Nobody can eat fifty eggs or: jump off the roof, Maggie, jump off it.

Good man, it seems. Great actor.

Confidence (and lack thereof)

Where do people find confidence these days? If you are in academia, or even worse in academia and looking for a job, it is all about rejection. Papers gets rejected, job applications go to waste, conference presentations fail to impress. It often seems that this whole hoop-la is only about balancing with oneself. One would think that we would know how to do that since we've gone through a PhD process, a process that (according to my wise friend D) puts you opposite your own mediocrity. We're all mediocre yet when we apply for something we need to persuade people that we are the best. And that exactly is the drama of academics: we know we are mediocre but we have to persuade ourselves and others that we are the next best thing since sliced bread (is this an awesome expression or what?)

The question is where do we find the confidence to do that? From the mirror? - News on that front are not always uplifting.
From the job itself? - As I said failure is an everyday thing.
From teaching? - Well, yes, because sometimes, my students are all I have to get some strength. With their funny little fake-tanned faces looking up at me, nodding along to what I say. Making them understand the crazy things I work on is sometimes what I have to make myself feel better. Is that a bad thing? Am I putting this whole thing down?

The Baader Meinhof complex

Is it my idea of is it only the Germans that have no fear of their history? The make movies about second world war (the fall) about stasi (lives of others) and now about their most well-known terrorist group. Really looking forward to it. And to put you in the mood even more, here is a great extract of Ulrike Meinhof's interview before she became part of the organization.

Please sir, can I have some more, sir?

© Steve Bell 2008 (Guardian)

Like the credit crisis, the Wall Street Crash was caused by irresponsible lending, as hundreds of thousands of Americans, reassured that they could only make money by investing in shares, borrowed heavily to invest in the stock market. (Telegraph, today)

I think 'irresponsible lending' is the key phrase here. Our lives are at the hands of so called 'financial geniuses' (and I mean all our lives, not just the lives of people that are paying credit to their banks, although these people are hit more, I'm sure, how lovely...) and these self-designated genius are now leaving us in deep shit.

I'm not going to discuss this much, I'm not an economist and I will refrain from propagandising my political beliefs, which may be very distant from the idea of capitalism but do not change the fact that I live in a capitalist system and behave accordingly. I'm as capitalistic as they come, I guess, so my political convictions have obviously not taken me very far.

The question is now figuring out what to do. Perhaps trying to keep our cool and not believing everything that the media tries to feed us. Quite frankly, either I'm extremely dumb and cannot understand what they're on about or these media people/economists, whatever they are, are in more turmoil than banks and tax-payers. Just try reading the business section of the Guardian today, for example, and you'll see what I'm talking about (and I do like and respect the Guardian). Better yet: read the Guardian, then read another equivalent broadsheet and compare their analysis. One week we're not going into recession, the other week we're facing the worst recession since 1929; one week petrol will reach $200 a barrel, next week is going down after all; one week the Central European Bank will finally lower interest rates, the other week is increasing them after all, so on and so forth. All the predictions that journalists, economists and commentators who have aired their opinions on the media have made turned out to be utterly and completely wrong, so I for one am trying not to be allarmed by the madness that has taken over the media.

It seems, however, that the people who are running our lives don't really know what they're doing. How do they justify the money that they make at our expense? I don't know, but like I heard someone say, they still sleep at night. Is it shame on them or shame on us? We all borrow from the bank after all, from mortgages to credit cards to overdrafts. And we're not children, so we should all be smart enough to know we're dealing with complex financial institutions and a very sophisticated financial system that will only help us out if it gets something in return, ie, our money. But did we ever really have a choice? Was there ever a point at which we could have opted out of this system? I guess not, and that is our saving grace. Of course there are people who try more than others to be out of the system (ah, those lovely hippies). All the better for them, but do not tell me they don't need money to live, so they probably have a bank account as well and that's all it takes to be in the system. So, we're all on the same boat. Just hanging on. Hopefully we'll get to Ittaca some day, I really just hope that happens while we're young.

