On Silences

I haven't posted here in about two months, but not for lack of topics to talk about.
To be frank, there was too much.
I still haven't regained my balance, so I'm never quite sure what to write about, which of the voices in my head and heart are worth listening to, and how to verbalize my thoughts in a way that at least offers some clarity for myself, let alone for others.

So I've been silent here. Don't get me wrong - I was still yelling and cursing the TV, but even discussing some of these topics with anybody seems beyond me.

First, it was Sri Lanka. How am I supposed to wrap my head around several days of fierce fighting over a patch of land the size of the field next to my house? I must have spent hours just looking at that field, and with each look, there seemed to be fewer answers.

Then it was the EU elections, which I still can't think about without tasting the bile in my throat.

And now it's the elections in Iran. I watch the news obsessively, I follow some blogs, I try to keep up with Twitter, although that seems a superhuman task. And in every picture I see I look for my friends. I don't write to them, because I can't seem to find the words. Everything I come up with seems insufficient at best, or ignorant and self-indulgent at worst. So I leave it and keep watching the news, and the posts, and the tweets. And I stay silent, even as I bite my lips in helpless furstration.

I think that Sean came closest to what I've been wanting to write. Even when he is speechless, he is still more eloquent me. And I'm grateful for that, because simply reading his words, knowing that they are out there, made me feel less alone, and just a little bit less helpless.

Scary

It freaks me out really badly when people take narratives I'm familiar and comfortable with and twist them to make them scary. It's particularly bad when it's fairy tales.
Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples" kept me up half the night, and his "The Problem of Susan" pretty much ruined Narnia for me.

And today, as I sat there, peacefully staring at my TV in that brain-in-standby-mode I find so soothing, I stumbled across this:

Great. Has anybody seen my security blanket?

Dirty Words

Spot the contradiction, anyone?

"I am by no means a feminist, but I am definitely for equal rights."

Kelly Clarkson, during a visit to Austria for the Women's World Awards Gala.

Public Service Announcement

I just wanted to take a moment to say that I've been really busy with completely irrelevant stuff And now I also have a cold, which makes me whiny and drowsy and means that I'm glued to my bed (which is a boring and desolate place, hidden behind a mountain of cold medicines).

But I still felt the strong urge to make the following proclamation:

I am totally, madly in love with Jon Stewart.

I think that man has one of the sexiest minds on the planet.

Thank you.
Carry on.

How evolutionary psychology is letting me down

I'm a heterosexual woman. I like children. I'd even like to have some of my own (in the not too immediate future).
According to evolutionary psychologists, I should be an instant expert in all things child-related.
My instincts should just take over, switching me to super-maternal auto-pilot. In some situations, that would be awesome. Because I'm really, really, *really* helpless with babies. Put me in a room with children above the age of 2, and I will love it. But babies...I don't really know what to do with them. I don't know what they want from me. Hell, I'm absolutely mortified that I might break them.
That's why, when I was sitting in a café with one of my best friends yesterday, and she wanted to go to the toilet, she handed me her little girl with the words: "Okay, I need you to be very brave now." She wasn't talking to the baby, and she wasn't kidding either, because she knows me very well.

Amazingly, I didn't break the baby. I didn't even make her cry (Go me!!!). But that mixture of nervousness, and helplessness, and vague dread didn't go away until my friend came back.

Space Opera Galore

I'm a sci-fi nerd. Only a few people who have spent any amount of time with me (or read my blogs) are unaware of this fact.

So, naturally, when I stumbled upon a very, very sweet deal on Babylon 5 DVD Box Sets (all five seasons of them), I stopped, blinked, drooled and promptly hoisted my debit card.
I remembered watching the show on TV and liking it, and I was aware of its acclaim for complexity, depth, good dialogue, and also - indirectly - saving DS9 from total irrelevance ^^

Surprisingly, the show holds up not only to the cult status, but also to my own fond memories.
If anything, I love it more than I did before, although I admit this might be because I'm no longer 12 years old. (Also, the sheer number of gratuitous roundhouse kicks adds a hitherto underappreciated level of awesome.)

For the Region 2 DVDs I own, the images have been digitally remastered, which has improved the quality (although it still pales in comparison to HDTV and serves only to demonstrate just how dated the CGI really is by today's standards), which is great and follows the convention of changing something (no matter how small) for the DVD release to make it new and exciting.
Unfortunately, everybody got soooo excited about enhancing the image and animating a really crappy DVD menu, no attention was paid to the sound. And trust me, they should have done something. Anything. The relative volumes of dialogue and effects/music are so different, it's impossible for me to let the remote out of myhand for even a moment. I have to turn up the volume to get what people are saying, but then a jumpgate opens, or something explodes, or somebody wins in the casino, or a fucking tree falls over in a fucking forest, and the sound is so loud it's almost painful, so I turn the volume back down. But then they cut back to people talking, ... *sigh* Especially the battle sequences are no fun at all that way, and I haven't even started on Season 3, where the real fun begins...er...sorry...where "the Great War comes upon us all".

