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Whenever things seem to go awfully wrong, there's something out there that puts them back in order without requiring any effort or, for that matter, any contribution from my side. True, I'm very lucky to have some of the best friends a girl could ever hope for so that makes everything a lot easier. After an extra-crappy Sunday evening with loads of snow, which alone could have been enough of a reason to make me feel down, the week started with some great news and with two early Christmas presents. I was expecting books, but was pleasantly surprised to discover they were delivered with chocolates & jewelry. A classical combination that works almost every time, except maybe on those days when I can't stomach any food and don't really feel like wearing anything else but a pair of worn-out jeans and a hoodie. But those days will soon be over. And although I felt like staying in and trying to focus on work as to avoid interacting with too many people, apparently it's not an option. With the release of (yet) another magazine and a fabulous party to celebrate it, the opening of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art and a concert organized by the people at my favorite art gallery, in a building that's soon to be demolished, things suddenly look a lot brighter than they did on Sunday. And the best part is that Big Brother is flying in from Paris next week, which requires very careful planning and a selection of the best cultural attractions Warsaw has to offer. Focused on out-of-Katowice events in the past few weeks, I almost didn't notice we were only two months away from this year's Taczka Runners and I still don't have a wheelbarrow. I think I'm running out of time.

Staying on the run. With the appropriate soundtrack (one of my most amazing friends reminded me of just how right these guys are when it comes to life issues)

Bruising made easy

1. invent an implausible story
2. take your time convincing yourself it's not only plausible, but also probably the best story you'll ever come up with
3. do your best to force reality to fit into the pattern
4. ignore all the signs that it doesn't
5. open your eyes and assess the damage
6. blame yourself for everything but the implausible story you started with

Better late than never

Eight months later than expected, it's finally time for my summer holiday. The one I still owed myself. Last year was quite a good one if I don't take into account the fact that I was working like a dork while everyone else was having fun, so now it's my turn :) And because I was rather traumatized by the lack of a decent vacation in 2009, I've already planned another trip in April and one in May. That should be enough of a compensation.

As for this trip, there's a beach involved, but that's about the only thing it might have in common with my usual summer holidays.

Spring collection

The following is a theory I developed some time ago, back in those days when I still had time to develop theories, now I'm rather scenario-oriented. Learning foreign languages can sometimes resemble wearing high heels. It's pretty, every tiny step is a tiny victory, at least until the shoes become comfortable enough, but it can also be annoying, painful or even not worth it.

photo: stylediary

Polish was definitely my first pair of stilettos and it followed the pattern: seen 'em, loved 'em, bought 'em - now what? During those first weeks of Polish I was very impatient, I wanted more, I couldn't wait until I'd finally be able to speak fluently, but it was too much of an effort. Much like high heels, it was gorgeous, it made me happy, but it was uncomfortable and tiresome. I was relieved when I could switch to English. The faithful, adorable and colorful pair of Chucks. The ones I'm likely to choose over anything else, no matter how sensational and eye-catching. Even if they don't always fit in the picture or match the outfit- it's a sin I'm happy to commit whenever I have the chance (and I do, very often).

Back in high school I had a thing for Spanish. Which was much like a kitten heel. Comfy, sweet, reliable and pretty without much effort. Not necessarily spectacular, still one of my favorites. But after getting used to wearing stilettos on a daily basis, a low heel feels odd and not entirely wearable. French was similar to a cone heel. Might look good but I never knew what to wear it with and how to make it look good on me. I'll speak French if I have to, but I need to be in the mood for it or to miss speaking it and that hardly ever happens.

As high school was a time for experiments of all sorts, I took a Japanese class for about a year. Totally a prism heel. Very unusual and so not me, the reasons for my attending that class are still unclear but it's ten years now and I might as well let it go. In the same fashion, several years later I had a rather disappointing encounter with German. I felt like one of those runway models falling flat on my face, in shoes that don't fit me at all but that look just perfect on other people.

Yesterday I added a new piece to the collection. Portuguese. Or a really nice and original pair of wedges, with a cosmopolitan - laid-back - sexy look. It has the huge advantage of being closely related to Romanian and that helps a lot. After all, this is the only pair of shoes that's entirely comfortable.

I'm still muzzy about all the Brazilian / European Portuguese differences (especially when it comes to pronunciation) and I think the time has come to have my tongue pierced. Hell, I moved to Poland in order to improve my Polish, what's a tongue piercing compared to that? It's the least I could do, a small step towards a perfect Portuguese pronunciation. It would be great if I could stick to that. Unfortunately, I can already see the pattern: it's going to take me about two years (or less) to decide I just have to move to Portugal, that it's the best place for me, I'll find a job or some studies or both, a house, make new friends and get used to a new city which will eventually not suit me anymore.

