from here to there

this blog will be having a massage until mid february.

that means, no new posts.

confusion and simplicity

so, what is going on? what is it like, when all seems effortless?

where was i when i stopped posting here on a more regular basis?

i think that i was at the same place that i am now. the thing is that the earth keeps on spinning on its axis and flirting with the sun on its orbit, and somehow in the meantime pluto has been reclassified as a dwarf planet. pluto is unperturbed by all this commotion and reclassification, and so am i.

i have been traveling a bit much since april, or at least that is how i have chosen to call it. i feel a certain restlessness when i do leave on a trip. i like returning home, and it seems that i need a bit of time to settle back, but then i get restless about the settlement process, and it takes a while until i find my groove. i am starting to suspect that i have no groove at all.

summer was much too passionate for the monk whom i am. in one week i found myself between three men, and somehow this was a picture that did not fit my self-image. it turned into some exercise of figuring out who is the whore in all of this, and who is the fucking therapist, and i was much too relieved that i was blessed by the professional help of my own therapist, an experienced professor of medicine.

to me psychotherapy is working when i can laugh out loud in the therapist's office about this amusing and adventuresome construct that i call my life. lately there has been a lot to laugh out loud about.

when yesterday i became fascinated by a few bits of jammed plastic joined by a few screws and their owner expressed his potential gratitude by promising not to marry me, i was most amused. finally i could smile like the cheshire cat. i would have loved to take the whole thing apart, unscrew it, find the source of the malfunction, and repair it. however there was a train to catch, and the gadget was as insignificant as my own life. i like the perspective that looking at the whole of this existence from the reference point of a few pieces of plastic offers.

the attentive reader will catch on on what has changed in my blog writing, the insider will conjecture as to the why, the rest know or guess, that i am exercising the tools of the mystery writer. i always said that mystery writing is not my genre. could it be that i was lying, or was it just plain ignorance? did i forget what i said? was it science-fiction that i said that i would never write?

i had a very fabulous weekend, a total luxury: aikido, excellent company, a lot of behaviour to observe, good interiors, restful nights crowded with strange dreams, and a few moments that i would not have wanted to miss. however i could have done without the intestinal indisposition. before leaving for this weekend for the few hundred kilometers by train, i was about to call it off... had it not been that up to one week prior to departure i had said that i was going, and then a colleague bought me the ticket and by wednesday last week, the whole was a bit on the very committed side. now, was the hesitation real, or just a certain fear or letting life happen and flow?

we arrived at the destination, we all got our three protocol swiss kisses, and i delighted in a the details of the ritual and in one case, in the scent of after-shave. i do get weak knees when i smell a good men's perfume, so much so that i have taken to wearing men's perfume myself. it is so simple, i like men's perfumes and i prefer to separate the perfume from the man. while the perfume can be changed, the man usually stays the same, even when he grows, develops and matures.

am i being seditious? am i trying to provoke? hardly. i like what i like.

i am not used to attention. i thought that we all crave attention, and in particular it seemed to me that i had been looking for it all my life. then in the course of the past few months something changed. i have had more attention than i could imagine possible. here i am seeing my dream getting attention, and i am thinking it is me who is getting attention. no, it is my work, the expression of what is mine. that is the expression of that which is mine and yours, that which we share, sharing life, that is.

"more often than not i can not tell where one being begins and the other ends, and perhaps that is what it means to touch someone"

within the past few months confusion has given was to clarity and simplicity like a morning fog that dissolves in the sun... yet now the days are getting shorter, autumn is here, it is november.

in may of this year, on my second trip out of the local garage, it dawned on me, i have no choice other than to live my dream.

the trouble with us

first let's be clear who that us is. it is you and me, it is us or how we relate to each other as humans. the trouble is that we are animals, and we are the kind of animal that does not want to be one. in short, the human condition is about being an animal, and wanting to escape it.

what leads me to such brash, rash and abrupt conclusions?

in the absence of some form of relating there may be you and i, but there is no us. so it was that a week ago i sat next to a man and he proceeded to behave in a way that i would call oscillatory. he went from deep personal confessions to bad jokes within a short period of time, and then back to the deeply personal and intimate, and so on. now this man is wonderful in my eyes exactly because he exhibits such behaviour that makes his doubts palpable and his fragility evident. other than oscillatory, he behaves like the prototype macho. he seems very real to me, and he feels very far from the idealized utopic view of what a man ought to be; and he struggles with his ego and whatever will and drive he has. he remains animal and he keeps on censoring the animal as though that animal had no right to exist. this is how i chose to describe this man's fragility.

