Summer's come, summer's gone

So here I am, back on the last day of summer 2014, after months of silence. Did I only find the guts to write again only because it seemed absurd to not squeeze at least one post into my blog while it's still summer? Maybe. I'd say yes.
It's this strange feeling that's been all over me for a while. It's contradictory: I want to write and I don't at the same time. I barely write anything in the summer. No letters to my pen pals, no blog posts, no short stories in my notebook. I'll blame the summer, it's always like this:

However, pushing away my zero productiveness in writing as a hobby, I worked as a journalist for a local news website. This job made me face my fears and do things I've never been  comfortable doing (e.g. call people I've never met multiple times a day, five days a week), but at the same time it's been an adventure. I love interviewing, and I had plenty of opportunities to do that. One of my greatest memories of the whole summer is the day I interviewed an Australian guy and his American girlfriend, who, thanks to a house exchange program, moved to a Lithuanian countryside. The two people from big cities now use water from a well, take care of ducks and grow their own food. Meeting them definitely was an opportunity I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Other than that, i also went to a music festival, which was way wetter than anyone could have expected. It rained for three days and tents were floating in water. We got lucky so our belongings didn't float, but others' did. Not being able to dry my wet clothes and cutting my toes whilst swimming on he sea on the first hour of a three-day festival was really annoying, but now that I am back and my cuts are healing, I remember that festival as one of the greatest adventures of the summer.

Yesterday I went to cheer for my friend and her boyfriend in the first-ever color run in Lithuania and that was amazing, too. Came back with my camera covered in pink dust paint and smiling from ear to ear :3

All in all, I can really say that my summer has been one of the best summers I had :)

Beautiful as we are (I)

This post has been here as an empty draft with only a name on it for exactly one month and one day. Everybody starts with a blank page, but I don't usually struggle with it as much as I did this time, not sure if it's because I have too much to say and I don't know where to start, or because I'm just afraid of being misunderstood, my words and thoughts being misinterpreted or thought of as egoistic and narcissistic.

I'm pretty sure I'll write more on this topic because I have way too many thoughts on presently existent perceptions of beauty and I don't want to make my posts too chunky and overloaded. I know - I'll make a series of posts on it :)

So, to start off, a few days ago, a friend of mine recommended a book called "1984" by George Orwell, which I will definitely read. From what she told me, it's about how societies can become dull only by narrowing down people's vocabularies and making them use basic words. As I think of it, it hits me just how true it may be.

The course I took on my Erasmus exchange this semester really got me thinking about so many cultural and social aspects of my life and my environment, and I think I might have found the connection between the ideas in "1984" and what I heard from my lecturers throughout the course- endless streams of academic vocabulary. Every time a simple word could be substituted for something more scholarly and professional - it was. It is shocking how much my own vocabulary has grown and how critically I started to see things since I started it in January, 16 weeks ago.

Even though I will be writing my own thoughts, mainly based on what I have read when I was searching for quotes to use in my exam papers, I feel like I need a disclaimer here: I do not intend to be egoistic or, worse, narcissistic. I have been told numerous times that I am physically beautiful, and it's not an achievement that I intend to brag about. And yes, technically, from the global point of view, I have, in fact, an "ideal body "- pale white skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, tall, long legs and all this shit that makes people think I am beautiful and assume I'm not smart at all, sadly. That is purely a social and cultural thing about which I intend to talk in my "Beautiful  as we are" series. Here we go :)

Unspoiling spoilers

I just found a perfect quote that hints at my upcoming post in this blog. Coming soon :)