Going back

Walking again on the streets of my youth. Back to Romania, after 2 years. Back to Iasi, after 11. I resisted. I found excuses, I delayed.
And when all my arguments were broken down by the tiny ring on my phone "Are you coming? You have a bus at 3pm", I packed a bag and I went. To Iasi. A whole twenty-four hours and I didn't even have the time to see everything I missed, everyone I thought I'd see. I was simply there, I passed by the Uni, the parks on Copou, the crumbling building in Ralet where I nurtured my dreams for 2 years, the place where I first met my husband, the Students House and Hygeco Pub - a stinky bomb full of cheap vodka. Then back again, home.
A day that has reconciled me with the past decade....

The rear view

I have a soft spot for borders. Borders that exist and no one even remembers they are there (Belgium to Holland), borders that are real but some people ignore their existence (North-South Cyprus), administrative borders (England to Wales) or political borders (Republic of Moldova and Moldova region in Romania).
There are borders ahead of us and behind us and we are stuck in the space in between, with a limited view, trying to piece together a world without borders.

Longing and Belonging

That's the leitmotif of the past few weeks. Granta 114: Aliens (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing), LSE's Space for Thought festival, my previous post.... what do we long for and where do we belong?

Every once in a while I rediscover the Romanian bloggs, newspapers and ever Twitter feeds.... and I fall in love again with a country where I don't belong anymore.
At alternative times I discover English, The Onion and McSweeney's, Granta or The Atlantic and I long to belong. Again.
Occasionally I fell good in my skin and I deny longing and belonging to anything else but my own world. Good times they are... when I can forge ahead to meet the latest version of my self-identity.

Legal vs Illegal

Two books His Illegal Self and The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel have marked my week. Both have been quietly sitting in my library for ages, neglected and unread. Thanks to a rainy bank holiday week-end, I managed to read them both. I loved Linda Grant's story of a Hungarian family in UK, though maybe 10 years ago I would have voted Peter Carey, who runs wild with an Australian commune.
Legality and illegality are blurred concepts when you look at them through an immigrant's eye - and these two books capture nicely the turmoil created by the blur.

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Open, Sesame!

Just like about everyone else in the techie world these days, I spent a good half hour glued to my Mac's screen, watching Steve Jobs and the team present the iPad. I already know what I want for my birthday.
It's toyish and cute. And I can easily imagine lazying about with a good book - or even the newspapers on the shiny 9.7 inch screen. That does it for me - a cool book reader with all the added features of an iPhone, minus the annoying incoming calls. At some point during the presentation Steve Jobs ventured to suggest books that would include audio or even video clips. Open, Sesame! I'm a convert before even touching the thing.

Work

Granta 109: Work - it sent me thinking about what was work and what is work, at a time when I seriously question "my" daily work.
For a long time, "work" was just a word to describe an enchanted, far away place where mum and dad spent their days. Once or twice a year we had the privilege to go along - for a disguised Christmas party ("No, no, no! Christmas did not exist in the 80s. The communists replaced Father Christmas with Mister Big Freeze / Mos Gerila) or during school holidays, mostly so that mum or dad's work colleagues can take a break from work and comment on how tall we'd grown or some other silly twaddle often accompanied by a gift of candy. In turn, my parents woudld make the same type of comments about their colleague's off-springs.
My mother worked in an open plan office with huge architect's desks separating the space into tiny boxes. My father worked in a tiny box of his own at the edge of an open plan repair hall for 2-ton electricity generators.
My naive 6-year old self aspired to "go to work" just like mum and dad. Maybe even trail my children along occasionally to show them the wonders of a 60s steel mill.
But my "work" took on a completely new meaning. I work from home - most of the time. I write and translate and spend hours on end explaining things to strangers. For my 6 year old daughter this must be anything but magic."Work" takes me away from her in a more direct way than it took my parents. They worked and came home - to me and my brother, leaving most of their work behind. I carry it along day and night - mostly on the phone. Physically here, mentally there.
Where is work? What is work?