I really do -I'm insane and I write love stories about toenails

© Ben Westwood

I hate your toes and your toenails, I swear, I really do. I think about your toenails and how confrontational they are -you know I was never one to shy away from confrontations but this... They are crooked, hard and layered in a ridiculously grotesque way over your rough skin the way a dirty roof hosts a dying family and I hear myself scream internally -yes, they have won. They stomp on the edge of my long vaporous dress and I see myself recoil at the ferocious grunts coming from the corners of the room, the coarse and husky sighs of your footsteps accompanying me into my retreat.

The day my lemon tree died your toes were carefully wrapped in a hideous russet blanket and I hate myself for remembering these details but I know I was thinking about the colour grey because your dirty feet always looked out of place on our grey carpet. I really hate your toes and your toenails, I really do, and I swear that day, I almost asked you to leave the house because it really seemed inconceivable that you and I could live together, that something so warm and visceral could be capable of anything else other than carefully managed violence. Your toenails make my chest heavy and my breathing shallow and I know these are signs of anxiety, yes before you asked I researched it and yes, I still hate the way your toes look even hidden beneath an old mustard sock.

It took me a long time to forget about your feet when I was in the same room as you, I never told you, but that was the reason I bought the lemon tree. I thought it would distract me from the plain sight of your naked, warm feet walking all over me as you left pieces of yourself all over the house, just like a cat, and I was right -it did, for a while. You shuffle from room to room, carpet to carpet, from bright, vivid lights to the dim lamp on my bedside and your toes, your ugly toes, they follow me into the warm spot in the bed and they make me touch you and them, and then you again -at times like this I think of the lemon tree and how powerful beings need powerful roots; I play hide and seek but there really is no one seeking me. Tense as wires, the muscles in my back finally gave in after a couple of months, and now the assault of my senses feels more like a tender caress that I cannot help but approve of.

I still hate your toes and your toenails, I swear, I really do. Only now there is something rather tender about the way they look when emerging from the white duvet or when solidly tangled in the grey carpet. In the morning I look at them and I still hate them.... but with crushing tenderness. Beneath the sheets I hear you murmur something incomprehensible and slowly, then suddenly, an elusive sense of belonging that is neither here nor there submerges me. It's peculiar how tenderness works its way into your body, like a new habit slowly drowning into an old one. The art of feeling at home whenever I glance at your ugly toenails feels like an ironic, absurd romance I cannot help but court in spite of all the warnings...

No, really, I hate your toes and your toenails, I swear I really do.

The bus did not stop for me

The lovely James Hunt invited me on his radio show 'For Folks Sake' two weeks ago, where we chatted about my short stories and how hard it is to be an existential cat. He also asked me to compose a short story while on air... so here it goes! 

You can listen to the podcast here, and follow James here.

The bus did not stop for me

I waited 36 minutes at the bus stop and
it did not stop for me. I waited 12 more minutes
and it felt like an old party I could not attend. Fists clenched
from the cold, I thought it was funny how
if you grit your teeth hard enough they will move inches
but not mountains, leaving a taste of bloody accordion and-
if even the bus did not stop for me, who am I to blame you for
not moving hills and taking my pulse?
Nursing myself back home is not an easy task. And -if even
the bus did not stop for me who am I to blame you for not
following with gritted teeth, trying to taste novocaine
but only licking on rusty blood clots? It's cold outside and
like an old party I can't attend, I await
at the bus stop of a city stranger than me.

Rambling midnight thoughts on honesty

Alfredo Jaar

I'm writing again and it suddenly feels like I can breathe again -the way a city breathes after the rain cleanses the crisp morning air. I used to write a lot. I used to fill notebooks all the time, I used to write on the margins of my books and my receipts and it felt both addictive and relieving. Then, when I ran out of papers I used to write on coffee shop napkins and on my phone. And after a while the only words I ever laid down on paper were 'jasmine tea, potatoes, tomatoes, milk'.

Sometime last year, the idea that words aren't enough started forming in my mind and it never quite left it. Are words and beauty enough for a lifetime? Is anything ever enough for a lifetime? Writing is an organic relationship between the hand and the mind, but there comes a certain point when the hand  starts hiding little things from the self, like a mischievous kid hides stolen objects. 

