The pleasure of small things...

The smell of my shower gel. The opening sequence of Mozart's "Dies ira". Walking around in my pyjamas while it's still daylight. Getting a short message from someone I care about. Apple juice. Flipping through the pages of a new book I'm about to start reading. Strechting until my shoulders make a cracking sound. Cuddling up in a blanket and watching "A Room With a View".

On the strangeness of bodies

I very deliberately choose to go to a female gynecologist. First of all because in Austria, medicine is very sexist in a lot of different ways, and it's especially hard for women to become a gynecologist. In Innsbruck, which is the city I studied at and which has a big med faculty, even today no female gynecologist has a contract with the public health care system. That means if you go to a female gynecologist, you have to pay for it yourself and the insurance only covers part of it. That is one reason. Another reason is that, well, I just don't like the idea of a man giving me a gynecologist examination, you know, putting a speculum into my vagina, touching my breast, those things (I'm prude in that sense, I guess). Another reason is that I don't think that a man can actually understand the way in which I feel certain things related to my body. For example, when I say I have pains during my period, how would a man know what that feels like? Sorry to be essentialist that way, but that's just what I think.
Then of course, I think in general being a doctor is one of the most impossible things. Because you cannot actually "understand" the patient's pains in the sense that you cannot feel it in the very moment the patient is feeling ill. The only way of relating to it is that you 1) know your own body and pain and how it is to be ill; 2) you have a sort of "diagnosis questionnaire" that you have to ask the patient in order to categorize the symptoms. For example, you would ask if a certain pain stings, or is more "strechted out" or whatever. But then again, how do you know if what you consider a "stinging pain" is considered a "stinging pain" by another person? So considering that, I think the fact of people actually getting the right medication and getting healed is a real miracle.
I guess it's the whole notion of never being able to get outside "your own skin" and you only have approximate notions of what people feel, and those are negotiated and shaped by conventions. In a totally different sense, it's the same as you never know how a particular person perceives the color blue, you can only know because we have language that arbitrarily made the convention: the color blue is to be called the color blue, and in some sense we all can more or less agree to a certain object having that color. But when other people say "that is blue" and you try to question that, if it's only you not perceiving/calling blue as blue, people will think you have a problem (and maybe put you in a looney bin, ultimately).
It's like when you look at movies from the beginning of cinema: the way I perceive them, is to some extent as being very funny (even if they're not comedies), because they have a lot of what we now consider "technical flaws" that make you very aware of the medium itself, because the acting seems very exaggerated, the make-up too and the props and all those sort of things. But for the people at that time, it didn't look strange in the way it does to us nowadays, it looked "realistic" if you will (but that, again, is only my guess).
Which brings me to Foucault's quotation of Borges Chinese Encyclopedia and the impossibility to think it. Obviously, since I am into historical research right now, that is also a big "problem" of my research. I have no notion of the way people perceived the world, themselves, etc. 200 years ago, other than my present notion of objects, concepts, feelings, etc. The strangeness of historical texts for us today proves, I think, also that we are unable to think or fully understand that text, that we now don't have the same meanings/references/conventions in which a historical texts makes sense in the way it did 200 years ago (obviously, there is enough similarity to understand it in some sense, otherwise historical research would be impossible, like hearing a foreign language you don't know). We only have our frame of reference and "system of intelligibility" to understand a text that was written in a totally different frame of reference. But, coming back to my initial observation, even the present, shared frame of reference doesn't enable you to fully understand other people, because of the unresolvable strangeness and, well, isolation (in lack of a better word) our bodies are.

Inventory

10 things that I love
1. Dancing (or, if you prefer, moving your body to sounds)
2. When people surprise you (not as in a "surprise party" kind of thing, but when they just amaze you or act in a beautiful but totally unexpected way)
3. When people really see you
4. Things being/getting complicated
5. A cold glass of beer
6. The feeling of the wind tossing my hair
7. Dreaming (as in dreaming while you're asleep)
8. Having mind-cracking, challenging conversations
9. Strangers smiling at you in the street because they're happy
10. The beautiful curve of a human shoulder

10 things that I hate
1. Being hungry and/or thirsty
2. Impolite&rude&uncaring people
3. Seeing other people getting hurt without being able to help them
4. Things being/getting complicated
5. Being out on a day of walking and wearing shoes that are uncomfortable
6. Throwing up
7. Hangovers
8. Big egos
9. Angelina Jolie
10. People who like to hear themselves talking

What's new pussycat?

