In meinem Leben

Sea of Sin

I'm home for quite some time... Like a shored sailor, I enjoy the peace and the lack of storms and giant waves. I like to look outside from my balcony and to see the city, to hear the words I can understand while walking on the street, to be able to chat with the cashier at the supermarket, when I pay my bill ... I like that my phone rings and that I can chat for 10 minutes about nothing and that I can interact with people and with my friends.

However, after about one month of staying I realized that I've been too much away to come back here untouched and to act like I used to, when I was young. I've been alone for too long, I guess, and this loneliness calls me back. I start to feel overwhelmed by interactions and the peacefulness starts to be heavy on my heart. When I think of going away, I know I'll be missing the shore but when I am here I miss my ship, my sea, my nomad being.

I've met quite a few sailors in my life and I've always wanted to be one. I saw them leaving and coming back to their families, welcomed guest but so unadapted to the family life. Their visits home were a source of joy and happiness, but in he same time an earthquake for the routine. And after a while, when they were leaving back to the sea, everybody was sad but in peace - life was coming back to normal.

When does a sailor come ashore and stay there? Why some settle, after a time of sailing, and some just keep on going back to the sea? I've noticed that the family was the main reason used for settling, but I've always wondered how do they feel inside... how does one feel to be home, after being homeless for a while? Am I over-romanticizing and naively building some adventurer's characters, or are they for real? Is it immaturity and an eternal adolescence to keep on running back to your sea of freedom, while pretending you have responsibilities ashore? Or is it something stronger than you, which keeps calling you back to the sea, to the storms and to your ship? What is stronger, the love for your family or the comradeship you feel towards your fellow sailors, with whom you face the danger and the fun of a life of nomad?

Last night I dreamt Sh. I've loved him since my 6th grade and I don't think I've ever stopped. I never fucked him and I've always known this is for another life time and not for this one. Somewhere in my early twenties I met him again, just to find out how much he loves me too. Of course he was by that time married, and I was (just like now) sailing. I forget about him most of the time but there are nights when I dream of him and I wake up lounging ... I somehow know that if I had ever been with him, I would have never gone sailing.. and I would have been unhappy, without knowing why.

Maybe I am born like this, or maybe we all secretly like unhappiness. Or maybe missing something, missing the shore while sailing and missing the sea while ashore is what keeps us going further. I do not know.... and I do not know what to choose and what to do... I try to keep on sailing and to keep on coming back home, but I know it's a frail balance and I will have to make up my mind. Or maybe it takes one Sh. to make me decide... or then again, it's too late now to change and not even a Sh. would make me stay on shore. I do not know, but I will soon go back to my ship and hope it won't sink this time either.

Out of Africa

I would like to impose a visa regime for my soul. I sometimes allow people to enter, take a tour or even make a little place of their own inside. Such a bad idea... it seems expansion is the dominating natural tendency. Everybody wants to take over and it's useless to place signs - 'private property, do not trespass'. Every sign becomes more of a challenge for expansion.

- Hey, my soul is not the Easter Island, we are not trying to prove the Darwinist theory here...
- that's what you think?
- well... it was my garden ... there used to be flowers and exotic birds here and I used to enjoy seeding thoughts inside. When they were growing, I never allowed them to become weeds... it was shiny and peaceful here... what are you trying to do?
- civilize you... civilize you because I love you. Let me make order in your garden and tell you what to plant. And let me show you how to clip the wings of the birds, so that they don't fly too far. I like to watch them in OUR garden.

They give you no option and they force you to choose. Offended, they threaten to leave if you don't let them fix your garden. Or, cunningly, they stay and try to make the hawks lay eggs daily while you don't notice. They think the phoenix burns their wooden cottage and they try to make a steak out of it.... since the bird enjoys the fire that much... why not?

What choice do you have but to force them out? And if you are to condition their entrance from the beginning, what will be the selection criteria?

Maybe that's what wedding rings are... visas given to somebody willing to fertilize your crops, when you are too blind to see the phoenixes anymore. Welcome to the civilized world, good bye my Africa...

Sense and Sensibility

I rarely write about animals, I find it hard to. Not because they occupy too little space in my life, but quite on the contrary - because their stories fill up my life on a daily basis. I don't write about them, because I feel humbled by their strength and by their ability to endure life with humans and, some of them, to love us, humans, more than we deserve. I feel I lack the words and the ability to transcribe this.

