Drat you, Betsy, for being someone I can’t refuse a lot. Certainly not a blog post, in any case.

She gave me a “Gorgeous Award” for reasons that are best left unexplored lest they do not stand up to scrutiny. As a grateful acceptant, I am to list six things relating to myself that are generally unknown, and mention six blogs or bloggers I consider gorgeous.

I will hijack the ceremony and also use it as a thank-you for some of my best friends in the blogosphere, as I leave behind this blog and this pseudonym.

Six little-known things about me:

1. I have very feminine arm veins.

2-6. As I laid in my bed last night and watched the clock turn to 00:00, signalling that I have spent a quarter-century on this here planet, it was tempting to be depressed by the fact that I have 10 euros and 14 cents in my bank account, live with my dad, and am still entirely without my degree (my degree, MINE). But there are ten people in this world who know me through and through – with warts, dirty laundry, crises in academics, faith, and family, my laziness, my excuses, and all, and still think I’m an okay person. This is a mind-boggling high number.

I have tried, and failed, to write down what these people mean to me. It took me four hours, and this is what I came up with: they’re my greatest inspiration, because I love them, not because they love me. And they’re my greatest support, because they love me, not because I love them. Also, “love” utterly fails as a word. Come on.

All other things about me are irrelevant.

Now, six gorgeous ladies I loved blogging with:

1. Anima
2. Vicky
3. Puella, now sadly blogless
4. Mrs. Powell (I can’t not call her Mrs., she’s a mum)
5. Little Flowers
6. Rosamundi

And six gorgeous blogs that make me squeal whenever they update:

1. Practical Ethics
2. Laatste dag
3. Finslippy
4.  Ask Sr. Mary Martha
5. Backreaction
6. Morning Coffee Physics

This, I hope, will give you enough to read now that this blog has come to an end! “Notio bonum, visa olum” means something like “it seemed like a good idea back then”. That, it certainly did. Now, it seems like a good idea to stop!

This blog has gone on (permanent) hiatus. Thanks for the ride :)

(I will defend my research work on December 7th, complete my last exam in physics on February 17th, and from February-July follow a semester program in history and philosophy of science at a different university.)

Visit Jen at Conversion Diary for more quick takes!

1.

It seems an undeniable fact of history that mostly-lovely people can have shocking blinders that somehow allow them to confuse genocide with morning coffee (oops!).

Read more at Merry’s Cloister!

2.

There’s so much (fun) going on right now, I don’t have the time to write about it! In any case, it really does seem like I will graduate eventually.

3.

I had the flu last week. It vacuumed.

4.

After the fever had gone and the world went back from spinning around my head to its normal state of revolving around my ego, I finished World of Goo. I don’t have words for its awesomeness (thanks for pushing me into it, Habbie :) ).

The physics engine is beyond anything. The puzzles are great fun. The variation is so huge, they could easily have made three games out of it. It’s so G-rated it wouldn’t shock a 40-year-old woman (because, to be honest, I’ve seen kids at Tarantino movies and they were profoundly unshocked). GET IT. Get it for your kids. Play it yourself as well. Trust me. GET. IT.

5.

Speaking of beyond awesome, so is my sister. (You’re not getting her, though.) My temporary housemate is her godson (which makes him my godnephew, I suppose), and he spends half his evenings laughing because I walk in the door announcing that I NEED TO SPEAK TO PUELLA. “You called her for an hour yesterday!” Yes, well, I ALWAYS need to speak to her, don’t I?

Men. Don’t know anything.

6.

My brother’s girlfriend is having a housewarming party tomorrow. I’m going.

To be precise, I’m going to help her do the shopping and cooking in advance, and then I have explicit permission to stay in the kitchen for the duration of the party. This is probably going to be the most pleasant party since my birthday last year, when I spent two days in the kitchen with people occasionally wandering in from the living room to chat with me :)

7.

Unf. Which reminds me, my quarter-century is coming up. I am sorely tempted to just hang out and watch a DVD with my siblings and The Guys. And/or partake of unhealthy beverages. And play World of Goo (get it!)

Due to having spent most of the past couple of days in bed feeling sorry for myself (I’m okay now, thanks), I don’t really have interesting Quick Takes. There were several things I found absolutely hilarious… and then my fever broke :)

I did write four of them last week, which you might not have encountered because Jennifer didn’t host them then. (My room is, amazingly, still very neat, for anyone but my mum’s standards. Housemate put up the laundry for me (after I removed everything with lace and/or satin bows, as he’s a boy), and my lack of appetite made me accumulate exactly one cereal bowl and two cups.)

1.

“I do like it,” my sister said, looking around my room. “I’m just not used to see you having space.“

2.

“So, you can actually stretch out! In all dimensions!” Guy #1 proclaimed from my sofa/bed.
“That is, the three spatial ones…” he added, interrupting my “Not the string ones, that would break the universe…”

There was an embarrassed silence.

(We do talk about normal things. Food. Clothes. Religion. Movies. Relationships. It just always skews back to physics somehow.)

3.

