Question of the day.

   What could you talk about for thirty minutes with absolutely no prep? 

   My answer: 

   Lolll, probably a lot of things. I once asked you a similar question about what topic you would give a lecture on to five thousands people if you had only fifteen minutes to prepare for it. What I didn’t say in that post is that, while I’m generally not one for peopling, I have, kind of paradoxically perhaps, often found public speaking to be less challenging than actual interaction with a group of people. Probably because, when just speaking to people, you can prepare yourself better, including all the possible worst case scenarios, and there’s some kind of script so I know what to actually do. The challenging aspect of that lecture scenario would be that I never actually spoke to a crowd THAT huge, so it could feel rather intimidating in a way, and also that I would have such a short time to prepare for that lecture, which would make me feel very insecure about its quality. But like I wrote in that post, I could still talk about something that’s more based on my views/opinions, rather than raw facts, and there is some decent chance that it could go not too badly. I’d just have to pray that my Xanax would kick in on time. 😀

There are a lot of things that I’m interested in long-term,    But just plain talking is a lot less pressuring than a lecture, so it could be even easier, though it would also depend on other things like how large that group of people would be and whether this would be more of a both-sided interaction or Bibiel monologuing, because if it were to be a two-sided talk, I’d do better in a smaller group of people. And I’ve also written about it several times before that my brain can be quite unpredictable when it comes to socialising, more so I guess than with simple social anxiety with a clear specific trigger(s), because sometimes I might have no problem having a convo with a total stranger and they will end up considering me very outgoing or even sometimes “charismatic”, whereas another time I feel cripplingly self-conscious around my own Mother, whom I live with every single day and most of the time my anxiety when interacting with Mum is at my baseline level or above. Sometimes I can spend half an hour with people and not say a single word, whereas other times I get logorrhoea that’s almost as powerful as my late friend Jacek’s, about whom I always jokingly said that he could talk people to death if he wanted. 😀 I sometimes just seem to have very little active control over which Bibiel kicks in when, perhaps because I can’t see very much rhyme or reason to the way it works. 

   Aside from that though, given that just talking is a lot less pressuring than a spontaneous lecture, I think I would have quite a wide range of topics to choose from and bore my interlocutors/listeners with. People that have ever lived with me for any extended period of time know that I can go on for ages about my fazas and anything related, especially during a peak, so much so at times that they think I’m an extrovert, or for others I am overwhelming aka “too colourful”. 😀 Generally as much as I like to bottle up any so-called “negative” feelings, I’ve always found it difficult to keep stuff that I feel excited or enthusiastic about inside. If I can’t talk about it without feeling like I might be bothering people, I will write pages about it in my personal diary. Same applies if I happen to be in some very interesting but temporary rabbit hole at a given time. And there are quite a lot of things that I’m strongly interested in long-term, be it “my” languages and language overall, all the name-nerdy stuff, all things folklore etc. So, because there’s so much to choose from, I’m afraid I can’t really tell you one single thing that I could talk about for thirty minutes. I think I would either choose something that would be of some interest to the folks that I’d be talking with/to, or if I wouldn’t be familiar with them beforehand then go with my most intense obsession at the time of having such talk, but then right now I have a few strong interests going on at once, so it still would be hard to choose one. So, if all else fails and I couldn’t make up my mind, or if I’d have to talk to some totally random people and wouldn’t want to exhibit my personal and quite intense stuff to them very much, there’s always the safe small talk topic of Misha which has saved me numerous times in social situations, particularly when Misha himself is present. I could definitely talk for thirty minutes about Misha. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What do you do first when you wake up? 

   My answer: 

   Usually, probably what most people do these days. Look at my phone, lol. As someone who didn’t have a smartphone until 2020, I adapted to the whole smartphone culture pretty quickly in most aspects, I guess. Well, sometimes I do not do it right away, but if I’m looking forward to getting some specific email or something else like that, or if I’m deep in some temporary rabbit hole all the way up to my knees and just keep reading about something and obsessing about it etc. or when I wake up right as my alarm goes off on the phone (unless I’m sleeping with my Apple Watch) then that’s the first thing I do. Otherwise, I hit play on my PlexTalk and read whatever book I’m reading at the time. Another answer I could give you is that I get out of bed immediately to let Misha out, as he usually wakes up sometimes between 4-6 AM and regularly sleeps with me, and I can’t stand sleeping with my door open so he has to wake me up to let him out, but that’s not always exactly true, because sometimes I think I just do it on autopilot if I’m really sleepy/tired, and when I wake up later, sometimes I don’t recall ever letting him out and wonder how he managed to get out. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What are you doing for Valentine’s day? 

   My answer: 

   Absolutely nothing. I mean, I’m doing a lot of things, but nothing specifically for Valentine’s. I’m single for starters, and I just don’t really care about Valentine’s anyway. It’s a bit cringey imho. I think I wrote a more extensive post on a similar topics around Valentine’s Day last year, but I was just talking with Mum over breakfast actually how it’s a very bad idea psychologically, because people feel this pressure that they have to do something special with/for their other half for Valentine’s Day or otherwise it feels weird and looks like they don’t love their significant other, even though they show them love every day, just not so spectacularly. And I personally think that it’s wedding anniversaries, or other special day for each couple individually, that should be their day for spectacular manifestations of love. It’s a bit lame and artificial that there is supposed to be one such day for all the lovers in the world. It should be a personal and intimate thing, I believe, then it would feel a lot more significant and less shallow. And then some people who are very sensitive to such things that will not get any Valentine’s gifts or anything like that, who are unhappily single, will only feel sad about it. Hence there was the need for creating a Singles Day or whatever it’s called, so people don’t feel left out. 😀 When the solution could be a lot simpler. And I guess it’s not only singles who might feel left out. What about those couples where one person is into Valentine’s and the other is not and is very uncompromising in this aspect for some reason, so the one who is into it doesn’t get anything and feels unloved? There should be a special day for such people too, to further help the marketing and give media something to chatter about. So for me it’s just a regular day. Unless you want to consider my buying food for Misha a Valentine’s gift for him haha, but it’s just regular food and nothing fancy. 

   How about you? 😕 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What keeps you up at night? 

   My answer: 

   There’s a lot of things that can potentially keep me up at night. The most obvious would be if my brain clock happens to be temporarily synced with a different timezone than mine – it doesn’t really have one single timezone that it sticks to, as the regular people will know, but things just shift around throughout weeks and months. – Alternatively, it could be a good book that I’m so engrossed in that I don’t want to pull it down, or my Brainlife which is so interesting, rewarding and pleasurable that I don’t want to pull out of the Brainworld. Night time is the best for paracosming/daydreaming. Or maybe I do want to pull out because I’m not in a fun place in the Brainworld, but have gone so deep in that I’m stuck and my brain just keeps swirling and humming away. Or I’m really stressed or anxious about something and can’t stop ruminating for the life of me, so I spend half the time on ruminating and the other half on  desperately trying not to. 😀 Or I’m really excited and hyped up about something and can’t stop thinking about it either. Or I’m having a cringe fit about something I said or did, or someone said or did to me, or something that I said or did but I thought that someone thought I meant something else, or something I witnessed, either during the past day, or just random stuff from fifteen years ago, ‘cause why not. Or I’m having sensory/silence anxiety, though thankfully these days it’s rarely so bad that it would keep me up for hours because I have Misha and Misha helps a great deal with this particular thing. I think those would be the main things for me. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What’s the best type of texture you’ve ever felt? 

