Sunday, December 11, 2005

We are all myths

Visit #1 – Creation

Double Helix arrived to the family late. The family was a big group really, of several hundred beings.

“So, how is the project going?” they asked DH.

“I can’t believe it took me seven days to finish the first part of it. I call it Creation.” DH answered. “But I am very happy with the complexity of it all. Now I have to wait a while to see how it develops.”

“What did you do about life?” they asked.

“I decided to have many different forms of it. I started with the simplest kind and at the end, created a complex being – I am calling it the human. The more complex beings, also known as animals, are all in pairs; I divided every living thing into two – left my mark everywhere,” smiled DH. “My human has free will, it is self conscious and I provided it with great potential.”

“You are aware of the fact that we don’t have very good results with free will, right?” they asked again.

“Oh, yes, I saw the data. But I trust that this is going to be different. As I mentioned, I put my mark on everything I created. Balance and the need of balance is on all levels of existence. I will be back reporting soon.”


Visit #2 – Evolution

After a period of time, Double Helix went back to the Earth to see how things had developed in the interim, filing this report to the project supervisors:

Project Earth is going well. All living creatures are developing and adapting rather nicely to their environment. Some new species turned up and some old ones disappeared. I find it very aesthetically pleasing. The human, on the other hand, is giving me much trouble. I left it, in my opinion, in the most beautiful part of the planet – they will later call it the Garden of Eden – and it seemed content. It is the perfect being – I put all of my gifts into it. The three components that my project is based on – the material, the emotional and the spiritual – are united in a perfect body. Their DNA consists of the XX, XY, and YY variation. Still, it bothers me that I see no change in them. When I asked them how they are, they said:

“We are overseeing all living and non-living things on this planet, as you commanded us, Creator. As we observe animals and plants, we are aware of the fact that we are a higher being. We don’t have disgusting bodily functions to deal with, because we get our energy for living from our spiritual source. Our body, although it is material, is never sick, because it is perfect. Unlike the animals, who use primitive sounds to communicate, we communicate mind-to-mind with animals, plants and our higher spiritual selves. Unlike animals, we don’t follow our instincts, we simply don’t have them. Also, we don’t have to be afraid of death and fight for our life, which is what most animals do, because we are immortal. We are special, perfect and holy creature. But we are wondering, what is our purpose on the planet? What is it that you created us for, Creator?”

I am afraid I don’t know what to say. Please help.


The Supervisors sent this reply:

Double Helix, Your project should show some experiment with the evolution of life in connection with individualism. We don’t see it in your description of the higher beings. You will have to make corrections and submit a progress report midway through. Count about 200.000 rounds of your planet around its sun in the linear time frame before you do so. Good luck.


Part # The Report

Interim progress report by Double Helix,
The Project: Experiment Planet Earth


Following the advice of my supervisory group, I changed the premise of the Experiment as follows: My perfect human being was transformed into two – following the rule for animals – imperfect beings, a female and a male. Their DNA is now accessible for change through evolution; mutations are possible. I removed the spiritual part of the being and left only material and emotional sides. With this, the bodily functions became much like those in animals - humans now have to eat solid food for energy and fight for their survival. They have powerful instincts like sex and fear of death. I added one special instinct from the spiritual realm: love. Communication regressed into a primitive sound-based system.

I used the red laser light technology to erase undesirable knowledge and memories from the initial perfect human being. I must say that it did not work well – humans carry some memories with them and some of them are able to access the ancient knowledge more than others. This causes a lot of confusion, but I am not correcting it, because it also creates interesting outcomes. They even used a very similar instrument to the red laser light in one of their movies for the same purpose – erasing memories. Please take a note of this insufficiency. I will provide examples of the malfunction below.

The new humans developed quickly into several different races. From their memories, they created myths about me and about their origin. They seem to have the compulsion to name everything and to look for an explanation for everything and if there is none obvious, they just make one up and want other humans to believe in it. They fight over who should believe in what. The primitive sound-based system they use for communication – language – developed in hundreds of variations on the planet. They all talk but don’t understand each other! In these systems, they have basically the same explanation for their existence. Leaking through are some memories of creation and so the myth is about a first male and a first female – Adam and Eve. Later some of them remembered their spiritual side that was taken away from them – Lilith. Poor things, they don’t understand why Lilith was sent away. They demonized Lilith, and idealized Adam as the father and Eve as the mother of human kind. I was right to predict that the male ego will govern in the earlier part of development and that the struggle for having Lilith reunited with them will go on in many different forms. These forms are: religions, philosophy, and science. They are all trying to explain human nature, how does it work and why. Lilith is portrayed as a woman who refused to submit to Adam (as spirituality does refuse to submit to ego) and Eve is imagined to be much more submissive (as the part of the subconscious that can be controlled by the ego). Human males, who wrote most of the early myths, are mystified and intrigued by Lilith and are not sure what she represents. They are happy she got chased away. It seems to be part of mankind’s collective quest for balance, which is part of their changed DNA.

These humans are still looking for their purpose. They are scared of death and are trying to fight it or deny it, and this instinct governs the majority of them, basically stripping them of their free will. Another big group is governed by a different instinct – the desire to be special and to be recognized as such by masses of other humans. They tell each other tales of special beings called heroes. These heroes are very much like the perfect being at the beginning of the experiment, but the humans are thinking in their own mindset and they are imagining them female or male. They even use the term the holy trinity, though they don’t mean by this unity of spiritual, emotional and physical. Narratives are present everywhere and create a system humans call culture. They are very proud of their cultures and find great comfort in them.

Individuality is what these later humans believe in most deeply, even though no human can survive alone, not physically or emotionally. Even those who say that they believe in collective consciousness and the collective itself, are acting individually because they are pushed by their instinct to be different from the majority. Being part of the group, but being special is one of the challenges of these humans.

