Illuminations

This has definitely been on of the most intense weekends in a long time. A little old school, reminding me of the days when I could function with very little or no sleep and lots of activities. I was very happy to discover I could still do that, although I quickly understood it was all very deceiving and that the difference between early twenties and mid twenties lies in the effects of sleepless nights.

But apparently lack of sleep can be illuminating. Or at least it was in this particular case. That and the fact that I have some really smart friends :)

• I finally understood what Bilus meant when speaking about "the path with a heart". I knew I was walking on mine the minute I stopped wondering "what if", when I settled down and looked at all my projects and understood what was worth keeping and what I was ready to let go. The path with a heart is the one that gives you butterflies every morning because you wake up and you know you're going to take a few more steps on that path and it instantly brightens up your day.
• In the academic world, the more Eastern European you are, it is expected of you to research your own culture. Ana made a very good point while we were debating the paper I'm currently researching for my studies: no one will have anything against a research conducted in Latin America by a person coming from Western Europe, but they will find it strange if a Romanian does it, and it's equally true for students coming from other less known countries. The fact that I'm studying gender roles in the history of Latin dance seems to have provoked a mild dissatisfaction at the Uni, simply because Romanian culture appears to be very exotic and, truth be told, little known in Poland, so everybody expected me to be writing about it. It's this type of labeling that bothers the hell out of me because it makes people miss the big picture. In this case, my coordinator saw my nationality first and my fabulous research came second, which means I have to work twice as hard to convince him - and not because my idea was not good enough, but rather because it did not match his expectations, built simply on some information he had about me before we even met.
• Speaking of cultural exchange and peculiarities of different cultures, there's one thing that I could not get used to in Poland, even though I've been systematically exposed to the phenomenon and I was everybody's favorite bartender for a year: what's with the whole excessive drinking thing? Just when I was about to stop asking questions and take things as they are, I had an edifying talk with Karolina (she's Polish, btw) while we were out celebrating the first anniversary of Nowy Wspanialy Swiat, one of Warsaw's hot-spots: it is wrong and not normal to be happy when we meet guys who only drink every so often. This drinking issue should not be the first thing to come to our minds when meeting someone new, but unfortunately it does and it seems to be increasingly difficult to find guys who can handle their liquor.
• Went to see Herta Muller and was really, really disappointed. Mostly because I wasted two hours getting bored and trying to figure out an elegant way to leave the meeting. Monica summed it up perfectly: if the meeting organized in Bucharest was a circus, this felt like a trip to a museum where you're not allowed to touch, take pictures, ask questions but instead you get very dull explanations. It was not the first time I got extremely bored at such a meeting and I don't know if the organizers are to blame or if it's best to just let writers do their thing and not ask them to perform on stage - they're often less remarkable than their books. At some point, I fell asleep for a few seconds and the only reason why I didn't sleep until the end was that I didn't want to damage my hair because I was going dancing. Turns out my partner and I still have lead & follow issues, which is not exactly surprising but it can be very annoying because it made us waste valuable dancing time arguing. Now I'm pretty sure one of us will resort to murder sooner or later.

It's the first time since I moved to Poland that I'm not depressed in November. True, it's only been a week, but something tells me I might be safe this time.