Joey's First Thanksgiving

Yummy!

Last week the time came for me to take part in the celebration of a great American tradition: Thanksgiving. During the day on Thursday I went running up in the Berkeley hills – it was a beautiful, sunny and warm day despite the calendar showing the month November escalating toward its imminent end – and ran into one of my professors who was out running with their dog. The experience was pleasant indeed – is there anything about this place one cannot love?! – especially as the professor instantly said: “I want you to have a real American Thanksgiving. Come to our house!” I was forced to decline the invitation for I already had made plans to eat dinner at the house of a girl in my department, to where a few other fellow graduate student were also going. It was lovely. A lot of food. God should know there was A LOT of food. We consumed it at length. And at the very moment when I thought it could not go on any longer – desert was brought to the table! It was a feast of excess, indeed, but combined with the best of nonmaterial excess as well: of kindness, friendship and general warmth. After dinner we all went out and saw a movie together. When I got home at about 1 am I was so stuffed and so worked up on a sugar high that I did not fall asleep until about three hours later…

On Sunday evening some of the graduate students from my department got together and celebrated a Second Thanksgiving. It was basically the same food in similar silly amounts and very resembling awesome company; only instead of going to the movies afterward we opted for playing Apples to Apples. My first Thanksgiving was thus commemorated in an abundance this country would be proud of me for – not once, but twice. Even though I must confess I couldn’t have any turkey [being as I have been a default vegetarian since childhood], I made up for it by having so many servings of pumpkin pie everybody stopped looking and eventually simply turned the other way as I devoured myself…

Yesterday – Monday – turned into one of those occasions to be filed strictly under “Only in Berkeley!”, for I doubt [maybe even kind of hope not] such things may be repeated anywhere else in the world. At my department we have these academic talks given by visiting scholars from all over the world every other Monday afternoon for a couple of hours followed by snacks, wine and intellectually challenging conversations amongst each other. After yesterday’s talk the visiting scholar from Germany asked me if I wanted to come with him for dinner and drinks and I said yes, of course. I did not know that we would end up at a Nepali restaurant, enjoy lovely food, great wine and make friends with perhaps the most hilarious waiter [a native of Nepal] I’ve come across so far in life. Even less did I suspect we would go to a bar after dinner, drink ourselves silly on margaritas and finish the evening by singing karaoke together in some seedy basement on Telegraph Ave… Next summer my department has decided to send me to Germany for an extended amount of time [perhaps that means I myself will be that ‘visiting scholar’?] and last night I was making some of the necessary connections needed for when I’m in Berlin and need a fellow Slavic scholar to show me how it’s done. Either way, it was fun. When I was younger I would always become filled with white envy whenever I told my dear professor back home in Sweden about this or that famous scholar whose work I was investigating at the time and he’d go: “Oh I know him/her!”, and then tell some amusing anecdote about something crazy they’d done after/before performing severe academic work. I have a feeling I’ve already started my own collection of such anecdotes.

In other news I’m wrapping up my first semester at Berkeley [ie. writing my final paper on Romanticism and preparing for the exam in Modernism], still not smoking, still not dating and still at my outmost happiest when I wake up early on Sunday morning and realize that today is the day I get to go to the Norwegian Church in San Francisco. My love for church is clearly an instance of the purest illogical joy, but hey, that’s the kind of joy I like the most – completely devoid of sense, reason, judgment.

Taking a picture in the dressing room at H&M in San Francisco on Sunday afternoon is for me a new subsection in the genre of ego-glam-shots, comrades. Bear with me as I master it. Of course I couldn’t help myself but got the entire outfit… Christmas is right around the corner, isn’t it?

“In California”

a short story

November 25-26 2010

“...she pressed [his old summer coat] to her face,

and as she did, sat down on the floor,

all of her shaking with tears while screaming,

begging someone for mercy”.

[from “In Paris” by Ivan Bunin]

Something was peculiar about how they met. Both strangers – to each other as well as to this country – and it might as well never have been. Their paths crossed on a cold Sunday morning toward the end of November. The sky was clear, the air – crisp. She sat on the bench farthest out on the pier. He stood a couple of steps to her left. He wouldn’t have sat down next to her – for he disapproved of women wearing heels outside of office hours – had he not caught a glimpse of her face. The marked cheekbones, pale skin and watery, green eyes reminded him of a girl he had known in his childhood; the first girl he ever kissed, on a distant summer evening, in a dark forest, in the north where the sun never sets at that time of the year… She wouldn’t have smiled at his comment “seems like winter finally” – for she detested men who wore baseball caps on non-game days – had she not sensed a slight accent in his English. The familiar, soft melody hidden in his deep voice which would have been missed by anyone else was distinctly there for her, even though he had uttered no more than four words…

At first she almost failed to comprehend. He tried to misunderstand the situation. Yet it remained clear: this solemn Sunday morning had brought them to a meeting with someone from the home country. And even more: to a meeting with someone from the same small and remote village.

