Rosebud

U went into labour just after midnight last night (i.e. this morning), three days before her scheduled caesarian. U and daughter are fine, G is wandering around the hospital delirious with relief and happiness, Oma is upstairs with Ralph.

An odd thing: just after midnight last night, lying in bed, I suddenly had an urgent desire to figure out how I might get to their house in the middle of the night, and how long it would take to get there. I decided that waiting for a taxi would be slower than walking, and therefore that it would take me nearly twenty minutes from a lying start (as it were), and with that the urgency passed.

At about the same time, G was wondering who to call to take care of Ralph for the hour it would take U's cousin to drive Oma in from their house in the country; he concluded that I could not get there fast enough, and called Famous Photographer instead.

It's probably just a coincidence, but it is a very interesting one.

Milwaukee and Toronto

I haven't written about being in Milwaukee yet, because I couldn't find a way to say anything worth reading (assume for the moment that my ramblings are potentially worth reading) that didn't get into matters that should remain private. "What happens at [the wedding] stays at [the wedding]," as it were. There is much that I would like to say about it, about the people I met and the things I learned, but these stories are not mine to tell.

I can say that it was the happiest wedding I've ever been to, completely free of tension and status games. There are two reasons for that, I think. First, that no family members were present (other than N's daughter): the group consisted solely of friends, and while nobody but the happy couple knew everyone, it is also true that everybody knew at least a half-dozen of the others. Secondly, and relatedly, that we were composed of two overlapping self-selecting groups: we had a buttload of common experiences and interests to unite us.

The ceremony was conducted in the couple's back yard; a friend from Second Life officiated, and we all took turns to say a few words of congratulation and blessing, after which we celebrated with margaritas, sparklers, live music and waterpistol fights. Woot.

On the last evening, we had a spontaneous meet-up in Second Life, which was vastly amusing: picture us sitting at our laptops around the dining table or in the living room, chatting both in SL and across the screens in RL. It was vastly amusing; but you probably had to be there to appreciate the humour of the situation.

It was a wonderful weekend, full of joy and companionship and great conversation and fine food, and of near-constant and near-random hugs and headscritches. What I miss most is the hugging, actually, the easy and comfortable bodily contact between friends. There's not enough hugging in the world, peoples. Get to work on this, please.

I have been in Toronto for four days now, talking with my parents and hanging about downtown. I'll write about my father's condition another time. Tomorrow I fly south to visit another SL friend.

"Infinite Jest" is proceeding well. I'm reading the chapter about AA meetings, and am finding it so rich and so thoughtprovoking that I am artificially slowing myself down, making myself take time to think about it as I read. There were several Twelve-Steppers (as they call themselves) at the meeting, reading this makes me see them with different eyes.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. I hope you are happy and healthy, and encourage you to hug a friend — or even a stranger.

What Second Life is really about, Part one

Shari asked some time back, "I don't really know what SL is, have never looked at it, don't understand it. So please do explain how it had such an effect on you." This is the first part of an attempt to gather some answers to that question. In this piece a dear friend in SL (and perhaps soon RL, gods of finance willing) talks about the community and connection that SL can enable.

It's funny how so many people are suspicious of virtual lives. A textbook I use to teach social problems describes feeling strongly invested in online environments as mentally unhealthy and antisocial. It's said to be isolating.

I came into Second Life socially isolated by disability and sexual status and geography. I found community and connection and love, first inworld, and then crossing the boundary between worlds. When I proposed marriage to my partner Beta a few days ago, I did it inworld so that I could make this move in the presence of dear friends. I know the idea of proposing in front of a computer screen with my love sitting downstairs in front of hirs would strike many unfamilar with virtual worlds as crazy, but we were not separated or alone, we were in the midst of a circle of cheering friends, scattered around the globe, dancing together, bound by love.

Virtual worlds have brought connection and joy into my lives, first and second.

Amen.

Life etc.

Yes, I'm still here despite the silence. Time is flashing past at a frightening rate, even faster than usual. I will be on my way to Canada in ten days, for two weeks of family and food and properly cold weather.

Speaking of which, it continues to snow lightly (as I twittered a few days back), but the ambient temperature down here in the valley is still too high for the snow to settle. I am trying an experiment this year: I am only heating the living room (because I sit here for hours on end) and the bathroom (because I'm a wimp), letting the other rooms do as they wish. (This is Germany, there is no danger of anything in the apartment freezing). Getting undressed for bed is pretty grim, coming as it does after a few hours in the warm living room, but I find that I wake up toasty warm and very comfortable despite the temperature. This was prompted by reading a claim that central heating and suchlike actually make us more susceptible to colds and the flu by de-training our natural bodily resistance. We'll see.

