When I Asked Who Didn't Know

So I sat there thinking about being,
answering a lifetime's question
in one moment of one night.
Clarity would dawn upon me as
I let myself be lead by the hurried
hand of one kamikaze thought.
Quickly,
he said moved
through memory
as lightning struck outside the window,
inside my chamber of secrets revealed.
Come, and I did
through amazing eyelashes you're gay brainbox
angel good attempt idiot crazy gay dux
cool accent where are you from gypsy in the back of my mind
don't judge me victim my best friend sick
one of the kindest always says bitch little girl
mama is that like Rome sooooooooo smart anxious
sinner him too nerd effeminate awesome
never be left behind easy doormat door
guilty positive good with words hypersensitive
disgustingly cute Pengu overthinking
controlling liar Son of God gay
couldn't deliver disappoint empathetic Protoss
French economic historian writer
so sorry there for you ego lost wrong
and then I ran out of breath,
having chased memory to the bolt that held its chains.
He turned around, looked at me
with unfeeling
and left me with all these answers
in the dark to find the answer.

Take Me Up

There is piano music playing in the background. You try living without your other half, without two quarters of your ego. It's a liberating nightmare, a full-blown dispatriation in split senses. And anywhere you go is the potential of the moment to remove the earth beneath one of your feet, testing your balance, checking to see whether you are able to shift your weight onto the right foot in time. Watch your back, try to prepare and you end up projecting your fears onto the future, a half-wish come true halfway up the stairway to heaven. Just then, you hit that bump, that wooden plank that's rotten to the touch and gives way under the weight of your guilt as you step on it. I thought you would have left your baggage at the bottom. When you refused to take the elevator, the doorman told you to leave the luggage downstairs anyway, that you couldn't possibly take it upstairs with you. But you, stubborn and foolish, held on to it. At least half of your mind did.

But I have told you, you cannot achieve anything with half of you. It's either all or nothing, the decision has to be whole. And so, climbing the stairs has been an uphill struggle. You see happiness at the top, but it's a narrow road and you know you can't hold all your shit with you, mountaineer.

You wish I'd just move on, but so do I, believe me. Tell me you're not an idiot, and I'll believe you, but for fuck's sake don't tell me you can handle what you hold in your pockets. You have a half-burnt cigarette for your middle finger and are squeezing a removed doll's head in your left hand's crush grip. Exhausted, are you not? Perhaps you'd like me to go on, say 'anyway' or 'regardless', and just move on up the steps. I don't have to lumber your ball and chain of course, but I swore I'd take you up, and that's what I'm going to do.

So, I implore you, leave those things you value downstairs. See, just unclench that angered fist and your broken toy will roll down the steps along with those painful memories. This is about letting go of the past. You can't heave it up, heaven doesn't accept things that have passed their expiration date. You can't go in with broken mementos, or with souvenirs of suffering. Believe me, you don't need them anymore, there's enough childhood and joy there to satisfy all of the world's children that have ever lived. Have faith that you will find it.

Now that you're looking into my eyes, I want to assure you that the way we travel is the right way. Your doll's head cannot talk, even though you hear its voice. It's but a passing wind, one that will cease its whispering once you're no longer in range of its emission. So when you recall those visions and thoughts that mean nothing even here, even before we have reached where you want to go, you cannot forgive yourself. Why are you holding yourself to such an obscenely distorted standard? What have you to die for? Rolling emotions? Unrooted sentiments? Fear that you have hurt? You cannot hurt, I'm telling you, it isn't in you. All you can do is make these images in your head of being a tyrant, a deceiver, a betrayer, a cheat, a liar, a destroyer, a dictator, a fallen angel. These are such violations of reality, of what you are, that if you knew, if you only knew, you would instantly let go of all the pain you're holding on to and go up. Since you have forgotten the difference between what is true and what isn't, I've come to take you up the stairs, to teach you what that is. You don't need to understand. It's better that you don't, actually.

So, stop. Let go.

Then, lighter, keep walking, and it will feel more like you are traveling a flat path, closer to the truth.

The Root

Happiness. I want it, you want it. We both have it. It's time to realise that there is no reason for it there, because if we limit ourselves in thinking that we can only be happy if certain things happen, if so and so isn't there or if such and such happens, we'll have big fat gaps in our enjoyment of life. And the spikes that we do get will be even less short-lived.

