What I didn't learn so far

Do you ever wonder why we're here? I mean what's our mission in this life time? 

I know in one of my previous ramblings I wrote things that might make you believe I don’t believe in God. It’s false. I believe in … something. I believe there is meaning somehow, we are meant to do … stuff, and especially to learn something. Not just anything (even if that sounds good as well), but really learn something in particular.

So back to my first question, probably hopefully better put this time: do you ever wonder what you’re meant to learn in this life (not even assuming you might believe there are more lives for one soul or whatever)?

I constantly do. And never quite grasp the answer(s). One that comes regularly to mind is: accept that there are humans who cannot control their minds/brains.

I started to wonder if this is one of my main lessons in life when my mother had (what would be her first) episode of depression. The doctors called it depression. No idea what it is exactly, I just know she acted strangely, seeing people/hearing stuff, not making sense and generally being afraid. Not such a surprise all in all, as she was – even her normal self – very afraid of everything and everybody. She was maniacally correct & honest and was always scared that other people were not and they will try to take advantage of her (or put her in a position to ‘pay’ for their mistakes). As she was head accountant in important companies, this part might have been true every now and then J Anyway…

So she acted strange, she spent some time in a hospital, with medication and then slowly got back to almost normal. Then she started working again and some months (or years?) later, boom! same thing all over again. Hospital, meds, conclusion: early retirement. Work is too stressful for her and she never really got back to herself after that anyway.

Lately she’s been worse. A lot of things happened in her life these last years that could account for her condition to worsen (and I plan to write about those at some point, because they also affected me, the egotistical bitch writing this). The status is that somehow she is not making a lot of sense lately. And I could kind of ignore that as she lived 2500 km away from me. Now both her and my dad are visiting us for Holidays. So it’s back in my face.

And I feel like a bitch because I am one. Let me explain why:

• I never understood her sickness. Neither accepted it. I just don’t get it how someone cannot control anything in their brain. I know – logically – this is what happens. It’s just not possible (so far) for me to accept it.

• I have ‘evicted’ my mother from my life a long time ago. I don’t feel her as part of it at all. And that is just sad. And sick. And awful. And I hate myself for doing it. And I would do it again if I had the opportunity.

•  I probably simply don’t love her. I don’t admire her. I don’t like her. I don’t understand her. I only remember bad stuff. And I have erased any good memories I might have had.

I’m just a horrible (only) child and I keep wondering what she did wrong. All this mainly for one (egoistic) reason: so that I don’t do the same with my kids and become a non-existing person in their lives.

So you can see why I still have a lot to learn about this situation. I wonder if I will ever mange to do it. And I also wonder if God (or whatever we call that thing that makes all this life messiness mean something somehow) will go all the way with His lesson and, if I continue to not get it, will hit me in the face with an un-controllable brain of my own.

So what?

I've been reading several blogs with the usual 'what I am thankful for this year'
Ok, I'm not American, I don't much care about Thanksgiving and stuff. But it's an interesting question, as it forces us to look for the good things in our lives.

The only answer I came up with was "I'm thankful that life is not fair".
I bet it's not what you expected... or at least I hope so, otherwise you'll get bored easily reading my rambling.

So: I really think life is not fair. I'm not the smartest, nicest, most .../best at... (fill in the blanks with whatever you want) in the world – or even in my tiny universe. As one of my friends said about herself – but it applies to me as well, I'm average. I don't much like this thought, though. But that's another story.

Even if I'm average, I pretty well got everything I wanted. And when I didn't know what I wanted (yeah, that happens every now and then, you cynic people!), life threw something at me that in the end proved to be better than I ever expected.

I’ve been a pain to some of my friends, I made weird (or damn wrong) choices, I didn’t care about stuff I should have cared about, I’m a selfish bitch… and yet I have a pretty good life.

Life’s not fair. So what? It worked out well for me so far.

And a special thought to my college French teacher who reminded us often that good girls go to Heaven and bad girls go wherever they want. I like to think I am part of the second category.