All art relates to perception not nature, but what if your perception was clouded by your nature? Laying out words is laying yourself naked, on a cold bed, for everyone to see. Being naked and unashamed is a hard truth for everyone to bear, but especially the self -some truths are so true they are terrible to admit. Hiding little secrets behind a word or a chapter is easy -having your deepest thoughts exposed the way the sky is exposed sounds like a betrayal. Though, perhaps it feels better the way pouring sweet words over a healing wound feels good, or the way the sand feels good when it remembers the saltiness of the water. 

You have to make it a rule to always be honest, especially towards yourself. It's the only way your words will come out right, and I understand now that this was a frightening idea for me. You cannot write if you cannot be honest with your own words: the moment you start becoming scared of your own self is the moment words cease to exist as a means to life. Looking back, I realize now that not allowing myself to write down the truth was denying myself assertion over... over what? Over ego, perhaps, sense of pride, feeling of shame... and the frightening idea that some people will not understand the anatomy of your naked mind, laid out there to be judged and touched by every passerby -beggars, and lurkers and vendors; and cruel minds.

Without prejudice, without watering down my words, without editing for fashion... Raw honesty is the only catharsis. Fearlessness starts with the taming of your own truth. It is not easy, my mind is bruised with secrets and desires but I know better now -wounds heal but do not follow. 

So, from now on, honesty. It's very scary because I know that I see myself in a fully disparate way than others see me, which is painful to admit for it means that no one can ever really know you the way you know yourself. But for now -I am writing again.

Collective dynamics of small world networks theory

On bumping into undesirable people in London, on a fine Sunday morning

Being on a holiday away from London and thus having an infinite amount of free time on my hands, I decided to revisit a classic, one of my favorite film : 2 Days in Paris, by Julie Delpy. The film, if you haven't seen it, is as funny as it gets -although more enjoyable if you are fluent in both English and French. It it set in Paris, and follows couple Marion and Jack (franco-american couple) for two days.

One thing that caught my attention in the film was Marion's monologue on the 'Collective dynamics of small world networks theory' (cf video above). Although she doesn't believe in it, and although I was dubious at first, I have to admit that times have proven me wrong. It is incredible that in a city as big and diverse as London, you always end up bumping into people you know. Granted, everyone in their twenties hang out in the same spots and your chances of running into your neighbours on a holiday trip increase if you stand under the Big Ben, but why is it that we always have to see those people? 

Bumping into people you love is one thing. Bumping into old hook-ups who never answered your call and people who have wronged you (Or, the opposite, *gasp*!) while you are taking a casual stroll on a lazy Sunday is a terrible offense that should be punishable by law. This may not occur to you very often, but it does to me. I have bumped into people who were in London for only one day, parents of high school friends, teachers, old hook-ups (the number of these appearances are extremely high and I suspect a serious case of stalking), ex-friends, and even animals (There is a black dog that I always bump into around Shoreditch). 

2 Days in Paris

What I am trying to say, though, is that if you pay enough attention, you start noticing that your mind is subconsciously looking for the familiar. You don't accidentally bump into that old lover of yours at the food market. In a crowd that big, some energy pushes you to the familiar. In a room full of strangers, it will make you hear the voice of the one person you know in a louder volume. It will make your eyes search for people you know, acknowledge their locations and your feet will subconsciously take you to them. If you pay enough attention, you notice that encounters are coincidental -but you noticing it comes under your brain's frenetic and unconscious search for the familiar. 

So, next time you are out and about, try and and focus -see how easily your brain tricks you into going back to the familiar. 

A Rant

Art College 2.0: How to cope with being an art student

Think graffitis on washroom walls. Think electric blue beanies and oversized velvet cardigans paired with washed out dungarees. Think late night coffees (and perhaps drugs), and acrylic paint or tobacco and empty canvases. Oh, and think creepers as well. Think overdraft, recession, Dalston & Peckham's hip kids instagramming their unmade beds, and some nonsense facebook status à la Damien Hirst's dead shark. Also, think 9000£. An art degree has never seemed less appealing these days, especially when the fees tripled last year. Who would want to go to an Art college anyway? Who would want to go to university to study film instead of getting a real degree? A lot of people, actually, including me. This year's Ucas figures show some signs of recovery from last year's 15% drop in creative design and art courses applications. The number of students hoping to apply for art and design next year is up by 2.4%, and I happily applaud this figure.

