Family fun (June 23, 2007)

Slightly amusing argument today with my granddad. He comes at me all pissed off because someone left the gate open yesterday night and he was extremely sure it was me. Now, that fence is 5 feet tall and easily jumpable by anyone not crippled, but I suppose having the gate locked makes him feel a teeny bit safer, so I nod and play along. But then he says he’s going to start locking the gate at 7 p.m. and I can’t manage to stop myself from saying he’ll be cleaning my bootprints off the fence then, since I certainly won’t be putting up with a 7 p.m. curfew. Yours truly was then subjected to the age-old “You’re a lady, I thought you were better than the riff-raff on the street” monologue. Maybe if the teaching system of 20th century Romanian colleges relied more on dialogue than on professors perrorating in front of halls full of silent students my ex-university-professor granddad would have noticed by now that *that* argument stopped working on me when I was 9 (not that it managed to do anything but annoy me before then). Or maybe he’d have a whole new set of annoying attitudes instead.

Absurdity of the day (May 24, 2007)

My house has a terrace roof with rails on its edge. Since we don’t go there much, a bird that would die there would probably rest there for some time. This happened to a pigeon and, since the past few weeks’ weather was very hot and very sunny, the corpse got flat and quite dry. This afternoon we had a storm and I went up on the roof to look for rainbows and lightning bolts/marvel at the force of nature/enjoy the gale/get wet. I’ll let you guess what sight awaited me on the roof and, if you guessed it was the sight of a dead, dry, flat pigeon being blown around by the gale and smashing into the rails, you were right. I’d like to add that the whole thing was a cruel mockery of death and our hopes of immortality and delusions of a world with an inner meaning which got even funnier as the rain started and the pigeon got wet and, now too heavy to be wafted around like a withered leaf, got dejectedly marooned in one of the puddles.

April 27, 2007

If someone would have told me a year ago that I’d be cheating on Bauhaus and The Dresden Dolls with Bach and Tchaikovsky, out of all posibilities, I’d have thought they were joking. After all, my father and I haven’t the best of relationships and, since he’s an ex-orchestra member and, I sometimes thought, an insuferable music snob, it was only natural that I’d end up listening to anything that wasn’t classical music. But human beings wouldn’t be human beings if they didn’t question their nature, and I’m sure you’re not allowed to call yourself an adult if you still blame your shortcomings on your parents. I could tell you an inspiring story about how I decided to stop letting old prejudices ruin my appreciation of music but, while it wouldn’t technically be a lie, I’d still hesitate to pass it around as the truth.

Fact is, I’ve recently read the Washinghton Post article on Joshua Bell. Gorgeous guy. Playing music. On an amazing violin. In a subway station. During rush hour. Getting ignored by the soulless masses. Poetic fuckin’ moment; call me shallow if you like, tell me the article was manipulative and I’ll agree and say that it still gave me a much more pleasant thing to associate classical music to than my past memories of it*. So, between googling for Joshua Bell pictures and googling for Joshua Bell interviews, I also got my hands on a couple of Joshua Bell CD’s and I’m most certainly not listening to them over and over just because the man is such a hottie. I’ll be the first to admit I know almost nothing about classical music, but I find in those records things I didn’t knew existed. I’m learning new ways to listen to music, to see it as recording the flow of evershifting emotion rather than giving stillshots of a mood. I get images in my head as vivid as the ones I used to have when I was a kid. I find the music engages all my brainpower and all my emotional capability and leaves me feeling one and whole…I can count on my fingers the numbers of times I’ve felt this before. I know I have much to learn and to understand about this music and I also know I’m falling in love. Eh, I suppose Bauhaus and The Dresden Dolls will just have to accept this…

*Long, argument-ridden family trips, long, boring school music lessons and the long, long, long Symphonia Fantastica. Well, at least it seems this way when you’re 7, all alone and stuck in a chair in a concert hall wondering when will daddy begin to play

March 23, 2007

“Feeling lonely and content at the same time is, i believe, a rare kind of happiness”

Some Nightwish lyrics, I think. It was one of my favourite quotes when I was 14.

Life was much more intense then….or maybe I just magnified petty things. One single glance can hurt you so much when you’re barely able to make the difference between what’s inside and outside your head. I remember I used to only have two “emotional operating modes”: completely numb and completely dramatic. The years passed, I managed to find a bit more balance and began to think of the 14-year-old me as a horrible brat. Now that I re-read my old posts, I find I didn’t quite come across that badly. I was immature, a bit of an attention whore and had some really stupid reasons for many of the things I did, but I could have been much worse.

As I read those posts, I thought for a second that maybe life was better, then. Then I thought about making a blog post full of all the things that make my life now so much better. The 14-year-old me would have replied that I sold out and exchanged my intensity and my passion and my uniqueness for calm and bland happiness. The 14-year-old me could have used a hug, really. I have far less ready-made-phrases to throw around than I used to when I was 14, so I’d probably lose the argument. In my 14-year-old eyes, anyway. There’d be too much to explain, beginning with how other people’s emotions and thoughts only look so definite because you’re looking at them from the outside.

