Iuliana Cosmina

I started re-watching House M.D. and I remembered why I love that series. First it shows adults behaving like children, but getting the job done. It shows people being themselves unbounded by political correctness or any other society norms we invented to protect snowflakes that were over-protected by their parents and then sent out into the world to be adults without being taught how.

And I was reminded how it feels to tell somebody that they are an idiot and not be afraid that the internet will lynch my Twitter profile. Because that is the problem when your internet persona is more of a brand than an individual user. You tend to try to polish that persona to be tolerable to a lot of people, so your books will still sell, and so recruiters will still call you when you are looking for a job. But fuck this, some people are idiots and I’m tired of keeping most of my revulsion towards some people in. Some people do not have to be protected from the world, because they have to bloody live in it.

I must have been influenced by this series, because I called somebody an idiot on Twitter. I haven’t done this in a long time and it felt so liberating.
Why did I do it? Well…

And since not all my readers are Romanians. Here’s the context. You probably heard of Simona Halep, right?
Apparently, some of my countrymen are unable to understand the amount of work necessary to be a world champion in tennis and seem to think she somehow does not deserve the money she made playing tennis.
The “blinking” user seems to think she doesn’t work more than the rest of us, or maybe she woks more just around the time of tournaments. So yeah, I replied to that tweet and told the person that they are an idiot. And proposed a marathon analogy. Everybody knows, you cannot win a marathon by only training one month before the tournament. He did not get it and thought I got … mad. Apparently, you cannot tell somebody they are idiots these days without being mad. This is what the world has come to. You have to feel something, to make such a “serious” affirmation. No, sometimes people are just being idiots and deserve to be told they are idiots.

I called him an idiot, because he was an idiot. And it felt soo… good. The internet did not crush me, I was not banned from twitter and I do not feel guilty about it. And my internet persona was not lynched.

Why did I feel the need to call that person an idiot? Because I trained six years when I was a child for the Olympics, well at least my trainer said I was Olympics material. (And my parents did not give a rat’s ass and moved across the country anyway. So yeah, six years of training went down the drain.) I know the amount of work it implies. I know the risks on your physical and mental health. So, nobody in this world should comment on the amount of money she deserves or not. Whatever she made, she worked for it.

Also, questioning the money a public person that actually proved their worth in quite a few tournaments is idiotic. Questioning politicians and their acolytes, questioning mobsters, questioning magnates such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others, is expected, especially since they made their money by being tax-exempt. But … leave Halep and other athletes alone, because whatever money they made, I am sure they paid their taxes. Unlike … those other guys I previously mentioned.

I know I am fighting on the internet, how pitiful, how lame! Well, sometimes it must be done, because sometimes being called an idiot it what helps you grow. If there is any potential for that. I can only hope there was.

Stay safe, stay healthy!

A while ago I went for a bike ride in my favorite direction, the Forth Bridge. I haven’t done it in a while and my muscles are weak and my knees feel weak too. I feared of falling a few times and I felt my heart jump as I haven’t in quite a while.

I’ve been a little bit down lately. I wouldn’t say I am depressed, just a little bit sad and disenchanted with life overall. It is 2020 after all, so I do have reasons to feel this way.

The bike path to Forth Bridge goes through this big piece of land called the Dalmeny Estate. I do not know who owns it, but I’ve seen some people play golf and I’ve seen a lot of Scottish hairy cows which look well taken care of. So, somebody with a lot of money owns this estate because they afford to pay the taxes for it, maintain the land, tend to a big herd of hairy cows and maintain a decent size castle.

So, there I was, taking a break on the stony pier in front of the castle and I was looking at it. And it hit me. No matter how hard I work, I will never afford that. And even if I could by some miracle afford it, could I afford to maintain it? How much work would that be? Do I need to hire people? How many? Does the council have anything to say in how I maintain the castle? Because if it is considered a historic building, who know what conditions I might need to fulfill to maintain it. So, I might be forced to give up my dream sex dungeon.  Yeah, it would be nice to live in a castle by the sea. But taxes, expenses and administrative responsibility would make it impossible for me to enjoy it.

