Simon's Snowflakes, Island's Athorities,

On saturday i saw a four year old put together an icosahedron. He was the only boy in the group of ten who managed it. His name was Simon, and he was the cutest blond haired button of a little boy—who could also add faster than i could—that you could ever ask for. (This makes three wonderful Simons I have met here.)
Together with Ding, i lead a math workshop for geniusy kids: a "crack these christmas math-nuts" kind of course, over two days. we filled out stars with magic square-like number patterns, solved riddles of symmetrical snowflakes, learned how to count in Chinese and built origami cubes. in the pauses between the lessons (during which ding and i tried—often struggled—to gather their chaotic mind energy and focus it toward the prepared tasks) they invented and developed a strategy game called Islands. The game was at least as interesting and, I thought, just as thought-provoking as any of the christmas-themed word problems or geometrical figures we were trying to present. So it was hard for me to tell them to stop working on it and do whatever math game was next on the list since, honestly, I considered the skills entailed in Islands more valuable than figuring out how many toy trucks johnny could have bought with his santa money if x equals 7y and the economy weren't a black hole.
The game, which worked a little like Risk, involved holding, building up, and defending one's own Island—and its interests—while exploring, conquering, trading or making alliances with other Islands and their owners. The routes were complex, the potential wares (ships, large and small weaponry, all manner of accessories) were meticulously priced, and the game board—begun as a simply curving pen drawing on graph paper— was transformed by the end of the workshop into a fabulously colored archipelago paradise.
The most amazing part of the process was how matter of factly a couple of the kids took on roles of authority, which other children simply accepted, whether or not they had been originators of the game. if two children doing their own individual development of the game were unsure about something, they would turn to another, one of those possessing this mysterious authority, "can we do this?" they would asked. the Author replied with immediate assurance. with a 'this you can do, this you cant do' as though dictating a preestablished method and form, instead of guidelines he has just that moment determined. No one challenged, if it was a good ruling, the game simply went forward, slightly more defined than before. There were few disputes (such as over how many other game players one could form a peace treaty with)which were settled as quickly and logically as possible.
How are these Rulemakers made? There are the dreamers of dreams and then there are those that decree what is no longer dream. Determiners of Reality perhaps.
If we could all remember how to be so.

on the other side hand, I wasn't sure whether to be impressed by this one boys self-assurance, or to fear it (maybe fear what it would/could become), or to resent that I was never, and probably will never be, quite that dictatorial. its hard to imagine my word as law. yes, of course I navigate a range of relationships and embodiments of power dynamics, but still, whether by choice or chance leadership roles are not my lot.
its worth mentioning that this one boy with inexplicable authority (the Authors seemed to have authority based on age and the fact that they had started the game) was also one of the least controllable kids in the room. he was the joker, high energy, kept trying to sneak the answers to the problems, had little patience for the any of the tasks and often asked favors of us (teachers) in an exaggeratedly wide eyed, head cocked to one side with a tragically endearing smile way. his voice became adoringly pleading as he beseeched us "oh just one more minute, please..."
I forgot for a moment the ten year old standing in front of me, eyelashes batting away.
Manipulator, i thought.

So...

SNOW!
the first snow (post summer)!
window out backyard garden color covered, gone
white soft and cold and white.
what unexpected winter

I've never been in love before...