Entire populations think that they are better than others – males think that they are destined to lead over women and children. Lighter skinned humans think that they are better than darker skinned humans. They have elaborate theories about these principles and their scientists are working on legitimizing these theories. Their religions justify males ruling over females, and racism and eugenics support lighter skinned dominance. They also create narratives to feed their egos, which is very surprising to me.

What I see as a ruling principle through this first part of the experiment is that they miss me. They are ready to give up their free will and consciousness to have me around. I can’t be around, of course, so they make up narratives or delegate some of my characteristics to some humans and due to this, masses of humans are happy. But it also leads to unexplainable things where one mass of humans kills another mass of humans. Any suggestions about what to do with this?

All in all, the experiment is going much to my satisfaction, after the necessary changes at the beginning. Humans are evolving, pushed by their instincts, curiosity, creativity and free will. They understand much more now than at the beginning, but they are still searching. I would like to further encourage this. For my specific plans for the second half of the experiment, please see attachment. I would be happy to consider suggestions from the group of supervisors.

Friday, November 11, 2005

Martha is back

Martha Stewart is probably not as widely known in Europe as she is in the US. Here, everybody knows her, even the men……though Martha is in a business many men don’t have anything to do with – decorating, baking, cooking, growing roses, and other similar “female” things. Except, of course, because this is not such a “housewife” thing - Martha built her empire from scratch and became a celebrity and a billionaire.

Last year, Martha was investigated for insider trading of stocks of the company ImClone. She got a tip that suggested that the stock would to fall. She should never have used the tip and should have not sold her stocks. (The profit from this sale netted a miniscule amount, compared to her net worth.) The insider trading charge could not be proven, and so she was sent to jail because she lied to the investigators about whom she spoke to regarding ImClone stocks. In my opinion, the whole scandal was blown out of proportion because she is woman. Martha belongs to the still small group of women, who have been able to fight their way into the still male dominated world of big business and be successful there – playing the men’s game. She made a lot of enemies in the process.

Also, Martha is not a nice person. She screams at her employees and at employees of other companies, she is rude and commanding. During her trial, that was public, we learned a lot of information about Ms. Stewart. While the press did mention that if she were a man, she would have been treated differently, from the emails and phone transcripts we learned how she was not nice to her family and friends either. And complying with the laws of karma, she went to jail partially because of this too. Because if she were nice, fair and respectful with the people surrounding her, they might not have testified against her and if so, there would have been no evidence against her at all. The sentence of five months in prison and five months under house arrest surprised many.

One of the TV stations made two movies about Martha. The first was about how a Polish-American girl became Martha Stewart - the divorced mother of a daughter and a billionaire. If Martha saw the movie, she could have not been too thrilled with it. The second movie aired at the end of September 2005, and it describes Martha’s trial and her months in jail. It is a little more on Martha’s side, but maybe this is also because we don’t know much about what happened during those months in jail.

But Martha is back. And she is back big time. Those, who thought that the humiliating trial, the jail time and the house arrest would be the end of Martha, were mistaken. Even during her house arrest, she was allowed to work a few hours a week and she went on every TV show in the country and proudly showed her ankle bracelet, which is electronically connected to the police. This was just the beginning. There is more Martha on TV now than ever. (During her trial, almost all of her shows were taken off the air.) She has a new daytime show, there is The Apprentice Martha Stewart every week and there are the good old cooking, decorating, gardening shows. All her magazines, published by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia are flourishing too, and her merchandize at K-Mart is selling extremely well.

What happened to Martha is a fascinating human drama. This might be one of the main reasons behind the interest that the public is showing in her - it seems like her story was taken out of a cheap paperback novel about millionaires. Personally, I would like to know if Martha learned from her experience. Is she more humble? Is she respectful to the people around her? For her own benefit, I hope so.

(Published at www.baratno.com)

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Three Leavings

1. To the “Hot Dog Land”

I did not leave for my university studies in Bratislava until about two weeks into the semester, because at first, I thought I will live at home and commute. Before the school began and after I spent days doing all the paperwork that was needed to register, my mother and me went to see the dorm room that was assigned to me. We could only see it after we paid for the whole semester. It was a disaster: it was dirty, old, the furniture broken, the bathrooms in the hallway without locks, also dirty. My roommate was already there and was very happy to see me coming. “It is a little scary here, especially at night when the drunken boys are running around and want to come in here.” So, of course I did not move into the dorm, although I felt very sad and worried about this girl. I decided I will commute, 3 hours by bus each day, leaving with the 6AM bus and coming home around 7PM. After two weeks - it was Saturday morning, if I remember correctly - I came down to the kitchen in my PJs and bathrobe and started crying. I could not stop and went on for a long time. My mother decided that we will rent a room for me in Bratislava and we did. (After having a rough time with each other during my puberty, I was best friends with my mother since high school.) I ended up in one of the many projects, on a street called Lilies of the valley, with an old lady who lived alone, longed for her sons to visit and pay attention to her (they did not), hated her daughters in law and on occasions could not stop talking. (She would stand in the doorway of my room for hours and just talk, while I stopped paying attention to her after a while, since the stories were the same.)

Leaving my family home, our house that I witnessed my parents building, was emotionally not easy. I still spent the weekends there, but they seemed short. I missed my mother and my sister, who in primary school, was turning into a real person. Even though the semesters were short, about 13 weeks, I go sucked into a different world, one in which there was little structure and lots of possibilities.

I also left a household in which my father was unhappy, maybe even depressed, - I only realize now - and my mother struggled to keep the peace in the household by giving into my father in almost every big thing and rebelling against him in little ones. She bought new clothes for us and herself with ease because she knew he would never notice. She bought glasses and pens, and snacks. But she would not go to graduate school (Who would make me dinner? – my father asked) and would agree to buy a new car.

