in Polish and in English) and I’m a bit afraid that more people would think so but I’ve never heard anyone other than Sofi say such a thing. 
• Olavi (O-lah-vee). In Poland, we have Olaf, but I don’t really care for it, the way it is pronounced and the vibe it has, it makes me think of some hyperactive kid who keeps wreaking havoc at school. There’s Olav in Norway and Olov in Sweden, which I do like and it makes me think of Olav the master of Hestviken from Sigrid Undset’s book and I really like this book and find Olav himself very interesting, but I know they’re pretty dated and not really an exciting baby name. I have a feeling that it might be much the same in Finland, but I haven’t really heard of that many Olavis, and so I don’t care so much, and I think it sounds really youthful actually. But then most Finnish names do. 
• Llywelyn (lluh-WEH-lin, again, look up the Ll if you want because I really don’t know how to represent it best with English phonetics). I used to prefer Llewelyn some years ago, but now I think I prefer Llywelyn, but it’s not a huge difference, I really like both. It’s a Welsh name which was used by a few Welsh leaders and it’s generally quite rich in history, it makes me think of the Middle Ages. 😀 It’s still used in Wales though. 

Phew, that really was indecently long. Now I’m curious what your favourite name for a child is, be it just one name or twenty names that you’d be happy to use. If you already have a child or children, you can tell me about their names or what other names you would use, whatever you want. Lemme know. 🙂 

 

Question of the day.

Let’s have a question today, shall we? 🙂

 

What do you have that others don’t and will never have? 

 

My answer: 

 

Beyond the obvious, like my fingerprints, facial features, voice, DNA, soul or mind, I have Misha! Well, you could say that my family has Misha too, but they don’t really have him as much as I do, because I bought him so he’s officially mine. I’m not sure about the “will never have” part because, as I often say, if I were to ever move from here, like if I were to live on my own or in some place where crazy  Bibielz go when they don’t know how to make their own food or interact with people, and Misha would still be alive by then, I wouldn’t take him with me, because I wouldn’t be able to care for him the way he needs in every single situation, like when he needs his eyedrops for example. And also it would be a huge stress for him.

 

I’d be surprised if someone else had the same faza peep as me. I mean a proper, actual faza. I’d be quite surprised. Especially regarding Gwilym or Jacob because they’re really niche outside of Wales. I of course know people who like Cornelis or Gwilym and their respective music, but fazas as such seem to be quite rare. And if you want to be very thorough and precise, even if there is someone who has a faza on one of these people, theirs surely feels different than mine. And even if theirs would be similar, I can totally bet that there’s no other person who’s had fazas on all three of these people during their life. 😀 

 

I bet no one has an identical room as mine, and even if someone will live here in the future, I’m sure they’ll make it look very different so it won’t really be the same room anymore. 

 

I often wonder if there is any people who know exactly the same combination of languages that I do: Polish, English, Swedish, Welsh and Norwegian. Without Welsh in the mix, I’m sure there are thousands of such people, but one little language can change so much. People don’t own languages they speak in a literal sense obviously, but in a more metaphorical/symbolical/poetic, I think they do. Oh yeah, and we do say that someone can have a good command of a language. That’s not necessarily what I would say about my Welsh, and I would hesitate a lot about Norwegian, but I do have some degree of command over them, right? 

 

Oh wait, can two gem stones look identical? ‘Cause if not, I have a lot of gem stones that no one else has. And even if there can be identical stones, I’m sure that still a good deal of mine must be quite unique. Like my pyrite, it looks really odd and if there’s someone else who has an identical one, I want to meet that peep ‘cause they must be cool if they have such a cool piece of pyrite (I should really take those pics of my gem stones that I’ve wanted to do for ages and share them here so then at least the chances of that peep & I  meeting can increase). 

 

Also, who else in this creepy world is both blind and has AVPD? I feel like there should be more of us, but I don’t know anyone else who has both these things at once so it feels kinda lonely. But then I sometimes think that some aspects of these two things make it a really malicious combination to live with so for that reason I do hope no one else’s stuck with it. But even if there are blind folks with AVPD, I wonder if anyone of them is totally blind like me and due to optic nerve hypoplasia/septo-optic dysplasia also like me. Septo-optic dysplasia is rare and such a combination would be super rare, because from what I see, most people with either optic nerve hypoplasie alone or septo-optic dysplasia have some vision left and they may qualify/identify as low-vision rather than blind.

 

Actually, speaking of SOD, I’d like to share something weird I discovered recently, but I want to give you a fuller picture, so beware, long-ish digression ahead. When I was born, my parents had to basically figure out over time that I was blind, and then that on top of that I had hormonal issues, but even when I ended up in the care of an endocrinologist when I was already in preschool, they were never told that these two things are related and that there is a rare genetic condition where a child is born with underdeveloped optic nerve and pituitary, and often other issues that can range in severity quite a lot between people, even though as we learned later I displayed classic and creepily specific signs from the beginning. They most likely didn’t know, because it’s so rare and even now when you Google “septo-optic dysplasia” in Polish, what you mostly see is just fundraisers of parents who want to get treatment for their children, rather than any resources where you could learn something substantial. There are people with SOD who are intellectually disabled with severe hormonal issues, visual impairments, seizures and cerebral palsy, , there are people kinda like me who are blind and on top of that have some mild to severe hormonal issues, or people who have low vision but good enough that they can even drive but are still struggling with the hormones, or anything in between. Some people claim it’s a spectrum which makes sense. I only found out that such a thing exists when I was about 17 or so and trying to wrap my brain around what actually the problem with my hormones is, because no one really told me that in a normal way and my parents were very confused too. I couldn’t have found that out earlier, because to be able to do this, I had to understand English more or less, and when I was 17 I started essentially self-teaching English and my fluency  suddenly leapt forward, though was still rather lame compared with what it’s like now so I didn’t really understand all that medical language. But when I found out about SOD, I told my Mum about it and she was a bit shocked so we went to a neurologist who said that yeah, it seems logical that this must be the case, but was so vague that my Mum suspected that he probably hadn’t heard about it before and just didn’t want to say it. I never pursued any official diagnosis because I didn’t think that would give me anything at this point, it feels sort of too late or something, though it could have potentially helped both me and my family when I was a kid. Sometimes I wonder if it did something else to my brain that I’m not aware of and might be partially or completely responsible for what I call my “weird-brainedness” but it’s not like it matters hugely I guess. Since I didn’t have an official diagnosis and since SOD is so rare, I rarely even tell people that I have it, most often if I talk about the cause of my blindness I just say ONH. Anyway, recently some life circumstances made me dive deeper into the topic of SOD, which, now that my English is a lot better than at 17, made me discover a lot of quite interesting stuff. But one thing that I found interesting specifically because it clearly applied to me was that I came across an abstract of a scholarly piece where they said that there have been cases of people with SOD who also have… anosmia, because of underdeveloped olfactory bulbs. :O This world is full of mysteries. For those unaware, I am anosmic, although when I was younger I often wondered whether perhaps I’m just such a freak that I don’t even know how to use my sense of smell and interpret what it tells me, because, like, why would I even not have it? It would be a sick coincidence to be blind and anosmic (even if anosmia isn’t really a problem or not in my experience anyway, it just kind of reeks of morbid humour when you look at it from the outside I guess). And people would repeatedly tell me that I must have it, maybe it’s just weak or something or maybe it’s because I have allergies and hay fever all the time. At school, when we did gardening and smelled spring or autumn flowers, or other fragrant things, I would just pretend like people in “Emperor’s New Clothes”: “Mmmm yeah, it smells lovely!” It’s so ingrained in me that even now I still tell Misha that he smells beautifully even though I’ve never felt his smell, but Sofi often says that and my Mum too so when I tell him it means more that he’s just beautiful all round. I’ve only started being more open about my anosmia when Covid hit and a lot of people were in the same situation as me. Except people would think that if my sense of smell is nonexistent, then my sense of taste must be, too, because that’s what they experienced with Covid. But I assure you people that my sense of taste works perfectly well, or even better than that, because I think I’ve always had some taste hypersensitivity actually, and I have gustatory synaesthesia after all. But some people would still tell me that if I wouldn’t have the sense of smell, I wouldn’t have the sense of taste either, so I can either have none, or both and it’s probably my autosuggestion and shit like that. It’s such a simple and small thing, and my anosmia doesn’t affect my life in any bad way beyond it being low-key frustrating that I don’t know what it means that Misha “smells like sleep”, but it made me feel oddly happy to learn that it’s actually a real thing and that there’s a proper reason for that. My Mum got a laughing fit when I told her about that, I wasn’t exactly sure why, but it turned out infectious so we both ended up in stitches over this anosmia thing. And then I even came across a YouTube channel of a woman who has SOD and she’s totally blind and has anosmia as well. But I’ve never come across any info about gustatory problems related to SOD, and I think I dug deep, or at least long. So I resolved that from now on, if someone will try to discredit the existence or clarity of my sense of smell, I will  just flipping eat them, and once we meet in eternity I’ll make sure to let them know what they tasted like. So yeah, it may sound miserable to you or like I should be a vegetable but now it’s confirmed that I have three senses lol (at least when you count only the five senses as senses, and not proprioception and all that other sophisticated stuff). 

 

So, going back to the question finally, it would be even more intriguing to learn if there’s anyone else who has AVPD, no vision and anosmia all at the same time. 😀 

 

Ugh, and I’m absolutely sure that no one else has the same “Ian” living in their brain. But then no one has the same other, Brainworld peeps that I have either, the ones that are fun, and generally the same Brainworld/paracosm structure as mine. 

 

And no one has the same passworded diary files as I do on their computer, haha, at least I hope so. 😀 

 

I’m thinking but can’t think of anything else interesting or worth mentioning, so that’s probably it for me. 

 

How about you? And how do you feel about being the only one who has the thing that you have? 🙂 

 

Question of the day (16th March).

   What is your most useless achievement? 

   My answer:

   The first thing that comes to my mind is graduating high school, and even with honours (or rather our Polish equivalent of that). 😀 It’s funny and was totally useless, because months later, as you may or may not be aware, it turned out that I failed my Maths final exam, and you have to pass all your finals in order to go anywhere further in your education. I failed it miserably enough that that I decided not to retake it, as I had very little idea about what I’d do afterwards anyway, so I guess it’s possible that in the end my finals and any further education would end up being a useless achievement too. As I wrote in a post about useless skills, I guess some of my languages, namely Swedish, Welsh and Norwegian, may be considered useless for me as well, so if we think of them as such, then my achievements related to them can definitely be called useless. Not that I care particularly much though. 

Eithne ní Uallacháin – “Bilingua”.

   Hiya people! 🙂 

   The song I have for you today is from an album that, although  recorded over 20 years ago, and released almost a decade ago, is very new to me, and even though it’s only  the beginning of February, I feel very confident in saying that this is probably going to be one of my most exciting musical discoveries of the year. And not just the album, but also the artist behind it – Eithne ní Uallacháin. – Maybe there’s even some minor faza going on at this point, because I only came across Bilingua (that’s the name of the whole album) last Friday, and have now listened through the entire thing five times, not counting the number of times I’ve listened to  individual tracks and other recordings by Eithne ní Uallacháin. It’s strange that, although I’ve been exploring Celtic music for years, it’s taken me so long to come across Eithne and her music, even though she is a very important figure on the folk music scene of Ireland. But apparently there is a right time for everything, so perhaps this was just the right time for me to discover her and appreciate her music as   it deserves to be appreciated, perhaps if I’d come across it earlier, it wouldn’t have made as  strong an impression on me as it did. 

   Eithne ní Uallacháin was born in Ballina in 1957. She grew up in an Irish-speaking and musical family as her father was a collector of songs from the Oriel area in Ulster and encouraged both Eithne and her sister to sing. She married fiddle player Gerry O’Connor, who was also her long-time musical partner, and together they formed a duo called Lá Lugh. Eithne was not only a very competent and expressive singer of traditional Irish songs, but she also wrote her own songs, and was not afraid to experiment with music, mixing old melodies with her own words or vice versa, and she sang in  English and Irish. She also played the flute. In 1998 she began recording material for a solo album. At the same time, she was struggling with severe depression, which, if I understand correctly, was a result of, or in any case accompanied by, a debilitating physical illness. A year later Eithne very sadly took her own life. All the recordings of her vocals had been completed by that time. From then on, it was Eithne’s son, Dónal O’Connor, who worked on Bilingua , together with her producer Shaun “Mudd” Wallace. However, there were some contractual problems along the way, which is why it was only released in 2014, after fifteen years. It ended up receiving lots of positive attention from various media, both English and Irish. 

   The whole record is an absolute treat. It’s full of emotions and features influences from various other countries’ traditional music, such as Breton (thanks to guitarist Gilles le Bigot who  also worked with Eithne on her earlier albums) Scandinavian or African. As I’ve  said before, Eithne is an extremely expressive singer, which is something I always appreciate  in folk music. There’s a fair bit of language play here, as Eithne smoothly switches between Irish and English, and sometimes into Latin. I like every single song on this record, which is why I had a bit of a hard time picking something, and why in the end I decided that tomorrow I am going to share one more song from this album, just so I don’t have to limit myself to one. 😀 For the first one, I chose the opening, tribal-sounding track, from which the whole album took its name. To me, it almost sounds like a tribute to language in general, which really appeals to the voracious linguaphile in me. I love all this energy flowing through it that sounds almost euphoric. 

Question of the day.

   What’s your dream job? 