Euphoria doesn't occur all the time, no, and it doesn't need to. Let us not make the mistake of conditioning our happiness, because when it comes to joy, it is our natural state. We are children after all, in the midst of our childhood. You could be happy because of so many things, or so you may thing, but you are happy because of you. Because you respond. Because you live, and breathe, and encounter life wherever you go. Because you are honest, because you are light. Because joy is you. I say these things and it may sound like you have to 'do' things to be happy. But that is precisely my point - you do not have to do anything. Do not make the mistake of depending on someone else for it. It is within you, and from there must it radiate, never from the outside, although it might look like that.

Be happy. We are human beings, not human doings.

Child's Play

I remember when we were children. I remember it because that time has not ended. We are all walking around as if we had only learned how to a few short days ago and are discovering the world for the first time. Everything is amazing, even though we've seen it so many times before. Everything is just fantastic and fascinating, the tops of trees, the shine on windows, the clouds, the faces of the other children. Oh joy, childhood lasts a lifetime. We don't grow up, we just decide to abandon our innocence for irresponsibility. Mate, that decision is not practical or plausible. We are children, we walk the Earth hand in hand and we play together in so many locales and ways. It's so much fun to be. Adults don't exist, so don't fool yourself into thinking that we are old or that we are somehow mature inhabitants. Insecurity doesn't make you mature, but it makes you feel like a scared child who has let go of our hands. Don't worry though, you'll eventually stop crying and open your eyes. You are going to smile then because you'll realise we were always here for you, with open arms, ready to laugh with you once more. The disorientation will just serve as a joke for a while, and we'll get much entertainment out of it. Come on, we can laugh at anything.

Let's play with our building blocks. We can make so many things. If we put them one way we can make a pyramid, or another way and we can make a wall. We can fort ourselves around the bench and protect the doll on her throne. From the elements? I don't know from who? But psychology might be able to tell us what she is afraid of. Yes, I know she's a doll. We are playing pretend aren't we? Like when we used to play pretend when we pretended to be bus drivers. Oh, how fun that was. I had so many pencils, pens and felt tip pens. Excellent markers for roads; an experience that allowed me to visualise cityscapes. And back then, I did. And I didn't have a bus, so I used a toy car. Not Hot Wheels, but some tiny ones that probably broke very easily because the plastic was cheap. You could find them with the cheap cheap cheap gum. What a treat, ephemeral, but that was part of the deal. Cheap doesn't last long. But it lasted enough time, or else I would have lost my appetite and would have wanted to try my mum's or grandma's food afterward. But back to the vehicle sandbox, remember when I put my thumb and finger onto the car and drove it around the roads I had made? I'm smiling. I pressed a bit too much sometimes to the point that the small wheels either snapped or stopped working properly. That's okay. They were buses anyway, and when I went from room to room through those roads that led me to interesting and unlikely intersections in differently congested areas (traffic-wise), I could always stop by gas stations/repair stores/anything else I wanted them to be. What a simple time that was. I'm not quite as naive as I was back then. I don't believe in it anymore. I don't find roads as fascinating anymore. Sometimes traffic lights make me anxious.

But, as I was saying. This is all child's play. No one's really very grown up. We fight over things because we think that what we are fighting over matters. Politics, a toy car. Democracy, a rubber chicken. The sexualisation of young girls, flowers picked from the field. Homosexuality, the broken lead of a pencil. Choice, innocence. Close-minded people, honesty. Lies, telling the truth as the most natural thing. Loneliness, love. Fighting, smiling. Hell, heaven.

I want to make sure I get this. Salvation is here. The only reason I would be confused about salvation being here is if I was told that salvation was elsewhere, which I believed before but now realise I trusted someone who didn't trust themselves. But I know now. I am a child, a son.

Operation Cwal

Do we increase the rate of unit production like the cheat above? 'Coz you can't wait any longer... is that why you have to rush? Cheater... I'm guessing you weren't taught to play fair before? Anyway, now that the Starcraft reference has been disposed of, I present you with a more light-hearted post. I've had enough of the worrying et al. My conclusion, which I have written on this piece of paper in front of my keyboard, says "When you are led to think that things you do and that happen to you mean more than nothing, all you can do is trust." I shall gladly take my advice, because I can't wait any longer. Nope. To be driven crazy is unhelpful and time-consuming. So I press Enter and type this in.

operation cwal

And now it's enabled. This is not a Starcraft game but we can agree that it works because the subject now changes. To a memory that is related to Starcraft. Stay tuned.

