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? 🙂 

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? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   Do you ever see wild animals? 

   My answer: 

   Well, given the fact that I’m blind, I don’t really get to see or be in any kind of contact with wild animals a lot. That being said though, I grew up in the countryside, having a forest on the other side of our gate, and now live in a place which perhaps is part of a town, strictly speaking, but feels a lot more like a village, so I still do see wild animals sometimes. We are often visited by all kinds of wild, stray cats from the whole area. Now that Jocky is around it happens a lot less and they’re a lot less brave around here, but when we first moved in here they would often move around our backyard very care-freely, not caring about my Dad’s attempts at scaring them away. Our place is also very well-liked by various birds, from kingfishers and blackbirds to magpies and seagulls (the latter two are Jocky’s worst enemies as they keep stealing his food when he’s asleep or on the other side of the backyard, and they’re nasty to Misha too ‘cause they like to drive him up the wall with their noise and he can’t even retaliate because he’s closed in here, and when he manages to escape they often scare him and seem like they’re laughing at him. We are also very often visited by hedgehogs, which is super cool because we all really like hedgehogs, they’re so cute. I got to feel a hedgehog quite a few times. Unfortunately, Jocky can be very nasty to them and has killed a few. 

   Just the other day, a blackbird hit our terrace window while my parents and their friends were having a little party. My Dad took care of it right away and wanted to call the rescue people, but the bird sadly died in the meantime. And then my Dad brought it to show it to me. Honestly, at first I had no idea what he was showing me and I got a total brainfuck for a few seconds. I had a quick feel of a small, silky, shapely, oddly limp head and immediately got chills, ‘cause some little part of my brain thought that my Dad was holding a little piece of Misha and I thought something happened to him, like that he must have gotten out while they were out and had some sort of gory accident or something. That was just a really really brief moment, I didn’t even manage to form that thought properly, but I already thought like I was going to get a heart attack, in my mind this limp little bird looked so much as if it was a little piece of Misha’s body. Only after a little while I realised that Misha is actually tucked away safely in my own wardrobe, and when I looked more closely I finally knew that it was feathers rather than fur and figured out what happened. It looked so sad and pitiful, but so cute as if it was sleeping. My Dad has a particular love for such little wild creatures, which perhaps may seem strange for some who know him but he really does, so he was quite depressed and no longer into partying so after that he promptly went to bed. So yeah, technically I saw a wild animal fairly recently, but for practical reasons I don’t have such opportunities very often. 

   Oh, and another fairly recent situation that I obviously didn’t see directly, but was present when it happened, was that one day when we were driving back home from church, Mum saw a whole flock of boars crossing through the road. Good thing that no one was driving through that particular place at the time, but it must have looked quite absurd. 

   Oh, and now I’m reminded of yet another thing. When Sofi was just a month old, we were also on a way somewhere, and my Dad spotted a female deer that must have been lost I guess or something else was wrong with her, so he stopped and just picked her up without much thinking I guess and brought her into the car. I’m not sure really what he wanted to achieve, guess show her to Mum or something. Mum was really afraid though that the deer might spread some bacteria or whatever and could infect Sofi, and she felt for her just being picked up abruptly like that, it must have been scary for her. I didn’t get to touch her or anything of course, but I heard her shrieking really loudly, probably in confirmation of my Mum’s words, so Dad quickly took her back from where he picked her from. I remember really feeling for her because that shriek of hers really sounded like she was very scared.

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What three things do you need for a good night’s rest? 

   My answer: 

  Well, I need a lot more than just three things, for one thing I need at least two pillows so it’s already two things, but let’s at least try to narrow it down to the most necessary things (let’s skip the pillows though since they’re pretty default, except for their preferred amount  which I’m sure varies for everyone). 

   So, for the most part of the year, I need a hot water bottle. Like I recently wrote, I’m okay with being cold during the day, I’m totally used to it, I even like it, and really the fact that I am cold most of the time doesn’t necessarily have to mean that I feel cold, but at night, regardless of whether I feel subjectively cold or not, it will take me ages to fall asleep if I’ll have cold feet. Another thing that I need quite critically is some background noise. Not too loud, so that I can actually fall asleep and sleep deeply, but also not too quiet so that my brain can latch onto something when I’m awake so that it doesn’t have to generate scary auditory stimuli itself, or so that it’s less likely that it will do it. For lack of anything better, even some white noise humming will be better than nothing, but if I have a choice, which I usually do, I much prefer it to be something more tangible like music that I like or a radio station where they talk in any of my favourite languages, because it’s just more interesting to listen to some nice music or a beautiful language before I fall asleep, and gives me something to focus on so I won’t start ruminating and overthinking which I generally have a tendency to do a lot at night anyway. Also it’s fun to have a nice soundtrack to your dreams. 😀 For that reason, I also really like to sleep with Misha. I’mm not really including him on this list, because he’s not a thing and it’s not like I really really need him to sleep well, because he doesn’t even sleep with me every single night, but when he does sleep with me, it also tends to decrease my night time sensory anxieties and makes me feel more peaceful overall, even though Misha is very quiet, but his mere presence makes me feel safer. 

   And the third thing… I was going to say a good book because I often read before sleep, well, I almost always read before sleep, and sometimes I get so engrossed in a book that I just can’t fall asleep because it’s so interesting so I keep reading instead. But a book doesn’t really make my sleep better or worse, it’s just a fun element of my bedtime routine. So I think the third thing on my list is going to be an open window. I guess I take it after my Mum that I can’t sleep in stuffy and very warm rooms or else I’ll wake up with a raging headache or even a migraine. And usually I’ll oversleep then and wake up feeling totally, disgustingly lousy, as if I had a hangover or something. And since I already have way more than enough migraine triggers, I’d rather avoid the ones that I have control over and keep the window at least partly open, or at least solidly air the room before going to bed, depends on what the weather is and what seems most reasonable at a time. So I’ll sleep with a hot water bottle, Misha who generates a lot of heat, and in the autumn-winter season like now Misha sleeps on a lamb skin, which lies on a blanket that belongs to both of us, and the blanket lies on my duvet which is quite thick in itself, so I like it to feel warm and cosy in bed while at the same time having very cool air in the room that makes sleep feel refreshing and that keeps my brain cool so that it won’t overheat. 😀 My Mum is a lot more hardcore though because she sleeps with her window wide open every night, and she doesn’t do hot water bottles, has no blanket most of the time and just a single duvet, but unlike me she always puts something over her head and ears, like a scarf or something, to keep more warmth in and to isolate herself from noises that could wake her up (like my Dad’s snoring). That would make me personally feel very much out of control and, knowing myself, I’d constantly wake up thinking that someone was calling me  or something and I didn’t hear it, not to mention that it would make my anxiety worse, but my Mum literally can’t fall asleep without covering her head, and she can’t have any light. My Dad was previously a definitely window-closed person, but he just had to get used to it being different when they  married, because this is one field where my Mum doesn’t tolerate compromises, and now that she’s going through menopause, she’s even worse, so my poor Dad sleeps under a huge duvet and a really warm, heavy weighted blanket, and with socks on, and he says he’s still freezing some nights. I guess that’s because he does socks instead of a hot water bottle. Socks don’t really give you additional warmth, just keep your natural warmth in, and if you’re not really warm to begin with, that’s not much help I guess. Sofi also likes to sleep with a hot water bottle, but it’s more just because she enjoys it a lot rather than that she won’t fall asleep easily without it. And she’s also like me in that she needs some quiet sound in the background, as well as a bit of light because she’s scared of the dark.

