Winter is coming!

Europe has been covered with a think white cover since Tuesday, and my Polish compatriots are bracing themselves for a -20 Celsius night. Still, one always feels for the English of course - they traditionally appear so cutely amazed and terrified at the slightest sight of white-coloured precipitation. So - my warmest thoughts go to all my friends stuck somewhere in cold buses (London Underground was on strike this week), and in cold houses. I remember my cottage in the Cotswolds - so gorgeous but so impossibly, bone-breakingly cold! 

We also have our own cold streak here, and today Atlanta even saw some small tornadoes! Top that, Brits! It still did not deter me from starting my Christmas shopping. Malls are a great invention - probably an American invention. If not, Americans took them on and perfected the idea. Spent half an hour being pampered by a half-Italian, half-Russian make-up salesman. Of course I bought some - mea culpa. 

TV watching - one of the great pleasures of early pregnancy... or not?

As I have become temporarily house-trapped by my morning sickness, I explored the joys of day-time American TV. What else can a girl do when the only way to be comfortable is on her back, and the only direction is horizontal? I thought I became accustomed to the media of 1990s and the present – so different to the experiences of my childhood in Poland. But here I am, all old-fashioned, black and white, and irritated. 

Why am I being shouted at? TV hosts, advertisers, even serious journalists tend to raise their voices to the level which my hormonally-affected head cannot tolerate. It is a peculiar phenomenon, where people seem to think that the louder they talk, the more important we the viewers would perceive their message to be.

And to continue with my list of complaints: I am missing news from Europe! US is a large country, to be sure. Thus, unless there is a major (minimum 50-ish victims) disaster somewhere across the Ocean, or some lesson (normally a 'what not to do' lesson) to be learnt, Europe does not seem to be much on a radar. 

Should I stop complaining? Perhaps... Voltaire wrote a story of a man sent by a god to explore a city and determine whether it was worthy of survival, or as the god intended it ought to be destroyed. The man first encounters the loud, the outrageous, the despicable – what Voltaire rightly observes is often the most visible in any nation or society. Only after deeper observation, almost as if he were peeling an onion, does the man see the worthy, the good: which tends to be quiet, modest and thus less visible. Perhaps I have not peeled the American TV onion yet. Still searching...