My father hated spending money. He grew up in a family that worked hard and valued hard work above all else, but did not know what to do with the money. I think my father just wanted to have money in the bank and know it is there. He worked hard most of his life in multiple jobs, which under the socialist regime was difficult. Not that he would have wanted not to work this hard – when he was home, lying on the couch, he seemed bored. Television, radio or books did not interest him. He really only liked politics; stories or sports were unappealing and he often made fun of my mother and us for watching and listening to fairy tales and stories. (They are only following a script. – he would say when we had tears in our eyes.)

He gave all the money he earned to my mother to run the household, except for one month, when, after my parents had a fight about my mother not being able to save enough, my father took over all the shopping. It was a disaster, of course, he had no idea what was needed, he did not know how to make favors to the people in stores so that they give us edible groceries, where to go to buy fresh eggs from farmers, when to escape from work to stand in line at the fruit and vegetable stand to be able to get at least something, which snacks we liked, etc. It was not really fair to leave him on his own, but he refused any advice from my mother. After 5 weeks he gave up and we went back to normal.

It did bother and angered him that he was never able to make half of the money the children of the papalashes (high ranking Communist party leaders) were given without any hardship. When our house was built, there was only one design that it could be – approved by the party. It was almost impossible to get good quality materials: there were no tiles, no tubs, and doors and windows were a problem too. My parents had to bribe many people many times to get the basic building materials and it took forever for them to be delivered. I remember them talking about how much of the loan that the state provided for the house is going to be spent in bribes and how they will account for it.

Our neighbors, on the other hand, who started to build not too much later than we, got all the excellent materials, the workers and the many extras that we could not even dream about (e.g. a fireplace) for free and fast. Their house was designed by a prominent architect and was very different from the rest of the houses on the street. The husband’s father was a papalash and the materials were stolen from somewhere and the workers were sent from state building facilities to build his son’s house. The same happened when their second garage was built or their wines planted. They were what was considered successful: with great connections to the party and a flawless “Kader Report”[1]. But it was hard to get mad at our neighbors because they were nice people. They had two sons while young and a daughter quite late in their marriage. They were responsible for my even being accepted into the university. The wife became my teacher in high school and she really considered my sister and me family members and was very fond and protective of both of us.

The story of my being accepted to the university consists of two letters and a pig. It is
also very characteristic of the regime in the 1980s. In primary school, we were asked at the beginning of every year, what we wanted to be when we grow up. I did not know what to answer and I remember my mother planting in my head the answer she wanted to give and realize herself, which of course was not possible in a country where Russian was the only foreign language permitted to be studied – an interpreter. None of my schoolmates knew what an interpreter was, which surprised me, because it was so obvious. Later, when I had some sense of what I wanted, I was too afraid to say it, so I still went with the interpreter. Only after, already in high school, my first article was published in the paper of the socialist youth, Smena, was I able to say – I want to be a journalist. I really wanted to be a writer, but there were no writers in the socialist society. Everybody had to have a “real job”. Boys were recruited at age 13 to be soldiers and miners (I am miner, who is more? was one of the slogans of these years). Soldiers and miners had to be party members, of course and they had the privilege of a high salary, good and early pension and soldiers did not do much. Our town was surrounded by many villages and most of my schoolmates were from them – some of the parents also encouraged their sons to join these privileged professions, because they wanted them to have a better life.

Girls were not encouraged to do anything. They were expected to marry young and have children and after about a year of maternity leave, join the socialist work force and build our socialist country as sales persons or secretaries. Their bosses were always men – men
sometimes stupider, more ignorant and less educated then them.

I went to the best high school in the county – luckily located in Velky Meder, so I did not have to commute. I did get in easily, because I was a straight A student, so the fact that my parents and grandparents were not party members – one of the plusses for admission – did not matter that much. But it mattered in third grade, when we had to fill out the preliminary applications for higher education. As an excellent student, I was expected to go to the university. My choice was the school of journalism, even though my mother warned me that every working journalist has to be a party member. The principal of the school said that he could not give me permission to apply there, because I am not a “good kader”. I have basically two choices: the university of economics (because the high school was a special economics high school), or teacher’s college. I went to the first one, mainly because I did not want to be a teacher.

But in order to get into the somewhat prestigious University of Economics in Bratislava, one had to have a certain amount of points. Many of those points were given for having parents in the party. I did not and I also did not do well on the math exam. Even though I did excellently in everything else, in June the letter announcing my failure arrived. I dreamed about the letter and it was funny that when it came, it looked just like the one I saw in the dream. It said that I was not accepted for shortage of space. One of my high school school mates, whose father was a papalash, was accepted to law school (which accepted a lesser number of people), with much worse entry exam points than mine. The best student in our class was not admitted either; she had no connections. I still feel guilty about me having an MA and her having to work stupid jobs that are either misusing or not using her potential.

I could not have imagined my life any other way, just continuing my studies and so did my mother. Immediately after we learned the results of my entry exams, she went to our neighbors and asked for help. We knew we didn’t have enough money to bribe the minister of education, who could get me in, so we did not even offer that. Our neighbor said that he is good friends with the minister and that he owes him some favors. It turned out that a fat pig was enough as a bribe for my admission. My father’s father provided his largest pig and in late August a letter came in which the university informed me that I was accepted for “extraordinary studies”, which meant that I had to had a very high GPA to be permitted to continue to the third semester. This is how we used the corrupt regime to our advantage even though we did not approve of it.

