Those who can, do

Those who can’t….

The circle finally seems round. After a detour in Ghent, I moved back to Leuven, where I’m originally from. Sorta, kinda. At least it’s where my longtime friends live, and I feel at home there. In an equally big change, I started teaching at the local college, which is the one I attended myself, teaching programming and coaching internships. It all feels a bit strange. A lot of my collegues used to be my teachers, and a lot of the students remind me of my then-collegues. And my self. It’s can be weird being on the other side, and I try to not create that divide where I can. My collegues told me that, when I was a student I already wanted to become a teacher. Which I had totally forgot. I had to dig up my transcripts for something unrelated (more about that later). And it was painful. I always tell my students that I always got all 10’s and one 20 on my courses, but that’s not accurate at all. I flunked plenty of courses each year, about a third of them. Including some very embarrassing ones, such as math. It’s a small miracle that I managed to get my degree in the minimal three years. Those years, I remember being very focused on my friends. I remember few nights we wouldn’t seek each other’s company, either at the same dive, or at someone’s room when they managed to save up for a decent amount of beers. The night were long, the morning woozy at best. Now that I’ve moved back, and everything seems different. I get woken early by an armada of cargo bikes trying to get on cycling path outside my window. I try to go to bed early. I meet my friends every Wednesday evening, after they are done cycling in their lycra uniforms. I don’t join them for their mountain bike trips, I prefer riding my city bike, but I walk in nature and started running in the park. I obediently following the schedule an app made for me. I quit smoking. It sounds bleak, and an early version of me would have dismissed it as a ‘soft version of dying’, but it feels pretty good. Probably because I’m in week 6 of my holidays, a glorious perk of working in educations. Just as then, work has a tendency to be a stressful chaos. And it probably has been for all the jobs I’ve been in. Something for another post maybe.

PS My go to teacher joke is : “My classes aren’t mandatory; but I’ll try and be here as often as I can”

Return

Historic times

I haven’t updated this blog these last 2 weeks. I haven’t uøpdated it in years, but this time is different. I have a ton of time, and a ton of will to update this blog. But we’re living in historic times, and things keep changing every day*. Or at least from what I can tell from the newspapers, my world has shrunk to my apartment, the grocery store, and the 400 meters between them.

I do think there’s one thing that is certain though. We are living in historic times. Big epidemics and economic difficulties have led to large societal changes in the past, and this will be the case again. Impossible to say what that change will be. Perhaps a surge of support for the political right, social media currently is flooded with … questionable? … posts, often blaming foreigners or even local of foreign ancestry. Perhaps a surge of support for authoritarianism, now that incredibly disruptive measures, enforced by police, are normalized. Perhaps a surge of support for the political left, as it’s obvious marginalized people will disproportionally be affected by the disease and its immense economic repercussions. Definitely an elimination of the fatalistic argument for apathy in the face of climate change, now that it has proven that drastic changes in our society can and will create immediate benefits, with a real measurable increase in air and water quality being observed right now. Undoubtedly a better understanding of how extended solitary confinement is a form of torture.

Lots to think and write about, and as a silver lining, tons of time to do it in :)

• Dear future reader, to whom it’s might not be obvious to what I’m referring to: the entire world is currently in the grips of the (hopefully only) Covid-19 pandemic, aka Corona. If you’re Belgian, I can’t explain the true weirdness of current life more succinctly than telling you all the bars and restaurants are closed for the next couple of weeks, and the border with the Netherlands is mostly closed, with police checkpoints.

New primary email

I’ve finally figured out how to make my new email adress work, so I’ll be running that as my main one for know.

daan at elmarcel.com

Feel free to update your contact / say hi as you please.

PGP info on the home page for those interested

Support the living

A smart person on Twitter pointed out that it’s good to buy art from living artist rather than the dead ones, because they need the money a bit more. Which is a very good point. So here a list of recent acquisitions (all three of which I really love):

bohemianchaos

viiolaceus

IleanaHunter

Latency

I arrived home late-ish today. 19:30, after a pretty unsuccessful day at the office. The sun is still out, not particularly warm and low in the sky. Golden. I change into my running gear. Shorts and t-shirt. Lie in the couch for another half our, just wallowing in a renewed distaste about the whole endeavour.

20:00. Still golden. I walk to the sidewalk, turn right, and start trotting. The first minute is the same as my commute. A minute later I turn left, turning it into the weekend shopping routine. At the second intersection I turn left again, turning my back on the routine, and my front towards meandering. The houses on these streets are a lot larger, garages fit for two or more cars, and most people would agree the occupant’s wealth must be ill-gotten to some degree. Most foreigners anyway. Each house still tries to pose as an overgrown garden shed, wooden slats reigning supreme over a kingdom of dormers and balconies. Flat-pack chalets, perhaps. I jog on, happily noting that I haven’t had to downshift into a march yet. The houses shift significantly in size, but the plots they rest on less so. They would be considered small by most countries standard, the distance not entirely out of eye contact range.