   So yeah, it’s funny how you can find so many tips on how to sleep well from all kinds of sleep experts, when in reality, everyone has such totally different habits, even within one family, and can’t fall asleep if something’s even slightly different than the way they like. 😀 And then there’s Misha, abut whose sleep routines one could write a whole essay and how they change based on seasons, his moods, external circumstances etc. I guess even I don’t know everything about them and don’t always remember the order in which all his sleep rituals should take place. 

   How about you and your ideal sleep conditions? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What did you try and found out it’s not for you? 

   My answer: 

   Making music. I’ve already written on here how I used to sing a lot when I was little, and I’m pretty sure I must have liked it, though sometimes I wonder whether my love for it evolved naturally, or was it coaxed a bit by my well-meaning family, once they found out that Bibiel can hold a tune and that music is something that a lot of blind people are good at. But in any case, I at least thought that I liked it, and I was singing all the time and liked to show off my abilities, and whenever someone would ask me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I would always say either a singer or a musician or both, or that I wanted to “do a career”. I also used to take part in song contests for children from a very early age, but I already wrote not so long ago about that bad case of Bibiel propaganda in a school for intellectually disabled children where I was the only non-intellectually disabled kid from outside that school who took part in that contest and won it like three or four times in a row. I still feel sad for those children lol, I mean their teachers or whoever organised that stuff must have been quite dumb to let one single non-intellectually disabled child who hadn’t even reached school age yet take part in that contest just so no one from the actual school could ever win. 😀 I suppose though that perhaps it was someone in my family, like my grand who is a very sociable person and knows lots of people in her town where that school was, who must have had a good relationship with someone in that school and convinced them to do that.  

   Then when I went to school, or preschool at first, to be exact, it was a very musical environment as well so they encouraged me to continue singing as well. I also got to sing during many more contests, for example in the religious song contest twice, or various kinds of celebrations and such either within the whole blind centre thing or a bit larger stuff. 

   Speaking of the religious song contests, when I was taking part in the first one, I was prepared for it by the headmistress of the music school that was part of the whole blind centre thing. I wasn’t a member of the music school then as few preschool-aged kids were, she just must have learnt somehow that I’m into singing and figured that it would be a good idea to include me in that contest although I remember being ever so slightly intimidated that most of the children taking part in it, including the ones who sang some bits of my song, , were quite a lot older than me, like teenagers. But it was still all very exciting. The headmistress was quite a particular person in some regards and I’d heard that many students didn’t really like her or find her a bit intimidating, but while I do remember she was quite demanding, she was also very nice to me and I actually liked her a lot, though for Bibiel back then it didn’t take much to like someone a lot. I remember how she showed me all kinds of instruments that were in the room where we were rehearsing and how to play them, and when I think about it now, it seemed like the whole preparation time must have really taken quite a few weeks. The contest finally came, Bibiel came third in it, and then suddenly it was over. I guess it was a bit confusing for my Bibiel brain, and I was wondering why I no longer have those singing lessons. So finally one day I asked one of the preschool staff, but she had no idea and told me to ask our eurhythmics teacher when she comes, because she worked in the music school as well so might know better. ANd so I did ask the eurhythmics teacher. She asked me what instrument I used to play in there, which made me go dumbstruck for a while, because, umm, we weren’t really playing anything, just singing. But the headmistress was playing piano so eventually I said piano. The eurhythmics teacher said that it’s someone else who teaches piano and mentioned that teacher’s name and said she’ll talk to her. And that’s how, quite accidentally, Bibielz ended up in music school before Bibielz even realised it. 😀 

   I had a really fun, chatty and engaging piano teacher and like talking to her about all kinds of things, but I quickly learned that playing piano isn’t going to be quite as easy as singing. I did like it in general, but slowly felt more and more discouraged, because to play really well and the way I wanted to play in my mind, I had to have more coordination than I actually had. I knew what I should do in theory, but in practice my hands didn’t always cooperate with my brain too well and so I was progressing very slowly. 

   Once I started actual school, I continued learning piano and a lot of the other kids from my class and boarding school group were also in music school by then, I also sang more or less regularly, including occasionally psalms in church and stuff like that. Together with my other school friends, I also started having various theoretical activities as part of music school, like ear training and other stuff that I don’t even know how it’s called in English. But we’d learn scores, listen to classical music etc. etc. and as far as I remember we all found it rather boring at that point. 

   As I continued to struggle quite a lot with the piano, and my brain started to change quite a lot, both in a natural way as in developing and a more pathological way as in depression, which I only got diagnosed with at age 10 but had been feeling like that since I was 8, which I wrote about in that post I linked above, gradually, I started losing all the fun that I had with music and singing, and instead started to find it quite stressful and overwhelming. Then when I was ten, I changed schools and went to an inclusive school closer to home, which I was really happy about in general because I always wanted to be able to go to school closer to home so that I could be home every single day rather than go there once a few weeks. While being home was certainly a very welcome change, my brains grew more and more neurotic and depressive, which wasn’t helped by the Achilles tendon surgery I had to had in the meantime and then was recovering for long weeks without having much to do in the meantime, and obviously boredom only worsens shit like that. My being in the inclusive school was also not all as great as we originally hoped. Unlike in the blind school, where everything is prepared for children’s education beforehand, here, my Mum had to cover the costs of my school books. Printing books in Braille isn’t a cheap business, and if you want to order a particular book to be printed, you have to pay a small fortune. So my Mum wasn’t even able to pay for all my school books, only the ones for math which we figured would be the most necessary because other subjects would be easier for me to learn than math, and also the math teacher insisted that I have exactly the same books as the whole class. It didn’t work like that anyway, because as soon as the printing company sent one volume (Braille books typically have several volumes because they’re naturally larger than normal print books and Braille letters take up more space), my class was already further ahead in their book and the volume I had didn’t cover that yet. 😀 Also my Mum was expected to help me with school work a lot, again particularly with math which my Mum has little idea about. If the teacher didn’t have time to explain something to me during class, I’d have to do it with Mum, and she’d have to help me with homework from all subjects as well, because she had the books in normal print and would read to me what I was supposed to do etc. That was difficult because Mum had baby Sofi to take care of, and those schooling sessions could take ages. I was also totally not used to it, as I used to do all my school work totally independently and be done with it in no time, so having to wait for Mum to help me out was insanely frustrating. So after the second year of my stay at that school, even I could see that, academically, it would be a lot better for me if I went back to the blind school, and Mum convinced me to make that move, telling me that she’ll make my biggest dream come true in return, which at the time was meeting the Polish writer Małgorzata Musierowicz, and she did eventually make my dream come true. However, in the end she didn’t even have to use that bribe, because during holidays after that second school year, we got involved in a huge shit thanks to that inclusive school, which I wrote about here, and after that there was no way I could imagine seeing those people again. 

