Filip

Filip e înalt și brunet (cu părul negru de fapt) și pielea albă ca de porțelan. Are barbă și destul de mult păr pe piept, și pe spate, și pe mâini și pe fund, iar printre se întrevăd multe alunițe ca niște constelații ascunse. Contrastul ăsta dintre pielea albă și barba neagră îi stă bine și îmi place mult. Are niște ochi mari și rotunzi, cu multă bunătate în ei. Și niște gene lungi, negre și stufoase. Îmi plac buzele lui în mod special. Are arcul lui Cupid foarte pronunțat, chiar ascuțit aș spune, iar de acolo marginile buzelor coboară vertiginos spre colțurile gurii. Și o buză inferioară plină și cărnoasă. 

22 August 2023 Playlist

Night Crawling – Miley Cyrus feat Billy Idol

Prinsoner – Miley Cyrus feat Dua Lipa

Movie List

Movie list for the week of 14 October 2018.

Red Sparrow

Atomic Bomb

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

The Little Hours (best so far)

Logan Lucky (good movie)

Florida Project (from last week)

On loneliness

I realize that one of the feelings I have experienced most often throughout my years has been loneliness. Loneliness that I have constantly tried to escape, hide away from, play hide and seek. It seems to eventually always find me. And I am not talking about those moments when you simply enjoy being by yourself, when your sole company is what you need and what you crave for. I am talking about those moments when, sometimes, the presence of other people is not enough to make the loneliness go away. Those moments when you feel loneliness like a pang in your chest, followed by a slow and increasing anxiety. Of what? That the universe is infinite, that I don’t understand the concept of no borders and am afraid I will be swallowed into this enormity, infinity of space.

My mind brings me great joy and great misery. I would not trade myself for being anyone else. I would miss my thoughts, my window to life. And at the same time sometime I am trapped by the glitches of my own mind. I have been looking for escapes for such a long time, and sometime, like now, I wonder what to do. Who to reach out to? Who can I use as a balm on this wound that never heals? And I am searching for a solution. And I don’t know if this is even the best way to go about it. Is there any shore, will I ever reach the shore? Maybe I am bound to forever drift in the middle of the ocean. And I don’t know if I am ok with that, if I can accept this possible reality. And I search, and I search for someone to share my thoughts with, that thinks like me, or at least I think we think alike. Somebody to blow away the loneliness and bring back the peace of water. The rest of still air and hot days. Should I wait for this, or, instead, turn to loneliness and embrace it. As part of me, part of my life, part of existence. And say what to it?

Red beets with feta cheese

Since I started working I barely cooked anything. Honestly it’s very convenient, I get free lunch at work that I spread out until 5 pm or so, and in the evening many times I am not that hungry, also too lazy to cook, and cereal with soy milk is such an easy dinner. However, somehow I decided I need to cook a bit better and what I realized is missing is a list of about 20 quick recipes that I can always go to when I need to feed myself with my own two hands but I don’t want to spend too much time on it.

Reed beets with feta cheese is quite easy and quick, even for the laziest (like me).

Ingredients:

feta cheese (solid or crumbled)

red beets – not the already cooked ones

sesame oil

sesame seeds

How:

Peel the beets and slice them (not too thin). I slice them so that they cook faster. Put the sliced beets on a tray, pour some sesame oil on top (it does not matter how much; you can’t put too little and you can’t put too much), put a sheet of aluminum foil on top (I did this assuming that if I don’t do this, the beets will get too dry). Put it in the oven at about 200 degrees Celsius (Fahrenheit users, you’ll have to go through the same pains as I do when I try to cook recipes that use weird measures such as cups, ounces, Fahrenheit) for about 20-30 min. To check if the beets are done, poke them with a fork. They shouldn’t be too hard.

After you take the beets out of the oven, put them on a plate. Toast some sesame seeds (briefly – this is just because raw sesame seeds make you think that they would taste better toasted) and put them on top of the beets. Crumble the feta cheese on top. And eat!

Autumn happenings

First, a post that I started at least a month ago and saved it as a draft with the noble intention of writing more before I publish t. That obviously did not happen, so before this stays as a draft for years I am publishing it. Today.

