Note1: The names are not real.
Note2: This text is a very strong critique. It is MY point of view. You are free to disagree but my point of view shall remain the same.
Note3: I still have to continue, but I have already written a lot as it is.

1. Argument
I am writing this because I know there are a lot of people who believe America is the “promise land”. People from Eastern Europe, like me, people from Asia, India who come in almost herds in the US, expecting a free, capitalist, rich, beautiful etc. etc. country. So many people I’ve heard who praise America like it’s the ultimate country, the best (so fuck the rest), the dream, the alpha and omega. And, for a certain part, it’s just a big load of shit. It makes me sad that also so many believe these epithets and descriptions. So this is a warning or wake-up-call if you wish. It ain’t all that they say it is.

2. How I got there.
I was fed up with my life here. The school system sucked, the people sucked, we were filled with corruption and lies and hypocrites and uncivilized people, society sucked. Basically 80% of my daily life sucked. And, as any Romanian, I was stuffed with the “American dream”. Movies, music, stories, omnipresent appraisal of America, everything told me that America was just right for me. What could I want more then a country where I could be free, where democracy is at its height, where people are tolerant and civilized and where everyone gets their proverbial “happy-end”? So I looked for ways to escape from my god-forsaken country. And I found some sort of grant program. That’s what it seemed like when I read about it in the newspaper. You give this association 3500 dollars, the American state gives 40 thousand and you’re off to dreamland! So I gave the tests and got the highest score in my country, went to the interview and did very well and so I was good to go.

3. About the agency
So this agency was supposed to find a right place for me taking in account my letters, my CV and my requests. I had to right a letter describing myself and I wrote a 4-page letter, I had to fill out forms and forms so they can find me an appropriate home. They did NOTHING of that sort.
First of all, I was at the end of my 11th grade. Was it not natural to find a home where I would go to a school as a senior? Well, not really. It seems common sense don’t really apply to them. So they found a home where I was supposed to be enrolled in the 11th grade. So I was supposed to repeat a year. It wasn’t enough that I was going to Medicine and that’s 6 years, I was to lose another year. I wrote a letter explaining the situation. I asked them to tell me if they can’t find an appropriate placement for me and if that would be the case, I wouldn’t go. But that would have meant they lost 3500 bucks. As it turned out, the state didn’t pay diddly squat. All the money they got was those paid by us. The families were volunteers. And for those of you who do not understand why that particular word is in bold…by being a volunteer means that you can quit the program whenever you wish. Who gives a shit that that means you meddle with the life, hopes, dreams etc. of a kid? Anyway, they send me a letter with the info of a supposed “second placement”. And we supposed I were to be a senior. We found out later that they didn’t bother finding me a second placement and that I was enrolled as a junior (imagine the surprise, the joy and happiness when I found that out).
Secondly, I clearly stated that I am a smoker. If I said that it means that I wasn’t planning on quitting very soon. If I couldn’t go because of this (and being a minor) they should have said that. But they didn’t. More than that, they found a family where the mother loathed smoking and also was allergic to smoke. A perfect match, don’t you think?
Third of all, I wrote quite clearly that I am open-minded, independent, free-willed etc. The family only got one fourth of my letter. The family was one of the most conservative and narrow-minded I have ever seen. The mother being an Asian, you can understand why that happened. So you can see the family was just perfect for me. I wonder why it didn’t work out…So they made some mistakes. They didn’t even say they apologize, they don’t give a shit.
Another mistake, which they blamed on us. In the contract it was stated that I have to be on American grounds with 5 days maximum before school starts. School started on the 10th of august, so we got a plane ticket-the last plain ticked to Palm Beach - with great effort; it was for the 5th of august, late at night. So, 10 days before my departure we get an email from the family where they say that they’ll be in a vacation in Colorado until the 8th of august. Since we couldn’t change the ticket (we would have paid the huge tax to do that), my dad talked to a friend, who talked to his orthodox priest who talked with the priest from Palm Beach to pick me up from the airport and take me to a hotel. The agency (lol) said that we planned that. Like yeah, there’s nothing I want more in this world that to sit for 3 days in a hotel, placed in the middle of nowhere (everything is in the middle of nowhere there) in a total foreign country. So they did a lot of mistakes even before I got there. But the moment I talked, later on, to the NY agent, I understood why. He was totally incompetent and arrogant. Moreover, he was stuttering. He was talking to a freakin’ kid and he was stuttering. Not from being pissed, but from being afraid. Like I was to go in NY and kill him with an axe or something. Truly pathetic.