   But, going back to the actual topic of this post, during my whole stay at the inclusive school, I didn’t really sing all that much anymore. In fact not at all. And I didn’t really miss it one bit. On the contrary, when I thought about going back to the blind school, and doing all that music stuff all over again, it made me feel a bit sick. My Mum strongly encouraged me to take up the piano again though. All because, years earlier, I told her how I once imagined being a mummy of a huge family and how it would be neat if I could play the piano for all my children, which was an imagining I had based on a book I was reading at the time and the main character being like that. 😀 My Mum didn’t quite realise yet that I tend to have ALL kinds of daydreams, and the mere fact that I have daydreamed about something, doesn’t have to mean that I seriously want to do it in real life. And I didn’t realise yet that sometimes it’s better to keep your daydreams to yourself, or else there’s a risk that people might take you seriously. 😀 That’s, after all, a huge pro of daydreams, that you can switch between them whenever you want and don’t have to commit to one. When I imagine something, it definitely isn’t always something that I’d like experiencing for real, it’s just fun to imagine it for a while. So anyway, whenever I’d say that I want to quit the piano, she’d remind me of that daydream and said that I’d later regret my decision. The school people of course also encouraged me to take it up again. 

   This time round, my previous piano teacher was on maternity leave I believe, so I was assigned a different one – an older, very serious lady who had the patience of a saint, and as she once admitted, she graded me based on my good intentions, which I thought both very amusing and very kind of her, although I don’t think any good intentions for playing the piano were left in me by that point, so I guess I totally didn’t deserve the good grades I got Fromm her. 😀 Also as a way of compromise between me vs the school people and Mum, I wasn’t in music school anymore, but instead in something that would literally translate to musical fire or musical hearth from Polish, I don’t know what it’s called in English or if it’s called at all, anyway it was a sort of less demanding alternative to music school, where you could learn to play instrument but didn’t have to take so many exams or do theory and it was a lot less serious. I was very adamant though that I wouldn’t do singing anymore. And, thankfully, I didn’t even have to fight too much about it, because I think people realised that it’s no longer that Bibiel who liked singing so much, and I was very glad to be free at least of that. I did occasionally sing a psalm in church if they had to find someone quickly and no one else could do that, but that was it. And like I’ve already mentioned, some people seemed really disconsolate that I didn’t sing anymore, wording it sometimes in such a way that you could have thought I was my singing, and once I didn’t sing, I wasn’t really at all, or so it felt being on the receiving end of such comments. 😀 

   Eventually, I was able to break free from the piano as well. It turned out that I may need another feet surgery, and in order to try and prevent it from being a necessity, I had to have a lot of feet exercises and rehabilitation. So in order for that to fit into my schedule, I was more than happy to ditch the piano out of it. Theoretically, if I really wanted and was really motivated to do both, I’m sure I could, even if my schedule would be a bit packed, but I was elated to finally get rid of it out of my life, and this time round, my Mum didn’t oppose, as she understood that I didn’t want the surgery and neither did she. The piano was hardly a priority anymore. 

   Then later on, during some holidays, my friend and roommate was going to visit me at home. She played guitar, and I really wanted her to be able to play for me a bit, but I guess she either didn’t have her own guitar or couldn’t take it with her or something, don’t remember what exactly, in any case my Mum and me wanted to get hold of some guitar that she could play. And my Godmother had a friend who played the guitar, so we asked my Godmother to ask her friend if she could lend it to us for a few days, and she did. While my friend stayed with us, my Mum got an excellent idea that Bibiel could learn to play the guitar as well, and that this friend of my Godmother’s could teach me. The idea itself was not unappealing to me, but I was quite sure that if I wasn’t able to learn the piano very well for all those years, then the guitar would be even more difficult. You really have to be quite dextrous to play it, even if it’s not a super difficult instrument overall. But Mum was saying that, oh well, if I won’t like it or will find it too difficult, I won’t have to keep going, and I guess a part of me did indeed want to try in case it could work out. So she visited me every week during the remainder of the holidays and taught me some really basic things. It was very interesting, but again, practically, my brain-hand coordination or lack thereof made it very difficult and even when I thought that I have learned some chords or technique with her, when I tried to practice it by myself, I didn’t know how, or rather, I did know perfectly well on a cognitive level, but not on a manual level, if that even makes sense. 

   So, after the summer was over, my guitar playing was over too, and now I don’t even remember anything of that at all. 

   From my current perspective, even though all those years of various forms of musical education were mostly quite difficult for me, I am now grateful for that in a way. Because while I haven’t been making any music in any way more serious than singing Misha to sleep or playing a water bottle ever since quitting the guitar and I have no desire to do more (well theoretically I think I’d really like to be able to play the Celtic harp but I know that it’s either totally not doable for me, or even if it is, it would require a lot more effort than I’d be actually, seriously willing to put into something like that), I wouldn’t be able to get as much out of listening music as I do. I definitely think that my role is that of a listener rather than performer, but to be a good listener I think it’s also a good idea to be able to have a basic idea about performing, so that you can judge it more fairly. My understanding of music is definitely not as good as that of people who have actually graduated from music school or even can play an instrument well, I don’t have absolute pitch or anything like that, but still I think the many experiences of performing music and learning about it that I had make me a bit more of an attentive and analytical listener than people who have no such experiences at all. Also I think given that so many people can sing better or worse, and can be easily trained to sing even better than they do, it’s a good idea to give every child at least a taste of what it’s like to sing or play an instrument, ‘cause otherwise they’ll just have no idea if they like it or if they might actually be good at it. 

