Personal Rants – Page 3 – Joanna Maciejewska

Melfka’s Birthday Week: Melfka’s Accent

Welcome to my Birthday Week during which I post random, interesting or embarrassing facts about myself. If you missed the introductory post, you can find it here. Today, I’ll be wrapping up the birthday week. I know it’s a bit of cheating, since it’s only day 5, but I hope today’s surprise will make up for it.

I was thinking about something special to put up here as a way of saying “thank you” to all my readers, and here it is: a video! If you ever wondered what Melfka’s accent sounds like or how it would be like to meet me in person, you can get the taste! I’m even slightly nervous as I would be in a real life meeting. (more…)

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March 5, 2018

Personal Rants

Melfka’s Brithday Week: Those Horror Things

Welcome to my Birthday Week during which I post random, interesting or embarrassing facts about myself. If you missed the introductory post, you can find it here. Today you’ll venture into the dangerous territory of Melfka’s personal horrors. Of course, since it’s my Birthday Week, I won’t be talking about those real and well-grounded fears probably almost every human being has. Instead, I’ll amuse you with those absurd things that shouldn’t cause a flinch reaction.

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March 4, 2018

Personal Rants

Melfka’s Birthday Week: All the Pretty Dragonflies

Welcome to my Birthday Week during which I post random, interesting or embarrassing facts about myself. If you missed the introductory post, you can find it here. Today you’re going to have a peek into my peculiar relationship with dragonflies.

There are people out there who collect “everything cat” or “everything dolphin”, and if I had an obsession like that, it would be with dragonflies. Yet, at the same time I own hardly anything with dragonflies… (more…)

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March 3, 2018

Personal Rants

Melfka’s Birthday Week: The Sweet Tooth Witch

Welcome to my Birthday Week during which I post random, interesting or embarrassing facts about myself. If you missed the yesterday’s introductory post, you can find it here. This time I’m going to cover a topic that is quite obvious: Melfka’s favorite sweets.

It’s not a secret that I like my sweets. A household is not a household without chocolate, but the list doesn’t end there. (more…)

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March 2, 2018

Personal Rants

Melfka’s Birthday Week 2018

It’s that time of the year again when Melfka turns a year older, though not necessarily wiser. (Though rumor has it she actually improved her English skills!) And like last year, to celebrate Melfka’s Birthday Week, I invite you to a bunch of posts in which I’ll share funny, not very serious, or embarrassing facts about myself. I’m not too keen to reveal my birthday date publicly, so instead I claim the whole first week of March for my birthday, following JR Bee’s idea who two years ago organized my Birthday Week on Twitter. (more…)

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March 1, 2018

Personal Rants

Watching Novels: Thoughts on Book Adaptations

Sometimes, when you look at Hollywood’s movie repertoire, it seems they only release remakes and book adaptations. Some people cringe, hoping for more original content and fresh stories, and as much as I’d love to see more originality as well, I do have a soft spot for book adaptations. There’s something enchanting in seeing the story I loved (or at least enjoyed) envisioned by someone else. It’s almost like sharing thoughts on a book and learning someone else’s perspective. (more…)

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February 19, 2018

Personal Rants

Being the Reader I Used to Be

I’m not the reader I used to be. Ever since I stopped being a student, I struggled with reading as many books as I did in my youth. Partially it was because of my limited time: I didn’t have gaps between lectures or workshops to fill with reading. Being employed full time meant 9 hours a day at my workplace. After that, I had to take care of my food and house chores. It was also the fear of losing sleep over a book – something I confessed to two years ago, and something I couldn’t afford being an employee. But lately, I realized the problem is more complex than just less time to read. (more…)

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October 16, 2017

On Writing / Personal Rants

Sex Scenes: How Did It Happen?

I read sex scenes for the first time when I was about 11.

It came at me quite unexpected, in the Arabian Nights book which I bought for my own pocket money. The Polish title of the book that could be translated as “The Tales of One Thousand and One Night” promised me exotic fairy tales from the lands of sand and sun. I was prepared for them to be dark, maybe even cruel sometimes, as I was very familiar with Brothers Grimm tales and works of Hans Christian Andersen, but I wasn’t prepared for sex scenes. The description was very vague and brief, but for a girl who already knew what was what it seemed pretty obvious what the sentences were talking about. (more…)

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August 28, 2017

Personal Rants

Reading Books: to Finish or Not to Finish?

For a while now, I’ve been struggling to read more. Part of the problem is what I’ve written about before: the fear of getting too immersed in the book which would result ditching everything else (books have kept me from sleep, eating, and many other things). At the same time, I found myself getting more and more picky about the books I read, so it’s getting harder to find a book that would actually enchant me enough for the first fear to be true. (more…)

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July 31, 2017

Personal Rants

3 Books For a Desert Island – Blog Hop

Yesterday, as I lie in our Evil Bed (named this way because it’s so villainously comfortable that you don’t want to get up), I looked at what I’d consider rather a meager but nonetheless special bookshelf. Back in Ireland, and before that in Poland, I owned many more books, but my moving over to the USA forced me to be very picky of what I’d be taking with me (and believe me, I spent a lot of money to get those books over the pond), and what I might need to buy again in the future.

This got me thinking of the memory game from my youth, “What would you take if you were to go to a desert island?” in which one person mentions an item, and the next person has to repeat that item, then add another one to the list. After a while, the list would be quite long, and the loser would be the person who failed to list all the items in the right order.
As I looked at my precious books, I couldn’t help wondering: if I was to spend a year on a desert island, which three I’d pick? I was limited only to paperbacks and hardcovers, as an e-book reader would be useless without electricity, and to my surprise, instead of pondering the choices for hours, my list presented itself in an instant. (more…)

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June 19, 2017