LONDON

Time for us to write about London as well.

PIECE ONE: perspectives:

Quick thoughts about perspectives: In London you pay at least a thousand GBP rent per person per month for a decent place. That's a large chunk of your income (much larger than in Sofia), if you're working for real, and an impossible chunk of your income, if you are a student returning to Bulgaria to work afterwards. Also, London is a huge place where despite the extensive transportation network more often than not you need to walk for decades of minutes for the nearest Tube station. Additionally, most of the city looks old and worn out, lacking renovation since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Streets are tight, neighbourhoods are musty and suspect, buildings are in derelict maintenance.

But then you enter the apartments. They look brand new from the inside. They are equipped with the newest kitchens, chairs, tables, large plazma TVs, state-of-the-art computers, the nice large wine glasses, the fancy bed sheets and matresses. You feel inside like a king, like at a fancy cocktail. What a weird contradiction in London...Real estate madness...

PIECE TWO: Saturday:

I wake up and exit the apartment I am staying in. It is a lovely (by London standards) Saturday morning. I have a mini jet lag (2 hrs difference is significant, mate), fatigue in the legs from lots of walking and travelling, etc. First thing that hits me is the air. More humid, full of flavours, smelling like something strange, unfamiliar. Then it is the buildings. Neat and tidy, short and organized, with little fences and clear markings. Then it is the people. The occasional jogger. Arab dude standing in front of the Ali Baba restaurant. Paki woman hurrying along Glocester Place. Blonde German-looking backpacker circling Dover Square. This is variety you don't get anywhere else...

Then you get to Baker Street. There are minature Sherlocks pasted on the tiles along the Tube entrance. Mdme Tusseauds is beckoning nearby. The Globe across Marylebone is semi-full of Chelsea fans already. You smell bakery (it's Baker Street, dumbass). You see rushing cars but cannot comprehend the traffic direction despite the instructions on the ground. Admiral Nelson should have imported proper traffic direction, mate. You feel a rain drop but do not worry or look up - the rain in London is completely neglectful - there are plenty of places to hide plus it stops and goes on again, all the time...

You end up in the Sports Cafe near Picadilly to watch Chelsea-Man U along with hundreds of others and a couple of pints of Magners/Guinness. You take a stroll afterwards, along to Covent Garden and across the river to the London Eye bank and you suddenly realise that you need to dedicate a whole week to each London neighbourhood in order to really get to know and feel the whole of London. You see people that seem more and more unfamiliar (unlike Sofia, where everyone seems like you've seen her/him again some time before). The activities seem more and more absurd also - people pretend to be dull statues, mimes eat ladies' ice cream, dude gets out of a crazy suit... You rest a few hours and continue to dinner at Soho, dizzily (because of the sleep). The Indian tapas are nice and fulfilling, Cobra is a decent lager, but you need some time to awake. Then it's off to the heart of Soho and Waxy O'Conner - the best pub ever, but for two small details - the Tequila Lady does not respect your manhood (because you don't want tequilas) and it closes at midnight. What an absurd English tradition, you think, but you notice that everyone is either wasted or has a plan for where to move to next. Would it be possible that the tradition is there simply to stimulate folks to move along and interact more, instead of standing silently in one and the same place for hours? Donno. Anyway, you have now awaken, but your company is tired and want to go to bed. That sucks.

We walk to catch the last Tube train. We catch it. It seems kinda homey, like it's accompanying you home, not like NYC where the crazy folk come out at night on the F line. We walk home some more. It's warm and cosmopolitan. Like a wise man sleeping. We get to our little street. Everything is quiet and so are we, turning the key in and getting to sleep. m-f

Rejoin Yourself
The BALANCE Theory

Hello dear. I have a theory.

He had not been himself, lately. He was a stranger to himself. What he did was surprising to him as well (a few seconds after he said something he asked himself ‘wtf!’. How could he overturn it? Did he really want to (probably yes, but more appropriately, was he prepared to do what was needed)? What did overturning not being yourself mean, actually?....

Let's investigate this scientifically, first:

Let's see how this so-called straying from yourself starts.