“I was still a child when you left,” she said.

“I can’t even believe it has been twenty years already…” he said. “You don’t remember me?”

She glanced at him; then looked out on the water in front of them. And laughed, shaking her head: “Do you remember me?”

He nodded: “I remember I caught you stealing cherries in my garden on an evening in August… You were a very bad girl when you were a child. I think you might have been about five years old then?”

She shook her head again, laughing: “This I have no recollection of… What did you do with me, with the little bad girl?”

“What any man would’ve done, of course. I grabbed a hold of you and carried you over to your parents’ house and left the reprimand to them,” he smiled.

She didn’t smile. She was silent for a minute; he didn’t understand why.

“I’m afraid you have mistaken me for someone else,” she finally spoke, “it wasn’t me. You couldn’t have brought me back to my parents for I had none. My mom was murdered by my dad when I was four, and that was the last I saw of them both. When I was six he committed suicide in prison.”

He wasn’t mistaken.

He had known all along; ever since he about an hour ago in her traditional northern good looks distinguished something more. He saw that hint of curiosity in the eyebrows, those subtle strokes of liveliness over the lips; and knew them to be traits all derived from another woman’s face. Perhaps it seemed to him they resembled each other to the point that he only needed to stretch out his hand, touch a lock of her hair – and the sound of bare feet running over soft, wet grass in those faraway woods would be resurrected… He never told her that the first female lips he kissed had belonged to her mother. Instead he suggested they’d go to a café and drink something warm.

On the 6th of June the following year he died. While cleaning out his apartment she found the baseball cap and threw it out.

Жди и ничего не будет

Out with the roommates on Friday night.

One week later and I’m still smoke-free – though it is less clear as to whether or not I can as proudly confess to being ‘men-free’, or even ‘date-free’… Though this now matters less and less to me, especially considering that last week contained several extravagant experiences: on Thursday I taught my first class of Russian at Berkeley [as most of our department was in LA for the big conference several of us first year’s had to fill in] and on Friday I visited a class in Swedish and spent an entire hour only answering questions about myself. Both of these occasions were the first time I interacted with this university’s undergraduates – more than walking past them in the hallway or on campus – and I must say I walked away with a huge smile on my lips. I love to teach, and I love students. I can’t wait until I’m actually going to be teaching my own very course and have my own very students – again. I miss it. After the afternoon seminar on Russian romanticism I and M. went out to dinner and proved our friendship in the deepest of ways: first by splitting a pizza and secondly by getting two different kinds of dessert and eating both of them together from one and the same plate. After a couple of hours – during which I do believe that I acquainted her with bulky chunks of my personal history and so did she and that’s very cool because such intimate aspects of one’s private experiences cannot [nor should they] be shared with just anyone – I went out drinking with my roommates to celebrate that one of us passed her Ph.D. qualifying exams earlier the same week. It all started out in a style akin to those applied in polite society: we had drinks at one bar and it was nice and then we went to another bar and had more drinks there and it was also nice. Then it was suggested we’d go to a party at a frat house. I had never been to one of those before, even though I’ve heard of them – and literally heard them from where I live so close to campus – and I am pretty sure I won’t be going to any such event soon. Frat houses are crawling with undergraduates – though not entirely and certainly not exclusively [for we were there and we are all ‘respectable’ graduate students] – and the walls are soaked in alcohol, to say the least. I do not remember the night at the party in its ‘entirety’, there’s no coherent ‘narrative’ so to speak; my memories constitute of haphazard flashes of different moments, all displaying me engaged in one inexplicable action after the other…. I believe I even played the vuvuzela? And that I danced with someone who said I already “have the legs of a marathon-runner”, which pretty much implies that I must have mentioned something about my preparations to run a half-marathon prior to this, but when? Ничего этого неизвестно и все покрывается туманом, like my homeboy Niklai Vasil’evich Gogol’ would’ve put it. Undoubtedly, there should be a limit to how many individuals one is allowed to make out with during the course of a night. When I woke up on Saturday – with an enormous hangover that I had indeed earned – what worried me most was what effects this kind of promiscuity might have on my mouth hygiene.

