You can not.

You can not expect one relationship to satisfy all your communication and interaction needs. And no I am not talking about dating multiple people at once. I am talking about developing and maintaining deep and meaningful relationships with one's family and friends.

I feel like I am dissolving in my relationship with Shane. Not completely my fault though. My best friend Natalya moved to SC, my sister (and best friend) Mindy is in Europe, my best friend Lena is in Germany, Jazmin, who I grew really close to over 10 weeks and who is also surprisingly one of the most awesome friends I have had, is in Arkansas. Trevor left, Anjan left, my mom, my dad, my brother are all so far away. I miss them all so much.

I love Shane. I love hanging around him. But I need to be with someone else at times. Like I used to go out with Natalya or Mindy, or even friends I used to have in college. And I don't don't don't want to be that girlfriend who only has her boyfriend for her friend.

I want, I need a female friend. A shopping companion. A go-out-for-dinner and chat buddy.
Or a gay guy. That would work too.

There isn't much to choose from though. I am the only girl in most of my classes.
And I don't really have much in common with most girls I meet.

Yea, thats it.

Pizza!!!

 Here is the wonderful recipe I found and it is delicious:

Crust:
2 c. flour
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 c. water
1/4 c. vegetable oil

Preheat the oven to 425 F. Mix flour, salt and baking powder. Add water. Knead the dough. Roll out into a pizza-like shape. (Shane and I tried to make it a square or a circle, but it ended up being a rectangle with rounded corners). Put some vegetable oil with just fingers on top of it. (We used the oil with spices already in it). Put some basil, oregano and whatever else might taste good on pizza on the crust.

Bake the crust for 5 minutes.

Take it out of the oven and put pizza sauce, cheese, stuff (tomatoes, mushrooms, pepperoni, ham, green onions, green peppers, whatever else might taste good), cheese on the crust. Sprinkle Parmesan on the outside of the crust. Bake the pizza for 15-17 minutes :)

Wonderful

 I woke up to a kiss today. 

I love it. It feels so good.

 I feel much more inclined to get out of bed, than when I wake up to the annoying sound of the alarm. It went off three times today without me hearing it. Unless Shane made it up.

I also talked to my mom and my brother yesterday and my dad and I seem to have established email communication, so I am finally in touch with my whole immediate family. Yay to that.

Also I finally did the laundry last night. It feels good not waking up to a bedroom with a pile of clothes in the middle. I just need to finish it up today. And I need to clean out Simba's litter also. It is  hard to breathe in the laundry room.

As a side note, Shane and I  made the world's best pizza. I found the recipe on cooks.com. It is a yeast free dough and it only takes about half and hour to make the whole pizza (including baking time). That's less time than ordering pizza at pizza hut. We made bread sticks also. I will put a photo up with a recipe next time we make it. You will see it's good. 
I also wrote my English paper. Seven pages describing my flying adventures. Now I need to write my history paper only. I think that's what I will do, since there is really nothing else to do at work today.
(*Instead I am talking to my sister. Time well spent*)

Thankful (in no particular order)

1. Being here
2. My supportive families
3. Wonderful brother Oleg and sister Mindy
   
4. Most wonderful man in the world
   
5. My dad's job
6. My job at school
7. My house, despite all the problems with it
   
8. Knowing how to speak and write English, Russian and French
9. My cat Simba
   
10. Being able to create
11. Understanding math and science
12. My very few girlfriends, who are wonderful nevertheless
    
13. People I met because of physics
14. My summer REU program in Arkansas
15. Electric blanket
16. Emotions
17. Trust
18. Photography
19. Natural light
20. Summer, lakes, mountains
21. Impressionists
22. Being healthy
23. Board games
24. Google
25. Books
26. Harry Potter
27. Traveling everywhere 

And to brighten my day even more....

My daddy just sent me money for school. Wonderful.

Yesterday.

We are back to normal.

Just like we are supposed to. Thanks blogger for accommodating my thoughts when I need it, because sometimes retrieving them is a wonderful thing.

