adrenalina lipsei

Câteodată depăşeşti fără să vrei cantitatea de cafea recomandabilă – fiindcă eşti încă chior de oboseală şi ai treabă care nu poate aştepta, sau fiindcă e bună, sau fiindcă eşti aşa de somnoros încât îţi torni automat încă o cană înainte ca cele două dinainte să-şi fi făcut efectul. Şi te trezeşti (îhî!) cu inima în gât, cu surogatul de adrenalină panicând în locul creierului tău, cu un gâfâit surd şi animal care, preţ de câteva minute, pune stăpânire pe tot ce e rezonabil şi rutinier şi confortabil. Recognoscibil, nu? (mă rog, beutorii exclusiv de ceai verde s-ar putea să se uite la mine cu ochii uşor goi şi să se-ntrebe despre ce vorbesc). Însă nu-i o metaforă de data asta. De la o vreme, fie asociat, fie cu totul independent de cafeaua de peste limita de toleranţă, pseudoatacul de panică preia câte un minuţel controlul. WTF fac eu aici? Waar ben ik mee bezig? Şi dacă nu-i rost de găsit niciun fel de magie de niciun fel (asta cu magia personală vine dintr-un articol de blog aşa de american-motivaţional că nu merită citat)? Dacă cumva asta e tot, o sumă de preocupări mediocre, lipsite de orice strălucire deosebită şi de orice pasiune, în care în loc să habar n-ai încotro te îndrepţi şi să faci pe tine de frică, ştii cu precizie că totul e gata determinat şi asta e şi mai deprimant decât neştiutul. Cum o cheamă pe bătaia asta de inimă? midlife crisis? păi… deja?

 

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.

 

about nostalgia

Once upon a time, in the nineties, on a St Patrick’s evening, I listened to a band full of the most amazing lust for life play Irish music in one of the stiff and serious music halls of Bucharest. Somewhere towards the end one of the girls sang this song, with a divine voice and in an accent in which the stanzas made no sense to me whatsoever, but I could just about make out the chorus properly enough to melt into tears. I looked for the song for years after that, forgetting to ask Matthew Sweeney during his creative writing seminar what it was called (not that I could reproduce enough of it, with melody, for someone else to recognize it, but it would have been worth a shot). I found it last year, when I decided to transcribe what I remembered of the chorus word for word in the google bar (Hail, Google!). I’ve listened to it a few times since then. It’s still beautiful to me. Maybe also because I remember now my student self from when I listened to it, who was moved by nostalgia for a time of purity and grace and community togetherness before that… and that’s where the harsh sound of the needle scratching the LP breaks my construction, like in kids’ TV-series.

It’s not then. It’s never been then. I know everybody says this all the time, and yet, even when you understood it, it is difficult to feel it, because it’s so damn easy to make `then` feel absolutely perfect, to purify it of everything that was not idyllic, or, just the opposite, to fill it with all sorts of anger that are actually not about then, but are much easier buried there. `So we did, so we did and so did he and so did I/ And the more I think about it, the nearer I’m to cry…` And it’s so easy to melt down in this invented collective memory which my generation puts in PPS-es with all the lost products of the communist age that we grew up with. Because `then…`

It’s not then. It’s now. It’s now that my daughters splashing each other in the tub laugh so beautifully that the back of my throat aches with suppressed tear-bliss. It’s now that I feel the ocean of fear for whatever world there will be ahead for them. It’s now that I’m grateful, furious, amazed and drained at the same time. It is the now that is loaded to the brim with ideology, politics, communication, life, work, meaning. I’m nostalgic, as I write, about every bit of now that I wasted thinking about how differently serene things have been before. Instead of looking for my serene point from which I can absorb and deal with today. It’s now.

 

Gaura ca temă recurentă

Zicea băiatul ăla cândva

Că gaura din steag se va umple cu sens,

Că scopul va deveni palpabil, ca pe pahar vizibilul condens,

Că gaura e mai mult decât ea.