That last tweet should not worry anyone, nothing happened, everybody is safe. But there were a few long and quite harrowing late-night conversations until X arrived at that safe point. I'll tell you this for free, dear friends: whatever therapists earn, it is nowhere near enough. [Updated: Dervala writes movingly about loneliness and unhappiness: "I’ve come to believe that Starbucks may be the largest private mental health organization in the country, a place where anyone with two bucks for a drip coffee can get smiled at and can sit safely next to other human beings for a while." Go read.]

Just finished reading a kind of autobiography, "Istanbul" by Orhan Pamuk, he of last year's the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. It's a strange book, no more a true autobiog than say "Tristram Shandy" was. It is actually about Istanbul and anger and melancholy, in nearly equal measures, with young Orhan popping up now and then to point to things. Very well written, at least in the English translation, recommended for readers who aren't after cheerfulness or action.

For those who do want some cheerfulness: put on your headphones, close your office door, and watch this video. Very funny, pix are harmless but the words are definitely not safe for work. Enjoy.

Nothing compares 2 U

If people still know the-artist-once-again-known-as Prince in a hundred years, this song will be among the reasons why. The cover version by Sinéad O'Connor shuffled up from the depths onto my iPod today and reminded me in a rush of emotion of the first time I heard it.

In the winter of 1990 I was working at a Great Big Computer Company in Sprawlville, commuting to and from London every day — except when train strikes or boozing with the lads prohibited this. On one such occasion, I camped at Smiler's house after a particularly intense beer-and-curry session. It had been a very late night and I had had far too much to drink, so I was dog-tired and still half-drunk as we got into his car to drive to work the next day. Smiler pulled up at a tobacconist and went inside to get his fix. As he closed the car door, this song came on the radio.

It was the first time I'd heard it, and in my weakened condition the song — and Sinéad's delivery — just devastated me. By the time he returned the tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was literally struck dumb. I could not have spoken a word to save my life.

Smiler earned big karma points and my undying respect and gratitude for what happened next: He saw nothing, heard nothing and said nothing, neither then nor ever after. He even stopped for gas on the way to the office (though the tank was three-quarters full) to give me a few more minutes to pull myself together.

This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but seen within the yobbish cultural ideal of The Lad which reigned in England at the time it was an act of singular generosity and kindness, a demonstration of true greatness of spirit. English humour has always been based on cruelty and insult, and within that culture reputation and popularity were held to be zero-sum games: I can only improve my standing with the Lads by damaging yours. He could have shot up in the pecking order by cutting me off at the knees that day, and others of my so-called friends would have done so without hesitation. "Well, it's jus' a larf, innit? Can't you take a joke?"

Shabbat shalom, my dears; and wherever you are, Smiler: thank you.

London, Sunday morning

Notes from my laptop, written after failing to get online.

Think of London, a small city
It's dark, dark in the daytime
People sleep, sleep in the daytime
If they want to, if they want to
Talking Heads, "Cities"

Look, Jane, look: see David Byrne talking through his hat. The last adjective one might with justice apply to London is "small." London is a monster, it's just too big, too dirty, too crowded — and far too expensive. It cost Oscar and I four pounds each to go by bus and Tube from his apartment near the Thames in West London to Oxford Circus for the party; coming home, it took us half an hour to find a taxi, and the quarter-hour ride cost thirty-seven pounds. And Birthday Boy cannot have paid less than 750 pounds for the (admittedly quite wonderful) dinner and wine for us all.

I am remembering both how much I enjoyed living here as a student, and how glad I was to escape fourteen years ago. The multiple nationalities and languages of London are a delight after the near-monoculture of Germany; the variety of skintones and languages on the Tube made me quite absurdly happy. The party was also such a mixture: BB's family is Belgian by parentage and lives in France, Switzerland and Holland, and he attended school in Geneva and university in London. I sat with two friends from Geneva days (an American living in Hong Kong and a Swiss-Italian), his Swiss-living sister and her Italian husband, and a relatively recent Russian friend from London; the common language was French rather than English, so we spoke that together.

