footnotes to bigger grievances (to come)

I wash my socks in the sink of my bathroom because there are six hundred students and only two washing machines here. Then I hang them to dry on a few coat hangers hanging on the edge of my desk because there is not really any other place. Pretty surreal it feels. What is also surreal is that I have 4cm long nails sticking out of the walls of my room, placed symmetrically but also randomly - their function is a mystery to me and I shall leave that to my landlord. I have been spending so much time in my room that the university feels like a small appendage to my surreal adult life (especially now that I have to cook for myself and wash socks in a sink). Which I am quite enjoying. Apart from the socks part.

almost forgot 2

Courtesy of Chatlin. Quite jolly.

almost forgot

Satie

At the rehearsal of Parade the orchestra thought Satie's was ballroom music. Cocteau had to go fetch Ravel to convince them it was a piece of stylized genius. A flutist rose and said to Satie: "Mr. Satie, you seem to think I'm stupid". He replied "No, I don't think you are stupid. But I could be wrong".

the fucking rain

so no, it doesn't just rain or not rain here, the netherlands seems to be unable to make up its mind; i have found it useless to look at the forecasts, and useful to carry an umbrella at all times. and people here behave in the same way: yesterday we went to an open air cinema, it was not supposed to rain but it did, of course, and half of the people left as soon as they felt a couple of drops whereas the other half stayed through the whole torment. i have a feeling this place is full of ambiguities like that.

Amsterdam

I have a single room all to myself. Completely self-sufficient too, which has allowed me to stay indoors for three straight days quite comfortably. It has also made me feel as a character from the Sims: eat, sleep, exercise, work - bars are going up, self esteem included.

It seems that the rain here takes little breaks every half an hour or so. I have counted eleven rains this Saturday. It also rains disturbingly quietly.

Everyone seems to be friendly. I like the size of the place. Around 700 students, almost half of those has never seen each other before. Easy to disappear. From an orientation for example.

I bought a bike but I fear the biking lanes. Cyclists seem to know what they are doing and even if they don't - how am I supposed to know?

I am reading Kant and taking notes. Found my old notebook for the notes about books I am reading. Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Why does the past me always seems a more thoughtful me than the present me? I'm pretty sure it is not true but can I use the illusion to my advantage?

Beers here are very small but strong. I haven't been out much but from what I've seen Amsterdam looks very uniform: similar houses, similar bridges, lots of water, bikes bikes bikes. They tell us the city is not very representative of the rest of the country, to to Utrecht they say. Go I will. I haven't taken a single picture yet.

Apparently, if a bar has an outdoors terrace you are forbidden to drink while standing. Also a little bit of cannabis in a cafe is ok, but tobacco - no no. No drinking outdoors either. My sentiment for Berlin seems to be running very deep. Probably that's why I have begun learning German on my own and on a regular basis. Das buchstabiert man I-D-O-N-O-T-W-A-N-T-T-O-G-O-B-A-C-K-T-O-T-H-E-C-O-U-N-T-R-Y-T-H-A-T-I-S-S-U-E-D-M-Y-P-A-S-S-P-O-R-T.

I have been listening to lots of music. Spotify began playing Ditch advertisements for me. I'm not your market, stupid. And it sounds really weird too. My top-5 lately:

Erik Satie - Gymnopedie #1 (lent et doloreux,  a soundtrack to all the good things that happened to me)

Grizzly Bear - Yet Again (itching for the new album)

The Antlers - Drift Dive (as underwater as it gets)

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Nostradamus & Me (reminds me of Sparklehorse's "Maxine", love when he sings "Good bye.."

This Will Destroy You - Quiet (rediscovered, after six long years)

I'm brewing all these projects in my mind. Do I lack time? (I will have a Wednesday off, by the way). Rather skill. Also patience, persistence. I've been told recently that it's a myth that successful thinkers need to live in poverty and their own filth, that making money (lots of it) and living a comfortable life is ok. I'd like to stick to that suggestion. I'll have some yogurt now.

