Romania

Well...here I am.  I've been in Romania for a little over a week now.  It felt strange to go back, honestly.    I had never felt like that before.  Usually, I'm thrilled beyond belief - but this time, I just felt strange.  My biggest reason for being excited was seeing my husband (who I won't have to be separated from anymore by the whole long-distance relationship thing ever again--woohoo!).  I finished my last final the day before I left, which meant that I had to pack for three months all in just one night (my final finished at 6pm and it took me two hours to get home).  I was tired from studying, I hadn't slept much since I was so busy, and all I wanted to do was lay on the couch and watch t.v.  In previous years, I was so excited about Romania that I would start packing a month in advance - this time I was still stuffing crap in my suitcase a few hours before my flight.

When the plane landed, I didn't get the usual butterflies in my stomach and tears in my eyes that came over me as soon as the wheels hit the ground.  This time, all I thought about was going to the bathroom,  getting my passport stamped, and finding my luggage on the annoyingly over-crowded baggage claim. When I saw my husband, I was absolutely thrilled (I hadn't seen him in about five months).  The one positive side of our long-distance relationship was being able to have a bunch of "first kisses" over the past four years.  But I will tell you a little more about my husband in another post.

Anyway, let me give you some background information.  About six or seven years ago, my plane to Los Angeles was delayed and my layover in Paris was about three hours longer than it should have been.  I didn't have much to do, so I just lingered around the gate trying to fill my time with whatever I could.  Somehow an older man next to me realized that I was also Romanian and we started talking.  I don't remember the details of the conversation, but he told me that he was a writer and that he had spent the last few months trying to publish his book in Romania.  Apparently, he had had a bad experience and he was leaving Romania with a bitter taste in his mouth.  He told me that he had had enough with Romania and all of the people there.  I, being the romantic and patriotic Romanian that I was, kept trying to soften his criticism with my ideas of why Romania was a beautiful country--but he wouldn't have any of it.  He told me his daughter had gotten a medical degree in the United States and that she had a great job in New Jersey.  He said that he wouldn't even want her to go back to Romania and he swore that he wouldn't go back either.

I hated that man for what he said.  In my eyes, he was an abomination to the Romanian people.  I knew perfectly well that Romania had its problems...but I couldn't stand the ex-patriots that gave up on their country.  I have met so many Romanians that have come to America and, after only a few years, have puffed themselves up with so many airs of superiority that it's sickening.  And I'm talking about the kind of people that leave Romania when they're 30 and then two years later they suddenly have an American accent and they can't remember how to say sarmale si mamaliga after having eaten it for thirty years straight.  These are the kind of people that meet other Romanians in other countries and yet deny that they even understand buna ziua.  I never could understand these people.  I couldn't see how they could be Romanian and yet say that they hated the whole country and its entire population.  (Of course, there are some that say, "Romania is a beautiful country--too bad it's inhabited by Romanians").

In any case...I've started to see things a bit differently in the past few years.  I still disdain the ex-patriots in some ways, but I've come to understand them a little more.  I've seen how life in Romania hardens people.  It can crush a person in every way imaginable.  I, for one, was lucky enough to experience life in Romania as a sort of half-resident half-tourist on vacation.  I never had to struggle with all of the hardships that the average Romanian person faces at the hands of a corrupt state, rotten government, and heavily complicated bureaucracy.  But I've seen my friends and family struggle...and I've come to share in their sentiment of disillusionment.  Life here is tough.  Actually...it's hard to find words to describe how tough it is.  Most people have to make ends meet with a measly salary of $200-$300 when prices for food and clothing are pretty much the same if not more than those in the US.  And the money issue covers only about 10% of Romania's problems.  I won't go into details, but they're gnarly in any case.  Again, please excuse my lack of description--but there really are few words to describe how terrible the situation is over here, one has to experience it to believe it.

