20/12

My blood pressure is usually around 9/5. I desperately need to drink coffee to avoid fainting and get my mind started. Or I can just read-listen to some comments on gay people or gay parade and then bang! Hits 20 in a nanosecond!

There had been no trace of homosexuality among the Romanian people before we opened our gates to the mighty dangerous Europe. All we used to do was writing poetry, unifying ourselves with Nature and fucking sheep in the mountains (or writing a national poem on them, it depends). Homosexuality was infiltrated in our culture together with Turbo chewing gum, Adidas commercials and democracy.

It’s against nature. Its presence in the animal world is pure scientific bullshit, compared to our healthy common sense (that used to say some time ago that the Sun was revolving around Earth, and those that stated otherwise should have been barbecued in the main square of the town).

We’ll go extinct as there are no babies coming out of it (thanks God – do you even imagine the models they’d be exposed to in the intimacy of their homes?!). Here is one thing mother Earth really misses – more people to share her unlimited resources.

Yach! Two lesbians in their late forties may make a purist man pewk; nevertheless, if we’re talking about two friendly Swedish bimbos – well, that’s Heaven all right!

Why do they have to show off so much? A parade?! Couldn’t they just continue whatever horrible things they are performing away from the sight of normal people? Why don’t they just take the example of pedophiles and incest lovers, keep a low profile and the world would just let them be.

We should do whatever it takes to limit the homosexual manifestations. As same gender groups nurture such deviations, I say we should begin by inaugurating mixed gender prison cells and also mixed gender convents and monasteries.

AIDS is a divine punishment for homosexuality. By no means is it a punishment for our medical negligence or for us giving a shit if tones of anonymous African kids die.

It’s immoral. Of course it is! Please, everybody – immediately – turn of the light and get back into the box! Smells like diversity out there! Leave all the immoral pleasures out! Out! You know… premarital sex… blow jobs… candles… whipped cream… all that crap that drives us the away from old healthy missionary!

Pathology of Eye Contact

Maaam! Maaaam! Rupees, maaam! Twenty beggars in an unimaginable state of physical decay, both children and old ones (old as in looking seventy and being thirty five) are trying to touch you and you get this feeling deep inside your heart and belly that the rupee they’re asking for means life for them and nothing for you, that life isn’t fare, that you ate cookies for breakfast and they had nothing for days and fuck! hopefully they don’t infect you with leprosy! and they are children and grandmas for God sake! and their master will beat the shit out of them if they go back empty handed!

But you do know what happens if you give them the life saving rupee. Same thing that happened to the fellow from Perfume in the last scene. You reach for the rupee and their number will increase exponentially and then they’ll eat you alive. And as you’re just another white underweight under height woman wandering alone, you do know that survival of the fittest = letting the Red Cross and UN to save the world as you have your own white ass to save first.

So what do you do?

You avoid eye contact.

Do you know that tiny culturally shaped reaction that states your existence, the reason why we might believe dogs are as smart as human beings, whose absence makes timid people sink into the social informal hierarchy?

Well, just forget about it! No eye contact, no you. Peace at last…

So you see, now that I left the streets of Hyderabad and I’m working as a Recruiter, the only indicator I use for filtering mentally disordered candidates is the quality of eye contact. If they fixedly stare at me or not. Now, I give a shit if the Sys Admin won’t look into my eyes when telling the story of Ubuntu and the clusters, but I do freak out if a candidate glues his eyes on mine so roughly that I feel a claw scratching the inside of my skull. The immobility of eye muscles shouts danger and – stop staring at me! or at least move those eye balls! Are you by any chance trying to get into my mind? Find out my deep thoughts? Turn my brains into ashes by Afro-American witchcraft? Hypnotize me so I go around killing your enemies?

PS: the last person with a fixed stare that I met during a training also explained me how he never leaves traces on internet, as he will become one of the most important people in Romania and in the whole world. Now, as a professional thief of contact details and identities, I am totally aware of the importance of traces.