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I have not posted something on this “blog” since end of August I see, and since then I have been thinking that I should post something, but somehow the ideas did not really come together. I think since the beginning of this blog I have been wondering what exactly is it about, and why do I need to type so many words here? The simple answer to myself is that I have this blog to freely express whatever goes on through my head, and I think it’s important to write in order to remember, because all things eventually fade away. For example, high-school is currently more or less a blur for me. I used to go to these Physics contests every year and when now I meet people that went to the same contests and they ask me “Oh, do you remember that and that?”, my reply is a blank face while trying to figure out if whatever I do remember even belongs to the event they are talking about. My theory is that I remember high school so poorly because after that I left Romania to study and various places, and my life experience has been so different since, that it honestly feels that high school was a different life, lived by a different person that happens to have the same name and looks the same as I do.

Going back to what happened in the past months… The main thing is that I have been working. Almost every weekday, starting at 7:45. Which means I need to wake up early, and I am definitely not a morning person, so I try to streamline my morning routine so that it is reduced to stumbling out of bed, brushing my teeth, putting clothes on, leaving the house. Of course there is also the oversleeping, spending time thinking what should I wear today, trying to fit in my bag all things possible such as books, clothes in case I am cold, clothes for the gym, and of course keys. I am proud to say that most mornings my bed to bike time is about 20 min (meaning the time from when I get out of bed to when I get on my bike to go to work). And yes, I bike everyday to work, despite the more and more cold weather, because the metro in the morning is more or less a battle to manage to squeeze inside and then travel like a sardine for the three stops it takes me to get to work. Biking provides more space all around and less people breathing in your neck.

With work there also comes vacation!!! I am sure that somewhere in September I went to Romania for a long weekend, although I am not sure about the dates – proof I am starting to forget things. I saw my grandpa, who is struggling through the consequences of two brain strokes, my other relatives, my parents and their clan of 3 dogs and 10+ cats.

I also went to New York for a week and visited one of my college friends that I have not seen in three years since graduating. We managed to make the trip a bit too exciting, the first days after arriving there we rented a car and ended up driving all the way to Ithaca, were we visited this other college friend (who I did not see for just one year this time), who is doing a PhD in Physics there. The way I remember these days is as tired, with this diffuse jet-lag headache, but at the same time sunny and orange-yellow colored, happy to see my college friends, and with this sense of I am discovering new territory (upstate NY). From this trip I still have these decorational squash residing in my living room in Amsterdam:

(to be continued…. eventually)

On feminism

A couple of days ago I attended a workshop on feminism, I think it was called “How did feminism become the big bad F*** word”, or something in the lines of that. The main reason I go to events like that is to hear other people’s opinions and ideas, with the hope that I will find in their words my own opinions, by means of “Oh yeah, I think the same thing” or “This doesn’t sound good to me, I am actually of the opposite opinion”. In general, I think if regarding anything, you are not really sure what you want, just ask people for their opinion. You’ll get lots of opinions, lots of arguments, and all you have to do is listen to yourself, which self will will react to words and opinions, and then you’ll know where you stand. So whoever I ask for their opinion and at the end of the conversation I decide on the opposite, that is just my way of figuring things out. This doesn’t mean that I have a clear idea of what I like/dislike, what I want/don’t want. It also doesn’t mean that once I reach a decision I will hold on to that decision till the end of time. My opinions seem to be a bit like water, at some point in the future they can turn around, so experience has taught me to not advocate anything too belligerently and always be open to different opinions, even if at the time I disagree with them.

But going back to feminism and the topic of this post, for a long time I would have never thought of myself as a feminist. First of all, the first thing that came into my mind when I thought about feminists, is un-sexy clothing, hairy legs and armpits and a rather butch attitude. And my personal choice is to shave my legs and keep my eyebrows trimmed, wear make-up when I feel like it and put on bright lipstick when the weather here in Holland gets dreadfully colorless. This does not mean that there is anything wrong with people that don’t shave or stuff. It just means we make different choices, but we are still all awesome people.

So going to these feminism workshops has made me think and try to answer the question whether I am a feminist or not, and whether I want to identify as a feminist or not. My conclusion in the end was that first of all feminism is not a fixed movement with a very narrow inflexible definition. Given that you can’t really exclude somebody that wants to take part in a movement, the movement is also amendable to the ideas of the new people that join it.

