The New Flat Mate

We have a new flat mate. He is 21 and seems to pretty nice. After carefully choosing him from a choice of three he should be, too. Oh my, maybe I should have gone for the 43 year old or given my vote for the awfully chatty one!? No, I think in the end my choice was right. 
However you should have seen my face when I was cooking yesterday and he came up behind me starting our conversation with: "Hey, you are a biologist, right?"
This question always makes me wary. When people say this to me I never know where they are going with it. All I know is there is another question coming. You would not believe what people think a biology student (I am not a biologist yet after all) should know. Like my mom, who told me once that because I am a biologist I should know all the Es food companies put into their products.
So when my new flat mate asked me that question I prepared for whatever might be coming next. 
Only I wasn't prepared at all for what hit me with after my cautious "Yes." 
Instead of asking me what I wanted to do after my graduation (which seems so far away right now I can't even say it’s in sight) or even any study related question, Mr. Flatmate asked, during what time of her cycle a girl was most likely to get pregnant. 

From BZgA, who make some of the best condom advertisement ever!

I must have stood there dumbfounded, my hand on the rolling pin, for 30 seconds or something. My mouth probably hung open and my eyes darted wildly to all sides.
Maybe I should find a single apartment. Sometimes I feel like a mom here these days. Now I don't only get kid-questions from Ms. Flatmate and have to explain to Mrs. Flatmate (she is the oldest of my flat mates that's why I am calling her Mrs. Not because she is married. Not that I know of anyhow.) how life here works in general, no, now I also get to do sexual education.
Not that I mind telling him, but really!? When is a girl most likely to get pregnant? What do parents and teachers teach their children these days? When he went on talking and I was still trying to wrap my mind around the question it sounded as if he believed a girl could not (just could not) get pregnant shortly after her period. 
At that point I was two seconds from banging my head against a wall (or smashing his with a rolling pin).
Instead I smiled sweetly and said calmly: " If the girl is not on the pill her cycle can be irregular so you can never tell when her ovulation starts." Stanger things have happened then a girl getting pregnant at the 'wrong' time of the month. 
I know he has been in England for a year, but Great Britain is hardly located behind the moon, or am I that geographically challenged? So how can he not know this? Didn't he read Bravo or something? Maybe it is a girl's magazine. So what? Obviously guys should read it too! Dr. Sommer would definitely be a great help to them as well. Or someone should start a magazine that deals with those topics for boys. 

Source: BZgA

Though I until now I believed every semi-intelligent teenager would already know this. Obviously I was wrong. If he knew better he would hardly have asked. Either he already did something stupid or he was planning to. I tip on the former, but hope for the later. I really don't know what makes people believe this won't happen to me. It's like with cancer: It can happen to anyone. You can just minimize the odds.
To tell the trust, I wanted to shout at him to just be smart and use FREAKING condoms! Then I decided that I was not his mother and I didn't know him long enough to be so crude.
Maybe I should start a sex consulting business. Or I could start that magazine on sexual education. Damn, I really need to find a way to make this into money.

Cat in Bed

This sounds so familar! That cat is like me. Only smaller, furrier and it gets regular pets!

drinking, partying and getting into trouble

First of all I would like to mention that I am posting this from my netbook. The kyeboard is broken, so there might be some typos... I hope I found all of them but no guarantees!

On Friday I had my last test for the semester. It was my last try and now I am seriously worried about the results. I don’t know what I will do if I do not pass.

As a result I tried to get totally drunk. It was an attempt at forgetting my troubles. An attempt I might ad, that did not quite work out the way I had planned because as it turns out getting drunk is harder for me than most people. Believe me, I tried really hard. I drank all night long! One caipirinha after another. At one point in between I thought I was getting close. I was getting a little fuzzy and plenty happy, but after that it felt as if the alcohol lost all its effect on me. Maybe my friends just started to substitute the cachaca in my drink against something non-alcoholic and while I cannot prove this theory it is pretty unikely anyways. They were all way more drunk than me and not capable of actions this complicated. So probaby I just have a pretty good tolerence level. In the end I believe my faiure in getting drunk was for the best.

