My life post 15 November (end of exams) in bullet points:
- I went to Melbourne for four days. Melbourne is amazing. I love the shopping (Chapel Street! and the department stores and the designers) and the parks (the Fitzroy Gardens and the Treasury Gardens sont tres pittoresques; had I been in Melbourne longer, I would like to have strolled through them) and the food (Lygon Street: the only place outside Italy where I've been able to find fobby Italian shops) and the MCG (Jolimont Street is so nice, and the topiary elephants were impressive... so much prettier than Eden Park). I wish that I lived in Melbourne.
- Realising the importance of things that used to be important but that I had left behind. This includes all the areas of study that someone like my mother would ask "what are you going to do with that?" about. Languages and literature and history and philosophy are all so important. I've started reading my old books (see below) and re-learning Italian and Latin, and it's weird to think of how empty and boring my life had been without things like this. I remember when I first started university, I thought that Commerce students were really boring, because they couldn't talk about literature or philosophy, and didn't know what I meant when I said "grazie mille". Over the years I feel like I've started to become one, and it is boring and somewhat depressing. Even though so many people (including me, for a while) write off the arts subjects as being useless, I think they are essential.. not necessarily as a degree, but for life inspiration and fulfillment and higher order thinking, you can't go past them.
- 21st birthday parties. I've been to two this week. For the party on Friday, I had to get out my six inch heels for the first time since May, and I tripped over three times walking from the car to the venue (about ten metres). My ankles are feeble. It was nice to see everyone again, and also to be a bit more the centre of attention than usual, because I hadn't seen people since the end of exams and had missed parties/gatherings/miscellaneous social events when I was in Melbourne. I had a ridiculous amount of Coca Cola to drink, because it's pretty much the only non alcoholic beverage that bars seem to serve (I hope my teeth don't rot). Because really, there is nothing uglier than a drunken woman.
- Reading. This started when I found some of my old Robert Harris books, and started to read them again, starting off with Pompeii and then with Imperium and Lustrum. I like the latter two in particular, because they focus on Cicero, while most Roman historical fiction tends to focus on Julius Caesar. The books are also good because they portray JC from the more typical Italian point of view (that he was a tyrant). I also realised that I know someone who is a bit of a real life Cicero.
- Reading II: Lori Gottlieb. A few years ago, I saw an article about her in the newspaper, just before her best known book, Marry Him: the case for settling for Mr Good Enough. The book caused a huge fuss within feminist circles, outraged by the thought of giving instructions to women to settle for anything but the best. That's not actually the point of the book. The point is that a lot of women enter relationships (and I guess I'm probably guilty of it too), for various reasons including things they see in movies and magazines and maybe even fairytales (?), with ridiculously high expectations that can never be met, and for a relationship to be successful, both parties need to have realistic expectations. Although everyone has heard the message before, the bluntness with which it is conveyed is what makes the book hilarious. For example, this, from the author:
Many women in their twenties or early thirties are either breaking up with really good guys, or refusing to even go on a first date with a really good guy, because there’s not instant “chemistry” or because the guy is kind (but not a mind-reader), successful (but not wealthy enough), cute (but balding), and funny (but not Jon Stewart), and they think there’s someone better out there. So they pass up the ‘8’ in order to hold out for the ‘10’ – and then suddenly they’re 38 or 40 and now they can only get a ‘5.’ The ‘8’ would have been the catch. Most of us would be very happy married to the ‘8.’ But we don’t realize this at the time. This whole business of “having it all” is a problem because guess what, most of us aren’t ‘10s’ either. Some guy is going to have to put up with our flaws and give up certain things he may want in a partner, too. Maybe he wanted someone taller, or someone with a better sense of humor or someone less sensitive. We tend to forget about that because our female friends are always telling us how fabulous we are, and soon we think we’re so fabulous that we always find a reason that this guy or that guy isn’t good enough for us.
I find this hilarious. True too, I guess, but mainly hilarious. My mother hates it. Hahaha.
- And seriously, why does everyone insist upon declaring their undying love to me on MSN after midnight? It becomes somewhat overwhelming. Always a relief when it's only platonic.
PS: this is more a reminder to myself than to anyone else, but I need to go through and punctuate this properly and put hyphens in and so on. But I wanted to get this done before sleeping. Bonne nuit to my five followers! hahahaha.