Retelling this tale today during downtime at my department, a fellow graduate student commented quite insightfully: “Now I know why you had so much fun in Russia – you just go with it.” And I did have a lot of fun in Russia, especially on all those wild occasions when I simply ‘went with it’. The same is, however, also true for life in the US: I certainly enjoy myself here whenever I just go with it. As a matter of fact I don’t think I’ve laughed this much at any time in my life before! Here I laugh while with my colleagues at the department, I laugh when I’m at home with my roommates, and I laugh when I’m hanging out with M. But the best part of all is when I go to the Norwegian Church in San Francisco, for that’s when I really get to enjoy the most fun of the entire week. I can’t even really explain it. I guess you just have to be really into Jesus to get it; or celebrating your Scandinavian heritage occasionally, for that matter. You should know, comrades, that for several years I was not only deprived of living in my COUNTRY, but also of living with my PEOPLE, thus I don’t know my people all that well. Spending time with fellow Scandinavians at church has brought back to me a sense of what exactly it is in me that makes me a part of this culture [though I also become acutely aware of what in me has changed during academic exile], and what about these traditions I can appreciate and explore. Swedish people – and how could I even ever forget about this since I myself am exactly like this, as are all the people back home that I know and love? – are all about solitude, about being introvert and intimate, yet not necessarily inviting others to share this [this doesn’t meant that it isn’t there, though]. Yesterday I got to talking to a couple of Swedish people after mass; our highly interesting and even more so informed conversation made quite an impact on me and left me questioning some things I thought I had made up my mind about long ago. I suppose that the danger of entering into a foreign culture is that you’re bound to lose some of your native heritage in the process – no matter how much you fight it or surreptitiously think it isn’t going to happen to you. Not only did I lose bits and pieces of my native language during these years – I lost a large lump of ‘Swedishness’ too.

There is always this feeling of being outside looking in. I’m not sure it is a bad thing. I prefer to think of it as a blessing. I remember this conversation I had a few weeks ago when we talked about traveling and I laughed and said that I hate traveling, even though I’ve been so many places all over the world and continue to travel despite my better intentions, for, as I argued, “I like to be home”. Then the other person asked: “And that is Sweden?” I thought this was a weird comment to make, and so I was soon to correct: “Home is where I live”. Home to me is a very definite spot. I’m not going to tell you exactly what this ‘spot’ is made up of. I can only tell you that I can take ‘it’ with me from Siberia to California but I would never carry ‘it’ on my person in everyday life. ‘It’ must never be exposed to sunlight or strange air. ‘It’ is waiting for me here every day, and thus every day I come home.

Sublimation, said Sigmund

I’m a fun person, comrades. Want proof? Here I am teaching [an invisible audience] how to draw a horse on a blackboard. Just for fun – because that’s how I roll.

Suddenly many decisions have been made lately. It was as if the past weekend was for me not only a brutal blow to my sense of dignity – after all, it is never all that pleasant an experience to get shaken and stirred into realizing one has opened up in vain and duly made a fool of oneself – but also a crude awakening to the imminent reality of what is actually going on in my factual existence. On Sunday it occurred to me that I was finally finished with two unhealthy habits: smoking and dating. The fact that I have been smoking since about the same time as I published my first article in 2005 has not been available to the general public for one reason and one reason only: my Mother. I don’t know if I ever during these five years really managed to fool my Mother into not suspecting I was smoking all the while… But at least I did my best by never uttering it out loud [or here on the blog for that matter] and never letting it be seen. Then why – if I did indeed manage to dupe everyone into thinking I was a good girl never behaving badly – do I now decide to let the veil be drawn and the ugly truth uncovered? Well, mainly because I really can’t smoke anymore; no matter how much I might secretly want to or even more secretly enjoy it – smoking in California is not financially feasible for a graduate student of limited means such as yours truly. The decision to stop dating is not as final as the smoking, though, for I’ve only sworn to stay away from more such precarious ventures – as well as casually flirting with the opposite sex in general – until the end of 2010. My wonderful roommates believe I’ll manage to give up smoking [and it should be noted, comrades, that it is already Wednesday night as I’m writing this], but so far nobody has taken my pledge to abstinence seriously… I think we can look at this my first fall in Berkeley as having been a so-called ‘reversal’ of Freud’s theory on sublimation. Or if that kind of thought makes you uncomfortable, then let us simply consider it a ‘twist’ on his common concept. Now I’ll apply sublimation in the fashion it was originally invented for: to be once again studious and throw myself deep into science. And hopefully finish this semester not only with straight A’s, but also with my mind intact – despite all those tiny bits of madness that have been poured through it during these past months…

Yet there’s a sense of liberation; might well be that we are as strong as we imagine.

