Went to donate blood, first time ever, with a few colleagues from the math. Perhaps some folks from physics were there, I didn't know any of them anyway.
The slogan used to be "help the wider social community", "humanity in deeds" and such, which was probably there on the posters on the wall. The one I heard in the waiting room was "better I to them than they to me".
Tried to learn hungarian. Bought a book, "quick and easy hungarian". First lesson went fine, crashed on second, understood nothing there. Still, some knowledge stayed in my head, I ended up knowing more than before. Later I heard that it's "neither quick nor easy, and whether it is hungarian, well, beats me".
Around this time my head was full of maths. To the point that she wouldn't stand me talking if I went into that, she'd just switch off and swim away, thinking of who knows what and not listening at all. So I was getting this feeling that I've entered the circle of special nutcases, some kind of brotherhood, which practically has its secret language strictly for internal use. Don't use it in public, it may be anywhere between ridiculous and dangerous, at least troublesome. But then I'd need something else to talk about, and realized I didn't want to become, as the german expression has it, Fach Idiot. Now "Fach" is a drawer, or a cubbyhole, a PO box, but also means a specialty, a profession. So the expression has a very distinct meaning, and to avoid becoming one, I decided to become a kind of a renaissance man - to widen my fields of interests. So I started raiding the nearest library - in Dunavska in Novi. I started reading anything that would tickle my fancy - Wilchelm Reich, Freud, medieval poetry (well just once, I'm surgically divorced from verse, and even that one was because of Dragec's „Jur nijedna na svit vila“ [cause not one in the world fairy], which he composed to his verses). And I learned to love the smell of the books. Shelf diving is a special treat to me.
When we ride a bus to Novi or back, there's usually not enough seats, so the driver and conductor let in more people inside. Usually they do that at the end of town, where the village buses have a stop, and the crowd mostly disperses in the next two or three villages, but not every time. The sunday evening, when many students ride, it can be crowded all the way. There were bus wars in the late sixties, when the selfmanaged bus enterprises were competing severely on the market, and raced to the next stop to be the first to take the most of the passengers, and when the bus stops were made just about anywhere on the road, and when many deaths were caused by this wild culture and technically bad vehicles. So laws were written to regulate the branch, and among them taking more people than you have seats was prohibited in intercity traffic. No seat available for you, they must not take any more passengers. Though, as I learned this winter while making the „Busodrom“, silly Čeda would always sell all fifty tickets, even for the older buses which were one row short, and thus had 46 seats.
Except they often did take you in, specially at night, and then when it passes the big intersection near Novi (the halfway to Belgrade was just built - almost like a highway, just one side missing), with cops almost always there, the driver and conductor would command the passengers standing in the aisle to crouch, lest cops see them. Only the two would be fined, but then all the passengers would lose at least half an hour while the paperwork is made, so they all crouch. I've seen this happen at least twenty times, and took my part at times.
16-XI-2014 - 31-X-2025