4. Behold…America!
From the customs in Detroit, I noticed that all Americans are “nice”. All the customs’ agents smile, heck, most people are constantly smiling, everyone has this glued pleased expression on their faces. On the plane from Detroit to Palm Beach I realized I landed in “Jesus Land.” I was sitting between these two ladies who were obsessed with God, Christ etc. and had a great pleasure in expressing their faith. Imagine me, an orthodox who became a catholic who became a non-practicing Catholic, openly disgusted by the Church and the people who blindly believe in this whole Christian hypocrite crap, squeezed between two fanatic Christians. Imagine how Florida, Jesus Land felt for me. Didn’t really expect it to be that way. But since if you are an accredited pastor and have an accredited church (a sect people, a sect) you don’t pay any taxes and since America is the cradle of all fanatics, it is easy to understand why Christ is so praised there. By the way, did you know that 26% of Americans believe Jesus will come on earth during their lifetime?

I got at the hotel. The priest was really nice and a man who showed at least to be less fanatic about god. Maybe it was because he was orthodox and not belonging to some sect. I owe a great deal to that priest. We had a wonderful conversation and he helped a lot. I shall thank him forever. He was one of the very few “truthful” Americans. Anyway, it was late, the hotel was in the middle of nowhere (everything is), it smelled like humidity and I was hungry. I checked in. The guy from the counter had a very strong Caribbean accent and I had to make him repeat twice most things he said. In the end I understood him more from signs then from the “common” language we spoke. I got accustomed to all accents soon enough, because in Florida live people of many, many nationalities. I crossed the ocean of a street and got to a gas station to buy some food. A very nice African American person served me through a shelf in the wall. We started talking and he invited me in because there were a lot of junkies at that time of night. That was the first African American I got into real contact with. I decided I shall not be racial when I went there but then I discovered I really didn’t need to. Black people are very cool, most of them are much better than Americans. And, why be racial, when everybody else was doing such a fine job? If you think Americans ain’t racial, think again. Forget about the movies, they are one of greatest lies America has ever produced. Americans are very racial. And, unlike us who do not like gypsies for very well defined reasons (most of them are beggars and thieves); Americans don’t like black people just because. I do not say that there are not exceptions, but your regular American will still think a “nigger” belongs on a tobacco plantation. That in the South can’t really say anything about the rest. I think that in the north things might be different. In school, white people avoided the corridor where black people stayed during lunch. One of them said (and he was serious) that black people scare him. And yes, it is quite uncommon to see a fat or unfit black person. They look…animal like, but in a very good way. I, for one, couldn’t stop looking of the slenderness of their forms. And yes, they get jobs, no one says they don’t like them, everyone is “politically correct”, but a neighborhood is “bad” only because black people live in it. Speaking of which…
My first school was a “magnet school.” The magnet program had the purpose to raise the quality of “bad” neighborhoods by bringing really good schools in them. Suncoast is the best school in Florida and the 4th in the country. And it was near a “bad” neighborhood. Yes, you have guessed indeed: it was near a black neighborhood. I found out that bad is something very different to me.
I was trying to get someone to buy me cigs at school. I could find a drug dealer in one of 50 students (it was a good school) but I couldn’t find someone who could buy me a damn pack of cigs. So when I finally got my hands on those cigs it was 14 days since I smoked and I was really desperate. I confess: I love smoking. I don’t just like it, I love it. It is one of my few addictions and the only one that’s bad for my health. So, in that desperate state, I said I will take a chance, the ultimate chance and go smoke my cig in the neighborhood. Everyone said that the people there are murderers, rapists, junkies, thieves. My god, it was hell on earth. But, being a reckless kid, I went there, asking for a light. And I actually found a light. And I found more than