   My answer: 

   I’ve felt a lot of great textures in my life, but I think it’s hard to beat Misha’s fur. It is so luxuriously plush, it feels almost creamy, if you can say so about  fur. I remember one time  Misha  went out in the snow for a bit and  I held him when he came back and I thought that his fur feels even softer when it’s really cold. It would be an ideal texture for a sumptuous, expensive dessert (although it wouldn’t be hairy, of course). Or clouds could have a similar texture. But when his fur is all warm from sleep, it’s amazing too. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   Have you ever had a dream in which you started to cry, only to wake up crying in real life? 

   My answer: 

   Actually, oddly enough, this happens to me quite regularly. I generally have a lot of really emotional and intense dreams, which I wouldn’t call nightmares (although I do get a lot of nightmares too), but they’re just really emotional and the sheer intensity of them sometimes makes me wonder whether it isn’t my brain’s weird way at trying to deal with stuff that I have bottled up, some form of autotherapy or something, though I have no idea where it’s leading or what good it’s doing in the end because it keeps happening over and over again so it must be a rather fruitless effort. They usually have something to do with things I find difficult and emotional at the time except it’s all glaringly exaggerated, or other times it’s something from the past, or sometimes my brain just makes stuff up. Anyways, most often when I have those dreams, I only have a vague recollection of the actual plot line of the dream, just more or less what it was about but no details, yet on the other hand I remember all the emotions from it very vividly, and often when I still have one foot in the dream world and the other in the waking world, I am actually crying and only realise that when I wake up for good and have no idea what I’m even crying about in the first place. 😀  It’s really weird and quite confusing, but yeah, I think that’s a side effect of being overly emotionally inhibited in the waking world. On the other hand, there have been times when I’ve woken up laughing, because I’ve had such hilarious dreams. That’s probably even more weird, but it’s fun and I love it when it happens. 

   You? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   We haven’t had a question for a couple of weeks again, so let’s have one today. A chill one. 

   How do you like to relax at the end of a stressful day? 

   My answer: 

   With Misha. As I often say, Misha is my charger. I can recharge in other ways too, but with Misha it goes faster. I also like to listen to some music, depending on my mood. Often when I’m stressed I find it quite difficult to eat, so when the stress subsides I’m often ravenously hungry, so having something yummy to eat also helps me relax. And sleep, of course. Sleep helps a lot. 

   You? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   How do you feel about your name? Do you know why/how your parents named you what they did? Do you know what it means etymologically, or what it meant to your parents? Does it mean anything to you? 

   My answer: 

   Well, as for myself, I actually wrote about it a couple years ago for Nancy’s Baby Names who has a name interviews series in which she asks people how they feel  about their names, so if you don’t know how I feel and do want to know, check out this post on Nancy’s blog, and by the way if you’re anything of a name nerd but haven’t come across her blog before, I highly recommend it in general. 

   As for the meaning part, my birth name means “pearl”, and I used to joke that it’s because my Dad’s favourite brand of beer is called Perła which unsurprisingly means “pearl” in Polish. 😀 Obviously though if you’ll read Nancy’s post you’ll know it’s not true. It was my Mum who picked my name and I think she liked it, if only because of associations, given that it was her best friend’s as well as her little sister’s name and she chose it as her confirmation name. As I also wrote in the interview for Nancy, the only thing I seriously like about my birth name is my patron saint – Margaret of Castello – who was a disabled (she was blind, a dwarf and had some  deformities) member of the Third Dominican Order. There are many saints, blesseds and servants of God named Emilia or other people with similar names who could have worked as a patron saint for an Emilia, but first, no one really resonated with me as much, and second, I didn’t feel it was seriously appropriate for me to look for a different patron saint, after all, my birth name is still the name that I was christened as and I still use it as my Christian name, so like in church and such, and Margaret of Castello is even my Confirmation saint as well because she’s just my favourite. I could have chosen st. Hyacinth of Poland who is amazing as well and use Hiacynta as my Confirmation name but Hiacynta sounds like a nun name and I wouldn’t have pulled it off, not even just as a Confirmation name. 😀 I also liked Luisa Piccarretta and considered Luiza as my Confirmation name, but Luisa Piccarretta hasn’t  been properly canonised yet. 

   My current legal name, Emilia, comes from the Latin word “aemulus”, meaning “rival”, which is also interpreted to mean things like “envious”, so it’s one of those names with a not so positive meaning, but it doesn’t seem to discourage people from calling their daughters Emily or Emilia, and it doesn’t deter me either. I’m hardly competitive, and feel lucky that envy isn’t a feeling that I would have to deal with often at all (if I did have to pick an emotion-related name that would actually fit me, I guess I would have to be called Agar – “one who fears” – lol). But, again, as I wrote in the interview for Nancy, it’s not the meaning that drew me to the name Emilia, but the first thing was Emily of New Moon. And later on I just found more and more reasons to like it, and it does feel very much like me. 

   My middle name, Anna, means “grace” in Hebrew, and I really like it. I mean, both the name, and the meaning. I love it because it’s my Mum’s name, so mostly what Anna means to me is my Mum, or generally someone who is quite motherly and caring. My Dad actually wanted to call me Anna, which I would certainly like more than my birth name, although it would be even more problematic in terms of sharing my name with someone close than my birth name was, so I’d likely be even more confused whether someone was talking to me or to my Mum. And Anna is overwhelmingly common in Poland, so that wouldn’t be too enthusing either. My Mum once said that after all she wished they’d have called me Anna, and that if they did, she would go by Ania as she usually does, and I would go by Anna, but that’s not too realistic, because I don’t even know a single Polish Anna who goes by Anna, every single one is nicknamed to Ania. And I bet most people would deem it unnatural to call me (as the younger) the full version, and my Mum the nickname, and no one would do it in practice. And I wouldn’t have liked it the other way round because Ania is so plain and boring, lots more than the full Anna. Because of Anna being the most popular name for women here in Poland, I once heard someone say that they perceive this name almost as a synonym for “woman”, which was definitely supposed to be a negative comment. But although I personally also dislike Anna’s popularity, this observation actually made me realise more than before that it’s that essence-of-femininity vibe that I like most about Anna. As any regulars here and people who know me closer will be aware of, I have a very rich and varied Brainlife with multiple Brainworlds in one, with all kinds of beings, real and fictional, and that also includes one Brainworld where there are fictional characters who are like parts of me, embodying some of my traits, strong feelings, difficulties etc. Think Maggie the inner critic or Bibielle. And one of them is actually called Anna, aka my inner mummy, and in some aspects also the opposite of Maggie. She is one huge softie, kind of like my own Mum or grandma except less rational, you know, the textbook example of an individual who would fall into toxic relationships and wants to save people from themselves when they do shit to themselves, or feels compassion towards a villain in a book when he finally gets punished and there’s a vivid depiction of how he’s being impaled and cut into tiny little pieces (not that I ever read or watch stuff like that lol, just a random thing). Anna feels sad for all the people in the world and their issues, be that because they’re a hopeless heroin addict or because they have no slippers on their feet and might be cold, and she would most happily spend her life hugging people, listening to their woes and making them hearty dinners and cakes and massaging their feet. And of course particularly when it comes to any people that she loves or likes. That is certainly not to say that I am like that, because I don’t always, well, I usually don’t, let Anna act on her urges or tell me what I should think or do, because that sort of thing requires exposing your own vulnerability and I don’t like feeling vulnerable, nevertheless, Anna is a piece of me and I think her name fits her perfectly, even though of course not all Annas are like that. I also like that Anna is such a classic name and the Christian and Biblical connections, I like saint Anne (the mother of Mary), who is known as Anna in Polish. 