See? I was right. I knew they are all trying to get into my mind!

What's in a name? That which we call a rose…

Romeo and Juliet. The basics of romance. Victim-Persecutor- Rescuer. The roleplays in the Karpman Drama Triangle (that is the reality show that we all star in). Propp described the fundamental roles in the structure of the folk tales. Las telenovelas have Cinderella, the evil step-mother and Prince Charming.

Each World has a Story, and each Story includes Characters.

The world of a Recruiter working is an agency is populated by various such characters. The mole that gives you inside information about the potential client. The lovely secretary who shares with you the ups and downs of her life. The candidate that you recycle endless times.

And the Harassers. In the past I had Jean-Paul, the fluent German speaker who thought a visit to our office on a Friday afternoon is appropriate and will increase his chances to get a job. This season’s Harasser was named Adolf. How else?!

Now, unbalanced/ exotic / non-traditional families or gone-with-the-wind mothers may be more inclined than the common fellow to cross the “Ion si Maria” boarder when naming their babies. Their adjustment problems are passed over to their kids by means of DNA, breading, and baptism.

And then again, I sometimes wander aimlessly on youtube to have some musical background for my searches of Hungarian speaking Accountants. At some point I realized that I was in fact listening repeatedly to a speech of Fidel. That Fidel!

So I well deserve an Adolf.

Death.

During a meeting I had with this ideal employer from the Software Havens, they emphasized the fact that they offer to their candidates equal opportunities.

And so does death. It doesn’t give a shit about the content of your wallet, your age, looks, if you give money to poor people, if you believe in God or if you’re an atheist, not even if you led a healthy life or not.

Unlike my potential client, for whom your IQ makes a big difference, there is this logic error that we all commit, no matter how many Phds and MBAs are written on our business card: we all think we’re immortal. And as we have so much time on our hands we indulge ourselves in existential questioning.

The abstract reflections. Why is my life so boring? Isn’t there more to it than work? He loves me, he loves me not. And the concrete ones. Will I ever own a red Ferrari? We’ll they ever eliminate corruption in this chaotic country? Oh, if only I were a bit slimmer… If only I were born in Germany…

What a fuck! The mental activity performed for the sake of it is what sets us apart from the cat (no, I ain’t gonna accept the kitty is able of introspection!), the dandelion and the sprout (fuchsia aardvarks not included). So why not spending the billion years of our life investigating the billion plus one motives why it isn’t perfect?!

I ain’t saying the dimension and nature of our problems doesn’t equal the size of our inner world, our home. The only world we remember experiencing. I pay my deep respects to the creative results that existential questioning delivered us: psychoanalysis, Munch, Heidegger, religious systems. I respect grief (even if it’s for your defunct kitty), post-traumatic disorder, the decision to slice your veins because you actually felt you couldn’t bear it anymore.

However, self-pity and endless meditation on the negative aspects of our lives is highly similar to masturbation: an excellent way to discover ourselves and to have some fun, and a pathetic one when it becomes a lifestyle. How I would gladly embark all the wankers and whiners and send them for a trip to the real world, so they’d actually have something to complain about!

I heard that! Who the fuck am I to cast the first stone? I mean, I even have a Master Degree in the art of complaining about how our parents caused our present unhappiness. Ironically, it wasn’t the 6 years I invested in learning this art that helped me get ten inches closer to reality.

It was crossing the street in India and plugging the anti-mosquito apparatus every evening. That’s what taught me that my complaining that my life is boring, that the time I spend thinking of alternative pasts are just pure shit. See, all these are abstract, non-concrete, unreal things. The mosquito that might have bitten me if hadn’t plugged in the machinery and the consequent malaria were real things.

Complaints and endless existential questioning make us live in an unreal world, where death isn’t a fact, but only an abstract motive of negative thoughts. And as a result, it doesn’t press us to enjoy life, as it might end ANY minute.