I read an article the other day saying that aesthetic surgery of the vagina has increased in the so called "civilized" world (yeah, and how civilized is that, I ask you?), especially among young girls. Apparently, the "fashion" of totally shaving your pubic hair (called "Brazilian style", don't know why) makes the girls realize how "big" their labia are, and consequently seek or wish for aesthetic surgery. I mean: Jesus, how are we supposed to change this fucked up world when a whole generation of girls are busy with shaving/ cutting/ reshaping/ getting anxious about their pussies?
So, if aesthetic surgery it is, I'm having a Freud-going-Solanas kinda moment and plead for the realization of Vagina dentata!!!!

One of those days...

You know these days where you feel like 24 hours is just not enough.
You know these days where no matter what you do and how much you do, it still seems like you've done next to nothing.
You know these days where you come home in the evening, but you really stayed at the office with your brain.
You know these days where your mind just won't stop turning around and around and around.
You know these days where not even watching stupid TV series helps.
Well, that's one of the days I'm having.

Memories

I found this picture of my mom the other day, and for the first time I realized we resemble each other. Or rather, I should say that I resemble her. Obviously because not only my hair is as long right now as hers is in this picture, and I do wear the same hairstyle from time to time now. But there is something in this picture that reminds me of me, the whole expression in her eyes, the slightly opened mouth and the look from the corner of her eyes, attentive, sceptical? In my imagination, I am about the same age as she was when that picture was taken (although I have no idea how old she is exactly). I wonder where that was and when. What she was doing at the time. What that photo was taken for: it's a passport size picture, but I haven't seen it on any of her documents. (I especially wonder since she was always very picky about her pictures. I have photo albums with loads of pics where my mother's head is missing. Like in some thriller, when a person's identity is to be erased. I think she would have made a huge fuss had she known I upload and post her picture here.) Maybe it was just a "fun photo", one taken at an automat somewhere in the world. Could be Paris (where she met my father). Could be London (before she even met my father). Could be Marseille (where she grew up). Or Grenoble (where she went to school). Or Austria (with my father again). Or Madrid (also with my father; they married in order to be able to live there together. It was still Franko's dictatorship, so very strict morals). So many places.

I wonder how it is that we never know our parents before they were our parents. I wish I could meet my mother before she was my mother. I wonder whether we would have been friends. Right now, judging from that random picture taken somewhere, a couple of years, a lifetime ago, and all the images it creates in me, I think we would have been friends. And it makes me feel sad, and strangely happy or proud at the same time. I think I've become a person my mother would have wanted to be friends with.

Being Annie Hall

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)
i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

I discovered e. e. cumming's poetry through Woody Allen. In "Hannah and her sisters", there is this one scene where Michael Caine reads "[somewhere i have never travelled]" to Barbara Hershey, a vinyl playing a preludium or fugue of Bach in the background. It's one of the most amazing love scenes in movie history, I think. Makes me want to be Michael Caine and Barbara Hershey all at the same time.

Anyways, you might think I'll talk about poetry now, but I'm going to talk about Woody Allen movies. Which I really really love, most of them at least. Since I've been a teenager, I used to watch them with my brother and my mom. Since I don't think I had ever heard of Woody Allen before (he's not exactly a director that would come to your mind at 13. Or maybe yes?), I guess it was my mom's idea. And of course, one of the reasons I like his movies so much is that I have about a dozen memories of watching his movies with my mom and my brother, or of us talking about the movies afterwards. I think I've seen Annie Hall at least a dozen times, same with "Hannah and her sisters". I think a lot of his later movies are a poor-copy of these two, especially when it's not him playing the main character. I mean: Jonathan Biggs trying to play Woody Allen is just a joke, basically. Thank god for Nina Ricci in that movie.

But, what I really wanted to say is: seeing Woody Allen movies, or rather: growing up with them to some extent changed my life. That might be a bit pathetic and over the top, you think? Well, yes and no. For example, Woody Allen movies where one of the main reasons why I always wanted to go to New York City, and why I wound up doing so for a year. (Of course, it was totally different from Woody Allen's NYC, but I had some Woody Allen moments while being there.) Also, I became a huge fan not only of e.e.cummings, but of jazz, that is, the 30ies to 60ies big band jazz style (like Cole Porter, Benny Goodman, etc.). Cannot listen to one of those without feeling like I'm in a Woody Allen movie.

