greed

it is xmas that is around the corner, all that i can think of is greed and that i hate this season. i hate it even more when i am going to be away from my whole family. my friends are all going to be with their families. i have friends whose families feel like my own and that would welcome me at this time of the year, but it just is not the same thing. i really do not understand what goes through my head at this time of the year. which ever way i slice it, i do not like it. i never liked it. my memories of it are a mess. i never understood what this time of the year is supposed to be about.

i am sitting in one of the local watering holes, and at the table next to me, they are speaking arabic. from the tone, egyptians. a look at their faces tends to support the misr hypothesis. yes, i miss the nile, it is good to hear the speak. it is warm there now. it might even be that next week i take a short hop over there, stay for a few days. get lost in the masses, wear a head-cover and boring unpretentious clothes that do not allow any imagination as to what kind of feminine curves i might have. i really like the anonymity of traditional islamic grab. the funniest thing that i ever saw however was once a man walking in alexandria wearing a white robe and headdress, carrying a bag of groceries on each hand and exhibiting one hell of an hard-on. i just burst out laughing, and it was a good thing that i was not the one driving. so much for the idea of what that kind of dress can hide in a man when there is a bit of wind and the good man did not wear what would have been proper, that is, the long cotton underpants. it was summer, and it was funny, and it has nothing to do with xmas or greed, but a whole lot with the irony of what life is all about.

am i pleading, begging, arguing or just dreaming of getting the hell out of here? it could be.

but what is it that i am trying to escape?

life could not be better. all the indicators are up. i am surrounded by dear dear friends, yet. i am pissed-off. i am in a fighting mood.

tuesday i had a crash of sorts. i had a discussion with one of my colleagues with whom i work intensely and well on a matter that had to do with me and my mimic. i was telling him one thing, and he claimed that my mimic was saying something else. fuck! i actually argued with him that he does not have a clue about my mimic and what it means.

just monday evening i found myself with some like-minded people in a restaurant in another city. among them one whom i particularly like. i had a two hour train ride back home and the discussion was going well, i would have loved to stay longer, and moreover i would have loved to stay with that one particular person. so as it is with these intense geek moments, i asked if i could crash on his couch, he declared having no couch, but a bed. there in front of everybody, and my little wonderful mind told me that was exactly what i wanted, and i gave him a look that he interpreted as reproachful, and all that was going on for me was surprise and sheer embarrassment. look, i do like my private life private, but all of a sudden, it looked like i was arranging to share a bed at the dinner table like a casual affair. i was not ready for it, and then when somebody else offered me a bed, then i realized two things that yes i wanted to share a bed with him and in all likelihood we would end up at the very least talking until the wee-hours and i had a deadline that required my presence back home the next day. after maneuvering myself in such a tight spot, for once i was saved by my own procrastination that required my presence back home, or something like that. i wonder what the real big deal would have been if i would have just accepted his offer. is it not that everybody sooner or later finds out about who is sleeping with whom?

again, my mimic got interpreted in a way that just did not correspond to my internal state by someone who clearly is also on my good side on monday. on tuesday, the same happens in a different context. it just often happens that my face lies. my mimic rarely corresponds to my words. it is damn frustrating and i am pissed-off about it. on occasions my face actually expresses to others what my internal state is, however when it is something about my affections and private life, it does not. i have only recently gotten to the root of this strangeness of mine. it is not a pleasant one.

today i decided that it is time to attend to my needs. why on earth do i ignore my own needs?

and, yes, i am fine, very fine. xmas will pass, it always does.

clogged up

really. that is how things started me on blogging. the kitchen sink on the pied-à-terre was clogged up. i opened it up, and there was no obstruction. that was two and an half years ago. come to think of it, a long time. much has happened, some of it i have discharged right here in the kitchen sink, a lot not.

i have poured my heart out in "fluage" and i have tried to be as sincere as i can when i here attempt to answer the question of how i am. mostly i am, often i find the how a bit irrelevant.