   My answer: 

   Ever since I’ve read a German book on the history of brain surgery by Jurgen Thorwald, which I believe has no English translation but I read it in Polish and the Polish translation is called The Fragile House of the Soul, I thought it would be super cool to be a brain surgeon, or even a neurosurgeon more generally. I’ve been interested in various aspects of the human brain pretty much since forever, but it was then that I thought that being able to actually work with it in such a tangible way and tinker with  brains must be incredibly interesting, if also just as incredibly stressful, pressuring and all, but I think the interestingness compensates well for it. My conviction only strengthened when I met my horse riding instructor, who aside from being a horse riding instructor and hippotherapist and quite a few other things is also a neurologist, and so we tend to talk about various brain-related things a fair bit. Obviously though, I cannot be a brain surgeon being blind, so while I’d really like to be able to do that, it has to stay in the sphere of dreams. And actually, I have a feeling that even if I could see, perhaps this wouldn’t necessarily be the best fit for me. I guess to be able to study medicine you have to have a bit more of an idea of subjects like math, chemistry and physics than I ever did at school. First and foremost, you actually have to pass your finals and I didn’t pass my math final, let’s not forget about that. 😀 And I think being able to see wouldn’t necessarily make me a lot more dexterous and coordinated. But it’s not like I am or have ever been devastated because I’m not able to do that, it’s mostly just a fun thing to think about and the fact that I cannot do that doesn’t fill me with bitterness or anything. 

   Another thing I’ve also wanted to do for ages is to work with speech synthesis, text to speech solutions and such, and especially to be able to create speech synths for various mini languages that no one cares about, sometimes even their speakers hardly do. And that would be a way of conserving them, as well as a way to help speakers of those languages who are blind or have various communication challenges to be able to do things in that language, like read ebooks in that language with synthetic speech the way they’re actually supposed to sound, rather than having to use, say, a Polish speech synth to read a book in, for example, Vilamovian (no clue if there even are any books in Vilamovian, it was just the first really small language that came to my mind), or communicate with their family in such a mini language if they can’t speak. This is really interesting stuff for me and has pretty much always been, but to work in such a field it’s not enough to have some linguistic knowledge and be language-conscious generally, you also have to be awfully geeky with technology and everything and again, that involves a fair bit of math and other such so called left-brain things (if we do believe in left and right brain doing separate things). And I doubt you can actually make a living off making Vilamovian, Karelian or other Lusatian speech synths, as these languages obviously have a very limited number of speakers and the speech synths would be used and needed by like 1% of those speakers. 😀 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What’s a saying in your language that probably doesn’t have a straight-forward translation into other languages? 

   My answer: 

   Well, in my experience, when translating anything between Polish and English, it’s English that has more words that are untranslatable into Polish, simply because English has loads more words than Polish does. That being said, we do have a lot of sayings, also proverbs, idioms, colloquial or downright slangy words that are very handy yet don’t seem to have a straightforward translation into English, and as much as, when speaking Polish to a non-English speaker, I often sorely lack the huge amounts of weirdly specific and descriptive words that English has, on the other hand, when speaking English, I really feel the lack of all those very picturesque and often quite humourous and to the point sayings, idioms etc. of my native language. As you may know, I have always envied people who are multilingual since early childhood, but as my own language development keeps progressing, I am increasingly more inclined to believe someone I was once writing with who was raised bilingual, and who told me that being bilingual is not all amazing, because, according to him,   when you speak two or more languages fluently from a very early age, in a way you can’t develop either of them as well as a monoglot can, and you have gaps in each of them and mix them up a lot totally accidentally etc. I was raised monolingual, so that was not my experience, but now that my thinking is pretty equally divided between Polish and English, and my Swedish is also pretty strong, I think I am starting to see that myself. When I speak English, I still don’t know a lot of niche words or am unfamiliar with some structures, or make a lot of mistakes, or am just not sure how to express some very specific thing, or  like I said  lack some colourful idiom from my native language. But when I speak my native language, I find it increasingly difficult to resist the temptation of snobbishly throwing words from other languages in between or awkwardly calquing expressions from other languages, or otherwise it sometimes takes me ages to remember what something’s called in Polish which feels and appears ridiculous. Also I write a lot less in Polish these days than I do in English and sometimes I have an impression that ever since I’ve started writing loads in English, like blogging and having mostly English-speaking friends, my writing skills in Polish have degraded slightly but visibly, while I still haven’t developed as distinctive a writing style as I’ve had in Polish. I shared that observation with my grandad a few months ago and he said that perhaps this is evidence for why humans might not actually be built for being multilingual. It’s an interesting theory and could sort of make sense at the first glance, because in the past people rarely travelled so far that they’d need more than one language to communicate effectively with everyone, nonetheless I don’t believe in this theory one bit. AlSo yeah, linguistic dilemmas. But anyway, I’m digressing already before I’ve even managed to properly start answering the question. 😀 

   So, an untranslatable Polish saying? The first thing that comes to my mind is one that would literally translate to “to think about blue almonds”. At least on the surface, that may seem like the best literal translation for it, even though it’s not really right or exact but we’ll get to that in a minute. If you’re thinking about blue almonds, it means that you are dreaming, usually about something that isn’t very likely to come true, or, in any case, you are not doing anything to get closer to it coming true. It is also strongly associated with being idle and lazy, like, instead of doing what you’re supposed to do, for example doing your job so that you can eventually get a raise and gradually become richer and possibly very rich, you just sit there thinking about blue almonds, that is in this case  how cool it would be to be a billionaire and what you’d be doing if you were one, but you’re not even trying to increase the likelihood of it happening. I’ve also heard it used several times to signify something more like zoning out, for example, you’re in the middle of doing something, and then you stop in the midst of it and suddenly appear deep in thought, so someone might ask you what you’re thinking about and you could say: “Oh,  just thinking about blue almonds”, meaning that you’d simply zoned out and weren’t thinking about anything in particular at all or just mind wandering or something. But generally it’s most basic meaning I’d say is idle, lazy daydreaming of very unlikely or perhaps utopian things. 

   But why blue almonds, actually? Well, the thing is that they aren’t really blue. The Polish word for blue (niebieski) also has another meaning – “heavenly”. – It is much less commonly used, these days you’d mainly see it in religious texts like the Bible (lol my Mac is so brainwashed by me already that it autocorrects Bible to Bibiel 🤣 ) or hymns or prayers (so essentially in Polish Heavenly Father means the same as blue father, and I remember that when I was little I found that really odd) or such, or otherwise perhaps astronomy-related stuff where it would mean “celestial”. I guess it’s because the word for heaven (niebo) is the same as sky in Polish, and well, the sky is blue. Or perhaps there’s a more logical reason behind that. So technically the almonds aren’t really supposed to be blue, but heavenly. But since “niebieski) is more  commonly used as meaning blue these days, most people think the almonds in the saying are actually blue and interpret it as to think/daydream about something very weird/fantastical/surreal, ‘cause blue almonds don’t exist. Apparently, in the past centuries, the Polish word for almond (migdał) was also used to mean something delicious, perhaps a bit sumptuous, exotic, luxurious, that you didn’t eat every single day. So I guess a more fitting literal translation would really be something like “to think about heavenly delicacies”. 

   Or am I wrong in assuming that this doesn’t have an English equivalent? If so, please do enlighten me.

   . How about you? Or if you’re not sure what sayings from your language are or are not translatable to others, what’s your favourite saying in your native language? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What are three things you couldn’t live without? 

   My answer: 

   The first such thing that comes to my mind is Holy Mass. And I mean Traditional Latin Mass in particular, because back when I used to go to the new Mass I never really felt this way. Despite being raised Catholic, I never really felt like I couldn’t live without Communion. I knew it theoretically, that it’s important in your spiritual life, that it’s the Bread of life and all that, but I didn’t really feel it as such. Kind of as if you knew that you need to eat to survive and know what minerals and vitamins are in which food and how many calories each food has and all the theoretical stuff like that but you had totally no appetite even though you ate regularly and you didn’t even feel it if you skipped a meal or a few. Spiritual anorexia or something? Lol will have to share this term with my Mum. 😀 But really, it’s kind of how it was with me. Before I became a TradCat sort of officially about a year ago, I went to Mass every Sunday and holiday and sometimes on regular week days as well (at least ever since my “re-conversion” about 7 years ago), but it was more out of habit/a feeling of obligation rather than because I actually felt a particular desire to do so. Now, even though in a way attending a Holy Mass is more challenging to me, because you could say that TLM isn’t perfectly accessible to blind people due to it being highly visual and you having to have the missal or other prayer book with you which I can’t really have  with me in church, I actually look forward to it every week and feel that it gives me something. I do realise that religion isn’t about how you feel, contrary to how many people think, rather, it is about giving praise to God and placing Him in the centre of everything instead of yourself, but TLM does that obviously, so if it also affects my feelings, I am really grateful for this additional grace. 

   Another thing would be music. It really really helps me with the sensory anxiety thing which kicks in during silence. Of course, the background noise that helps me counteract that anxiety doesn’t have to always be music, and it doesn’t have to be music that I like as long as it obviously isn’t sensorily creepy and doesn’t make me even more anxious, but good music works particularly well because it’s very brain-engaging and music that I like will usually be more effective for me than something totally neutral or something that doesn’t really speak to me on an emotional level at all. I think life would feel really dull if I had to live completely without music, and finding ways to counteract sensory anxiety, especially when alone, would be extremely challenging. Also my fazas would wither and what would I do? Probably wither too, for what is life without fazas? 😀 I keep saying that but for those who still don’t know, faza peak is the best antidepressant for me, so I’d be struggling extremely with no faza peaks and no hope for any. Unless my brain would be inventive and I’d start getting fazas on literary characters more instead of musicians, or perhaps on people I know, or, dunno, maybe I’d start watching movies instead of listening to music and get fazas on movie characters or actors or movie directors or whatever? 😀 That’s an interesting thing to ponder, but I wouldn’t really be overly enthused with such a change, because musical fazas are easier for me to feed than literary or potential film fazas, and I presume a lot easier to deal with than real life ones could be. 

   As for the third thing, I guess it’s not necessarily as bad as that I would completely not be able to live without it, but my life would feel extremely barren. This thing is my languages. I mean obviously I can’t eliminate Polish out of my life because everyone around me speaks it and it’s rooted in my brain deeper than the other languages and you got to think in some language lol, nor English because it’s present everywhere in bigger or smaller amounts, but if I had to, for whatever crazy reason, cut myself off all the others completely… ugh, what’s the point of living? I mean obviously there is a bigger point in living than languages from a Christian perspective, but you get what I mean I hope, I just wouldn’t really feel like there was much left to my life here. I had such a time in my life for seven years when, after two years of learning Swedish with my tutor, I had to stop it, because I was leaving the inclusive school closer to home and going back to the blind boarding school that I originally went to, and it was impossible for me to continue seeing my tutor and neither the school people nor my Mum could find someone in the school area who could teach me further, I had still rather little idea about technology and we weren’t really encouraged much (though not discouraged either) at that school to use tech devices for learning anyway. So my Swedish started to fade, and I felt quite embittered because I still felt that something, almost like a calling, that made me feel that I should learn Swedish, and whenever I accidentally heard a little bit of Swedish somewhere I felt extreme longing for it. So I tried as hard as I could to just forget about it, not knowing if I’d ever be able to pick it up again, and was I guess as successful as I could possibly be in such a thing, but then sometimes I’d hear it again in a movie or somewhere, or I’d hear someone speak about Swedish/Sweden, like once I came across a Swedish couple (of all the nations in the world) on a train, and then my brain was in pieces all over again. This means that I am now able to appreciate my languages and being able to learn them even more, but I definitely don’t feel like going through something similar all over again. I love my languages so much that I sometimes jokingly speak of them as if all of them were my partners/lovers or something like that, hence I refer to myself as a linguaphile. I can’t even decide which one I love most, it’s always the one I’m with at a given time. And being multilingual and learning new languages helps me keep my brain in shape and is my favourite way of doing it, so what would I do if I was left without it? I’d die of fear of getting Alzheimer’s some day, I guess. 

   How about you? 🙂 

TToT (about apples, sleep, Misha etc.)

   I feel like writing another gratitude list on here rather than just in my diary, and as part of it, I’m participating in the Ten Things of Thankful linky. In no particular order as always. 

