Justyna Dorsz

Personal

Travis moment

Travis was a chimpanzee adopted by two people, Sandra and Jerome. They raised him and treated him as if he were their child. Travis lived at their home, ate at a table with the family, rode in their car, watched tv, helped around the house. What Travis did one day can’t be summarized better than what Wikipedia wrote so I am quoting it here:

[Travis] in February 2009, mauled a friend of his owner in Stamford, Connecticut, blinding her while severing several body parts and severely lacerating her face.

– Wikipedia

The woman that was attacked knew Travis well, was a family friend, visited often. I was thinking about it today. About how a single moment can change your life so dramatically.

I felt somewhat silly going to my friends’ place this afternoon to take a shower. Maybe I was being paranoid, I don’t know. My water heater has been acting weird lately, emitting a sort of gurgling noise. The previous water heater that was here blew up — like, literally exploded. The plumber who came to fix the sink one time told me a story of another water heater that blew up.

I wrote to the landlord to let her know that the water heater was malfunctioning, she wrote back “don’t worry, it won’t blow up”.

Maybe it won’t. I don’t know. But maybe it was my Travis moment, maybe I would have taken a bath, the water heater would have exploded, and I would have been blinded, or paralyzed, or dead.

Yesterday I found a new apartment. Tomorrow, I am moving.

Disruptions

Joshua Waitzkin is a chess master, he wrote the book “The Art of Learning”. I was reminded about it today when my neighbors were listening to music too loudly. Joshua wrote that you are supposed to be able to concentrate even if something is distracting you. As an example: there was someone mowing the grass, and Joshua deliberately left the window open even though the noise was disturbing.

I have never achieved that kind of ability — I can’t work when something is bothering me. Too loud music, neighbors arguing and throwing bottles, someone drunkenly yelling, people smoking in the corridors and cigarette smoke getting inside my apartment — all this stuff distracts me so much that I feel I have not been productive these past few days.

I plan to find a new apartment and move this week even though I will lose some money this way.

You never realize how boring your life is until you decide to blog daily

This view is the only nice thing about my apartment.

I want to lodge a formal complaint — there is no owl in my palm tree. You see, Austin Kleon, a writer, has a backyard with a palm tree, and in that palm tree lives Coconut the Owl. So not only does he have a backyard and a palm tree, but also a blog post that pretty much writes itself every week.

I, on the other hand, don’t have a garden with wildlife to write about.

The photo above is of the view from my kitchen. There is no yard. I need to find a new apartment soon — the owner asked me to move out because her daughter wants to live here. I tried telling her that she should just sell this apartment, that this is not a place that her 18-year-old daughter should live in. She says she will renovate when I move out, and it will be fine.

This apartment has a few problems:

  • Some of the radiators don’t work. Most importantly, the one in the bathroom doesn’t work at all so it’s always freezing there. It apparently can’t be fixed because it’s a general plumbing issue.
  • The water pressure is often so low that the water heater doesn’t turn on. (It turns on automatically when the water is running, but not if the water is running very slowly.)
  • I have new neighbors in the apartment next door. Two nights ago a drunk guy was yelling to let him in, I suspected they didn’t want to because he was drunk and angry. I found some pumpkin seeds in my cupboard and decided to go to the grocery store another day.
  • Live wires are sticking out of the walls.
  • People leave trash on the sidewalk. There was a carpet lying there for weeks. And also a toilet — for months.
  • The windows are leaking so much that when it rains and you are sleeping, you can wake up to a puddle in the middle of the room.
  • There’s only hot water in the kitchen. Unless the water heater doesn’t turn on because of low pressure — then there’s only cold water.
  • I was cleaning tiles in the bathroom, and one fell off and broke.

I know it looks bad. I swear, I am not as poor as it seems, and you can make money as an artist. I got used to the apartment. It will be funny to look at this list when I am rich, or at least living in a functioning apartment.

January is for resting after Christmas

This is something that no one understands.

I visited my mum for Christmas and spent over a week there. On one hand, we are all obviously very lucky that we are healthy and that my mum and grandma just had Covid-19 so we could meet without worrying about putting them at risk. On the other hand, spending a week in a house with so many other people and animals and constant noise is so tiring that I don’t know how to even explain it.

