23 and 368 others

no kidding!

"23 and 368 others"  was the fine filename that my system picked today for creating a VCF file of my address book contacts (mac-ese for same item in normal language) so that i could convert it to a CSV file to get them contacts on thunderbird. am i a geek? i'll let you be the judge of that. still the "23 and 368 others" made me laugh. it looks like i might believe in redundancy and contingency.

"23" in my address book refers to 23 an absolutely great photo sharing site, better than flickr in may ways. i confess to have gotten a bit tired of flickr, i keep on being faithful to buzznet, my very first blogging site ever.

"23" is also the nickname that i use to designate a man with whom i have had an interesting intimate affair. at this point i will let you conjecture how a man got such a cute nickname in my book, and most likely your imagination will make you blush, and if it does, that is really good. but given that just last thursday night i heard the sigh of relief from another man whom i just had told that i wanted to be left out of his relational dramas, because after all -sight- he was starting to get jealous (of the others). 368!

i am bound to see humour in the oddest of places, even in a filename generated automatically. when my legal-brains friend and i talk about my escapades with this one man, we do refer to him by "23" and he is not even aware of the man's first name, much less his family name. discretion is a natural trait of good lawyers. to name "23" by his civil name would clearly be a violation of the nature of our unspoken agreement, and it would add nothing to what my legal-brains friend and i do share. i have violated this agreement once and i hope that i will not end up regretting it one day down the line. sometimes my ego interjects some crap into my life, and then i may have some cleaning up to do later. this is the nature of dealing with humans. shit happens.

so, what is the nature of an intimate affair that has anything to do with the matter of how i am doing today? what does "23" the man have to do with any of this, what does he have to do with me anyhow? i do not know. i know that a few weeks ago i did see him and i got to experience another side of him which i had had no clue was there. the greatest of all gifts one human can give to another is to allow the other to just be as fucked up as he or she really is. that is, giving up the masks and the pretenses is simply another gate to that paradise that i call serenity.

"23" came to my rescue one day some years ago when i was feeling and being rejected  by this one fellow with whom i had the audacity - make that neurosis - of falling in love with. then there was "23" whom i bumped into one saturday while doing the weekly shopping downtown. you know how the story goes, man and woman get together, it looks like it is all about sex and then you discover that it is just about freedom to be oneself. some people call this the relationship between a whore and its client. if that is so, i am all for the whore relationship. there is something very authentic and honest about such a relationship.

how am i feeling today? today i feel good. i must have slept a good 12 hours during the past 24 hours and i really needed it. i also found myself at two in the morning with the cat in my bed and wondering why this has not ever happened before. this morning the cat caught a little mouse out in the garden and spent a good while playing with the dead mouse for a while tossing it up in the air. see, the cat belongs to a neighbour, but this cat has taken it on itself to court my company and has spent quite a bit of time with me lately. if the garden door is open it comes in, and i, being a cat of another sort, had no problems with allowing it to jump on my bed. my limit is however reached if it ever tries to bring a dead mouse to my bed. 23 and 368 others be warned, no dead mice in my bed. wireless mice designed in california are excepted, transgenic mice are included in the exclusion.

Technorati Tags: change, intimacy, intutum, philosophy, psyche, mice and men

a simple word

on wednesday i got up at five and had two soya cappuccinos in the garden while doing a buffer spill before going to training. wednesday morning training is as close as anything comes to being sacred in my life. do not ever dare to think that you can come between my wednesday morning training and i! alright, by now you know that i exaggerate on occasions! sometimes i cancel wednesday morning training on short notice after i have spent a whole night working. this time i arrived at the dojo certainly wide awake, but for some odd reason my blood pressure had yet to reboot.

i suppose that i am once again talking to my belly button and doing the kind of mind fucking or buffer spill-out that precedes a full core dump. it is lunch time and it is stormy, i hear thunder outside and i feel like an hurricane inside. how do i get to do a core dump without blowing a fuse?

easy. code is the solution. you have the right code, you can do a core dump in all safety. yes, software of the third kind, this is my own very soft being. i feel the wind, or do i? i am sitting here in the cooled garden and i wonder who is writing, is it the cyborg? clearly the stories are bubbling and i have a ton of work that must be done in the nonfiction section of my existence.

no, i am not writing this in the voice of the cyborg, this is me, whomever that me might be. i am tired of being tired, and i am full of energy all at the same time. it is friday, and i have started the full core dump. the agitation from the inner hurricane of emotions is starting to calm down.

love or hate, what is the difference i asked another. he claimed to hate a woman because he loved her so much. yes, that is one claim that he can make. i wonder how i would feel if i was that woman? could i then feel anything at all?

indeed i have never been here before. still on wednesday i spent some time talking with a dear dear friend. he is one of those dear friends that when i hear about his domestic marital troubles, i have a need to get drunk out of my wits for the pain of listening to accounts of such human drama becomes too much to bare. at times like these it is very easy for me to understand how one can become addicted to the relief that alcohol brings. alcohol is a narcotic, albeit technically speaking i have no clue as to what its classification in the pharmacopeia it might be, and am much too lazy to look it up now.