Imagine me, a young boy of seven or eight or nine years, lying on my mother's side of my parents' bed. There's a small notebook in front of me, nearly untouched save for some pages ripped out of it - previous attempts at giving the book a use. My head with that brown-blonde hair is focused ahead and a bit to the left, at the computer screen. This Pentium 2/3 (I forget which) hosts the afternoon's entertainment. My brother's there, playing the game of the month, and on the screen I can see hordes of Zerglings massing across the plain into a Terran base defended only by a few feeble Marines. My brother played Terran - he liked the tanks because they dealt splash damage. I hated them because they dealt splash damage. I preferred Protoss, thanks - more yellow, happier, more interesting. From my perch I got excited at what was happening on the screen - it was only later on that I learned that excitement expressed through erratic movement was considered mental for older people. Once I reached that, I stopped doing it publicly.

Each of the three races of Starcraft had a particular technology tree, each unit having a particular name and significance in the game. The balance of this has provided many people the chance to enjoy the strategy game... which is why it is still played today, in Korea especially. Those trees... they were the ones I liked to fool around with. I was so fascinated by them that I decided to make my own race and the tree to boot. Where to start? The beginning of course - with the main command building that each game started off with. It needed a fantastic name, so it received that honour. My not being able to remember any of the specific names can suggest to you that this honour was ephemeral. I make no apologies for that, bigger and better things appeared so I must have seized them. Or lost interest. Either, or. I would spend quite a few minutes thinking up these names... which were most important to me because they introduced to the reader how cool they were (the made-up buildings, not the reader - it was never read by anyone else besides me). After the first building was named, soon followed the worker unit, then the first fighter unit, then the other buildings and then upgrades. This process lasted me hours.

I don't remember having gone past a whole page. The next time I would come to do it, my interest in my current tree would have waned and I would rip the page out and begin again with a 'better' idea. At some point I collected the big (big) grey English-Romanian dictionary and looked up a plethora of words to sophisticate my trees with. Magical. I also translated some words of buildings from the game itself. I taught some of these to my mother because she wanted to learn English and me being helpful, I endeavored to assist her. I taught her the meaning of Barracks, Hatchery, Lair and Hive. The first is the first attack unit-producing building from the Terrans, the other three, in that order, are the upgrades of the main and only unit-producing Zerg building. I chose these because the words fascinated me - I had never heard them used in spoken English, not that I was exposed to much at that early stage of my learning/absorbing the language. Suffice to say, these words did not help much with her personal language acquisition. Maybe it helped in pronunciation, just a little. She still remembers two of them, although likely not the meanings. I don't blame her.

So... fast forward, and I stopped my tree invention/creative expression; at least in that specific way. It had taken many other forms, some similar, some quite different, later on during my teenage years. Possibly, this unearths the origin of my impatience, this operation cwal. I've noted in my first job interview, when asked for my weakness, that I was impatient at times. When asked how I would improve on that - as generic as the question sounded - I may have said that I would try be more patient. Maybe I should have retyped that cheat, or just quit out of the game - that would have put things back to normal speed. This journey through time thus has been brought to you by a cheat code. Now, back to the present. I press Enter.

operation cwal

Nightingale Street

Growing up, I lived in an apartment building on Nightingale Street. I was on the second storey, excluding the road/ground level which was considered as a storey in itself but not actually called a storey. My young body was small, and through it I saw a world much bigger. The road was much larger than it appears to me now, at least in photographs. I had to take many steps to get to the other side where there was a small store that served as our dairy. It was quite a mission, not in the difficulty, but in the responsibility of it being assigned to me, to take the 50,000 lei note from my mother's hand and go downstairs, across the asphalt street into the store to buy a Coca-Cola and a Mirinda. Then I made my return journey with the change. It took less than five minutes, but I had completed my errand.

Nightingale Street was small. It connected two other streets and ran parallel to a larger, longer, more traveled road. The sidewalks held ample room for two people to walk side-by-side. More recently, they (whoever that may be) installed parking spaces in front of the buildings, which our family used when we got a car. This left only room for one car to actually travel through the street at one time. I imagine it would have been even more difficult in the winter with the snow. The street looked different in summer compared to winter. In summer, you could see the shoddy repairwork that was hastily or improperly done on the roads. Bitumen spots covered random places, somehow like mosquito bites, together with a myriad of cracks and other potholes, from wee to big. As a child, these features are part of the landscape - I saw nothing wrong with them, they were just there - irrelevant and included. Come winter, a blanket of snow would just about cover the whole street, which is why they had to send in snowploughs and a roster for locals to do manual shoveling of snow. Generally, the street itself would be clear enough for cars to pass through. By that I mean there was a layer of muddy stamped down snow that coated the way for vehicles to travel to work, that is, if their engines weren't frostbitten at 7am in the morning. The sidewalks were also snowed on, as one would expect, but they were also manually cleared by the shovels of middle-aged men with warm coats and fur hats. If the snow got too wet and mushy, footprints of gumboots and thick shoes were visible. At times, when the conditions were right, sheets of ice would form, which would provide good entertainment for children like me to skate on with the neighbour or with some friends I had made at the playground two streets away. Older people at times fell and scattered their groceries here on the ice. The few trees that interrupted the sidewalk to the right of the entrance to our set of apartments were covered in a white mantle all winter. They simply lay there, warmed by the cold, an odd oxymoron, because they were preserved until spring when they would bloom in their natural magnificence. The grassy garden areas between the sidewalk and the apartment building itself, while naturally green and alive in summer, now was tucked away in hibernation, perfectly white except for spots of yellow which neighbourhood strays decided to paint on the landscape. Then there was the occasional sign from heaven that winged children delivered in the snow.

