to me being a journalist is more a calling than a job. i never wanted to become one, but once i started i instantly felt it was the right thnig to do, to believe in. i suppose that’s why the setbacks hurt even more. especially if you figure at some point that the energy and the passion you have been putting into things, the days off that you still spend at work because things have to get done - they get you into nothing but trouble. they get you half-whispered comments behind your back of doing too much, wanting too much. do i want too much? i don’t think so, i just want to work on something i am happy with.
The songs are in your eyes
I see them when you smile
I’ve had enough of romantic love
I’d give it up, yeah, I’d give it up
For a miracle, a miracle drug, a miracle drug
God I need your help tonight
Sometimes I wonder about those small things I consider being problems in my life. Being so insignificant and small as David Gray would put it. Not always does it take a miracle drug.
sometimes it’s all about pushing things through, about making decisions, about falling and rising again. or as winston churchill put it: we shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. i last saw it on a poster in a window in canterbury, kent. his message never lost its power.
never have the nations of the world had so much to lose or so much to gain. together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames. save it we can - and save it we must - and then shall we earn the eternal thanks of mankind and, as peacemakers, the eternal blessing of God
miteinander werden wir unsere erde retten oder miteinander in den flammen ihres brandes umkommen. aber retten können und retten müssen wir sie und damit werden wir uns den ewigen dank der menschheit verdienen und als friedensstifter den ewigen segen gottes.
it’s been nearly seven years since i first moved out from home. off to sweden i went and after a short break in between onwards to finland. i just looked up what i wrote about leaving the place i called home for 20 years, it was more a question than an answer: would you trade your memories for freedom? mom asked me if i wanted to move back to the yellow house together with atsrid. she would take an apartment on her own as she feels the house is too big for her. and it all came back. the memories, the stories. my great-grandfather had bought and re-built it over 100 years ago. my family was by no means rich by then, but we owned some big pieces of land. he gambled most of it away. so when his father died my grandfather took over, the first one in our family to graduate from high school. he was so talented and working towards a career in academics when the war came. high school would be the last school he went to because when he returned from four years as a prisoner of war in russia there was a family to take care of. but there was also the big yellow house, which miraculously had survived the war and the bombs. as austria rose from the rubble, so did the house which gained a floor to accomodate an even bigger family: mom, her sister and her brother - my aunt and my uncle. including great-grandmother and another relative there was seven of them. and even if times were sometimes hard, my mom had a happy childhood. years later there was grandfather, mom and i. my aunt and uncle left for vienna to become a doctor and a diplomat respectively. the first memories i have of this planet are all about the yellow house, about grandfather, our garden and the summer days when we would take the bike and ride it only a couple of hundred meters down to the horse racetrack. i would get my ice cream and call it quite a day. i would walk to school and walk home because there was always someone around the big yellow house and it felt like the best place in the world - home. i could bring whomever i wanted because i was trusted. and even if grandfather was strict sometimes (oh yes, there were fights!) i probably had the happiest childhood i could imagine - being the spoiled single child i was. and now a circle closes. i am back in klagenfurt, sitting in apartment i like. i like it but its white walls bare no memories, the could barely tell you any stories. the walls back in the big yellow house could, for hours or even days. i do understand astrid. i do understand what her motives are for not wanting to move back there. but things are not always easy, because what for her is just some house, some pile of bricks in probably not the greatest neighborhood to me is home and always will be. and i could never imagine anybody else than myself, my children or grandchildren to make up for the stories its walls will go on to tell for the years to come.
another case of doping in austria, one more round of endless discussions. and it made me think of paavo nurmi. my grandfather told me about him when i was a kid. i didn’t know where he was from or what he actually had done, but my grandfather told me he was someone he looked up to. it must have been more than ten years later when i finally got to meet paavo nurmi. his statue stood and stands up to this day in front of the school of physical education at the university of jyväskylä. between 1920 and 1928 he won nine olympic gold medals, broke world records and won the 1500 and 5000 meter races in the 1924 paris olympics. a feat that took 80 years to be re-done in the 2004 athens olympics. nurmi died nearly blind and partly paralyzed in finland in 1973. he died a broken man who thought that he “didn’t leave anything of value behind”. what however he did leave behind is the memories that in some time long gone champions were made out of will, dedication and love for their sports.
