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.

Pain, I wanna do it again

Sometimes you get entangled in your thoughts and you think you are right - this just makes you deaf and blind and you pave the road to hell with your good intentions. You don't see or hear suffering, you dismiss whoever tells you: 'you are hurting me'. You treat others pain as a mosquito - slap it when it makes a noise or when it stings, without thinking that it needs that blood to live.

Kill the mosquito and then tell it - 'Lazarus, come forth'. And cry and walk like a caged tiger screaming 'how dare you die on me?'. You just think and you forget to feel and if somebody screams, maybe to bring your senses back, you just look at it and say pompously - 'I'm doing it for a good cause'.

Seeing the cause and not the people makes you an immutable bastard, even worse when people become that cause. The pretext of love can make one become the private Inquisition of another. Not only the public history, but also the private one is full of torture and pain in the holy name of love. And yet, we do not stop loving and hurting and suffering. And what is more important, we never stop hoping that love will not hurt anymore.

The last unicorn

I like fish tanks. I like staring at them and just thinking of nothing - watching how the fish smoothly move back and forth and up and down and back and forth again. There is such a randomness and yet such a smoothness in what they do over there. Plus, what I like the most is their lack of emotions. Or I don't know, maybe they do have some emotions, but I've never seen a fish expressing anything else but... its own fishiness (is there such a word, I wonder).

I am away from home again. New city and new people - I love change but I get so easily bored. Still, I'm not going to complain about the city (yet) since I haven't explored too much of it. So far, it seems pretty decent, particularly thanks to the vast green spaces it exhibits. Other than this... Lithuanian is not a language I am planning to learn (although it might be a good investment, since there are like 3million speakers in the entire world) so I'm staying as a tourist - partly in and partly out, always able to block the surrounding world through the simple act of not listening.

What's been on my mind lately is my own emotional desert. No, I don't want to say that I am not loved or that I don't feel warmth around and stuff like this. But what horrified me lately is my utter inability to miss. I don't miss home, I don't miss the people from there. I don't miss my dogs or anything or anybody. I know they are there and they are fine and I'm happy about it. But I don't miss them.

Out of sight, out of mind seems to be the guiding principle of my emotions. As paradoxical as it might sound, it doesn't mean that I stop loving what is far away. But I simply can't live my today sunk into missing. Somehow, my universe is fractured into the 'here and now' and the rest. I don't think I am too lazy to go the extra mile, emotionally speaking, and miss those who are away or far from me... I just think I can't give more than this.

Moreover, I start to feel slightly irritated when somebody tells me "I miss you". OK, I believe you, I know, you said it yesterday as well. Lacking any declared change in the state of the universe, it means you miss me today as well.... and my yesterday's statement that "I miss you" is still valid. Why do we need to get through the same things all over again? I talk to my mother through the messenger - 3 lines every second day or more (in which she says the usual crap, that she is fine and that my grandma is fine) and it's more than enough, as far as I'm concerned. But I am being given the entire ordeal that I am a too cold person and that I should (jeez, I hate this word) show more affection. WHY?

OK, I understand that people have emotional needs. I can fully sympathize with this, rationally speaking. I mean, I have my own emotional needs (pretty straightforward, imo - pay attention to me, ask me how I am and whether I am OK, talk to me about what bothers me and fulfill my sexual needs) but it seems I am not aware of even a small fraction the universe of things called 'emotional needs'. Why is the humankind so emotionally starved that it takes a lot of reassuring to make them understand even the most elementary truths?

Why is it that we pay so much attention to the words and not to the facts? Why do we tend to act like facts are interpretable but words are not, when I believe exactly the opposite? Why do we tend to place an emotional burden on the ones we love, under the name of "emotional obligations" and give them an entire guilt trip through the simple act of loving them?

On the other hand, why do we connect facts with emotions so much? I have to admit, I am myself fascinated with emotions, but I find them appealing as a six-legged four-headed creature - great to look at from behind a safety glass, but pointless to come too close. Looking around and being reproached for too many times that I am ... let's say emotionless (in various ways, from a sad "you are too cold" to a yelled "heartless bitch"), I started to doubt the social basis of my own construction and wonder whether I am or not a 'freak'.

My first thought was to go see a psychiatrist. A friend of mine explained me, in a highly elevated language, that my 'problem' might be rooted in my childhood and that a shrink might help. Absolutely - I mean, a psychologist helped, when I had a mild depression and I managed to understand the underlying mechanism of help.... so why not a shrink. Well, since this would have to wait till I get home, I decided to play on the net and get myself some personality tests. And I was happy to know that there is a name for people like me, according to the MBT (Myers Briggs Test) - they are called INTPs
(http://www.intp.org/intprofile.html and more specifically http://www.personalitypage.com/INTP_rel.html).

I happily put a badge on my blog - I mean, I am not the only one like this. Apparently, there are more 'emotional monsters' in this tiny universe, who appeal to reason and logic and not to emotions and are, in various degrees, 'insensitive'. I am perfectly aware that this will not excuse me in any ways from now on from my 'emotional duties', but at least I am in peace. I'm not the last unicorn....

