Friday, 27 October 2006
to the few, the young, the brave
be warned, i am clumsy when it comes to dealing with comments left on this blog, and if that was not enough, i think that sometimes beta.blogger has an appetite for comments and devours them before they appear. do not ask me how this can be, technology is as human as the monkeys doing the coding.
Tuesday, 24 October 2006
Monday, 23 October 2006
perfection: the way it was
i have a thing or two for dark dank rooms and men with firm glutæi muscles. other than that my tastes are perfectly normal, however i am not quite totally sure that the devil wears prada. you, the devil, and i are on a first name basis. it has always been that way, we are best friends and companions since time irreproachable.
- life goes on and i do not quite know how it got to be this way -
if you - or anybody with the ability of speech - would have asked me some 35 years ago where i would see myself 35 years from then, i would have been the one with not much of a clue. i can only suspect that in putting myself back then to being barely 14, all that i could think of then was that i wanted to study medicine. medicine. there you have it. i had been exposed to the books that medical students drag home during the breaks, and i liked what i saw and read. i also heard all the gory tales about anatomy labs and what abuses cadavers and students get to endure, and i was not impressed. i also liked architecture, but that seemed very remote as i had no access to the world of architects in those days. agronomy was a dream, a very romantic dream that nobody around me ever listened to or gave any encouragement.
then it all changed. why am i writing this now, and why are there tears flooding my eyes?
it was an accident. i was doing the dishes and a glass slipped off my hands. reflex, slow reflex. when i went to catch the glass that slipped off my hand a sharp edge cut through my left wrist and i could not move my left little finger. needless to say that it was a bloody mess. i was alone and called my father across the street at work. in hospital they stitched the tendon back together and then the wound. i really do not remember either the pain, nor the stitches the blood. i remember however how some physician spent a whole lot of time stitching it back. i most likely do not remember the pain in hospital because there was a local anesthetic applied. the wound healed well, and soon i could move my little finger again. however in the freezing cold of a northern american city i could always feel the internal stitches until years later they finally dissolved. it was nothing, a little cut, a mended tendon and a few shredded plans about medicine. instead of flying back across the atlantic to europe, i remained in north america. i had registered at school, i had left my room ready for my return and i was looking forward to seeing my school friends in the fall. it was not to be.
my parents had other plans, plans that i will never understand, and plans that i do not need to either understand or analyze. these plans affected my life and that is as naked a fact as i have ever witnessed. somebody does something and it has consequences or not, the fact lies in the the doing, not in the consequences? no, the consequences are also a fact, a consequential fact activated by another than the primary actor. should i get theoretical now on causality theory? no, not now. causality theory is nothing that i call fiction, it is circumstantial abstraction.
but do not let me lead you astray, i just looked up sachverhalt in order to find the word in english that i wanted right now to express something that comes close to circumstantial. this looking up from german to english is nothing that i could have ever predicted 35 years ago as one of my actions. then i wrote portuguese, did not know one word of german, and my english and i had a tenuous relationship. then germany was a far away country that i never planned to visit, much less live in, and i would be willing to bet that i had never heard of switzerland other than in geography classes or referred to as la suisse. that one day i would be sitting at a dinner table in lisboa surrounded by distinguished members of the legal profession and caught myself speaking as one with swiss roots and national esteem. but it was not i who was defining my identity as such, it was the distinguished round that clearly assigned me this role. my swiss roots are the ones that i have grown by studying and working in this country, they do not stem from blood lines or other historical or biological facts. if i speak of national esteem, and not of pride, it is because there is something that i call swissness, and others may call swiss culture, or suisse raison d'être that has somehow become a part of me. nationalism in any shade is something that i can not and do not want to accept.
i am right here, not enlightened, not famous, not glorious, not anything in particular. i am here finding my place and looking into identity and knowledge. i am here facing the bloody fact that is some foreign concept about perfection and satisfying my perceptions of what the expectations of others might be. i am here reminding myself that nothing outside can cause any trouble.
it was upon my return from the ivy league circuitry that fourteen years ago i came here in search of myself and then wondered off north and east to return with one word alone, sincerity. extreme sincerity.
