A friend of mine once told me he always tried to be different. Not kind of flawed, as he regarded himself, but more like he wanted himself to be – and others to see himself. I think by trying to change to outward appearance he kind of hoped to eventually become that ideal that he wanted to be.

Somehow I feel I’m just about to do that myself here.

I mean, that I dress differently here than back in my old place is a fact, as well as me behaving differently. But is it just natural, because you are hundreds of miles away from the place you lived, in a completely different culture? Just the normal change you go through when your personal living conditions dramatically change? Or is it the attempt to change myself? To fit in here?
I already gave up on trying to change myself to fit in. I already considered that concept a complete failure. But ain’t I just starting over with that here again? Completely different environment, new people, new faces, new conditions, new hope of finally belonging somewhere, of finally finding someplace to call home?

The funny thing is, I’m already pretty sure this is not gonna be the place. Deep down I know that. And I’m also not really trying to fit in here anymore I think. I feel like I already settled for the next place (what number is it already? 5? 6?) and somehow start dreaming about how I would feel at home there just to (maybe, if i ever make it there) face another disappointment?

The last weeks I felt like changing my style. Now I’m wondering. Am I feeling that way because I’m just on my way to the next disappointment, or ist it just because I’m stepping onwards to another chapter in life?

I really hope it’s the latter…

I like it when
They get shot in the head
And there’s blood on the pillow
And blood on the bed

And it’s good when
They get stabbed in the eye
And they scream and they take
A long time to die

And it all spurts out
All on the floor
And the audience shivers
And shouts for more

But I don’t like it when they kiss.

(Roger McGough, 1983)

The full blue of the cloudless western winter sky at dawn, while the full moon is still high.

Or the rosé trails of smoke departing dark-grey skycraper’s silhouettes against a perilous sunrise.

Was wäre, wenn die Menschheit untergehen würde und tausend Jahre später Aliens auf der Erde landen würden? Was würden sie von unserer heutigen Kultur erraten, was falsch interpretieren?

Ich bin sicher, da haben sich schon viele seriöse Wissenschaftler Gedanken drum gemacht. Vielleicht sollte ich es mal googlen. Aber eigentlich finde ich es viel cooler, einfach mal draufloszuspekulieren.

Ich hatte vorhin wieder ausreichend Gelegenheit, die Graffiti an einem beliebigen Bahnhof zu bewundern. Wenn ich mir so anschaue, welche Artefakte wir von den anderen Kulturen, die längst untergegangen sind, haben, und wie wir das interpretieren, grinse ich bei jedem Graffiti ein bißchen mehr. Welch seltsame Rituale und absonderliches Pantheon müssen sie bei uns vermuten! Und so häufig, wie das Wort “Fuck” vorkommt, war es wahrscheinlich die heiligste Anrufungsformel einer zutiefst religiösen Gesellschaft.

Ich mag den Gedanken.

Oder auch die Vorstellung, daß es zu irgendeiner globalen Katastrophe kommt und die Überlebenden alles vergessen. (Vielleicht, weil die, die sich erinnern, eisern schweigen, weil sie glauben, daß erst unsere Kultur diese Katastrophe heraufbeschworen hat) Rebellisch, wie Jugendliche nunmal sind, könnte ich mir vorstellen, daß es eine back-to-the-roots-Bewegung geben könnte… auf Basis dieser völlig verqueren Interpretation unserer Kultur.

Tätowierungen im Graffiti-Stil im Gesicht und überall (bei der derzeitigen Temperaturentwicklung kann man in Zukunft bestimmt viel Haut zeigen….) Welche Rituale würde man wohl in uns reininterpretieren?

Ich glaube, ich werde Graffiti-Student.

Namen von Fußballclubs würden sich bestimmt gut als Götternamen machen.

Bahnhöfe als Kathedralen mit ihren hohen Bögen. Ich sehe schon die Bildbände: “Religiöse Architektur der….” Wie sie uns wohl nennen werden?

Züge als Werkzeuge religiöser Prozessionen, weshalb auch alle Tempel mit Eisenbändern verbunden sind. Ein einzigartiges Beispiel, wie tief die Religion in unserer Gesellschaft verwurzelt gewesen sein muß, wenn man schaut, wie viele Züge man findet – und außerdem erleichtern die Eisenbänder jedem Menschen, einen Tempel zu finden, wenn er das Bedürfnis hat.

