Finally!
Finally I have finished my thesis, made a little book out of it, presented it to a bunch of old smart dudes (including an academic), and gotten an excellent grade for it (that part was obvious from the very beginning, but it's nice to finally have it in deed and not only theoretically.) So now I finally have completed my bachelor, and absolutely nothing changes.
Well, not really nothing. I get paid about 30 dollars a month for 'working' at my base now, and I'll be spending more time there than I will in the MIPT main campus, but overall it's all the same. Continuing education. but for now, it is summer, and I get to watch the Tour de France and the Universiade (where Russia is currently beating everyone really really badly.) I actually watched the opening ceremony. Like the vice-president of the Russian swimming federation and member of the IOC said. "What will Sochi be like?" basically they made a huge deal out of it. It seemed more like a trial run for the Olympics than some weird Universiade that has existed for but 27 years. I'm thinking that this competition will become quite a big deal from now on. In short the opening ceremony was spectacular. complete with dragons, myths, golden wish fishes, dancers in a huge pool of water great singers and her and there some perfectly bizarre choreography and costumes. The ceremony lasted a whopping 6 hours.
But enough of that. aside from getting a fancy piece of paper, I've also done something terrible: I've spilled orange juice on my computer a while ago. So now my computer hates me. This, I have determined thus: usually the computer in on one of three states. It thinks that I'm continuously pressing the space bar, which I'm obviously not; it decides that I never press the spacebar, which makes typing a pain in the behind; or whenever you press any key, it goez berzerk and prints out the symbol about 300 times, which is terrible as well. I tried to clean the keyboard which, it turns out is actually quite difficulty, because sony has to have obscenely complicated buttons. And, of course the only thing we have to clean it with is home made vodka from the soviet days. The stench of the stuff was impossible. I don't even want to know what they distilled the disgusting liquid out of. ugh! so yeah. But that of course, wasn't the worst part. I had to write my diploma, and doing that when every half hour your computer decides to make fun of you in new and interesting ways, it is three times as frustrating than it would usually be.
Well, that aside there has also been a few good things in the mean time. As I'm sure you remember I went to the Ukraine - Kiev to be precise. So here’s a few words on that; it was awesome! The city is wonderful, much friendlier and cleaner and somehow nicer than Moscow. The air is much fresher, and smells of growing things, which I found quite surprising, especially the fact that the smell is really not uniform at all. In one place it is flowers, in another something like the sea, and then an old car goes by and you remember that you’re in a city. So, we walked about, and looked at a few of the church-y places. But the thing I probably remember the most vivid is the sheer size of the river. It’s… well, quite frankly I haven’t seen anything that size. D and I decided to take a walk and we walked through some park by the river, and as we came to the bridge, we decide to cross it. It didn't seem to far to the other side, so we started walking. Well, it turned out the that shore ways away was actually an island on the river. There was just as much river on the other side. It probably took us half an hour to reach what we now knew to be the actual shore. Well when we got there, the bridge ended, and there was a huge traffic knot, but then the whopper came when I saw another shore just as far as we had already come still ahead of us. Apparently, we were now on a bigger island, and the river is absurdly large. And consider, this is not even the widest part of it by far, you see further downstream it becomes so huge that, when on a boat in the middle you cannot see either shore… so, consider your horizons expanded - literally. And, of course there was the staircase of death. The institute, of course was on a hill, and there was a very long staircase, which also had this effect of fooling you. When you look up, you think, ok I can do this, it’s not too far. It’ll be fine. You start out, and it’s ok. Half way up, you drag your feet, panting, but you keep going because you’re half way there and you grind your teeth and squint through the bright sun and keep going, and finally you get there. And then you see that there is just as much to go. You see, at that point the slope changes in such a way that you can’t see the second half from the bottom, because it’s not as steep. You might think, hey isn't that good, the second half is half as hard, the worst is behind you, right. But the fact that you thought that you should have been done already weighs you down, so the second half is just as difficult as the first half. So basically the people who built the university have found the ideal way to torture their students, not only mentally, and psychologically, but also physically. But luckily we didn't go to the university even half as often as we should have, and the staircase was but a minor inconvenience.