My mother did not subscribe to the collective guilt theory and considered every person as an individual entity. She did not care about someone’s nationality, party membership or sexual identity, she only cared about whether or not they were a good person – and she had her own criteria for good people. Her family, a mix of Slovaks and Hungarians and probably also other central European nationalities, was an extremely kind and non-judgmental one. Both men and women were especially nurturing towards children and all of them were very supportive of their family members and the members of their closer micro-society. I do not remember any fights, nasty gossips or tricks among them. Hatred of Jews, Gypsies or peasants, so wide spread among people then, was unknown to them. They always invited everybody in, never locked their doors and never suspected bad intentions from anyone. My mother is still this way.

My father, on the other hand, taught us to be suspicious about every communist and every soldier, especially the Russian ones that paraded in nearby towns with their servants. He said that if one day, there is going to be a day of “state of emergency” he will go and personally shoot the officer who was in his unit when he was a young soldier. This officer did not bother him, because my father had a teacher’s degree which made him a higher ranking soldier, but he tortured the young uneducated boys. My father always said that the regime has to collapse soon. But still, he was surprised when it happened in 1989.

Out of my father’s rebellion against the whole establishment came the first schizophrenia of my youth. During the winter afternoons, my father and I used to do woodwork in the basement and listen to the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe. Sometimes it was hard, because the soviets tried to override the signal. But since we lived 10 miles from the Hungarian and about 30 miles from the Austrian border, mostly we had good reception. I could not tell anyone about what we heard and discussed in the basement and I remember teachers asking me, mostly in a teasing way “Oh, I am sure you listen to the imperialists too, like others, in your basement, right?”, but I was like a good partisan, I kept it to myself. I knew my father and my mother would get into trouble. The same way my father, a history and Slovak teacher, got into trouble during a history class, when one of his students asked him how do we know what year it is. My father answered, that we are counting the years from Jesus’ birth. Then he explained who Jesus was. The next day, he was asked to go into the principal’s office and was told that several parents complained about him spreading Christian propaganda and if he does one more of these anti-socialist remarks in his class, he will be fired.

My father’s and mother’s jobs were not secure in any way, because they were not party members. They were both approached by the party and offered membership, but they both declined several times. This was of course not easy. “If you are not from the state, you are stealing from your own family”, was one of the slogans. “We pretend that we are working and the state pretends that it is paying us”, was another. Only people who joined the elite were able to access resources that enabled them and their children to have a good life, which really meant a normal life, in which one’s children are able to get into a good high school, any university (they were not particularly good) and a decent job. It also meant having access to basic goods like toilet paper, cars and fruits in the winter time. Farmers and factory workers were considered lower class and were treated as less valuable, even though it was in the name of the workers the whole regime was built. The old rhetoric was still present in the newspapers and speeches on May 1st and other official occasions, but nobody listened anymore and nobody cared about what the papalashes said – we all knew how it really was and could not be fooled.

Even though there were no black cars coming to someone’s house at dawn to take someone away forever, as it happened often in the 1950s, one could still lose one’s job and become unemployed, which was illegal, or get work only as a heating worker, who were putting coal into the stoves, hence spending all their working hours in a basement breathing coal dust and getting very little money. This famously became the job of most of the dissidents and there was some secret pride in it.

The thing that bothered my father most in the late 70s and 80s was our inability to travel. We were definitely not permitted to travel to the West, but travel to the Soviet Union was also limited (not that he would want to go there). Since we lived so close to the Hungarian border and we had family members in Hungary, it was maddening that there were years when we were permitted to cross the border only one or three times a year. The comrades were afraid that we would see how much better off the Hungarians were in their “goulash communism”, in which small enterprises were permitted (combined with stealing time and materials from state owned factories, this proved to be great business) and the state borrowed millions of dollars (from the evil West, of course, but they did not mention this ever) to keep the people quiet by allowing them to buy goods in Austria. All the horribly smelly and noisy Trabants (little plastic cars made in East Germany) crossed the border empty and came back loaded with TVs, radios, fridges and freezers, perfumes and other things that we did not have. And the comrades were right: we were jealous of the Hungarians for having more and living better, but we did not know that they did it on the account of future generations and that we will be better off later when the regime collapses. Every crossing of the border was an excitement by itself. Out car was searched top to bottom with mirrors, in and out by soldiers carrying kalashnyikovs; they asked questions and had the power to turn us back without reason. The way back was even more dangerous, since we always bought something that was not permitted through the borders – like Pepsi Cola or laundry detergents. But my mother’s relative, who worked at the border, saved us every time we got into trouble.

One of the most exciting things in my childhood, were visits of our Hungarian family members. They came to visit my great-grand and grandparents, and they mostly stayed with them. (We also had family members in the Czech part of our federation and these relatives came every summer.)

I was most fond of the older sister of my grandfather, Nennyje. She was a woman in her 50s, still chain-smoking, when I met her. Her husband killed himself years earlier after he was diagnosed with stomach cancer and they had no children. She never remarried and seemed to be pretty content living on her own in a village in southern Hungary where most of her relatives still lived – a few Hungarians among many Slovaks. The land is very flat there and life hard. Summers are hot and dry, winters wet with lots of snow and cold. The streets in her village are wide, trees planted on either side, are very straight, very unnatural, and the one time I visited there with my grandfather, it was hard for me to imagine that I could have been born there too, had my great-grandfather not moved back to Slovakia during the “exchange of inhabitants program” in 1948.

Nennyje had the greatest stories and we listened to her for hours when she came. I remember walking up to the third storey apartment of my grandparents after school and smelling the smell only Nennyje had – she often came unannounced - and running up with great expectations of gifts. Nennyje came by train and had extraordinary skills to smuggle illegal goods, such as home made sausages, bacon and spicy kolbasz in her coat and under her dress. She always brought something special for us children that she collected all year long, a treasure among them were the caramel candy she bought by a the pound from smugglers from Romania. But her stories and her smiling presence was the greatest gift for me, even though I knew most of the stories by heart by the time I grew to be an adolescent. We also corresponded for many years, Nennyje and I – I drew a picture to go with each letter and she answered on square-patterned paper with strange looking letters. She died in her 80s in a nursing home after she was diagnosed with dementia and could not take care of herself anymore. I still miss her laughter.