15.11.08
I went to see a fully Germanized version of guys and dolls, the musical. Great singing acting and blocking aside, I fell in love with the mondrian like set: a criss-crossing of blue or red beams, gray and black lines, and see-through squares of whitelight. The people ran around in bright 40s era comic-book colors, looking like live Lichtenstein characters navigating a subway map schematic. I went with ding ding, miss shanghai from my german course, and we happened to catch the after-show discussion session with the actors. It was hours and hours, but the weather outside was too rainy and depressing not to do something. Its in that kind of weather that staying home just kills you.
But even more stunning than those hypnotically transforming set pieces is what I accidentally discovered when looking for original clips of the guys and dolls movie songs on youtube. No, its not what you think; I came up with no results as questionable as one might expect a search for ‘guys and dolls’ on google to return. But…right at the top, a documentary about guys who carry on relationships with ‘real dolls’. What?
Yes, real dolls. No, I don’t mean blow up blow me sex toys, but life size realistic-ish rubbery Barbie puppets with exchangeable tongues with whom (on whom?) some men not only carry on a physical relationship but construct an entire psychology and emotional connection to. Beyond Stepfordesque.
“we just spent this morning laying in bed; I think she may be sleeping it off” says one man as he opens the door to let the cameraman into his room. “Virginia” slumbers half covered by the sheets, a delicate cross on a gold chain resting askew on her elegant plastic neck. “Yes, its just as I thought” he continues.
Now, it's not an unfamiliar idea to me that many people find plenty solace in plastic plus imagination, but this feels like a step too far. Like when one man speaks lovingly of how "Jeeshan" gazes into his eyes as he carefully massages her malleable feet. ‘what’s most important is how I know we’re really there for eachother’ he sighs.
Alarm bells explode in my mind.
Ok, so Yes I played with dolls as a child, and yes, many had a constructed inner consciousness (some several) with which they could connect and interact with other dolls and people, including myself. But even I (who many a time poured out childhood woes to a stuffed lion) find myself….taken aback. Wasn’t this pretending just practice so I could then better relate to people who ‘actually’ have individual minds; beautiful, complicated, unpredictable and (for the most part) not in my control?
I like pretending, I’m all for it. I like to dress up and costumes, I like games, and a little self-delusion, but all within reason. (But then who am I to assess what is in reason?) This frightens me but I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what unnerves me most about it. Its not that I find the people creepy, the problem is that I half understand: the need for human (or half human contact) is so strong that no price is too high (or form too strange). But are people so uncooperative that extra forms of beings (dolls) have to be created in order for a need to be fulfilled. Or is the idea that someone would instead enact a doll desire on a human person creepier? I mean, which is creepier: treating a doll as though it’s alive or treating a human like plastic?
I am trying to be open. People have needs and its disappointing world for many. besides these people aren’t hurting anyone (real) directly. (Although, on second thought maybe this is a perpetuation of a system of abstracted human contact. Where our ideals and expectations are developed in disjunction with the real people around us.) Why can we relate better to things than others??? Sorry. My thoughts on this are not quite fully formed yet, there’s just a justifying rational struggling with gut repulsion. meanwhile, im rubbernecking it like a car crash.

FAQ's

I have been reminded again that when I tell one friend about what is going on in my life—how I’ve been and what I’ve been doing or not doing—this does not automatically update all my acquaintances through a universal elen-centered connected consciousness. OK, so for all of you whom I have not spoken to in the last few weeks (or more) and for those I have, here is an attempt at some less-abstract, more informative, less pretentious paraphrasing of this, my life.
I have chapterized it as well for easy listening.

Where
I am in Germany. At the moment I live in Bielefeld in my dad’s sparse but sleekchic white and blue house—the former family house that he grew up in and which I remember from visits in my childhood—on Karolinenstrasse. The burst of autumn reds and golds is unfortunately just at its end and the last few burning leaves cling shivering on the birch trees, or release sighing to the damp grass.

Why
TBD

What
I have been attending a german class, german for foreign speakers. My classmates are two men from korea, one from taiwan (Strangely all three seem to be pastors and married with children) none of them have names which I (or anyone else, including the teacher) can correctly remember or pronounce. This is shameful, i know. Then there is Ding Ding, a woman from Shanghai. Ossman a Turkish guy with a good sense of humor, Raoul from the D. R. who never stops grinning but also never comes to class, and three Russians, Euvgeny, Tania and Olga. The girls are both early twenties, bleach-blonded and super nice.
It’s strange and disorienting for me to learn geman as a foreign language in this class setting. when you learn something from the ground up, there’s the understanding that you don’t know anything and of course things will be frustrating. You can also add elements one at a time so that, hopefully a semi-sensible structure will emerge. But I am, and have been, already ‘in’ german. I speak it, however bumblingly, my accent is undetectable so that most people assume I am native right away. I can read and I understand most of everything that people say. But when it comes down to writing, I actually have no academic or instinctual sense of when to use what article and why.

Der, Die, Das,…(small tangent on german grammar)
In german, nouns are gendered, and not just male/female but neuter as well. The system of gender has nothing to do with logic, with culture, or even with word ending. There are generalities but always exceptions. It’s the (she) fork, (he) spoon, (it) knife. It’s the (she) city, (he) land, (it) village. It’s the (she) wall, (he) graveyard, (it) mausoleum.
The problem continues because the articles decline, that is, they change according to the case of the noun. If I am looking at the (der) mann, then he is not ‘der’ mann, but ‘den’ mann. And if I am showing something to the man then he is ‘dem’ mann. And if I am taking something that is the man’s (of the man) then it is ‘des manns’. The theory behind all these changes might be familiar, as it should be to anyone who has tried to learn Latin or any latinate language but the actual implementation, on the other hand, takes training. For which I find it hard to have patience. Oh yeah, not only that, but adjectives change in the same way, and even prepositions take certain cases.
Anyway, this is probably boring but I could chatter forever about it, so, onward to the next subject.

Who
This is me now, somewhat. I am somewhere in the middle of being German and American. I am sort of a student at the Bielefeld university. I have been sort of productive cooking pumpkin soup and baking lots of pies with the thousands of apples we have picked around the roof.