- life goes on and i do not quite know how it got to be this way -
if you - or anybody with the ability of speech - would have asked me some 35 years ago where i would see myself 35 years from then, i would have been the one with not much of a clue. i can only suspect that in putting myself back then to being barely 14, all that i could think of then was that i wanted to study medicine. medicine. there you have it. i had been exposed to the books that medical students drag home during the breaks, and i liked what i saw and read. i also heard all the gory tales about anatomy labs and what abuses cadavers and students get to endure, and i was not impressed. i also liked architecture, but that seemed very remote as i had no access to the world of architects in those days. agronomy was a dream, a very romantic dream that nobody around me ever listened to or gave any encouragement.
then it all changed. why am i writing this now, and why are there tears flooding my eyes?
it was an accident. i was doing the dishes and a glass slipped off my hands. reflex, slow reflex. when i went to catch the glass that slipped off my hand a sharp edge cut through my left wrist and i could not move my left little finger. needless to say that it was a bloody mess. i was alone and called my father across the street at work. in hospital they stitched the tendon back together and then the wound. i really do not remember either the pain, nor the stitches the blood. i remember however how some physician spent a whole lot of time stitching it back. i most likely do not remember the pain in hospital because there was a local anesthetic applied. the wound healed well, and soon i could move my little finger again. however in the freezing cold of a northern american city i could always feel the internal stitches until years later they finally dissolved. it was nothing, a little cut, a mended tendon and a few shredded plans about medicine. instead of flying back across the atlantic to europe, i remained in north america. i had registered at school, i had left my room ready for my return and i was looking forward to seeing my school friends in the fall. it was not to be.
my parents had other plans, plans that i will never understand, and plans that i do not need to either understand or analyze. these plans affected my life and that is as naked a fact as i have ever witnessed. somebody does something and it has consequences or not, the fact lies in the the doing, not in the consequences? no, the consequences are also a fact, a consequential fact activated by another than the primary actor. should i get theoretical now on causality theory? no, not now. causality theory is nothing that i call fiction, it is circumstantial abstraction.
but do not let me lead you astray, i just looked up sachverhalt in order to find the word in english that i wanted right now to express something that comes close to circumstantial. this looking up from german to english is nothing that i could have ever predicted 35 years ago as one of my actions. then i wrote portuguese, did not know one word of german, and my english and i had a tenuous relationship. then germany was a far away country that i never planned to visit, much less live in, and i would be willing to bet that i had never heard of switzerland other than in geography classes or referred to as la suisse. that one day i would be sitting at a dinner table in lisboa surrounded by distinguished members of the legal profession and caught myself speaking as one with swiss roots and national esteem. but it was not i who was defining my identity as such, it was the distinguished round that clearly assigned me this role. my swiss roots are the ones that i have grown by studying and working in this country, they do not stem from blood lines or other historical or biological facts. if i speak of national esteem, and not of pride, it is because there is something that i call swissness, and others may call swiss culture, or suisse raison d'être that has somehow become a part of me. nationalism in any shade is something that i can not and do not want to accept.
i am right here, not enlightened, not famous, not glorious, not anything in particular. i am here finding my place and looking into identity and knowledge. i am here facing the bloody fact that is some foreign concept about perfection and satisfying my perceptions of what the expectations of others might be. i am here reminding myself that nothing outside can cause any trouble.
it was upon my return from the ivy league circuitry that fourteen years ago i came here in search of myself and then wondered off north and east to return with one word alone, sincerity. extreme sincerity.
Sunday, 22 October 2006
it is not every day
it really is not. it is not everyday that the phone rings and it is one of my friends around the corner that erroneously rang me; god only knows after what. it was morning and i was still in bed half asleep after a very late turning in last night at three this morning.
he rings, this friend of mine, and he is apologetic about his blunder, i sounded sleepy. i thanked him for the keys to his apartment that i had picked up last night before going to see a flick at a good old movie theatre in town with a retired and somewhat lonely colleague. i thanked him, the one on the phone this morning, and remarked the fact that the keys were pink after all. yesterday he had asked me what colour i wanted the keys, red or blue? i said pink. in fact they are more like fuchsia or magenta, however this bit of naming colours is not exactly my strength, and metal coloured keys is a very local thing that keeps some of the folks sorted in terms of what key goes into which hole. so, barely awake, and with a set of keys to his apartment in a ridiculous colour, i shared with him my excitement, and told him that i had had an orgasm right there and then when i got his keys last night. we laughed, we often laugh.
this one friend of mine, like another one at the same address, are both jurists and as close as i get to having two brothers around the corner from me. we hold each other's hands through thick and thin, to say nothing of a few fun and animated social occasions or bits and pieces of our lives. we have helped each other move apartments on more than one occasion, we have stood ready with moral support and prepared meals through exams and dissertations, and when we need a good shoulder to cry, we know where to go. we also have no difficulty what so ever in making bad jokes while half-awake.
it is not every day that i am home. but how am i?
