I like reality the way it is

People say that my blog is very negative. All you can read is either bad stuff that happened to me or something totally unrelated to me. I never say anything good about my life. Indeed, I never do. As a joke I remarked that “blog must be bad” (a pun that only Lithuanians will get). But then I thought a bit - no, my life is not as bad as I make it seem here.

First of all, I’m alive. That’s quite an achievement, given that most of the human beings that were ever on this planet are already dead. I’m not ill with some terminal disease, I’m not handicaped, I’m not suffering excruciating pain. I have warm home, I have warm food, I have warm bed. Most of the people don’t.

However, the human mind tends to diminish things it wants to be diminished and aggravates things it wants to be aggravated. All that I mentioned above have become a given in Western culture. As these needs are fulfilled, human mind starts to look elsewhere for a problem.

Why? I don’t understand. But I know this for sure, you can’t make a person happy. Never. Once he or she achieves something, it’s not enough, one starts to search further. Every small detail that is incorrect becomes pissing off. It’s like plastic surgery. First of all you make wholesale changes that you really need because you look ugly, but after that you start to pay attention to the details no one would ever notice. You can never get happiness…

This is weird. This is really weird. Or is it? What if suddenly you realised that you don’t need anything at all. Wouldn’t it make meaningless to live and wouldn’t death become the only route? Is human existance meaningless without a search for improvements? Or maybe it’s just meaningless?

On the other hand, there is a saying: “Happy are those who don’t know”. Well, interesting idea. Maybe you can get happiness for yourself if you can stop at the right time, when it’s only small unnoticable problems that worry you, when you forget, don’t know that something is wrong.

OK, actually, it’s not that I’m very philosophic tonight. I just wanted to kick some life into this blog again. Good night, everyone.

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Since the last time I wrote something I:

• missed a wonderful opportunity to get happy (and I don’t want to provide any more details than that);
• started a paper model of “ORP Garland”, Polish destroyer ship. At the moment it’s only the hull that is completed;
• officially left the band;
• wasted many hours worthlessly;
• made myself a board game from the info on the Internet;
• started the end-term exams.

I was browsing Google for some Nelly Furtado images and noticed a caption underneath one of them: “Crush of the moment - Nelly Furtado”. Heh, I can relate to that - she’s an awesome musician and a very beautiful woman. Frankly, she’s my crush of the moment as well. Weirdly, my previous crush of the moment was no one else but AdRock from the Beastie Boys. OK, I know, he’s a dude and it sounds pretty gay, but I really liked the way he looks and the way he raps. OK, homophobes, you can shoot me if you want now. I believe you have more reasons than enough for that.

Anyway, far more important than that is the sudden rush of past memories that I’ve endured past two days. First of all, one of my classmates wrote me after quite a long time. It was very unexpected, it was, I guess, more than a year after our last email message. It was very fun and exciting, because I was starting to miss her a bit, just that I wasn’t brave enough to write first. I’m never brave enough for that. OK, sometimes I do write, but that takes a lot of effort.

However, this was quickly beaten by quite a different happening. Me and Jelou Medou were playing in some sort of music festival. There were a few good bands, so it was overall a fun experience, even though some of the “musicians” outright made my ears hurt. Anyway, before the concert all bands were doing a soundcheck, and when we came into the hall where everything was happening, I noticed a girl playing the drums. I stared at her for at least five minutes until I realized that she is not my exgirlfriend. Still, she brought up quite a lot of painful and pleasant memories, and I decided to talk a bit with her, even though she wasn’t who I first thought she was. That was quite fun, and we exchanged emails. So she might not be my exgirlfriend, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get to know her a little bit better. And, of course, get to know her band better, because they play some good music.

The image of my exgirlfriend haunts me a lot more often now though… Too bad, I had almost convinced myself I can live on without her, so it seems I will have to start from scratch again.

Today was quite a sad day for me for several reasons. I don’t think any of them alone would mean much, but combined they make me depressed.