   People in my extended family still ask me on a regular basis if I still sing like I used to, or why I don’t anymore, even if they asked me precisely the same thing when we saw each other previously, and I usually tell people that I now do languages instead, which are kind of like a different form of music. Because I do think they are. So, who knows, if I didn’t have that early music education, maybe I wouldn’t take up languages either? I’m very curious what I’d do with my life then, but I doubt it would be anything interesting. 😀 

   How about you? What’s not for you? 🙂 

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? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What is something others find scary but you don’t? 

   My answer: 

   I’m not really scared of death, though a lot of people seem to be. I think dying can be scary if you die in a painful or some really brutal way or something, but still, there are things that are a lot scarier to me and death itself isn’t scary to me at all, so I have to say I don’t really understand people who avoid the topic or even the word panically, avoid telling their loved ones that they’re dying or have other  superstitions around it. I think we do need to talk about this topic because it is going to happen to everyone, and we need to think about it and prepare for it and often have it in mind because our life after death is going to be immeasurably longer than the earthly one so you want to be well-prepared and live this life well to be able to live your eternal life happily. So yeah, I think part of why I’m not scared of death is simply that I’m Catholic, but also part of it is probably that I’ve been suicidal many times, with passive suicidal thoughts being a regular background noise in my brain, and I’ve had dysthymia for years and don’t really feel overly attached to this life as a result and have gotten used to thinking about death in all kinds of ways, healthy and not. If I got to choose how long I want to live, I’d definitely not be one of those people who want to live a hundred years provided I’d be healthy, which my Dad says he’d really like, and presumably many Polish people because people here always wish each other “a hundred years” on their birthdays. That would feel extremely exhausting. And actually, yeah, scary. Because I think I’m more scared of old age than death. I always say I wouldn’t like to live past 50. Which isn’t to say that I’d off myself if I were to live until my 50th birthday, but simply that if it was up to me, I would choose to die younger than that, but since it’s not, I trust that however long I’m supposed to live according to God’s will is  best for me long-term. Similarly, I am also not afraid of stuff like cemeteries or “ghosts”, if what people mean by ghosts are spirits of dead people. Ghosts as in demons and evil spirits are obviously evil so it’s natural for people to fear them, but fearing deceased people… I don’t get it. Like, I once read about a guy who believed that his house, which used to belong to his mother but he moved in there after her death with his family, was haunted by his mother’s spirit. Why would your mother’s personality suddenly change completely after her death and why she’d enjoy scaring her children and grandchildren by playing poltergeist is beyond me. The poltergeists and similar phenomena are not dead people but demonic stuff, unless your mummy has come to you to ask you to pray for her or watch over you. 

   Another thing that a lot of people I know are scared of but I myself not really are spiders. Sure, they’re yucky, and I have no liking for them, but, assuming they’re not poisonous, which those in our bit of the world are not, they don’t scare me. 

   Also, perhaps quite ironically given my rather angsty nature, I am usually not phased by horror movies. The reason is pretty simple – I just don’t see them. – And while I probably know it better than most people in this world that sound alone can be very scary, I don’t really find horror soundtracks scary usually. Granted, I’m not interested in such movies so I don’t really watch them, and perhaps there are some that I would find scary but am just not aware of their existence and don’t care. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

  OK, guess it’s time for some new question of the day, what do y’all think? 

   Simple one: 

   How do you feel about cold weather? 

   My answer: 

   I feel positively about it, in general. Way more than about hot weather for sure. Staying in cold conditions for longer can be difficult, but, unless it’s some really extreme cold, I think it’s a lot easier to deal with than heat. My brain and my whole system don’t really do heat. It makes my thinking sluggish and it makes me feel faint and weak pretty quickly and it makes my migraines worse, and sometimes when I’m in heat for long it even gives me nausea. And I’m just totally not a fan of that hot, clammy feeling. I’m the sort of person who has usually cold hands and feet, which I’m usually okay with ‘cause I’m used to it, so I don’t necessarily feel cold when I am cold, unless it’s night time, then I often need a hot water bottle because I won’t be able to fall asleep easily with cold feet. And I’m so used to the default state of my hands and feet being cold, that it feels really odd and kind of low-key disgusting when they get really warm, even if they aren’t sweaty or anything. Cold hands are a lot more practical. I find it a lot better to read Braille with cold fingers, though not necessarily really cold like freezing obviously. They’re also really good for migraines if you don’t have ice cubes or a cooling pad or whatever, or you can serve as a cooling pad for someone else afflicted with a headache, lol. 

   If you asked little Bibiel what was her favourite season, she would say summer without the slightest hesitation. I did indeed like summer a lot as a kid, ‘cause it was holidays time so I was at home as opposed to boarding school, or even when I wasn’t going to boarding school but to a school closer to home, I still always had school allergy and so summer months were very much welcome. Also you could go to the sea (which I still like a lot) or pick berries, which were my favourite fruit and we had a forest nearby. But now that I don’t go to school, I definitely much prefer winter because I just hate the heat. Even with all the introvert-unfriendly things about winter like Christmas and a lot of other celebrations in my family, I like the winter vibe a lot more. Oh, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned it a lot here that I have a weird affinity with ice. I just LOVE ice. Always have. When I was a kid, I dreamt of having a huge container filled with ice cubes that would never melt so I could play with them as much as I’d like. Would still be super happy to have such a thing. I love the feel of ice, the sound of ice cracking, the sound of ice in the glass with a drink (when I add ice to a drink I always add quite a lot of it and if there’s any ice left by the time I finish the drink, I just suck on it), icicles, everything! I even suck on ice when I’m really anxious because of emetophobia, like when I’m particularly triggered when someone in my family gets a tummy bug or something like that, ever since I heard that that’s what chemo patients do to avoid vomiting. I now know that it’s done more to keep them hydrated during those times, and I’m obviously not a chemo patient and don’t even vomit, but I find it helpful nonetheless. I suppose if I wasn’t blind and hadn’t such crappy balance, I could have been an ice skater or something. As it is though, the mere idea feels scary. 😀 

   Also, let’s not forget about the cosy aspect to cold weather. Isn’t it just so cool when you can stay warm and comfy in your bed at night, or sip on something hot while having some cosy slippers on while it’s snowing or even just raining heavily outside with the wind howling like crazy? Or even coming back home from such cold conditions, it feels really nice. I am particularly lucky in this regard because a couple years ago, my Mum made a pair of very fluffy overalls for me, which I really like to wear in the evenings, because they’re the only clothing item that my Mum made for me and they’re super fluffy. And there’s so much yummy food that is generally associated with cold weather, not to mention all the delicious Christmas foods. Some people think that cold weather is depressing, like my Dad for example, who says he’d be perfectly happy living somewhere hot like the Mediterranean countries or Latin America. But for me personally, sometimes heat can be more depressing just because of how it makes me feel physically, when I have no energy or even brainergy. So I don’t think I would mind it very much at all if I had to live in a really cold place like Finland, for example. I guess I would feel a lot more ambivalent about cold weather if I were a driver (like my Dad is, he’s a lorry driver), driving in winter conditions or when it’s foggy must be a nightmare. But even as it is, the snow and ice are still a challenge for blind people to get around in. Not only is it easy to fall, especially if you’ve got other things on top of blindness like the balance stuff in Bibiel’s case or like cerebral palsy that a lot of blind people also have etc. but also the snow can be really disorienting, because you can’t feel the ground under your feet and how it changes, which is often a very important cue in navigating, and additionally it can change the ambience/acoustics of a space where you are so it feels different than usual and might be confusing. Still, cold weather totally wins for me. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What do you think your pet thinks about you? 