During the warmer part of the year, the aforementioned trees would bear fantastically green leaves, an assortment which would change to warmer colors during autumn when they would carpet the ground, no one to clean them up but the children who kicked them away and awed at their slow dance with gravity. The farthest tree along gave us chestnuts, free to pick. If I were to get one, it would be off the ground because it would have fallen. I wasn't tall enough to climb, but my brother and his friend from the apartment vis-a-vis ours were. They climbed up, exploring the crevices, the spaces between the branches and the view from close to the summit. At one point they may have shaken the tree, resulting in chestnut rain. They're supposed to taste nice. I think I tried them once but I can't recall the taste so likely it didn't make a very good impression on me. At least not a lasting one, and I'm usually one to remember smell and taste.

Going the other way towards the end of the street we didn't live on were more apartment blocks. One of them held a dentist which I went to once or twice, probably just before I moved to New Zealand. In between the two apartment blocks on our side of the street, each four storeys high, lay a rubbish dump where stray dogs used to rummage through. I didn't like going past there, out of fear. There were also some tramps and/or gypsies who did the same thing (rummaging), and I was scared of them too, but they may also have repelled other people with their stench. The lack of hygiene puts people off. By the rubbish dump there was also a concrete space which now probably is a car park. But it used to simply be a space where friends, brothers and sisters played catch or ran around deceptively aimlessly. The other side of the road also held a four-storey apartment block, and then in front of our block lay a much taller ten-storey block, which had, understandably, its own elevator. Generic would be one way to put it, but the whole street from memory had an entrenched quality, almost fixed in concrete, as if those buildings would always remain there, even though they looked unappealing and impersonal from the outside.

I never quite got the significance of why the street was named after a Nightingale. If we were to be correct in translating from the Romanian, literally the street belongs to the Nightingale, and I don't remember any nocturnal songs being sung outside. Maybe it was named after a person. Maybe not. The place, though, has evolved over time, and just as my own vision has changed with age, so has that place. The cracks that I did not notice before, I do see now, and the amount of them, metaphoric and otherwise, leave me with a sentiment of sadness - that my childhood home isn't really being cared for. I still have my memories though and while I don't hold on to them, I am aware that changes happen. Nothing lasts forever and that's the way it is.

Calligraphy

Sometime during my fourth year of school in Romania, my teacher noticed that I had changed my handwriting. Her expression, tone and repetition of this a couple of times throughout that year brought to my attention her disapproval of me changing the way I wrote. Perhaps it was the way I wrote the 'r's or maybe my copying the handwriting of a colleague of mine who I admired because the way she wrote was similar, but still more personal than the standard taught in schools. The way we were taught was cursive script. Initially, the paper we used was not simply lined like refill or in 1B5 notebooks today; instead we used paper that followed the subsequent pattern:

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Note that the spaces between each horizontal line, dotted or not, are meant to be the same size.
The handwriting had to be set between those sets of lines, in a specific way. This was a sort of guideline - think of it like training wheels when you first learn to ride your bike. You always started writing a part of a letter on the lower continuous black line and most letters would have to then fit between that one and the continuous one above it. However, we were taught to not actually touch that line but to instead leave a small gap, probably for aesthetic reasons. Capital letters were written in the same fashion but were supposed to take up the space from the starting line to just under the dotted line above the upper black line. Some lower-case letters like f, l, t, h, k were treated like capital letters in the sense that their extra length had to be accounted for. So the length of the 't' would stretch out almost to the top dotted line. Letters like g, j and y which had 'tails' could have those 'tails' reach down and touch the bottom dotted line. It's quite simple, but I suppose it does take some getting used to. As for what the letters actually look like, they are joined together at one point or another if they belong in the same word. Letters like v, w, l, h and r have little curls within them, which I suppose adds an element of style because it gives the writing a more refined feel. For v and w, the curls look like little pig tails pinned onto the ends of the letters. It does look pleasant if done well, but writing like this takes more effort and time than the script I use now. When you're taking notes in a lecture, there's no time to make perfect curls or to formulate a good curve for the s. So I wonder what the point is of learning such 'refined' handwriting if it is not going to be used later on in classes in that way? Maybe it gave us students an appreciation of handwriting and what it can do to the content to make it more visually pleasing (and thus maybe more persuasive?). Each person adds their own little twang to it of course, which reminds me that some people's writing was quite dissimilar to the standard taught in the sense that it was much less careful, much less neat. Those people would have gotten lower marks for that.

I tried to change mine probably because it wasn't the best and I wanted it to be. I had a look at the handwriting of some girls that were in my class and I was impressed by their ability to make it look aesthetically clean, no matter what they wrote. So, me being a child that wanted to show clean work, copied the little differences in the way they did their curls (maybe they made theirs bigger) and how they positioned their letters all standing up straighter than the slanting slightly-to-the-right norm that we were taught. It's possibly the same type of xeroxing that I did much more recently when I started dotting my i's with small pretty circles instead of butch dots. It was much cleaner, but I became slightly mad about it and made every letter much more circular so the spaces in the writing became more noticeable. How did this had an effect on what I was writing? Not sure, but I personally did notice I took more care in my writing than before. I wanted a cleaner image, likely.

So was this whole process all about image? The way you write can give away quite a lot of things about how you see yourself, or so I have heard on television from a person that studied people's handwriting. In that sense, your handwriting is like a mirror, reflecting things that you may not want to admit about who you think you are. Word processing has taken away part of this vision since you no longer are writing, but typing, but some may argue that the font you choose is also revealing. Deciphering handwriting however can be a difficult if you don't know what each little feature or difference can suggest about the writer.

Maybe when we learn how to write, the fears and aspirations we adopt at that time are shown to us despite our efforts to conceal them or run away. For a child, learning how to write is an important step in learning to communicate with the rest of the world. I had a 'traumatic' experience with this step that has remained tucked away in my mind, hardly resurfacing until now. In my first year of school, we learned the alphabet. We practiced writing letters individually, then words with those letters and finally sentences that emphasised the usage of the letter we happened to be looking at on the day. This practicing was done in a pink A4 workbook which had four pictures at the back, one of which was a close-up of Snow White, with her black hair and a hair band which maybe was red, or white, or blue. The pages were lined as shown above but there were pictures also within so it didn't look too daunting. At school, we mostly used pencil, never pen. We used refillable ink-pens more regularly in the years to come, but at our level, pencils were necessary because often we made mistakes, mostly aesthetic ones I imagine. I was under the impression (possibly influenced by the strictness of the Romanian school system) that our books had to be kept neat and tidy. One day, while the class worked on the letter O, capital and lower-case combined, I somehow managed to make a smudgy mess in the middle of the page, probably from rubbing a mistake out with a cheap eraser because the higher quality ones were too expensive to afford (on the subject of money, a year or so later I got a more expensive mechanical pencil which wowed me because I never had to sharpen it and could just add 0.7 lead on demand and it would actually write well). Our teacher was coming around to check that we did our work and as she came to check each person individually, the class was silent, each pupil awaiting judgment. Just think of it - awaiting JUDGMENT. It was a serious case then, for me, because I was petrified by my smudge on the page. Trying to fix it by rubbing it out worsened it - I actually created a small hole, which of course added to my tension. When the teacher came around in her aura of perfume - i.e. the judgment moments - I remember her finger pressing down near the smudge as she was assessing what I had done and how well I did it. I looked down at this time, shoulders maybe hunched, scared. She asked me what happened there, her nail indicating the (black) hole. I might have stammered an answer and she may have given me a reply but I was still ashamed when she moved on.

At 18 now, I can smile and laugh about the insignificance of what happened, but ten or more years ago, that haunted me for a while. The focus with school was so much on the result... and fear was what led many people, including me, to strive for the best. Yes, I did enjoy the self-satisfaction of getting a question right and being told in front of the class that my writing piece was the best, but I would argue that it was not those moments of success that kept me going through the system for those four years at school but the dread of punishment, of getting something wrong, of BEING wrong. Such pressure to not fail... I'm glad I was fortunate to experience what education was like in another part of the world.

