Memories from Poli...

and no, that's not Polio :-) It's just the nickname of my University, as it is called "Politehnica".

As this year my colleagues have celebrated 10 years since our graduation (and yes, without me, as I'm in a different country all together), I figured I should write down what my small brain remembers until I'm really too old to remember anything at all.

So here are some good/great/fun moments I remember from my 5 years spent in Poli:

• getting to share a room with a high-school colleague who I didn't know very well - and managing to become very close friends, despite our differences in every.single.thing.you.can.think.of. My memory of her in high school was that she had ripped apart a sandwich poster someone has put on the wall of our class, just because this made her hungry :-) I still bug her with this memory once in a while. She calls me a mean bitch and I laugh about it. This has to be true love, right?

• discovering I was the only girl in our class. I could pick any guy I wanted, they had to be all single, and they had no other choice than to like me, right? In the end I picked one from a different class. Can't blame me, he had a very-cute-Mr-Darcy look :-) No way to resist that.

•  going to a show down-town with some friends and then walking back to our rooms, at night, at -15 degrees C. It took us two hours and something, and it was terrific! And the (not collective, get a hold on yourself!) hot shower at 3 a.m. to start feeling our legs again was the most appreciated shower I ever took. Or closely competing with the one I could finally take after a week of too-close-to-nature camping in the Danube Delta...

• going to my first Brad Pitt movie and falling totally in love with the guy. Yes, even if he's blond. Nobody is perfect.

•  being called by one of my colleagues "mini-technicus" because I could fix a toilet. Hey, I had to, no one else would come to fix it. And I could drive a car in Bucharest... Even if for a couple of months I strongly believed my car was a 4 speed one (and not 5, as it actually was), and I kept being shouted at in cross roads because it wouldn't start properly. (for those who didn't get it yet, I was starting it in the 3rd instead of the 1st, of course...)

• choosing to buy a book on Maths instead of going to class, because the bloody classroom was a renowned "fridge-room" around the campus. That, and I actually had a Math-genius in my class and he liked me so he was calm enough to overcome my stupidity. And my constant 'What the Hell do I need to know how to derive this three times, for each variable? What's a kernel got to do with Maths? What am I doing here?'. Luckily, Maths lasted for 2 years only, or he would have killed himself (or me) in the process.

• splitting the lectures at the beginning of the year between friends: you go to that one, I go to this one... then we copy each others' notes and be done with it. It worked pretty well, even though people seem to prefer my writing to others' and I got pushed into attending more classes than I wanted to.

• our 'exam routine': 4 friends, learning together all day (reviewing our notes - actually, my notes), then playing bridge during the night. When we finally went to bed around 4 am, I dreamed about bridge, not exams, so the strategy worked pretty well.

• being part of a European student association - BEST - (even if only in my last year). Amazing experiences, people and that is also how I discovered travel. 
• Establishing together with a handful of guys from our Bucharest local group (of course, no other girl was weird enough) the "BEST RoM" group, which actually had the only mission to drink Rum+Coke at any occasion. "Rom" is the Romanian word for "rum" and we found the choice of words quite funny - but of course we were under the influence of the spoken drink. There was a group called BEST Ro - meaning BEST Romania, gathering all local groups at that time in the country. In the end, I think BEST RoM reached a national audience and I hope there are still members of this group following its mission as I speak write this... 

•  Meeting my future husband: I was standing with my classmates in front of a closed door, waiting for our first tutorial on Artificial Intelligence to start. One person comes, looks at us standing there and decides to go for the door. It's locked. Of course it's locked, you silly person. OR, we could be just 20 idiots standing in front of it just for fun. A second person comes, looks at us, goes for the door. yup, still locked. This starts to get on my nerves. So when a next one arrives, I tell him flat out "the door is locked" before he can even reach it. He answers: "well, sure it is, but I have the key". So yes, he was our new teaching assistant for that tutorial. He was smiling at me (of course, the only girl in there, remember??) and was so cool, calm and ... zen that I just knew then and there I had to make his life more... interesting :-) 10 years later he keeps begging me to let him be bored every now and then.