This sort of perpetual hopelessness, from what I've seen, is rather contagious.  I say, with a hint of shame, that I've started to believe the situation to be hopeless too.  And, honestly, it's easier to close my eyes or look away from what Romania has become.  That's what most other people are doing once they leave.  And yet...most Romanian-Americans I know, despite the hate they show, still express a sense of nostalgia for their home country.  I've met people from other countries and, though I may be wrong, I didn't feel that they were as attached to their home countries as the Romanians are to Romania.  There's something about the land and the people that draws the Romanians back.  Even those people who talk about Romania with hatred still do so with a sense of regret and bitterness that shows that it's not so much that they hate Romania, it's that they hate that conditions in Romania have made it impossible for them to live there although they would want nothing more than to be with their families in their native land.

I suppose I'm starting to feel a bit angry too because a lot of this stuff affects me in a very personal way.  I've always been curious about what my life would have been like if I had never left Romania, but I'll never know.  And I highly question whether I'll ever even end up living in Romania anyway.

quick tangent as I laboriously study for a philosophy final...

For some reason, I never quite embraced Plato.  For that matter, I don't quite feel I ever embraced philosophy.  I've taken two philosophy classes while in college, and while that barely gives me any grounds for offering criticism, I feel that I am quite disappointed at what philosophy turned out to be.

I used to romanticize the notion of philosophy before college.  I thought philosophy was all about sitting around and talking about deeply human matters.  I thought philosophers asked, "what is the meaning of life?  What is religion?  What is the meaning of experience" ad infinitum... but, to my surprise, that's not what it seems to be.  I barely remember what my first philosophy class was about--something about Descartes and the whole "I think therefore I am" thing.  All we did in that class was examine arguments as if they were some sort of mathematical formula.  The whole class was about logic reasoning etc. etc. and it seemed like it was a math class more than something belonging to the Humanities.  And then I took my second philosophy course entitled "philosophy in literature." I (foolishly) thought this class would have a heavier emphasis on literature than it did philosophy, but I was wrong.  It's a bit less mathematical--but nonetheless, it's all about evaluating the validity of arguments with (goodie) an emphasis on irony.  Need I tell you that I am wholeheartedly opposed to the whole idea of irony?  I feel that irony is the slippery snake that problematizes language by undermining its ability to convey meaning.  Thus, I feel that nothing I learned in this class truly stuck.  It was very unfortunate because I would have otherwise been interested in some of the literature we looked at.  Although...a huge chunk of it was Plato.  Again, I've encountered Plato in several other classes too (philosophy, literature and history) and I feel quite the same about him.  It's not that I don't see value in his work (I'm pretty sure a whole bunch of Western ideology is based on his writings), but for some reason it just goes through one ear and out the other for me.  I'm not inherently biased or anything...I just involuntarily can't pay attention.


But anyhow...after re-reading The Trial and Death of Socrates for the third time--one thing stuck (miraculously).  At some point during his defense, Socrates says, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

This idea has a certain poignancy to it.  If there is anything I truly like about Socrates, it's his philosophy about not truly knowing anything and his quest to challenge the "wisdom" others claim to have without truly possessing.  And yet, even when faced with the abyss of the vast unknown, Socrates always champions questioning.

Whether I'm taking this entirely out of context, I don't know--but I really do like the idea that one must constantly question one's life instead of just passively believing in whatever standards/norms/ideologies/social constructs/whatever else they are conditioned to believe.  I think that one of the reasons why people are often faced with meaninglessness is because they are afraid to ask questions.  But, if we don't seek to uncover some sort of understanding about our existence, how are we ever to arrive at meaning?  If we just accept the role that society (or whatever else) prescribes for us, then we'd just be living our lives like puppets.  And from what I've seen, it's fantastically easy to fall into a meaningless and passive existence...there are so many people who wake up and realize they don't even know what has happened to them for the past few years of their lives...and (even worse) there might even be people who never wake up--they just live, work, perform whatever social conventions dictate, retire, die and so on.

I don't know... I can't account for much because my experience of life is limited.  But I can say one thing--no one is ever going to be sitting on their couch and find that a ray of light flashes over their head and drops "meaning" onto their lap.  Those kinds of things don't just come.  You, as a living person, have to make it.  What is the meaning of life?  Quite frankly, whatever you want it to be!  That's what I think at this stage in my life.  Some people find meaning in love, in religion, in friendship, in their careers, in art, in creation, in idling about, etc. etc.  But however a person chooses to live, act, think, feel--I really hope that they do so with meaning, with awareness, with passion, with fire... and, on the same note, I hope that more people in the world will realize that things will just work out better if we all, as people, just let the other people around us have more room to grow and to express themselves in whatever way is meaningful to them.