that: a person that knew more about my god-forsaken country than any American I’d spoken to. He not only knew where my country was (to most Americans there’s “America” and “The rest”; watch Eurotrip to get my point), he knew that we used to be a communist country, when the revolution was and all sort of things. I asked, amazed, where did he learn all that. School doesn’t teach you much there. He said he had history channel and the library right next door and he likes to know stuff. So I got out of the neighborhood un-raped, un-murdered, unharmed. Yes, indeed, everyone looked weirdly at me; it’s not everyday you see a white girl going into a black neighborhood. From that day I used to come every time I could. So let me tell ya what a “bad” neighborhood means. Yes, they did drugs. But white teens do drugs as well. They don’t talk about it, but they do. And, as oppose to school where I talked almost daily about parties and drugs and booze, in that “bad, bad place” only a guy asked me only once if I “burn” and I denied vehemently and that was it. They didn’t smoke in my presence; they did not talk about it in my presence. They were precautious? Maybe. Respectful? Maybe. Whatever the reason, I liked that. They drank, even during the day (omg omg) and not only beer (omg omg). But I can drink whenever and wherever and whatever I wish in my country so it was nothing surprising. They laughed and OH, GOD, they got laid. I’m looking now behind my shoulder because getting laid is tainted, un-pure, disgusting and very very taboo. It’s not like we’ve been doing it for some time now. Southern people, ahem, white southern people like to pretend they are somehow pure. So they don’t talk about sex, they don’t have sex, they don’t drink, they don’t pronounce obscene words, they don’t curse…to sum it up, they don’t. Live, that is. So the “bad” neighborhood was for me a breath of fresh air. I could curse, I could, unbelievable, people, truly unbelievable, talk about precious, god-given America and actually criticize it. I will get to that subject later. So, because I used to go there, the second family thought it was dangerous. And also they thought that I’m using the poor helpless African Americans to get cigarettes. Yes, they bought me cigs (right-minded people they were) but I gave money for them. I also went there because I liked them and nothing bad had ever happened to me. Black people are frank and direct. Sincerely, they are not sophisticated enough to be hypocrites and double-faced like white people are. They believe in god and such, but with much more moderation. They truly know what respect and tolerance is. And for that they are discriminated. Viva America.

School, another very interesting subject. I must say I was some sort of genius there. Yes, their classes are a bit more interesting than ours, teachers are trained to make them that way, but WHAT they study is, as plainly put as I can, retarded. I was the best of my twelve grade English class – that’s right people, I, from an Eastern country knew more English than the natives, their Advanced Placement 12th grade AB math was a quarter of what I did in the 11th grade and chemistry…I learned how to count significant digits (don’t get me started there) and how to transform from decimeters to meters. And I was not allowed to just do it mentally; I had to use their antique and truly retarded methods. More than that, 11th graders were using a calculator to do ten at the second times ten at the minus third! Truly appalling and sad. For me anyway. And that’s just school, “science”. You do not wish to ask an American anything of decent knowledge, like “where is France”, he will just give you a blanc stare. They do not have any information of what we consider basic knowledge. They only know procedures. “We don’t need no education, we know need no thoughts control. Teachers, leave them kids alone! All in all it’s just a brick in the wall!” they are trained from young age to be little robots. Everything they do, from eating, sleeping, family life, having fun, human relationships is mechanical. They are somehow “trained” to do those things. They get “life training”, like in the army or like a computer who has a code sequence to do something. It is quite scary. I finished my homework and class work in what they considered “record time”. Goddamn right it was record time, I was used to think! I used to explain different things to people, things they didn’t understand. Used to do other people’s homework ‘cause I had so much spare time and no fun stuff to use it with. After a while I felt like I’m becoming a veggie.