Yeah, I tidied my room. I’m as shocked as anyone. Unfortunately, though I do have the floorspace now, there still won’t be much mad dancing about, since my (v. cool) hanging lamp is a) on nose-level and b) forged. Out of metal and suchlike.

(It has, because of exactly these reasons added to the fact that it is located right between the light switch and my bed, a glow-in-the-dark rosary dangling from it. My religion saves me from physical harm on a nightly basis.)

4.

I still think he was just having a bad day.

In any case, the TA of one of my classes reached such a level of less-than-useful that we were still talking about it a day later. I was defending him (guys can have PMS, I’m sure of it, and if not, they deserve our sympathy for not having such a convenient excuse).

“Yeah, but you like EVERYONE,” said two classmates in unison.

This is not true, because there are, off the top of my head, two people whom I’d really rather not be around. Plus a large bunch that just make me uncomfortable.

But it did get me thinking. Do I like a lot of people? (Yes.) Do I like more people than most people do? (How would I know?) Do I like people most other people do not like? (There are a few cases, but I don’t think it would be more than average.)

Obviously, there is research to be done.

In the past five years, I have become

• friends with classmates
• classmates with friends
• girlfriend with classmates (not at the same time)
• friends with flatmates
• flatmates with a friend
• friends with labmates
• labmates with an ex (still a friend)
• choirmates with a boyfriend (later ex) (twice)*
• choirmates with classmates
• friends with choirmates
• friends with co-workers (one of which was also a classmate)

Oh, and choirmates with a former teacher, the father of a friend, the mother of a former schoolmate and the current girlfriend of an ex. All in the same 15-person choir (which also has several other interesting link chains of which I am not a part).

Conclusions:

1. I am not as anti-social as I used to believe.
2. I really need to move to another country for a while.

*if you’re a singer, and you end up dating me (pffft), never, ever go on choir tour with me. So far, I have a 100% fail rate.

It’s once again the first Saturday of the month (e.g., it’s October, when did that happen?) which as of last month means it’s time for the Saturday Evening Blog Post! Thanks our new WiFi connection, I’m actually typing this in bed. And I’m sure it’s evening somewhere.

So be quick about it and visit Elizabeth Esther, where many bloggers will soon have posted their best post from the last month.

My choice won’t come as a surprise to most, it is “Things my knees taught me”. Of course, it’s trumped by yesterday’s Seven Quick Takes because that one has a picture of Christoph Waltz in it, but I have been instructed to find something that it also interesting for other people, maybe.

“Things my knees taught me” has been a long time coming. And I’m not done with the topic yet (just as my knees aren’t done with me yet). So there might be a follow-up, sometime… if I stick on the schedule so far, in about two years, haha. But the post reflects a lot of what has been on my mind lately, which makes it the best post for this festival.

Enjoy the other posts, and I’ll see you next month!

Visit Jen at Conversion Diary for more quick takes!

1.

“So,” the medical secretary said through the phone, “then finally I need to know your BMI and drug history… What are your height and weight?”
This is going to be fun, I thought, and stated my measurements.
“That means your BMI is just within normal range, that’s good. You might be rather tall, though.”

Oh no! Gotta have that checked – the suspense is killing me!

(Actually, she was a very nice lady and sounded not at all flapped by the numbers. I just thought the formulation was very funny.)

2.

My sister was trying to explain to me how she Does Math (she’s doing a Masters in linguistics, which always makes people forget she already has one in mathematics) in an attempt to show Why She Does Not Like Irrational Integration.

“See, I have this curve, you know, and [...] curves [...] curve [...] tangent line… and then in the complex plane it…”
“Yes, rub it in,” I said. “You have curves. I don’t. WE KNOW THIS!”

Instead of profusely apologising, as one is entitled to expect, she went thoughtful: “That might actually make a great female pick-up line. In the right company, that is. ’Would you like to integrate my curves?’ Think that would work?”

(If you are a practising Catholic male, un{married/vowed/ordained}, a geek, and not opposed to lush black curls and enthralling brown eyes, I need to introduce you to someone.)

3.

My sandals died. My father thought having the soles fixed might pull them through until too-cold-for-sandals-weather, but the shoe repair man just shook his head and told me to buy new ones. So I’ll be shopping next Tuesday.

Unfortunately, I have had these for two years, and they were the last batch of an old model. I will have to update to the more padded new model. That will mean blisters. Whinge.

(You might be able to tell that I’m not the kind of girl who gets excited about footwear shopping.)

4.

When wine-tasting, or anything-tasting, people get palate cleansers, right? A bit of water or a piece of bread, to clean out the taste buds and prepare for the next sip/bite.

We might need to invent something like that for physics students.

Most physicists only work in one specific field, with a mathematical notation they are used to. Most people in the field would share the same notation in books, papers, and classes.

Physics students, on the other hand, might rummage in up to four different fields on any given day. I can now tell you that statistical physics gets rather interesting when you think that the T and V in Λ(T,V) (that’s a Lambda, the greek L) are in any way related to the T and V in L(T,V), the Lagrangian you encountered half an hour ago in the history of classical mechanics book you’re reading for fun. In the first case, the T is temperature and the V volume. In the second, they’re kinetic and potential energy.