So I left this strange milieu with fear, but I was also excited and knew I have to get out and away from Velky Meder, then still called the Slovak name the communists gave my town – Calovo. I found myself in the capital, having hot-dogs every day after school across from the university building, because it was the cheapest and easily accessible food. It seemed silly to me why someone would call a food a hot animal, but they were delicious. By the end of the semester, I could not walk by the stand, because even the smell made me nauseous.



2. To the Big City

I left Bratislava for Budapest right after graduating. It was the most natural move I could have made, even though my great-grandma was worried that I would be hungarianized there. I was not, of course.

The tension between Slovaks and Hungarians is has been, historically speaking, present ever since the Hungarians (then known as the Huns) arrived to the Carpathian Basin on their horsebacks. The Slovaks (just many tribes of Slavs then) were already there, living a farming way of life, as opposed to the Hungarians wandering kind. It is easy to prove this even to those who do not know much of history, just by pointing out all the Slavic words the Hungarians use – describing tools, professions and things that they did not have, exactly because they were wandering tribes.

Today, the conflict arises mostly because after the Trianon treaty in 1920 a big chunk of what was previously considered Hungary was given to neighboring countries which meant hundreds of thousands of Hungarians living all of sudden in a different country along the borders. In Slovakia today, there are around 600 000 Hungarians. They have their own Hungarian schools, on all levels except at university. In Velky Meder, my home town, about 90% of the inhabitants are Hungarian and even the Slovaks who married there or were planted there (the communist and later the nationalist government liked to artificially send Slovaks from the mountains to Hungarian territories to lessen the percentage of Hungarians in certain towns, counties and districts[2]) learned basic kitchen Hungarian out of necessity. In primarily schools today, Hungarians still learn about how unfair the Trianon treaty was towards them—a pan-European conspiracy—and in this way, waves of nationalism are present to this day, on which irresponsible politicians often ride with joy.

Interestingly enough, my great-grandma – my sister and me were very close to both our great-grandparents, my grandmother’s parents – was not worried about me getting too much slovakicized in Bratislava. I went to Slovak primary and high school and I studied at the University in Slovak too. I was very lucky that my parents were not nationalists on either side of the spectrum and I grew up speaking “Hoch Hungarian[3]” from my mother and “Hoch Slovak” from my father. (On the street and at school with school mates I spoke the local Hungarian dialect.) Many of the Hungarian parents discouraged their children from learning Slovak, which made their lives much harder.

Early on, in Bratislava, I felt disdain from my schoolmates, who were 99% Slovak, just because I told them I was from the south. I had no accent – which they had – and my vocabulary was richer, but it did not matter. Later I liked to tell anyone in Bratislava that I am Hungarian and in Budapest that I am Slovak, just to see the reactions and also because I was not willing to engage in any of the nationalistic nonsense and prejudice that was and is still present. If my skin were not as pale as it is, I would probably also have said that I am Roma (Gypsy).

Three months into my first semester, the Velvet Revolution started. I was standing for many days, freezing every evening at 5 PM in the cold November of 1989 on the main square in Bratislava and ringing my keys. It was a symbol of us, mostly students at the beginning, for the Communists to leave and for the Soviet army to leave also. It was an extremely exciting time. Politically we were almost all happy (you can imagine how unhappy and scared the papalashes were) and full of hope for a better future. People were longing for a drastic change and it happened. I was also very happy that I was right there where it all began, at the universities. We were on strike for the rest of the semester, and still we did not go home. We distributed flyers, went to factories to talk to workers, answered phones, and did anything that was needed. For me as a student, the revolution was also rewarding, because I was almost certain that I would not have had a good enough GPA if I had to take the math and Marxism-Leninism exams. They were both canceled and I made it through four years of study with good grades.

After the changes happened and it was clear that there is no going back, the whole political palette changed too. We were learning new words, like democracy and pluralism. My father got into local politics and became a member of the local assembly. I got into national politics through a neighbor who knew that I spoke excellent Slovak and German, and a little bit of English that I picked up from songs and the movies, (my Russian was of no use) and he thought that the newly formed Hungarian political party could use my skills. I met Hungarian intellectuals who were in dissent for a long time and who were fully prepared to get involved and represent their minority, but except for one of them, they did not speak Slovak. So I became involved with the first ever free political party in Czechoslovakia after 1989, a liberal minority party of Hungarians. My studies were so boring and the classes so surface scratching, that I rarely made any effort and still got through exams mostly with what I learned in high school. I had a lot of free time and I loved to hang out around all these interesting individuals and even get paid for it. First I got involved in the first election campaign in 1990, later the second in 1992 and I also became a member of the international committee. For almost three years, I closely watched big politics as an insider and the more I knew about it, the less I liked it. But I made two very good friends during these years, for which I will forever be grateful.