i’m slowly starting to get sick of the International Olympic Comittee. while the olympics games still claim to be a peaceful come-together of nations it has long gone astray from its original cause. so it seems like bitter irony when IOC-spokesperson Kevan Gosper condemns the protesters all over the world and especially those who stepped in the way of the olympic flame yesterday for being “full of hate” and asking them to “give way to the peaceful olympic flame”. mr. gosper seems to be - as the rest of the IOC - ignoring the fact that giving the Olympics to China inevitably would draw those protests on every which level. it’s a sad story that the olympic movement, being the force that it is today even business-wise, hides behind empty words or - even more likely - looks the other way. i do hope, deep inside, that us, the world, the people on the streets, writers and journalists, every single voice that raises, will force the IOC to turn its head back around. I do belive it was a good idea to give the Olympics to China. I just doubt mine are the same reasons than the IOC’s but I have this feeling down inside, that this time they won’t get away with it.
whenever i needed comfort and solace as a kid, it would be waiting only a flight of stairs away. i’d sneak into my granddad’s room and within a couple of minutes i would sip away on a mug of hot ovomaltine sitting in one of his chairs. grandad died 12 years ago and the only ovomaltine i get today is from a coffee-dispenser down in the hall. it rattles and hums but it doesn’t give comfort and advice to a 27-year-old that doesn’t know what to do with his life.
the call came in when the day, another sunday at work, slowly started leaning towards its end. it was one of those calls you neither expect not wait for to happen. it was a colleague of mine, asking for advice. very specific advice, advice on one of my dreams: working or attending colleage or at least a summer school in the US (god, astrid and o.s. know it). he asked me to review a letter of motivation he drafted. a letter of motivation that with the consent of our newspaper will most likely get him to do a 2-month-trip to the US courtesy of the austrian academy for journalism. now that astrid and me spent three weeks in the in the states and i have been mostly talking of making this one dream come true one day - it felt like life took a cruel hit-and-run on me. don’t get me wrong, it was only a second but that small second i saw somebody else make this one - my - dream come true. i will gladly help him. not only because i respect him as a person and friend but because i do believe that he truly has earned his chance to be nominated by our newspaper. did it sadden me? yes, a little. but i also believe that one day god will help me make my dream, or at least what i will regard then as my dream, come true. why? for one simple reason: dreams prevail.
it’s those little moments when you doubt if the path you have walked so far is the one you want to walk up to its very end. and then there’s moments that re-assure you that will it might take some detours, some one -ways and dead ends to ultimately understand that while the path is the right one, it doesn’t come easy. ted (via axel, sofastar) seems to be the place for people who doubt but still believe. i never planned to become a journalist, it happened to me. and now i know it was no coincidence, even if i might appear childish still thinking i can make the world a better place. at least i can try. like james nachtwey.
if i’d ever have the choice the newspaper i’d love to work for would be the new york times. not for the name, the reputation or its history but because it has resisted - please call upon on me if i am wrong - giving up common sense and sensibility. not only did i enjoy the scoop on new york governor eliot spitzer who after all had to step down from office after the times reported spitzer as the well-pazing consumer of a prostitution ring but also the way reporting was done. it was facts and opinions with a sharp line drawn between them. there was class, there was style and there was after all a subtle but noticable undertone that, while spitzer’s decision to leave office was the only to be taken at that time, failing is inherent to human beings as well as is getting up. that there were two spelling mistakes at one point and a sentence apparantly missing its second part only added up to my impression - that we all fail in small and large things at some points in our life. it’s that bit of human touch.
we walked for half an hour and even though if i knew where we were map-wise, we were lost. it was classic, we got off the ship at nassau and just tried to get away from the thousands of other tourists. it’s something i’ve always stuck to: get away from the crowds, the groups - go single, go by yourself, try to see. we walked, well off the beaten paths: houses started to get more and more shabby, backstreets darker, roads grimmer. to quote form wikitravel: the “Over-the-Hill” area south of downtown is the poorest part of Nassau, and tourists might want to be wary. It is, however, much nicer than “slums” in the Third World, and indeed, parts of the United States. And we ended up in front of the church were two old ladies were about to attend service. We asked them for a safe way out, our white faces sticking out in Nassau like a sore thumb. They didn’t show us the way out, they didn’t contemplate - they acted or better the nice young gentleman who overheard our conversation acted. He put us in his car, gave us a tourist tour of Nassau, drove us to a shopping mall were we had coffee and a more great and enlightening conversation with astrid and him. After that he even showed us were would take the bus. I didn’t know how to express my gratitude for the way her acted, I just know that he ressured me believing that people by far and great are good. It was all topped-off by a more than cool bus driver who played rasta-music at full force on the way back dropping us off right in front of our ship. Some angels don’t need wings.