AM

I went to see Arctic Monkeys this Monday. A ton of money well spent. Everything that could go right did go right: it began on time, the sound was great, the lights were expensive and lavish, I had a true bourgeois seat in the front row on a balcony, people knew the lyrics and one could hear them gently hum at all times; I was worried they wouldn't play 505 - they did: the delicious stuff was left for the encore.

It also made me think about many things (probably because I was seated as opposed to being occupied with trying not to be squashed by the crowd). Like listening to all their stories about reckless adolescence I thought maybe I should have chosen a jollier life path; I have also come to the conclusion that probably I have reached my puberty just about now; I have also had a true Heideggerian moment: there is something very unsettling about a raving crowd looking up at a bunch of looking down guys reproducing sound waves, basking in the light etc etc.

51%

I think by now I properly believe that the majority of things is shit.

15 years

I used to play SEGA a lot. There was this one game I gave up on. The protagonist was some sort of a weird creature; as you go through levels you collect pieces for something that looked suspiciously like a moonshine machine. There was one level with four buttons you had to jump. They all had to be somehow pushed simultaneously. It was so unsolvable I gave up.

I was going back to Berlin this weekend; I was falling asleep and I came up with a perfectly viable the solution. 15 years. You jump, repetitively.

Somehow, it is Wallace's thing. There are two ways to half-raise a flag: to actually half-raise it, or make the pole twice as tall..

briefly

Briefly,

i'm back from Florence & Rome. i was told the other day: "i fucking hate Rome, that's why i'm staying". well, i sort of fucking hated it either but am used to other methods of self-punishment. Florence is narrow and crowded, like a never-ending marketplace or a metro station after 5pm. Rome is not so narrow but that is generously compensated by the abundance of motor vehicles. i had fun, it's nice to socialize with friendly eclans, drink wine on the Medici church stairs, eat out at least once a day and have cheap Italian coffe; but now i feel like spending a week in a solitary confinement, away, away. i spent 2 days in Brest. i skipped trolleys and buses because they looked too crowded. Berlin is the best place i've been to so far but i'm thinking of Paris this summer.

i've read a big article about David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker. coincidentally, they have posthumously released his third novel three days ago, The Pale King. it's on the library.nu already, of course. i'm buying Kindle in two days. i have finally started Infinite Jest, that over a thousand pages monstrosity, which is a mighty fun read.

i can see a blind spot in my left eye. i don't take it as a troubling sign, rather an opportunity to explore, phenomenologically, and factually, the interplay of sensations my eyes and brain produce. so far i have managed to see my own face in the blackness of a closed eye. that was moderately troubling. i have big plans of teaching myself not to be deceived by all optical illusions.

i have many other plans. i forget things so i developed a habit of carrying a small notebook and a pen with me. it helps. i even like to reread it. sometimes i don't understand what i meant by a sentence or two but it's ok, i'll have more.

Agriculture

This week i carried furniture, painted an apartment, made fire and grilled meat. It felt primordially exciting. Jared Diamond in his 'The Third Chimpanzee' writes it's very likely that hunter-gatherers lived happier lives. Paleopathology shows, that they had a better diet, fewer diseases and healthier teeth. A few 'primitive' tribes that exit today have a working load (hunting and gathering) of about 20 hours per week, something barely attainable for an average westerner.

Hey Cool Kid

One has to habituate to certain music but I never knew it could happen without any involvement on my part (i.e. Sartrean free will exercise). I've watched a 'Hey Cool Kid' music video by Cloud Nothings at p4k a few months ago. I thought it was shit and forgot about it. Then a few days ago it started playing in my head and I had to listen to that 'Hey Cool Kid' again. When i did I already liked it. Cloud Nothings, nice guy.

Războinici de la Pankow

By now everyone is pretty much comfortable with each other and friendships start sprouting. I love this place for the amount of pseudo-intellectual bullshit conversations we can do in a day. Funny but also stimulates the memory. What we've got the most of is pseudo-clans and bullshit theories.

