playing the game

last night i had dinner with one of my best friends. i have lots of best friends and lots of friendships that have sprung the confines of convention. besides all of that, i also like to share the nature of our conversations and interactions.

last summer he and i started on what became a six month project of reciprocal moral support. yes, moral support, we both needed exactly that at the time we were both restricting out expenses, so there was no money available to pay expensive personal coaches or assistants; we took the matter into our own hands. i can say that i was in good hands; he is a clear thinking jurist with a training in mediation. i am a fuzzy thinking physicist with a training in high-impact-delivery coaching.

we sat down in my office to a pot of tea one day in july and formulated the goals of our individual projects. together we created a support structure that involved weekly to do lists and meetings either in person or on the phone. on the weekly meetings we took turns in reporting on the progress on the to do list, the barriers encountered, and on what the hell we were feeling at the time. often we cried, but mostly we listened to each other and asked critical questions. mostly, i repeat, we listened.

both our projects came to yield results that neither of us would  have expected, and that have surpassed our expectations. my own project brought me to milestones in what is a much longer project and it also uncovered a few parts of my life that were totally dysfunctional. it was painful to discover the dysfunctionalities and it is necessary to deal with them if i am to see my dreams turn into reality.

yesterday he shared what is one of the feedbacks on the result of his project. his project was to write a doctoral dissertation in a rather esoteric aspect of our legal system. his thesis advisor has now read the opus and he has been showered with abundant praise on the quality of his dissertation.

this legal friend of mine is brilliant, like most of my friends. however anybody who tried and found a good excuse knows exactly how easy it is to give up on completing a doctoral dissertation once you have entered the workforce and are gainfully employed somewhere. he took an unpaid sabbatical to write his doctoral thesis, and he knew that he was up against windmills of all sorts and projections. my project was no less challenging given its nature. alone and left to our devices, we both knew that we did not stand much of a chance to see it to the end without finding an exilient and  seductive excuse for abandoning the enterprise at hand.

i know for my part that there was one moment when the idea of jumping off a bridge was a plausibility. i also know myself well enough to know that such fleeting thoughts are the social ether that we unconscientiosuly breathe, and i being a iota aware do catch such thoughts as uninvited guests and can distinguish these as not being the product of disciplined thinking. he also went through ups and downs of all sorts from an attractive job offer from another firm to having his girlfriend pass the message that she was his ex-girlfriend via one of his best friends.

last night we sat for a good round of conversation, a glass of wine and a simple meal. we ended discussing some aspects of the workings within his present employer (a very well-known swiss company) and there was a lot of ranting and  comparing notes. i pointed him to the old wisdom of sun tzu the art of war and he was not thrilled. i know, it never thrilled me to think that we humans, animals of superior intelligence, interact by playing games with each other and basically screwing whoever gets in the way of our plots and machinations. it is a game indeed, and indeed some of us end up walking that moral hight ground that i know much too well, and will categorically say that we will not play the game. yeah, i have been there and i have been taking some time out to think about it. for me it is rather simple: i am not particularly interested in somebody else's game, much less in the rules of the game. i just want to win my game. this is the starting point for all: we want to win our game.

come to think of it, it is not even the rules of the game that disturb me much. it so happen that the game is laden with pitfalls. one  of the first pitfalls that most succumb to is to fall for the belief that to win, all others must loose. wrong, this is not a problem with the rules, this is problem with the attitude.

i am discovering that i like this subject far too much, and that this post is getting much too long, and the day much too short.