PS: for my boss who might be reading this, no, I did not write all this today at work, but yesterday night at home. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The thing I like about myself

I am laughing at myself a lot... and this can only mean: I am doing really stupid things quite often :-)

Not sure if anyone would start laughing out loud when:

- arriving at work, taking two (clean!) diapers out of her bag, leaving them in the car, taking her laptop and calmly walking towards an all-day-meeting. It just looked funny for me. It was early on a Monday morning, this might have influenced my judgment a bit, OK?
- looking around her bedroom and noticing she has dropped carefully put a pair of socks in the close vicinity of each and every wall in the room. And yes, I have a spare pair downstairs. One never knows when one can be out of socks!!
- finding empty bottles of water under the bed. Hey, they hid in there at their own will, not my fault. I'm just drinking the water, and then the bottle, seeing itself empty and lonely, tries to join the others: under the bed it goes never to be seen again. Or at least till the next season's cleaning, if there is such a thing. Or until I'm looking for a lost pair of socks (!)

And all this was just today's fun. At least I didn't cancel my trip to Boston yet. Who knows what I can do tomorrow?!

Let's get retarded

And here's what I had in mind when going back to work after my lunch break:

I wonder if this says something about what expect from my work? Or maybe I'm already in that state?

Honey, I think I broke my toe!

You know the feeling that sometimes the entire universe is against you for a very obscure reason?
That's what I think about my trip to Poland on Monday... Yes, it's the one I should take for which I kind-a/almost/sort-a cancelled my booking several days ago.
It's also the Monday when the French (otherwise lovely people) air control employees decided to go on strike for - to me - even more obscure reasons...
And it's also in two days from now, with a flight at 7 am (so, yes, what the heck, I can get up at 4:30 for nothing, right?)... and I think I just broke my toe.

How come? Well, let me tell you the steps to get your toes destroyed, if you're interested:
- in the evening, move the furniture around your home to unusual places
- when your son wakes up at night, DO NOT turn on the light when you go to his room
- repeat this at 10 pm, 11 pm, 12 pm and 1 am
- take him in your arms and go to the bathroom, THEN turn on the lights so you won't see a damn thing anymore
- once he drank enough water to fill an entire box of Pampers, turn off the light and...
- go to his room, your royal blindness
- find his bed, try to put him in there, without smashing his head on any side of it, because you have no freaking idea where the bed is anymore, with all the moves you made last evening and with the fact that you're not really awake
- then try to walk out of the room and...
*drums*...
- hit the stupid f..ing door with your toe on your way out

Result: in the morning you get a nice red, swollen toe and the right amount of pain that goes with it. And again the question 'how the hell am I going to Poland?!' asked for like the hundredth time this week.

PS: yesterday evening I had finally received my three new pairs of fabulous-looking (me thinks) shoes that, guess what, I won't be able to wear anytime soon. Universe, go screw with someone else's plans now, please!

I deleted my Facebook account

Yes, I know, after my previous post you would tend to believe I'm really a moron and/or in a 'let's delete everything' suicidal mission.
Actually, it's neither of those. I deleted my Facebook account and I did it on purpose. On a side note, with all the 'are you sure' questions asked by Facebook, you really really have to want to do it. Not like my stupid tool to book and cancel my business trips. Anyway, back to the initial statement: Hello, my name is ...(who cares?) and I deleted my Facebook account.
First thing I have to say is that I am not missing it at all. So maybe it was not such a brave gesture as I thought, I was not even addicted.
Then, a question (I'm good at those) keeps popping into my mind: why? Why did I do it?

And this morning, on my way to work, I think I grasped a small part of the answer (actually two):

• I like doing things "wrong" - aka not the same as the rest of the world (being a tiny bit of a rebel, in my own way, because I am so damn boring and conventional in 99.9% of my life).
• Facebook is like TV. And I.hate.TV.

I know, it might be a weird statement, but really... did you ever think about it that way? Facebook makes you read and watch what other people want you to read and watch. It just takes away your freedom to choose what news, blog, music, pictures... you name it, you actually want to see.I know it's supposed to be about "following" friends, family and people who actually mean something to you. But it kind of doesn't. It goes chaotic and very much 'spam' like and in the end it absorbs your energy and your enthusiasm to actually go and look for something interesting on the www.
Same as my friend-colleague who regularly calls me a moron (because I am one and because she loves me), I love Internet. But I just don't get Facebook.
And I deleted my Facebook account. Statement made. Right?