 

Ziceau şi la cunoştinţe despre natură că puloverul cel mai gros

Nu-ţi ţine cald cu lâna, ci cu ochiurile rotunjite pe andrea

Că pledul de aer din spaţiile circumscrise e… aşa

…un fel de termopan avant-la-lettre miţos. 

 

Să zicem, prin urmare, că şi gaura asta din stomac

Între când, carevasăzică, totul urmează şi totul a fost

Are, probabil, un rost,

O pupăză sau măcar un colac.

 

 

de ciocolată şi meringue cu lămâie

Am fost în weekend la Maastricht. Şi e drept că mi s-a mai întâmplat ca stările de bine concret şi culorile de toamnă să se traducă în senzaţii gustative (nefericită condiţionare atunci când funcţionează pe dos), dar oraşul ăla, în care am hotărât acum că, într-o zi, dacă lucrurile stau altfel, ne-am putea muta fără nicio îndoială, oraşul ăla în care trebuie musai s-o plimb pe mama, oraşul ăla care se află de fapt într-un buzunar mental foarte asemănător cu cel al oraşului în care locuim cu mult drag, dar parcă totuşi cu alt tip de dantelă, oraşul ăla care are întotdeauna o mângâiere pentru sufletul omului (probabil al omului care-şi găseşte acolo vreo rădăcină), ei bine, oraşul ăla, toamna, pe soare de miere şi pe frunze de culori dintr-alea în care aş vrea să-mi crească părul de la mama lui, maastrichtul e de ciocolată cu caramel cu bezea cu coajă de lămâie şi cu piure de castane. Iarăşi am imagini diabetice. Da uite, na, fără dulciuri, ăsta e un gust coloristic de luni:

Ştiu bine că sunt şi oraşe mai romantico-brizbrizuite decât ăsta. Ştiu că-i produsul unui hibrid de culturi care explică, pe rând, fiecare colţişor. Ştiu că mă interesează fiindcă e, ca şi oraşul meu de azi, provincie şi capitală în acelaşi timp, nu foarte mare, dar universitar, burghez şi boem totodată – resorturile sunt previzibile. Mă descurc în el cu ochii închişi după vreo şapte-opt vizite. Dar visez să stau acolo de-adevăratelea, să-mi crească în mitologia personală pietricică cu pietricică, poveştile mele să fie din oraş şi poveştile oraşului să facă parte din mine… Şi asta tocmai când aş fi zis că-s pe punctul să prind rădăcini de tot şi să nu mă mai mut. Nu că ar trebui neapărat să faci ceva cu toate îndrăgostirile …

 

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 .

 

baia de culori

paintball joacă netul cu mine. mă împroaşcă cu vopsele colorate: albastru e informaţii noi, roşu e frica de a nu şti destul, galben e neputinţa de a schimba conţinuturile, verde e centrul care închide pe rând sursele de zgomot. vânătă, aflu într-una că trebuie să mă păzesc, dar să mă deschid, şi mă măzgălesc cu sentimente neadevărate de toate culorile. din timp în timp, pulsul se grăbeşte către interiorul unei pungi de hârtie: „şi dacă mă-nec în culoarea vântului turbat?”

 

