BTW

The exchange program is over. I am sober and back in Lithuania. For a second time already. Sorry for not informing you, dear Readers. I either forgot or did not have enough time.

Since I did not write anything for more than 3 months, I believe that even a very good post would not compensate that. Therefore I just decided to include something more valuable.

This is the picture of happy horse I have just made. Hope you like it. It took me exactly 3 minutes to draw that.

See you some time in the future.

Good luck.

The worst and the most expensive haircut one has ever had

Yes. For that you have to go to the Netherlands. Now I understand why Dutch men use so much of hair gel here: barbers here suck. Average Dutch man looks like he is has just washed his hair and did not dry it up with a towel not even for a second (except that it is not dripping). Only injection of half-tube of hair-gel into hair can help to achieve that. Enough about hair! This blog is about everything else but fashion (still…).

This blog is much more about science: Chinese scientists have created first ever artificial black hole. And I am not going to explain how they did it. Nor do I care. But it still makes my blog about science, doesn’t it?

This blog is also much more about politics… well… Maybe not. This blog is about everything else but fashion and politics. It was said that economics is too important to be left for politicians. I doubt reverse being true. Maybe I do care about politics, but not enough to force myself to read about what is happening in parliaments. This has something to do with my diminishing faith (caused by real life experience) that democracy is actually the best form of ruling the state…

My aim is to make this blog about education. Education in the widest possible definition. You can notice few links on the top-right corner of my blog. I will continue to post everything what I (subjectively) find worth reading, looking, watching (Oxford comma) and/or listening. Share, if you have something similar.

Finally, puppies!!!

puppies

Getting out from the comfort zone

The longer you live in one place, the deeper roots you establish. It sounds wonderful to build up your life piece by piece just like you have always wanted and that would remain forever… But sometimes you fail and it makes you feel miserable. Even worse is to be successful in building it, but at the end understand that it is not what you need after all. So maybe it is not that bad to be uncertain of what you want to include in your life…

I do not know what should be in my life. Therefore I am searching. Remaining in a comfort zone limits abilities to find something fundamentally different. Not getting anything new limits our growth. Growth is good, no growth is bad. Growth helps to distinguish between temporary and permanent, to understand what is fair and what is not… and many more things which I am not able to tell you well since I still have to grow a little more to understand them…

I used to envy people who knew whom they wanted to be since high-school. I did not. However, I do not envy anymore. I think that the joy lies in trying things and discovering that. Now I know that I do not want to be a lawyer and a drug-addict. Two options eliminated after 21 year… Still many more options and many more years to come (hopefully…).

American (we used to smoke together 10/15/2009 – 10/18/2009) from my flat told me one day: “A man from West can at most claim that he is half educated if he has not made an attempt to understand the secrets of the East”. He said that he just understood that he would like to travel to Asia, although he has never been abroad, even outside Californian state, before he came to the Netherlands. 80% of Americans do not have a passport, which indicates, that he is not unique. Doubtfully he would be able to come up with something like that remaining in his comfort zone (wonderful life in sunny California), where it seems that the US is the World…

Finally, a link for those who search.

Living in hi society

Smoke a joint…

This is how you can spend most of your time here. This is how most of the exchange students here do spend their time like. Being constantly high, laughing from exposure with the various items arround them, shifting problems to the 11th dimension.

Take a different perspective…

You are not here to take courses. Courses are here to take you. You mustn’t allow that. Drop them out if they give too much pressure on you (well, this is what my flat-mate did; however, for her English language barrier might have been more important factor). Well, it is far from the FE thing we used to have in SSE Riga… I honestly miss it… Now it makes every course I take look like a listening a tricky question when you know the answer…

…living in a pause currently. Just like the one we had during the film here in the Netherlands. For the audience to consume more (presumably beer, quite popular in the cinemas), the film had a 15-minute-brake after one hour had passed.

