Not too long after I had decided to get married and had had a few daydreams about how my great grandfather would be proud of me getting married he died. Probably my reaction was a natural one but I still felt a bit ashamed. I mean who is angry with someone for dieing before an event they would be invited to. If anyone had the right to be angry, it’s the deciest. Then again, my great granddad didn’t know he would be invited. Oh, and also it’s very extremely unlikely that he cares anymore. It’s quite more likely, that he’s not any more.

I liked the funeral kind of, as much as one can like a “goodbye forever” party where everyone feels sad that they’ll never ever meet the person again. But I liked it in that it was private, just the closest family. Of his over 30 great grandchildren just the oldest two were present. And after the short ceremony we all went to a dining place and just chatted about the things that family members chat about with each other as well as remembered both my great grandfather and his wife, who had died five years earlier. It was sweet.

There were two scary thoughts I had. It was sad burying a great grandfather I hardly knew from a few visits. How much more sad it must be to bury someone much closer to me, like most of the other people there. The rest of my grandparents, my parents and their siblings. If all is well, I still get to go to most of their funerals. And how kind of scary and sad must it feel for my grandparents to be the elders of the family. Yes, they have their children and grandchildren, but no parent of either of them lives any more.

It was almost by accident that just before my opaps passing away I had lost belief in life after death and the good things that the dead can do for us. But this unbelief made the whole thing even scarier for me. Before I got convinced of the unlikeliness of an afterlife I would have thought the only scary thing is to be the most experienced one, the one that everyone would look up to. Because I thought death would be something to look forward to, finally to know what exactly happens next. Not so any more.

What happened was that my Love begun borrowing Richard Dawkins’s books one by one, reading them with enthusiasm, watching all videos available with Dawkins talking and submitting me to those same books, same videos. The God that Dawkins wanted to free people of was the revengeful angry God of the Old testament. As a side effect, he convinced me my lovely fantasies were also illogical and highly improbable. I complained to my Love about this and told him how my beliefs were completely different and nice and I wanted them. He asked me questions and pointed out discrepencies and unlikelinesses to me. This made me totally sceptic.

The feeling was not unlike what it would feel like if I was waiting for a bus, a very comfortable and fun bus that would take me to a really cool place. Then the two of them come along and tell me that according to the bus shedule my bus has gone long ago. For now I am left without a ride, but my mom always says it’s no good chasing after buses and boys, because the next will come along soon. I think I want the nice afterlife so bad, that I’ll figure a way to circumvent logic, to keep believing in afterlife.

The New Year has come and gone and so has the holiday season before that. It left me unfulfilled and unhappy. I had been sick too much of the time, too lazy some of the time and moody and unrested, and… Well, you get the idea. I took consolation in that a really entartaining blogger had it worse, because at least I spent all the time with my Love and my parents without involving grandmothers who can be difficult at times. Well, actually apart from the having a bad cold part, my holidays weren’t that bad. Still, they weren’t great either and it took me a walk in a park to lift my mood.

The winter here and now is cold (unplesantly so, but bearably) and beautiful. I’d like to say how beautiful, except I’m not sure how mesure it. Perhaps I can say it’s so beautiful, that it makes me smile despite the cold air getting in my mouth and hurting my teeth and making me cough as a result. In the morning the air is strange, kind of pensive, lingering. Everything is covered in perfect whiteness that sparkles. Still the sun didn’t hurt my eyes like the summer one does when it’s all bright and reflects of everywhere. Maybe it was because it was low and didn’t shine down on the whiteness. The most beautiful thing of all in this are the trees. Every branch covered in snow they look like giant depictios of snowflakes. Not so geometrical and equal angled, with black lines to stress the white shine they stretched up in the blue of the sky. If my English was better, I could go on and on describing the magical beauty of it all.

So I am feeling quite better, still, I don’t manage to do as much as I’d like to having to blow my nose all the time and getting a headache from that and everything. When I find that the lovely woman from Wide Lawns and Narrow Minds feels just like me, and I guess we love what we can identify with.  Not just with the lousy holiday and the needing a kick part, but mostly with not being able to gether herself to do something she wants to do, about not wanting to be imperfect at doing it. Her thing is yoga, I don’t care for yoga, but the idea is the same. I don’t want to do some things that  I want to do, because I will make mistakes at them and I will have to learn them the hard way – by making mistakes and then practising in order not to make mistakes. I’ve put so many things I want to do down because of this, that I’m not sure which one I could call upon now, to illustrate. (Hah, turns out I mentioned all of them in my firtst post on this blog, which is all about this.) I kind of blame my education system for this, because we were not pushed enough, we were not required to do much for ourselves, except listen to the wise teacher, take notes and repeat the stuff. But seeing how others in other education systems feel the same, it might just be me (and her).

I am not yet an immensely successful, but I intend to be. I’m not rich, but I intend to be. I’m not famous and I don’t really care if I am, but I suppose it comes with success. I’m young enough to manage those things. What I need to do in order to become all that is work. A lot of hard work. For now the work would mostly be in the area of learning things, but it still needs to be done. By me. I think I’m not doing enough now.

There are tons of advice out there about how to become successful, happy and other things. And there is enough of advice about getting work done too. The tricky part is to pick the one that helps you. I mean for me the tricky part is to find the one that helps me. I have problems getting work done. Especially if I get my hands on an interesting fantasy or science fiction book. There are a few categories of work I have problems getting done, that I’ll try to describe.

It took me quite a long time to begin a proper blog, because I wanted to write one only when I was ready for posting regular meaningful entries. Like I was ever going to be if I didn’t actually start writing them. Of course “to learn to write blog entries” is not motivating enough to write something. I think this could be called “perfection syndrome”.

When I try learning something new, I sometimes don’t do more practising after the first few attempts. I hate the thought of doing the thing so clumsily again. This happens when I’m trying to learn musical instruments or programming. It is the silliest reason ever. Of course I suck at doing something I’m learning to do, but I can’t learn to do it better if I don’t practise. But I just want to be good all the time. “Perfection syndrome” again, only in a more bizarre form?

And last but not least are the things I’m not bad at, but I am afraid of getting stuck at. There might appear some kind of problem, like some calculations wouldn’t match or I wouldn’t know how to describe some results, so I don’t want to even begin. Mostly these are school exercises. Today I spent all day not doing my physics homework. And since it was what I was supposed to be doing, I wasn’t doing anything else useful either. The ridiculous part is that those problems can be overcome, but they take a while and more work.

It is said that realising the problem is already a step towards the solution, so I hope I have pinned the right problem. I am too frightened to fail or even to not be perfect, to do as well as I’m capable of doing. I must overcome my fear of failure and fail more often, work harder to learn more and therefore succeed more in the future.