Today I feel warmth in my chest and on my face, because I feel the pleasure of a new emotional connection.

That is both good news and bad news.

Good news, because I had almost forgotten what it feels like. It's absolutely wonderful, and I find it far more interesting than lust or limerence because it does not tax the body or the mind by draining the energy out of it. I like to remember that this good stuff makes human bond together and societies hold. I like to remember that it has happened before, as my friends are coming to visit me for New Year's eve and now I will doubleplus thank them for being my friends.

Bad news, because I had almost forgotten what it feels like. Which means that I do not find many occasions to have it happen. Or maybe I do not hang out with the right people. Whatever. Now I want more of it and I do not really know what to do.

Hence another resolution for 2007: hang out with more people and see the good in all of them, to connect more often.

When I stumbled across this piece of politically incorrect art about the close relationship between religion and economics (reminds me of the one between religion and football) I felt amused at first, then scared about how obvious the link is and how very few people do actually notice.

And then I found a possibly explanation: many people do notice, but they do not care. Or sometimes, they do, but only to see the good side of it. There is a lot of money to be made, and religion is providing quite a few of them.

It was interesting to discover today an interesting example that this explanation might have something true about it. Even if it hasn't, I love the schadenfreude of imagining what the site makers think about their potential customers.

This is an update to another post created in another life.

Here it goes:

(Thanks to SP Studio for the generation)

The main reason behind my receiving my mother and brother at home for the two Christmas days was to take a point across to myself (first) and to my family (next).

It has to do, of course, with emancipation. I needed to make a statement, make it clear that the place I call “home” is now the place I am living in and not anywhere else. That I am fully able to be in charge and host an elaborate family event. And allowing them to peek around freely at the various queer items laying around my place was part of the story, too.

And all went well, much too well.

They made me feel that I was doing well, but exactly as good as they were expecting me to do. And I knew it. I did my best for the event, knowing in advance that it was expected, would be “appreciated” but would not create any feeling that I was treating them in a special way.

When I think about it, I see either that I was raised with insanely high standards of making other people feel at ease without them even noticing, or that my family was totally insensitive, as if we had no ability to be positively surprised, or acknowledge with genuine gratitude as special token of attention.

Either way, it is quite a disaster for my mood and my ego, and a serious drawback in my social life. I come to be very careful with all guests, whether I like or dislike them, and provide a level of attention and service usually unexpected from them; although it is totally "natural" and un-exceptional for me.

I've been explained once that if I was a woman fifty years ago, I would be considered “ideal wedding material.”

But!

The first issue with this situation, now, is that I have absolutely no idea of how to make someone who is special to me, feel special with me.

The various attitudes displayed by other people, used for seduction purposes and considered as “attentive” or “caring,” strike me as totally obvious and common. I do that all the time, and not for seduction — so then, if I want to do “more,” what's left? Besides, I tend to show very publicly that this behavior is automatic for me; with time, people who become closer to me get used to it and their expectations raise, too.

The other issue with this situation is that I become gradually “out of reach” for the other way around. This behavior of mine tends to make people believe that I also have high expectations, that I need a lot of display of attention and care to become impressed and notice. Although it is not true (I am really easily impressed) it comes through this way quite often because I tend to keep my feelings for myself — another habit carefully learned from the family environment.

Hence comes another resolution for 2007: actually show that I am happy instead of keeping it for myself.

In an online news report I can read today how the traditional practice of firing a cannon during american football games in Snohomish, USA has cost a boy's leg due to the cannon exploding.

The un-funny part of the article is that members of the community are threatening the boy and his family against investigating the cause-to-effect relationship between the cannon and his maimed leg; for the tradition is so important for them that they would rather have the boy's other leg maimed than be prevented from firing the cannon again.

Not only I'm disgusted, but I can't help thinking that this kind of situation would never happen in any of the kingdoms of mainland Europe.

Imagine…

Imagine three young guys in a museum, singing their faith for christian places:

They have everything for young men to enjoy,
You can hang out with all the boys ...

And then…

Honestly, I love this picture. On the other hand, I can't help thinking that there are places where this kind of public display could get you into serious troubles.

Some days I look at women, shake all context and past experience out of my mind, and look at my feelings.

