despre timiditate (diary entry)

Boală grea. Atunci când n-ai deschis gura să nu deranjezi pe cineva şi te-ai trezit că ai aşteptat o lună degeaba ceva ce nu avea să aibă loc fiindcă era de la sine înţeles că trebuie să deschizi gura, doar nu contezi pe “due process”. Atunci când te întorci acasă cu convingerea că te-ai purtat complet asocial la o întâlnire cu oameni noi, fiindcă senzaţia că ei au ce să-şi spună unii altora sau că te bagi ca mărarul în ciorbă te-a împiedicat să le arăţi că-ţi sunt simpatici. Atunci când aştepţi o bucată mult prea lungă să înceapă altcineva să danseze la una din prea puţinele ocazii de a dansa, deşi ştii că trebuie să pleci devreme. Atunci când copilul studiază îndelung copiii necunoscuţi care se joacă, neîndrăznind să se amestece în jocul lor, de care are chef. Deşi pe mine însămi mă pot lua sistematic de urechi şi mă pot obliga să mă port invers decât tentaţia viscerală, să mă arunc în mulţime, inerţia e acolo. Şi o văd în fie-mea - răsfrântă. O să-i treacă, zic.

 

bucuriile mici

Ce bine că pot

Să mă tac făr’ să mă prefac

Să mă tic fără să mă stric

Să mă toc făr’ să mă sufoc.

Ce bine că ştii

Să mă mustri-atunci când mă îmbii

Să-mi spui pas dându-mi totuşi nas

Să-mi laşi loc să nu dau în foc.

Ce minunat, minunat

Că-mi trebuieşti rezonabil şi cumpătat

Că piticii din ţeastă s-au maturizat

Că-mi trebuie doar trebuitul, şi ăla moderat.

Dar cel mai şi cel mai bine

Ar fi să reuşeşti (alt tu, cel generic) să-ţi ascunzi

Cât mai ai de cărat sacii ăştia cu tine.

- Care saci? Nu cumva mă confunzi?

 

strong/weak if you do, strong/weak if you don’t

There are many standards that we never consciously picked up – they are more or less „infused” into our very substance through their pervasiveness. There are things we admit or not, things we share or not, because there are standards about what is share-able, and placing yourself on one or the other side of certain standards makes you immediately „one of those people who…”. But given that this page is not (read: pretending really obstinately to itself not to be) an exercise in (narcissic) likeability, but rather one in being honest to oneself, I’m questioning my standard.

I’m on a (rather severe) diet.

I read blogs of people who write about body image; I can agree with lots of stuff, I can get judgmental and wonder whether continuously writing about it doesn’t affect the extent to which you think about it – and it really shouldn’t be that important… I admire some of them for their sustained effort of embracing themselves instead of media images. And I am, by no means, one of them.

I have long ago tacitly embraced the standard that a woman might joke about her weight, but a `strong` woman should never show that she actually has issues with her body – because, well, she’s not that shallow and self-esteem cannot possibly be influenced by something so `worldly`. Yet, the same `strong` woman should never `let herself go` and turn into a middle-aged shapeless potato sack. It’s always perverse – because, to obtain the `cool and composed` attitude, you should never visibly count what you have on your plate – or else assume the consequence of being a different sort of fretting woman. And to obtain the `decent`, `I have everything under control` silhouette, you should do something about it – something that involves time and effort. But it shouldn’t show.

Therefore today I am writing about it. I’m on a diet: it’s awful and masochistic to bake cake for your kid’s school birthday party while working your willpower to its end not to touch the frosting; it’s a test of dealing with frustration, putting it in perspective, coping with low energy in a demanding life pattern; it’s time-consuming in preparations and asocial because, apparently, all social things at work and at home are organized around food; it’s really boring if you’ve developed gourmet tastes; it’s a journey of confirming that this is my weakest physical and possibly psychological spot; it’s possibly demeaning in the eyes of others who are struggling on a daily basis with how their body, of whichever shape, is themselves and needs to be loved. But I’m tired of this game of constant guilt, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I’m giving it my best shot, and if it saves me thinking about this for the next 10 months, at least, then it will have been worth it. If I can extinguish the desire to press delete whenever I look at pictures of myself, even if it’s only temporarily, it’s worth it. (Of course, it won’t be, given that, when I weighed 10 kilos less than today, I was desperate to find a gym where they know what you should do about your upper arms (that was perhaps around 21). ) But it turns out that there’s strength to be found in all positions on a spectrum, and today, I’m sticking by this decision: I caved in to society’s ruler – I’m a wimp on a diet.

