If... then...

Iată că a fost nevoie de o Raluca pentru scrie din nou pe blog :-) poate nu ar fi trebuit să îl uit de atâta vreme. Promit că mai scriu!

Dacă eram o lună, aş fi fost - septembrie
Dacă eram o zi a săptămânii, aş fi fost- sâmbătă
Dacă eram o parte a zilei, aş fi fost – dimineaţa devreme, la răsărit
Dacă eram un animal marin, aş fi fost – căluț de mare
Dacă eram o direcţie, aş fi fost - înainte
Dacă eram o virtute, aş fi fost – credința
Dacă eram o personalitate istorică, aş fi fost – Ecaterina a II-a a Rusiei
Dacă eram o planetă, aş fi fost - Uranus
Dacă eram un lichid, aş fi fost – apă
Dacă eram o piatră, aş fi fost – acvamarin sau opal
Dacă eram o pasăre, aş fi fost - colibri
Dacă eram o plantă, aş fi fost – nufăr
Dacă eram un tip de vreme, aş fi fost – furtună cu tunete și fulgere
Dacă eram un instrument muzical, aş fi fost - pian
Dacă eram o emoţie, aş fi fost - gratitudine
Dacă eram un sunet, aş fi fost – grav
Dacă eram un element, aş fi fost - Helium
Dacă eram un cântec, aş fi fost - One
Dacă eram un film, aş fi fost – The English Patient
Dacă eram un serial, aş fi fost - Medium
Dacă eram o carte, aş fi fost – Pendulul lui Foucault
Dacă eram un personaj de ficţiune, aş fi fost - Winnetou
Dacă eram un fel de mâncare, aş fi fost – Păstrăv în mălai
Dacă eram un gust, aş fi fost – acrișor
Dacă eram o aromă, aş fi fost - vanilie
Dacă eram o culoare, aş fi fost - verde
Dacă eram un material, aş fi fost - in
Dacă eram un cuvânt, aş fi fost - tu
Dacă eram o parte a corpului, aş fi fost- cap
Dacă eram o expresie a feţei, aş fi fost - zâmbet
Dacă eram o materie de şcoală, aş fi fost – analiză matematică
Dacă eram un personaj din desene animate, aş fi fost - Catwoman
Dacă eram o formă, aş fi fost - sferă
Dacă eram un număr, aş fi fost - 2
Dacă eram o maşină, aş fi fost - Mini Cooper
Dacă eram o haină, aş fi fost – o rochie albă de vară

Maddame și Andrei, voi ce ziceți? :)

Talk to strangers

You’ve probably also been told not to open up or talk to strangers, because they are evil, right? Still, it happens that you sometimes check your own assumptions against those held by strangers. You have an own situation that gives you headaches, you can’t understand it – and at some point, you feel the need of sharing it with someone. Who knows, maybe sharing will help bring out mysterious resolutions we have not thought of, at times our eyes are crying out to hear what we want to filter or maybe all we are looking for is to hear ourselves speak and relieve the pain. It happens that strangers resonate to thoughts in your head, it just happens that they speak out the words you do not allow yourself to.

So do talk to strangers, they also have stories to tell.

Did I disappoint you?
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without
Well it's too late, tonight
To drag the past out into the light
We're one, but we're not the same
We get to carry each other
Carry each other...
(U2, One)

Everything I know is wrong

One year ago I started a mock experiment – the experiment of being stupid. What I did during the experiment was trying to prove that using less of your brain capacity to think about stuff that seemed unimportant could translate into a happier life. Practice proved me wrong. It is not the thinking that kills us, not even the “unimportant” stuff we are trying to process. Using less than you actual mind capacity does not function either.

While experimenting for a way into a happier life, one that required less thinking and more perceiving, there were some happenings around me that were of definite help. Some will still take time to refine, some could immediately be translated into actions. All in all, the one thing that made me richer this year was that I learned to laugh heartily – at both life and myself. This was the one good side effect of being stupid – you cease taking yourself ever so seriously and start weighing the pleasures of life through other lenses. You start considering your life from the perspective of its impact in other’s people lives. Not necessarily the tags they attach for you inside their heads, but what you mean to them, how you can be of help to them. You start seeing the beauty of nature around, start being interested in the recipe of the cake you are eating at the business meeting, really enjoy the taste of the morning coffee and stop taking it for granted. You start developing others instead of just yourself and start laughing when you see others handling situations with the self-importance you once attributed to yourself. You start seeing the context rather than the individual pieces of the puzzle and you stop obsessing about what you cannot change.