Technorati Tags: coach, dinner, friendship, game, legal, philosophy, rules, values, war, win

getting it right

i could get an hint from the fact that the novel with this title was written by a man labeled conservative and born in 1925. but is it an hint?

the facts are a bit simpler, and this is about me, not about some smart cookie born in colonialized land. i keep on forgetting that i am a colonist by the hazard of birth, and that i too have all the rights of any other bastard or avetrol ever conceived on the planet. so, let me get this straight from the beginning: i have a right to this as much as anybody else. whatever this is, it is my this to define.

then to add insult to injury, let me continue that marriage was a bad invention to only be topped by that of nationalism. in a world of abundance, the bad ideas are just as abundant as the good ideas, so let me start painting this world the colour that i want to paint it. you may not like it, then do not look. the fondest memories of my childhood are of those of afternoons spent building houses with the wooden blocks that were then to be the floor of my parents bedroom. i also wanted to be an architect, and somehow i never found the way to be become one. why do i cry when i think of this?

rule number one: i live here
rule number two: so does the rest of humanity and a few other animals
rule number three: figure it out!

i have been trying to figure out for the past week what has me so damned paralyzed. i can not really talk of writer's block, or lack of ideas or none of that nonsense. i called it fear, but is it fear? i sat there on my comfortable voltaire fauteil the other day and the tears started to roll down my face when thinking of what it was like to be the teenager whom i was, or at least what my memory renders of it. tears still come up whenever i think of this time in my life.

it was once suggested that my adverse sensitivities to certain foods was caused by a psychological shock sometime in my life. i heard this many years ago, and being trained in the hard sciences i immediately relegated it to the bin labeled "hypothesis" and went on denying the whole affair. denial did not work well. whatever is the cause or source, irreverent to all lack of scientific understanding, my sensitivities are real, and my organism reacts adversely in several ways with the ingestion of such "nourishing offenders."  this annoys me beyond imagination, all that i ever wanted to be was to be just like everybody else. fuck it, i am not. i can not even eat what a gluten intolerant person can, although some gluten free products are also free of all the other stuff that i ought to not eat. i immediately withdraw from any conversation in which somebody starts complaining that they must not have ONE particular foodstuff and they go on ranting how terribly limiting that is. really? i withdraw because i would rather scream at them for being such myopic averish idiots!

scream! when i miss the beach, it is because early in the morning on my run, what i do is scream. i scream at the ocean, i scream my pain away. if what has me paralyzed is fear, it is the fear of pain. how am i to embrace this fear and this pain? is fear the anticipation of pain, and is pain what i am trying to avoid?

on the back of this, i think of that image so engraved in my memory of the first time that i went to a certain ivy league school and after a most stimulating discussion with a colleague we said goodbye and i turned my back to head back to the car and drive to new york city. i could not  turn around and look back at where i had just been. yes, i wanted to be there and be part of it. for the record, i became part of it, i spent some time on the faculty at that ivy league university, and i wrote a lot of journals while there and have published none of it. what is remarkable is that i remember my paralysis and inability to turn back while coming down the steps. some power was holding me and whispering to not turn back.. what am i to make of this? why do i remember this so vividly, and why was i so present to that very moment that it seems to have turned to stone in my memory?

i am tired of the average, like i am tired of not being average. i am tired of not looking back and trying to avoid the pain. last wednesday when i got to my therapist/analyst all that i could come up with was that i was tired. she offered that i lay down. nothing hit me more strangely than the idea of laying down, i did not even seem to be able to decline the offer properly. i had already taken a nap that afternoon, and was feeling damned guilty about sleeping in the middle of the day instead of being out there being productive. what the fuck am i talking about? what on earth is going on? i am not quite sure that being productive is one of the goals in my life. i just want to write, and frankly words are for the most part a totally useless creation. the world keeps on rotating on its axis and around the sun just fine without a word needing to ever be written. there was a big bang and there will be a solar final explosion not so in the near future, but eventually that will finally reduce all of the solar system to ash. ash or whatever plasma debris the burning out of the sun will produce, that is the future.

i am not up on cosmology these days. cosmology is the other thing that had i had the guts to go for it, i would have studied it. come to think of it, being an astronomer would have been a rather cool occupation... architect... astronomer... agronomist... at least i did start with the first letter of the latin alphabet!

