March 9th

Spring cleaning. It's spring now. Of course locals don't quite call it a spring when it's regularly around minus ten in the mornings but we know better. I got an urge to spring clean. Maybe it has nothing to do with spring but the regular cleaning and tidying just cannot go on any longer. All the corners are full with clutter that is regularly or at some point some time ago has been shoved there so when we try to shove things away they just instantly flow back out. Lili's desk is like that, we clear and clean it sometimes than agree that she shall tidy away what she works on and with after finishing, for it is impossible to keep Everything there. Then things start to gather till only a very tiny worm or caterpillar could just wriggle there a little.

Yesterday I had a go at their room and now the desk is clean. Finally it is ok for Ernest to work there too and he does love it. While Liliom is in school we gather some paper and very nicely play with the felt pens. I am surprised how long he manages to play 'nice', putting the tips back on and the pens back in their holders. I think soon grandparents and other volunteers can start receiving sophisticated pictures from Ernes. Lili really liked the one I put up in the kitchen today, she liked the colour coordination.

In the afternoon when everyone was at home already I was in the kitchen while Ernest in the kid's room was drawing at the desk. Lili was reading. And Jen in the kitchen too when Ernest started shouting 'Apa, apa...' didn't stop. It turned out one of the lids fell on the floor and he needed help, someone to pick it up for him! He by the way also said Mum today. Lookin at one of Lili’s drawing he almost said cat, ‘cica’ but bother only with the second syllables. He might turn out a mumbler like the rest of us.

Liliom wasn’t so keen on Ernest enjoying some drawing at Her desk. And the two of them cannot really handle it together. I think they both think that the other is just an extension of their own will and it is unbearable and unprocesseable to realise that it isn’t so.


I have been having a somewhat moody day. Had a nice day, yet, I feel a bit unexplainably not so good. Perhaps worried about something although we finally managed to get access to our bank account so we can re-engage with the money system. Yet there is still something. I spend a lot of time with Ernest and as he is not quite well (some diarrhea) I have plenty of time to worry about him. probably that's it. Or maybe somehting else. Can't quite put my figner on it. It's a shame though. Maybe it is just a lack of sleep and rest when spring is coming ( so I sit up blogging). I wanna do a spring cleaning, hang out with the kids all day, do a couple of online course and about a dozen other things. Silly. Anyways, I sit in a café while Liliom was in her ballet class and Jen prepped dinner with Ernest. Started reading a book.

I got through reading much of the introduction of a book collection of existentialist writings. The book was published in 1966 in 'communist' Hungary. It eagerly provides a Marxist analysis and critique of existentialism explaining in detail how it is nothing but another example of the crisis of capitalist societies and a half-hearted reaction to the imperialist expansionism of capitalist states, to the fight for hegemony in the international system.

The critique however seems to forget to maintain its own Marxist analysis and critique. But of course in '66 free speech was even more an issue in Hungary than nowadays. Or actually less an issue as there was not much to go around. Anyways, the Marxist criticism of the so called Marxist reality of the revolution would be that the personal cults were not the only immoral, damaging, unnecessary and false aspects of these regimes. After all 60s Hungary was also playing, and playing big time on nationalism, proto-fascist militarism and bourgeois greed. Besides, the so called communist countries while had a degree of barter system at the end they were also integrated within the international state system, an inherently capitalist system and they were also engaged in the same game of hegemony and imperialist expansionism as those evil capitalists.

Funnily the editor of the book, writing the introductory analysis seemed to have difficulties placing some French fellows, Camus and Sartre who happened to be more or less Marxist themselves, Sartre convicted that existentialism was merely a critical development of Marxism, arguing similarly to Guevara (yes, that guy with the same first name as Hemingway) that drinking milk these days doesn't require one to declare himself to be a Pasteurian
, it's just simply how it is now, thus Marxist analysis isn't 'an' alternative to capitalism for instance, just this is how it is and would be foolish and inconsistent to think otherwise. (or something like that, can be googled). Camus was probably a syndicalist and few get more communist than them.

Have you noticed my amasing list of tags?!
Jen thinks they are stupid