One day till the exam begins

Current status: Oh, slightly worried by the following 2 weeks, nothing special. Other than that, happy that Russia won last night 3-1 after extra time!
Currently listening to: The Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 soundtrack. Instrumental versions of cheesy robot anime themes. Ain't it nice?
Quote of the day: "If he'd read communist poetry, Titu Maiorescu (famous Romanian critic who promoted our would-be great classics and started the association known as "Junimea") would roll in his grave." Never knew our Romanian teacher had such a sense of humour, even in his manual.

Someone once complained that my blog is written in English. Now, I don't necessarily consider this language to be the best or the classiest there is, but I like it: it has its charm, I guess. Why am I not writing in my own language? Romanian's nice too. It's a beautiful language born from Latin, Dacic and Slavic. And others. Including Turkish (like "baclava". I love those things). Problem is that very few people understand this wonderful language ("very few" is an understatement: even our bloody leaders have trouble with it). Bad enough that this blog has only one comment, the last thing I'd want would be for it to be even less read.

Another argument is that if I write in English, I can control my formality a little more. I'm quite convinced that if I were to write in Romanian, I'd end up swearing about some teacher or some classmate. Not you, you manipulative patriot, don't worry. At any rate, even if I do swear in English, it's not as effective as in Romanian. (Maybe because our people use the letter "P" a lot. Believe me, it adds quite an effect. In case you forget what you were gonna say, you can just spit him. Still a "P") On the other hand, if I were to write in Romanian, I'd probably censor myself in a silly way. I've seen the opposite in school, actually. Some girls were mentioning... err... you know. That-which-they-lack.

Lastly, it's a fact that Japanese cartoons use English terms. For example, Great Mazinger's melting beam called the Breast Burn (because it's fired from a V-shaped breast plate) Can you call it "arsura de piept" without laughing? No. Engrish (Japanese attempts at writing in English) is funny. Lomanian might not be. At any rate, I hope I've convinced you why I chose this blog to be in English.

***

Romania has left Euro 2008. After waiting 8 years to qualify to such a competition, we were close to getting out of an impossible group. We had to face France, Italy and the Netherlands. France being the finalist of the 2006 World Cup, Italy being the winner and Netherlands being the team we'd beaten in the qualifiers. What happened?

France-Romania 0-0. We defended like crazy and ended up having no chances on goal. As someone would say, we put our asses in front the goal.
Netherlands-Italy 3-0. Scary stuff. World champions lost badly. A simple calculation would lead us to think we'd beat Italy.
Italy-Romania 1-1. I was having private classes when I heard a shout of happiness. Romania scored! Within a minute, Italy equalised. Italy had a goal cancelled. Romania had a penalty. Adrian Mutu shot it. And what do you know, he missed. Everybody called him an idiot on the Messenger, but I defended him: it was he who scored the other goal too.
Netherlands-France 4-1. Chances were high. The former were qualified, which meant they had no reason to beat us in the last match. All we had to do was beat the Netherlands, or draw (if neither France nor Italy won).
Netherlands-Romania 2-0. We failed.
Italy-France 2-0. France failed too.

The aftermath: Raymond Domenech is going to get fired. Mutu got press-raped. Piturca got press-raped. Ionut Lupescu realised we don't have experience. The Dutch lost 3-1 to the Russians in the quarter-finals. Poetic justice? No. The neighbor's goat has just died. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Amen.

***

Ah, yes. The dreaded baccalaureate. Tomorrow, I'll be discussing with a woman near her menopause about the wonders of communication and, likely, some literary current. How lovely. Wednesday, I'll be talking German, in a sea of nincompoops or geniuses. That's what you get when there's just eight of you. There's no middle class here, folks. Friday, the indispensible Romanian writing paper. Ooooh, boy.

And that's just the first week. Second week has History, Latin and Psychology. In three days. Great. I'll be taking my leave then... Signing off, yours truly.