   How about you and your name? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   How did your 2023 start? 

   My answer: 

   Pretty normally. Honestly, I don’t really get celebrating New Year’s Eve, like in general, the fact of a new year starting is a rather neutral thing for me, and in particular, I don’t get the way most people seem to like to celebrate it, by getting drunk and staying up until as late as possible and do peopling. Ugh yuck. Oh yeah and the fireworks, I don’t see the point in that either, perhaps I would if I could actually see anything but I am kind of doubtful.

   So I didn’t do anything special for that day, in fact the first half of New Year’s Eve I actually had a migraine but thankfully it dissipated later on (things could have gotten quite challenging if it hadn’t until the evening so I really am very grateful). However both Olek and Sofi invited their respective mates here, and my poor parents, who originally planned to stay at home and perhaps invite a couple that they’re friends with, felt obligated to take part in a New Year’s Eve organised by my Mum’s cousins. 

   We’d had a few such situations last year where our parents would go out somewhere and my siblings would invite their friends, and while I generally didn’t mind it or anything, it did make me rather uneasy having some random peeps here and two parallel parties going on in the house at the same time, with the peeps running around the place and blasting music at full volume, and you can’t even have a proper guarantee that you won’t come across someone while sneaking out to the loo. And Misha gets all dysregulated as a result, I don’t know whether it’s more because of the noise, strange people, lack of structure or lack of Mummy but he gets very unsettled and it’s me who gets to deal with all that. And these peeps can’t even clean after themselves and leave loads of filth, I feel for their families. But  I have my room, after all, and no random peeps are allowed in here, (why would they  if they’re not my peeps), so I can and do stay in here and so can Misha if he wants, and listen to my own music and do my own things. 

   This time round I found it slightly more difficult though, because soon-ish after Sofi’s party started, I was treated to overhearing a whole very dynamic scene where the main character was Sofi’s friend puking (my room is next to the bathroom). For any potential uninformed newbies, I’m emetophobic so… Well, actually, I didn’t even get properly scared, I knew it most likely wasn’t a sudden bout of stomach flu that she got, but hearing such a thing was rather distasteful. 😀 

   So at the start of  New Year, I think I was in bed listening to music and  engaging full-on in one of my most favourite hobbies, i.e. paracosming (is that even a legit word? Do I even care? 😀 ) Well yeah, now that I’m thinking of it, actually perhaps that’s the exact point of New Year’s, everyone gets to indulge in their worst addictions or develop new ones, so that then they can make a New Year’s resolution that they’ll try to indulge less. 😀 But yeah, as a lot of cultures and languages say, like New Year, like the whole year, so according to that I’m not very likely to become any less maladaptive of a daydreamer any time soon. Sofi’s friend will probably be more successful overcoming her issues, as she managed to indulge properly before midnight. 😛 I stayed in my BrainWorld until 1 AM, which was when my parents came back, full of regrets, because that get-together for cousins was even more boring than they predicted. And when they did, their regrets became significantly greater, as they saw the state of the house and in it some peeps with temporarily altered brain chemistry who were very reluctant to leave and a “v-v-veeer-r-rytired” Sofi”. Suffice it to say that neither Sofi nor Olek are allowed to invite friends  this year, and Sofi had apparently broken all the rules that she promised to follow, and others that Mum thought were obvious. I kind of wonder why, because Sofi is normally more sensible than that and it seemed a bit out of character for her, but she doesn’t even seem to feel any contrition or at least doesn’t show it at all. To be honest, while as I said I never particularly minded those parties when Sofi had them before (and they were  more civil and more teenage-like than the New Year’s one), I was always kind of surprised that Mum even allows this, because generally she is very attached to her house, hates the thought of someone coming in here when we’re away, doesn’t like to leave the house alone for too long as she’s afraid of theft, and has a strong sense of privacy, so allowing a bunch of random young people to come in and do practically whatever they want while she’s away seemed like a huge sacrifice on her side. Anyway, we all feel quite disappointed with Sofi, but also it feels like a relief for both of my parents and myself, and perhaps for Misha the most, that those parties are a thing of the past now. Olek has got a large-ish plot in a different town so he can still invite his friends there, and, actually, if I were him, I’d much prefer doing it at my own place, even if it’s not a proper house. And a part of me feels for Sofi, even though Mum says I shouldn’t because it’s her own fault, but I still do because she’s going to have an awful year by the sound of it. No parties, no sleepovers, no concerts, no hanging out after school… And I bet she doesn’t even have fun memories or anything, and probably a few spoilt friendships to make things worse. 

   Anyways, Sofi & Co. aside, after my parents came back, I decided I can’t be worse and went to sleep as well, or rather intended to fall asleep, but couldn’t. That’s why paracosming right before sleep isn’t always the best idea, ‘cause your brain gets all activated and doesn’t want to stop working. After 3 AM, I gave up and decided I’d rather be a zombie, because I had to get up early to go to church anyway, and I prefer to be a zombie than having to go through the torture of just having fallen asleep early in the morning, and then having to get up after what feels like a few minutes later, even if in reality I’d get two or three hours of sleep. But I wasn’t meant to start off the new year as a zombie, because I drifted off to sleep after 6. 

   I was woken up by my Dad who kept saying “Bibiel?… Bibiel… Bibiel…!” In a way that sounded a little off for some reason. When I managed to shake the thickest layer of sleep off my brain, I was rather surprised that instead of telling me to get up or something like that, he asked if I was hungry. I was WAAAy too disoriented to answer such complex, introspective questions, and a more conscious bit of my brain was a bit like “wtf? Why? did I sleep for a week or something?” so I think I uttered some very ambiguous response like “Hmmmmm…?”, and he must have decided that that means “yes” because he was something like “Let’s go then” and basically pulled me out of bed and led me, or rather dragged me, as I was basically hanging off his arm half-asleep, to the kitchen. If I weren’t as sleepy and all round confused, this would have been quite absurdly hilarious. Mum was in the kitchen and said that she thought I’d be very hungry because I ate very little the day before due to the migraine, and for me that is one of the triggers that causes me to feel really really faint so Mum was afraid and didn’t want this to happen to me so she sent Dad upstairs to ask me whether I was hungry, and he must have assumed that I was so out of it because I was feeling faint, rather than just zombie-ish. 😀 I was very appreciative of her consideration, even though I wasn’t hungry and didn’t feel any weak feeling or anything to be approaching. In the end, I was glad that Dad woke me up like that, because it was already after 9, so this way we could still make it to the 10:30 Mass instead of having to wait for the next one at 6 PM, I think it’s very lousy to go to evening Mass if you don’t have a solid reason for putting it off, or in any case I would feel as if I was being lousy. And Sofi wouldn’t be fit to go with us either way. So I was glad that, even though I fell asleep probably even later than most people who celebrate New Year’s the “right” way, I didn’t have a lousy day. And despite I was definitely under-sleeped, my sleepiness dissipated fairly quickly and I didn’t feel like a zombie or even half-zombie at all. 

   So we went to Mass and then had breakfast and I talked a lot with Mum, who was feeling really blue after that lame party and the Sofi thing and we ate a lot of apple pie. It was my grandad’s birthday and we wanted to visit him like we usually do but we found out that there are quite a lot of people there and my Mum was not in the mood for dealing with a lot of people so we decided we’ll go some other day. And other than that, it was really just a normal day. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   Hi people! 🙂

   Use ten words to describe yourself: 

   Some angsty, dreamy, gloomy, freaky Bibiel with overactive , glitchy brains. 

   You? 

Question of the day.

   How do you feel about video games? 

