Reluctantly freaky

Time

2011-07-30T22:00:00.004+01:00

A friend of mine has something that can almost be described as a clock phobia. He can't stand ticking clocks. I personally find them calming, reminding me of my grandmother's house and the first time I saw a cuckoo clock - a magical novelty for someone used to 1970s DDR design. A 5-year-old me sat in my brother's friend's house, determined to wait until that little bird would come out of that loudly ticking clock again - until my brother told me that would be an hour, and an hour in a 5-year-old's life is a hell of a long time.
My friend, however, just dreads this audible reminder of time ticking away. And nowadays I don't even need a cuckoo clock, or any clock for that matter, to rub my face in that.
What happened to the summers that seemed to last for years?
What happened to the time when the wait for Christmas seemed like an agonising eternity instead of the mad rush it is today?
How come I seem to waste my entire day on trivial unimportant matters instead of doing what I really want to do, and how come my to do list never gets shorter?
I was 25 just recently, now I'm 34, and it spooks me, because I don't know how I got here, my body and life raced away with me while I am still stuck in a mental teenage limbo. It's unsettling to feel your life running out and your body disintegrating around you when you feel you should still be reading your school books. Maybe that is why women (and men) lie about their age. It's not vanity. It's self-denial. It's being unwilling to submit to the pressures and expectations that comes with increasing age, when they have barely caught up with their early 20s yet.

Apparently it's because a day in relation to the life you have lived already is much longer when you've only lived four years, but much shorter when you've lived 30.
For me, it's also the sense of time running out. That may sound crazy, but the past ten years have gone by so fast it makes my head spin. And I have been warned, it's only gonna go faster.
So I am anticipating that whatever time is ahead of me, as much (or as little) as it may be, will pass in a heart beat.
The thing is, we never know how much time we've got left. I've had that reminder a few times, and it made me quite paranoid. I've lived fairly unsettled for some time now, and many friends I've had from all the different places have come and gone - something which has never got easier for me. I've been told it's natural and I should accept it, but I can't - it hurts too much. You could say, I'm almost always in a panic to spend as much quality time with everyone as I can, because I never know how long it will last, how long I will be able to be around them, and whether I will lose them to distance, forgetfulness, or worse.
I will never have as much felt time again as I had when I was 20. Then you think you have an eternity ahead of you, and it leaves you relaxed enough to be able to focus - nowadays I just seem to run at top speed just to keep up, and never quite managing to, trying to get everything done at once, my concentration frayed into a blur.

How can you trick your brain out of this? Maybe it's to really make yourself believe you are 2o, to reach that feeling of eternity ahead of you.

Consenting Adults - A Review

2011-07-24T19:52:00.005+01:00

I have never been much of a theatre-goer, not because of a dislike of the medium but simply because one didn’t meander in the right circles. Until university – if it teaches you nothing (or makes you employable), it will broaden your horizons, often not by what is taught but through the people you meet. But I digress. What I meant to say is that I have no experience with theatre and its critics, am innocent ignorant of its politics and semantics and might therefore produce a pile of wank based solely on my limited understanding, grandly calling it a review.

I had no idea what to expect, but in my mind I saw an ordinary stage with the audience neatly separated from the action into rows of velvet-spanned chairs, while the actors would dramatically fly around the scratched floorboards of the stage, seamed by dusty curtains matching the upholstery.

What we got instead with Stagepunk Theatre's "Consenting Adults", as it premiered at The White Bear Theatre in Kennington, was a small-ish room lined by two rows of chairs where the border between stage and audience is made up by the toes of the latter. There is no way of hiding in your seat during uncomfortable scenes, removing yourself from anything that scratches your comfort zone with demon claws. You are as exposed as the actors – in some respect, your reaction becomes part of the play. I have no idea whether that was intentional, but it helped. It’s what makes theatre so appealing to me: it’s the rawhide of dramatic performance. It is immediate and in-your face, rather than the overpolished recordings of film. I cried when I saw Hamlet on-stage in November (starring three members of the aforementioned theatre group). But "Consenting Adults" took it to a whole new level.

As we edge ourselves along the row of seats, plonking ourselves down with our pints wedged between our feet, the stage is littered with boxes, abandoned toys and various rubbish. Simon Jay sits motionless on a workbench facing the wall, with his back to us, eerily reminiscent of a scene in the Blair Witch Project. Monty Python’s Intermittence Music doodles in the background, enhancing the grotesqueness of the image while adding a strange sense of humour to it. I am already spooked, and the image is so strong I fail to spot the other actors. Until the pile of rubbish in the centre of the stage literally explodes, spitting out Stephanie Jane Gunner sans clothes, the innocent babe, who, from the second of her emergence will be stripped of her liberty of mind, her dignity, and become a creation of her own visceral responses.
What follows now is a continuous, hour-long violation of my subconscious. The kind you wanted really, bitch, while acting coy. The sweet, scratchy nostalgic sounds of 1950s sex-ed PSAs (if you remember, the PSAs of those days even made nuclear holocaust sound like a picnic) fill our ears, conjuring up images of innocent ponytailed girls in petticoats being prepared for their entrance into the adult world of romance and old school chivalry. But what happens onstage turns it into sinister mockery. Molly, totally at the mercy of what society teaches her in theory, soon enough learns her own lessons. The gap between the friendly sweet neighbourhood advice ringing from the speakers and what actually unfolds on stage widens quickly, drying my throat. A sense of betrayal pervades the first part. Molly seems a victim not just to the vile men she loves, or her ill preparation by those in custody of her, but by life itself. Seeing her with her head in a box of emotions, being seemingly violated by the sheer insanity of her own puberty, then lying on the floor, twitching in shock, is almost too hard to bear. Having her lie at your feet makes you feel as guilty as a passive bystander who doesn’t want to get involved.

Molly moves in stages through her female evolution, each time emerging as a new character. Her vulnerability is shed, hardens, with each new experience, each new boyfriend ripping away a piece of the sweet innocence, reshaping her expectations and her resolve to adjust. Too much a prude, lose your man to cheating, and become a vixen, seeking the bad guy. Bad guy hurts you, you resolve to become the Iron Virgin, cold and angry and closed up.

The rape scene – yes, there is one – is not brash and cliché or in any way gratuitous, but much more fluid, starting from an innocent dance. It’s the type I call the 'boyfriend-girlfriend rape', the type that makes a girl question at what point she perhaps unwittingly consented or whether she consented at all. The type that will shake her up to her foundations, not knowing her role in it. There was no ripping of clothes... the image of bad boy Steve, played by Simon Jay with a dark elegance and bleak psychopathy, tearing down his zipper was more sinister than flying buttons ever could have been. It’s clean rape, rape good enough for The Times and the Upper Classes, none of the National Enquirer filth, rape that keeps up appearances, covering the hell beneath, but this way so much more horrifying. There was no screaming. Molly did not know what was happening to her, at what point this had turned against her. That they were fully dressed just added to the shock. Stephanie delivered an amazing performance, both subtle and powerful, every inch of her screaming out what was going on inside her. Seeing the emotion in her face was too genuine to take lightly, the frozen shock, brokenness, endurance, confusion, watching her shake – it made my guts cramp up. I had to remind myself if wasn’t real.

The one question that pestered me throughout this part of the play was: Is Molly becoming her true self, stripping herself of her societal education to become an empowered female or is she just a reactionary product of her experiences? It makes it a thoroughly feminist play – but it has none of the blind man-hating gusto that comes with some of those. Rather, it seems to uncover the ever-perpetuating violence, whether recognised as such or not, against women, but also their part in it.

The second part appears to be completely disconnected from the first. At first glance it seems like a harmless, weirdly sado-masochistically sexualised version of Jeeves and Wooster. Simon Jay, playing a posh gentleman called Algernon, engages in light and jolly conversation with his butler Alec, played by Zack Polanski, but the conversation quickly degenerates into sheer perversion while never losing its lighthearted tone. As the interaction goes on, Jeeves and Wooster appear to morph into a bizarre cross with American Psycho, at times in the lingo of the AOL chatroom play of a grooming perv, without failing to deliver the upper class manners the Empire prides itself on. The combo makes you laugh, but the laugh comes uneasy. It is disturbing, but at times so grotesque it creates its own comic relief – but the laughter bubbling up in you is veined with guilt. The juxtaposition of the sweet and the brutal, the posh and the vile becomes so extreme at times that your laughter turns into a form of psychological defence. Don’t get me wrong, it IS hilariously funny... but sometimes you feel you shouldn’t be laughing at these things, but can’t find any other way to cope. Yet the aftertaste, at least to me, was not foul... I felt enlightened.

When Lady Bracknell enters, dressed in a strange Victorian outfit, something in me clicks. She is a grown-up version of Molly, a hardened woman of dubious gender, the exact opposite of the creature that was born at the beginning and the final product of her experiences. Now she is not just perpetuating sexual violence, she wholeheartedly embraces it, only to comment in a blasé manner on its medical dangers.

The play was hard work – it wore you out, the ever-changing mood from funny to shocking pulling and pushing you, leaving you ever unprepared - It felt very much like Life itself. Stephanie Jane Gunner’s acting was intense and heartfelt, pushing every nuance, probing into every emotional nook and cranny. Zack Polanski gave you both the sweating testosterone driven male without becoming his own cliché as well as the jester-licious butler type with a healthy dose of deranged humanity beneath, and Simon Jay was, as ever, of disturbing elegance and emotional intensity which seems to become his trademark.

So what have we learnt today: Consent is shown to be not just a simple yes or no... it is a psychological process that will change you for good and from which there is no coming back, but at no point would it permit either the characters or the audience a remittance from responsibility. Yet there is no black and white/either-or mentality: it demonstrates and acknowledges that there is no such thing as either a victim or a participant. It questions the very nature of psychology and self-awareness; humans appear both enlightened and self-aware but simultaneously prone to their animal instincts.

"Consenting Adults" was not just a play but a powerful reproduction of the nature of life itself, of the psychology and evolution of sexual communication, a sarcastic and grotesque commentary on social etiquette that would yet not fail to smirk at itself... something that hit almost too close to home for me, but for this very reason becoming a masterpiece. Like John Osbourne once said, it has only merit when it evokes a reaction ... and tonight John Osbourne would have been proud.

Breathing

2011-05-07T12:33:00.000+01:00

There is the old blonde joke about the blonde you have to tell to keep breathing.

But have you ever noticed how, when you become hyperconscious of the way you breathe, you walk, you move, all those automatic things your body is programmed to do without thinking, it suddenly becomes difficult to keep going without falling on your face, without suffocating?

Some days I'm so conscious of my breathing I suddenly can't seem to breathe. My body tenses and my lungs somehow seize up. Weird, eh?

Witney's got talent

2011-04-24T09:22:00.000+01:00

So this guy wanders into our shop and approaches Sally and me. Needless to say, being all splendid at customer service, we're all ears, expecting him to want a recommendation or something sane like that.
But the man isn't here for books, nosireee. Instead, he asks, looking slightly sheepish, whether we could give our opinion on his singing. He wanted to go to an open mic night, but was shy and wanted to see a public response to his voice on a small scale before he put himself out there.
So obviously he came into a bookshop for that.
I could tell that what was going through Sally's head was an exact carbon copy of the content of mine.
(Whatever you do, don't laugh! Don't make eye contact. Oh shit, this could be the mystery shopper - do make eye contact. But in a strange removed way that does not allow him to enter your soul and throw a mental anchor, prompting him to come back every day. Do the dissociated helpful customer service smile. Pretend all is normal; as long as his dick ain't hanging out, it's fine.)

And because I thought it'd probably cause less aggro and embarassment and because I attract strange people A LOT and should be used to this by now, I agreed to listen.
(Sally, in an astonishingly quiet and inconspicuous way, managed to slither away.)

After much rationalizing and emming and err-ing, he started. And I pricked up my ears, waiting for the inevitable power ballad.
And he goes...

"Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes,
head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes
And eyes and ears and mouth and nose..."

INCLUDING the motions.

You know, when you have to stare and you know it's rude and you can't help it, and you don't know whether to laugh or back off and get the maze out and your every fibre just screams "OMGWTF"

Well, yeah...that.

He stopped and looked at me expectantly. Over his shoulder I could see Sally, staring with wide eyes and barely holding back hysteria. My eyes searched for possible mates of his who might have sent him in on a dare. No joy. I had to conclude he was mental and that it's best not to upset the patient.

"Well", I said, diplomatically. "This might work if they are all really really drunk...?"

And would you believe it, he thanked me and left?

Hell, at least I have met my quota for the month.

3 Minute Walk from the Imperial War Museum

2011-04-21T15:53:00.001+01:00

This was (must have been, considering its location) someone's reaction to the Holocaust exhibition. Which has a cattle train. And piles of children's shoes from the camps. And this springs to mind? I mean, really??

Apart from that, I'd beg to differ. Goebbels was, as we say in the poetic tongue of my forefathers, a "Hackfresse".

Gratification Burnout

2011-04-12T13:50:00.001+01:00

From rampant hedonism to bleak anhedonia,
my vesicles are dry-heaving

Sun

2011-04-12T09:21:00.000+01:00

I've always loved my windows facing east. I've had a few of those, growing up. And West windows, which are great for afternoons. And an unlucky dark North one. That was shit. It makes you feel like you're always removed from life, you can see the bright sunlight and how it is there for others, but somehow not you.
But East is definitely a winner. That way you catch the sun rising in the morning, and you wake to a bright burst of sunshine through your window. Which happens on about three days a year here in England. The quality of morning light, between 9 and 10 am, is my favourite - it is at its most full-blown but still purest and unblemished... afternoon sun is yellower, heavier, dustier, making you feel more sluggish.
There was this painter – Monet, I think - who spent days painting the same scene over and over again, because the quality of light would change the quality of the scene so radically it seemed wholly new.
Take the Grand Canyon at sunset. Every five minutes it's practically a new planet.

I hate the word "Sun worshipper", but there is something to it - I can see why people worshipped a sun god. Sitting up in my bed in the mornings, that sun hits my face right on, a pink glow through my closed eyelids, and it feels like a drug coursing through my system. It is more immediate than any drug I can imagine, and purer, without the bad effects. Alcohol calms me and makes me feel carefree, but it always feels a little like grimy sludge in my system as well, it is never pure, perfect happiness.
Now I sit here, with my morning coffee, the caffeine mimicking the heartbeat of an excited child about to go on a seaside holiday, and fooling my consciousness into true but fleeting happiness, and my eyes are closed, blocking out the world, and I am getting, as they say at gas stations, a full tank.

It brings back my memories of Texas, of Arizona, of California, of how full of light these places were (I'm deliberately ignoring the dark underbelly that every American who lived there for some time will probably howl at me, while laughing at my cliche-ridden tourist view.) But fact of the matter is, I have spent some of my most perfect, complete days there, as short as they were... something which I probably, admittedly, would never achieve if I lived there for an extended period. Places are only fleetingly beautiful, they all show their true face eventually, and it is best to move on and not stay in a place long enough so you won't get violated by the badness of it.

I remember when I first walked down the street in Santa Monica, CA, and the road opened up and there was the Pier, bathed in Californian sun, that I had only seen on TV so far, that was a prop to years of daydreams, a focal point, something I clang to in my hope to get away. It had been a setting in a story I had dreamt up and written for years, a story that filled me completely over these years, like a counterpressure from inside me to stop the pressure of the world I hated around me from squashing me. And finally it was there, for real, just a few steps ahead of me instead of unreachable thousands of miles away, and I didn’t care whether it was just a tourist trap, it was beautiful and perfect to me. And the day remained perfect, from the people I met, to the music that blared from beach radios, to the scent, to everything that happened, and I wanted to bottle that day and take it with me like the vial of a drug that could put me into that happiness any day I needed it.

I remember when Pat and Patrick and I headed back from the Texan Gulf Coast to Dallas, and how Pat drove back via country roads, so we would see the beauty of Texas instead of the dull freeways, and how the heat beat down on us like a damp hammer made of cotton wool. We stopped in a place called Virginia, which had beautiful old trees and Southern mansions with giant American flags hanging limp and sleepy in the summer heat, long before patriotism had developed the nasty fundamentalist flavour it has now. I had a banana split blizzard from a Dairy Queen, which did little to quench the heat in my body but tasted so good, and it was a perfect moment of contentment and sublime happiness that I didn’t want to end.

Amazing how cheesy it sounds when I reread this. Maybe it feels sentimental now because I have lost the ability to feel that way, because it was based on innocence and naivety, two things I equally scorn and miss. If I had the choice to go back and be that naive again, I wouldn’t know what to do. It was bliss living in that ignorance, in that stupid mindless worship of something that didn’t really exist, but the joy of that worship was the main goal, not the object I worshipped. It just hurts like hell to have that innocence torn away from you, that ability to enjoy without being wary; I don’t want to go through that again. I would have it back, though, if I had a guarantee that I’d never lose it again. What have I gained from the knowledge I have now, from the ~~cynicism~~ realism. It's like Scout says in "Generation X":

"the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead, we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God"

I have, since then, tried to re-create that happiness. It never works, of course, one only gets a snippet reminder, a weak version of the original burst, like that drug that will never be the same again after that first hit. I've kept memorabilia, I have a Mountain Dew bottle full of Death Valley sand that feels to me like I bottled some of that joy and I dare not open it lest that spirit of that day escapes or at least gets tainted by Today. I tried to grow my own Joshua Tree out of seeds I bought in a mid-desert store, and even though they promised me a mini tree after about 10 years, it has never grown past the size of a fleshy blade of grass, which makes me think this is exactly what they sold me: a fleshy blade of grass. I'm afraid to say I'm a gullible tourist.

Anything, anything that works.

And I am terrified, should I one day go back there, that it will never be the same carefree perfect beauty before, where the world unfolded in front of me like a perfect daydream, either because I am no longer capable of feeling that joy or because something will happen that will sully that dream. What else will I have if even that dream fails?

Hot Authors - the Wishlist

2011-01-04T10:15:00.000Z

Usually, when you see the little photo of brilliant authors on the back of a book (or on the internet, which is usually the case when the publisher doesn't want to deter the punter from buying a book), you tend to be disappointed by how incongruent the brilliance of the mind is with the vessel that contains it.

(Right, I am so opening myself up here for abuse, and I can't really talk, having a frog for a face myself, but I am just a sucker for beauty, sorryverymuch).

Not that it matters, because if Alex Garland published literary excrement, I wouldn't look at him twice.

But then you get the occasional gems which make my heart jump with joy because there I spotted a literary nirvana, sexy books written by sexy people.

So here is a list of Beautiful MBS, and please feel free to add to it.

Alex Garland - "The Beach"
Wil Wheaton - "Just a Geek"
Ben Schwartz - "Breaking Bad News With Baby Animals" (ok, it's not really a book book, but it's still fucking funny!)
David Benioff - "City of Thieves"
Poppy Z. Brite - "Swamp Foetus" - pretty and dramatic in a gothic way, just like her stories.
Chuck Palahniuk - "Fight Club" - the man has a twisted mind, but he is not a scarecrow.
Jack Kerouac - "On the Road"

Asexuality

2011-01-02T17:33:00.002Z

Recently, I have been hearing more and more of that term. Asexuality - the complete lack of desire for sex.
How much does such a label apply? How total is it? Is it something you would always identify with? Does someone who is gay always "feel" gay? Identity is such an undercurrent of an emotion, it isn't necessarily active by nature, unless something triggers it to step into the foreground to express itself. I guess I feel a similar degree of confusion as people do when they come out as gay, accept that they are.
When does an interest turn into an orientation - when it is absolute? Does that mean someone who is bi is undecided or definitely likes both?

I have seen discussion groups on the internet debating what makes you asexual, the way groups debated decades ago what exactly where the defining terms for homosexuality. And I don't know if I am. I have been in love before, but I don't know if there was a lack of sexual compatibility or if my disinterest is just down to asexuality. I guess whenever I have sexual interest, it is usually a long time after I actually experienced it, and that hormonal buzz is just based on an ideal that only exists in my head. That whenever I experience the real thing, I decide all over again it's really not my thing.
I dunno if that is down to never having experienced that sexual connection other people talk about. I dunno if that is down to me and my possible orientation, or just pure bad luck. Even if I might find someone who I am clicking with, it is very possible that my interest in sex will still be amiss.

