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.

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.