Room to breathe
At last, I’ve finished high school for good. No more uniform, no more bells ringing periodically. Except of course for the fact I want to become a teacher. There are so many things I’ve been waiting to do, and now my exams are all over, I can finally get on with it.
I want to become more fluent in German, because I have neglected it since I went to Germany almost a year ago. I want to get started on learning Japanese because I have a conditional at Edinburgh Uni to study it. To be honest, I don’t think I did well enough in my exams to get in, but it’s better to be optimistic. I think it’s important to keep your self-esteem no matter what happens.
Speaking of self-esteem, I was watching a documentary about Vaginoplasty today. I felt incredibly sorry for some of the women on it. One girl had been verbally torn apart by some men in a club because of the way her labia looked. How petty and ridiculous is that? As if it wasn’t bad enough the way people are treated based on their breasts or their tummies, now the aesthetics of the vagina is a problem. One plastic surgery had seen a 300% increase in labia reductions; many of the patients were only around 16 years old.
Well of course we know what this is going to be blamed on. Porn. This is an excuse. Yes of course porn shows an unrealistic perfection in people’s bodies. But can’t we see through this and realise that porn is just a fantasy? You wouldn’t watch a film about human flight and then jump off a cliff. No, we need to be more realistic. Porn isn’t to blame, our society is.
We ourselves perpetuate this behaviour. We try too hard to emulate what is clearly impossible and then that kind of standard is passed on. The taboos of sex and body image need to be forgotten, and we need to become more comfortable with ourselves.
It just makes me so sad and disgusted when people would rather change their own body rather than the way they see themselves. If your boy/girlfriend doesn’t like the way you look, well then, what on earth are you doing with them? Another part of the documentary showed young Muslim women going for hymen reconstruction because on their wedding nights, if their hymen wasn’t intact, they could be punished, even killed because it would mean they were not a virgin. This is happening right here in the UK. Apart from the fact that you can break your hymen from activities such as horseriding, what’s the big deal with losing your virginity before marriage anyway? Virginity is a meaningless word. Having sex makes you no less of a person, it doesn’t change anything. People still seem to think it’s some kind of dark magical act that will make you impure and evil.
Our society is in desperate need of reform.
“The Perfect Vagina” can be watched here.
Into the rhythm
I still can’t believe I spent the whole of July in Germany.
Shy little me, never before travelled beyond the shores of the UK.
It wasn’t even a holiday. Now it’s all behind me, and all I have is experience and memories. That’s the most valuable thing you can ever gain, even though some things weren’t quite as positive as I would have been comfortable with. And my goodness, is it stressful speaking a foreign language constantly for a whole month! Trying to be articulate enough to be understood is difficult, but then you have to be social with the other people, some of whom were from countries I had never even heard of. I’ve never talked so much in my whole life, which is strangely ironic, given the fact that my German was not exactly the best in the whole group.
To be quite honest, I don’t think I’ll even keep up with the people from my group much longer. I added all the people I met on Facebook, but I was only very close to about four people. I resolved to be talkative and friendly, but I guess old habits die hard. There was a clear gap between my little group of friends and the loud, typical bunch.
I don’t want to go into too much detail, I’ll discuss things more in detail in other posts, when they become relevant. Of use to a certain theme, you could say.
Something I want to make clear is that when you do something that has a big effect, it builds the foundation or helps structure you. What you bring into conversation, how you see things, your opinions. Everything is effected most by the things that make you uncomfortable or take you out of what you’re used to. Do you remember what happened last Thursday? Probably not. It hasn’t had a big effect on you, and only helps scrape the spare cement off. (But if you’re a procrastinator like me, it didn’t even do that much.)
We all need something to remember. We all need something to look forward to. When you are just stagnating in daily routine, life seems pointless. Anticipate something. Even if it’s just giving yourself a little reward at the end of the week or trying something scary, or making a new friend. Trust me.
I’m building.
In other news, the LHC has a final official start-up date! 10th of September and the (I assume) lovely physicists at CERN will flick the switch to perhaps discovering something incredible- world changing even. I’m looking forward to it.
The Guardian newspaper online has collected quite a few interesting things about it-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/cern
Tschüss!
Amour
Now this is an interesting subject, isn’t it? A lot of the time, it seems to cause more trouble than good. But that can easily change, just by the way you look at it. Of course, there are always going to be people that you simply can’t get along with, maybe they are so problematic that you can’t fix anything. But most of the time, there are things you can consider to make your relationships work better.
I think that love is one of the most important parts of life. It’s close to impossible trying to live alone. I wouldn’t say I’m a very social person at all, but my life would truly suck without people to love.
If you’ve been reading any of my previous posts, you might have tried to learn to love yourself. This is important before even considering loving anyone else. If you don’t know what you want; don’t understand yourself, your needs and bad points, you won’t be able to handle a meaningful relationship.
A lot of people are not going to agree with me on this, but I think that it is possible to love just about anyone. That’s right. Just about anyone. It does make sense. You love your family even though you had no choice in the matter. It doesn’t matter what sort of personality they have, you love them all the same. That’s because you care about them. It’s a human thing. Therefore, this can extend into your relationships with anyone.
It’s true that if you get to know someone too well, you can get bored of them, but that can easily be combated by changing yourself every so often. Of course, your partner has to do this too. People change their personality a bit roughly every seven years, but if you get too comfortable with someone, you might not undertake this change. This is why it is important to retain yourself when you get into a relationship. Too many stop caring about themselves once they think they have the person for them.
You stop looking after yourself when you have no one to impress.
You cannot neglect people like this. Keep your life different and exciting and trust me, life will be great, your partner and yourself will not become predictable. Love is something that anyone can feel for anyone else, given the right circumstances. That’s the most important thing.
Well, that’s my opinion anyway!
