Ita est!

http://web.mac.com/sbussel/sigalbussel/4_NS.html

The movie ends. Carrie Bradshaw is finally happily married. Summoned by the strong wind outside. I leave my warm room and prepare to go out. I drop my three mobile phones, but I take my keys. I don’t want to ever get locked out of my very own place. I put on a jacket, but I leave my feet bare. I love to be cold and yet to feel warm.

I walk down the stairs; then turn off the lights that help me make through the steps. I remove the nylon which keeps the bench covered against the things sleeping cats leave before they get up. I sit down on the hand-woven cover and stretch my cold feet. I hear nothing but bumping windows. I am perfectly alone. No lights, no cars, no other awaken creatures. I am accompanied just by my neighbours’ spooky laundry spread all over their balconies. I wonder if I’ll see such messy terraces and lavish vine trellis in northern Germany where I’m soon going.

A kiss in a Planetarium… A strong flow of wind makes me scared. It wants to blow what is left of that non-exactly love story far away to the east … but this memory is about 31 363 199 seconds old, the place is 1.7 x 10^14 Å away, that boy is flying over 8000 km away from here. This blow will never reach him – he’s now above all clouds. The place is ruined – they are raising a new better building for the observatory. All those seconds but one have passed away in hopes for another kiss. A kiss I for A second thought would never come.

The wind smoothly stops. I am perfectly alone again. Yet I feel happy, happy that I have someone to talk to. I’ve got myself. I’ve got me to discuss myself with. I want to keep it private. Yet I want to share it without revealing it. That is why I think of it in the language I couldn’t help him learn well, and I publish it where hardly anyone opens.

I climb back, I turn on the lights, I enter my room, and count the mice on the walls. It’s funny I had five of them painted on the wallpaper next to my bed, and yet it was just one rat passing over my foot on the street, that made me eventually realize my hopes will never come to real life.

I need to turn another page right now, but I’m not ready. I’ve been stuck to that memory for too long to just turn my back to it like he does. Maybe one more month would help, or my moving to a place a thousand kilometers away from here would work, or not knowing where he is would do…

What a pity! Watching movies about a happily married author makes me neither more loved, nor a writing better.

“What did you go to Berlin for?” asks somebody

I can simply say I went there for the European youth exchange “City Garden”.

“What did you do in Berlin” another one would inquire.

It’s even easier. “I made a short clip. You wanna see?”

“Why did you go to Berlin?” the most perceptive one would put it.

The answer here is more challenging.

- I went there to participate in a youth exchange, and meet new funny people. I wasn’t quite successful in this. I did interact with them, but it wasn’t as much fun as I need to call it fun.

- I went there to make a short movie. I was fond of the idea of creating something. What I did is something esoteric, which can be understood only by people who know a little English, Spanish, German, and a lot about Kreuzberg area in Berlin. However, I am not disappointed with what I did, because it was for the most of it my idea. I was given about 30 photos taken at one spot in that neighborhood together with 5 pages of depressing text describing the area in the heart of the winter, and 5 sounds two of which recording a conversation about Cicciolina in Italian. What I did was to match the pictures in groups until I find proper contrasts. Then I arranged them, so that I tried to make a plot out of the static unrelated images. I was so happy when I first saw it complete in my head. It actually made my day. I was eager to share my idea with everybody, and after I explain my conception five times, it got even clearer, and I felt even more excited. It’s a pity I didn’t do well on Adope Premiere, and the obscure idea doesn’t even look pleasant to the eye.

- I went there to see Berlin and to be together with someone, who, I thought, wanted to be in Berlin together with me. It was disappointing to realize that I had been wrong that it’s not only me who wants to share our time. As a result I was blue for the better part of the time, but happily I saw much more of the city than I had expected. Consequently, don’t regret spending 11 days there, and I don’t think I’ve wasted them – I learned quite a lot about the city, life, city life, and expectations there.

“Wouldn’t you regret going to Germany in December when you apply to colleges?” is what my brother says, and he makes me think if I would ever know if something is for bad or worse.

My alarm started waking me up at 5:55. I had to be ready till 6:30. My cousin was going to drive me to the SAT Test Center in Plovdiv. However, I wasn’t startled by the sound of my watch. I turned it off and I continued sleeping for 10 more minutes. I didn’t care of being late this time. I was calm!

