Monday, July 25, 2011

I don’t care about Amy Winehouse

In the past days all social media has been flooded with videos and comments about Amy Winehouse. Well, honestly I really do not care so much. Long time I have seen posts by most of the people, and not really lot of them used to be about this singer. Suddenly everyone is an Amy Winehoue fan. Some people might tend to say that I am a bit selfish, but honestly there are many reasons not to care. Here are some of them:

The club of 27, this one does not need a lot of explanation. To put her in the same space as Cobain, Joplin, Hendrix, is simply saying too much about her talent. So please do not even start that discussion.

Second, right now there is a humanitarian crisis in Somalia, in which a million people are in risk of death due to lack of food and water. A million people who have not chosen that destiny, but have to try to survive it. How much money did this singer spend in booze and drugs only to destroy her life? Just what she spent in her last night, was enough to give some hope to some of those innocent people. So please, we should put things into perspective and take a look at what is really going on out there in the world.

Third, I come from a country in which drug production has taken many lives and closed many doors on our fellow citizens. Consumers, which are idolized by the pop culture, who simply want to get more and more drugs are in a way the fuel to conflicts in countries like mine. They don’t care about how many innocent people have died in the conflict. Consumers just do that, consume, they don’t care what is in the product, and how it was done, and even more so, they don’t care if that product has some blood behind it.

Today when I see a death of a young woman, fueled by drugs, I simply can’t care. Caring for her would be an insult to the people of Somalia that struggle for their life. Caring for her would be an insult to the families that have been torn apart by drug driven conflict in my home country. So next time a pop singer does something like this, before making social media a hypocrisy landmark, please put things into perspective.

So it’s simple, I don’t care about Amy Winehouse. She didn’t go to rehab now she won’t have to.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Flirting with dementia

So I recently moved to Hungary, after living in Germany for almost four years. There are not so many differences in terms of the countries, even more so, there are some advantages since the culture and the food are more similar to my home country compared to what I experienced in Germany. The biggest weakness is my inability to communicate or understand people.

I recently started to learn Hungarian, but the progress is slow, basically I can’t get past the introduction conversation. Who cares who I am, or where I come from, and for that matter if I am learning Hungarian, if I have nothing else to say? Few people can speak in English, but most of them have little to say.

I constantly find myself in many tables where many people gather and talk. In Hungary, food and alcohol are always present. The advantage of not understanding is that basically you do not have to talk or to listen to the uncomfortable things many people say in any language. I can dedicate time to feel the flavor of great foods or to taste a good wine, and of course, the Hungarian drink, Palinka. Which on the label should say, don’t try this at home. Those are of course positive points. In this prolonged silence I have been able to be quieter and calmer.

The main issue, is that in order to go through gatherings, which are very common, I constantly find myself filling in the blanks, imagining what they say, or the jokes, or what they talk about. I guess is the feeling of missing the gift of understanding a conversation. It has been a while since I had a deep and profound conversation, not that I had them a lot before, but at least I had the chance, here I do not have it. I guess that is how dementia starts; there should be a study of the correlation between immigration and dementia. How many immigrants actually lose their sanity? Well I hope I do not get to be a part of the statistic. It is uncomfortable enough to know that there is a possibility that filling in the blanks is not totally sane, but who cares, if that is what gets me through a day and a night?

Silence is golden, but a word and a conversation it is also very valuable in, if not building your intellect, at least keeping your mind in shape.
I guess that while my previous entries in the blog were in order to let go of feelings that were hurting or keeping me at unease, these next entries may be a way of talking to me, or at least raising the issues concerning my past decisions and the ones that may come in the future.

So long and viszontlátásra…