It becomes extra problematic when the professor only refers to “T” and “V”, not the full words, and keeps saying stuff that would almost make sense when you’re talking about the energies.

5.

While we’re talking mixing fields, I would like to share this webcomic with all my fellow Catholic physicists.

…who already knew of it way before I did, I’m sure.

6.

I went to see Inglourious Basterds with Guy #1, and had a great time. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, unless you SPOILER WARNING loved Amelie and also like gratitious use of the ketchup bottle. END SPOILER

You hardly notice it while watching, but man, that thing is long!

Also, my new favourite actor, Christoph Waltz, looks exactly like one of my favourite writers.

Christoph Waltz (photo imdb)

Arthur Japin (photo Thom Hoffman)

Like. :)

7.

One of my friends is temporarily moving into my brother’s old room (above mine, I hope he’s not going to keep up his start-at-6.30 morning routine on days I don’t have class until 11…). I have heard from various sources that the stupidest thing you can do is make a housemate out of a friend (a friend out of a housemate is a much better idea, or so I’m told). But as he doesn’t want to be in this very province, we probably don’t have the time to work up a good long small irritations-induced eternal fight. And I have another lab rat person to eat my cooking. I say win-win :)

For… has it been two years already? I have had wonky knees. Knees that hurt. Knees that whinge. Adolescent knees: they are perfectly able to perform any task I ask of them, but it goes with such deep sighs, such woe-is-me, oh-the-unfairness, that you’d just as soon give in and say ALL RIGHT, I’LL DO IT MYSELF – only that doesn’t really work, of course, since I wear skirts, so scaling stairs on my hands is just not going to happen.

I’m not impaired in any way. I don’t have to check web sites before I leave to see whether a place is accessible to me. Sometimes I miss a train because I take ages on stairs, but that’s only during “bad knee days” (which may be up to a month apart). I strongly prefer to sit on floors, and I know in advance that long seminars = ibuprofen. I need a long bed. But that’s about it.

My wonky knees are among the best things that ever happened to me.

My former GP was a bit… over-enthusiastic. She’s greatly in favour of Informing the Patient. This involved, in my case, an exhortation on the current general quality of life for people with prosthetic knees (or, to be more specific, she said “they last about ten years, so we will want to pull you through until you’re at least 40 or so”). There apparently was one word that applied to my initial diagnosis, and that word was “degenerative”.

All of a sudden I had the knees of a seventy-year-old and was invited to enjoy it. After all, in five years I would wistfully think back to this time of comfort and ease.

This must do strange things to your mind at any age, but, I imagine, especially so when you are in your early twenties: invulnerable, immortal, about to take your glorious place in society. Eagerly looking forward to the tax and wear of a job and a family. And suddenly you turn out to be very vulnerable indeed. The days of blindly trusting your body are over. You didn’t get to say good-bye. What good is an eager mind in a body on a ticker?

Or, in my less-than-usual case: what good is a nun who can’t kneel? A preaching sister who can’t show our tradition’s movements of reverence? I can still out-walk most, it is a completely hidden handicap. I could embroider “I don’t genuflect, but you ought to” to my cape… that is, if a community would still accept me.

Many congregations are open about accepting women with various limitations, and they try to keep their elderly sisters home as much as possible when their health starts to fail. But a 23-year-old? I was inquiring with a community of missionary sisters then, and it soon turned out to be problematic. So the rug was well and truly yanked from under my feet.

My trust in my body – over. My life’s plans – over. The knowledge that I could get up in the morning and do everything I planned – over. I couldn’t cycle anymore, it took 30 minutes to get to the nearest grocery store, the elevators in the physics building always took ages to appear and seemed to be out-of-order at least one day a week, and I was in constant nagging pain. All in all, it was a rather miserable feeling, and it took me the better part of four months to grieve what I had lost and get on with my life. At which point the knees got a tiny bit worse. Repeat.

Of course, I have been incredibly lucky, not only in finding a physical therapist who soon had me on a plateau of an almost-painless, cycling existence, but also a community that is more attentive to my needs than I am myself sometimes. (My first visit there was during a very bad knee day, or rather week, but they only chuckled and said “awww” when I hobbled downstairs.)

So it all turned out very well indeed. Instead of losing my comfortable life I have gained the experience of being completely overwhelmed, scared and angry, and then getting over it, even before the physical therapy moved beyond pain, pain, pain, exhaustion, pain, and did I mention pain, to control, strength, control, stamina, pain, and control. It is something you can’t learn from books, and I am ever so glad to have had the opportunity to gain this awareness.

Bodily decline is a given, for all of us lucky enough to reach old age. Being allowed a practice run isn’t.

I can listen to other people who deal with chronic pain and understand just a bit better than I did before. I know what others my age mean with “I’m too young for this!”, and I know the spoon theory. And I have received this all for a baffling low price.

This is called “having luck in life.”