Gold turns into brass. Everything becomes slightly desaturated, or at least I’m only becoming it aware of it just now. My neighborhood has always seemed to be a movie set “a generic couple of decades ago”, where only the presence of a smartphone or ludicrously expensive baby buggy could betray the it’s modernity. My neighbors have second hand volvo’s, children’s toys that are faded to colours I remember from my youth, and shoddily maintained yards. None of them have bothered to take the antenna’s off their roof. There’s an obsolete wooden electricity pole still standing. Stockholm sometimes has a very strange old-fashioned esthetic in it’s richness, even way past this neighborhood. The old metro carriages have seating upholstery recycled from the Overlook Hotel.

I reached home tired and out of breath, but less than I was hoping to be. My endurance is absolute garbage, but I still have the experience of having been marginally more fit before. But I’m mostly frustrated that there are plenty of interesting and nice roads going further. About half a year ago we had some pretty rough winter weather, which I adore when I have the time to cope with it. That night had 40cm high snow on all the roads, and the wind was strong enough to blow it vertically straight up your nose. I was coming home late, and when I tried to catch my metro connection there was nothing on the board. The radio announcements were all in Swedish, and I couldn’t be bothered to ask anyone what was being said (how Swedish of me :)). Or maybe I was looking for an excuse. I decided to just walk the 4 km home.

My roommates had been giving me shit about my footwear for the past couple of days, as I’ve been going out with just my sneakers. But I remember doing just the same in Berlin, where the problem was ice rather than snow. The trick in snow seemed to be to lift your feet straight up, as not scrape any snow on top of your show. Straight up, forward, down. The route was pretty straightforward, hugging the metro for most of it’s way. A couple of stretches through residential areas. The streets were totally abandoned, no human in sight, nor cars, nor any visible activity in the houses. And I’m obviously really enjoying this. Well enough equipped to not be uncomfortably cold. Snow a lot more enjoyable than rain. Just a completely white wasteland, ripe for exploration, filled with a multitude of generic pizzeria’s and supermarkets, gas stations and slipways.

When I arrive home I grab myself a beer, and sit my ass down on the couch. Just to reconcile myself with being indoors again, I suppose. One of my roommates walks in, relating his adventure getting here from the closest metro stop. My mind is in two parts about informing him, but decides to hold a trump card the next time he gives me shit about my winter shoes. I keep getting into this kind of shit, and I’m still not entirely sure why. I have a tendency to at least make a token effort to what I commit to, and I often push myself by making a commitment I can’t back out of easily. Moving abroad could be an example of this. Tall tales and a desperate scramble to not completely lose face another. Something I should think about more. Or overthink less.

The snow was great. The sound it makes when compacted when I shift my weight. The general lightness of the night when virtually every surface is covered. How everything seems so alien when everything looks so similar. How I can be the only person alive without being lonely. An astronaut in a city of thousands…

I suck something new and that's awesome

Last year I picked up sculpting on a whim (putting it very mildly here). I bought about 2 kilos of clay (water-based, what you can imagine playing in as a kid) and some random wire for armature, and then got to work. Pictured the goal in my head. Found some good reference art. Created a skeleton out of wire and started shaping out my figure in clay. All of it without too much preparation or thought.

I didn’t end up with much at all. About two or three 30cm tall statuettes that would be impossible to bake due to the materials used. Cracked all over, as I didn’t take care of them overnight. What I did end up with showed some promise though: good composition, subject, and motion. But there were a lot of mistakes I started noticing while still working on the same piece: looking good only from one angle, “boxy” limbs and heads. Unfixable problems due to the naive way I constructed my armature.

But what amazes me the most is the raw satisfaction and fun I had. I usually write or practice photography, and I have been frustrated with both for different reasons.

Writing has always been about direct personal experience for me, as I can’t seem to tap into the right kind of creativity to write fiction, nor do I have the discipline to create decent think-pieces. Since I need personal experiences, I’m bottlenecked by the ones I have, even more so as I have become pickier about the things I want to write about. So unless I can satisfy myself with writing once a year, or change my lifestyle to o

Photography has become rote. Virtually all the photo’s I publish are the result of recognizing potential in a few pictures out of hundreds, and editing them to a quite simple aesthetic I’ve developed a while ago. Most of it is landscape, and I’ve never really attempted portraiture. Even though they’re very well received, there’s really not that much intent to it.

In both writing and photography, I really should buckle down and deliberately practice outside of my comfort zone. It would be a shame to just keep running in place. On the other hand, I’m really enjoying sculpting. I’ve been doing a lot more of it, and did my homework. And I’m coming to realize that I have a lot less aptitude for it than for the other things I do, apart from perhaps the skills that carry over. But I’m starting to doubt whether it matters. I do want to take it more serious, and finalize some ideas/works that I’ve started. I wish I could follow a course, but I can’t seem to find a suitable one. Time to put in a lot more deliberate practice. Watch this space :)

Up up and away

I guess today is finally the day. I’ve been wanting to open up about it for a long time, and since I’m virtually anonymous here, I pretty much can say whatever the hell I want. And you probably will be polite about it, and listen. So here goes nothing.