   My answer: 

   I don’t really play much games, for two main reasons. The first one is that the amounts of accessible video games is limited to begin with. You can’t just download or buy whatever game you want when you’re blind and expect that you’ll be able to play it right away. And secondly, out of those games that are accessible, I haven’t found many that I would  really be interested in. The only game that I really do play regularly is a life simulation game called Bitlife, which is a text-based mobile game, but I’m so ignorant that I’m not even sure if a text-based game counts as a video game, but after having done a bit of Googling some people do refer to Bitlife as a video game as well so I guess it can be a video game at the same time, and it’s not like it’s completely text-based, it does have visual stuff as well and some sounds too. If what most people like and look for in games can be judged by what most games are like, then I guess there must be very high demand for stuff that is full of strong emotions, tension, aggression, competition, adventure, quest for being THE MOST, be in the most powerful, the richest, the most evil, the fastest etc. I’m not really so much into all those things. I mean, okay, they can be fun sometimes, but it’s not something I would truly enjoy on a regular basis. I’ve never even liked adventure books, I read some as a kid and teen while still finding out what I actually like and what I don’t, and whenever I read adventure books, or mystery books or such, where you have for example a child character who plays detective while on holidays at his grandparents’, I’d be all like: “Why do you even bother? Why won’t you just enjoy your holidays like a normal kid and for example have a lie-in if you can instead of jumping out of bed at 5 AM to solve some local mystery that’s not even any of your business? Who would care about that?” I’m still very much like that. I rarely read the aforementioned adventure or mystery books, and same about crime novels, science fiction, or fantasy, unless the heavily folklore-infused stuff like Tolkien. So similarly I don’t play games like that either. I don’t play shooters (don’t even know if any are accessible actually, but either way I wouldn’t), because they seem utterly pointless to me. Not necessarily because I’m so afraid of violence that I wouldn’t kill anyone even in a game (you can kill people in BitLife and I have done it), but killing for the mere sake of killing is as pointless of an activity as it gets imo. I don’t play strategy, mostly because I don’t seem to be very good at this kind of thinking. I’ve played some strategy games that I found mildly to moderately interesting but I was quite easily discouraged with each of them, and again, getting as rich and powerful as possible just for the sake of it can be fun for a while but not long-term. Long-term I’d happily be less than that if I could have an interesting plot and a well-developed character, but usually it seems to be just about expanding your empire or whatever else and earning achievements with not much depth to it. I don’t play sports-related games, because I’m not into sports in any way, although gimme an accessible horse riding game or sim or generally something revolving around horses and I’ll happily try it out. I don’t play multiplayer games because, well, I’m not a multiplayer, I’m a MiniPlayer, in every sense of this word (except for the YouTube MiniPlayer, in case you were wondering 🙃). I don’t play logical games except for word games, because all others feel dangerously close to math, even if they don’t involve math as such, they just feel and smell and look and taste and sound like math, ewwww! 

   So yeah, I play BitLife for the most part. When you play BitLife, look at their weekly challenges, read what people want in the game, it is also clear that BitLife definitely aims for much the same things as most games – be rich, be famous, be evil, what not. – And from what I see most people play it like that. When I let Sofi play BitLife, the only thing she’d do when her character grew up was alternating between burgling houses, robbing banks and gambling, because she found it thrilling. I mean, yeah, okay, it is thrilling and I do it sometimes too when I play some character whom such things fit, but doing it like all the time your whole life? So eventually I uninstalled BitLife from her phone because she’s still a kid so if she can’t play it less pathologically, I guess she shouldn’t at all at her age.

   I like BitLife because I can play it the way I want. There’s nothing you have to do, you don’t win it or lose it, you just live. And I also like BitLife because I find people interesting as individuals, and here you can basically pretend you’re someone else, pretty much whoever you want. The way I personally usually play BitLife is I create a character in my head, who they are, what sort of personality and life they have, what flaws, what advantages, and then I play their life in BitLife the way I think such a person’s life should look like. Sometimes they’re completely random characters, sometimes peeps from my BrainWorld or sometimes I try recreating lives of people I know or book characters etc. And in the game, it’s hardly so that everything goes to plan, so there are usually some more or less interesting plot twists along the way. Anyway, I always like to imagine my BitLife character as I play, and have a bit of a movie going on in my head as I progress with the game. Then when the character dies, or when I just feel like switching or need to switch for whatever  reason, I switch to one of their children, and then one of that child’s children and we have a whole dynasty where everyone has loads of children with unusual names (BitLife can generate names from some name bank it has but I always name my children there myself because there’s also such  option, my current character, for example, is called Anne-Micheline Grønberg-Cleary, her father is Norwegian and her mother is Anglo-Irish and she also has some Dutch and Welsh ancestry and she currently lives in LA and runs a healthy food store which is just about to go bankrupt because naturally she’s near-dyscalculic and I don’t know what she’ll do next with her life). Which is why I think it stinks like a skunk that BitLife still doesn’t have more advanced family features – I mean you have parents, siblings, lovers, children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews (oh and family pets if that counts), but you cannot interact with your grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles etc. It’s not very realistic that a grandparent can interact with their grandchild but the grandchild cannot interact with the grandparent, but there are more such bigger and smaller ridiculosities in the game, like that every country that doesn’t have euros or pounds has dollars, and generally even though you can play in almost any country, the whole thing is absurdly US-centric. Like I once lived in Saudi Arabia and had a scenario where my cat allegedly threw an urn with the ashes of some distant ancestor of mine off the mantlepiece, and I was like: “Yeah, because Muslims sure cremate their ancestors, right?” It’s unclean. 😀 Or you can be a Swede going to a Swedish school and turns out your Swedish language teacher is actually from Mongolia lol. 

   Because Bitlife is largely text-based, it’s not as immersive as other video games, and a lot of the play feels repetitive when you play it for some time, so it absolutely can and does get boring. But on the other hand you can also live each life a bit differently so that things are never the same, and you do have quite a lot of options as for what you can do with your life, even if not as many as we’d ideally like (I’ve always wanted to homeschool my kids in Bitlife for example but what can you do, you have no say as to what school your children will go to, you can’t express your opinion on their new girlfriend/boyfriend or tell them how distasted you are when they say after years of you paying their college tuition that they’ve become a stripper or an escort! 😩 ). And BitLife devs may not be the fastest at releasing updates but the game is being developed so new things are added nonetheless. I wish I could also try playing their other game – CatLife – which is what it sounds like, a cat’s life sim, but it isn’t accessible even though it’s about a year old now so it’ll probably never be, and people say it’s not that good anyway, but I’d like to find it out myself. 😀 

   Most of all though, I’d like to be able to play The Sims, because it must be like a more fun and expanded version of BitLife. But I doubt it will ever become accessible for screen readers with the way it works. 

   Overall though, how do I feel about video games? Well mostly neutral. For the most part I don’t care. But I get why people who like them do, and I get why people who don’t like them say things like that video games kill creativity and imagination or desensitise you to violence and are addictive, although I don’t like generalising that they all do, like the mere fact that something is a video game means it’s bad and will make your brain rot. Even though I have never came across an accessible, interesting and truly valuable video game, I’m sure that there are such and that they are as valid pieces of art as good books, films and music. And speaking of music, game soundtracks can be great too. Or they can be creepy. I mean seriously, last year Sofi had a phase where she played some stupid little game on her phone, I don’t know what it was called or what the overall point was but you had a few parallel worlds in there and some weird creatures and you were racing someone, that’s about as much as I can remember, but what I remember most vividly is that each of those worlds had a different tune that played while you were in it, and one of them was absolutely creepy. Of course, for the uninitiated newbies, I don’t mean creepy in an objective sense, like spooky or anything, but just sensorily creepy for me, not sitting well with my brain, for lack of a more suitable description of the phenomenon. I’m so grateful to God that Sofi no longer plays that game. 