 

… none of the above :)

There’s obviously no wisdom highground to be taken by someone who is being emotionally incontinent online (in the illusion that this saves some energy from friends who might not have any to spare for one’s shit and also, hopefully, it prevents one from blurting out inappropriate relation-altering nonsense just because it hasn’t received any vent for too long) on the notion of dealing with one’s emotions. With that disclaimer in mind, though, I’m wondering whether there’s not something to be said for… denial. If the fact that it’s part of one’s process of acceptation of traumatic experiences doesn’t mean that it might have a useful part to play in how we deal with our emotional reactions to all sorts of things.

All right, perhaps I’m being too vague. I wonder if the things we feel cannot, sometimes, be made less aggressive towards our own fabric by recategorizing them somewhat. If the consequence of calling something an emotion which is socially accepted as intenser doesn’t allow it to take over you in a more depletive way. It’s probably the same approach I have to pain thresholds (we are, after all, creatures who think in categories). What if, as soon as you say `I’m depressed` instead of `I’m sad`, that changes the quality of your emotion and it empowers the emotion over you. And while I think it’s a good idea to live one’s emotions instead of burying them completely, I’m wondering if sometimes we don’t live more dramatic emotions just because… well, I don’t know – they give us purpose as individuals, maybe?

It seems to me that the yoyo (I know, I have a fetish-image, get over it already) bounced back at some point from an (overly masculine, some will say) overly rationalistic way of conceptualising the world, towards an (overly feminine) overly emotional manner of dealing with things as a mainstream. What if the divide is not as simple as `rationalistic defies nature, emotional embraces one’s impulses`, but instead, being rational is just as natural an impulse of repressing the feelings that make one incapable of functioning effectively, while what we experience as `embracing one’s emotions` is also a greencard for filling one’s life with a host of `issues` which get in the way of experiencing any good, growth-bringing feelings? What if we might imagine this as only a gradual scale between the two attitudes and what if there was a, perhaps healthy, way of balancing the rigid, starched collar with the fluttering tye-dye robes? What if our children need to learn to harden themselves just as much as they need to understand how important empathy is?

 

somewhere in there

In keeping with how eclectically I usually write this blog, this has nothing to do with books (or politics), language (or children) or basically anything I have been thinking about lately. And yet it is a recurrent thought that kept gaining flesh… and yet it is, like all of the above, (also) about identity.

The way we conceive ourselves – and it’s very difficult to figure out if this is characteristic of women and men at the same time or even of most women – seems to be this archetype of who we would like to be/used to be in photos/intend to be at a certain time. It seems to me that, at any point in one’s life, there are things that a person is, and yet thinks (or merely hopes) they’re not.

`I look all right these days, if only there wasn’t for those pimples` - followed by a mental photoshop brushing away temporary things that are not essential to who you want to be.
`I’m actually not someone who wears glasses. It’s just because I can’t stand my contacts lately and I don’t dare attempt surgery and… oh yeah, because I have bad eyes` – photoshop to your face 4 years ago when you were wearing contacts or to 9 years ago when you refused to wear the glasses on the street.
`I’d be feeling very well with myself if it weren’t for those extra pounds. I don’t recognize myself in the mirror, this is not me` – photoshop brush to 63 kilos that you may have had 10 years ago, while at that time photoshopping towards 59.
`My cheeks in this photo look like a basset hound’s, but it’s just because I was pregnant at the time, this is not how I generally look` – accompanied by silent envy towards all the gorgeous pregnancy photos of friends, who probably photoshop their own head out of those pictures as well…
`I sound like a very controlling mother, although this is really not how I am, I want to…` - photoshop towards a mental image compiled from Hollywood family movies where kids roam around free all day and yet follow the most perfect table etiquette.
`I’m really not an office clerk, I’m a writer…` after years of deskjobs in which you never wrote a line of literature. (all right, this is really not one of my thoughts, it’s more inspired from the `Bartending is just a temporary thing until I get an audition` – I admit as an identity decision that I could never live in the insecurity anything artistic as a vocation presupposes.)
`I’m sorry my house is such a mess, I’ve only just gotten home…` - whereas it would look just the same at any moment someone visits without calling beforehand, because the way the house it’s supposed/designed/imagined to look only lasts while the cleaning lady has just left the living room and is sweeping upstairs, only to be completely lost for another week by the time she goes out the door.

