My Very "Robert Rodriguez Kind of Movie" Week

Fade in. 
The classical freeze-frame: the main character, wearing boots, a skater winter jacket is alone in a cemetery, on a Saturday afternoon at dusk, with the snow falling down, the ground muddy and the dogs howling someplace in the distance. She is trying to get her car to start, hood open, frozen fingers clutching a 10-key. 

”This is me now, you probably wonder how I got here.”

This is either the beginning of a horror movie or of a very demented comedy. Choose the latter.

My week started slow, with a cold and lots of work, continued with exciting discussions on business intelligence with Qlik, innovation and the new Innoteque, blockchain and the BLOCKS project.

Thursday was the turning point. All morning at work, lots of meetings, new projects, the usual suspects stealing ideas. Nothing new. The day was supposed to wrap up rather quickly, around  3-ish. It dragged into the evening, pleasantly, with conversations about OUG 114 (do not Google that, you will get annoyed) and the lack of morality in the current global society. I got home, the cold still raging, got ready for bed. Wishful thinking. A loud knock on the door, panic. The neighbor from across the street, a lovely lady aged 93 that seemed eternal, was found dead in her house by her grandson – the source of the bang on the door. We got dressed, crossed the street to her home, met another couple of neighbors there. They had already called the ambulance. Apparently, you don’t need to call the ambulance. Anyhow, it came. And said that the procedure is to call the police. Which also came: one car, then another. More neighbors. „What happened?” …. Surreal scenes in which the four cops are asking each other about which form to fill in. Overall, nice people all of them, compassionate, solved the issue quickly and left. We also left, the family remaining to deal with the usual…

There must be a lot of anthropological material in the way Romanians tackle death issues. Far from somber images, the funerals are a mix of circus and grief, old traditions and imagined ones, everyone has an opinion about everything. What else can you expect from a people that have as favorite dessert a „meal of the dead”’ – sweet wheat porridge only served at funerals (and hipster restaurants with ice cream)?

Friday was calmer, with the other old ladies on the street, her posse, so to speak, becoming Miss Marple and trying to piece together the details of the previous evening, adding to the story, imagining earthquakes at the wake, remembering other funerals… I grew up here, the crowd got smaller with the passing of the years, members of it moving from the seating position to the table in the center of the room. One by one. Leaving memories of laughter and tears.

Saturday was cold and snowy. The kind of day that you would hate being out unless it is on a slope and there is mulled wine at the end of it. Mushy streets, the priest saying that he will arrive after 2 pm. There is a new priest in the neighborhood. The previous one retired. He knew all the old ladies, this new guy is disconnected, he can’t understand the quirks. Didn’t pass approval as of yet. He felt the need after the funeral rite to say a few words. Nice ones, about the need to be kind and atone. They reached deaf ears because everyone was stressing about the snow and the fact that dusk was coming. It all sounded very Robert Rodriguez. The night is coming, and we must get this over with.

The cemetery was muddy, cold, snow came down faster, the rite went by quickly, there was another funeral coming, and they needed to wrap up by nighttime too. Going back to the car, contact. Dead. The battery that is. Suitable for a cemetery. Get people out of the car. Call an Uber. Send them home. Call for help reliable friends. They send back ETA: 33 minutes. Dusk is coming. The other funeral wrapped up too, people leaving fast. The gravediggers finished their business and went, after asking if I need any help and if I am sure it is because of the battery. Nice people, compassionate.

The snow is falling faster, the raised hood of the car cannot keep all of it away. Success, I manage to make it start, dusk at my heels. If it were a movie, it would be incredulous: the heroine managing to start the car, in the nick of time, zombies approaching… There were no zombies in the Saturday snowy cemetery. Just memories of laughter and tears. And of kind people helping when necessary.

Some other time, I will tell you about the story of my grandfather’s funeral – a series of unfortunate events which are the food for a very Balkan movie.

Nighttime. I am home, a bit freezing, a bit cold. All is well, the car is in the garage. The dogs are not howling. My neighbor from across the street was a lovely lady. May she rest in peace.

The main character sits in front of her laptop, very Carrie Bradshaw, typing away. A full moon rises.

Fade out.

The Burnout

Robert Doisneau. Les Tabliers de la Rue de Rivoli. 1978. 

Being part of the so-called burnout generation, the dreaded millennials, even in its earliest instances, is not an easy thing to come to terms with. Aging is hard for everyone, that is a truism, obviously, but it seems to be harder to us, accepting the adulthood and turning to be an adult into a verb.

What does it even mean? Getting married, having kids, taking the place of our parents in decision-making? Oh well, then I only check one out of three. There is a joke about being scared when people ask for the adult in the room, and you panic and look around for a ”more adult.”

Doing the clean-up for Christmas, I noticed a photo from my parent's wedding, with them and my aunt and uncle. Respectable adults. And it hit me: they were in their late 20s, early 30s at that time, 8 years younger than me now. I showed up when mom was 25 and dad was 32. My grandmother had her first stroke when my mother was 31. By the time mom was my age, I was going to high-school. And that brought perspective. There are people in my generation that have kids ready to got to high-school. Do they feel old? Did my parents feel old in their late 30s? Never asked, maybe I should.

Do I feel my age now? Hell, no. Sometimes I still feel like answering I am 28 when asked. It is doubtful to me too. And yet, after all these years, with two burnouts under my belt and another one creeping in, I get it. We are the burnout generation, burning bright, putting all our efforts into actions with impact. High energy, low impact activities are skipped, moved further down the line in the to-do list and innovations come for them: the dishwasher, the Roomba…

In the brief introspection about the lives of my parents as compared to my own, I still wonder how they could do things which seem unattainable for me. Mom was washing clothes weekly, outside, in a tiny washing machine, that required taking them out and rinsing them in three or four different tubs of cleaner and cleaner water. Oh well, I still need to take the clothes out of my washing machine, that rinsed and dried them. Too hard. My parents came home from work, had a meal with me and then left for the theatre or a restaurant with friends. How many times did you manage to get back home before an evening event? In my case, twice in a year, in special circumstances. I just link meetings, work, salon and doctor appointments in a stream, input in my Google Calendar, optimized to fit as much as possible. Is the world running faster? Are we busier? Why? Will I be as happy as my parents are in their 60s? Probably not, although I travel more in a year than they did in a lifetime.

It is all a matter of approaching time. We alternate periods of high activity with stretches of laying on the couch and binge-watching Game of Thrones, or playing whichever video game is cool at the moment. We are very much sinusoidal in our approach to time, and their generation was more linear.

And I did find my ”spirit animal” writer in Clarice Lispector, a millennial before her time when she wrote in The Stream of Life: 

“Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep–living is upsetting.” 

Reading her, a part of my parents generation, felt like all this dichotomy of us versus them, my generation versus theirs is fake. They did not write blogs, but journals, they are fearing getting old and frail and missing out on things as much as we do. But we have a stranger kind of resilience, and we should take to heart more their resilience. There are millennials of all ages...

How do all these things fit into the story of a burnout? Maybe they don't. I guess I am just rambling because birthdays are hard when one still has imposter syndrome when called an adult. But there is a burnout creeping in, and perhaps that is a sign of a much-needed change in my approach to time and the activities which fill it. And I am not alone in this... I have an entire generation with me.