i have been in love i don't know how many times since the blogging started, and that is irrelevant too. i am always in love, mostly with a stone, or with the spiders that share my living space. spiders, i love the spiders unless of course one errs into a place that i claim is mine, and then i get rather basic about it, and the spiders loose. no, i am not a good Buddhist, but then, on days like today, i feel like i am a good nothing. if at least i could be a good thief! alas, not even that!

i am often very sceptical, and there is precious little that i believe in, not even logic, not even maths. it is all abstract, and i love the abstract. love? yes love. love. that too is pretty abstract. what is love? liking, loving, being passionate, being intensely curious. the abstract is my love these days.

i keep a portrait of a friend of mine pinned on a wall because each time that i look at that face and see the representation of that expression that to me exudes calm and serenity, a lot of my fears evaporate. other friends have wondered what it is between him and i and i have found myself a few times tempted to somehow justify my need to be reminded of his existence. it is a need, yes. i do however count my blessings that i have not developed an obsession with him. loving is nothing more than the pleasure of having experienced presence and knowing that for a few moments you have shared existence without the lecherous morpion of possessiveness.

there is nothing harder for me right now than to admit my own needs, and to allow myself these. i pray, i do not believe!

about jewels

today while minding my own business, that is, wrestling with a self imposed deadline in a attempt to preempt total panic later when the real deadline falls, the phone rings. i pick it up and on the other side is one of my dearest friends, colleagues, lovers. you name it, he is it to me or has been at some time. because he spent five weeks in a de-stressing therapy clinic and i have myself been up in the air quite a bit, it has been a total of eight weeks since we have seen each other, or so he tells me. for my part i have not really been keeping books.

a couple of weeks ago i buzzed him on email and got an answer with contents that roughly translated that he was not yet ready to talk to me. i mailed back that he should take his time, after all, that is all that is really his, his time. not having an expectation or anticipation as to how much time he needed for himself, i also put the whole to rest. i love him dearly, intensely, even passionately but i also have the same attitude towards my work. when he rang today, i was both surprised and pleased.

he told me about his experience at the clinic and that is a story that is not mine to tell. i shared with him the events of my last eight weeks. it was on sharing those events with him that i became aware of how very much has happened in this life of mine during the past eight weeks. that feeling that i had four weeks ago after returning from a week over-there-somewhere attending to matters close to my heart, is not a feeling, it is an attitude, a way of being and living. it is relatively new, change has taken place in this life of mine. that bit about me not recognizing my life since is real.

roughly one week ago i met with a dear soul who this summer populated my carnal distractions and when the animal who i am decided that also good affairs must one day come to an end, he decided that i am a cold blooded bitch. in our most recent meeting i could barely recognize the man, and i wondered who that person there talking to me was, he seemed so foreign. i cared so very little for his troubles and tribulations. i wondered why on earth i had even bothered to call him up when i passed his office. yet, i remember well one moment earlier this past spring when this man touched me, and i ingested a wonderful drug. i knew that it was a drug, it is a drug that i have taken before, it was the abysm of falling in love. we do fall in love with our own neurosis, and so it is also with me. the love affair with the own neurosis, is however therapeutic, if not narcissistic. what a delightful choice the psyche gives you, you fall in love and then you may choose therapy or narcissism. the choice is yours, it always is. on occasions i forget this so very basic bifurcation in every day life.

it was in my week away one month ago that i faced that choice once more. i went for therapy, and i felt like a total fool. imagine me having this man whom i very much like, and whom i admire, right there sitting next to me. imagine me sensing his presence, imagine me feeling insecurity. mine or his, it really did not matter. then i feel him pulling back and away, i turn around and tell him exactly what all of his tossing, doing and bending activates in me. then imagine the two of us alone in the privacy of his kitchen a few weeks later. imagine him calling me yesterday with a wonderful stratagem just to talk but having not much to say. it takes so little to make me happy. our call lasted less than ten minutes, and i was delighted, even satisfied. satisfaction sounds perverse now; perverse is the very idea that the seducer is now being seduced. yet our egos are so very delicate and brittle. shattered egos make for very deep neurosis. being the fool whom i am, once more i wrote to him again... and again i felt like a divine fool. i like being a fool at this point. i have given up all pretense of wisdom, enlightenment, or for that matter common sense. i am as i am so be it.