It's the most consistent experience I've had in my life. What I felt most was the pressure to be sexual, to have a sexual drive. My parents, not wanting me to grow up repressed, I assume, encouraged me to have a sex life a bit too early for my liking and spoke about it quite openly, to the point of Too Much Information. I remember how I freaked out my Dad by saying at 15 I wanted to stay a virgin till I got married. That wasn't strictly true, I suppose, what I meant was, I rather wanted to have a good experience than any experience. Sex that is based in mutual trust and respect and that is something beautiful and connecting - I know, don't laugh!
But there wasn't. Ever.

At times I felt it was the only way to save or feed a relationship... pretend to be interested so the person you care for doesn't run away. Give them what they want so they give you what you want. I've only ever wanted love. But I found that sex and love are two completely different things. I find it frightening that there can be a loving person in your other half, but as soon as sex gets into the equation, they turn into something else, into something altogether dark and grotesque. Sex is a ridiculous act if you look at it from a distance. Why does the physical connection between to loving people have to be so bloody slapstick? There is no dignity in it - it is an animalic act and ultimately selfish. Someone in my past was very eager to perform "to my satisfaction", but the longer this went on, the more irritated I became, and resentful about him being so fixated on this, not recognising or accepting that I did not need that kind of fulfillment to be happy in the relationship. Aside from the sexual satisfaction he got out for it for himself, it just felt as if this act doubled as petting his ego about being an excellent sexual performer. I was beginning to feel like an experiment, but to be fair, I was never that fussed about it to begin with. It was just a tool to keep his interest because I knew it was necessary. If you want to be loved and have the company, you have to put out. And I can't ever tell what is the actual nature of the relationship as long as sex is involved. It blurs my head and confuses me and makes me anxious.

I am so utterly fucked off about this. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of sexual undertones, of having to worry about this element, of wondering whether anything I do or say could be misconstrued (on that note, ironically, I am guilty of constantly churning out the innuendos, but then humour is the best way to deal with something you essentially detest).

I am sick of having to put up with men coming on to me in various guises or trying to take advantage of a situation, and I have to smile and bear it for the sake of keeping the peace. (Not that it happens all the time, but when it happens, it usually comes in that form.)

Sexual notions and the expectation or anticipation of it has destroyed more than one of my friendships, or damaged it beyond repair.

It is frowned upon nowadays to consider sex as something impure, it rings of emotional repression and religious oppression, but it has very little to do with religious codes in my book. (I guess I have responded to religion because of that original experience of its damages... those religious codes were just the first ones I found to acknowledge that a world where everything is permitted, and lack of want for permissiveness is considered psychologically unhealthy, if not downright dangerous, is just something utterly disillusioning and frustrating for me.)

When I say that sex is impure, it's because of its damaging effects on trust in relationships. I am not talking about the act per se, I mean rather the notion. The best relationships I have are those where sexual tension is completely and utterly ruled out. Some of my closest friends are gay, or they are in stable relationship with a well-channeled sex drive.

Let's say I feel safest in relationships where I can joke about sex and throw around the innuendos, where I can be affectionate without having to worry that it will be misunderstood as coming onto them, or encouraging them. I feel most exposed and vulnerable in relationships where I have to be on my guard about everything I say or wear.

It's not the first time that I've pretended to be gay to keep some creeps at bay. But I am frustrated that I have to, because being asexual is not a good enough reason to stop them or respect my boundaries... on the contrary, they seem to see it as a challenge. "You just need to find the right person".

Fuck that.

No pun intended.

P.S. Does anyone else find it ironic that the Asexuality symbol looks like a minge?

2010-12-14T15:26:00.000Z

i'm feeling so empty today it hurts to breathe

not that it matters in the big scheme of things

Childhood Trauma no 1

2010-09-28T19:34:00.003+01:00

Up until about a year ago, I thought Moomins were just a figment of my early imagination. But then that book arrived in our store, and I nearly dropped it, screeching "OH GOD THEY ARE REAL!!!"

I have a very very dim memory - which I even thought was no more than a dream - of some mousy-elephantish looking creatures hiding in a house, while outside a sinister, dark creature approached, nothing more than a black lump with red fires for eyes and a mad grin and a pointy nose.
I must have been about two, and I remember I was terrified of that image, but neither my parents nor I could remember whether that was real or just a nightmare.

In subsequent years, I had serial nightmares of a similar creature I called the Worm, which regularly invaded our home, living in dark nooks and crannies, and in the land beyond the mirror. Sometimes you could see it in the mirror, a reverse landscape I was always fascinated by and wondered what it was like to be there. Mind you, this was long before I ever heard of "Through the Looking Glass".

In some of my dreams there was a cupboard near a mirror with a curtain instead of a door, and when you crawled behind that curtain, there would be a hole in the wall that would let you through into the mirror world. One time I foolishly followed that path, ending up in a mirror version of my flat, which was eerily silent and deserted... until a rustle made me jump, and when I peered into the dark corridor, I could see that this was where the Worm lived, that nameless lumpy creature. And I raced back to the hole and crept back into my own world, hoping it wouldn't follow me.

The Worm would appear in all kinds of unexpected places. On my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I would spot its long pointy nose sticking out from behind a dresser where it was trying to hide, and then it would lunge out and charge for us while I screamed "The Worm! The Worm!", running back into the lounge, where I tried to hide my family in cupboards before floating up to the ceiling myself, hoping to God it wouldn't look up.

At other times I would sit in the bathtub with my baby brother, and suddenly the floor of the tub would tilt and open up a gaping hole into which we slid, and the Worm would be down there, groping for us.

And its babies would be under my bed, screeching and poking their needle-sharp noses through the mattress (good Lord, what would Freud make of that??), into my back, giving me something that felt like seizures of terror, and I would wake and scream for my Mum and Dad.

The Worm was the single most terrifying creature of my early childhood. And I think it had its origins in the Groke... except that the Worm was infinitely more scary.

About 12 years ago, when I first met my friend Peter in Berlin at a Christmas party, he recited me this tale in his marvellous Queen's English, an excerpt from "The Moon of Gomrath", in which a dark, evil creature called the Brollachan possessed first a horse, then a little girl.

"Now the Brollachan", Peter said in his spookiest voice, with goosebumps creeping over my flesh, "had eyes and a mouth... but he has no speech, and alas... no shape!" He told me how it was blacker than black, a shadow in the night too dark to comprehend. "Somewhere near the middle... if there was a middle", he whispered, "were two red points of light."
And I realised he was talking about the Worm... it was the first time in years I had actually thought about it, and I had an invisible cold hand crawling down my spine, because Peter's story hit me square in my subconscious' nuts: "The pony turned its head and looked at Susan. Its foaming lips curled back into a grin, and the velvet was gone from the eye: in the heart of the black pupil was a red flame..."

Things like this make me wonder if there are archetypes of evil planted in our subconscious, ideas that cross cultural boundaries, because if there is a Collective Unconscious to mankind, as Jung describes it, then surely similar images representing similar ideas would pop up all over the world. The Groke (it's original name is Marran; I remembered it as Morrah) is Swedish, the Brollachan is a Scottish legend... and what about the god Kaonashi in "Spirited Away" (god, that creature always hit a nerve with me)?
That's ultimately more scary than just a single child's nightmare, no?

Childhood trauma no 4

2010-09-28T19:21:00.002+01:00

On the destruction of the geriatric metanarrative

2010-09-28T12:51:00.003+01:00

I always had an inkling I would be a crazy cat lady. Dad predicted from an early age (mine, not his) that I would resemble my grandmother, something which I fought vehemently and yet find more and more applicable with the passing years. Nan stopped at every animal she encountered during her walks around town, making cute noises, and she always had some treats in her pockets for them. It was a source of embarrassment for me when I was young and foolish, but now I am just like that (well, I haven’t arrived at the treats yet, but I am sure I will get there eventually). It’s got to the point that some of my friends point and laugh whenever we watch that Black Books episode when Fran is labelled as “aunt Millicent, who lives in the crooked house with 20 purple cats, and she has sex with them all”.

I defiantly started collecting cows, but the truth is, I bloody adore cats. I don’t mind dogs but cannot abide the sucking up and emotional dependence. Cats are criticised to be fickle and “fuck you” , that they own their masters, but that’s what I like about them. They get what they want and then they go their own way. I wish I was more like that.

Anyways, the splendid year I lived with Kate, I also lived with two cats – a treat in the pet-unfriendly renting market of the UK. Dolby and Theta are old and wonky, but amazing, both in their own ways. They have mannerisms and personalities and cracked me up many a time... especially Theta, the old blind man with a penchant for getting spanked , sitting in impossible spots, nosing and nudging his way under duvets where he would sit purring like a 1920s car motor, and sporting splendid Batman ears and ballet feet. We always imagined him as a bowler-behatted English gentleman who has a sex dungeon and wears fishnets and gimp masks on Saturday nights.

Sometimes I just sit and observe them. And this is what happened one sunny summer afternoon in the garden, something so defining and Theta-esque, I had to write it down.

Theta blindly shuffled around the flowers that grew by the garden path, nosed them, investigated closely, while I watched, with the usual affection and amusement for his wonky antics. He looked like something out of an old ladies’ fantasy, flower-sniffing kittens and the like, the type you see reproduced on cheesy G&Ts greeting cards and who are only ever cute in real life.

Finally he gingerly, ever so carefully, set a paw in the midst of the feathery bush of blossoms that grew by the path, then the other, then finally the last two, blinking, until he stuck out of that floral lump like a feline, short-sighted garden gnome, pretty as a picture. He looked like he was trying to play the trump card in his and Dolby’s never-ceasing battle for my affections. And it nearly worked.

“Awwww Theta, you darling...” I managed to say - but then he lowered his behind ever so slightly and stuck out his tail. And when his ears pulled back into Batman formation and he squinted concentrated into the dusky distance, I knew what was coming. Shattering my granny fantasies, he unceremoniously dropped a huge dump into the virginal blossom crown. I could almost hear them scream like prissy maidens.

With little regard for this violation, he hopped back onto the garden path, blindly located the epicentre of his business and then, in a vain effort which was barely more than a symbolic gesture, he ruffled the flowers around it a little to cover up the deed and then scampered off.

I love that cat. Have I mentioned that?

2010-06-15T23:18:00.001+01:00

Oh Christ almighty, I just want to leave. Problem is, the place I want to be doesn't exist.

Summer the first

2010-05-24T20:59:00.000+01:00

Tonight, I’m sleeping with the window open, because it’s been stifling hot all day, hot enough to remind me of my Texan days, where the heat could lull you into an exhausted doze in no time – except here we do not have the reprieve of air conditioning. When it’s hot, you can’t get away.
But we’ve complained about the cold for so long that we have long lost the right to whinge about heat until at least August.

The air now is a silky balm, pleasantly cool without being chilly, billowing mildly in the dusk, just that temperature where your skin can’t sense it anymore as a contrast to itself and you almost feel suspended because suddenly, the atmosphere seems gone and time stopped. The sky is a royal blue dome edged with turquoise where it blends into the silhouetted tree line, and speckled with the first pinprick stars. Orange street lights glow in the evening blue like grand still fireflies. It’s a night glorious enough to sleep out in the open.

Back in Cowtown, that’s just what we girls did. We dragged our old mattresses from our beds out onto the balcony of the decrepit house we shared on the edge of the village, a balcony large and deep enough to hold five mattresses lined up next to each other. In the midst of this harem-esque bedstead we sat, giggling like school girls, drinking pina colada mixer that went warm too quickly, and cheap wine, and told each other stories from the life before. And later, we slept, the country air as nourishing as soup, enough to make us full and saturated when we woke. Sometimes it was almost too much for me, being used to stale, thin indoors air, the night air would give me intense dreams which made me feel exhausted the next morning. Birds in the massive cherry tree next to our house would wake us at 5am, crying and screeching at the sunrise.

My life has always taken strange turns, and my timing always seemed off. I was three years late finishing high school, but played mother at 19, and in my mid-twenties I finally came as close to that girly sleepover I never had when I was a teenager. Maybe that is why I feel life so intense, overwhelming joy when good stuff happened, but crushing grief when things go wrong – my life never happened to me when and how I anticipated it, but all elements seem to show themselves at other, unexpected points in time, making things feel just “more”, because they are out of joint.
For someone who craves security as much as I do, and as much as it torments and confuses me at times, I almost enjoy that kind of unpredictability. As long as I know I can hope for something good.

2010-03-29T12:29:00.002+01:00

I can't be with him because he can't protect me. He doesn't want to. Not even that. He doesn't care enough. I can't feel love for someone who won't save me, who thinks I am not worth the effort. I have grieved for it, but I am done grieving.
Integrity.

I'll choose to be alone before being with a wrong person over and over and over again breaks me, turns me into a person so twisted and damaged that I wouldn't be able to see when something good comes along. I think I am already halfway there, and it scares me.

Quote of the Day

2009-11-22T14:31:00.002Z

The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation's celebration.

-Delmore Schwartz, "The mind is an ancient and famous capital"

How David Hasselhoff brought down the Berlin Wall

2009-11-11T08:09:00.002Z

At least, that's what he thinks.

It's been 20 years, kids! 20 years!!! And I remember it like yesterday.

When Bimbos and Books collide

2009-11-03T16:14:00.008Z

Today, the shop was invaded by a classic bimbo. So bimbo, in fact, I had a Bournemouth flashback. Fashion princess, obnoxious perfume, and just that kind of bimbo intonation that I can't describe but which drives me insane every time.
"How much are the books?", she asked.
"Which ones?", I replied. "They are all different prices, you know..." (This isn't the bloody pound shop!!, I grumbled mentally.) "You'll find the price usually on the back by the ISBN number."

She looked at me in terror. What? Numbers? Letters? Her head exploded.
Well, I lied. But it was close. I'm pretty sure, in fact, her pea brain lost some info somewhere to make room for this one, and she's gonna jump every time she sees that weird old guy in her house she used to call dad. "Yeah, there was all numbers, and I got confused...!"
'I bet you did', I thought.

I know, I'm being mean, but seriously, airheads are just a pet peeve of mine, and some of the ignorance of the most basic knowledge I see on a daily basis should just be punishable. Girls like that make Mary Wollstonecraft turn in her grave (the irony being that that type of girl tends to congregate in Bournemouth, which is where MW is buried. But then, maybe her school of thought was buried with her...)

But because I'm a corporate whore, I was all nice and customer service. "Which book are you after?"
And lo and behold, she walked straight up to that Katie Price book. Not the (ghostwritten) novel, but, to add to it all, the fashion guide. There, on the back, it said in fairly large letters (to accommodate the intellectual capacity of its target group) £20. "Half price of that, that is £10."

Just to give her something to think about.

Lilya 4-ever

2009-10-27T09:33:00.003Z

Reluctant to say it was good when it depressed the hell out of me. Nonetheless a heartwrenching, well-shot, gritty film displaying the bleakness of post-Soviet Russia, the loneliness and despair of an abandoned teenage girl and her ever-raised and destroyed-again hopes of escaping her misery. Her friendship with Volodya adds a warm, emotional touch preventing this film from becoming unwatchable due to the despair it emanates.
It's a film that must be watched, but watched with caution, and not on a day when you feel unstable and blue, or it could easily tear you along into the abyss.

not much to say, so let another tune speak

2009-10-22T20:27:00.000+01:00

2009-09-27T16:28:00.001+01:00

2009-09-10T08:42:00.011+01:00

It was fucking stupid of me not to double check that I had some left, but I ran out of Prozac the other day. It's happened before that I missed a dose or two, but the combination of work stress, losing friends and a variety of other worries have really made this withdrawal hell. Is it withdrawal? Or is it just grief? I've begun to question everything, not trust anything that I feel, wondering if any of it is justified, if I am allowed to feel it, or if I'll just be accused again of emotional blackmail.

I've been so on edge these days it's scared me. I dunno what it is - is it just the lack of pills, is it that my resources are drained to the last drop, my capacities stretched to bursting point - either way I feel as if I am precariously balancing on some precipice overhanging an abyss of complete madness, full of those unnameable swirling colours from outer space that Lovecraft used to write about. I've had awful dreams, I have aggression fantasies so violent they freak me out every time someone pisses me off. This old miserable git that rammed his shopping trolley into Kate without a word of apology: I had a mental film tearing through me where I kicked and smashed the shit out of him for being such a cunt. I am mentally screaming at people who block my way, who seem to whinge at nothing, I want to tear my hair out and hysterically curse the idiocy around me, and at the same time I feel that I am as much part of it and contributing to it as everyone else, and it makes me hate myself.
Am I that much a product of my neurotransmitters (or lack thereof) or is it an inherent character flaw? I have no more patience, joy, interest, enthusiasm.
I have repeated suicide fantasies that invade me, and I dunno if they are an alien force or truly part of me, but they are coming more often now, more forceful, prompted by smaller and smaller things.

Lack of Prozac turns me into a bad person. I can't function on my own resources. I will always be this nutcase, and I will always scare people away, and I will always have this need to get emotionally attached just to keep me wanting to live, to fill me up with something good and approaching something like joy, even if it is entirely delusional. But it will always be unrequited, and it will always push those away I care most about, the more I love them, the more they will hate me. Indifference is what saves my relationships, and what empties me so much that I see no point in continuing.
I can't blame them. I don't want to be around myself either.

I want to scream, but I feel totally alone, isolated and suffocated.

Life comes around

2009-08-29T18:57:00.001+01:00

And every time you vent your spleen,
I seem to lose the power of speech,
Your slipping slowly from my reach.
You grow me like an evergreen,
You never see the lonely me at all
...
Without you I'm nothing

Black Books's got nothing on him

2009-08-28T14:03:00.000+01:00

Just around the corner from where I used to live is this old little bookshop. Just as it should be, in a side street, nothing flashy and high-streety, full of obscure old titles mixed in with your grubby second hand book.
It's been there as long as I've lived here... but what I didn't know until a little while back is that it's actually quite famous. Famous for all the wrong (which, in my book, makes them right!) reasons.
It's because the owner, Rodney, was absolutely bonkers. Some found it endearing, some entertaining, some terrifying. I personally adore a shop run on abuse, it's the ultimate novelty and gives a nice break from the annoying suck-up customer service we've all been violated by at one point or another.

By now I have met quite a few people who had either been served by him (doesn't this give 'serving' a whole new meaning) or worked in the same business. The professionals usually say that Rodney has pissed off quite a few people. He has certainly creeped out a few.

My friend Iain told me about how he was browsing for poetry books one day, and, as he was leafing through a Shelley book, found Rodney peering over his shoulder.
"Shelley, huh!" grumbled Rodney. "Dead, i'n't he? His 'eart's buried in Bournemouth!"

Rodney had a go at me once (which extracted internal squeals of delight from me) for using the word "dissertation": "It's a thesis, goddamnit!"
He also regularly abused his bookshop minion, his "Igor", if you will, that freaky little man who once pretended that the clock integrated into a giant hideous painting (weird paintings was another thing they seemed to sell in there) was his wristwatch.

All in all, Rodney is the antithesis of all that the Waterstone's Get Selling campaign stands for.

However, the younger generation, with a few exceptions, loved and adored him. The man has his own facebook fangroup, for crying out loud!
It even went as far as a team of TV production students filmed a documentary about him.
In case you don't believe me about how equally nuts and endearing Rodney is, watch it.

From the (admittedly sometimes foul) mouth of babes

2009-08-28T09:50:00.005+01:00

It's been 2 1/2 months since I transfered to this tranquil little town in the Shire, after my bookshop in the Mouth of Bourne has been put to eternal rest. (It had been wasting away quietly for years, but then the end came swiftly and painlessly.) It's a high street shop, which is totally different from the campus clientele, but still adventurous, and I have been lucky to find a team which is good fun and a healthy bit bonkers, as all working in the book trade should be.

Our customer base is completely different from what I was used to. Now I get disgruntled old people, perverts flicking through the erotica section (which I had always managed to avoid in the uni shop by totally eliminating said department), the odd Lord and Lady, surprisingly few chavs, and then, of course, the children. Oh, the children.