i am thinking a lot more than i had expected that i would about my dear - not better half, not worse half, not half at all - with whom i spent last weekend. he is an angel, he is a muse, and he gets to me every now and then. in the last two decades i have fallen in love with him several times. i neither believe in this thing of falling in love, nor do i like it whenever it happens to me in spite of my own lack of belief and my insistence that each time that i do, it is with the world and with life that i fall in love, not with someone in particular. in between my falling in love with him, and with the world, my fancy trails other chimeras and fantasies, yet we return faithfully to the eternity of our dreams and the lightness that our shared times indulges us with. sometimes it is this lightness and ease that i suspect has had me so confused, if not apprehensive and confronted. but is it an indulgence?
life goes on, or so it pretends. i have been feeling very light and i need to return to my silence, and my monastic life. therapy has been good, really good. it is not every day, like today, that i make waffles and end up not managing to get one single one out of the waffle iron in one piece. all three waffles disintegrated in small pieces all over the iron... i forgot some ingredient and i do not recall which one. i make buckwheat waffles from my own recipe that i have forgotten to write down. this is my life, a recipe that i have forgotten to write down. sometimes it works, sometimes, it doesn't.
he rings, this friend of mine, and he is apologetic about his blunder, i sounded sleepy. i thanked him for the keys to his apartment that i had picked up last night before going to see a flick at a good old movie theatre in town with a retired and somewhat lonely colleague. i thanked him, the one on the phone this morning, and remarked the fact that the keys were pink after all. yesterday he had asked me what colour i wanted the keys, red or blue? i said pink. in fact they are more like fuchsia or magenta, however this bit of naming colours is not exactly my strength, and metal coloured keys is a very local thing that keeps some of the folks sorted in terms of what key goes into which hole. so, barely awake, and with a set of keys to his apartment in a ridiculous colour, i shared with him my excitement, and told him that i had had an orgasm right there and then when i got his keys last night. we laughed, we often laugh.
this one friend of mine, like another one at the same address, are both jurists and as close as i get to having two brothers around the corner from me. we hold each other's hands through thick and thin, to say nothing of a few fun and animated social occasions or bits and pieces of our lives. we have helped each other move apartments on more than one occasion, we have stood ready with moral support and prepared meals through exams and dissertations, and when we need a good shoulder to cry, we know where to go. we also have no difficulty what so ever in making bad jokes while half-awake.
it is not every day that i am home. but how am i?
i am thinking a lot more than i had expected that i would about my dear - not better half, not worse half, not half at all - with whom i spent last weekend. he is an angel, he is a muse, and he gets to me every now and then. in the last two decades i have fallen in love with him several times. i neither believe in this thing of falling in love, nor do i like it whenever it happens to me in spite of my own lack of belief and my insistence that each time that i do, it is with the world and with life that i fall in love, not with someone in particular. in between my falling in love with him, and with the world, my fancy trails other chimeras and fantasies, yet we return faithfully to the eternity of our dreams and the lightness that our shared times indulges us with. sometimes it is this lightness and ease that i suspect has had me so confused, if not apprehensive and confronted. but is it an indulgence?
life goes on, or so it pretends. i have been feeling very light and i need to return to my silence, and my monastic life. therapy has been good, really good. it is not every day, like today, that i make waffles and end up not managing to get one single one out of the waffle iron in one piece. all three waffles disintegrated in small pieces all over the iron... i forgot some ingredient and i do not recall which one. i make buckwheat waffles from my own recipe that i have forgotten to write down. this is my life, a recipe that i have forgotten to write down. sometimes it works, sometimes, it doesn't.
she said
i said that i would, i did. i have been travelling and i have been gone far and wide. i am still on the road, and for the past four weeks, this is the first sunday that i am anywhere close to that place that i do call home on occasions. the travelling is still not yet done, next sunday i will not be here again.
in a way i am really tired of the road. in another way i did schedule the return to this blog for a time that has made it close to impossible to post much of anything at all.
this being as it is, i am not here to either offer excuses or detailed travel logs of my geographical errands. i just miss my diatribes on the trying to figure out how the hell i am doing, and discovering again again how very alive i am. alive and in love. but what is love really?
Friday, 20 October 2006
good to the last
a friend of mine asked me recently if i cared. i did not have the courage to say that i do not care, not in that particular case.
yesterday a bus drove past me while i listened because i cared to listen.