This entry is going nowhere. I’ll stop for now.

Word of the day (March 22, 2007)

Kairos – the right and opportune moment, “a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved”

I think I may have to take up Greek.

The gods are strange (excerpts from my paper diary – February 27, 2007)

“I am happy now, I enjoy a certain kind of fantasy and a certain kind of humour and I fill my hours with useful activities in lack of anything better to do. I read at least 4 books a week, counting the pages before I start one. I have music on almost non-stop and use it as a protective cocoon. I’m like an oyster covering up the intruding speck of dust with layer upon layer of ideas and routine.”

“All in all, adulthood’s quite unexpected. I’m faster in regaining my balance and I wonder if it’s because I have found the groove to run in over and over and over.”

“I’m rambling aimlessly and re-reading Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian wood” on a whim. I now have words for some of the things his books made me feel, like how life there means a continuous losing that leaves you with some quite useful gadgets.”

February 13, 2007

Ideas are safe to meddle with. People won’t exactly burn you at the stake in this time and in this place, and the worst the experienced man will get from ideas is a case of good wholesome angst. A vertigo. An intellectual high. I toy with ideas and it keeps my mind questioning the world. It distracts it from questioning itself. Then come the signs of “Stop”, “Private property” and “Here be dragons”, cropping up like mushrooms after the rain, unnoticeable like someone else’s problem. Then you bear a small frail light in a maze of particular cases and twisting shadows you don’t recognise and understand anymore and maybe, just maybe, it’s enough to realise you don’t know how much of it is the world and how much of it is you.

As I finish the first coffee of the day (January 26, 2007)

There’s a mess in my head and quite a few stifled emotions in my heart. I’ve been forced to admit I’ve still got lots of work to do. But I now remember what I dream at night, and while they often get frightening, there’s something beautiful in every one of them. I fall asleep peacefully and I wake up peacefully and that’s more than I had in the months when I thought I was all peachy and finally done with self-analysis. You’re never quite done with self-analysis, I should have kn

Only a few months of school left (January 13, 2007)

“Teppic hadn’t been educated. Education had just settled on him, like dandruff”

~Terry Pratchett – Pyramids

I don’t like school. I suppose I could spew up in my defense a whole story of how organised studying stifles natural curiosity, and how I knew beforehand most of what they tried to teach me in primary and secondary school, meaning I never managed to get used to an organised way of studying. I could spew that up, and it would be mostly true. But that doesn’t really matter. I don’t regret the classes spent reading under my desk. Those books formed me and taught me. I do wish I knew more history and more chemistry and more French and much much more math. I do wish I didn’t have to learn now how to properly study*, but that’s just laziness. And all these are just small regrets and missed chances and nothing that can’t be changed if I really put my mind to it**. What worries me is how I sometimes find myself thinking myself better than other people my age, how, when I have to accept that someone went through and paid attention to an organised learning process and now knows more things about something than I do, I immediately tell myself that I’m still better, because what messy knowledge I have I got by myself. I remind myself over and over again that it’s not how you acquire the knowledge that matters or how intelligent you are, but how well you actually understand things. I remind myself that I can’t be the one making my decisions and the one whining about them at the same time. And I must admit it would be nice to have enough background info to systematize all the stuff I know about, say, literature. Or enough background info to figure out what I would like to do for a living. I guess I should stop flaming the school system. It’s been kind enough to let me read under my desk in 3 classes out of 4. And, while I wish I had a truly amazing teacher, one that fascinates you and makes you fall in love and feel like a magician’s apprentice, it’s no teacher’s job to keep the passion and the curiosity and the flame burning in my heart and head, and no teacher’s fault that I feel more like smouldering cinder. Things have been confusing lately. I suppose someday I’ll make something out of this mess. Meanwhile, I’m glad that I could get up my ass and write a blog entry and buy a paper diary for when I don’t feel like dealing with complete or comprehensible phrases.

*As opposed to simply learning

**Though I probably won’t. But still.

Travel thoughts – December 14, 2006

I’m thinking about Love. Of the capital-letters, butterflies-in-the-stomach kind. And I’m thinking about the deep separation it stems from. I’m thinking of roots and the lack of. I’m thinking of the mangrove appendages the rootless will stretch to outside things. I’m thinking about stones and the slow growths they contain. I’m thinking about Venus of Willendorf and about the stone earrings that were waiting for me in a handmade jewellery stall in Syke, Germany. I’m thinking of my ten days of travel. I’m thinking of freedom and fun and the total confusion you tend to get when you wake up on a bus at 3 a.m. I’m thinking of a man who I’ll probably never see again and how he knew to say and do just the right things to turn a few chats on neutral subjects in a life-changing experience. I’m thinking of a whole lot of hang-ups I acquired at some point or another. I’m thinking of love and roots and stones and journeys and I’m thinking of finding your center.