I find jet lag disorienting. It’s a torment I dread every time I return from the US, and it never fails to deliver. On the way there, it’s mild: the sometimes almost pleasant feeling of tiredness from having gone to bed a little late or taming a torrent of thoughts after a few hours of turning in bed.
On the way back, it’s a bad high. I find I go through my days in a haze, my brain straining to keep up and focus long enough to figure out what we’re up to. “Let’s eat”, it says. “How about sugar?” This usually doesn’t solve it. A couple of hours later, again. “Maybe food?” And again: “How about we eat?” To my brain, desperate for cohesion, food seems to be the hammer to the nails of time zone difference.
All it does is splinter everything. My thoughts, ideas, actions, a detritus of human experiences that don’t cohere. I try to put them back together so I can function – edit a story, carry a conversation, coach a fellow journalist – but I can never shake the feeling that I’m trying to glue pieces together in a fog so dense I can’t see my hands.
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I write this on the tail end of my jet lag week (I hope), around 5am on Saturday, in the lobby of a hotel in Tbilisi, Georgia, where I came for Zeg. Two young women are minding the café and scrolling on their phones. This marvelously strange city is lighting up, traffic already buzzing.
The first thing I do in the morning is take vitamins – especially an Omega-3 pill I started taking at the advice of my dentist. I’ve done it for 1.254 days in a row says Streaks, an app I use as a reminder. But I’ve missed my Omega-3 pill for the past three mornings because, in the haze of jet lag packing, I forgot to bring them. So, my streak is dead, something I accepted not without a hint of guilt. I’ll start again on Monday.
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A friend of mine, the designer and illustrator Mircea Drăgoi, has been running every day for almost four years – that’s an insane daily streak if I ever heard one. Most days now, he runs for 8 kilometers. Not a big deal, he says. His days always accommodate the hour of running. Plus, he adds, he’s nothing compared to the streakers he admires – people who have been running daily for more than 40 years.
I’ve always been fascinated by tools and routines. For me, there’s always freedom in structure. The Omega-3 pills were part of the skeleton of my day, just like coffee and writing a page a day in a journal. I do them as a narrative coherence placebo: I am who I am also because I do these things regularly. But as Oliver Burkeman put it well recently, it’s good to be mindful of looking at the things we do as necessary for us to be.
He says it’s “easy it is for habits that help you function well – getting enough sleep, exercising, eating right, meditating, journalling, all that stuff – to turn into things you tell yourself you need in order to function well”.
Sometimes we end up using broken routines or glitches as explanations for not doing something (Didn’t do this / that, so now I can’t do this / that other thing). We end up trapped by the structures and mechanisms we theoretically put in place to free us.
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For me, this newsletter has become part of the structure of the week, and I wrestled with its place in it (as I’ve told you before). I treasure its existence and the low hum of pressure that starts creeping in by Thursday, but I go through with it every time because I trust the process.
It’s not necessarily fun to start writing at 5am, in the lobby of a hotel, because you can’t sleep.
But I also don’t need my Omega-3 pills, a full night’s sleep, a run, and a completely clear head to do it. Yes, they help (so does better coffee). But the ideal conditions to act are rarely there. I don’t just write when everything is in place for writing; I write because the writing itself puts things back in place.
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I loved the newsletter Jacqui Banaszynski sent out this week on Nieman Storyboard – it’s an explanation of why there is no newsletter. But it’s also a short meditation on breaking a pattern. As I’ve told her, readers are sometimes grateful when you skip an edition – they already feel guilty for not having read everything. “Changing pace is something I spend a lot of time on when I work with other writers; it’s a key to a compelling story”, Jacqui writes. “I need to remember to do that in my own life.”
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I don’t want to sound wise or Zen about everything, although I have been told I don’t match the Romanian stereotype of people who see life as a constant crisis. Yes, I have a soft spot for imperfect systems, but I also thrive on optimizing them.
Here’s a few that I still have a hard time with: people not being on time or being unwilling to schedule or saying “I can’t commit to X because I don’t know what will happen until then”. It always amuses me how people selfishly want to protect their time and freedom to decide, while simultaneously denying others’ ability to do the same.
Just think of the signs saying, “I’ll be back soon” or “be back in 5 minutes”. That’s you owning your time while denying others the same thing. This is also what journalists – especially young ones – struggle to understand about deadlines. They are not constraints on your time, they are a contract that sketches a common road map. (I’m talking here about deadlines that are not set arbitrarily but negotiated by all parties – which is the ideal way to do it).
What I’ve become more understanding of is that some people thrive on just being, on a chaotic system. Sometimes I adjust (as an editor you’re molding to the shape of your reporters), other times I decide that no matter how much I want us to do something together, it’s better we don’t try again.
Another one I struggle with happened (again) this week: I put the apartment renovations I wrote about some time ago on hold, because the new windows needed this time to be finished and delivered. Any chance we could do it faster?, I asked. The company was adamant: it’s what the contract says, it’s what quality work requires, and I had to accept the math. It wasn’t ideal, but it was fair, and it was a promise.
They were supposed to be installed Thursday. On Tuesday I was told they’re not done – and then only because I called to confirm the installation. The editor in me kicked in: OK, we’ll re-adjust to a new deadline.
“When will they be ready”, I asked. “We’ll let you know in a couple of days”, they answered.