See, death is not about the beauty of the daffodils growing on our fresh grave, nor about the angels taking us to fluffy clouds or about sacrificing ourselves to save our land from the Russian invaders. That’s the poetical side of it. It’s about unbearable pain, surgery, a call you receive one day saying the beloved one had a car accident, disfiguration, not being able to go to the toilet unattended, coughing blood, endless fear.

And unlike the fear that one will fail his exams, won’t get a raise, or that some lover won’t answer to a desperate message, this fear IS actually based on the worst case scenario.

An American Trilogy: Reign of Carrots; When the Irrational Strikes Back; Purity as a Disease

Part 1: Reign of Carrots

One morning a fuchsia aardvark peeped at the 8 lanes highway and saw the well fed driving huge cars at the legal speed of light. And he knew they were heading towards the American dream.

And then he took a glimpse of some crowded street where the middle class heroes were riding their bikes towards the call-centers. They were leaving the Indian dream; and their Sanjanas and Dheepas were also in the picture – the fair virgins with a natural inclination towards giving birth to a thousand sons so they ‘d have multiple choices for the one setting aflame their death pyre.

And then the fuchsia aardvark heard the claxons of the brand new Peugeots and Mercedeses driven by Nike dressed, grumpy, but determined guys. They were leaving the Romanian dream.

Thing is we all have a dream.

I take the bus to work. I am one of those horrible creatures who rises her eyebrow in discontent at the look of a bag of chips. I am a vegetarian, a garbage-separator, I got insomnias after becoming aware of global dimming (you didn’t actually believe that the global warming is the greatest shit that’s happening to us now, did you?!).

My dream is to lead a rightful life (eating veggies, drinking green tea, thinking positive thoughts, etc) that would protect my karma at least for the time I’m present on this Earth in the shape of Ancu.

And there are also two demons that entice me into taking this dream and sticking it up my ass. The first comes from my pervasive aversion towards carrots. The second one comes from the carrots-lovers and the way they tend to interfere with my life.


Part 2: When the Irrational Strikes Back

In a dark corner of my mind I strongly believe that a rightful life destroys my creativity. Now, I am perfectly aware that all the substances that affect your nervous system in an instant way (such as coffee and booze) also screw it in the long run. Yet no yoga teacher and no documentary on Discovery will ever annihilate the low vibe of my soul ticking “eating carrots makes you dull!” “carrots are the worst thing that can happen to you!”.

The Americans believe that the terrorist can be terminated only by splashing on them some fresh blood coming from the youngsters sent to the Afghan dessert. See? The irrational thoughts make the world go round.

In Ancu’s vision of the world, creativity has two main purposes: to get you out of the shit unless depression got there first and to make sure that the shit looks cool, so depression doesn’t get there first. So shit does play his own part in the universal order of things.

Perfectly balanced life - no shit - no fun. I’ll live to be ninety, serve as an impeccable example to my grand-grand-children, and have no story to tell them.


Part 3: Purity as a Disease

The Americans (not the ones believing in the bearded man hiding in the desert, the other ones – the Indians, the Russians, the Pakis) deliver so many scientific theories because they have the material basis for doing it, and also because they just take any natural manifestation of - let’s say - human experience, and formalize it.

A subspecies of formalization is the assignment of a Latin-derived name or of an acronym to a human behavior that just doesn’t fit the 90% percent of socially accepted part from the Gauss curve. That is considering that a kid that feels like playing instead of listening to a boring lecture has ADHD. And if the same kid is not able or willing to learn the completely illogical English spelling – well, that’s because of his dyslexia.

We have PMS, PTSD, dyscalculics, anorexics, dyslexics, and orthorexics.

The orthorexics are the people who dedicate a great part of their time to spotting the neologisms on the labels of food products, that see the enemy in the carb bubble in the water that should always be still and coming from a controlled source.

