Hubris

If you were to look up the word "hubris" in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, no doubt you'd find a picture of me crushed under a christmas tree.

So there I was, strutting along the city streets with my arms full off carefully selected christmas presents, feeling incredibly smug at how beautifully organised my shopping spree was. Common sense was telling me to return to my flat, offload my cargo and only then return to the market to pick out a christmas tree.

But no. Pew's feet decided to take her straight to the market. And of course, there it was. The perfect tree.

Now, I must have been on all kinds of high, because I am looking at the damn thing right now and it's far from exciting, but in the frosty morning light, it looked b-e-a-utiful. Somehow, I managed to convince myself that: (A) I could easily stuff the shedload of prezzies in my teenie tiny daypack and (B) that it was perfectly reasonable to assume that my "bulging" muscles could carry this "one-inch-short-from-gulliver" green monstrosity all the way back to my flat on my lonesome.

I managed to carry it a whole 50 meters before my arms and legs buckled under its weight. Slightly embarassed, I decided to reorganise myself, looked at the damn thing from all angles, trying all those very usefull formulas my physics degree surely should've taught me, and ended up lifting it the exact same way I had before, only to collapse 25 meters onward.

By this time, people around me had dropped all pretense of politeness and openly laughed at my expense. Thinking I couldn't possibly give in now, I grabbed it by it's top-branch, and decided to DRAG it all the way to my flat. Would've worked nicely, if it weren't for the fact that I'd decided to buy a LIVE tree, its roots beautifully encased in a bucket of manure. The dragging tore the bucket apart and HUGE clots of manure were now spread all over my hoodie and jeans.

And this is where I finally started to panic. Could I get arrested for abandoning a recently purchased christmas tree in the middle of the city center, just cuz I'd changed my mind? People were literally staring at me. I must have been the joke of the day, cuz they were all waiting for my next move. Except I did nothing.

I dug up my mobile, rang everyone in my phonebook till I found someone who happened to be nearby and waited till they came to my rescue.

Impulsiveness always was my best and worst vice.

Irony

Coincidence or not, my horoscope for today reads:

"You can feel pulled between duty and freedom needs. You can resent the demands made on your time. But this can also be a time when you understand how to take your inventiveness and originality and put them to positive use. Be a little more flexible just now. "

I'll bend over backwards shall I?

*growl*

Anger-Management Therapy Session

I'm angry with the world today. Or with life. Fuck knows.
I'm angry with society.

Whenever I'm in this mood, I've a tendency to blame my hormones, my neurochemistry or anything else I can excuse myself with. But I'm sick of apologizing for feeling this pissed off or for feeling low. There's too much of a pattern here. If the same flashes of anger and lows keep re-occurring, perhaps it's time to try and find the real cause, rather than to automatically point the finger at myself all the time. I'm sick of blaming me.

The last ten days have been a right struggle. If it were just a struggle with myself, then there'd be no problem. I've a pretty good relationship with myself. Yes... myself and I, we can usually sort stuff out together. I'm not afraid of a little introspection. Nor am I afraid of cracking open the toolbox for some maintenance. But a person can only go so far. When you clash with your environment, there's only so much you can do to try and make yourself fit in, without losing yourself completely.

A week or two ago, the papers headed an article stating that our generation (20-30 yos) is panicky and views the future with a distinct notion of pessimism.

Well bah-humbug. Can you blame us? We're the first generation that was brought up in extremely good fortune. The values instilled on us all circled around the notion that we should at all times maximize our choices and opportunities. That we should never settle for anything but the best. That anything truly was possible for us because we were given all the best chances for success. That the only responsibility we had was to carefully consider our options and choose the one that would do honor to all the possibilities that were given to us.

Call me crazy, but to me that all sounds very much like: "Here's your reward, make sure you earn it." And that's as negative a premise as one can get. If you don't live up to the chances you've been given, you're a failure. Yet, if you do manage to live up to them, well then "of course you did, you were given all the right parameters from the start". There is no winning here.

And let me tell you something. It's fucking hard to make the right choices in life and to maximize all your opportunities if you barely have a moment to consider them.