So my conclusion is that yes, I hold a lot of feminist ideas and at the same time I disagree with some ideas associated with feminism. However, I also decided that feminism is also what I want it to be, and I can be my own type of feminist. My main beliefs can be summarized by the post below. The first time I read this post it was love at first sight, I felt that I have finally found put in words and pictures ideas that have been swimming in my head in an amorphous nebula.

http://thatu.tumblr.com/post/58075318808/noshoes-noworries

Some ideas that I hold about feminism and women and society in general, would be that the most important is to not restrict people’s choices and respect everybody’s choices once they are made. Starting from here, a woman is whoever identifies as a woman. Anybody else has no say in this at the end of the day. And my idea of what feminism is does not fall in the category of “You should do this and not the other thing, because otherwise you fail to fit into this well defined category of feminism”. I think feminism is about freedom first of all, and the right to choose and have your choices respected. Feminism being about women and what are the rights and freedoms of women, I would say that a woman can have hair on her legs or shaved legs, she can wear high heels or not, she can decide to be a housewife or not, she can decide to wear a short skirt or cover her body, she can be pro choice or never even think of abortion as an option. A woman’s choices depend only up to her, they do not have to bend to society beliefs or opinions (or any sort of beliefs that seek to change or limit her choices). The below post is the inspiration for this paragraph:

http://noshoes-noworries.tumblr.com/post/58242460158/excuse-me-while-i-throw-this-down-im-old-and

Going back to the Laura garden bred type of feminism, I would like to say that on the matter of heavy shopping bags, I appreciate it when my male friends offer to carry the bags for me. I don’t think it’s sexist, I don’t think it says that women are not strong. Most of the time when this happened to me it was because my friend showed genuine care for me, and it’s not like this is a one way street. I always ask my friends if they need help when I see them carrying a lot of things, whether they are girls or guys. And in general, you offer to help your friend whenever it looks like they need some. So carrying a girl’s groceries is not sexist, it’s not the guy being exploited, it’s about care and friendship. But of course, if you think different I will respect your decision while I hold on to my beliefs.

Today’s conclusion (my conclusion and my opinion on Sunday, 18 of August 2013 at 3:07 pm) is that first, I am a feminist. And second, that the way I see it, feminism is about freedom. The freedom to make the choices that are best for you, and the freedom to not have to fit any predefined idea of what a woman should be and what a woman should do.

Lately

Lately somehow I did not have that much time to post anything on this blog. In the meanwhile, I went for New Year’s to Vatra Dornei, visited the Dominican Republic at the beginning of January, got a job, traveled through Spain, started working and I am currently in Zug, Switzerland for a short while.

This post is a short recap of the things I liked in the past months and travels. I liked staying in a cabin in the mountains with no running water. I liked seeing the sky full of starts at night and the smell of snow. I loved not taking a shower for three days and also not caring if my hair is greasy or not. I loved eating around a table with ten more people, playing games and keeping the fire going (that was more the guys than me).

I love sun and I loved the Dominican Republic, the scenery, the colors of the sea and the colors of the sky, the sun and the warm air. I loved the people there, they were kind, alegre and warm. It is a poor country, but everything seemed to be exploding with life.

I liked the food in Spain and talking to people in restaurants and on the streets and in museums, and drinking tea. I liked dancing salsa in Sevilla (and the Dominican Republic !) and walking around the gypsy neighborhood in Granada. I liked seeing the palm trees covered in snow and hanging out with relatives in Madrid.

I really like where I work and the people there, and meeting up with my friend in Zurich. I don’t like too much the prices in Switzerland, but after all you can’t love everything.

And life is good.

Cool stuff

Today I came across the portfolio of an Industrial Design student. Check it out.

http://evapalaiologk.com/#

Me, the bike and the pavement

After more than a year in Amsterdam, I had my first bike accident. The knee is not happy and the bruises hurt, but all in all it was a good fall with minimum damage. This reminds of a PE class I took in college called “Women’s Self-Defense”, where we learned how to “correctly” fall, meaning how to fall and not break your arm, smash your face or smth else (make a triangle in front of your face with your hands). However, I don’t know how I can apply this to falling of a bike. The horns are in front of you and what do you do with lost legs that end up getting caught in the back wheel?

Note to self: learn better falling techniques.

And here is the aftermath:

Bruise #1

Unhappy Knee

The knee doesn’t look that purple, but it hurts badly.