Internal debate

Which additional persons should I invite to view my blog? Mom, friends, cousin?

Just maybe...

Maybe every story is a love story.

I am reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at the moment by a guy named Jonathan Safran Foer. It has been recommended to me by a friend, and during this past weekend (during which we went away with two sets of friends, which included the recommending friend and his wife, who had also read this book), another of the friends was also reading it. Meaning two identical copies of this book, same English edition (Penguin!), were being transported to Stockholm from Amsterdam and back at the very same time. Spooky.

Anyway the book is about 9/11 and the WWII bombing of Dresden and a family. In short: about love, betrayal, desertion and searching. I don't know yet how it ends. Don't worry, I won't post it on my blog when I do.

But I am curious about this love story hypothesis. I will search for counterexamples, in keeping with the Scientific Method.

Stockholm

...meaning something like "stick island" in Swedish, which I managed to work out for myself before the tour guide on the boat explained it. She also explained that nobody is quite sure why Stockholm is called that (except for the island part, obviously). Well, obviously if you've ever looked at a map of Stockholm, that is. It's built on a whole bunch of islands. Which are located on the boundary between a lake starting with M and the Baltic Sea, and which are also part of the 300,000-island archipelago of which we were taking a boat tour at the moment referred to above.

We had a very nice weekend visiting the lovely capital of Sweden with two sets of friends, ate well, visited a classy nightclub, did a little shopping, see the loveli lakes, viewed wolverines and wolves and European bison (which I did not previously know existed) and baby wild pigs and brown bears (björn) in person along with various Old Swedish Farmsteads from all over the country and some art. Also we visited the Royal Palace and more or less ignored the changing of the guard. All in all a great success. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.

Stoned

Yes, I live in Amsterdam, but no, I am not stoned.

The girl who feeds our kitties while we were away told me this story about her dog:

We were in the Vondelpark and she (the dog) ate some vagrantpoop. There were drugs in it. Afterwards, she was walking around looking like this: (stoned looking face).

I thought it was quite funny.

Translator's note: I apologize for my use of the homemade compound word in the story above. In Dutch you have 1) a word for homeless person (zwerver) which I translated to vagrant because it was slightly more wieldy than saying homelesspersonpoop and 2) the ability to spontaneously create compound words in this way, which I realize seems somewhat irresponsible to the purist English-speaking reader. Please try to appreciate my creativity in this matter. Or at least, don't let it distract you from the deeper meaning of the anecdote.

I noticed

I noticed my postings have a strong tendency to be about work. The reason for this is that my mental space is pretty much dominated by work (although I do not prefer this to be the case). Also because, although I do lots of fun things in the weekend, during the weekend I am busy doing them and by the time I am sitting behind a computer again I am typically at: work. As a result of which I am thinking about: work.

Maybe I should take up golf.

Write more stuff

I enjoy to read about the lives and thinkings of others on-line. As a result I entreat them to please: write more stuff.

In order to serve as an example (even though I am very busy) I will tell you a little bit about me. This morning my desk was moved into a new office. I share it now with one colleague instead of two, which was the temporary situation whilst walls were being moved around and new carpet laid. I like the new carpet much better. I like the new office just fine. I can still see the same row of trees, only now I see the ones located towards the northwest of the office rather than towards the southwest. At the moment the sun is shining slantily through my window.

I have just eaten some Thai food with a few colleagues in consequence of our staying late at the office to do some work. Now I am going to get back to work. I am not feeling sorry for myself, although I did yesterday when I came in for a little while to work only to find the office closed less than an hour after I arrived. But I got over it. I don't really believe in working on Sundays, anyway.

Meaning of life

Some say: You only live once, and after that comes nothing. Gather all the experiences you can, live to the fullest, because then it's all over.

Some believe there's more: life after death. The funny thing is, live to the fullest remains -- you still only live once. But somehow this fullness has to do with living for others, rather than for yourself. A hard teaching.

Interesting thought from church this morning: when other people around you have issues with you, it's because you're living out of your strength. It is hard to be weak towards others. Especially when you feel weak: especially then, you want to act strong. And by you I mean, of course, I. But I think you help people more when you let them help you. You have more to give when you have less to give, or at least: less to prove. What is grace? I think it's to do with letting other people be who they are, letting yourself be who you are, letting life be what it is: acceptance. And yet with a positive spin; not resignation; not defeat; not giving up. Accepting, while dreaming and hoping for more. Seeing the good, choosing to see the good, choosing to believe in the good. Or should I say: the Good.

Facing a rather stressful few days at work, it's hard to keep the perspective of what's really important. But I hope I will.

Kids (cont.)

The more I like the people, the more I like the kid, it seems. For example, I can't wait for my sister to have kids. They will be the greatest ever.

I was thinking this morning, this phenomenon may explain my ambivalence towards the idea of having my own kids. You see, I like Mr. Cat very much indeed. But myself, I don't necessarily like all that much.

Who you are

I think it is not irrelevant that we, humans, are embodied.

I mean, it's not as if we're just a spirit which happens to be floating around in a body. In that sense, I'm not a dualist, no indeed. I would like to have a debate with you about this, in case you are one. But not on-line.