In spite of all these benefits, my basis for considering the experiment a failure is that all this does not necessarily relate to thinking. Quitting thinking was not what led me to those insights, as a negative action does not translate into a positive one. It was probably love that did the trick. Unconditional, constant, foolish and vulnerable love, one that came in unnanounced, unawaited for, while the barriers of too much thinking and analysing were lowered.

The topic is complex and still needs expanding, and over the next posts I will try to write more about it. It’s just such a relief to know that I can finally continue the thinking where I left off, armed with a more powerful weapon than ever before.

And the hardest part
Was letting go not taking part
You really broke my heart
And I tried to sing
But I couldn't think of anything
And that was the hardest part

I could feel it go down
You left the sweetest taste in my mouth
You're a silver lining the clouds
(Coldplay, The Hardest Part)

The Prodigal Daughter

7 years into my departure from my hometown and another 4-and-something into my consulting continuum, I have returned home. Though I have been in Sibiu at some point or another over the years for holidays, now it will be different. Working from home and going to the office in my town already feels strange. It is a matter of professionalism to deliver the same value to the client, as if it were in any other city in the world. However, working from the desk I used as a high school student and maybe seeing my old friends in the evening has a perfume of a long-awaited rendez-vous.

Given that I will be mainly involved in work, please follow the Twitter updates on the right-hand side – it might be that they will give you more insight, since I will not be able to write on a constant basis.

Cheers!

Video about a guy and his dog

Nee, my heart doesn't feel so bad at all, it's just that I liked the video so much. I wonder how much negotiation it will take with my mother to get myself a dog :)

The devil is in the details

Someone told me tonight that all our trials are given to us by the devil. That the guy has nothing else better to do than to mix in the lives of people and make them unhappy. And that God has currently higher work to do than to help us handle it, but that He trusts us. I said I believe in a mass of good energy floating around and occasionally changing focus and influence. She looked at me in disbelief, but I appreciated her expressing neither contempt nor admiration. She took it just as if I had said a few words about the weather, so I felt confident to further expand, and say that since all this energy is good, and it resides in all of us, then we must all be good.

In the silence that followed, the only thought I could hang on to was that maybe now all the good energy is with me, and if I send some in your direction, then you will understand me behind all words and come back.

Moby - Slipping away

Snapshots of my Dalloway-ism

Tonight I put some order in my stuff and found an old notebook from my university years. There are two fragments below from Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway', which I remember having read many times over, because I found it so enthralling.

"What is this terror? What is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was."

"He had not said 'I love you'; but he held her hand, Happiness is this, is this, he thought."

I feel like I have lived them out myself :)

Emaciated

I’ve been lucky to have learnt to swim at an early age, and swimming has since become a second nature to me. What I especially liked, back in Sibiu, was diving. In Sibiu you can actually swim in an Olympic sized swimming pool with 8 lanes, and there is also a deeper pool with a diving tower with 3m, 5m, 7m and 10m levels. For us little dolphins, the diving pool was only open on certain days, as it was considered dangerous to jump (because of various accidents etc). One day, when it was “ok” to go diving, we lined up and started. First we used the springboard, 1 m above the water. The instructor then led us to the platforms. Some of us did dive from 3m... but the more we climbed up the stairs, the more courage left us, as we seemed to be so high above the menacing blue water. At some point, the inevitable happened and one of us dived the wrong way. She hit herself quite hard on a side (in diving, especially when doing it from higher above, it is essential to enter the water perfectly vertical, or else the impact can harm you). I was next in line... and I suddenly felt like turning around presto and giving up diving. There was a moment when I looked at the water and my body refused to return there, for fear it would get hurt, just like my friend's had been.

Over the past few weeks I was sick, and the return to normality seems more difficult than I have expected, as there are some aspects in my general ability to fight off disease that are not particularly encouraging. I dread jumping into the water again, just like years ago, because of concerns regarding my health.

What I did back then, after looking at the water below, was to close my eyes and jump anyway, from 10m. The water, on entering, felt warm and embracing, and all that excited expectation of pain disappeared. It was not as if the doubt had disappeared, but the weight of it seemed to have been left behind. And as I resurfaced, I felt like lingering there, for it felt like my second nature indeed. No harm would come.

On returning from the holidays...

