I've come to a realization. The only way to deal with somebody's death is to be damned sure that you did everything you could to make their life bearable.

…are we, too, part of the highly modernized world of today?

At one moment, I’m watching Sex and the City, the ground-breaking and most outspoken TV Show of the 1990s, which speaks of transgressing the outdated sexual, gender, cultural and class boundaries. And I myself tend to imitate “the merry Manhattan four” at times. And I look for pieces of myself in each of them, while actually I’m none of what they are. But still… I go for a drink in the evening, sit by the counter, want to order a Cosmo. Screw Cosmo, I’ve caught some crappy cold, “Chamomile tea here, please.” Saturday morning, there’s Sex and the City on again. Sure, why not? Gosh, how I’d love to be a Carrey Bradshaw! Doesn’t she look lovely in that yellowish night dress? Kind of what I saw in Zara a couple of day ago, innit?

 

At another, I’m hearing mom saying something. She enters the room, leans on the fireplace and starts another one she heard in the street this morning. “Have you not heard of it?” Something along these lines: a local girl of 22 died of tuberculosis last week. I’m in disbelief (Hasn’t the sixteenth century passed long time ago?). Yeah, well, the local doctors thought she had a regular cold, sent her off home, said “have some tea and take more vitamins, and you’ll do just fine, gal.” Nah, her parents took her to Novi Sad to have her checked up in a hospital. “Oh, it’s Friday and weekend’s coming,” said the nurse, “the doctors can check her up on Monday earliest.” She didn’t have a cold. And she passed away on Saturday eve. Geez, I wonder what the local doctors did that evening? Did they even flinch at the thought of having made a mistake?

Sharlot looks stunning in her new wedding dress! One of my girlfriends has the isn’t-it-cool, so-NYC-style, glamo-fuckin’-rous habit of throwing a Sex and the City party/marathon with her three girlfriends. Afterwards, they go for a cocktail, acting it all out. Some other girls I know feverishly held on to their cinema tickets for the film premier of “the famous Manhattan four”. There’s so much of Sex and the City around us. Does that mean that we, too, live that reality? Is it really within our reach as the cinema or TV screens are? At one moment, I think yes. At another, my mom comes in and I don’t feel as safe anymore as Carry Bradshaw sweet-talks me into.

On the Christmas Eve, I become once again deeply aware of the discrepancy between reality in Serbia and that which the world has supposedly reached. Sure, we tend to be globalized, feel globalized, live *and* think globally. “Local” is out of fashion these days. Boy are we all world citizens! How far did we all get, didn’t we? I have friends living Sex and the City. How cool is that, right? Hold on, we’ve got something else too. It’s rather local, I can promise you that. Kids die of tuberculosis in Serbia. There’s no one to take the blame. No one to explain how come the sixteenth century has intruded the Sex and the City-Manhattan-Aiden-Carry Bradshaw-Coctail party-The Beast-crazed girls-Serbia of the twenty-first century. Now, isn’t that amazing.....ly unbelievable?