I owned myself quite a few dogs so far, I met and tried to help a few others. Each of them had a clearly defined personality and, if they were all to look alike, they would still be so easily distinguishable. Tofa: delicate, picky and cheerful... Ugly: meticulous, devoted and humble... Raptor: an old criminal, joyful and willing not to bother... Gica: a leader, an epitome of dignity, and still a puppy deep in his heart... Aldo: neurotic to the bone, innocent and joyful when he trusts... Cara: serious and independent (but still able to love so much that she would give up her independence to follow me wherever), strong and yet playful... Toby: a dog like a smile, a bit cunning and always happy ... and the list can go on - Aldo (II), Bijou, Kitty-Cat, Dunguska, Fido, Bruno and then again another Bruno, Molda... Sosetuta, the stray dog who was protecting his girl-dog till the last day of his life... and his girl, Griuta, who died soon after Sosetuta because she was too weak to survive without him... The unnamed stray male who was raising generations of abandoned puppies ... they all marked a place in my heart and their memory is still with me long after they have left my life.

And then again, the unnamed dog... deserving a monument like the unnamed soldier, unknown martyr or humble survivor, so rarely having a good faith from birth till death... how can one write about this and not feel humbled? How can you look at a cat, so far untouched by humans and a bit wild, who surrenders into your lap and starts purring, for as little as a can of food and some petting, otherwise than with respect? Is it innocence, is it trust, is it ... what is it?

Humbleness is what moves me and touches me the most in animals. The humbleness with which they accept their place and they live their life. The humbleness with which they face the good and the bad, they live the today and survive till tomorrow. No complaining, no whining, no self pity and no dramas - just patiently facing life. Humbleness is not a virtue we are used to, and it's not a culturally transmitted value. I find it hard to understand how one can watch a moon eclipse and still over-evaluate his place in the universe.... almost just as hard as understanding how can one kick an animal just because he passes by next to it.

Why am I writing this? Because during my long drive home, I encountered again the Romanian village and the dogs wandering on the edge of the roads. Thin, humble and scared, hungry and always searching for a piece of food, for a piece of life, they made me feel again powerless against the suffering of the livings and reminded me that the best way to perpetuate injustice is to pass by and do nothing. If we were all, once per year let's say, to take attitude and do something about the things that we care for, the world would be a better place. And no... I am not participating in a beauty contest and I do not want rice for the African kids or forests for the tigers... I just want a decent world. There where compassion and common sense prevail, nothing can turn bad.

Dungeons and Dragons

For quite a while, I am addicted to the internet; and, with all honesty, to online games. I managed to spend a couple of years playing Utopia, a game of medieval fantasy (experience which I hope will turn into a nice research soon) and I generally get hooked to all types of games as long as they entertain me.

They have a lot of interesting features but their best one is, I guess, how the game style reflects one's personality (this and the fact that they create unexpected social ties and bonds). I am not a psychologist and, with my talent in people, I guess I shouldn't even consider this as a hobby. But I find it fascinating to think about the person behind the screen and how he/she must be like, given the visible results of the game. Utopia was a very mathematical game, but you could see a lot of other personality features - and, interesting enough, I met a lot of nice people and I made quite a few friends in that universe (read 'on that server'). For a few years, I was every day logging into my game and talking to people; with my good math skills and obsessive compulsive behaviour, I ended up running a kingdom. Besides the excellent practice for leadership and for team management (which I found extremely useful since then, tho' my gaming tyrannic policies are a bit harder to practice in the real life than in an online game), the game gave me the huge opportunity to befriend people from all corners of the world.

I spent a lot of time chatting with them, about the game at the beginning and then about me and themselves. The in-game forum was very often alive, and although the main part of it was dedicated to the strategy, there were threads with jokes, pics or with music. I flirted with a few of them, I found out when some were getting married and I was a shoulder for some of them, when they were being sad, or cheated, or were having I don't know what sort of problems.

The youngest member of the team was an Australian teenager of 15 or 16 when we got together in the same kingdom, and he was a college student when I left the game. The oldest one was a 45 yrs old Dutch squatter, having a lots of cats and a few ex-wives. There were the Canadians and then the Asian tigers, from all over (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore). When somebody new was coming to the kingdom, you could not know who hid behind the name... and the process of getting to know each other was then starting.

