Owlspotting

It could have been the beer. Sometimes it is the beer. Sometimes beer is just one’s cover.

I don’t keep many (of my own) secrets to myself and I believe the one’s that have not surfaced are hidden because I haven’t found an understandable way to put them out there. To me, life is a collection of stories and the only way I can function in it is to tell the stories of others and the stories of myself. These keep me grounded, they keep my eyes open and they teach me about other people and about myself.

Listening to myself last night as I talked about the need to tell stories (something intimately linked to a pretty consuming project I’m working on) I realized how much I depend on them for strength. Although the coherence of my argument still gives me chills, it’s something I’ve sensed for a while. I came across the text below on Monday when I picked up a package of stuff John sent from the States. Apart from the crazy pink dots, the box contained my master’s project (written in 2005). In turn, the project contained a self-evaluation of the time I spent in journalism graduate school–something that reads to me like the draft of a mission statement.

I hope I’m still walking this path.

As I get ready to wrap up the most incredible two years of my life, I can’t resist the temptation to look back. It was a Missouri summer day – the kind that takes your breath away and draws sweat from your body like a water pump – when I exited the St. Louis airport. I was tired, confused, scared and feeling like I had never written a lead, interviewed a human being or ever published a story.

In those first days in America I realized that the moment you switch languages, the past takes a back seat and it all begins… again.

Twenty months later I remain tired, but I am no longer scared or confused. I fought so many battles with myself and my journalism that I stopped counting the falls and the comebacks. I would be cheating and holding back if I took the standard approach of saying the master’s program helped me grow as a journalist. Yes, of course it did. But my most impressive growth exceeds my chosen profession.

During my time in Columbia I grew as a human being, learning so much about myself and the world around me that my previous knowledge resembled an archaic stable next to a modern farmhouse. The tool I used to understand myself and the world I lived in was journalism. Journalism allowed me to become more confident, discover new things, embrace people, tell stories, mature, love, cry, smile, and understand.

As I leave the Missouri School of Journalism, I know stories are born within me and they are in my heart and in my brain as much as they are in my notes. My fights, pains, joys, experiences and quirks bring as much to a written report as a wonderful quote or a scene does.

Reporting and writing cover stories for the NewSunday Missourian allowed me to articulate what I always felt deep inside: a story is as much about me as it is about the world I talk about. This is not about ego; it’s what the Missourian’s executive editor Tom Warhover called “the place of sentimentality in a news article.” Sentimentality is the sadness of the character as much as it is the struggle of the writer to bring that sadness to the page. Sentimentality is the perfect quote that captures a person as much as it is the time spent to get it. Sentimentality is not being able to break-up with your story – because if you do, the story is dead no matter how alive you think your characters make it.

If two years ago I was scared to challenge the idea of hard news as manifested in a city council story or a police brief, I am now able to make a clean break from it. Being a journalist means different things to different people. The city council story is not my journalism because I need to grow while working on a story. I need to grow not only in terms of acquiring information, but in terms of becoming a better person. Telling the stories of people trying to slow down their lives or chronicling the journey of a Pakistani man to find God as part of a story package on the struggles within Islam, have allowed me understand my place in the world, reevaluate myself as a human being and challenge my thoughts on journalism and life itself.

Not all stories will be as challenging and as rich in meaning but I know that if I keep looking for stories as large as the world itself, I will at least remain in the market of ideas. What I get at this market can make people’s lives richer. The more we understand of the world, the better we’ll feel in it. If all journalists jump on the breaking news and huddle like sheep at the place of impact we’ll be too caught in the moment to remember it means little in a larger context.

I feel my place is outside the moment. To make a parallel with time, if one’s journalism is the minute, mine is the hour that minute belongs to.

I loved stories since I was a little boy and to me they were always were more than just what the text said. When I was five, the story of the prince rescuing the kingdom from the hands of the evil dragon was the fight of the individual against the onslaught of hardship. Now, at 24, the struggle of Muslims to marginalize references to violence when it comes to their faith is every person’s challenge to defeat preconceived ideas and try to engage in dialogue. The spiritual growth of a person has always fascinated me. The development of ideas, skills, beliefs are at the core of our lives and they determine our direction and ultimately, our legacy.

Fuchsia dots are taking over this city. Not my dots. Hers.

As I’ve done for more than five years now (last time, here), I will indulge in a little nostalgia and give props to ab4. They are playing tonight in Suburbia.

There is little excuse for being silent on your blog, so I won’t venture into that territory. But I do want to use the tried and tested trick of letting someone else write when you can’t do it. A few weeks ago Elena left a very thoughtful comment to this post. I wanted to make it more visible earlier, but I kept forgetting.

Here it is (lightly edited). Finally.

Fabulously well put, I should say!

Thank you, for writing! It’s good to know that u are not alone, and somebody else is experiencing the same sort of feeling as you.

