Coincidence or destiny?

The most amazing thing happened to me this week. Before I share this most extraordinary little piece of adventure, let me give you the following, essential information: To get to my office, I have to take two different subway lines and change at a particular stop. Usually, when I change the subway, I walk all the way back to the end of the train, because then I'm right at the exit once I arrive.

All right, so on Wednesday I get up in the morning, I go through all my regular morning routine, I get onto the subway and change at the usual place. I make my way up the escalator, and I arrive just at the same time as the train, so instead of walking all the way back, I get onto the middle wagon. I stand right next to the doors, not because the train is particularly crowded; just 'cos I feel like it. Okay, so at the next stop a man and a woman get onto the train and they stand right in front of me. Looking without thinking at this guy, I suddenly think that his face seems familiar; and familiar as in: I know you from a former life (called teenage years). So I turn off my Ipod and realize they are talking Austrian. And suddenly it dawns on me: I had a "relationship" (well, actually, I believe it lasted about 4 weeks or something) with this guy back home when I was a teenager. After which I never saw him again, because he didn't really belong to my circle of friends or my school.

Isn't that the most unbelievable thing? Granted, that he'd be living in Munich is probably not that unlikely, but imagine what had to happen for us to meet on this particular train on this particular day? Just a shift of thirty seconds or so in our respective trajetories that morning, and we wouldn't have stood in the same wagon of the same train right in front of each other.

I'd say: Destiny 1, coincidence 0. Now I only have to figure out what destiny wanted to tell me with this encounter.

My litte Pony - revisited

For those of you who also had a little pony as a child. If you want to see more hilarious make-overs, click here.

Soap&Skin

My latest fancy.

Quote of the day

Zu umschreiben, was man selbst getan hat, war vielleicht eine Möglichkeit, Zugehörigkeit zu sich selbst zu bekommen.
Per Olov Enquist Der Kartenzeichner

Fourteenth lesson of academic logic

Once you have gotten yourself around to actually start writing, it becomes, of course, one of the most gratifying, exciting, mind-thrilling things on earth. You can feel your brain bubbling like a fizzy tablet dropped in a whirlpool.

Conclusion: I love my job; even if I always wine and complain about it.

Be real

Okay, this is kinda like a follow up story on the killing spree business.

So of course now everyone is discussing the damaging and dangerous effects of violent video games, particularly ego-shooting games (those are the ones played in first-person-perspective), and the bad influence of hiphop/rap (mostly because of a video/song by a no name German rapper that was about running amok. The video was banned immediately; thanks to which - I imagine - the guy is a millionaire by now). All sorts of very intelligent, well-educated and worried adults give interviews discussing whether the influence of violent video games and violent song texts explains why youngsters get a gun and start shooting people in their school. What they discuss is the inflation of the boundary between reality and fiction; between the real and the virtual world - and whether or not that has something to do with said games and music.

As far as I know, there is to date no empirical survey whatsoever that would prove or exonerate violent "fiction" (in whatever form) as the cause for killing sprees. Be that as it may, what annoys me in the current discussions yet once again is that they seem to suggest "we", the adults, (that is: the normal and mentally sane adults) can of course differenciate between the virtual and the real. Or, let me put it yet another way: As if much of ourselves, our lives, our aspirations, our conception of the world wasn't virtual, that is: shaped by the imaginary (in the psychoanalytical sense). As if the distinction between reality and imagination wasn't quite impossible - because what is "real" for the psyche is a very difficult matter in the first place. (And I won't even start to discuss Baudrillard here; who, I'm sure, would have a lot of things to say about the reality or virtuality of events.)

Secondly, and even more astonishing to me, is the implicit assumption that children and young adults are idiots. As if they weren't able to discern between reality and fiction. Seriously. The "problem", as far as I see it, is that fiction causes "real" (whatever that means) feelings (which is at the same time the widely appraised benefit of fiction); and this happens despite the fact that we know we're in a fictious world. I could tell myself as much as I wanted to that Walt Disney's Snowwhite was but a movie; the queen-turned-witch still scared the shit out of me.