1.    Misha. Currently, Misha is sleeping on my bed, curled up in a little ball and seemingly very content with his life right now. That makes me very happy because he seemed a bit off earlier this week. I’m not sure if he actually was or if I was being hypervigilant as I often am in regards to Misha, but he wasn’t much interested in his snacks and isolated himself a lot, while now he’s decidedly more cheerful, if mostly very anxious but that’s pretty much the norm unfortunately. I check on him every now and then, more for my own benefit than him really needing regular supervision during sleep lol, and I seriously wish I could make a close-up recording of all those cute sounds coming out of him – his sleepy purrs, his fluttery heartbeat, all the funny gurgling sounds in his tummy, his gentle breath and little “Hhrrru?”’s when he stretches in his sleep – and show y’all, but I don’t think any of my devices would be able to pick up such mini sounds. 
2. My room. Today I feel especially grateful for having a room which I don’t have to share with anyone (except for Misha obviously, I always tell him it’s his room too because he doesn’t have his own, but who would mind Misha?) because later this weekend I’ll have to lend it to my parents’ guests. Late last summer, my Mum invited her acquaintance – my aunt’s sister-in-law who really likes my Mum – to come over to us for a weekend. Back then she slept in my parents’ room, and they slept in the camper. She was really appreciative of how my Mum hosted her, so appreciative, it seems, that she wants to come again, this time with her husband, who normally works in France, but for a shorter time. Except this time round we don’t have the camper because it’s having some sort of maintenance stuff or such done, so they’ll have to sleep here and Bibielz will sleep with Sofi in her mini room). I can’t say I don’t mind, because I do (even though her husband is called Jacek), but this makes me even more appreciative of having a room just for myself the vast majority of the time. And aside from simply being my own room, it’s also a really cool room, so I’m sure they’ll like it here. Perhaps so much that they’ll come for another weekend sleepover in two months’ time. 😀 
3. Going back to horse riding. I don’t know when exactly I’ll go yet, but I know I want to do it again. It may be the worst sport for me given my abilities (or lack thereof actually) and both mental and physical health situation, but it’s the only one I actually like, and I miss it despite the anxiety that has always been associated with it for me. I miss the stable and my regular horse and my instructor, and I want to give it a go again. Perhaps less ambitiously than before and more hippo therapeutically after all, but I really do. But the ultimate thing that actually made me make this decision was something else, which I won’t write about now but probably will quite soon. 
4. My fazas and generally my faza life. The past year or so, my faza life has been very… well, weird, chaotic, tumultuous… I don’t really want to get into the details, plus it wouldn’t be fitting for this particular post because it would take up most of it, and I don’t really have enough distance to it to be able to write about it publicly like that at this point, but things have been really weird and a little confusing sometimes I’d say, and both good and bad. But this week has been pretty good faza-wise, if very intense, and I wonder if perhaps things won’t be becoming more stable from now on. I’d quite like that finally. 😀 ANyway, I got a massive peak on Gwil this week totally out of nowhere, and you regular people on here know that a peak is a great thing and works like the best natural antidepressant for me, so having a peak means I’m doing really well mood wise. No spectacular highs like peaks cause sometimes, just a serene, calm sort of happy feeling. 
5. My Apple Watch. My Apple Watch may not be the most useful of my devices like my iPhone or Mac or PlexTalk, it doesn’t really bring anything extremely new to my life or its quality or whatever, but I just like it. This week I attempted to sleep with it for several nights to see how accurate its sleep tracking is, in particular sleep stages. I didn’t expect much because I didn’t believe a device like that could be reliable at all in tracking something as elusive as sleep, and because my Mum was saying it didn’t work too well and seemed very random to her, and claimed that it can only track your sleep during the scheduled sleep time, so if your alarm goes off and you’ll just turn it off and go back to sleep it won’t notice it. Well, my experience with sleep tracking seems to be better than my Mum’s. As far as I can tell, it’s oddly accurate. It knows very well more or less when I fall asleep, even if I fall asleep before my scheduled sleep time starts, and it knows quite precisely when I wake up, and it’s not because I use the Apple Watch right when I wake up, because even when I do check the time when I wake up I usually do it on the PlexTalk out of sheer habit. I obviously can’t objectively verify the accuracy of the sleep stages thing, but again, as far as I can tell, it’s pretty good. Like last night I kept waking all the freaking time and felt like I was sleeping very lightly, it did show that my sleep was very fragmented and I got only half an hour of deep sleep. After I let Misha out at half past four and went back to bed, I remember having a lot of dreams and Apple Watch said I kept switching between REM and core sleep pretty much til I woke up at almost 11 AM, and I remember having a very vivid dream right before I woke up and woke up with a raging headache, and Apple Watch says I woke up from REM sleep. Apparently it’s a thing to get headaches when you suddenly wake up from REM sleep like that. Also because I fell asleep at half past two last night and then didn’t really get the best quality sleep, I still felt very sleepy by the time my alarm went off at 8. I tried to snooze it, but must have done something differently than I originally wanted because Apple Watch turned off the alarm completely, while still staying in sleep mode and it knew that I was sleeping. So my Mum was definitely not right that it will only log sleep during the schedule, although I guess Apple Watches are still unaware of such a thing as naps. So yeah, overall I’m quite positively surprised and, who knows, maybe I’ll end up sleeping with my Apple Watch every night, after all. Not that knowing the sleep stages gives me anything really, but it can be just good to know. I’m also very curious if it’ll notice anything weird during my sleep paralysis. I already had it once with the Apple Watch on, but it was past my set sleep time schedule and I didn’t know yet that you can prolong it like I did today, so it wasn’t tracking my sleep. It was very helpful though because as I was in sleep paralysis, at some point I got an email, so my Apple Watch vibrated and I woke up. Which, while we’re at it, makes me also very grateful to the email sender, although I don’t remember who that was anymore. 😀 
6.    Speaking of Apple – apple pie! 😀 – My Mum made one last weekend and we ate it during the week, but we couldn’t eat it all so in the end Mum had to freeze it. It was very yummy though. 
7. And speaking of sleep, that dream I had earlier this week. That was really ridiculously hilarious. And yes, I find myself really liking the name Helenor. The next gem stone I get is going to be named Helenor (for all the new people here, I give names that I like to my gem stones because I don’t plan on having children and even if I did, many of the names I like are unusable for children). 
8. My fluffy overalls that I got from Mum a couple years ago. She made them for me and they’re very warm and comfy and I love wearing them when it’s relatively cool weather like it’s been recently. 

Noticeable Welsh progress this week. I wonder if it isn’t the aforementioned faza peak doing this to me, because I haven’t really been doing anything any different than last week or the week before. The power of peaks. 😂 Anyway, I really appreciate it because while my Norwegian learning has been mostly a stroll in the park because of Swedish, Welsh, with all the related excitement and my feelings for it, has been quite an uphill struggle compared with my other languages, so even the smallest leaps of progress are very much valued by Bibielz. And Welsh-language music. Even now I’m listening to Blas Folk Radio Cymru and I’m really grateful that there are ways for people like me who live someplace completely different to also discover music in minority languages. 

1. Chips for lunch yesterday. Mum was trying some new experimental recipe for chips, which didn’t sound all that good to me from the beginning, and eventually we both agreed that they turned out quite crappy, but then my Mum made «normal» chips, and these, as always, were very good. Good chips always deserve appreciation. 

   So, that’s my gratitude list. How about your thankfuls? What nice things have happened to you this week? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What were you like as a child? 

   My answer: 

   Just to clarify for the beginning in case it could be confusing, I am going to mostly refer to my younger self as Bibiel or little Bibiel. Those who know me may know that I like to talk about myself as Bibiel or Bibielle in third person, and also use that name specifically for the more child-like/childish/quirky/creative part of me. When I was very young I didn’t use that specific word in reference to myself, and I never really think about my younger self as Bibiel because the child-like Bibiel part of my Brainworld and my younger self conjure two a bit different images, but in this post I’m going to refer to my younger self as Bibiel because: a) I like the word Bibiel, b) I guess it’s boring to constantly repeat awkward phrases like «my younger self» or «little me) and c) I went by a different legal name back then, which I don’t share on here, but Bibiel works well enough instead as it seems kind of absurd to think about my 5-or-so-year-old self as Emilia. Now for the actual answer. 

   
   Fairly different to what I’m like now, in a lot of ways. In fact, sometimes when I think back to the child version of me, the one below age 8, or when someone tells me about something from that time that had to do with little Bibiel or reminisces about how I was like then, I feel kind of flabbergasted and almost confused about how it’s even possible that I was different like that and liked so many things that I hate now, like peopling. Other people, family and others, have also told me countless times how I’ve changed since then. I mean, duh, everyone does, right? And I do think that some of those people are a little biased, like my Dad for whom the past is always better than the present, or my maternal grandparents for whom I was their first survived grandchild and they spent a lot of time with me as a little kid, doted on me and idealised me in a way, and then we parted ways a bit both emotionally and physically so they kind of know the little bibiel better than the present me, particularly my grandma, even though we see each other regularly. Of course I do recognise some of my current traits that I have in common with little Bibiel, like some of my weird ways of thinking or the funny way my Brainworld works, some of my interests or even some of my personality traits, but generally, whenever I thought about the little Bibiel more, I feel kind of perplexed, like wtf?! My Mum says I changed so much ‘cause of the boarding school, but I don’t think so. I mean yeah, sure, it must have been a strong trigger, very possibly the main one or one of the main ones, but I really highly doubt it could be the cause. I’ve always associated the whole «change» thing with my first major depressive episode, that I was diagnosed with when I was 10, but I’d been feeling depressed  ever since I was 8. It wasn’t that I was feeling some spectacular change in myself at that time or like it happened overnight as soon as I turned 8 or as soon as I started to feel depressed, but simply when I look back at my childhood that point in time seems to be more or less the dividing line between the «two Bibiels», although my Mum claims I was quite like that old Bibiel still when I was 10 and remembers me like that for the last time from my aunt’s wedding. So perhaps the new Bibiel was born after my Achilles tendons surgery or something. At around similar time when I started feeling depressed, I also started taking growth hormone and so it seems like my appearance changed more or less simultaneously as well. I was really short and quite chubby as a small kid, and then on growth hormone I suddenly went quite skinny, and while I’ve never really been tall especially compared with my immediate family members, I was growing so quickly at first that it kind of seemed like I became really tall in no time and people made lots of comments about how I suddenly changed physically so I guess it was a big deal for them lol. 

   Honestly? As much as I don’t necessarily love myself, I don’t really like that little Bibiel almost at all, so whenever and however it happened, I’m glad she’s gone. I mean, I only like her a bit because I have some sympathy for her or something and obviously in some regards understand her better than anyone else so I know that in a way she was just what her surroundings expected her to be or something like that, and we’ve been through the same things, but if she was someone external, like one of my little cousins or my sister for example, I probably wouldn’t like her at all because I wouldn’t even have that understanding to warm me up to her. That’s probably why all the therapist and coach speak about embracing your inner child irks me so much.

   When I was a teenager or so, my frozen in the past Dad really liked to watch old camera videos that Mum had recorded when Olek and me were kids, and insisted that we all do that together, or at least that whomever he was watching at a given point should be there and see themselves as well and reminisce with him about the good ole days and laugh at the same things over and over and over. There weren’t very many things that I hated about my family life more than that. I mostly hated watching these videos because, unlike for my Dad, I wasn’t really nostalgic for those times at all. Perhaps some little bits yes, but generally watching that shit always made me feel extremely blue and then I couldn’t stop ruminating. Then I had to go through that once again not long ago when Olek decided that he wanted to revive his childhood memories and got all those tapes digitalised and we had to watch ALL of them again. Thankfully, at that point it wasn’t just me who got hit with a blues afterwards, it hit my Mum as well and probably even stronger ‘cause she ended up crying and all. So from then on we decided that we’re not going to do the communal time-travelling sessions  anymore because it affects Mum in a rather destructive way. I wish I could be an easy cryer like that so perhaps it would have already been over much sooner, lol. 

   But the other reason, like I said, was that that little Bibiel was just so bloody annoying. In some ways almost like your typical annoying character from children’s books. People always liked me when I was a kid, I mean adults, kids probably didn’t care ‘cause she didn’t care about kids either and didn’t know how to interact with them. I’ve always perceived her as extremely selfish and not caring much for other people. I guess she only liked people and was nice to them when they gave her attention, otherwise acted like some sort of offended queen and could be downright rude, like I was rude to Olek nearly all the time on those tapes, even though Olek hardly got as much attention from our parents or other adults in our lives even without me trying, ‘cause Bibiel was so fucking adorable and oh so disabled. My Mum has told me that when Olek was very little, I would come over to him and whack him over the head full force with a toy or something. Later on, I was always very happy to snitch on him. Interestingly, despite Olek is no meek character, as a kid, he was always extremely tolerant of me, very protective and even if I was nasty to him or outright ignored him, he always wanted to play with me and waited patiently for whenever queen Bibielle would be in a more favourable/playful mood, which would usually kick in late in the evenings when we were already in beds. Then we’d make up all kinds of crazy games, or just keep laughing our brains off for no apparent reason, because  almost the mere fact that it’s bedtime makes everything instantly more hilarious, that’s one thing that I still do have in common with that Bibiel, I still get fits of giggles at night quite often. 😀 Or we’d play jump-bears (simply jumping on the beds, either standing up, or bouncing up and down on your bum, or on your back when in bed and yelling «Jump-bear!» Every time you jump, just ‘cause bears, and more exactly the Polish word «miś» which means bear, is super cool and you just can’t say it too many times during the day). That would naturally really annoy our parents that, instead of sleeping, we’d be double as noisy as during the day, but instead of dividing the punishment fairly or at least equally, most of the time, Dad would storm upstairs and sometimes Olek would get a spanking. Sometimes, he would tell Bibiel not to «provoke» Olek, but he never seemed to assume that Bibiel was just as active a part in those games, probably because he didn’t want to, because Bibiel is so adorable and cute, how could Bibiel ever do anything wrong like, for real? Believe it or not, but that’s what little Bibiel kind of thought herself. Bibiel knew that adult people go to confession, and I recall little Bibiel having a thought once that she will probably never have to do that, because she never seems to do anything wrong. In Bibiel’s defence, we can say that it certainly wasn’t because Bibiel was actually so self-assured. Bibiel was simply very rarely told that she did something wrong or that her behaviour wasn’t right sometimes. I don’t think Bibiel thought it in a way: «Oh yeah, I’m so amazing that I never sin and I won’t ever have to go to confession, it’s for losers», rather, I remember that thought more like feeling kind of curious, like, how come all the kids around are so badly-behaved and all the adults do bad things all the time but Bibiel is always so good? I guess that means Bibiel is somehow really special or something. 

   Once queen Bibielle’s playful mood would vane, she’d go totally quiet, and if Olek tried to initiate a conversation or something, he would usually have to call «Bibiel!» «Bibiel!» Several times, and then at some point would invariably hear a very indifferent: «I don’t want to talk to you anymore», which he always calmly respected and promptly fell asleep. 

   Aside from being sinless, Bibiel also thought she must be somehow incredibly smart, which was totally thanks to my grandad, who values brains in people more than anything else and thinks very highly of his own, so I wonder what would happen if Bibiel dared not to be smart, whether he’d still spoil her as much as he did and pay much attention to her at all. While Bibiel had no real desire to be cocky or smarter than others or anything like that, I think for a while she genuinely thought she was somehow incredibly smart for a child. The truth was simply that Bibiel absorbed information pretty quickly, and liked language, and obviously children who have a wide vocabulary seem a lot smarter, regardless of whether they actually are smarter than their peers, whatever «smarter» actually even means more broadly. Like I once heard of a condition called Williams syndrome where people have below average IQ but are really outstanding at acquiring language, and outsiders often think they’re of normal intelligence when they’re definitely not, so that’s all obviously very relative. 

   As you may be aware, Bibiel LOVED singing. At least that’s the common narrative. I’m actually really quite curious if that was truly the case, or that my family simply went along with that «Oh yeah, our Bibiel sings so well (read, not too out of key 😀 ) and we’ve heard that so many blind people are good at music, so our Bibiel must be really good too and we should promote that skill) or something along those lines except perhaps more subconsciously. Anyway, even if the latter was the case, Bibiel grew up with a conviction that she does love to sing, and wanted to be a singer when she grows up, or, as she always eloquently phrased it «do a career». And I think I’ve mentioned several times on here how there once was a movie about our blind nursery while I was there and they asked each of us what we would like to be, and 5-year-old Bibiel obviously said singer, plus in reference to every other girl saying that they want to be mummies (and one (girl) who wanted to be a daddy), Bibiel revealingly noticed that «I don’t want to have a baby ‘cause when women want to, they can have it, and when they don’t, they don’t have to». 

