iskola.

school started yesterday for the kiddo. tightly wound like balled up rubber bands, vibrating with a tiny force of nervousness that moved every molecule in him visibly one millimeter in every direction outward from the core in a wildly random fashion - sorta like the filaments in a light bulb - if that would can be at all visualized. yep, that's how it looked to me. I'm tempted to say "poor kid" but no way am I copping out with that clichéd reaction, no way. We all went through this, didn't we? [well, save the ones whose parents effectively wrapped them in bubble-wrap, burrito style, because their little future doctors, lawyers, politicians, kings and queens must not be marred and scarred by such unbarable hardships] first day in a new school: everyone knows everyone, except for me. that day happens and passes quickly and next thing you know: oldodik (the word that Marika néni used this morning ever so carefully with me when describing Sy's outcome during the first day in class). To this word at first I reacted with a sort of "huh" look on my face (I felt it, silly me) - this she picked up on and immediately started speaking ever so carefully and slowly with the "long-lost hungarian mama returning to the motherland"... heh... I get this all the time, these days. It's all good, though - again it all lies in my own self-assuredness (or lack there-of), for I do know what all these damn words mean - I did grow up speaking the language at home all my life - but I seem to be suffering from the same balled up rubber bands syndrome that my son is stuck in - though for me it's on a smaller scale and more randomly surfaced - there are days when all is good and the rubber bands just sort of flop into a heap and the vibrations cease. it's all about being all too self-aware, I suppose. Just let go. that's the ticket, I suppose.

yeah, so back to that word that kept reverberating in my head all the way home from the school: oldodik. it means to dissolve. love it. dissolve. let those molecules separate and dance out and about and mingle with the outerstuff. dissolve. like sugar in coffee, like the effervescent vitamin-C I dropped into a cup of water this morning in a feeble placebo-like effort to battle the swollen glands and blocked sinus thang I woke up with (thank you, September, for bringing that new challenge to the table). It seems like here in Budapest the seasons and weather are almost eerily perfectly in tune with the passing of time. My sleepy head automatically devised the conspiracy theory this morning at around 3 damn 30 AM: must be some kind of remnant of the old communist system here - they must have at some point somehow even gotten their grips tightly around the very symbiosis of daily human life and nature to be perfectly in tune. there's a frightful fine-tuning there, the way that exactly on the first of September the leaves started falling, the nights got cold and the sun suddenly started to set at 7:30pm or so, despite the fact that til just the day before (I swear - I can swear!) the sun was still shining summer-style til we were ready to meander back home from a weekend outing, lazy hazy vacation mode... but what do I know? could just be my consciousness kicking in after being comatose in DarkLand. Add on the strange fact that it only really seems to rain at night here most of the time, as if Nature courteously holds onto the precipitation during the day so that society can efficiently and somewhat pleasurably go about its business without getting the cuffs of their pants wet... releasing only when the kids have been tucked in to bed and the grown-ups have pulled their covers over their own noses after setting their wake-up machines (love that term - I think it was V who tickled me once by referring to his alarm clock with it). Then you end up at 3 damn 30 in the morning waking up to the swishing swooshing wooshing of automobiles outside your window that sets the wheels in your gray-matter factory turning and churning and the next thing you know you're concocting conspiracy theories about the finite capabilities of the old and abandoned communist government in this red-white-green multi-bitten cookie of a land right smack dab in the centre of Eastern Europe... oy. run on run on run on... screw the rules, words are like paint and so..

oldodik.

dissolve.

the kid is good. hats off to the ghost of communism that quietly mumbles inaudible stuff out of every bullet-banged brick around me.