the state of the art

This afternoon I got myself up to the Gurten, the local hill with a sledding run, a few restaurants, and a great view of the city. Although down in the city there are only a few scattered patches of ice on the ground, up on the Gurten there is snow, and more ice. After having amused myself with observation of the crowd, being greeted by young men whom I did not have a clue as to their identity, looking intensely at some toddlers all bundled up and sledding around, I did manage with SLR camera hanging over my neck and a backpack with additional optics, to slip on a patch of ice down a hill and fall on my bum.

My first thought on getting up was that I ought to pay more attention to how I practice falls (ukemi), I still managed to hit my right hand a bit too hard on the ice and it hurts now. I suspect that this is a result of a bad habit from practicing on firm but soft rubber foam tatamis. I am however glad that both I and the optics survived without major damage. It was a good thing that I was wearing what I call work gloves, the kind with cut off finger tips so that I can still operate the camera without totally freezing my hands. Yes, it was below freezing the whole day today.

On returning home I prepared some polenta and wondered a bit about this type of grain and its value in the european and eastern cooking. Supposedly it is a true american, this maize or indian corn, and then I mean american indian corn, however it has become quite a staple in mediterranean diets. It was while experimenting with making polenta in the rice cooker - these days I try almost anything in the rice cooker - that I started self-debating my ability of carrying out some of the projects that I have on deck. Why don't I just do it? Why?

Lately I have been seriously challenged by the word "lifestyle." It seems that everybody and their twit half brother has a different lifestyle these days: digital lifestyle, gay lifestyle, and of course "my lifestyle," or "what kind of lifestyle is that?" and so on and so forth. Style! I start querying the instant that I read or hear the word "style."  Is it an affliction of somebody bent on throwing off the orthography rules and with a serious distorted conspicuity in punctuation use?

While reading Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul" I found an interesting interview in the famed "The Paris Review":  The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 187: The Art of Fiction.

Technorati Tags: aikido, art, fall, fiction, lifestyle, Ohran Pamuk, style, The Paris Review

untitled and divine

a bit crimped!

that is exactly how i am feeling: crimped. why is it that in this year i am meeting some of my ugliest cousins?

it started with temptation, then giving in to it, and ending up sick as a dog on the first of january. the culprit: biscuits containing wheat flour, butter, and eggs. i am allergic to all of those things, but i do not want to accept this fact, i keep on looking for validation in the esotericism of classical medicine, and it has none to offer. whatever ails me defeats modern immunological assays. at the empirical level it ought to be very clear to anybody willing to see it. i hesitate, i see it sometimes, and then i question my own ability to see it, i hesitate in my assessment and validity of my empirical knowledge. i hesitate i suffer the negative consequences in triplicate.

i had a most enlightening conversation with a friend of mine yesterday, he asked how i was doing, and i answered that i was feeling crimped. what does that mean he asks? crimped, i explained, is not crumpled up, it is when i feel that there are too many rough edges to me. i could have said that i was ill at ease with myself, that would have expressed part of it too, but not the whole. crimped, like pleated and formed and forced to have sharp edges, and then... rough edges are the result, and it does not quite feel right. what feels right, feels smooth and transparent. certainly not the mood yesterday. it could only be because my stomach was still grumbling, and i am back at not feeling like eating. maybe it is all just about flatulence. the crimp was not the enlightening part, in the conversation i became un-crimped. my ugly cousin, the hesitation, was sent back home unaccompanied.

i keep a few muses throughout the globe. there is one with whom i had not spoken in a while. yesterday, late at night we had a chat, and later i could not sleep. our dialogue kept on returning to me. he calls me goddess and i call him something else, not muse, but for all intents and purposes that is the handle that i have edited into our dialogue. in addition, i have only edited items that would reveal identity or location, the usual internet abbreviations and orthography abuses have been left in place.

23:36:46 muse: :)
23:36:58 goddess: my! is it you or is it your shadow?
23:37:13 muse: surprised? :)
23:37:20 goddess: yes
23:37:34 goddess: often i say something... and i get no answer from you
23:37:44 muse: oh
23:37:49 goddess:
and i fucked up and have lost your phone number
23:37:51 muse: but i have rarely been online

somebody has reached into the cookie jar!
i confess, i have his address, and i know where he is, i could have gone and visited him. actually often i wish that i could just go and spend a few days or weeks working on the bleached shores of those beaches.

