Rainbow Child

1. Mum has a university colleague who has moved to Germany. They kept in touch and 5 years ago she insisted I go and visit them so I was at her place for 2 weeks.

2. Her boy, who is 16,  is staying with us for 2 weeks just because I like his mum and I feel like I owe them something for those 2 weeks I spent at their place. I don’t like him at all and it was just a favour.

3. When we got back home from BM, the house was a mess. He had been using our pans although Eddie had told him to buy his own pan for frying meat. There were oil stains everywhere, unwashed dishes scattered around the kitchen. More than that, his stuff was everywhere – we barely had any place in the fridge to put our own groceries.

4. The moment he came home I told him about the mess he had made. His answer: “I didn’t think that was a mess. To me it looked clean enough”. Not to mention the countless rude retorts. He thinks he owns the place and he acts like I’m the guest.

5. I started cleaning the kitchen and the moment I was finished with the cooker he wanted to fry meat!!!!! For fuck’s sake, I scrubbed and I cleaned and now you want to fuck up my work? Of course, he is a sportsman and he needs to eat heavy stuff… Now all the apartment smells of his fucking fried meat and I don’t even want to see how the cooker looks…

6. Every time I tell him about something bad that he has done, he replies that “I’m only 16″ or “I had no idea about that” or “I’m a boy, I don’t have to know how to cook”. Well, fuck you, I won’t give you private cooking lessons! Speaking of which, his mum told me today that I should teach him how to clean! EXCUSE ME??? Are you bloody insane???? You’re letting your kid move on his own to Bucharest, finishing his high school here and you want me to teach him everyfuckingthing that you haven’t taught him yet??? I’m sorry, I’m no babysitter.

7. This is it! Except friends and family and the occasional couch surfers, I won’t have anyone else stay at my place. Yes, I have a spare room, but I don’t want to be anyone’s maid. Really, it’s absolutely outrageous the way this kid talks to me! And for these two hell of a weeks he is not paying rent and he didn’t bring us anything, not even a bar of chocolate. It’s like “hey, suckers, I’m pissing all over you and you can’t do anything about that”. I would LOVE to just throw his stuff out of the balcony and change the lock. But I can’t, so IN MY OWN HOUSE I will have to put up with his crap until Friday.

Someone really hates me up there…

This moody weather doesn’t inspire me at all. I look at my bike, I long to go and read in the park and as I’m heading towards the door it starts raining cats and dogs. Every bloody day! Then of course the sun shines like nothing has happened but it’s too late: my mood is ruined, the roads are wet, the earth is full of water, there’s nothing to do than to stay in.

And that’s what I’ve been doing since I came back to Bucharest. For almost a week now I’ve been going out only to buy groceries and only once I went to the city centre. I met a high school colleague who was here for an interview. We had a nice chit-chat and caught up on what has been going on in our lives but I have to admit I don’t understand her and others like her. She didn’t say it out loud but you could see how helpless she was here. She was afraid of getting lost, she gave me the money and I bought the metro card for her!!!, you get the picture. And it was the first time she had traveled by herself with the train. Come on! Ugh, I don’t understand people who are that scared of this big world, people who prefer to stay at home where everything is safe and nice.

Anyways, my days are so bloody boring that I’ve started playing old DOS games. I read a bit, I sleep, I cook and that’s about all. In the evening we watch Friends and Seinfeld and then we sleep some more. I can hardly wait to go to Athens to feel like a tourist again and walk everywhere and take hundreds of pictures daily. I have no idea how housewives don’t feel like killing themselves from all this boredom…

Encounters with freaks? Countless! But each and every time something like that happens I’m really taken aback.

Today I was walking very fast going from Romană to Unirii to meet up with him. I had my earphones on (like always), I was wearing a very decent red skirt and, like I’ve said, I was walking very fast. As I was passing through the passage at Universitate, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I stopped and turned around expecting to see a familiar face. Well, the guy who had tapped me didn’t look familiar at all. He was a bit chubby, kinda my height, with blonde hair and he was wearing a red jacket and a red cap (red, everyone was wearing red today!).

I saw that he was saying something so I took off my earphones. I thought he was someone who needed directions or wanted some money.

- Uhm… do you speak Romanian? he asked me in English.
- (WTF?!) Da! Of course I speak Romanian!
- Oh, hahaha, OK. Well, you know…
- What do you want?
- Uhm, do you have any idea what would be the perfect but casual pick up line?

I didn’t even listen to what else he wanted to say. I put my earphones on and headed for the escalator. He was coming after me. I rushed out and walked even faster but he was still behind me gesticulating and saying things I didn’t hear. I lost him at one point or he simply gave up.

I really don’t understand these guys. Do they really think we could fall for someone who is creeping up on us? Or for someone who out of the blue asks us for the perfect pick up line?

People are so fucking strange!

Yesterday was supposed to be a beautiful great day. Well… sometimes shit happens.

Like when you want to change your bike’s back tire and the man at the shop gives you a bigger model, you give it to the mechanic and after he takes the wheel and the old tire down and puts the new tire and the wheel back he realises it’s bigger and the the whole process starts over again. Now I still have my old tire, but they promised they would order a tire in the correct size for me and I should go back at their shop next week. We’ll see about that.

And then you plan on going to this whatever concert and when you get there they tell you need a reservation. “But we don’t want to sit down”. “Still, you need a reservation. You can’t attend the concert otherwise.” I wonder why these clubs bother updating their websites with the dates of the concerts if they can’t even put a small sign with “reservations needed”. Uhm, hello, I’ve been there to lots of concerts before, I didn’t need a reservation for those, how was I supposed to know I need one now? Jerks!

We ended up going to the Kumm concert instead. I’ve missed their concerts, but I can’t listen to their latest album offline. It sounds quite catchy hearing it live, but it kinda sucks when I play it at home. De gustibus.

I thought I was going to leave my bike at the repair shop, but they made the changes on the spot so I was stuck with it. When we went back home, he and Hanna took a cab and I pedaled home. I wasn’t properly dressed for biking at night, but I survived. It was 1 o’clock in the night, the streets were almost empty, it was awesome! At least that.

• I hate the fact that I always have to switch between the English and the Romanian keyboard. I get confused, I have no idea what language is currently on, I want to write something and I get a total bullshit, it’s driving me nuts!
• It’s difficult to try and live your life by doing only what you want. Sometimes you can’t do what you want and then your only option is to do nothing. But at one point doing nothing feels even worse than doing something you don’t like/don’t want to do.
• Sometimes I feel like I’m not living at all: the days come and go so fast I don’t have time to enjoy them.
• My only “work” at the moment is a translation I have to do for my master’s program. The problem is that it’s kinda third-hand translation: the original text was written in Polish, then poorly translated into English and now I have to translate into Romanian.
• Sometimes I fear I’ll die a very stupid death: a flu or a minor infection gone wild, slipping in the bathtub and cracking my head etc.
• if my aunt agrees, we’re going to visit her in Athens this July. I know, it will be fucking hot!
• I can’t believe I’m considering leaving uRMa here with him this summer!
• Speaking of which, tomorrow’s her birthday: she turns 3. And the day after tomorrow is his birthday. Thanks for ruining your b-day present, jerk! Now you’ll get nothing!
• Juliet, Naked hasn’t been great up until now. Maybe it’s just me. I’ll read some more and see.
• I miss having obsession. I feel empty without them: no song to haunt me, I’m not hooked up on any TV series, no nothing. Bleah.