Cracks In The Walls

From here, they look like tiny Lego pieces, all the same off-white colour with a faded orange stripe. These apartment buildings, home to a slew of people that I never knew, rise up in ordered lines. The rectangular windows are equidistant from each other and as they dot each storey of these homes, it becomes a message in Morse, a cry for help. With my two eight-year old feet planted on a grassy descent, facing away from civilisation, I look at the camera, hands on hips. My childish smile – unaware of the truth behind me – turns into a smirk that I see now, some ten years later, to be a question: what happened?

Today, there are cracks in the walls that used to be my home. The security that they once provided, the warmth during winter and the shelter during storms, remain but memories of a place I know does not exist anymore. The process of leaving Romania, leaving childhood, leaving my home and learning about the “real” world in New Zealand shattered the window through which I looked out and put a filter in its place. Romania was not a comfortable place to live in with its corruption, its disorganised system of government, its apathetic politicians, its victimised mindset and its overall squalor. Blame the communist dictator Ceausescu for his totalitarian regime. Blame the gypsies who are marginalised and look for food in the rubbish dumps. Blame the people emigrating for not loving the country enough. Spit on the ground in frustration at the wretch of a life you live – no one is going to clean it up. Blame every single other person, except yourself.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in Romania. How much would my family and friends have changed? Would my mind be as open as it is today? I don’t like to dwell on the ‘what if’s because they inevitably distract me from the reality that I do enjoy and appreciate life. But I imagine that, when seen from an unlike perspective, my experience of the world would have differed quite dramatically.

Romania – a simple place when viewed from the curious gaze of a little boy with eyelashes girls would kill for and a face that looks a little bit too much like his mother’s. A boy with a happy childhood, because what else would you call it when his grandmother ties both ends of a rope to two branches of a tree to make a swing because the metal ones in the nearby kindergarten were vandalised and broken past the point of repair; or when his brother builds a tower of bricks around him so that he only has enough room to poke his head out and smile as his mum takes a photo on his eighth birthday, the same day he would witness a solar eclipse at 1pm. These snapshots are not few in quantity, because they fill about ten photo albums of family history. But their quality, their ability to preserve a reminder of childhood joy for a teen to revisit as he matures, is what really indicates their value to me.

I find myself looking back at these photos to relive the emotion of the tale they tell. I used to feel nostalgic within the first few years of living in New Zealand as I was still reluctant to accept that the reason we moved was because it was better for us here. My childhood ended on arrival in this foreign place with palm trees, clean roads in good condition and personalised houses, as opposed to small unkempt streets between copy-pasted apartment buildings that Ceausescu had built in an attempt to attract workers to the cities. The contrast was and still is quite stark.

My coming of age story thus has elements of adjusting to a whole new culture and keeping from being absorbed into it. I’m not a Kiwi. I’m not a Romanian either, despite my saying that I am when asked because although I empathise with what is going on back home, I do not share the survivalist view that the world is cruel and unfair. And yes, Romania is still home, because so much of what I knew to be happiness originated from that place and those people there that were close to me. You can tell this from the number of smiles in the photos, and the amount of smiling they in turn cause.

Growing up is magical for any child, for they cannot see the cracks in the walls. So much of society is built upon righting past wrongs and realising a world better for the next generation. Children only find the present, and what a gift it is to them. What can we say about ourselves then, as humans, when we take that away because we lost ours, too?

Second Week

The second week of university has come to a close a few hours ago - the weekdays at least. The weekend is still ahead, a time for reflection, relaxation and rest. I've gotten more used to the university experience now, so I feel more comfortable with it. Tutorials were interesting and interactive and the psychology lab was short and sweet. A highlight among these was today's English tutorial. We were asked to write for seven minutes without thinking. To spark off this journey into the known unknown, the tutor wrote on the board "It's funny the things we remember..." I started off writing about Commander Keen, the game I used to play in childhood, then went through a discussion which features computer comparisons, a trophy cabinet, a question in French, followed soon by an expressive question about the journey I take during life, having been through so much, yet so little, and heading somewhere, but not knowing the destination. The degree does not matter, for it is nonexistent.

What a question. Following the writing down, some of us were asked/invited to read out a piece or all of what they wrote. People around me intentionally (I think) did not make eye contact with the tutor, but I did not deviate, something he noted. I read out what I wrote, and as I did so, I felt my face warm, partly at the idea that I was sharing something personal, partly at the triumph that I was sharing something that came from behind the 'protective' veil of thoughts and warnings. At one point in the middle I think I got a chuckle, but once I was finished I looked up, I don't remember how many clapped out of the dozen+ people that followed the tutor's example. Victory? Pourquoi pas. But it is not a war, death is not the aim. He commented on my expressiveness and how the discourse came out from within me. He said something like it sounded like a novel. Cool.

