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The very recent new USR scandal featuring Andrei Caramitru and the Vice Romania “journalist” Sidonia Bogdan is both disturbing and funny. I don’t consider myself “journalist” but as a blogger I’ve asked candidates questions, with mixed results, and as a political candidate I often had to deal with incredibly idiotic interactions on Facebook, so I sort of see where Caramitru the Young is coming from as well. Let me explain.

A former CNSS (Sf Sava National College / High School) classmate sent me a link to an article about Horia Constantinescu (curi-interlop), asking me if I remember this guy being in our class. In Romanian, “interlop” is used to mean shady/criminal while in English it means “unwanted, persona non grata”.

I should’ve written “Guten Abend” instead of “buna seara”, but I don’t mean to torture my readers more than necessary. I’ve recently learned about Ion Caramitru’s prodigal son Andrei having returned from Switzerland (bmr-icstory), much like the older Ion Ratiu, to give Romanians Nestle candies in exchange for votes.

In a recently published article on Euronews (en-roadfat), Alice Tidey asks the question where in Europe are roads deadliest; the answer is posted even before the question: Romania. We decipher a recent “ProTV News” news segment (spt-victime) where Titi Aur, a “defensive driving instructor”, reveals a deeply seated murderous misunderstanding in terms of the rules of the road, a misunderstanding that he shares.

@Simona_Halep’s win is an amazing victory and an event we’ll be remembering and talking about at least until her next Grand Slam.  Sadly, it was only hours before all those hungry to for publicity started to throw shade, claim ownership and speculate it for their own nefarious ends.

Recently, on the WhatsApp group I share with my former classmates, one of us posted an article about Soros. I don’t know exactly why he did so – there’s a small chance he shared it because it’s such a dumb article that it’s funny, but this is a good opportunity to look at the mythology created around the boogeyman Soros. As it happens, this article would be best written in Romanian, as anyone capable to follow an article in English has already made up her mind, which is why a summary in Romanian will soon follow.

I’m becoming a Nastase hater. Can’t this guy just disappear from news altogether, or realize that we’re no longer in the 50s and the 70s are over?!

The way I experience love, or at least what most people mean by it, is dumb and I haze it. I get jealous, obsessive, cheesy. This kind of love is not enjoyable for me, likely not for the other and I try to avoid it, yet this is the kind most girls I had dated in the past seemed to want.

As expected, we owe most of our understanding of love to the Greeks, who were collecting words to describe it. Some scholars prefer to talk about four kinds, others five, others seven and some go as high as thirty. Here are the most used Greek terms:

• Storge (family affection)
• Philia (brotherly love, co-workers, soldiers, shared goal)
• Eros (romance, passion, desire, sex, physical, strange)
• Agape (god-love – unconditional, self-sacrificing)
• Ludus (flirting, playful, euphoria, uncommitted, non-punctual, believable lies, lovefool)
• Pragma (mutually beneficial, enduring – e.g., marriage)
• Mania (obsessive or possessive; adolescence)
• Philautia (self-respect)

Hendrick^2 & Slapion-Foote^2 (1985) found (hsf-gdisa) that men were more likely to show the ludic type of love, while women were more likely to be storgic or pragmatic – though their research was done on undergrad students.

Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things don't seem the same
Actin' funny but I don't know why
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky

In his 1973 book (.CA, .UK, .FR, .DE, .IT, .ES), John Lee compared styles of love to the color wheel, basing them on the aforementioned Greek words.

Lee’s 6 Styles of Loving

• Three primary styles:
  1. Eros – Loving an ideal person
  2. Ludos – Love as a game
  3. Storge – Love as friendship
• Three secondary styles:
  1. Mania (Eros + Ludos) – Obsessive love
  2. Pragma (Ludos + Storge) – Realistic and practical love
  3. Agape (Eros + Storge) – Selfless love

Now that we have the basic vocabulary, we should also know that there are a few theories of love.

theories

In general, theories moved from a clinical standpoint to a more psychology and socially-based stance.

