okay, here we go. starting with the well know complaints, put down on the train from c. to b. last sunday evening:
sitting in the train, listening to a compilation that alice had sent especially for me to listen to it on the train. it opens with charles trenet singing “la mer” and i’ve got to smile because the second before it started an old, distinguished lady pointed to the vacant seat next to me and said something which i did not understand.
“pardon?” i asked and she replied
“il y’a quelqu’un?”
i was too surprised to come up with an appropriate answer in french so i just made some wild gestures and said:
“non, non!”
and she sat down and muttered:
“alors…”
and then trenet started to sing “la mer…”. but he has finished now and other songs are playing by the tindersticks, laura veirs, the arcade fire or the magnetic fields, most of which i haven’t heard before. listening to unfamiliar songs on the train is weird. i usually don’t do this. it’s completely dark outside already. felt pretty fucking bad yesterday and today, my thoughts returning to you again and again for no reason, really. i don’t want to travel somewhere where i’ll be sitting wishing i was someplace else. but let’s face it, i really don’t want to be anywhere except with you. even though you fucked with me like that. another day worth less than a penny.
so that was on my way to b.. being at my parents’ house had, predictably, a very high degree of absurdity. i’m not quite sure whether i have mentioned this before, but my mother has a very frail health: she’s 61, has a pace-maker and after the last check-up the doctors told her that her heart isn’t working on its own anymore, the only thing that keeps her alive is the machine. also, parts of her lungs have become dysfunctional so that she suffers under a shortness of breath frequently (add to this any number of psychosomatic illnesses that i won’t even start to get into now). nevertheless she is the leader/instructor of two sport-groups for senior citizens. why she is doing this can only be understood if you consider that my father has a proto-fascist-leni-riefenstahl-approach towards the body and ‘fitness’. in his eyes (and my mother has internalized this view because all she wants is recognition from my father) you are only a valuable human being if you’re ‘fit.’ if you’re doing sports. it’s not even about being healthy (because he equates being healthy with being sportive), it’s about following some totally absurd triumph-des-willens ideology. what’s more, corporeal fitness is clearly more important to him/them than mental ‘fitness.’ hence my aversion towards sports, by the way. so, what is my father giving my 61 year old mother whose heart is only beating because a little battery gives its periodical kicks as a christmas present? a home trainer! i was so stunned and speechless that i couldn’t even voice my anger and irritation.
later on christmas eve the rest of my mother’s family came by (three sisters with their husbands plus two cousins of mine) and the absurdities continued. my parents had told them about the graduation (*i* would certainly have kept my mouth shut about it) and they started shaking my hand, making disturbing remarks about ‘how proud we are’ and ‘we have a doctor in the family’. my grandmother asked me in earnest and a little concerned:
“but you don’t feel being worth more than other people now, do you?”
they spent the rest of the evening discussing whether a woman over 50 can lead a ‘fulfilled and worthy’ life even if she does not have a husband and a family. it really felt like christmas 1907 rather than 2007.
but the real terror started when my relatives had gone (my sister and her friend had left already, too) and i was sitting alone with my parents in the living room, just about to go to bed. suddenly my mother started ‘the talk’. you know, like it seemed that i was some kind of stranger and they didn’t know anything about me and that it seems there was a wall around me and what they had done wrong that i had become so distanced. i tried to assure them that they had not done anything wrong and that it’s just kind of ‘normal’ that children develop, and sometimes develop differently than their parents. i think the point is that both of them were not really happy with their own parents and that they wanted to make things ‘better.’ so they are clinging to some romantic, ideal image of family (where ideally everybody is living together in one big house – weirdly, the word ‘family’ has the same magic gravity for my father as the word ‘fitness’ : some unquestioned, unreflected ideal concept), and seeing that this hasn’t come true makes them feel like having failed. the thing is that most of my cousins are doing the reverse from what i am doing : they are ‘turning into their parents,’ moving back to the street where they were born, taking the same job as their fathers, buying a house, having two kids and a dog.
so this conversation went on for over an hour, and i was pretty worn out and bewildered when i finally went to bed. i had set up the wlan of my father all day long and had showed him the skype software earlier that day. so when i was lying in bed with my eyes almost closed already i checked the mail one last time and just when i wanted to shut down skype which was still running, alice skyped me. i think we were both a little perplexed by the fact that we were talking to each other on christmas night, me at two in the morning and she inbetween dinner courses with her family downstairs. it was very good to hear her voice that moment.
so that was christmas. yesterday i met with jodie and we watched a stupid dvd (shreck III) ordered tons of chinese food and ate sweets en masse. later j. called and c. too, and they both came over and the four of us emptied four bottles of champagne. when the two had left again i took all my courage and told jodie about my ideas to make 200 lurkers improvised minor-videos. she liked it and agreed to participate. so now that i have borrowed my sister’s camera i might in fact realize some of those ideas.
