My SUB

Do you know that: You have still plenty of stuff to read at home, but for any reason you end up in your local bookstore and before you become aware of yourself you have left it with a little less money in your pocket and a little more mass in your bag.

Today I had one of those situations. My laptop was out of charge, I forgot to bring along my current book and was near the store for some other reason (i.e. maize meal, taccos and tortillias) and the next moment I had THREE of Pratchett's masterpieces. (all of his works are, as far as I encountered them) They answer to the names "I Shall Wear Midnight", "Thud!" and "Thief of Time".

But I sill have plenty of Books, some even I had begun, but not finished before putting it back into my bookshelf. E.g. "Hamlet" and "The Picture of Dorian Grey". At this very Moment I read the Bartimaeus book series by Jonathan Stroud. Of which the first book has remained unfinished the longest of all of my books. I'm currently at the exact mid of the 3rd and as such last book of the trilogy. I bought them a looong time ago (like 3 years) and since then I pretty much lost interest in the genre of fantasy. But I can endure this series pretty good as they're written well.

The following is my remaining SUB (Stapel ungelesener Bücher - staple of unread books) in the currently most probable reading order - which is shortened at least by the half:

• Hamlet - Shakespeare (stuck at IV,2)
• The Picture of Dorian Grey (stuck in Chapter XI - so pretty much in the mid)
• A lovely book called "Französisch für Büffelmuffel" (Büffelmuffel is someone unwilling to learn due to idleness)
• Measuring the World - Daniel Kehlmann (I acquired it at the state (like one of the sixteen German states) Maths Olympiad) - (read my fellow-blogger's site)
• Ringu - Kouji Suzuki (the original book of the original Japanese horror film of the famous American remake "the Ring")
• Thief of Time - Pratchett (It's to awesome to let that wait longer)
• Thud! - Pratchett (This too)
• I Shall - Pratchett (again)
• Selected Stories - Edgar Allan Poe
• Startdust - Neil Gaiman (I own a German volume)

But there are also some books which I will probably never gonna read, as I totally lost interest in them. Most notable are are series of books under the name "BILD fantasy" (BILD is the biggest German Paper . pretty equivalent to the SUN) Most of these books are just the first volumes of typical unending Fantasy series.

Another Status update

Hey everybody,
long time no see! And what a long time: I have written no entry for exactly one month now for various reasons. So I want to renter businesses with a couple of (random) status updates.

1.: The main reason for not writing (apart from missing subjects) is that I have THE final exams of a German school career just now, to speak exactly this week I had two written exams in German and Latin this week, and will have exams in maths and informatics next week. So I was somewhat busy with preps and stuff...
But what I want to say with all that: I am making big leaps towards the end of school, even though this is no sharp break for me as for others, since I am already in some way enrolled in university.

2.: Yesterday I had (as already mentioned) my big grade Latin exam, which means that this is the end. I probably will not have any bigger use of my knowledge of the Latin language for an extensive time. Or would have, but because I don't want to forget so easily (I really liked the subject in school) I came out of the bookshop with an exemplar of "Harrius Potter et philosophi lapis" (I hope you have guessed it's the 1st volume of Harry Potter in Latin language). It's somewhat fun to read, but also very wearisome to reed. So I probably wont read it until the end...

3.: The theatre club of my school,of which I am coincidently a member, has its long awaited première at April 18th. Even though you have probably either already heard of it somewhere else or you will not have the (logistical) chance to come to visit, I wanted to introduce that fact. For further information consult Facebook please, or ask me per comment/mail if you cant.

thats for now,
see you soon, hopefully on a more content-related subject

Voluntary service II: "Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."

The problem is that I never had the chance to leave.
Today I have officially canceled my enrollment in the FSJ-Programm, as I could not ignore the current developments any longer. Going to Tokyo for an whole year would have been risky and even though I am very sad about the outcome, I did the final phone call.

The result is, that I am now without any gap-year placement and the typical application time frame is already over. So my only remaining option is to enter university, do my bachlor and maybe do something diffrent afterwards, before enrolling in an master course.

Of course this is not what I planned, and I am not happy at all about the devellopment, but still all my thoughts are with the people of Japan, especially with the population of shaken Tohoku and also the Tokyo metropolitan area, knowing that an evacuation of up to 40 mio. people is not possible by any means.

2011年東北地方太平洋沖地震 or Sendai earthquake and tsunami

At this point, all of you have probably already heard of the heavy earthquake off the shore before Sendai. Since this 11th March probably everyone of you heard enough news broadcasters and read plenty articles throughout the interwebs to be well informed.

I did not write anything about this so far, neither here, nor on twitter (apart from one or two retweets) or facebook, because I have great difficulties to gather my mind and express it. I sympathise with every single Japanese within the region shaken by the earthquake and ridden by the tsunami.

One of the first thoughts I had was, that fortunately Japan is very cognisant of the dangers and puts high efforts into actions to defend themselves against the strokes of nature. Thanks to that the number of victims is luckily still a magnitude lower than it was 2004 throughout the pacific ocean tsunami.

On the other hand side I am very worried about the things happening in the power plants. I am praying to any god, no matter that I do not believe that there are any. I hope thoroughly that all will turn out well. Any nuclear disaster will cause huge problems especially since there live 40 million people in that very area.

At this very point I can only wait and hope for nothing bad to come around the corner. I try to stay informed, but every second I notice my lack of knowledge of Japanese again and again when I try to read yomiuri and asahi (two biggest Japanese papers) online news and have hard to struggle and rely on web-tools to get the gist of their articles. Additionally those articles are, for understandable reasons, often based on very careful information policies, so that we probably will learn the whole extend not earlier than within a week.

With anxious thoughts, sincerely
me