Finally, and this is quite a Derridaen point to make I guess, what is annoying in those kind of discussions is that it also seems to involve a discussion about the literal and the figurative (which, needless to say, is another variation of the "real" and the "unreal"). It's a discussion about what texts or games "really" mean, and whether or not kids will be able to understand and discern that "real" meaning. In regard to the said rap song about a killing spree, people were worried that kids might not read it as a form of provocative social criticism (= its "real" meaning, according to the rapper), but as an instruction manual for their next violent run around school (= the "wrong" meaning). The Derridaen question to ask would obviously be who is in the position to define the "true" or "real" meaning of a text; and if there is a "true" meaning of a text to begin with. In this particular case, it's very tricky of course, because the literal meaning isn't the literal meaning (i.e. you go to your school and shoot people is not the "true" meaning); and how, I ask you, should the generation of poor, illiterate, angry-without-a-cause, stupid boys and young men be able to understand such an intricate and complex message?

Question to my future self

I wonder whether I will ever feel less uneasy about things.

Winnenden - Columbine

Fünf einsame Frauen, von denen jede für sich in aller Stille verrückt wird, trotz Ehemann und Kindern, oder eher deshalb. Eine Eigenschaft hatten sie alle: Zweifel an sich selbst. Ein Schuldgefühl, weil sie nicht glücklich waren. Die Formulierung, die sie alle gebrauchten: "Mit mir muß irgend etwas nicht stimmen."

Doris Lessing Das goldene Notizbuch

I've really been wondering the past days about those killing sprees. The one in the US was almost covered up by the massacre in a German high school, where a 17-year-old shot to death 10 pupils and 3 teachers before killing himself.

The media now are, obviously, full of experts giving their opinion about how and why they think such a thing could happen. What seems striking to me is that most of the people running amok are young men. Granted, the connection of violence and masculinty isn't exactly what you'd call a fresh concept. Apparently we've had - at least since the early 20th century - generations of young men who aren't only willing to kill, but willing to kill themselves. (Which, at least in my opinion, has something to do with the instauration of the modern army and nation states.)

What is thus very interesting in this respect, at least from my perspective, is the fact that almost every killing spree ends with suicide (though I am not sure if - causally speaking - suicide is the end, and not the starting point). I believe those young men are just another form of suicidal bombers. Of course, contrary to religious fundamentalist or separatist suicidal bombers, they do not openly display a political agenda. It seems as if they "merely" suffer on a very personal level and for very personal reasons. But then you have to ask yourself why they seek this kind of publicity (in the sense of a public space and attention), and why they don't merely kill themselves in silence, but chose to go out there and cause as much damage as they possibly can.

And what they are saying, in the end, is fuck you. Fuck this society. Of course it's a personal problem, but if you think about it, those young men do some form of social protest. And it's not about violent video games and nerdy children being outsiders in high school. This 17-year-old kid theoretically speaking was a so-called "winner" of German society: well-off family, educated, with all the possibities of making it. (Notice, by the way, that a lot of the suicide bombers in Western Europe do have a similar situation. The 9/11-terrorists were educated men who, if it weren't for their ethnic background, would've probably been able to live a comfortable life in Germany. Another question - one that Houellebecq might ask - would be whether Tim K. was an economic winner, but a sexual looser.) In any case: what he's saying is: I don't even want to be a winner in this society, in fact, I don't want to be part of it at all; and I want to kill as many people as I can out of sheer rage and desperation.

The host of a discussion round was despairingly asking psychiatrists and teachers, policemen and media experts why there was a generation of angry kids "out there". Quite frankly, I'd find it bewildering if those kids weren't angry; if, given the present social conditions, they weren't on the verge of going completely crazy.

As I said in an earlier post, I think the question isn't why and how things like that happen. The question is why they don't happen more often.

NB: This is the only (and maybe most important) objection to psychoanalysis I would agree on, i.e. that it is reactionary in the sense that it "cures" people's personal problems, as if they weren't suffering from society but from their individual, particular biography. It's like: People go crazy in patriarchal, capitalist, heterosexist nuclear families, but hey, go see a shrink and you'll do fine and be back into your machine routine in no time. I believe Freud was very right with his description of the problematic of identity formation in a Western patriarchal, capitalist society, but since he was an old chauvinist himself, he wouldn't dare think of any other way out other than curing his patients from their neurosis and hysteria so that they could go back to their bourgeois lives which made them sick in the first place.