the long talk with my friend yielded an eye-opening experience: i am finally discovering who i am. i do not know how to describe it, but i cried and i cried with a certain joy of having had the opportunity to meet his parents and to have felt loved and understood by them. this happened many years ago and now his father is rather ill. my observation is that i do fall in love with the relationships that my friends have with their family. it is the only kind of falling in love that is not neurotic or psychotic.

i have grown rather weary of that neurosis that we call "falling in love". yet, this is one of the everyday routine neurosis that happens to normal people. in that respect, in having experienced this neurosis so many times, i am damn normal. this is however the end of my normalcy. i am tired of this kind of normal, and i am tired of falling in love. i am that woman whom that friend claims to hate because he loves her so much.

when i first read that message my immediate reaction was that i want even more distance from that sort of emotional drama. what does love have to do with it? nothing, nothing at all. i am. period. do i ever love? do i ever hate? are those two not two sides of an emotion associated with dysfunctional attachment to another human being?

truth is that i have been investigating the issue of money and sex in relationships. sometimes i code it into my own less than prosaic diversions on whores and samurai, but then i could as well call it business and ethics in an interrelated world. although i am quite fond and adept at using the scientific method, i am doing a different kind of investigation when it comes to the subject of money and sex. i am looking at it through the experience of growing up in a  schizophrenogenic  household. growing up in such an environment is not necessarily what i would recommend in terms of privilege, unless of course you were born bent on becoming either a writer or a psychotherapist. in the latter case, that is, if you are bent on making a career in literature, philosophy or psychiatry, then the  schizophrenogenic household and a facility with critical thought will became assets that can only be envied.

all sarcasm aside, that kind of household, does not provide much in terms of nurturance, and it does imprint unconscientious programming that to unravel takes great discipline and greater pain tolerance. namely, you do get imprinted by the undiagnosed and untreated neurosis of your environment that to all on the outside looks normal and even privileged. the façade looks good while the core has long imploded in a schizophrenogenic person.

having survived such rearing, the individual develops a few unusual sets of survival skills alongside with a particularly well tuned antenna to all such behaviour. do recall that the other coping mechanism available is to lose your mind.

he fell in love with me and i have spent days and days distracted by such seductive distraction and taking a fucked up emotional bath. observing myself in the last few months has been fascinating and at the same time revolting. the more i looked at it, the more i saw myself being lured into what looked like a double bind situation. but it was not a double bind, it just looked like it until one week ago.

what happened really?

while i never had an existentially viable option out of being in a relationship with my parents as a child, when it comes to being in a relationship with a man, i do have a choice. i can say no. say no or do tenkan, either way it is something like cutting a gordian knot.

small wonder that for the past couple of weeks i have been having one hell of a time doing tenkan on the mat as though i was the bloodiest of all beginners! it has been as though i had almost forgotten how it went. for non aikidoka, tenkan gets you off the line of attack and facing in the same direction as your attacker. fascinating, tenkan is required in my life and my body forgets how it goes! damn, my head knew what tenkan is, yet it happened that several times i could not execute it when it was called for. this wednesday, circulation unrebooted and all, i could do tenkan again when necessary.

still, it had all the taste of existential struggle. last night "no" rolled over my lips easier than i could have imagined it. now i am getting messages about love and hate and how i am wrong and contradictory. i am all of those, i have been all of that in other's opinions. your utterances are not my reality. i am also off the firing line. the aggression that i was feeling coming at me is nothing that i am ready to deal with at this time. some people call this love, others will say that i turned down a man's love. you can write your story in any way that you want, and you can be inspired by me to paint your most villain of characters. i am unimpressed and the buddha will once again smile.

last weekend while driving to our hiking place my friend with the blogging questions asked me one simple question to which i could answer without reservations for i knew that the question came from a concern for me, not a preoccupation with how things look or an attachment to a particular concept of how it ought to be.

it is so easy to confuse sex with love, and the love with money. it ought to be no surprise that one can also get muddled about sex and money. you can buy money with sex, and sex with money, it may or may not have anything with love.  you add human emotion, call it love or call it hate, to the above ingredients of sex and money, and you have all necessary requirements for dysfunctionality in a relationship. no, thank you.