But even without their screeching sound effect at a volume that makes my ears ring, those Shadow ships are still right up there among the creepiest things ever seen in television sci-fi.

Starting 2009

For many people, the new year started at midnight last night.
My personal reckoning works a little differently.
For me, the new year doesn't really start until I've heard the last few notes of the Radetzky Marsch. (I may or may not be one of those people who clap along at home - I'm not admitting to anything.)

I'm talking about the Vienna New Year's Concert, played every year by the Vienna Philharmonic.
It's broadcast live on TV (to over 40 countries, apparently), and watching it is probably the only unshakeable new year's tradition we have in our house. We don't really get into the spirit of the night, normally. We don't do the lead-pouring-thing, we don't waltz into the new year, and we don't always eat pork on New Year's Day. But every year, without fail, we watch the New Year's Concert, and I love it. (Here's a taste.)

What I don't really know is why I love it.
The thing is, while I don't hate classical music, I won't actively seek it out, either. I know some of the most famous stuff, and there are a few pieces I absolutely love, but the times when I actually dig up those CDs or watch a concert on TV are few and far between. I know what I like, even if I can't articulate why. For some strange reason, my basic argument of "It sounds nice" is dismissed by people who take their music seriously ^_^"

I guess there's just something incredibly reassuring about starting the new year with a set of melodies that are both timeless and completely familiar. And while I'm philistine enough to not hear whether a polka is conducted by Muti or Barenboim, I recognize Strauss music when I hear it, and it never fails to put a smile on my face.

Old Year, New Year

I was unhappy in January.
I cried myself to sleep in February.
I was desperate in March.
I was numb in April, May and June.
I was desperate for diversion in July and August.
Then I was numb again in September and October.
I took a step back towards the world in November.
I relearned how to hope in December.

I don't know how your year was.
Regardless, I hope for the next one will be (even) better.

Maybe we can leave the shitty bits behind and take the good bits with us.

Maybe :)

Twilight OST

So, I've been feeling a bit left out by the "Twilight"-mania.
Some people love it, some people hate it.
I strongly suspect that I'd be with the "hate it"-crowd, but I can't really tell, since I haven't read the books, and I won't get a chance to see the movie until January.

But I did manage to get my hands on the official soundtrack.
I even listened to it, because there's some stuff I like on it, and because I wanted to find out whether cramming Debussy and Paramore on one album was inspired or insane.

As of the first few bars of the "Drinking Song" from La Traviata, I've made up my mind: insane.

Rom-Coms - They're Bad For You...

...apparently:

Watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life, a study by a university in Edinburgh has claimed.

Oh dear.

Rom-coms have been blamed by relationship experts at Heriot Watt University for promoting unrealistic expectations when it comes to love.

They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner.

Many held the view if someone is meant to be with you, then they should know what you want without you telling them.

Oh dear.

Students watching the romantic film were later found to be more likely to believe in fate and destiny. A further study found that fans of romantic comedies had a stronger belief in predestined love.

Oh dear.

So, the stereotypes are true. I will be unable to have a relationship with a person, because in my heart, I will always be holding out for Mr Right (TM) who calls me "Princess" and who had me at hello. Damn.

But shouldn't there be some mention of gender in this?
Could there be a difference between male and female participants?
Could it be, say, that more women than men love rom-coms?
Could it be that girls are fed stories about The Man For You pretty much from birth? You know the guy...he's the one worth waiting for, the prince who will always rescue you, the one who will be your husband, the one who will be right for you in every way, the one for the happily ever after without any trials or tribulations or arguments about who forgot to buy the milk.
Could there (and I'm going out on a massive limb on this one) be a correlation?

Also, if rom-coms are the only genre to promote unrealistic ideas about relationships, or anything else, for that matter, I will eat my (one and only, much beloved) hat.

Shopping for Frustration

I love to shop.

I love to look around for that perfect gift for somebody.
I love to come out of a shop with a bag full of DVDs I hadn't even known I wanted.
I love spending hours on end in a bookshop and browsing until the stack of books I want to buy becomes too heavy for me to carry.

And yet, shopping for clothes makes me want to cry and scream after about five minutes.
There is nothing that will destroy my morale and my will to live quite so quickly as a clothes shop.

You wonder why? Me too.
The last time I checked, my anatomy was "normal". One head, two arms conveniently linked to the body at the shoulders, one torso, two legs ending in two feet, which point the right way (as far as I can tell). My joints bend in the directions they should, I have no tail, no wings, nor any other appendages not normally associated with Homo sapiens.
Granted, my body is closer to Rubens' idea of beauty than to Karl Lagerfeld's...but still.