Thursday, 12 October 2006
the cry in the wild
if you have ever wonder where i get those titles for these posts, you clearly are bored with your life, and bored as you are, you are also a voyeur: you want to know what the fuck i have been up to while keeping silent and being absent from this blog.
the return of cairo otaibi to the kichten sink, or how one human being keeps on writing, walking, farting, and breathing, would also do well as a title to this post.
but what is it with intutum? intutum is a nick, a TLD, and it is a project. it started by me - whomever hides behind this screen - picking intutum as a nickname in my fist forays into the interacting internet. i certainly did not know what the fuck i was doing, and i was much too chicken to really show up with my name and face, thus i picked a nick. then one thing lead to another and intutum became one nice name and i registered the top level domain name with icann. now i am wondering what to do with it, as i have more TLD then i can make sensible use of. then for add insult to injury, or just before it, i started blogging at intutum.blogspot.com and caused a whole lot of commotion that i will never quite understand. after much careful and deliberate consideration, that is, what the fuck, i did remove the offending material from that blog and started writing something else there... however that one is not flowing easily.
however of late i have been quite active and present in the blogoshere under what is considered my legal civil name, and that is forcing me to think about how i want to use my time and reconsidering the whole idea of blogging under a pseudonym.
so, i was gone for a few weeks, and i was gone for a variety of reasons including the one that i felt my therapy was going through a point that made it difficult for me to keep on blogging about it. what i needed to write, i needed to do offline. time is just one freaking limited resource, and i can not just transcribe to latin alphabet every daredevil half-baked thought that pops up in my mind. writing is a lot more than free-flow, and sometimes free-flow is necessary. i just happen to think that the results of some of my free-flow writing exercises are not for all eyes. some of it just needs to get out and to never be looked at again, and that is one practice that i use: writing free-flow and then forget about it: shelved, archived, forgotten and disposed of.
it turns out that i still do not know what to do with this blog, and i do confess to love writing it, and getting a few things off my chest in this voice. yes, this blog has a voice, it is one of mine, and i write it with all the sincerity that i can muster. in a way, it ends up being a wonderful training ground for the attention whore in me. here, i have no face and no identity. cairo otaibi is a pseudonym, it is not me. it speaks with one voice, a sincere voice that i generate from the deepest corners of my being, yet it is not me. frankly, i have no clue as to who i am.
i was gone... therapy, travel, conferencing, beach, family. i was gone and then there was my return home. i had barely landed and while sharing a meal with a good friend i got a text message on my mobile. i looked at it and it was not from one of the contacts stored in my phone and i did not recognize the number either. i made a dismissing comment about it and my friend and colleague commented that there were too many men in my life. i laughed and agreed with him, and presupposed that the text message could not possibly be from a man in my life as those have names stored in the mobile's memory.
this text message incident does reflect a bit of the state of affairs-affairs these days. i am not stressed, or arsed in any way about any of it. i thought that this day would not happen ever, and that for ever i would be stressed about the fact that i live alone and have failed my perception of other's expectations of what my life ought to be. that ought-to-be state meant married, and taken care of in some suburban ghetto, living the illusion of happiness and wealth, overfed, and forced into the straight jacket of mores and appearance.
so here i am, i return home and to this blog. i am blissfully living alone and writing, struggling and dreaming. i have long term relationships with a variety of friends, a few physical and psychological affairs, and i am, if nothing else, a student of life.
so it was that recently i was a conference and over lunch had an interesting conversation with a fellow who seemed to be rather well versed in history. it was the sort of the funny incident that only amuses me. he told me a lot about the history of the place that we were at, and that in my reckoning i ought to have known better, but i somehow oversaw the detail of introducing myself. after all, i was wearing a name tag badge, so was the fellow. judging from the ring on his finger the bloke was married and judging from the note that he gave me with his email when he left the conference, this acquaintance was not about a professional interest. i am amused at such behaviour and although i may be a bit naive and often much too distracted or busy with my own crap to notice such things, on occasions i do recognize when a man is making a pass at me. this married man was, and i am amused.
what i find totally magnificent was that the whole time that i was travelling, not once did i ever think of those other men in my life. i saw myself calling a friend in italy because i felt i had a duty to. i could hear myself making an effort to think of my german friend whom i had invited to join me on this trip because we have often spoken about being in that place together, and i could feel the loving surrender of my muses as though they are the air that i breathe.
the return of cairo otaibi to the kichten sink, or how one human being keeps on writing, walking, farting, and breathing, would also do well as a title to this post.
