21

I am now 21.

I wish I could say its been an easy few days, but its been harder than usual. The words "there are still so many things I want to see with you, so many things I want to say to you" keep running through my head. I miss him dearly, and regret much.

Against the Wind

I turn 21 in a day's time, and I've never felt more unprepared to become an adult.

There were times in the past where I did feel prepared. Doing little things like making my first bank account, my first angry letter to the landlord, even fixing the problem of the sticking lock (WD 40-ed it) made me feel accomplished. Look Ma! I can do these things by myself, I can take care of myself. Yet today I find myself, having fled home, immensely relishing my time here being cocooned away under the safety of home and my family.

Small steps I suppose.

Ready to Start

My world has been shattered once more. I am flying home on Tuesday. I booked the tickets last night.

I love him, and he he says that he loves me, which only serves to make things worse.

The Kitchen

I was originally going to attempt to show I clever I am by going into a mini discourse about Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth. I was going to talk about the fact that Romans worshipped her showed that they understood that the kitchen was literally the heart of the household, integral to its being. But then I realised hearth could also mean a conventional fireplace located somewhere else in the house, not necessarily the kitchen, depending on how annoyingly picayune a reader could be. Therefore I choose the safer, but still pretentious path of attempting to highlight this possible deviation in definition and distance myself slightly from its originally desired (but definitely pretentious) narrative.

So anyway I cleaned the kitchen today. On Saturday, Jewish people celebrate the Sabbath. On Saturday, my roommates celebrate the fact that I clean the kitchen, and simultaneously clean up all my dirty kitchen implements. I'm not exactly sure to the extent which they appreciate me cleaning however, as I often take around an hour to clean the kitchen. One does no housework at all, and the other takes about 30 mintes to clean the bathrooms. The kitchen is by far the hardest thing to clean because of the raw work and time needed. Still, I am surprisingly less peeved because they tolerate with my dirty dish pile and often take the initiative to toss the contents of the large black bin in the kitchen away when it overflows (one of Christoph's friends told me about her household last year... the flatmates refused to take the initiative to toss the trash and after a few weeks maggots started appearing).

This week as I cleaned the kitchen, I listened to Outlook on the BBC podcast. The first one which was very interesting was about this woman who went to Afghanistan to live among the locals and befriended a local family after 7/7. The second one was far less invigorating, but nonetheless interesting. It was about a man, who suffered from domestic abuse for more than a year before the neighbours called the police to rescue him. He spoke of how his partner would pour kettles full of boiling hot water on his lap, punch him until he got black eyes and the like. It was rather depressing really. What depressing really was that it reminded me of my flatmate. While merely confined to what is apparently self-induced emotional abuse in her relationship, the fact that she sits there and just takes it while non-stop justifying it to herself, depresses me to no end. I really hope her other friend moves in with us next year because I'm at the end of my depth of empathy.

On another note, I apparently forgot there was an ACS dinner last night. For some reason I thought it was on the 14th of March, and not the 11th. It only occurred to me to check when I was showering last night around midnight, when I suddenly remembered. I then realised why I thought the 14th March was a special day. It is, for starters the birthday of my uncle, an event we celebrated every year at home. Secondly, it's also the day I met Christoph last year. This is the second year running that I missed the dinner, I bet there's going to be more gossip again.

Evian

Today at Subway the sub of the day was Tuna Mayo. Now I ordinarily like Tuna Mayo, but it had the tendency to make one's breath incredibly stinky, and therefore I do not like to eat it in public. Instead I opted for Chicken Tikka (sub of the day for Monday), but the poor stressed Subway Man dumped one scoop full of Tuna Mayo onto my bread before I could say Chicken Tikka! Chicken Tikka! Instead, he apologised, and then put the Chicken Tikka on to of the Tuna Mayo. I wish I could comment and say that it was a weird combination, but I ended up not tasting any Tuna Mayo at all (which makes the Tuna Mayo rather suspect in terms of taste).

In other news, today my Korean GTA who cannot pronounce "L" and instead replaces it with an "R" sound, repeated the world Election multiple times because we were studying the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party in class. For some reason, I was the only person who apparently found this funny. Also when a classmate, Chet as he is known, attempted to say "LDP" he went "LG" (as in LGBT, for we just had student union elections where that particular acronym was shouted about often) before correcting himself. It was a very accidentally sexually charged class. If you call juvenile mispronunciations and brain farts sexually charged that is.

In other, other news, I have a headache of the same sort that has been recurring everyday nowadays for the past few days. I also cannot think of any other versions with the word "day", except for weekday and Doris Day.

Chicken Risotto

I actually made Chicken Risotto for dinner today. It sits in front of me, a yellowish shade of grey. The smell of freshly ground peppercorns is more overpowering than the chicken, or the onion, or the risotto itself. I'm amazed I have found the strength and willpower to cook it after the breakdown I had last night, which lasted till I fell asleep at 7:30am today. \

I am very tired again.