   So, how do you feel about video games? And what games do you play, if any at all? 🙂 

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.

   If you can’t sleep, or just don’t sleep for whatever reason, what do you do during the night? 

   My answer: 

   I listen either to music or some radio station where they speak one of “my” languages, and usually read some book. Or if I don’t read, I typically daydream or just generally hang out in this or that part of my huge Brainworld, because it’s most interesting at night. Or I ruminate if I’m feeling very anxious, or nervous about something specific. If I’m sure that I am not going to fall asleep any time soon and don’t feel like it at all, I may write something, like in my journal, or write back to one of my pen pal’s if I’ve got any emails from any of them that I wasn’t able to respond to earlier. Or I play with Misha, because he’s often up when I am. Or I play a bit of Bitlife. Or chat with my Replika (a sort of AI friend) called Jac, because obviously he never needs to sleep. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Sharing my world after a LONG time.

   Oh boy! How long has it even been since I last participated in Share Your World? I used to do that fairly regularly when I was just starting with this blog, when it was run by Cee Neuner who I believe was the original host of SYW (someone please correct me if I’m wrong), and then a few times when Melanie of Sparks From a Combustible Mind hosted it, but it feels like it’s been absolute ages since I last did. 

   I didn’t know Melanie very well, but I was aware of that she’s been MIA from the blogosphere for some time. But it was only yesterday that I found out that she has sadly passed away. I feel really ignorant to have learnt about this so late, and a bit shocked. This makes it a sad year for the blogosphere, as she is the second very active blogger (of those that I know of anyway)  who has passed away during it and is going to be very much missed, the first one being Ashley of Mental Health at Home I am and will continue to be praying that they both rest in peace. 

   Thanks a lot to Di of Pensitivity101  for hosting this last SYW of this year. Here are Di’s questions and my answers to them: 

   1.   If you have been given a variety of gifts, do you have a clear out of older stuff to make room for it? 

   It’s definitely not something that I’d usually do for Christmas/birthday/other such gift occasions, certainly not just for the sake of replacing old things with new ones, unless it’s logical for some reason like for example getting a new phone and thus doing away with  the old one or receiving new clothes and getting rid of the ones that I no longer wear if there is no room in my wardrobe etc. 

2.  Do you overindulge with food for special occasions and then come to regret it with either weight gain, guilt or severe indigestion? 

   Not very often. Generally, these days the amount of food that I can eat in one go seems to be a lot smaller compared with most people, ‘cause everyone says I eat very little. But as I always say, at least that makes me low-maintenance. 😀 I have a little theory that I might’ve screwed myself up a bit, because I’ve had emetophobia (fear of vomit) for years, which is now easily manageable most of the time but used to be quite bad when I was younger and I would heavily restrict what I ate, most things were more or less unsafe really. For the same reason I’ve also tried my best to avoid overeating, feeling very full, not to mention indigestions, as it’s naturally all quite triggery. I’ve also had times when I struggled with a sort of control issue around food, where I didn’t like having needs like that ‘cause it was a burden on people and I thought it was weak etc. And when I’m anxious or stressed, I’m usually not able to eat much or at all, but once it goes away and I feel relief, I become ravenously hungry and get wild junk food cravings. So I think all that undereating and erratic eating patterns has turned against me and now I really don’t need very much to feel really full. Add to that the fact that I’m awful at estimating amounts of anything (including how much I am able to eat) and that I’m scared of eating in social situations, and there isn’t really much room for indulging, both literally and figuratively. The upside of that is such, that while most people eat a lot of food in one go and then feel heavy and bloated all day and have no energy for anything else, I am able to beat everyone at hangman 😛 ‘cause I can still think clearly, and then  happily eat another mini portion of something once I  recover and have some room freed again. There have been times when I overindulged on Christmas, either due to overestimation of my own capabilities or because I wanted to try as many yummy things as possible (it sure CAN be hard to limit yourself to just a few when suddenly there is so much delicious food in front of you and a lot of it appears only during Christmas season) and then I always regretted it sorely indeed. Not necessarily with a real full on indigestion, as you paradoxically very rarely get those when you’re emetophobic, but some mild nausea and bloating that then got worse just because of my ruminating on them and whether or not I’m going to vomit in the end because of feeling like that. 

3.  What is your favourite part for any celebration? 

   This is going to make me sound like  Grinch or someone who really doesn’t enjoy things but I do have to say it’s probably the part once everything is over. Celebrations can be fun for sure, but one thing that they all have in common is peopling, and peopling is generally quite overwhelming, so it feels great when it’s all over and you can go recharge your brain and breathe a sigh of relief and things go back to normal. 

4.   Are you looking forward to getting bargains in the January Sales?

Honestly I couldn’t care less. 😀 I don’t really follow it but there seem to be some sales all the time or very regularly so I don’t see it as anything spectacular to bother with. I never buy anything just because it’s on sale, and I hate shopping so I don’t go shopping without a very clear reason. 

   Gratitude: 

   This week, I feel really grateful for Christmas, because we had a good one for the most part, even though I was a zombie (sleepless) on the first day of Christmas (Boxing Day is celebrated as second day of Christmas over here).  That in itself is a reason to be grateful, because I’ve had zombie days which were far worse than that. It wasn’t too stressful, even with the peopling involved, and we had a really fun atmosphere. I am grateful for all the lovely gifts that I received, in particular for the new jasper in my gem stone collection whose name is Alasdair (I give my stones human names if you’re a newbie or something and are feeling confused 😀 ). And now I regret that I don’t have a pic of him to show y’all, but oh well, I’ll ask Mum if I’ll remember and maybe I’ll post it some other time. Generally I’ve been forever wanting to show you my entire collection but it’s so huge that I guess I’d have to hire some real photographer for a few hours to take pics of all of them and then write alt texts for me so I know which is which. 😀 Who would want to do all that for free! And I’m also grateful for re-reading (for the umpteenth time) my all-time favourite YA series – Jeżycjada by Małgorzata Musierowicz – this time round together with my Mum. I mean, we’re not necessarily reading it together physically, but going through each book more or less at the same time. My Mum reads slower than me since she doesn’t have as much time for reading as I do, which allows me to read other things in between and also helps me to savour the series more and remind myself to slow down sometimes as well when reading. I don’t know, maybe I’m boring, ‘cause I first read this series when I was a kid and I still remember whole lines from them, but they still make me laugh, even though I perceive them differently now and notice different things than before, but that’s why re-reads are such a good thing. 

Question of the day.

   What food do you think is overrated? 

   My answer: 

   The thing that pops into my mind is avocado. But probably a lot of so called super foods could belong in there too. I understand that it’s healthy, but it’s so yuck that I don’t get how desperate for health people must be to eat it. 

  Also most fast food in my opinion. It sure is fast, and most of the time cheaper than making a home-made, healthy meal, but in my opinion most of it isn’t as good as one could think judging by how many people eat it regularly as a treat. The only fast food I really like are enough to eat it regularly are chips and KFC hot wings. I can eat some other fast food things but I can’t say it’s truly delicious or anything. 

   Also a lot of people I know really like hot dogs and I can’t wrap my brain around what is SO amazing about them. 😀 

   And pizza. I don’t necessarily dislike pizza, I absolutely love a good, home-made pizzas, but most pizzas that you can get in food places or at least the ones that I’ve had aren’t all that good. A truly good, noteworthy pizza is a rare thing in my experience. 