Il Nome della Rosa

The other day I was trying to choose a bottle of soda from the shelves of the supermarket when an old lady asked me to give her a jar of honey from the upper shelf and to read her the price. Of course it was too expensive for her to buy it before the pension day and of course I couldn't resist her attempt to comfort her crave for sweet honey with some cheap salty black olives, so I bought the honey jar for her. No, I'm not saying this to point out what a generous great creature I am, but for two other reasons.

First, I hesitated a lot. I didn't want to offend her, I didn't want to make her feel that this is pity and that she is somehow disabled. I never thought of how delicate one should be in order to make his charity not to look like an insult. Sometimes we give from the bottom of our heart to the ones we love, but we do not know how to do it. Giving is an art and the one who does not possess it turns giving into humiliation.

Second, I was surprised by what she asked me - she wanted to know my name and she introduced herself to me. Her name is Gabriela and she is 83 years old. No, she didn't ask me for my name to mention me in her prayers - this would be nice but oh, so mushy. But she gave me a memory and she wanted to know my name, to individualize me... If I were to be cynical, I would say that one jar of honey bought me individuality. But I can't be cynical. Quite the opposite, I am sad. This is all I could do, and there is nothing else. One act made me feel like I am giving with all my heart, and this is how compassion should look like. Make this a habit and it's gonna become a pain in the ass, a burden, and all the meanings in a gesture of compassion would be forever lost.

In the end, I am who I am - not God, but Irina. My name defines me just as much as the colour of my eyes; I can always wear lenses, but my eyes are forever green. And my name is Irina, this is who I am... that Irina who writes a blog and bought a honey jar for the 83 yo Gabriela, in one supermarket from Bucharest, Romania, Europe, Earth. In AD 2009...

Love is all around

There is so much time of our life we dedicate to loving, thinking about love, searching for love or suffering from it that we all end up, eventually, thinking what the hell love actually is. I wondered about this myself and I ended up with a potential answer...

One of these days I was watching a presentation about phantom limbs and about "learnt" paralysis (http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html). It somehow seems that our brain creates stable paths between different areas, connecting certain stimuli with specific responses, through the pure repetition of the the succession of gestures. Like this, somebody who had a paralyzed painful limb eventually amputated still feels his limb, as painful and as paralyzed as when it was attached to his body, because for quite a long while he felt as such.

No, I did not come to the conclusion that love is like the phantom limb symptom, but I saw a potential answer coming from this medical presentation. We all differentiate between "falling in love" and "loving" and attach a certain stability to the idea of love. If falling in love can be a temporary loss of reason, to put it like this, then time cements this falling and transforms it into real love. Or some crap like this...

However, what if it's a simple chemical and, later on, neurological thing? What if we "fall in lust," due to some hormonal and chemical signals we exchange with our potential mate and, if this falling gets actuated, we start to create stable paths of communication between the visual and the emotional area of the brain? What if we actually teach ourselves to associate a certain person with the idea of love due to simply practicing the connection between the respective areas of the brain?

To me it seems like a quite decent explanation for love - I've never understood (in myself and others, not to be hypocritical) the idea that "love endures". Hell, I was talking about this in an earlier post and I was highlighting about the intrinsic connection between "lasting" and "enduring", on one hand and the concept of "true love" on the other. Why does love have to endure in order to assert itself as such, is a different question. However, how can we actually endure a lot of shit and still think that we love?

In almost everybody who can say "I have loved" you can check this - after the couple has been going through a lot of crap and of mutual miseries, resulting from living in common long after lust has ended, they still say that love is what holds them together. Some separate and leave, sick and tired of this endurance of love, but they still miss their former partner and attribute this feeling to the idea that "I still love him/her". But what if, in fact, it's nothing about love but it's just a path your brain created, in those times in which your chemistry was talking too loud for you to be able to hear your reason? What if that path, which became, in time, dug into your brain makes you think that you actually "love" somebody? Or (and this is even better) love IS this path and we just invented a name for it and then transformed it into a cultural pillar of our social and moral life?

I can only hope it is like this... I mean, wouldn't you want to invent a medicine against "loving" and against "missing" and live through rather short but fulfilling and rewarding relations, which can end when the "falling in lust" ended and leave no regrets, no disappointment and no bitterness? We lie to ourselves that "at least we feel that we are alive if we suffer from love", in order to allow ourselves to live on without permanently wondering "how could I be SUCH an idiot?" But I, personally, would swallow any pill that would allow me to stop missing. And yes, I would slip such a pill into my actual partners glass, to stop myself form having to deal with their past.

Thank you for smoking

I read on the pack of cigarettes - "Smoking Kills". No shit, huh? So does life, why don't they put a warning in the maternity hospitals and more warning in people's bedrooms? "Life Kills". It does it in the same insidious and ugly manner as smoking, if not worse. So keep smoking, you might even get away with dying easier.

Lost in Translation

At 7 am I am not sleeping - and not because I just woke up, but because I couldn't fall asleep. I spent the entire night going in circles and being depressed. The efforts of the last months proved to be completely useless. I tried so hard to run away from my previous life and rethink everything while being on my own... and I so miserably failed. Not in the execution of my master plan, but in its core - this is NOT what I wanted.