I had to reconcile myself to the fact that there would be a kids' section, it was a job in a job with a children's department, or no job. You, dear reader, probably gather from this that the kids' section is not popular with us, simply for the fact that it's impossible to keep cleaned up, absolutely hopeless to find a book if you need it, infamous for mysteriously making books disappear, and utterly inconceivable to organise. It doesn't help that parents nowadays happily watch their children nuke said department, tearing and stomping on books or just throwing them off the shelf and leaving them all over the place, without putting anything back or asking them to behave themselves. Wouldn't have happened in my day.
On top of that, half the toddler books come in formats that you can't shelve or stack properly. And the noise. Oh the noise. Fire engines, creepy tinny recorded children clapping and cheering because a kid in a book managed to take a dump, dinosaurs roaring (does anyone actually know what a dinosaur sounded like??), Old MacDonald's never ending quack quack quack, all in the name and for the purpose of giving us the equivalent of a lobotomy (or otherwise wishing for one), you name it.

But I have to admit, sometimes things happen that almost - I said, almost! - make the kids' section worth its while.

Like that time that little boy argued with his mother, who refused to understand why he wanted that Michael Morpurgo book so much. "Why would you want to read about that?", she said.
And what he replied, with an angry whine, loud enough for the entire shop to hear, nearly made me drop my load (of books, fool!):
"But I LIKE nazis!"
Never have I seen a parent leave a shop so quickly.

Or this 9-year-old boy who watched me putting an A-level history book on the shelf, nudging his 6-year-old sister, pointing excitedly at a picture on the cover and exclaiming with joyfully glowing cheeks: "Look, Katie - HITLER!"

Oh, and sometimes they can even be cute! A mother and her 5-year-old, cute, blond little boy came up to the counter with two children's annuals, one a Power Ranger one, the other a Disney princesses one. I was in a good mood and made conversation, asking the little boy whether the Power Ranger one was for him, then.
He looked at me with wide, confused and slightly frightened eyes and shyly shook his head. His mother said: "No, actually, it's the Disney princesses one."
Shit. There I had made myself guilty of what I've always found a bit shocking and over the top in this country. "Sorry", I said to the mother. "I guess that was a classic case of gender-stereotyping!"
And then I turned to the boy and said: "Can you say "gender-stereotyping?"
He looked up at me from impossibly blue eyes and said, surprisingly clearly: "Gennersterotyping!" It was fucking adorable.

On films and the reality of childhood

2009-07-27T13:00:00.004+01:00

Bloglag: 5 months

I have been sick for the past few days and spent most of my time wrapped in a blanket, drinking lemsip or hot chocolate, snotting my brains out and watching films.

One of them was E.T.

Since I first saw it in 1987 (that’s when it first made it to East Germany), I have watched it more often than I can count. I saw it a gazillion times in the cinema, back in the day when you didn’t have to sell your last shirt to afford a ticket (50 East German pfennig for kids, the most expensive ticket I ever bought was 2 East German marks, which still was only about between 20 and 50p, if at all, by today’s standards).

You’d think a film would get old and stale, and most films these days do for me, but I swear, watching E.T. made me cry every. single. time.
I am gripped and wrapped up and swept away by it every single time. And when I think about it, I am pretty sure that E.T. was one of the most intense, profound experiences of my childhood.

That might sound lame and geeky to some, or like I haven’t had a childhood to speak of.
But the thing is, my childhood happened mostly in my head, in my own little world. I don’t know how universal that is, but I strictly filtered what I would allow in that world... reflecting on that, that’s a skill I should readopt. It might well be that this would “reduce” my life to the imaginary, but I have never seen it that way. It’s more like, expand my life to the imaginary.

This is the, admittedly cheesy, truth: E.T. was one of the few stories that acted as a surrogate for a lot of things missing in my life back then: affection, the tolerance and embrace of the soft, emotional, beautiful, sentimental. I have always been an emotional, soft person and I do believe that people are born to be a certain way, but I didn’t necessarily grow up in an environment that fostered and nurtured that. So whatever I couldn’t express and live around my family and friends, I would channel into something else: my dolls and stuffed animals, the stories I played and made up and finally wrote down, the books I read and the films I watched that could grow roots in me and fill an emotional hole – fiction or not, they served a purpose. That’s why stories exist. That’s why films and stories and that secluded little world that my dad believed would be my downfall are actually the things that made me what I am today, or more so, kept alive what I was born to be, constantly battling against the cynic, the bitter hag, the deranged, twisted creature that is the dark half of mine.

In the past months I have worked my way through many of the deranged films of the Tartan collection, read a lot of twisted books and bizarre magazines (make that a capital B), and it is as the saying goes, the wolf in you that you feed is the one that gets stronger.

And when I watched E.T. today, I suddenly remembered what I miss so much... and I was relieved to feel that I still am capable of being that person.
It’s not that I want to give up one side for the other, I embrace both of them, and both of them are just coping strategies. But I have had that vague feeling for a long time, that somehow things have gone wrong, that I am not the person I wanted to be, that life has turned out to be not what I wanted or expected, and that turning around and groping my way back is not going to be easy if I have forgotten what I’m looking for, what I used to want, what I used to be like. It’s like my core got buried in a mental mindshaft that collapsed under the weight of real life and bad choices.
E.T. is that reminder, some sort of guide post, a scratch in the bark of a tree that I recognise as a marker of being on the right way.

Catch 22

2009-07-17T20:45:00.000+01:00

Rose-tinted view
And satellites that compromise the truth
But I wanted more
With the cuts and the bruises
Touch my face
A hopeless embrace

Faith, it drives me away
But it turns me on
Like a strangers love
It rockets through the universe
It fuels the lies, it feeds the curse
And we too could be
Glorious

I need to believe
But I still want more
With the cuts and the bruises
Don't close the door
On what you adore

Faith, it drives me away
But it turns me on
Like a strangers love
It rockets through the universe
It fuels the lies, it feeds the curse
and we too could be
Glorious

(Muse)

Soul Cancer

2009-05-19T07:00:00.007+01:00

I have almost forgotten how bad depression can get, how it takes you over like an intangible parasite, whispering stuff to you that makes you want to die. And the more often it happens, the more it becomes clear it’s just a natural reaction to the inevitable. Not a disease.

There was a scary moment when I felt that there was nothing anymore that could hold me back from finishing it. I can’t imagine that people care. I don’t feel capable of accepting or absorbing love. The few manifestations I doubt, I don’t understand, I blame on the possible delusion of people. I can’t see why. And I feel so shredded, so mauled, in such agony and despair that I don’t give a fuck because what right do they have to keep me alive when I’m feeling like this? For their own sake, not for mine? And then that makes me laugh, because that sounds like they would care whether I die or not, and how full of myself am I?

People say suicide is a selfish act, but that is debatable. Stopping someone from a mercy death just so you don’t have to feel sad or deal with the loss is selfish.

Yes, I guess that makes me pro-euthanasia. What a German thing to say.

Does Dad love me? Does he have any choice when he is my father? Isn’t it ingrained in him to love his offspring? If it isn't voluntary, not for my merits, but because I am his biological extension, does it have anything to do with me or who I am? Wouldn't true love be the one that allows me to die so I don't have to feel like this anymore?

And mother? If not even she could love me, then something must be wrong with me? Then there must be a reason why I’m not loveable? If all I ever inspired was bullying and laughing? Or nothing at all. Being ignored by those I thought to be my friends?

I’ve been sinking into isolation. I’m exhausted. I’m drained. Even when I smile and laugh, I feel deflated and fake. I have been trying so hard to stay in touch with people, to remind them I’m their friend, and I feel pathetic, like a beggar, nothing ever seems to come back.

I don’t feel I have the right to cry out, because I don’t want people to love me out of charity, out of obligation. I don’t want them to resent me, and I feel that I have already started to make them resent me. I can feel them backing away, and it makes my despair grow to unbearable, but my panic drives them even further away. I have nothing to keep them but begging, and I hate myself for it.

Drugs. What do they do other than making me not care?

Therapy. All they teach you is a few techniques to brainwash yourself into something that looks like self-esteem, but all it does is make me feel like I’m kidding myself. It doesn’t change the fact that if people really don’t give a flying fuck, that must mean that I am not loveable. It is nothing but logical.

What’s left there for me other than to feel that I constantly want to smash my stupid ugly face into a wall?

What's the fucking point?

It's been a while, so time for another one...

2009-05-10T08:13:00.003+01:00

If I had to name the most retarded question I've ever had from a customer, I'd struggle because they were all gems in their own right.

This one happening last Friday was comedy gold, though.

Woman, probably in her late 30s, comes into the shop.
"Can I help?", I say.
"Yes", she says, "can you order me a book off the internet?"
I look at her, confused. "What do you mean, waterstones.com? You'd have to have your own account-"
"No", she says. "Off amazon."

I don't even know what to say to that. I suppose now is the time to give up. *slowly bangs head against wall*

I'm sure I must be approaching enough material for a book, or a least a Top Trumps deck. All I know is that she'd be ranking mile high.

2009-05-10T08:11:00.002+01:00

I saw that bird on "Have I got news for you" and couldn't get over it. I've always been a sucker for parrots, but I am so re-sold again, I want one. Now. Please. Now.

Evil Eye. Oral. Or written, even.

2009-05-06T20:26:00.003+01:00

I've been in a foul mood recently, something my poor boyfriend has put up with amazingly patiently, and usually I am not a great believer in slagging people off, but when it gets to the point where THEY. ARE. JUST. BEGGING. FOR. IT., it's really hard to restrain myself. And more often than not I feel bad because it is a really naughty thing to do, but my tolerance does have limits. Maybe because I'm getting old. Maybe because I am getting to the point where I'm losing hope.
Let's say, I can tolerate them if they are far away from me, and I get agitated if I have to be around them... I'd rather, for the sake of my own sanity, surround myself with nice and pleasant people. It makes me a nicer person, too, and I usually haven't got a problem being nice. I actually enjoy it. Yet I am here bitching my head off.
Well, they may have taught us differently in Bible School, the whole shebang about that it's easy to love those loveable and that true saintliness lies in loving the unlovable, but to be honest, I have never applied for the saint job, and I personally am favouring the verse that mentions the not throwing your pearls to swines and wasting your energy on things that aren't worth the effort.
So here I am, kind of handing out verbal nominations for the Darwin Awards, or more like, I wish some people qualified for them, i.e. removed themselves from the gene pool to do mankind a favour.

Stupid people get my goat, usually. I don't mean ordinary stupid people. I mean people so absolutely idiotic and self-absorbed and irresponsible and retarded that I want to bang my head against a wall until I am no longer capable of perceiving them.

This girl is full of keys....!!

2009-04-17T16:51:00.000+01:00

... we must remove her nipples!

Species

2009-02-28T16:08:00.000Z

I may be flypaper for freaks, but working in customer service brings hazards of its own. Again, one could argue that this is probably why I ended up working in an industry that provides an endless supply of every bit of disproof of evolution.
And it's not just me. My friend James, who runs a different bookshop, has a load of tales of his own, which he allowed me to share, again proving that human progress is on a rapid decline, especially considering that our main clientele is supposed to be academic.

So here is an exerpt from an email, which I considered editing, but then thought would just let speak for itself.

"We had no psychos - certainly not to your Russian standards* - but then I seem to remember Bournemouth being much better for that sort of thing! Mainly I get people who seem to not be able to read, or understand simple phrases like "we don't have it in stock, but I can order it for you" (this is usually met with "I can have now? I want buy now.").

I should tell you about my favourite customer of the last fortnight. Chinese girl comes to the till with two books and a loyalty card. I scan books, swipe card and tell her she has 8 quid of points if she would like to use them?
'I get points for this books?'
'yes, they go after, so you can use them next time.'
'I want use now.'
'You can't.'
'I buy separately then.'
Ok. Void transaction. She points at one book- 'I use points from that to buy that' (points at other book).
Ok, scan book, swipe card.
'Actually I want use points from other book.'
Right. Void again. Scan other book, swipe card- 'That's 42 quid for that one, do you want to use your 8 quid of points on this one?'
'No I want pay both books together.'
Right. 'You can't pay for both of them at the same time if want to use the points from one for the other.'
'Oh. I pay together then.'
Right. Void AGAIN. Scan both. 'Thats 77 quid, would you like to use your points?' Nodding with big grin. 'Ok, that's 69 quid.'
'I want use points from those books.'
'You can't until your next purchase.'
'Oh. I don''t want use any points then.'
VOID AGAIN. I swear if she had changed her mind again, I would have refused to sell her the books. She didn't, and as such, she escaped with her life.

I shall get back to explaining to all the students a: why their lecturers lie to them and tell them they ordered the books with us, and b: that when we say about a week for delivery, that does not mean an exact 168 hours from ordering!

Another recent favourite was the girl who responded to everything by nodding and smiling even when I was telling her that the book didn't exist, the girl who decided against buying her books because I had pointed out that she was buying a single copy of the book which was in the pack which she was also buying, the man who started screaming at me when I told him that he had to pay for the book when placing an order, the lecturer who has been told every year for five years that the book on his list is no longer available yet insists on continuing to include it on his reading list, the lecturer who hides books by other authors in the hope that students will buy his over-complicated out-of-date book, the lecturer who can't understand why we can't keep in stock a book which hasn't been printed yet (especially as he wrote it), the continual arguments with students about returning books they have obviously used (sometime even annotated) and we won't refund them ("it's against my statuatory rights!"- it's against my human rights to have to deal with people that stupid), students and lecturers alike giving answers to different questions to the ones which you haven't even asked yet.
And the one that really gets to me a lot of the time - Me: "is there anything I can help you with?"
Customer: "hello", then walking away. 'Hello' is not the answer to 'Can I help you?' Unless you say it in a Terry Thomas voice.

Ah, Vitriol!"

I replied to this: 'Hahahahaha. Say, did you ever notice the difference when you stopped working with mental patients and then just went into customer service instead?'

James: 'Yep, my patients always said please.'

I rest my case.

(*this was after my telling him the tale of Christopher Tarantinovskovich)

Friday the 13th and the influx of psychopaths

2009-02-13T20:52:00.002Z

Getting up on a Friday 13^th is a bit of a wary experience at any time, but that we were going to encounter a class A psychopath was something I never expected. As a disclaimer, I need to point out that I have exaggerated nothing in the following description… he really was that intense.

We had barely been open for 30 minutes when this big burly guy wandered in. Late 20s, shoulder-length wispy frazzled hair with a receding hairline, leather jacket, thin wire glasses. When he greeted us, he had a thick Eastern European accent… possibly Russian. I require you, dear reader, to apply this accent to everything he says, to fully appreciate the experience.

He was quite loud in an overcompensating way, and meandered around the shop. “Have you no cards for Valentine’s Day?”

I dutifully pointed him to the shelf.

“The student shop, they have nothing, just five cards, just all about love!” he complained loudly, half to himself, half to us.

“To be fair, mate, it is the holiday of lovers”, I said.

He looked up at me with a wild expression. “I was online, on internet, and there was, for lovers, for friends, for boss! I researched, I’ll go out on computer, I show you print!! I’ll prove it!” For a second he reminded me a bit of Borat, on a massive aggro trip.
”Nah, that’s alright, mate”, I said. “I believe you.”

“They have them on there, for friendship, for teachers!”

“For teachers?” I repeated, incredulously, with a little laugh. “Slightly inappropriate, perhaps?”

“Why not teacher?” he said. He looked dreamily into the distance and quietly mused to himself: “”My teacher… she is very young…”

“erm… ok”, I said, with a slightly panicky grin.

He handed me a card which he stated was “very nice” (the Borat comparison immediately sprang to mind again). I rang it through the till. He wandered off again, looking at more cards, something that irks me in customers, especially if there is a queue behind them (which there wasn’t in this case, but it was still rude – kind of the equivalent to walking out of a room mid-conversation. It irks me as much as customers drumming their fingers while you ring their stuff through. Makes me want to chop them off!! But I digress.). Get on with the transaction, mate!

“My teacher…”, he said again. I looked at the card. It was covered in little hearts, saying “Gorgeous”, “Sexy”, “Kiss me”, “Hug me”.

“If that’s for a teacher, you might want to reconsider”, I said and read it out to him.

“Fuck me??”, he burst out loudly, repeating a misunderstanding. I shrunk back, creeped out, squealing internally. I glanced at Max, who stood behind me on a computer, trying to look busy and not involved by typing frantically, trying really hard not to laugh.

Psycho Boy picked another card. I voided the first transaction and put that card through, instead.

“I will pay you!” he said gravely and pulled out a little velvet bag (where he must keep his booty, surely). He dug out a few coins and threw them at me in a too-wannabe-nonchalant way. “Yes!” he muttered intensely. “Let’s do this, Christopher!”

I gave him change and a receipt. “Thank you!” he said, gracefully (in his own mind).

Then he leaned on the counter. “Have you got 'Lolita'!”

“Erm, no”, I said. “But I can order it for you.”

“You haven’t got 'Lolita'!”, he said, in exaggerated horror.

“No, but we got a lot of other books.”

He looked around and spotted the 'Grindhouse' book, a ‘Making of’ book of ‘Death Proof’ and ‘Planet Terror’. He went to leaf through it. “Quentin Tarantino!”, he said appreciatively. “One day I’ll be as big as him. A filmmaker.”

I suddenly realised who he tried so hard to be. He seemed like someone who had decided to completely reinvent himself as a tough shit guy from an action movie, and would, from now on, only recite bad movie lines. Maybe this whole psycho act was intentional? Except that it was more of an 80s version of a psycho, but possibly perceived by him as the latest psycho chic, as it just had made it over there to Mother Russia.

“Keep this book for me!” he ordered. Then he turned around and wandered towards the exit. “These books have nothing to say!”, he muttered. “But I, Christopher, I do!”

Show me what you read and I'll tell you who you are

2009-02-12T10:11:00.000Z

A boy came into the shop. He bought these two books.

This is even funnier when you know that the Tax book is 78 quid.

I couldn't stop laughing for half an hour.

Panzer

2009-02-03T20:27:00.002Z

A while ago I was going through old photos. Can’t get enough of them – the older, the better. Whether it’s to look at old fashions and laugh about them (and be secretly ashamed to have partaken in them), or marvel at how skinny we used to be, to trigger memories or to wonder at our innocence/ignorance at all the things to come – the people we would become, and the gap between our expectations of the future and what actually happened to us).

I also love looking at other people’s photos – somehow it makes your friends more three-dimensional and even more loveable to know what they were like when they were kids, and how they came to be the people they are now, which is why I pester them at every opportunity for photos and childhood stories. You then don’t just bond to the few years you have known them. It makes you feel like you have known them all your life.

I have some pictures that seemed pointless at the time they were taken. Why get a shot of the view from your bedroom window? You see that every day! It amazes me now, though, to see how architecture has changed, how the East German standardised children’s playground has changed into something adhering to health and safety laws and how the scrawny saplings behind our house have turned into thickly foliaged trees. Some of these photos I merely took because I wanted to show my host family in Texas 12 years ago what it was like where I lived, not knowing that these would be the remnant documents of my childhood I managed to salvage before mother could run off with the rest of the household.

And then there are a handful of photos that strike me as plain bizarre. Almost alien. Parts of a past that is so opposed to everything we live and believe now that it seems entirely like someone else’s life, and although I used to live in the middle of all this, I now remember it like an independent observer… as if my kid self was just a character in a story. If I didn’t have those pictures, I might not even remember at all. They are little pieces of conserved past, pinning down memories that would otherwise dissolve and be forgotten.
Like this picture of a ~~Soviet~~ Panzer rolling past our living room window.
(Whoops. I lied. It was German. Dad told me that according to the Four Power Agreement, Soviet tanks weren't allowed to drive on German soil. They could be transported, but not driven.)

Dad remembers the exact day. It was 30 April 1984, the day before the International Worker's Day, and the tanks were moved closer to the city centre to be ready for the parades the next day. The tank came from neighbouring Berlin-Karlshorst, which was the district housing the Soviets, heading towards Strasse der Befreiung, now called Alt-Friedrichsfelde.
It was the same street our school was on, and the same street Gorbachev came driving down when visiting Berlin in 1989 or 1990, the street we lined up along, shouting “Gorbi! Gorbi!”, which infuriated our fiercely communist Russian teacher.
We had quite a few Panzer parades back in the days. It was always cool and exciting, but in retrospect I wonder why they organised those parades. It was always treated like a celebration, a celebration of East German and Communist power, but now I can’t help but think (what may be a statement of the obvious to those who were older and more aware of the political power play in those days) it was also meant to serve as a reminder to us who held the reigns. In the end, we were only the Soviets’ buffer.
There were Panzer parades on regular occasions. We already heard them when they were miles off, a deep rumbling which would, when drawing near, start shaking the glasses in our cabinets. The Panzer chains plowed over the asphalt and left white tracks, like a car’s skid marks in reverse. Sometimes they would carry medium range missiles, which was equally impressive and terrifying (as a Bomb child, I was in permanent fear those things would go off in front of our house, and I always naively let out a sigh of relief when it had passed us, even though they would have still done considerable damage exploding a few miles down the road.