After reading your posts I dare say you enjoyed your time in the States to the max. Even more than me, I should say for reasons it is not worth spending the time to explain right here. However, it’s interesting to see how you went ahead and bought home appliances. I did almost the same stuff. I bought bedroom furniture a week after my return to Bucharest, right before buying Christmas presents…

And this was out of a need to own something after switching apartments and houses (3 in 3 years), buying and discarding Goodwill furniture, let alone hand-me-down sort of type vacuum cleaners, irons and things of that sort… Basically, after almost 6 months since my return home, I cannot really define Bucharest as home, although it’s been my home since I was born. Funny huh, how 3 years of one’s life (spent in the States) can define you better than the many more years that basically represent your life…

What’s even funnier is that people are listening to your stories, and seem to understand, or at least they make efforts to relate. Only there is nothing to relate to for them. When you try to explain this to a co-national who’s never been away from home, or even worse to a friend who spent years abroad (be it in the States or Europe) but who never ceased to identify his home with Bucharest/Romania, it is like having a monologue. That is the sad, honest truth.

It’s sort of like the same thing of trying to explain to an American, that is making him/er understand why exactly “super” is “too pretentious a designation for the Romanian equivalent” to quote your exact words. For an American to understand the exact meaning of your statement, would be impossible unless he or she has lived or met or seen the Romanian super….

I am equally amazed and pleasantly surprised to see that you are going through the same process and experiencing your return home in the same way I am. Although you fit right in in the US, and you felt so at home and all, you are having a hard time thinking of your present home as “home”.

Keep up the good work though. Keep buying home appliances, furniture or whatever you might need. It works. With time your apt will definitely look like home and will give you that permanence feeling you long for…

I am still buying home appliances. My next target is a lamp to make reading in bed more plausible.

Martie 27 e plin de pete roz. In maslinarie, sub maslinul in forma de carja, ea ii culege firimiturile de covrig de pe camasa. Cu toate ca era prima cafea dupa multe zile, ar fi vrut sa o poata savura la umbra. Acolo unde casa face o curba brusca se joaca, ca deobicei, copiii—astazi balaia Lapte il da pe Fulgi cu capul de sevaletul crem pe care mama l-a aruncat pe geam pe motiv ca “nu-l intelege”. Se auzea doar zornaitul pietrisului de pe aleea pe care isi rupsese tibia in urma cu doua veri. Pe malul marii, potolul de iepuri trage in teapa o haita de veverite, iar barbatul casei tine sa se minuneze: “Ce roz sangereaza bestiile!”. Gasise cadrul perfect, dar degetul ii ramase intepenit pe declansator, refuzand sa apese.

Disclaimer: Don’t bother trying to figure this out (or translate it). It’s a sort of an exquisite corpse.

I can’t see the sun anymore—it’s now a smidgeon of light behind grayish clouds, as if it turned away to fluff the pillows and get ready to tuck itself in.

I’m not a sucker for sunsets and I’m not one to indulge much in star-gazing or in the occasional open-sky-as-a-parable-for-freedom banter. I once dumped a girl because she used to do too much of it.

“Oh, those stars clogging the sky, you should have seen them,” she could have said.

“Oh my God, please don’t go there,” I must have thought to myself.

But I do let the occasional imagery fool me, especially when accompanied by the sound of the train rocking the tracks (the draft of this post was written on the Bucharest-Sighisoara IC). I’m a train kind of guy—it has this romantic quality, a ‘loner on a mission’-allure that, while cheesy, I find attractive. It’s comforting to crash into your assigned spot, open your book and let go.

And the occasional gaze out the window just as you’ve escaped a tormenting passage describing stomach-removal followed by an orgy involving spray-painted pink bunnies (hypothetical reading material) is like the bite of chocolate you take at night after you brushed your teeth: clichéd but fantastically rewarding and awkwardly self-affirming.

But I’m afraid I’ve derailed the discussion from where I intended it to go. Wednesday night I saw Cristian Nemescu’s beautiful “California Dreamin’ (endless)” and one thing I can certainly say about it is that I wasn’t nearly as perky on the bus ride home as I am now (Lavi knows).

The movie is ruthless in its portrayal of an absurd situation that takes place at a desperate time for Eastern Europe and involves characters desperate to hang on to their personal quests.

In the movie, a train packing American NATO troops (led by Armand Assante) and military equipment bound for Kosovo is stopped by the station master (a devastating Razvan Vasilescu) of the small Romanian village of Capalnita. The train ends up sequestered there for five days because it lacks proper customs forms. The station master is a crook and the master of his fiefdom: he collects (or simply pockets) mountains of bribes from passing freight trains: everything from cigarettes to bags of cement. But he stops the NATO train under the legitimate pretense that it doesn’t have documentation.

