all about id

"One day I carried thirty pounds of wood a distance of file miles. Another day while hiding in the forest I covered my eyes with make up to see how they'd come out."

i took a small break tonight from the heat, the heat of exams, these ghostly, ghastly exams banging like mad on the exit door of my superego, trying to take over and suck out all the fun. (speaking of which, my superego is losing lots of ground lately to the hedonistic id, but it still knows more tricks; e.g. the first sentence was very much good superego P.R.).

but well, during this break i did a small unscientific study on the aesthetics of my face. it's this new long hair thing, combined with the questionable possibility of being more feminine derived from years of awkward haircuts and my charming, but boyish walk. there was some recent cinesseurial influence, too. i proceeded as follows: i put my hair in a due i could never re-do (hi!), applied make-up, and turned on photo booth.

mind you, i don't think it's pretty stupid to take pictures of yourself with a computer, then put them all together and publish them online somewhere, hoping people will appreciate or even be amused by the content and not think of how sad and narcissistic and insecure it really is you did it. i know it's stupid. which is why i didn't publish them online. the one below is an evocative, but unintelligible exception.

contrast was added to protect the integrity of this webpage

so i took them anyway, and as they're lying in a diversion folder called pictures of meadows, flowers and sunsets, i went on with analyzing and writing down my conclusions. of course, the results of this pseudo-study shall not be published either, but the superego P.R. team released the following statement: "the battle between the little-unaware-tomboy and estrogen-regulated-society-inoculated-girly-girl is far from over, but as they say in curling: let the best man win!"

but now, gentlemen, to bed! we rise at dawn!, said the superego to the ego, as the id wasn't listening.

you have my soul and i have your money

if calves are babies of cows, elephants or whales and every woman has two, uncomplicated but grammatically irreverent logic would have it that all women are cows. or elephants. or whales.

but men have calves, too. so they must be cows as well.

and we're all equal, finally.

why i'd like to be a cat

the enfant terrible of the citrus family, mr. grapefruit, has an identity issue. you'd think he's the fruit of the grape or maybe they're somewhat related, so you could realistically expect him to be crunchy yet soft and sweet just like a grape is. but he's not. he's bitter and difficult with deceiving on top. i like him anyway, though, and even if every attempt at devouring him ends in a mess, i remain ridiculously positive. just like i once liked this boy called benignus who i suspected very early on would hurt me terribly, but i acted against my better judgement and my own interest, just like one does in love, and my only consolation was the little laugh i had to myself in the end at the irony of benignus' evil side, cause har har, things are not what they seem to be, and benignus was actually malignus.

but if i turned into a cat i wouldn't care about eating grapefruit. i'd ignore it just like i would ignore anything that doesn't move frantically or looks like dinner. and boys called benignus couldn't hurt me, firstly because of my feisty cat claws and secondly because everyone's name would be spelled in meows, which would make benignus (or anyone else by any other name) somewhat non-existant by my new rules of perception. i'd be happy licking my paws, listening to jazz and maybe sometimes getting a bit confused and howling at the moon. or i could be william burroughs' cat, junkie. that would be pretty cool, too. except he's dead.

sleeping sissy

for entertainment and also differentiation purposes, we develop certain likes and dislikes throughout our lives which make us more or less idiosyncratic, depending especially on how well we groom our dislikes into dramas of different proportions.

in a top three major dislikes list i would always include afternoon naps (i hate them so much, so very much), which could also feature on all or any of the following lists: things to do when you're almost dead, top ways to waste your time (besides facebook), 10 ways to politely avoid seeing people you live with and natural ways to authentic bed hair.

today's afternoon nap came into being despite all my efforts to prevent it and had an abrupt and loud end: i was talking to someone in my dream, about naps themselves, when i noticed his face looking worriedly at my chest. i had no time to react awkwardly because he immediately said "your heart, it's gonna blow!" and then i heard a big noise, kind of like 12804 cheap chinese fireworks blowing up at the same time, my heart exploded and i woke up.

sax and violins

nothing makes me more sad on beautiful sunny days than couples walking hand in hand, with gloomy looks on their faces. you know the kind, looking in different directions, almost as if there was nothing to say to each other, walking the same way the losing team leaves the field, facial expression similar to that of remembering the day your first pet died. and as hand-in-hand is pretty disturbing anyway, with all the questions and sighs it generates in the mind of the standalone viewer in springtime, if you add the gloom you've got a whole different type of horror. facial gloom and hand-in-hand simply don't go together, cause they stand for opposite things (e.g. boredom vs. bedroom, dead end vs. happiness, there might have been love vs. this could be love etc. etc) and they cause maximum confusion in my apparently cynical but really hopeful mind.

here's a slogan for a new kind of spring cleaning: fuck habit. break up this spring!

the lion ate the dingo who ate the baby who couldn't even chew

i was biking somewhere, with two other people, on a road that had no bike lane. scared as i was due to that, it got worse: on the side of the road, in a small lake by a house, a guy in a car and his wife were trying to drive out of the lake. (i know this was because i saw some scenes from pierrot le fou last night). we stopped to look or to help, i'd like to think it was the latter, and as we were sitting (maybe we were just looking!) in the field also close to the house, a man with a dog came by. we were all watching this lion who was lurking in the field and had his eye on the people in the car. the dog was silly and wanted to make contact with the lion, the man said he was going to eat us anyway so i said, calmly and collectedly, let's blow this joint. we tip-toed out of the field, the lion had no idea. we decided it's too late to go where we wanted to go, so we split up and decided to go home. so i'm alone on my bike and i look back and see the lion chasing me! fuck! a woman-eating lion! and my bike chain is all rusty!