somewhere along the line i got it in my little pretty head convinced that i did not have a right to live, that i had no right to go after my likes and dreams, and that the only way to go about getting anywhere close to what i liked, i had to disguise it and make it somehow look like what i thought was expected of me. totally wonderfully fucked plan that was, and now i am starting to see into the fallacies and booby traps built into such a plan. it is not amusing, as a matter of fact, it is damned painful. facing my psychology, the mashed up interpretations of a collection of oxymoronic hazards that we call life, is not much of a picnic, it is both painful and a comedy. this one life - mine - is contradiction.

we do take great pleasure in sexual activity, yet when we look at genitals, i must confess that i fail to see the beauty of such appendages, protrusions and cavities. beauty is an odd invention, and it lives in a parallel world of that of pleasure. one constant universality of nature is its irreverence towards intellectual abstractions. welcome to contradiction, it simply does not exist in nature, it an intellectual artifact.

so, i am tired, and i can not even gather up the wisdom to accept to lay down. still, there are days when i feel tired down to the marrow of my bones, and then there are days when i could climb everst in one breath! that is how i feel, that is not necessarily what my body is up to. still when i am tired and sleepy and can not quite concentrate on anything and can only turn the same old stale thoughts around in my head... it may be wise to lay down and sleep.

still, lately i have been discovering another side of this: i may be totally fucked up, but it seems that i am in very good company. less than two weeks ago i listened to a friend of mine recount the sad tale of a relationship gone sour. of all the people that i would have no doubts about being able to manage a relationship as a win-win situation, he was my prime candidate. still, the present state of his affairs tell me that all his communication know how and expertise did not prevent him from ending up in what is a rather ugly situation. this evening i asked a friend who joined me for dinner about how her brother is doing, and i was just being formal and casually polite with my question. i certainly do not like to ask these questions to get information or detail, it is a matter of social protocol. surprise, her brother seems to not be doing well, and i got to hear another sad story of family scripting playing out some ugly drama. it is very clear to me why psychologists and psychiatrists must go through analysis in the course of their training. somewhere along the line, the realization of our own psychology and its deep entrenchment within our ego's entrails ought, at least in principle, to bring some enlightenment to what human nature is like, and hopefully that is one valuable asset in guiding others to that same enlightenment or peace of mind.

but when i slip into the memories of my being a teenager and again feel the pain of feeling my dreams crushed, it is painful. while the dreams may have felt to be crushed, never did i give up on them. i just began to plot a submarine strategy. how was i to reach what i want without being noticed?

this is when my flirt and love affair with deception started. i was about fifteen.

Technorati Tags: abuse, deception, depression, drama, dreams, guilt, human, leschosesfloues, life, nature, psychology

starving artists dinner for 3

last night three of us got together to our more or less regular "starving artists dinner" or something along those lines. one of us is a lawyer working in the swiss court system, another is a music teacher, and i am supposedly a physicist. this trio accounts for two writers, one sculptor, and on occasions a photographer. we gathered yesterday at the musicians atelier and i got to play a grand piano. the minute that i arrived, i could hardly wait to go bang a few discords on the keyboard. mind you, i can not play the piano beyond the scales. i had lessons while i was in elementary school because i was forced to go to them. later, much later, i discovered that i actually like the instrument.

at these dinners we always get into two subjects of contention: sex and philosophy. however we do stay clear of the philosophy of sex, and that is perhaps a good thing.

since yesterday i had given gawker and wired a good look while going through my RSS lists on shrook, i had found some interesting items, read new to me information on cyber sex. after a few glasses of wine, i mentioned cybersex. then my surprise met me in the face, my dear friends in starvation and artistic inspiration seemed unaware of all the high tech forms of masturbation available for grabs, albeit absent of groping, on the internet. or is it that they are long term users of teledildonics, and somehow could not talk openly about it?