Bloggobirthday

Dear blog,

I wanted to seize the opportunity and tell you how grateful I am you came into my life. We've come a long way since we started our journey together; you bore with me through all my caprices and tempers, you witnessed the good, the bad, and the mediocre.

Stay just the way you are, and I hope there are a lot more years ahead of us.

Happy Birthday!

Bloggingly yours,

Blogger

The Celibate Life - Thoughtful.

What you miss being single is not so much the company (because after all, you have friends and other people dear to you).

What you miss being single is not so much the sharing of a daily routine (because after all, routines get quite tedious; and you've grown a little peculiar with time anyways).

What you miss being single not so much the sex (because after all, you can masturbate and have one night stands).

What you miss being single is not so much emotional security and intimacy (because after all, you don't really believe in finding such a thing with another person anymore, if you can't find it within yourself).

What you do miss is the body of the Other; to touch, to smell, to taste, to nestle against. The incredible strangeness of another body that can't be denied or rationalized. (And I'm afraid this does not come out right the way I mean it. What I mean is not remotely connected to sexual attraction or desire. What I'm talking about is that every baby, even if you satisfy its basic needs, will eventually die if it doesn't get some sort of bodily attention and affection; if it does not feel the attention and touch of another body. Almost as if human life without the feeling of other bodies was unbearable and ultimately unlivable.)

Bitter, sarcastic cynic

(Inspired by a scene from Hannah and her Sisters)

The problem with everyone wondering why people run amok is that it's the wrong question.

Considering the present situation of the world, you'd better ask why things like that don't happen more often.

Thirteenth lesson of academic logic

I don't know how or why or when that fear of writing materialised in my life. Fact is, I've lost the light heartedness and airiness of writing; all that's left is an incredible anxiety in the face of a white page.
Or maybe I fantasize that I used to be able to write without fear; just like childhood days always seem like the golden days in retrospect.

Conclusion: Having to write an essay and trying to stop smoking is NOT a good combination. Believe me.

Quotes of the day

Et c'est bien cela l'inter-texte: l'impossibilité de vivre hors du texte infini - que ce texte soit Proust, ou le journal quotidien, ou l'écran télévisuel: le livre fait sens, le sens fait la vie.

Caractère asocial de la jouissance. Elle est la perte abrupte de la socialité, et pourtant il ne s'ensuit aucune retombée vers le sujet (la subjectivité), la personne, la solitude: tout se perd, intégralement. Fond extrême de la clandestinité, noir de cinéma.

J'écris parce que je ne veux pas des mots que je trouve: par soustraction.

De même que l'enfant sait que sa mère n'a pas de pénis et tout en même temps croit qu'elle en a un (économie dont Freud a montré la rentabilité), de même le lecteur peut dire sans cesse: je sais bien que ce ne sont que des mots, mais tout de même... (je m'émeus comme si ces mots énoncaient une réalité).

Roland Barthes Le plaisir du texte

Ideology and ideological state apparatus

The Spanish socialist government replaced compulsory religious education with civics. Countering this law, roughly 50.000 parents withdrew their children from those lessons because they considered the taught content (democracy, equality between the sexes, homosexuality, immigration, globalisation,...) as indoctrination. Particularly catholic parents felt that their children were being infused with certain (read: communist) morals, and claimed that it was their (inalenienable) right to corrupt their children themselves and with their own morals.

Now, I don't know anything about this civic education business, and honestly, I don't care whether it "really" has a leftist coloration or not. I am simply astonished by the fact that those people obviously think that their children are blank spaces and will-less machines that can be fed with whatever content you have and ta-da! they become well-behaved, honest communists, who think men and women equal and don't consider homosexuality a curse or an illness. (Of course, since there never were any youngsters who revolted against the values and morals of their teachers or parents.) I am also astonished by the fact that obviously they don't think that their children get infused with values and morals in any other class. Like: History class, as if that had anything to do with morals or ideology? Please! Moral free schools! Teachers without opinions! Lessons without ideology! TV without information! Capitalism without bad banks! Society without citizens! Markets without states!

