Time to get real

1. The big story this week = I had a cold. A cold like I hardly ever got anymore – sore throat, sore neck, sore everything, no sleep, bloody nose, feeling cold and then hot – bad. I’m lucky my aunt is a pharmacist. She called me every day, took me to the doctor, and got me some powders and pills that helped me get better and made me sleep – a lot.

2. Tonight I watched a Turkish movie with my cousin at Dit e Nat – we were hoping for the Science of Sleep, but got Uzak instead. It’s about two relatives named Mahmut and Jusuf, and both are unhappy in really cloudy and depressive long shots of a random Turkish town. One of them is an urbane jazz-listening, prostitute-buying “artist” (Mahmut) and the other is a country bumpkin who is out of work and loves his mother (Jusuf). We left about an hour in. It was incredibly, unbelievably bad, but maybe in a good way. All of the reviews on Metacritic praise it to the skies for its “moodiness” and “non-events”. Whatever.

3. There’s been some major newspaper beef between two people I enjoy reading – Agon Hamza is/was a Self Determination activist who believes the current structure of Kosova’s independence is only a kind of semi-independence (i.e. Ahtisaari’s plan gives Mitrovica to Serbia, the UN’s Six Point Plan guarantees that the EU mission in Kosova will remain “status neutral”, etc) that doesn’t offer democracy of the people for the people – he says that Maliqi, a political analyst that has been around for a long time, is basically selling Kosova down the river for supporting Kosova’s current form of independence. According to Hamza, real self-determination would be bringing down the current government, forgetting about Ahtisaari’s plan and starting from democratic, plebiscite-style scratch or uniting with Albania :) This is a really short blip of an article he wrote called “Maliqi’s Irrational Kosova” – Maliqi’s position? First off, he says that Hamza is a neostalinist, and that self-deterimination is a long, historical progress that requires structures of power and international support, before the mass citizen-based self-determination that Hamza is talking about. As much as the two men may be irritated by each other, they both are right :P

4. Kosova has a bad rap for corruption. In fact, one of the reasons the EU supports continuing its mission in Kosova is to fight corruption – corruption is apparently widespread enough in our little country to require an international mission? (Why exactly are these European EU people so morally above us Balkaners, I don’t know. People here can tell you stories about pretty slick international corruption from UNMIK days :P) Well, I can tell you this – Kosova’s Anti-Corruption Agency sent off 68 cases to local and EULEX courts last year. Yes, it is good that they are under investigation, and yes it is very despicable to misuse one’s position, and yes, it doesn’t matter if it’s one person or one hundred, corruption is corruption – BUT- we are not the have of inequity that popular opinion sometimes paints us as. We have corruption, but no more or no less than that of our richer, Western counterparts.

5. And no or more less crime either. The Kosovo Stability Initiative published a report last year that analyzed actual statistics of crime vis-a-vis international perceptions/media commentary on Kosovan corruption/crime. It left me kind of surprised: http://www.iksweb.org/repository/docs/IMIDZ_english.pdf

6. It is tricky to find pants that fit me here. Before I was floored by my cold, I went shopping. In Canada I’m a 28 pretty much all the time, so that’s the first size I tried when I went shopping for jeans. I couldn’t get them over my knees. Size 30 looked like it was spray painted on me. And this particular store had nothing above 30. What happened? I’m a 38 here :) Oh North American sizing designed to make people sound smaller than they really are.

7.  I found some old postcards, letters and notebooks that belonged to my parents. It’s hard to imagine the life your parents’ had before you were born.

8. I’ve been sporadically reading interviews that Ismail Kadare gave with Alain Bosquet way back in the mid-90′s. Kadare hated writers while he was a student in Moscow, because they reminded him of party clerks.

9. Submitted my essay re: Albanian identity + media mishmash. I’ve read enough to make me : 1. Accept that most identities, but especially national ones are constructed 2. Resist the idea that identities change easily, or that they should 3. Even more skeptical that we will one day reach a post, trans-national state of being where being a member of the global is more important than being a member of the local – or that we should 4. How so much is determined by historical context 5. There is something precious to be protected in a continuous, historical identity 6. And that it has to be able to change to remain so.

10. So many errands to run, and things to plan for in the next coming months, and people to see and talk to. Time to get real.

Linda Rukaj, people. I like Albanian hipster music just as much as Canadian hipster music :)

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