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.

440

Does it matter for the heart who it loves?

Look at me, talking about love as if I even know what it is.
Some say you must have broken your heart
Before you know what true love is.
But isn't love always true?

Sympathy
The world's my little place to come and crawl into.
It's my little cave where the rays won't hit me.
But it's dark.
It always will be where there are walls
Where there are pits into which I can fall.
And I can cry
I can swim the rivers in my tears
I can make an ocean and disappear
Beneath the waves I'll lie asleep
Until I drown.

And even then, I'll hear this song
I'll dream about a day that's gone.
I'll mourn my loss of life and light
And my turning towards night.
I'll reminisce on times I tried
I'll stare ahead, refuse to fight
Refuse to give up my place of safety
My own humanity
My own protection from the sea
Of my own sadness.
I refuse to let the world tell me who I am.
For not even it knows what it is
Because it isn't even there.

What will be
When you will not love me?
What will be
If you leave from my life
I'll feel like a star fallen into an abyss.
I still won't know who I am
Who to call, who to replace you with.

My white thoughts, not made so by the snow outside
But by the colour of the flag I hold up.
I cannot charge into a war of passions
Because I cannot call it art and speak truth
And all I want is to speak truth, to be real
To be who I am.
Is it a tragedy?
When did this become two things?
When did being become a question?
And why?
Across this bridge I walk with my surrendering flag high
Aware of the ditch that I cross,
The fissure in the landscape I had tried so hard to close.
My palms, wounded, now hold on to the ropes along the sides
And my feet sway on the planks.
They may give way
And I may fall into the fissure
And die.
I close my eyes. Who is it that sits beneath the tree at the end?
The tree I cannot see, the tree from which I breathe.
Is it her? Character? A she? No, a tree, or what we may call it.
Branches, roots, leaves, a home for many
And the representation of character
With its shadow being the reputation that hides away always from the sun.

What did I write?