Whom
I spend a lot of time with my rugby team, which is not exactly my rugby team because there is only officially men’s rugby here, so though we are trying to start a women’s club for the time being I train with them. There is one other girl, Anne-Marie who comes regularly and now Sandra, married to one of the players, is going to show up, but there have been quite a few trainings where it was just me and, well, a bunch of people considerably larger and male-er than me. This, as you can imagine, leads to some interesting situations as we all try to navigate the gender (and size) dynamics of co-ed rugby.

Ok, that’s a general outline. Now i promise promise to try and actually (small things) at least once a week.

we can

o yes
O yes
O YES

things here, things there

words words words. the more i try to learn german the more i am aware of my speaking and so the less i am able to speak it. it even effects my english. i need a break from words.

For the sake of an update

The careful alchemy required in the conscious convergence of two worlds should not be underestimated, especially when both elements being brought together are places and people to which (and to whom) one is deeply attached— and moreover the meeting of the various parts is an event on which one has preparatorily bestowed great emotional significance and expectation. Such a mixture can almost only lead to disappointing results, but a merely peaceful though unsatisfactory anticlimax may be preferable to chemically explosive.
Those who are on the move, or have moved, should especially know what I mean by two worlds. there is, or ought to have been, some break between the few years leading up to last may, the vague summer following and the Now and To Be that follows, i.e. that Rest of Your Life that we were to have been preparing for (been prepared for) and have now entered, however much we may have stumbled on the stepping in, or caught our oversized shoulderside against the doorframe.
the one world is inhabited by people we know well, some too well, whose faces we see in passing, arbitrarily or like clockwork, in meeting, parting, moving or in waking in the morning. and then there is the New. where we savor (or fear) the unfamiliar that surrounds us, are stimulated by the novelty and possibility, or made hesitant by the sudden absence of safety and soft familiar hands, voices, thoughts.
both realms having their individual momentum, is a meeting necessarily a collision?

Things left behind

My father and I walk through rooms, half rooms, quarter rooms, tags hanging from the closet units, the footstools, the lampshades, saying wouldn't this plant look pretty beneath my window, these new shelves for your familiar books. Then we put a few white candles in the cart and shuttle swedish prefab furniture home to a house furbished in sleek white antiquity. New York across the sea I am wearing the new green dress, allwide pocket in the front like a marsupial pouch.
It rains in Bielefeld of course, the day I arrive because my father promised it was perfect sunshine all last week. But I am not dissappointed, this is the german gray I recognize. morning dawns unfamiliarly bright and we visit Bärenort, the Bear-place (brick house, birch trees) where I discover things I left behind. like uncovering, abandoned in an attic, the incomplete remnants of some stranger's life—except that this was my life and nothing is so strange, only for a time forgotten. these shirts that no longer fit, those coats that never did. the lavender left in the wardrobe, the blue pillow, the pens run dry; letters discarded, piled on blank postcards, misplaced copy of Howards End (there it was,the mystery solved), sketchbook, watchchain, accordioncase, rice-paper lightcover. not everything exactly as I left it, but exactly everything I left and, for the most part, never thought of afterward.
Why so many things? stuffed in our pockets, in pouches of our ever growing belly, the widths and breadths and bottoms, basements bowels, of our houses, saved, stored, sequestered. we've sunk into the ocean of objects swallowing up all space to breathe, think in. or at least I have, even here the more noticeable because there is more space to move my limbs in, space that is still enough to overtake the many things i fill it with. brought from another home, bought at flea markets, borrowed from someone else's discarded storage. Before flying I worried for days about what to bring, what not to, anticipating what I might need or use, what I would want to have. Now I wonder how much I left behind that I will never miss.
Things already forgotten, what fails? Just people, places, moments.

oh canada

to prove my ever barefoot state here I am out of states....

in the seas of nova scotia. my one short week visiting christine is ending in blaring sunglare, the waves hushing, the oceanwind whistling, harpstrings vibrating and me, humming with pure contentment

El Batay

In a small dive bar, three-quarters up the steep calle de christo, I was offered a choice. Black sharpie or white out? Stepping down into the first room I felt as though stalactites should hang from the dark ceilings instead of the yellow lamps which illuminated, on every curving wall, what was most striking about the place: decades of names layered in every medium in every font, size, design, from floor to archway, in every room, one one top of, through, obscuring, obliterating or accompanying another. there was not a single stretch of plaster or wood left bare.

33,000 words later

A year, I know, but you didn't miss much. I spent time being a serious senior, being a summer fling, being self centered, being sacrificial.
I danced and wrote and dawdled and dreaded and splashed ink across giant drawings on my floor.
Now all I have to show is a stack of papers. printed, colored, penciled, other-sized.
not too bad really.

and guess what...
I have moving on the mind.