January 2010 Archives

there is no checkbox for that.

walked past panel after panel with photographs of clint eastwood. "clint eastwood" he said, as i entered the apartment for the first time and it felt like it was also the last.
my fault.

then there was the little blue car. it was italian but very happy to drive all the way, for almost seven hours. just to get lost in the streets that somehow did not make sense.
at least it was the middle of the night. the days were the true horror.
i did not like the traffic during the day.
i loved the city. i just really did not like the traffic. it was so much worse than new york.

and then that walk the other day. i knew that i was feeling something. and i knew that it was a strong feeling somehow. except that by thinking that i was feeling something, the feeling itself became an abstraction, a bit of an unbelievable tale. removed.

there was the flag. such a simple flag it was. so beautiful though. and it did feel like a stone was taken off my chest. the reaction is usually very different with flags.

i wondered what the city must have felt like before there were cars. before there were large flooding lights, the giant projections of illumination onto whatever someone deemed interesting.

and tourists everywhere. taking pictures with the oddest little things. and pointing. and smiling. as if they had just managed to capture the city.
and the city smiled and grabbed them by their future memories.
it would never let go. from now on, never.

there might be a checkbox for that. maybe somewhere there is one. but it is as bad of a description as one containing thousands of words.
why does this place always smell like a beginning?

my office at home currently smells like the end of a catholic mass (i was cleaning the place and came across some old german incense. no priests were harmed.)
the books on my shelves are no better organized than when the "vacation" began a few weeks ago, last decade. and the snowflakes outside look a little bit like razor wire. so maybe leaving the house would be a very bad idea now.
especially since the sun is setting and the music streaming from the living room is quite pleasant, actually.
my 2010 horoscope on one of the polish newspaper websites i tend to visit predicted a year of confusion and something probably best described as doom.
glad it was not a chinese fortune teller telling me that i should not fly this year. that has already happened. and there is a nice book about a similar experience, about 17 years ago.

i should probably have another bowl of tea. is it good to drink tea until the mouth goes numb and my insides turn that freshly plucked, ground, bright green?

there are many more questions now than there were just a few days ago. and they are hard and challenging and actually pretty good. and they are the kind i could never dream of answering myself. the best kind.

hmm... another bowl of tea?

this is not a book with empty pages.

managed to not say a word to the guy sitting next to me on the plane. even though we appeared to be the same age, we seemed to read the same magazines, and even ordered the same food.
well, i watched "wickie der wikinger" right after "kojak" while he held his iphone close enough to his face to leave smear marks on the screen. with his eyelashes. it was some art movie. mostly blue pictures of people doing something.
it was not my seat anyway. i was supposed to sit two rows back, in a seat i had booked months in advance. but there was this father who wanted to sit next to his sons.
"i speak three languages" said one of the boys, maybe 8, instead of a hello, when i was exchanging my opened blanket for the one that had not been used yet.
"oh that's nice, what are the languages?" " i speak english, german, and french."
"das ist ja sehr schön, dann haben wir zwei sprachen gemeinsam" "ja"
i was a bit upset that we did not have three languages in common. today.
perhaps the boy will end up learning polish at some point in his life, or perhaps i will finally be forced to learn french.
that charles V quote i recently read somewhere made me smile... I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.
he should have probably mixed it up now and then. and would he have used other languages had he not suffered from the habsburg jaw?

we are back in new york. the snow flurries are turning the palette of the brooklyn i can see out of the window now into something that one would probably use a pencil to describe, perhaps some dirtied sienna? a true lead pencil?
it appears to be cold enough for the flakes to actually bounce of each other as they land. they do not feel they should be come one cover of snow yet. right now they want to be new year flakes.

we travelled a bit too quickly in the last few weeks. it is so tempting to just jump on a train to go to a place that is so close and yet so different than the current location. köln is now about an hour away from frankfurt? really? that's pretty much the length of my daily commute today.

what is it like to express anything in more than 140 characters? how many facebook friends does it take to make one who will actually save one's life when it is threatened? not just like or comment on one's fall. or just retweet it.

jetlag can be a beautiful thing. and now i am even 5 minutes early.