i knew it was there. i was in the words of the cab driver, it was in the smile and chat with the waitress, it was there in the love of the russian immigrant and it was in the gentle optimism of the jewish ex-army-girl. i took me some time to warm up to it again, but this is my america. all those people i met today somehow mastered their life up to the point of ending up in key west. will they stay to last or go to pursue new dreams - i don’t know. put my america is compromised of all these characters, faces and different backgrounds. there was the cab driver who had seen pink floyd 23 times in his life. “money” was on the radio and i mentioned it and he just started talking, how he had followed them from city to city “seein’ em four time in five days until i ran out of money” - the times they might be a-changin’ but this day, the ride home and knowing that there is dreams to pursue for all of us made me feel comfortably numb. cheers roger.
america was always a dream to me. i can’t really tell why but most likely - and as for so many people who came - it felt like the promised land, where everything was possible, where you could achieve if you only try hard enough. now being 27, it’s my fourth time here (having seen most of the east coast, ohio, new orleans and the little places in between) - i wanted to show astrid why i though i should try my luck here one day. i wanted to show her the differences, the little moments of life here - and for now ended up seeing a different america, a somehow disappointing america. it might come with age or profession, but some of the experiences we have made up until now just do not fit with my picture of this country. ok, down here in florida, people are probably sick of the tourists, theme parks and all the stuff that comes with it. but where is the genuine friendliness about americans, not the fake smiles that you see everywhere? i went down to the starbucks that is located in the hotel lobby - i ordered and received “enjoy your coffee and have a lovely day” the waitress said, when i took off. but the color of her voice - as caspar would say in peter hoegs “the quiet girl” - the color of her voice spoke differently. it’s something someone told her to say to enrich the customer experience. it’s something she has to say a million times a day, because the staff training manual tells her to. it might have been 9/11 but this country has changed, changed for the worse. i found hope though in the most unlikely place. one of the staffers who showed us our seats in the panther’s hockey game - well he must have been well above 70, but his smile, his voice spoke different. born to imigrants in brooklyn he had worked his way up from poor kid to a senior residence in florida. he was proud of what he had accomplished and assured that “everyone could make it” - it migh be an illusion or a dream all long gone but i’d rather believe in an old man’s words then in the starbucks training manual.
Today we buried my Nan. She was an amazing woman and I doubt that these words can do her justice. She could cook anything and make it taste good, sew anything and make it look good and say anything and make it sound good. She was an optimist and refused to believe that anything was impossible. She was old in age, but I think she was one of the most open minded women of her generation. Most of all, she loved her family unconditionally. We saw that love, we felt that love and did our best to return that love, as unconditionally as it came. To me, she was the best Nan in the world.
Today marks an historic day in Australia. You can’t turn back the clock and right past wrongs, but when you do something wrong, or know that a wrong has been done, you can say sorry. See the full text of Kevin Rudd’s speech below:
“Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment.
We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations – this blemished chapter in our nation’s history. The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.
We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.
To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.
We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation. For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.
We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.
A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.”
i looked up to the stands. few people come and see us. i had given up on seeing her there but there she was by herself in the cold. i don’t know when we will have kids on our own and what and how they will grow up to be. what i do know however is that i will try to give them the same feeling as astrid gave me yesterday, holding out in the cold at a meaningless hockey game. to me it meant the world.
from the moment we laced up our first skates, we were hooked. the digging, the dangles, the top-shelfers and the tilts. morning, night and in our sleep. we play, because once we take the ice, we forget that anything else exists. no problems. no hassles. only hits and hat-tricks, one-timers, slappers, sick saucers & backhanded toe-drags. we play for the glory for the best game on earth. we play because we are privileged to be able to. we play for the greater game. (gosh does bauer make great hockey commercials or what)
astrid and me had a day off - which we, quite frankly, needed. a long list of things to be done had piled up. so we started at the taxation office where i got the code to do my tax declaration online. the lady behind the counter was ok, though mechanical in a way - well she works in the taxation office, what can you expect, right? stop number two - my car dealer, i had forgotten to pay a bill (36 euro). the lady was really friendly, i even got a chocolate bar. though i got a little suspicious because back in the days when i drove my beloved skoda i never got a chocolate bar, and yes, it was from the same dealer. learning: driving an audi instead of a skoda gets you a chocolate bar. next stop: a coffee place near the university. bad bad bad experience. the waitress: unfriendly, uninterested, uninspired. i know it’s a hard job, but the way she waited us made us feel more as a disturbance to whatever business she had on her mind. the place was full of smoke - and i know i am pretty militant about smoke, but in the end i asked her if the air condition wasn’t working and her reply was “if you would have told me, i would have turned it on”. learning: when i go to a coffee place, restaurant there’s a couple of things i have to bring my checklist: (heating? check, running water? check, air condition? check). last stop - a sports store. since my old nike sneaker slowly started to smell like someone (or something) had died in them, i went for new ones. i tried exactly one pair whcih perfectly fit. in the 2-3 minutes it took me to decide, mr. shoeseller didn’t look bored, he didn’t look tired. he more looked like someone who’d rather commit suicide then serve one more customer. it might have been the day or an unfortunate chain of events - but in the end i kind of thought to myself - where have all the friendly people gone? people that show passion for what they do? happy people with jobs, people on a mission, people loving working, caring, serving, teaching, telling, talking with/to other people, their customers, friends, partners? whatever happens tomorrow, i will be friendly to whomever i meet - i won’t let the world get away with this one. will you join me in making tomorrow a happy day?