We lived near a big intersection, where our street crossed Strasse der Befreiung, which, in the direction of Berlin’s city centre, would turn into Stalin/Karl-Marx-Allee, a majestic boulevard with a Stalinist architecture intended to impress. At that intersection, the tanks would turn and rumble towards the town centre.
Strasse der Befreiung was the road the Soviets entered Berlin from Poland, the B1 that directly connects the two. The Soviets, depicted as our soup-supplying, chocolate-distributing, child-hair-smoothing Big Brother, while our grandmothers repressed stories of how they hid in basements from getting raped and pillaged by those same soldiers. (Not that you can blame them… after all, we practically flattened their country.) Strasse der Befreiung, which earned a bitter twang of irony because of the kids it killed like stray cats, when they tried to cut their way to school short.

By the way, that street is not called Strasse der Befreiung (Liberation Street) anymore. It was one of those things that were eagerly changed, almost with a sense of shame, not just about the Nazi past, but also about that we fell straight from a brown mistake into a red one, repeating our past just in different colours, like a teenager swaying from one extreme fashion to another.
Most of the past is a mere memory now, a fleeting image, because hardly any hint of the past remains, everything having been demolished or being derelict now or turned into discount shoe shops.
There is a debate about whether removing cultural artifacts is a good or bad thing, if they are artifacts of a totalitarian regime. I can understand demolition as an act of liberation, but somehow, the place where I come from hasn't got historical markers... the ones we've got are displayed with a sense of guilt, or hidden away in museums. It wasn't a good history per se, but trading it for the pretense it never happened can't be the right way either. All I really got are some old photos... but they do the trick.

It just feels like a significant period ended, well, as an anticlimax. But then maybe, so does life.

On Великая Октябрьская социалистическая революция, or the wrongs and rights of history

2009-01-30T08:00:00.000Z

They say history is written by winners. But how often do you get to experience a changeover of winners and a shift of historical truth?

When I was young, I found history tedious. That was mostly due to my history teachers being clichéd, talentless bores. I remember one particular one, I forgot his name, who incorporated every history teacher stereotype you can imagine. He was an elderly, stocky bastard with his shirt sleeves rolled up, the top buttons of his shirt undone to proudly display an impressive and equally gross greying chest wig, wire-framed glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, over which rim he would inspect us with suspicion. And oh, he killed history for me. Even an incredibly fascinating era like the French Revolution he would mentally mummify by reciting dates and facts with a monotonous voice that would have put a can of Red Bull into a coma. The man was a walking sleeping pill. The amounts of times I physically (not proverbially!) fell asleep in his class, I cannot count.
Needless to say, I just about managed to scrape through the exam and pass his class with 99% of me hanging over the abyss of indifference and ignorance.

It wasn’t until I met Herr Pommer in senior high that my interest perked up. Herr Pommer was a legend! We called him "Pom-Bear" because he was so “cuddly” and fun. He always laughed, and his classes were a riot. He had nicknames such as "Leonardo Pommer" because he always used drawings and scribbles to illustrate his classes, and "The Guru", because he was simply the best teacher anyone could have.
Our high school paper had a section including quotables from teachers and students, and Pom-Bear would crop up in there on a regular basis. The way he taught his classes was fascinating: history became alive, historical figures became humans with motivations, which turned the subject into what its name suggests: an exciting story.
All of a sudden it wasn’t a list of dates and events anymore… it became a continuous making and breaking of the world that made sense and interconnected.
But he didn’t just tell one-sided stories. He always encouraged us to form our own opinions, especially when he started teaching Modern History and Political Science, to critically view all sources, question their circumstances and motivations and view any documentation in that light. It was the first time I became aware that history is not a set fact but a subjective, circumstantial matter of experience, something that picked up again at university, when we read Swift’s Waterland… an amazing book that might have been lost on me without Pom-Bear.
I went from a near-fail in history and political science to all As and Bs.

Before Pom-Bear, however, there was The Bitch. I forgot her name, I just remember that she shared her name with a German supermarket chain that eventually went bust (which filled me with a little glee). The Bitch was just that: a middle-aged, embittered hag that wore foundation like a brown face-mask ending at her sharp jaw line. She had The Glare which made students duck and hide behind each other, The Glare that meant once you locked eyes, she’d inflict a report or a test or something on just you. It was like she couldn’t see you, unless you looked at her. Or unless you were trying too hard not to be seen. Somehow she would sense that and shoot down like a hawk on a trembling mouse.

The Bitch taught maths and political science – my two weakest subjects for which I had not the slightest comprehension, interest or patience. Maths with its pointless formulae and rigidity was a mind-rape to my escapist imagination, and political science just rubbed my face in the historically recent misery I tried so hard not to think about or escape from. Both subjects just incorporated everything that made me want to curl up into a ball under the duvet. I hated it because I didn’t understand it and because I was bad at it. I was never the popular kid in school. I wasn’t pretty, or fashionable, or amusing, and consequently had to deal with quite a bit of bullying, my only consolation being that I was smart, got good grades and could hope for a future, whereas the bullies would get their dues as soon as they went into the real world. But these two subjects just took away the last pillar of my self-esteem, and it made me miserable. Now I was dorky, ugly, unpopular AND stupid.
Chances were that there were a lot of kids like me, but teenagers are by definition too self-absorbed to notice. The Bitch didn’t have patience for any of them. She had her small circle of pets. And hell, I wasn’t one of them. A wrong answer, and she, an academic Darwinist, would sigh, roll her eyes and make snide remarks questioning one’s intelligence.
I used to sit in the last row, in the very corner, trying to be as invisible as possible. That must have been back in 1994 or 95. The Bitch sat on her throne in front of the class, getting ready to assign a presentation on the Russian Revolution, and you could tell her pause meant that she was mentally scanning the class. I ducked. I almost held my breath. I willed her to pass me over. And it seemed that all this energy going into getting her off my back actually attracted her.

“Patricia!”, she said, and it hit me like an arrow. “A report on the revolution, by Friday, if you please, 20 minutes maximum, marked.”
Fuck! It wasn’t just the report, it was that I had to present it in front of the class, full of people I didn’t know, who thought me the weird newbie. I was petrified.
But I got down to it. I went home, grabbed an encyclopedia (no internet, guys, we used actual books!) and got to work.

But when I stood up in front of the class, I barely got past the first paragraph.
Suddenly the class started grinning, and The Bitch interrupted me, announced that this was complete rubbish, I got a fail and could go sit down and could someone please point out what was wrong with it?
One student raised his hand and snickered smugly. “She called it the Great October Socialist Revolution.”
“Correct!” said the Bitch. “What on earth did you use for research?”
“An encyclopaedia”, I said, barely audible.
“Written by Lenin himself?” she mocked, and got a few appreciative laughs from her petting zoo. “Time you updated your bookshelf, young lady!”
With that, I was written off. It had never even occurred to me that our encyclopaedia could be wrong.

The thing that still gets me is the hypocrisy of all this. It was just a few years earlier that this encyclopedia was perfectly acceptable. Yes, it may have called that event the Great October Socialist Revolution and not the Russian revolution, because the state I lived in happened to support the revolutionaries, and the textbooks available supported their stance as well. No history book is unbiased. Then, all of a sudden, the East Bloc collapsed, and everything was rewritten. Schools were cleared of the pro-communist books. Suddenly what had been drilled into us for years was no longer valid. Dissent had always been heavily discouraged in East Germany, and that puts it mildly. The entire East German mindset was one strategically formed not to form independent and critical opinions. Before that we had Nazi Germany, which embraced the same policy. Basically, for decades and generations, dissenters were an endangered species. And all of a sudden they turn around and expect a bunch of kids to grasp and accept an entire inverted worldview, not just that it was inverted, but also why. It doesn’t even make sense to me now.
There were two versions of history, each correct in their own way, each just an angle on an event, but in the end the winner makes you choose.

The thing that really irked me, however, was that the same teachers who gave you crap if you got it wrong after the Change were the most indoctrinated bastards back in the communist days. They were the loudest proclaimers of the Soviet glory, the first to spy on kids’ conversations about their home life to find out if anything contra the state was going on, the harshest to punish state-critical glitches (we never even got to the point of forming a view), and the first to pretend they always secretly disagreed or had never believed in the Red Truth when it all was finally over.
In other words, if I had used anything else like a modern history book 6 years prior, if I had not called it the Great Socialist October Revolution, The Bitch would have called me an enemy of the state and sent me to the headmaster.

But that's history. A blur. Not even winning is set in stone.

Saeglopur, fixing what Cadbury's fucked up

2009-01-29T21:10:00.004Z

Just as I have to watch Disney films after Trainspotting and Threads to enable me to sleep, this video is meant to directly cancel out the creepy children below. Sigur Ros are my subconscious happy place. There is something about listening to music in another language that just adds to the beauty of it. The last time I felt that was before I could understand English well enough to grasp what they are on about in their songs... the lyrics, in combination with the music, became more a tool to enhance one's own imaginative interpretation of the song, through intonation, association and pure guesswork. Understanding the lyrics of a song can then make or break a song, wholly depending on if the lyrics are good. Sometimes a song can only be saved if I can't understand what is sung.
But I blab.

Sigur Ros is beautifully otherwordly. And the video to this one is just as magical as the song itself.

Cadbury's is creepy, too

2009-01-29T21:01:00.003Z

Let me say that right away, Cadbury's chocolate is no friend of mine. I have harvested abuse from the island monkey Cadbury worshippers (little do they know of what real chocolate is made of...) for spewing anti-Cadbury propaganda, but the stuff just tastes like the milk they use is off.

I have to give them some credit, though - Cadbury's know how to do an advert, even though this one is a direct rape of my subconscious and has already given me a nightmare.

Creeper

2009-01-29T20:52:00.004Z

Today, a creepy old man was in the shop, fingered this book for quite a while and then bought it.
It makes my skin crawl, knowing that what initially must have attracted him was the cover.
It may sound prejudiced, but when my creepy old man radar beeps, I am usually right.

*shudders*

St Nicholas Day - an emo tale

2009-01-03T12:07:00.007Z

December 6^th has a tradition in Germany called St Nicholas Day. It is some sort of preliminary Christmas; St Nicholas always seemed like a vice-Santa to me – although, by origins, it seems to be the same guy - but the main idea is that if you’re good and you clean your boots on the eve of St Nicholas Day, you will wake the next morning to find it full of treats: oranges, gingerbread, chocolate. Both boots, in fact, if you’ve been very good or your parents just happened to be rich and generous.

My English friends always reacted to this with noses wrinkled in disgust. Ew – eating chocolate from a smelly shoe? But they should shut up, really. Two words: Christmas Pudding. Like Marmite, what the hell is this about? Christmas pudding, by tradition, is a blackened, steamed lump of the shit you scrape from the corners and bottom of your pantry at the end of the year, and the only reason it’s semi-edible is because you drench it in booze, set it on fire and then drown it in brandy custard – otherwise it would taste about as delicious as the shoe my more civilised countrymen are judged for eating out of on the day of December 6^th.

Ah, but there was nothing more exciting than polishing your boots the night before, and then go to bed, and wait for anticipation to wake you in the wee hours. We were not allowed to get up too early, but sometimes I could not bear it anymore: I would tiptoe out of my room in the middle of the night, and grope in the dark for the shoe rack by the front door until I found my boots, and the bulky feel of the goodies inside. It was almost the same stuff every year, and I remember vividly the pack of gingerbread, the carton in the shape of a gingerbread house that promised to be an awesome toy for when the cookies were gone. I’d sneak back to bed and then return to pick it up around 6am, and sit in my bed munching gingerbread, feeling naughty for stuffing myself before breakfast, and relishing the Christmas tingle warm inside me.

One particular St Nicholas Day, I went over to my friend David’s place, who lived just one apartment block away from me, and we’d have an early morning pre-school picnic in his room, with oranges, gingerbread, cola and chocolates.

But there was one St Nicholas Day that will always stand out to me. It was that time when I didn’t get anything.

I need to point out at this stage that my older brother and I never got on. He just knew how to push my button. And he did at every opportunity. He got away with it because our parents never really cared much who started it, just any sort of fight was crushed and broken up, and anyone involved got punished. I never understood how an adult can tell a kid to “just ignore” the bully – it requires a lot of emotional and cognitive control, and kids just don’t have that yet. While I certainly wasn’t an angel in my childhood, I can openly say that I had no interest in fighting with my brother – he was older and stronger, and I would always lose. I never looked for a fight with him – but he did, for his entertainment. (Ah, nothing like the blame game, eh?)

I don’t know what started it that particular night of December 5th, but my brother and I got into a terrible fight. It ended with our parents prying us apart, giving both of us a good spanking and condemning us to our rooms. They had often threatened us that Christmas would be cancelled if we misbehaved, but never made it true – either because we managed to pull ourselves together, or because they just found it too cruel to see through. That’s why I never expected anything when I sneaked out of my room in the cover of darkness that night, feeling for my boots, as I always did.

When I first felt it, I thought I had the wrong boots. But a second feel confirmed it: they were my boots, I could feel the embossed design on them. They were limp and hollow when I squeezed them. They were empty. My stomach sank. It couldn’t be right. Maybe they had put things in a different shoe. I felt my way along from shoe to shoe, identifying my parents’, my brothers’, mine again, straining my eyes in the dark, not daring to turn on the light. Nothing.

My mind refused to believe it. Maybe they got the date wrong. Maybe I got the date wrong.

But let’s be honest: has any kid ever got the date wrong for any sort of lucrative holiday?

And I remembered the threat of last night, and it became clear they had not been kidding.

I sneaked back to bed, pulling the covers over myself, still in disbelief, and then started crying.

The next morning I was determined not to give them the satisfaction of seeing me cry. I pretended I had forgotten about St Nicholas Day, I had not noticed that my boots were empty, tried to hide any sort of emotion of awareness on my face, acted as if everything was normal. I had breakfast, put on my coat, grabbed my school bag and went to school. I managed to hold the tears back all the way to school. Then my friend Dave saw me, waved at me, holding a chocolate santa, and shouted, “Hey, what did you get?”. That set me off. I burst out in tears.

In retrospect, I can’t really understand what upset me so much then. I remember what it felt like – the gutwrenching feeling of disbelief and worthlessness, especially when seeing all the other kids with their presents, and me not having anything – but I can’t put my finger on what exactly it was that really got me. Must be an adult thing to not really care anymore whether you get something for Christmas or not, but for kids it seems to be a fundamental thing. I am still trying to understand why, maybe it’s one of those days where in spite of the whole naughty or nice ritual, there is a sense of unconditional love and giving to it, that shows that inspite of everything you have done, you’re still worthy. Either way, I never got into a fight before any holiday again. Let’s say, that particular method my parents employed worked. But still, I think it’s never going to be one I’m gonna use on my kids. Some things are too sacred to touch, and it doesn’t matter how I feel about this incident or Christmas now, as an adult, but I will always remember what it felt like when I was a kid.

THANK. GOD!

2008-11-05T07:30:00.006Z

Coffee to the rescue

2008-07-06T10:41:00.005+01:00

As a connoisseur of ye olde vino and an equal hypochondriac, I am permanently on war-and-peace negotiations with my liver. Some days we speak, some days we defy each other, sometimes there is severe abuse (I go on a booze binge with my friends, and in turn my liver screws me over by shutting down my fat processing, which is why I may have ballooned a little over the past two years). As I am a girl and paranoid about my body fat percentage, I usually get a massive guilt trip and then drink nothing but cranberry juice and munch Milk thistle pills for days after. And one likes to think long term, cos one would not like one’s liver to pack it in entirely one day. Sadly, the call of Bacchus is way too strong sometimes. Be it for the fun factor, the social lubrication (how wrong does that sound?!), the de-stress factor or the hug replacement.

Now we got this new book in the shop, called “101 Foods that could save your life” by David Grotto (note the use of “could” instead of “will” – someone is saving their ass!)

And I kid you not, this is what it says about coffee:

“In a study of more than 125,000 people, one cup of coffee per day cut the risk of alcoholic cirrhosis by 20 per cent. Four cups per day reduced the risk by 80 per cent.” (p107)

Said study is listed in the appendix as Klatsky, AL, Morton C, Udaltsova N, Friedman GD. Coffee, cirrhosis, and transaminase enzymes. Arch Intern Med 2006 Jun12; 166(11):1190-1195.

So in other words, I can drink myself into a coma on a daily basis if only I have five cups of coffee the day after, and my liver will be fine and dandy? The countrywide problem of alcohol-related liver disease can be solved, as long as the alcohol binge is followed by a coffee binge?

I’d be more than happy to believe that, but unfortunately, it just sounds too good to be true. And if it is true, why hasn’t it hit the newspaper headlines on a grand scale yet?

To go or not to go - the church dilemma

2008-06-19T18:00:00.002+01:00

Last summer, my "ex-husband" Johannes, who I hadn't seen in years, came over to visit, and we had an absolute blast. I know Johannes back from the days when I lived in the "convent" (me working for the magazine, him doing his civil service at the mission centre). Being friends with the civil service guys kept me sane, because they weren't so over-the-top religious and holier-than-thou like the bible students, teachers and missionaries, who would even turn their farts into hymns if they could. We did what we could to not go stir crazy in the village; our parties were legendary.
So even though we attended the obligatory bible and prayer meetings, the lads never seemed massively bible-bashing... and Johannes never seemed much the type who was very vocal about his religion. It sometimes makes me forget that he actually is religious, to the point where I was almost flabbergasted when he told me on Sunday that he hadn't been to church in ages, and I almost felt like I owed him an explanation why I hadn't. Isn't it funny how our behaviour is shaped by those who surround us? Even weirder, how much of a behavioural trap is created when different people meet, who know different sides of us, to the point where they would probably define us in different ways, and how you suddenly feel that acting in character with one person makes you act out of character with another? I have been around my current (non-religious) friends for so long that I am just not used to being my convent self anymore. It feels like putting on an old dress which is yellowed by age and a tad too small.

The reason why I haven't gone to church in years is quite simple. Church congregations make me angry. I dunno why, I think I have just developed an allergic reaction to religious communities. I have been looking around to find a church to feel home in, and none of them felt like IBC in Berlin, with Scott Hinton as our pastor, who was a legend and who was one of the very few pastors I ever knew who didn't talk out of his arse. Who could accept me for who I was, no matter what I said or did. Who I could tell that I wanted my mother dead at a time when I was terrified of her nasty plots, without having him going all sanctimonious on my ass.

Most - well, all the other churches I have been to, with rare exceptions, were places where people put on a religious facade, but essentially didn't give a crap about others, where I saw a lot of religious hubbub but felt about as welcome as in the schoolyard of my junior high. Where attending felt like nothing but going through the motions, like something I did because I felt obliged to, if not guilty about if I didn't show. And it didn't take long for me to realise what damage it actually did to my faith. In quite simple terms, if I had continued going to church, I would have lost my faith.