Some bad Romanian music... and it's antidote

Coming back on an older subject: Romanian music.
I think I shared with you some groups that I like and I consider as good music. It might be a clear sign I'm getting old, I only like those that no longer play.
Now I have to share some that are pretty bad. By my standards, so it might not mean much, I guess. Except to me. I digress. That is soooo unusual…
Back to the topic. There’s an expression in Romanian highly used since the last… 25 years (Jeez, it’s been that long!). It’s “since the Revolution…”. Almost any conversation can start with this. And it’s all the Revolution’s fault – or the governments. You guessed: governments “since the Revolution”.
Anyway, there is a point to this, I think. Because I was about to write that “since the Revolution” there’s been a surge of really really stupidly horribly bad music in Romania. Might have been a general (natural?!) evolution, but all I saw was my simply surprising Romania.
And this is when the category of “manele” has been born. It’s really quite indescribable. What follows is my view on it. It is (or supposed to be) a mix of popular music and one “no-way-this-is-a-man” singing something after he drank tons of unidentified alcohol. This is one famous guy who was (is??) one of the ‘leaders’ of this type of music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHNI6FXXbIA
Ok, the music is what it is and I won’t comment on it further. The lyrics are worse. They speak about love, women, heartaches, money, how cool & powerful a person is if he has the right car/money/clothes, whatever. A total mess all in all.
And now for the antidote I promised in the title.
Also ‘since the Revolution’ we have finally seen emerging some rap/hip-hop Romanian music. I’m not a big fan, but it was pretty good for the style, I would guess.
There’s one group though who I really like, called Parazitii (yes, it means parasites…) – and of course it’s mainly because of the lyrics. This kind of music relies on them heavily. And they have a terrific song that I listen regularly just to reassure myself that there are still normal people in Romania. The song is this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qATTFDPLgaQ
 
And this is just an extract of why I love this song:
[…]
Imi place sa ma vad pe TV in cadru,
Mulumesc lu' mama ca mi-a pus televizor prin cablu.
Am 113 centimetri,
Sunt inalt in ochii tai,
Cu pantofii mei de lac las urme 53, ma vrei?


Femeile si banii sunt doar in capul tau, ba!
Bate, bate-bate inima, ti-e rau?
Toata lumea stie ca esti doar un lingau, ba!
Bate, bate-bate inima, ti-e rau?
[…]
In orice club ma duc, ma-ncurca
Pantalonii domnisoarelor pe juma' de buca.
Dedic aceasta piesa acelui tip de Casanova
Care-nvrte volanul de Renault pe Dacie Nova.

With my translation:

[…]

I like to see myself on TV

Thanks mom for getting me cable

With my 113 cm

I am tall in your eyes

With my cheap shoes I leave a size 53 trace

Do you want me?

Chorus:

Women and money are just in your head,

Your heart beats, beats, beats – are you sick, man?

Everybody knows you’re just a boot licker

Your heart beats, beats, beats – are you sick, man?

 […]

In any club I go I’m bothered

By the ladies’ pants that hardly cover half their ass

I dedicate this song

To that type of Casanova

That steers a Renault’s wheel

On a Dacia Nova.

 […]

Disclaimer: I realize my translation is crappy. It is way funnier in Romanian, probably also because it refers to some common stereotypes over there.

So now I have a cat...

I've been reading this recently:

If I Have to Tell You One More Time...: The Revolutionary Program That Gets Your Kids To Listen Without Nagging, Reminding, or Yelling

It contains very interesting ideas that I am trying to put into practice.

First advice is to spend 10 minutes, twice a day, with each of your kids (face-to-face, as we like to call it). You need to play with him exactly the way he wants to. It's called Mind, Body and Soul Time... and the purpose is to completely focus on each kid and give him the attention he need on a regular basis. This should help decrease their kind (or not so kind) requests for attention when you are trying to do something else. So I would be less likely to want to scream that often during the day. Win-win, right?

Now why did I talk about a cat in the title of this post? It is because since this week-end we really have one. A cat, yes. I am really really happy about that, as I love both cats and dogs and our current lifestyle (meaning about twelve hours out of our homes every day - I hope robbers do not read my blog!) does not allow us to have a dog. So a cat is the next best thing to having one of each (I heard you gasp, mister!)

All this to say that this morning, looking at the cat I realized it also needs attention. And I was wondering if I should schedule it in the 10-min routine. Like it was my third kid.

Then I started thinking why I prefer a cat to a third child.

• I do not care if it "cries" in the middle of the night. I can ignore it and not to prison or whatever.

• It knows where to "do its business" on its own - no diaper-investment, no running around the house "I'll catch you to change that smelly thing stuck to your a@#!"