Technorati Tags: art, dinner, cybersex, teledildonics

happy and unsatisfied

this buddha woke up on sunday morning before 5. nothing unusual, i was in bed before 10 in the evening. i spent the whole afternoon on saturday with a visiting friend from germany. we had lunch together, we walked in the old town , down to the altenbergsteg and up to the "rosengarten" and we had a few coffees (his latte, my expresso) while enjoying a fantastic view of the old town.

sunday was a strange and foreign day. i was in zurich by 9 in the morning and visited a friend. when i arrived at her doorstep, she was still in her nightgown in the kitchen applying glaze to a cake while her husband read a book in the sitting room. he has just gotten out of hospital for some rather annoying affliction that keeps him paying the hospital regular managing visits. i was happy to see them again. while my friend got under the shower and her husband went out shopping, their nine year old son and i had a good match of football on the hallway. i enjoyed the play so much, that i wondered who was the nine year old, or if for a while i was just not another tomboy...

brunch was rather a pleasant and enjoyable extended experience that we call brunch, but it seems that in spite of being awake, sunday eluded me, i was never quite up to the day. i returned to berne from zurich by five in the afternoon, and i could not do anything but crash on my bed and fall asleep for a few hours. when i woke up, i was still dazed, and am still dazed on wednesday afternoon.

while i keep on toying with the idea that people's faces are like confetti, all the same and none identical, i also keep on teasing the idea that we are built like infinite psychological onions. in this confetti world peeling through the layers of one's psychology seems to provide for continued entertainment. happiness is irrelevant, and satisfaction an animal of seven legs.

it could be that the visit of my german friend has once more overwhelmed me just a tad. it could also be that it is the discovery of that feeling of being overwhelmed that was ever so present in some of the conversations that we had in a still much too cold and sunny afternoon this past saturday. this time i felt different, whatever has shifted in my life, has really shifted. we sat over lunch in my kitchen and i listened to what is a most unfortunate turn of events in his life. some fifteen years ago when i first met him, i could never have imagined the scene that took place yesterday. fifteen years ago, i was in a similar situation to where he is now. i have been living in the belief that only i can screw up my own life that much, and that everybody else has it figured out. when i listen to his story, i also hear how very new and unimaginable the whole is for him, i hear shock, and i also hear powerlessness. that is what i hear, but then, i also know him to be strong, intelligent and a kind soul. eventually we go through the unraveling of these non-euclidean layers of our life' story, and i keep on wondering why on earth i have a rather persistent knack for torturing myself.

fear, another layer of fear that i could not have imagined was there. i am so tired of the crap! i just want to write... yet each and every story that i write wrings itself out of my own blood, sweat and tears.

Technorati Tags: buddha, fear

inadequacy

long long ago, in another story i quoted something about fear by Marianne Williamson. i come around and struggle to come to grips with my own psychology, and although on the surface there is something appealing about fearing one's greatness, right now, it just does not register with this one buddha. this buddha, me and myself, we beg to differ. it is not even my won humble opinion; there is nothing humble in this opinion of mine.

while i wrote beyond 2 sigma, i knew that i was struggling with fear, and that perhaps that fear had something with my capabilities and the sheer potency of my own dreams and visions. that story is one of rebellion, it is one sacred irimi of self-assertion. two years later i find myself wrestling fear at a new level, a level that i am foreign to. it could only be because the whole of who i am discovering to be is indeed a rather foreign me. reinventing oneself along the transient terrestrial path seems like a simple matter of slipping into a new role, but to discover that being repressed for almost half a century and aching to pierce through the layers of delusion, that is something altogether different.

what is fear? whatever it is that i am feeling, i can only call it fear, i know no other name for it. what has me turning in circles is that i have no clue as to what i fear, although it is not the fear of my own strength that i fear. i know that much, and i know how the fear of my own strength tastes and it tastes differently.

still something has shifted. i also do not know what to call that thing that has shifted... is it karma? is it the stars? is it the mood on wall street? certain is that a shift in the constellation of my perception and circumstances has taken place.

while on monday, i could not wait for wednesday, and today i discovered that once more i totally messed up on one of my commitments to get a document out on time, i also am losing track of time and gaining a sense of immediacy which is unprecedented.

