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.