This is the commercial I have seen before the film, the day before yesterday. The Netherlands…

[unnamed]

Twitter page of Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania

The rise and fall of subtitles

Who is the last person on earth who have not seen the Inglorious Basterds film? Not me. I have seen it today in cinema of Utrecht. Well I have seen all the film, but I heard (understood a more precise word for this) not more than 34.7%. This is a mistake I made by choosing the movie which is not entirely in English. You are used to the fact that some movies in order to look more realistic are using foreign language (by foreign I mean non-English… wow… did not see that transition in self-determination… let’s hope it is temporary…). Well, but then you just look at subtitles and you are part of the movie as well.

Now imagine how you feel when you hear something in German (assuming you not speak German) or even French (God no…) and then you automatically look at subtitles and surprise surprise you are even more confused. Brain gets a punishment for something which previously was giving a reward. How do we call it? Not gooooood (well at least it is the phrase which my French room-mate uses extensively). I am really afraid of whether I am going to make my brain look at the subtitles again…

It's Mavi o'clock

By the way, this is how I have pimped the clock bought from Ikea. Each of 12 members of our flat has her hour twice a day, during which he gets free hugs from everyone. And we do not use numbers anymore. We say names instead. This is more confusing and no-one else understands it… Just like speaking French… On the other hand it is better than to read in Dutch…

More on motivation: The Fun Theory

There is a way to motivate one to get up even if one does not give a thing on productivity. Every time a person gets up he must do something fun. Something so fun, that he would go to sleep in the evening by looking forward for that fun. For some it could be playing with puppies. Some strange people like running. Others hate running and would look forward have some time with Maria Juana while drinking coffee.

There is an opinion that the best motivator for human being is fun. People know that it is better for their health (especially for hearth, the third most important body part just right after the brain and the naval) to climb some stairs rather than use an escalator. However, video gives some evidence that unless motivated by possible fun, people are still not doing it.

And a very similar example from theoretical point of view.

Disregard the corporate part of it. Treat it as a material for education purposes.

Productivity for those who just cannot find more decent blogs to read about it

The day I decided to change (again, for some 653rd time already) was today. For no reason got up at 7 (s-e-v-e-n) o’clock (on Monday!!!) in the morning, took a shower, listened for the Economist audio edition while eating a toasted sandwich and drinking tea with milk. Then went to a library and studied sociology for exactly 89 minutes (learned that the main reason for lack of business ventures in Africa is not the lack of entrepreneurial skills (one may argue even contrary) but the lack of social capital, and especially in the form of trust. Since there is no trust among members of society, costs of running a business increase dramatically… long story…). Then went back home and continued a quite productive day… long story… telling only as much as would be enough to make a point…

The only thing which I changed from all the previous days was the attitude towards time in the morning. Every Monday I have a lecture at 1pm and usually get up at 12. And I was getting up late only because I did not find what would motivate me to jump off the bed. When you have a lecture in the early morning (which I usually had before coming here), you get up early, since you are not willing to miss it. It is a sufficient reason for doing so. When, however, your lectures start in the afternoon (or even at 7pm as for my room-mate) you usually find it idiotic to get up 5 hours before it.

But I thought to myself: value of time before the lecture is more valuable than afer. “Why?”, you may ask. Because (I may answer) we need time for doing stuff. The more productive time, the more stuff you can do, the more expensive the time is. Also opportunity costs matter: some of the things you can only do at a certain point of time (i.e. partying alone sucks). Since lecture is not an extremely hard activity (one may argue even contrary), it is possible to attend it with “slightly used brain”. However even after going to a lecture even with fresh head, you will exit it with you brain tired. So I just thought, that the stuff which requires most of the focus must be done before the lecture, with a peak of productivity after about 3-4 hours since you got up (may be different for strange people). And in evening one does not need to force himself to work on stuff (especially when certain parts of a body want to get wasted and check out tipsy girls). A trend-setting discovery. It took me only 21 year of my life to figure it out.