Instant

The best thing with blogging is that it is instantaneous: you think of something and immediately you can post it (this is not my thought, I am quoting a blogger I like, who said that on the radio). This is both good and bad, it is good because communication with the world is immediate but it is also bad because what you post is not something you've thought through too much. It is not polished like a journal article or a research proposal for example (!) But perhaps, that's the charm: you think of something, admittedly a minor thought, it doesn't deserve to be a thesis or something, and the next moment it can be posted to the world. Like this picture of my coffee that I took two minutes ago. It's ephemeral yes, but it's still nice. Like a beautiful picture that captures a fleeting moment in time, like a short story that doesn't have the depth of a novel, but it still manages to give a glimpse of reality. It seems to me that we need these things, in addition to the heavier ones. We like both, we need both, life comprises of both: the posts and the theses. Brahms and Britney. Tolstoy and Mickey Mouse.

Pulp is not lucky

After the silence, comes the storm, or so they say, don’t they?
After the long, lingering summer, I am back in the rain. I came back hastily, with high hopes but the Pulp song brought me no luck. It doesn’t matter, n’est-pas? It never does.

Throughout the summer, I was trying to think of something to post upon my return. Most of my thoughts though were petty, I was thinking of bad things to say about the people next to me in the beach or stupid lyrical thoughts about the beauty of the summer. I guess I won’t be writing any of this any time soon. Elitism and lyricism are not supposed to happen in autumn. Autumn is for new beginnings, like Mondays. Long live the new beginnings then, even if they mean that I will stay were I am and I won’t be moving anywhere East.

Family

Separated at birth. Please check here to confirm.

Creeps

Maybe there are other things going on in the world that deserve my attention more. But reading this, I cannot help but being appalled. Apparently, some people in India have got nothing better to do than to think it's cool to have the average Indian Joe Schmuck (who is poor beyond belief) wearing designer clothes and fashion items costing hundreds of years' salary.
There's something deeply sad about those pictures of poor people smiling and displaying some glorified item of wealth. I mean, poverty is sad anyway but it really seems heightened and even more objectionable when portrayed in this way, turning poor people into picturesque objects for wealth display (reading the article, we learn that Vogue India didn't even bother to mention the names of the peope they used in the photo shoots. They mention brands all right, but no names). The whole debacle becomes even worse when you read what the Indian Vogue editor had to say in her defense - "we're not trying to save the world or anything. "
Since when is this an excuse for regretabble behaviour instead of a reason to be profoundly embarassed? Shouldn't we all be trying to save the world, no matter how efficient we are in the process? People use this argument all the time - I'm not trying to save the world, I don't want to make a difference, I don't want to change anyone's life, bla bla bla.
My problem is that I do not understand the validity of this argument. These people give me the creeps. And they are creeps.

António Variações:

"I can't control this state of anxiety. The hurry of getting there so as not to get there late. I don't know what I'm running from. Perhaps from this loneliness. Why is it that I refuse all who want to hold my hand? I shall continue to look for the one to whom I want to give myself, because so far I want the one I've never seen, I want the one I've never met. This dissatisfaction, I cannot comprehend. I always have this feeling that I'm losing out. I'm in a hurry to leave, and when I get there I want to leave. I shall continue to look for my world, for my place, because so far I can only be where I am not, I can only go where I do not go. "

Brave man. Wonderful performer. Lived in an ultra-conservative country and dared to be controversial and wear whatever he wanted and say whatever he wanted and go out with whomever he wanted. Died of AIDS in the early eighties and the whole thing was hushed up, maybe because people didn't know what AIDS was at the time (as a kid, I remember hearing he had died because he'd drunk cold water when he was hot and sweaty -!For a while, I didn't dare to drink water in hot, sunny days).

It's hard to be liberated where you live. People know you, or you yourself know the place too well, you have a job to keep, you have a social persona to maintain. In a place where you're completely unknown and don't care about holding on to a job, you can do other things, dress in a different way and reinvent yourself, maybe even pierce your eyebrow, which I would do if it wasn't for the fact that I might get, if not fired, then let's say warned.

Therein lies the attraction of travelling, of living abroad, of having the opportunity to be someone else all the time - in the fact that you can discard everything you don't like about yourself and keep only what you like. When you're bored, you reinvent yourself and become someone new. That's impossible to do when you live somewhere for a long time, though, and ultimately living with yourself all the time, with all your flaws, becomes just too tiring.

This man in the picture, however, didn't have to go anywhere to be exactly what he wanted to be and to look exactly how he wanted to look. He managed to be himself, to accept his flaws and to reinvent himself in his own country. He sang about permanent dissastifaction and the constant need for change and he set an example, I think. Good man.