   There are loads of videos of Bibiel singing. I would have understood it if Bibiel was seriously some significantly talented child, but really, while Bibiel could sure sing in tune and even produce quite clear very high notes, I’ve heard a lot of children of similar age who are more remarkable in this respect. My Mum regrets it now that, when she focused so much on me, she left Olek out a bit, and that while there are so many recordings of Bibiel singing, Bibiel talking, Bibiel playing, Bibiel this, Bibiel that (why haven’t anyone recorded Bibiel pooping? 😛 ) there are comparably very few recordings of Olek. There’s only one recording where we sing together. Bibiel loved all kinds of public performances, and even if they were a bit stressful, it was pretty much only positive stress. It was our family tradition that, every year, Bibiel would take part in a song competition for disabled children that was taking place at one of our local schools. The odd thing was that the school was for intellectually disabled children, and Bibiel was the only non-intellectually disabled child there and the only one from outside that school. Bibiel would prepare her favourite song or even a few, sometimes these weren’t even whole songs but just a bit of this, a bit of that mixed up together and it was clear to everyone anyway that Bibiel will be the best, and it was always the flipping Bibiel who ended up leaving with a huge basketful of sweets. I mean, if that’s not utter Bibiel propaganda, wtf is it? 😀 One could have thought it must have been 20 years earlier and Bibiel was actually a representative of the USSR  or something like that. Poor children from that school. As if that wasn’t enough of Bibiel, later on Bibiel even made it to a radio show for children in Warsaw, and then some sort of a casting for some sort of advertisement about disabled children or whatever shit, in what is now my least favourite Polish television (not because of anything to do with the casting). My Dad apparently still regrets I didn’t win it. 

   And that singing thing is really what I remember about Bibiel most, and what others – family, strangers and everyone in between – seems to recall most strongly about Bibiel as well. 

   Knowing all that, you’d think that Bibiel must have been a very confident child. Except generally not. Bibiel did love to socialise, very much so. Any kind of gatherings, meeting new people, talking to people, it was definitely Bibiel’s element. Bibiel had a weird sort of way of becoming really clingy with stranger people. Like, a lot of people who would visit our house just a couple times or even once would very quickly and spontaneously earn the title of Auntie or Uncle. But Bibiel mostly only dealt well with one on one contact, when the other person would be wholly engrossed in listening to Bibiel’s constant chatter or at least pretended to be, and bonus points if they were good at pretending that they understood what she was on about (no one could actually understand, because basically Bibiel thought everyone was synaesthetic and fixated on sounds and thought the same way). 😀 Bibiel could also thrive in larger gatherings of humans, but only if they were made up of exclusively or mainly adults, and, again, if their attention was on Bibiel rather than constantly shifting and a bit on Bibiel and a bit off Bibiel. Kind of like our Misha is now. It is really weird to explain and I guess I don’t even get it anymore at this point but in a way, while Bibiel really enjoyed peopling, she was also really shy. She was very easily scared of people, and as much as she liked meeting new people and making friends with them, she was afraid or perhaps didn’t know how to initiate contacts with people, so the initiative always had to come out from the other side. I clearly remember that when Bibiel was in the nursery for the first few days and the children were brushing their teeth, which they started each at slightly different times depending when they finished their meals, everyone would always ask the staff person: «Can I rinse now, miss?!» Repeatedly, and she’d have to tell everyone whether they can or not. But Bibiel was too scared to ask. Or something. So while all the other children brushed and rinsed their teeth and went to beds, Bibiel was still standing by the sink, and brushing or at least pretending to brush her teeth. 😀 It’s really weird, ‘cause I guess normally «smart” people would see that everyone else’s left, so what’s the point of brushing your teeth all night? Apparently Bibiel didn’t pick that up, and like I say for several days, until she finally did. On the other hand it’s weird that the nursery people didn’t notice that though, perhaps they wanted to end their shifts quickly. 

   Bibiel was also oddly unassertive. My Dad’s family, who are generally pretty rough, unemotional people, were really touchy-feely with Bibiel, and they liked Bibiel’s singing no less than Mum’s family, even if they weren’t quite as exuberant about it. Apparently Bibiel liked visiting them, because I remember Bibiel praying every single evening that we would visit (paternal) gran tomorrow, but I also remember that, just like I usually am these days, Bibiel would also usually feel quite bored there, and kind of tense in a way. My late paternal grandpa had a real soft spot for Bibiel, and when we (that is of course Dad, Mum, Olek and Bibiel) would visit them, he would run out all smiley and call out «Our Bibiel is coming! Hello Bibiel!) as if everyone else was just a mass of air surrounding Bibiel. Bibiel liked him, but didn’t always feel comfortable around him, just like with the rest of Dad’s family. It was seriously like they thought that a blind child needs to be touched all the time to have any sort of meaningful contact with people or something. They would often suddenly scoop Bibiel up and carry her into the house, despite Mum’s faint protests that «Bibiel can walk…» or at my paternal aunt’s place my teenage cousins would always bring Bibiel to their rooms. If Bibiel sat at the table next to my parents, someone would often want her to come to them and sit on their lap, which Bibiel, despite her frequent clinginess with people, rarely felt enthused about. My uncles, trying their best to develop some sort of relationship with Bibiel, would often creep behind Bibiel and rub her cheek or ear with their finger, sometimes asking if Bibiel knows who this is. Bibiel didn’t like that either. Only Bibiel’s maternal grandad was officially allowed to play dumbly like that with Bibiel ‘cause he knew that Bibiel actually knows who it is and it was just him and Bibiel being silly. When Dad’s family did stuff like that, Bibiel would just sat stiffly there, sometimes smile and do whatever was polite and expected, other times just sitting and not doing anything, afraid to refuse the touchy-feely attention in any way or directly oppose someone. As I learned years later, my Mum hated that too, and, just like Bibiel, was also too afraid to speak up or do anything. 

   Also Bibiel was totally incompatible with other children, with only a few exceptions like Olek and a couple children from the nursery and some children older than Bibiel. This had gotten better once Bibiel went to primary, and then at some point I noticed that, at least in some respects, I much preferred talking to my peers than adults. 

   At nursery and to a lesser degree later in the beginning of primary, my Mum claims that Bibiel was also something of a school mascot. Bibiel would often represent the school at various outside song competitions, as well as sing on those organised within the school. Bibiel would bring flowers and thank all kinds of VIPs who visited our nursery/the whole blind institute thing or however I should  best call it in English, a photo of Bibiel would be featured in a magazine during then-First Lady’s visit to our school as she held and kissed Bibiel. My Dad apparently still has that pic, who cares that he wasn’t the supporter of that president? 😀 However Bibiel didn’t really notice it as much there because there were also other such kids that were sort of seen as more representative or something so it wasn’t like there was only Bibiel as it was the case at home, therefore it didn’t really bother Bibiel while it was happening. I only talked with Mum about it much later on and realised that it also had some other consequences for my stay there but that’s beyond the topic of Bibiel. From Bibiel’s representative school activity, I remember most vividly how we were often visited by people from Italian embassy or consulate, not sure exactly who they were but usually people just called them «the Italians» even though not all of them were Italians, and as far as I remember they visited us regularly throughout Bibiel’s three-year stay in the nursery. There was an Italian couple who seemed to be in charge of the whole thing, I’m not sure if they were the actual ambassadors or what, but I heard unofficially that they visited us so often and funded all sorts of things for us and stuff because they had a particular liking for one  girl in our nursery who had multiple disabilities and a difficult family situation and so they were like second/foster parents to her or something. But they also had some sort of special likings for many other children, including Bibiel. Bibiel didn’t really like them back though. SO many people and SO much noise were beyond even Bibiel’s capacity for peopling, no matter how genuinely nice they were. In fact, they were really nice to Bibiel, and two times they even organised Bibiel’s birthday in a proper style, with all them people who came giving Bibiel separate presents. Most of them knew that Bibiel doesn’t like to play the way normal kids do, like with dolls or whatever other kids play with, but instead Bibielz (still) like glass balls, as in I guess you guys call them marbles in the Anglosphere, or iron balls like you have in car bearings, or teddy bears, or glass/porcelain figurines, or any random, small objects that have a nice texture and are fun to fidget with. And most of them really cared and got Bibiel really nice things and lots of marbles and the like, except one couple who bought Bibiel a doll who was moving and singing something. Bibiel went from one thing to another with the translator lady showing her everything and the couple asked Bibiel whether Bibiel likes the doll, to which the normally so unassertive Bibiel simply answered «No». I guess Bibiel thought the translator would keep it to herself, but she didn’t, and the couple got understandably upset. They made up for it the next year, buying Bibiel a huge sack of beautiful marbles, such like Bibiel had never seen before. 

   When I returned to the blind school from being in an integration/inclusive school for two years at age 10 and 11, it quickly became very clear to everyone that that Bibiel, who was already waning before I went to the inclusive school, must have been taken by Moomins to the Moomin Valley or wherever else and is  totally gone. I was already very much set on that I won’t be singing publicly anymore or anything like that, but I didn’t even have to say that really because I wasn’t that Bibiel anymore and so no one expected it from me I guess. After that, I had quite a few interactions with different people who told me stuff like, for example: «You know, I remember how Ms. So-and-so said she wanted to have you in her class, because you sang so well and were so cute, awww what a pity that you don’t sing anymore!» That made me feel quite weird. I definitely didn’t want to come back to singing, I totally didn’t feel it, but hearing stuff like this, especially at the beginning, also made me feel like now I wasn’t really likeable at all. On the other hand, it made me feel relieved that, although this process of kind of «shedding» Bibiel was completely involuntary, I was no longer that Bibiel who got attention from everyone all the time, and in a way life became much more peaceful. 

   Aside from Bibiel’s a bit strange problems with peopling, like I’ve already mentioned, Bibiel had a very peculiar way of thinking, and thus also expressing herself. That is one area in which I kind of do regret that I’m not that Bibiel anymore, because looking back at little snippets from memories that I have, I believe little Bibiel’s brainlife was even more varied and lots more vivid than mine is currently. I don’t think I can describe that well so I won’t really try. In any case, one of Bibiel’s peculiarities was that for a long time she thought that other people also have the same synaesthesia as hers. Which, for the non-initiated folks, made understanding her a bit tricky sometimes. For example, Bibiel associated the words crocodile and dragon with two different kinds of metal trouser braces clips that she had in her play box, among other things, and whenever she saw similar brace clips anywhere she’d also call them «crocodiles» or «dragons». Don’t ask me why crocodiles and dragons, I’m curious too, I mean it’s interesting because generally synaesthetic associations like that are very random for me and crocodiles and dragons have quite a few things in common. That’s one reason why I think that my synaesthesia developed based on links between different objects/shapes/textures that Bibiel felt while at the same time hearing specific words spoken by people. Bibiel had such weird mindset that she thought that if someone’s name is associated in her mind with a specific food, they should like that food, or otherwise it’s… well, just wrong, dunno they should change their name or something. 😀 One person who was particularly tolerant of Bibiel’s synaesthetic chatter was my uncle, whose name Bibiel associated with the Chocapic cereal. And Bibiel would always go on and on and on about how «All Marcins must like Chocapic! Because Marcin tastes like Chocapic! It’s impossible that you don’t. Why don’t you like Chocapic? Did you like Chocapic as a child?» Etc. etc. etc. He must’ve thought I was high on Chocapic, but he and my aunt divorced so we haven’t seen each other in years. 

    Even before Bibiel had any idea about spelling, books and stuff like that, she had lots of favourite words, and while she liked some (like miś) for their sound, she liked most for their synaesthetic associations. When some specific word or object was on her mind, she liked to speak as much as possible using words that felt similar to the original word that she was thinking about, or that were associated with the object she was thinking about, because I can have multiple synaesthetic associations with one object. There’s still one Mother’s Day card in our house that Bibiel made  and it has wishes for Mum on it that to most people would probably sound very odd to be written by a child (well it was the nursery teacher who wrote them but the idea was entirely Bibiel’s). It goes something like: «Mummy, I wish you were very happy, very sensitive, very zealous, very benevolent to Daddy and Olek, very patient, very kind, very caring, very bright, and that you wouldn’t be deceitful, fearful, gruff, boastful and argumentative». I of course don’t remember that list of adjectives by heart and what they were exactly, but I know that Bibiel associated all of them with a particular thing – my grandma’s necklace, and they all happen to rhyme in Polish, and it’s quite a large group of adjectives really. – When my Mum saw this she just snorted, and I think Bibiel felt a bit hurt that she was so unappreciative. 😀 

   On the other hand, there were words that Bibiel feared, for all kinds of reasons. There are still such words, for that matter. But one particularly ridiculous example that I remember vividly and that was so bad that even my family remembers it to this day, is how Bibiel was scared of the word traffic. The word traffic in Polish is peculiar because the word that means also means a couple other unrelated things, for example a bath plug. Bibiel feared the word traffic so much because one radio station at the time had a horrific jingle for their traffic news that Bibiel found really scary. And so then when it turned out that bath plugs have something to do with traffic, Bibiel became panically afraid of bath plugs. Bibiel wouldn’t even touch one, which, as you can imagine, made baths a little bit complicated. As far as I remember, Bibiel seriously thought that these are the same «traffics» as the ones on the roads – lines and lines of rubbery «traffics» making the gulping water sounds, plus the jingle sound blended somewhere into that. – Bibiel was scared that if she even moves that damn bath plug, let alone plugs it out or in, that traffic jingle is going to explode over the whole bathroom and… don’t know what. Kill her or something.

   So, if Bibiel wasn’t chattering about her synaesthesia, it was the sensory anxiety, because again, she thought everyone must at least dislike the sounds that she finds scary. In a way I still find it baffling that people just usually don’t care. 