As a recent returnee and a former Romanian exile, this is when my heart began racing. This was kafkian bureaucracy and clerk-bullying at its best: people at the mercy of a hypocritical scumbag who randomly decides to use the law today, while ignoring it on every other occasion.

Many of us who’ve left the country have left because they didn’t want to fight that. Many of us who returned still think we can change it. What hurt me most is that the man’s actions (the character is brilliantly written and is far from being one-sided although I know I make him as such) are often dismissed by people as being „the way things are.” He is a prime example of how things should not be and he illustrates the failure of an entire system, not just one station master. The fate of the NATO train was chosen randomly—little peons in the system often have that power—but its long-term stay was sealed by a lack of action at all the levels above. Nobody brought the customs papers from Bucharest and all the way up to the minister people tried the same approach of „fixing the problem” by throwing more bribes at it.

The station master-type freaks people out because of the power he wields and I admit that this archetype scares me, too. That is why Nemescu’s movie is so good. Because it shows what journalism has taught me in recent years—even bad men sometimes have good (or at least understandable) reasons for their actions. In this case, the station master stopped the Americans because they never came to save him and his family after World War II. Blocking their passage to Kosovo, where they would aid the US army bombing the Serbs, was his revenge on what life had bestowed upon him. Not to mention that stopping the Americans somehow feeds his illusion that he can keep his daughter (Maria Dinulescu) from eloping into the world.

The Americans, though mostly a group character, are no caricatures either. They slowly give in to local temptations (yes, that means women), allowing some personality to shine through their soldiers’ uniforms. The captain though has his own obsession—he has to finish the mission and get the train to Kosovo no matter what.

It’s hard to believe that the American captain and the station master understand their mutual obsessions. Their devotion to their mission, which Nemescu conveyed so clinically to the viewer, is too blinding for them to open up to a stranger.

California Dreamin’ is a movie about the early times of when the West met East; about a clash and mesh of cultures in the unlikeliest of circumstances, where not even a translator can do much good. It pits American idealism and slight naiveté to Romanian laziness and slight cunningness and the result is epic chaos on a minimal scale. In such chaos, the only hope lies with the dream of escaping—whether it’s the train escaping its imprisonment or the station master’s daughter escaping his grip.

Nemescu and his co-writers penned one of the most touching tales of longing, obsession and cultural difference I’ve ever seen. The movie is sad, but hopeful in that things move on, which in itself is a metaphor for the backstory of the movie. Nemescu and his sound engineer died in a stupid car crash before the editing was finished, but this rough won the „Un certain regard” section at the 2007 Cannes film festival.

Romania has always dreamed of the Americans coming and whatever we feel about them today (be it hatred for how their late and often condescending arrival or appreciation for their long-expected and just as often enthusiastic arrival) is borne out of this sense of longing. And for some, like the station master, this longing was endless and overpowering.

I’m full.

Every once in a while (alright, every once in a very rare while) you get the chance to spend that perfect weekend peppered with just the right amount of food. Saturday was burger time and Sunday–following another lovely American tradition–was brunch time.

Just a few days ago I was chatting with Mirona over beers about how awesome American breakfast was: not just the variety of salty foods and omelets, but the myriads of soft textures and heavenly flavors that reside in pastries–everything from pancakes to scones to sweet breads. Couple with that, Lavi shared a personal fantasy of the “hangover party,” which involved getting together with people for coffee and such after one of those rougher nights on the town.

These conversations, along with my own personal longing for American breakfast and a new muffin pan purchased as a birthday present to myself, led me to the logical conclusion that Sunday should be brunch day.

And it was. The menu was simple but tasty:

- Pepper and onion omelet;
- Strawberry Banana muffins (we used this recipe as a guide);
- Mimosa cocktails (1/3 orange juice, 2/3 champagne).

I’ll take credit for chopping and cutting a bunch of the ingredients as well as finding recipes and offering the much needed cooking space and encouragement. As usual, most of the cooking credit goes to Jo and Lavi. We make a pretty good kitchen triad and we’re available for weddings, funerals and various spontaneous gatherings. All we ask for in return is a decent working soundtrack and the right to share your personal story with the world.

Are we worth it? Just check out our dream-like muffins below (and this was our first attempt, mind you!)

A couple of weeks ago I found myself drooling at the thought of an American hamburger. One of those that require you to handle ground meat, assemble the patties, grill them (in a pan will work just fine), slap a piece of cheese on them and so on. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted a hamburger and I was going to make one even if some ingredients were hard to assemble on a visit to the giant Cora store.

What I didn’t have was good lettuce and some of that seriously American cheese. I made do with some Romanian cheese (the softer kind) and Lavi suggested some of the leftover cabbage. The onions and the tomatoes proved lovely though. And the hamburger buns were not really hamburger buns, but they were OK.