but what is it with intutum? intutum is a nick, a TLD, and it is a project. it started by me - whomever hides behind this screen - picking intutum as a nickname in my fist forays into the interacting internet. i certainly did not know what the fuck i was doing, and i was much too chicken to really show up with my name and face, thus i picked a nick. then one thing lead to another and intutum became one nice name and i registered the top level domain name with icann. now i am wondering what to do with it, as i have more TLD then i can make sensible use of. then for add insult to injury, or just before it, i started blogging at intutum.blogspot.com and caused a whole lot of commotion that i will never quite understand. after much careful and deliberate consideration, that is, what the fuck, i did remove the offending material from that blog and started writing something else there... however that one is not flowing easily.
however of late i have been quite active and present in the blogoshere under what is considered my legal civil name, and that is forcing me to think about how i want to use my time and reconsidering the whole idea of blogging under a pseudonym.
so, i was gone for a few weeks, and i was gone for a variety of reasons including the one that i felt my therapy was going through a point that made it difficult for me to keep on blogging about it. what i needed to write, i needed to do offline. time is just one freaking limited resource, and i can not just transcribe to latin alphabet every daredevil half-baked thought that pops up in my mind. writing is a lot more than free-flow, and sometimes free-flow is necessary. i just happen to think that the results of some of my free-flow writing exercises are not for all eyes. some of it just needs to get out and to never be looked at again, and that is one practice that i use: writing free-flow and then forget about it: shelved, archived, forgotten and disposed of.
it turns out that i still do not know what to do with this blog, and i do confess to love writing it, and getting a few things off my chest in this voice. yes, this blog has a voice, it is one of mine, and i write it with all the sincerity that i can muster. in a way, it ends up being a wonderful training ground for the attention whore in me. here, i have no face and no identity. cairo otaibi is a pseudonym, it is not me. it speaks with one voice, a sincere voice that i generate from the deepest corners of my being, yet it is not me. frankly, i have no clue as to who i am.
i was gone... therapy, travel, conferencing, beach, family. i was gone and then there was my return home. i had barely landed and while sharing a meal with a good friend i got a text message on my mobile. i looked at it and it was not from one of the contacts stored in my phone and i did not recognize the number either. i made a dismissing comment about it and my friend and colleague commented that there were too many men in my life. i laughed and agreed with him, and presupposed that the text message could not possibly be from a man in my life as those have names stored in the mobile's memory.
this text message incident does reflect a bit of the state of affairs-affairs these days. i am not stressed, or arsed in any way about any of it. i thought that this day would not happen ever, and that for ever i would be stressed about the fact that i live alone and have failed my perception of other's expectations of what my life ought to be. that ought-to-be state meant married, and taken care of in some suburban ghetto, living the illusion of happiness and wealth, overfed, and forced into the straight jacket of mores and appearance.
so here i am, i return home and to this blog. i am blissfully living alone and writing, struggling and dreaming. i have long term relationships with a variety of friends, a few physical and psychological affairs, and i am, if nothing else, a student of life.
so it was that recently i was a conference and over lunch had an interesting conversation with a fellow who seemed to be rather well versed in history. it was the sort of the funny incident that only amuses me. he told me a lot about the history of the place that we were at, and that in my reckoning i ought to have known better, but i somehow oversaw the detail of introducing myself. after all, i was wearing a name tag badge, so was the fellow. judging from the ring on his finger the bloke was married and judging from the note that he gave me with his email when he left the conference, this acquaintance was not about a professional interest. i am amused at such behaviour and although i may be a bit naive and often much too distracted or busy with my own crap to notice such things, on occasions i do recognize when a man is making a pass at me. this married man was, and i am amused.
what i find totally magnificent was that the whole time that i was travelling, not once did i ever think of those other men in my life. i saw myself calling a friend in italy because i felt i had a duty to. i could hear myself making an effort to think of my german friend whom i had invited to join me on this trip because we have often spoken about being in that place together, and i could feel the loving surrender of my muses as though they are the air that i breathe.
Tuesday, 3 October 2006
back from reality
it so happens that the 30th of September caught me while travelling and quite off-line. i am off to a bit of mingling with a few old chums - i am right about the old part, however they do fail the chum test in every which way imaginable.
i love internet cafés but 2€/hour are a bit stifling on my creativity, so i will return to regular posting when i can hug my broadband.
what is for sure is that today was spent taking my place, and that i am rather surprised that i do know where my place is.
the next installment of the "kitchen sink" is going to be fun and totally unpredictable.
i love internet cafés but 2€/hour are a bit stifling on my creativity, so i will return to regular posting when i can hug my broadband.
what is for sure is that today was spent taking my place, and that i am rather surprised that i do know where my place is.
the next installment of the "kitchen sink" is going to be fun and totally unpredictable.
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