Then I realize that nothing prevents me from loving, sharing intimacy, having sex, support and live with one. My closest friend is female; the colleagues I go along better with are female; I find the female body beautiful, and I actually take pleasure at admiring females in art and around me. Some people have even told me I would be the perfect lover: I like to and know how to take care of a household; I can create and animate conversations; and I have demonstrated an ability to handle and educate children. I actually feel proud that many women like me.

And yet, I'm still not married and never been into a relationship with a woman. And I'm over 25!

I could, and I'm not.

I feel sometimes sub-human. Like I “miss” a feature all humans should have, even for basic reproductory purposes. I am just totally not attracted. No tingle spreading for voluptuous lips or gorgeous breasts. No out-of-the-ordinary interest for curious or brilliant female intellects. Absolutely no feeling when witnessing intimacy between males and females, or females and females. None. Nada.

And yet, I know how it feels. I have been branded several times by intense attraction at first sight, and I remember it so well that I'm still shaking of the memory. In fact, I know very well what I like and what makes the warmth spread from my heart to the rest of the body.

I do find it difficult to feel different. Especially the part about living with other people who are not this way and still be confortable. But I would give it up for nothing.

As would Shakespeare state it:

To be or not to be, that is the question —
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep —
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to — 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep —
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

That said, the acute reader could observe that some words are missing from this entry. I am actually having an vocabulary issue about it, which is beautifully explained by someone who shares the same concern.

Activity on the workplace has been quite hectic for the last few months. Increase in work load, decrease in business, environment changes piling up one over another, conflicts, political dances, uncertainty… Although I could handle everything until now, I was spared nothing.

Yesterday I felt that I reached my limits. I was stressed when I went to sleep, for the first time since my arrival in February. I had a few nightmares. I was angry when I woke up.

One of my projects for the day was to skip work pretending to feel unwell, to remind my supervisors that my technical skills should not exempt them from paying all due respect to my well-being. To explain them that the situation they let me put myself in is precisely the kind of situation I have been running away from multiple times in the past. I felt as if “they” put me in a position where I was not meeting expectations and not knowing how to perform better. I felt betrayed in my trust in our relationship.

But then I blinked my eyes and I was enlightened.

I realized that I would achieve far more interesting results by trying to state my concerns and work a solution with “them,” instead of running away from the situation. Because I feel I now have the power to change my surroundings and make people adapt, instead of the other way around. Decide to be part of the flow and work to shift it where I want to go, and not fight against or get out of it.

This is a huge personal achievement! My first of the kind in a lifetime.

Now I'm relieved. The pressure is still there, but the stress has disappeared.

I guess that feels like growing up. What a life.

This week-end I decided to put my new website online. I had been preparing it for several weeks already, and there was where I was keeping this blog up-to-date.

After finding this beautiful skin from PyBOOM and designing a new logo myself yesterday (thanks to InkScape and The GIMP) I just felt it would be a nice touch for the week-end to make this work — at last — public.

It was a lot more work than I expected. Since my former hosting service, Zettai is currently going out of business and the future one, High Speed Rails has not yet enabled my account, I had to redistribute the different services across multiple service providers: Fastmail, FreeDNS, and a temporary web server courtesy of my friend from Z0pe.org.

The tricky part was to set up all the redirection rules for those various parts of my former site which have now a new home here. I hope I did not forget anything...

Whatever; it's not like I have so many visitors anyway.

There were two guests at my place this week.

Hosting guests is one of the activities that help me keep care of my home.

There was a time when the mess would only be cleared when someone visited me. A reflex due to a contrast between the carelessness of youth and a deeply ingrained respect for the comfort of visitors. A principle acquired from my mum says that receiving someone properly goes necessarily through making every effort possible to make them feel home, and that is now part of my life.

Then it happened that I grew up (a bit). I started to realize the truth behind the age-old French saying: “charité bien ordonnée commence par soi-même,” and that the way to build the feeling of being at home for myself would go through making the kind of efforts I deploy for guests, for myself.

That was the moment when vacuum-cleaning, dish washing, mopping, laundry and disposing of the cat's litter became pleasurable (sometimes even fun), instead of a necessary chore to avoid as long and as often as possible. That was also the moment when I started actually caring about home decoration in shops in all places I visit. After that I would choose my furniture not only for practical aspects but also for the overall harmony they would bring at the place it would be eventually fitted. And so on; the list is long.

Oddly enough, it coincides more-or-less with my settling in Rotterdam. (ok, not that odd, but the coincidence is part of another story.)