For the unlikely case that someone would ever ask me: What kind of movie would you want your life to be like? or: If you were a movie character, in which movie would it be? I would have my answer ready: Woody Allen movies. Preferably Annie Hall (being Annie Hall of course, oh my god, have you ever seen a woman better dressed than her throughout that movie? I don't think so.), second choice "Hannah and her sisters" (being Michael Caine, this time. I just love his hair and his glasses.). But of course, things like that never happen, you never end up living in a movie. Sad but true.

One more thing I want to say about movies in general: There are some people I met in life, who are "movie nerds" (like I am) in the sense that they know more or less all the dialogues from their favourite movies by heart. I used to have a friend in school with whom I could spend hours reciting/replaying all the different Monty Python's. My brother is like that too (our favourite: old Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies, who were translated into German by a GENIUS. Apparently, they're much funnier in German than they are in the OV). With my boyfriend, it's mainly "The Big Lebowski". With my mom, it used to be musicals (favourite: West Side Story. Running down the streets of Salzburg like the Jet and the Sharks is another secret movie-come-true-wish of mine...).

I end - this being the post of the never-ending-never-attainable-movie-likeness, apparently - with Annie Hall and thus one of the best story lines to ever, I think, end a movie: " It was great seeing Annie again and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her and I thought of that old joke, you know, the, this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken,' and uh, the doctor says, 'well why don't you turn him in?' And the guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but uh, I guess we keep going through it...because...most of us need the eggs."

The Cohens did it again...

I saw "No Country for Old Men" yesterday, and thought it was amazing. I'm not, you know, an "expert" in movies, but I do consider myself a cineast (if that's a word in English). Which to me means that I try to go to the cinema at least once a week (sometimes even twice), and I try to be careful about the movies I choose to go to (also because it's quite expensive, I think). Oh, and also: I like to go to the cinema on my own (as in: alone), which some people consider a very sad thing to do, but I love it, mainly because after having seen a good movie, I don't feel like talking at all, neither about the movie, nor about anything else. I just want to go home silently and still be in the "mood" of the movie.
Anyway, coming back to the new Cohen brother's masterpiece and why I think it is a masterpiece. It begins like a lot of Cohen brother's movies do: somebody does something really stupid which gets him (almost never her) into a really bad situation. Like for example: You find a bunch of abandoned cars with corpses lying around in the middle of the desert, obviously there are drugs involved, so - what do you do?? Well, what I would do is get the hell out of there and hope no one saw me. I might consider calling the police. Which, obviously, isn't a very interesting plot for a film, and that's why the protagonist of "No Country for Old Men" does nothing of the like, but goes chasing after the only survivor (well, obviously: if you find a bunch of shot people, there must be at least one survivor), and that's when the troubles start. So far, so Cohen.
What I really really like about this movie: it's about violence, but it doesn't give you all that psychological explanation bullshit like a lot of movies do. There is this psycho killer (Javier Bardem) who is a total lunatic, but throughout the movie, you learn next to nothing about him, his life, why he's doing what he's doing etc. Considering there are a lot of films about psychos and serial killers that most of the time end up giving you an explanation for their conduct (usually, child abuse is the answer!), I think it is pretty amazing how little you learn about this killer's psyche and life. I mean, this guy is running around with this animal-slaughtering-machine thing, Jesus, you would think that deserves some kind of explanation (like in "Silence of the lambs" or so)! My guess is that the Cohens are "playing" with precisely this genre of "psychological thriller", they know we are "trained" to expect an explanation, that we make up all these conjectures throughout the movie, etc. So basically I think they're leaving this blank because we are filling in all sorts of explanations anyway, to make sense of the movie. Which reminds me of something Peter Haneke once said about violence in movies: He said it's much more effective to not show violence "directly", in a full shot, because nothing you can ever film will be as gruesome as the spectators imagination.
Coming back to the Cohens, I think they also discharge the "historical" explanation. At one point, the sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) brabbles on how he doesn't understand the world and the people anymore (we're talking about the 80ies here), and that he wants to retire because it's just too much for him etc. Upon which his uncle (or some other older relative) tells him the story of a sheriff getting violently killed in 1909. So it's always been like that. Furthermore, there's obviously drugs and a lot of money involved in this whole chase, but that's really also quite out of focus. It's a frame, allright, to get the story going. But you never know: who is fighting against whom, why did the deal not work out, what happened, who are the "good" guys, who are the "bad" guys, etc. There's violence. You don't understand it. Voilà. Or rather: whatever we do to try to understand it won't ever be enough.
Another great thing about this movie: It doesn't give you this whole "action-hero-alone-against-all-odds" bullshit. I mean, the protagonist is just a "somebody", he's not fucking Bruce Willis in "Die Hard", and so he won't get out of this mess easily, even though at one point you get to know that he was in Vietnam, so there is this (very brief) moment of "Oh, okay, now here's Rambo coming back, he will all outwit and shoot them".
Then, the title: "No Country for Old Men." Which I think is brilliant by itself. If you want to dig further, obviously a lot of people get killed throughout the movie, so, you know, there are no old men because a lot of them die young or fairly young. (At one point, towards the end, Tommy Lee Jones says that he is twenty years older than his dad ever was.) Also, as I indicated, Lee Jones plays this older sheriff who is getting really tired and anxious about his job (and the world in general), so, again, no country for old men: even if you live to grow old, you're not going to be able to live/stand it.
Finally: there is no music in this movie (except for the very end, when the credits start appearing). Which again reminds me of Peter Haneke, who said that using music in a movie to enhance emotions (fear, sympathy, romance, etc) is just a very plain and easy thing to do, because it picks up the spectator very easily without needing a lot of well elaborated visual hints.
So, to come to an end: go see the movie.