So hard things first, lectures afterwards, less demanding things later and only then time for mostly dull conversations with exchange students (“Where are you from? Oh. Did I really ask this before? Oh. Could you say it again, I believe it was a place I did not know before, therefore it did not stay in my mind. Oh, Germany it is…”). However, I found few people here who are interesting to talk with. Id est, completely unexpected discussion about flaws of utilitarian approach to justice just after finishing conversation how cool it is to sleep all day, do a push-up and smoke some weed as a reward.

Anyway, I might have tried to put something more valuable than just an experience of how-exciting-is-to-live-in-a-foreign-coutry. My intuition says that I have failed. My brain say that it for no reason had more pressure today than the last week combined. My stomach says that I should never ever eat at KFC. Finally, my hair say that I should cut it off immediately!

Link of the day: Newsmap. Just to compensate those, who feel that they have just wasted 4 minutes of their life (depending on reading speed)

Creation of problems 101

Front wheel of an item which used to be my bike

The sunny day it was today. I tried to get into somewhat better pattern of sleeping, but I slightly failed. This was only because I did not find anything motivating to do after I get up, so I just did not. I get up only when a headache said that if you put me in a horizontal position for one more hour, I am turning off the brain for today. Maybe it actually did (knowing what happened afterwards).

Together with Ervinas we went to a museum. The one which is fifty meters away from a window of mine. The strange museum it was. About some kind of tribe near Papua and New Guinea which was colonised by Dutch navy. Museum mate a new benchmark for what I call complete randomness. Not a single item was related to another one in that museum (or I did not tried hard enough to relate them). Examples of items: stuffed bird, cowboy vest, huge touchscreen, room of a sailor, t-shirt of Dutch national team, a lot of books, pictures of various cruise ships and in every corner you were able to find computers and guest books. This looked like a museum I could make if I would not throw away unnecessary things for few years in a row. But since we had cards which allowed to enter museums in the Netherlands for free, I did not regret those 5 euros which I did not pay…

The day was really peaceful so I decided that I should create some problems. Driving around neighbourhood of Ervinas (a.k.a. ghetto for Muslims) was not enough so I just somehow (i.e. by turning off my brain) managed to put my bike in such position that while going really fast Ervinas rode on front wheel of my bike. As a consequence I quickly and unsuccessfully landed on the ground by having serious bruises with a lot of blood on my knee and palm. The bike looked horrible, but I still decided to ride it (unimaginably slowly) fixing it with a help of few brutal moves. It took very little for a front tire to explode, so it did.

The cost of fixing it is 90 euros. I bought it for 55. Solution to problem is obvious.

Interesting times we live in

Howdy,

I will not apologize for not updating my blog. I just do not have enough time (which I never have). I believe I am not the only one who does not have time in these interesting times we live in, so I think that many of you understand me and are not upset that there is a boring post on the top of the page for already few weeks.

During that time I have visited Oktoberfest in Munich, which was a great experience of obtuse consumerism. Nevertheless, it is dandy to get drunk at 10am and get a hangover at 4pm while laying on the grass and digesting an awful Whopper from a Burger-King which we found by getting in the random underground and getting off in a certain station only because the woman who get off there had a map, which signaled us that she is not indigenous, therefore she would also try to see something exciting rather than to drink additional liter of beer and eat more of white sausage… Advice for future: never ever go to a rollercoaster with five 360° spins after drinking few liters of beer because people look scared of it and you seem to be brave (a.k.a. drunk) enough to show that it is nothing to be afraid of…

My bio-clock is raped. I usually go to sleep at 4am (GMT+1) wake up at 1pm and usually have a two-hour-power-nap at some 8pm. What is worse, I rape bio-clocks of my flat-mates, by having what-awesome-youtube-video-you-saw-and-think-that-others-must-see-it-otherwise-their-life-would-be-miserable evenings. After each party kitchen is raped. Not a life, but a rape. You are only happy if you have the right role. Just like in the story about the guy walking into the bar and shouting: “I could get any woman in this bar if I would like to! It is because I am a rapist!”

This is a picture I took in underground of Munich. It symbolises harmony. I am with a purple sweater.

From a spider's perspective