• It knows how to eat (and doesn't throw food everywhere when it's not what it wanted in the first place)

• Can't ask for chocolate. Or cartoons. Or toys. Or more chocolate.

• Seems happy when you are there and just scratching its head.

• Doesn't mind if you shout, ignore or move them somewhere they don't want to be (like: out of my way, out of the bedroom, or not on my curtains)

I think this list is potentially infinite. Does this make me a bad mother?!

Memories from Poli...

and no, that's not Polio :-) It's just the nickname of my University, as it is called "Politehnica".

As this year my colleagues have celebrated 10 years since our graduation (and yes, without me, as I'm in a different country all together), I figured I should write down what my small brain remembers until I'm really too old to remember anything at all.

So here are some good/great/fun moments I remember from my 5 years spent in Poli:

• getting to share a room with a high-school colleague who I didn't know very well - and managing to become very close friends, despite our differences in every.single.thing.you.can.think.of. My memory of her in high school was that she had ripped apart a sandwich poster someone has put on the wall of our class, just because this made her hungry :-) I still bug her with this memory once in a while. She calls me a mean bitch and I laugh about it. This has to be true love, right?

• discovering I was the only girl in our class. I could pick any guy I wanted, they had to be all single, and they had no other choice than to like me, right? In the end I picked one from a different class. Can't blame me, he had a very-cute-Mr-Darcy look :-) No way to resist that.

•  going to a show down-town with some friends and then walking back to our rooms, at night, at -15 degrees C. It took us two hours and something, and it was terrific! And the (not collective, get a hold on yourself!) hot shower at 3 a.m. to start feeling our legs again was the most appreciated shower I ever took. Or closely competing with the one I could finally take after a week of too-close-to-nature camping in the Danube Delta...

• going to my first Brad Pitt movie and falling totally in love with the guy. Yes, even if he's blond. Nobody is perfect.

•  being called by one of my colleagues "mini-technicus" because I could fix a toilet. Hey, I had to, no one else would come to fix it. And I could drive a car in Bucharest... Even if for a couple of months I strongly believed my car was a 4 speed one (and not 5, as it actually was), and I kept being shouted at in cross roads because it wouldn't start properly. (for those who didn't get it yet, I was starting it in the 3rd instead of the 1st, of course...)

• choosing to buy a book on Maths instead of going to class, because the bloody classroom was a renowned "fridge-room" around the campus. That, and I actually had a Math-genius in my class and he liked me so he was calm enough to overcome my stupidity. And my constant 'What the Hell do I need to know how to derive this three times, for each variable? What's a kernel got to do with Maths? What am I doing here?'. Luckily, Maths lasted for 2 years only, or he would have killed himself (or me) in the process.

• splitting the lectures at the beginning of the year between friends: you go to that one, I go to this one... then we copy each others' notes and be done with it. It worked pretty well, even though people seem to prefer my writing to others' and I got pushed into attending more classes than I wanted to.

• our 'exam routine': 4 friends, learning together all day (reviewing our notes - actually, my notes), then playing bridge during the night. When we finally went to bed around 4 am, I dreamed about bridge, not exams, so the strategy worked pretty well.

• being part of a European student association - BEST - (even if only in my last year). Amazing experiences, people and that is also how I discovered travel. 
• Establishing together with a handful of guys from our Bucharest local group (of course, no other girl was weird enough) the "BEST RoM" group, which actually had the only mission to drink Rum+Coke at any occasion. "Rom" is the Romanian word for "rum" and we found the choice of words quite funny - but of course we were under the influence of the spoken drink. There was a group called BEST Ro - meaning BEST Romania, gathering all local groups at that time in the country. In the end, I think BEST RoM reached a national audience and I hope there are still members of this group following its mission as I speak write this... 

•  Meeting my future husband: I was standing with my classmates in front of a closed door, waiting for our first tutorial on Artificial Intelligence to start. One person comes, looks at us standing there and decides to go for the door. It's locked. Of course it's locked, you silly person. OR, we could be just 20 idiots standing in front of it just for fun. A second person comes, looks at us, goes for the door. yup, still locked. This starts to get on my nerves. So when a next one arrives, I tell him flat out "the door is locked" before he can even reach it. He answers: "well, sure it is, but I have the key". So yes, he was our new teaching assistant for that tutorial. He was smiling at me (of course, the only girl in there, remember??) and was so cool, calm and ... zen that I just knew then and there I had to make his life more... interesting :-) 10 years later he keeps begging me to let him be bored every now and then.