at the end of our phone conversation today my friend and i were bubbling. while we were not looking for it, we have found a deep friendship. he told me about his therapy, his falling in love, his needs, his life's errands. i shared with him my struggles, my falling in love, my fascination with the muses, my passion for life. we concurred on the matter of sharing a bed with each other.

misunderstanding

i have been struggling. i really have. i have tried not to struggle and the more i try not to struggle, the more i struggle. i do not like this one bit.

i feel the ground changing under my feet faster than light travelling through space, and it is hallucinogenic in all its forms.

yesterday i had an encounter with a colleague that was of the strangest kind. but what is strange? at one point i was muttering to myself that i am indeed the grand-dame of whores. if so, i like it. i love it. i am self-absorbed with it!

one thing is certain about my colleagues, those with whom i share a common discipline or work: they range from the highly underpaid university professor to legal counsel types in high places.

here i am in the midst of putting myself through a lot of self-generated stress working on a project that is absorbing every cell of my body, and this wonderful colleague comes to my office for a coffee. i have a whole world of understanding for his condition, he is single, retired and has a lot of time on his hands and no financial worries. i am single, live alone by choice, can not find the time to do all the projects i want to do, and count every cent three times before i spend it. a bit of conversation is good, and an occasional coffee with a colleague can be refreshing. however with this one case, i am wondering which muscle it is that i am exercising now.

it is a good one, this case. before leaving yesterday my colleague claimed that i should be giving him more warmth. i smiled and remained distant and cold, and told him that he gets hot coffee and the occasional warm meal, but that is it. that part of our interaction does not bend me out of shape in any way. i have almost fifty years of experience of keeping men away from my body, and i am quite sucessful at it. but then i had to start early in protecting my own physical integrity. i experienced a first attempt at rape of the age of seven. i had the reflexes and the presence of spirit at that age to escape the ordeal physically unscathed, psychologically the incident left a deep wound.

when my colleague yesterday went on rambling about what all women secretly deep down really wanted was to be taken by force and be raped, he got a lecture on how very ill informed his opinion was. he backed out and tried to defend his reasoning by citing the german popular children' songs that clearly in his opinion can be interpreted to represent that secret wish. i remained most unconvinced of such reasoning. every part of my being was on alert.

never before in my life have i felt the kind of rage that i felt yesterday. i felt the rage and i remained calm, assertive, and with a smile. if there is at least one woman without that kind of deep desire, then the claim is false. this woman - me - does not have that deep desire. i have looked deep down, i have embraced my own sexuality, and there is no such desire. not here, not with me.

it is however easy to get confused when it comes to sexuality and agression.

i may live alone, claim that my life is that of a monk, and pornographic details of my private life may or may not exist. i am neither asexual nor abstinent. i know moments of lust and play when force is involved. still, those moments have nothing to do with some deep secret desire for rape. those instances when force is involved in the expression of sexuality are moments of extreme clarity and deep desire that can be communicated and shared between consenting adults.

that part had nothing to do with me feeling like the grand-dame of whores. in an exchange with a cousin - an honourable member of the legal profession - we ranted a bit about the kind of life that we live and how we exchange our intellectual services for money. i call this the life of a whore, and he confirmed it by telling me that is exactly how one of his universtiy professors had described the legal profession. then we ranted about the medical doctor's attitude towards money, and decided that we had still much to learn from them if we really wanted to be professional about it. anyhow, if i am sick and my medical quack does not heal me and i die, do i get my money back?

time to get back to basics: the ultimate conspiracy

i am here in a titter, and i ought not to be. my trouble is with the ought, and there is no titter, nothing to laugh about, and frankly... i ought to. it is something about a day job, and right now, i could not even be arsed about another kind of job. i just can not help it, you tell me day job, and i think blow job, with or without hyphen. it really does not matter, does it? i mean, the hyphen does not matter. according to oxford dictionary the word blow-job does not exist, so do not be such a blow-through cock. i mean, don't be such a valve. a valve - in case that you have lost the logic train here - is a clasper of a male butterfly.