I haven’t admitted this freely to anyone yet, but thinking about gravity often causes an impending sense doom in me. It’s called barophobia and it’s a real thing. I has been weighing heavy on my heart the first day I left the delicious bouyancy of prebirth. Unlike most other barophobes, I do not actually that gravity might increase to the point that I might become spherical. My fear is much stupider. Whenever I’m in a building with a high ceiling, I’m terrified that gravity might reverse direction, accelerating me enough to leave me a wee crimson smudge on an otherwise pristine ceiling.

Like any good phobia worth cultivating, I keep touching it like a loose tooth. I love coming up with several complicated analysis and theories about how it works. Hell, there’s nothing much else to do then theorize when you’re obsessively gazing at the ground. So I present you with my commandments, and I welcome you to my preposterous madness.

Rule nr 1: Location, location, location. A good place to fear death should be worth being remembered over. St Peter’s. The St Hubertus gallery in Brussels. The blue mosque in Istanbul. I have particularly fond memories of dying a million deaths while traversing Grand Central Station in New York. Sometimes I think I should embrace my destiny, and lie on my back on the floor of the Sixteenth Chapel. Arms wide open, waiting till gravity lifts me into God’s transcendental embrace.

Rule nr 2: There is a very real possibility that gravity might not reverse. I’ve only observed it rotating in straight angles, but that’s probably attributable to human buildings tending to be built in orthogonal ways. This fear usually manifests when looking at a tall building from a big distance. For example, the sweet agony of caressing my lover’s face when she lies in my lap, visualizing hurtling across Siena’s picturesque main square before death scrapes my puddle-like self off the tower. Or imagine admiring the Flatiron, the first skyscraper of New York. An office tower where they had to pay the workers double, as everyone was convinced it would fal over in the first week. Meanwhile I’m concerned I might fall into it. Perhaps I can admire it’s fine masonry detailing in my final moments.

Rule nr 3: Stick to the sides. Many building have a small slope where the ceiling meets the wall. If I get lucky, that might make me skid onto the ceiling rather than careening into it. I don’t actually believe this, but I do get some comfort out of pretending I believe this.

Rule nr 4, which might explain rule nr 3 to some extent. The angle matters. I’m not afraid of falling into a mountain slope or pyramid. But I am terrified of falling into a cliff or monolith. Generalizing, the more perpendicular and planar a surface, the more it evokes horror. That’s why man-made structures feature so prominently in my fears. Fascist architecture, like Milan’s central station, is especially bad. No surprise there.

Rule nr 5: The sky is actually not terrifying. Even if gravity would reverse, I just slowly asphyxiate while having a killer view. Not scary at all. Hypothetical. Gravity simply doesn’t reverse when you’re outside.

Rule nr 6: The major exception of rule nr 5 is that sometimes the sky turn into a ceiling. Or even most of the times. Starry skies are especially dangerous. Cloudy skies aren’t ceilings though, I can safely look at them. This might seem counter intuitive, but direct experience has proven this to be another fundamental rule.

That's nuts

I’m living in Sweden now,
and that’s nuts.

I’ve been here for 3 months,
life is good,
work, which was my primary motivator to move, great,
and that’s nuts

Yesterday I walked in the dark
at 4 pm
slipped on the snow and hurt my ass
hoping to assemble my ikea bed
in time to sleep in it
and wake at
8 am
at when it’s dark

and that’s nuts

My feelings about all of this fall on two sides. I’m incredibly lucky to have found this job, and, more recently, a good group of people to live with. Stockholm is good place to live according to every metric. There is also some baggage that I didn’t manage to shake off back home, but being in a new place is very conductive to reframing it in my head. On the other hand, typical expat bullshit. Not knowing basic stuff, where to get stuff, what paperwork to do, etc. Loneliness. Which I’m fine with, but it takes time and effort (apparently a lot here) to fix with. More then the times before, I miss my friends and family.

I guess I live in Sweden now?
And that’s pretty nuts

Sapiens

I read Sapiens by Harari, a book about the evolution of the human race. It has long chapters on how settling and agriculture changed society, and how that change came about for reasons that differ a lot from what you expect. Really well written, novel and interesting. Few things are as satisying as a well written introduction to a whole field of knowlegde you don’t even know the basics of I told some people about it, and several people mentioned both having read it, and loving it to bits. Unfortunately, the book turns a significant turn for the worse. Starting in the industrial section, and very acutely at the introduction of DNA (manipulation), Hariri shows that he has basic errors in his understanding of genetics, and those mistakes form the very shaky foundations of a lot of his predictions about the future of mankind. What vexes me most is, that if I can find mistakes, hiring an expert for some QA would have improved this book massively by either cutting it short, or making the latter chapters relevant. So, buy the book. And read about half of it.