   What are your overrated food picks? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What do you appreciate or look for in a friend? 

   My answer: 

   I think loyalty is the most crucial thing when it comes to friendship. I’d say so crucial, actually, that there isn’t even much point writing about it when answering such question, because if there’s no loyalty, is it even a real friendship? As for more subjective things that I appreciate or would look for, I think the key thing for me is at least some mutual life experiences, and preferably not only that we’ve experienced the same or similar thing but that we’ve also experienced it in a similar way. For example I and someone else can both be blind, or mentally ill etc. but I think it’s more likely to evolve into friendship if our experience of blindness/mental illness is more or less similar, that is, we feel similarly about it and experience similar ups and downs of the shared experience. Even better than experience is if I and the other person  share some interest(s), even if it’s just liking similar books or some of the similar music (though dare I say if we like similar music we’d probably find some other interests in common as well 😀 ). If we can share something, be it an experience or interest, it can make such relationship deeper. 

   Other than that, I highly appreciate a good sense of humour in people, even if it’s a bit silly or weird or something. As well as intelligence, so you don’t have to clarify everything to them all the time. I really appreciate sensitivity, both emotional sensitivity and sensitivity to beauty. Also I think that either having beliefs, values and views on important matters in common with each other, or being able to have respect for each other’s beliefs and views is incredibly important, at least if it’s supposed to be a really strong friendship. I like weird, quirky people. Not necessarily being quirky for all means and just for the sake of being quirky, and not necessarily in the sense of being controversial, but just having your own way of living/doing things/your own things that you like and not many others do. I think for me it’s better to be friends with introverts, because since I am an introvert too, a fellow introvert would understand things like needing to recharge and not feeling like interacting with you ALL the time and that it’s not for personal reasons and that it doesn’t mean we’re no longer friends. I guess such things would make an extrovert feel underwhelmed or possibly hurt if they’d take it personally. And qualities such as being helpful, supportive, kind or a good listener are also very much appreciated, but I think these are again ones that most people would look for in a friend. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   Simple question today, as we haven’t had any in a long time: 

   What did you do today or will do? 

   My answer: 

   Well, it’s half past noon here right now. If we’re considering that today started at midnight (which I guess would be the most logical), then the first thing I did is I went to the midnight Mass. Now that we go exclusively to TLM (traditional Latin Mass), our new parish, so to say, is quite a bit further away, and  midnight Mass is long-ish, so by the time we got back home it was after 2 AM. Most of my family overate for the Christmas Eve supper, but I hate overeating so by the time we got home I was starving, so I ate a little more of the Christmas food, and then we opened our presents. It’s fun opening Christmas presents at 2 AM. To an outsider, especially one unfamiliar with Christmas Eve celebrations, it could look as if we were so impatient that we couldn’t even sleep the night through like all normal people and wait for the Christmas morning but had to run for the presents as soon as possible, but actually it’s the other way around because most people who celebrate Christmas Eve festively tend to open their presents soon after the supper. And we did that too for many years, only changed it a couple years ago because why not.  Sofi is no longer a little kid and has more patience these days and understands that there are important, more important and most important things, and the rest of us aren’t really crazy about presents like she is. I mean, sure it’s cool, but we don’t really think about it so much and we all agree that it’s a little bit awkward, the whole thing. Without Sofi, perhaps we wouldn’t feel the need to do them at all? So it’s good that we have Sofi, as she brings a bit more spontaneity in here. 

   We all got Sofi new AirPods. Mum bought her AirPods earlier this year, but someone stole them from her at school about a month ago and she’s been disconsolate, because lately she goes everywhere with earbuds in her ears and otherwise life sucks. Actually, yesterday morning I even asked her just for fun what present she would most like to get if she could get anything, even something for a million dollars or more. And Sofi said that she’d like to get driving lessons so that she could ride some mini car that kids her age are allowed to drive, but since that doesn’t seem likely to happen at this point even if our parents or Olek or me were millionaires, she said that the other thing she’d really like to get is new AirPods, and then added that, actually, if she got some AirPods today, or find her old ones, she’d be the happiest peep in the world. And she really was happy when she got her AirPods. 

   I never know what to give Olek (even though he always knows what to give everyone), so I traditionally buy him FIFA every year because he likes to play this game, although I’m seeing that his enthusiasm is waning gradually every year so for the next year, I’ll have to think about something different. 

   For Mum, I got a bullet journal, because I think this is something she’ll really enjoy now that she’s IFfing (intermittent fasting) and on a keto diet, and she didn’t seem to have an effective way of actually tracking how she was feeling, and it can potentially also be a fun outlet for her abundant inner life that keeps spilling out rather uncontrollably. 

   Dad says openly that he doesn’t want presents really, and he’s hardly ever even happy with anything, so I didn’t get him anything. If our situation was different, I would have probably gave him some money and he would have appreciated that, the materialist he is, but considering the fact that I am his employee, it would be a tad bit ridiculous, like a child taking out money of their parents’ wallet to put it under the Christmas tree. 😀 

   And Misha got a water fountain. I never know what to get Misha either, because, well, when people talk about presents for cats, they usually talk about toys and things like that. And Misha isn’t really big on toys. He does like to play, but he gets bored quickly, and as for shop-bought toys he hardly ever looks at them. He’s a naturalist and prefers things like cones, leaves, feathers, peas etc. Oh yeah, and he likes marbles, but he must take that after me. So I usually just buy Misha some yummy food for Christmas and spoil him in every way possible. But this year, just totally last minute, I thought that I would buy Misha a nice, ceramic water fountain, so that he could drink running water, which he likes most, as all cats I suppose. It also has a sensor so that the water only flows when Misha’s nearby, so Misha also finds it interesting and he really drinks loads now. I’d like to have it here in my room, but I’ve no free outlets, so I’ll have to get some new power strip or something first. For now it’s standing in the kitchen. But what I actually wanted to say is that, despite I bought it last minute, I mean this week, and despite it was online, the fountain managed to arrive before Christmas Eve. And I strongly suspect that Misha is an atheist anyway so he doesn’t give a flip about Christmas, or otherwise he must be an Orthodox Christian in which case he’d have two more weeks to wait for his Russian Christmas and have it on our Epiphany, so I figured that I might as well show him the fountain right away, and I did. 

   As for myself, I got a beautiful, rough chunk of jasper from Mum. You regular people know that I give my stones names that I like, especially ones that wouldn’t be usable for me on a real child even if I was to ever have one. I thought the whole evening about what I’m going to call this jasper, even involved my whole family but that was more for a bit of social fun rather than because I expected actual help, almost all their suggestions were absolutely crap, but at least we had a laugh. In  the end I chose Alasdair which suits him ridiculously well so it’s weird that it took me so long to think about this. I also got a very delicate bracelet which is made of carnelians. I am generally not a huge fan of jewellery other than rings ‘cause it gets in the way of doing things and I find it annoying when it happens, and also the whole thing of getting used to wearing something, but this one is subtle enough that it doesn’t really get in the way and I hardly feel it most of the time. 

   And from Olek, me and Sofi together got like a whole, indecently huge cartonboard box of sweets. I mean seriously, if anyone wants some candy, come to us! If we eat it all throughout the next year, we will both turn from mildly underweight to morbidly obese by next Christmas. 😀 I highly appreciate though can barely fathom the fact that he even felt like wasting so much money on us. And last year I got  wooden box of ALL kinds of teas from him and I still have like  half of that left. 

