We, Romanians, have an expression: doing -insert stuff here- like a goose goes through water. 

As an explanation, water goes away from the goose's feathers, so it's not affected by the wet walk.

Yes, I know, I am not even close to being old, so I don't have quite an extensive life experience. I probably, hopefully, have more years to live ahead and time and opportunities to gain more and more experience, so I am now speaking again as a mini-beginner. Or as much as the mini-adult that I managed to become.

Truth is that the recent years made me experiment situations with which I hoped I would not have to deal with, at least for a while, so I managed to change some of my perspectives and tried to look more at the big picture, rather than focusing on the small issues.
Then again, I see people around me going through life like the goose I was mentioning at the beginning. More and more I am forced to digest that "ignorance is bliss" saying, as I see it tends to become a habit; and like all habits, embraced by many, I am sick to the stomach when I think it will in the end become something more than normality itself.
I see people worried about clothes, carbs and diets, I see poor people on the street about whom no one gives a damn while walking past them, I see rich kids spending money they will never know how it was earned, I see animals killing dogs, I see lovers hurting people.

Some weeks ago I was having a tea in a tea-house and at the table next to mine there was a couple. Since the tables are very close to each other, I managed to enjoy their 3 hours conversation - even if I know that paying attention to people's discussions is not polite, but I was simply hearing more or less everything. 3 hours later I was still amazed, but happy they left. I couldn't indulge more talks about, food, Coke Zero, going to the gym and so on.
Ignorance is bliss. But at least they seemed to be happy.

One of the good things about flying so often is that I get the chance to quickly go through the magazine offered by the Airline company. 

The very good thing about these magazines is that they offer details about nice places to visit or events that are happening in the city you are heading to, from concerts to exhibitions, from modern to classical, etc. When I have business trips I don't even bother to waste my already poor sight with that, since I usually have 0% time to actually visit anything, apart from the hotel, the meeting spaces and the sightseeing taxi-tour to and from the airport.

But for Vienna it is quite useful, as here you can always find something to do, so I started a list in which I wrote down from the magazine, about things to do and see while in Vienna. Every time I get the chance, I go and cross something from the list.

A nice name that draw my attention was the so called Salon der Angst, an exhibition held al Kunsthalle Wien, where I eventually went last week. According to the booklet, "Angst" is a German word, which in English could be translated as Fear-Anxiety-Worries. I used the 3 words altogether, since the English booklet I took from the exhibition tried to sell "Angst" as the very German word that cannot be translated into English as just one of them.

Now, I am merely a freshy in this contemporary art thingy, so I will avoid making comments on the exhibition. All I can tell you is that it was worth the time and more information & pictures can be found here. But I will focus on a simple piece, that draw my attention more than others, especially after I read the text, which made me think about this Angst in a very diversified way. I couldn't say it better than the author of the Wall, so you can read below the description of what the artist wanted to express through such a simple idea as a Lichen Wall.

The proposal of a surface - Lichen Wall (Zin Taylor, 2013) 

"The spots that collect on a stone, these things know when they arrived. They're thousands of years old, remembering what came next, and next, and next. It's their job, it's what they do - they're lichen.

Foundationally, Lichen is a four-layer organism. The first and last layers are identical fungal hosts, the middle two a paired algae. Composed similar to a sandwich made of two elements, ham and cheese or peanut butter and jelly, the planar units of bread (fungus) contain a dialogue (algae) within its form (lichen). The forms can be small and repetitive, oblong or circular. they can be pools of colour, like a stain referencing the action that made it so, or cauliflower patterns traversing a surface with colourful growth, blanketing the host with a field of their thoughts.

Red, pink, rose, orange, yellow, lavender, blue, green, black, grey, darker grey, white, whatever happened, whatever that organism "saw" was absorbed, producing these colours. A field of spotted colour shifts hues according to the events, actions, gestures and forms, passing before it. Sometimes these spots are turned into paint, a memory-paste rubbed onto a surface to depict a person's impression of something. These are subjects that exist only in the mind, that can't be photographed. What exists in your mind? What secret thoughts control your actions? What have you painted today?

Photographic examples of lichen, in particular the scattered patterns produced through centuries of build-up, strike a fortuitous relationship to visual representations of 1960's LSD culture. Projected light shows, presented by Liquid Light Groups, were one of many aesthetic elements employed to visually define psychedelic culture of the 1960s. Light companies, specializing in live performances utilizing liquid inks and overhead projectors, routinely lent a visual complement to the progressive/psychedelic bands playing at the time. San Francisco's Brotherhood of Light performed at San Francisco's legendary music venues Fillmore West and Winterland Ballroom. Other groups of the area, with equally enigmatic names were The Single Wing Turquoise Bird Lightshow Troupe, Little Princess 109 and Light Sound Dimension (LSD).