Their totem is a giant Carrot, and its greatness derives from its importance and high content of vitamins, and by no means from the chemicals in the soil where it grew.

Thou shall not be fooled into believing that orthorexics are a peaceful species! Oh, no! Part of their mission in this world is to impose on the others the cult of the mighty Carrot. They build their self-esteem on the belief that they are superior to the common fellow who enjoys an ice-cream every now and then. They kindly remind you that you’re going to die one day and that drop of oil is bringing you much closer to that moment. Your fear is their ladder to the sky and your denial will only stir their purifying rage.

There’s nothing that makes me drool over a bag of chips such as their voice. There’s nothing convincing me that a low-carb diet leads to perpetual unhappiness and dullness, such as the look in their eyes.

And in the end, there’s nothing left in my tired soul but pity. I know that they’d also enjoy ice cream. I know the price they paid for saying no to cigarettes and coffee. I know they dream of Coke and chocolate cakes. Orthorexia is a lethal disease, just as going to McDonald’s every day and just as life itself.

Allowing myself to play the wise ass part to its glorious end, I’d remind them that imposing something on others – no matter how positive that thing is – is just another type of aggressiveness, that actually destroys the karma. So orthorexics will have the chance to eat carrots all day long during their next reincarnation, as Bugs Bunnies.

the Evil Female Touch that could have Transformed el Che into just another John or Hans

At some point during the past century I learnt how to write. “Elevul scrie.” was the mantra of that epoque - tasteless, emotionless and completely uncreative. Communist, I dare say.

The preparation for IELTS brought into my life another kind of topics – English seemed to be all about some foreign students (one of them definitely had to be an Asian) trying to find their way in a huge campus in UK, the ultimate destination of their learning adventure.

Pero el español… pues… I’ve been taught the Spanish subjunctive based one of Shakira’s songs. Love and war – that’s what they use to teach the foreigners that need to acknowledge Spanish as The Language not because it’s widespread and practical, such as English, but because it’s gorgeously passionate. There’s a conquistador hidden in the heart of my 60 years old teacher who has “libertad” as a username for the course forum. Their is a sparkle in each Spanish speaker’s eyes that only a revolution or a woman is able and will instantly bring to life.

And they have every right to be proud of this sparkle. You see, the Finns are now able to enjoy a chill swim in the lake after sauna because for ages they systemically removed the cardiacs from their gene pool. Now, these Spanish fellows worked out their asses to burn witches, to eliminate all the evil, impure creatures that could steer their dark thoughts and passions. Floating in a worry-free space, they are now able to enjoy the purity of admiring, caressing and whispering sweet thoughts in the ears of spotless fairies.

While the evil ones now inhabit a hell of their own, together with all the pagans who do know which plants are more powerful than the trivial coca.

Survival of the Depressed

Long before Prozac, before depression became a distinctive feature of those that go beyond the surface of things and venture into the world of existential questioning, before the poets decided that being depressed because of a beauty is far more productive than enjoying her, so before depression became trendy - well, the Universe had to have a pretty good reason to allow the depressives to survive.

It’s pretty obvious why the anxious personalities did – they were the only ones able to perceive the least probable dangers ten years before they appeared. The paranoids were spotting the evil intentions of the neighboring tribes and smashed them just in case, the antisocials do survive anyway, the histrionics were making the religious rituals far more interesting and they all had the schizotypal personalities to rely on when saints and miracles-makers were needed.

How about the depressed ones? Now, the Universe loves diversity and this is exactly why it kills a great part of his prototypes to allow others to be tested. And these fellows survived.

You see, these low-energy softies were not going to battle, nor were they joining the others in the rain dance. So they were willing to stay home and guard the possessions. (I’d also venture a bit further in the world of urban myths and say that, well, no surprise there are more depressed women than men.)

Next time I go around some booze I’ll reflect on the survival of those with attention deficit. I know, that’s called introspection.