The thought came back to me again yesterday, in Polish class, when a colleague describing me said `she has curly hair` – and although I had taken the mysterious change that electrified my hair a few months ago for a temporary, `not-me` phenomenon which will pass, after which I will `be me` again, it dawned on me. Every single day I will be things that I want to photoshop away and things that are esentially the way I want them to be. Things I know and I don’t know about myself. Outside and in. There are `ways I am` that I will have to fight my whole life because they will not simply allow themselves to be changed radically, but will allow a daily `straightening`. The things by which I define myself are not pick-and-choose, although, for the sake of minimal confidence, they are the ones one rather concentrates upon. I don’t think there is peace to be had with all these things I don’t like about myself (temporary or not). But the layers I try to strip away in order to get to `really me` are, sometimes, to be accepted as inevitable, and sometimes, as demons that can be louder or quieter roommates on my asteroid, but the `baobab plucking` or `volcano cleaning` keeps me on my toes and makes me aware of my shortcomings towards others.

 

about languages… and stuff

This is about bilingualism. Or at least, that’s where I started. Then it turned out to be about identity. And then about history and information in general. I am in awe at the fact that people ever manage to stick to one `subject` – to me everything seems connected with everything else. It might be time to convert to some native religion on some virgin island .

Aaanyway – an article about unbalanced bilingualism got me thinking about why it was that I seem to have trouble speaking my own language with my children, although it is a language I am still very comfortable in, of which I love the versatility and of which, conceptually, I want them to have the benefit. Of course, there are all the contextual excuses – that the home language is the same as my partner’s language and the school language, therefore it’s far more contexts of Dutch to outbalance Romanian exposure; that I have to switch a lot and that I am not comfortable with the people in the room not knowing what I just forbade the kids to do or the people in the supermarket not being aware of the contents of a conversation that has them as a subject (`please let this lady pass in front of us at the register`, `watch the cart!`) etc. But there was a question in the article addressing one’s potentially internal reasons for linguistic inconsistence. And, while painting walls in the study, I went with it to see where the answer might take me.
It may be that what I often perceive, while translating, as shortcomings of Romanian in comparison to some Germanic languages is also perceived, consciously enough, as proofs of shortcomings in the `signified`, of empty spots in the fabric of `the world according to the Romanian` (because I strongly believe that language shapes the way one sees the world). It may be that those shortcomings (that I supplement linguistically by long and uneasy periphrastic constructions) become symptoms of where my original identity was lacking perspective, symptoms that I compensated by adding new layers of identity on. It might be that the fact that I am embarrassed to place the kids in front of even DVD’s dubbed into Romanian because of the sloppiness and fake tone of the translations, the unnerving quality of the TV shows when we are there on holidays and the `quick-and-dirty` way of making money by publishing children’s books/CD’s with idiotic poems/songs illustrated with a couple of animal shapes printed off the Internet without paying the rights, or printing Disney’s integral with texts that twist the language in ways it was never supposed to be twisted – drastically reduce my linguistic exposure resources – but also, mainly, get me down. It might be that my guard is down insofar as speaking Romanian is concerned because I’m all the time angry at and dissapointed with my country and that it takes an effort to filter the `now` out of the legacy of beauty that I need to pass along.
And that took me to another thought. I am very much aware that there is no such thing as absolute truth where personal or national identity and even history is concerned. But, for the sake of the game, we hold some stories to be commonplace in order to be able to relate to one another. Obviously (to me), Romantic nationalism put in place all sorts of fictions about nations and collective identities and especially about reasons to be proud of what you are (even though you have no merit at all in being born where you were born and even less in not trying to see how anyone else sees the world). These fictions have been, to large extents, debunked at some point in the 20th century – in any case to the point that nations had to admit the existence of quite a few skeletons in their closets. However, manuals all over the continent kept selling plenty of the Romantic dough – and many of us didn’t question it. I have met an extremely intelligent Finnish guy who claimed unflinchingly that the Kalevala was an absolutely unique product of national genius and that no other nation had ever produced a saga (he was a bit appalled at the wikipedia page with which we opposed his stance). Just as I have only met Dutch people being very-very-very proud of being Dutch – because oh, their commercial and colonial history and oh, their standing up to everyone and anyone and oh, such a little country among so many powerful nations and water… And of course, when asked, they will tell you that it’s not always the nicest of histories and that in fact it is based on a lot of suffering for others and mistification afterwards, but the core is unchanged – whatever is objectionable can be swept under the carpet of national pride. Where I come from, relativity in this sense has become the norm – because we know that the communist-nationalistic manuals we learned our history in gave a very warped vision of the world and because we are aware that their predecessors stem from a rather nationalistic age as well, I, for one, have no clear idea about any historic truth (apart from years and wars – which can be interpreted in all manner of ways). My lack of trustworthy information about the place I come from makes me relativise all messages I’ve ever received about my identity. Having been fed `national poets` whose value I couldn’t really, objectively, appreciate and `national values` which turn out to be inexistent in a free world, there is this fundamental lack of `pride` in my identity: there are, of course, wonderful things where I come from, but I see them being destroyed year after year by greed, stupidity, cowardice and, more than anything, a basic incapacity of working together towards any goal. So the strange thing is – I question other people’s rationale of national pride and can even find it misplaced, but, for the simplicity of self-definition, I miss it.
And this might be it – we live in a world in which nurture, as far as values are concerned, is placed significantly above nature. If you are a greatly successful farmer on land where your ancestors were greatly successful farmers, your added value is seen as minimal. If you come from a modest family and make something of yourself intelectually, it’s all your merit – these are, I think, strong and widespread beliefs (maybe `well-bred` as a concept is going to win back some force in the years to come, who knows). Conserving your given identity feels like little work, shaping a new and better one gives you an individuality which you can take pride. It might be then that it is sometimes easier speaking a foreign language because it is the signifier of who I worked to become instead of the signifier of a random complex of events shaping me from the start. With the added bonus that the people that I tried to approach were actually happy being what they were, as opposed to the people I was slowly drifting away from. In which case the right operation to sort this out might be embracing all of the identity layers instead of unconsciously fighting some of them; and only buying one’s resources at an old books’ shop .

