LOVE, actually

While reading romance novels may not be good for the soul of a single, lonely woman, they had the oddest effect on me: they made me realize that there are 3 things I want to be able to say to that perfect knight that I’m sure will ride into my life on his white stallion (feel free to laugh it out right now, for what I say next is quite serious) - 'I love you. I trust you. I support you. Not necessarily in that order :)'. I need this 3 simple things in order to be happy with my relationship. In truth, I need to relate to almost anybody on those presumptions - my family, my friends, my colleagues, my neighbors, the girl who bags the groceries at my supermarket.

For love is not only romantic love, but also the care towards our parents, siblings and extended family, the strong bond of a true friendship, the respect and care for those who work with you and can receive and provide help.

Trust - this should probably go unexplained, but what the heck - is also the trust you implicitly give to all the other drivers when you start your car in the morning, the trust you put into the cook at your favorite restaurant that they will deliver a good and healthy meal or into the officer checking your backpack when boarding a plane that they will keep you safe.

Support - this may prove to be a tricky one, but my way of extrapolating it is, that, apart from trusting the people around you with their respective responsibilities, you should also encourage (thus prooving your support) them when they do a good job. [I am a carrot type of person (clue: motivational theories in plain words), and I find it difficult to strongly reprimand someone, even when they systematically butcher a perfectly simple task. I prefer the talk-it-over approach, give them the tools to unmake their mistakes and they will, hopefully, eventually succeed.]

So, you see, my whole world can be reduced to those 3 little words - love, trust & support.

Since my horoscope told me this is the year to simplify, I see this epiphany as the first step towards that :D

Oh, and in a more down to earth note - since we are in between the two LOVE holidays of the year (I’m counting the Dragobete, for those who prefer it), I had the opportunity to skip through or out-right ignore a lot of articles published about Valentine Day gifts this past week. Not one of them - and trust me, there were all over the world wide web - mentioned what I truly wanted on February the 14th - a wee push when my car got stuck in the snow!

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!