First of all, I weighed all pros and cons and decided that I’d rather leave “Jelou Medou” at least temporarily. I don’t know yet, for how long I would like to leave them alone. Maybe two weeks. Maybe until New Year. The point remains the same, I don’t feel good in the band anymore, I don’t feel that environment is friendly and creative, I don’t feel encouraged enough to develop myself as a musician, I don’t feel possibilities to develop, I don’t feel capable of contributing to the band, et cetera. In other words, I need holiday badly. I know this will disappoint all other members, but, frankly, I don’t care. I really need it.

Another quite unpleasant moment was when I was visiting the school where I studied before university. It is (or, supposedly, was) quite a friendly place and people return there from time to time just to return a bit back in time, talk a bit with current pupils and so on. However, today I witnessed how a group of them came to one of the visiting more often exes (even more often that me, which is quite impressive) and let out a long tirade about how he hates him, how he hates his smell, hates the fact of his being there, hates all his friends who come to gymnasium as well and so on. I was shocked, even though it was not directed at me (well, they apparently like me a bit more). I always thought that expupils who come back to their old school is a good sign. Now I was told that it’s quite an opposite thing, that they don’t like us returning and they think that we need to “get a life”, “get some friends outside of gymnasium” and so on. You know, it really hurts. I really can’t say much, because I’m still speechless of what I saw. Yes, I know, I was told that they don’t have anything against me, but that doesn’t change anything much. It’s the first time I definitely felt like an outcast.

And no, today I’m not posting anything about certain someone, because I feel that I’m getting repetitive there. Really. But she’s still awesome.

I never thought I would say this but my band “Jelou Medou” is starting to piss me off. I don’t have much time to go into lengthy descriptions of why and what, but it’s basically about putting pressure on me. I have lost any hope I will ever convince my band mates that university isn’t as easy as school, that you have to be way more responsible here. I have lost any hope of convincing them that I sometimes don’t have any time at all for the band. I don’t say I don’t like them (as they decided after today) - I’m just too FUCKING BUSY!!! If my lectures end at 17:30, believe me, I have no fucking energy to go to rehersal at 18:30 and I never will.

I can only hope that they will get it when they go to a university themselves.

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On a way brighter note, today I spent some quality time with Vaiva talking about all kinds of stuff. <…insert your favourite ramblings how wonderful she is here…> I just wish we could do this more often, because she’s a great person to talk with. Maybe I’m lucky…

 

First of all I want to show you this cool video about resonance. This time it’s not destroying bridges, instead a metalic thin plate is covered with rice, which move around to create nice patterns. How come? Well, it’s pretty simple, the plate is affected by sound waves and starts to vibrate. In some places these vibrations are minimal, however, elsewhere they are very noticable because of resonance, and rice grains get thrown away to more stable places. And this is how the patters are formed - these lines are where plate doesn’t vibrate. Very cool stuff.

Also I have to admit I was too harsh when talking about university. No, I still think that many things there simply suck, however, yesterday I was proven that there are some fine people there - even among professors. I had several possibilities to talk with some of them which I gladly used (somehow most of the students around here that talking with professor is something like talking to outcaste in India). We had a very interesting conversation about the situation in universe, overall faults of the system and so on. It was very weird to find out that professors are aware about everything just as well as students are. I don’t want to retell everything we were talking about, because I don’t think it will be interesting (it wasn’t too different from my rant in this blog), however, now I am sure that the main problem of my university is no one else but the rector and his team. And now I’m even more convinced they must be gotten rid off, if KTU wants to become a world-class university any time in the future.

Also today we have tried out one dude we met in “Leiskite veikti” festival we participated in on Wednesday. Actually, I’m quite impressed with him, however, there are slight problems - he has never played in a band before, so there are a lot of thing for him to learn, starting from expressing his opinion freely and without hesitation, finishing with learning to work in a team and how to neither be in a shadow nor cast the shadow on other bandmates himself. I don’t know the opinions of other band mates, but I would really like to give him a try. It may take a while for him to adjust, but he seems to be capable - and as a guitarist he’s really good, just inexperienced.