It’s been 5 days since I returned to my own apartment and only now do I feel that I started recovering. Slowly.

I remember that last year I met with my friends in the last week of January and I told them that I was still tired after Christmas. They said that I was exaggerating.

Just now I talked with another friend and I had to insist that I need more time alone and don’t plan on meeting people anytime soon.

And it’s not like Christmas was bad. We played Pictionary every day and had so much fun that we didn’t even watch any movies, we played some computer games, drew, baked a cake. I tried to find an opportunity to work out wherever I could, so I got to throw coal into the basement.

But after a week of that, I very much needed to stay away from people, and rest.

Is it truly only me? Does no one else need to rest after Christmas?

My Mom is wrong

My Mom in Prague

True to a mentality of any generation, I think my Mom is wrong about everything.

You can take any area of expertise and it seems my Mom manages to be wrong about it. Let’s take nutrition — she thinks potatoes and bread are healthy. Or managing money — she doesn’t invest, she doesn’t even save up. She is wrong even about how she spends her vacation — she answers work calls when sitting on a beach or hiking. And it’s never a life or death situation — she runs a small company that manufactures clothes.

But there’s one thing she has always been right about, since 25 years ago, and it’s something I agree with wholeheartedly. And who knows how much impact it had on me, so I can forgive that she tries to feed me potatoes every time I visit.

When I was a kid, I had lots of ideas of who I was going to be when grown up. I wanted to be an artist, a scientist, a secret agent, a soldier, a pilot, and probably many more occupations that I don’t remember anymore. And when I said I wanted to be, let’s say, an astronaut, my Mom would say, “that’s fine, but you need a second thing”. It’s not like she said it every time, but she said it often enough that it stuck.

Having a second thing means that you need a second way to earn money, just in case. You should always be able to do at least two things well enough to be able to do them for a living.

This is something that a lot of people don’t think about. And when they lose their job, all of a sudden, they don’t have a way to support themselves.

Those two things for me are: making art and programming. I am not a good programmer, but just good enough to make small games or to get hired if I need to. And I am also not an amazing artist, but I can draw well enough to make designs and sell them on t-shirts.

What are your two things? Do you have a backup thing that you can pick up if your main source of income dries up?

My Grandma

Two days ago, my grandma had trouble breathing and was feeling tired. My mom measured her blood pressure which was too high and then called a doctor at a local public clinic, described the symptoms, and told the doctor that she gave my grandma Nebilet to lower the blood pressure.

The doctor consulted my grandma’s file.

“I have not prescribed Nebilet,” – the doctor said. – “If your mother dies, it will be your fault.”

She refused to come over and examine my grandma.

In theory, public health care is free and generally available in Poland, as nearly everyone pays a mandatory health care fee. But in practice, you have to wait a long time to schedule a visit, often times a year or two even. So, we pay for private doctors when we can’t wait and Nebilet was prescribed by a private doctor, so that’s why it was not in the public clinic’s file.

This is only partially a story about my grandma, though. The second part is that after the call with the doctor, my mom was very upset and cried, and was furious with the doctor who refused to see my grandmother. She was distraught all day and even when she told me the story the next day, she could not tell it calmly. Most of all, she was angry at herself that she can get emotional and lets other people get to her.

This is a good start — noticing that we get overwhelmed by our emotions and wanting to learn to manage them. Most people don’t even get to that part. I, too, was like that.

Here are 2 main things that helped me:

  1. Writing down all the emotions, in detail. And dissecting them into even more atomic emotions. I have hundreds of pages of notes written after upsetting events or conversations. I kept writing everything that came to my mind and analyzing what made me feel that way.
  2. Realizing that I am responsible for my feelings – Accepting this made all the difference. The fact that someone made me angry is not their fault. It’s my fault for letting that emotion impact me that much. Once you realize that anger and other negative emotions only live in your mind, you get to decide what you do with them.

My grandma’s feeling better now. She’s only 94 years old, which, in her family, would be a bit early to die.

This is a story I’ve never told before

This is my, oh I don’t know, the fifth attempt, maybe. My brother read the previous version and hated it.

