Stingomeme
Inspired by my neighbor’s piano practice, beginner level, roll eyes here, and my other neighbor’s loud party, I was tempted to pass altogether Stingo’s request. But here I am, ten years after. Can I say I know who I am? What I want? Where I am going? Cause sure as hell I had no clue ten years ago.
I am more carefree than ten years ago, but not much more mature. I am one of those people whose exterior change goes unnoticed. My baby fat is burned, my long hair gone. My black leather motorcycle jacket is long gone to shreds saving the life and skin of a friend. Not me, the jacket! there is little I could have done. After all, he was riding his bike approximately one thousand miles an hour, do you wonder he’s skidded?
So, yeah! lets take this imaginary train to back in time, to ten years ago!
1997 is the year of my graduation. When I said “I am graduating a ballerina school, only without the pirouettes” much to my teacher’s distress at these words. He was angry with me, but I had been angry with him before that. He had recommended my diploma paper for a nine, and later made the mistake of coming to me in these terms: “Reading the other papers… now I regret I have not recommended you for a ten”. Of course I wanted to bite back.
Ten years ago I applied for a leader’s position. With the Soros foundation. My first application, my first interview, my first job. I had the nerve to tell the commission, which consisted of an executive manager, three branch managers and a psychologist slash HR specialist: “You called me to interview for the wrong position, I have applied for the Chief of department. I decided to come to let you know”. After a months trial I was Chief of department.
In 1997 I was dealing with my first real life invoice, dully noting at the time that all the schools I have been attending to that point had served me shit. Ten years ago I was a freshly graduated student who had no clue about basic financial procedures. It was on the occasion of supervising my first international conference. I was becoming an event organizer.
Towards the end of the same year, the Foundation was rendering obsolete part of their machinery. I have thus bought my first ever PC, a famous 486, which I was mostly using as a typewriter with a screen. I also remember a recurrent dream I used to have. The dream went like this: I see an excel file in front of me, I am filling in the numbers, I am checking them one by one, then I apply the sum formula and add them up. Then I sellect all, erase and start all over. Such a dream used to last an entire night, while I was preparing the Foundation’s Annual report. 400 A4 pages of names, figures and unintelligible text.
That year I don’t remember if I was seeing a girlfriend or not. But I remember seducing, in my small but no so small hometown, Timisoara, a gay British professor by the name of… Parrot. He kissed me on a bench next to the rugby field, hold my hand in the taxi, took me to his hotel room, where he came on me telling me “It’s good clean sperm, don’t you worry”. That night I made my first and last shameful exit from a hotel, at two o’clock in the night. I continued to send him poetic email, until he cut me loose. Very direct, almost made me bleed. I was not under the impression I could ever have a relation with him at any time, I just nedeed a vessel for my literary creations. I don’t know what came of these. They are still stuck on little floppy disks, in Timisoara.
Finally, ten years ago I had a passport featuring me with long hair. And I had no driving license.
In brief, I had no idea of where to go, but I was determined to get there fast.
