I found these three things while cleaning up my files, and I just couldn't go pass them. These three thingies mean a lot to me :D
It would probably require a whole lot of approval from peeps on the shot, but I just have to add it to my memoire :D Shot was taken was after 19 weeks of fuckwit training in the country's worst training centre - and by worst I mean it was the hottest place and instructors were a nightmare. I have never been so thin or so athletic in my whole life! I think I cried in the bathroom every Monday morning, knowing what pain and trial I will have to put up with the following week, but now that all that's forgotten, it was a really cool experience. It teaches you a lot, that kind of strain. Pity I never kept up with any of the girls from there. We were warrior queens, at least for those 19 weeks. They chose good ones, none of the whiney abused babes in the wood you see in the movies. Some were the kind that ate men for breakfast. Not me, of course. I was the chubby, mouthy, idiotic type that always came last to the finish line and wrote articles about warfare diplomacy to the barracks leaflet. Was popular, though. If anyone, folk in the unit is bound to admire someone who can shoot like that..
Interesting closure, however, was when 4 years later, they sent me back to train for an officer status and I was suppose to undergo a similar training - but by then I already saw what becomes of female soldiers, what with watering the ficus and making coffee and cleaning ashtrays for some near-retired old fart in some god forsaken old warehouse.. The first time an instructor yelled at me to humiliate me as part of the training, I walked out. No fucking way I'm falling for the same propaganda twice.
The second thingie is a design for the cover of my book called The Necessary Bard
The design depicts me, standing in front of a see-through screen, covered in my thoughts, behind which is my bleak reality. On this side I'm a kick - ass bard. This was the first epic novel in my own language I have written in adult life - my attempt at actually adding a cool adventure novel to our literature.
Of course I never finished it - but I did get pretty far.
The story takes place right after the War for Startracker - after all we had was destroyed and vast majority of my colleagues dead. I wasn't sure what I was, but I did wake up in a forlorn forest with some of my things and came to discover I was in a completely outlandish environment - it wasn't Earth, it wasn't modern, it had no books. It was something like Middle Ages France, but a bit fantastic. And I had nothing to bargain with. And winter was closing in. Slowly but surely, though, I managed to earn enough for bare necessities - a mule, for example, and began exploring the land, drawing a map and teaching people to write. Yes, I was a one-girl plague of literacy :) Thorough the tale, I acquired a few companions, most of which one way or another turned out to be my old colleagues, looking after me. There were some new ones, too, such as Tempa Medeidre and her demon, Behemut, which stayed on to date as a kind of my girlfriend. This was a cool, cool book. I better finish it someday, now that I'm in just the right business ;D
And this...
... is my favorite family photo of them all. This speaks so much about us, about my dad and our nature and the situations we put ourselves in.. It's simply monumental.
Long time ago, long before I had any say in it, there was a nasty earthquake in Skopje - a Yugoslavian city got leveled to pulp. Journalists from near and far all gravitated towards the ruin to lend a hand and write back home with reports. This is my dad, the young journalist tailor-made for the occasion. I think he even bicycled his way down to get there..
See the press center? The smallest tent ever. The ground? Mud and silt. The tiny carpet to protect the tool of trade - an old newspaper under a huge type-writer. My dad, skanky, hairy and in tight shorts, his shirt buttoned the exact same way as he wears it still, and a pair of rubber boots by, for field effort...
Can anyone imagine still the old school journalism? Where you had to get your butt dirty?? These days we log on-line and wait for the press reports and what we get is half a tourist pamphlet of the location and half some political statement about the society. The mud, the fleas, the dead, the lack of instruments, that's beyond anyone's interest now.. And news of those kind would linger for a long time. Almost everyone around here remembers those days, those disasters. We, the latest slaves of the info onslaught, remember perhaps three of the worst per year, perhaps 3 years back. Two out of three of those are from USA, as they simply can't get enough of self-pity and drama. I always get the feeling, like with that dreadful tsunami that wiped out the eastern shores of Asia, that Americans *instantly* needed one of their own and as they lost part of a city, it simply needed to be a faaar worse tragedy than all of the eastern Asia combined. But then again I think most of the eastern Asia shore has recovered by now whereas poor Orleans is still dumbstruck.
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