yesterday a good friend an and colleague called from germany, and i found myself listening with interest and empathy to a one hour rendition of the events in his life for the past few months. the specifics are his to keep and share, still i would have never expected to have such a conversation with him. he is one of these people who have accompanied me along my path for better and for worse, and our relationship is difficult to understand in the shackles of drugged up mores and corrupt propriety. still, something has shifted in the year since i last saw him face to face. i listed to a story that sounded to me much too dreadful, and much too real...
there was nothing to do but listen, and there was that existential fear in his voice, that fear that i also have known and know, that fear that i had to learn to be friends with, that fear that is nothing more than the certainty that this life is very tenuously anchored on this earth and that we have a rather short horizon for that chimera that we call security.

that i would find myself in existential struggles does not surprise me, i do live a bit recklessly, and to survive i had  no other resource than to ignore many a convention of our times. to deal with my reckless adventure on the planet, i must explore the limits of the rules that are imposed on me, and at the end of the day i tend to care very little about the game because i am far more interested in cracking the code, than i am at winning the game. the game is life. i know that this game can only be won with one last breath and that breath's time is, with a few exceptions, unpredictable. winning the game is not in my hands while cracking the code does fascinate me. that others who do not lead a reckless life, like this friend, end up also struggling with the same existential fears does surprise me.

it was thursday and we must have spent two hours on the phone, if not longer. i confess to not having gotten the day off the ground of my expectations yesterday. i got three things done, none of which were really planned with much advance, it was all spontaneous. besides the long phone conversation with my friend, i had tea with  a kind soul, and i did sort out a bit more of the mess in my cellar. i had planned to do something else... and that thing that i now call fear has me by the balls, and i get nothing done, i feel that i am going in circles, i feel incapacitated, powerless, numb, paralyzed. i have pending deadlines, i have paperwork to do, i have commitments... why on earth am  i paralyzed?

lately i have had days like i had not known possible: all is well, there is a feeling of serenity and calm. those are days when i can shut out the world out, the days when i do not bother to think, the days when i can escape with my words, the days when i paint a reality that is mine and mine alone...

this fear is not of greatness, this fucking freaking fear is of inadequacy. i fear failure. i fear rejection. i fear being laughed out. i fear being ridiculed, i fear being disdained, i fear being told that i am not good enough, i fear. this is my bare, raw fear: the freaking paralyzing fear of inadequacy.

i can deal just fine with my brilliance and greatness.

Technorati Tags: anxiety, brilliance, existential, fear, feelings, greatness, inadequacy

time and again

here i am on a monday, sitting pregnant with emptiness and silence. somewhere along the line of the course of events today, i keep on wishing that it would be wednesday.

it is surprisingly quiet here, it reminds me of the house where i was born in bordeira, that house with that patient garden awaiting for me.

why emptiness and silence?

because. because that is what i aspire to.

on sunday i had an exceptionally good day. no alarm and woke up fairly early for somebody who went to sleep rather late. this has however been the rhythm of things around here for the past months, and the last few weeks have been madness trebled. my five in the morning regime is something that i am missing, however when i go to sleep shortly before then, it does not work in any practicable responsible manner. as the days get longer, and the sun rises earlier in the day, i will be returning to what i call my default mode, that is, up around five in the morning. i just love the morning hours, the silence of dawn and the frail light.

while writing this the day happened: phone calls, more phone calls... and i did get only a couple of things done of the myriad that i had wanted to do today. it was a monday with promise, and short on deliveries.

i like the silence of this house. every once in a while i hear somebody go up the stairs, but not often. i can open the french window and the garden becomes my kingdom. on saturday i got myself some cigarillos, this time danish ones (Petit Nobel, Sumatra). i have not bought any cigars for quite a while and have occasionally smoked on friday evenings with my physics colleagues, a majority of whom do smoke cigars. it occurred to me only on sunday afternoon that i actually could smoke in the garden. smoking cigarettes is nothing that i think is a good idea, but an occasional cigar is like meditation, and one must take the time to savour it. i like these little sumatras... and after all, the danes needed a bit of moral support.

at the tobacco shop on saturday the sales person took it upon himself to recommend the Cohibas or Montecristos... i do suppose that i look like i would not be familiar with the subject matter of cigars. i thanked him for the advice and told him that unfortunately the cohibas and montecristos cigarillos have dropped in quality considerably over the last few years. i ought to know, i used to smoke them until they started skipping on the quality.

what i really wanted to write about when i started this post this morning is the fact that right now my whole schedule is in a state of reconfiguration. regular, usual, average or default seem to have lost their meaning... my day can change from hour to hour... and what is important is that i not lose sight of my goal. one step at a time, i will get there.