   My answer: 

   I like to think that Misha likes me, if not for anything else than at least for being a fairly consistent part of the room that he most likes to sleep in, so like a part of his comforting daily routine or something. I think that, if he associates my Mum with food, which seems to be the case because she is his main food provider and he wants food every time he sees her, as if he thought that she’s some sort of food-producing machine who can make meat fall out of her hands randomly at will, then he must associate me with sleep. Very often when Misha and I are downstairs and then I go up to my room, he runs after me and wants to be there with me and sleep. I always tell him that it’s his room as well, because he doesn’t have his own separate room. He has a lot of places to sleep in in my room, but usually sleeps on his favourite blanket on my bed, and when it’s colder I also put his grey-coloured lamb skin over it. But before he actually falls asleep, there’s a whole ceremony to go through. He has to have his sleepy treat, and then I have to lay down on the bed and he goes on top of me and lays on my chest, sniffs my face and wants a deep head and face massage. This is actually very unlike Misha because he’s generally very afraid of touch, closeness and things like that, but this lying on Bibiel has become a part of his daily routine and he seems to like it very much. Mum once saw us like that and she said she’d never seen Misha more relaxed and blissfully glassy-eyed. 😀 Sometimes he ends up falling asleep on me, or we both do. And then when he’ll always wake up with a start and get off me, go on his blanket and move as far away from me as possible, ashamed of his extreme weakness and desperately trying to pretend that nothing happened and pick up the leftover pieces of his usual dignity. He’ll rarely sleep there when I’m not around or can’t lay down with him at least for a while or assist with his sleeping routine. Then he usually climbs up on the wardrobe or sleeps in my armchair and Sofi laughs that he looks like some mini businessman who fell asleep in the middle of his work day in the office or has nowhere to go at night so sleeps at work, because this armchair is huge in comparison with him. 

   I think Misha also associates me or at least my room with calm, because he’ll also always come here whenever he’s stressed or overwhelmed, like when something scary for him is going on or there are a lot of people downstairs or he’s had a difficult day or isn’t feeling well. I’ll always try my best to comfort him then and, if he feels like it and is in his clingy mood, which sometimes is the case when he’s sad despite he is usually not clingy at all, I’ll try my best to give him my full attention and cuddle him and make him feel safe and happy as much as possible ‘cause I hate to see him sad or stressed out or ill or something. 

   I’m also sure that Misha knows I like him most of all the people here. Whether he actually cares about it/appreciates it/it makes any difference for him, I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters really, but I’m sure he knows how much I like him and how important he is to me and sometimes he likes to take an advantage of it. Like, sometimes when he goes somewhere high up or gets stuck somewhere and can’t easily get out/is afraid to jump off it, he’ll cry very pitifully when he knows that I’m near him, ‘cause he knows I’m going to be worried about him and that he won’t be able to make it on his own out of wherever he is, and I’ll want to help him right away. But when it’s anyone else other than me and he’s stuck in the same place, he will jump off or extricate himself totally independently, with no crying or anything, even if it takes him a long time to figure out how to do it or how to jump off safely. Or he makes a lot more fuss of his sleep than when he sleeps with Sofi, who has no time for dwelling whether the reason for Misha’s not wanting to sleep is the fact that he doesn’t like her new blanket, or perhaps he wants to eat, or maybe he’s cold or whatever. If he doesn’t want to sleep in her room and cries, she’ll just kick him out, not wondering what might be the reason for him crying. So he’s learned that if he wants to be at Sofi’s he has to be happy with what he’s got and not complain. Meanwhile with Bibiel he can usually be the one who sets conditions and refuses to fall asleep if the bed isn’t made the way he likes, or Bibiel tosses and turns too much or he didn’t get his sleepy treat or not enough and Bibiel is a huge Misha-pleaser. Bibiel can go as far as to randomly come over to Misha while he’s sleeping and check if his extremities are not cold, no one else bothers. I also think that, while it’s Mum who has best eye contact with Misha and understands his different expressions and stuff, it’s Bibiel who is better at interpreting his sounds. Other people here don’t seem to have much of an idea what is the difference between a happy “hhrrru?” Or a sad “hhrrru?” Or that there is a special sound that says “Uh oh, I’m going to vomit soon”, or a special moaning sound for when he wants to the loo but the door is closed or something, or even a very rude, impatient sound that says something like: “Will you finally move your flippin’ ass and give me my food? I’m dying of starvation, you stupid peep! I want to eat, now!!! Can’t you see?”. My Dad doesn’t even think he does that deliberately, he says Misha’s sounds are just random depending how they happen to come out of him. But I’m absolutely sure that he knows what he wants to say and I think he knows that I know, because as much as he knows that he can get a lot out of me, he never meows rudely like that at me anymore, ‘cause when he used to do, I’d yell back at him and wouldn’t give him his food til he said something nicer. Meanwhile he talks like that to Mum regularly, and she just gets mad at him, because that’s how this sound makes you instantly feel, except she doesn’t seem to understand that it’s because of how he said it and thinks she’s mad just because he keeps asking for food, so she doesn’t address that properly. 

    I think he must also think that I’m weird, ‘cause I talk to him a lot more than anybody else here does and often about totally random things that have nothing to do with him. Or I sing to him.  Or I talk to myself when he’s around. 