During all these months and even years (if I think about it, I spent definitely more than 'a couple' of years in the game... but this is not so relevant) we never met. But I don't think I had closer friends than my kingdom mates. And I spent a lot of time caring for them and for their provinces as well; from a certain point on, I started to notice the resemblance between the province and the person. Some were nice and caring, and they were always sending aid to others; some were just so eager to war and attack other kingdoms that they barely had any defense in their province; it was not hard to notice, for example, that the attitude towards risk was very well reflected in the construction of a province - the more the player disliked taking risks, the more defended his/her province was.

As life was taking us further, we were leaving the game one by one. Some were changing places, others were having newborns and no more time for online games, some others had to start to work for their living and so on. At a certain point, I myself left and the kingdom disbanded. I still talk to a few of my former kingdom mates and I know how and where they are and what are they currently doing. Of course, the relations are getting colder because we don contact each other on a daily basis, but they haven't stopped completely.

With my limited time, I now play a few flash games, mainly those which are so easily accessible on FaceBook. One of them is Farmville - not so relevant what the game is all about, because it is quite obvious from the name itself; it is a simple thing, where you build a farm, harvest your crops and enhance the appearance of a 22x22 squared surface. Not so complicated, but gives enough space for a personal mark.

For somebody who is both homeless and deeply in love with nature, building a farm is a fun hobby (even if you do it virtually); so I paid attention to my farm and then I started to notice others'. Apparently, in a small surface of 22x22 squares, there are infinite possibilities to arrange all sorts of items - from housing to animal cottages, while keeping enough land to plow and maintain your farm productive. Since you can watch the farms of your friends (if they play... and some of them do), you can also try to make some correlations between the persons (whom you know) and their farms. Again, a striking resemblance...

Am I trying to make a point here? I don't know, maybe I am. But for the time being, it's just an overview of a pretty interesting phenomenon. You cannot hide what you are even in the virtual world.

Words

As strange as it might sound, I deeply dislike academia. Strangely, because that's what I do for a living; not strangely, because it was not my first career choice, but something I ended up doing, for a number of reasons - decent (not great but decent) payment, relaxed schedule, sometimes fun environment.

A few years ago, it looked pretty well - nice people (we were graduate students then), a lot of alcohol (needed sometimes), smart talks (and smart asses), good quality humour. Well... that was just the surface, the visible part of the iceberg. The deeper I got into the academic waters, the more I hated them. And it's not only a matter of people... I have nothing particular against people. I mean... I don't dislike academics as a separate species among the humankind, but on an equal foot with everybody else. And, to be very specific, I don't dislike all academia - I fully understand why exact sciences or medicine should exist. But humanities?

Never until now in the history of humankind people were paid to produce nothing - and this is my main problem with Humanities: what they deal with and live out of is the production of words. OK, there were the king's fool and the king's poet... but they had a role. What role do all the graduates of some beautiful sciences (no, it's a very wrong word, this is anything but science... but how else to call them) have for the society?

Some time ago, I was having a rash when hearing the words 'French post-structuralism'. They all looked to me like people with a lot of time to waste and a lot of pens & papers at hand. Sadly, the disease seems to be spreading. I hear about new academic specialties and I can't stop wondering... WHY do they have to make a discipline out of everything? WTF is a specialist in Culture, huh? Why do you need to graduate 4 yrs of college to be able to have an opinion about a movie (and call yourself a film studies specialist)? OK, you can write about females and discrimination, but WHY start a gender department and create a school of thought called 'feminist studies'?

Don't take me the wrong way - I can understand all this as a... let's say... sect. Such as a group of people sharing the same beliefs. And I can also understand the students paying for getting a degree in one of those fields... in the end, we are all so deeply imbued with the idea that 'believing is paying' that we owe a big thumb up to the Church... but let's not divagate. Why does the society pay for this?

I know, academia is actually a business. We managed to convince everybody that the main asset of today is real time information and real time communication, so the poor students are buying the crap and pay their tuition, imagining they will end up being smarter. My fear is, however, that they will end up being just indoctrinated. We never teach them to doubt or to wonder... we teach them what the gurus said. But this is not a religion, a spiritual way... it's just somebody's opinion about how things are. All the respect for Foucault, but Jesus worked more to be quoted so often. And dying on a cross should give you more credibility than wondering whether a pipe is a pipe or just the representation of it.