But this is not a happy-ending story. I sometimes lose sight of the feeling of being at home when it becomes part of the invisible world of the daily routine.

Then come guests. Those people I like being with, for which I would just do the little extra that I can share with them and of which I know that it would make myself happy if it was reciprocated. Like preparing breakfast in the morning, or setting up beds in advance, and so on.

And doing so breaks the routine and brings the feeling of being at home back into sight.

Today was a day of rest, following a tiring fight against a cold for my voice.

But today was also a day for myself, time to organize some thoughts and renew my surroundings at home.

Inspired by a simple and clever classification system it was decided that I would stop spending time to find and decide what kind of classification hierarchy would fit the thousands of computer files I collected over years and don't want to throw away (yet).

Relieved by that thought, I was in the perfect mood for an experiment with a beautiful mind opener. The experiment was successful; upon waking up again it felt like a new birth.

And with birth comes celebration and change. I indulged myself with chocolate, then went on to experiment with new layouts for my furniture.

The afternoon and early evening were busy, and I eventually created a new home for myself. Coming up with a new layout for lighting was an integral part of this effort, and I am now feeling confortable in my living room for the first time since I arrived in this apartment.

The feeling of "gezelligheid" experienced through listening to di.fm / Mostly Classical and enjoying a beautiful view on a series of candles is totally awesome and nearly competes with the sense of fulfillment I have sometimes by looking at the sky when walking in the streets around my beloved new place.

That to say that I regret having underestimated the effect of a gezellig lighting on my mood and feelings until now. It becomes more and more clear to me that I tend to mistakenly ignore or disregard the requirements for my well-being which I cannot satisfy immediately or without effort. I noticed it many times in the past, for instance when I re-discovered music, reading, casual sex, taking care of a home, seeing friends, watching romance movies, hosting commendable guests and light-hearted conversations.

I also realize that many other things come to my mind if I let it open to more sources of well-being. And that comes with mitigated feelings, part of them fear and laziness about the required efforts and part of them curiosity and excitement about involving myself into new activities.

This incredible movie was brought to my curiosity by some pictures of its georgous cast.

Until now Notting Hill was my favourite item at the top of that list where younger people put Cinderella and other happy-ending fairy tales. But after I watched The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert I realized that Notting Hill was lacking a bit of… something. Something fabulous. Something queer. Something about chaos and immorality. Something about me.

And so here comes Ethan Green, and I can toss Notting Hill away from that list.

Je m'en rends d'autant plus compte que depuis jeudi dernier, le chauffage de mon immeuble est défectueux. La propriétaire de l'appartement ne daigne pas répondre au téléphone, et j'attends impatiemment qu'elle reçoive la lettre que je lui envoyai lundi.

Je n'écris plus beaucoup non plus ces temps-ci. À vrai dire je n'en pense pas moins, mais je réfléchis en même temps au medium et la forme les plus opportuns pour coucher avec des mots écrits le fouillis produit par mon for intérieur.

Car il se trouve que je ne me satisfais plus de quelques billets déstructurés ça et là, sans matière autre que la matière ressassée de l'Internet que je trouve chaque jour à importer, et sans introspection depuis de nombreux mois déjà. Si ce site doit continuer à constituer ma pensine, je souhaite dorénavant pouvoir y retourner et y retrouver mes pensées.

Plusieurs changements à venir :

- des textes plus longs dans des sections à part, avec des réflexions un peu mieux élaborées ; moins d'écriture « jetable. »

- un concept un peu plus « dessiné » qui puisse être mentionné (par exemple) sur une carte de visite. Par exemple, la vodka et la pomme comme symbole d'une étape charnière…

- des commentaires authentifiés, et pas n'importe où.

- de l'écriture en anglais au moins, en néerlandais si possible. Les nouveaux gens bien que je fréquente ne lisent pas le français.

J'ai recommencé lundi après une semaine de vacances.

C'est chouettes, ces vacances ont été comme une étape.

Pendant ma semaine libre, j'ai changé (encore une fois) la couleur de mes cheveux, et j'ai beaucoup dormi (c'était le but).

Un petit voyage à Amsterdam, un autre petit voyage imprévu à Versailles. Vu beaucoup de gens, évidemment pas assez comme d'habitude.