Neah, I don’t need a castle. Maybe because I was sad, I just imagined I might be happier if I owned a castle. But if I’ve learned anything in my short life is that we can be poor and we can be rich, but we’ll always find reasons to be sad. Sure, any person longing to be richer will tell you they would prefer to cry in a castle, rather than a one room rented apartment. But being unsatisfied and sad, fells the same regardless of your social status. Of course, the reasons of being sad are different, but that feeling is exactly the same.

That is the irony of life, you can be rich or poor, but sadness will always find a way to seep into your mind and take hold of it and make you miserable. So instead of being sad because of that you do not have, just try to appreciate what you do have and currently are taking for granted.

Stay safe, stay happy!

On the 11th of September 2001 I was taking my admission exam to the university. I remember some friends that had mobile phones – and were called by their parents about it – started talking about it at the after exam beer.

Although Romania was thousands of miles away, it was an important topic. US was after all one of the countries where most Romanians ran to when escaping Romanian communism. So, it was important. The land of milk and honey, the land of unimaginable progress, the land where dreams come true if you are willing to work on them, the land of the free, home of the brave, the perfect democracy was hit hard. It seems US had made serious enemies.

There were a few voices that said, Well… they did it to themselves by not sticking to their piece of land and going to war with Arabic countries for cheap oil. Don’t they know those Arabs are nuts? We Romanians view Arabs as what is left from the Ottoman Empire, and those guys were many and were ruthless and our people has fought them for centuries.

I did not think of the country being hit, because “the country” is a pretty general concept. The people were the ones being hit. And some of them probably never benefitted much from that oil. It was unfair after all, normal people were suffering for ambitions of politicians. A lot of innocent lives were lost because some 1%-er wanted more.

19 years after that tragedy and US is destroying itself.

Sun Tzu, in the “Art of War” has one quote that I’ve always liked: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”
Probably Osama bin Laden, somewhere in hell, is kicking himself right now for his part in that horrid tragedy, because he realizes he could have just lived his life and watched the news. The outcome would have been exactly the same.

I don’t want to be pessimistic; I am writing all these things and I am waiting for the reality to bloody contradict me at some point. I am only hoping for the day when I will write an entry about US, the Phoenix country rising brighter and stronger from the ashes of racism and Trumpism and I will praise it for becoming the biggest and best democracy of them all.

Until then, go vote for Biden and hope for the best!

Stay safe, stay happy!

I received a comment a few days ago to one of my entries. It doesn’t happen very often because people rarely take the time to communicate online with a stranger these days unless they are contacting support. I previously wrote an entry about our country economies being fuelled by babies. It sounds somewhat macabre if you think about it. But it is also true. We are born and we are shaped into adults that are meant to be part of a society and … behave nice, almost submissive. So, somebody commented on it. Turns out, I know nothing, and I quote: You know what I think? That you would do anything to find a man and have a family. People are different and thus have different opinions. But she, because the commenter is a woman, does not have an opinion about my opinion and the ideas I expressed in my entry, she has an opinion about me. Not about what I expressed, but about me and how I think. This woman did not even give a second thought to the ideas expressed in the entry. She dismissed me without providing any arguments as why my ideas were wrong. She did not want to start a discussion. Because…

She did not doubt her knowledge or thinking. And this is one of the things I still don’t get about people, even after all my time on this Earth. I know enough about this world and about this life, to know that there is much I do not know. That is why I ended my entry with But, what do I know?. I am ok with not knowing, it took me a long time, but I accepted I will die not being sure of anything. But it is good to be aware of your limited knowledge, because it will stop you from making affirmations with too much conviction and ending up hurting someone. Because being fixed on an idea, is a sign of narrow-mindedness. Looking back into my past I remember one of my ex-boyfriends jokingly saying from time to time I don’t have many ideas, but the ones I have they are fixed. And people around him, including me would laugh at that joke and found it funny.
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