   He also seems mind-boggled by some things that we peeps do. Like, just the other day I was praying, and Misha wanted a snack, but, well, I was praying, so I wasn’t up to giving him his snack just then. He was very patient and just stood next to me and waited, and I could feel him staring at me. I assume he must have wondered what the freak I was doing while being practically still for so long. Perhaps he thought I was sleeping in a kneeling position if he didn’t even ask for his food, only when I finished. Or several of us have noticed that Misha’ seems  very much interested in human toilet habits, like my Dad says that Misha regularly stares at him when they happen to be using their respective loos at the same time. He must also think that our food – like veggies, or chips, or eggs, which are some of the things he showed some interest in – must be disgusting. And I guess he’s also a bit afraid of all of us, because like I said he’s afraid of closeness and we want to stroke him all the time and Sofi and I want to pick him up and cuddle and kiss him all day because he’s almost like he exists solely to be cuddled and stroked and kissed and hugged and squeezed and carried around everywhere. So unlucky for him that he looks the way he does with the sort of personality he has. 

   When Misha first came to us, he had to learn quickly that being sprawled across the floor or getting  in the way of people might not be the best idea, as I managed to step on him on his second night with us while going to the loo, and then trapped his tail in the loo door on my way out of it, which low-key traumatised both of us, I think. Now Misha never gets anyone in the way but Mum says he seems to be particularly careful with Bibiel. I’m not sure though if he actually gets the fact that I can’t see him. People tell me that he often looks at me very persistently, in particular when he wants food or attention, or alternates his gaze in a very telling, reproachful way between me and his bowl, seeming equally baffled every single time that there is no reaction and that the food doesn’t magically appear in the bowl. 😀 But on the other hand he’s a lot more patient and forgiving with me than the other peeps. When he was very little and just arrived at our house, initially I would often unintentionally put my fingers in his eyes, and even though he’s normally so anxious and can’t stand when Mum gives him his eye drops which he needs regularly, he’d never run away or be angry or anything. Or when he wants to say hi, in the morning or when I’ve come back from somewhere, he’ll come close to me for a very short while and rub his head against me, whereas with other peeps he just looks at them in an acknowledging way, unless he’s really missed us or something then he’ll say “Hhrrru?” And will “faint” on the floor at someone’s feet out of happiness. 

   He also seems to think that we peeps have some weird superpower that allows us to locate him whenever he says something, because when someone accidentally shuts him somewhere like Mum often does in the wardrobe ‘cause he keeps going in there while she picks out her clothes, he’ll then “Hhrrru?” That he wants out, but as soon as someone realises that he’s closed somewhere and tries to locate him more precisely, he won’t respond anymore because he thinks if people know that he’s closed they must know where he is closed and will rescue him soon. You can call out for him till you die, and he won’t make a sound. He only will when you’ll stop actively looking for him. That can be a problem sometimes, like once we looked for him for two hours when he got stuck inside a sofa or other place that you wouldn’t necessarily think about. Once he got stuck somewhere in the bathroom soon after we got a new bathtub installed, but we couldn’t figure out where in the bathroom he was so Mum freaked out that the bathtub guys must have walled him up in the bathtub not realising that he was there and everything would have to be taken down and redone to set him free, if he wouldn’t starve in the meantime. But he only turned out to be in a cupboard. 

   Oh, and people are very good vehicles in his opinion. Just today in the morning my Dad came into my room with Misha on his back. It was totally absurd because my Dad claims he doesn’t really like Misha, because he doesn’t like cats in general and because, yeah, we have to say that, apart from his angelic looks, objectively speaking, Misha isn’t a very likeable creature, because apparently his gaze is rather unpleasant and his personality isn’t the most outgoing in the world. Yet, he’s managed to wrap even my Dad around his cute little toe bean. He kept sitting on my Dad and riding around the whole house for like fifteen minutes, and my Dad (even though he’s having a cold, which always makes him grumpy) was all smiles and kept cooing at him, and then when Misha jumped off him, he laid down on the floor, and my Dad was down on his knees next to him immediately, stroking his spine. That was so hilarious, but I didn’t dare laugh until afterwards, as I didn’t want to risk putting an abrupt end to this serene scene and snapping my Dad back into the reality. I’m inclined to believe that conspiracy theory that  cats have some sort of substance that brainwashes people and tricks them into loving the cat even if it’s against the personal interest of the affected human victim, and then the peep in question goes crazy or even demented over time, hence so many cat owners are crazy. I myself am a very severe case, as not only am I happy to serve as a vehicle for Misha as well, but I often do it voluntarily, so that he doesn’t have to walk too much, and walk around with him on my shoulder. With so much food, sleep and so many vehicles, lifts and other such available, it’s kind of a miracle that he still looks as scrawny as he does and isn’t a more literal fur ball yet. 

   So yeah, that’s what I can say about what I think Misha thinks about me and us. 

   I’m not sure how about Jocky but I suppose he must really love me because he’s always so happy when I show him any attention as if I was some sort of Bibiel deity, it’s weird because it’s Sofi who’s his mummy but he doesn’t get so crazy when Sofi plays with him, but with me he goes nuts and humiliates himself licking my feet all the time. Not to mention what happens when I give him food. And my Dad’s fishies are probably in awe whenever they see any of us, if fish have as short memory span as I’ve heard. They probably only care about Dad anyway because he feeds them. And perhaps sometimes Misha who likes to play fisherman when he’s bored and probably terrifies them, if they have enough kilobytes of memory to actually remember something for long enough to feel terrified. 

   How about your pets? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   How curious are you? 

   My answer: 

   Well, I am not aware of any way to measure curiosity (though now that I think of it I’m really curious if one exists and if so would like to try it out), but, for what it’s worth, I’d say I’m VERY curious. As much as I have mixed feelings about astrology, and, being an Aquarius, don’t really find much in common between myself and Aquarian personality traits, curiosity is definitely one thing that I do have and that is often mentioned as an Aquarius thing. I like to overthink things, look at them from different angles, and when you that, in whatever topic or field of life really, you’re going to end up with a lot of questions and wanting to know more. Also, while I’m a fairly extreme introvert, I am also curiously curious about my fellow human beings at the same time. I love to observe people, how they behave in different situations, what they’re like, to learn what they think, how people differ from each other and why and what it depends on etc. etc. I like to listen to people, and, in my immediate surroundings, a lot of people come to me to tell me about what’s going on for them or what’s going on in their minds, and it’s very interesting for me to compare how two people involved in the same situation see it totally differently. 

   I really like to learn new things, in particular in those fields I’m especially interested in, but I also often wonder about lots of totally random little things and want to know why something is the way it is and then I’ll keep digging til I quench my curiosity. I keep falling down rabbit holes of various depth, usually more or less related to my topics of interest, like some niche topic within one of those larger topics, and I’ll keep digging, prodding and poking til it feels like there either isn’t much more to find out, or what there still is to learn exceeds my lay person understanding, or I just get fed up with thinking about the same thing all the time. I can spend really long times in such rabbit holes, and occasionally there are just some that I never get out of but instead develop a full-time interest in a given rabbit hole. Or there are rabbit holes that I may not be into full-time but still end up revisiting more or less regularly with the aim of deeper exploration. They can be very sophisticated and nerdy rabbit holes, or very mundane rabbit holes. 