This is the first time I've been here in a dozen years; many of the guests I have not seen in twenty-five years or more. Time has not treated us all kindly. Oscar has put on the twenty kilos that BB lost along with much of his hair. His mother is still going strong: she is finishing a book to be published in 2009, her 88rd year.

Rain, cold winds, grey skies. Blah.

Walked in Richmond Park yesterday for a few hours, between the rains, talking about life and age and the attempt to make peace with oneself and one's ghosts. Oscar has had a hard time: a nervous breakdown leading to early retirement in his mid-forties, a serious depression since then from which he is only just emerging. The state of his apartment makes me think with shamed recognition of my own.

Today will be spent in bookstores and cafes, damn the weather.

Ho ho ho

Blogging briefly while waiting for G and U (and Ralph) to pick me up, to go to the Black Forest for two days.

It has not (yet) snowed as such, but the combination of frozen earth and moist air has left a film of hoar-frost over the city. It's about -5°C at present, sunny but with a humidity haze in the air. Walking home at 3 a.m. under a full moon, alone in the city with my feet crunching in the snow, I felt peaceful and very happy.

G, U, Famous Photographer and I cooked a four-course meal last night: topinambour soup, carp bleu, duck legs in a sweetish ginger and lemon sauce, and a bread pudding. Delicious; though I must say that having once eaten carp, I see no particular need to eat it again. It has a very, shall we say, unusual texture which I found quite unpleasant. The topinambour soup was the highlight of the evening, I've translated the recipe here.

Merry Christmas, my dears. I hope that you are all happy, healthy and with your loved ones today.

Tired meets Godzilla

Parents and their travelling companions, friends of twenty-seven years' standing, arrived yesterday. After tea with Sis, I settled the friends in to their hotel (only the finest will do!) and walked home. Spent today catching up on news and having a portrait photo made with Sis; soon dinner.

Sentences you wish you hadn't heard, part 37: "Mom, the cat just walked across the pie." True, alas; photos will be posted on Flickr when I get home. We covered over the footprints with whipped cream and ate it anyway.

But young Conan is adored and indulged nonetheless, to the extent that one finds oneself whispering because he's asleep on a nearby chair. There is a certain quantity of sibling rivalry between the dog, who was here first, and him; but on the whole they get on well. They play together, i.e. fight without drawing blood; despite the difference in size and weight it's nearly an even battle.

I've been considering my speech for a week, and shall now have to settle down and write the damned thing. It'll be short and bittersweet and hopefully win approval on both counts. We shall see.

Reading "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" and enjoying it greatly. No spoilers about the new one please, it will be arriving with Niece tomorrow evening for me to read on Sunday.

In other news I love being here. I love the flat, empty landscape and the enormous so-pale-it's-nearly-white sky. I love speaking English. I love the small houses and colourful trees and quiet streets. I am considering the possibility of moving back to Canada.

In other, other news an amusing cartoon from xkcd which will appeal to SQL-geek moms everywhere.

Second thoughts on Second Life

I checked into SL just before midnight last night, for a quick look-around before going to bed, and was pinged by a blogger who happened to be online, and who had read my "First thoughts on SL" post some weeks back. M2 teleported me to one of her favourite places, a snowy, foggy mountainside, where we stood alone and talked until after 3am.

Second Life is like a party in that the most interesting people hang out where it's quiet, for instance in the kitchen (for certain values of "interesting;" your mileage may vary).

It's odd how effective the avatars in SL are at adding emotional resonance to conversation: I would not have stayed up until 3am if we had been doing a pure-text chat. One associates oneself very quickly with the image, I actually found myself thinking "I'm not dressed for this weather" as we stood in the snow!

She had joined SL after I did, because my post made her curious about it, but has clearly spent much more time there than I. She gave me many pointers to places, events and resources which I'll investigate in coming weeks.

Thank you, M2, for your generosity—and for your openness. It was nice meeting you.

And now it's a sunny, warmish (13°C) day so I shall walk downtown for a cappuccino, possibly under the plane trees at the Café Eberhard if there's no wind.

Vollmondwanderung

bärensee_reflection
Originally uploaded by udge

Walking with Princess at the Bärensee again this evening, talking at length about life and friends and how many of us seem to be in danger of shipwreck.

We saw parhelia just before sunset (P had never seen them before, to my astonishment) then watched the bright orange harvest moon rising over the lake as we turned south to go home. I took a dozen moon-over-the-water shots, all utter crud: unfocussed and blurry from my shaky hands and the long exposure. Sigh.