 

despre dureri în membre amputate

Am ales să plec. Oraşul a ales să trăiască în lipsa mea, uitându-mi amintirile. Oraşul îmi uită străzile copilăriei, una câte una, pe măsură ce lor le cresc dinţi de case noi, roz, sau sunt făcute una cu pământul. Locuitorii lui nu mai urmăresc traiectoriile pe care paşii mei le-au săpat, repetitiv, în asfaltul uşor de topit. În oraşul săpat, invers, în mine, supravieţuiesc linii de tramvai contemporane borcanelor de iaurt şi nume de străzi din trei epoci diferite, copii bătăuşi a căror morală protejează păpădiile care cresc pe parcela blocului şi magazine demult dispărute. Şi deşi pe negativ se suprapun, an de an, imagini ale oraşului altora, mă chinui să uit de pe-acum viitoarele amintiri despre oraşul meu imploziv.

Pe fantazia oraşului meu o muşcă neantul.

 

comparing criterion lists

Everybody must have some memory of first dates/first periods spent together in some context or other in which they worked through some ridiculous (ad hoc for most people) made up checklists that would reveal their compatibility with the person they were interested in. You know, the „favourite actor”, „what will your future house look like?”, „best memory”, „favourite book” kind of conversations. The older the memory (the younger we were), the more importance the answers bore – the wrong musical affiliation was definitely a dealbreaker in highschool, whereas later on it could be seen as just a reservation, when all else „fit”. However, even at times when the answers weren’t that heavy anymore, some answers could make one win or lose. How much they were carved, at that point, on the mould of the perception you have of one another, how much they were meant to please, I cannot tell today. Although I’m sure that `Meryl Streep` won points, whereas the list of smokin’ hot sexy actresses we now also know to be valid would have lost points. Just as, somewhere in translation, `I never managed to finish that novel by Marquez, what was its name again…` was magically transformed in `I think Marquez is my favourite writer.` Or `Oh, you like Cohen. Is that the Canadian guy or the Belgian guy?` became a revelatory moment of `Absolutely, they are in the same drawer in my mind too!`. All in all, obviously, the criteria were deeper than the superficial questions, and what we knew was real was real with or without the scoreboard. Yet I cannot but wonder, 9 years later, why I abruptly changed my answer to the one serious question: „What is your greatest fear?” from the first impulse „Not being in control.” to the mild „No, actually, I think it’s being bored.” I’d make fun of my own bovarism if he hadn’t turned the radio a bit louder last weekend for „Is dit alles wat er is” (does it need translation, I wonder?).