   Oh and of course let’s not forget fazas. In that particular area, my curiosity can feel absolutely unquenchable and unrestrainable. Which is, hm, just a little bit of a problem because, I mean, these are people, and being curious about basically everything to do with someone like that, I guess would usually seen as kind of weird. I am interested in everything possible about my faza peeps. Most of my faza peeps happen to be musicians, and often pretty niche ones so it’s not easy for me to learn very much about them, I have to just infer a lot based on what knowledge I’ve got. And, as people who know me will know, it’s far from me being interested solely in their music/musical activity. I want to know everything, down to how they like their flipping coffee, or if they do at all, or what they like if they don’t like coffee. I want to know what sort of relationship they have with their mum. I want to know what their happiest/saddest/funniest memory is. I’m also curious about the same things regarding my literary fazas, even though they’re technically creations of someone’s brains. I usually (with one exception being Valancy Stirling) get literary fazas on secondary characters, and it always bugs me so much that, even though they’re all pretty well-written characters with a strong identity, I know so little about what sort of people they really are, so when I was younger I wrote mini fanfic stories with them. Only  Ravi Reinssön, my most recent literary faza that I got in 2018, didn’t get his fanfics, because I haven’t really been writing much fiction by then already, but still I’ve created a lot about him just in my brain. But whatever is reasonably possible for me to learn about my faza peeps (the real ones in particular) I’ll always try to learn and investigate properly if that’s actually true if only I am able to do that and will do as extensive research as only possible. 😀 Which sometimes may be difficult if I’m only starting to learn their mother tongue, but I try nonetheless. 

   I’m relatively less curious when it comes to experiences though, my curiosity is much higher regarding intellectual or other abstract things. That may be partly because of me being rather anxious and so my motivation to do potentially scary things just to see what they’re like is much lower as a result. I don’t really see it as much of a problem though, or only rarely do. Usually I’m happy just exploring things on a cognitive/intellectual level and sometimes I actually feel it helps me see them from a different angle. Like, I much prefer just observing a group of people as an outsider rather than being an active part of it and I feel I take things in a lot more deeply this way and can analyse everything more thoroughly. I don’t usually miss being in the centre of things and I don’t think I necessarily always need it to quench my curiosity. 

   Curiosity is thus one of many traits that I share with my little Misha (a fellow Aquarius, by the way, our birthdays are only two days apart, but I think it’s more his famously curious Russian blue ancestry rather than the zodiac sign making him this way). His can be quite extreme and even make it difficult for him to fall asleep sometimes. He’ll hear the door creaking and he’ll sit upright immediately and have to investigate. And he’s nosy like an old lady, spending a lot of time looking out the window. The source of every single sound or movement, no matter how faint, has to be found out and explored. Any sort of change in the way things look sparks his attention. Sure, a lot of his curiosity is driven by very bad anxiety, but sometimes it’s actually so that when his anxiety and curiosity tell him to do two opposite things, the curiosity  wins, even though his anxiety is quite strong most of the time, so I think that says something about his level of curiosity. So I think that’s largely why we, two very curious and very anxious beings, get along so well together. 

   How about your curiosity level? 🙂 I’m obviously very curious, 😉 

Question of the day.

   What made you smile or cry today? 

   My answer: 

   I don’t remember when was the last time I cried, but something did already make me smile today, namely a super crazy but fun dream I had. I had actually pretty rotten sleep last night. Perhaps it was because I decided I’d try to sleep with my Apple Watch out of curiosity and perhaps the novelty of it made my sleep shallow or something. I fell asleep a bit after midnight so not too bad, but I didn’t really feel like I was sleeping at all, just at some point realised that it’s almost 3 AM and that someone is taking a shower (you can hear basically everything that’s going on in the bathroom from my room and in particular when the water’s running in the shower). I was really surprised because everyone was at home sleeping when I went to bed so I thought it was a bit odd that someone decided to get up in the middle of the night and have a shower. My brain started running 1000 miles a minute as I was thinking what might have happened, and then when the person got out of the shower, I realised it was my Dad, ‘cause I heard him sneezing. In fact once he started sneezing, he kept sneezing for ages, and then sniffling and making other weird noises, including such that actually made the alarms in my brain go off ‘cause it sounded kind of like vomit. So obviously I could sleep no more. Then I heard him go downstairs so I texted him if he’s okay and what’s up, but he wouldn’t respond. After a while I heard him go out and start up the lorry so obviously I figured he was going to work, but that still didn’t explain the middle-of-the-night shower as he usually doesn’t do that if he has to get up at night for work. Usually when he has work early in the morning and late at night and I’m not sleeping, I text him to wish him a nice journey or something, as he usually sits in the lorry for some time before driving off to fill out paperwork and stuff, and he says he likes that and it makes his day better, so I texted him again wishing him a pleasant day, and this time he did reply «Thanks Bibiel» but didn’t reply to the first message. Eventually I figured that perhaps he got a bit of a cold or something and tried my best to convince myself that what I heard wasn’t gagging or vomit, and was successful, but was already too wide awake to fall asleep. 

   Instead, I decided to go to my Brainworld and spent there the whole morning, pretty much until eight. That was the first thing that made me smile, I often smile when I’m in my Brainworld, and last night I mostly really enjoyed myself in there.

   But then when my alarm went off I actually realised I had totally no energy and didn’t feel like getting up at all, and felt a migraine coming. Sleep felt like a dangerous idea as well, because after such a break in between sleeps I would be running a huge risk of getting into the sleep paralysis world. But I felt so tired that I gave into it, took some pain killers, set another alarm for 10, and drifted off to sleep. I indeed did end up landing right in front of «Ian» from my sleep paralysis world, and the first fifteen or so minutes of my sleep were very unpleasant, but this time it was more just because of all the unpleasant physical sensations I get from sleep paralysis and a general sense of fear and discomfort rather than because of any particularly scary content of those dreams. Even though I set another alarm to wake me up, I forgot to turn on Do Not Disturb on my Apple Watch, which in this case turned out to be a great thing, because after some time of being in sleep paralysis, I got an email, so my Apple Watch vibrated and I woke up. I was even more tired now from sleep paralysis and promptly fell asleep again but this time in a proper way. 

   I totally ignored the alarm and kept sleeping past ten, even though it wasn’t really the best quality sleep I guess, sleep after sleep paralysis is usually not, but something’s better than nothing. I also had lots of weird dreams, but it’s only the last one, the one that made me smile when I recalled it after waking up, that deserves attention and that I really remember vividly and so can describe in detail. 

