The Age of Selfishness

In a world where information becomes more accessible every day, people learn to self-educate themselves. So each one of us will be an artist, critic and in the same time we will continue to be a consumer. Our taste is cultivated through a tradition hardly transmitted with some communist infiltrations and a western dream which is still alive. And our taste seems to influence somehow the true and educated creators. This fact cannot help lowering the world culture, interest and implication. We develop an age of selfishness, of independence, of individualism. This proves we haven’t learned anything from the world history. People have come to evolve in the moment they have united, the moment they have overcome their city limits and the moment the cultural conflict has given birth to a medium or long term compromise. 

Sadly we can evaluate we are in a reiteration of Medieval Age. Luckily, hope is still alive, that even after us, there will be some brilliant minds who will know to judge our times as a preparation for the next humanity jump. 

Our selfishness may head again towards humanity together with the realisation that individually we are nothing. And our art will then be considered as a step to a future age of powerful feeling as we cannot meet at this stage. 

Beauty

Somehow deep down our hearts we feel the beauty of those around us. And I must say we unconsciously like certain people or certain things. It's actually surprising that we don't show that in a way that you can explain it. I have tried to put it somehow in words and the problem remains that we don't really know what to choose from our feelings. We try to find reasons where argument is more of a sentimental order. 
In all my education I have learned that there are three stages of a work of art analysis: the first one is the superficial recognition, the second one is based on the personal interpretation and the third one refers to the connection between our knowledge and the meaning it catches. Maybe we function the same way when recognising beauty around us. We try at first to establish the subject, then we recognise the specific group and then on the third level we contextualise  it based on our experience: beautiful of not. 
Beauty is somehow closer to our heart, so it needs to be similar to previous choices. And beauty is still too deep to be mentioned, noticed and expressed. 
May we find as much to judge so we feel beautiful and surrounded by beauty every day!

Every Day I Joggle… Like the Man Next to Me…

I was educated that I need to joggle on daily basis with all sorts of tasks. And it always seemed fun to do this. I noticed since very early age this constant pendulation of mom from bathroom to kitchen, from clothes to the playful cooking machine, from one room to the other and always with the thought for the others. I wanted to become this busy bee as she used to be because she seemed to be my hero. 

On the opposite side, starting with dad, the man next to me has always been quite cerebral and has tried to take things one at a time. He always proved to me that he could make things better this way. It became sort of frustrating. But mom would take me by her side and told me that us, women, are always amazing exactly because we joggle with all these tasks and that we can do what "they" do even better. 

Unfortunately things didn’t remain as mom would present them. Unfortunately capitalism brought each employee o challenge that our body is not yet fully prepared for. Tasks continue rising. Panic is bigger. 

In the new context, as a woman, I try to joggle with all the tasks at once like in a loom. While he knows how to take each project at a time and not become stressed… Until the corporation hits him too. But still he knows how to fight for his life beyond work. I stress, I panic. He has sorted everything out and he carries with dignity a cross he knows how to even hide behind a smile and a detachment. 

Work lays ever more pressure on “the ant’s shoulders", and they, men, start to joggle just like us with multiple tasks. Maybe they weren’t taught to do this, but they manage to handle it. And I watch simply amazed and fascinated by the calm and the adapting capacity. 

I become histerical and try to eliminate the stress and frustration I feel towards the "unjustice-hero" and his companions, but he remains always calm and knows how to treat things with diplomacy. 

He learns to sustain his point of view with arguments, and I raise the histeria. 

Everyday, personally, I wish to be more the man next to me. 