Oh yes, fun. This is indeed, a very difficult subject here. So most Americans consider shopping the most “fun” you can find. And this brings me to another interesting subject, shopping. They have these super-stores, like Target or Wal-Mart; where you can find anything (and I do mean anything) you want. It’s like a Disney Land of stuff. When I first went shopping in Target I got mesmerized by zounds of things. I am not a shopper, in fact shopping gets me really tired and bored and pissed. But the mirage of things got to me the first time. I, on the other hand, even with me typical Eastern-European awe, didn’t ever come close to what they do. As other people said, they are like locusts. In august sometime, the stuff for Halloween arrives, occupying three-four isles of a store. And immediately after Halloween, the Christmas things appear, occupying maybe half of every shop. Christmas is biiig. Not because of the birth of Jesus Christ. They are politically correct and they must respect all religions, so they’ve found the common focus point for everyone in America at Christmas time: shopping for presents. Friends of ours told us that the Church wasn’t even open on Christmas day because everyone had a vacation then. Including the Church!
Apart from Target they have Malls. A lot o’ ‘em. And so they shop. A lot. And that’s considered one of the most fun-giving things.
Another fun thing that we did was go out and eat. Another very itchy subject…food.
I gained 10 kilos (22 pounds) in America. I think the food there and its lack of anything (vitamins, proteins) made my hair so weak, so that it started falling in industrial amounts. Food there, of any sort, gets you fat. “Organic” food, the food I find here almost everywhere, is expensive and rare. Even if you cook at home you have a huge chance of gaining weight. I gained weight also because I didn’t smoke there that much. So I needed another activity to perform; so I drank water and ate Oreos. And got fat. More than that, I ate a lot. In quantities I mean. Here, a 500g lunch can hold me for 36 hours. There I ate maybe 4 times a day and I wasn’t full, I didn’t feel “the energy”. And fast food, oh boy, that’s just “bad”. In any possible way. McDonald’s is the worse, I reckon. Their food I think fits exactly the minimum requirements for it to be legal. I don’t know if they even put real meat in the burgers. Watch “Super-size Me” and you’ll understand better. It’s about a guy that goes through an experiment: eating for one month only from McDonald’s. After that month he gained weight, lost his very good health, became depressed and addicted to the food. So, as I said, eating out is “fun”. They once took me to a place where you just paid to get in and then you could eat whatever you wanted. I kinda liked it, but it does tell something about the way that they eat.
I’ve had quite a lot of surprises concerning food. Onions didn’t taste and were almost like apples. I once mixed the aspect of prunes with a peach. They didn’t have garlic, but only garlic powder (petrol based, all nutritious, obviously). And the list can go on.
Watching movies at home is “fun”. For more then a month every weekend the family’s kid would have friends over and we’d just watch movies. Most of them we’ve seen at least a couple times, but that didn’t matter. It was all about “socializing”. You can imagine this activity is very intense and it requires a lot of social skill and energy.
Another thing – and this to me was truly hilarious- that’s fun to do is a DDR party. What is DDR, you might wonder. It’s a game, where you have a foot-pad and on the screen you have arrows flowing. And you have to step on the arrows on your pad to match the ones going on the screen. It’s sorta like training to dance. They never actually danced, DDR was the closest thing to it. I have never been to a bar or a disco or wherever of the sort ‘cause you have an age limit in most of these establishments.
And, oh, yes, video games. Truly amazing how addictive some mindless video games can become. Take Counter Strike. You just shoot people. Barneby, the kid, told me a very complex theory about how video games enhance your reflexes and such but that’s just BS. I mean you can enhance your reflexes in hundreds of ways, sitting with your ass on a chair and hitting the mouse button not being the first of them. But then again “why should I have my fun outside, where it’s hot and I sweat and I’m uncomfortable when I can sit inside in the air conditioning and relax?” A truly great and smart opinion. I don’t know, maybe I’m an outdoors person, but I just do not see the fun in sitting all day between four walls.
Alright, so that was fun. Why haven’t I said anything about sports? Because they just do sports at school and most of them do it because they have nothing better to do. Since the distances are so great they cannot go to a high school’s basketball field and play, like we do. I have never been to a picnic, have never played just a leisure outdoors sport. Yes, we went once to some friends of theirs and did knee-boarding but that was pretty much it.
So that was fun for them. They almost never have variations in their life. My life here is extremely dynamic and what I do every day changes a lot. I almost never get bored. There, I entered a mind-killing monotony. Every day was the same: school, food, homework, reading, browsing the net.

