The 5th anniversary of Maidan is almost there (or is already here, depending on when you start counting from, the first round of voting or the second), and every now and then I re-read what I was writing in Nov. 2004. Today, I ran into this post, about my father, his best childhood friend and the politics that got between them in the early 1990s. Papa's friend, Dima, died of cancer just a few months ahead of papa, in early 2007. We didn't tell papa about Dima's passing. It hurts terribly to re-read that post, to be reminded of how intense and positive everything was back then, of how idealistic we all were, and of how quickly it all turned into crap, and of how it all ended for Dima and for my father. When we were searching for papa, I stopped by at the hospital where Dima had died and was directed to a so-called hospice for the elderly located nearby - the conditions there shocked me then, and this is still a very vivid memory - a horrible memory. I guess one of the things I'm trying to say here is that politics and reality do not seem to overlap much in Ukraine, and even though back in 2004 it appeared briefly that such an overlap was possible, I don't think many people hold on to this illusion anymore. Yushchenko calling Tymoshenko 'a bum' and Tymoshenko calling Yushchenko 'a terrorist' - this so undignified, and so irrelevant.