It starts with a few compromises. A few trade-offs that give you what you don't have, but crave, in exchange for a part of yourself. A few times of silence, withholding what you itch to say. A few broken hearts that push you in the wrong direction of thinking you should somehow compensate for them by being different or doing what some idiot did to you. A few lies, here and there, innocent, silly and fun (but deep down pissing on everything you stand for). And you are there - a few feet from yourself. You start moving through life like the animated clone of your own true (former) self, a silent companion, a shadow that comes in touch with the body only under the most extreme of circumstances (high noon shootout). You stop having the ability to make right choices, because you don't feel anything, being outside your own body. You think you know what's good for you, but you're only judging by what's good for the shadow companion and what you vague remember about your true self.

Desperate measures are called for, and you realise it. You realise you can only make steps back to breathing back life to your own dry zombie companion, walking alongside your shadow soul if you start making some uncomfortable changes that lead to obviously bad tradeoffs (as judged by your current state of mind - since we want change, that's what we need to change first and foremost). For example, you need to change a job, even if it feels comfortable, money's good and you know what you are doing, just because you can feel the need for excitement and renewal from the opportunity to change. You need to change your girlfriend if you feel like you're sinking in an emotional swamp of stress and compromises with her, "just to keep her". You need to stop (eating, drinking, smoking, watching TV, whatever...) if the thought that that's not right for you has ever crossed your mind. Etc...

Let's now further analyse this the proper way: the "what I'm feeling" way.

You hear accordions and harmonicas. You realise that everything is subjective and rules are only valid until the current ones are broken, shortly. Min tells you about Paolo Conte, you download some and you like it very much. You become surrounded and overcame with senses and impressions. You give up the scientific formula explanation and you seek out a deeper overall meaning: after careful thought, everything seems to be driven by a need to balance, hence an achievement of something good for you is often naturally followed by a conscious step on your behalf to something bad for you (ex. you stop eating pizza but you start drinking more). Why this need for balance? What does ‘need for balance’ stand for? Such a need for balance sounds like simply a fear of change, and a fear of change naturally seems to be driven by the bad effects of change one has experienced.

So, we can simplify to this:

your life depends on the effect that the changes in your life have on you

Thanks,
Dr. M-F, MD

Tina Turner knows shit about shit. Simply the best is the feeling after you see your little baby for the first time, then share your feelings with your loved one; full stop. This post has to be here. It is dedicated to the entire male audience plus the women - the nature's true miracles.

I am far from being the person who has tried everything, but being an expecting father while your wife is in labor is far more effective than anything that a chemical genius in the depths of Columbian coca fields could imagine. There's no way to detect it, as well. The only ones who can detect is other people suffering the same kind of wooziness. Like in that movie "They live" or something, where one had to wear special glasses to see the pizza-faced aliens. You have absolutely no idea what you're doing, let alone why, but you do remember that there was adamant logic behind it just a moment ago. All ideas seem marvelous until the arrival of the next one, which does nothing more but supersede the previous one in lack of sense. The culmination comes with simply the best feeling mentioned above. That's when you run out of all ideas and where I bet that even the most macho of the macho will feel as if their knees as magnets of matching polarity. You realize that basically 95% of what you were doing while socializing in clubs and bars during your "wild" years was an inappropriate overture, but an overture nevertheless, to this moment. This is also what makes our species eerily close to just about any other species out there, and that is the innate motivation for achieving the ultimate goal of remaining a species. A good thing is that what your instincts were telling you about finding "the one" and settling for good was not just smalltalk between you and your conscience. Your priority list is not turned upside-down - it gets erased and re-written starting with one item only. All that repeating of how being stupid is a bliss sort of starts making sense, because you start wishing you were stupid about anything but this.
Then, there is the insightful moment when you realize that the little bugger knows who you are, which puts them one step ahead of you already, because you and your fully developed brain are having a hell of a time trying to figure out who the little mush of skin and hair with the most intriguing eyes you'll ever see really is. This is also the moment when the four invisible dwarfs make a human (or rather dwarf-) ladder by your spine, the topmost midget nails a 10-inch nail in the back of your head and they all sing the anthem of some banana republic of which you'll never hear. The logic behind this event equals the amount of logic you find in your own part of the scene where you are left babbling goo-goo lingo while thinking of how you shouldn't spoil the little one's perception of adult communication starting from day one. These two happenings go well together rendering each other meaningless if separated. What remains in the end is a quick, incomprehensible thought of what your life is going to be like having the little piece of godliness next to you for good.
How to explain the part when you explain this to your significant other is very difficult to explain. This is where you find the definition of some impressively sounding words like intimacy, trust and dedication. Knowing that what is between you will stay there is worth... well, anything really.

And this is just things that I could think of in 10 minutes of pre-sleep.