• Freud’s theory of love centered around the need for an “ego ideal”, which is the person one aspires to be, patterned after those whom one holds in great respect. (On Narcissism, Bourdieu-Lacan, Freud-Lacan)
• Maslow takes the view that only those at the top of his pyramid (self-actualized) are capable of love (Heylighen, Francis). 
• Reik conceptualized a more altruistic, agape type of love in Being love. (Amir, Mathes)
• Zick Rubin proposed that romantic love is based on three elements: attachment (the need to receive care, approval and physical contact), caring (valuing the other person’s needs and happiness as much as your own), intimacy (sharing of thoughts, desires etc). Based on questionnaires, he determined liking vs loving.
• Elaine Hatfield felt that compassionate love is characterized by mutual respect, attachment, affection and trust while passionate love is made of intense emotions, sexual attraction, anxiety and affection. According to her, passionate love is transitory, lasting 6-30 months and it arises when cultural expectations encourage falling in love, when the person meets your preconceived ideas of an ideal love, and when you experience heightened physiological arousal in the presence of the other person. It ideally leads to compassionate love.
• As psychology became more socially based, Sternberg’s (.CA, .UK, .FR, .DE, .IT, .ES) triangular theory of love emerged (not to be confused with Bizarre Love Triangle) and became dominant (w-triang). This theory, illustrated above, holds that “consummate love” is the most complete, as it involves Intimacy, Passion and Commitment. The other types of love involve a combination of only 2 or just one.

The Attachment Theory (w-att) is very important in psychology and it deals with patterns learned in early childhood and how they determine people’s response within relationships when hurt, separated from loved ones or perceiving a threat. Four different attachment classifications have been identified in children: secure attachment, anxious-ambivalent attachment, anxious-avoidant attachment, and disorganized attachment.

If you can imagine the central point of the triangular theory – consummate love – being elevated (through the power of love, of course) out of its planar complacency to a pyramidal vertex and what do you get? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, of course! :)

Purple haze all around
Don't know if I'm comin' up or down
Am I happy or in misery?
Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me

Purple haze is not to be confused with Purple Rain.

LE: Two things: I know about the "languages of love" and I think it's BS - the main idea being that most women prefer "words", while men, actions, so there goes that "theory" and secondly, Hendrix probably talks about love as an excuse for getting high with "illegal dreams" which is not my thing.

Sources / More info: inbo-jealous, w-4l, w-gw4l, w-triang, w-att, w-rolo, w-losty, hsf-gdisa

Finland, the country who is light years ahead of Romania in education, is moving away from structured learning and a Romanian Senator opines that it's BS, which, in our view, makes him a 'zambaccian' or a person who is incapable to understand his mistakes, nevermind assume them, a person whose mindset prevents them from accepting new, revolutionary ideas.

Though it may be unfair to extend the failure of the Romanian National Press Agency (Agerpres) and the Romanian External Affairs Ministry to an entire nation, let us not forget that part of their job is to represent the country. The recent faux-pas, confusing the French contours with the German one in a one-print commemorative brochure is, unfortunately, indicative of the dilettantism that has taken over the Romanian government.

More than two years have passed since my last Poc-Rrrom (III) and today, inspired by a story I've just read, I've decided I'll go through with this one.

Christmas is a time of forced happiness, unmet expectations - i.e., looking forward to spend some time with your family, only to end up annoyed by the same things that caused you to move out as quickly as you could if your parents are alive, or feeling unappreciated by those ungrateful earthlings if you are a parent yourself. No wonder so many of us have started to take the Festivus joke seriously!

On the subject of long-distance communications (following my recent WhatsApp-ian conversion). And then I added something a little less annoying and quite satisfying: a debating project.

(I’d place the last word of the title in quotation marks, but they’d get escaped, causing the title to look silly.) Recently, Francois Hollande, the French president who looks like a Mickey Mouse (not Victor Ponta, the real, trademarked one), allowed the press to take photos of him and his lover. I suspect the show is put on so that the French people can convince themselves that they still have a heterosexual president. "Is his lover a woman? Are you sure? Well, then we can keep drinking wine, eating cheese and live long!" Meanwhile, I'm annoyed as hell that a friend of mine won't (or pretends she does not) get my jokes.

One contest I thought about is superscrieri (superwritings). That got me thinking of other contests, such as fiction in Canada or the US Visa Lottery.

Questions of marriage preoccupy all of us, at one point of our lives or another. I for one was forced to face them head on back in my undergrad, when during a French course I had to write a quick essay on getting married or searching for pleasure. Recently, a monologue about marriage came to my attention and I hurry to share it with you, primarily for the pleasure of the female readers of this blog, recently tortured by a long list of articles on politics and MEP 2014 elections (results I, II, III, UKIP, Toronto, TestVote).

There's a positive, uplifting effect to reliving memories it's especially useful to me now, that I fell on black days. And that's why I continue here with the spring that preceded that July.

Much to my surprise, a movie featuring Elisabeth Hurley and filmed entirely partly in Romania has no review that I can find.

With all the March 8th celebrations, I got this idea about writing an article about each important woman in my life, starting with early childhood or as far as my memories go. That would take a while.

Using recent examples of discrimination against Romanian [most likely] Gypsies, I am arguing that Europe should give Gypsies the same cross-border roaming rights North America has given its First Nations.