Ita est!

(Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity) is
emblematic of Vincent van Gogh’s suffering in his
final months in Auvers-sur-Oise.)

I see him every day. He has his usual walk on his crunches. Then he sits on the concrete bench in front of his tenement. He sits there for hours and hours until his wife takes him up to their flat.

I’ve known that man for all my life. He and his wife are my neighbors. She used to be quite neurotic when we played under her window. She threw jars on us… However my grandmother has been her friend. That woman was her hairdresser for a long, and now she is often visiting our house. I didn’t know that weak and quiet man was her husband. He seemed totally opposite to her temperament, although I’ve never had any contact with him.

Now when I stare out through the window next to the screen, I see him standing alone with his crunches on one side. I’ve heard he had a car accident last year, which obviously made him much weaker than before.

He reminds me of my late grandfather. He was that weak in his last weeks… and I visited him only about five times for two months. Grandpa always told me to consider school and studying first, but he was so happy when I was with him. In his last weeks he felt so hopeless, he didn’t even want to speak, but he seemed to be pleased when I told him of every little or slightly bigger success I had. That is why I tried to present everything good I’d done. He was the first witness of my success with jumping - I finally reached the ceiling after many years believing that I won’t be able to do it. I was so pleased that I used every opportunity to jump in my grandparents’ flat. The last time I went to visit him, before I looked at him, I casted a glance on the ceiling.

“Keep away from the TV antenna” he murmured. I smiled and didn’t jump.

I can’t watch my neighbor waiting his end like that. I must not switch on Damien Rice and watch the sunset walking in the town this time . I don’t want to do it again. I won’t be able to approach him either. I am so wretched. I write essays about changing and being able to be at ease among unfamiliar people and in different situations. Still, I am not capable of going to talk to an old desperate man. I don’t know what to tell him, I don’t know how to act. I am just going to stay here and timorously watch.

I woke up on Monday morning after a four-hour sleep.

“… let’s help elect Barack Obama our president!”

I went to the bathroom.

“… let’s help elect Barack Obama our president!”

I walked the way to school.

“… let’s help elect Barack Obama our president!”

That seemed to be the chant of my tired brain that morning. I couldn’t drive it out!

“Let’s help elect Barack Obama our president!” I said to my classmates

“Hey, what’s wrong with you? What was that?”

“Let’s help elect Barack Obama our president!”

“Haven’t you slept at all?”

“Oh, I have. I slept from 2:30 to 6:30.”

“What were you doing last night? Watching presidential campaigns?”

“No, … ugh.., yes!!, I mean, the last thing I saw last night was Barack Obama, but I watched Hillary Clinton on Saturday. I watched her Endorsement Speech, in which, I think, she repeated that phrase for about a thousand times in a couple of minutes “

“So let’s help elect Barack Obama our president!”

“No, don’t say that again! It’s so annoying! It doesn’t sound pleasant from your mouth”

“But that’s exactly what she said… Let me show you this video!”

“Four times in three minutes?! You are as good in repeating that as she is “

However, this slogan seemed harmless compared to the repeating of “energy resources”, “global warming”, “segregation”, “women’s rights”, “Troops in Iraq”, “middle class” and “Stronger America”

I didn’t like the speech. It was trite. Clinton just repeated the main shortcomings of the US throughout the years. The only thing that kept me in front of CNN for half an hour was the fact that her wordes were so simple that I could understand everything. That made me remember the challenging SAT readings based on Martin Luther King’s speeches, and their persuasiveness. The weight of his words came from the significance of his causes as well as from his eloquence which I couldn’t catch in Clinton’s final act. I got a bit disappointed of the presidential campaign, but then a friend of mine told me about this:

This speech is different. Here Senator Obama says “I am reminded every day of my life, if not by events, then by my wife, that I’m not a perfect man. I won’t be a perfect president..”, while Hillary Clinton declares “I was proud to be running as a woman, but I was running because I thought I’d be the best president”. She’s repeating the modern society’s concerns and the causes she’d be glad to work for, while Obama’s retelling a real amusing story which shifts the focus on the ordinary individual and makes him believe that large-scale ideas stem from the smaller events. While Clinton is harping on the key points of her political program, Obama is galvanizing with: “Fired up! Ready to go!”.

This juxtaposition made me realize my brain keeps repeating: “Let’s help elect Barack Obama our president!”, only because I’d rather hear more of “Fired up! Ready to go!” in the future.

This is a good way for me to stop worrying about my problems.