During all of this – during the madness of being a first year graduate student in her first semester and living in a new country after having lived in another country for such a long time and leaving so much and so many behind and entering into something completely unknown but essentially necessary and that it is [but now I always forget this part] the dream come true – I haven’t only excelled at making a fool of myself. Despite all of this I have managed to make an excellent friend from another department – of Comparative Literature – and together we’ve shared some of the most fun moments at Berkeley so far. Every Wednesday and Sunday we rent study rooms in the Main Stacks and go there to study together for hours and to put all of our thoughts on the blackboard and simply to play and to think, to think and to play – all the way talking and laughing out loud. It never did enter my mind when I came here that I might make a friend here like that. Someone who’d be that awesome and make me feel like there’s someone here with whom I can share this adventure fully and wholly and completely. And that with her it is actually an ADVENTURE! We go on magical mystery tours of campus together while talking about those monumental things in life which I didn’t think anyone else cared about but me. When I told her about my two decisions for the rest of 2010, adding “…because it is not that this isn’t my day, or my week, or my month – this is not my YEAR” and “…because you know, 2010 was a waste of time – I was single the whole freaking year; I’m such a loser…”, she said: “Yeah, and things like getting accepted to Berkeley and finishing your Master’s degree in Russian philology don’t really match up to nurturing a relationship with a man, now do they?”. And when I asked her about children and marriage, she answered: “Well, first I’d have to find someone I can stand”. Now that idea had never even occurred to me, in all of my life, in all of my relationships, not once had I even thought that one could look at it like that – but can a woman ever stand a man? What a preposterous idea!

Yet we were not meant to endure our lives; thus perhaps we’re onto something here.

In the midst of all this decision-making and female-bonding, a fellow first year graduate student in my department asked if anyone would like to run a half-marathon with her in San Francisco in April. Since I’m already running about an hour and a half every other day and quite enjoy the whole process of actually getting into ‘andra andningen’ and becoming sweaty and tired and more toned with every day, I said yes. And yesterday I registered. And today I tried to be better than before and run a little bit more than usually and threw up… Well, comrades: it is a) a process; and b) all in a day’s work.

Yet the most difficult is not to let go of you as an individual, but of you as my fantasy.

Confuse the European

Yeah that’s the face you – my dear European – make when confused.

It goes without saying that these first fragile months in the US of A have brought several new English words to my vocabulary; not only the elegant ‘apparition’, but also colloquial necessities like ‘cock-block’ and ‘buddy-punch’. The two last words are not things you’d necessarily want to happen to yourself, but as with everything in language they have been invented out of a real need – and can be found in actual reality. But maybe you are – like me – a non-native speaker of English and not as familiar with American life and thus unsure what they mean? Allow me to explain, dear comrades. A ‘cock-block’ is when you’re trying to pick up a man [or a woman for that matter] and another man comes along and interrupts the natural flow of things. Yeah, and the not-so-funny part is that this happened to me about a month ago. A ‘buddy-punch’ is when a man – with whom you may have gone out on a date or just randomly spent some pleasant time with on more intimate footing – tries to swerve away from it happening again by, for example, setting the next date for a time of day when the chances of asking ‘your place or mine?’ are minimized. Like suggesting to take a walk in the afternoon or – what’s even worse! – grab a cup of coffee around lunch. As most Europeans are not familiar with how dating is done in this country, without natives explaining these subtleties to us we’d be lost and ultimately far too easy a prey for champions of the famous game “Confuse the European”. Yesterday I felt like I wanted to run up to the top of the hill above Berkeley and scream out on the top of my lungs to all of Bay Area underneath me of the agony and frustration of dating American men. But as one girl in my department had her birthday yesterday [as did my awesome mother!] and we were all invited to her party on Friday evening I decided to put aside my personal irritation and go get smashed in a socially satisfying environment. Maybe I’ll do that later this Saturday. After all, the sun shines in California today and it is still warm enough for me to run in hot pants even though it is almost the middle of November… But maybe you want to know what exactly it was that happened? Maybe you’d like to find out more juicy details from my private life? I can’t tell you everything – I can’t name any names and never would I ever again because that just comes back to bite my ass when I least expect it – but I can give you a general overview on the situation that has led me to swear off men in favor for academic work at least until the end of my first semester in graduate school. So, in September I dated this handsome man from the English department – in not-so-polite conversations I call him ‘my Sartre’ for that is what he essentially became eventually – and we spent a couple of nice evenings together. And just as I was about to actually start liking him, he drops the most dreaded line of them all: “Look, I think you’re an awesome and very attractive girl but I’m just out of a long relationship and I’m not looking for anything serious right now”. Ouch! Douche bag! But I pulled myself together after this startling blow and went on to the next challenge. This next venture happened to be located conveniently close to my very own department, and was wrapped in curiosity as well as filled with excitement even though now – in retrospect, so to speak – I have to confess that it was obvious early on that this was not going to be anything in the end. Nevertheless, this my quite quixotic endeavor involved me running after him in the corridor and saying several stupid things that only women like me – completely unabashed [against our better judgment] and fully confident that any man will be had if you’re set on taking him – can afford to utter in public without severe consequences. My outrageous behavior resulted in us going out on a date two weeks ago, but it didn’t take long – as a matter of fact, it happened yesterday – until also he felt the need to drop the most dreaded line of them all: “Look, I think you’re a smart and attractive girl but I’m not looking for a relationship at the moment”.