Could this small rise in art-related applications signify that the arts are not as dead as we want them to be? Could it mean that people are finally taking us seriously? Perhaps. I come from a background where going to an art college is usually frowned upon. An art degree is not a serious degree, not a real one. Science and business are. You can imagine my surprise when I came to London and discovered that the creative industry was so vibrant and omnipresent in our lives. With multiple art colleges spread across London, art students are everywhere. You can usually spot them at a small and independent cinema because Tarantino is just so much better on a small screen (right?), or strolling around markets on a lazy afternoon because markets are so alternative and underground. Am I right? I am not trying to say that art students are pretentious, rather that there are certain stereotypes that they (and I) love to live up to. Just try us. Bring us to the cinema and you can be certain that your movie will be ruined by 'The color gradient in this scene is shit' and 'This is fucking bullshit because... but from a visual point of view it makes sense because...'. Not to say that non-art students cannot be critical when it comes to films, but they simply wait until the end to discuss it; whereas we get thrown out of cinemas and bars because we've been debating the futility of an english pie with a very angry boy for too long (true story). Or bring us anywhere else and you'll find yourself plotting ways to (artistically, of course) end our lives. Don't worry, we get threats everyday, especially when we hang around museums and warehouses for too long.

Unknown

All sarcasm put aside, my main problem with art degrees is the connotation and stereotypes that surround it. Why is there such a pejorative connotation attached to the word 'art college'? Why does it always have to be contrasted with science and say, mathematics? Why all this nonsense about creative vs. logic, right hemisphere vs. left hemisphere? The answer is that there is a gap in education that no one is willing to fill. We are taught, from an early age, that you either go into art and humanities or you go into science and business. That your brain is either wired that way, or the other. This is particularly present amongst countries such as Switzerland or France. If you are not good at maths but can draw a hand with six fingers (=creative genius), it must mean that your brain is wired in a creative way, it functions in a more artistic way as opposed to a logical one. What you have, then, is a conflict between nurture and nature. Are you not creative enough because you are a doctor at core or because no one has ever taught you to use your imagination? Are you bad at maths because you are, at the very core, an artist; or are you bad at maths simply because no one pushed you to work harder? Granted, we do not all have the same learning capacities. Some learn faster, some are slow, and some are less logical than others. This does not mean, however, that once a preference is shown to either the arts or the sciences, we should push someone in that direction. Intelligence is fluid, and reveals itself in different ways. And one thing that does stimulate intelligence is learning skills in a wide range of topics, from the arts to the sciences.

If you are familiar with the swiss or the french educational system, you will know that after a certain number of years in the curriculum, you are forced to choose between a Bac L (diploma that focuses on literature and humanities), Bac S (diploma that focuses on science) or Bac ES (diploma that focuses on economic sciences & humanities). The positive aspect of these different diplomas is that it helps the student focus on what he likes and is good at. The negative aspect is that it reduces his ability to succeed. The dichotomy between science and art is such that it is now seen as 'nerdy' to study science while it is considered 'pretentious & lazy' to study art. Can't we ever have people who are creative geniuses yet still capable of logical thought processes? These two aspects of the same coin are always dissociated, when instead they simply imply an intelligent person who is able to see past this division in the education world. By constantly polarizing the arts and the science, the education system is not only strengthening the stereotypes we have around these two fields, but also discouraging people from doing one or the other. People should be able to reach their potential. As someone who failed all her math exams throughout high school, I am convinced that I could have passed all of them had I not been fed this idea that 'it's just not the way my brain works. I'm more creative. I am doomed anyways, no need to study for that exam'. Looking back, there is a lot more that I could have achieved, and it is a shame that the education system nowadays is still perpetuating the arts/science dichotomy. I mean, it's not that hard to be good at both, is it?

A ticket to nowhere: Airports & Home

On airports, and feeling at home 25 000ft up in the air.