With the revolution, not only freedom of speech and thousands of books that were previously censored, but also freedom to travel came along. My father had tried to get permission to go to Vienna with me for about ten years. He did not dare to ask for permission for the whole family, because that was out of question – families who got out to the West rarely came back, and not being a party member, he was not considered a reliable comrade. He finally succeeded in 1987 and we had money for about 5 days. When we crossed the border, after a ridiculous search by grumpy soldiers, my father said: “Breath in deeply. This is free air.” He loved everything about Austria – the smooth roads, the nicely kept gardens and streets, the shop windows, all the goods in the stores. I was most impressed by the newsstands and the music stores - I was 16. We had an address for room rentals that we could afford and were on our way to it, when my father approached a lady on the tram to make sure we are heading in the right direction. The lady asked where we are from and after my father told her the tale, she said: ”We have an apartment nearby that we are not using during the week, you can stay there for free, but let me double check with my husband if it is ok with him too.” We met the husband later on and we indeed stayed in their apartment and became friends with this family. They visited us every couple of months until the late 90s, when the husband got sick and could not travel anymore. They were generous and curious people. Whenever they came, without even asking us, they brought something my sister and I really longed for – a cassette, a Barbie, a sport sack, a calculator. They brought cases of yogurts and pounds of bananas and chocolate. I still have most of the things I was given by them.

After the regime change, we were free to go, but we had no money. (The papalashes, even though they lost their positions, kept the wealth stolen from the state and had, yet again, an easier start in capitalism – an actual capital to work with.) Many had relatives living all over Europe and some in Canada and the US. The relatives, most of them escaping illegally from the “paradise of socialism”, were now also free to come and visit without getting thrown into jail for treason, as would have been the case before. Families and friends were united after decades of forced separation. Some of them moved back. My parents regretted that they did not leave in 1968, when the borders were open for a few days. My mother was pregnant and she knew leaving would mean never to see her family again. After 1989, they were happy for us, but also sad that it was too late for them to have a life. They supported us in everything we did to adapt to the new situation.

My family took its own first trip to Vienna, which used to be connected with Bratislava by a tram line, in December of 1989. It was exceptionally warm and we were wandering the streets of the inner city for hours every day. We stayed again at our friends apartment for free and we used the mass transit for free too – an extraordinary gesture from the Viennese city council. My father went on a trip to Venice with my sister a few years later and that was about it for family trips, mostly because none of us wanted to go anywhere with my father ever again. He was starting to lose his sanity at that point, I think now, and the best way to deal with him, if we did not want to get into huge fights, was to avoid him altogether.

During my weekend visits and during summer vacation, I spent a lot of time at home either studying or helping my mother and my grandma around their households and it was increasingly difficult for me to be around my father, especially at meal times. He was always very particular about food. He weighed himself every day out of fear – if he loses weight, he dies. He also hated when my mother complained about being overweight and said that it is not healthy to be skinny. He scolded us when we left something on the plate, as wasteful behavior and had his own theories about what is healthy. He made me drink warm milk in the mornings and prepared the most horrible buttered bread sandwiches for school, but most importantly he could not understand that I could not eat soup and the main course at the same time. As an adult, at age 18, I started resisting him and not eating soup at all, which always led to a fight. I started making up excuses so that I don’t have to eat with everybody else, or would eat with my mother and sister when I knew he was not around.

As I became more independent and more adult, my father lost every bit of connection to me. We did not talk, except neutral things, but sometimes even when he drove me to the bus or train, we would just be quiet. It bothered me for years that he was this much unable to communicate any other feeling than anger and it drove me crazy that he started picking on my sister too, since she too started to have her own will. It was during these years that I lost my father as a close relative, someone I once loved dearly and started feeling that a stranger lived in our house. A stranger who was never able to be happy with us, who always picked fights at holiday seasons when my mother decorated our house with wonderful creations made by herself, who never appreciated my mother’s setting the table nicely every evening, cooking for him every evening and weekend and who never listened to what I said, just followed his own fixed ideas.

As a teenager, I often imagined my parents divorcing. I imagined living with my mother and sister and living quietly, in peace without having to watch what I said in front of my father, and anticipating in fear every minute in his presence some fight either with my mother, or me. I wanted my mother to be happy and I saw that she is not. I knew, because we discussed it often, that she does not want to go against my father because of us, because of my sister who still loved him and because of not having a place to go. I always imagined him leaving, but at the end, by the time both my sister and I left our house, it was my mother who was forced out of her own home, and not my father. My mother could not take him hurting us, and she knew he would, as he always did, when he had a disagreement with her. And so she suffered.[4] The life around my father became the second schizophrenia of my childhood and young adulthood.

My writing was also somewhat schizophrenic. During high school, I learned to write in a style that suited the regime and got published. I remember being on one of the end of the year celebration ceremonies listening to my own words read by a classmate and thinking that they sounded just like anything else. I was very disappointed and for a long time thought that my life is over, because I will never be allowed to write differently. Later, I had to reorient myself with the help of an editor, who also published my writings. She said I should only choose to be a journalist if I will be able to write even when I don’t feel like it and even then do a great job. She also said that what I do is not journalism, but literature – which was discouraging and flattering at the same time. I had no idea what to do with this literature that came out of me for a long time.

I also got in touch with something new in Bratislava, which was the serious interest of men. I did have boyfriends during my years at home, but it was mainly something I did because everybody else did it too. In Bratislava, I was an adult and adult men were asking me out for dinners and lunches and I grew fond of most of them, even though I felt no chemistry or romantic attraction to any of them. For me, it was rather enjoyable to be around people who were intellectually challenging and from whom I was able to learn something every day, but for them, my attention was misleading. It was especially painful to decline a mathematician, who once after a nice afternoon of walking and talking said that he feels that he would want to be tamed by me, just like the fox in the Little Prince, but that after that I would be responsible for him. I had to say that I could not tame him and he got married about a year later in Prague.