Moreover, we don't teach them anything about work. Again, maybe the 20th and 21st century are a step closer to the Apocalypse (the one that my grandma is waiting for since the beginning of 2000), but all along history people were paid to WORK. What do the 'humanists' do, be them teacher or students? They produce words on papers. Are they inventing at least a sharpener for a ball point pen? Nope, they are INTERPRETING - because this is what they are taught to do. To interpret the interpretations of others.

In the world of interpretation, nothing seems to be real anymore. There are levels and meta-levels and a lot of psychoanalytical jargon trying to convince you that nothing from what you see is real, but it is a product of your subconsciousness, or of the collective subconsciousness, or of some Oedipus/Elektra complex or God knows what else. If it's not psychoanalytical, it's Marxist and it's about class and oppression. And if it's not Marx, then it's the Panoptikon and the ubiquitous relations of power. C'mon, people... WAKE UP. Even princesses take a crap, once in a while...

Liebe ist fur Alle da

A New Year spent in Lithuania, at home, gave me very little choices but to watch the Russian TV shows (having a Russian speaker with me, while I speak neither of the languages, it seemed like a decent compromise to make). I'm not gonna write a long plead about the inherent patriarchy, coz I don't feel like an European bel hooks for now. But a short one... yeah, for sure.

So... what could I see on the Russian TV channel I watched? Well, in a random order: Medvedev giving the New Year speech, old Russian stars with various amounts of money spent at the plastic surgeon doing whatever they were trained to do (like... singing, dancing, acting or something else) and half naked girls. This last part is what caught my eye. Why? No, it's not because I started to develop a certain interest in the weaker sex, but because I had the feeling that I am watching a men's club show and not a New Year TV program.

For like 4 hours, some guys came on and off the stage and pretended to sing, while he girls kept dancing - OK, we can count in here pole dancing, belly dancing, strip-tease (half) and sensual rubbings against few half naked boys. The first thought was that the few representatives of the stronger sex dancing there in their underwear, were for the delight of the few gay viewers among the Russian audience. But then I realized it's not this - it was too much macho breeze there to even consider introducing the idea of 'gay' - but it's actually adding to the voyeur pleasure of the straight males, by mildly suggesting sexual intercourse. OK, lesbians are fun, but how much of it could they take? So a few male counterparts had to be carefully inserted (pun intended) into the show.

I am by no means a puritan. I couldn't care less about the square cm of naked skin I see on the screen. In the same manner, I'm not a feminist - it's hard to belong to any other '-isms' when you are already a misanthropist; I confess I dislike men and women almost equally. However, I am a big fan of equality - if we are to use some of us for our sexual arouse, it's perfectly fine, as long as everybody is satisfied. But I can't stop wondering how much the women in the audience enjoyed that particular show? Or maybe... and I only say maybe... who cares about what women have to say, anyway?

25 random things about me

Don't ask me why exactly 25. Conformism or laziness I guess... this is how it came to me. With 25. And random. So here we go.



