there are days when it is difficult for me to be where i am. it is one of those days. woke up, all alarms were off, but the blessed freaking church bells of the münster have a will of their own, and there was one hell of a lot of ringing and chiming while i was trying to sleep. then, it was my brother who rang. the phone by my bed picks up some EMI and it sounds like bad news. why didn't i pull the plug last night on that cheap cacophony? my brother seems in an OK mood, that is good. he worries too much, i worry too little, on the average, out parents did well. one manic depressive and another wayward, that is the sum result of their progeny. in discussing with my son, their only grandchild, what direction his university studies might take, we concurred that he had all the prerequisites for studying psychology, a fairly screwed up family. it seems he has abandoned the idea of either pure mathematics and/or english literature and is opting for the more applied, psychology and computer science. personally i think he has all the talents of a great lawyer, he writes brilliantly, has damn good logical skills, is pretty fast on the verbal track, and an IQ that is too embarrassing to quote, certainly an handicap in swiss society which is so geared to average everything and anything.
appropriately enough i started this day listening to music of the genre "electronica" and a hot cup of tea. still, i have this ill feeling that i would rather be in the algarve. the trouble being that it is not possible to be in two places at the same time, although i keep trying. what two? three. remember, it is always at least three. yes, last night i kept thinking that my favorite party dress is in storage in the basement of the my dear's villa in Amman waiting for him to move back to his humble dwelling of over 700 square meters, this will be in about two years. inshallah. yes, there is some irony in this life of mine.
what is in store for 2005?
i do not know.
two minutes before the new year rang in, standing in the middle of the Münsterplatz with about an odd 1000 other people, a friend and i quickly passed review on 2004. for one, it was an year of a lot of changes, for the other, totally different changes. i finished one manuscript, worked on two others, worked a bit, published one somewhat interesting article that got translated to more languages than i can keep track of, travelled quite a bit, bought a digital cam and powerbook, did research in areas that i thought i would never touch, got home sick about doing more serious physics research while in göttingen, trained aikido for one whole year with only one injury that put me out of commission for one week (and on morphine), and travelled far more than i had planned. best of all, is that i walked and run many a mile barefoot along the shores of the atlantic.
what did i learn about myself in 2004 besides being a pain sissy with no shame for strong drugs? while i make jokes with the youngsters who complain about their joints giving them pain in practice, and although i can take thousands of falls and rolls in one week, when it comes to serious pain, i am the biggest chicken. i do not like physical pain. but this is not new. i much prefer the slow torture of continued practice to the pains of a decaying body.
i learned, or rather was reminded, that i have always had great difficulty dealing with success. in 2004 i met with some totally unexpected successes, and i almost freaked out. an internal and very loud "leave me alone" was my immediate reaction. i had no serious arguments with anybody, although i had a few tricky situations to negotiate, somehow i did mediate these in a rather successful way. i really like that, it reminded me of the old days of "defusing bombs" as a way of making a living.
the word of the year for me was "constraints" in english, and the attempt to map out the difference between it and the french "contrainte" had me on the border of the tatami having a meta conversation with one of my teachers (sensei).
the unchanged: same dreams, same loves.