We never discussed in my family that it was strange that I did not have a serious boyfriend at age 20 or 22. I myself did not think it was strange. My mother always said that I have time and I should enjoy life and not hurry into marriage. Strangely enough, I had only one “real” boyfriend, for about 2 weeks, after I participated in a seminar in Austria with people from all around the world. He was American, of Turkish descent, studying philosophy at the New School with one of the professors whom I admired (the Hungarian Agnes Heller) and very handsome. To spend time with him and to get to know him was interesting, but when we left the seminar and went to Vienna for a few days before he went back to New York, I realized that nothing else – sex, his drinking every night, handling everyday things – felt natural or good. This adventure into being heterosexual was my last one, and I don’t regret it. It made me think about what I really want and I did not know it, until I left Bratislava – with its male oriented politics, boring school, small cultural scene, nationalistic tensions and where my writing started to get published - for the real big city, Budapest. I got accepted into a post-graduate school of political science with a scholarship. I was excited and terrified at the same time, but I went.


3. Following my heart

I left my convenient life in Budapest after 7 years of being there because I could not not leave. A force stronger than anything else I knew before dragged me across the Atlantic to a fancy neighborhood called Park Slope. I found a soul-mate, the love of my life who said she would never move to Budapest (she has revised this radical statement since) and who was everything I wanted in a partner/lover.

But what became a convenient and enjoyable life, started as a hard one in Budapest. I had a small scholarship that was half the monthly rent, but somehow I was able to make enough money. I had only one friend there, who was very nice, but busy. But I went to a school where the teachers were excited about teaching and students about learning. I imagine now that we had the best teachers from all Hungary in our small and young school where we studied the basics of everything there is to know about politics: history, philosophy, organizing, statistics, research techniques, campaign management, etc. The school was affiliated with the party of the young liberal democrats – FIDESZ, which later transformed itself into a disgustingly demagogic nationalistic, hate spreading monster. But during the three years I was there, the principles of tolerance and democracy were self-evident.

Aside from being very happy in school, there were two other things that happened in Budapest and that made a big difference in my life: learning to write in Hungarian and meeting my first lover.

Curiously enough, these two things were closely connected. It happened that during my first year in Budapest, I was hired to help organize a big international conference for FIDESZ. Mary Robinson was the key note speaker and it all was very exciting. But for me, the most exciting thing became to be around the main organizer of the conference, a girl slightly older than I. I started to think that there was more to this obsession than just intellect and also started connecting the dots with other women, mostly teachers whom I was obsessed with. (At the time, it did not seem strange, since most of the teachers were women in all of the schools.) Shortly after the conference, I read in the local paper an ad for a weekly meeting of gay and lesbian students. I basically knew nothing about gays and lesbians, had no idea if I am one, and it took me several weeks until I had enough courage to go to one of the meetings. It was February, already dark and very cold in the early evening, the meeting was to be held in a basement room of the Eotvos University. I entered the room, which was dark and when I turned the light on, I saw a young man sitting there, with his eyes closed, resting. He turned out to be very nice and welcoming. His sister, who did not arrive at that meeting, only the next one, became my first lover.

Orsolya was beautiful, depressed, with low self-esteem but very ambitious, with an alcoholic father and a mother who had abandoned her career as an opera singer to raise her three children. The mother was depressed and on her way to alcoholism herself, as were all the children, but on occasion she was more fond of me than her own daughter which of course caused tension. She was very supportive of her two gay children and was willing to anytime do anything necessary to help other parents deal with a similar situation.

Orsi was an actor. I never met anyone who was neurotic and hysterical before and I had no idea what to do when she had a fit the first time. Some of her fits were acting, as I learned later, but she was severely depressed and suicidal mostly in the second half of our relationship that lasted for about two and a half years. She was also a great admirer of the Hungarian language and knew hundreds of poems by heart. I encouraged her to apply to the graduate school for actors, and it was a great achievement that she took the entry exams, but she was too nervous to perform well and did not get in, nor did she try again. I learned a great deal about the language from her. She helped me translate from English and Slovak (I was lucky to have these relatively well paying jobs occasionally) and corrected all of my mistakes in spoken Hungarian. The main reason why we did not last longer was that she could not grow with me and she would not let me help her, even though she said that is what she wanted. She was jealous of my progress and my making good money after a while and also of the good relationships with my mother and my sister. She threatened to kill herself and to become homeless when we finally separated, but after about a year later we were able to speak again and became friends. It also helped that she was happily in love with a new person.

During my second year in school, I got an illegal job at a shipping company.[5] It paid well
and it allowed me to go to school in the afternoons and evenings. After about a year I got a job at the Hungarian state radio, in a section that broadcasted to the neighboring countries. I became a translator from Hungarian to Slovak and one of the hosts of the half hour daily shows. I loved working at the radio. It was new, challenging and I used my language skills. I loved my boss, the Czech woman Kveta, who loved me back and protected me from homophobes and bigots.

In the radio, this labyrinth like building, I met someone who became a dear friend, the first out gay radio personality, Balazs. We really met in a different context – he was on the board of the AIDS prevention foundation that I worked for and we interacted a lot before he invited me to co-host his own monthly live radio show. I don’t think I was a good host, because I was too nervous and not aggressive enough to grab the word from Balazs, but I loved doing it. Even after Kveta retired and I was forced out of the Slovak section (after about 5 years of working there), I continued to do shows with Balazs and to maintain a friendship with him that I still cherish.

My other good friend, although of a very different nature was Nyck. She was as old as I, a butch with a baseball cap and a cigarette always in her hand. A great visual artist, she was very sensitive and shy, but I was able to break through her facade and throughout the years, we spent many hours at our table at the lesbian/gay pizza place in downtown Budapest. Nyck was also a notorious womanizer and had multiple girlfriends aside from the woman she lived with, who functioned more as a mother substitute than a lover.

Only after Orsi and I definitely broke up, I got more involved in the lesbian scene. I met the craziest dykes and femmes, got into a love triangle and lived through previously unimaginable adventures on an emotional as well as physical level. I also realized at this point how much of my energy and time taking care of Orsi consumed. Not that I regretted any of it, it probably saved her sanity or even life at the time, but not having to do any of it now, I felt liberated and free.