Writing again comes a bit uneasy, as there is so much that could be the subject of explorational musings. Some of it might be of no interest to anybody else but myself. But as I have learned until now, you can never do stuff just for yourself. Sometimes you write so that the voices inside be finally fixed somewhere, some other times just to make a point, or just to see how the words you are thinking form into a poem right in front of you :)


Anyway, I’ve thought about it and I’ve decided to keep the blog. Seems that I’m not writing for the walls and the toys and the joys, there really are some people out there reading it (thanks guys!). Since I’m not exactly an e-mail communication techie, writing here will just be an easier way to let you all know how things are going.

Welcome back to the freakshow @Sundance!

Help me when I fall to
Walk unafraid
I'll be clumsy instead
Hold my love or leave me high.
Walk unafraid
I'll be clumsy instead
Hold my love or leave me high.
(R.E.M., Walk Unafraid)

Deciding what to do with the blog

I just need a way to figure out how to make it useful to others - as is was useful to me. In sharing my thoughts and states of mind with you, I got richer on the inside. And as I think that nothing comes for granted and that one's legacy consists of the things we leave in others - I will try to put in more useful information than gather my thoughts. That we could do together over coffee :-) so feel free to say hello whenever you are in town.

Anyway, as I feel it, a period of my life has ended - it was a nice period and I thoroughly enjoyed every part of it (well maybe the unpleasant aspects less but you know how it is :D...)

I don't know what this is
but you got me good
just like you knew you would

I don't know what you do
but you do it well
I'm under your spell
(Duffy, Mercy)

We have reached a meaning

I’ve written before about things you cannot say – nor otherwise express. We cannot say what we mean unless we do it and sometimes it is better to keep some things untouched by words unless we mean them.

Slowly, the Sundance Kiddo Blog has reached its initial purpose – to bail me out of a world I had gotten into by accident. It has done so over the past two years – helped me to clarify my thoughts and make sense of a world I had thought of bigger than my grasp. Some of the happenings I’ve written about here are so dissolved into words, that sometimes I cannot remember what shelf to put them on, or what they were really referring to in the real world.

It was a good journey.

And it's draining all of me
Oh they find it hard to believe
I'll be wearing these scars
For everyone to see
(Leona Lewis, Bleeding Love)

Flying to Maramures

This evening I am flying towards the north of the country. Hopefully the weather will be fine.

Take me and break me and close all your windows and doors.

Shut me off, cut me off, make me an island, I'm yours.

Take me away from the world, take me away from the girls.

Take me and break me and make me an island, I'm yours

(Joe Dolan, Make me an island)

Reconsideration of telephoning and Twittering

This morning I dreamt of my former project manager telephoning. I rang her up in the afternoon to tell her and she was glad. Maybe I’ll reconsider my hostile attitude towards telephoning, as it seems to make people happy to hear each other’s voices from time to time.

In trying to make communication more fluid and step up to the times, I have included my twittering on the right column. Enjoy!

Back from holidays

On returning from a wonderful and relaxing vacation, I forgot my network password. The IT guys will be delighted :))

Plus, it seems we're under Saturn in May, so the changes are starting to get more serious.

Tired and bored of waiting for things that'll never happen

I asked my mother once "Where do you go when there is nowhere left to go" and she told me "You die". The truth is never that simple though - you never die at the right moment, nor does the earth swallow you at the point where you would zapp it into doing just that.

It won't come as a surprise if I tell you the earth never cooperated on my hardest times, so I had to be inventive and get out of quite some messes. Blushing usually helped in the first few seconds but then you should really be able to say someting more. The point is what - and in the last months I have reached the conclusion that saying nothing at all can bring you more than anything. In spite of being more painful, of course.

Killer tale with three subways

How much of a total nerd must you be to miss the right subway, take the next, have it get you to the wrong station and needing to further switch subways, get to the railway station exactly on time to miss the person you actually shouldn't be expecting and then seeing them again in the subway, on the way home? And most especially, how can you explain the entire mess without making it seem like a fable?

The things I don't plan come out as if I had planned them a long time and the things I do plan go completely amok. There must be something I'm doing right.

Show a little faith there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty but hey you're alright
Oh and that's alright with me
(Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road)

5 motive pentru care imi place sa merg la mall

Dupa ce am citit postul Ancutei despre mall, am avut o mica revelatie: mie imi place la mall! Oricare din ele... Vedeti mai jos si cateva motive pentru care weekendul sau serile la mall nu sunt asa de rele cum par.