In the absence of photos: get up from the computer, dear reader, go outside and look at the full moon, and be reminded that life is good.

On the kindness of strangers

We really don't know each other, but I wish there was something I could do to help. Is there? I don't have money to donate, and I don't have proximity, but I have a computer and a brain and the desire to help. Please do let me know.

and

I just read your last post and am very sorry for the difficult moment you're in. Do you need some money? I have a job and could send you a little sum every time I get paid.

Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!

Thank you so much, M and M2, and the others who e-mailed consolations and material offers in response to that last post (which I've updated, by the way). I am moved to tears by the kindness of the Internets.

I appreciate the gesture and hope not to have to take you up on it. The ball is in my landlady's court (or will be as soon as the payment clears), and it's now a legal matter rather than a financial one. My understanding is that she can still require me to leave if she so wishes, but she cannot force me out without giving the usual period of notice.

Elsewheres

The Lioness is in fine voice tonight:

Basically, I think I am afraid of becoming a full adult bcs I am afraid I won't be a fully competent, fully excellent one. I don't think that people who fight becoming adults do it bcs their childhood or adolescence were so good they are not ready to give that up. I think it's maybe bcs they weren't all that good, something was missing, they were filled with fears still left un-faced, still not laid to rest, and they fear they will never be good enough at the next, most self-informative, most decisive, most important stage. If you're going to be an adult and not be a fully excellent one, well, potential is good when made into something real, if not you might as well throw yourself in the river now. The tought of what the world is going to demand of us is exhausting but you want to know what the truth is? The truth is, the world, our life, reality are never as bad as our fears abt them. NEVER. I am now looking The Beast right in the eyes, enough, enough of reinforcing what I'm not, time to salute what I have managed to become. I have come far, I truly have come far. I think it's time to see that.

Wonderful, inspiring, enhumbling.

In other news courtesy of swissmiss a very simple, beautiful house high on a mountainside in Scheidegg, Switzerland. (Links to a review of the house and the architects' website.) When I win the lottery, I will make the owners an offer they would be foolish to refuse, and spend the rest of my days looking out of this window. And it was even cheap to build, apparently: only 1450 Euros per square metre.



Paradise, that is.

And like all paradises, completely delusional. I know even while I admire the photo, that I could not live like that. Where are the bookshelves? where are the computers? where are the CDs and DVDs? where are the paintings and etchings and photographs? Where are the piles of paper waiting since 1998 to be filed away? No, the inside of that house would look very different after I'd lived there for a month. Alas.

Thoughtful

Cooler than the last weeks, it's only 19° at present and still raining in fits and starts after a terrific thunderstorm late last night; oddly enough the rain hasn't reduced the humidity at all. Can't have everything.

Dinner last night with Princess was at the Neckarblick, an outdoor restaurant on a hillside overlooking the Neckar river above Wangen. Very pleasant. It's not gourmet food, but it was tasty enough and reasonably priced and well served. And the view is tremendous, click on that map link and zoom out towards the northeast (i.e. top right) to see the area we looked out over). We sat until dark and talked about our various recent delights and disappointments, then drove back to town for an ice cream dessert. Very pleasant, I do enjoy being with her.

Princess is ageing, aren't we all. She will turn 49 in November, days before G turns 50. I had a Proustian moment at one point last night, when I turned to her and saw a stranger's face—a middle-aged woman wearing a hint too much makeup—imposed on the person whom I knew to be "Princess," a woman as young as myself. The moment passed soon while she told a story, I recognized that wryly-amused grin as being truly hers. (I just spent the better part of a half-hour flipping through the start of the Guermantes' reception in "Time regained," in search of what I remembered as Proust's vivid and moving description of the effect of seeing a chronology of earlier faces layered upon the physical body that stands before us, but discovered this to be my own distillation of a hundred leisurely pages.)

I have been quite aware of my age since returning from the Camino. I look at somebody on the street and think "Mid-forties" and then "younger than I." I have let so much time and so many opportunities slip through my fingers, as though the supply of both were infinite.