Years and years ago, when I spend nights crying myself to sleep because I felt that very core of mine was dying, and I was afraid to lose it, I made a pact with God. I cannot tell you how terrifying that was, when you're so indoctrinated that you believe any straying to the left or right will send you straight to hell. When in your mind this is a real possibility. But when you feel you are going to go there anyway, just a little sooner, because you've begun to crack under the pressure.
It was probably more a conversion than the night I said the sinner's prayer. Then, I handed myself over to guidance the way the church offered it, but this time, it was a complete leap of faith. That pact was about that I was going to go my own way, and have whatever notion of God existed, lead me. It would mean relying on my instincts, and my conscience, and not on the contradictory and simplistic doctrine that was spoon-fed to us and felt like the spiritual equivalent to something they would have fed you in Victorian orphanages. It would mean falling, messing up, possibly not being a religious role model, but at least always knowing that I believe what I do for the right reasons, and not because some religious community peer-pressured me into it. I'd know that the faith I'd have would be the faith I'd asked God for, and was willing to receive at that point in time, and all I'd know would be something I had learned in my heart, not just head knowledge that means nothing to me. It would perhaps be a dirtier faith in "their" terms, a more sullied, impure one, but at least it would be mine, and I wouldn't be lying to myself or act contrary to my beliefs.
And to be honest, I have never looked back. I have moved far away from the evangelical roots I have, and I have allowed myself to be open enough to learn about the divine from all sorts of sources, by recognising it for what it is, and not rejecting it just because it has a non-evangelical label attached to it.

But getting to the peace of mind was hard. It took me ages to rid myself of the sense of guilt, the feeling that I had committed an unforgivable sin by rejecting the church and its doctrines just due to their nature, because for too long it has been drummed into me that belief in church equals the belief in God - the only acceptable belief.

But when Johannes mentioned that, that twinge of guilt returned... just because of to the context in which I got to know him. And I suppose I tried to justify it again to myself.
I thought about what that particular word actually means. Gottesdienst. Directly translated, it means "god service". In which way, actually? Us serving God? Or God serving us?
I don't think God needs us to serve him. I don't think he needs us at all. I don't see him as an entity that has the need to be worshipped, to fulfil an egotistic need. Maybe God needs us in the way we need our own children, not in the sense of them ensuring our survival, but because they're the object of our love, and without them this love would be unchanneled, empty and frustrated, or not even existent... maybe loving children makes us more of what we are. We were created out of love, and perhaps our existence created a need in God. Of course you want your children to love you. But then again, would you want this love to be expressed in a doctrinal way? Would you want to force them to love you, or to show something that resembles love but is, in the end, only an act?

What is the point of us going to a service if God can be with us wherever we are? Would you summon your kids into the lounge and say, right, it's Sunday morning, show daddy some love? Isn't it more natural to love your dad in a thousand different ways? Quietly, when you walk next to him, not having to say a word, talking to him like a normal person, laughing, joking, crying? Does it have to be in Christian speak, in lame pathos that sounds fake and put on?

I don't think God has an ego in the human sense. If our ultimate goal is to be like him, and to dissolve our ego, which is a granite pillar of self-hood preventing us from melting and blending into that Ocean that is God-hood, then surely creating a barrier of falseness and pretension, of distancing worship, of rituals, of anger-creating guilt, can't be the way forward.

Out of his Head

2008-06-19T16:35:00.005+01:00

So Brian "Head" Welch converted. I can virtually hear the fundies break out in what they call praise and jubilation, another “closet Satanist” in their trap, another score for Jesus.
I have no problem with people finding a spiritual path that they find suitable, but why do they have to propagate themselves like this? Of course, they claim it is “for the glory of God”, but come on, who are they kidding? So Brian Welch went from cool to another Jesus wannabe – what is with this cover picture??! I mean, the audacity to portray yourself as Jesus, and pulling the old “humbled and contrite” face, when the whole photo session to achieve this cover was to display him in a certain light. Would Jesus do a photo session and write books about himself? Nothing has changed… just the target audience.This is what winds me up so much about evangelical culture, this whole pretension to be all for God’s glory, when it is blatantly about PR for the self. If at least they were honest about it, it would be less annoying.

The sad thing, now that he is converted, his music has blatantly turned crap. Christian rock. It’s like a job requirement to suck.

Cackle

2008-01-29T08:03:00.000Z

Jerry O'Connell does Tom Cruise.

I need to pee now.

To a T

2008-01-28T19:26:00.000Z

When I was in Berlin this January, I sat on a train at some point, just looking outside, so I didn't have to look at the creepy cockeyed old guy opposite me of whom I had no idea whether he was staring at me or out the window. And while I watched the incredibly depressing scenery of Warschauer Strasse area roll past, I spotted this wall, which was dominated by two graffitis.

FUCK and BLAH.

Funny enough, I have never seen anything that so accurately describes the current German Zeitgeist.

Nightmares Part 2

2008-01-05T08:45:00.000Z

Moving from ventriloquist dolls straight on to spiders. I've had my share of creepy arachnid experiences, but I have just read a (true) story on Weird Tales that makes me NOT want to go to Japan.
It's the truly magnificient tale of

"The Year of Ninja Spiders"!!!

I am alternating between goosebumps, shudders and hysterical laughter, so you should give it a read, trust me!

And if you're still not creeped out by then, check out the giant "clock spider".
Don't forget to read the comments, too.

The stuff nightmares are made of...

2008-01-04T18:56:00.000Z

I've always been spooked by clowns, and positively terrified of ventriloquist dolls. I dunno what it is, but even though they are meant to entertain and make you laugh, there is something deeply sinister about them, in a way that stops you sleeping and stare into the dark with your eyes bulging with terror, waiting for one of them to grab your ankle from under then bed or just suddenly be there at the edge of the bed staring at you when you turn around and open your eyes.

(You never know... tonight, when you're in your bed, they might just be there... do you dare to turn and look...?)

Because I apparently like to give myself more nightmares than necessary, I googled "ventriloquist doll" and found this:

Considering that I fear pervy old men as much as I fear these dolls, I am not gonna get much sleep tonight.

Defiance is...

2008-01-04T07:39:00.001Z

found at the old master's site...

When you're de moon...

2008-01-03T19:39:00.000Z

Adjuration

2008-01-02T16:19:00.000Z

When you’re a kid, your entire life seems to be structured by school holidays, your birthday, Christmas, Carnival and all the boring bits in between. Certain smells, symbols, events, even the clothes you wore were deeply associated with that structure so that your whole life became an advent of nearby excitement. Switching from winter clothes into summer clothes became almost ceremonial, and then again back into winter clothes promising the approaching Christmas season, the magic of winter, snowball fights and sled races.

We had a week long break in October, our first school break of the year, and we couldn’t wait to get away from the daily school drudgery. But there was always one thing that drew me back to to there.
Our teachers asked us every year if we wanted to go, and not everyone was up for it, because it would be the first Saturday of said autumn break. But some of us always wanted to go... because you didn’t meet at school to, well, go to school.
Instead, we were invited to go to the Initiation and Adjuration of new soldiers of the NVA (Nationale Volksarmee – the National Army of the People).
Real soldiers. Dude.

Looking at it from a historical perspective makes this a rather surreal memory. There were us kids, in our pioneer uniforms, to be some sort of live propaganda material at a military ritual held in the Stasi (secret police) Headquarters in East Berlin. Our school was just a stone’s throw away.
But back then, it was an adventure. And yes, it was an honour, too, they told us. It made us feel part of something, involved us in a serious grown-up ritual.
It boggles my mind a little what effect this was meant to serve. Indoctrinate us? Create some sort of bond to an idea by playing on our being impressionable?Not that we noticed at the time. Back then it was all just good clean fun.

October was when the crisp cold air of first frost set in. I was dressed in my uniform, way too thin underneath my red anorak, a woolen hat and mittens against the cold, quietly excited about the snug comfort of my winter clothes that still smelt of last winter, carrying memories like a sponge. We stood, lined up in an assembly - not what we were used to from our pioneer assemblies at school, but a proper, serious, grown-up assembly, at a serious, honourable occasion. We were expected to be on our best behaviour, and it didn't even occur to any of us to do or act otherwise. We were the kids, the future, the adults of tomorrow, witnessing and celebrating those who swore an oath to protect our country to keep it for us as it was, a socialist haven. Back then, occasions like this formed us into the believing followers we were supposed to be as adults. Obviously, we didn't realise. We were just excited about the opportunity. This was no playing soldiers at the playground and the Little Forest. This was the real thing - grown men in uniforms, who would solemnly swear an oath to serve their country, protect its borders from the warmongering class enemy (anything West of us, with special emphasis on America). The ceremony seemed to take an eternity, especially for a nine-year-old who had to stand attention and not discredit this sacred moment with foolish child's play. The cotton of my pioneer shirt felt cold and inappropriate for this weather, but it would have been unthinkable to wear anything else. I wore a cap as well, borrowed from the school because I did not own one; it would not stay tucked on my head because I wore an alice band, trying to look perfect for this occasion. I had to stand even stiller to prevent it from falling off, and with every passing minute I felt more like an ice statue, despite the low yellow pre-winter sun that gave only light, not warmth, leaving us freezing communist child martyrs, or at least the light version of it.

But once the ceremony was over, it was our turn; we'd run up to the soldiers and smile and shake their hands and give them flowers (carnations, of course), and they would smile back at us, full of goodwill and kindness, the embodiment of the handsome men we saw in the Russian and East German propaganda pictures, of working class men with square jaws and straight white teeth, throwing small children up into the air playfully, just to catch them again, without a trace of malice and full of laughter, against a backdrop of picturesque farmland, above which a dove, the bird of peace, would circle, ensuring that the Imperialist warmonger would never disturb this perfect peace.

After the ceremony, we were led inside, into a conference room which had been cheered up as much as possible into something child-friendly. On a long table was set up places with napkins and mugs of hot cocoa, and platters full of biscuits, sweet pretzels, some covered in chocolate, and we indulged in that heavenly goodness, thawing the frost in us and exciting even more the anticipation of Christmas.

Historically, there may have been something sinister about this whole event, but to me it was nothing but an adventure.

80s kids movies - they just can't make them anymore!

2007-12-30T12:15:00.000Z

bloglag: 2 years

E.T. was on the other night, and it ran on every single TV in our house. It was funny. I came up the stairs and heard some strange gargling sounds and immediately recognised it. I have seen it THAT OFTEN!
Abi, Charlie and I giggled our way through all the silly things we never noticed in the film: e.g. why the scientists are wearing space suits, why they sound like Darth Vader ("I am your father!", we cried in unison) why one of them, when they come over the hill, carries a glow stick ("his pager called him and he had to come straight from a club", Abi suggested), why they come through the window, why the toy train goes off when the scientists break into the house, how they managed to turn the house into a lab in the space of about 30 mins ("flat pack labs from IKEA", Abi suggested) and why Elliott's brother, when he finds ET in a creek, tries to camouflage him with a white sheet.
"It was the 80s", I said defensively. "Back then, we didn't question things."

Anyways, ET will always be one of my favourite films. Along with The Neverending Story. The tears I have shed!

There is a charm about 80s movies that could never be reproduced in the following decades. Today everything is CGI shit, there seems to be a lot less love put into the work. They had less to work with back then, and had to put in a lot more effort to get results, but somehow it made it worthwhile. Did you know that the tortoise in The Neverending Story cost about 1 million dollars to make, and most of the characters were created from some latex material that would actually disintegrate in daylight (which is why the displays in the Bavaria Film Studios are literally kept in the dark). Today it would be a pure CGI creature that would probably bear a striking similarity to the mummy (which seems to have become the template bad guy for a lot of films – The Fog remake, The Boogeyman, I am Legend, don’t get me going on that shit).

What happened to models?

There was an imperfection to it that actually gave it the special something that seems to be lacking in today’s blockbusters, because they are too bloody perfect.
Remember the old Sinbad films and the way the creatures moved? Ray Harryhausen is a genius! Man, it creeped the hell out of me, but it was amazing.

Anyways, here is a list of 80s films that you need to buy for your kids, and watch yourself, if you haven’t already done so.

E.T.
The Quest/ Frog Dreaming
Flight of the Navigator
Space Camp (a bunch of kids go to a space training camp and accidentally get shot into space where they have to make their own way back... not likely, but who cares!)
Camp Cucamonga (oh the 80s fashion, and 80s hip hop, and all the old child stars in there that raise the question of what ever happened to them? Well, Chad Allen is a gay icon *sad sigh* and Candace Cameron is the sister of Growing Pains heartthrob-cum-born again fundie Kirk Cameron)
Explorers
The Goonies
The Journey of Nattie Gann
Lost Boys
Project X
Wargames
Breakfast Club (or any brat pack movie – you haven’t lived the 80s without those!)
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (teenage legend and messiah, he is what everyone wanted to be as a teenager, and he had a band named after him – Save Ferris. Plus, amazing for enlarging your quotes repertoire. Anyone? ... Bueller? Bueller?)
Joey/Making Contact (A bit like Poltergeist meets ET: Hitler-lookalike ventroquist’s doll going apeshit in a little boy’s world)
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (I rest my case.)
Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey
Weird Science (we were all disappointed to find out that the internet doesn’t actually work like that, but it’s still a great film!)
A Christmas Story
Tron
Poltergeist (if anything, it will teach your kids not to sit too close to the telly)
The Gate
Labyrinth
Jim Henson’s Storyteller (a series, but amazing nonetheless)

Only a small selection but a good place to start.
Just trust me on this one.

Monkey love

2007-12-26T21:35:00.000Z

When I was a kid, my favourite toy was a monchichi called Nucki.
(Yes, that’s pronounced “nookie” – the true meaning of which would not be revealed to me until I was 21. It really is a reference to the little pacifier in his tiny fist, which would translate his name as “Sucker” – probably not much better. His name was one in a long line of unwittingly inappropriate names, such as Bubi (“boobie”) for my budgie and Hannibal for our pet tortoise, who loved nothing more than biting).
Nucki was in the company of many a monkey inhabiting my childhood. I had a thing about monkeys when I was a kid. I sure as hell pet a lot of them.
...Erm... that came out all wrong.

I have a very blurry, dark memory of my great grandma bending down to me when I was two and handing Nucki to me, brand new and still wrapped in a cellophane bag, and I’ve loved that little monkey ever since. Nucki’s design was still the old school cute one, whereas later monchichis began to look slightly deranged and deformed, with faces too small for their giant heads, and ears too big and red, and fur too black, making them all look like sinister alcoholics. Nucki’s face was sweet and freckled and in proportion, and his fur a chocolate brown. He is old and tattered now, and his fur is threadbare in places, but he is still alive and kickin, in his own happy monchichi way. I loved his smell and how he always fitted perfectly into my grip, so that it felt more like I was holding a live creature than a toy. Nucki went everywhere with me. He was alive to me, like a real pet or a baby. The thought of being parted from him was agony for me.

Our happy little world was only disturbed when my brother was born. Because there are some unwritten rules every child knows about the existance of young(er/est) siblings.

1) They get what they want.
2) They’ve got some weird kind of immunity. And they know it. No matter how old or young, oh do they know it, and milk it at every opportunity.
2a) Subrule of this is: your toys are not your parents’ highest priority to keep safe from the spoilt brat’s ferocity. And no matter how little you are ahead in years of the little monster, your parents expect you to be mature.

When you combine annoying little brothers with toys you love with the fervour only a kid can produce, things are bound to go haywire. It creates stories like this.

When my brother Marc was about one, we went on a summer holiday, to a resort near a lake. We lived in a little bungalow, and us kids caught too much of the sun playing in paddling pools and chilling out with our dads when they went fishing, us secretly nibbling the sweet dough they had prepared as bait (yes, I loved to eat fish bait. Yum!)

One day dad hired out a rowing boat, and we went rowing on the lake. (Well, dad was rowing.)
I had Nucki with me, which, in retrospect, was a bad idea, but I wanted him to have fun as well, believing the little plastic-and-fur fella would get a kick out of being on a lake just like me. Clutching Nucki in one hand, I let my other hand trail through the cold water which broke in little waves against the warm wood as our boat cut through it, like dark green liquid glass, while I imagined a fairy tale underwater world. I wanted to stick my feet out in the water, but my little legs were too short to reach over the edge and into the water. Mother warned me a few times not to lean out too far, so any experimenting was forfeit before it began.
I was entirely immersed in my daydreaming, my older brother leaving me in peace for a change, and the summer heat was upon us like cotton wool, with only the water bringing cool relief from below.

Needless to say, wonderful peace like this is like a thorn in the eye to any toddler. This is why my little brother suddenly started kicking off. For no apparent reason he suddenly threw a full-on tantrum, deafening screeches, bucking and throwing himself around like he had a stupid fit, my mother barely able to contain him. There was a portion of embarrassment to this, too, as the lake carried sound so well, and people probably thought our parents were trying to drown us. Gone was the relaxation and peaceful joy as my parents went straight back into their usual stressed home mode, unsuccessfully trying to calm my brother, who trumpeted out his mysteriously aroused displeasure with a voice way too big for his little body, emphasising every scream with a spasm that made the boat rock. I sat at the stern of the boat, watching this unfolding hurricane, and subconsciously clutching Nucki tighter, as if touched by a premonition.
Despite his complete immersion in his hissy fit, Marc saw what I was doing, and, rotten little bugger that he was, changed his tactics. He leaned forward, against the constraint of his mother, and reached his pudgy little paw out towards me.

Correct that. Towards Nucki.

No fucking way. I pressed Nucki tighter to my chest. Marc screeched all the louder, twisting in his mother's arms and grasping for what was dearest to me in the world.
And promptly and predictably, dad said: “Give him the monkey!”
“No!” I protested. Marc let out a massive wail to make sure we knew he meant business.
“Jesus, just give him the monkey!”
“But he will chuck him in the water!” (Up to this day I don’t know whether Marc just gratefully took my suggestion or whether I just knew he was going to do that anyway.)
“Don’t be silly. He just wants the monkey to play with. Just give him here for a second.”
When dad raised his voice, I dared not talk back. Defeated, with my little heart jumping with fear for my beloved primate, I handed Nucki over, like the prisoner of war he had become. That or nuclear war.

Nucki glid smoothly from my dad’s strong big hand into Marc’s drool-covered, angry grip.
And didn’t I know it, a fraction of a second later, Nucki sailed in an impressive arch over board and landed far off in the water with a splash. I screamed.

“Oh shit”, said dad. I don’t know if I screeched “I told you so!”, but I didn’t have to. My heartbroken cries, which were equally as fierce in volume as my little brother’s, mingled with his audioterror into an insane cacophony of childhood apocalypse.

Dad and Mom didn’t even try to calm us down. Knowing me for about 6 years longer than my brother and being well aware of my attachment to Nucki, it became all about damage control. Nucki bopped at a considerable distance in the dark seas threatening to swallow him, if it wasn’t for his little airhead keeping him and my sanity afloat. Dad tried to reach him by means of an oar while simultaneously trying to balance the boat, with me howling on one end and Marc on the other. He barely reached him, trying to coax him back towards the boat with that big, clumsy wooden stick, but the motion of the water seemed to carry Nucki off further and further like a lost paper boat.

I dunno how he did it, but he managed to get Nucki back eventually, and I clang to the little wet monkey and cried and cried, for the near loss of him, and the betrayal by my dad who was outwitted by the little shit that was my brother, and never again has dad dared to touch any of my toys in favour of Marc.

Because when it comes to tantrums, I could always outdo that little demon.

Fractal Evolution

2007-11-27T20:32:00.000Z

"We are not humans until we create humanity."

I think this guy summarises it pretty well. (Thanks, Marcus, for sharing this!)

Just on a side note...

2007-10-20T16:12:00.000+01:00

I hate rom coms. They make me feel lonely and miserable, when I should be happy and grateful for what I got. What a pile of fucking lies.

What were they thinking???

2007-10-14T10:17:00.001+01:00

It's like something out of Modern Toss. Mr Tourette would be proud.

(P.S. For the tourists among you, this shop is in Southampton, in Burgess Road. You'd think after hundreds of people stopping by, crippling themselves with laughter and taking photos, they would have changed the sign, but no...)

Postmodern postmodernism

2007-09-03T22:05:00.000+01:00

So I started this discussion group on myspace called "The Postevangelicals and other reluctant believers". It's targeted at people who once used to be fundamentalists but have become disillusioned and outgrown their former evangelical views. In other words, a postevangelical, by the definition that Dave Tomlinson coined in his book, is someone who is anything but fundamentalist. You could even say that postevangelicals are religious people who have accepted the inevitability of postmodernism.

And now this guy posts a request on the discussion board, in this group, of all places: a Christian filmmaker wanting to interview fundamentalist Christians.

Ironic, if it wasn't so ironic.

*slowly bangs head against wall*

Quote of the day

2007-08-07T21:25:00.000+01:00

"A morality that attempts to please God without attending to its effects on the human beings that God loves may ultimately do more harm than those moral visions that claim no truck with the Almighty, but which nevertheless achieve the work of the Kingdom. In this era of global relations, God may be theologically outsourcing the pursuit of justice, truth and goodness to those without religious portfolio who are willing to do the work."