and then i woke up. at 8.30. double fuck! 

home alone as i was, i put on some lipstick to match my pink rubber gloves, and got to work. i understood: the lion was my conscience, chasing me to do my homey chores. which i have done. in the process of cleaning the bathroom i met with the realization that it's the first time i'm doing this. the whole thing was absolutely weird because it was very much like a really cute flirt: kinda fun, subtly dirty and sort of sexual (!!) and made me feel very proud at the end, even though i'd still be sleeping alone tonight.

afterwards, while kneading, my mind wandered off and my enthusiasm for a job well done plummeted at the thought that i have become a weird future housewife hybrid, which was never part of the plan (mainly because there never was any plan), and i would've face slapped myself if it wasn't for all the sticky dough on my hands.

but maybe it's a fair trade: all my hopes and most of my self-esteem for a cake that no one will remember in few days and a bathroom that will look dirty in another few. 

aurora

"hell is other people."

j.p. sartre

for about 80% of the watch time, aurora felt confusing. i didn't know where it was going, but i stuck with it. i wanted to know. the build-up lasted for about two hours, more or less, but it played with my memories and it got me thinking about things i never thought about before, even if i should have, in a way in which the build up was more than two hours, it was so much of my life experience.

aurora could very well seem a cinematic aberration to some. maybe to the same degree it can seem a masterpiece to others. and this is a clue to why it is a masterpiece. there is no clear definition of whose side to be on, there is almost no information (till the very end), all rules are twisted and broken, the main character speaks very little, and when he does, he's always cool and collected or refractory. i believe the key of the movie is in understanding his drama (where "drama" is used loosely, as his drama is something you can't really comprehend, and once you do, for real, it doesn't make sense to relate it to anything).

his killings aren't fueled by hate, madness or what not. but that's again, relative. and he kills his "relatives", as his last resort to making sure his daughters end up right. or better, at least. this makes little sense to you, maybe, but it makes a whole lot of it to me (i used my utter subjectivity glasses, yet again): he's a man who knows he's going to die soon and he wants to leave things in order. his killings are like spring cleaning (spring killing), or, more like tidying up after yourself. in a very radical manner, yes. they are unjustly just and, if not, justified. 

he doesn't find his wife fit to care for their daughters. he doesn't find justice fit to understand (anything). "i don't trust that justice would be able to understand the complexity of the relationship my wife and i had." and probably no one would. 

to me, cristi puiu achieved what no one else did. i've never seen a movie that was so far away, and yet so  invasive, penetrating and complex.

fondled in gastric acid

the thing about idioms is that you often disregard their words for their socially accepted meaning. romanian folklore is loaded with such non-sensical but deeply-meaningful sayings. i'll enumerate a few, amuse myself at the fact that they make even less sense in english and then get to my point: 

the little stump tips the big cart / don't trade the sparrow in your hand for the crow on the fence / good cheese in dog skin / he who steals an egg today will steal an ox tomorrow / where there's no head, beware feet! / he went as an ox and came back a cow / he who wakes up early gets far / the sparrow dreams of corn flour / don't put your nose where your pot isn't boiling / work is a gold bracelet / where you hit and where it breaks / the dog dies from the long journey and the idiot from caring about someone else / shard laughs at broken pot / admitting your fault means being half forgiven /

but alas!, my point is in the stomach. love passes through the stomach - the ultimate romanian genius cleverly mixing both gastronomy and love in the form of some kind of advice and/or encouragement, used abusively by elderly taunting aunts, who want to make a point that you should learn to cook, when your problem isn't that at all, but might rhyme with it (i.e. you look like captain hook).

so i keep repeating love passes through the stomach to try and make sense of it and its naked truth hits me like the last drop of ketchup in the bottle that wasn't stored upside down: the transformation of that which passes through the stomach (into that which passes through our pipes) is the most sensible metaphor ever used for love. that i know of.  


later edit: romanian folklore might be rooted in dinosaur civilisation.

http://allosaurus.tumblr.com/

i never said i was deep but i am profoundly shallow

(here's a post of shallow profoundness, hidden deep.)

(we dont make them like we used to.)

freeze, don't move

just when i thought my late teens were over, proof otherwise hit me in the head like jet lee's shadowless kick: as i was uncomfortably sitting down in the tube carrying me from work to house, and as insecurities and questions about the future, about what will ever become of me, essential/vital trivialities that only grown-ups worry about were flooding my mind, the metro stopped unaffected at one of its stops and through a glass, darkly (i.e. through the forrest of big bellies and stretched armpits clouding my view) i could see the corner of an ad for a tate exhibition. more precisely:

the actual exhibition 

i read it in my head and i smiled out loud (a clear indication that i still have magical residue in this old head of mine). now, we wait. (and very soon we go to tate).