What goes around comes around

I know this doesn’t play out well for my karma, but sometimes you have to be mean, at least for reasons of sanity. I’ll explain.

You see, I’m one of the thousands of drivers that have to deal with traffic in Bucharest week after week. Since my schedule is flexible most of the time, I usually manage to avoid rush hour, which sometimes seems to spread throughout the day over here.

However, there are also those days when, even without a particular busy traffic, one manages to meet all the drive-school drop-outs, who, through some kind of miracle, managed to get behind the wheel – I will not say they actually have driving licenses, since I never stopped them and asked to check for them, so I’m going to assume the situation can go either way. You, drivers out there, know very well who I mean by that category: the gallant gentleman who honks and flashes his headlights when you are patiently (and legally bound to do so) wait for the pedestrians to cross the road, weather permitting even gallantly addressing you in passing through the open window with some delightful peace of philosophy, the exquisite prince that enters a cross road without paying the slightest attention to traffic lights/signs or other incoming traffic, the well-bred man who puts everybody in danger with their vehicles, may that be something so old and damaged it most certainly will not start again should he touch the breaks at any point, or, on the contrary, new and powerful enough to twist its owner perception about self, making him into the new Batman. You do know them? What a coincidence, so do I…

[Disclaimer: I know: there are plenty of women who do the same stuff as that described above, and I do not side with them. It’s just that the metaphors were better with a man behind the wheel. In the future I’ll make sure to replace 'he' with 'it', so there is no confusion about it :) In my mind I’ve always found drivers to be good or bad, not male and female anyway, so we’ll just call the bad driver 'it'.]

So, why did I say it’s good to be mean? I did not make a reference to what any driver can call his/her own list of favorite fowl words, stocked into categories, depending on the severity of the incident, but rather to that feeling of complete and utter bliss when you see the named culprit get exactly what he/she was looking for – in this particular case that I want to share with you it was a he, driving a lovely white Dacia pick-up truck, collection of summer-fall 1995, by my estimate. I know, pick-up truck is a bit too loose of a description of the car in question, but it apparently serves its purpose. He decided that, since he was only entering a roundabout to exist at the first right, he can bypass the give way sign and cut in front of me without even as much as a faint attempt of slowing down. When something like this happens, I usually barely have the time to react, to break or to maneuver in order to avoid impact, so swearing is, as you would imagine, quite low on my priorities list. Yes, I do swear, and why wouldn’t I? It works out a bit of the tension of the event, and in the privacy of my car nobody can hear me anyway.

Nevertheless, this time my delayed swearing session was replaced by laughter and my basking in the glory of his misery – a police patrol was just around the corner and I could actually see the police officer watching him with a bewildered expression on his face, before raising his hand and signaling him to pull over.

Needless to say I didn’t stop to see whether he’ll get a suspension, or at least a ticket, being now practically avenged for at least one of the many traffic-induced cardiac arrests of the day.

So yes, I say we should enjoy someone else’s misery from time to time, especially when they have wronged us in a way or another.

Culprit driver – Hope that stung!

Coming out of the closet

No, not That Closet.

However, for the briefest moment I could understand why it’s such a difficult thing to do, especially to one’s family. Have you ever found yourselves watching a movie and not being able to comprehend why the character had such trouble admitting his or her sexual orientation to their parents? You think: what’s the big deal, their parents will understand and a parent’s love won’t be changed by a thing like that, will it?

Yap, well, we apparently never took in consideration what the characters themselves were going through. I will exemplify.

The other day I came out to my mother… about being Agnostic. Yes, we are talking religion here. For those of you who have trouble understanding what agnostic means, here are some pages that will offer more information, better than I could ever put it: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agnostic or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism .

Just so that you understand what I mean by it, I should add that I consider myself as an Empirical Agnostic, or like I explained it some time ago to some friends, while believers believe in some form of God, and atheists believe there is no God, I know for sure that I have no idea (pun intended) whether there is a God or not, but I’m open to either possibility. Since we currently have no information to confirm nor deny the existence of a God, I prefer to withhold judgment until/if evidence becomes available.

This may be a by-product of my analytical mind, or my inquisitive nature, or even the logical being that resides inside me and cannot accept that religion is something else rather than a set of rules and norms meant to be followed in times when laws and regulation were harder to impose on people without the scare of supervision from some sort of Unseen All-knowing entity.