About not remembering the applause. This has occurred times before. When I have won an award and I have been congratulated, the procedure that follows is clapping. The most I've gotten was during last year's awarding of the highest academic prize offered by my high school. I remember it very faintly, possibly because I received the majority of it as my name was announced and I moved onto the stage. I think there was whistling too, but I was nervous. Heart was beating, I could feel it, sentimentally visible within my body. Blood was pumping, rushing throughout my body. Maybe then that the memory of the experience was erased partly or adjusted in order to prevent trauma or shock? En tout cas, I enjoyed the moment. Few months on, I think back. What does it mean? That's the question that I asked in my writing. That is the question that I am asking? What is the point?

Twistedspoon

Kadabra carries one, Alakazam's got two. Abra, has none. He doesn't quite need them because if you equip Exp. Share then you can train him, and if he DOES happen to get into a battle with a wild Pokémon, then he can always teleport out of there. Then all you need to do, young trainer, is to get out of the tall grass, or out of the cave, or use an Escape Rope or Fly to your nearest Pokémon Center to revive the other members of your party.

Yes, I'm a fan. Cool wee games there (my bias expressed - there we go, this is no longer objective). Well, when I was younger I had the Gameboy Advance and I played Sapphire and I enjoyed training my little team of Mudkip (and its evolutions) and the other ones, all 'lesser' until Kyogre which I found helped me wipe the Elite Four, especially Drake, because Kyogre knew Ice Beam and against Dragon Pokémon, it was super effective :D

Twistedspoon is an interesting item that was carried by the Psychic Pokémon I mentioned at the start. For some reason, I suspect one of which may be the limited character spacing in the games, it is written as one word. A nice combination, because when I look at it now I am pleasantly reminded of my 'adventures'. You know what, the Pokémon phenomenon was a phenomenon! Back in my home country (Romania), at our school, shortly after the cartoons started, the local store started selling branded croissants which had two stickers, each being one of the 151 original Pokémon. To get the album itself, you had to buy six or seven croissants. After persuading my parents to give me money for that much, I bought the batch and got it! Of course, that meant 14 stickers too! And no duplicates, if I remember correctly. And, to top it off, I got #25 Pikachu, first, or among the first one in the class. I showed my friends, we were childishly excited. Woop! I was on my way to collecting 'em all!

The croissants seem to have been mass produced in retrospect, because I remember them tasting cheap and stale. The chocolate in the middle was too little reward for chewing through all the (unhealthy) pastry, so they went from okay to crap as more were consumed. Someone say Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. But I had to finish my collection.

Time passed, I finished it while I was still at school. Squirtle was the last one I needed. #7 had been elusive... but I managed to trade my duplicate(s) with someone to finish my collection. After that, I must've felt pretty cool finishing my sticker album! I had all 151 stickers, as well as the stickers at the back of Ash, Misty, Brock, James, Jessie, Prof. Oak, Nurse Joy, Officer Jenny...

After that achievement, which maybe lasted a day, focus shifted to something else. I still like Pokémon though. When I was at my grandmother's one year during this early fad, my friends and I got a notebook and we decided to sit down and design our own Pokémon, each with their own name (my favourite part was giving them names). We made about ten? Artistically speaking, they were not Leonardo Da Vinci's, nor any other painter's displayed at the Louvre. But they were cool, by our standards, or maybe without any standards and just mere observation. I apply the label 'cool' to them now because of my current feelings about the past. Back then though, how would I have felt? Creative :D

I played the GBA games after I arrived in New Zealand. New games are still coming out, as well as remakes of the old ones. I'll have a look at those ones too and if I want to play, I shall. It's exciting, feeling like a kid again.

It is possible to bend spoons. But Twistedspoons belong to Kadabras and Alakazams. To get the latter, you had to trade with a friend. I had no trade buddies, so I never got to Alakazam on the games. But I saw the pictures online and in the cartoons. Holding two spoons, he used psychic abilities like telekinesis during battles. The spoons acted like the focal points of his energy. My point? It is possible to bend spoons. And as the Matrix tells us, "There is no spoon."

Alone

So far, now near.
The distance grows shorter, the tide creeping upon the beach then
falling back.