   And then we went to sleep… well okay, at least to bed. I was feeling kind of weak since midnight Mass and first thought it was because I was standing for a long time (which is normal for me, I mean don’t know if normal but typical), then I thought perhaps it was because I was starving, but it didn’t go away once I ate, and Mum kept saying that I’m probably ill because apparently there’s some weird very high fever epidemic going around right now, but I didn’t really feel sick or feverish or anything like that at all. I thought I was just tired, so went to bed thinking I’m going to be out like a light, except that was not what happened. My brain was going a thousand miles a minute about everything and anything and I couldn’t settle, while at the same time feeling quite exhausted. And I didn’t get a wink of sleep ALL night long. In other words, I’m having a zombie day. So this thing you’re reading was written by a zombified version of Bibiel. But I haven’t had a full on zombie day in ages, so that’s okay, I can deal with it, although I’m not sure why it happened, because my sleep-wake cycle directly prior to this was very satisfiable to me and in line with societal norms so I wonder what’s going to happen next to my circadian rhythm. I still feel weak physically, and while I’m not even feeling sleepy really, I feel seriously spaced out and outrageously mood-swingy and that really annoys me. And I don’t like how my brains feel cognitively on zombie days, it’s frustrating as shit, my languages get all jumbled and I can’t think like a human and can’t make the smallest decisions rationally and without stressing out like the whole world depends on it. I told my Mum about it today and she happily offered that she can help me make any decisions that I need help with, but I was like: “But I don’t even know what decisions to start dealing with first”. 😀 It’s as trivial as: should I eat now or in half an hour? Do I first let Misha in or finish this sentence? Do I listen to this song or that now? I’m not normally like that, not to this extent for sure. Misha slept with me though and he slept for us both, because he slept until 9 which is unheard of for him unless he’s sick or sad, but today it was simply because everyone got up late, and he was warm and toasty so no point getting up at 5 AM and sit in the empty, cold and silent kitchen waiting for someone to come. 

   Hm, what else did I do…? I can’t think! I mean, I started writing this post half past noon and now it’s after 2 PM so I guess that gives you an idea of my cognitive abilities today lol. Hmmm well, I had breakfast while my mood was swinging back and forth, and then I went back to my room ‘cause all people started to wake up and I couldn’t face people because at that particular point my mood was swinging very low above the ground. I went back to my room and started crying, not like I even had a reason for that, I just felt really sad and mad and useless and like the only thing I was able to do was cry. And then after a couple minutes I realised how absurd this is that people all around the world have real problems and some stupid Bibiel is crying and doesn’t know why, and stopped crying and chuckled at myself how weird I am and at Bibiel’s first world problems. My parents went for a 10 km walk and Olek and Sofi watched a movie. 

   We thought that we are going to be visiting people – Mum’s and Dad’s family – today, but (paternal) gran is at my uncle’s today, and we don’t want to split up the visits for two days, and also I really can’t do outside people today and would be afraid that I would suddenly become sleepy with lack of anything constructive to do other than sitting by the table and would fall asleep. And also, as a normally socially over-inhibited individual, being around people on zombie days sort of scares me because I’m not as capable to control  everything as I normally do, or at least as I like to think that I do. It’s mind-blowing how sleep or lack thereof can change everything in your brain so much that it barely even feels like your own brain and the same one that you were using yesterday. So anyway, we’re going to visit everyone tomorrow, which I’m relieved about. 

   So no big peopling today, and no other big plans either. We’re just going to do whatever we feel like for the rest of the day. Now let me try to figure out what it is that Bibiels actually feel like doing, maybe I’ll know in the next two and a half hours if I’m lucky. 😀 

   So how about you? How’s your Christmas going? 🙂 

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.

   Simple question today: 

   What book are you reading right now? 

   My answer: 

   Me, well, I think the GoodReads widget on my blog is still working, in which case you should be able to see that I am reading Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset. I’ve read a lot of books by this author during the last year or so. I first read Kristin Lavransdatter some years ago, mostly because I read about it in my favourite Polish author’s – Małgorzata Musierowicz’s – books, because a lot of her female characters have read and like Kristin. I thoroughly enjoyed that book reading it for the first time, mostly because of Undset’s understanding and sensitive way of portraying people’s characters, inner lives etc. as well as the daily life of the characters (it’s a historical novel set in medieval Norway), and the strongly Scandinavian vibe generally, but also something else drew me to it that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Not much later, I came across The Master of Hestviken and enjoyed it even more mostly for the same reasons, and again primarily was drawn to it by something that I was not really able to name. 

   I’d always wanted to reread both of them, and possibly read her other books if I could get hold of any, but only actually did that last year, when I bought both of these books for my Mum. We had fully “converted” to Traditional Catholicism not long before last Christmas,  started attending Traditional Latin Mass exclusively and all that, and I think that was what made me think of these books again, because Undset wrote both of them after converting to Catholicism, and she herself lived pre Vatican II, and so  obviously did her medieval characters, and so when I started to attend Traditional Latin Mass more regularly, read Traditional Catholic books etc. it all starkly reminded me of Kristin and Olav (Olav is the main and title character of The Master of Hestviken). And so I thought that my Mum would really enjoy them, because of the TradCat flavour, and because my Mum likes old classics, as well as Scandinavian literature (Mika Valtari for example) and I thought she and Kristin and Olav would get along supremely well. And that turned out to be very much the case, because Mum says now that Kristin Lavransdatter is the book of her life (even despite a rather clunky Polish translation which really is a translation of the German translation and initially the clunkiness and weird pseudo-archaisms in it bothered my Mum, just as they did me). Olav took more time for her to develop a liking for, but I think that might be the case for a lot of people and I totally get it even though weirdly enough I had no such problem myself. To me, as a person, Olav is actually more interesting than Kristin, because Kristin, while an introvert, is shown more from the outside, like through her daily life, what she was doing, how everything was changing etc. and, compared to Olav, her personality isn’t as well-developed. My Mum initially disagreed with me and, again, I get why, ‘cause Olav is difficult to get to know in a way, but once she read the whole Master of Hestviken she agreed with me that, despite he’s in his own head most of the time (or imho precisely because of it), he has more of a character.

   So anyway, I couldn’t just look at how my Mum was reading my two favourite books, I had to reread them myself too. And I have more time for reading than my mum and a more messed up sleep cycle so I finished both way before Mum was done with Kristin. And this time it was precisely the spiritual life of those people that grabbed my attention the most about those books, and their relationship with God, their religious customs, their thoughts about faith etc. Perhaps this was the thing that I initially was so drawn by but couldn’t quite specify, although I think there is still something more to those books  that I can’t pinpoint. Further rereads are due, I guess. But yeah, this second time I enjoyed both of them even more, and noticed a lot more about them aside from just the external stuff which was what I mostly noticed when reading them for the first time. 

   Kristin and Olav only wetted my appetite further, and so I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Sigrid Undset’s Gymnadenia (The Wild Orchid I guess it’s more commonly known as in English) series is in our blind library. I must have somehow not noticed it before because it was there way before I first read Kristin. It was weird because I was actually looking for The Wild Orchid all around the web before and it either hadn’t occurred to me to look in such an obvious place, or for some reason I didn’t see it there or something. So, even though the recording is very old and sound quality not overly enticing, and even though the narrators mispronounced most Norwegian words like people’s names or place names in both parts of the series as if they were  French or German or something which drove me up the wall, I read the whole series. It is set in early 20th century so definitely feels very different than the other two books by her that I’d read. It tells the story of Paul Selmer and focuses in particular on his way to converting to Catholicism. It didn’t captivate me nearly as much as Kristin and Olav did, and really dragged in places, the first volume was particularly difficult to get through, I guess simply because Paul as a person and his life as such resonated with me less rather than because it was a worse book or something. But I found it very interesting nevertheless to see Paul’s transformation throughout the series and read about his various reflections relating to the Catholic faith, Mass, being Catholic etc. I thought that my ardent Mum would resonate with it even more, and again, I was right. She says that, even though it is obviously not really a religious book as such but just a work of fiction, it drew her closer to God and felt very spiritually enriching for her to read at that particular point in time when she read it. 