Here’s what we came up with:

Perusing the drafts folder in my e-mail, I came across an excerpt from Svetlana Boym’s book, “The Future of Nostalgia.” I met Ms. Boym, a Harvard professor, in Boston a few months back and we chatted over coffee about nostalgia, its post 9/11 manifestation in the West (her book came out just before and she said she’d revise some themes today) and other pretentious-sounding topics.

It was a pleasant late-afternoon, one of those dominated by concepts rather than facts. For some reason I believe Thursday is the ideal afternoon for concepts to trump facts. That being said, here’s more theoretical ranting on the idea of “home.”

When exiles return “back home” they occasionally realize that there is nothing homey back there, and that they feel more at home in the exilic retreat that they have learned to inhabit. The exile became home, and it is the experience of returning to the country of birth that might become unsettling.

One shouldn’t ask writers in exile whether they plan to go back; it is condescending, and presumes that the biography of a nation carries more weight than the biography of an individual and his eccentric imagined community. The tear of nostalgia is not a tear of return; one doesn’t become one with the object of longing.

The booming sound of the giant speakers was pounding us all.

I’ve been tortured by concert speakers before, but the warm butter way in which the violin layered itself over the bass sent chills down my spine. People all around me were waving their arms in the air and jumping, their feet touching the pavement for just enough bounce to leap again. This muggy Bucharest May night was the perfect backdrop for Gogol Bordello to rip into “Immigrant punk“, their wonderful track about alienation.

Music has often been a solitary experience for me, a personal exile I craved to share with others, but rarely could. On that night, bobbing, bumping and bruising with my friends, it was no longer just mine. As the band sang “Immigrant punk,” I remember grabbing Tibi and Jo, who had suspended themselves on the guardrail, by the shoulders and kissing them on the head. (Luiza was next, and Lavi must have received similar treatment at some point during the show.)

On stage, Eugene Hutz sang:

Of course we immigrants wanna sing all night long
Don’t you know the singing saves the troubled soul?

Yes, Gogol Bordello is a fun band and their Bucharest gig was an awesome concert. But this post isn’t (just) about them.

A couple of weeks back I was rushing home from the neighborhood supermarket hauling a vacuum cleaner. I had just had an air conditioning unit installed and I had debris all over my rug. The men who installed it had a horrid fight with my super (too pretentious a designation for the Romanian equivalent but I’ll go with it) and the two parties even traded threats like “Go hang yourself,” “I’ll head-butt you in the mouth,” or “I’ll slap you with the back of my hand and you’ll go to sleep for five minutes.”

Social hysteria aside, as I started sucking up the dust I realized that the AC unit, along with the new fridge and stove that I had bought a few days before, was more than just a shiny addition to my Bucharest apartment. It was one of those pathetic cries for permanence that some people—me for instance—answer by buying domestic appliances.

I say this because everything is still about being ‘here’ as opposed to ‘there.’ Everything is still about no longer being a visitor. Everything is still about re-claiming the idea of home. Everything is still about being in control of a new, yet familiar, reality.

One of the saddest things I have come to realize is that all of the above are my responsibility and I have to do all this (largely) by myself.

You see, I blush when people mention the United States because I perk up no matter how disconnected from the conversation I might have been. And it’s not because I’m one of those “America is the land of honey and milk” preachers; it’s because for a long time America was home. So when people want to talk about the reality I’m familiar with, I start buzzing. “Yes, please please please please. Let’s talk about America. What can I tell you? Is there anything you want to know? Can I tell you something even though you might not care?”

I told Lavi I’m still largely a visitor being shown around the streets on Bucharest. Sure, I know those streets like my back pockets, but they are not my streets (yet). They are their streets and I follow their lead. And what’s most irritating is that I can’t show them MY streets, can’t have them drink in my bars, sleep in my bed, use my toothpaste (or even my toothbrush), or go to my concerts.

I will soon own these streets myself and I will become one of them. But they will never become one of me because they never experienced my reality with me. I know it’s childish (and corny) to think I’m losing something of my American experience by not being able to convey it to others, but I feel this deeply.

The childish kisses I gave my friends Friday were both an acceptance of this natural process of loss and a small thank you note for the work they do as guides.

There is a Bright Eyes song (music talks about a lot of things) that says:

All your friends and sedatives mean well, but make it worse
Every reassurance just magnifies the doubt
Better find yourself a place to level out

I think I know what that means, or at least I know what it means to me. I “leveled out” as Eugene Hutz and Gogol Bordello crashed on the heads of a couple of thousand screaming Romanians at Arenele Romane.

I might not be “home” yet, but I don’t feel like a transient gypsy anymore.

Somehow, on a muggy night, at an outdoor rock show in Bucharest, I have traded transience for permanence.

And such.

Can you see us? Sure you can–we’re on the bottom left of the screen, where the yellow shirt becomes illuminated about 11 seconds in. Yes, I’m the one wearing yellow.