Sometimes you spot a problem and make it the central point of your life. Finding a solution occupies your time fully and you toss and turn till you find one.... and then you become obsessed with putting it into practice. You think and rethink it and fail to see major flaws - so you start making it real. And once it's up and working, you look at it, and you realize - WHAT A FAILURE!

The wave of disappointment is mixed with shades of anger, of rage, of doubt. Facing the nothingness most of the people offer, you suddenly realize the meaningfulness of what you just gave up. You know that in your life some people are there to stay, while most of them are just poor players on a stage of shadows, coming and going - but when you realize what people are important indeed and that you so hastily tried to take them out of your life, you start understanding what makes the distinction. Some people stay and try and make efforts to stick together even when times are harsh - and you end up blaming them for the harsh times you are going through, both of you, but fail to see they still love you (love being that thing that's left when lust has gone).

I've been through very hard times with my boyfriend. We hated each other, forgetting that we used to love each other. And out of that hate, I wanted, like a caged animal, to run away. But now, when I am away, I miss him badly and I can only admire his resilience. He is a bulldozer and that killed me for a long while, but the same style made him endure the harsh times and still love me. I do not know how to define love, because it can take many shapes - but very few shapes are real and lasting. I do not know if an enduring love belongs more to its kind than a fling - however, I do know that I miss him a lot and that I don't want too much to continue this experience of being separated. Things were not perfect and they won't be - but, like in any Hollywood movie, the good guy wins the girl in the end. And he is the good guy here, I just realized it... it's all about the point of reference. Maybe that saying is right - that the key to a successful relations is to have low expectations. When you benchmark a person against your expectations, everything looks gloomy.... but when you change it, and compare what that person offers to how life is without... I dunno, blame Stockholm Syndrome if you want, but all I wish for now is to go back home. And my home is a person, not a place. I miss you, my dear.

The Sound of Silence

It's been a long month since I haven't even thought of my blog. I somehow felt I used all the words in the world and have nothing more to say. I wanted to leave Germany peacefully and silently, like I lived there. And every day bringing me closer to the end of my staying there made me realize that I don't want to go back to my home country. I knew the German stage has ended and it's about the time to start looking for a new place, but no way I felt like going back to where I grew up.

There were times in my emigrant experience when I missed speaking my native tongue or meeting my old friends from back home. I felt many times alone and isolated and that's when the idea of going back home sounded a bit appealing to me. I kept thinking I could call people and talk for as long as I wanted, not being limited by the minutes spent on international phone conversations... or I could (even better) go out with them, just to hang out and have a drink or watch a movie or chat... in this line of thinking, the country I left because I felt as being too much limiting my choices became the country in which I was free to be a social creature. And I was missing this more than many other things in those times, so the decision to go back home came naturally, in a way.

I bought a car, rented a place back home and headed for my trip of independence. With my personal life going through some unclear times, I considered it wise to be back home and think things over in a more clear manner. Change is never a bad thing. Driving two thousand km's with three dogs in the car sounded like a bit of adventure, and I never refused things of this sort. When my car engine exploded on the Autobahn, the adventure started to look a bit unpleasant but ... it's all well when it ends up well. So we kept moving, after a short interval spent in a small Bavarian village, where I had the opportunity to contemplate living in the country and to turn off any fantasy of this kind for good.

At Szeged, civilization ended. The four lanes highway going around the cities, like on a normal trans-European road, became a two lanes country road, where you had to cross small towns and cities, driving behind a long line of trucks. It all became worse after crossing the Romanian border, so any sort of home sickness that must have brought me back here, started to vanish. To make a long story short... I am home. Sweet home, Alabama.

Oddly enough, I feel more dislocated than ever. Times which were promising to be fun and alive and entertaining are actually boring and lonely. I look around and I fail to understand people anymore. I spend long hours to solve simple problems and this makes my heart shiver, reminding me of my Italian times. I feel insulated on a grey deserted island, where I understand the language but nothing else from the surrounding world. I do not hate, I just feel paralyzed - I wake up and I do not know what to do and where to go. I have no desire to call or to meet people and I have no places I know of where I can take a peaceful walk. I stay for hours in front of the TV screen, watching the pixels hit my eye and not getting one layer deeper and I feel deadly bored.

I must be feeling like a prisoner after release, but I was released in a place where I do not want to stay. In the world where I had no limit, I felt trapped by the vasteness of my horizons - anywhere equals nowehere. Strangely, I feel the same nowhere here; the surrounding universe is neither hostile nor friendly, just looks and feels more deserted than the place where I knew nobody else. There, loneliness seemed natural - here, being alone is weird, since I am alone by choice, at least apparently. However, this is how I feel - I do not refuse the contacts, I just don't feel that I want them.

As you get older, it is probably harder and harder to get to know and to accept new people. I look at new faces and at old places and I feel ... silent. Even writing this post made me feel somehow clumsy. I do not know what to say, words have left me and I'm caught in a limbo of silence. No hostility in me, no revolt - just a paralysis of senses and of mind, in which days flow one after another and I live in an expanding, pointless, today.