Einzig den Zweck des Netzes aus Steinlinien, die das Land überziehen, hat man noch nicht entschlüsseln können, besonders wenn man es mit den Linien von Nazca vergleicht. Die Divergenz der Formensprache ist bei beiden enorm, besonders die Rosette der Autobahnkreuze scheint in der Züge-Kultur ein wichtiges Symbol zu sein, auch wenn sie sich in der religiösen Kultur so gar nicht wiederfindet.

Ich glaube, ich bleibe lieber bei den Alien-Archäologen. Die können bestimmt fliegen und sind mit dem Konzept Bodentransport als zentrales Mittel nicht vertraut… Ob sie wohl jemals die tiefere Bedeutung verstehen werden, die dem alles überstrahlenden Konzept des “Die Linie darf nicht durchbrochen werden” zugrunde zu liegen scheint?

My life is a Wong Kar-wai movie.

No, I guess I wish it was. In fact it’s more like a Murakami-novel, brought to the silver screen by Wong Kar-wai. Does that make sense?

Well, even if it doesn’t I guess it fits my life even better.

I feel like life consists of 1000s of layers. Language class in university is one. Meeting friends is another, culture class yet another. Organizing your private life, hobbies like computer games, dozens of ideas I have about what my life should be like, what I should be like all are different, individual layers.

I guess with most people that’s fine, because their layers are congruent with each other and each layer leaves enough blank space for others to match.

Somehow mine are not. Each of them is a plane in 3-dimensional space, gently shifted, none of them is congruent with the other. And yet, none of those countless layers is myself. Instead they are all closely gathered around me, around my self, without a loophole for me to sneak out, imprisoning my self.

today i was attending a lecture on the situation of tibetan women during the years. it started in 1959 with the flight of the dalai lama to india and went on, regarding both the situation in the tar as well as in dharamsala. there was a guy attending that class, ethnic chinese, who was heavily offended by the lecture. i know him, he considers himself a westerner, although both his parents are chinese (hong kong chinese, that is). he has german citizenship, lived in london for some years etc pp and still he got so angry because he felt like the situation wasnt shown objectively and it was all the usual china bashing. it was concentrating about the restrictions tibetan women have to go through, but not only in china – in fact, according to that lecture, the social situation was similar in dharamsala and china, but china held some more physical  restrictions for women.

i dont want to go into details, it doesnt really matter nor do i want to offend any chinese. its not what this entry is to be about. i dont want to talk politics here, but identities. that chinese guy clearly sees himself as westerner, being raised in the west, and still he reacted strongly emotional and what he felt was an assault on china, like most chinese i know would have reacted. its nearly impossible to talk about the tibet topic with chinese, because there has been so much criticism in the west that they have started to feel all that westerners have to offer about the tibet topic is an assault on their country and therefore on their identity.

this whole incident just tore all those old wounds of me wide open again. you wont believe it, but i truly envy those people. i envy them because they know where they belong. they have a home, an us. i wish i could have something to cling to like they do. there is no us i belong to. what exactly am i? can i be something on my own? isnt every human a social being and therefore has to be seen in relation to the environment?

simply put, is the western view of human as inidividual who by birth has certain characteristics true, or isnt the asian view of the human as a blank page where life and society leave their writings on the more accurate one?

all my life has been an identity crisis. i never fit in anywhere, i dont know where i belong. i know the culture that has coined me but at the same time i know that i despise A LOT of this culture. from early on i dreamed of emigrating somewhere – its almost 15 years now. and yet i havent found a place to emigrate to…. will there ever be a place where i truly feel at home? where i can be comfortable with myself without thinking all the time about how to behave, what part of me to show without having people judge me?

its not that i didnt try to find a place like that. im fluent in english and german, intermediate in french, lower intermediate in chinese and spanish and have some basic knowledge of a lot of other languages (cantonese, indonesian, tibetan, vietnamese, japanese). i also spent a lot of time learning about foreign cultures. i dont know where i want to go but i know i dont want to stay in this place for my life. but yet im damned to see the flaws in every places, i can never truly admire or love a place.