What?! I was calm?!

Yes, I was. I’d been studying for that exam for only 20 days. I didn’t go to school for the last 10 days in order to study, but I didn’t spend much time focused on Math.

What?!

Yes, too many people told me that the exam was simple, and I tended to believe them. Why?!

Because I wanted to. I didn’t feel like bothering myself studying hard math conceptions that didn’t really catch my interest.

I don’t know how I succeeded in turning off my “Hey, that’s an important exam alarm!”, but I did. And now I was heading for the exam. I wasn’t afraid of it this time. I tried to keep my brain in a cozy state, so that it wouldn’t be tired later.

When we arrived at the Test Center, the Sun was already making everything look cheerful, and so I felt. I met a lot of friends, who were going to test the exam. I laughed all the time, and wondered at my light-heartedness.

Even the endless procedure of filling the Answer Sheet before the exam didn’t exhaust me. Then I took a few deep breaths, and the Supervisor said the “Magic Words”:

“Open your books!”

I controlled myself, and I think I had clear thoughts for most of the time. I had problems with some of the questions, but I had the confidence to try to solve them. I finished with the last question 10 minutes before the end of the exam, so I reviewed the whole test again. Then we all heard:

“Stop working!”

…and I smiled with relief. I felt like having completed a task fine.

Then I spoke on the phone with friends and relatives, I visited my father’s aunt, and told them all how for the first time I am not mad after an exam finished. Later my cousin took me to Metro, where daddy and I bought an inflatable armchair. Oh, I had been dreaming for comfortable furniture for reading for so long! Now I finally found! It was cheap enough for me to invest in it for an year. Then we found notebooks with Van Gogh’s painting on the cover… and we couldn’t restrain from buying them together with a wonderful folder with a World Map on it. I can organize my stuff in it, bring them with me safe all the time, see the World, inquisitively see small countries on the map, and have a clearer view on the US states for my college choosing process.

I don’t know what has happened to me, but I feel so good now. I hope that this different attitude will proof better when I see the results on 23^rd. I had always been dreaming of achieving calmness and cheerfulness, and I really hope this path will lead me to where I’d headed.

Who do most of the people share their thoughts with? With those around them.
But what happens when you talk to the same people every day? You tell them your stories every day, and soon the stories just become trivial things of your daily life. Most people get used to your way of reflecting the world. At some point, in most of the cases people just share their stories just to provoke empathy or to relive what has happened.
When you talk to a stranger, however, it’s different. He doesn’t know anything about your background and your past experience with what you’re talking about, so there are a lot of things you should add to the story to make it clear. Those are the things, which you rarely have to think about when you’re talking to your closest surrounding. You have to answer the questions you think your listener would ask, as well as these that he surprises you with. That makes you think about the stuff you “just know” and “just feel”, and find explanations for them. They make you see those things that are so close to you that in order to catch them you have to distance for a while.
This lays in the foundation of the only program on BNT (Bulgarian National Television) I can honestly say I admire – “BNT Taxi”. I accidentally came upon one evening. I don’t remember when or how that happened, but I remember I really liked it because it left me a thinking. It’s like a raw material for philosophical or sociological analysis.
It presents people who travel in a taxi, where the journalists Spas Kiosev and Nevena Spasova-Batsarova drive them for free and ask them questions related to the topic of the day. I liked it because the hosts ask reasonable questions, which lead the passengers to see their stories in an unusual way and ingenuously show their personality.

Seeing the different faces of the people in Bulgaria, one can learn about the situation here, because approaching society through different people’s eyes is a great way to explore it. He can hear all kinds of people, and observe their manner of speaking, their way of expressing, and their way of thinking. He can feel close to them and like them, or see how distanced from him they are, but still he will see his society through them.

Do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Last October when I added this test as an application into my Facebook profile, I decided to hide it. It showed that I was more like right-brained, which made me scared that I’m not proper for doing astronomy.

However, a few days ago, after a month spent mainly with three piles of Physics books, when I opened it again, it was difficult for me to see the dancer turning clockwise. It was difficult to write the previous post, too.

It seems that my left part of the brain is prevailing now.