- Michael Eric Dyson

Quote of the day

2007-08-06T21:51:00.000+01:00

This is the reason why I'm a mystic... someone who cannot find and connect to God in a sermon, a book, even the bible, through someone else's view and stories... I can only truly find him through intuition and experience. Only your own experience can be relied upon if you want God to root himself into your soul. Everything else is just theory... babble.

"Talk of spirituality is often like trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps: Unless you already understand, the words are of little help, but once you understand, the words are unnecessary."
- Daniel A. Helminak

1 Corinthians 13:12 (New Living Translation)

"Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely."

Guilty pleasures

2007-07-11T20:49:00.000+01:00

Once again, Wil Wheaton, my favourite celebrity of all times, has done it: something I should have done ages ago, which is to write about guilty pleasure films. I was actually wetting myself when I read this (I know - attractive!), not just because he manages to turn The Omega Man and the likes into drinking games which will land you on a drip in hospital, but also because he points out so marvellously what exactly is so cheesy but at the same time sooooooo good about these films. And he actually names almost exactly all my favourite Guilt Trips (which I do own on DVD because they are too good to miss.

Come on, there is nothing like Charlton Heston in 70s movies. I know he can't act for shit, and he is a gun-waving idiot, but nothing makes me giggle/watch in 'passing a car crash'-fascination more than his catchphrases, overacting and having helpless damsels cling to his barrel chest in a desperation that makes feminist tear their hair out.

So yes, have a read of this fantastic review.

ze klick.

Potter and Priorities

2007-07-09T23:27:00.000+01:00

Security tightens as Potter release nears
09.07.07
The release of J K Rowling’s last outing with her creation at one minute past midnight on Saturday, 21st July, will be the culmination of the most fraught operation in publishing history, reports the Times. "Boxes have been chained shut, barbed wire has been uncoiled and satellite tracking systems for delivery vans have been double-checked."

Bloomsbury is using padlocks and confidentiality contracts to ensure that the plot twists remain a secret. In the words of Scholastic, the American publisher, it is all about the "magic moment" when readers open Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the first time. Only a few people have been allowed to read the book.
Bloomsbury refused to send the manuscript to Scholastic electronically because it feared that it would be intercepted, reports the newspaper. Instead, Mark Seidenfeld, the American publisher’s lawyer, travelled to Britain to pick it up and, on his return journey, protected it from prying eyes by sitting on it.

The Times

Oh man. Barbed wire? Am I the only one who finds it a bit disturbing that essentially a pile of paper gets more protection than the average citizen?

LIIIIIVE! LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!!!

2007-07-08T18:01:00.000+01:00

I know I've been gone for a while. A lifetime's worth has happened in the meantime. Exciting new things, like I have moved house - AGAIN! - and am now living in a gorgeous cottage with my friends. Getting back in touch with old friends. Making new friends. Hearing things I never expected people to say about me - in a good way! - which is always a bonus. Tales of the bizarre. A bit of the poor man's John Grisham action, which I won't get into until it is settled.
I had no internet for ages, and no time, for that matter, so tumbleweeds have been rolling about this site for a bit. But I'm all psyched up for more.

Hooray.

Or not.

I'm not the boss of you.

Tales from Customer service

2007-07-08T17:54:00.000+01:00

I am all for environmental action and all that, but when you work in customer service, particular in retail that relies on natural resources like paper, you just hear weird things once in a while. One I particularly love is this: upon paying for their book, I ask customers whether they want a bag. And sometimes I get the ever-so-sweet answer with the sly ego-PR thrown in: "No thanks. Save a tree."

What. Plastic trees? If they wanted to save a tree, they shouldn't have bought the book.
But far be it from me to point that out to them. Because, after all, I am a corporate whore. And b) discouraging sales would kinda be like - scuse the pun - sawing off the branch I'm sitting on.

Hug that tree, bitch!

2007-04-13T18:10:00.000+01:00

I dunno what's going on, but I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And I just feel the overwhelming urge to tell all my friends I love them.
I really really do.
My friends are fucking awesome.
I don't want to make a list because I would feel guilty for everyone I am leaving out by accident, and I don't want people feel bad to be inevitably lower on the list than others.

So basically, you know who you are.

*grabs every single one, puts them in a headlock and knuckle-rubs their hair*

I totally and utterly love you guys.

That is all.

Open the floodgates for wisdom

2007-04-09T13:03:00.000+01:00

My friend Marcus is not just a poetic genius, but also one of the most enlightened people I know. People like Marcus remind you that your life has purpose, and gives you a flood of hope for the fuckin species we are. Here is some mindblowing and beautiful poetry he wrote.
Marcus gets my YOU FUCKIN ROCK badge of honour.

It is for the sake of those without hope

That hope is given to us

There is no new messiah

It's a big fraud

To leave us waiting

For the ultimate parental figure

We lay here waiting

For direction

In the hope He will tell us what to do

There is no messiah

He's not coming

It's down to you

We have all we need

There is enough

The Muslims say Muhammad was the last prophet

I concur

Now it is us

We are all prophets

So whilst we lay in wait

Our egos take control

In the century of the self

You are the next messiah

All of you

Seek and ye find

Seek what is for the good of us all

- Common unity

Each one of us is here on a mission

To find our life role

Our true meaning

Our true goal

So find it – do your research

How will you better our soul?

I say again:

There is no new messiah

It's a story

We lay in waiting

Waiting for the father

We lay here waiting

We want direction

We hope for direction

There is no new messiah

He is not coming

It's down to you

We have all we need

There is enough

The last prophet ahs come and gone

Let us unite and refine

let us unite and define

let us unite in time

We lay in waiting

Our egos take control

The century of the self

You are the messiah

All of us

Seek and ye find

Identify wholesome actions

For the good of us all

Dismiss unwholesome actions

For the good of us all

Find common unity

Celebrate life

Find common unity

Find your mission

Find your life

Find your meaning

Find your path

Celebrate life

Reflect

Find the goal

Common unity

End to war

End to control

End to death and destruction

End to greed

End to infliction

End to ignorance

End to selfishness

Find your piece to the jigsaw

For us all

Five things you didn't know about me

2007-03-13T20:36:00.000Z

Now here's a challenge. Roman came up with this fun little game, some sort of blog virus (and don't you know how I love passing on viruses! It's a charm for the karma!) where you have to reveal five things no one knows about me. Which is difficult, considering that I am a self-absorbed cow that loves nothing more than talking about herself and has done so via the internet for the past few years, draining all the bile into this blog, most of which being stuff no one really wants to know.
Needless to say, I can't pass up the opportunity. But it's a bit tricky to find the material. So chances are that one of you guys may have heard some of these before. Therefore, let's call this post: five things about me you have probably heard about one or 12 times.

1) I can't ride a bike.

2) When I was 10, my first story got rejected by a television programme with the excuse that it was too scary for kids. I think they just didn't want to tell me that it's just a cheap rip-off of "The Little Vampire" and didn't want to get sued or incarcerated for treason (after all, this was an East German programme, and said Vampire story a West German fabrication and therefore poison to young pioneers eyes). It could also just have been rejected because it was utter shit. But at least I got an autographed card by two fictional characters, which could probably get me a lot more profit on ebay now than the story ever would have. If I hadn't lost it.

3) I used to have a pet tortoise named Hannibal, which was prophetic, because the bastard loved nothing more than biting. Hannibal was a vengeful creature who started to leave turds in front of my brothers bed after my brother kicked him once.

4) I did fortunetelling for a short time once and was good at it.

5) I once stayed over at my friend's place when I was about 9; we read magazines and medical encyclopedia (I had a morbid thing for looking at disgusting manifestations of diseases) and listened to the radio. At some point my friend jumped up and said with a scared voice: "Did you hear that?" - "What?", I said. - "On the radio they just said the end of the world will happen in 10 minutes. Let's go to yours!"
And you know what? I was so gullible, I believed it. Turns out, what she heard was just an announcement for the weather report, and all she wanted was to get away to play with my toys.

Right, Roman. I have now totally ruined my street cred. I hope you're happy!

Greedy bitch

2007-03-13T19:56:00.000Z

I just found THE ULTIMATE toy on ThinkGeek.
It's a rabbit.

It moves around and fills me with pleasure.

So if anyone wants to pull a Brewster on me, you know where I live.

Thanks for listening.

I :heart: Banksy

2007-02-27T20:47:00.000Z

Stella will rip off my head and poop down my neck, but I love this creation by Banksy.

Reasons why Bournemouth Uni will never make it to University Challenge

2007-02-27T20:38:00.001Z

1) Iain Rowley has left the premises.

2) Uni pub quiz sheet found after said pub quiz:

Come again???

2007-02-25T21:25:00.000Z

The other night Mike and I were bored. Abi was on late shift, and Stella was out at her mom's, so we decided to watch a movie together. Mike said: "Let's watch something scary. What's the scariest movie you got?"
So I picked out "Threads".
And you know what happened?

Mike fucking fell asleep.

I just don't get it.

By the way, for your viewing pleasure, "Threads" is available to watch on google video. I'm not sure how legal this is, but do give it a shot. I dare you.
And if you fall asleep, I'll call you a poopiehead. Don't make me.

Good and bad ways to spend money

2007-02-21T13:29:00.000Z

I'm not really one to talk, considering that the first tenner I got out on payday was spent on booze last night and a fry-up this morning, but my mate Roman wrote this excellent blog entry which I will copy over here instead of just link, because I know you guys are lazy bastards and I want you to read this, dammit.

So here it goes:

cost of the war in Iraq
I've been doing a bit of research on the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The consensus amongst scholarly studies such as this and this is that a CONSERVATIVE estimate of the cost of the war is thus:

The money already spent or allocated for Iraq alone is being spent at a rate of approximately $11 million per hour and $255 million per day.

From Wikipedia:
In economics, opportunity cost, or economic cost, is the cost of something in terms of an opportunity forgone (and the benefits that could be received from that opportunity), or the most valuable forgone alternative (or highest-valued option forgone), i.e. the second best alternative.

So, I guess that my idea to cover the Sahara desert with solar panels so as to cater for the entire planet's energy needs doesn't appear so outrageous or indeed expensive in comparison.

In other news, Australia has really impressed me because they have just banned the conventional lightbulb.

Q. How many Australians does it take to change all the light bulbs?

A. One - Prime Minister John Howard, who banned incandescent light bulbs yesterday, making Australia the first country to take such direct action to stop global warming

By Cahal Milmo

Published: 21 February 2007, in The Independent

After almost a decade as a pariah in the battle against global warming because of its refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol, Australia scored an environmental first yesterday by becoming the only large economy to ban the traditional incandescent lightbulb.

In a move that environmentalists hope will spark a similar move in Britain, the government Down Under said the sale of all incandescent bulbs will be phased out by 2010 and replaced with low-energy versions to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The enforced switch to new high-efficiency fluorescent bulbs will cut Australia's carbon emissions by four million tons by 2012 and reduce domestic power bills by up to two-thirds, the Environment Minister, Bill Turnbull, claimed. Mr Turnbull, whose right-of-centre government is a recent convert to action on global warming, said: "It's a little thing but it's a massive change. If the whole world switches to these bulbs today we would reduce our consumption of electricity by an amount equal to five times Australia's annual consumption of electricity."

The initiative follows a study by the International Energy Agency last year which found that a global switch to fluorescent bulbs would prevent 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the world's atmosphere over the next 25 years. It would also save £1,300bn in energy costs.

Traditional incandescent bulbs, based on the 19th-century designs of Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan, produce light by passing electricity through a thin wire filament. They are inefficient because up to 90 per cent of the energy is wasted in the form of heat. The new generation of compact fluorescent bulbs are more expensive that the incandescent version but use only 20 per cent of the power to produce the same amount of light. Manufacturers say economies of scale mean they will soon be comparable in price to traditional bulbs and last much longer.

Artificial light accounts for almost 20 per cent of world's electricity consumption, significantly more than the output of all nuclear power stations in the world. Overall, lighting generates 1.9 billion tons of carbon a year, about three-quarters of the amount produced by all cars on the planet.

Australia is the first major economy to ban incandescent bulbs, although the American state of California is also considering a similar move.

But it is not first time a country has made an enforced switch to energy-efficient lighting: Cuba launched a similar scheme two years ago.

In Britain, the Government has yet to move far beyond a symbolic gesture to low-energy lighting by Tony Blair when he ordered the bulb in the lamp outside Number 10 to be changed to a fluorescent one. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it was working within a European Union scheme to promote the use of low-energy products within the home.

The reductions in greenhouse emissions from moving to low-energy bulbs are nonetheless small. The four million tons of CO2 that the Australian government expects to save must be compared with the 565 million tons that it produces annually.

Despite the recent conversion of the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to environmental issues, he has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Mr Howard said the deal would do too much damage to Australia's coal-based energy production.

But campaigners welcomed the ban on incandescent bulbs as one of a number of concrete measures which all countries, including Britain, should be taking as part of their response to global warming.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) said a wholesale conversion to fluorescent bulbs would cut UK electricity consumption by 2 per cent - equivalent to a large power station. Nick Rau, FoE's energy campaigner, said: "We would certainly like to see Britain follow the Australian example. There is no magic bullet for global warming and switching to low-energy bulbs is one significant step among many that we would like to see the Government take."

The failure to achieve a global swap from incandescent to fluorescent bulbs has been a source of frustration and bemusement to experts and campaigners.

The Lighting Industry Federation in Britain estimates that the majority of lights in this country still use inefficient bulbs despite an average reduction of 30 per cent in electricity bills from using low-energy bulbs.

Rest in peace, Casey!

2007-02-13T20:00:00.000Z

I just watched the news with Abi, and this shocking thing came on about a guy in Leeds who strangled a two-year-old girl called Casey Mullen to death. Allegedly he has sexually abused her before murdering her. They are still questioning the guy they arrested (apparently the fecking UNCLE of that girl), so it’s not conclusive as of yet, but all I have to say to whoever did this is:

You should have your cock taken off with a blunt saw! In public. While getting assraped by the Hell’s Angels. And then be left to die in the gutter.

You know, there are always debates about how to treat convicted pedophiles and murderers, especially child murderers, and there is always a tendency to protect the guilty. Some of the bastards get away with a few years, sometimes even a few months of imprisonment. They talk about rehabilitation and all that shit, and that there is no point in harsh punishment, and that a guy as sick as that probably doesn’t know what he was doing.

You know what? I don’t give a flying fuck about that. Seeing this adorable little girl, such an innocent, pure little thing, knowing what happened to her, how can you even for one minute consider the rights of the perpetrator? How low scum do you have to be to be capable of hurting someone as defenseless as little Casey? Anyone who commits an atrocity like that surely has forfeited every chance of defense or consideration?! I dunno what it is these days with people getting away with virtually everything (and to be fair, we don’t know yet what will happen to that guy, but call me prematurely cynical...). Maybe an extremely harsh punishment would be a good deterrent. Like if I chopped off the hands of thieves and nailed them over the door of my shop. You just wouldn’t risk it, if you have any common sense, and if not, well boohoo, learn to fuckin knit with your feet.

And if it’s not a deterrent, at least it’s a worthy punishment.

I am just sickened and sad.

And there was another thing that came to mind when the news were on, and they showed the results of some bombing where a ton of people got blasted away.

Does objectivity create lethargy?

While the news were on, I suddenly woke up to the way the anchormen spoke.

“At least 100 (or somethingorother) were killed”, he said with an indifferent-semi-jolly intonation.

This and seeing the baby on the news, it sometimes makes me wonder, is this so called objectivity in journalism actually a good thing? I know I have done the whole media study thing, where you discuss the advantages of journalistic objectivity (even though you have to admit that it really is a farce), and a lot of things speak for it. But the longer I think about it, the more I wonder whether we didn’t chuck the baby out with the bathwater.

See, I don’t mean one should be emotional to the point of riling up the masses, creating riots and so forth. That’s just polemics and propaganda. But the fear of drifting into that has pushed journalism to the other end of the scale: complete detachment. And that’s fucking wrong!

If you report about something in a way that sounds like it’s not even worth listening to, like it doesn’t make a difference, then doesn’t that ultimately result in the general mass of people only listening with half an ear? How can you expect the whole country to be involved with world issues if a) they are loaded with their own problems and b) not even your voice or reaction to an issue as a reporter gives them an incentive to care.

We are not rational, objective beings. We’re emotional beings. We have emotions for a reason.

Yes, we have reason, too, but there is a place for everything. There must be a healthy balance.

Some things should distress us, and we should express it. There is something wrong with us if it doesn’t.

Add fuel to the fire

2007-02-04T16:23:00.000Z

If the recent nuclear paranoia hasn't been doing the job for you, I recommend you check out Barefoot Gen.
Anime is cute, you'd think, but it probably has the most harrowing images ever produced on the subject. I remember seeing a clip from this back when I was 17, and it has haunted me ever since.

Growing up too fast

2007-01-28T16:12:00.000Z

I'm in awe. I just spent about half an hour googling for people I used to know, just hoping a website would pop up somewhere and update me. (It's weird. Mike and Mark and me chatted the other night about the point of Facebook and high school reunions... it's not necessarily that you want to get back in touch with old school mates, you just want to see what they are up to now... hoping that the bastards that used to make your life hell are now on useless scums on welfare, with fat ugly wives and snotfaced brats for children, and the bitches that used to drag you down are hopefully fat and used up and have abusive husbands wearing dirty string vests.)

Back to the point. I entered the names of the triplets I used to take care of back in 96/97 into google, and while nothing ever used to come up in the past years, I struck gold this time. I found a middle school online paper, and it had their names AND PICTURES in it.
My babies have grown up to be drop dead gorgeous teens. Caitlin will be a classy queen, and the boys... holy shit. You can see they will be extremely hot one day (when they are old enough to be called that!)
I am so chuffed!!! Check them cuties out!!!

Doomsday Clock

2007-01-17T21:00:00.000Z

"I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein

If you're an obsessive-compulsive like me marked by the cold-war childhood trauma of nuclear paranoia, then this is the last thing you want to read in the paper - the headline today in the Independent:

The Doomsday Clock: Nuclear threat to world 'rising'
For 60 years, it has depicted how close the world is to nuclear disaster. Today, scientists will move its hands forward to show we are facing the gravest threat in at least 20 years

Fantastic. 20 years, that means about 1984. 1984 is the year I officially shat myself because of the Bomb.

At age 8, I only considered the option of running for my life, should the Bomb drop over Berlin, for a few minutes. I decided pretty quickly that if it came to the worst, I would want to be in the epicentre. Be vaporised in a split second. You won't feel a thing. You'll be gone before you know what hit you.

There is no way in hell I would let my kids see any footage of nuclear devastation, or let them read books about it. If the school did, I would raise fucking hell there. I'm not talking about 16-year-olds. I'm talking about the 8-9-year-olds we were when the schools would use anything for propaganda. I grew up with the tale of Sadako Sasaki who thought she could beat her radiation sickness by folding a thousand paper cranes. There is nothing sweet about this. It was terrifying. I'm talking about the siren codes mounted on the wall in the gym, teaching us to differentiate between siren patterns indicating severe storms, fires, regular bomb raids or just a good old nuclear attack. Every time they tested the sirens, I froze. I had fucking nightmares all the time.

Then there was good old Tchernobyl, not to forget, just to rub in that we didn't just have to worry about The Bomb, but about the Nuclear Power Station as well... it wasn't until after 1990 that we found out about the desolate state most of those stations in the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany's, were in - meltdowns waiting to happen.
The Tchernobyl accident was a weird thing. They didn't really speak much of it... obviously they mentioned it, but then made not as much of a hype of it as the West did. I just remember that just after it happened, I went home from school with a mate, and was suddenly hit by a few raindrops. And my mate just panicked and shouted at me to run home, because it was radioactive rain from The Cloud. Obviously a bit blown out of proportion, but we were kids, and I did run, already envisioning myself with my hair and teeth falling out, my gums bleeding and lesions dotting my skin.