   Bibiel had a huge, metal box, in which she kept all kinds of things. Mostly marbles and iron balls, of course, but also loads of other small objects that could fit in one palm comfortably. From natural things like chestnuts or cones, to some little bits and bobs from my Dad’s garage, to the aforementioned brace clips, old-fashioned clip-on earrings, or the agate necklace of my grandma’s that Bibiel loved so much that at some point she just gave it to Bibiel because she weren’t wearing it anymore and how could she not give it to Bibiel if Bibiel so clearly wanted it? The contents of this box varied throughout the years a fair bit. What did Bibiel do with all that? Well, Bibiel sat in the living room, and fidgeted with every single object from that box – either waving it between her fingers, or tossing up and down in her palm, or whatever felt most intuitive with a specific object. – And, to an outside observer, it was just that. Some crazy Bibiel sitting on the floor and wiggling various random objects in her fingers while mumbling something to herself. Except there was more to it, because all the while playing with these objects, Bibiel was making up some sort of story, using the various toys as inspiration for fun words to include in the story. The stories could be based on anything – whether it be something that happened to Bibiel, a fairytale she recently listened to, something she heard in church, a random idea or imagining that popped into her mind, something that someone said, whatever. – Since she usually had multiple words associations with each object, there were a lot of words to be drawn from them and to be used in such stories, and to provide sometimes unpredictable plot twists. But even when Bibiel didn’t have her box with her, she could still play in some different ways in her mind. She had absolute tons of various weird mental games that were to do with language. She learned the alphabet pretty quickly, even though she had no idea how words are written or anything, and had her favourite letters as well as such that she disliked and based some of those games around that. Others were again based on synaesthesia. I remember that in particular she loved finding words new to herself that felt to touch or tasted like some particular thing. I can recall her sitting in my grandad’s car with him and trying to think of as many words as possible that would taste like any kind of ice cream, enlisting grandad’s help, because obviously she thought he knew what she was talking about. I guess in the end he was trying to think of words similar to those that she had already accumulated in her ice cream words collection and that proved to be a good strategy because I think Bibiel did learn a couple new words  that ticked the criterion after all, in particular I remember Bibiel being in awe with the very ice-creamy name Arabella that she never heard before. 

   And you know what? I still do it. Well, some of my language brain games are very different, and I don’t utilise them quite as often, and I don’t have a huge box like Bibiel did, I only have one little plastic fishy, but now the details work a bit differently. Anyway, I still fidget with this little fish in my fingers while making up stories, but I only do it when I’m alone and I’m sure that no one sees it. It’s really fun, you should try that too. They don’t even have to make much sense, although ideally they should at least seem like they do. My parents never understood what I was actually doing with that, and they don’t know that I still do. I mean, my Mum knows that I take the fish with me everywhere I go for longer than a day, but she thinks it’s just emotional, like that I just like her so much for whatever reason and can’t part with her. Well, in a way, yes, so I don’t tell her otherwise. My Dad had told me that he once asked Bibiel what she was doing while she was playing. Obviously she said «Playing». He asked how she was playing and if he could play too. Bibiel graciously allowed and he sat next to her, presumably waiting for instructions, but Bibiel already started playing again, not bothering about him. After a while, as Dad was sitting there observing her, she turned to him and, according to him, said: «You can’t play, you human you!» I have absolutely no recollection of that, but it cracked me up and since he told me that I always refer to him as «you human you» when he annoys me or something. 

   Okay, I think that’s already far more than enough about Bibiel for one day. Now I want to hear about your childhood selves. What were you like? Do you like yourself from when you were a child? Were you much different at all? 

Question of the day.

   If you named a disease, what would it be? 

   My answer: 

   Why not nitch? As I wrote in that post, it really sounds like some gross, highly contagious, medieval plague that affects your skin first. It is spread by annoying insects which are a lot like mosquitoes except smaller, make more annoying sounds, fly faster and are more dangerous. They should probably be called nitches like the condition. They pop up when it’s really hot and humid for long periods in places where it is not normally hot and humid, and when they bite people, they then go deep inside their skin and live there happily with their babies, and meanwhile the poor peep gets the nitch condition which had been transferred to them via the bite, and they get extremely itchy skin that you just can’t live with normally and you keep scratching and scratching all over, can’t sleep, can’t work, can’t focus on anything ‘cause it itches so much, and that is further worsened because of the baby nitches crawling under your skin. Eventually you either end up scratching your skin so much that it’s one huge bleeding, infected, gory mess so you basically lose a lot of blood and have a very serious infection that would probably be fatal, or you die from lack of sleep caused by constant itching, or the nitches do some damage to your insides and/or rob you of all the nutrients that you might have been able to take in with food in between scratching sessions, or you go crazy from it and dead yourself, it just depends what happens first for whom. Gosh, this is actually creepier than originally intended! 😀 I wonder what the treatment would be for such a niche condition. 

   What’s your creation? 🙂 

Question of the day (6th September).

   Let’s finally do some questions of the day, ‘cause there haven’t been any in a LONG time, I just don’t seem to have a lot of ideas anymore and not even my Mum is of much help. 😀 

   What’s a mispronunciation that sends you into fits of rage? 

   My answer: 

   Mispronunciations generally tend to rub me the wrong way, at least when a person doesn’t realise that it’s a mispronunciation and/or if it’s particularly glaring, because sometimes deliberate mispronunciation can be a fun way of playing with language or expressing things and I do that myself at least in Polish. But, whenever the topic of mispronunciation, misspellings or bad grammar comes up in any other of my languages, I feel kind of awkward because, yeah, I always have a radar on for such things no matter the language as long as I am good enough in a language to notice them, which can be quite annoying in itself because you focus on such details which most people don’t seem to care about and get distracted from the actually important thing, and then you’re further driven up the wall specifically by someone mispronouncing something. But, in English, I am just learning the language myself, so it feels weird for me to talk about English speakers’ – native or not – language mistakes, because obviously I make them too, so it seems kind of jerky or conceited to me, as if I was making a statement about their English in general that it’s worse than mine or something, even though it’s not at all what I mean. And what if their pronunciation is actually some uncommon regional variety or something? So I generally prefer to keep my acquired-language pronunciation irks to myself. But if I was to talk about Polish mispronunciations here it wouldn’t really be relevant for people and I’d have a lot of explaining to do. 

   One thing that I am sure is wrong and that I hear loads of, especially native, English speakers say, is “ek cetera’ instead of et cetera, as in etc. It almost seems like more people say it wrong than right, so perhaps, since language is a living thing, over time this will become the alternative proper pronunciation of this, but it would be a real bummer, because it just makes no sense. It’s not ect or ecc, after all, is it? I even used to have a Welsh English speech synthesiser back on Windows which always pronounced it like that, and it boggles my mind how no one even noticed it in the process of making it or anything, I mean it seems a fairly easy and obvious thing to catch and rather glaring in a speech synthesiser, and I assume it must have been the way the person doing the recordings pronounced it because the other Welsh English speech synthesiser from the same company pronounced it correctly. I wonder why, if this phrase is clearly difficult to get right for people, possibly because they can’t really associate it with anything in their minds that would make it feel logical, there isn’t an equally or more common English equivalent, I mean such that wouldn’t be a direct loan-phrase. I guess phrases like “and so on/and so forth” don’t seem to be used as frequently. In Polish we do use et cetera, but it generally sounds very sophisticated and intellectual, like something that someone very educated would say, or perhaps in literature or something like that, sometimes for a humourous/satirical effect as well although lately “etc.” has become more common online/in texting because of English. But generally, we have our own phrase for that. 

   I also used to be really irked by people pronouncing niche as “nitch”, because to me something about it just sounds gross, like some kind of yucky insect or other bug, or a common name for some gross skin condition that involves a lot of itching, my synaesthetic associations with it are awful too but better let’s not get there lol. And I used to think that the only true pronunciation is “neesh” which is so much nicer obviously because it almost sounds like Misha except it has N instead of M and no A. 😀 And for my synaesthetic brain it looks like some sort of stained glass that I don’t really know how to describe, and it tastes like dry wine which perhaps isn’t something I necessarily like but it certainly tastes lots better than “nitch”. But then I learned that not only is “nitch” just as okay to say as “neesh” but also that it has been a thing a lot earlier in English than “neesh”. 

   Your turn. 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What is a useless skill that you have? 

   My answer: 

   I can click with my big toes if I move them a certain way. I used to be more skilled at this when I was younger, but still can do it if I try hard enough. I can put my legs behind my head, which is apparently not something that most people can do although I think it’s weird because it’s not like I’m super sporty or anything, our Sofi is a lot more than myself and she cannot do this, and for some reason some people think it’s creepy and I sometimes do this and then rock in that position back and forth to make people freak out, ‘cause they think I’ll get stuck like that and won’t be able to get back to a normal position. 😀 

   When I was at the blind school, we would often get calendars in Braille at the beginning of a year. Usually here in Poland when you have a calendar it doesn’t just have dates in it but also names which celebrate their name days on a specific day, because like some other countries in Europe, we do name days. And that was the case with those Braille calendars too. I would often feel kind of intellectually understimulated at the boarding school, especially if I had nothing interesting to read because I would usually finish my library books quite quickly and often didn’t really feel like going to library several times a week. So to do something, and make it seem like I was doing something, I would often reread my current library book, or would read the name days in the calendar. The resulting side effect of that was such that I ended up memorising all those name days totally unintentionally, and a lot of people seemed quite impressed with that, especially my grandad, who values brains and I guess for him something like this must have been evidence that I must have them, even if it was totally passive and I didn’t really make any effort, nor did I had a particular desire, to memorise all that stuff. I’ve just generally always had a tendency to memorise a lot of useless stuff, which has often given people an impression that I know lots of things about lots of things, even if my knowledge about something is rather superficial. 😀 So he would often show off with me when we had some guests on family gatherings and stuff like that, asking me when those people’s name days are. I suppose this is quite a good example of an absolutely useless skill. Later on, I’ve learned to have a bit more respect for my brain and figured out I must be more mindful of what sort of things I let take up my brain storage, and so whenever someone would ask me when is so and so’s name day or whether I still remember that, I would say that I don’t, and eventually I indeed ended up forgetting most of it. 

   Hm, not sure what else, but some people would probably consider my Welsh a useless skill, because people are so often like “Why the flip would you even need Welsh?” And they’re totally right  that I don’t need it at all, I just want to learn it and speak it and understand it, but I most definitely do not need it, and it isn’t particularly useful here in Poland. But then thinking this way, perhaps we could say the same thing about my Swedish and Norwegian as well. English probably not so much, because I think it IS actually, objectively useful and would be for anyone, but I don’t really have to use Swedish or Norwegian, I don’t work with them, I don’t have to communicate in these languages. Well I do have pen pals with whom I communicate in these languages but it’s because of learning these languages that I wanted to find pen pals who speak them, not that I’m learning the languages to be able to communicate with my pen pals. 

   How about your useless skills? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What is your best insult, without using curse words? 

   My answer: 

   Well, one insult that me and Sofi use literally translates to English as “Roll a candy drop” (Turlaj dropsa in Polish, in case you’re curious). I have to say though that it wasn’t either of us who was so creative and made it up. Sofi used to have a friend with whom she had a really stormy relationship. They were friends for life a couple months, going everywhere together, sharing each other’s deepest secrets, what not, and then after those couple months something ridiculously insignificant would make them worst enemies, or at least the way it looked like from where I am sitting was that that other girl would blow something out of proportion and get absolutely incredibly mad at Sofi compared with the level of her guilt (like being late to the park where they were supposed to meet), but perhaps if I were to hear both parts of the story maybe Sofi did also contribute to the drama in some real, meaningful way, I don’t know. Anyway, as soon as she’d go mad, instead of just leaving Sofi alone like a reasonably thinking person would (if I’m THAT furious at someone, why would I want to talk to them?) she kept drowning Sofi’s phone relentlessly with quite unsavoury texts, unsavoury especially given her age, and most of them, especially the first ones, quite unoriginal and laughable. Sofi wasn’t worried or anything, but understandably was quite angry, and it doesn’t take much to set Sofi off, so she found it very hard to resist responding to those texts as they came, despite Mum and me repeatedly told her not to and were wondering why she didn’t block her right away. Anyway, further down the road, her texts have become somewhat more creative, some of these expressions that she threw at Sofi neither of us had ever heard before. I’m pretty sure that neither had she and she just looked on the Internet for “how to diss someone” or something like that. And at some point she told Sofi to “roll a candy drop”. Sofi knows a lot of slang words, but she didn’t know that one and it had both of us in stitches. Turns out it simply means fuck off, but why?! Why roll a candy drop?! I’ve no idea. It just seems like the most random thing someone could come up with. Not that I have a problem with that, Sofi and me also make up random code words for stuff, it’s just weird and funny. So we would say that a lot to each other, of course more in a playful way, to make each other laugh, rather than to actually tell the other one to fuck off, though occasionally that would be the case as well. After a few months of radio silence, Sofi’s hot-blooded “friend” resurfaced again, all apologetic, asking her if they could be friends again. They had tons of stuff to talk about and Sofi felt like they were on the same wavelength, so after some initial resistance and, again, despite absolutely everyone was telling her to quit that, she decided to meet up with her and the cycle began all over again, with them being the best friends in the world for a few months and then parting in a dramatic way. But while they were still friends that second time, Sofi asked her where she got that “roll a candy drop” from and she confirmed that she got it from the Internet. When they broke up their “friendship” the second time, Sofi was racking her brain for some equally random and funny insult that would also still sound equally legit as an insult as “roll a candy drop” does. So eventually she came up with “Roll a lollipop” (except in Polish the word roll is two distinct words in “roll a candy drop” vs “roll a lollipop”, I don’t know, maybe it should be something different in English too, but I’m not sure what would fit best… twist? Spin?) So she told her to go roll/twist/spin a lollipop and that’s pretty much the end of the story as far as I know. But we still use both, with one another and with other people as well. Sofi often tells her school mates to roll a lollipop if they annoy her or something but she doesn’t want a drama to blow up, so this is a pretty easy way for her to insult them without them knowing, they’re just like: “What???” Later we also tried making up other such insults, involving some verb and a food item, but the only other one that has actually survived to this day and is in use for very special occasions is the seemingly most trivial – “Eat bread!” – And this is also Sofi’s creation, and it’s also her who came up with how exactly it’s supposed to be used. If Sofi tells you to eat bread, things are not good. Unlike drop candies and lollipops, the “eat bread” one is not used when you’re simply mad at someone and don’t want to have to do with them, whether temporarily or ever again. You tell people to “Eat bread”, for example, when you’re really disappointed, or disgusted, about something they did. Maybe you expected a lot more, or maybe something they did was really immoral or just insanely dumb or cringey so that you no longer really feel like associating with them. It could of course also be an angry insult but more like cold angry than drops candies and lollipops are. You don’t shriek it out loud, you just say it in a low, kind derisive tone, or that’s at least how Sofi usually does it and she created it so I guess she gets to say how it’s supposed to be said as well. It’s more scornful than insulting really, like a veiled way of saying that you’re almost nobody, or something along those lines. Hence we never tell one another to eat bread, we thankfully never had such very bad  relationship with each other. Sofi says it’s bread because, well, bread is something that everyone eats, most people do almost every day and it’s just a normal thing, while drop candies and lollipops are candies and most people consider them good rather than neutral things. So if you tell someone to eat bread, they don’t even deserve to roll drop candies or lollipops, they’re just good enough for bread. Not sandwiches, not toasts, just bread. 