take for instance his smoking. he says that smoking is not a good habit, yet he confesses to not being able to stop. i get that, i certainly get that he feels like he can not stop smoking. i also sense that he is making some progress in coming to terms with his own limitations, he has stopped counting how many cigarettes he smokes in a day. this knowing and not acting according to the knowledge is the kind of behaviour that i find in many around me, and certainly one that i know well enough from my own experience. i know what i ought to do, i feel a craving, ignore the good intentions, and do give in to the craving that the animal whom i am commands upon my rational illusions. but not always, not on all of life's little issues. the animal is simple, and the animal is not linear.

last night my son gave me the key for what i was looking for. i had been thinking about self-confidence, however he pointed me to self-esteem. yes, they are not the same. one being can have loads of self-confidence and zero self-esteem and the result is the animal being out of control. the animal me that is, not necessarly the man. that man from last week is one whom i admire and one that has me being grateful that he ever showed up in my life. he showed up at the right time, with the right attitude. it has taken me years to see him a bit better for who he is. my delay residing in the fact that he seems so much like me, that i end up hardly ever being able to distinguish between what is his and what is mine.

i remember that when i first became aware of his interest in me, i could only feel the attraction that admiration catalyses. i felt that and i felt my own confusion about being attracted to the man and at the same time seeing a father figure in him. at that time when this had happened i had not yet gone through deep psychothereapy and i had a few unresolved conflicts floating around in my mind gnawing at the very essence of my being and paralyzing any expression of what is mine. the idea of engaging in sexual interplay with a man whom i saw as the father that mine was not, was at best disconcerting, it was incest. impossible was the overwhelming feeling of the whole encounter and our interactions that followed, totally impossible. my immediate reaction was to send him a letter in which the tenor was that he was to keep away from me. imagine desiring him, and imagine not being able to imagine anything more than to be held in his arms as though we were both asexual. for months, years, i censored my desire for him, i wanted him to be my missing father. the psyche had censored the animal, and reason was beyond hope then.

then we fast forward to last week and his admissions of his own daughter's sexual advances towards him. at that point i felt like i had fallen victim to my own fiction, and that my madness was the only reality keeping me sane. within seconds i had a whole tempest of feelings back on my lap, and i had invited none of it. we were sitting next to each other, and my immediate thought was how very much i did desire him, and how good it would be to forget all social convention, pierce through all the barriers, and experience the complete sexual beings that we are with all our weaknesses and strengths. yet, i did nothing and said even less. i offered good, reasonable, sound counseling. the coward whom i am, retreated, my animal's cravings for his body were censored and discarded.

the day after this rather intimate and personal exchange there were a few moments when we could have met, we both were in the same building, however between the many floors and the crowds, neither made much of an effort. the next day we exchanged emails and i returned to being my very intellectual mask, a real mask as effective as a man's macho mask, and once more the animal got to take a back seat to that very much in command intellect.

it could be that one of these days one of us will be foolish enough to grab the other, and just let the natural animal satisfy its cravings away from psychology and concepts of propriety. it could also be that nothing ever happens, and that we are left with the assurance of the knowledge that nothing outside ourselves can cause any trouble.

tell me, why do you write?

above all i write for myself, because i need to communicate, and because often when the time would have been right, i can not find the words. i call this writing, fiction. yet, the fiction of this life of mine is based on my experiences and on that which i feel, whatever random and associative thoughts meander through my mind that find their way to my fingertips. the whole of the fluage blog is special to me as it is the one that is dedicated and above all inspired by my most adored muses.

last week one of these muses and i spent the whole of sunday evening together with a group of other aikidokas. those few lines i thought that i had forgotten were inspired by that evening and our interactions which i fail to understand. i feel that i have no way of reaching the man, and all that i have access to is the muse: he inspires me. i am aware that the man is far from perfect, but then humans are only perfect when they are not perfect. it is exactly his fragility, weakness, sincerity and so very human condition that inspire me.

i write for myself and my very selfish need to share life as it happens.

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.

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.