When something takes control over me, I drive it away thinking about space. I imagine a view of myself sitting where I am, then I see my town, the whole country, Europe, and the whole continent. I continue with the entire Solar system, our galaxy, our cluster of galaxy, the whole observable universe. And as I go further away from myself, I stop thinking of what is so pettily occupying my mind. It seems so insignificant compared to the new questions about the outer space. What was it start? What caused it existence? What’s going on with it now? Is it going to vanish someday… I’m getting perplexed, and… erm what was I doing? … oh, I’ daydreaming again…and I’ve got so much to do today, let’s go back to work!

Yesterday evening when I was just ready to open “the message to the planet” by Iris Murdoch the telephone rang. It was my mother. She told me I could go and visit my grandparents with her. I couldn’t say no. My grandfather’s been worse recently. In the summer he had his gall-bladder removed, but his heart was going worse, as the doctors finished the operations before they could kill all the neurons damaged by the surgery. The pain caused by them, together with the pain of his sore pancreas and gastritis, made him afraid of eating. He was so cautious not to eat food which could cause him pain that he nearly stopped swallowing anything. Naturally, he got too weak, and now he can’t do anything but lying and thinking about his missing health. The worst thing of all is that he doesn’t want to believe that he can ever get better and he doesn’t even try to eat more or distract from the bleak feelings of the last few moths.

Every time I visit him I am trying to be as cheerful as possible. I think he hasn’t encountered anything but concern faces and health instructions for quite a long. Nonetheless, I can’t do it for a long, because soon after I see his apathy and surrender to the illness, my empathy takes place and I transmit nothing by pity.

On my way to my grandparents’ apartment the picture of what our visit was going to be like was already vivid in my head, and again I started thinking of a possible plan how to take grandpa out of this all. I had already rejected making him meet people - he can’t talk to anyone; everything makes him rather nervous and he is unbearably impolite; he could neither do agriculture anymore - the only thing that has ever been his entertainment, nor he could read books - he says he can’t see any point in doing it anymore, and he refuses to read anything. The only thing left, I thought, was finding a faith healer to disperse his despair, only if there were some psychoanalysts in Haskovo…(Please, tell me if you know someone to practice this here, I’d be really happy if I could find someone to help). The other profession that works with faith healing is energy therapy, I suppose, but it would sound very nutty to my rational-minded relatives to rely on a charlatan, mesmerizing people by talking about energy fields.

How can I persuade my mother to take grandpa to her nephew’s godmother (a well-known energy therapist in Haskovo) as she always consider her job ridiculous and she barely meets to my cousin after his wife decided she doesn’t like us? How could I possibly help? … or how could I stay indifferent to my grandfather’s aggravation?!

That was the topic of an essay I chose to write for school 2 weeks ago. I thought it would be simple, as I know how many things and ideas I just overlook.

I thought a lot, and finally wrote about my inclination to leave my own country and live with my family away from here, with no excess of money, but working as a scientist. My essay received “5″ (B), because “A lot of other things could be considered as well”. Anyway, Istill keep in mind to reveal th efull picture of what I aquiesce.

A friend of mine has put that link (http://www.storyofstuff.com) in his Skype profile today. I felt it was worthy, because he’s prooved to me the value of his liking, so I followed it.

This short production includes the better part of what I dislike on Earth. But obviously noone does enough to prevent it. It makes me feel dizzy and whirling, but I don’t do anything considerable to change it. Our life seems to get more and more tangled and we are just… watching.

At least, I hope that by watching more, people would realise the problems of what we call civilization, and one day we’re going to pass the new level and work for preventing the disturbances of people and their habitat.

In the summer my brother was confined to our hometown, because everyone considered it too dangerous for his poor after the operations heath to let him go anywhere. He was supposed to stay at home to study and read, but mostly to relax – to do nothing that could harm his condition. As it could be easily guessed, opposite to this, it tormented him. What could he do all summer, all day long in the sweltering, emptied town? Everything he liked would be the same, and sooner or later he would exhaust his enthusiasm. The only entertainment in the heat of the summer at home not indifferent to him were neither the TV programs, nor songs, movies and meetings friends, it was photographing the sunsets that made his days. He was prescribed three-kilometer walks every day, so he took his camera and lenses and went away from home to wait for the last rays of the sun for the day.

While I was in all kinds of summer schools, exchanges and trips, he took piles of pictures and became inspired by the magnificent views people from Haskovo never see in their lives. He found the best places for watching the setting sun, and one day when I was just back from the last camp for the summer, he took me with him to see it.

