13th September 2014

Finally back to Lisbon!

Can't believe I am going to start classes in two days ;______; GOOD GRIEF, IT'S ABOUT TIME ALREADY

... Except that this semester I'm going to start right at 8AM on Mondays... Getting up at 6AM in the first day of the week, going all out right from the start! Yeaaah, no, I'm not gonna enjoy this part that much, no no.

In other news, I'm in the same residence but got a different room this time! I'm all set, dad says it looks like I've been living here for years because it's packed with random stuff everywhere already. Plus points are more space and less heat during the summer. Minus points: Winter is going to be a freezing hell, and one with lots of moist.

No roommate yet (it's a new one). Apparently she's from med school 3rd year, and she's comming tomorrow evening or on Monday.

And now I'm off to bed because they want me to be up by 9 tomorrow and I always take hours and hours to fall asleep in the first night. =w='

Let's all cheer for a fresh new year with lots of surprises waiting! Hopefully the good kind too, else I'm going to cry. This year is going to be an overwhelming chaos. 

Oyasuminasai ~

7th September 2014

As you probably know, it's an undeniable fact that I'm nuts about Maneki Neko statues. I mean, I bawled out my eyes the day the neighbor's dog ripped down my T-Shirt with one on it.

So I've been waiting for years for the day I'd stop resisting buying one of the million solar-powered statues from the chinese shops. I mean, they're cheap, but I wanted to wait until I found one with the calico-pattern, or a simply too-adorable-to-even-consider-resisting version of it.

Nope. The day I gave in to buying one of the chinese shop ones was a random day where we entered a shop in order to buy my coworker a belt because his pants kept falling all day long, last week when we were still near the eastern border to collect some research materials.

And, so far, I do not regret it one tiny bit! I MEAN LOOK AT IT, HOW CAN YOU NOT LIKE MANEKI NEKO.

In other news, I also changed the blog template. It's been some time since I wanted to incorporate the artwork of one of my favorite artists, Pascal Campion, into something. Anything. Well, blog template it is! The palette of the banner is a bit off, but that's because I couldn't resist using these two pictures, who are among my favorites of his.

What I like about his stuff is that he doesn't try to baffle the world with any complex technique, but manages to make his art feeling like it has more life than many realistic, heavy on technique, artworks. There's a warm, bubbly, jazzy feeling to it, and it's like each image has a story to tell. Not to mention that, for me, the star in his paintings isn't really the human figure(s) on it but rather the whole scenery. The way he makes the scenery is what takes my breath away.

Also he uses cats often, so that's an extra bonus.

Mentioning cats, one of my four cats just dashed into my room and started purring and cuddling 2 seconds after I heard a loud bang somewhere else in the house. Nice try. Let's find out what you broke this time.

The blog is officially back to activity! 

(or at least I'll try to make it so)

So many things have changed since my last posts. MANY many things. In order not to overload you with all the updates, I'll simply create topics. Because who doesn't like lists and topics, right? In any case, sorry because it'll still probably end up with an overload of updates.

• New psychological status - a bit of insiding on my status back in the first university semester

During my first semester in Lisbon, as you can probably feel from my old posts, I went through a small depression. My professional goal since elementary school had been to become a languages teacher thus I built all my academic path in Humanities in order to reach that goal in a straight line. Then I ended up in Literature because that was the bachelor degree I needed to get access to the masters degree that I wanted. Oh boy was that interesting. I think you all know by now how <sarcasm> amazing </sarcasm> I am in classes related to Literature and Culture. If you don't, I'll just say I rock the mathematical, objective and practical areas MUCH more easily. I just didn't actually know it back then because I had no idea that the fact that I things such as grammar related to the later group much more than the first one. Anyway, the truth is that I soon realized I had landed in a degree quite far from both my interests and my strong points, and started to slightly regret my decision of getting to that masters degree through the easy/straight-line way which was Literature. I borderline hated all my classes and the consistent feeling of me being worthless and dumb at what I thought (and I thought very very wrongly) was my strongest area. Add that to the fact that I had to miss classes for half my semester due to several health problems, plus my new friendships being ruined by several misunderstandings, and you can have an idea why I was actually not that much of a *genuinely* happy person back then.

• Found something I am both very good at and very interested in. Found out that I am actually the opposite of a passionless, useless kid. Found Linguistics.

My first semester consisted in classes related to Literature, but for my major I needed some linguistics classes, and all of them ended up clumped up in my second semester, by pure chance. That coincidence changed my life. I managed to post a bit during my second semester, and I think it's quite clear, despite the posts still being from the very beginning, that something changed. Lots of mentions of Linguistics Analysis, for example, which is the class that made me fall deep in love with Dialectology, and one of the first classes that started to tease my interests concerning Linguistics. My sudden Hiatus is not a coincidence. It matches the time I started to devote myself wholeheartedly to a journey of discovering the wonderful world of Linguistics Research, so deeply that I forgot whatever else was around me. I had never felt so interested in something during all my life, and I sure as hell wasn't going to let it slip through my fingers. So I held onto it, to my beloved classes, to my beloved professors, to my beloved new friends. My average score went from 12/20 in the first semester to 17.4/20 in the second. And, by the end of the semester, I realized I had never, in my entire life, felt that way, felt that happy. And I mean, GENUINELY happy. I had never wanted something that much. So much that I broke down crying really hard after a class of Linguistics Analysis while thinking of all this and being haunted by the reality that was the chance of my family not being able to afford the rest of my degree. I had finally found my muse and my passion, and I spent my whole second semester knowing there was a chance there was not going to be any more of it after the end of the year. So I forgot everything else, including the blog, in order to fully experience the love I felt for Linguistics. Miracles happen and I'm still here, through still struggling a lot. My third semester had an average of 18, and last semester I averaged 19 out of 20! And so I keep falling in love with something I now know quite well, I fall in love with my wonderful professors and mentors who lead me here, I fall inlove with research (so much I begged so much for a volunteering position in the research center to my mentor that she gave up and managed to find a way to get me there) and the complexity behind the methodology, I fall in love with the idea of becomming a researcher in Dialectal Syntax and, ideally, a professor too. I want to take the chance of helping hopeless, lost little pups to find their own and only passion, the way my professors helped me.

Okay, I apologise, I thought making topics would help reducing the wall-of-text'ing, but noooope. Didn't happen.

So, TL;DR, nowadays I am a very happy, sleep-deprived workaholic who's not going to rest until she becomes a renowned investigator and professor. I'll still post my ranty, random, oddball stuff just like I used to, though. So if that's why you're still around, you can relax. Things are going to be the same. Just with looots of Linguistics in the middle of it.