dezordine

Mă întreb dacă în capul fiecărui om e la fel de dezordine ca la mine. Sau dacă cei la care dormitoarele arată impecabil îşi întreţin şi interiorul glăvatei cu aceeaşi scrupulozitate, asta făcând din mine un „slob” în general. Şi de data asta nu e vorba de incapacitatea de a ţine o agendă mentală sau scrisă şi de perpetuul nod în gât că am uitat să fac ceva important – subiectul ăsta e epuizat, mă tem. E vorba despre ordini mult mai fundamentale (ştiu că nu suportă grad de comparaţie, j’m'en fiche!). La mine în cap convieţuiesc straturi peste straturi de „adevăruri” despre ce simt şi/sau gândesc cu privire la anumite situaţii. Şi nu-i cred nicio secundă pe cei care jură că „ce-i în guşă şi-n căpuşă”, fiindcă ei fie a) fac rău orbeşte în numele principiului, suspendându-l apoi temporar când pagubele sunt prea mari, fie b) nu sunt conştienţi de straturile lor sau, mai rău, chiar n-au decât unul, ceea ce mi se pare tare simplu şi destul de egocentric, fie c) trăiesc într-un mod pe care încă n-am reuşit eu să-l concep (trebuie să ne recunoaştem tot timpul limitele!). Dar divaghez.
Straturile cele mai evidente sunt destul de strâns întrepătrunse, de-asta mi se şi pare aşa de dezordine – câteodată devine tare greu să aflu ce cred cu adevărat. Există un strat de „onderbuik gevoelens” (emoţii viscerale, să le traducem), în care există oameni pe care nu-i plac (fără motiv), există frici neţinute în frâu, există revolte ieftine eu-alţii, tot soiul de gogomănii inerente jeguleţului uman, dar care, pe de altă parte, nu se lasă negate în bloc – şi zice-se că nici nu-i sănătos. Stratul ăsta e făcut sandwich de două alte straturi – unul către afară, în care emoţiile astea sunt raţionalizate şi domesticite către „dar nu mi-a făcut niciodată niciun rău, nu există motive de ostilitate către X”; „dar dacă pun un pahar peste păianjen şi-l iau cu cartonul, pot să-l scot din casă fără să-l ating şi nu vreau să fiu cineva care se lasă dominat de bube-n cap”; „nu m-a pus nimeni, am făcut munca y pentru că am vrut eu şi nu pot să-i scot asta pe nas altcuiva [negare raţională a unui mod de a disfuncţiona (nu există? îl inventăm!) în care am crescut şi care nu poate fi dezrădăcinat]”. Sau, oare, ăsta e stratul de dedesubt şi nu cel de deasupra? Nu ştiu, ele par acelaşi lucru, dar se simt diferit. Exemplificând, dialogurile interioare curg în ”Ne vedem duminică cu x şi cu iubitul lui X, pe care [adevărul e că] nu-l agreez deloc, deşi [adevărul e că] nu mi-a făcut niciodată nimic, e un om la locul lui, uşor exagerat, dar bun ca pâinea caldă, etc, etc.” În care adevărul e şi stratul 1 (cum că n-aş acţiona niciodată pe baza emoţiilor viscerale, dar faptul că n-o fac îl resimt uneori ca ipocrit), şi 2 (dar, superficial, aşa simt), şi 3 (dar cine sunt se defineşte prin valorile xyz, ca atare emoţia n e invalidată). Iar 2 e adesea un adevăr de neocolit. Dar şi raţionalizarea lui e corectă. Do I make any sense?
Problema e că, pe principiul ăsta, poţi să ajungi la dileme de viaţă grave de tot – din care te salvează, în bună parte, ceea ce e acceptabil în lumea în care te învârţi. Fiindcă, slavă cerului, degeaba te bântuie riguros şi încăpăţânat câte-o fantasmă în condiţiile în care „do no (intentional) harm/do no harm knowingly” e atotputernic. Dar cum ştii dacă, cu totul independent de ce se întâmplă înafara ta şi de consecinţe, atunci când e vorba de sentimentele pe care construieşti, sentimentele reale se află în stratul cu cine eşti ca substanţă sau în cel uşor inflamabil şi egocentric căruia, la alţii, îi răspund partidele de extremă dreaptă? Pentru că adevărul e că…

 

third in a row

(meaning third post in English in the last few days, mostly in order not to dissapoint my first other-than-my-mom subscriber – who so pleasantly surprised me this morning – with random musings in Romanian.)