Sometimes walking in my shoes can be really exhausting.

One of those days

Today I successfully managed to block all my Polish cards. Numbers might not be my thing, but this is just too much. How hard can it be to remember a few digits in the right order, especially when it comes to the cards I use on a daily basis? I don't even want to try using the Romanian cards. Apparently, I'm dealing with a memory-loss situation that might turn out to be more serious than I thought.

The Portuguese course was supposed to start today but the teacher got lost on the way so after 20 very uncomfortable minutes of staring at the walls and at each other, my colleagues and I were told we'll start on Wednesday. Probably.

Came back home to find a poster downstairs informing that one of my neighbours died. I find it very disturbing and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do - if anything. And how do you ignore a poster that delivers such information?

Last but not least, I think I'm coming down with a cold, as Polish spring is never what it seems to be - if it's sunny and warm in the morning, that's hardly a reason to dress accordingly.

By the end of the day, I was frozen, soaked to the skin and grumpier than I've been in a very long time. I'd dye my hair but I'm afraid I'm not ready to deal with the consequences in case I make the tiniest mistake, so instead I'll just wait and see what tomorrow brings.

One day, I'll look for my head and it'll be gone

Big meeting tomorrow. I had all the materials neatly prepared and figured nothing could possibly go wrong. Now I know something might go wrong, because I left them at the store next to my house. The bright side is I have 2 packs of cigarettes to keep me company while I freak out about not finding them tomorrow morning. Oddly enough, it's the same store where a few days ago I left all the stuff I had just bought and only realized it the next day. This reminded me of my superb grumpy-but-gorgeous pajamas I lost some years ago in Spain and a few other pieces of clothing that have somehow vanished from my wardrobe or from my luggage or God knows what happened to them, the point is I can't seem to find them anymore and some of them were fabulous and I miss them, so if anyone knows anything about them, I'd appreciate the information. Once I lost my birth certificate, found it in one of my Literary Theory readers and then lost it again. Last week I also noticed my contract of employment was missing and I have no clue as to where it could be. Over the years, I've lost countless sets of keys (my own but also the keys of every apartment I've ever spent even a few hours in) and dozens of lip balms.

I really wish I could say I learnt something today, but I didn't, and perhaps I never will.

As for the big meeting, I can either go back to the office, drink hectoliters of coffee and prepare everything neatly once again or go to sleep and figure something out tomorrow morning. A decision that's obviously easy to make.

Berlin reunion

After a year and a half, the three of us were once again in the same city. And we had very little time, yet we did manage to make the best of it.

Meeting the girls and hanging out with them made me reflect upon my shallowness, my happiness and my sometimes very unhealthy obsessions and fears. And while I’m perfectly ok with the first two and content with most of the choices I’ve made, I figured it would be in my best interest to stop obsessing and let go of my fears - in the end, it's been 10 years and it would have been even more unsettling if things hadn't changed at all. However, looking back at those 10 years, with their ups and downs, even though I did manage to come to terms with the fact that as we grow older, we have new priorities and outlooks upon life, I still think we're not old enough for such a conversation:

my high school crush was not a crush, it was a crash

mine is best to be avoided, even after all those years

mine is dead...

It so happened that Ceci was there reporting live from the film festival, so almost all our meeting points, day and night, were somewhere near the red carpet. So I discovered that proximity to glamour can make you feel glam, but also that you can't rely on your friends, especially when you ask them to shamelessly use & abuse their press pass. And so, because Ceci is very ethical and professional at very inappropriate times, she refused to set me up with Leonardo DiCaprio :(

Berlin was amazing and more than just a very good setting for our reunion. I'm officially in love. I don't want to move there, not planning to start over (yet) again, not at all ready for the whole packing-unpacking-life twisting scenario, but it could easily become a regular weekend destination. Coming from a city like Warsaw, which has its odd and melancholic charm, distant and not exactly open to multicultural experiences, Berlin is like a breath of fresh air. It's dynamic, light and positive, with a contagious energy. And I just love the fact that everybody smiles - it's not very common to see people smiling in the streets of Warsaw. Its magic is made up of all those apparently insignificant details: the Russian accordionist on the S-Bahn, the Iranian shop with all the conceivable and unconceivable spices in the world, next door to our hotel, the colorful Kreuzberg district with its extra sweet cakes, immigrants, radicals and the most amazing artichoke in the world, the Russian market with fresh fruit late at night and the Asian supermarket with everything and anything aloe, the industrial buildings and the art world they hide and of course the exciting nightlife. I may have found my favorite club in Berlin, although it's rather an assumption, not a certainty. SO36 was described in my guide as being home to any alternative lifestyle, from gay Turks and metal heads to punks and hardcore vegans. I wouldn't know, because unfortunately we didn't make it there - I blame it on that last round of shots, but another fairly reasonable explanation was that the last round of shots came after we had tested almost everything on the menu. But I think I found the perfect excuse for yet another perfect weekend in Berlin.