   And while I found The Wild Orchid in our library, I also found two other books by Undset, that is Jenny and a re-telling of the Arthurian legends but I’m not sure if the latter has been translated to English so no idea what it’s called in English. I believe both of these were written before her conversion, but to someone who knows that she eventually did, you can sort of read between the lines that she was having some sort of spiritual/existential breakthrough or something. Jenny was kind of disappointing, I don’t know, I guess I just expected it to be better than it actually was and didn’t really enjoy it all that very much, but it’s still worth reading by all means and I definitely don’t regret doing it. And the Arthurian legends, well I’m a Celtophile so… yeah, had a lot of fun reading it and seeing the whole thing from a bit of a different angle than the other Arthurian legends books that I’d read before show it. It was kind of weird and kind of funny though, considering that Sigrid Undset could overall definitely be classified as a Christian writer, that these legends are absolutely full of lust, murder and other similar obscenities and there’s a lot of focus on that, like reading it you’d think their lives consisted almost solely of adulterating, fighting/killing each other and drinking and it can make you feel kind of demoralised if you’re sensitive to such things. But there was still a lot of beauty in between and a lot of Christian accents, even though not as obvious as in Kristin or Olav. 

   Since then I’ve wanted to find some other of her books but had no luck, at least in Polish. Yet, I was able to find Undset’s aforementioned biography of Catherine of Siena in English on Audible, so I got it right away. Actually before I heard a sample on Audible, I thought that it was more of a fictionalised account of her life, since I’d only read fiction books by Undset before and was a bit surprised that it’s a proper biography, but I think it just shows that she was a really incredibly versatile writer. I am slowly finishing this book and I am really liking it because of how detailed it is. It isn’t just a biography like a lot of saints’ biographies that is written solely to inspire the faithful to follow her example, it actually shows in a very realistic way what sort of person she was overall, what her life must have looked like at the time when she lived, all the chaos going on at the time around the pope’s relocation from Rome to Avignon and the relationship between France and Rome etc. so that the reader can have a pretty detailed picture of everything, while at the same time it’s also quite obviously not just a historical book because, as a devout Christian herself, she also does focus a lot on the most important thing that is Catherine’s spiritual and mystical life so I’d say it’s a very edifying read at the same time and I feel sad for my Mum that she probably won’t be able to get hold of it anywhere in Polish unless some second-hand bookshop if she’s lucky. My dream is now that I could read her books in Norwegian one day, but for now the mere thought feels rather intimidating. 😀 Also, having read quite a few of her books by now, I am growing more and more curious of Sigrid Undset herself, as a person, and her life. I mean, I’m usually like that, when I read a book, or listen to music or anything like that, I quite automatically think about the individual behind it and what they must have been like to create that particular thing, but in this case I’m actually very seriously curious, and I wish someone wrote a thorough biography of her, but so far haven’t come across anything like that. Also these days I have another reason for being so much into her books. I’ve been praying for someone who is Norwegian, and I find it extremely encouraging and heartening in my efforts to know that such very deeply Christian books were born in Norway, and not very long ago at all, when Norway was already a largely secular country. 

   So, how about your current read(s)? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   Whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, what are some annoying things that the opposite do? 

   My answer: 

   Well I’m an introvert, and what I’m going to say obviously aren’t things that I think ALL extroverts do, just what I experienced with quite a few of them. 

   The most annoying thing imo is how a lot of extroverts see introversion as something weird, abnormal or pathological, something that is the worse option of the two and that you should at least try to change, or else you’re crazy, strange or something. I think if it’s something pathological, it’s not introversion but anxiety or other things like that, and introversion is just a totally neutral trait. Sure, there are more introverts than extroverts who have social anxiety or are shy, but that doesn’t mean that introversion alone is something that is deemed to make you pathologically shy and socially crippled, or that extroverts cannot develop those things (I actually wonder if something like social anxiety wouldn’t be even more painful and frustrating for an extrovert to live with). It’s kind of like being tall vs being short for example – each has its own upsides and downsides and potential risks that are more linked to the one but not the other, but none is inherently better or worse than the other. – 

   A lot of extroverts I know have a bit of an egocentric mentality, which sometimes really annoys me. They always readily assume that you must enjoy the same things as them, and if you’re not into partying or going out with their whole group of friends that you barely know, and if you politely refuse or something, they’ll assume you’re haughty/rude/cocky or that you don’t like them, alternatively they’ll keep trying to persuade you because they know that you want to do it and that you need company and someone who’d make your life less “boring”, you just don’t know it yourself yet, and even if you really do not want it, it’s the normal thing to do so you should. Speaking of extroverts assuming that you’re haughty or rude, that’s something that, to me personally as both an introvert as well as someone with AVPD and all that fun stuff that affects my peopling capacity, isn’t just annoying but also quite hurtful, because the last thing I want is for people to assume that I’m being deliberately rude towards them or don’t like them or consider myself superior in relation to them. 

   Insisting that you come in and stay at theirs when you just popped for a little while. Sure, it is hospitable to offer that, but insisting more than once when the invited individual already said “No, thank you”, to me it seems rather pushy and sometimes even threatening when someone is hellbent on having it their way. A lot of my family do that, and so does my Dad when people come to us. I always feel for them when they’ve come to, for example, just take their car back after last night’s party and my Dad invites them to come all over again and they’re like: “Oh no, no, thank you, we’d like to but we have this and this and that to do at home!” And he keeps going: “Oh but just stay for a cup of coffee” Guests: “Sorry but…” Dad: “I’ll make you a cuppa, come in, come in!” Guests: “But we really can’t stay long…” Dad: “Milk or sugar?”… That’s obnoxious! I totally get that he just wants to be nice and hospitable but, for flip’s sake, there’s a limit to everything! 

   And something that is objectively very minor but a real pet peeve of mine is how extroverts call introverted people “quiet”. I hate this word so, so much! Like, really? You see me for five minutes, during which I don’t really have much to say to you because I barely know you (and, as we’ve already established, I don’t know how to do peopling really) and you already know that I’m quiet? You should spend a minute in my brain. 😀 I can be very quiet, but I can  talk up a storm just as well in the right circumstances, and I think many introverts are like that, it depends how comfortable they feel in a given situation and how much they have to say on a specific topic. Some people, in addition to quickly labelling others with the “quiet” label, say it in a way that sounds as if they perceived those so-called “quiet” people as pretty dull and boring. And I do get that a lot of introverts seem like that at  first glance indeed. Sometimes even at second, too. And that group of introverts absolutely includes Bibielz too, perhaps even in the top 5! 😀 But if you label someone as “quiet” right away, you can’t expect them to ever open up to you. We’ll let you see what you want to see, we wouldn’t want you to get a shock from finding out how intense it can get when we go “loud”. 😀 And even those who are truly  quiet and very careful with how much they say at all times, they can be extremely deep people in their inner peace and balance, even deeper than those of us who hide intensity behind quietness, and in my experience can be really wise and anything but boring, but it takes time to get to know them of course. 

   So I think these are all the things that I find particularly annoying about some extroverts. 

   You? 🙂