For heaven's sake people, you can't be serious about this.

Quote of the day

Dans la perversion (qui est le régime du plaisir textuel) il n'y a pas de "zones érogènes" (expression au reste assez casse-pieds); c'est l'intermittence, comme l'a bien dit la psychanalyse, qui est érotique: celle de la peau qui scintille entre deux pièces (le pantalon et le tricot), entre deux bords (la chemise entrouverte, le gant et la manche); c'est ce scintillement même qui séduit, ou encore: la mise en scène d'une appartition-disparition. Ce n'est pas là le plaisir du strip-tease corporel ou du suspense narratif. Dans l'un et l'autre cas, pas de déchirure, pas de bords: un dévoilement progressif: toute l'excitation se réfugie dans l'espoir de voir le sexe (rêve de collegien) ou de connaître la fin de l'histoire (satisfaction romanesque).

Roland Barthes Le plaisir du texte

Onanist manifesto

Don't knock masturbation — it's sex with someone I love.

Annie Hall

Masturbation has a pretty prestressed history. Particularly starting from the late 18th, early 19th century onwards, Europe witnessed a crusade against onanism; medicine and pedagogy blamed it to be the cause of almost every mental or physical illness you could think of. Interestingly enough (I've read quite a bit about the topic, as you might have guessed), there was a particular link between reading/books an masturbation. Of course because in pre-movie times porn was mostly in written form (Rousseau once referred to them as the books you read with one hand). But even more so because reading - like masturbating - was something to be done alone; both were solitary vices.

Masturbation was a site where boundaries between individual and societal body, public and private, and the particular fears of bourgeois society became apparent. Foucault (who else?) described the fear about infantile masturbation as the key trigger for the instauration of the heterosexual, bourgeois nuclear family; the infantile body becoming the area of a particular parental care and thus - hello psychoanalysis - the vanishing point of incestual desires. Masturbation was also a key figure of class anxieties, because the servants were seen as the modern Evas who seduced innocent and healthy children into depravation. They were the enemy in one's own house; potentially dangerous because they would teach the precious offspring an alluring hobby which in the end would lead to the degeneration of bourgeois class and thus of all society. (The most interesting story to me is the one where nurses would masturbate crying and annoying babys and toddlers to calm them down.)

Masturbation was more or less absolved in the 20th century, particularly by dear Siggi who was one of the first ones to openly accord sexual drives to children. Nevertheless, masturbation beyond childhood and puberty still carried (and carries) the stain of deviantness and something vaguely associated with infantilism (also dear Siggi's idea, because the ultimate goal of sexual development was of course genital, heterosexual intercourse). To masturbate is embarrassing, pubertal, deficient - you're only doing it because you can't get the real thang.

I, for one, am really into masturbation. I got a late start, but enjoy it all the more. I don't consider it as a supplement (to speak with Derrida) in any way or as something inferiour or less good than sex with another person (in fact, I've had sexual partners where masturbation clearly would have been the better choice). I just think it's a different way of having sex. I would like to see it as a technology of self in the Foucauldian sense; a bodily exercise where you work on yourself, for yourself. I see it as a way of being nice to myself, of taking care of my body; also a way of getting to know my body and explore my fantasy and my mind.

When I masturbate, I feel like the boundaries of my body are becoming strangely blurred. You know, it's like when you go to sleep and there is this moment where you can't exactly tell where your arm ends and the part of your body on which your arm rests starts. I get a sense of total disorientation or rather: I feel like my whole sensations are solely focused on my lower back and pubic region.

I kinda feel like a Monchichi, you know those stuffed animals you had in childhood that had those plastic fingers you could stick in their mouths?

Twelfth lesson of academic logic

It's very easy not to write a PhD, because there's nothing that can't keep you from actually writing it: Cleaning your fridge, going to find a Turkish supermarket, reading anything that is remotely not connected to your topic, having a chat with a friend or a collegue, going for coffee; pick and choose.

