I didn’t get an 86% on my master’s. I got an 89%. How’s that for an undersell…
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Graduation over – my speech went thunderingly well. My party went thunderingly well as well. Swell. Except some people are RSVP-phobic so more than expected showed up and sustainance ran out before I managed to grab a bite. My niece ran for more bread and all was (s)well. In any case, we all had a great time and I received flowers and wine, as I hoped for. I also got an 86% on my master’s degree, which I consider not a small feat in this day and age. Mostly age.
Now I am very happily unemployed, swimming a kilometre almost every day, doing jigsaw puzzles, meeting friends, eBaying a bit, making patchwork and waiting for the ultimate job to show up.
Have decided to stay on my meds for the summer. I am having such a great time and feeling so well. Why spoil it?
Ain’t I just BLESSED!
The not-very-well-hidden exhibitionist inside me jumped and cried ME! ME! when someone was asked to make a speech on behalf of the students at the graduation tomorrow. Now I am sitting here with severe PMS and the only thing I can thing of saying is GO FUCK YOURSELVES WITH A POGO STICK! Which has nothing to do with my graduation, my teachers, my fellow students, my studies or the price of tea in China and everything to do with hormones. Huh!
I had all these interesting, mildly funny and thought-provoking ideas sloshing around in my brain earlier this week and I thought I’d let them steep and come up with the very spot-on speech tonight. Instead I am stuck with a lethal potion.
Nothing I can think of, besides expletives, seems appropriate, interesting or worth wasting breath on. Do I really want to talk about a bright future? Uh… in Iceland? Do I really want to talk about the crisis? We’ve got it coming out of our ears – on the radio, TV, on every page of the newspapers… do I have anything to add? And if I did, who’d want to hear about it on a supposedly happy day?
What a conundrum (I really like that word). Pffttt… my very good friend, Kolla, who is staying with me at the moment (lives in Florida), told me to break out the red wine intended for tomorrow’s party and it would get my juices flowing. Except my PMS and alcohol don’t mix terribly well. Aggressiveness in the nth. Son, barricade yourself and hide the knives. Too bad I have access to my husband’s weapon collection…
Alcoholic, PMS-ridden, unemployed, pre-menopausal, hysterical, middle-aged woman slaughters innocent (chronically yapping) neighbour dog on the eve of her graduation as a mature student…
Dad and mom. Or the other way around (I don’t remember whether yin is the female or the male counterpart to the female/male yang).
In any case. When I am around people who are somewhat disorganised, creative, full of ideas and perhaps a little scatterbrained, I become my mother. Their vagueness gets on my nerves, their ideas are so unpragmatic, and their effusiveness speaks incompetence, even stupidity to me. I am the square who brings them down to earth – the spoilsport. I am not saying that my mother was a boring, mean person – she just always saw the very real obstacles to people’s ideas; I believe she just wanted to point out what they had to overcome to get where they wanted to go. But I think I am just a bit nasty. And sometimes jealous that I didn’t come up with the ideas myself. Or just a plain sourpuss.
When I am around people who think linear thoughts, have everything squared away, never have a hair out of place – know everything worth knowing and seem to balance everything with perfect ease – I become my father. I poke holes in their logic by playing devil’s advocate, I become flippant, I become a free spirit and do my very best to shock them with my attitude, language, clothes, and stories (all true, but perhaps slightly overstated…). I irritate them in exactly the same manner as the people in the paragraph above irritate me.
Hmm…. analyze that!
Like oil and water – they don’t mix well. Iceland has geothermia – which is why we can live here. Piping hot water from every faucet, toasty houses in the middle of winter, jacuzzis in every other garden (well, almost). And all for a truly reasonable price.
But the geothermal water has a lot of extra ingredients - one of which is sulphur. Foreigners smell it when they first take a shower and start their desparate search for a farting intruder. We natives don’t smell it anymore, except when we come back from a long stay elsewhere. Generally, it doesn’t bother us. However, I have now spent hours cleaning silver, which will be back to black within a fortnight. Nice little things which I inherited from my grandmother, but they aren’t nice except when they are, well, silver-coloured… and if I keep them wrapped up in a cupboard, why keep them at all? They are all decorative items, although a couple could be used when we have dinner guests. Strike that. Cleaning the house and cooking a nice meal before dinner guests arrive is enough – I am not about to start cleaning silver for an hour each time I have company. Guess I am not enough of a Bree Van de Camp/Hodge (if you don’t know what I mean, you are an incultural imbecile who doesn’t watch Desparate Housewives…).
eBay for my silver? Mulling it over.
Well, my dears. More than a week has passed since I finished my last assignment. In a few days I will officially be a Master of Project Management.