I'd love to say more...but I've got many more painful hours of studying ahead of me.  (How lamentable it is that at the moments when I am most preoccupied and stressed with things like exams, I feel the greatest desire to write--I wish I could perpetuate this feeling post-finals week)

Just Jump

Do me a favor?  Go to your room and stand on your bed.  Now--jump.  Remember how fun that used to be?  It's amazing how I haven't jumped on my bed for years and yet it used to be one of my favorite pastimes.  Whenever I'd be taken to a new hotel, testing the bedsprings was the first thing I did.  My grandmother has this room with two beds and I remember the funnest thing for me to do was jump from one bed to the other pretending I was a warrior of the Amazon scaling dangerous cliffs and barely escaping the dangerous abysses below.  My grandmother also has a tapestry hanging on the wall in the same room. There is an image of a boat gliding through a silvery lake in a dark forest.  In that boat are four nearly life-sized figures that belong to, on my guess, the Victorian era.  There are two strapping young, aristocratic men on the left side.  One is playing a mandolin as the other offers his ballads to the two women on the opposite side.  The first woman is standing up so that her pink gown flushes around her in all its Victorian splendor.  The lady in pink is coquettishly glancing at the young men as she turns a string of pearls through her fingers.  The other young woman is wearing a lavender dress that bunched around her as she sits at the far right end of the boat.  Amidst the folds of her dress is a book that has captivated her attention.  The eight-year-old version of me found it odd that these women didn't seem to fully appreciate the young men's efforts to woo them.  I scorned the lady in pink as she interrupted the mandolin's lyrics with the vulgar strike of pearl upon pearl.  Likewise I disliked the lady in lavender who was oblivious to the music altogether as she gave her attention to the sensationalistic fiction in front of her.  I distrusted these delicate ladies and I suspected that they were harboring a malicious plot against the young princes.  Just around the river's bend, lurked an army of traitors waiting to capture the innocent gentlemen who, although skilled sailors, were unfamiliar with the dangers of the Amazon.  I, however, was an Amazon warrior like Xena and it was up to me to save them (especially the Mandolin player whose music had reached my ears).  So, night after night, I trekked across the rough terrain of the forest to follow the music.  I reached the princes just in time, and although I was muddied and disheveled, they recognized me as their savior as they came to see that the ladies were their foes.  In my mind, the princes stepped out of the tapestry and into my grandmother's bedroom and we relived these adventures every summer.

I can't help but smile when I think about the kind of things that ran through my mind at that age.  I literally believed in everything.   I lived and breathed fairytales.  When I went to the beach, I swam with mermaids.  Whenever my grandmother took me to the hills in the countryside and I'd see red poppies, I never picked them because I was convinced that Thumbelina was inside.  My dog Moni was my faithful knight and my grandmother's chickens were my subjects.  I draped bed sheets around the swing that hung from the walnut tree and I imagined that it was a carriage taking me to foreign lands.  I understood the language of birds and I believed everyone else around me could too.  I believed wholeheartedly that butterflies were fairies and I looked out for dragons in the vineyards.  Perhaps Romania (I'm Romanian--I will explain more of this later on) was the perfect landscape for my childhood adventures.  Aside from the rich cultural experience it offered me, it was also the place where my imagination was able to develop and run wild.

