Introducing Mr. X

It suddenly dawned on me that I have yet to introduce someone quite important to me. And since it's such a nice day for it, I decided that in stead of finishing my lab report I want to tell you about Mr. X:

The Mysterious Mr. X

First of all, the pseudonym "X" was introduced in the earlier stages of our acquaintance and has stuck with the gentleman to this day. He is my greatest comforter and supporter. He makes my days brighter and my life happier. He reads, plays the drums like a pro and listens to tons of good music. Nearly every day he tells me a random fact about the world. He likes history and wants to travel. He knows two languages and is 2 years older than me. Most importantly - he is a passionate believer who constantly encourages and helps me on my walk with God. To me, he is perfect :)

All I can say

Stasie's special moment

I am one of those people who very often has "special" moments. Moments where I make a complete idiot of myself and if no one is around to see it I enjoy telling people about it afterward. It becomes my little story and it makes them smile, so I am just happy to tell anyone who will listen about my great stupidities :D

Here is an brilliant example of one such moment:

I was sitting on my bed this afternoon, talking to my friend Jamie. He had to wake up really early today because of lectures and I was emphasizing with his great pain. To me getting up before 11 seems like torture no one man should endure, but alas he was forced into it by necessity. Anyway, while I was emphasizing I thought it would be a great idea to get some breakfast (about time too, it was 1 pm after all), so I got off my bed, stretched out while still thinking how lucky I was for having my lie in and...

I woke up on the floor from an emerging panic-filled thought: "Where are the muffins?"
Then, calming down a series of other thoughts followed: "Wait, what muffins? And why am I on the floor? My head hurts :( !!! Ooooh"

Everything came back to me within seconds. I had gotten dizzy and fallen on the floor hittin my head twice. Laughing hysterically at this incident I explained all of it to Jamie, whereupon this conversation followed:

Jamie

wow lol!! That sounds exactly like something that would happen to me.

I liked the muffin part in particular, that's kind of how i think when i wake up

Me

same here, just completely random thoughts that are either left overs from a dream or just something my head creates to smooth the transition from sleep to awake

Jamie

yep, although i never thought about them that logically

Me

it just came to me, must have been the hit to my head :P It's because I hit it twice. At first it rearranged my thought to "muffin-thinking" and then the 2nd hit rearranged them into "logical explanations for weird things- thinking"

Jamie

haha, sounds great! Who needs drugs?

Me

yh, just hit your head on the wall and you'll go to muffin land in no time

We are indeed a weird bunch :P

The drugs don't work

Sometimes you find a song that you just love

All my feelings in a song

Porcupine Tree - Shallow

I don't remember
Did something in my past create a hole?
Don't use your gender
To drive a stake right through my soul

I live to function
On my own is all I know
No friends to mention
No distraction, nowhere to go

Shallow, shallow Give it to me
Scissors cutting out your anger
Shallow, shallow No good to me, not if you bleed
Bite your tongue, ignore the splinter

This city drains me
Well maybe it's the smell of gasoline
The millions pain me
It's easier to talk to my PC

Shallow, shallow Give it to me
Scissors cutting out your anger
Shallow, shallow No good to me, not if you bleed
Bite your tongue, ignore the splinter

The five people you meet in Heaven

As you all very well know, I've been trying to read through a list of books that have long been recommended to me by both friends and family (and BBC) as books you "have to read before you die". There are many great titles in that list, but only a few jewels that I would keep reading again and again. One of these jewels is "The five people you meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom.

The book starts with the end. A strange place to start a story, perhaps, but as Albom says "All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time." The story tells us about Eddie - an old maintenance worker at Ruby Pier, an amusement park near the ocean, who dies on his eighty-third birthday while trying to save a young girl from a falling cart. Eddie awakens in the afterlife remembering nothing from his last seconds on Earth except that he felt two small hands in is. He has no idea whether he managed to save the girl or not and thoughts of whether his life was worth anything in the end torment him throughout the whole story. He soon realizes that Heaven is not at all like the Eden he had imagined it to be, but rather a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. Five people who's path you changed forever, or who might have changed yours likewise. Strangers and loved ones who wait for you in their own version of Heaven to tell you their story and give you a lesson to learn.

Throughout the book Eddie starts understanding what his life meant to those around him. Seeing more than one incident from another point of view helps him accept the things he could not come to terms with before and see things, and people, in a different light. In the end he realizes that the ordinary life he thought he had settled for was the one he was meant to lead all along.

I believe this book is one of the most powerful stories I have ever read. An ordinary man leading an ordinary life that touched so many others whom he never knew. It' s a story that inspires, a story that comforts and a one that stays with you for the rest of your life. I highly recommend reading this book. It's good one for the soul.

Wuthering Heights

Ok, so I have attempted to read this book online but failed miserably as the copy they have doesn't actually correspond to the real book. It jumps over chapters and there are misspellings and misprints everywhere, half of the sentences don't have endings and there are letters in some that just don't belong. So I went to my favorite bookstore to seek a hard copy, yet the only one they had had a Twilight-styled cover that said "Bella and Edward's favorite book, read the original now", and as I could not get myself to buy a book that has anything to do with Twilight I ordered a different copy which will hopefully arrive within a week. Meanwhile I have watched 3 different film adaptations of the book and can say right now that I much preferred the 1998 version to the 1992 and 2009 versions. I also found a song about it sung by Kate Bush. Never heard of her before but the song is good and I guess it helped her earn some money. Well well, as I remarked earlier she is not the only one taking advantage of this book's popularity.

As time goes by

My gosh how quickly the time goes by. Today I woke up and realised that so many things have changed just in a matter of days. Funny how that can happen, right? It's no longer March, I'm no longer in England, I've finished reading 1984 and my holiday will end in just 3 weeks. Everything is changing and I'm not sure whether it's for the best or for the worst. I'm in a state of in-between where nothing is certain, but I'm not even sure I want it to be certain because somehow it seems that as soon as I find out what the future holds it will lose some of the air of mystery around itself. It will be like the past - familiar and safe, but also boring in a sense. Yet there is a need inside for something...constant...something I can depend on so that if everything else fails and falls to a million bits and pieces, like it has done so many times before, that I will still have something left to hold on to. Wow that sounds so melancholy but I guess that's what happens when you've suddenly got so many hours a day to think about stuff like this.