Technorati Tags: schizophrenia, schizophrenogenic, storytelling, tenkan

lurid, pale, ghastly, dismal and sallow

yes, i knew that such a title would get you going and pop you out of whatever doldrums you were in. no? rats!

i love rats! rodents. disgusting little vermin that i associate with that so very human and so admirable novel by albert camus, the plague (la peste).

happiness is assigned to having my online dictionaries working, and a slew of reference works which i can consult and intellectually masturbate over. the mice, the rats, and all that sort of stuff, do not terribly excite except for human's abhorrence and repulsion of such living creatures. is such reaction natural? are we reacting naturally when we abhor nature's little creatures classified by the bipedal as rodent? mammals we are, both of us the bipedal and the rodent.

a friend of mine has recently asked me all sorts of good questions about blogging and why i blog. i may have satisfied him in other aspects of our shared weekend, like hiking and cooking, with my answers on this subject i may not have done as well. truth is what it may be, but i really do not know. blogging for me is still very experimental on both the technology, social and writing aspects. why is it important for me to so often share the outpour of feeling, emotions and random mumble jumble coming out of my head through my fingers?

come to think of it, i can manage to come up with a rather plausible and rational explanation for my blogging activities, and that i did in all sincerity with my friend.  still, i have no certainty as to the validity of my arguments.

then we proceeded to discuss my relationships with the muses, those that i call my muses. this one issue is even more perplexing than that of my blogging. this friend and i enjoy a very long and sincere friendship - i have quite a few of those - that allows me to ask equally probing questions about his relationships. seeing a lot of my friends struggle recently through all sorts of relational drama, i also asked this very enlightened being, how it felt now that the relationship with his longtime partner has come to an end. i could not have anticipated his answer.

i have lived for over fourteen years in the impression that this was indeed something very special, the kind of relationship that i would never be able to create or share with anybody. he does not have much of a tendency to beat himself over past mistakes, nor of attributing much meaning to what happens, so he just commented that the relationship was basically over within less than two years after it started, however he had something about a commitment and he went through thick and thin with this woman. i remember some of it, i got it served as a side dish on many of our joint dinners. still, i too did not make much of it then, after all, being a friend i listened to my friends long complaints and dissatisfaction. after all it is normal that when two people get involved, things get involved. still, this is the same person who just a few months ago i saw being quite devastated. this is a man whom i have known for many years, and just a few days ago i hear him confess to that feeling that wants to cling on to another human and make a relationship out of it.

this was a shock and a reality check braided into one nice bundle. i thought that i was the only lost soul that has ever ended up in a relationship out of fear of being alone and then went into one big proof of concept exercise called commitment. he did not use these exact words, somehow that is how i understood his commentary. in time he and i will go over the details and dissect the anatomy of this communication in all its gore and glory.

when another friend of mine, and that one i have known much longer, tells me that i need a man in my life, i wonder what he means and why on earth he is thinking this. you need a man to take care of you, he said. do i?

i think that i need an ultra rich uncle to die and name me his sole heir, i could use a bit of real estate and cash. i have no living uncle. all my uncles are dead, i had two. one was a precious and gentle soul who passed away before he was forty, and my other uncle is one that my psyche killed long long ago while in real life he only passed away one year ago. neither was rich, both were survived by a whole bunch children. conclusion, inheritance is not how i am going to get some wealth.

in recent weeks i have found myself commenting to both my therapist and close friends about my stories with men being nothing more than a distraction and sidebar in my life. indeed, sometimes when i look at it, that is what i see. men are sort of amusing distractions, a source of pleasure, an incentive to irritation, and indispensable friends.  so, when my good faithful long term friend and colleague in italy tries telling me that i need a man in my life, my immediate reaction is that that is exactly the last of my necessities. there are already too many men in my life is more descriptive of my own call. still, there was something deeply familiar about the fear of being alone and the desperation associated with it. this fear has passed, and may it rest in peace.

these days my fears have another hue. being alone is not an issue. i do not feel alone, i like being by myself. being by myself has become more of a necessity than having company. i love company and often have friends over or visit friends. not all my friends are men, many are. i still have a whole lot of women friends. when i spend time in the middle east, then i spend much more time with women and throughly enjoy those times. so, what is the hue of my most recent edition of fears?

let this be a warning to you all that should you ever venture into psychotherapy, then you may have to part with a lot of popular, useful and worn out concepts as to what it is that humans fear. those fears, are the first layer of the grand-onion that fears end up being. to delve into one's psyche, the meaning machine, torturer and transponder, is to reach into the spirit's turbid waters and mind waste products. it just does not make for a pretty, gentle, or smooth sight. that, after all is the nature of nature. rough, incongruent, abrupt, surprising, changing and unpredictable.

my friend curious about my blogging and i went hiking this weekend. hiking in the alps does not expose anybody to just postcard melancholic looking alpine pastures. the abrupt cliffs and deep gorges, the waterfalls, and the rock-slides are also part of the landscape. there is very little that is particularly gentle about the geological history of the alps, and it is obvious when you walk around or climb the trails. this bit about the gentleness of nature is an idea, a concept, that needs to be disposed of. it is simply wrong. wrong it is and very very romantic.

between muses, men, friends and blogging what is it that i fear these days?

reality.

Technorati Tags: authenticity, essentials, fear, friends, movement, muse, muses, reality, therapist