When I go to Romania now, though, it gets harder and harder to see the fairies and poor Moni died two years ago.  I've come to see that the biggest price one pays for entering adulthood is the loss of childhood imagination.  The contours of reality seem to sharpen as make-believe loses its vibrancy.  When you grow up you start to realize that adults aren't always wise and responsible, there are bad people in the world, there is violence, there is greed, there is hunger, there is tragedy and, a lot of the time, there is no happy ending.  I think most people experience this kind of realization when they grow up; for me it was very heartbreaking and very personal.  But even so, my childlike-imagination actually survived well into my high school years.  That's when I started writing a lot and my imagination still ran very wild.  Maybe because I went to a small, private all-girl school, I was sheltered from the bitter realities of life for a longer time.  I started learning, little by little, that there were bad things out there- but I was still able to distract myself from them and venture into my own little world.  But then college happened.  I entered a world where there were so many people that I couldn't keep up with the faces I was seeing and the names I was learning.  I felt small and, even though I was surrounded by people, I never felt so alone and insignificant.  I suppose this is quite normal, though.  But then I experienced even more unromantic things.  Although I had always thought about death in theory, I wasn't prepared to think about it when I started losing loved ones.  I started seeing that happy marriages are a rare thing.  I started seeing that actions are often fueled by interest.  I started seeing people around me getting sick.  I started seeing the marks of fatigue on people's faces as I learned how endlessly they have to toil to survive.  I started to recognize disillusion in the tones of people's voices.  I realized how prevalent and how real suffering truly is.  I started noticing that I didn't see people as fairy tale characters anymore, they started to seem more and more like strangers that were broken up in hundreds of unintelligible pieces.  Harsh reality has been tainting my fiction ever since.

I consider myself lucky, though, because I still have the luxury of remembering a time before the world darkened.  I don't mourn the loss of the old world, however, because seeing reality has taught me how to recognize and appreciate all that is beautiful and inspiring.  Even though my imagination has suffered terrible blows, I'm trying to adapt to the strange glory of adulthood.  My writing, too, has suffered since it's very hard for me to use my imagination when I'm constantly being intimidated by things bigger than myself.  Just five minutes of watching the news is enough to depress me and petrify my imagination.  But there's a reason why tragedy and comedy exist together.  Most of us are familiar with the idea that good and bad cannot exist independently of each other.  The reality is that life isn't fair and life isn't always romantic.  There will always be tragedy, but experiencing tragedy is part of being human.  How we overcome tragedy is where the beauty comes in.  And even though a lot of people seem to think there is some sort of universal determinism, I truly think that how we think plays a major part in how our existence is going to be.  Henry David Thoreau once said that, "it's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see" and I couldn't agree more.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was thinking about my writing.  Maybe I come off as confident or maybe even pretentious, but I'm actually very easily intimidated and very self-aware of my shortcomings.  There was a brief period of time in my life when I was very confident in my ability as a writer, but I've been gradually losing that confidence every day.  Before college, I thought I was a good writer.  Now?  I almost feel strange even calling myself a writer because I'm not sure if I deserve that title.  I haven't written much aside from a few unpolished short stories, some unfinished works, and random fragments here and there.  I used to think that I was talented, but then I went to college and found a whole bunch of other "writers" there that actually wrote much better than I did and who actually had books written.  For someone like me, that was painfully intimidating and I even considered quitting altogether.  But you know what I realized?  My biggest threat was me.  Sure there are a lot of talented writers in the world, sure there are a gazillion amazing books out there that might be better than anything I will ever write, sure many of my ideas have already been thought by others, sure there are ideas better than mine, sure there are many people that will say hateful things about me or my work, and (most scary) sure there are billions of people out there who won't give a shit about me or my work. But all of these things are outside of me and, even though they constantly affect me, I can learn to distance myself from them.  What I can't distance myself from, however, is my own voice.  If I don't believe in myself, then who will?  I know I have yet to practice what I preach, but I've come to see that how I see the world and myself is, ultimately, what is going to shape my reality.  If I choose to not believe in myself, then I probably won't ever do anything worthwhile...but if I can start trying to see the good in myself and in the world, then maybe (hopefully) I can aspire to find something worthwhile and meaningful.  But I have to learn to think like I did when I was eight years old.  I have to learn to see myself as that confident Amazon warrior that can soar over mountains and rescue princes from evil, aristocratic snobs :-).  I have to learn to use my imagination again.  And I don't mean to suggest imagination as a sort of escapism, but rather I think that imagination can be useful for helping people learn to see the good and beauty that is hidden in the shadows of what is tragic and difficult to understand.

Again, my argument has its imperfections...and, on most days, I'm definitely not an optimistic fortune cookie - I often suffer from bouts of low self-esteem, doubt, fear, hopelessness and general anxiety; but I'm trying to learn to find a balance.  Balance is probably the key thing here since we know that life cannot be a perfect comedy, but it also can't be a perfect tragedy.  I think that we need to reach a sense of balance so that we can be open to receiving and understanding whatever the heck our existence throws at us.  I suppose we can look at this as something depressing, but maybe it's also a good thing.  I don't know, I'm still trying to figure it out.  But, one thing is for sure - whenever I'll find myself in my low days, I'll try to jump on my bed.