It's also very easy to feel bad about your PhD in general and your topic in particular; any negative comment by a passer-by that doesn't have a clue what you're writing about will do.

Conclusion: I'm a PhD-hypochondriac. It causes me a constant level of sorrow and worries, without actually anything really troublesome happening (least of all: that I am actually writing).

Rectification

I got up this morning and realized that serotonine hangovers do exist.

In German we call them muscle cat, though considering the amount of pain my legs are causing, I'd rather call it muscle lion.

Thus, on the third day of the rest of my life, I went to bed human, and woke up on the fourth with a walk like a rheumatic duck.

Day 3

On the third day of the rest of my life I took my body for a run, and it made me a present immediately.

Serotonine, man, serotonine. It's for free and you don't get a hangover.

Illumination

On the second day of the rest of my life, I realized that I was heart-broken.
So I sat down listening to music which made me cry.
Because I figured that there was no sense in spending the rest of your life pretending to yourself that you're stronger than you really are.

The first day of the rest of my life

The first day of the rest of my life started with good news, i.e. my dermatologist told me that I was not going to die of skin cancer (or at least not now). Needless to say, this is a sine qua non for starting the rest of your life, because, after all, it would actually be impossible to have the first day of the rest of your life without having a rest of a life to live.

On the first day of the rest of my life, I decided to take things easy and enjoy the moment. Whereever I went today, I tried to walk slowly and consciously, savouring every minute, even the minutes I had to wait for public transport. Because clearly, when you are starting the rest of your life, you want not a single precious minute to pass you by.

On the first day of the rest of my life, I went to see my analyst, and found out that what I was most scared of was to die alone. Hence my wish for a baby. Needless to say, I am not going to go and get knocked up by the first passer-by, because, after all, when the rest of your life just started, you don't want to blindfoldly rush into things.

On the first day of the rest of my life, I went shopping because I figured that when you've just found out you've got the rest of your life to live, this is clearly not the day to be frugal. Also, you want to be well dressed for the rest of your life, and wear shiny brown cowboy-like boots.

On the first day of the rest of my life, I cooked myself a delicious dinner, because I thought it a good idea to be a bit more hedonistic for the rest of the life ahead of me.

On the first day of the rest of my life, I called my friends who I had been worrying over the weekend and told them that today was the first day of the rest of my life, because clearly, when you've just started the rest of your life, you want people dear to you to be part of it.

On the first day of the rest of my life, I vowed never to google any medical conditions or symptoms again, because, obviously, you don't want to spend the rest of your life worrying about death.

This isn't funny

Being the hypochondric nutcase that I am, I spent my day thinking about things I'd still like to do before I die. Strangely enough, the only thing I could come up with was having a baby. Other than that, I feel like I've experienced a decent amount of things; which probably is a good thing, if you think about it.

Then again, even though I don't really have a list of stuff I want to do, I still want to experience myself in 1 year, in 2 years, in 3 years, in 4 years, in 5 years, in...

But should my life really come to an end soon, here's a couple of rather small and somehwat doable things I'd do:

- get a tatoo

- buy myself a ridiculous amount of new clothes

- spend as much time as I can with my friends

I'm also thinking about my will. Still up for grabs are:

- my Ipod

- my library (mostly in German, but also a considerable amount of French and English books)

- my jewelry

Let me know if you're interested in any of it.

Refusing heritage you can't refuse

Okay, so basically, having genes sucks big time, if you ask me (of course I know you weren't asking me, but I'm telling you anyway). Granted, if you're mother is a 106-year-old Chinese lady, you probably hit evolutionary jackpot, but with my family, it sucks. Think of the most annoying and scary heredital illnesses, and you can be sure someone in my family had them: all sorts of cancer, depression, glaucoma, and what have you not. And yes, they're mostly passed on through the female side. Thanks mom. On top of that, I inherited my dad's hypochondria, and that combination, I tell you, is a match made in heaven.

You know, at least with psychic stuff, there's something to be done about it. It's a family heritage that you can't escape to some extend, but at least you can distance yourself from it or accept it, you can try changing it. No talking cure for genes, unfortunately.

I thus officially declare war with my body. I feel strangely at its mercy; and I hate that.