Dreams, mirror neurons and my new scientific career

So I wake up this morning having dreamt a lot tonight, and since I feel a mix of irritation, sadness, and anger, I can tell it hasn't been one of those Hollywood-like "action-love-story-heroine-dream" nights. What I remember is this weird scene: it's my wedding (though I have no clue whom I married) and my brother is there as well (among other people of course), and at one point we're standing outside on this huge porch (like the ones you see on these old, Southern US-style colonial mansions, maybe they're called verandas?) and he starts crying and apologizing, confessing that his boss has clustered him with work and that's why he hasn't been around (we're having a very tense relationship at the moment, as you might tell. In fact, we don't have any relationship at all at the moment, since he doesn't talk to me, though I don't know why). Allright, I'm not Freud and I don't have any intention of analyzing this dream here (I think it has a pretty obvious manifest content, you know: the wedding, the brother, the reconciliation, etc.; and on the latent side I probably just want to marry my father).
What I want to get at and what I've been thinking about is how you live through your dreams so intensely that even when you wake up and you realize you've been dreaming, you still feel bad, or happy, or whatever feeling you were having in this dream. In the past month, I've had two dreams I forgot by now, but what I remember is that in one, I was laughing and I actually woke up laughing, and in the other I was crying in my dream, and I woke up in tears. So the dreams seemed so "real" that my body was having "real" reactions to it.
I'm currently reading this book called "The Echo-maker" by Richard Powers, and it's about a young man who has a car accident and is seriously injured, especially his brain is damaged. Well, I'm not going to tell you the whole story (you go and read the book, it's really worth it), what I'm interested in is this: At one point, this famous neurologists who comes to study Mark (the protagonist) explains about "mirror neurons". In the 80ies or 90ies, scientists were observing the brain activity of monkeys while they were doing certains things, for example, when the monkey would lift its arm, a certain part of the brain would show high activity. So far, so good. But all of a sudden they realised that there was brain activity in this part even when the monkey didn't move a muscle - they were puzzled (or maybe freaked out!) until they found out that the monkey was looking at another monkey who was lifting his arm. So just SEEING another monkey lift his arm made the particular region in the brain active - mirror neurons. They're the reason why we feel emphaty for other people (or maybe: why we theoretically should), why we are able to imagine how other people feel, act, etc. And when you think about it: if this is true, if certain neurons fire away no matter if you really move your arm or not, then - and ta-da! here's my conclusion - that would explain why we feel so intensly in dreams. On the level of my brain activity, it doesn't really matter whether the dream I had this night was "actually" happening (and what is ever "actually" happening, I ask you?) or not. You think I should go and publish this ground breaking thought in the New England Journal of Medicine? I think so too.

There will be blood!