It sort of makes me wonder what it was that made them think I’m hanging out with them solely because of a burning wish to instantly make them my ‘boyfriend’? Is this not some sort of misplaced self-flattery? Could this be something common to men in academia? For hard as it already is to find a straight man in the humanities – and even more so one with an intimate knowledge of versification – it seems impossible to locate one also ready to invest emotionally in a bond with a woman intellectually his equal. It is not that I feel like I want to meet someone and get super-serious right away and talk about meeting each other’s parents or even leave my toothbrush in his bathroom, but I do think I am ready to build something that’s going to last a little longer than alcoholic intoxication. It kind of sucks to be chronically single, especially considering the fact that I do spend a lot of time and energy trying to cure my condition. Maybe I’m doing it wrong? Maybe I should try and take it slow next time? Maybe I shouldn’t always jump into things head first and heart later? But as one of my favorite fellow graduate students said yesterday when I told her about how I hadn’t completely ceased seeing my Sartre while cultivating relations with the new object of interest and how this made me feel kind of guilty and somewhat self-conscious [in her exact words]: “Josefina, you can do what the fuck you want”.

I suppose she’s right. Especially if you consider a) that I belong to nobody else but myself; and b) that this life is mine to live, not anybody else’s. Or even c) that like everybody, also I define what I am most appropriately through the concept of what I am not, thus in relation to The Other. Ultimately, my Other is always a man. And to touch back on a topic discussed in the post prior to this one: I’m in this to get to know myself better, and so be it if I need to fall in love with representatives of the opposite sex only to slip, fail, crash again and again and again in order for this to be achieved with near scientific precision.

Sometimes I do feel like a bit of a failure. Because I haven’t managed to get my act together relationship-wise and keep making all the wrong decisions and waking up in all the worst positions – all of this because I can never get it right. But like one of my closest friends at Berkeley told me yesterday: “Josefina, you can read and freaking understand Lomonosov in the original Russian. Do you know how many other people can do that? Like no one!” I suppose that’s as good a skill as any other. Also I do happen to make the best lasagna in the whole world!

It is Life, but Not as We Know It

Most of my dear comrades are probably reading this post with an anticipation to find out what happened last Friday night, especially considering that I prior to it so boldly stated I was “going out. For drinks. With a man”. Even though today’s post is essentially intended to be on a completely different topic – a sort of brief account of what my life in the United States is like [now that I have officially been here for three months] – I might start by lingering on the previous weekend’s debauchery. Summoning up this lovely & dramatic experience in one sentence – without slipping slowly into the contemptible category of those who kiss and tell – it could be said that: “We consumed enough alcoholic beverages for me to ask permission to touch his beard [which is so not the equivalent of kissing but even better] and the next morning I woke up in not-my-bed”. Upon hearing about this, my seventeen year old sister said: “But that’s not the behavior of a lady!” Only up until about the same age did I nurture illusions in which I conceived of myself as a lady. Later in life I have arrived at the conclusion that there are all sorts of games one can play and masks one may wear and roles one might master, but in the end of the day the most difficult task is that of being only oneself. And when I’m completely myself I do what I like and if I like to spend the night and the other part doesn’t object or disapprove or mind – then that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t try to be hard-to-get. If I’ve ever given anyone of you, dear comrades, this impression then it means that I’m just not that into you. When it comes to cross-gender-inter-sexual-relations, I tend to be rather explicit. But I am truly enjoying all these little glimpses into American traditions that I’m receiving on a daily basis. Apparently, public displays of affection are not an American tradition. Neither is making out in parks on sunny afternoons. Speaking of things American, allow for me to invite you to take a quick tour of my current life in the United States of America – or, to be more specific, my life in Northern California.