   What’s such an insult that you use? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What’s a ridiculously fun word to say? 🙂 

   My answer: 

   Oh my flip! This is gonna be a long post, no matter how hard I try! 😀 There are so many fun words! And, which language are we talking about? Whenever I think about stuff like this, I always have extreme trouble thinking about just ONE word, even if one for each language that I have any  idea about. Because really, there are so many words that feel fun to say, and fun in all sorts of different ways. And English is particularly difficult because it has such insane amounts of words, which can not only sound fun but also be so weirdly specific in what they mean. Also, I suppose that when most people think of words that are either fun or beautiful, they think words that aren’t used that often, whereas for me, a fun word can be something that’s part of daily vocabulary, for example ever since I learned about the English word pillow, I really love it and I think it’s so cute. And I’ve already wrote of my love for the English word sleep. Both English and Swedish have such a weird quality to them that they have so many words that sound absolutely cute and that are in regular use and I really like it. In the past, I even used to do rankings of my favourite words for each language I knew – so then it was Polish, English and Swedish – because I wanted to keep them all in one place or something, so I’d do yearly rankings for that. But there are too many cool words, and also I finally realised that a ranking isn’t perhaps the best way for me to keep track of anything, because as my brain doesn’t really do numbers, it only made things more complicated when I had to think which word I like more and put them in such very specific order. 

   So, I think rather than sitting here for hours and thinking about my ABSOLUTE most favourite English word, I’ll just tell you about one that I learned about quite recently, and it’s jackanapes! Does anyone still even use it?! :O I mean spontaneously of course? I wonder if an average English native speaker even know what it means? I’m very curious, but if you don’t, I’ll tell you that from what I learned it’s a fancy word for someone who’s misbehaving, or being mischievous, or downright impertinent. I’m nnot sure though if it’s supposed to have more of an insult vibe or is used in a lighter, joking context. Being a Jackophile , I love how English has so many jac- words, and so many of them are slangy and quite funny or quirky. Like, apparently in Ireland people use “the jacks” to mean toilet! 😀 I love it! 

   I think I already wrote about it in some distant past on here that one of my very favourite Polish words is mózg (MOOZG, though actually when pronouncing it on its own like that the zg goes unvoiced so it’s practically MOOSK) which means brain. No other language I know has a word for brain that would be equally or more satisfying to say than this. I generally find the brain fascinating, I like the word mózg, so I end up using it a lot, just like I do in English, even when most people would rather use mind or soul or head or something like that. For example in Polish I usually wash my brain rather than hair, which some people find extremely funny. Back when I was in college/high school/whatchamacallit in your country, I once let my Math tutor in and she had something she wanted to tell my Mum straight away, but I told her that unfortunately, right now my Mum’s washing her brain (meaning hair of course) which at first really puzzled her, and then after a while she started laughing like she never heard a better joke. When I have a migraine or a normal headache I also say in Polish that my brain’s aching. The English brain sounds not very cool though, it has an odd texture and tastes like plastic. Swedish hjärna and Norwegian hjerne are cool and quite passable but nowhere near as cool as mózg, and the Welsh ymenydd is incredibly bland. 

   In Swedish, one of my many favourite words which I learned quite early on and fell in love with passionately is krimskrams, which means knick-knack. It’s so cute! I also really love the Polish equivalent which is bibelot. It almost sounds like Bibiel! 😀 I don’t care about the English word though, because while all these words clearly sound like what they mean – something that’s not very practically useful and just gathering dust, at least the Swedish and Polish words sound like these things hold some emotional value to the owner, while knick-knack doesn’t give such a vibe, at least not to me. – 

   In Welsh, I love pilipala, which is one of several Welsh words meaning butterfly, it’s extremely cute. And the Swedish equivalent, fjäril, is so stunning and has very distinct tangerine flavour to it! The English word is quite disgusting though. And I’m fairly neutral about the Polish equivalent – which is motyl – it sounds like motility or something like that. 😀 I don’t have any stronger feelings about the Norwegian sommerfugl when it comes to its sound, but it means summer bird so that’s quite nice. Also when it comes to Welsh, I love the word achafi for how expressive it is, it’s not a swearword or even close to that but it can be loaded with so much expression that it can almost feel like one at times. Honestly though, after so many years of Welsh learning, I’m not perfectly sure whether it’s actually a proper Welsh word, or more of a Wenglish invention, that is something that’s actually originated among Welsh people whose dominant language was English, because most often when I hear it it’s thrown into English. Anyways, it means yuck, and from what I’ve noticed it isn’t only used when something is yuck, but also when you disapprove or feel indignant of what someone’s doing or when something generally doesn’t go quite the way you’d like. 

   Also, now that we’re talking about fun-sounding words, after I’ve mentioned one of my first loves in the Swedish language, and after having read Ashley Leia’s post about the versatility of the word fuck not long ago, I am reminded of another of my early infatuations in the Swedish language, namely, the word knulla, or, more exactly, knullar, which is the present tense of this amazing-sounding verb, as that was the form in which I heard it for the first time, being about 10-11 years old and totally unaware of it. I had just started learning Swedish not long ago, and, just like I did before I started learning, I loved to watch Swedish movies just to hear the language. I am not and never was a movie person, and I hardly focused on the actual movie, it’s plot line and all that, I just listened to the language, relished it and tried to understand as much as I could. And one day my Dad told me there’d be a Swedish movie on the telly in the evening, and we watched it together. I have no idea what movie it was and don’t remember what was going on in it at all. I only remember that it was something quite old, historical I think, and there was a dude who was yelling at what I think was a young woman/girl, and he used this word, and it sparked my attention right away, ‘cause it sounded so lovely and the more I thought about it, the more I loved it. “Knullar…” I was so excited about this new word that for the rest of this movie, I couldn’t focus on anything else. Then I went upstairs to enjoy and savour this new found word in the privacy of my room. I wonder, if any Swede would have seen me then, sitting on my desk, happily swinging my legs and stimming/“sensorisming” away with my fingers while repeating the word “knullar” to myself, what would they have thought of me. 😀 Thousands of different ideas went through my brain as I thought what this lovely, cute-sounding word could mean. To the tactile synaesthetic bit of my brain, it looked like a very flimsy-looking, small flower with very gentle, small, kind of velvety leaves. But it sounded like kötbullar (meatballs) and tasted like grilled cheese to the gustatory synaesthetic bit of my brain, so I figured it could be some kind of dish. I knew it probably wasn’t that for real, but I really liked the idea. Bulle (plural bullar) is bun, kötbulle (plural kötbullar) is meatball, so knulle could be some kind of cheesy ball or something. You could have some food place called Knullar, Bullar & Kötbullar, I thought. LOL if only I knew…! 😂 And then I entertained myself with thinking about what exactly these knullar could be, what they’d be made of other than cheese and how they would taste.

   Every time I had my Swedish lesson, my tutor would give me time where I could ask him all sorts of Swedish questions, be it about language or culture or whatever, that was unrelated to the topic of the lesson itself. So during our first lesson after my knullar discovery, I happily asked him about this beautiful word, and was very surprised with his odd reaction. First he went totally quiet for what felt like ages, so I wondered if perhaps he doesn’t know what it is but doesn’t want to show his ignorance, but that didn’t make sense as it had happened before that he wouldn’t know something I asked him about and had no problem admitting that. So I wondered maybe I didn’t get that word right and the guy in the movie actually said something else. But it felt kind of awkward. Finally he asked me in what still felt a rather odd way, where I came across this word, so obviously I told him in a movie, and then he calmly explained to me what the word knullar, or rather knulla, as that’s the infinitive form of this word, means, namely that it means to fuck. Now that was quite a surprise! Now that I’ve known this for years it’s normal to me but then I remember being really shocked because it totally didn’t sound to me like what it meant. And while I still think it sounds quite endearing, after I learned that, it lost a lot of its initial appeal. As far as I’m aware and from what I’ve noticed, it’s only used in the sexual context, you wouldn’t use the word knulla to mean fuck as in “fuck you” or anything like that. At least I’ve only heard it used in this one context and I’m pretty sure it’s considered quite vulgar and heavy. But once I managed to get over the shock and accept the truth, I did have a good laugh at it. 

   And, speaking more interlinguistically, I think the word mishmash, which as far as I know exists in many different languages, is very fun to say. Speaking of mish- words I alsoo like the English mishap, and I seriously used to think it’s pronounced MEE-shap. But I like it still, even though it’s not. 

   What’s such word(s) for you? In any language(s)? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   How did your Valentine’s Day go? 

   My answer: 

   Well, personally I don’t really care about Valentine’s Day. For one thing, I’m single and have always been, so I’ve never really had a reason to celebrate it. The second thing is that even if I was not single, I don’t think I would celebrate it, unless my other half would feel really strongly about it being otherwise for some reason. It’s always felt so awfully fake for me and is clearly not so muchh about love as about marketing and it being a great day for all sorts flower businesses, restaurants and the like. Oh yeah and media as there is something to talk and write about so they don’t have to think too much, just throw lovey-dovey content at people’s poor brains so that their own relationships start to feel even more flawed than ever. I suppose it’s different in countries like the States, but here, sometimes if someone expresses that they aren’t really a fan of this holiday, they’ll be accused of being stiffly conservative and not liking modern holidays and wrongly assuming that Valentine’s is an import from America like Halloween or other such, which is probably because, at least according to my Mum, Valentine’s Day was apparently not a thing in Poland until after the transformation, so 90’s. But I know it’s not a modern holiday, even if it’s new here, and even if it was modern, I don’t have a problem with any holiday solely because of how long it’s been a thing. In general, I totally don’t mind there being a special day for people who are in love, so that they can do something extra special for/with each other, or profess their love, as I can imagine it could be easier to have a day like this than pluck up your courage on some random day in a random situation, or even for steady couples who need something more than just their anniversary to remind them how much they actually love each other and to focus more on each other than on their children. But I don’t like its current superficial form, it looks very exaggerated and often almost forced to me. When we (my siblings and I) were younger, our parents would usually buy us some sweets and wish us Happy Valentine’s Day, and Dad always buys Mum, Sofi and me flowers on this day, same as on our birthdays and Women’s Day. So we got some lovely daffodils from him today. He never gives anything to Olek these days though, probably because he thinks it would feel awkward, but I think as it is it’s a bit awkward too, if you treat Valentine’s seriously you could have thought he doesn’t love him. 😀 And yes, he’s also single (Olek, not my Dad, just in case you’re wondering) so the poor lad doesn’t get anything! 😦 

   So, apart from those traditional daffodils, it’s just been a normal day for me. When we were having breakfast in the morning, Sofi sarcastically asked Mum and me what our plans for Valentine’s are and promptly added that she is going to spend all day with the love of her life – skates – celebrating that she doesn’t have the “morphine” (Marfan syndrome, which she was suspected to have but was tested a few days ago). Mum’s ambition was challenged, as the love of her life is running and she didn’t go running today morning. So, despite she normally doesn’t run in the evenings, she decided not to be worse than Sofi and said she’s going to have a romantic outing in the woods in the evening. I said that me and the love of my life don’t need special days to spend happy times together, and we don’t even need outings to enjoy each other, but Mondays are the days when we’re particularly close for particularly long, and so I’m going to spend ecstatic four hours with the love of my life – yr iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh language). – And that’s what I did, with my other, true blue purrfect Russian lover – Misha – accompanying us for a significant part of our date. Unfortunately, polygamic relationships are logistically complicated, and after a challenging and demanding date with my Cymric lover I was not able to do justice to my Norwegian one, but as I knew that was going to be the case, we had a lovely, romantic, light and not quite so demanding weekend together instead. But again it’s not something extremely unusual as we usually spend weekends with each other. 

   So, how’s your Valentine’s been? Do you celebrate it, or do you do something more like Sofi, my Mum or me, or is it just an average day like any other with no highlights to it? 🙂 

(Almost) ten things I am really good at.

   It feels like, ever since I’ve got my Mac, I haven’t really posted anything longer. But now I’m mostly used to all the basic stuff on it, and have figured out how to blog from it, so I figured I’d finally do some journalling prompt-inspired post now. 

   I am going to go with a prompt from the book called 200+ Journal Prompts for the Mind, Body and Soul by Riley Reigns and the prompt I chose to do is as follows: 

   What are 10 things you are really good at? 