Actually, I don’t know, why I added “Vaiva” tag here (yes, I always add tags before writing a post). Ah well. I wouldn’t say that something substantial happened today in my relationship with her, but somehow she still made me enjoy my day a little bit more. She’s tough. No wonder she almost won the first round of “Diplomacy”. Maybe I was too used to her before, but now I really find something to admire in her after every conversation. OK, I know, it’s a bad sign for me. I don’t care. This day was good.

OK, so we passed the first stage of the song competition. Wow. The problem is, everyone did, so it sucks. There were many of “musicians” I would have rather seen anywhere but ruining my ability to hear on the stage. Come on, how can you even consider yourself a musician if you look and sing as a corpse? Singing “Ooooooooooooooh” somewhere between A and B flat doesn’t help my ears and stomache either. To put it shortly, most of the competitors sucked.

On the other hand, I must admit I was very impressed by some of the people, who were obviously not just pretending to be musicians, but actually living it, putting a lot of thought into their lyrics and putting a lot of soul into their music. Too bad all the good stuff was only in the very end of the show (we were there as well!), so we had to go through two hours of unbearable torture with various sounds human voice and a mistuned guitar can make.

All in all it was nice experience, despite all the drawbacks. Getting to know some of the true artists and musicians was good and it may be highly beneficial in the future. Well, I had to borrow a cable for my bass already…

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Today I wrote a Java application which writes a bunch of names “Vaiva”, so they make a big “Vaiva” when printed into Skype window. I’m losing myself.

 

My Sundays are never exciting. Mildly speaking. No, seriously, I think no other day in the week is as busy for me as Sunday, and I mean busy as in “filled with many daunting tasks I’d rather never do”. First and foremost, of course, it is Java programming. I love Java. I think it’s a wonderful language with wonderful capabilities, readability and other abilities. However, professors in our university are even more capable of screwing everything up with dumb and boring homework you have to do even though it’s the lamest one you’ve ever seen. And, on top of that, they want you to make a full documentation for that pile of crap you just created. Riiight… I think that is definitely the way to keep people interested in programming and creates an incredible temptation to discover the wonders of programming for those of use who weren’t born with god’s gift of communication with inanimate machines. To hell with them. I’m not surprised most of my friends say they will choose any modules which do not contain programming next year.

OK, enough about Java homework. That’s not interesting at all neither for me nor for you. Let’s everyone applaude my cat, which managed to scratch me in the same place two days in a row, and in that manner so that it now looks like one LOOOOOOOONG scratch from a tiger or something. Ah well, at least cat scrathes don’t hurt that much. On the other hand, you almost always get a scar from it. I have quite a few on my hands already. Well, no wonder, I have been living with that cat for ten years now. She’s not very aggressive, but sometimes something goes wrong in her head. Not that I don’t make it go wrong…

Spiders have many advantages compared to cockroaches. For example, they don’t transfer various diseases and they don’t shit into your food. And they don’t run on the floor like mad when you turn the light on at night - there are only few more thing less disgusting then 50 or more cockroaches spliting up and running in random directions. Spiders are even better than the cat, because they don’t scratch or bite you, and they don’t shed their fur on your clothes. Anyway, I’m starting not to like spiders as well. They are way too many in my place. Today I counted… I don’t know, thirty, maybe forty, all over the kitchen. Their webs are everywhere - and that’s definitely not the best room decoration in this world, if you ask me. Better than pink furry thingies, but still…

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And now to some better news. My band and I will be playing in some sort of song competition on Saturday. This time it will be jury-only, and if we’re lucky, we will get to the final, where there will be some more serious stuff. Anyway, I have no idea, what is the level of that competition. Somehow I don’t think it will be showed on TV. Ah well. At this moment every opportunity to play publically must not be passed because we really need to get going fast and strong. We already have some plans about our album… So all we need is our following.