© Suzanne Zhang

As human beings, we are programmed to find a nest and call it home. At first we are born into a house that we learn to call home, but just like birds who have to leave the nest, we are forced to leave it too. What follows then is a quest to find our own home. Some people find a home in a city, an apartment, a café, or a group of friends. Others are left to wander because nothing feels like 'it' yet. High standards or doomed wanderers?

I often feel like I belong to a group of nomads, changing homes every now and then, building new houses for the heart and then leaving it for others to find it. But I don't want to. As a person who was constantly rejected by all the places I have wanted to call home, I want to find roots. Create my own roots, actually. I find beauty in calling a person home, but I have learnt recently that you should never make homes out of human beings. Home is the one place where you know it's just 'it'. Is it so awful to want to belong to a place?

I was born Chinese in Switzerland, and my whole identity is built on this dichotomy. Not asian, not swiss. I can never fully belong to either of these two, no matter how hard I try. A heart in exile, a person on the verge of belonging someplace. And so over the years I have learnt to call places home, but none of them warm my heart as much as airports. I have a fascination for airports, it is the only place where I feel it is acceptable to feel what I feel. Airports are sacred places. Liminal places like airports are places that are nowhere in particular, and yet everywhere. No one belongs there, everyone is a stranger in exile, everyone far away from home -and yet, so close.

Unknown

No one belongs anywhere in airports. People come and go. Everyone in an airport is either about to embark on an adventure, or have come back with a bag that still smells of exotic flowers and home. You don't carry your past in a luggage, you carry white shirts and linen skirts. You don't carry your troubles and your past homes in your luggage, you carry excitement and a sense of belonging. Airports are places that move, no one stays there permanently, everyone goes somewhere. They are home to no one, except the nomads. Airports have no rules, no traditions. They smell of nothing and resemble nothing. Just large white corridors with large white areas of seating space. 

Embarking on the plane is the best part. You are finally free, free from geographical space, from the limits that your 'home' impose on you, free from yourself. Up in the air, it's simply you and the peach-colored sky, you and your books under the anesthetized light, you and your apple juice that tastes like clouds and freedom. No one is there to remind you that you haven't found home yet, no one is there to remind you that you are a nomad. It is simply you and the silence of the sky. 25 000ft up, you feel like you belong somewhere, finally.



Watch this: A very good short film called "Where's home? A film about third culture kid identity" for more on airports and finding home.

"Forty years ago, the Beatles asked..."

"Forty years ago, the Beatles asked the world a simple question: they wanted to know where all the lonely people came from."

(Fiction/Non-fiction, Bullshit/Poetic ramblings: your take.) 

_________________________________________________________________________________

Where do lonely people come from? My latest theory is that they don't come from anywhere. They become lonely. Because of circumstances.

Unknown

1. You're walking alone and you have your music on, you're listening to Portishead because it's sexy and melancholic. Your green parka is way too big for you and the wind is blowing way too harsh on you, so you put your hand in your pockets; they form a fist. You're walking quite slowly because, well, it's a sunny day and you don't get many of these here. Your hair is in a ponytail and is hidden beneath a black beanie hat that covers everything but your eyes. You suddenly realize you look like a homeless person, the thought makes you laugh.You decide to go sit on a bench in a park and read the book you always carry in your bag: it's the latest Murakami. You read until the character gets into the other world, you feel serene and calm because that's what beauty does to you. You decide to go home for coffee. On your way back, you bump into a puppy, he's jumping around you, yelping, and licking your new shoes. You want to pet him but his master walks away with him. You want a dog. A cat. An animal. A fish. A book. Lies, you want someone. But you don't. You don't even have a fish.

2. You're in a club. You're moving your body to some underground new-age electronic music and you're feeling the beat- really feeling it. After ten minutes you look around and you don't recognize any faces, you see guys and girls sweating, people making out, people waiting for the drugs to kick in… You need fresh air , you don't feel anything in here apart from the pulse in your veins and somehow it is not enough. You go outside for a cigarette, you ask this cute guy in black for a lighter. He gives you one. You like black. And lighters. And people who give you lighters. You light your cigarette, take a puff and for a nanosecond all you can see is black. You hand him back the lighter and in the process, your fingers brush his hand. Suddenly you see his hands: they are long, and bony, and not nice at all. They are veiny, white, and the fingers move too fast, the way they wrap around that tiny lighter is too much for you. You long for those fingers. They could paint you. But they don't. You say thank you and you go smoke under that small roof because it's starting to rain. And hard, by the looks of it.