The thing circling about in the bucket of my mind and trying to get a formulation, stimulated by more or less debate-ey comments on the mummyblogs that I’ve been reading with unembarrassed thirst for the last weeks, is the extent to which exposure to gender identity stimuli in the world around us makes us comply and be what we are told we are. Or rebel. Or – ideally – shun labels.
Because I used to think I would die if anyone ever called any thought in my head a feminist thought. I also used to think my children, if female, will own no pink piece of clothing – in apparently no connection at all with the first thought. I used to think I could be absolutely anything I wanted AND that the thing I absolutely wanted to be was a mum (to be honest, this is the one piece of reasoning that never substantially changed and I’m happy with that, in spite of the fact that I never got round to actually resigning my lucrative activities and probably never will). And I hated the feminist movement because of growing up in a country where the movement had done nothing but defeat its purpose: where I come from, women were and are supposed to work full-time, more often than not keep households in which their men don’t lift a finger (rumour has it it’s been changing lately, I’m not there enough to check), raise children more or less on their own – with the occasional male input of ball-throwing at little boys at the weekend side-of-the-pond-barbecue and of belittling them if ever they manifest any non-masculine interests. I am quite aware of the extent to which this sounds like a rant – I used to see the issue rather black and white and be angry at the wrong… ah, but no, I still think, to a degree, I was angry at the right people. Because the generation of our mums, while being quite driven in their carreers and telling us sky was the limit, also taught our brothers to be exactly as helpless as their dads, whose mothers they used to curse, in turn, in their youth. Chores in houses were seldom split evenly, the roles of boys and girls were distributed before we even knew it and by the time I went to the seaside on holidays on my own with a group, when we were about 15, the girls were cooking every single day for everybody – never grudgingly, mind you, we were playing at being grown-ups, and that was what grown-up women did. (I also impressed a very temporary love interest to tears in my second year of university by washing his t-shirts – apparently it was endearing that there were still old-school women who took care of their men in that way, and amusingly, I was proud to be one.)
In time, a lot more nuance has come into the way I tell these stories or see `societies`. Having lived in three countries by now, I have been able to see that people get exposed to things to which their particular society attributes values and most of the time the `irrefutable truths` about `how things are` are integrated unquestioningly in one’s system of beliefs. (The temptation here is to illustrate with examples of `universal` trains of thought per nation, but I’m not going to fall for it, of course, this already being a rambling post with too many branches). What I wanted to say is that, with globalisation, quite a mass of the thought that is acceptable and accepted, mainstream, not consistently questioned, might just be the same for many of us. This being how come we can wonder on different meridians about the effect of sexualising pictures on children growing up and on their image of themselves. This is how come anorexia and bulimia are spreading at much the same pace in different places. This is how unfiltered feelings of being unsafe or of making too much effort in comparison to others (ow, how well this ties in with my rant, although it comes from somewhere completely different!) create rejections of otherness of the least politically correct kind.

And this is where I begin to wonder about the sense of this post and get all solipsistic on my own ass – to what degree am I capable to think independently about these things when, in truth, I wanted to have girls because my own brain was washed enough (and it’s difficult to say by whom) to believe that girls were the part of humanity that I had a more decent chance to reason with? How can I stand straight in any debate on society shaping uneven roles when I have been glueing all-hated labels on human behaviours on both sides of the gender rift for years? But also, going back, are the unquestioned things which have been settling peacefully in my brain really disqualifying me from formulating any informed opinion? And if so, is there no informed opinion possible on gender identity issues (or any issues, in fact)? Or is there a way of securing one’s attempt at `objectivity` (lovely construct, can’t help labelling it `scientifically male` though ) by critically questioning all assumptions one makes when trying to make up one’s mind? In other words, if I assess myself, for instance, as touched by an improperly/insufficiently questioned tinge of misandria, will that disqualify my view on how my world typecasts children in little princesses and little dinosaur lovers or will it just give it more strength because I am dealing with my own potential bias by admitting it?

Whoa, I definitely have too many questions for one single post and too many modifiers for every single sentence. Oh well…