The newspaper article further stated that our generation's biggest complaint is lack of time. Well d'uh. Did anyone ever think about stringing the two together? Panic. Lack of time. It's bloody obvious if you ask me. If you have no time to think about what you're doing, to consider your choices, your options, your future... then it's pretty damn normal to feel panicky.

The last couple of months, I feel like my life has been reduced to my job, domestics and my relationship with Jo. And the latter, I rarely have enough time with. I gradually feel myself slipping between the nets. I feel hesitant to meet up with friends because it generally means a compromise on either my hours of sleep or my scarce long-distance-time with Jo and at any rate, my brain has become so one-dimensional of late, I feel like I have nothing interesting to share with people any more. I bore the hell out of myself.

I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. Without adequate time for myself (and that includes Jo & my friends), I feel I will eventually diminish the contributions I have to make to the world around me, because I can feel myself grow increasingly limited.

I don't know how so many of you can even consider starting a family. How can you juggle a job, a social life, a family? Is it because you surrender to forever having lack of time? Do you start a family to add a new dimension to yourself because you've lost so many dimensions along the way? Or are you all just more capable of dealing with the world and its timely limitations than I apparently am?

Something's got to give.

The witty brain's worst nightmare...

Author Pratchett has Alzheimer's

Flem-barriers

There's something quite smug about being able to communicate in a non-mainstream language whilst stood amongst a crowd of strangers. Being a Flemish native has afforded me many such moments. The trouble is, I'm not the only Flem in the world and most certainly not the only one to roam amongst foreign crowds. And because not every Flem walks around with waffle in hand, it's sometimes hard to spot us.

Cue scene 1:
My brother and I (12 and 10 at the time) are stood in a hotel elevator in Florida, when Fat-Man-In-Shorts walks in. Matt and I look at each other and exchange an awed Flemish "My word, those americans really ARE fat". We giggle and wait for the elevator to come to a halt. When we're about to offload, Fat-Man-In-Shorts turns to us and says in perfect flemish: "Well, it sure was nice to see a few fellow Belgians in this resort."

Painful, to say the least.

But if you can bet on one thing, it's that Karma's a bitch and she most definitely came back with a vengeance. In the Paris underground of all places...

Cue scene 2:
Couple enters the metro, conversing in Flemish and they grab a spot right next to us. Convinced the language barrier is a safe bet, the woman starts bitching to her husband about anyone and everyone in her vincinity. I smirk secretively at Jo, because I obviously understand every word she's saying. Until, that is, she eyes us up and says to her husband: "They're gossiping about us, I'm sure of it. Which one do you think is the male (in their relationship)?"

What bugs me here is this: I had plenty of retorts ready which would have really hit the mark. But then you start doubting your own senses. Did you really overhear her correctly? Just how much of a tit would I look if I turned around with a snipe reply only to find out I'd misheard?

So... I said nothing. Let them walk off without anyone knowing any better.

Another Hello, Another Goodbye.

- Gare du Nord, Paris -

Gay Paris

I'm off to Paris in an hour for a 4-day weekend of sheer indulgence with Jo.

I know. I know. It's SUCH a stereotypical thing to do: Romance in Paris, but I'll have you know that we spent HOURS trying to find flights to more exotic locations that didn't eat away at our friday and monday too much. But there were fuck all.

It's entirely Jo's fault of course, for living in such a tragically unhip county. All we could find from her local airports was flights to melanoma-land-Lanzarote and twat-city-Alicante. Flights to Berlin, Barcelona or Oslo would've cost a whole travel day, which, quite frankly, I'm not willing to sacrifice off a 4-day weekend with my girrel.

So... 3 nights in Paris.

I'm thinking... roomservice, hide-and-seek in the Louvre, a wee boogie down the Gay Quartier, lazy reading over Cafés Russes, indulgent day-time sneak-backs to the hotel and christmas shopping at the souvenir-stand.

A bientôt mes amis!

Going Up?

I was wondering today just how many people die whilst riding an elevator. A slightly morbid idea, I admit, but surely I'm not the only one to have ever considered that question? At any rate, I decided to look it up. And here's what I found:



"Incidents involving elevators and escalators kill about 30 and seriously injure about 17,000 people each year in the United States, according to data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries reported 244 deaths in the 12 years 1992-2003 – about 20 per year. Of these, 173 involved work on or near elevators and 68 of those killed were elevator passengers – people entering or riding in elevators while at work."