I'm listening to Tristan und Isolde while working blogging and farting about. There's some very fine music in here, especially the last act and in particular Isolde's final aria "Mild und leise wie er lächelt", her farewell to Tristan, which bears a close family resemblance to the "Liebe" theme of the Ring. I saw this in Vienna with Waltraut Meier as Isolde (she was very good, I liked her better than when she sang one of the Valkyries at the Met); can't remember who sang Tristan, so clearly he made less of an impression. Might have been Domingo. Try the link, you might like it.

In business news I have begun to translate and extend my professional website, recognizing that its current state doesn't exactly sell my services. For a start, it's in English and my clients are all Germans; more seriously, it presents the same wide-eyed cheerfully-curious view of the world as does this blog (well, they are both me) rather than giving the impression of an honest and intelligent businessperson who could be entrusted with confidential data and a bag of money. I have been asking myself the alpha-and-omega question that every web-designer should ask every client: What is the site intended to sell to whom? I think that my oft-repeated observation that 90% of database users are women will find application in the answer, but I don't yet know how.

On anonymity and hiding

May asked (in the course of an e-mail conversation) whether there were any photos of me on the Internets; I replied that there were several on Flickr which were friends-and-family-only but that I'd certainly "befriend" her if she wanted to see them.

Thinking about this later on, I asked myself why I had bothered to restrict them in this way. My reasoning was that I don't want people who know me professionally to find my blog, because they might (would!) find some barely-disguised uncomplimentary references to themselves, and that identifying my face on Flickr is one way that the link might be made. (In the early blogging days, I did tell some workmates about my Flickr account.) The reason is valid as far as it goes, but it only goes an inch or two.

The probability of my being discovered through random googling is infinitely higher than that somebody might recognize my face. "Security through anonymity" doesn't work any more, if it ever did: Big Brother sees all, and tells all to anyone who asks. People have found my blog by searching for the most peculiar and abstruse things simply because all of the search words happened to occur on a single page, one word per post: write about Paris, France and then a week later about the Hilton hotel in Manhattan, and people will find your blog when searching for Paris Hilton (without quotes; many users of search engines don't know to put quotes around a phrase). Ben is regularly visited by people searching for Emma Watson's breasts because he once used all three words during the same month; they are surely terribly disappointed by his stories of children and early-morning jogging.

But my impulse to keep things secret and separate goes deeper than that. I have always maintained divisions between parts of my life: my architecture friends don't know my computing friends, and none of them know my blogging friends who know neither of the other groups. This even goes to the point of segregating my architecture friends from Big Famous Office from my architecture friends from Small Stylish Office. Silly, really, but it is my impulse in all things and always has been.

I am planning a dinner to celebrate my birthday (in a local restaurant) and was thinking who to invite, and kept tripping over this imaginary boundary between types of friends. Can't have both X and Y, what would they have to talk about—other than me? I would like to invite Marco from the Dead White Male Poet Cafe and my favourite barista from the Espresso-Laden, both of whom I think of as friends-in-the-making, but wonder what they'd make of the architects and vice versa.

Well, damn this: I shall invite them one and all, and let them see whether they can get on or not. It could be a very interesting evening.

Odds and ends

I note with amusement that this blog currently holds first and second place on Google for "Blessed Willibald," even outranking the Wikipedia. Oh, the pressure of fame! (Closes eyes, places back of hand against forehead; recollects that this is typically a woman's gesture and hastily squeezes bridge of nose instead.)

Since you asked: Willibald was an Englishman of Saxon descent, one of three children of Richard of Wessex (and thus nephew to Saint Bonifatius) who were inspired by religious zeal during pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Willibald became a missionary and was appointed the first bishop of Eichstatt in Bavaria, and founded the abbey at Heidenheim where he in turn appointed his brother Wunibald and sister Walburga as Abbot and Abbess. All three were canonized. It's odd to think that Germany was pagan as recently as 1200 years ago (twenty-four grandfathers), and that Christianity and Islam were struggling to establish themselves during the same period.

So, it's Sunday, a sunny day. I am drinking coffee and listening to Benjamin Britten's 1945 opera Peter Grimes, an oddly ambiguous but very grim tale. It's hard to say what the opera is about: "intolerance" and "inarticulacy" are probably the simplest short answers, though that does the work an injustice. There isn't a villain as such, unless it's Grimes himself; the facts are clear but not their meaning, effects with unknown cause. The music is typical of Britten, in a style that sixty years later sounds self-consciously "moderne" and quite dated (reminds me of Charles Simmons' aphorism that "an 'experimental author' is one whose experiment has failed"); however in contrast to Britten's later opera "Billy Budd" it does contain traditional harmonies and progressions of notes and even one or two genuine tunes that one might hum on the way home from the performance. Give it a try; and if you do, listen with an open mind three or four times before deciding, because it is an acquired taste worth acquiring.