All I knew was that it was next to the water tower I used to ask my father to take me to, when we were going to our villa in the “Yamatcha” hill. Daddy always refused to take me there because, as he told me, it was full of dangerous people living around it. 10 years later I was rushing to it, urged by my brother’s insistence to get there on time. He was no longer slower than I, and this time he was determined to take pictures.

I asked him to tell me where exactly we are going to, but soon, I found it out myself. We were gradually floating into an unknown-language tide. Altaic words were the only articulate sounds surrounding us. We were making our way into the “Turkish Neighborhood”. People there live with animals in the yards of the dirty miserable houses with aluminum window frames. People inside the frames looked at us in a very peculiar way – they didn’t know us, and they were surprised to see a girl and a boy, speaking in Bulgarian rushing towards the water tower with full of heavy equipment backpacks. They were staring at us, and this frightened me. This time it wasn’t the feeling that they were looking at me with full of malevolence glance, it was even worse – their eyes didn’t express anything. Their faces were not even covered by masks, but they exposed the emptiness beyond the visible lack of features.

Until we reached the Water Tower I was already stunned. My mind was full of the series of pictures of unconscious despair and not minded poverty and stink of miserable life. We were now on the hill, right under the enormous concrete device. My brother was excited by the unparalleled beauty of the colorful sky above the fiery red sun. He took photos, and he pointed it, smiling with delight and repeating “this is what is worth! It is magnificent; it’s the best place to watch sunsets! How I wished I came here more often! You like it, don’t you?!”

Right next to him I couldn’t see the beauty, created by the sun, because I was dazzled by the poor reality surrounding me in my own town. I obviously wasn’t familiar enough with it, to know its real state. I had to examine it. From that hill I could see the whole of it, with all the groups of houses and blocks of flats and. The proud symbol of Haskovo, the Blessed Virgin Mary Monument high above on the “Yamatcha Hill” protected the town keeping everything in her arms and eyes. She seemed to hold everything but she had turned her back on the Water Tower and the life around.

At the weekend I went to Shumen to take part in a competition in Informatics. I had been listening about the statue of the 1300th Bulgarian anniversary with the 1300 steps you must climb to reach it since August, and I was eager to see it.

On Friday evening, I couldn’t make people come with me to see it. Instead, they preferred to go to a restaurant and have a beer before the competition. I didn’t mind hiving a juice with them, however.

On the way through the central part of the city, I saw the most significant building in Shumen, together with a high, enormous, mighty, concrete building. It looked like the municipality halls in many towns, but my question “Wow, what’s that building?” was taken as a joke, and no one told me what does it stand for. On my way back to the hotel, I was alone with one boy from Shumen, and when I saw the imposing figure again I asked him what people do in that building and, again, he smiled and answered nothing important, so we passed on my next inquisitive question.

After the competition, this time with tha sun above the horizon, I was together with my friends, we followed the previous night’s route, and when we went close to the striking building, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It stood there, high above everything else, frozen, unfinished and deserted, as a reminescence of communism. Through the epochs, the tallest building in the city was considered to symbolize the power ruling the world of that place like the cathedrals and palaces, followed by scyscrapers nowadays.

Here in Bulgarian cities, the most impressive buldings, stand for the unfulfilled ideas and dreams of the country and its resigned people 1300 years after their ancestors obtained that rich land for them.

Surprisingly, I’m not going to say anything about prof. Yulian Vuchkov now. “The Professor” this time is Damien Rice, and, actually, everyone who sings together with his record.

Loving is good if it’s not understood
Yeah, but I’m the professor
And feel that I should know…

It’s true that everyone feels the urge to know more about love. With every song I hear, every book I read, and every day I live, I see that people are pretty fond of talking about love. I’ve wondered why love mater is not only discussed so commonly, but analyzed, and what the special thing so interesting about it is. Eventually, I have an answer!

In “Portrain in Sepia” by Isabel Allende I recently read the following idea of a young lady in love.

“If a dead poet on the other side of the world could describe my feelings with such precision, I had to accept with humility that my love was not exceptional, that I had invented nothing, that everyone falls in love in more or less the same manner.”

It made me realize that it is not the uniqueness of each love that makes the great minds think of the aspects of love for centuries. What makes it common, must be the essential thing sophisticated people try to reveal. By all the descriptions, good authors do not just want to present a love story and make one closer to others’ affairs, but they yearn for its real hidden essence, which provokes the similar conditions of diverse people.