In Berkeley I share an apartment with four other female graduate students. Our fridge is always on the point of exploding with food. But that is on the inside. On the outside we have placed several personal details, like a map of campus together with Bulgakov, Kafka and Kahlo. And yeah, reading IS sexy!

This is what is universally known as ‘American esthetics’ [I know, it isn’t pretty is it?] or: the common area. We have a whiteboard on which we write important messages to each other and always try to be as politically incorrect as possible.

The shower looks strange to me – it doesn’t move at all and is located suspiciously high up – but after a while I promise you one gets used to it.

Our apartment has two bathrooms with showers – and we even have one bath! – and several big mirrors. Like this one. In front of these mirrors I spend several hours every week rehearsing my best sultry poses instead of actually doing hard academic work.

When I get home in the evenings I sit down by my desk and look up at the wall above it. This is when I see these magnificent folks and get reminding as to why I am putting myself through this intellectual torment in the first place. I don’t have any pictures of any family members or friends in my room, and I don’t really know why. I used to have that during the first years of my life abroad. Somehow they went down and then never got up again. Generally I’m not the kind of person who surround herself with photographs of people I actually know. What I surround myself with is always first and foremost conceptual.

My room is becoming more and more my very own. The only bad thing about it is the bed which is evil and will often not let me finish my work at the desk but lure me into it… That’s why I always escape my room when serious work has to be done and go to the Slavic Library. Which in a way is kind of a second home – second to this one, that is.

There are those days when I all of the sudden stop for a while and think to myself as if the thought hit me for the very first time: “Wow, I’m living in the United States of America!” Mainly this fact occurs to me while going grocery shopping for that is probably the only time here when I am entirely sucked in, totally drawn into American life. While at the university life is always somehow spent in another – highly abstract and essentially academic – country and thus not necessarily in THIS one. And the fact that this is Northern California does really help to cushion the naïve foreigner from the crudeness of popular culture and its capitalist values. Mainly my reality revolves around the work I do and the people involved in this process. Sometimes I like to take sneak-peaks of this strange society and try to look for mysterious things of it that I wouldn’t be allowed to see if I had asked. Every day brings something new to a deeper understanding of my surroundings, even though I must confess that I am not overtly curious when it comes to certain aspects of them. I feel sometimes that all of these experiences of living in all of these exciting places and meeting all of these fascinating people are wasted on me. For the purpose of living this life in my opinion is to get to know myself, and – to the extent that it is possible – God. Maybe, comrades, this means that I am an egoistic and introverted person who’d rather go for long walks alone to discover rich nuances of internal dialogue than head out into the world to explore actual people and their actuality? Perhaps this is what happens to a person after a certain amount of years spent in distant lands – that one must somehow find a firm foundation within oneself as to be able to continue to exist and – to the degree that it is possible – flourish in multiple milieus? For even though it seems like the cool thing to do in exotic settings, one cannot always be reaching beyond oneself and fetching far and relying on the external, no matter how exiting all of this sounds, for it will wear us down – and ultimately, if we can’t make peace with our own silence, then why would The Other ever want to come in and fill it? I guess it is in part due to the brain only being capable of processing X amount of exhilarating information before it simply decides enough is enough and turns to private reflections which are not always electrifying but all the more indispensable for it.

Essentially I think that a life well-lived doesn’t have to involve everything that we do or think we need or pretend to be. I think of days well-lived as those days when I made someone laugh and when someone made me laugh. It doesn’t matter in which language the joke was uttered, but a day without laughter is indeed a day lived in vain. And a day in which I did not look up at the sky and marvel at nature is also a day lived without sincere gratefulness and instant happiness. Of course we always reach beyond ourselves. But the kind of reaching beyond that is profitable to us is the kind that eventually arrives back at where we started, that is – within ourselves. I’m not suggesting life is better lived with eyes closed, I’m only saying that sometimes we don’t have to look or watch or be watched. Sometimes we might just walk together, talking nonsense and laughing out loud. And that could be like the coolest thing…