22
July
2006
Lately your mails contain mainly requests for more forensic expertise stories. Here you go:
Last thursday I had four inmates from the local prison coming for a check-up. Their guard escort consisted of three tall muscular guys, all dressed in black, with masks on their faces. For some reason, masked people creep me out more than handcuffed ones, so I was a bit nervous when they came. I mean, come on .. would you like to see three of these in your office?
The tallest of the MIBs (men in black, that is) stayed inside with the first guy I examined, while the other two waited in the hall with the rest of the inmates. Julia (my apprentice) was with me also, and I’ve let her do the tests for the first guy. Meanwhile, I told the MIB to get himself some freshly made coffee from the filter, and he silently pointed to his mask while shaking his head in a “no”. He also could not be convinced to sit down, prefering instead to look over the shoulder of the inmate at the Raven test.
After fifteen minutes, the situation changed - our MIB was sitting down, sipping from a big mug of coffee and has requested permission from his superior to remove his mask. Surprise surprise- the face under the mask was more than handsome. He wanted to know everything about me until he saw my wedding ring, when his facial expression changed and he turned his attention to Julia, as he should have done from the start (I’m the type that enjoys looking at a gorgeous guy every now and then but I’m also a very married, very husband loving chica, so he was just wasting his time on me).
After the inmates were tested ( two healthy simulants, one slightly mental deficient and one true psychopath whom I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley - nor in a well-lit one, for that matter) and the MIBs left with them, we both started giggling like highschoolers and as you probably have guessed it, the next hour’s chit-chat contained numerous references to a certain example of extreme police hotness.
This Wednesday, I had the Police coming angain for some expertises, and before the second fellow was brought in, the prosecutor came in and told me that “This guy we’re bringing in is very dangerous, miss .. we have to have a SPIR (rough translation would be “Police’s Rapid Intervention Service”) inside during the examination .. is that ok with you?” I looked outside, saw a tall MIB frantically waving and bursted into laughter ” It’s definetely ok with me” He looked out, saw the source of my amusement and grinned: “Oh, the two of you know each other - I’ll make sure you get sent from now on to escort all the expertised jailbirds here. What do you think?” “I’d love to, sir” said our MIB.
I didn’t pay much attention to him during the examination, since the guy they brought was a tough nut to crack. (I cannot say too much about him since he’s been involved in *ahem* some state security troubles and I’d like this blog to continue. Let’s just say he’s a very bad guy.) At the end while I was filling my report, the MIB started to clear his throat.
“Yes?”
“I wouldn’t want to sound rude but last time I was here your apprentice has left me a very good impression .. how come she’s not here now?”
“Oh, she’s having an exam - but I can say you left the same impression to her”
His face was lit with an ear-to-ear grin.
“You think I can ask for her phone number?”
“I’ll tell her you asked for it”
Julia was thrilled to hear the news. I have now her mobile number written (and underlined, heh) on my appointment sheet. Let’s just hope, for the sake of romance, that there’ll be at least one jailbird to have the brilliant idea of pretending he’s insane. And for the sake of my own mental health, that he didn’t commit anything close to what this last guy did.
Posted: hospital
18
July
2006
..and one with a nice template, too. The blog is called Long, Slow, Beautiful Dance and its name gets the owner the most *ahem* interesting searchers from Google to find her site. I mean - “Long, Slow Fuck”?
“Plug-ins Bear Dance”?
Want to see the rest of the searches? Click on the image you see at the top of my sidebar.
Posted: stumbled upon
17
July
2006
My cousin Agnes came to visit this Saturday with her husband and our other cousin, Stefania. They were heading towards Sibiu, where HIM were having a concert. When they arrived, they told us they had a spare ticket, so would one of us join them? Both me and Robi didn’t want to go alone, so in the end we ended up leaving Timi at my mom’s and hopping in the cousins’Logan together.