Technorati Tags: angel, art, ashes, bordeira, garden, studio

this side of paradise

you being an insider to my life, you know that paradise is the place to find me. paradise.

the last week, that is this week, has been a bit of wonderful madness. i now sit in my new studio among piles of boxes and listening to the jazz inside my head after a few beers and sights of the carnival in town. on tuesday i installed the cable modem and it all went without a snitch or hitch: plug it in and the wireless network was up in a matter of minutes.

now. this studio is about now, just now, nothing else. now and the conquering of that that seemed impossible just a while ago is what the next adventure is about.

while doing the laundry... oh the laundry, the wind, the storm, the boxes... what does it all matter?

on friday i had lunch at one of the local sushi bars with one of my dearest friends and legal counsels. we have known each other for a few years and for some odd reason - mutual sympathy and shared values - we have became friends. i am the aikido one, he is the boxing guy, and  somehow we do speak the same language. if nothing else, i am all excited about him being an expectant father, and to see him follow one of his dreams about continuing his education and expanding his horizons. we had not seen each other in a while, it must have been almost a year... since then a lot has changed, nothing has gone quite like the smooth plan that we hoped for, and yet all is going better than i could have imaged it.

being with a friend, someone whom i trust, and passing review on the past few months did give me an opportunity to get real about what is going on right here. as it is this year started with a floating sentence resonating somewhere in the air around me: if i am a writer, then i might as well behave like one. it feels odd. i am not used to calling myself a writer, yet that is what i am. my boxing lawyer friend and i today passed review not only on the last few months, but also exchanged the kind of confidences that have me stunned in awe on how very connected i can feel to another human being.

then after the old boys club i met another friend, one with whom i have a special project going on, and we end up drinking to some big changes coming up in his life. the changes in his life do affect my own life and bring home how very evidently connected we all are somehow.

of course i have to grin and smile and i am getting a lot of satisfaction out of what is happening around me these days. take for instance the conversation that i had yesterday with a friend, an american writer, and on discussing the relocation of my pied-à-terre she reminds me that to have a new place is almost as good as having a new lover. i corrected her, i think it is better, far more refreshing, and certainly with as much potential for complications.

now, here i am in paradise. my desk is still covered up with unpacked boxes, and my cinema display is still in its protective box while i write on the PowerBook on the dinning table. i like the studio. i love one of the shots from the photo session yesterday at one of the national landmarks... oh yes, there are days when i am just a writer who loves to shoot photos. other days i am just a writer who consults for industry, or a translator. right now i am fascinated with the assertion of being a writer and my own very real lack of identity.

one of the luxuries in my life is my therapy, something along the lines of deep analysis, something to help me come to terms with an history of abuse, something that is both a plain luxury  and a basic necessity. in this week's session it occurred to me that when i entered the pied-à-terre in the old town, the sensation that i had was that it was time to write, not just think and wish that i would write. eight years later that is where i am. however when i first entered that flat this sensation was very strong, just as strong as the resistance that i felt. i had no idea then that it was fear that was motivating that resistance to just follow my desire and need to write. i would perhaps have never discovered the magnitude of that fear if i had not blogged under a pseudonym, like i would have not have discovered the nature of the fear if i had not written under my civil name. somewhere along the line there is something about identity in there. i just happen to think that identity can be a very potent venom. can you imagine being caught within the bars of what you think you might be?

Technorati Tags: authenticity, change, fear, identity, paradise, pseudonym