   I dreamt that I lived in some sort of collective dwelling  place for lots of people, like a kind of institution, I have no idea what it might have been but perhaps some sort of long-term lodging place. It had loads of single rooms and it had a reception and if someone wanted to see you in there, there was a whole procedure for them to go through of filling out lots of papers and stuff. So perhaps it was more like a prison? 😀 I was staying in my room and then the receptionist called me and told me excitedly that I had very special visitors, that I’m supposed to be measured for a dress that I’m going to be wearing for a very special occasion. Almost as soon as she said that, the door to my room opened and in came a middle-aged lady and a teenage boy. And it was the lady that was most interesting and that I remember the most vividly. She introduced herself to me as Helenor (my favourite name of the year now probably 😁 ) and was very warm and open, though also very eccentric. But what I found particularly striking about her was her way of speaking. She spoke to me in English, and she had an accent that was the quirkiest possible mix of ridiculously hardcore exaggerated BBC English with an unmistakable hint of North Welsh accent, with rolled «r’s» and strong plosives and the characteristic u’s so it sounded kind of  rough in combination really, but she was also extremely sing-songy and had a sort of inflection that is more South Welsh rather than a North Welsh thing, which added some mildness, and she had a very rich contralto and went up and down in pitch a lot as she spoke. She enunciated all her words extremely clearly and had some really peculiar style of speaking as well, using kind of weird vocab and expressing herself in a funny way, like she kept referring to me as «Bibielle sweeting» all the time. I also had Misha in that place with me and when they came in, he was laying on the bed and she came over to stroke him at some point and was something like: «Misha, oh Misha, such a lavish fur. What a splendid colour! Unrivalled thickness! These gleaming eyes of yours! Verily bewitching!» And  stuff like that and she could talk all the time. In hindsight, I wonder if her awe regarding Misha’s fur was because she thought it would be great for a coat.

   The boy that accompanied her was Polish and I remember that his name was something like Dawid or Dominik though I have no idea where I know it from because she never referred to him by name and he seemed awfully shy and hardly spoke. This Helenor lady turned out to be some kind of seamstress, and she went to the trouble of making several different dresses for me and decided to check if any of them actually suits me only after she was done with making them. And the Dawid/Dominik boy was like her assistant or something, carrying stuff after her, picking up her needles and reminding her things that she forgot to do which seemed to be a very regular occurrence. Like I said he was extremely shy and seemed to be even afraid to speak louder, but at the same Time he didn’t seem to like his job at all and as he stood in the corner and Waited for Helenor to be done with me I heard him sighing theatrically all the time as if this was the most boring day of his life. She, meanwhile, was super enthusiastic about her job, to the point that I guess it must have been a bit infectious, because while I normally hate things like trying on clothes and stuff like that, but this time round I totally didn’t mind. All the dresses that she brought me were in a bit different styles, but they were all extremely elegant and fancy and old-fashioned, like ball gowns, one actually had something that I suppose must have been a crinoline. 

   At some point it finally dawned on me that I had no clue why I’d even need such a ball dress, so I asked Helenor if she knew what all that was about. And she happily explained to me that, basically, the whole idea was hers, and that she herself picked me as the most suitable to attend the ball, and that it was a ball of the fairies and trolls and elves «And you shall be away with the fairies, Bibielle sweeting» – she giggled. – 

   Eventually Helenor decided on a dress that suited me best, and I liked it a lot too. It was long but very airy and light and frilly and made of muslin and Helenor said it was purple. But then she got concerned and said that it’s probably too light and that I’d need to have some warmer outer garment as well and she went on and on how otherwise I might freeze and then she’ll be the one held accountable by the fairies so I assumed it was very likely that I could actually freeze there and she blamed herself in a very dramatic way and despaired over how she hadn’t thought about making me a coat as well. So she ordered Dawid Dominik to fetch all the spare coats that she’d made, I don’t know from where he fetched them and if he really had to carry all the clothes that Helenor has made just in case they could end up being useful. So then Helenor wanted me to try all the coats, and eventually settled on one made of rabbit fur. It was really cute and so soft and fluffy and even had a hood and huge deep pockets, and then she generously offered me her very own rabbit muff, though I didn’t really need it with such huge pockets in the coat.

   She kept oohing and aching about that rabbit coat and how well it looked on me, and went on and on and on about all kinds of things very chaotically in that peculiar accent of hers, and then was suddenly interrupted by the Dawid Dominik boy, who uttered a very loud moan. She turned to him, and he seemed to show her something and point at it and whispered something very agitatedly but I couldn’t understand a word. But Helenor seemed to do, because she got really alarmed or anxious. She quickly grabbed my arm and dragged me into the corner of the room where the boy stood, she switched a light on and they both seemed to inspect something very closely, but I was not sure what it was, which made me feel anxious too. At first I thought they were assessing me up-close like that, and wondered whether perhaps something happened to me suddenly if it caused so much agitation, like, dunno, perhaps I myself suddenly changed into a troll or grown another head or whatever. But the more they looked and debated between themselves in hushed voices and pointed at something the more I started to think that perhaps it’s something in my room. Is there a pile of shit lying somewhere or is it infested by mice or what? I felt more and more uncomfortable not knowing what was going on. And then suddenly Helenor shrieked on what I would assume must have been the top of her lungs: «Jesus Christ help me!» and just disappeared, and Dawid Dominik, dresses, coats and the muff with her. I was speechless and wondered wtf happened, all the more anxiously that I felt I was waking up and I might never know what was the deal with Helenor. Then, as I was already one food in the waking world, someone opened the door of the dream room. It was someone who worked in that place I lived in. She sat on the bed and was like: «So, how did lady Helenor’s visit go? Did she find the right dress for you?» I thought perhaps she’d be able to explain the mystery to me so I told her everything, but she just said something like: «Oh, that’s a pity. But in this case she probably won’t ever come back». I wanted to know why and everything but then I woke up for good and it was 1 PM. 

   I was really amused by that dream once I was able to think clearly, I love it when my brain creates vivid characters like that and then when I wake up I wish they were real. I often try to imagine them again consciously and get them into my Brainworld and I definitely want to do that with Helenor, she’ll be making clothes for Magnus, Nerissa and his children (Magnus and Nerissa are my imaginary sea people who help real people feel happy, and Helenor will fit in their castle perfectly). And where the flip does my brain get such random plot scenarios? It also occurred to me that, while Helenor was so concerned with my not having a coat, she was seemingly oblivious to the fact that I had no appropriate ball shoes. But perhaps fairies dance bare-footed. 😀 

   So, how about you? What made you smile today? Or what made you cry? 🙂