Sibiu is mostly under reconstruction, because being chosen as the European capital of culture for 2007, it received a shitload of money for renovating its old buildings. It’s still an awesome medieval city:
with awesome medieval streets:
and awesome (medieval?) toilets, decorated with stuffed birds:
Being such an awesome city, it also contains a local branch of the CIA:
We killed time before the beginning of the concert in a park. Notice how Robi is the only one dressed appropriately for the concert:
And then we went in, just in time to see the perfomance of the last opening act, called Amorphis. Shame on me, but I don’t know much about these guys. Wikipedia says they’re also Finns. They were OK, but I went to far to the soft side these days to enjoy a good moshing anymore, so I stayed back. As a friend of us said - “being in the front row while Amorphis is playing gets you a free cellulite treatment.”
Oh, and how soft we got - we had an insulating mat we put under us while we waited for the big guns to begin, and opened our umbrellas whenever rain decided to pay a visit. Hardcore is for childfree youngsters, not us old settled people:
But we sure had a good time. Agnes went to the front row, because she’s the biggest fan of HIM (read - Ville Valo) among us. She also made these pics of Ville, who sang, smoked, drank a few beers and spitted every 5 minutes :
The last song was a Black Sabbath cover, during which Ville learned a bit of Romanian. All in all, a great evening - although I still can’t feel my left eardrum.
Posted: on the road
14
July
2006
Robi sent me this link and I had a good half hour of laughing . You see, I uploaded this picture of me:
which then I transfomed to look like a kid’s face, an African’s, a drunkard’s and, my favourite - I saw how it would have looked:
Painted by Modigliani:
Drawn by a Manga artist:
And by art-nouveau painter Mucha:
If you’ll play with the link, paste a comment with (and maybe a link to) your best/most hilarious results. I’m really, really curious.
Posted: chestii
12
July
2006
I’ve met recently two of the girls I called “best friend” in a portion of my past. One encounter was two weeks ago; the other was yesterday.
The one I’ve met yesterday is called Horiana. She was in the same class as I was from first grade to 7th. We shared the schoolbench, and exchanged countless lunches, books and ideas . She was just as big of a bookworm as I was and God only knows how many of one’s books ended up on the other’s shelves . We had conversation booklets in which we wrote during school hours so that the teachers couldn’t punish us for talking. She was the one that saved me when my mom forbade me to bring books to school, since “Comrade Bintintan” (the teacher) was exasperated by the fact that I was reading during classes. Poor mom looked into my bag in the morning - there was no book. She looked into it when I came home - still no book - yet my reading continued. The explanation? Simple. Horiana carried her books for me to read to and from school. Neither mom or the teacher discovered the sistem, so they had to give up after a while. We were both skinny, gifted and apparently serious. After my leave from Cugir we wrote each other long letters, full of allusions and witty word plays.
The other was Ana . I’ve met her near the end of my 7th grade, a few months before moving out of town. She was my hopeless love’s classmate (a diabetic genius asshole called Bogdan, who mocked my poor 13 years old feelings without remorse - I still have nightmares sometimes about being a 7th grader). She played tennis a lot, spoke english fluently and looked beautiful in my eyes. I unconsciously took her as a model - listened to the same music, immitated her clothing style and later fell for her boyfriend. To my defense, neither of them found out about the last part - and when they broke up later I sincerely wished them to be together again. You see, I think I only loved him because she loved him and he played the guitar beautifully, not because I wanted to be with him. I was left with a lifelong liking for long-haired guys, accoustic guitar and Mircea Eliade. We grew apart when she finished highschool, as far as I remember.
The feeling I had while talking with both Horiana and Ana was pretty close to the one you have when you meet an ex-boyfriend you didn’t “stay friends” with - a mixture of unease, slight embarrasment and just a wee bit of sadness. I shared everything with them at a time. I don’t have common conversation subjects with them now. In a way, we outgrew each other - the friend they had is not me, the woman I am now, nor are they the girls I loved during growing years. Horiana is preparing to leave the country for England; Ana looks tired and worried and I couldn’t bring myself to ask if the reason was her dissapeared dad, her kid, her husband or her job. You see, we just didn’t knew each other that well now.