Until now I never understood what people meant when they said they get depressed when drunk. Now I do. Drowning my problems in alcohol completely blew up in my face. Instead of forgettig I stared worring even more. At least now I know to not even try. Why do other people do that more than once!?

At least I know better now. I also know I can’t even get drunk when I try.

From now on I will just save my money and stay with water…mostly. 

Not that that's a heartship since I usually don't drink anyways.

Next topic on my list are… can you already guess?....yes! MEN!

After mostly not talking to Mr Brazil for weeks (no, there was no non-verbal 'communication' either) I decided to put an end to awkward situations and just stay firends. Seriously, who am I to wait to get a guys attention? Do I look deserate!? Okay, so maybe you can't see me but let me tell you that no! I am not desperate. Not that desperate anyways. Nor am I willing to waste my time on a guy who has not asked me out once since I met him. I bet we agree that asking me to watch a movie at his place does not count. 

Then yesterday he contacted me and asked me why I…. get this I…. was ignoring him. Puhlease! I already explained that I didn’t know how to behave towards him three weeks ago! I was sort of waiting for pointers from him. (Another decision I should have known better about.) So I explained to him that after him not contacting me and ignoring me when I finally saw him I thought he just wanted to stay friends, which was fine with me. And it is. Actually I think it's even better than fine because as much as I like to hang out with him, there are just no sparks. This way I at least don’t have to worry about how to bahave. I really hate when I get into situations that are not clearly defined.

Of course he said he didn’t just want to be friends. He didn’t want something serious either. He also didn’t want to be friends with benefits (I asked out of cuiousity, duh!). Excuse me, but what does that leave?

Whatever it might be I don't know and have no desire to find out and seriously, at that point I was just glad he gave me an easy way out.Maybe I would have gone for it had he told me from the beginning. Probably not. Right now I am very relieved this awkward situation is finally resolved. It leaves me free to explore my attraction to PiC who is funny, sweet, good looking and seems honest. He also can tell me that my eyes are pretty without making it sound totally corny, so when he asked me to ‚stay’ with him on Friday I kissed him. Though I still don’t completely (more like at all) understand the concept of staying with anyone I at least want to try. With him I already feel that prickly warm feeling in my tummy.

Of course that might still be the result of all the alcohol I had last Friday night.

chemistry, the bain of my existence

What a crappy day! First I forgot my gloves, then I got some chemical on my hand that leaves me with a blue-brown ring on my pinky finger (not the nice variety, but the I am a chemical I can burn your flesh away kind that might or might not be the cause of my death twenty years from now), then the cooler of our distillation unit broke and after we got a new one we tried for over half an hour to get a sufficient vacuum for our distillation and last but not least there was this mean lab assistant asking me all kinds of questions.

Actually we are working in groups of two, so he was asking us lots of questions. Sadly my lab partner didn’t say a danmed thing so it was on me to do the talking. As if I have any clue what to say.

In the end mean lab assistant actually gave us homework. HOMEWORK! I had not done homework since I finished school.

Man, was I tempted to just do nothing and tell him to go screw himself. But I really, really don’t want to have to do the stupid lab again which left me one option and one option only. To suck it up and do freaking homework. 

Now my bright, pretty little self knows about boiling point/pressure diagrams and the Beckmann Rearrangement.

And isn't this great!? More stuff I never wanted to know taking up valuable storage capacity in my already overflowing brain. 

Brazil 101: Round Three

Tuth: When a Brazilian is really in love and serious about a relationship he is faithful (or, as in every culture, the good ones are).
Question: How do I know whether he is serious or not?
Answer: You don’t.

Just imagine how much I laughed (please put a lot of emphasis on the sarcasm here!) when I heard that answer. Especially since I just started seeing a Brazilian. I say 'seeing' here because it is really hard for me to put a name tag on what is between us. Particularly after hearing the above mentioned. In Germany when we start a relationship with someone we automatically receive certain rights and responsibilities. These (should) include truthfulness, certain skin privileges and faithfulness. While starting into a (for lack of a better word) romantic relationship with a german guy I automatically assume that I receive them all. Otherwise it would not be considered a relationship by my standards. Also from my experience (and age) we usually do not start into a relationship without knowing whether we actually want it. Okay, so maybe we do. More often than we should, too. But even if we do, once you are in, you are in and the rules count. 
If you want out you break up and are free to do as you please. I do not believe I can expect the same from a Brazilian.