I spent two hours today writing an estimate on importing a customer's data, and came to the conclusion that the customer doesn't know her own data (and therefore that I cannot estimate the price). The excerpted information (as Excel tables) doesn't match her description, and seems to refer to other data sources that she doesn't mention. Bah.

I have been thinking about the Camino Way and what walking it will mean. The first thing that occurs to me is that I will be away from the keyboard for three weeks: no e-mail (hooray) but also no blogging (boo). How will I survive three weeks without hearing from you? How on Earth will you survive three weeks without my humour, wit and charm? (How many of you would return to reading this blog in June when I return to writing it?) I really don't know what to do about this. I shall of course write, I've got my Moleskine and will make copious notes, but that doesn't alter my probable three-week-long silence.

A larger problem is the assigning of license numbers for any new customers who happen to choose those three weeks to buy a copy of the database. That only I can generate license numbers is what keeps my nameless partner honest; not that he would sell copies and keep the profits, but that he cannot give away free licenses without my consent. Were he able to generate numbers, he'd issue free licenses by the hundreds.

This needs thought.

Ageing Yuppie has given up his Stuttgart apartment and is moving to the college town Oop Noorth (where they taawk foonnah). It's a sensible decision since his contract has another three years to run (and he is certain to get tenure if he keeps his hands off the students, which is not certain), and he has been in Stuttgart for perhaps ten weeks in total during the last two years. There was a farewell dinner on Friday evening that went on until 2am on Saturday; the staff kindly didn't throw us out but waited for us to finish in good order. The usual suspects were there: Famous Sculptor and Famous Photographer, B, Princess, Beauty, the Dentist, G and U, and your 'umble narrator, to name only those who have appeared in this blog (or are about to).

We are all getting old(er), grey and/or sparse hair is the norm in the group now, but ageing sometimes has odd effects. The woman I call Beauty, though not to her face, is one of the most beautiful women in Stuttgart, and also a lovely, charming person. She will turn forty in August, and the behind-her-back consensus at the table is that she is even prettier now than she was in her early thirties. It's called "maturing well" and by God she's good at it.

The Dentist is a real character, he and his wife Giselle are bon vivants in the slightly old-fashioned sense that the phrase now carries. Since he retired two years ago, they travel around the world having fun—they discovered the apartment where we now stay in Venice; returning home now and then to throw extravagant parties. We talked for an hour about the Camino way and what it means to undertake such a journey on foot.

The end of an era, as they say. AY has been the centre of all this, the hub that holds the spokes together, the alpha wolf whose howling summons the pack; I hope that the group will continue to meet without him to motivate us.

Inconclusive

Well, that was very interesting, the body language alone was fascinating. They sat together on one side of the table, opposite me, the typical panel-interview situation—except that it was clear that I was the panel and that they were applying. U started things rolling by saying "it's all my fault, I made this problem" which to be honest is about 75% true.

U has given up the immediate cause of her behaviour—this was the first time that anyone ever mentioned it, at least in my presence, though it was already an issue in my mind last year. The underlying cause, her fears and her inability to deal with them, was addressed but in a way that I found unsatisfactory: G said words to the effect of "you'll snap out of it all right." I don't think it's that simple, and were I in her shoes I wouldn't have found his comment helpful. There was no suggestion that she might benefit from assistance in this process, e.g. by seeing a therapist; but G is the wrong person for that, he is opposed to therapy with a vehemence that suggests that he's doing some serious repressing of his own.

We haven't had a meaningful conversation about anything personal or truthful in many months, possibly not since a year ago. (Neither of them remembered that conversation, by the way.) I should have forced the issue of U's problems in May, but didn't; and neither did G or U herself; and so the pressure built up to this explosion. In retrospect it's clear that much of the pain of the last eighteen months or so could have been prevented by a few honest discussions at the time: nipped in the bud, to coin a phrase. I am also at fault in the not-seriously-talking: the things I write here and read on your blogs, these non-physical friendships, have taken a place in my mental and emotional life which I cannot (do not) discuss with them.

