Read more about the article Being the Reader I Used to Be
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…)

12 Comments
October 16, 2017
Read more about the article Sex Scenes: How Did It Happen?
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…)

8 Comments
August 28, 2017
Read more about the article Reading Books: to Finish or Not to Finish?
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…)

13 Comments
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…)

10 Comments
June 19, 2017
On Writing / Personal Rants

Writing Is Much Like Learning To Drive

I never had the need of learning to drive. Poznań, my hometown in Poland, has an excellent public transport network, and when I moved over to Ireland, I couldn’t afford a car. Also, with the narrow and always jammed streets of Dublin, it seemed better to just search for an apartment near my workplace and walk to work. But moving over to the USA and living at the very edge of the town meant I would finally have start driving.

After waiting for my residency to be sorted out, I got my driver’s permit, and started getting familiar with the “controls” of the new game called “driving,” but it wasn’t until later I found similarities between learning to drive and writing. (more…)

21 Comments
April 17, 2017
Personal Rants

Grand Canyon Trip

I hope you enjoyed reading posts in my Birthday Week series. I promised that at the end of it I’d share the story of my trip to Grand Canyon. I took over 200 pictures, and then managed to cut down the number to 70, and then, I trimmed it to little under 57. It’s going to be hard to put them all in a blog post, so with a heavy heart, I picked 24. I hope you’ll enjoy them. (more…)

7 Comments
March 5, 2017
Personal Rants

Melfka’s Birthday Week: The Dancing Klutz

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. Today, though running a bit late, I’m going to tell you about the less glorious side of being Melfka: being a Klutz. (more…)

10 Comments
March 4, 2017