PS: for my boss who might be reading this, no, I did not write all this today at work, but yesterday night at home. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The thing I like about myself

I am laughing at myself a lot... and this can only mean: I am doing really stupid things quite often :-)

Not sure if anyone would start laughing out loud when:

- arriving at work, taking two (clean!) diapers out of her bag, leaving them in the car, taking her laptop and calmly walking towards an all-day-meeting. It just looked funny for me. It was early on a Monday morning, this might have influenced my judgment a bit, OK?
- looking around her bedroom and noticing she has dropped carefully put a pair of socks in the close vicinity of each and every wall in the room. And yes, I have a spare pair downstairs. One never knows when one can be out of socks!!
- finding empty bottles of water under the bed. Hey, they hid in there at their own will, not my fault. I'm just drinking the water, and then the bottle, seeing itself empty and lonely, tries to join the others: under the bed it goes never to be seen again. Or at least till the next season's cleaning, if there is such a thing. Or until I'm looking for a lost pair of socks (!)

And all this was just today's fun. At least I didn't cancel my trip to Boston yet. Who knows what I can do tomorrow?!

Let's get retarded

And here's what I had in mind when going back to work after my lunch break:

I wonder if this says something about what expect from my work? Or maybe I'm already in that state?

Honey, I think I broke my toe!

You know the feeling that sometimes the entire universe is against you for a very obscure reason?
That's what I think about my trip to Poland on Monday... Yes, it's the one I should take for which I kind-a/almost/sort-a cancelled my booking several days ago.
It's also the Monday when the French (otherwise lovely people) air control employees decided to go on strike for - to me - even more obscure reasons...
And it's also in two days from now, with a flight at 7 am (so, yes, what the heck, I can get up at 4:30 for nothing, right?)... and I think I just broke my toe.

How come? Well, let me tell you the steps to get your toes destroyed, if you're interested:
- in the evening, move the furniture around your home to unusual places
- when your son wakes up at night, DO NOT turn on the light when you go to his room
- repeat this at 10 pm, 11 pm, 12 pm and 1 am
- take him in your arms and go to the bathroom, THEN turn on the lights so you won't see a damn thing anymore
- once he drank enough water to fill an entire box of Pampers, turn off the light and...
- go to his room, your royal blindness
- find his bed, try to put him in there, without smashing his head on any side of it, because you have no freaking idea where the bed is anymore, with all the moves you made last evening and with the fact that you're not really awake
- then try to walk out of the room and...
*drums*...
- hit the stupid f..ing door with your toe on your way out

Result: in the morning you get a nice red, swollen toe and the right amount of pain that goes with it. And again the question 'how the hell am I going to Poland?!' asked for like the hundredth time this week.

PS: yesterday evening I had finally received my three new pairs of fabulous-looking (me thinks) shoes that, guess what, I won't be able to wear anytime soon. Universe, go screw with someone else's plans now, please!

I deleted my Facebook account

Yes, I know, after my previous post you would tend to believe I'm really a moron and/or in a 'let's delete everything' suicidal mission.
Actually, it's neither of those. I deleted my Facebook account and I did it on purpose. On a side note, with all the 'are you sure' questions asked by Facebook, you really really have to want to do it. Not like my stupid tool to book and cancel my business trips. Anyway, back to the initial statement: Hello, my name is ...(who cares?) and I deleted my Facebook account.
First thing I have to say is that I am not missing it at all. So maybe it was not such a brave gesture as I thought, I was not even addicted.
Then, a question (I'm good at those) keeps popping into my mind: why? Why did I do it?

And this morning, on my way to work, I think I grasped a small part of the answer (actually two):

• I like doing things "wrong" - aka not the same as the rest of the world (being a tiny bit of a rebel, in my own way, because I am so damn boring and conventional in 99.9% of my life).
• Facebook is like TV. And I.hate.TV.