23:37:54 goddess: happy new year!
23:38:07 muse: not to worry, i have gone n fucked up my own fone number
23:38:24 muse: had to reformat my fone
23:38:31 goddess: ah
23:38:33 muse: and in the process, lost all numbers
23:38:36 goddess: i feel better already
23:38:57 muse: and tired of telco's monopolistic ways, i have shifted loyalties to CTL
23:39:00 muse: >:D<
23:39:18 muse: my new number is xxxxxxxxxxx
23:39:21 goddess: there is a new player in wonderland
23:39:28 muse: and a happy new year to u 2
23:39:49 muse: wonderland? my friends call it fantasy land :)
23:40:01 goddess: thanks:D
23:40:24 muse: how have u been?
23:40:27 goddess: it washes out to the same color
23:40:34 muse: true
23:40:39 goddess: me, been...uhm
23:40:42 muse: in the end, we r all dust in the wind
23:40:43 goddess: crazy as usual
23:41:18 muse: tell me
23:41:21 goddess: true
23:41:38 muse: ur the one true noth in my compass
23:41:49 goddess: u lost an R
23:41:54 muse: every time i am faced with a dilemma, i think of what u wud say
23:41:58 goddess: are u turning japanese?
23:42:05 muse: lol, that's not the only thing i have lost
23:42:17 goddess: oh, u lost your virginity too?
23:42:32 muse: i thought i lost it with u :P
23:42:50 goddess: that is very flattering of you, but it may explain why u r having dilemmas
23:43:11 goddess: loooool
23:43:13 muse: well, i do need to consult my goddess once in a while
23:43:28 goddess: thank godess!
23:43:38 goddess: i lost a D?
23:43:41 muse: thank goddess, u mean?

real goddesses do laundry

23:44:12 muse: what r u doing up so late?
23:44:22 goddess: the laundry?
23:44:38 muse: aaah, that explains it
23:44:45 goddess: no kidding i just finished putting away laundry

true. i had just finished ironing and stowing away the laundry and clothes after these had been untouched and awaiting such delightful treatment for about two weeks. later, i just could not sleep. our dialogue did not end there, and the rest of the dialogue i do not have an history for. much to my surprise, for technical reasons, much too dull to detail here, i have no history of the conversation. we moved to video chat using a different instant messenger client and that one does not keep an history, or at least i have not found out how to turn it on. in passing, it must be added that video chat is something great with the same kind of potential for abuse as any nuclear device.  given the great geographical distances that both family and friends are at, it is indeed a great pleasure to be able to see somebody's warm and delightful smile, or their stoic and concentrated expression while typing a message.

a woman that likes to be called a goddess. is that how i am? not really, but he has a way of making me feel just that. some years ago it was his idea, after we literally painted the town red a few times and stole a few figurative horses, to call me so. i had to scramble for something appropriately just for this jewel of a man with a smile that  is the picture of heaven itself.

the part of the dialogue that would not leave me alone had to do with happiness. he wants to know how to be happy, he claims to not be happy. for some odd reason all that came to mind were the questions from a french aikidoka  a few months ago about happiness and literature.

are there novels about just happy people? are there stories with happy endings? how would one tell the story of somebody who is happy?

samsara!  is  my answer on most such occasions. i like these questions, and samsara was not my answer to the muse. but my divine muse wants to know how he can be happy, and i know that i have no answers for him, but i am glad that he is asking the questions. my divine muse is a successful entrepreneur and rather talented and able manager. i have seen him in action, and i am always awed by the ease with which he maneuvers through sticky situations.

happiness, we have been sold happiness as a must and scarce good that you must scramble and fight for. who was the idiot in charge of marketing that one?

just a few days ago i was on the phone with an exiled american playwright living now in paris. it turns out that when two scribes get together these days the themes of their conversations are rather limited: a meta conversation about the state of the work in progress, the common friends and acquaintances, and invariably about finances and taxes. on occasions, we do chew on politics and rant about publishers. we never talk about happiness, at least these two of us do not. we talk about money and how to manage either its lack or its existence. for me it is easy, if i can write, i do not give a fuck about anything else. which ever way i slice it, the deciding factor in any relationship that makes me call it a nurturing or an abusive relationship, is the criterion of whether i can write or not while that person is around. if the relationship brings anxiety and i can not write because i end up hanging up on my hang-ups or on his, it is fucked-up and doomed before it even took off. in this contorted logic of mine, we could also call it fuzzy, i have managed to equate money and human relationships on the same side opposite to something that i would call the absence of discomfort and anxiety, and which i am not brave enough to call happiness. it is perhaps no wonder that some of my most intimate and revealing conversations of the past year have occurred with my accountant.