Aside from doing the radio show, I got invited to monthly editorial meetings of the only gay monthly at the time – Masok. It was not easy for me to write in Hungarian, but the two editors, a couple, were so supportive and happy to have a lesbian writing for them, that they published whatever I wrote. I felt that I against all odds, I became a journalist at last.

The AIDS prevention foundation where I worked hired an American fund raiser, Douglas, and I helped him and many volunteers to organize the first lesbian and gay film festival in Budapest. The work there was rewarding until a crazy woman board member decided that she wanted the job of the director and through lies and manipulation got my boss fired. After she learned from me how to run the foundation, she fired me too and brought in her own people, who ruined the foundation in a matter of months.

I got a new part-time job at an American foundation called Freedom House. I did basic admin work and translated relevant articles from Slovak and Hungarian into English, which at that point was better, but still not very good. The Americans I met in Freedom House were very nice, relaxed about the heated political situation that turmoiled around us and surprisingly knowledgeable about the wider region of ex-soviet satellites. My boss understood Hungarian, Polish and a little Russian. I liked being among these Americans and the two Hungarians that worked in the office, even though at the beginning I had a headache from concentrating all day on English.

Meanwhile, I was going home almost every weekend and things stared to happen there with my sister. She got into a student exchange program (with the help of our papalash neighbors) and spent 3 months in Vienna and came back with a nose piercing. My mother and I laughed hysterically when we saw her, but my father got furious and my grandma cried for two days (why, I still don’t understand). Even though my father could not say why exactly is it a capital crime to have a nose piercing at age 16, except that my stupid Armenian uncle who lives in LA told him that it’s a sign of gayness (wrong daughter, though), he insisted that my sister immediately take the thing out of her nose. She of course would not and my father turned to my mother and told her she must support him in this and not talk to my sister until she does what he tells her. My mother - a major step for her - did not take his side and refused to be a messenger between my sister and my father. I refused also and stood firmly on my sister’s side also in the matter of her boyfriend, a serious one at this point, whom my father hated without even once speaking to him. “He is shorter than she”, was his argument. The boyfriend was nice, of course, a talented artist, hard working, taking care of his ill mother and really loving my sister. My sister moved out of our home and in with him shortly after turning 18. It was surprisingly hard for me not to have her there when I came back to visit. I loved her visiting me and staying with me in Budapest and in my mind she belonged there with me. But the boyfriend did not want to move and so they lived happily until they broke up many years later when my sister met her future husband.

It started with the nose piercing that my father lost his second daughter. I speculate that he was very jealous of the boyfriend and could not deal with his emotions in any way other than being a despotic father and alienating his whole family.

My father probably never suspected, or if he did, he never revealed that he knew, that the girls I brought home for weekends in the summer were my lovers. My mother, my sister and her boyfriend knew, also most of my friends, and later my aunt and cousins in the Czech Republic knew. Everybody was fine, except they knew that these girls were not for me. But they let me make my own mistakes and I am grateful because even though I suffered a great deal during these relationships, I also learned a great deal about myself and became much more aware of my emotional needs and traps. I believe that it was through these affairs that I became emotionally mature and capable of being my own person.

My being gay was the next schizophrenia that I had to eliminate from my life. Not wanting to do any harm to my family, I used an alias in the radio and the gay papers. But after a while I felt uncomfortable. I also realized that I did not like to speak to some people from my past, e.g. my former school mates, because I did not want to lie to them about myself, but could not reveal the truth. I felt free in Budapest, but not free at home and in public, in my work.
Moving to New York changed all of this, though not entirely. I do write regularly for the Hungarian newspaper in Slovakia, but I don’t write about my private life (I believe, if I were straight, to a certain extent I would). My father, his family and my grandmother still don’t know why am I living here. But people here seem to be more tolerant and much more open minded than what I was used to. And even though I think it should be like this everywhere, I am aware of how unique it is that lesbian and gay male couples in my neighborhood have children together, own property together and marry. People are rarely hiding facts about themselves and for the most part are dealing with their issues, e.g. that they are alcoholics, gay, addicts or depressed – things that elsewhere would be shameful.
I also realized after a while that all those wait people who said when asked what they are doing, that they are actors, writers, composers, musicians or dancers were right. It is not about what we do for money, it is about what we love to do. Since only very recently am I able to say when asked that I am a writer, it still gives me a funny feeling. And when I say it, I think of my drawer full of published work. At this very moment it seems, that I traded a comfortable career for hardship and freedom with writing. At this very moment it seems that it was worth it.


[1] A report written about everyone by the Communists. It commented on how useful a member of the socialist society one was. One was not, for example, flawless, if one went to church, talked against the regime, did not accept the invitation to be a party member or had a relative who was an enemy of the regime or who illegally immigrated [emigrated]. The reports were often based on anonymous letters/reports written by neighbors, colleagues or jealous relatives.
[2] This was also done after the revolution to avoid Hungarians getting into the parliament and into local governments in big numbers. The voting districts were strangely divided so that the maximum number of Slovaks and minimum number of Hungarians were registered to vote.
[3] Analogy with Hoch Deutsch, the official or literary version of the language, spoken by educated people with proper grammar, without traces of accent or dialect.
[4] When I was three years old, my mother left my father and for a few days moved back with her parents. She knew then that she would not be happy with him. But she got no support. Her family was afraid of shame, nobody else ever divorced in the family and they sent her back to her husband. The next time she got enough courage to leave him was 30 years later.
[5] It had to be illegal, because the company had a lot of “black money” from cash business and to pay someone off the books costs only about half of a legal employee.

Saturday, October 01, 2005