tonight

Tonight my life doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I am on my own in a country that I often fail to understand, with people who do not share my way of being, my way of feeling, and my aims and aspirations. The politics here are crazy, we are moving from one political crisis to the next. The spin of the moment is whether the European elections will be postponed. The spin of tomorrow is yet another deal with personal interests and business interests uncannily close and extremely dangerous. Becali, the richissime owner of Steaua Bucharest, leads the Party of the New Generation, without a programme, but the slogan that ‘politics is his salvation’ and a weird compulsion to talk about idealism, honesty, thieves (all other parties) and that he wants to build a right-wing oriental Christian democratic kind of politics. My true worry is that he might become Romania’s next president. People in the village take it stoically. They know regimes come and go and they are all bad, in one way or another. People are involved in very hierarchical relationships of dependence and services and yet, I am not sure whether community is the right word to use. All this and more makes me tired, prone to colds and, sometimes, grumpy and extremely vulnerable to whatever comes (or doesn’t come) my way. I miss my friends and I miss having a life that is filled with things I love doing: exercising in the gym, playing badminton, going to the library, having a regulated, tightly scheduled life, going to the cinema, going to the pub with people I share more than just location with. I am eaten by fleas and spiders and the people I want to spend time with for fun are the same who I hurt in their manly pride by telling them that I am not in the least attracted to them. The selection is not vast I must say, and those that do not consider me worth ignoring regard me as a child. I am not taken seriously, because people work in different ways here and do not hold appointments and delay, delay, delay, and then do not have any time left. It makes me feel like I am not achieving a lot. The child-woman lacks everything at times to defend herself in a manner that will not be considered impolite or reckless or un-womanly. I try to be a good anthropologist, but I do not know if even come close. I exhaust myself on one day, manically wandering through the village and being filled up with other people’s lives, and feel so elated I could eat the world, then follow three days of rain, of rejection, of ‘I have no idea what to tell you’, and of ‘this week I really don’t have time for this, maybe in the autumn’ (my hosts’ response to this was, ‘yes, but they didn’t say which autumn’), of broken promises and a ruptured tire to round it off. I do wonder at the methods we anthropologists use, and at all the time wasted to get just a bit of information, all these hours spent hanging about in pubs (unwomanly), in gardens with busy women, on the street just to get a bit of ‘data’. I suppose most research is like this, and how naïve I have been to write all the things about activist research, and similar patronising things.