Świat Książki strikes again

When it comes to book events, promotional campaigns, publishing houses and book parties, I'm very hard to please. I find most of them dull, old-fashioned, predictable and they're hardly ever book-oriented.

In most cases, we are dealing with a universal pattern that guarantees about 10 people in the audience: two or three speakers (at least one of them must be a literary critic), a moderator with very bad moderating skills (usually, some messed up PR person who has to be there because it's a job thing), a pile of books on a table in the corner, three or four on the table in front of the speakers, a venue that's normally popular (pub, club, fancy coffee shop) and a very inadequate timing (very few people bother to enter a club late in the afternoon, and it's even more embarrassing when the event takes place somewhere downstairs, while upstairs the bartenders are getting ready for a busy night, with no customers in sight), some sad little abstract posters and a lonely dusty banner. The really daring and outrageous book events might feature a piano intermezzo that's sure to bore everyone out of their skull and cheap wine that won't even get the audience drunk, as to make things bearable. As far as campaigns are concerned, a book is lucky to get some publicity in the press, a teaser that tries to be funny / witty / controversial and in most cases fails and some pathetic Facebook announcements two days before the event. Most books are just thrown out there and end up in bookstores without anyone noticing they were there. True, I've only had firsthand experiences of the Romanian and Polish markets so maybe the pattern isn't all that universal after all, and somewhere out there another pattern awaits to be discovered and imported.

Luckily, there are exceptions to the rule. And when they do occur, they are truly...exceptional. Which is to be expected, especially when the book that makes the object of the campaign is a masterpiece.

Given the fact that we are talking about the follow-up to The Book, given my emotional implication and the effort put in translating it, it is with heavy heart that I have to announce yet another brilliant campaign made in Poland. My adoptive country wins again, this time promoting The Eye of the Moon.

First there was the contest: smart, perfectly capturing the spirit of the book, introducing the characters and their stories, giving fans the opportunity to come up with their own interpretations (I find it so good I was almost tempted to translate it into English, for the sake of my non-Polish speaking readers).

Then came the trailer:

And then the newspaper - The Santa Mondega Times, an awesome sneak preview to the book:

I do expect a party sometime in the near future. And in the meantime, something to look forward to: only a few months left until the official release of the third book, The Devil's Graveyard.

Sequence of events

It is said that as we grow older, memory loss becomes a serious issue. But it wasn't until yesterday that I felt somewhat affected by this - I always thought wrinkles, bills, work and taxes were the big problems that come with the aging process. And I was prepared to fight them with increased intake of coenzyme Q10, a better organized agenda and loads of colorful post-its. It didn't occur to me that I might need post-its to remind me what I did last summer. Or the summer before that.

One week before our Berlin reunion, Vero, Ceci and I tried to remember when was the last time the three of us met. Sure, we managed to meet for a quick coffee and much needed updates here and there - Katowice, Paris, Bucharest, but it so happened that one of us was always missing. So yesterday Vero popped the inevitable question: "When did we last meet, all of us?". It took about three hours, Ceci's blog, my diary and a review of the biggest concerts in Bucharest in the past two years to finally figure out that we last met in August 2008 for a Massive Attack concert. And before that, in October 2007, we all went to see Muse live in Bucharest for the first time ever. By the time we reached this conclusion, we were all tired, annoyed and very confused about our summer holidays, winter breaks, birthdays, studies, jobs and ex-boyfriends. There was no chronology, it was as if everything had happened in the blink of an eye and the overall picture of the last years was very, very blurry. And the biggest problem isn't that everything was dull or not spectacular or not worth remembering - we do remember the details of particular events or holidays, we just can't seem to tell when they happened.

Note to self (and the girls): take pictures, write everything down, use post-its, accept senility as part of daily life.

Culinary art

Following a recipe found by Przemek in the depths of the internet and with a helping hand from Magda, tonight I changed my gummy bears routine for homemade cake. It was about time I took cooking seriously, and I am very glad I did. I think I am really talented. It took exactly 12 minutes to turn the kitchen upside down, bake the cake and get down to writing. I also developed new, until today unconceivable feelings for my microwave oven.

The battlefield:

Baked in 3 minutes:

Edible and even tasty with extra whipped cream and toffee sauce: