Spirited Away

I feel rebellious today. So let me do this people otherwise I’m leaving work early ! Haha! You don’t have to be rebellious with me so you may want to stay out of this one, ok? Here goes nothing. You know, some people write something and then put a title to it. Well, I have to have the title first so I can write. If I know the title, then I know what the story it’s going to be about. It’s a summary of what’s coming. And this one was challenging because I could not decide over one thing and one thing alone. Initially I thought to call it “life outside Bucharest.” But then again I know it’s not as simple as that. Choosing a life in or outside Bucharest is a matter of choice. And then again I’ve been told at some point that I’m missing the big picture when it comes to living in the capital. Well, I gave this statement a thorough thought. What am I missing? What does Bucharest offer that Valcea or Sibiu don’t? People live across the country and they still make it without the “p

Imagine living inside a locked closet without any control over any aspect of your life.   You can’t choose when and what you eat, how you will spend your time, whether or not you will have a partner and children, or who that partner will be. You can’t even decide when the lights go on and off. Think about spending your entire life like this, a prisoner, even though you have committed no crime. This is life for an animal in a laboratory. It is deprivation, isolation, and misery. On top of the deprivation, there are the experiments. U.S. law for example, allows animals to be burned, shocked, poisoned, isolated, starved, drowned, addicted to drugs and brain-damaged. No experiment, no matter how painful or trivial, is prohibited – and pain-killers are not required.  Even when alternatives to the use of animals are available, the law does not require that they be used—and often they aren’t. Animals are infected with diseases that they would never normally contract, tiny mice