The last ten days have been spent doing a lot of nothing. Sleeping, reading paperbacks, working on my stamp collection, doing jigsaw puzzles… A holiday. Now I am starting to feel ready for action again.
eBay is my action these days. Bits and bobs which surfaced when I was cleaning out my late mothers apartment aroused my curiosity. Am selling said bits and bobs these days and I am very curious to see the outcome. The strangest things can be sold on eBay. But getting good prices depends on a lot of things. Mostly research and then some more research. Which takes a lot of time. So the initial income does nowhere near pay for the time spent on research. But then one learns. Just like with everything else, making money on eBay has to be learnt. Hope I will get there one day. My mission these days is to make enough spending money for my intended trip in July (driving up the US West Coast). I am still far from the mark.
Gotta look for some more bits and bobs in these boxes…
I started out wanting to wow them. Now I’ll be happy if they don’t fall asleep while reading my thesis. Or become apopleptic. I won’t get graded. It’s a fail or pass thing. I know I won’t fail. So, why worry? Well. I was brought up Calvinistic style. With a hint of Jewish guilt and a dash of perfectionism. Lethal brew.
Son has started his exams – which I worry about even more than my master’s thesis. Go figure… He is attending Iceland’s most prestigious and most difficult junior college. He will be thrilled to just pass. I will be thrilled if he just passes. I will be delighted and over the moon if he does a little more. Have had to curb seriously my ideas of boy wonder (well, he has my genes…). Son is a truly magnificent example of the human (male) species. He is (mostly) sweet to his mother. He is smart (never mind what some exams say). He is fluent in three languages. He is polite and well-spoken. He has empathy with those less fortune than himself. He is kind to the elderly, small children and animals. He is gor-juss. And I believe he is heterosexual, although the mother is usually the last to find out. Never mind. Strike the last sentence. I haven’t got a clue and I couldn’t care less, although I would like grandchildren at some stage. It’s his 17th birthday tomorrow. The itty, bitty baby I had is almost a man…
Back to business: Have been thinking seriously about moving to a warmer climate. Something needs to be done – I refuse to spend the rest of my life miserable 75% of the year! Here’s the criteria for the ultimate place: It has to be one plane-ride away from Iceland. It has to be warm almost year-round. It has to have a language all the family can speak. It has to have some opportunities either for work or for entrepreneurship. We have to be able to enter legally. Any ideas?
OK. You all know about my depression. Which is getting better. God and good medicine be praised! Then there’s the other disease. The thing is, that when I am suffering mental pain, the physical pain goes on the back burner. But now it has been ignored for too long and has become furiously jealous.
Due to a terrible toothache, two of my teeth have been repaired for a small fortune – each by one dentist – and I still have to go again, because one of these repairs was a root canal repair. However, neither dentist actually found anything wrong with my teeth. They found a lot of swelling, but no infection. After refreshing my fibromyalgia pages, I have come to realise that I am probably suffering from TMD (Temporomandibular Disorder). I have an appointment with my doctor tomorrow and I intend to take printed pages out to show him.
Besides that, I am seriously affected by the following symptoms of the fibromyalgia:
- Widespread pain (hips and shoulders the worst)
- Fatigue (chronic)
- Sleep disorder (night before last – not a wink)
- Irritable Bowel Syndrome (camping? forget it – need constant access to a loo)
- Painful periods (not horrendous, but getting worse)
- Dry eyes and mouth (real Sahara)
Ain’t I just a lucky gal? Still, to take a Pollyanna stance, a woman I knew died without ever being diagnosed and probably had fibromyalgia. Nobody ever really took her seriously – she was just an hysterical hypochondriac. At least I don’t have to deal with that (well, mostly I don’t).
So, tomorrow I am putting my boxing gloves on and demanding to be taken seriously regarding my teeth/jaw. Grrr…
Gaaad… I have been away from my blog for how long??? How time flies (even when there’s no fun). Hmm… let’s see. Have been to Germany for a week (very nice) and Ísafjörður for three days (equally nice). Have got three new students to tutor (keeping busy). Have only got 2,5 weeks left until I have to turn in my thesis (yikes!). Have taken on proofreading of a 90-page master’s thesis in engineering (where did I take leave of my senses?). Am still working as a volunteer in two Red Cross projects. Am trying to keep my son sane through his exams (he worries…) and getting him through a series of medical tests (digestive problems). My vision has deteriorated alarmingly (diabetes possible, but fortunately unlikely). Hmmm. I think this about sums it up.
I am myself again. Life has color. Things get done. Smiling comes easy. Food tastes good.
I am so pleased – I missed myself terribly.
I hope I am not tempting the devil by announcing my return, but it’s been more than a week now. Since before Christmas… I believe that I am safe in slaughtering the proverbial calf.
Moooooohhhh…
