Killing Batteries

Now that there aren’t people on three continents tapping their feet and looking at their watches, waiting for me to turn in my LP manuscripts, I’ve gone about the task of re-training my body to sleep past 7:30am. It wasn’t easy, but after a solid week of staying up until 2am and self-medicating with a variety of alcohol, I was able to get over the 7:30 hump. I’ve stalled out at the 9-9:30 mark for now, but that’s had more to do with my surroundings making sleep impossible than physiological programming.

As many of you probably already know, Latin people, Spanish and Italian in particular, are a lively, gregarious, excitable bunch. More succinctly, they’re loud as hell. Rare is there a conversation conducted at what most people would deem a calm, moderate level. Indeed, even an innocuous conversation about gardening or needlepoint is punctuated with vocal crescendos, wild gesticulation and the odd, impassioned curse word. Furthermore, yelling conversations down the street or across hotel lobbies are common. Horn honking is done with gratuitous enthusiasm. TVs and radios are left on in each room, at deafening levels, whether anyone is there to enjoy them or not. Latin people not only like noise, I firmly believe they would go bonkers without it. Romanians are no exception.

And so we come to my problem. I am not a champion sleeper, even at the best of times. I’m unusually sensitive to noise and the onset of summer has jacked up the general city noise level here in Iasi, right on schedule. When you’re surrounded by people who don’t seem to register what would otherwise be considered disruptive levels of noise, and some of those people like to rise with the chickens and get straight to work, sleeping late becomes a challenge.

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Have I mentioned that I’m a juggler?  Yep, for, oh god, 24 years now.  I started young and as such I was one of those punks that learned everything five times faster than the adults, who mostly loathed me as a result.  There was a window of opportunity somewhere in my mid- to late-teens when I could have put my head down and become one of the better jugglers on the planet, but I chose girls and a social life instead and I’m still not sorry.  Giving it varying degrees of dedication over the years I managed to become a respectable juggler anyway.

Unfortunately, juggling is one of the many sports/disciplines where one doesn’t age gracefully.  In my advancing years – I’ll be 36 next week! – and having done precious little juggling in my 30s, I can pretty much forget about notable improvement from here on out.  Indeed, I’ll have to practice pretty freakin’ hard just to maintain what I’ve got.

People always ask me, ‘Leif, how is it that you engage in virtually no regular exercise, yet you’re about a dozen sit-ups away from being a swimsuit model?’ OK, only one person has ever said that and he was trying to get me into bed, but still, the point stands; I look awfully fit for no particular reason.  Actually, in fact, there’s two good reasons; excellent genealogical inheritance and juggling.

Serious juggling is all about fast-twitch muscles, high-speed repetitive motion and of course razor sharp reflexes and coordination.  It’s surprisingly strenuous.  As such the human body just can’t keep up that intensity after a certain age.  Hell, the stamina alone will bury you, if you don’t keep at it several times a week.  Are you non-jugglers curious?  Try this experiment; find a relatively light object, like an empty glass bottle of anything.  In fact, find two.  Put one in each hand and shake them like you’d shake a bottle of salad dressing.  First do it at about 30-40% of your maximum intensity.  Not too taxing, eh?  Well, do it virtually non-stop for two hours.  How do you feel now?  Stings a bit, doesn’t it?  That’s about the equivalent of a three club (‘pins’ for those of you not hip to the lingo) or five-ball workout for you.

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You know, the supposed ‘culture shock bell-curve’ is a bunch off ca-ca.  Some weeks it feels more like the ‘culture shock perfect storm’.  I’ve suffered another overpowering wave of pessimism recently.  Some of you may have noticed that I have a streaky love-hate relationship with my second home and I’ve been in dire need of a little love this week, culminating in having read this article this morning: Clashes mark Romanian gay pride.

Now I’m fully aware that you can easily find anti-gay, anti-everything crackpots in any country you go to, but seeing this article only adds to the stuff I hear all the time on the streets.  There is a dispiritingly large sub-section in this country that goes all obtuse (in my opinion), even on the most minor issues. Gays, gypsies, Hungarians, hygiene…

In regards to the gay thing, the crazy thing is, Romanians are some of the most same-sex tactile people I’ve ever seen. Women are all over each other – hugging, kissing, hot oil wrestling (I wish) – and men aren’t much better.  I realize that hand-holding and hair caressing is a far cry from, oh say, dildo play, but it’s just amazing how such otherwise warm people can still be harbouring such wide-spread anti-social venom.

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