It's the same pattern every time. I walk into the first shop with a clear idea of what I want and what it should look like, full of naive hope that *this time* will be different.
Five minutes later, my hands are full with stuff I like (just like in a bookshop).
Then follows the dreaded ritual of Trying It On.
In small, enclosed spaces with far too much light and far too many mirrors for self-delusion.
At this point, my mood takes a nose-dive into the deepest depths of self-loathing, because the clothes don't fit.
After the fourth item, I become convinced that nothing will fit. Not today. Not ever.
That the search is hopeless and therefore not worth continuing. But I know that I still need those clothes, because going naked and/or freezing is not an option. At that point, I want to either scream in frustration and trash the entire shop, or curl up in a corner and cry...or both.
I'm not kidding - clothes shopping regularly brings me to tears.

By far the worst is the sacred quest for Trousers That Fit (TM).
Finding the Holy Grail seems easy by comparison.

There are billions of trousers out there, and a portion of those are (nominally) my size.
Of those, some are basically imposters, which aren't really my size at all, but have been labelled as such purely to increase the feeling that there is something wrong with me.

Others are, in all obvious respects, more or less my size, but there is a wrongness about them that makes them look weird on me or at least uncomfortable for me. Some even look good right up until the moment when I first sit down and get back up again.
Those are Ill-Fitting Trousers, some of which live in my closet by necessity, because I'm not much of a skirt-person, and even less of a going-naked-person.
Jeans are the worst. I like jeans, but somehow they always make me look as if I had a penis because they bulge in all the wrong places. For the record, I don't have a penis and I don't want one. And no Freudian jeans-conspiracy will convince me otherwise.

I actually can't remember if I ever owned Trousers That Fit (TM).
If I did, it must have been at least 10 years ago.
But I still haven't given up hope that somewhere out there, they do exist.
I have a clear idea of what I want and what it should look like, and I'm absolutely sure that next time, everything will be different.

On the way back?

I don't know...maybe?

Most of the time it doesn't feel that way at all.

But sometimes I look at the fact that I'm reading (and occasionally even writing) again, or I go home from the couple of hours of almost-work I'm doing most days, and I get the feeling that I might be on the right track.

Anyway, I'll try and post here again - just to prove to myself that I can.

Austrian Politics - Daytime Soap Edition

Politicians in Austria have recently been living dangerously.
First, the mayor of a small Alpine village was poisoned. With a cyanide-filled praline. (It came with a greeting card...isn't that charming?) The man survived, but he still needs to remain in an artificial coma.
Then, last week, politicians in a different province received envelopes that were somehow spiked with acid.
And yesterday, the office of a DA (in yet another province) was firebombed. Luckily, nobody was hurt.

I notice a disturbing trend of life imitating mediocre to bad crime fiction...
Honestly...one poisoned praline...that indicates that:

• the person who did this has been watching too much television
• they must be thinking in very convoluted terms...There must be half a million more convenient ways to commit murder in that village, and yet they go out and somehow procure cyanide for their evil plot
• that perp is cheap
  One praline?! How can you hate a person enough to want to kill them, but not enough to fork over a whole box of chocolates?

Common sense would suggest that all of these crimes were personal rather than politically motivated. There's not much to get this worked up about in regional & local politics.
However, and this is the part that becomes disconcerting for an average citizen like me, these stories marked the first time in months that I could bring myself to care about a news item involving a politician.

How did that happen? I'm a bona fide political junkie, getting excited about policy issues everywhere, from the US Presidential race to reforms of the Nepalese constitution. And yet, whenever I hear an item about politics of the country where I was born, where I grew up, and where I'll be living for the foreseeable future, I automatically tune out.
I can't help thinking that it might not be all my fault...

Chairness

Today, I found something that I wrote a couple of years ago, inspired by a note on one of the lecture programs at my university.
It struck a cord with me, since I've been doing a lot of thinking about "-isms", lately.

"This lecture will explore the 'chairness' of chairs"

The audience gasped in anticipation of what the venerable professor had to say. What were his findings? What did it take to be a chair? Were some chairs more chair than other chairs? And, most importantly, would they be chair enough?
The scholar prolonged his dramatic pause by letting his gaze wander through the auditorium, slowly, as if silently analyzing who amongst them were fit to be chairs.
Some of the listeners shifted audibly, their own fears and insecurities once again in the forefront of their minds. Had they not known all along that it did matter? That it was important to have four legs instead of just three, and a decent back, and armrests? And now, in only a few moments, the professor was going to make their insufficiency official. They just knew it - there was very little hope it could ever be different - you needed armrests, after all, to be a decent chair.