How Often Do You Think of Dinosaurs?

Really though, how often do people think of dinosaurs (excluding the scientist-like)?  I don't think about dinosaurs all that often.  If someone brought them up, I wouldn't deny their existence and importance--but I usually don't think about dinosaurs.  Actually, I can't even remember the last time I thought about dinosaurs.  I started thinking about them today though because I saw a documentary on the History Channel entitled "The History of the World in Two Hours" or something like that.  And while I recognize the difficulty (and sheer impossibility) of shrinking down 14 billion years into two hours (of which nearly half consisted of commercials--but I'll refrain from ranting about my utter disdain for advertisement until some other post), I still appreciated the idea because it made me think about life from a much more expanded perspective.  I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing recently.  In the world we live in today, the simple act of "looking" at anything has become a monumentally difficult task.  And when I say "looking," I don't necessarily mean staring at some object in front of you (although it definitely also applies to this), but I'm referring to the way we, as people, think.

It's very hard to think clearly nowadays (maybe it has always been, but since I can only speak of my lifetime--I will address the nowadays).  There is so much background noise interrupting our daily train of thought.  I, myself, find it very difficult to think in coherent strands of ideas that follow some sort of logical order.  Most of my thinking is done in fragments that randomly cut over and across each other in the confusing battlefield that is my mind.  This bothers me sometimes because it keeps my ideas from ever reaching fruition.  Usually I reach a point in which I am able to identify a variety of notions that catch my attention and I mentally recognize their importance, but a whole bunch of other things interrupt me before I can fully articulate that importance and connect it to some larger structure of meaning.  I struggle with this on a daily basis and whenever I do miraculously come to a fully flushed out conclusion to some idea, I jump around and think myself a genius.  I'm not a genius though--I just applied and connected an idea, I engaged in the simple act of thinking.

So, why is it so hard for the human being (the one mammal praised for thinking ability) to think?  Well just look around.  We've already passed the age of information and have entered into the age of information overload.  The internet and the entertainment industry is constantly bombarding us with more information than we can even see, let alone process.  (But we're already familiar with that debate, so I won't go into the gruesome details).  And then think about the rat race that is Capitalism-- jobs are no longer a small part of life; for many, work has become life itself.  All around me I see people running around in slavish desperation to sacrifice at the altar of the great Money God.  People spend countless hours slugging away in traffic, abusing their circadian rhythms with caffeine and alarm clocks, literally running over each other in garishly lit mega-stores while shopping for whatever the marketing industry convinces us we absolutely must have,  and last (but not least) miserably engaging in whatever society has falsely led us to believe are "leisure" activities (when, in fact, all they do is create the demands necessary for keeping people from escaping the rat race).  Ok, so I said a lot of things here.  None of these things comes from any original idea, there are plenty of theorists that endlessly debate about these kinds of things.  And one might agree or disagree with the specific things I've listed, but I'm sure we can all agree that there are a bunch of things nowadays that cause unnecessary frustration and make us feel disoriented.

So why is this a problem?  Well, it's getting in the way of our ability to think.  I mean, if you're like the average person...you probably know what it's like to have spent an entire day at work, in traffic, having to run errands, pay bills, yadda yadda yadda, and then all you feel is the intoxicating fatigue that takes over your body and mind.  Does that leave any room for thinking?  In my opinion, not so much.  It just leads us to think only about the little nuisances that are impinging upon our immediate reality.  It makes us think "locally," if you will.  And I'm not saying we shouldn't think about those things (obviously we need to think about getting food, paying bills, etc.), but it becomes a problem when we become incapable of seeing anything else beyond that.  It leads to a narrow-mindedness that, I think, is the biggest thing standing in the way of our happiness.

