Ederlezi

I don't usually do this but I want to share. It's a beautiful melody and I can totally believe this is Nigel Kennedy.





EDIT: Actually, it is Nigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band' East meets east and that's what I want for Christmas.

Abracadabra

I got out of work a bit later than usually and when I reached the grocery store dusk presided over the night. By the time I stepped out of the store, the sun had already migrated west and the sky above me was the darkest of blue. Over the city, to the west, though it was pastel-gentle pale blue, and in between, oh, in between the diapason of colour brought tears to my eyes. Only once in my life have I seen eyes of that dense dark blue colour and they looked at me with such indescribable intensity I fell in love immediately and almost fatally.

King Rat

"On the books, China's [lead content] paint standards are stricter than those in the United States... But enforcement of the regulations in China is lax.
The article.

This is as indicative as it gets of how a communist economy, and state for that matter, works. They might have discovered the joys and perks of capitalism but have missed the part where laws are there to be enforced...

Capitalism and democracy the way they are known here and in Western Europe are both achieved, if ever, after centuries of jungle style wild competition and throat slashing. When mixed with the type of corruption typical for societes with concentration of wealth and political power in a tiny, tiny minority... well, you have your typical county in transition, such as China, Russia, etc.

"Democracy is the worst from of government , except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Compliance training

I want to complain and bitch and vent but there's no one here to listen. Many times have I mused on the barely thought-out decision to leave my country, my family and friends, to come here, more than four years ago. I came without a plan and still seem to stumble through life without a plan. I am so jealous of the people that know where they are going and plan - if for nothing else, at least for the ability to monitor their straying-away's from the plan...

Anyway, recently I realized (only recently! - not the sharpest knife, I am) that I am probably never going back, never reconnecting with the friends I used to have and that makes me very sad. In times of need I realize fully how profound the change in my life is, how much I miss them. I need them to share, I need them for advise, I need them just to be here with me, to listen. Two people that I would give anything to have by my side right now.

I want to complain and bitch and vent but they are not here to listen.

Eternal sunshine

It turns out that, to my utter frustration, a lot of people back home are religious or spiritual. And when I say religion when speaking of Bulgaria I mean Eastern Orthodox Christianity, as we do have a traditional religion and believe it or not it's written right there in our Constitution, right after the separation of Church and State part. Opposite to what I thought, many Bulgarian people actually do believe in God and respect the Church (although, as an institution the Bulgarian Orthodox church has been in hiatus), they only do not speak of it. I don't know whether it's considered a personal spiritual matter or it's a remnant of the communist times when speaking of religion and God was equal to dooming yourself and your family to prosecution and abuse. But history has taught us that Christianity has played a major and largely positive role in the development and survival of our nation and people do remember this.

Why I am frustrated then? It is NOT because people are religious and I am mostly a-religious and a bit condescending (I admit) about it. It is because I did not see it. It is because I saw what I wanted to see in my people. They say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder… Well, everything is in the eye of this one beholder here. Apparently, I have an amazingly tough time separating what I want reality to be from what it actually is… I mean, I have been partial to the paradigm that reality is a patchwork of perceptions, but taking it one step further, reality for me seems to be what I want to perceive it to be.

And while all this doesn't seem to bear any direct significance to my life, it makes me wonder if I am consciously or subconsciously deceiving myself like this about other, more important things. I have decided long time ago that if not to others, at least to myself I will always be 100% honest because self-deception gives bad advise. And while it makes reality more bearable, I don't want to wake up one morning in a bed of shattered fantasies.

Which is where another thing I've been thinking about lately comes in. For the largest portion of my life my decisions and actions have been underscored by attempts to live up to some perceived expectations. Only in the last year have I started to not only see that these expectations do not exist, but also to understand that in many cases I have been using them to justify my actions when my motivation has been unclear to me. Or when I did not dare admit what my motivation was. Or simply, when I was afraid to see that there's no one right answer, because apparently life is an equation with too many unknowns and assumptions to have a single ideal solution. Now that I think about it, it all boils down to fear of taking responsibility for my actions. And, oh, how easy it is to blame someone else if things turn out bad!

Only in the last year have I made small but decisive steps to growing out of that deception mode… Just to realize right now (thanks to religion, mind you) how deep that mode runs in my system.

What do I do? Should I start revisiting all my perceptions and values? Should I try to be as non-judgmental and fair as possible to the extent to become a machine? Should I just ignore?

I wonder, to be fair and square, how many times have I neglected the beam in my eye for the mote in my neighbour's?

Heh.

BOO-HOO

Looking at myself in the mirror I can appreciate what Mother Nature has given to me in terms of concoction of genes, a little bit of my mother's and a little bit of my father's side. I can see the shape of my mother's eyes, and the thickness of my father's nose, the graciousness of my mothers figure combined with the sturdiness of my grandmother… The melancholy of my aunt (father's sister) combined with the chipper dimples of… I don't know where those came from….

With all that, I want to say I was never proud with how I look. And while it could have taken a role in my development as a person (although it didn't because during the most important years of development I was a fatty and not found attractive by any of the sexes, therefore I was able to actually develop a personality), I consider myself lucky to have been given a sort of an advantage in terms of looks. But that's pretty much it – lucky. I really cannot take any credit for it, as much as I want to. All in all, I consider looks, IQ, talents, and so on, to be like Monopoly's start – certain assets you begin your game with, like luck from Russian roulette or gambling. After that, it is important what you do with that, it is important how you capitalize on them.

Ummm, that is not where I was going with this.

Something sad that I see when I look in the mirror is the tiredness. The aging of the skin, it's losing its colour, it's losing its freshness. I see my big brown eyes looking behind my (currently brown) bangs and that is the only part of me I remember from before. The rest - the tired skin, the sad pale lips, the tricky little fine lines - those are new and uninvited. I am not ready to let go of youth yet, I am not ready to let go of life as I know and enjoy it. But there's that mirror. And that calendar. And they are screaming at me, it's time! What for, they do not say. But I have to hurry.

CSI

I have noticed that when I spend considerable amounts of time with someone with very characteristic manners or way of speaking, I subconsciously pick it up. It actually hadn't happened in a while until recently. I was telling Josh and Chris about this girl I met, who honestly has the sexiest voice ever. It's sort of low and she has that very peculiar way of pronouncing words extremely distinctively and clearly. And I picked it up... I caught myself a couple of times speaking in the same manner.

You know how they say that if you are in a relationship with somebody, you start picking up stuff from them... opinions, expressions, whatever... It's nothing like that. It's more like putting another personality on, or certain characteristics of it. In a way, it's is like losing or putting away part of myself for a while. I feel like another person. Not that I look, sound like or resembe them in anyway. I feel like them.

The thing is, I hadn't done that in forever... I used to do it in my teen years and then I stopped. I don't know if I became more mature as a personality with lesser tendency to sway away from who I am or I just became less impressionate. Something. At any rate, when I actually realized what was happening, I dropped it. It's sort of fun but I'm too old for this shit.