I’m still waiting on that answer.
I could write many letters about such encounters, both in my personal and professional life. People being vehement negotiators and setting terms in the beginning, only to break promises and contracts and try to turn a contractual dynamic into a primarily emotional exchange.
Imagine a many million-dollar private medical services company telling us at DoR that “it’s a small amount” they owe us, so we shouldn’t be so impatient to be paid (many weeks after the contractually agreed date). Or agencies – many of them – saying we should be understanding that they are 1-2 months behind on payments, as they are in a bind. The work you deliver can never be in late, of course; you must deliver to get paid. But they act as if they can decide not to pay, even when you deliver. (Fun fact: DoR wrapped up in December. We are still collecting money we are owed. I can write tons more about this).
Here's the thing with routines, patterns and systems splintering. They have a habit of affecting others as well.
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Here’s one last broken system that annoyed me: the Otopeni airport in Bucharest. When I flew Wednesday night, I was more tired than usual (yes, the damned jet lag), so the experience hit harder. Security check is a mess – you scan your boarding pass and then there is no clarity on how to get your luggage through, just people elbowing for space and trays. You’ll pass, eventually. But it’s unnecessary and frustrating friction, and it pits people against one another (while the airport remains blameless). I’m sure there are explanations, but redesigning this system to fit existing resources should be easy.
Then the lack of services, and the prices of food and drinks – disproportionately high compared to the city itself – are things many have complained about; this can also be redesigned if we changed the way contracts are awarded.
And the restrooms. The one I ended up in had a door that didn’t lock, the stall was tagged with colored markers, there was no toilet seat, the hooks had been ripped off the wall, and so on. This latest visit wasn’t an exception – maybe just the worst condition I found an Otopeni stall in.
I try to complain as little as possible about daily nuisances. But there was something about how I encountered the airport that night – in the haze of jet lag and the worry of nighttime travel – that made me wonder what this says about how we think about others and what we owe them. (Just to put a fact next to my subjectivity – a recent study of more than 120 airports ranked Otopeni among the four worst.)
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As I write this, I know I’m touching on my main source of pain and tension in Romania: our occasional collective inability (unwillingness?) to build better for others, as if that might make us lose something, or make us look weak, or make us feel like “a sucker”. (“Fraier”).
The design of a good system requires empathy – understanding what people are going through as they experience it. That can be an airport, a classroom, a medical waiting room, a construction service. What would it take to make us more generous? What would it take for us to not regard change as a threat, but as an opportunity for a better world?
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Lulu Miller, an amazing storyteller I am privileged to call a friend, did a story recently on gay seagulls. You must listen to it because a summary will never do it justice, but the quick version is that science discovered that homosexuality exists in pretty much all animal species. This obviously counters the centuries old belief that “homosexuality is unnatural”. It splinters one belief about the world and replaces it with a new one, allowing us to update a system of repression and exclusion to allow for love.
But will we do that?
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I came to Tbilisi to wrap up this year’s edition of the European Press Prize. I am the EPP’s preparatory committee chair, which is a fancy way of saying I make sure our jury has everything they need to bring down a total of many hundreds of entries down to five finalists in each category.
Last year, when I took on the role, I asked them how we could make the process better – what they needed to feel they’re doing a good job. “More conversation” was the main answer, so, with the help of the EPP staff, we updated the process. We talked more and this allowed us to do something special: create a category dedicated to reporting on the war in Ukraine. The winner was a story from Ukraine, published by an English-speaking outlet I greatly admire: The Kyiv Independent. (That story, and the other winners can be found on the EPP website).
Here's the thing: The Kyiv Independent exists because the owner of the country’s longest running English dailies (The Kyiv Post) shattered it in November 2021. The staff wasn’t having it: they put the pieces together anew, in a start-up. Three months later, missiles were dropping outside their apartment buildings.
The story they won the Special Award for does something bold: it spotlights flaws in Ukraine’s international legion, which is accused of mismanagement and looting. Anna Myroniuk, the reporter, said it best: the reporting isn’t supposed to make the Ukrainian military look weaker. It’s supposed to show that it needs to improve.
The EPP prize was a validation of this courage to be the voice that calls for doing it better even when it’s easy to say, “we’re doing enough”.
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Georgians are amazing hosts; one journalist said that some people gave invading Russian forces in 2008 water and food, because “they were guests”. Today, there are many Russians fleeing to Tbilisi, driving up rents, opening businesses – some of which don’t have menus in Georgian –, basically treating the place as an unwanted vacation space they’ll stay in until the war is done.
Russia has splintered Georgian history and heritage and identify for hundreds of years now. It acts as if there is nothing new to discover about the country, because it’s just a former satellite. Or a colony. But so much more than that – I saw it during protests in 2019 when I was last here, I saw it again these days this in the passion with which they spoke of their journey of putting their pieces together again, away from Russia.
They have their own story to tell, away from the pattern of letting the occupier own your narrative. They don’t. You own your story. Take the pieces and reassemble them.
PS: I used the word splinters numerous times because it’s also the name of Leslie Jamison’s next book, which I’m sooo excited about.
The ubiquitous note: a cell phone number on the dash of an illegally parked car in Bucharest, because my crisis (and my time to resolve it) is more important than yours.
Your writing is enmeshing. I get simultaneously annoyed and happy with it's length. Thanks