Well, in other news I can reiterate my endless complaints about the weather here. Soon after the snow melted, the heat set in. and it’s been ridiculously hot for the past month. See, as I've probably already mentioned, Spring, doesn't exist here. There’s winter and summer, and a week’s transition during May-April and then a rainy gray miserable period that lasts all November. Apropos rain. There’s a ton of that too. Just recently we had a little rain shower which turned all the roads into little rivers over ankle deep. Oh Russia. You’re perfect just as you are, no need to imitate the tropics, silly thing. But then again in the tropics you get this adorable thing where you have gushing rain from 1:30-2:30 each day. Here it’s more sporadic, which makes it more inconvenient if anything.
As for inconvenience, there’s another thing that’s really not something you want to do. Break the locks in the front door. I did that the day before yesterday after coming home from food shopping. My dad was out and when he came home, he realized that the door will not open no matter how long he jiggles his keys in them. In the end he had to come in through the window, which is rather comical if you've ever seen my dad. This morning we got up a bit earlier to attack the problem. We unscrewed the covers, juggled keys about, poked it with screwdrivers and did whatever we could think of. When all hope was lost, and my dad wanted to go out the window to buy drill bits to saw the thing out of the door one last attempt was made, he wanted to hammer the key in. who knows, it could help. Well the door opened smoothly. Apparently door locks are afraid of hammers…
Ah, yes, there is one more interesting thing I’ve forgotten to tell you. In the past year or two I’ve developed an unpleasant tendency - if I’m in a stuffy hot enclosed space for a length of time - I faint. This usually happened in buses, but now I’ve managed the feat in the local train and the metro as well. This is probably due to my having low hemoglobin, so whenever a shitload of people stay in stagnant air for a length of time, I don’t get enough oxygen and I go ko. It’s an odd sensation, really. And you can feel it coming before hand. You get unreasonably hot first, and your head starts getting really slow and heavy,l you get very weak, and at some point you just can’t manage to stand anymore because you don’t have the strength. The odd thing being that as soon as you sit, it goes away. Same thing when you feel a cool breeze. Well, there had been an accident in the metro that day. The rails lost electricity and the train was stranded in the tunnel for 4 hours. No one was hurt or killed, of course, but no one was happy about this either. This had happened earlier in the day but apparently there were after effects, and the metro was so packed as I had never seen. When my train was stranded in the tunnel for half an hour between two stations (it normally takes 2-5 minutes to get from one station to another) at one point that happened, and someone sat me down and I got off the next stop. Luckily I could take the train from there and get to dgap, and didn’t have to walk, and as an added bonus I got a sitting spot in the train, which prevented an unpleasant relapse. btw, the photo really doesn't show the extent of the packed-ness there. Just take what you see and multiply the sensation by 20, and you get an idea.
well anyways that's about all of it. I’ll write again soon-ish. Toodles))
But enough of that. aside from getting a fancy piece of paper, I've also done something terrible: I've spilled orange juice on my computer a while ago. So now my computer hates me. This, I have determined thus: usually the computer in on one of three states. It thinks that I'm continuously pressing the space bar, which I'm obviously not; it decides that I never press the spacebar, which makes typing a pain in the behind; or whenever you press any key, it goez berzerk and prints out the symbol about 300 times, which is terrible as well. I tried to clean the keyboard which, it turns out is actually quite difficulty, because sony has to have obscenely complicated buttons. And, of course the only thing we have to clean it with is home made vodka from the soviet days. The stench of the stuff was impossible. I don't even want to know what they distilled the disgusting liquid out of. ugh! so yeah. But that of course, wasn't the worst part. I had to write my diploma, and doing that when every half hour your computer decides to make fun of you in new and interesting ways, it is three times as frustrating than it would usually be.Well, that aside there has also been a few good things in the mean time. As I'm sure you remember I went to the Ukraine - Kiev to be precise. So here’s a few words on that; it was awesome! The city is wonderful, much friendlier and cleaner and somehow nicer than Moscow. The air is much fresher, and smells of growing things, which I found quite surprising, especially the fact that the smell is really not uniform at all. In one place it is flowers, in another something like the sea, and then an old car goes by and you remember that you’re in a city. So, we walked about, and looked at a few of the church-y places. But the thing I probably remember the most vivid is the sheer size of the river. It’s… well, quite frankly I haven’t seen anything that size. D and I decided to take a walk and we walked through some park by the river, and as we came