This cultural activity of the late 1960's marked a period in history when, both institutionally and recreationally, investigations of the unconscious were actively facilitated through the exploratory use of psychotropic drugs. During the 1969 music festival Woodstock a now infamous public announcement was made to a collected crowd of a half million people urging them to "avoid the brown acid" as the effects weren't as expected. A mixture of chemicals, designed to produce elated psychological investigations, had been mixed wrong - the brown acid was the harbinger of the nefarious bad trip. The effect enabled a seemingly negative experience for those who had ingested this particular item of hallucinogenic facilitation. Stanislov Grof, a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, has conducted extensive research into the bad trip phenomenon. This form of LSD induced psychosis, or psychedelic crisis, produces disturbing hallucinogenic experiences for the recipient. The manifestations can range from feelings of vague anxiety and alienation to profoundly disturbing states of unrelieved terror, ultimate entrapment, or cosmic annihilation - cerebral effects descriptive of elemental angst. Grof, as a founder of The Faculty of Transpersonal Psychology, believed an analysis of this state would lead to generative breakthroughs in the treatment of an individual 's psychosis, in particular the unresolved psychological tensions triggered during the course of the experience: bad trips generate positive material.

The bad trip philosophy predicates that the imaginative results of angst are generative towards analytical thinking. What does a bad trip look like? Let the mosaic field of lichen be a background of alternative possibility. The portrait of a slow-growing micro-biotic organism, never dying, always watching, absorbing, reflecting these thoughts as a colour palette scattered along a surface - a wall playing host to a myriad of thought."

So what does your lichen wall look like?

Recently I developed a passion of discovering people, piece by piece, as making people open up to me and trying to fill up their darkest corners with rainbows made me feel better in times when I needed it most.

But by recently, I am of course talking about the past years, as no passion develops like a summer rain. Or at least it shouldn't.

And by people, even more recently, I discovered I am no more comprising analyses over the individual in itself, but actually referring to the mass that individual belongs to. Sometimes my mind refuses to understand why would a mass of people act in such a way, when it is clearly the wrong direction, but after that my brain immediately switches off this theory and reminds me it is just a difference of perspective. I often say that having a different opinion than mine doesn't mean that either of us is necessarily wrong, because it means it is simply a matter of accepting different views over the same topic.

Then again, watching a mass poisoning itself with whatever is easiest accessible literally makes me sick. It also makes me think that reading about crowd psychology is just a waste of time, because there is nothing left to do here other than to analyse, without having a real chance of improvement.

....over me.

That's what he said. 

That's what he said on a night when I told him that a part of me is disappointed. And that a part of my soul is stuck in my throat, asking "why?".

I know what is the reality now, though some years ago I was dreaming of changing the world. Making people better, improving the quality of life. Actually doing something.

When I stopped blinking like a deer in front of the headlights and realized that impossible things do exist, a small part of me died with the thought. A part of my childhood's specific enthusiasm died and made space for the coldness of the dreamy realism I am suffering from now. 

I am sorry, World, I eventually failed in believing I can make you better on my own. I was looking at what the human animals around me are doing and realized that the remaining enthusiasm will eventually die, piece by piece.

So I changed the strategy and I am now working on myself, on making myself better and perhaps inspiring others to do the same. If we don't start with ourselves, then I am sorry again, World. Perhaps our generation has to die and make space for the new enthusiastics. 

But you should know, World, I will at least die trying.

Girl, you're glamorous, famous, notorious, dangerous...and he's the crazy one, you say. : )

As if life wasn't complicated enough, a snowstorm just had to start.

As if it wasn't cold enough, my book just had to end before I even started writing it.

As if curiosity wasn't enough, my fine cat senses made me put my whiskers in the air.

Sniffing...something's happening.

A sandstorm during a snowstorm must surely happen somewhere. No one has ever heard of such a predicament, but it's happening now in a far-far away land, where 43 squirrels are dancing with their mates, as if that's such a normal thing to dream about.

As if it wasn't hot enough, I just know I attract these things, so there's no one else to blame them for.

Might as well embrace them, Miez, might as well embrace them.

Such is life. : )

In the end, I still haven't found the answer to what is stopping me to finish all projects I start. Most probably, the simplest explanation I have found by now is that, if the process is too long, I am getting bored, like every 2 year-old gets bored of their toys. 

Too bad this usually applies to the most important of them, most important to me. You know how sometimes you find a line in a book or see what may appear like simple small talk in a movie, that turns your mind to reflect on it for half a day? I do that often, I split hairs and get ideas, sometimes from nothing. 

My Mom told me once, in one of our very few argues we've encountered in my mature life, that I sometimes treat the people I most care about, with the least consideration, as if I consider them to be next to me no matter what, without imagining that they someday might just pack their bags and leave. Truth is, what are families and best friends for, if not to stay by your side no matter how much of a perky jerk you are, right? Wrong. That line opened my selfish mind, not a single person around us has to be there no matter what and accept the shit you put them up to just because you are blood related or you share some good memories. After all, blood may mean nothing if you don't need a transplant and good memories can be stained with bad ones, if you choose the wrong path in dealing with anyone in your life. 

I currently have an exact, small number of people whom I can tell I love. Others know that I care about them, but only these few could actually hear the words pop out of my mouth. And I'm proud of it. Nothing good really comes in big quantities.