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?!