I think I'm getting my period. How do I know? Well, basically I've been trained almost since I can remember to write down the first day of my period in my calendar, in order to keep track of it and know when I'm "due", if it comes regularly, etc. etc. The usual stuff. And gynecologists seem to really rely on women keeping track of their period, because (at least in Austria and Germany), one of the first questions they ask you: So, when was your last period? (And they expect a reliable answer, too.)
Anyway, apart from the keeping track part that helps me to figure out when I will get it (and, funny enough, isn't that like putting down a "log" once a month as well?), I have a couple of bodily signs I usually can rely own: 1) being unusually hungry a couple of days beforehand, 2) having a craving for "unhealthy" food (chocolate, chips and the like), 3) being congested (sorry, I'm sure you don't want to read this, but it's true!), 4) my ovulation occuring a week or so beforehand (and NO, I'm not going to tell you how I know I ovulated!).
[Which reminds me of a really funny situation occuring during biology class in school, topic being male/female genitalia. So the teacher tells us that a woman ovulates about 400 times during her lifetime. Upon which one of the guys asked: So, that's cool, you can actually go and by 400 tampon boxes and you'll be covered for life.]
Anyways, coming back to my wonderfully elaborated "pre-menstrual sympotms" (btw: I never know: does PMS mean pre- or post-menstrual?), in retrospect I sometimes realize that when I was particularly "sensitive", emotional etc. the days before, I usually attribute it to getting my period as well (but that I always realize only afterwards, so it doesn't really help when I'm in that mood).
Of course, one could say that all these more or less mysterious bodily signs are just a result of a) my over-sensitiveness to the whole topic, b) me knowing about the "symptoms" you can have before getting your period and therefore actually having them or just using them as an excuse, c) whatever else constructivist-cultural shit. Which doesn't help when you feel like I do today: hungry and craving for chocolate, not been to the bathroom as I usually do, feeling a little bit stressed and anxious for no particular reason. But at least, I don't have to actually tell somebody about it (like in school when "having a period" was an excuse for not attending gym class), I don't live in a culture/time (at least, as far as I know) where/when I'm considered dirty or unclean because I have it and can't do a couple of things (like go to certain places, touch certain things or people, etc.) - and that, by the way, seems a bit like the good old school days and not being "able" to go to gym class (which is bullshit, of course, as if having my period really ever kept me from doing anything I wanted).
So, coming to my conclusion: one thing I really also want to state here (and I've said that for as long as I can remember having my period): Thank you soooooo much to the person who invented tampons; geez, that really made my life so much easier! So whereever or whoever you are: THANK YOU!!!!

Introducing...

I saw an exhibition today called "Absolutely Private?! From diaries to weblogs". One of my friends is a guide at the Museum for Communication, and invited me to come and see it. Two things really impressed me: a diary written by a man in a concentration camp (that was in 1933, and they were still called "Arbeitslager" - work camps - at that point), he wrote on cigarette papers and hid them in a double floor of his pocket watch. In utter desperation, being hungry, cold, subject of torture and I don't know what atrocities, he had the courage, the need, - the urge - to write on these really tiny tiny pieces of paper, not knowing if his wife (to whom they were adressed) would ever get to read them (or anybody else, for that matter). [Which right now reminds me of the poems by prisoners in Guantanamo that Judith Butler talked about in the lecture I saw two weeks ago in Utrecht.]
Second thing that sticks in my mind (and which is why, I think, I now started writing this blog myself): etymologically, "blog" comes from the word "log", ergo from shipping. In order to record the ship's position/speed/etc., seamen used to let this piece of wood sink into the water every day at the same time, and the dates of that were registered in the "log book" (ahaha!!). Don't ask me to explain exactly how this worked (special piece of wood, special construction to which it was attached, something like that), but what seemed so striking to me is this: if "blog" then really comes from "log", the custom that seamen used to have (and, apparently, "blog" was just a pun), then it is not only about daily routines, you know, the whole concept of recording what you do/where you are every day, but it's also about finding/securing your position again and again every day, it's a sort of help of orientation, it's a "point de repère". At least that's how I see it. So this is why, although I was rather sceptical/critical, at best times indifferent to this whole concept of "blog" (which is another story I might write about another day...), I now started my own.
Finally, I should maybe explain the title: Open diaries is what the first "blogs" in the 1990s were called. I like it not only because of that, but also because it expresses the paradoxical situation of diaries/blogs, insofar as they're never private.