And now I will reach maybe the most shocking subject for me: family life. One word, say it with me: “ar-ti-fi-cial”.
The OGs described themselves for the agency as loving. That was their basic quality: they had a lot of love for each other and they were a very “together” family. The family was made out of John, a very decent, quite typical American man, Lilly, the artist, the intellectual, obsessed by her grades (and they need to be like that, college is based almost only on grades), Barneby, the counter freak, a computer geek, sort of lazy at school, thank god for his mom who kept pushing him and, the great, the almighty Min-chu, the Korean tyrant mother. As you might have suspected, Min-chu had the pants in the family. She was full of pants. Anything she said had to be done; it didn’t matter if you wanted an explanation, if the thing she wanted you to seemed totally pointless or whatever. I shall give an example so you can understand. I was sitting in the kitchen with Lilly and Min-chu. Lilly was taking PSAT classes, as a preparation for the SAT classes. It cost 800 dollars. So I asked Lilly if these classes are any good. She said that they were boring and seemed pointless. So I ask min-chu why she pays so much to go to these classes when there were so many things that could have been done with the money. She said “because they are useful to my daughter”. I shut up. That was in the beginning, when I didn’t quite get how the wheels spin in that house and I think that was the thing that cursed me for ever in her eyes. Goddamn it, I actually had a mind of my own. All of Barneby’s and Lilly’s friends had to go through their mother’s filter. Take tom, for example. He was a really nice guy, sarcastic, funny, smart, but had a somewhat mind of his own. Min-chu didn’t approve of him until he got caught up in the house during a very strong hurricane and helped out and just then she realized what a trustworthy boy he really is.
Lilly, 16 of age, wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend. She had to stay focused on school and anyway her mom didn’t approve of most guys gravitating around her. All the inter-human relationships were quiet and posh. Even among Lilly’s friends, all in Art school, I saw this distance. Like it was somewhat fake, like they somehow didn’t mean it, like they didn’t really grasp the concept of having a friend.
Moving on…Lilly used to erase her browser history. When I asked why, she said “because I don’t want my parents to find out where I’m browsing.” Don’t think porn. Oh no, my goodness no, Lilly was a truly common-sensed girl. She browsed cnn.com, deviantart.com (an art community), her mail, her school’s page and other sites related to school. There was nothing obscene, malefic, satanic. And her parents rarely came into her room, they really trusted her. But still, she was that paranoid that she erased her history. Another thing: she bought, with her OWN money, a T-shirt, somewhere close to her birthday. She told her mom she received it as a gift because her mother didn’t approve of buying so many clothes.
I was living in a prison. I remember the first days of school. One day tom brought me hone and on the second day, another guy brought me home. Min-chu implied that I am some sort of whore, who lures guys into her precious, god-given home and she told me, if I ever want another guy than tom (whom she trusted) to bring me home, he should leave me at the premises’ gates. As if I was building a harem and the guys would take turns to bring me home.
Going back a little bit to fun…They live in extremes. We have, on one hand, the OGs, who have pure, posh, quiet and utterly boring parties and we have, on the other hand, the cool kids at school (or most kids anyway) who gather in a weekend at someone’s house and get wasted by means of industrial quantities of alcohol and marihuana. When I told them about the cafés and the bars where we go whenever we want to and drink and smoke [regular cigs] and talk they stared at me in amazement. When I told them about the clubs and discos they said they would like to move in with me. All these restrictions destroy them, make them do foolish things when they, on rare occasions, escape. The chains of their laws are so strong that when they escape, are like a blind man seeing light for the very first time. They find joy in the most simple and…childish things. They try to escape but they have nothing to escape to.


---to be continued---

I love stories. I do not know where it started. Maybe it started with my grandmother reading stories to me, exhausting every book on the subject in the house. And then, after I'd known them all by heart, she had to invent them. Every night, until I fell asleep. Maybe it started in the bathtub, when I was very very young and my mother surrounded me with plastic books and I looked at the pictures. Maybe something then made a click in the back of my infant mind. Maybe it started when I was still in progress, inside my mother, and she talked to me constantly. Like some people talk to plants.

I really cannot place the finger on the moment or the time of the click. All I know is that it happened very early and it got really big.
When I was young I talked to objects. I still do, frank to say. I give them an identity, a personality, a soul. I give them life. But in the back of my head I guess I'm just giving myself life. In every plush toy, in every doll, in every wall I have put a bit of myself, unsconsciously.
Talking to innanimate objects was merely the dawn of my imagination. It has so many functions now that it almost resembles one of those kitchen robots which do virtually anything except masturbate you. But my imagination does masturbate me. Mentaly.
I walk the streets, alone, or with someone and I imagine. I imagine the road I am walking is not concrete, but grass, cotton grass, blue and fluffy. I imagine everyone dressed funny on the streets. I imagine, as I am in a tram, what could the people I see be. An old lady holding the hand of a child - maybe she has been a teacher, molding the life of hundreds. A teen dressed in baggy clothes - maybe he is a student and has two sisters that drive him mad. I tell stories to myself, and sometimes to others. And I constantly tell the story of myself.
I oftenly find myself looking at myself from the ceiling. There's her picking up a spoon. There's her thinking about what to pick from the fridge. There's her thinking about what to say to her mother. This happens sometimes when you're drunk, I've heard. This happens to me constantly. Following a decent logic, I'm usualy drunk. Or just a bit mad. But it's become such a habbit I couldn't shake it off even if I wanted to.

A lot of people would say that staying inside reality and achoring ourselves to it is what we are supposed to do. But reality is what we make it. There are millions of realities, each for every person. You just think you are down to earth, but your perception is always distorted. Each one of us sees things in a particular way. Why not be aware of this and make reality what you want it to be. Do not understand me wrongly. I am not saying we should all see butterflies instead of money, or baloons instead of walls. I am saying that reality becomes much more amusing when it's coated in a thin layer of imagination. When it is merely a story your ultimate goal is to make that story worth reading. And no one will remember you, but maybe they will remember the story. And maybe they will become amuzed and maybe they'll become wiser.
Instead of trying to have money, grow kids, have a great boyfriend, just try to live your story. No one can achieve happiness, it is the thing to which we aspire and never achieve, said wisely a friend of mine.

This is why stories appeared in the first place. To give us hope. If David fought Goliath, if Alexander cut the Gordian knot, if, if, if, we have hope. These are just legeds, but there are stories in our everyday lives which have the same purpose. They give us hope...and something more. They give us the wish. A wish. To become "something more", to do "something better". Do not underestimate the power of example.
And stories gave birth to something bigger: gods. I sincerely believe no one is a true atheist. Everyone believes in "something". You need to. You need to tend, to believe there is something greater, bigger, stronger than you because that gives you a purpose, that gives you something to achieve. If we are not in search of something, something to give us happiness, we are not humans. And thus we have created gods and stories to explain them, to give them a shape, a meaning, to bring them closer to us so we can believe we can reach them, at least with the tip of our fingertips.

Do not anchor yourself in reality. It is just what you create. You shape it the way you wish, if you wish hard enough. Idealistic? Maybe. I am just working with what I have in front of me. My eyes see, but my mind creates. A story. Which, maybe, people will remember.