But all that being said, I think who you are is separate in some way from how your body is like. Like if your legs don't work, I don't think who you are is a person who can't walk. Although surely not being able to walk will have some impact on you who are -- or more precisely, how you cope with the fact that you are unable to walk.

I also acknowledge that how you look impacts how you feel about yourself. Whereas how you feel about yourself can also impact how you look. And how you take care of your body can absolutely impact how you feel as well as how you look, in addition to the causal relationship between how you look and how you feel.

Kids

Traditionally, I don't like kids that much. Lately I have been liking some of them, a bit. Ones that belong to people I like, in particular.

I read this. It seems relevant.

Random moment

Today a certain co-worker walked into my office, passed around behind my desk, paused, and then went back out the way he came in. I looked up inquisitively. He muttered something like, "oh, nothing," on his way out.

I had been working with this co-worker a bit during the course of the day, although usually I do not.

The incident made me wonder (I am being quite transparent here) whether he was checking out if it was, in fact, my perfume that he had noticed smelling so pleasantly floral earlier in the day. Reading Camobunny's blog just now made me wonder if, in fact, another personal odor was involved.

Probably he just forgot what he came for. I guess.

Why is it that the more I have to do, the less I feel like doing it, and even though I know deadlines are looming, both short-ish and medium-term, I don't seem to manage to plan my time in any kind of structured or effective way. I know all the things I have to do will take way longer to do than I have time to do them. Most of them are also things I hate.

Don't you hate it when you answer your own question.

Summer?

OK after yesterday's proof that it had been spring, here's the confounding news: it actually seems to have skipped right into summer. Well, the leaves on the trees are still smallish and light green, and some trees are blooming in that oh-so-springy way of theirs, but actually it has been above 20 degrees every day since Tuesday (whereas Monday was like 11 and rainy).




As I cynically implied yesterday, it will probably get rainy and cold again for weeks before it's actually summer, but for now I simply shout Yippee!! and run off to get my bike for a nice long ride in the sunshine.

Proof

Last weekend it really started to be spring.


By now it is virtually summer. Let's hope it sticks!

D-cup chihuahua

My colleague moved into a new living situation. Her roommate has a D-cup chihuahua. A what? I said. A D-cup chihuahua, she said. They call it that because (cupping her hand to demonstrate) it fits into your hand.

It turned out she was talking about a teacup chihuahua.

Number one rule

If I ever write a book on blogging, or provide unsolicited advice to other bloggers, the number one rule will be "keep it short" and closely followed by rule two "provide the reader some visual variation." Anyway I have broken this rule already myself. Here is a picture of Munich. This may or may not be somewhere near where I was. But it looks familiar.

Germany and the Germans, with grammatical aside

I have been for the past two days in Germany. In Munich to be precise. The fortunate thing about Munich is that the Germans there are not so German as Germans in general. I think I can say these things about Germans because I am one. At least my father is one. At least, his parents were two. At least, their parents came from Germany, or at least, they were ethnic Germans and came from somewhere in the general vicinity of Germany (Yurp) (present-day Yugoslavia, I think, to be slightly more precise) (if not necessarily accurate). As you can see, I am a highly qualified "I can criticize them because they are my own volk" German-like person.

Anyway many Germans (I will leave it up to the reader to judge whether I 1) qualify as such and/or 2) conform to such stereotypes) are known for being rather, er, uptight. Specifically with regards to, for example, planning and scheduling and time. Whereas the thing I appreciated about the Germans with whom I was meeting in Munich was that they seemed to be quite flexible and even laid-back with respect to time.

Also, the weather was very nice.

What I did not appreciate, although I can in no way blame this on any Germans, was that we declined a lunch of sushi at our first approximately-lunchtime meeting because we were expecting to have some lunch at our subsequent meeting, and this turned out to be, in a word, not the case. The subsequent meeting hosts graciously ordered us some lunch, which however turned out to be rather less satisfying than the sushi previously offered by the previous meeting hosts.

In unrelated news the Dutch are not always terribly fond of the Germans (at least they enjoy, as don't we all, to make fun of them) and hope to kick their butts in the upcoming World Cup soccer/football competition. I too hope this will be the case.

In an unrelated moment of unsolicited grammatical education, how many of you caught the mistake in my previous paragraph? Well, besides "as don't we all," which is not so much a mistake as an intentionally awkward sentence construction to make a humorous aside. Did you catch it? I used the phrase (though disguised by the aforementioned humorous aside), "they enjoy... to make fun" -- something frequently heard or read in oral or written communication (respectively) by my Dutch associates. Ah yes, they do struggle with our English gerund. The correct structure would be that they enjoy making fun of the Germans. To be fair to the Dutch, native speakers of numerous other languages struggle with this gerund/infinitive subtlety of the English language. To be fair to the Germans... oh, never mind.

My name

In the weekend we visited some friends. Their daughter, who is not-quite-two, called me by name! I was absolutely flabbergasted (and flattered) by this. In addition, she pronounced it the same (not-quite-perfect) way I pronounced it when I was her age (as evidenced by my father's tendency to call me that when he is feeling particularly affectionate in a nostalgic sort of way). She is approximately the cutest thing ever. And she likes me! :-)