i asked the question - how are you? - of my brother today, and he was just getting out of bed. siblings of a kind we are, he sleeps with his computer, literally. really, he has the thing - well, it is not a mac, so it is a thing - set up so that he can chat from all the comfort of being under his comforter. at this point i am just glad that my love for sushi did not kill me this time. after all, i was at that much fated sushi bar in one of the european capitals on that very fatal day for one very dead ex-soviet - ex-all - now. i wonder if that was all a ploy to promote the new 007 film? perhaps not. even hollywood is not up to such tricks. but then again, why would they not? there are a lot of unemployed and not yet too old soviet spies who will do anything for a piece of action, to say nothing of what they would do for a bit of sushi. they have never questioned the legality or morality or it, why would they start now with such inconveniences? it is after all just another day job. i mean the day job about in all discretion putting some polonium 210 in somebody's sushi - or was it in the wasabi paste? - and then gracefully exiting the scene to not ever be traced. really, i like such thrillers. you know, the bards are suckers for thrillers. i, i just have my pretensions, so i think that i ought to like thrillers, write one and then just ride the tube to the top of the new york times best seller list. no hyphen on best seller, i know that much, and when it is convenient, i too can follow the orthography rules. best-sellerdom obliges!

truth is, we have all missed the cold war. what could be more appropriate than to have a reincarnation of it just when another copyright industry product - a film - is being launched? it helps sales, and it stimulates the economy. it creates jobs for carpenters at the studios, and keeps students from starving while collecting ticket stubs at the entrance of the movie theatres. it is all for a good cause, ain't it. i know that my sarcasm reeks, you do not have to remind me of it. but then it was i who reeked last night, and for once i pittied those who shared public transportation with me on my return from a most enjoyable dinner invitation. you see, butter or any other cow dairy product, even in small amounts, gives me a glorious case of flatulence for starters and then a good case of diarrhea. i get tired of being a pain in the ass about being strict about what i eat, and then i get my gut to pay for it. i drank lots of water and tea today, and yes i feel as good as new, thank you.

am i digressing? giving the tone that this post has picked up, it seems that "blogging drunkenness" is an essential part of my victual persona, and i can not possibly not blog about what is happening in this world and that once more has not affected me in any way. still, that other blog remains closed, and i was there and had sushi on that day. it could have been the day before, but what is one day between life and death? still, i am tired of blogging here and there, and everywhere. there are such things as tags and search engines and i am not bent on creating the perfect web all by myself. really not. i am ambitious, bent and driven, but me too, i have my limits. the kitchen sink will now have to accommodate some of drunkenness.

see, i was at a lecture of a most distinguished philosophy professor this past week. you know the kind of professor who has an entry in wikipedia, who has known a few dead philosphers, is emeritus at a few universities, travels here and there, and has lots of interesting scholarly opinions. i listened and took notes, and i came out of the lecture with the distinct impression that this man was repenting for crimes committed during the second world war. i was totally unimpressed and rather much in my own ego trip albeit a bit upset with myself that i have not read enough kant, aristotles and varela. i would have loved to argue with the man, but somehow reason took a hold of me and i left the lecture at break and skipped the discussion. it could also be that i was plain aghast with the remote possibility of the implications of what i had overheard two faculty members in their shabby jumpers and dreadful outmoded trousers chipper at each other. not impressed, the woman in black walked out and asked the girl at the café bar if she had soya milk. she did not. nowadays you can get soya milk in many café bars in london, this was not one of those. it was not in london either.

back to my titter that is not happening or why i am feeling insecure about producing a piece of work that i know i am damn well qualified to do? was it because before i was commissioned i was asked if i was qualified and my impulse on the moment was to ask the good man if he was joking. instead i said something or other, and then had to manoeuvre myself out of the something or other and sound brilliant, while all it felt like for me was that i was one hell of a bullshit artist.

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