Je reprends lundi avec beaucoup de changement : des nouveaux locaux de travail, une formation de deux jours sur des sujets passionnants et totalement « hors programme, » et beaucoup de réflexions personnelles sur l'avenir, les objectifs, la volonté, la (fin de) procrastination, etc.

(re)Vu un type ce soir à la leçon de néerlandais, que je trouve intéressant. En fait, les deux mâles du cours sont intéressants. Des vrais gens, avec qui les conversations sont riches et denses, avec une expérience passée dont on peut parler, des opinions, cultivés, que du bon. Et l'un dont j'ai envie de caresser les lèvres et la nuque, dont je voulais ce soir boire le souffle à la source, entre autres choses.

La semaine prochaine, je vais essayer de l'inviter à le revoir en dehors des cours. Après six semaines de cours en commun, il était temps…

Voilà, ça c'est fait, j'ai rigolé comme un âne en regardant ces deux vidéos !

Vive Scrat et ses glands.

… c'est le titre du roman de Marge Piercy que je viens de finir de lire.

Ce livre est intéressant, à lire par quiconque dont la sensibilité ne porte pas encore les cicatrices de la réalité des internements psychiatriques. Sinon, c'est du masochisme.

Depuis vendredi, je suis en vacances. Pour dix jours. Au menu : du repos, et réfléchir un peu.

Corporations used to have severe limits and no rights. Corporations were created by the European Monarchies when they realized that the new merchant class had supplanted the nobility as the power they must court. They kings of european states knew they would need financial help to realize their dreams of empire, and that help could only come from the merchants.

But the monarchs knew that a corporation was essentially a landless, peasantless fiefdom. Corporations would have enormous power, so in exchange for the limited liability which would attract investors to risky, long term projects like colonization, they would say that corporations could only do the business for which they were chartered, in the region their charter covered. The East India company could neither trade in the Americas nor grow crops in the East Indies. And corporations were limited to the lifespan of the original founders: when the last of them had died or sold their shares, the corporation would be dissolved.

Finally, a corporation had no legal rights as a person seperate from its officers. This was one of the biggest limitations, and one of the last to go. But money buys power, and over time the concentration of money available to corporations allowed them to buy politicians who would enact legeslation expanding their power, allowing them to make more money and buy more laws in a vicious cycle.

Now, a corporation has always been able to own things, and to owe money. Seperating ownership and liability was the whole purpose of corporations and the thing that made them different from partnerships. But in exchange for that, severe limits were originally placed on what they could do. Now those limits have been erased and corporations have all the benefits with none of the societal responsibilities.

(lien)

Je découvre ce jour encore des trucs qui m'étaient encore totalement inconnus jusqu'alors.

Une fois mes doigts fatigués, je m'offre deux mixes d'un Dj que je découvris récemment : Grape et Cherry de Dj Kewlaid.

C'est bon, c'est pur, c'est magnifique.

Je pose aujourd'hui pour la première fois sur mon piano vingt pages de partition imprimées cette semaine. Je connais l'air si bien qu'il résonne dans ma tête à la simple lecture des notes.

Mes doits n'ont jamais tenté de le jouer ; je suis anxieux, soucieux d'obtenir un résultat parfait à la première tentative, malgré ma définie inaptitude à lire une partition tout en la jouant.

Les quatre premières mesures sont faciles ; une seule main joue : je l'avais déjà exercée. Je ralentis quelques notes avant le premier accord, rapproche mon nez de la partition pour être sûr de bien lire. Ma main droite se pose : c'est réussi, pour le premier. La note suivante arrive, puis le deuxième accord. Les notes continuent à arriver, presque moins d'une par seconde, alors que je devrais jouer environ six fois plus vite.

Le premier son discordant est odieux ; je lève les mains.

Je retente, c'est pire : j'avais mal lu.

Je finis la mesure à une seule main : je veux reconnaître l'air, une seule main est suffisante pour cela. À la mesure suivante, les voix se croisent, je repose ma main droite. La mesure suivant me replonge dans des souvenirs d'orgies accoustiques.

Douze mesures se suivent ; je survole vaguement la partition : je sens ce qui doit être joué, mes doigts savent où ils doivent se poser. La vitesse s'accélère, et je rejoue six mesures pour mon pur plaisir.

La suite est réservée pour mes rêves.

Tout de même, vingt pages pour 10 minutes de musique… Quand pourrai-je apprendre tout ça ?