As an occasional passer-by might guess from the previous post, Shane and I broke up. I don't want to write about details, because they aren't that important. I actually thought I was okay with it. A week in DC with Jazmin... and I was feeling fine. When Todd and Courtney picked me up at the train station - still fine. I did feel a little lonely hanging out with two couples that night, but most likely was too tired to be upset about it.

Next morning Shane came over to help me fix my truck, since as a single person, I needed my own mean of transportation (actually it would be nice to have one even when I am not single, but that's beyond the point). Long story short - we couldn't fix it. Too many things are wrong it. I had fun hanging out with Shane. We talked, laughed, he took me out to a new Japanese place. It was a great day. He left to go back to Ciesielskis later that evening.

I tried working on my homework and distracting myself in other ways. But it didn't help. I called Shane a couple times "to talk". I tried reading my blog. (I don't do it often). I came across something I wrote on December 13th. I understood how I feel, or at least how I felt then.

I called Shane and told him I am going to send him that blog. I felt like I needed to share. He read it and said he'd call me back. He called me back 20 minutes later. During those 20 minutes with a large amount of mental work, I was able to somewhat figure out what I really want. I wanted to be with Shane. I tried to write down all my thoughts as bullet points (here is the technical side of me). While talking to him on the phone I read them all to him. We talked for a while.

He finally said: "OK, I gotta go inside now. It is cold out". I started crying.

"Can't you just drive over here?" I asked

"I don't know" he answered

"Please..."

Then I heard someone was opening the front door. Todd and Courtney are back, I though. Now they will see  me all crying and upset, ugh. Slowly I realized the sounds coming from Shane's phone matched the ones coming from my front door. I still was doubting. The door opened and Shane walked in.

I don't think happy is the right word to describe how I feel. I felt more than that, far more.I ran up to Shane, gave him a hug and he kissed me.

It was wonderful.

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus

“Men argue for their right to be free, women argue for their right to be upset.”

Security

I feel a lot more secure now. I was scared the most of Shane breaking up with me. Now that it happened, and I am still “alive and kicking” nothing, absolutely nothing, can hurt me.

It actually didn’t hurt that bad this time. At least so far it has been much better than it was over the summer. I am not sure why. Maybe because it is still up in the air and I still think there is a possibility for me to cuddle up to Shane and kiss him good night. Or maybe because I just don’t care anymore. Or maybe I care, but learned to contain it within myself over the summer.

I have talked about all of it. I talked to Natalya, Jazmin, Amanda. It is nice to have girl time - I don’t get a lot of it normally. I have been told by them that I am not a crazy bitch for wanting to be with my man and that’s good enough for me.

Outdoors

I am such an outdoors person in the summer. I love to run, swim, play games. I can’t stand staying inside. And everything is so beautiful outdoors too!

But in winter…

Jazmin and I walked through Chicago yesterday to find the pizza place, because she wanted to try some Chicago-style pizza. The place was only half an hour away from the train station, but we had to make a bunch of stops in the convenience stores along the way, just to warm up. I realized that no matter what I wear, my nose will always freeze since it sticks out so far from my face.

So in winter I am definitely an indoors person. Fireplace, homework and hot cocoa = the best combination :)

Simba's master

Jazmin: My cat sometimes likes to lay on my chest, leaving her hair all over me  
Anya: Simba only likes to lay on Shane's chest. Especially when we wake up in the morning.  
Jazmin: He probably perceives Shane as his master. He thinks he is Shane's.  
Anya: Yea, because I left him for few months while Shane was still there.
Jazmin: Boy, is he in for a surprise when Shane moves out.

Trevor

Trevor came over tonight. That was great. Kinda sucked that I was crying for the whole day before, but I bet he wasn’t able to tell. Good conversation and many laughs as usual. I actually feel less depressed now. I wish I could talk more to him about things like we used to. He always seemed to be able to get more common sense into me.