how am i?

i, little me, how the fuck am i?

let me tell you. it is 16:13 according to my friendly local mac sitting on my lap, and my stomach is growling.

i spent the best part of the morning researching a paper, and i think some circuit overheated and i forgot to eat. then i decided that my dizzy spells were due to lack of fresh air and went for a walk and to return a few empty bottle and aluminium for recycling. a few times i had to hold on to the next anchored object as i felt that i was losing equilibrium and would fall down if i did not steady myself. i stopped at the local grocery store on the way back and bought some food, however i had plenty of food at home. i ate when i arrived home, but i need to slow down and cook myself a good soup, and i am feeling more on speed than on anything else. my stomach keeps on growling, it too must be on speed however it feels like it is on laxatives.

i am slightly confronted with my therapist's assertion that my psyche is doing rather well. although there are still a few psychosomatic mysteries in my physiology, the dirty work is done. indeed the depression is gone, and i remain convinced that that depression was necessary in order to illuminate and deal with childhood traumas that were indeed blocking all my self-expression. it has been an interesting road, but the one ahead promises adventures of another flavour and depth. i am anxious, yes, but the good kind of anxious that gives me inspiration each morning, and makes very clear as to why it is that i get up every morning.

clearly, i do not get up to eat. on the way back from my walk, recycling center and grocery parade, i met somebody whom i had not seen in ages. she said something about me needing to eat, i look very thin. i do not feel very thin, and in comparison to one year ago, i have a couple more kilos. i am however lean, and between my muscles and my skin there is indeed not much of a fat layer.

i am as i am!

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.

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.

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.