1. I like to sleep and dream. I can hardly sleep and my dreams are nightmares. However, I like the idea.
2. I love music when it's in tune with my feelings. I hate to listen to soft music when I am angry, to calm down. Maybe it calms down the singer, but definitely not me.
3. I love my dogs. And whatever other dogs. Actually, I like dogs.
4. I would be a druid, if born earlier. Nature is the only thing deserving a god-like respect.
5. People call me my style 'sarcasm'. I call it 'survival strategy'
6. I hate poetry. I'm too stupid to care that 'love' rhymes with 'dove'. One is emotion, another is bird. Doh...
7. I like SciFi - not as escapism, but as exercise of imagination.
8. I love to be in love. I completely cherish the hunting and killing of the prey. I have a hard time staying in love.
9. Been vegetarian for years; sometimes I revolt against it and eat meat, to remind myself there are no absolute, universal truths.
10. I have the soul of an engineer; I like cybernetics and I love to have a systemic view of the things; everything is interconnected and there are no coincidences.
11. Starting from statement no. 10, I think I can call myself a Buddhist.
12. I like the irony contained in the statements of whoever declares him/herself as 'religious but non-practicing'. WTF is that one?
13. I like order, but I thrive on chaos; I think chaos is the only true opportunity maker. That practically justifies my life choices so far, so it might be a defensive mechanism
14. I am a Cartesian to the bone - I doubt everything, including my own doubts. Go figure how I live .
15. I hope my next life I'll be a tiger; good enough reason to hate poachers.
16. I smoke a lot. I guess I do it because it makes me look smarter. Either this, or I watched too many cigarette ads.
17. I am oblivious to people. They have to jump into my way to be noticed. This might be closely related to the fact that I am a sound misanthropist.
18. I like connecting elements and seeing causalities. See statement number 10 once again.
19. I believe that there are many ways to fuck up your life, but they all have a common element - they start in the moment when you begin lying to yourself.
20. When I was a kid, I dreamt of being a pirate. In fact, the captain of a pirate ship. I like freedom and being rich, so I considered it the best professional choice.
21. I have a huge level of aggressiveness. Since I can't always externalize it, there it comes the self- destructive behaviour.
22. I hate inner ambivalence - maybe because I live with it for a life time. Or maybe not.
23. I consider myself a survivor - I have faith that I would land on my feet no matter what. Or die, of course.
24. I love long walks. They are always planned for 'tomorrow'.
25. Freedom. And just let me be.

Secondhand Serenade

There is one shop in Bucharest called MiniPrix - it sells cheap clothes, offering low quality for little money. The shop is most of the times crowded, although it's almost impossible to actually find really nice things. There are people who go there constantly to remake their clothes stock, because once in a while they can find one or two brand items searching in the piles of junk.

I tend to think this is just a symptom of a lifestyle, in which people just prefer to pay little accepting that they will receive little; and maybe, once in a while, they can find a decently nice moment in that low quality existence. In the economy of the system called 'life', they believe that giving a lot is too risky, so they settle for little.

There is this philosophy - if you dig too deep, you'll end up finding shit, so better if you don't. It fits the same MiniPrix life philosophy... if you keep things shallow, you don't have to work too hard, suffer too much or lose more than you can bear. However, the other face of the coin says that you won't receive too much in exchange also. In this world of small feelings, nobody cares that you can't grow roses on a layer of shit.... they settle for a thin cover of the stinky truths, because nobody actually needs roses. We can watch the wild weeds and pretend they have perfumed petals...

Fear of the Dark

One day I was talking to a friend about change and its value - I was changing the country again and I was excited about this. He asked - 'are you not afraid?'. I said 'why would I be?'. I still remember his answer: 'Those mortals are generally sensitive to and afraid of change and instability'.

I respect fear - it's good for survival. However, if you want to live and not merely to survive, then you should definitely overcome it. The human perpetual quest for certainty and stability is generally understandable, but sometimes it is sad to see how you give up your dreams for a tiny piece of stability. Life offers no guarantees but one - that nothing lasts forever. When choosing, one always tries to minimize the pain and maximize the gain. Nothing weird up to now. What I find generally quite pathetic is, still, how little it takes to define something as a gain and how often we mistake 'comfortable' with 'happy'.

I've always known good things don't come easy - maybe this is how we end up defining them as 'good'.... but this is another discussion. However, when one wants something, it's a pity to give it up not because he/she stopped wanting it, but because he/she is too weak or coward to stand up and face the hardships and the obstacles.

Aquariums are always safe - the water is warmed and it has no currents. Indeed, no adrenaline rush and not a too rich life. But the fish doesn't have to fight for survival and for the daily meal. It actually doesn't have to do anything - it just sits and moves back and forth in the tank, living his life until the day it dies. In human terms, it's like laying down with your arms crossed on your chest, to get used to the position in which you will be, one day, buried.

This is the only thing I fear - fear of living. I am afraid one day I will become too used to being comfortable to be able to follow my dreams, or to accept and deal with change. I am afraid one day I will become too lazy to leave what doesn't make me happy anymore, or too coward to face the truth and lie to myself that 'good enough' is good enough. I am not afraid of the dark, but I am afraid of turning off the light of my soul and make an oblivious darkness inside my heart, dying little by little every day without actually living.