Information management was amazing back in the days. East Germany, if they mentioned much of it at all, told us we were perfectly safe. West German news, however, warned the public from buying any too radiation-absorbing vegetables such as lettuce and mushrooms. It always astonished me as a kid how even a radioactive cloud could be political: be completely harmless while drifting from Russia via Poland across East Germany, only to unload its poisonous load over the fucking enemy of the state.

Funny enough, recently I got totally back into my nuclear paranoia, in a retro kind of way.
I bought loads of books on top of the ones I had already read: "The Last Children of Schevenborn", "The Cloud", "Malevil", Black Rain", "When the wind blows".
Now there is "Children of the Dust" and "Einstein's Monsters" as well.
Then lucky me also found "The War Game" on ebay, which is a 1965 BBC mockumentary about the effects of nuclear war on Britain. It's so dated it's actually funny, but at the same time frightening as fuck, considering how clueless the public back then was about it. ("Strontium? Is that gunpowder?") Even more frightening because it seems like a sinister joke if you have any clue about how bad it would actually be. "The Day after"? Kindergarten entertainment. "Threads"? Yeah, getting a bit closer. But still a million miles from the stark reality. "Once there were five proven nuclear powers. Now there are nine."

I dunno why I am doing this to myself. It's probably the equivalent to picking a scab. I guess I felt safe looking at it now where there was no imminent threat like back in 84. And now this headline pops up in the paper. Just my luck.
Now I just wanna take the whole bunch and lock it up somewhere, and part of me wishes I had never seen it. It's images so horrible they won't leave your mind.
About two years ago, I even found "The nuclear attack survival handbook" in a charity shop for about 10p... I just bought it for the comedy value (if "Duck and cover" means anything to you guys...). I bet the person who gave it up is kicking himself now. Even more so, considering that I wouldn't really need it: surviving a nuclear war is about the last thing I'd opt for. I mean, what's the point!
Give me a good clean hurricane any time. At least after that there is hope for rebuilding, for a future. Nuclear war just leaves the planet fucked for good. There is no future. There will be no healthy babies. There will be cancer running rampant like colds in January. People will be left psychologically destroyed, reduced to animals. There will be no ozone layer. Everything you eat is poisonous. There will be no more natural beauty, just scorched earth and horribly mangled and burnt corpses. No one fuckin wins, so I just don't get why anyone would use these kinds of weapons. Political purpose like back in the 80s, while it was irrational, at least fought for this side of life, meaning you could show footage and make people realise how devastating the effects would be, how pointless a nuclear war would be. (Yeah, I know, considering that it nearly happened, that's actually a really stupid thing to say.)
But give me a half-crazed religious terrorist who doesn't give jackshit about what happens to this world, what would deter him from using them? Sorry, I know I am stereotyping and all that shit, but I'm just scared.

Well, the good news is that being suicidal to begin with will make it a lot easier to snuff myself. Call it optimistic pessimism.

Fuckin hell. Probably the most masochistic post ever. I hoped writing this would be cathartic, but instead I just freaked myself out.
I'm gonna go now and watch Beauty and the Beast.

Your friends at Jack Daniels remind you to drink responsibly

2007-01-04T14:55:00.000Z

(leaflet in the package of a hipflask)

Nothing against my friends at Jack Daniels (although their booze is terrible), but if you have gotten to the point of using a hipflask, you have long moved beyond the point of drinking responsibly.

But then, that’s not news to me. I just bought one the other day, heh.
It was an impulse buy, because maybe I like the idea of whenever I'm stuck out in the cold somewhere, I have some warming booze handy.
On the other hand, that is quite worrying, isn't it? I've been worrying about the booze intake for a while. Maybe I'm a hypochondriac, but I think sometimes my liver hurts. And I have the cravings.
Last night I just refused to have anything, which wasn't too bad, because Stella and I got pissed the night before, chatting and watching TV. It was great fun, but I felt rough the next day. Rough enough to not like the sight of wine. But by the evening the hangover had cleared up enough that I muchly felt like having a glass, but my pride and my New Year's resolution pricked my conscience enough to not do it. Yet, I couldn't deny the craving. Especially since Abi and Mike were having a glass because it was Mike's birthday. For the first time I knew what it was like to stop smoking. The cravings, and the substitute eating. Just being at this point worries me.
It is bloody hard to quit drinking in this country, where drinking is so much condoned among young people, where the motto is "Ah fuck it, let's get smashed!"

I read Allen Carr's book about controlling alcohol, but all his arguments are really hard to apply. Alcohol isn't nasty. It tastes nice. And I like it. I don't want to stop drinking... I just want to drink less. Except that it isn't as easy as "just".

To drink or not to drink. It’s Friday night. I’ve been telling myself not to drink, or at least to drink less. It’s not good. It’s not fun drinking anymore... well, it is, but I do feel the consequences so much that I can’t ignore what it’s doing to me.

I dunno why I drink. Because it’s fun? Because I’m bored? Because I’m lonely? But I always drink in the company of people. I don’t have any social anxiety. Maybe it’s because it makes me feel something. Somehow not anxious. Somehow strong and enthusiastic. But at the same time, soon enough the opposite kicks in. I feel empty, bland, not bothered about anything, and the anxiety kicks like an angry malicious baby in my stomach.

The door just slammed shut; Stella and Mandy and Charlie have gone to the pub, and immediately the loneliness kicks in like some nausea. I haven’t gone, because I lack the funds till Wednesday, and because I am too tired to go out. But funny enough, I think I am tired because I drink too much. Drinking essentially prevents me from drinking some more. So I put on some suicidal-indulgent Haendel, and here we go, blog-whinging.
Welcome to England.

Yours truly,

the boozaholic

Texts on a Friday evening

2006-11-23T08:17:00.000Z

or A slice of British culture

- How are u? It’s poo to get drunk all by yourself. Patty x-

- You do your duty like the rest of us!! Ads X -

Prostitute yourself for charity

2006-11-23T08:13:00.000Z

Last week was quite a hard week, and Friday night I did some overtime to finish off an account sale (imagine entering six pages of ISBNs, making sure you make no mistake with the amounts and quantities, otherwise you have to start over again and it’s really gonna fuck up your stock. Yes, it sounds as fun as it was! But I was in the zone, man! I was in the zone!).

Needless to say, I needed a good drink, and since we had been sold raffle tickets for children in need, I just thought I pop up to Dylan’s after work, spend my last fiver on booze and see if I won the jackpot. Hah.
Dylan’s was heaving. Loud annoying dance music, butchered remakes of classic 80s songs, lots of girls dressed like 1920s prostitutes (hey, it’s Bournemouth, don’t expect too much!) and a guy who got his head shaved for charity. Or just his head shaved. Fuck knows.
Thankfully I had some proofreading to do, so I sat down on a counter somewhere with my booze and my paperwork. Well into a few pages and near the end of my first glass, this guy comes up to me. “Hey, you alright, you look all lonely and sad.”
“It’s just my face”, I said. “And I am just havin a lonely drink by myself because I’m pathetic like that.”
Well, I thought he was just being nice, so I tried to keep the sarcasm at a minimum. But then he really pulled it off.
“Do you know what’s going on here tonight?”, he said, in a slight sales pitch that made me suspicious. “Naaaah...” I said.
“It’s the Bid for a Date night!”, he said enthusiastically. “And this young friend of mine”, he presented a young chap who perfectly fit into the category of all I despise about Bournemouth boys, “is one of the candidates to be bid for. How would you like a date with him?”
The prostitute smiled like a right smarmy git.
“Oh, so you aren’t trying to be nice, you’re just trying to pimp that guy!”, I said. “Well, thanks a lot!”
“Well?”, the Pimp asked.
"Alright..." I turned to the prostitute. “Go on then, sell yourself!”
Smarmy git in a shirt, gold necklace, boyband-style hair, clearly thinking he is God’s gift, cocked an eyebrow and, with the gesture of an aging, used-up model presenting fake jewellery on QVC, he said smugly “Do I need to?”
“Well, yeah!”, I said, flabbergasted at his narcissism, and he, vastly insulted, cosmo male model hissy-fit-esque, wandered off.
Bournemouth men.
I'll just buy a rabbit. And adopt, after all.

Who shapes you?

2006-10-20T13:29:00.000+01:00

“You are awake, and so you have seen the difference between us, between men
akin to their father, and those who take their destiny from a woman, the
difference between spirit and intellect.“
Narcissus in 'Narcissus and Goldmund' by Hermann Hesse

It makes me wonder, of whom did I take my life? I dare say, neither, especially mother, who worked her whole life to crush the spirit in me, for whom what I wanted was never good enough... to please her, I had to become like she wanted me to me, and that meant sacrificing everything that I wanted to do.
Could it have been my great-grandmother? Yet I hardly knew her until I was an adult, how could she have shaped me? Getting to know her was finding out how similar we were... does that mean it’s genetic? She has a passion for beauty and poetry and idealism that neither my grandmother (her daughter) nor my dad shared and therefore could not have passed on to me. Maybe it is genetic then? On the other hand, I’ve always felt like a stranger in my own family.

I enjoy my strength and independence, but still, there is a craving in me for protection. It is not that I need it, and unwelcome protection that stems from being patronizing drives me up the wall, but sometimes I want it. From some people. It’s not that I need it, and I know intellectually that I am worth protecting, so I can let go of it. It’s not that I need protection. I just want to know that I am worth it.

"Vertrauenslehrer"

2006-10-16T14:14:00.000+01:00

In the schools where I grew up, there was a weird concept. I don’t know how globally widespread it is, but it has to be bizarre wherever you go. At least from the kids’ point of view.
It’s the idea of the “teacher of trust”, how we call it: The teacher assigned to be a confidential to students. I mean, how can you be assigned to do that? The thing was, most of the teachers I knew who had that position were exactly the kind of psycho bastards that traumatised you on a daily basis and made something like a Vertrauenslehrer a necessity:
The p.e. teacher, an infamous sports nazi who has no qualms about chasing you 3 miles at high speed during a summer heat until you fainted, shouting slogans like “In a healthy body lives a healthy spirit!”
Or the sadistic math teacher nicknamed The Pig, and not just for the shape of his nose, who laughs at you when you explain your being late with having to take your ill pet to the vet to be put down.

Right. That’s exactly the person you want to tell your deepest, most emotional secrets to.
No wonder us Germans are fucked up.

Damn kids today!

2006-10-16T14:09:00.000+01:00

Bloglag since: 07 Aug 06

Somnetimes I honestly wonder whether kids today are really just annoying little shits (with exceptions, of course, to prove the rule) or whether that’s just a perception I have because I have grown older. Our media studies lecturer mentioned that it’s just a perception because we are bitter about losing our youth, and maybe that is a possibility, but to be honest, I think in most cases it’s complete bollocks.

Just now I came back from the shop, in complete shock. There was this mother with her kid in front of me in the queue; the mother a proper chav, the kid just an unruly little wanker, maybe 9 or 10 years old. There is always a stack of beer on offer piled up next to the till – half of them Carling cans, the other half Grolsch six pack bottles. And this little midget shit started poking at the cans to pierce the clingfilm they were wrapped in, and the security guard who stood nearby said: “If that falls, it’s gonna be expensive, lad!”
See, if that kid had been me, at the latest then I would have shushed. But this little poo wouldn’t stop. The mother, of course, wouldn’t do anything to keep the kid in order.
The stack started wobbling a bit, and the security guard put his hands against the bottles to steady them, and gave the kid another word of warning, but before he could finish the sentence, the stack of bottles dropped and half of it shattered on the floor. The kid just ran after his mother and hollered: “It’s his fault!” And all the mother had to say, with hardly a look over her shoulder, was to echo her kid: “It wos his fault.” (The security guard’s.) And off they went, leaving behind a mess, without a word of apology.
Maybe the kid didn’t knock it over directly, but his fuckin around with the stack surely set things off, and I’m appalled his mother didn’t even have the decency to reprimand him or apologise.

Man, it does my head in. Seriously, I don’t care what our lecturer said, but I do not remember ever treating things I didn’t own with such disrespect. Or thinking I could get away with acting shit like that. Back in the days, if you broke something in a shop, you had to pay for it, and no one ever thought that was unfair. It wouldn’t even occur to you to whinge about it.
But customer’s rights these days have just gone too far, and all it leads to is people thinking they can get away with murder, and not face the responsibilities for their actions. It drives me mad.

But then again, I went home and had a nice experience to outbalance that little bundle of asshole genes. Our internet had been busted for two weeks, and that night, outside his working hours, one of the guys who fixes stuff up for our landlords, came round and sorted out the problem. He is a really nice guy, and he brought his little daughter (5), who is painfully shy but apparently loves being around her dad when he is working. And all us girls start fussing over her because she is too cute for words, and offer her juice and chocolates and god knows what. She is a lovely kid, and kids like her give me hope that our future is not just gonna be populated by fuckwits and wankers who only bang on about their rights but never about their responsibilities. She looks like she is gonna turn out a really decent person. One can only hope.

Trojan

2006-10-16T14:07:00.000+01:00

When I walked home from work the other day, I nearly stepped on an empty box of condoms lying in the middle of the sidewalk. I grinned, wondering how it got there... did someone finish it off in the hedges somewhere? I mean, I always wondered how that happens, how people manage to lose a shoe without noticing... and for that matter, why an empty pack of condoms ended up not at home in the bin, but square in the street.
And then the name.
Have you ever thought how bizarre and funny that brand name actually is?
I mean, Trojan! Think of the associations.

Trojan. A BIG WOODEN horse built to create trust and then slyly ENTER – penetrate, if you will – a “fortress”, a city, just to ejaculate little mean creatures. The invaded will be hopelessly and mercilessly BANGED to pulp.
What a metaphor for rape, if you’ve ever seen one, the feminist fatale screams. This is so blatantly named by a man. Quite possibly a man with a small penis and a big need for compensation.
And what a metaphor of truth, any ever so slightly streetwise (i.e. blokewise) girl would say. Isn’t it the classic fuckwit strategy to get into any girl’s knickers?

I can’t actually think about it without giggling, which basically means that every time I wanna get jiggy, I have to choose a different brand condom to not ruin the mood.

What a tosser

2006-10-16T14:05:00.000+01:00

According to the Bournemouth Uni student paper, a Bournemouth Uni student has recently broken a national record… in masturbating. 7 1/2 hours. Apparently he was in pain for two days after.
Had he gone an hour longer, he would have broken the world record.

Yep, this town produces academics en masse. It’s so Bournemouth it’s almost satire.

Still, there’s stamina if I’ve ever seen it. I am impressed and will get his phone number.

On the pursuit of happiness

2006-10-16T14:03:00.000+01:00

I’m reading a book by the Dalai Lama at the moment, and it opened my eyes to a few things that I had known for a long time, but either denied or forgotten for that time being:

The purpose of life is to achieve happiness.

Oh, I hear the evangelicals howl in outrage.
But what is happiness – true happiness – other than heaven, other than the soul perfectly tuned, perfectly in peace with itself and its source of life, reaping the maximum benefits from this relationship? All the bible asks... all any religion teaches... are ways to achieve that. There is nothing selfish about it. Happiness is the soul’s ideal state, the soul’s archaic, original state, which is why anything in life, any motivation, is aimed to reach this state, in healthy or unhealthy ways, or to simply avoid its opposite, di-stress. A happy soul will automatically strive to be virtuous and to create happiness around itself. A happy soul is a saint’s soul.
True, suffering may build character, but what else does suffering do but remind you of what you really want, of emphasising the lack of which you crave? They say suffering makes you stronger, but I don’t necessarily agree. Suffering breaks you, bit by bit, cripples your vision of goodness, and makes you fearful. And it is no secret what happens to many hurt and scared people. A precious few learn. But most of them lash out and pass on the suffering that was inflicted on them. No healthy, stable individual goes to commit a crime. Or violence.

The worry is that the goal to achieve happiness becomes one of unscrupulous hedonism and selfishness. But things like that don’t bring happiness. There is nothing wrong with a healthy level of pleasure-seeking, but as soon as it becomes addiction, it will lead to suffering. Happiness and goodness go hand in hand.

The sentence we are to find solace in in the midst of suffering – “It can only get better, there is no way it could get worse” – is a lie. It can always get worse. One doesn’t even have to point to Job to know that. That sentence is a cop-out.
Suffering doesn’t create good people. It creates, for the most, bad people. Crime. A permanent sense of loss and deprivation and fear that creates greed. Envy. Bitterness. Look at me. When I’m depressed, I’m a shit person and a shit friend. I become bitter, angry, destructive, whiny, clingy.

Is the pursuit of happiness mere hedonism? Buddhism differentiated between happiness and pleasure. True happiness does not create bad consequences. Happier people are more willing to help others, are much more open to connect, less willing to inflict harm. They can only give what they got. How can that be a bad thing?

Axioms of daily life

2006-10-06T14:01:00.000+01:00

There is something I have learned in the 3 decades I have been scampering around on this planet: Too many improvements are detrimental. I don’t know what it is, but isn’t it annoying how some things that are working perfectly well are changed anyway? Thought up by a world-removed marketing team with nothing to do, and quite likely just to annoy the hell out of me.

Take, for instance, the recent change of the Bournemouth University logo. Apparently, they spent a 120 grand on it, something which a five-year-old would have scribbled on the wall with a crayon while having a poo, but got bored with it halfway through. The old one was perfectly alright, has been around for ages so that everyone recognises it, I just don’t see why they had to debunk it. Especially if it gets replaced with something as shit as this. Considering that this is one of the biggest and best media schools in the country, this really looks just like a half-arsed effort created by someone last minute who just feebly hoped to pass their course.
But that’s just one example.

There is a particular thing I can’t get my head around.

(OK, just to say ahead of time, those of you who are squeamish about the female cycle, you better stop reading now. I am aware I am at grave risk to gross away the entire male readership of my blog. But then, grossing people out for fun is almost my trademark.)

Right, girlies. Let’s talk about Always, shall we?
Am I the only one who thinks that the new “cotton feel” pad is totally shit? I mean, through the centuries, since the invention of the prototype of the maxi pad, we’ve had more than enough cotton feel.
Then, finally, towards the end of the 20th century, some merciful soul invented “dry weave”, which was perfect. You could bleed like a pig, but you’d still feel as dry as dust devils in Texas down there. One could almost ignore the nuisance that is the monthly visit. And then some naturalist asshole had to come and spoil it all. Quite obviously a man who knows nothing about the joys of menstruation decided what we ladies really want is the cotton feel back.
See, there is nothing wrong with cotton. Cotton is nice.

However, we’re talking of wet cotton here. Basically, Always Cotton Feel has returned to the old wet knickers feel us ladies tried to escape for centuries and finally found relief from with the dry weave. What a fuck-up.

And then, am I the only one who finds the menstruation message on the wrapper totally bizarre? It’s like sanitary towel and fortune cookie all rolled into one. Ew. No pun intended.

What about tampons, you may ask? (Or not, heh). I find them a bit obscene, to be honest. Which probably has to do with my first encounter with them in Stephen King’s Carrie’s class: when her class mates chucked tampons at her, hollering “plug it up”. That’s just foul.

Periods are a weird thing, anyway. You hate them with a passion if you get them, but if you don’t, you panic. No wonder Eve got it for punishment. It’s a no-win situation.

Splitterbrötchen

2006-10-06T13:44:00.000+01:00

(Splitterbrötchen, n., Berlin dialect for sweet German breadroll)

One day this last September, Dad and I drove past the Wernerbad, a public swimming pool in Mahlsdorf. What a surprise, like all the places connected to my childhood, this place is abandoned, overgrown by weeds, the building defaced by graffiti, a sickly version of what it used to be when I was in the single numbers.

To be honest, there were only about two or three times I can remember going there. Once with some girl friends, once with my older brother (always a bit of a weird deal; he took me places, and in return I had to endure him and his taunting whenever it pleased him. It wasn’t that I could run away – he was my ticket back home. And one of my greatest fears was to not find my way home. In my kid’s mind, being lost in Mahlsdorf equalled being lost in a South American rainforest; I was MILES from home and would never be found. I dunno why I ever went anywhere with my brother, maybe because he could be nice, but you would never know when he would get tired of it, and a) I was gullible, and b) he could be very convincing when trying to sell me one of his plans. Back to the story).