1. E cel mai bun loc unde afli care sunt ultimele tendinte in moda. Vezi atatea exemple de prost gust, incat prin eliminare afli si cam ce se poarta.
2. Iti vin idei de afaceri si de promovare. Util mai ales daca lucrezi in marketing, evaluezi cam pe unde sa ma pui un banner nou, un gand rau concurentei ca sa obtii un nou spatiu petru magazinul tau etc.
3. Ai ce sa povestesti luni la serviciu. “Auzi draga, l-am vazut pe Vio ieri la mall. Ghici cu cine era?” Pe bune acum, de unde poti sa scoti mai multe evidente despre diverse relatii daca nu din faptul ca cei doi se duc la mall impreuna?.
4. De punctul dinainte se leaga si faptul ca Mall-ul este noul parc, odata ce te plimbi cu cineva pe acolo, e clar ca ceva se intampla. Dupa ce fac cei doi impreuna poti sa afli si in ce faza a relatiei sunt, respectiv ce statut social au. De exemplu: beau o cafea (abia s-au cunoscut), vad un film (e faza ulterioara, se face conversatie si poate se “verifica” noua achizitie), mananca la Mac (studenti probabil), se plimba prin magazine impreuna (planuri de viitor deja, el evalueaza cam cat o sa il coste) etc.
5. E mai greu sa imi conving prietenii sa “facem ceva” in weekend. Cand spui “mergem la mall”, sensul vietii se imbogateste instantaneu – la mall poti face o gramada de lucruri si de fapt nimic. Cum draga, sa mergem la terasa? Da ce facem la terasa? Hai la mall!

Viata de carton pe roti

Uitasem sa va povestesc: ieri m-am blocat in metrou. A treia oara in ultimele cateva luni. Asta dupa ce plecasem special mai devreme de acasa, ca sa fac impresie. Am ajuns in statie, unde niste sarmani stateau prinsi dupa usile metroului, alti sarmani se uitau cu jind la cei prinsi, de parca ar fi sa se afle in locul lor. Dupa vreo cinci minute de asteptare, anuntul fatidic: Va rugam sa va dati jos din vagoane, trenul este defect. Na super, imi spun, sa vezi acum invazie pe peron. Si da-i si ies oamenii din vagoane. Am mai scris despre cum arata vagoanele de metrou din Bucuresti, de zici ca mergi la Auschwitz. Ei bine, nu v-ar veni sa credeti ce puhoi de popor s-a putut revarsa pe peronul care deja era plin. Imbulzeala, coate, calcare pe picioare... tot setul.

Cum sunt o persoana optimista din fire, imi spun: Acum pleaca trenul asta de pe peron, vine urmatorul, asa ca totul va fi bine si ajung si eu la birou la timp ca sa imi salvez onoarea. Da de unde. Am mai stat douazeci de minute sa poata misca trenul si inca vreo cateva ca sa vina urmatorul tren – evident plin cu oameni stresati de faptul ca fusesera tinuti in subteran mai bine de jumatate de ora. Fericiti, dadeau telefoane.

Ce am hotarat in urma incidentului:
1 – Tre sa am grija sa nu mi se mai strice iPodul cand se blocheaza metroul. E plictisitor.
2 – In viitorul previzibil o sa incep sa merg cu bicicleta la birou.
3 – E mai bine sa plec tarziu de acasa, daca si asa intarziu.

I Know My Love

There are so many people in the world who hunger for a bit of love, that our brief afternoons and evenings together seem like an undeserved blessing. So many rich glances, few words that create worlds of understanding, those little touches filled with warmth and the intense feeling that somewhere, out there, there is a great something where we can be like in our dreams. This much love cannot be wasted, and the more you get, the more there is of it.

Perfume of the day: L'Eau par Kenzo.

One of the stories yet to be told

To follow up on a previous post: sometimes it feels good just to drift away. Questions such as “Where do you see yourself in 5 years’ time” are as annoying as the indications linked to one’s age. “Aha, you’re 25 already, you should think about getting married.” Right, but to whom?

Sometimes I just let myself go to the moment, and what happens is that no world crumbles if you are not there to give it a sense of direction. So as of now, I declare myself on holiday.

Girls like tea
Girls like me
Some girls like everything that they see
(Lisa Stansfield, Treat me like a woman)