I know, it might be a weird statement, but really... did you ever think about it that way? Facebook makes you read and watch what other people want you to read and watch. It just takes away your freedom to choose what news, blog, music, pictures... you name it, you actually want to see.I know it's supposed to be about "following" friends, family and people who actually mean something to you. But it kind of doesn't. It goes chaotic and very much 'spam' like and in the end it absorbs your energy and your enthusiasm to actually go and look for something interesting on the www.
Same as my friend-colleague who regularly calls me a moron (because I am one and because she loves me), I love Internet. But I just don't get Facebook.
And I deleted my Facebook account. Statement made. Right?

Email conversation from Hell...

From: Moron who accidentally cancelled her flight when trying to cancel her hotel (yes, that’s me)

To: Travel agency

Hi Travel agency,

I wanted to cancel my hotel booking and it looks like this has also cancelled the flight booking!

Can you please check and repair my mistake?

From: Travel Agency

To: MWACHFWTTCHH

Hello,

Indeed you cancelled your hotel booking and now you need to re-book again via an Offline request regarding the hotel.

From: MWACHFWTTCHH

To: Travel agency

Hello

as the ticket is still valid, is there a way to re-book my flights only?

You can find below the ticket:

.......................

From: Travel Agency

To: MWACHFWTTCHH

Yes it is possible

From: MWACHFWTTCHH

To: Travel agency

Great, so can you please do that?

From: Travel Agency

To: MWACHFWTTCHH

Yes I can do. You just have to send us an email

 ...

I'm a mom. What's your super power?

I first read this on the internet...and laughed. And then this night, around 1 a.m., sitting awake in bed it hit me: I actually have super powers. Let me tell you some of them:

• I can function normally (to read: not shouting/beating/killing anyone looking suspiciously like an idiot that crosses my road that day) with less than 4 hours of sleep per night, for several nights in a row. It never happened to me when I was in the no-kids world. A night with less than 9 hours of sleep back then would have made me grumpy for a week or so.
• I can change a diaper on a standing-up/walking/running baby. I figured it takes less time than catching the baby and holding him prisoner on a changing mat while he is screaming from the top of his lungs.
• I can give the bottle to two kids at the same time, while watching TV and talking to my husband. Ok, the last part is not always true, the TV can be quite catching...
• I mastered the art of make-up (aka: I can put on make-up in under 2 minutes). And I do it every working day, otherwise people see me for what I am and tell me to go get some sleep.
• I can follow a 30 minutes monologue about Autobots and Decepticons and (usually) not feel the need to kill 'em all. If you don't know what those are, you can read about them here, you ignorant people.
• I happily join in the fun of the above mentioned monologue and another ma-ma-aa-pa-brrum-brruum-pa-pa one, adding to the mess my own weird sounds - all this happening in the car, on our way back from work/school/day-care. Actually I am doing this only to see smoke going out of my husband's years and his face transforming into an angry dinosaurs' one...

there are probably more, but I managed to fall asleep at some point and forgot the rest of my thoughts.
So, what's your super power?

How much can the music represent a nation?

I recently went to a wedding near Toulouse (so at about 5-hours drive from my place). This gave me and my husband enough time to listen to all CDs we had bought and not listened for a long time. One of them is with Romanian music. Quite old Romanian music and what can be thought as good Romanian music (we consider it that way, at least).
One of the songs actually made me laugh in a way, because of the lyrics. This is the song, if you feel like listening.
Basically, what this says is that luck was given to people. By God, probably, but it's not clearly mentioned in the song, so maybe by someone who had tons of it and didn't know what to do with it... Anyway, so when luck was "provided", everybody got loads of it, but the singer got only a glass, because he was off to work. Wait, it gets better... Then he says that even the glass was only half full, and even that half was actually with bad-luck instead of just luck
So what made me smile/laugh at this? The thought that this kind of represents for me the Romanian way of thinking. Everyone else is luckier than me, poor me, I have only bad luck and nothing goes the way I would have liked it to be... Maybe I am exaggerating in generalizing this, it's just when I heard the song (that I knew very well) it struck me as obvious.

The singer also has other very beautiful songs. My favorite is this one. But it's all in the lyrics, so it's probably boring if you don't understand them.

So I wonder how much music defines a people? Probably a lot, it just depends which one. I will talk in another post about some really bad Romanian music :-)

for reference, other very nice pieces that I love:
Phoenix (an extremely popular rock band for Romanians, one of the first...and I think also known in the US):
  Marele URSS
 Timisoara
Iris (another classic for us): Somn bizar
... and the list is long, but I have to go to a meeting. So to be continued as well...