Boring. Cut to the chase: I'm still in the office for the time being, on a part-time basis. Fact is that the work is running out, the project will be finished by the time I go to Spain and there is no replacement in sight. I explained about wanting needing to get the database running as a business, which primarily means that I need an assistant programmer and tester, and the level of income needed to support this person, and stated that I will probably need to take a full-time job somewhere (this will be discussed at length in a future post).

With that, dear friends, goodnight. I've been rising with and because of the birds for the last few days, 5:30 a.m. to be exact, and I'm bone tired.

Sunday, lazy day

The sky is mottled grey and speaks of gentle rain towards evening; the air is cool and moist with a gentle breeze. I've been awake for a few hours now, drinking coffee and reading P.G.Wodehouse in bed, and would be there still but for my abhorrence for lying amid breadcrumbs. Most pleasant.

[Updated two hours later: the sun is setting and it has started to rain. Colour me "smug."]

My friends and acquaintances are all ageing, as most people do. Yesterday was Famous Photographer's fiftieth birthday celebration; there will be three more this year and at least five in 2008. The party was a pleasant jaunt that went on until 3am (for myself, others were still going strong as I left). We danced like untamed gazelles and ate and drank in reasonable moderation (I drank two glasses of Sekt before switching to water, and noticed many other guests doing the same). I met the Czech woman from G's birthday party again and danced for a few hours with her; we agreed that we would join a tango club together, so I shall get that sorted out soon. I shall have to think of a suitable anonym for her.

FP has broken up with his companion of eighteen years, after drifting apart during the last few years. In retrospect it's clear that this was happening: they took separate holidays and had separate hobbies (to the extent of singing in different choirs), and it has been a long time since they attended any public event together. She moved out on the morning of the party, leaving the cat and no forwarding address.

In other news here's another favourite song (6.8Mb MP3) and the Amazon page of the album it's taken from. This will be available until 3pm CET tomorrow. Again, no names or titles in comments please, I don't want any over-eager record company lawyers googling them and finding me.

My sister reports that importing Friday's song into her Mac iTunes revealed all the author/title/album info, I would be grateful if a Windows iTunes user could try this and report whether it works there too (I'm guessing that it will).

In other, other news I've upgraded to the newly non-beta Blogger2. Everything looks OK so far; if you find any problems or oddities please let me know.

Disparue

I had thought to write
a mutual on-line friend
to ask about her.

After two months of (mostly)
silence, letters unanswered—

I was uneasy,
wondering what had happened
or what I had said.

"I'm not asking for details,"
I'd say, "just tell me that she

is well and happy;
that this silence only means
that she is busy."

But I haven't written, and
I will not write, to our friend.

There is some justice
in her silence, a karmic
return for all the

letters that I never wrote
to people who were my friends,

not from anger or
because of resentments real
or imagined, but

just because I could not see
that time and the moment pass.

I hope and believe
that it is the same for her;
she bears no ill-will

and will write when the time comes;
as I have written, years late.

Virginia Woolf
said "I have lost friends, some by
death, others by sheer

inability to cross
the street." I am no better.

We see always our
good intentions, and thus do
we find ourselves good:

we will write that letter—soon.
But somehow five years go by

and the letter still
has not been written, and now
it never will be.

Late (updated)

It's nearly midnight, and I am still sitting at the computers (the plural is intentional, three of them are running). The Christmas holiday knocked me out of several routines that had been good, useful and enjoyable: blogging, meditating, getting up early and its corollary, going to bed early. I haven't been to bed before 2am since the 25th, and I am beginning to suspect that my state of general run-down-ness and unease is perhaps related to lack of sleep. Hey, there's a clever thought. Here's a first New Year's Resolution: I shall turn off the damned computers and go to bed no later than 10:30.

I feel like I've eaten nothing but cakes and fast food for weeks. Here's a second New Year's Resolution: I shall buy neither chocolates, cakes, cookies nor pastries for myself at home in 2007 (though I will eat same if offered to me, a good guest takes what is given), instead of this I shall eat healthy or at least less-unhealthy stuff: real food, yoghurt, fruit.

(The soundtrack to this post is a CD that I picked up purely because of its unusual packaging, Takk by Sigur Rós. It's very odd, hauntingly beautiful; although it clearly belongs in the general category of "intelligent pop songs," the best point of comparison that I can find is to Gorecki's Third Symphony which I blogged about in July. If you want a sample, click on the link above (the website gives a good indication of the graphic style of the CD) then click on "sirkus" to view the video of the second song "Glósóli." You should definitely not buy this on my recommendation, do listen to it first. If you click on the "eighteen seconds before sunrise" link at the bottom of their website, it takes you to an English-language band site with samples and several full-length MP3 tracks to download, or you can find them in the iTunes music shop.)