Côteau-du-Lac Explosion

3. Your eyes open. You're in a bed. It's not yours. This one is smaller and colder. You don't recognize anything. All you see is white and pasteurized green. Everything is blurry. You can't breathe properly, the atmosphere is heavy and your chest feels dry- like an autumn leaf. You try to move your hands, you try to say something, but you can't, your words and your vision are too hazy. You realize that underneath your white robe, you are naked, and cold. And heavy. You don't know what's going on, but you do know you don't like it. Where are you? What happened? You don't remember anything, except the heavy weight on your chest and the darkness that followed. You wait. You want to cry and to scream but nothing comes out. So you wait. How long has it been? Five minutes? An hour? At last, a woman comes to you and greets you with a smile. "You're in the recovery room" she says. Except it doesn't feel like it. You're cold and scared but she doesn't see it.

SASHA KURMAZ

4. You wake up in the middle of the night and you don't know who you are. You had a dream, a nightmare, or both, you don't remember. You don't even know your name . Your brain is still in its "asleep" phase, somehow your body managed to wake itself up.  You don't understand. You don't recognize your own room. It feels like you could be anyone, after all, you don't know who you are. Maybe you're a person who hates animals, maybe you're a painter… The hesitation only lasts seconds. The memories of your life rush back. Oh, you're this and this, not that. You go to the bathroom. You go back to bed, there is no one else in the room. You lie back down on your white pillow and your hand reaches under it. Nothing there. You roll around to the other side of the bed- it's empty. You wake up in the morning with no recollection of this. You don't even remember having that nightmare. Or waking up to go to the bathroom.

Missed connections: the tube is a lonely place

Barry Stewart

I'm currently sat on the scruffy but comfortable seats of the Bakerloo line, and I am surrounded by strangers. A middle-aged man with hands the size of a small plate is sat in front of me, he is reading the Evening Standard while nervously pulling at a loose string of fabric on his red scarf. I notice a ring on his fourth finger and I wonder: Did he marry his high school sweetheart? Is he cheating on his wife? Is he happy or does he feel trapped in his wedding? Does he believe in love? Next to me, another stranger. An art student, judging by the canvas she is holding. Chances are, she goes to my university as we both went on the tube at the same stop. It appears that she has emerged from a 90s sitcom: her long green plaid skirt reveal mustard socks tucked in a pair of chunky black creepers; her fur coat is way too long for her and her hair is the exact copy of Gwen Stefani's circa the 90s. I look at her and I wonder if she is struggling with her art, if she is afraid of dying, or of success, if she admires or despises her mother. Truth is, I will never know. These days, taking the tube in London feels a lot like being deaf: you see but you cannot hear. Sure, you might strike up a random conversation with an even more random stranger, but either way you look at it, the tube is a pretty lonely place.

Having lived in London for more than a year, the tube is one of my familiar spots. I know which lines run the fastest, which lines are great for planking, which lines have the most cozy seats and which ones are best known for fire emergencies (Victoria Line -If you are wondering whether hell exists, yes it does and this is it). But what all these lines have in common is this: silence. Silence, fear and perhaps, yes, curiosity. Every time I am on the tube I cannot help but wonder: what is this person's story? Is he like me? We often forget that others have stories as complex and twisted as ours, that their personality is not flat, just like their thoughts and desires. I am always curious about others' thoughts as it is unfathomable for me to conceptualize another inner world but mine. I almost always wonder about their inner struggles; whether they have found their home yet, whether they believe in God or not -and whether it makes it easier for them to live, whether they are going home to someone or to themselves. I wonder about their secrets, their dark fears, their silly beliefs... and I also wonder if they will go home and think of me, if they ask themselves what my story is -if I am scared of heights or if I enjoy greek plays. It feels to me that if we are all thinking of each other at the same time, somehow, somewhere, there is a connection. A string that connects us all and makes us more than just meat machines riding the tube to go to work or university.