The friend I’ll never get to know is called Kinga.
She was one of the pillars of Hospitality Club, embodying everything HC stands for - free spirit, love for travels, kindness and hospitality. A delicate-looking yet strong polish woman in her thirties, she traveled four continents and wrote two books when she decided to go to Africa. She kept a travel blog of her itinerary which I visited sometimes because I liked her writing and perspective. I forgot about the site for a while and stumbled upon it in my bookmarks yesterday. However, when I saw her site’s frontpage, I learned that her journeys have ended before we had a chance to meet in real life. Kinga died a month ago from cerebral malaria she caught while being in Ghana.
Go read her site. You’ll catch a glimpse of a life lived to the fullest.
Posted: chestii
11
July
2006
This week’s tenant (ya know, the little image to the upper right in the sidebar, on which you have to click to see what I’m talking about) was surely a surprise - I had a nice waiting line, with contenders, including - but not limited to-a dancing girl not-so-over-her-ex, a little green alien from Sweden and somebody reviewing things from a hole. But then I’ve clicked on the one I’ve chosen - and I just couldn’t say no to somebody that:
*uses Firefox and preaches the brimstone against IE
*has Jamie Oliver (yum!) in any form, shape or flavour on her front page (and seeing him with bright green hair was definetely a new one)
*pimps random weblogs for renting just because their offers are worthy.
Posted: stumbled upon
11
July
2006
Remember the whitewashing scene? (for you, my less-culturated readers - Tom is put to paint a fence. He doesn’t feel like it, but when a friend of his passes by, he starts acting extatic about the task. Soon the friend wants to paint too but Tom plays hard to get and accepts only in exchange for a bribe. The final result is a long line of boys waiting to paint a part of the fence, a lot of loot for Tom and a few layers of paint that get applied.)
Today was my first day alone in the Ambulatoriu. Not for long though, as both Danas came just to see how I was doing (an drink coffee and gossip a little). The surprise was Mia (the othe psychologist of the building), who entered martially, kicked the poor psychopath I was examining out and announced:
“I have a big problem and you’re the only one that can save me”
/*Uh-oh*/ thought I.
“I received an invitation for two weeks in Germany starting from the 21th of August and thought that we should exchange vacation periods - so you instead of going from the 14th until September 3rd, switch to 1st- 20th of August”
Stop! Hammer time! - this is heavenly music to my ears. Robi is on vacation that whole month, so instead of having only two weeks in the same period he has, I have three. I’m suddenly extatic. On the inside.
“Well, I don’t know .. This is too short of a notice - I say, with a face so straight, it belongs on the Texas hold’em worldcup. I’ll see if I can exchange the hotel reservations . (there ain’t any hotel, nor are there reservations) .. I dunno. You should have told me this earlier”
“But.. but.. please! You’re my only hope!”
/*Ada-Wan Kenobi, at your service*/
“Mia, I’ll see what I can do, but I cannot promise you anything.”
“Please! I’ll be in debt to you .. in a lot of debt! I have no other option! Can you phone me today after you talk to the hotel?”
“Hmm.. ok. But don’t get your hopes too high.”
I phone Robi, tell him the good news, spend the rest of my day working my ass off and get home. I decide to phone her after two hours.
“I managed to convince them, but don’t ask how long it took me”
“Oh thank you, thank you! I’m so grateful!”
If you feel bad for ol’mackerel face.. don’t. She’s the reason I almost got no vacation in the summer. She and the other older psychologist of the hospital split the July/August period between the two of them and I, being younger, am left with June or September. I had to almost throw a fit to get the two weeks I got, and that’s because the other (Erika, I haven’t talked about her yet) finally had pity on me and promised to return earlier so that I can get some summer freedom - Mia couldn’t care less at the time. I could have turned her down just out of spite - but my mom didn’t give birth to idiots.
Anyway, final results - three weeks of summer holiday instead of two, one ticket to Germany purchased and both parties happy. Ain’t this a wonderful thing?
Posted: hospital