   I have to say that these kinds of prompts aren’t really easy for me and I don’t really like them, because I never know what to respond with. I mean, sure, we’re all good at something, have some good traits etc. But I usually have a hard time coming up with things and also even though I’m normally not a perfectionist, I feel like I’d have to be significantly good at something to include it in a list like this. But, I decided to take it as a little challenge and see how it goes and if I can actually come up with ten things. So, here we go: 

1.    Language stuff. As I frequently say, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as language talent. You simply have to like a language and find a learning method that suits your particular brain architecture, because when you like something, it’s easier. Or at least the difficult aspects of it are a lot less daunting than they were if you hated it, and you have a lot more motivation. I feel for people who have to learn a language they dislike or feel meh about, for school or for business purposes or due to emigrating or whatever else. That being said, I think there is an area in language learning that is definitely easier if you have a bit of a talent for it, and that is picking up the sounds. And I feel lucky in this aspect too. It used to really surprise me how people often don’t hear the difference between sounds in a language that are similar yet, to me at least, clearly different. But it seems to happen to people frequently so I feel really privileged that I hear those things, it makes learning languages a lot easier. Often it also means that I have it easier to reproduce these sounds even though they may not be a part of my native language, though sometimes it may still take time for it to sound natural and other times I may be able to differentiate sounds in someone’s speech but be clueless as for how the flip they make a particular sound, like I don’t think I would ever be able to speak Danish convincingly, although I’ve been told that apparently getting drunk and speaking Swedish is a successful strategy for some people but I don’t even drink at all these days so thank God that I’m not in love with it or have never had a faza from Denmark or I’d have a huge problem. Even in Swedish, they have a sound called Viby-I, or Lidingö-I, which is a variation of your usual ee sound except it’s definitely not the same. It’s something that used to only exist in some rural areas  but now, for whatever reason, it’s common in Stockholm and Gothenburg and is considered a posh thing. I was always taught that the letter I is pronounced as ee in Swedish, just like it is in Polish, except I would so often hear people pronouncing it in a way that sounded really odd to me especially when the I was long. Even when I got myself a proper Swedish speech synthesiser, she also pronounced the ee like that. I once asked my Swedish teacher about it but he seemed like he didn’t know what on Earth I was talking about. It bothered me, because it felt like if I can’t reproduce a sound that seems so common in Swedish and that people use all the time even in the media, I ca’t be like a really really good Swedish speaker, but eventually I just let it go, because I saw that some people don’t do it at all, so it can’t be a huge crime if I can’t, plus it doesn’t really sound all that cool. I once saw someone online describing it that it sounds as if you have a bit of peanut butter stuck in your throat, which is quite accurate imo. 😀 The normal ee sounds a lot better. But then I started learning Welsh and I was particularly interested in North Welsh, which has a very similar, but not quite the same, sound for the letter U. So if I wanted to sound properly North Welsh I just had to figure it out. It took me some time but for some reason was a bit easier for me than the Swedish I even though the difference there is very slight. And once I figured out the Welsh u, I was also able to do the Viby-I as well. Although I don’t really like it so it’s not how I actually speak Swedish, I don’t think it fits me at all and it feels kind of exaggerated. Also what I mean by “language stuff” is that I, at least in my native language, have quite an extensive vocabulary. People always say that to me and people in my family always come to me when they don’t know what some word means or aren’t sure how to say something. 😀 I really do like words and word play and learning new words and using them in interesting ways, and creating my own words. 
2.     Judging people’s characters, observing people and analysing what I know about them. I don’t often feel like I am as good at it as some people tell me I am, like my grandad who goes as far as calling me X-Ray lol, mostly because i feel there’s so much I always miss because of not being able to see, as people always send so many visual cues about themselves – appearance, clothing, facial expressions, body language, gestures  – that are important, and sometimes not being able to pick up on those cues can skew the whole picture completely. But if we put all my limitations into consideration, i guess I’m quite good at it indeed. I like to rely on this skill a lot in my interactions with fellow human beings, as I always find them – the interactions, not necessarily the human beings as such, collectively – difficult, and having as many cues as you can is always helpful to some degree.  Plus, people are generally quite interesting and so complex and multi-dimensional. The variety in people’s personalities fascinates me quite a lot. Sometimes it works as a sort of defence mechanism as well. The downside to it is that when you use something like that a lot and it often works well, you might lose vigilance at some point and rely  on this too much, and it won’t always be right. I now know that my judgment isn’t always right and that I always have to keep it at the back of my mind that there’s a possibility that some or all of my assumptions are wrong, but I had to learn it through experience. 😀 
3.     Listening. I like to listen to other people. Their problems, their stories, their fascinations. I like to listen about how they feel. And I believe a lot of people like to share their stuff with me because they often tell me things that I would consider personal, or. ask me for advice or something. And I’m happy about it, because often I feel like this is the only substantial way in which I am able to help other people, so it makes me feel useful. I’m not sure why people like me so much as a listener, other than that I’m an introvert and introverts are apparently generally considered good listeners (which I don’t think is a rule) but I’ve heard it a lot that people find it easier to talk about personal or difficult stuff when they’re not looked at and I can relate to that myself as well very much. So it makes total sense to me . I am often able to perceive when someone’s looking at me, particularly if they’re doing it in a very persistent way, and more like staring actually, though it’s not like I can feel it always, and sometimes I feel like someone is looking at me even though it ends up not being true. But I really don’t like talking to people about stuff that I feel kind of emotional about when they are looking at me, so I can understand that they might find it easier to talk to me than anyone else because I don’t look at their expressions. Also, listening to other people  saves me from talking a lot myself, or from having to deal with people focusing their attention on me. A lot of introverts don’t like to talk about themselves. I can’t say I always don’t, because with people I like and feel some common ground with, I like to talk about myself, but only when I want it, not when I’m forced to do so by circumstances and the expectation to do small talk, so in such situations I’d much rather listen. And you can learn a lot of interesting things this way. Sometimes, it gives you a totally new perspective on someone and their life than you’d have otherwise. Sometimes, when you have a lot going on in your own brain, listening to others is difficult and quite daunting, but I usually try not to show it too much unless I really feel that my brain can’t deal with someone else’s shit on top of my own and no one is going to benefit from this. I appreciate it that people consider me a good enough listener to come with their joys and struggles to me, and I try to be helpful and as attentive as I can. 
4.     Avoiding people and scary situations. Well, I have AVPD for a reason I guess. 😀 I can be really creative and go to great lengths where avoidance is concerned. I can go as far as going out at night barefoot and in my PJ’s onto the terrace covered in snow and wallow in it to get sick and avoid going to school the next day. 😀 I hate peopling passionately and, as regular readers of my blog will know, I have lots of anxieties and phobias, big and small, so there’s lots of things that I avoid regularly and have a lot of strategies to do it and do it successfully most of the time. If I decide not to avoid something, it’s usually for someone else’s benefit, for example I go to some family gatherings because I know that there are some people in my family who are so weird that they’d blame my Mum if I didn’t go, or my grandad would be worried that I’m having a migraine or disappointed that I didn’t come, and I care about my Mum and grandad. 
5.     Not eating, or perhaps I should say dealing well with hunger mentally, because I’d been so good with not eating in the past that I no longer am as good. As a lexical-gustatory synaesthete, I really love food. I can be picky with what I like, but generally, I love food. Yet, I don’t seem to have as much of a problem with not eating as many people seem to have. I’ve noticed that stuff like not eating for a day scares many people, or blows their minds as something that they wouldn’t be able to do or would never ever want to do for any reason. For me, of course it’s not pleasant or fun, but it’s absolutely not a huge problem. Whenever I’m under a lot of stress, especially if it’s something temporary rather than more chronic, I tend to eat very little, if at all, and what little I do eat I have to just force into myself. It’s because I usually have nausea when I’m really stressed or anxious, but also it feels like all my energy goes towards dealing with the stress, and all the other functions freeze for the time being so even if I’m not nauseated I rarely have any appetite, or simply forget about eating. It doesn’t even have to be stress, can be strong positive excitement or a lot of changes, good or bad, going on. It’s only after everything’s over that I start to feel super-weak and ravenously hungry and usually eat something like a bag of crisps or a chocolate bar in one go. When I was a kid and teen I also had a few extended periods where I’d be unable to eat much if anything at all during the day because of generalised anxiety and the accompanying nausea, or emetophobia (fear of vomit). I also had times as a teenager when I wouldn’t eat as a way of self-harming or solely because I didn’t like having needs like that and it made me feel out of control, or I’d eat very irregularly and sometimes very little, and sometimes a lot. I still struggle with eating when something triggers my emetophobia really badly, and still sometimes have times where I have a control or self-loathing issue with eating, or other times I’m so engrossed and absorbed with something really fascinating that food is the last thing on my mind until I go back to normal earthly functioning or start to feel so weak that I can’t ignore it any longer. Also, as a Traditional Catholic, fasting is something I’m very much used to and something very normal to me. I know some people, like our Sofi, for whom fasting is a big sacrifice and they find it really difficult to resist not eating, but for me, while of course it’s an inconvenience, it’s not a huge one. Just enough to be a bit of a challenge but not like: “Uhhh no, it’s Ash Wednesday again!” Or anything like that. However, I feel that all my eating troubles have screwed me up a little physically. Because now I’m generally unable to eat larger portions, or even just normal-adult-people portions, of food in one go. Or if I do, I feel ridiculously full ridiculously quickly. On the other hand, while I can mentally deal well with hunger and fasting, physically it’s sometimes different, because often if I don’t eat at all for a full day, I’ll start feeling real weak and wobbly towards the end of the day and it’ll get a lot worse towards the morning and I’ll barely be able to drag myself out of bed and it feels kind of scary because even standing is exhausting and feels like I’m going to pass out and I really don’t know if I’d live alone how I’d even make myself food in such condition so I’m so glad I have a Dad who can make me sandwiches in the middle of the night. 😀 I also had this weird thing going on even when I was little, but it was a lot less frequent, only when I was ill at the same time or something, so I suppose my shitty eating habits must have exacerbated something that I have a natural tendency to or something like that. Therefore, these days I no longer do full-day fasts, even when it’s actually an obligatory fasting day, I just do intermittent fasting, otherwise it’s rather counterproductive and it’s obviously not the point of it. Even with intermittent fasting I have to be careful and not too ambitious and if I start to feel weak I eat something, even if it’s something small as it’ll usually do the trick and see me through the rest of the day. Now that my migraines have become more frequent and easier to trigger, I also have to watch out for that if I don’t eat for a longer period of time, as not eating can be a trigger, and if that’s what has triggered it and I manage to eat something before it develops fully, I may even manage to nip it in the bud without any medication. Oh yeah, and speaking of migraines, when I have a full-blown one, I always have awful nausea, so I never eat when having a migraine either unless I end up feeling weak like what I describe, and when it happens during a migraine it’s really shitty because you’re already drained because of a migraine, and you’re so nauseated that the last thing you feel like doing is eating, yet you have to eat because otherwise you’ll keep feeling more and more drained, and when you do eat you feel even more drained because when you’re already drained to begin with, eating’s more draining. 😀 Ohhh yeah and add emetophobia into the mix. SO yeah, these days, I’m rubbish physically at not eating, but hunger itself isn’t really a significant inconvenience for me on a mental level. 
6.     Misha. Yeah you can probably tell by this that I’m running out of ideas. So I asked Sofi, and that was the first thing she said. I asked her what she means by me being good at Misha, but she couldn’t quite explain. 😀 So yeah, let’s say I’m good at Misha. It sounds like a perfect thing to put on your CV! 😀 Well, I have a good relationship with Misha, though naturally he has best relationship with Mum because she’s like his Mum too and he always seeks contact with her the most and misses her most when she’s away, and, more important than that, she’s his main food provider, so he just associates her with food, and food is his meaning in life. But we do have a very good relationship and we often sense each other’s feelings and states of mind. If he associates all of us with something, then I’d say he most likely associates me with sleep, because we often sleep together and he often sleeps in my room during the day and there’s lots of places for him to choose in my room where he wants to sleep and everything’s designed especially for him. Communication with Misha, in particular understanding his needs, is rather challenging for me, because he’s generally not very fond of touch or closeness, and his language is mostly movements and facial expressions, so it’s usually my Mum who will pick up way faster and easier what he wants or if he’s feeling physically poorly. Yet there are things with which I feel like I may get him better than other people here, though we’ll of course never know for sure. I can usually spot when he’s feeling anxious or distressed with something based on his behaviour quite easily, and when I can touch him his muscles are all tense and twitchy then. I think I can pick up on Misha’s moods fairly well but I don’t really know what that’s based on, guess just my intuition mostly though he does tend to be more vocal when he’s happy or playful and they’re of course happier sounds then. And, as much as Misha isn’t into closeness with humans, with me he’s more physically affectionate than anyone else here. He has his very complex routines around sleep, and when he sleeps here in my room and I’m with him, he won’t settle unless I give him at least a small treat and lay down on the bed. Then when he’s finished eating, he’ll very slowly and carefully go on the bed as well and go on top of me. He’ll put his head next to mine and gently sniff my, hair, then my cheeks. If he’s in a particularly exuberant mood, he’ll even try to lick my cheek, but I’mm not overly fond of that so I don’t really let him. This whole licking and sniffing business only started a year or two ago. Then he’ll start kneading me and eventually will lay on my chest or tummy, and then he’ll silently yet forcefully demand an in-depth head, ear, nasal bridge, cheekbone and chin massage, purring louder than he normally does. This is still not as loud as your usual cat purr, but it’s very loud and powerful for Mish standards. Sometimes this whole session lasts just five minutes, other times even half an hour and we both end up having a nap until Misha wakes up with a start, horrified at the extreme weakness and softiness he has shown, picks up what’s left of his dignity and slowly moves onto the blanket, as far from me as possible, and starts the kneading all over again, or rather, as Sofi calls it, sleep-waltzing. Then it’s grooming time, after which he still sometimes wants to copulate with my feet no matter how much I discourage it, although he’s way better now with this than when he was younger, and then, provided that everything goes to plan, little Misha falls asleep. But if I dare  get up from the bed, or even move to much, he’ll jump off and go sleep somewhere else and there’s no coming back. When he’s very sleepy or upset, the whole sniffing and massage and sleeping on Bibiel part is left out, but if I’m here I still have to be with him on the bed ’til he falls asleep. Of course, he normally won’t do it either when someone else is in my room, now that would be too much of a disgrace, right? But my Mum has managed to catch us like that a couple times and apparently she’s never seen Misha with an equally blissful expression on his face. As much as he loves Mum, he rarely lies with her, because she doesn’t like it for some reason, and she never allows it at night. So when she does sometimes have a whim to have a nap with Misha under the duvet, she usually ends up regretting it, because he scratches her legs (I think he does it in his sleep actually but it must be painful nevertheless) and feels strongly attracted to her feet as well, which always ends with her calling him a pervert and kicking him out. So yeah, maybe I’m good at Misha, whatever that means. 
7.     Not vomiting. I’m forever grateful that I’ve got a brain like this, which, most likely, blocks me from vomiting. Apparently that’s the case with a lot of emetophobics, and it seems to be with me too. And even if it’s not, otherwise I’m good at avoiding situations that could lead to vomiting. I’m gonna assume that I’m both. 
8.    Ummm… what else…? Sofi says playing BitLife, but I think she’s biased here because she knows no one else who plays BitLife other than herself and me and to her I’m the ultimate BitLife player who knows everything about the game and does more than just endless crime (which is what Sofi does). I do like BitLife, even though I no longer play it as much as I did at the beginning when I heard of this game. I have an impression that BitLife is getting worse now, but it’s still fun to play once in a while. And I know people who are much more into it and have played a lot more than I do. I haven’t even completed any of the official challenges, I’d rather do my own thing. I like to think of what sort of character I want to play and who I want them to be and what I want them to do, and then play that character over the course of a couple of months. Of course there’s only so much you can do In BitLife, but I like to imagine that character’s life in more detail and think about motives behind their various decisions and try to go into their head while living their life. And then I like to live their child’s life, and then their child’s child’s life and so on and have a little saga of my own creation kind of. I’ve had one family which went on for 16  generations. Oh and I love naming kids in BitLife, I once had TWENTY babies (playing a man) and I relished being able to name all of them. That wouldn’t be quite so fun in the real world when I’d actually have to raise all those children. But I think that there’s one thing that Sofi is incomparably better at me in BitLife. Not counting things like burglary which don’t seem to be properly accessible or I don’t get it. This thing is winning money on horse races. Sofi gets it right most of the time and I have no idea how she does it, but she does! I wonder if she has the same luck in real life. 