 

of everything too much or too little – diary entry

The rambling quality of this my virtual place makes it rather difficult to communicate properly with anyone who managed to define more accurately what they are writing about. Hell, I haven’t even defined accurately what language I’m writing in, although I seem to have chosen as main one the one with the most limited potential audience. But then again, I wasn’t writing for the sake of audience to begin with. However, the feeling I get gliding from blog to blog in this labyrinth of minds and hearts spoken online is mostly a tinge of envy for all those who have learned to take into account the potential objections of the mainstream voice, to make fun of themselves/not take themselves too seriously, but still to allow themselves to go ahead doing the things they believe in or love to do, unrefrained by the harness of self-censorship. I stumbled today upon this adorable example of what I’d call a mild preemptive rebuttal aimed at the Other’s judgment of some me as a minority view on things: `Now, I know your Tie-Dye and Mung Bean Alarm is already sounding, but stay with me if you will. ` – and I so wanted the sentence to be mine…

I know I’m being incoherent right now, but – once upon a time in Amsterdam, I had this moment of clarity during a night of being drunk with friends and made a whole speech (that I immediately half forgot) about how being a woman is all about wanting to be things/people, not necessarily wanting to have things/people. I believe I meant that, even when there are things a woman wants to have, they are mostly props for who or what she wants to be – a setting, rather, for the play of her own life. But more importantly, that the way a woman lives relationships most deeply is not by wanting to posess another person as a friend or lover, but by wanting to be more like them, to reflect herself in them and them in herself. However, this kind of generalising talk (or drunken clarities) has left me quite a while ago, and now I only dare to write or say things in the first person, the way they teach you to in the rather pointless assertiveness classes. I, therefore, believe that I have been attempting all my life to become something, while constantly looking at others and emulating the parts of them that I would have liked to be – or just looking at the dancers and wishing I had the guts to go out and dance. However, at some point I cannot help but wondering, in the cacophonia of voices I’m trying to hear and in the multitude of people whom I guiltily envy because they seem to have found their convictions and peace – is what I call my self-censorship actually not my voice? Is the not giving in to the extremes of all the things I might like to surrender to completely, the measure of how I personally cope with the chaos? I would so like to be the person who invents rituals for themselves and for the children, and yet I am so obviously the person who could not stand the ridicule of their own partner about any excess of sentiment…

Shall we just leave it at that? No tie-dye alarm here today – just no nonsense, no maintenance, no envying others for being real – they’re probably just hurdling along as well – why else would they be writing?

 

despre evoluţionismul relaţional

Aseară, cu exact acel puţin înainte de a adormi care garantează preluarea în subconştient şi rumegarea îndelungată, am auzit un fragment de argument la o controversă fără liman şi lipsită de soluţie: „Poate că relaţia a crescut în dezechilibrul ăsta pentru că de asta era nevoie…” Şi deşi cel de-al patrulea stomac al minţii mele e mai raţional în starea sa de trezie decât în semisomn, sunt bucăţi de convingeri care îl fac să fumege în toate stările.

„Adică cum?” mestecă el în ritm alert: „în relaţiile în care bărbatul îi stâlceşte nevestei lui arcada săptămânal, relaţia a crescut aşa fiindcă de asta era nevoie? Ea avea nevoie s-o mai plesnească cineva din când în când de toantă ce e şi el avea nevoie de o supapă?”

„Adică cum? În relaţiile în care unul munceşte şi altul bea de stinge, relaţia a crescut aşa fiindcă de asta era nevoie? Unul avea nevoie de bani pentru a-şi susţine slăbiciunea şi celălalt avea nevoie să „lighten up” şi să relativeze gravitatea datoriilor?”

„Adică cum? În relaţiile în care unul munceşte serviciul şi celălalt munceşte serviciul plus casa plus copiii, relaţia a crescut aşa fiindcă de asta era nevoie? Unul avea nevoie să se simtă miriapod şi celălalt avea nevoie să i se spele şosetele?”

Argumentul evoluţionist aplicat relaţiilor îmi ulcerează niţel capacitatea de digestie. E întru totul de înţeles că relaţiile cresc aşa cum le laşi să crească şi evoluează în funcţie de nevoile şi disponibilităţile fiecăruia. Că unde unul cedează mereu şi altul câştigă prea uşor, creşte strâmb şi că acolo unde nimeni nu dă nimic de la sine se usucă creanga. Că unde amândoi dau în gol împotriva valului realităţii creşte relaţia în bălării şi că acolo unde se cooperează cu simţ practic ieşi la lumină mai iute. Dar că nu te poţi opune evoluţiei naturale a unei relaţii de cuplu sau că ea reflectă, împotriva exprimării explicite în alt sens a partenerilor, complementarea lor implicită în plan raţional/afectiv, dominant/subordonat, control/abandon, asta nu-mi intră-n cap. Poate o să-mi intre cândva, aşa cum am integrat-o pe cea cu a şti că eşti nevrotic nu te scoate din starea de nevroză. Până atunci, sufăr de indigestie.