David Harris

Perhaps one of the most fascinating and intriguing idea is that we run into so many strangers at a certain given location and time, that some of them are bound to appear in our lives at some point. Last year was my first year at University of the Arts London (LCC) and I didn't know anyone when I first came to London. I have since then met a lot of people and created very special bonds with some of them -most of whom I now call family. When talking about our first encounter with each others, it appeared that the first time we talked was actually not the first time we met or ran into each other. A lot of my very close friends at university were at a Fresher's Party in LCC last year, which I attended as well. What this means is that we were all together in one same room, at the same time, without knowing each other, and without knowing that in a few months we would become friends. I probably passed one of my friend on the way to the bathroom, or smoked a cigarette next to another one... Who knows? You have certainly experienced something similar, or felt that the people in your life right now have been there the whole time -you simply didn't know them or saw them. This brings me back to the tube because it makes me wonder: how many of these strangers will make an impact on my life? Maybe this man reading the news will turn out to be my husband's father. Maybe this lady with her baby will be trapped with me in a faulty elevator. Maybe this man will become one of my university tutor. I never know, and chances are I never will, but spending so much time in the tube with a sea of strangers always makes me wonder what connects us as humans. And the answer is always this: stories. Everybody has a story to tell, but we fail to remember because, let's admit it, sitting in the tube is pretty damn lonely at the end of the day.

Wine

If you were wine, I would drink you and leave three drops:
One for my heart
One for the lilies by my bed
And one for the times when I am sad

Berlin, or the city where people are unhappy

I just got back from a crazy week in the capital of beer and electro music: Berlin! I was there to explore the post-war atmosphere of the city, which is meant to be buzzing with art, underground music and parties (most of the time the parties are so underground you cannot find them. I swear. ). After some rather disappointing sight-seeing trips and non-concluding talks with locals, Berlin makes up for it with its crazy music (and by crazy I mean the DJ-Panda playing violing at an electro-techno rave), crazy drugs (maybe too much? The only drug you need is loooove, mate), underground parties, graffiti and an excellent music festival line-up.

The problem with Berlin is this: they hate tourists. I understand that they can be fu**ing annoying, as I often curse the gods when I see them in London, but they're part of the economy and part of life, so, the best way is to smile and not lie to them about where that museum really is (Come on, it happened to the best of us...). On many occasions, my friends and I (all of them are London based internationals and speak perfectly good english) were being told we were too loud and too foreign. I can't keep track of the number of times people have stopped by in the streets to stare at us (in a rather disgusting way). I also couldn't believe how rude and impolite some of the stares, whistles and insults were. I have had my ass groped by an old man in daytime, and after causing a scene about this he simply walked away without embarrassment. On another occasion a man called us "dirty whores" then proceeded to ask for cigarettes. Is this really what the streets of Berlin have come to?

Despite Berliner's rude attitude, I had a really fun time there, especially at the Helmut Newton Foundation and the festival. The food was also really good, and those mini-eggs really helped my daily hangover, which usually consisted of wine, tequila shots and bad decisions. The clubs were also very good (once you knew where to find them... mmh mhh Goldengate & Magdalena!) though sometimes unnecessarily selective and rude (berghain.. :( ). The only time I felt truly accepted by the people was at the music festival, which had really big names like SBTRKT, Paul Kalkbrenner, Bonaparte and Django Django. I won't spend too much time describing how fun it was, so I'll just say that it was so crazy I fainted (oops!) and that I discovered a new band called Sizarr! You should check out their songs Icy Martini and Purple fried!

A sad story about work

    It is almost 11AM and I am browsing a complex and dull-looking website that will tell me how much money the clients of the bank I'm working at will lose today with the stock market. It's called current liquidity excess, it is repetitive and uninteresting, and it needs to be done twice a day to ensure that no one loses a vast amount of money, like, say, 3 million dollars. All is well, none of the clients have their names in red.

I started my internship on the 25th of June 2012, and in two weeks I will be done. As a media undergraduate who attends an Arts College, working in a bank goes against all my beliefs and principles. I hate money and how it enslaves people, I hate that money is the biggest entity in the world, I hate the political schemes of corporations and banks, I hate what it makes people do. But most importantly I hate that I have to work for money, eight hours per day, five days a week, all year long. I guess you could call me a naïve idealist who believes that we can live on poems and flowers. 