sometimes i think if this isnt truly symptomatic of me. im always trying to see both sides in a conflict, always trying to be balancing and mediating. i also try to understand people, why they react the way they do, constantly analyzing ( no, im not studying psychology). i wonder if i can really love someone this way. or if that destroys everything from the very beginning. always thinking, never being simple. never enjoying.

and again im sure i didnt get to the point. im good at dealing with words, but when it gets to the important issues i never get myself communicated. just screw everything i wrote, its probably just some random whining. ill probably delete it later. for now i just had to let it out – or at least try to.

sometimes i feel crippled by all those thoughts i never get communicated. not that there is anyone i could really talk to about this. at least i feel i know no one who could possibly relate to what weighs me down like this, and probably this whole entry is simply emo-shit, what will eventually be the reason for it being deleted. but for now i have to publish it somehow, like helplessly screaming out things that are insignificant for anyone. probably better to have it lost in the sea of anonymous internet posts than annoying my friends with it.

Ich sitze im Zug, hinter mir eine Mutter mit Kind.

Kind: “Da ist ein Bahnhof!”

.oO( Weißt du, Kind…. Züge sind eine wunderbare, unglaublich zuverlässige Spezies. Sie haben das seltene Talent, Bahnhöfe zu finden, mit unglaublicher Zielgenauigkeit, und darüber freuen sie sich selbst am meisten – so sehr, daß sie stehenbleiben.
Aber gleichzeitig sind Züge auch unglaublich blöd – anstatt sich den Bahnhof zu merken und beim nächsten Mal weiterzufahren, haben sie den dann schon wieder vergessen und freuen sich schon wieder nen Ast, den Bahnhof gefunden zu haben – und bleiben wieder stehen.)

Yeah, come on
Stare at me
Watcha see?

A green-faced monster from outer space
A punk ready to rob’n'rape your children
An ugly face
Insulting your eyes
Disturbing your peace
A leech, sucking you out

How dare she exist in your presence?
Poisoning YOUR air with her aura?

Come on, come on
Don’t be so cowardice
Stop acting, be straight
Come on, come on
Stop inventing reproaches
Just tell me you don’t like me
Just tell me you despise me
Throw me out!

What? You can’t?
It’d be impolite?

Stop trying to be subtle, coward
That’s not your style
It doesn’t suit you
Your eyes mark you a liar
I can read the disgust in your face

HYPOCRITE
That’s what you are
You’re SO friendly and kind, at least
That’s what you’re trying to act out
吐く、吐く、吐く
You make me wanna throw up

My laughter’s too loud
My eyes too proud
This person’s just impossible

I’m being too strong
My views are wrong
How dare she?

She’s the perfect anti-woman
There’s nothing female in her
She even dares to disagree!
Refusing to fit in your schemes
Just to resist YOU, it seems

All she does is only to attack you
And your male superiority
There’s no other sense in what she does.
“Ich Mann Du Frau”, you know?
There are things in life that just have to be accepted
Like divine laws

Arrogant bastard, stupid ape
Beat her up, mob her
Make her fit in her place
That you’ve perfectly carved out for her
Nothing else is allowed
It’d be pure stubbornness
Personal attacks on YOU

吐く、吐く、吐く
You make me wanna throw up

You and your way of knowing everything in life

吐く、吐く、吐く
I shit on you!

Wo willst du hin, Zauderer?
Zauberhafter Zauderer
Willst du wo hin?

Ja – nein. Ja und Nein.
Vielleicht?
Vielleicht viel wichtiger: warum?

Warum? Warum willst du wohin?

Oder warum eben nicht.
Muß ich eigentlich wollen?

Ich weiß nicht.
Irgendwie muß doch jeder wollen – oder nicht?

Das frage ich dich.

Wo will ich hin?
Will ich wo hin?
Zauderer, zauberhafter Zauderer -
nun verzauderst du mich.

- “Hey?”
- “What?”
- “I want to KNOW.”
- “…know what?”
- “I don’t care. Just want to KNOW.”
- “But…”
- “You know… not that silly stuff that is ‘important’ to everyone who’s hot or cool or whatever. Like – where’s the coolest hot spot in town. No, I’m talking about the things that MATTER. And I mean that REALLY matter.”
- “But – what are those things that MATTER?”
- “That’s another thing I want to know.”