At the end of the day I wish to become the lady in distress… To find him, the man next to me, who can save me… Who can explain to me once again that things must be taken one at a time so you don’t mess them around… And that’s how I fall asleep calm with the solution my dad always had for the trouble me or mom made… take each task at a time…. The thought, that the man next to me is still different than me, gives me hope… 

Time for my own SELF

I discovered or better said rediscovered recently that burden which I have seen on the shoulders of my parents in the context of communist observation. What I mean by my observation I mean in a tender way the extremely undemocratic gesture which assumes invasion of the private space. 
And no wonder that we live under the impression that democracy means also invading of private space and that somehow we become VIPs if we are constantly under surveillance. I went once in a house where everything was closely supervised. And I was amused that each look I threw in the corners of the house, in the fake ceiling, in the mirrors on the corridors. I was amused that I knew I am nobody and yet those people were wasting their time watching a nobody. And I felt a little bit safe with so many people "watching" my back. I had a driver and a mistress who took care of all we wished for. And I had the seaside at a glance away and the beach and the waves. And I didn't feel threatened, but it had been my decision to go there and I wanted to experiment that feeling. My freedom to choose to throw myself in this experience. And then everything was justified by a will to overcome the limits, to see what such a house is like, an unjustified curiosity to test the evil before he became part of my universe. 
The time I want to spend with myself and my faces is a private time which nobody has the right to watch. This is part of my being which I decide to express in an intimate way, private and away from foreign eyes. Same thing happens with the phone. It's a mean of communication, not a tool to draw a psychological profile. If we are all followed, it means they are leaving from the premises that we are all felons.
I believe even more that my privacy is invaded if I am not warned by this. 

Safety has some limitations. The limits we must establish and we are mature enough to consider which is that private space which should be deprived of the foreign eyes and ears. 
Freedom means you can unravel without leaving traces, without having an impact on somebody's work, without being judged for your deeds. 

Freedom doesn't mean constraints and worries which we fell when the Big Brother watches over us. 

Big Brother doesn't make you a star but it invades in a brutal way and very aggressively the private life!

The Aspiring Innocence

The impact of aspirational was never trully evaluated or identified as a potential risk over the development of our society. 

We've always walked ahead in search of beauty, in association of new with a prosperous life. But a brief look back will make us understand and love more the power of traditional and old as heritage. If we realise that old can still have life, we will manage to still transmit the sustainability and perpetuation as two important life attributes. So we shouldn't wonder at the ephemerality and momentarity of each gesture. The "fast generation", as we should call those coming after us, will always be superficial and will rapidly forget of the impact of each event. 

But transmitting some attributes, distribution of a responsibility will manage to bring most back to "slow" the human kind.

And the moment in which the aspirational becomes adorable is a recent discovery in the lost look of a man in the traffic of a Bucharest mall. A man with poor clothes at the KFC order desk asks the cashier if they have something to drink. The cashier, a little bit surprised, told him they have Cola, Fanta, Sprite. The man verbally chose a Fanta and also excited took out his brand new credit card from his wallet to pay. He was so happy for the 5,9 lei spent via pos to the american giant that you could swear he had won the elections if you looked into his eyes. And the man was happy he could drink a Fanta in an aspirational environment paying with this new tool everybody uses. Most probably that smile and enthusiasm will stay for a long time in my memory. The lesson of life was a scary one: the exploitation of innocence to the aspirational shows us we fall often in that trap if we are already card users, delighted by the new "tool".

We are sure victims in front of advertising we embrace as a standard of life. 

For all the rest it sure is MasterCard.

The Nationalism With a Human Face

In the '90s we were crazy about the Coca-Cola bottle, who's drink we would taste only on special occasions, we had moderate access to McDonald’s, it was a holiday when we went to Pizza Hut and we hated the trip to the market every Saturday among market stalls, despite the crowd of people, despite getting all the germs. Now, it looks like everything we touch is beautiful and we need something real in order to survive. 

So I'm beginning to like the crowdedness at the market, I started buying from stalls, to manage the germs we meet at every corner and I believe the Coca-Cola bottles are no longer such a big attraction. We are trying to live healthier and somehow the return to nationalism makes us believe that the problems we know will disappear in the shadow of some long forgotten times. These problems did not exist when the communism existed and the fruits from the country side were the good ones. Although Soya would be found before ’89, we considered it bad quality and harmful, though now we embrace it as healthy food. 