So, what do we do?  We think about dinosaurs!  Ok, so maybe not literally.  But I truly think that there is value in expanding our spatial and temporal perspectives.  I know that there are a lot of things in the world that stir negative feelings in us--there are things that make us angry, uncomfortable, etc., and the easiest response is to just reject whatever conflicts with our beliefs/opinions and not think about it.  But that doesn't really help anyone solve anything, it just represses those feelings.  So I don't think we should just close our eyes, we need to open them wider than ever-- we need to become more conscious of everything that goes on around us and we need to be actively aware of our position in time and space.  I've been trying to do this myself.  Instead of looking at a bad situation, I'm trying to consider a broader perspective, and usually it leads me to see that things aren't so bad after all.  (I think this is where that maxim about seeing the beauty in things pops in)  But, don't get me wrong--that whole seeing the beauty in things thing is usually bullshit.  It's hard, and I often find myself cursing like a sailor on the 10 freeway on most days.  But who is that helping?  And isn't it totally wrong of me to bestow bad wishes upon the poor guy who just cut me off?  Maybe that person also has somewhere to be and he just made an honest mistake.  And maybe we're more alike than I considered.  When I think of it that way, I almost sense myself starting to be compassionate.

Now there are a lot of possible examples I can give for how to apply the whole "expand your perspective" thing and there is no way I can account for every situation, but here is just one example having to do with people.  People can be annoying, sure.  Anyone who disagrees with me is either lying or a saint--but if that person still insists that people are not annoying, I would like to chat with that said person so I can learn a thing or two.  Anyway, in a perfect world, we would all love each other and live blissfully together celebrating the miracle that is humanity.  Doesn't always happen, though.  There are people out there that have the ability to make one bite their nails off and literally spout steam from their ears.  And what do we usually do to those people?  We judge them (and occasionally add some ugly words either out loud or mentally).  But we all know that judging people is unhealthy for both parties, so why don't we just stop?  I don't know.  But, I think that the best thing to do is just get to know people.  I'm trying to apply this in my own daily life when I encounter people that make me angry, uncomfortable, etc.  Maybe I'm naive, but I like to think that there are few people in the world that are inherently evil.  I've met many people whose actions or ideas I disagree with, but instead of judging them, I'm trying to literally get to know those people.  And, from my experience, I've learned some surprising things.  What it all comes down to is understanding.  If we can start thinking in a bigger way, I think that it will help us reach a better understanding and compassion for everything around us.  And I've definitely judged people, and still do--it's easy to do.  But I've learned that it's so much better to try to consider that the person next to you might be going through things that are more painful than anyone can even imagine.  When we can take such things into consideration, I think it could lead, not only to tolerance, but appreciation.  And this doesn't always apply to other people, it also applies to ourselves.  Haven't you ever been frustrated and angry with yourself?  Well maybe if we learn to really think about our actions and thoughts, then we could better understand ourselves as well.  I think it's important to be aware of yourself--be aware of what you're doing, be aware of what you're thinking, be aware of the meaning of your thoughts and actions.  Actually, be aware of the fact that you're acting and thinking in the first place.  Nothing is pointless, and that's why I think it's a shame that so many people sleep through life without thinking.  Meaning is there, but you have to see it and you have to make it.  All of this can be done if we just learn to think.

Ok...so my rambling, thus far, is definitely riddled with imperfections.  Most of the things I'm saying are self-evident, but it's one thing to recognize such things and it's another to actually apply them to how we consciously live in the world.  And I realize that people don't think about dinosaurs very often.  But put aside the daily banalities for a second and think about the universe.  Whether you accept the big bang theory, Genesis, or alien colonization - the fact that human beings exist is still a pretty bad ass thing.  I don't know what the meaning of life is, but the one thing we do know is that we're alive.  If you're reading this, you're alive.  You are here on Earth in 2013.  You have a life and you should live it  and enjoy the simple beauty of breathing.  It's easy to forget this when shit happens (as it often does), but I think it's useful to learn to think in this way amidst all of the background noise and daily frustrations.  

As I finish up this post, I find that it is disappointingly similar to David Foster Wallace's This is Water (If you liked what I wrote about, look this up on Youtube right now!).  I wasn't trying to actually emulate his ideas, but my thoughts led me to a lot of the same conclusions.  Which I guess is a good thing because it means that other people have thought about this kind of thing and maybe we're on to something.  I don't know.  But I'm excited to see what new ideas tomorrow might bring.  Until next time.