to the bridge, we decide to cross it. It didn't seem to far to the other side, so we started walking. Well, it turned out the that shore ways away was actually an island on the river. There was just as much river on the other side. It probably took us half an hour to reach what we now knew to be the actual shore. Well when we got there, the bridge ended, and there was a huge traffic knot, but then the whopper came when I saw another shore just as far as we had already come still ahead of us. Apparently, we were now on a bigger island, and the river is absurdly large. And consider, this is not even the widest part of it by far, you see further downstream it becomes so huge that, when on a boat in the middle you cannot see either shore… so, consider your horizons expanded - literally. And, of course there was the staircase of death. The institute, of course was on a hill, and there was a very long staircase, which also had this effect of fooling you. When you look up, you think, ok I can do this, it’s not too far. It’ll be fine. You start out, and it’s ok. Half way up, you drag your feet, panting, but you keep going because you’re half way there and you grind your teeth and squint through the bright sun and keep going, and finally you get there. And then you see that there is just as much to go. You see, at that point the slope changes in such a way that you can’t see the second half from the bottom, because it’s not as steep. You might think, hey isn't that good, the second half is half as hard, the worst is behind you, right. But the fact that you thought that you should have been done already weighs you down, so the second half is just as difficult as the first half. So basically the people who built the university have found the ideal way to torture their students, not only mentally, and psychologically, but also physically. But luckily we didn't go to the university even half as often as we should have, and the staircase was but a minor inconvenience.
Well, in other news I can reiterate my endless complaints about the weather here. Soon after the snow melted, the heat set in. and it’s been ridiculously hot for the past month. See, as I've probably already mentioned, Spring, doesn't exist here. There’s winter and summer, and a week’s transition during May-April and then a rainy gray miserable period that lasts all November. Apropos rain. There’s a ton of that too. Just recently we had a little rain shower which turned all the roads into little rivers over ankle deep. Oh Russia. You’re perfect just as you are, no need to imitate the tropics, silly thing. But then again in the tropics you get this adorable thing where you have gushing rain from 1:30-2:30 each day. Here it’s more sporadic, which makes it more inconvenient if anything.
As for inconvenience, there’s another thing that’s really not something you want to do. Break the locks in the front door. I did that the day before yesterday after coming home from food shopping. My dad was out and when he came home, he realized that the door will not open no matter how long he jiggles his keys in them. In the end he had to come in through the window, which is rather comical if you've ever seen my dad. This morning we got up a bit earlier to attack the problem. We unscrewed the covers, juggled keys about, poked it with screwdrivers and did whatever we could think of. When all hope was lost, and my dad wanted to go out the window to buy drill bits to saw the thing out of the door one last attempt was made, he wanted to hammer the key in. who knows, it could help. Well the door opened smoothly. Apparently door locks are afraid of hammers…
Ah, yes, there is one more interesting thing I’ve forgotten to tell you. In the past year or two I’ve developed an unpleasant tendency - if I’m in a stuffy hot enclosed space for a length of time - I faint. This usually happened in buses, but now I’ve managed the feat in the local train and the metro as well. This is probably due to my having low hemoglobin, so whenever a shitload of people stay in stagnant air for a length of time, I don’t get enough oxygen and I go ko. It’s an odd sensation, really. And you can feel it coming before hand. You get unreasonably hot first, and your head starts getting really slow and heavy,l you get very weak, and at some point you just can’t manage to stand anymore because you don’t have the strength. The odd thing being that as soon as you sit, it goes away. Same thing when you feel a cool breeze. Well, there had been an accident in the metro that day. The rails lost electricity and the train was stranded in the tunnel for 4 hours. No one was hurt or killed, of course, but no one was happy about this either. This had happened earlier in the day but apparently there were after effects, and the metro was so packed as I had never seen. When my train was stranded in the tunnel for half an hour between two stations (it normally takes 2-5 minutes to get from one station to another) at one point that happened, and someone sat me down and I got off the next stop. Luckily I could take the train from there and get to dgap, and didn’t have to walk, and as an added bonus I got a sitting spot in the train, which prevented an unpleasant relapse. btw, the photo really doesn't show the extent of the packed-ness there. Just take what you see and multiply the sensation by 20, and you get an idea.well anyways that's about all of it. I’ll write again soon-ish. Toodles))