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about my traumatic experience coming out to my mother. I know, I know, I use the term loosely and too frequently, but I like it’s 'in your face' value.

I have started to understand how I feel and think about my religious believes for quite a while, and I recently found out there was a name for it, namely agnosticism.

Until the other day, I had not had the chance to talk it out with my family. Mind you, I will not start discussing it – if I can avoid it – with my grandparents, mainly because I can predict pretty well how they would react: my grandma would most likely wickedly smile and agree with me, my parental grandfather would probably be hurt and disappointed – he wanted to become a priest in his day – and my maternal grandfather, well, I have no idea, but since he was always a joker, I don’t really worry about him. Like I don’t worry much about my father, who I think secretly feels the same way I do.

My mom, well, she reacted in unexpected ways. Yes, I said ways, because her reactions were several, and very different, within a very short period of time. You see, this all thing started with us talking about some Christian ritual, and she had the much uninspired idea to ask me what I think about it. Now, any other day I would have carefully dodged the question and went to Christian doctrine for my answer, like I did so far, but the truth was I was tired, a bit edgy and didn’t know a lot about the said Christian ritual to begin with. So I told her “well, first of all, I don’t consider myself a practicing Christian”, which set the roof on fire, or, if you are a believer, when all hell broke loose. In retrospect, you could say she was spoiling for a fight in the first place, but I definitely didn’t go about it with much finesse.

Throughout our conversation – did I mention this was all by phone? Yap, I’m a keeper… – she managed to express different amounts of hurt and disappointment, almost cut short our conversation once with a 'call me when you decide which religion to choose', said she thinks she failed me in instilling belief in me and eventually decided she isn’t that bothered by the whole thing, pending further discussion; which let me tell you, I can’t wait for (imagine me saying that in sarcastic tones).

I did learn a few things about my mother and her beliefs during that conversation, and weirdly enough was probably as revealing for me as it was for her. We had never before spoke with such candor about this subject, and ultimately I’m glad I did, but boy, was I going through the most colorful range of feelings while doing so. Since I am dramatically empathic when I’m experiencing a powerful feeling, imagining what she must feel like worked as a kick in the gut, and left me drained of all energy for the day. I literally felt like after a good 2h workout when hanging up the phone, 20minutes after it rang.

So yes, now I can understand what coming out of the closet feels like, even if it’s actually a bookshelf where you keep your Thomas Henry Huxley and Bertrand Russell’s books…

Late night philosophy

I’ve just recently seen Funny People. For the second time. Circumstances aside, the movie was actually quite good, so I didn’t mind a repeat. Maybe not the best there is out there, and, mind you, the language is not exactly fit for All Viewers, but the way it’s written and played, well, it has a sort of decency to it. No exaggerated turn of events, no miraculous solutions (well, except for the whole cancer curing thing, which is actually possible, in a low percentage of cases), just regular, believable life: friends abusing each other, helping each other, living together yet having fundamentally different lives.

However, writing a review was not my reason for starting this post, but rather a more philosophical issue triggered by it. There was something in one scene that stuck with me, even from the first time I’ve seen it. It’s from one of the stand-up pieces the main character (if we consider George Simmons the main character, though in my opinion the story revolves as much around him as it does around Ira Wright): it’s about the things that stir passionate opinions in people, and their evolution with age.

While the stand-up bit is flooded by the acronym for fornication under consent of the King, the core of his words made me think of how much of the fire we have in us in our young years is kept lit in our older ones. Sandler bluntly paints the outrage that people feel in their 20s towards their immediate environment – family and friends –, anger that gets rerouted towards public institutions in their 30s, only to apparently die out completely in their 40s and be replaced by some sort of wallowing in one’s comfort zone. This picture linked instantly in my mind with another piece of script that I heard play out in two different other occasions: another stand-up comedian’s performance and a line in a funny TV series. It seems everybody is in agreement that the older you get, the more you stick to things you know, and things like learning and adventure don’t matter that much, or, even more drastically, are really just shunned.

I sure hope this is not true, at least for me and the people closest to me. I would like us to keep 'young' at mind until the very last breath we take. I would like to always cross things off and write new things on my Bucket list, and never grow tired of doing that.

Don’t you?