Anyone who's ever had the misfortune of watching the Dutch film "De Lift" will probably think the following is tragically unspectacular, but how exactly did those events happen?

Well...

- Deaths among passengers using elevators while at work (1992-2001) -

Let's look at this more closely shall we:

1) "Falls" include mainly falls into elevator shafts. Almost half of those occurred when an elevator door opened and there was no elevator car.

Let's backtrack here for a second. The elevator door opened and there was NO ELEVATOR! I always assumed the Doctor Drake Ramoray elevator episode was too absurd to be plausible, but clearly it has happened more than just the fictional once. Maybe elevator designers would do well to consider the concept of fail-safe systems?!?

2) The “caught in-between” and “struck by” deaths often involved getting caught in the elevator door. Mostly it's a piece of clothing that gets stuck(I've always known ties are dangerous!) but almost half of the incidents involved people's heads getting trapped.

BAM.

If you're thinking about taking the stairs or the elevator, you're no better off apparently, because there are quite a few reports of injuries caused by escalators that suddenly decided to speed up or... even better... REVERSE their direction of movement.

If Hollywood is dumb enough to spend money on films about Snakes on a Plane, after this report, surely it's only a matter of time before the next Killer Escalator blockbuster? ;-)

Doors of perception

Servicemen at Manchester Airport appear to have either a sordid sense of humour or a highly misguided sense of logic:

- Elevators to the car-park -

- Left & Right Elevator Close-up -

Tip-toe evolution

Our trip to the STRP festival in Eindhoven taught us a practical lesson: "Never attend festivals/gigs in the Lowlands". What with the average Dutchman's vertical dimension ranking among the world's highest, visibility at such events is greatly compromised for wee short-arses like my girrel and myself.

As Jo called upon my scientific expertise to explain why the Dutch have shot upward so much the last few decades, I felt compelled to deliver the -in my humble opinion- most plausible explanation *cough*.

"It's merely evolution at work, hun. What with a third of the Netherlands located a solid couple of feet below sea-level and 2 thirds of its population actually inhabitting said lowly one third of space, survival of the fittest principles were bound to kick in along the vertical axis at some point! Height offers a competitive advantage for the Dutch, as it greatly enhances one's chances of survival in times of flooding. My guesstimation is that they -as a nation- will grow 6.85 meters tall in the very near future, as this would enable one to keep nose and mouth above water in case the lowest area in the Netherlands (6.7m below sea-level) floods."

For all my efforts in explaining, I got a raised eyebrow and a shove. Ungrateful girlfriends... tsk! ;-)

Flying Post

Time seems to fly faster with each day that passes. Maybe I’m just having too much fun. Fact of the matter is, I struggle to find enough time to write (be it blog or other), despite a strong desire to. I feel like I’m forever playing catch-up with my own memories and thoughts. In fact, I'm on the plane as I write this. These really are stolen moments.

However, after a rather tough September and October (professionally and privately), it seems like the tide is turning. The last few weeks have been pretty amazing: Jo’s been over for a lengthy 10-day visit, and I’ve just returned from a weekend in Glasgow. We both had our birthdays these last two weeks, so it’s been like an extended double celebration.

We made little outings to the national cyclocross competition (jo dragged me off around the entire track just to pick a viewer’s spot on the ultimate “crash-section” of the track), the Ghent 6-days of indoor cycling (I figured out half-way through the competition that Jo really hadn’t the foggiest notion of scoring or regulations, so I had to turn a rather inebriated fan sat next to me for a more confusing -but accurate- explanation), the STRP festival in Eindhoven (Roisin Murphy, 2Many DJs and lots of alternative art exhibits) and Glasgow (shopping and fantastic birthday night out with Jo’s gene-pool).

I’m going to leave the full account of the latter up to Jo, as she’s undoubtedly bursting to tell. I, on the other hand, am knackered. So I’m just going to throw on a few pics (mobile phone pics, so low quality)

- A happy welcome home -

- Happy Scot devouring bedtime birthday cake -

-Diagonal cycling -

- Mechanical Hand (photo courtesy of STRP.nl) -

- White Visions (photo courtesy of STRP.nl) -