“Difficult to read,” he said.

Okay.

“No flow,” he said. “You sound like a robot.”

Okay!

“I would delete it and write again.”

Fine.

It was 2012, spring probably, but I will check. I had a dreadfully boring job as a programmer, and it’s difficult to have even a moderately boring coding job because we programmers really enjoy, you know, programming. It’s fun, it’s like puzzles for us, we do it in our free time, we talk about our projects with anyone who wants to know, we read blogs by other programmers where they show how they solved a very obscure pathfinding problem that we don’t need to know about because none of our projects use any pathfinding whatsoever.

And even if some claim that it gets boring after a while — sure, but I was not 2 years out of school, and you are not supposed to be tired of something you barely started. We worked on library systems — as in, systems to manage books in libraries. Those systems were mostly complete, written in Visual Basic some 20 years before, and we worked on a few low-priority features, I think, but I don’t remember much. I had wanted to move out of my parents’ house, so I took the first job offer I got, didn’t even negotiate the salary. Anyway, that spring in 2012 I was walking home, and I was so, so sad, hated the job and didn’t know a way out, there was nothing else I could do, and I was convinced that I hated programming in general not just that particular job, so I didn’t even try to find something new.

So, I was walking home, sad and depressed, and I did something that I am ashamed of to this day. I’ve never told anyone that till now.

I bought a lottery ticket.

If you think it’s nothing bad, and maybe you even buy lottery tickets some days, then that’s fine, but you probably don’t know the odds of winning, and you didn’t study math or computer science or statistics, right? But I did, I had extra math classes in high school, and then I studied computer science and there were a lot of math classes too and in my free time I did math puzzles for fun. My point is: I knew what the odds were. Or maybe I didn’t know the exact probability, but I could calculate it anytime. If someone woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me to calculate the odds of winning a lottery, I could do it. It happened, actually, my dietician asked me this once. Not in the middle of the night, but still, I didn’t expect a math quiz when discussing my low levels of vitamin E. She said something about coincidence and then added: “But if you buy a lottery ticket every day, you are bound to win once in your life, right?”. There wasn’t really a question mark at the end, she said it as if that was common knowledge. It sounded very unlikely, and I took a piece of paper and checked.

In case you wonder, even if you bought lottery tickets every day for 50 years, the probability of winning would be about 0,001. I don’t know about the lottery in your country, but I bet winning is just as unlikely.

Anyway, back to the story: sad, awful job, walking home, lottery ticket. The thing is, someone who knows statistics must be feeling lower than low to buy a lottery ticket. There’s no logic there, no excuse. Feel free to laugh. Don’t laugh at people who don’t know, though, tell them the odds.

After that, the days at work were even worse, and then something amazing happened. No, I didn’t win the lottery, I hope you didn’t think that.

What happened was that a colleague at work had a unique t-shirt, something with a drawing of a bus, and he told me that it’s from Design By Humans and anyone can submit designs there, and they select some for print and pay you. That was new. I have never heard about anything like it, never even heard about any business that paid for a singular piece of work instead of just hiring people and paying them a salary. I took a closer look at his t-shirt and I knew immediately that I couldn’t draw anything like that. But I checked that website and other similar ones and some designs were way better than what I could do, but a few were only somewhat better. I wanted to try to make a design for a t-shirt, it seemed doable.

So, the next few days I analyzed lots of t-shirt websites, read what people wrote about them on Reddit and such, and I made a plan:

  • Eat cereal and save up half my income.
  • Draw every day.
  • After half a year have enough savings to quit my job.
  • And then I would have another half a year to make designs and try to sell them before running out of money.

Seems solid? I thought so.

Just then, my boss sent me a humiliating email, so I quit.

By the way, I’ve kept that email just in case I ever start blogging, so that’s something for a future post.

The bad thing was that I had hardly any savings. But the most awesome thing was that after those awful months when I hated my life, I finally felt so alive, as maybe never before. I knew I had to draw, and I drew a lot. It was an amazing time, even though none of the designs that I made for the first few weeks got accepted anywhere.

But then one got selected and everything changed.