   Uh, no, I’m not going to come up with ten! Actually, to be honest with you, I was only able to come up with the first two, and then I had to ask around and enlist my Mum’s and Sofi’s help, but even they weren’t able to come up with as much as ten. As my Mum stated, ten is a lot! But, so is eight, isn’t it, and I think I’ve made up for this with that I’ve elaborated on each of the things on this list. . 

   What things are You good at? List how many or few you want. 🙂 

Question of the day (18th December).

What weird word or phrase does your family say but nobody else would understand? How did it come to be?

My answer:

Gosh, we use tons of weird words or phrases in my family. I really love word play and so does my Mum, so we create a lot of inside slang and neologisms and stuff. Sofi or my Dad aren’t huge wordsmiths overall, but still like it to and with Sofi we have a lot of words that only we know what they mean, or rather, people do know what they mean because they’re just normal words but we use it to mean something totally different, and my Dad does create a lot of weird, very peculiar-sounding neologisms too which he often claims are legit Kashubian words but upon research it always turns out they’re not. He also has such weird behaviour that sometimes he’ll hear a word that will stand out to him for some reason, for example because it’s new to him, and then he’ll repeat it over and over and over again with no context, and sometimes over time such word will gain some new meaning for us. For example he once watched the film The Great Gatsby, and then would be saying “The Great Gatsby” all the time for a day or so, and in the end for some reason me and Sofi ended up adopting the phrase to mean something like never mind. Olek doesn’t have such inclinations, but he’s always the first to understand weird language-based jokes and such.

To give you some more specific examples, Sofi is very uncomfortable when it comes to talking about all things sexual, even though my Mum isn’t this sort of person who would discourage healthy discussion about it or who wouldn’t make her children aware of the birds and the bees when it seems appropriate. Sofi’s repulsed by all that but at the same time interested in learning about various things to do with sex, and the weirdest thing is that, if ever she does want to talk about it, ask questions and stuff, the only person she seems comfortable doing that with is me, and she says she is really embarrassed to talk about it with Mum despite Mum definitely encourages her. I say it’s weird because, well, unlike my Mum, I don’t have any practical experience in the field, so I always tell her that she should talk about it to Mum, but she doesn’t want to. Sometimes I think I should seriously consider becoming a couples’ counsellor or something like that, because people often come with things like that or their relationship problems to me when I have no idea about it because like I often say I’ve never even dated or anything. 😀 So anyway, Sofi has a problem even with the word sex, and other words around this topic like body parts, and it seems like her embarrassment about using them is part of why she finds the topic so difficult to talk about. So I figured the best way to get rid of at least that part of the problem is to change the words. It certainly doesn’t work in all situations and circumstances, but I felt that it would here and it does, though it doesn’t get rid of all Sofi’s problems, of course. So we started creating our own, new, unique sexual vocabulary. The process was really simple, and funny. We got a random and would open it at some random word, and then from then on that would be the word we used instead of some specific sex-related word, if we both agreed that it worked well and fit. Some are really crazy, for example for sex itself, we use the word biel which means whiteness in Polish, and the crazy part about it is that I often go by Bibiel so it sounds very similar. 😀 For vagina, we drew the word jabłko, which means apple, except in the end we use the word jabłco more often, which is like the opposite of a diminutive. I guess there’s no such phenomenon in English but in Polish we not only have diminutives but also an opposite thing which is used to make something sound either pejorative, or bigger than standard, or sometimes also kinda affectionate but in a sort of rougher way than when you’re using a diminutive, or just plain funnier. For us, it’s about that last thing. We made that whole vocabulary thing up before either of us had any Apple products, but even now that we do, we still use this word because Sofi got used to it, and sometimes things get quite hilarious. We also use it in other contexts now, not just to mean the actual vagina, but for example we’ll sometimes say to each other: “Shut up your apple” when we don’t really care what the other has to say, but it’s more good-humoured and teasing rather than insulting despite the way it sounds.

Also, since we’re talking about sort of intimate or taboo or politically incorrect vocabulary, we’ve invented something else quite recently, about a month ago when we had that wave of sickness go through our house. Maybe goofiness is another symptom of Covid, or maybe we were just too bored or something. But we sometimes just do have phases like that. 😀 Namely, our Dad said that someone was an asshole, and then Sofi had some weird musings that she shared out loud, about how it’s okay to use vulgar words in a derogatory way (specifically dupek (which means asshole in Polish) for men and pipa (which means pussy) for women, but it would sound a lot more inappropriate if you called someone an anus or a vagina or something like that). That made my Dad and me laugh and my Dad said that if we’d use anus (odbyt in Polish) for men, then rectum (odbytnica in Polish) would sound more appropriate for women and we bot had a fit of giggles. And then we started using these words and calling each other that and Dad happily joined because he really has some weird liking for using neologisms of his own creation that sound like horrible insults to refer to his loved ones in what’s meant to be an affectionate way. 😀 In fact, Dad seemed to have most fun with it. After a few days, however, we naturally stopped using rectum for some reason and we all referred to each other as anuses, regardless of gender. It was only for a few days until we got bored of this, but in the meantime we used that a lot and Mum looked at us as if we were crazy. I was thinking what would someone from the outside think if they just came to us and sat quietly and observed things, and hear our Dad come to us yelling excitedly: “Yo what’s up, little anuses?!” and me respond phlegmatically: “Nothing, giant anus”. They’d probably feel like involving social services or something. 😀 I think if Dad wouldn’t get so excited about it, we might have ended up using it more between each other with Sofi, but he talked like that ALL the time so it became boring and rather childish for the two of us very quickly.

Other than that, I actually already wrote a post on that same topic three years ago, specifically on a phrase “without cheese” that we use, and you can read this post

here.

How about you and your family, or other people you mingle with a lot? 🙂

Question of the day.

What’s difficult to explain, but easy to understand?

My answer:

A lot of language stuff, imo, is fairly easy to apply in practice but freakishly difficult to explain in theory. I know I am terrible at explaining language, or so it seems, and so it always irks me when people assume that just because you know a language, you can teach it to other people. I think knowing/being able to do something doesn’t automatically mean you’re able to teach it to others. It shows particularly well if you try to help someone learn your native language when you actually have no experience of how to teach it to non-natives. It seems easy because, well, you know the language, but it’s not. It’s freakishly difficult to explain things to someone for whom it’s just not intuitive yet how your language works. I suppose it might particularly be a problem for me because I tend to learn a bit differently than people do in conventional language schools and stuff. I learn my own way and I comprehend things my own way, which doesn’t have to be right for everyone and which is difficult to explain to other people who are outside of my mind. By my own way, I mostly mean that I don’t really focus on theory so much. Like, in normal schools and many language schools, there’s so much emphasis on grammar, and more often than not, it’s done in a very theoretical way, like rather than just learning grammar through practice and exposure and noticing different patterns in it and stuff, there’s all the notetaking about what present simple is and how it’s used and then memorising it along with example sentences, and then doing exercises in a textbook which consist of filling the blanks in sentences with correct grammar forms or place the words in the right order to make a logical-looking sentence. To me, that’s quite boring. Also, when I was going to school, I seriously struggled with all these theoretical definitions. And it made me a bit concerned that perhaps something is wrong with me and that I’m not doing something right. After learning some grammar structure at school, I usually didn’t have huge problems using it properly, though of course I’d make mistakes sometimes like any non-native and I still do, but remembering the whole theory thing… nah, it was always rather abstractive to me. Even now, if you asked me about what is, say, a subjunctive, or even how articles work in English, I may have a problem explaining it, but if it’s some structure that I’ve become sufficiently familiar with, I’ll be able to apply it in practice anyway. I used to think it’s weird and perhaps just another example of how quirky my brain is and how it so often doesn’t do things the normal way. It was only when I started to try and help non-natives learn Polish language when I realised that, in a way, perhaps my way of perceiving and learning/absorbing grammar is better, because it looks a bit more like how natives perceive their language and thus I guess is a bit more natural. Inn Polish, we have something called reflexive verbs, and one guy who was learning Polish and with whom I was penpalling asked me if I could help him figure out how that works. Well, except… I don’t know… I just use them, and I know that I use them right, because it feels right, and any other way would feel wrong. I tried my best to help him out but writing all that down in theory seemed so infinitely more complicated than it actually is. I don’t need to know the definition of a reflexive verb in the Polish language to be able to use one and know when to use one etc. I highly doubt that there are many people in Poland who aren’t linguists, teachers or real huge language geeks or something like that who’d know what reflexive verbs are at all, let alone be able to clearly explain to someone how they work, just like people in the Anglophone countries don’t memorise all the irregular verbs because they just know how to use them. Because, of course, we acquire our native languages through constant exposure to them, rather than studying textbooks and memorising definitions. By that, I’m not saying that studying textbooks when learning a foreign language is total bullshit, I do it too (assuming I have access to such things as textbooks in a specific language, I don’t have any Welsh ones for example and I don’t really feel the need to) just that, if you base solely on a textbook, it’ll never become natural. Also, unfortunately you can’t just acquire a new language as an adult, or not nearly as easily as a small child would, even with a lot of exposure and practice, but for me personally, observing how the language is used and thus getting concrete examples, is more intuitive, and far more interesting, than basing primarily on dry, often long-winded and full of exceptions to the rules textbook definitions, and it clearly gives me more than the dry learning, given how insanely fast my English started progressing as soon as I started self-teaching and distanced myself a bit from the way I was being taught at school. I also often try to help Sofi with her English homework, but I always end up exasperated at all the boring theory in there they have to digest and all the silly exercises. No wonder that the poor kid hates English. 😀

What is such thing in your opinion? 🙂

Question of the day.

Do you ever fill out sudoku, crossword puzzles, or word finds for fun?

My answer:

I really love playing with words and that includes word games but I actually don’t play them very often or if I do, it’s most often just in my brain. There are a lot of accessible word games in English, but I haven’t come across any in Polish, though perhaps I just haven’t looked deep enough. I don’t think I’ve ever played sudoku at all, for example. Crossword puzzles I don’t play on my own, but often when someone in my family is playing they’ll ask me for help and I’m happy to join in. My grandad also loves playing with words and is a real crossword puzzle maniac and back when we lived in the country and shared the backyard with my Mum’s family I’d often do them with him and he would always get real mad and sulky when I solved something quicker than he did. He would also give me some random challenges, inspired by something he was thinking about, like, what word has three ó’s in it? And then I’d be thinking for hours, steam going from my brains. Ever since I was a relatively young child, whenever I’d go somewhere with Mum that involved waiting, like to the doctor or something, or on long rides, and especially if any other of my siblings was there too, my Mum would encourage us to play things like anagrams or creating as many different words as possible from one given word, to kill the time. She’d find a word on some sign or something and we’d have to make up anagrams from it if there were any or think of as many words as possible that could be made with the letters in this word. It’s a good distraction indeed and I particularly liked it because I would usually find more words than my siblings or often even than my Mum and they’d get frustrated cus there were no words left for them lol. Sofi doesn’t like this game because she claims it’s impossible to play without writing down the word. But there’s something in my brain that makes it very automatic for me to analyse words kind of in the background and I do it nearly all the time so it’s easy for me. When Sofi’s really bored, she still likes to play the alphabet game with either Mum or me and it’s fun, especially if you have lots of challenging categories.

Now that I have my iPhone, I’ve also started playing some English-language word games, but because English isn’t my first language and my vocabulary in it is limited and also not quite as deeply rooted as Polish, I’m not quite as good at it, and it sort of frustrates me because I’m used to being very good at these things. I’ll play these games sometimes when I have nothing to do and need some distraction. Currently I have three word games on my phone which are Ordet (where you get some random letters and have to create as many words as you can using them), 7 Little Words (which has word puzzles but they’re not exactly crosswords), and Blindfold Words From Words (which is much like what Mum played with us – you’re given a word and have to create as many different words from it as you can, this game is no longer really developed but was made by a developer who did all sorts of equivalents of popular games for the blind, but that could also be played by sighted people).

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

I am working on…

My answer:

…nothing really, at this moment, I guess. Nothing major for sure. I am always working on polishing my languages though, so perhaps we can count that though that doesn’t really feel like “working” or not most of the time.

You? 🙂