The year is nearly over, the neighbourhood kids are practicing setting off fireworks (by throwing them out of their X-th floor windows onto the sidewalk, which is every bit as dangerous and anti-social as it sounds). It's been a piss-poor year financially, but a great one in terms of satisfactions and happinesses experienced. The opera in Toronto is the only thing that comes to mind, oddly enough, but my general impression is that I was happy this year. Here's a third New Year's Resolution: to earn 50% more than in 2006, and to spend every penny of the increase on useful and worthwhile things like visiting friends old and new.

[Updated Another thing that made me very happy this year was giving people presents out of the blue, simply because I wanted to. Here's a fourth New Year's Resolution: to give more OutOfTheBlue presents.]

2007 is going to be busy in any case. I have three significant events confirmed or in planning: the opera in New York in July and my parents' 50th wedding anniversary in Saskatchewan in October, and the Venice Biennale between them (Art this time). The July trip will begin in mid-June with my nephew's high school graduation, then visiting friends in New England (any readers who wish to be visited are welcome to send me an e-mail giving details) in early July before the opera. I'll then return here, work for three months (minus a week in Venice) and then fly back for a week. Is it just me, or does anyone else think that that sounds somehow absurd and excessive? I just don't know what else to do about those three months, I can't just stay in Canada - or could I? What if I used that time to write an English-language version of the database and find the first few customers, that would be a useful and worthwhile way to spend my time.

Interesting, very interesting. It would mean missing the Biennale, of course.

And I do want to attend one of Savtadotty's famous Friday soup dinners and meet some blogging buddies (you know who you are). I had been seriously preparing to visit Israel this summer, before the war got in the way. I guess that will have to happen sometime in Spring, before the first trip to Canada.

In other news my mother recovers apace. They had walked for an hour the day that I called to talk about my uncle's funeral (which none of us will attend), and are planning a month in Arizona in late winter/early Spring.

Drunk blogging

Hello and welcome, my dears.

It's 2:13 am Saturday morning / Friday night and I've just got home from an impromptu party-type event, my hands smell of perfume and cocoanut oil. Ageing Yuppie called me up three hours ago to ask whether I wanted to drop in for a drink. I said no (too tired, too late) so he handed the phone to Jana, the young (very) woman who is subrenting his apartment while he is at the college Oop Noorth. She said that it's her birthday, I should please come by for a glass to celebrate. Such an invitation is of course compulsory, one may not refuse a birthday drink. Three hours and far too many glasses later, I'm home again drinking water and cooking hot chocolate (the party continues without me).

Jana is Russian, studying something that I can never remember, pretty and sweet and very high-maintenance. She requires constant attention: not just that she dances on the table but that we must all watch and applaud. It's at moments like this that I realize that I am indeed getting older: the young have so much energy, and they waste it on such futile things! Pascal famously said that our miseries derive from being unable to sit alone in a quiet room, and this is something that one can hope to acquire with age. (AY hasn't got there yet, he is if anything even more frenetic than when we met twenty years ago.)

Still, a happy and pleasant event. It's nice to associate with the young once in a while, strenuous as they are. I got into a long discussion with a marketing type from a Quite Well-Known Automobile Company about the meaning of life, and why he is unhappy in a job that contradicts all of his ideals, values, hopes and ambitions. Well. I tried as politely as possible to suggest that maybe his unhappiness is a thing worth noticing, and that the discrepancy between his job and his ideals etc might just worth considering. What benefit it a man that he gain the whole world but lose his soul? to coin a phrase.

Actually it's not about age as such. (Stop reading, please! The drunkenness has turned from merriment to pontificating (an interesting word, actually: "to speak like a Pope." Before the Reformation, when the whole of Christianity was Catholic, it must have been the highest of compliments).) Jana is probably no younger than Noorster who said "Given a choice, I'd rather watch an interesting biopic on TV than go out to drink alcohol and rub up against strangers" and "if I fall asleep after midnight, I'm knackered the next day." N has already figured it out, while J and AY are still worrying about the externalities.

Enough. Sweet dreams be yours, my dears, if dreams there be.