Once, we also went on a day trip with my class. Day trips were like bank holidays for school kids, they happened about two or three times a year, and instead of sitting in class, we would go somewhere nice. It wasn’t strictly academic all the time, either... some days, it would be field trips, but most of the time it would be pure entertainment, and you wouldn’t be quizzed on it.
We’d go to the movies, or the Pionierpalast, or in the woods somewhere. And this fine summer day, just before the summer holidays started, we went to the Wernerbad. We must have been in 5th grade or something, because I remember the particular teacher that took us. And like she usually did, she came up with yet another idiotic idea: that we all lump our lunches together and have a picnic.

I know, that sounds kinda nice. It probably is, too, in theory. And you can see the pedagogic value of it: bonding, learning to share, the works. But this is the real world, baby. And in this real world lived Robert. Robert, the sporty guy who would have been kinda pretty if he hadn’t been such an asshole. Girls tended to have crushes on him; I always despised him because he made my life hell. He was our teacher’s pet (our class teacher taught both biology and p.e., and any less sporty kid was an Untermensch in her eyes.) So Robert, who beat everyone in sprint, and who was at the other end of the speed scale from me (who always came in last, huffin and puffin) and rewarded me accordingly with disdaining eyes and comments of mockery, was her darling. Worse... I remember her saying to him what sexy legs he had... that was in 6th or 7th grade, but still! She always was a bit of a perv.

Anyways, so there we were, obediently emptying our lunchboxes onto a blanket. Apples and bananas tumbled about, and loads of wrapped sandwiches. And I immediately noticed the greed that sprung up in Robert’s eyes when he spotted my Splitterbrötchen (a sweet bread roll that I ate with butter and a sprinkling of salt; an orgasm in your mouth!). The fucker was after my Splitterbrötchen! All he had contributed was an insultingly ordinary boring pate sandwich. And he was an asshole, if I haven’t mentioned that yet. So the picnic was hardly a fair deal.

“Everyone ready to eat?”, our teacher hollered. Robert and I went into start position: leaning slightly forward, but not as to raise suspicion, raising our hands, ready to reach and grab in a split second. We only had one chance; we would get in trouble if we started fighting over food (it wasn't the proper thing to do for a young 'pioneer'). Our teacher had decided our lunches’ fates, and her word was law. In the spirit of communism, I had been disowned of my delicious lunch, and the only way to get it back was to be quick. Quicker than Robert. A challenge if there ever was one. But I was determined. Anyone but Robert! That fucker would only get my Splitterbrötchen over my dead body. He would have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

“Go!”, our teacher shouted. Robert’s and my hand shot forward like lightning. But Fortuna had smiled on me, nudged by the Goddess of Justice. When the dust settled, Robert emerged empty-but-scratched-handed... and me victorious, holding my Splitterbrötchen triumphantly like a crusader the head of the chief turk. Robert spat curses at me and called me a greedy bitch (hell, who is he to talk), but I didn’t care. Never had a Splitterbrötchen tasted sweeter and more delicious than under his hateful, envious eyes.

Childhood memories - Alex

2006-09-11T20:41:00.000+01:00

I met Alex Merle on the first school day after the summer holidays, entering possibly 5th or 6th grade. He was the new kid in school, and when I entered our class room, all the girls were whispering to each other, something along the lines of “Have you seen the fittie in class 5b?”
(I can’t for the life of me remember what the word of the year was for ‘fittie’ in what was it? 1988?)

I can’t deny that I was curious immediately... I like pretty things, and I am just a girl, after all. But I wouldn’t have been caught dead admitting it. So I glanced, demonstratively indifferent, into the room of our parallel class. The new lad I saw sitting there looked painfully aware of being ogled by the entire female population of his age group. And yes, he was quite cute. Dark hair made this here old cow swoon in her baby fat days.

Of course, I refused to join in the giggly girl shit. They would have never let me.
(- what are you giggling about? Like he’d ever look at you! - )
I wasn’t in the position to join the girl stuff. They would chase me back into my place, into the corner for freaks and weirdos. So I was defiant about it, too. Fuck you cows, who wants to be like you anyway.

I left the school building on my own in the afternoon, kicking my p.e. bag as I strolled home.
When I looked up, I saw Alex Merle walking a few yards in front of me, and no sooner did I register the giggles behind me, too. The girls who had been gaga over Alex the whole day were flocking together into a mighty stalking pack. They were the Legion of female prepubescent hormones gone bananas. Birds of prey, so to speak. And they had caught the scent and tracked him down.
Half the way home, Alex seemed to sense that something was up. He turned around. And found himself face to face with a drooling, giggling crowd of pre-teenage girls, ready to pounce. And somewhere around there, caught in the middle, was me, semi-invisible, looking sheepish and feigning oblivion to the looming battle as I trudged homewards. This was a thing between boys and girls. No dorks allowed.

I reached my apartment house and unlocked the front door. It was then that I realised Alex was running for his life towards me. Me? ME??? Well, let’s not get our hopes up. What he was running for was the door, really, a dust cloud mixed with uncontrolled oestrogen in hot pursuit.
I held the door open and he jumped in, and I slammed the door shut, saving his life and betraying the sisterhood. Well, sisterhood my arse, really.
Alex gave me a crooked and somewhat embarrassed smile, and I said, in a stressed non-committed way as to hide any hint of attraction, the most harmless flirtatious thing I could come up with.
“If you don’t watch it, they’ll eat you alive.”
I know. Nearly 20 years later, I still cringe. He didn’t say much except thanks and went into his apartment on the first floor (I lived on the second).

Alex and I became friends pretty soon, sharing a love for X-Men comic books and other geeky things, and for their cocker spaniel Cassie and his (single) mom, who I thought was well cool. But the best thing was that this left the popular girl crowd baffled: how it was possible that the most dorky and unpopular girl in school managed to hang out with the school’s latest hottie acquirement, while they were positively ignored. That’s the beauty of childhood. That’s when guys still like you for who you are, and not for whether you got a nice pair of tits. Another four years, and he would have never run, man. But this was also a defining moment for me in my relationship with men... in order to be friends with them, I had to deny my girlhood. Girls like me, that’s all we got. That, or nothing.

But back then, needless to say, it made me feel smug as hell – just the joy of rubbing it in their faces, even though any form of attraction to Alex faded in the shortest amount of time to a good old mateship, which only disintegrated when we grew into teenagers and lost interest in what we used to share. I could never really figure out whether I would have wanted it any different.

The problem of evil

2006-09-11T20:15:00.000+01:00

I have always wondered how to cure evil. I know, that sounds stupid, like I've got some Messiah complex. But the thing is, I just see it like, how can I expect for things to get better if I just sit and wait? Maybe it's part of my "religious" belief... I believe in the concept of evil, even though I also believe in postmodernism. I believe there are things people can do wrong. And I believe that evil is the tendency to damage, harm and distort.
The Christian view, in simple terms is, to turn the other cheek, and I understand that to a certain extent, because if one side doesn't put a stop to violence, you get disasters like the middle east. But it isn't that easy, and I think it must be a misunderstood concept, as well, because it would imply to accept any form of abuse without ever standing up for yourself.
How far do you go? How long do you wait? How often do you try it the nice way?
That's a thing that has tortured me immensely... when I fell out with The Evil Bitch that gave birth to me. Obviously, the only way to find peace was to cut her off. Some things are beyond healing.
It's also really hard for me to be around mean and rude people. Rude not in the sense of swearing, but in the sense of being unkind just for the sake of it. Fair enough, I am somewhat on the sensitive side, and I can accept that people sometimes have a bad day, but I have met people who seem to take pleasure in hurting others, and I simply can't get my head around that. I just don't get it.
I have tried to be nice to them. To overlook the fact that they are hurtful. Foolishly, I thought that maybe being nice would be a way to break that. It may work in novels and movies. But in real life? Forget about it. It's hard to be compassionate with someone who hurts you permanently.
It boggled my mind. Why the fuck are people still evil when you have done everything to show them that you mean well?
I found the answer the other day.
It's a simple quote from a guy called Scott Peck (I wonder, is that the same guy who wrote "The Road Less Travelled"?), and it goes like this.

"Regardless of how well they attempt to appear calm and collected in their daily dealings, the evil live their lives in fear. It is a terror – and a suffering – so chronic, so interwoven into the fabric of their being, that they may not even feel it as such.”

That's when I realised that there is no cure for evil. The only thing you can do is keep your own life sorted. I dunno if it is wrong to shut out evil people, for the sake of trying to avoid being hurt and become a monster yourself. I just can't do it. I don't feel equipped for it. And I dunno if I should be.
Scheiß-Postmodernism.

Dream-cum-nightmare, what's what, dangling carrot, doberman

2006-09-11T20:10:00.000+01:00

The faceless man kept lashing at me with a machete, and his slashes are so quick, I don’t realise he has hit me until I see the deep gash in my right hand, in which only pain starts to throb long seconds after I have been staring at it. He is absolutely mental, and to my screams of terror, of frantic attempts to escape, he only responds with laughter. I dunno how often I see him chase after me, with this huge knife, and I can’t help but scream, screams so violent they feel like they are going to tear me apart, and I run, my body running on the energy of fear and panic, driving me to exhaustion, while he keeps up with me effortlessly, like it is only a game which amuses him greatly.

Then I am with this family, and the wife gathers laundry, and I offer to carry her hamper. You don’t have to, she says, but I insist, and I carry it, even though it makes that cut bleed; I want to help so they can see I am good, and they can love me.
They have a party, and I play with their two children, and I am so anxious not to do anything wrong, because if the kids hate me, they will hate me, too.
After the party, I want to help them clean up and prepare sandwiches for tomorrow. They look tired and I ask them when they have to get up. We’ve got to be somewhere by 10 o’clock, they say, and I am shocked and offer to finish the food so they can go to bed. They politely refuse, and I can tell they want to get rid of me, nicely, and I wish this would never end. I could just be a quiet interior of their apartment, their life, I would be no trouble, no trouble at all, and soak up the love in this family. It doesn’t have to be directed at me, just experiencing theirs would be enough for me.
They hug me and say, We’ll be in touch, and we’ll write you. I can never be sure that will happen, most say that to shorten the goodbye, but then you never hear from them again. I know that. I know it will be that way. They don’t know what it means for me to have to leave.

Shelbourne Summer Afternoon

2006-08-04T11:51:00.000+01:00

for Jamie

When scouring the grass
in the garden of genius boy
spoons can be found
he uses
to fix his bike

spoons to abuse zebra spiders
with, make them flip
over a hot cup of tea
yet object to insect torture
by means of magnifiers

while,
a lying promise,
a pre-summer breeze
makes the grass shudder
and skin crawl

bloglag: since June 17

WANKERS!!!

2006-07-28T16:39:00.000+01:00

What the fuck?

I can't log into my myspace account!!! It tells me the account has been deleted????!!!

What the flying fuck???

I feel like someone amputated my leg.

This needs to be amended.

I'm still shaking.

Time for a drink!

Congratulations!!

2006-07-13T11:20:00.000+01:00

Pathetically late in most (well, all) cases, but it shan't be ignored anyway.

Congratulations to the BACOMMERS who have just graduated. Especially to Iain Rowley, who got 80% for his creative dissertation (a poetry collection) - a beast to achieve, as Malcolm is difficult to please when it comes to that. And an extra congrats for achieving a first class degree.
I (and from various recent chats, Helen C. and Roman G.) had never any doubts that you would, genius boy!
Congrats to Jim, whose results I don't know but who managed to whip out a difficult dissertation and doing so well in it that it has been recommended for publication.
Congrats to all the rest of you who, as I could witness in the past year, made the best and most of their university years. I'm proud of you all.

And not to forget, even though it's been ages, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Jamie. I will throw you a party, and if it's the last thing I am doing. Wild horses and irate Germans couldn't stop me.
You are ze Aw3s0m3! :) xxx

Bored

2006-07-02T19:06:00.000+01:00

It all started out as a pub dare question (and believe it or not, a lot of Bournemouth men are so gagging for it, it could actually work as a pickup line, too), but now we've gotten intrigued. But although google is the oracle for everything, it could not answer this question.
So I just emailed an expert about it.

Do bumblebees poo?

Note to self: really need to get a life.

Time

2006-06-25T17:49:00.000+01:00

“We don’t waste time. We keep it, whether we drive directly East or just a bit North first. Did you forget everything? Up here it is not important how quickly you get there. If you take a detour, your life is still happening. No time is lost... Maybe that was the biggest problem the Quallunaaq brought us – time. We had to learn that there is something like wasted time. The Quallunaaq believe that waiting means wasting time and therefore wasting life.”

– Akesuk in “The Swarm” by Frank Schätzing

Maybe Western concepts are not what they are cracked up to be. I see time as my biggest enemy, when it actually isn’t.

Needless to say, this is the desperate talk of a nearly 30-year-old.

Repeat and rewind

2006-06-25T17:17:00.000+01:00

A week ago, as almost every weekend, Dad called again. I love talking to him, but as I have mentioned before, there are just some issues that I dread. And once again, he tried “the talk”.
“Remember, I am not trying to tell you what to do”, he said. I knew immediately what was coming, and my stomach knotted up.
“But I had a chat with Sabine the other night. And we were both thinking that maybe it is better for you if you come back to Germany.”
“Dad…”, I began.
“I know”, he hurried to say, “but don’t you think it is better for you to be around your family?”
“Dad, we’ve had this conversation. I am not coming back.” I couldn’t stop myself from sounding somewhat antagonised.
“Don’t you think it will be easier for you to find a job here?”
Well, I knew what he meant by that. It meant that he would get me a job somewhere. Man, I really don’t know what it is, but why does he decide to be supportive now that I am nearly 30? I could have used it when I was 15, but then all was geared towards making me independent, which was mostly throwing me in cold water.
Dad seems to have this idea that I am an undervalued genius kid who shouldn’t do retail. But I love my job. I love the book trade. It’s not that I wanna be stuck in a bookshop for the rest of my life, but I have no problem of learning all about it and use it as a stepping stone into publishing.
“Dad, remember this. Everything I wanted I got eventually, but most of it I got later than expected. But I got it! I don’t mind having to wait and work for a few years, and nothing is wasted time."
"I know. You're right. But just think about it. When you come to visit, let's just have a talk: you, Sabine and me. We all put down our views and discuss this like reasonable adults."
The knot in my stomach grew instantly bigger. Don't get me wrong, I love Dad and Sabine and they are great people. But this talk wouldn't be among us three, it would be them versus me.
The problem is, I am not good at discussing these things.
"Dad, there is nothing to discuss. I have made up my mind already. I don't want to go back. It would be like admitting I have failed."
"That's bullshit", he said.
"It's not to me. I am happy here. I have achieved one step in life I wanted to go, and that was to get away. Why would I throw that away?"
He sighed. "Alright. Just allow me to think about it. Not worry... just think about it. Okay?"
"Okay", I said.
I know he means well. I keep saying that. And I enjoy that he cares, but at this point it suffocates me more than anything.

I think what really gets me is this. I dunno how it all came to be, but because I was so shy and timid and anxious as a kid and it was hard for me to slip out of my comfort zones, my parents came to believe that I would never amount to anything (mother), or manage to go through with anything. Dad only started to believe in me when I rebooted my life by dropping out of school and becoming an au pair. I got a job and worked for a year to pay nearly 4,000 DM for driving lessons to get the required license, and did an unpaid internship in a kindergarten and loads of babysitting to get my childcare references. It was then that I learned that determination is what gets you what you want, and to persist even when things don’t look rosy or don’t bring immediate results. Being a nanny made me grow up and completely turned my life around, but the fact is that Dad never thought I could go through with it till the very end. He only became convinced after I got back. I dunno why suddenly he seems to have forgotten.
Him trying to “help” me this way really is a way of saying that I am inadequate, and it makes me feel the way I felt as a kid. Not having your parents believe in you is a fucking stumbling stone for a kid, it’s weakening and discouraging because we look to parents for everything, and I remember how hard it was for me to work up the courage to face all I wanted to do on my own.
I am just tired of being under scrutiny, of feeling like I owe an explanation for everything I do, of having to live up to expectations. I know Dad means well, but the underlying issue is that he doesn’t trust I can do it on my own. It makes me feel like I am 5 again, and I hate that feeling. That’s why I want total independence, so I don’t have to explain myself anymore. I know I shouldn’t let it affect me, but I guess I am just wired that way. I know better than thinking that other people’s views are an accurate description of who I am, but reminding myself that this is not the case, but that I can be whatever I want to be or do whatever I want to do, is hard sometimes.
I need all the encouragement I can get, and it does disappoint me when I am not getting it from the people I need it from. Not disappoint. It scares me. It scares me when it comes from people who know me well, because what if they are right? I don’t even want to finish the thought... it turns the knot in my stomach into a ball of pain.
I tried to explain to my dad that my main goal in life isn’t a career. It’s happiness. Having a career is just one way to achieve it... but one thing I know for sure is that I could never find that happiness in Germany. My only happiness would derive from the hope of me one day getting away from it. I’d rather be a waitress in England than a publisher in Germany. Knock on wood that I never have to get there to prove my point.

A Shelbournian afternoon

2006-06-17T11:58:00.000+01:00

We're in the garden of the Shelbourne boys, languishing on scratched lawn furniture spray-painted with the Phonetics' logo, a tiger head. My favourite boys, Jamie and Geoff, and me.
"I'm cold", Geoff says.
"How can you be cold?", I ask. It's sunny and warm... well, warmish. He shrugs and looks down on himself. "Well, I am just wearing a dressing gown!"
"It's warmer than my clothes!", I reply. "And I am not cold."
"Well, I am not swapping clothes with you to find out", he fires back, in a bantery way, and Jamie, who's been watching us, giggles.
It gets quiet. We sit there with our cups of tea and absorb the peace of the garden, made complacent by a Sunday afternoon. Then Geoff looks over to Jamie, who is still smiling to himself.
"You're thinking about it!", Geoff accuses, and Jamie's grin, caught in the act, turns into giggles again. He turns his head away, but can't stop grinning.
A minute later, Geoff looks at him again, only to catch that the expression in Jamie's face hasn't changed. "You're still thinking about it!", he complains. "Stop it!"
Jamie breaks out in giggles again. He tries to force himself to stop, but his efforts are in vain. That he still pictures Geoff in my clothes and finds it hilarious is practically tattooed on his forehead, and the more Geoff complains, the more he has to laugh.

It hasn't got a plot, and to most it may mean nothing, but for me it is such an intense moment of good-natured bantering and togetherness, it makes my heart laugh. This is one of the things I will remember for the rest of my life, and store away in my mental scrap book, because it reminds me why I love being alive.

Navelgazing tomfoolery about navelgazing tomfoolery

2006-06-16T19:52:00.000+01:00

I know I haven't posted in ages. That doesn't mean I haven't written anything. I had this post noted down for a while, too, but never got to posting it. That's right. I wrote a blog about not blogging and didn't blog it. How postmodern is that?
Baloney aside, I haven't posted because there were a lot of things that I still haven't qualified enough or properly to post them. Some are too private to post. Some involve thoughts on people who most likely wouldn't want me to put this on here, and who I don't want to piss off by dragging things into public.
Then there are some things which I have written "under the influence", be that booze, depression or PMS, or any state when I wasn't quite myself or when I just was venting.
And then there are things which are, albeit urgent in my mind, better left unsaid. I don't even want to note them down. Writing something down gives some things a permanence they don't deserve or which it is unwise to ascribe to them... so I don't.
Funny, isn't it? I mean, what's "being yourself"? How do I know when I am not myself? Am I not myself when I am depressed, or angry, or drunk, or is that just a part of me that I don't like or don't want to be? I guess my idea of it is how permanent I feel about certain things, and whether they only get "altered" under the influence.

Or maybe I am just confused about who I am and who I want to be, and don't want to settle. I really don't know.

I just don't want to give permanence to a part of me that I don't want to accommodate. Fluctuation is human, but do I want to feed the wrong wolf in me? Do I want to grow roots on those parts of myself that I'd rather see disappear, by generating a history for them?

Quote of the day

2006-06-16T08:16:00.000+01:00

"There is nothing genius about a chicken taking a poo, even if it is blasé about it."

(Jamie, commenting on my excited outburst about them chickens running around in the Monkeyworld café. I tried to coax one over, and it just gave me a "fuck off" look over the shoulder before it dropped a shit for emphasis. Much to Jamie's consternation, it made me squeal with delight.)