Now are you still asking why I have trouble defining that thing between us? Damn, I have the uneasy feeling that I am in for some ugly surprises.

On the bright side: I am still receiving compliments! Not from the afore mentioned guy (which is probably a bad sign) but from another brazilian friend who keeps cheering me up in my darkest moments (at least when he is not telling me: "You never know!" thereby causing my darkest moments himself).

Thank you for that!

chemistry, oh chemistry

Every woman I have ever met has tried one diet or another. All of course are doing it to lose weight. If only they knew that the best and most efficient way to do so is standing in a chemistry lab all day long!

Believe me, I tried this one myself. Not that I tried to lose weight. But it worked anyways. No better conditions than standing and walking around all day long, breathing in stinking, probably poisonous fumes, being under pressure to finish your experiments and not being allowed to eat inside the lab.

It’s the magic recipe for losing weight!

Maybe I should have chosen chemistry as my major instead of biology! But then chemists tend to be pretty full of themselves. The ones at our university are acting as if chemistry is the only true profession in the universe. Maybe it’s all the chemicals they come into contact with. It just cannot be healthy! I believe my risk of ever getting cancer skyrocketed in the past 2 weeks. Also the danger of getting a thrombosis seems to be pretty high. It’s also not very healthy for your skin.

Mine was ruined for days after I finished my inorganic chemistry lab! And I did not even have to spill the content of the Erlenmeyer flask down my lab coat.

Hmmm, maybe it’s not the best way of losing weight after all. Effective as it may be!

After inorganic chemistry we now continue with organic chemistry. With those chem labs to finish, one might think I was studying chemistry after all.

To my great relieve and my body fat percentage’s great disadvantage organic chemistry lab turns out to be not quite as bad as I had anticipated.

Yet still chemistry is not my thing. Today the lab assistant asked me to explain how I calculated the results of my experiment and I was two acetone inhalations short from telling him that

1.        I follow the instructions on how to prepare and go through with the experiment as stated in the instructions

2.       I copy the calculations from fellow students

And that

3.       I really don’t have the slightest clue what I am doing or what I am doing it for.

I might have thought about suggesting that he probably does not have an idea about the last one either.

However, instead of getting myself into trouble before a save escape from the lab is somewhere in my foreseeable future I will bite my tongue, try to avoid explaining any calculations again and stay as far away from the acetone as humanly (and laboratorically) possible.

Brazil 101: Round two

When a Brazilian asks you to his place to watch a movie you might think he is asking you to watch a movie. Please be careful though, because that is not the intention behind his request. This is just a sly, very sly way of asking whether you want to come over to make out. Which is what the whole movie thing is about. He won’t even pretend interest in a movie. He might or might not start one though. If not, he will get right to the point.

Now if someone invites me over for a movie I think they are inviting me to watch a movie, not do the horizontal tango (or samba as would be more appropriate here).

Yes, I am naïve that way. And no, I do not know what to do about it!

The only thing that comes to mind is that from now on I will try to consult with one of my male friends before making any kind of rash decisions in these regards! No meeting alone with a Brazilian!  

Unless I want to make out with him of course.

Something I just love about Brazilians though is that they have a way to make me feel good about myself. They are true ego boosters. I have never met men who were more generous with compliments. The best thing about this is that they actually mean it. They will not tell an ugly girl how beautiful she is (lie, of course). And when they say you look awesome you definitely look pretty to them.

Maybe I am just deluding myself by believing this, but I do like a good compliment just as well any other women. And ladies, come on! You will never find a man happier to pay homage to you with words than a Brazilian! They might do it to get into our pants, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the attention, right? After all who gets and who doesn’t is still up to us.