money and relationships? now how do these jive together, and what relationship do they have to each other?

i am fond of saying that it is so simple and obvious, your brain should be in pain for not having figured it out earlier. oh, i can be such a daunting snot! one who feels crimped is unquestionably a daunting snot.

the friend to whom i explained crimped, he is paradise in my life. slowly i am starting to get the taste of this paradise. still, it is not that he brought paradise to me, nor is it that he makes me happy. it is all about that being with him, i can just be me, i can write, i can read, and i can fall asleep on the couch and snore. sometimes while walking around from one place to the other the taste of him comes to me, and i think to myself that  "it is good to have him in my life" and then i think of nothing at all. it is just good.

is there something about his man that is so special and wonderful or different that i could not have found it elsewhere  or in somebody else? no. i can not compare him with anybody. he is truly himself with all the smooth and rough edges that a human has. the only thing that was different was that i was not ready to make any compromise or avoid any responsibility for my life when i met him. are we happy? who cares!

but what does all of it have to do with money? nothing. except that the relationship with money runs through the same script.

Technorati Tags: divine, egoism, fluage, focus, goddess, happiness, illusion, IM transcript, money, muse, paradise, path, reality, relationship, samsara, work, writing, zen

1-borg-edited-welsh

now, that is one expression that i shall not explain.

it was not until the last hours, the last local hours of 2005, that i could call it for what i wanted to call it. in japan they have arrived already several hours ago, as usual. i could say that by global standards, it was as 2006 rolled in that i could finally call it, a fascinating year. i had almost every breakdown that i had never wanted. quite a few things went wrong, although the year had started well enough, at least from the appearances, but then some-when in the summer, hell broke lose, or at least a damned stubborn relative arrived uninvited. besides the breakdowns, and do not ask me about the causality of either, there were some beautiful breakthroughs.

now, let me look at it this way, i said that i do not make new year's resolutions, and i do not. still, it has turned out that for the past ten years or so, the time between xmas and new year is a good one to take inventory of past twelve months. i ask myself what i wanted to achieve, and i assess where i am relative to that. there is always some time needed for planning and evaluation, it is a time to assess my life and my goals. this time is as good as any, and the forced break in europe makes this a natural offering.

i discovered by living through the experience what a depression is. it was a bit like discovering what being pregnant is. it was not until i was pregnant for the second time that i realized that i had been in that state before, except that the first time it lasted only a few weeks and then i lost the embryo in what is a most natural early miscarriage. depression is a bit like that, it has visited me before, but somehow i always pulled myself up by the boot straps, and never called it that. but then this summer came and bang! one incident lead to another, and there i was in the middle of a full blown depression, and i could not see it. i was fortunate enough to have loving and caring friends and associates who caught on and offered their help. it was not a moment too early.

i wanted to have that manuscript of that story that i keep telling everybody i am writing, written. a dozen rough drafts later, i know where to go from here, but it is not finished, it is barely started. to think that i wanted to have finished by may 2005, does not make me feel too terribly good, but there is a time  i too must say, fuck my feelings! it just did not happen.

we wanted a specific business venture off the ground, it did not happen yet in spite of the fact that we have all invested very many hours and kilometers in getting the ground work done. sometimes i suspect that i have here  a gordian knot to untie... it is my challenge for 2006.

then there was the fact that i trained in karate for only the first half of the year, yet i was  satisfied with it. given a left side tennis elbow, i decided to forgo of karate, and keep on training aikido. where am i? senseis  and i are happy, and that is not being anywhere, and that is about right. but then happy is not the word either. i am here, that i am.

i did not spend much time in portugal this year, and a whole lot more time than planned in italy. as the year drew to a close, it was all much too evident what kind of breakdown i had had with the idea of spending more than six months in portugal. those who do not make plans, never know if they are on the path, or how far they have drifted. i am on the path, yet, the route seems to have changed, and the plan needs major revisions. gloria! this life is never boring.

i finally read a few books that i wanted to read, and although i put out many thousands of words, this feels just like the beginning. writing, aikido and the family seems to occupy my life, the rest may be just accessory.

that is the status of things around here, this is who i am: 1-borg-edited-welsh. it is ambiguous.

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