You see, the waves emerge in the distance,
Armed waves, white foam of thunder, ready to smash, slam, swipe, swell, singe
And they come in waves, the squadrons;
As they get closer, you can see the soldiers
No faces, but they're there, advancing, flags held up high beyond sight.
Those were white.

The shore is silent, awaiting.
War,
They hit, they smash, slam, swipe, swell, singe,
Here as they did there, indifferent.
In war, there is no celebration of life.
Here, there is life, and it goes on,
Unlike war.

The battle moves with the moon, up and down.
Terrain is conquered, lost.
Castles and other temporary constructions are destroyed and
reduced to lumps, to be evened out and rebuilt
In circles.

When the moon is at its bright height and round
I stood awatch, the waves coming on and on.
Poor visibility? Darkness hid the illusion of distance
but what I needed to see was there.

Note here that this is a sight I met in childhood:
Evening, staring out towards the sea, waves coming forth
crawling onto land and spilling their lonely secrets upon surfaces and
unsuspecting beachgoers.
Alone, that's how I felt, because I couldn't see anything past the blanket of night.

Alone, the feeling.
The answer, alone.
You, look. In the word. Alone. Look. Pair the L and split.
Oh, it fits :)

The sight is here.
It is a feeling of sadness, of being small.

Tiny.
Tiny.

Everything is. The waves, the moon, the darkness, the light, the sand, the water, the wind, the unmentioned.
Yet we weave all these things together into our own blanket and we hide either under it or from it. We think we are insignificant, minuscule, wee (in more than one sense). We could just as well appear to be that. If I think I'm bigger than that, then I'm delusional. If I think I'm unworthy or pathetic, then I'm delusional, too. If I simply am, the world around me is too. I appreciate the sight because I have learned that while the waves crash ahead and everything is large and small, I am witness to it. It occurs, and I can see it, witness it in its presence. Its emptiness, its hollowness is not a feeling of lack. It is a feeling of completeness. Nothing, yet everything.

January

"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
My (Inspiration) calendar informs me that Albert Camus said those words. Let's explore :)

January is a winter month, speaking from a northern hemisphere point of view. I've experienced eleven of those. Mostly, they're characterised by snow, rain, cold, snowballs, snowmen, snow angels, yellow patches of snow, trees with snow wigs, fur hats, layers of clothing that conceal people and air that's harder to breathe but worth breathing otherwise you die and there's a chance the ambulance won't get to you in time because of traffic jams and sheets of ice on the road. No summer.

I remember this month to be unique, in that the first week of it I used to be with family and friends on holiday at home. Ski-time!

I wait in line with some friends, we talk about nothing in particular that I can remember now. We slowly move our way to the ticket machine, where there's a slot that I insert this plastic waterproof card which has a certain amount of money on it. Once it rinses and spits the card out, the metal bars are unlocked and I shimmy forward to catch the incoming platter lift (thanks Wikipedia). I loved taking note of the numbers on the one I got because whatever number it was, it was going to be a different one to the other platter lifts so it was special (just like the other platter lifts :P which I will now affectionately and laconically refer to as claws) I grab hold of the valve and pull hard and place it in between my legs (carefully avoiding any locational trauma). Then I'm off as the claw pulls me up the snow slope. During my ascent I look at skiers in their descent, the skier in front of me on his own special claw (not as special as mine) but never at the skier behind me because I can lose balance and fall, endangering the oncoming skiers (happened before). At the top, I heave the valve from under me and let go. The claw spastically hurls itself this way and the other once or twice then returns to its starting position.

Here, I either wait for friends or go it alone, either is fine. Usually, I go from one side of the slope to the other side, in a winding path that goes in no particular direction except it manages to avoid other people.

A week after the holiday at home, school starts again, so I go back to my class. The mornings are cold temperature-wise, but there's something awfully warm about meeting your classmates and discussing what you were up to during the winter break. I don't remember that happening much, but it could have. We lined up in the courtyard before going inside the classrooms, snowflakes trickling in a delicate yet dense fashion. The sky is coloured winter, so whichever colour you pick, it'll be that, then diluted, mixed with grey and smeared above so you can't distinguish cloud from sky. To add, whatever emotions you feel are touched by a tinge of gloom hidden in plain sight.

And among this, the depth of winter (its harshness varying from year to year) has never placed me under a depressive sheet of ice. Winter isn't sad. Summer isn't happy. They're the same. Yes, I do prefer to swim in the sea when it's warmer, but I also prefer to ski when it's colder. So Albert Camus is right. There is a summer within me - joyful, triumphant - that makes my winters burn.

Further proof? It's January and right now, where I am... summer never left.