Then and now, occident and nationalism. 

And I wonder if it isn’t this tendency we feel even in the branding of the products that exploits our emotional nostalgy we feel in the context of some problems we didn’t know in the past ages. 

Everyday I Become More the Man Next to Me

The society we are living in has taught us that women need to take care of themselves. But ironically enough, we weren’t raised to take care of ourselves. My mom and my grannies have always taught me that girls should wear skirts, dresses, and constantly be preocupied by making things more beautiful and taking care of the household. Yet all these teachings got lost somewhere along the way. 

From the recent years’ experience, from a close observation of the opposite sex, it always seemed like HE provokes me to be in a constant competition with him. But judging things even deeper, I believe that the competition with the opposite sex has started from early school days. They could be relaxed and comfortable with themselves, and we had to be posh, wake up earlier, stay stiff in our perfect outfits. And why? 

So one day I decided I had to succeed in being just as cool and nice as them. And I believe it was also a man who told me a secret in the unsatisfied 16th year of my life. He told me that it doesn’t actually matter how you look, but how the others perceive you. And if you are the ugliest person, but to your audience, you are very sure of yourself, you will be percieved as beautiful. I looked at him and I suddenly saw all his flaws beyond his self-confidence. And then I understood the secret of the opposite sex is exactly this self contentment. They had their own uncertainties at that age, but they somehow knew how to behave "like men". And since then I learned attitude is the one I have to race with. 

Now if I think deeper into it, I realise that my love for trainers, basketball trainers and other sport shoes is coming also from the admiration toward them, the ones who manage always to impress through self confidence, through trust and powerful gestures. And I decided that in a man’s world it’s not necessarly good to wear high heels, to be helpless and to be a constant cry for help. It’s not in their genes to take care. At least not in those I see around me. Yes, my father used to help mom walk on the street, he knew how to hold mom by the hand, to offer her his strong arm and to make her feel good for being helpless. But there aren’t such men in a world in which us, women, constantly fight for equal rights. They don’t fight to show us they can take care of kids and they can clean up the house. For all these they have Master Card. In cooking they are for sure much better than us. 

And I believe the competition has continued when it came to the technical revolution. I noticed how my best friend had a safe place among guys because she mastered this new field called technology. So, I had to know something about that. It’s not ladylike, but it’s nice and pleasant to be there in the middle of discussions. And their discussions would always be relaxed, without passion or egos. They are always at the same level. There’s no rooster in the conversation. 

And there are a few more things that we stress about too much. Men have a style, that no matter where they go, who they meet, what they talk about, they don’t mind laughing. Us, women, we try always to be aware of how we laugh, why, about who, if the subject is according to our mood and so on. 

And the mood for us is a very severe thing. We are actually constantly unhappy, discontent, willing for more. And I wonder why can’t we just be happy with what we have? I mean what can be so bad that we cannot be thankful for what we have? The cave will become empty? There will be no more provisions?

Hey, but we could go hunting! If they can do it, why couldn’t we?

Every day, with every new challenge, I am becoming more the man next to me. And it seems sometimes that my shadow becomes manly. And that doesn’t seem like a good challenge. I like the man next to me to be in flash and bones, to have a firm voice who knows to impose some limits to my oscilant behaviour, to know me when I am mad and to know his part is more important than my competitive play. But I believe it’s very hard to admit we are vulnerable and we need a little guidance in life even at this age. We are proud, while they know that if today was not a good day for hunt, tomorrow the sun will shine again. To us the sunset seems the end of a cycle, and the empty glass is getting dry at the end of a cycle, otherwise you waste a good wine. 

This constant move is becoming tiring! Let’s admit it, we are trying, but it’s not always perfect and it’s useless. They will always be next to us. Closer or further their part is essential. I would take off my hat, but I would be just like them, so I will take a bow and hold my hand up for a gentle kiss and I will close by hoping those who will read these lines will understand the essence of the destructive fight of our society.