What my job consists of is making sure the clients' transfers are archived by numbers and dates, that the stocks they've bought are correct, that their amount of cash at the end of the month does not differ from the one in the bank's system... Hours of archiving and numbers and maths, and Excel graphs and tables. HSBC, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Merril Lynch have become part of my daily vocabulary. As a student who used to cheat her way through her maths class (and still miserably failing to get a simple PASS), this was torture. I could never get the same result twice, and would often opt for the number that seemed most appealing to me (34500 or 256... mm 256 pounds seems reasonable I guess). I found it hilarious that I couldn't get the same result for a simple addition of numbers, even with a calculator. But this was overestimating my capacities in maths: 38000 dollars became 83000 dollars, pounds became euros, hong kong dollars became swiss francs... I was a disaster. And when the cash at the end of the month did not match the bank's system, it was my task to find out why they had lost so much money (we are talking millions here). I thought it was completely absurd to let a 19 year student (who, to make it worse, got the internship without any interviews or skill assessment... Nepotism at its best) find out why the client had lost so much money, but they thought it was normal. After pretending to find mistakes in a twenty pages long cash statement, I finally asked the un-askable : "Maybe someone stole his card and then spent all the money! That would explain why he lost 38million euros and 256 million dollars! That explains it all!!". To which my boss looked at me as if I were a dinosaur. After a couple of hours, it came to light that I had entered the wrong data and thus the whole incident had been engendered by my maths mistakes. Oops. 

Another incident that makes me giggle (but shudder in shame at the same time) is the day I inadvertly printed out 250 pages of cash statement. It lasted around 10minutes, during which my infuriated colleagues  couldn't get hold of their faxes or prints. It was hilarious. After realizing that I had printed the wrong pages, I quickly flipped them over and put them back in the printer, as I did not want to look like a stupid, soulless and tree-loathing person. But in my purely altruistic act, I had not flipped the pages on the right side, and my colleagues were both shocked ( at my stupidity..) and irritated to find that their prints and faxes had been printed on my printed pages. They couldn't read a thing and we had to throw everything away. I couldn't stop laughing, but I was the only one. After that, they ceased giving me complex things to do, like printing out excel charts  or anything that involves numbers. Instead, I am now in charge or the archives and spend all my hours on 9GAG, because it is one of the few websites that is infinite. Sometimes I watch movies without the sound, because I like living on edge. It also makes for interesting plot twists. 

Apart from the sporadic hilarious incidents (mostly caused by me...), work is a dull pain in the ass.

I've only just come to the sudden realization that I will be graduating from university in two years. And then what? The real world? A job? I don't feel ready to become a person with a job. The only thing that I learnt from my internship is that I do not want to work in an office, I do not want to work in an environment that involves money or dealing with numbers. I want to learn new things everyday, I want to have a job where ideas are thought-provoking, a job where I can discuss compelling issues and contemporary problems that affect me... It pains me to see that people have jobs that they hate, but cannot quit for financial reasons, I hate that not everybody is given the chance to choose what they really want to do in life, it pains me to see that everyday is a repetition of the day before and before and before that... And it's worrying, because if I can't enjoy a simple and secure job like what I have right now, what will life be after university? Will I have to wake up everyday to a job I don't like? A lifetime seems pretty long...

Is it normal to be this scared? 

Written on the 2/03/2012

I am constantly confused, dissatisfied and tormented by the idea that there is ''something more'', ''something better''.There has to be more than what I have, there has to be a wider range of feelings, a wider range of views, of emotions, of experiences- be it spiritual or simply anodyne. There has to be something more beautiful, something so overwhelmingly good and perfect that man can never touch except with his fingertips, in his dreams. But, concretely, there has to be something more. I long all day to find it, but the question that there is nothing more for me always haunts me at night.

Nostalgia for a place

Unknown

I always find myself longing for something that I cannot have. Travel and family is one of them. I am constantly longing for the place I have just left, only to return and long for someplace new. 

Can I never be content in being in an exact place at an exact moment? Will I ever learn to let go of nostalgia and longing and realize that I must live in one place only? My problem, unlike others, is not living in the future or the past, it is living in a given space, a given location.

I would like to be everywhere at the time, to be everything at the same time, to be everyone and experience everything at the same time


Written on the 14.02.2012

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river

izz me