Members of all the following pseudo-clans is a loosely related group of all and the same individuals including many Romanians, a Polish guy, a Turkish guy, moi, and who ever else we feel like including these days. Pankow Warriors is a band of nonconformist anarchist renegades wearing cheap sun glasses from a euro store. Pankow Patrol are their antagonists, organized, cold and always ready to use force to instill order. Waldstrasse Boys is mostly just Ionut and Milan singing cheesy stream of consciousness love songs on the spot (seems to be disbanded as of now). Mayakowski Circle is more serious, a small group with a Marxist skew, devoted to writing manifestos and thinking about class struggle. For very obvious reasons we also have Checkpoint Zoltan in front of 15.

Bioehics

My Polish friend told me the other day - and he is a no gullible obscurantist of any sort so I tend to trust him - that people who die in all sorts of car accidents lose their shoes. Symbolically (and otherwise), shoes may stand for civilization and the loss of them by death negating whatever we have or will come up with culturally.

Spring!

I remember the times when I could go all night without sleep and just be a bit drowsy next evening. Well that is the case no more. My hands are trembling, people's voices echo, and the reality looks menacing. Yet it was worth it. I met Lola with her lovely sisters (one of whom I think I managed to piss off by proxy) on their way back to the glorious city of Minsk, learned about Czech men all looking like Jesus, chilled at a rock-pub, chilled at a British pub, got called 'big boy' by a bartender, smoked a lot, drank a lot, took an expensive cab, chilled at Schonefeld, chilled on S9 (goes directly to Pankow!), came home at 7, made a powerpoint presentation about cloning, ate a Paracetamol, ate breakfast, took a 2-hour nap (it's a nap, man), heard a lecture on Dante, amused Ionut with this story, amused people with my good mood, made a joke about gravity, got tired, hallucinated for an hour at a seminar on Dante, enjoyed the sun, got cold; good nite it was but I wish the day was already over.

One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I've just had one of the worst flu's in my life. It has also been the shortest. My body is amazingly resilient given what I'm putting it through.

Two days of not knowing whether it's too hot or too cold in the room, sleeping 14 hours a day and shivering under the blanket for the rest.

Also had the worst nightmare. I had the most painful intellectual experience reading a book by some feminist writer. Sentences made sense separately but they didn't as a whole. There were no punchlines and even semi-conclusions. But what was even worse is that the book made sense chronologically and so all those sentences were somehow connected and couldn't just be reshuffled. And when they didn't make sense they still deed via leaping through several unobserved dimensions as per string theory (at a certain point I saw it visualized and it was painfully incomprehensible - loops of loops of grayish intertwined bands - in fact, it looked like this, where my imagination, i'm assuming, stole it from). The longest nightmare I've ever had: not scary enough to wake you up, exhausting enough to make you want to sleep more.

I'm doing better now and it's a sort of happy ending. It also turned out there's at least one person in here who genuinely (inasmuch as it can be said about humans at all) cares about me which is of course always heartening.

The Scientific Method

Now it just dawned on me. Sure, I've been (am and probably will be) criticizing science quite vehemently but here's a story. My cousin is two years older than I am and when we were kids he was a big authority for me. I remember we had this argument (which was already a big thing) about the spelling of "Manhattan." He added an extra letter in there and was standing his ground. A few hours later I found a pack of coffee incidentally called "Manhattan" and showed it to him. I won. Quite a formative experience now that I think of it.

Spoon

Somehow I can never get over 'I Summon You' of Spoon's Gimme Fiction. Given that I can pretty much digest anyone from Wagner to Shostakovich by now.

the primacy of perception

Today have realized that 'shrooms might be up to something. Haven't tried but according to descriptions it goes well with Merleau-Ponty. The lived perception is lacking but it seems all other primordial perception attributes are there.

Danny

Have just finished '127 Hours'. Boyle's range is amazing. He's shot a drug addicts movie, a zombie movie, a rich kid movie, a space movie, a poor kid movie, and, as of recently, a one-armed guy movie. There's just nothing he cannot do. And surely, there's always a theme that unites them all: humans put in somewhat extraordinary situations and the way they deal with them. Oh so tastefully.