Iva’s WTF site - Squirrelism.net

It’s a song about nothing. Why were we waiting for 16 years to find that out?

I have just discovered DOPPLR by having seen a link to it on a well-known web developer/enterpreur’s blog and clicking it to see what it is.

So, I have a profile there now. I’ll be adding my humble collection of as-many-travels-as-a-lower-middle-class-Serb-can-do-under-visa-regime there soon. It is pretty interesting, IMHO. And it’s also interesting to see that foreign people are interested in Belgrade, as masochistic as that may be.

There isn’t much that I can add to it right now, I’m afraid, as my recent travels (as in XXI century/adult lufe) come down to this mere list:

• Maribor, Slovenia from 30th June to 11th July this year
• Trieste, Italy on 08th July this year
• Gyula, Hungary from 08th to 15th October 2007
• Vienna, Austria from 05th to 08th December 2006
• Zagreb, Croatia from 08th to 11th July 2006
• Gyula, Hungary from 21st to 29th July 2005
• Gyula, Hungary, 22nd to 24th July 2004 - the one with my mother forgetting the bank card at home
• Gyula, Hungary, from 20th to 31st July 2003
• Maribor, Slovenia from 30th April to 08th May 2003
• Budapest, Hungary from 25 to 31st October 2002

All of that not counting places visited in my own country.
It’s also pretty weird to realise that I have not been anywhere further than 60 km in 2000 and 2001.

One’d think us web designers/coders have an amazing life. No, we don’t. Especially if we’re not adventure-seekers by nature. I still consider 12 hours of cheap train travel to Vienna, seeing John Fr..errr…Red Hot Chili Peppers and meeting up with friends from all over Europe to be my biggest adventure in this life.

Oh well, I’m still young…just a quarter of a century old. If I think of two of my closest friends, one of them has seen the seaside only once in her life; and the other one hasn’t done anything but REALLY lo-fi travelling in the last…too many years.

Alice?

Alice! Wow…that girl sure had gone through something. I love Lewis Carol’s books, even though some people accuse him of…we all know what. But there is one moment in particular that I would like to remind everyone here. In Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There, there’s that ethearal moment when Alice is walking through a forest with a fawn, hugging it. She isn’t saying anything and the fawn isn’t saying anything either. And they do not know who they are, they do not know who the other one is either. At some point, however, Alice’s mind is less blurry and she says something in the lines of: Hey, but I know my name. It’s Alice…Alice…I’ll try not to forget it. That’s the point when the fawn is scared to death, and yells: I’m a fawn! And good lord, you are a human child! and runs away. Forever. Never to be seen again. Just because fawns and humans are not the same thing and there was that fear that Alice would do something. Unnecessary fear, IMHO.

What did I want to say? It is really obvious, but for those who aren’t using brains that much or aren’t interested in using them: society has put labels on us. No one is more exclusive than the other, it is just what they make us think. The fawn and ms. Alice are equal. It is just something neither of them realised at that very point.

If anyone would ask me what is my least favourite month in year, I would probably say June. June and I never liked each other and I have explained that a couple of times. However, if I was able to pick out my least favourite during the period starting with one leap year and ending with the other, that would be an OLYMPIC AUGUST. Yup, like the one that is (OMG, yay!) going to be over in nine days. And those nine days sound like an agony to me.

Olympic games were held in July in 1996 and in September 2000, so that is how the world escaped the horrible disaster that is an OLYMPIC AUGUST. However, that one came back in 2004…with a vengeance. In my books, for certain reasons, I call it the invisible A-bomb month. So many things happened and all of them changed my views of life.

However, I see a difference between myself during the last OLYMPIC AUGUST and this one. I was trying to be like the others. Now I am experiencing this phenomenon of, gasp, others trying to be like me.

And I’m advising them kindly not to try that. Everything in my life is like a huge storm with winds colliding from all the possible angles. Many of the things from this entry occured because of someone whose name is partly windy and I also happen to know a couple of people named after hurricanes. Ironically, the über-petite among them shares the name with the most diastrous ones.

Let’s end this with a fragment of the previous OLYMPIC AUGUST, hoping the one in 2012 will be sane:

Then we put Milena in one of those office chairs and we were “driving” her all around the 5th floor. I told her that she’s the first female to win a F1 race and she was so proud of that. Mom finally arrived and Milena basically glued herself to her. Yup, my mom is for some odd reason that little girl’s idol. LOL. I downloaded my stuff, but I couldn’t burn it on a CD, since Danijela who has the burner is on a holiday.

Dear western-Christian friends, I forgot to wish you a happy Easter, which was obviously on Sunday, 23rd.

I did so because a couple of people force-fed it to me and I already had a couple of cases where people forgot my Slava on 31st January (that’s my family’s patron saint once again! More of a pagan thing that Christian, but, well, Serbs are an interesting sort of people and probably not completely Christian either…) and my Christmas on 07th, yet, as usual, insisted to wish me a merry Christmas on 25th December and I simply decided not to bother at all. Instead of that, I spent the weekend finalising stuff for two new one-time design jobs that I snatched during March…a successful month indeed.

Also, the chocolate bunnies mania on one side and overusing of religion and making crosses out of everything on the other side totally freaks me out! As I always say, I hate comsumer-mas and consumer-ster; but at the same time, I think various backwards habits don’t have a place in XXI century. He’s risen? OK, sure he’s risen and although I’m not religions, I believe Jesus was not a myth and I respect all of the things he tried to teach people (and failed, as people seriously suck), it was, alongside Utopia and Marxism in theory the only idealistic thing in this world…but attending a mass doesn’t wash bad things you (no one in particular, any person!) might have done and it won’t change your life. It just might make you feel calm for a day or two.

But, since I know how it feels when people don’t care and when they think their culture is the only one in the world, and today is probably Easter Tuesday, happy belated Easter! I hope you all spent a nice weekend with your families. Love from me!

P.S. Mine is on 27th April this year and YES, it was on the same day as yours last year and in 2004, but NOT in 2008. I’d put money on 3 people on my friends’ list forgetting it.:p

P.P.S. If you respond to this with “Happy Easter” and you aren’t my clown-commenter; I’ll delete it and write you a long email about what I call comments taken straight from the bottom of your butt