2007 was great in so many ways, things changed, i returned home but by going and coming back i - of course - changed a bit as well. i still doubt my every very decision, but i probably again got a little calmer about making mistakes. they happen, but as god does not place dice, they happen for a reason. i will finish my degree, i am sure. i will continue doing what i do best: to write. but i will also continue to keep those close, that have grown to be my friends. when i walked home from the city yesterday, there was a car covered in ice and snow. someone had taken on the opportunity to write something on it. it was only one word, but i made me smile: terve. it’s finnish and it literally means “health” as in a good wish. in finland it is used to welcome someone or to say hello. i wrote “moi” the informal word for hello above it and walked home with a smile. welcome 2008.
Today I somehow realized (again) what home really means. It’s no only the place that your life, your dreams, your every single day is connected to, but also a special feeling of being safe and sound. When I came home today, home, our home, I felt safe and sound, thanks to Astrid. Good night, everyone.
in january i understood home is not a place, it’s a feeling.
in february i learned that we are all made up of our dreams.
in march, north korea seemed unreal.
in april i settled home.
in may it was round pegs and square holes.
in june impossible was nothing and it were the ties that bind.
in july it was an irish state of mind.
in august i remebered things i had to
in september i failed but i gained
in october i was over there. with him.
in november o.s. re-ignited the fire.
in december god was in the rain.
2007 was when i returned to klagenfurt, it was the year when some passions were re-ignited and some died away, it was a year filled with new goals and some not reached. but it was also a year of joy, a year of tears, of dreams arising and lessons learned. i wish all of you a great 2008. wherever you may be.
exactly a year ago i remember myself sitting in the huge loft in brussels by myself. i went because of a decision that i made months before, a decision that in the months after i questioned so many times. by the time we grow up, making decisions in general seems to get harder and harder. or then it is us. because deep down inside we know who we are, where we want to be and which path - even if yet unwalked - we want to take there. if there is a tune playing to our lives we are sometimes happy to be there with the rest of the orchestra while indeed we could more: composer, conductor, creator.
I dont care if it hurts
I want to have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul
I want you to notice
When Im not around
Youre so fuckin special
I wish I was special
when i first met him at the university it was for an interview. after we left my colleague told me he had felt like an outsider once we started to talk. it was him and me. now after almost year of emails, i will get to see him again next week. i had asked him if i could come to his office once again and after some days there was a call on my phone, number surpressed. it was him. him in his very own way. “why do you easily travel to north korea but then it takes you so long to find my ofice?” he said in his unique way. worst of all i had no answer. i told him i would have loved to talk to him about his “good ranking” he got by the handelsblatt” (top 4 scientist in europe). “what do you mean by good ranking, i am up there among the best”. typical him. our talks are not only entertaining but sometimes i believe i can take a glimpse of his genius. if only for a second, but this split-second inspires me. i know his story, or at least some more or less fragmental parts of it and by him accepting me though he’s a professor and i am a 20-something not knowing what to do, he accepts me as who i am.
alzheimer’s disease leaves back nothing but emptiness. i get to witness it every day, i can hear his screaming, the battling, the inner war that only knows victims. it leaves back empty houses, torn families but no memories. it takes what we all are made of in some way or another - the memories in the notebook of our mind. there’s no ,back then’ only a ,here and now’. i know i probably have faded from his memory a long time ago, the emptiness in his eyes tells me. i say hello and we pass. but as we all will fade into the memories of those we loved and were loved by, this is probably one of the most tragic ways.
yesterday, while making my home from a birthday party, police stopped me. for the first time in my life i had to do an alcohol test. i told them i had two drinks before. after i was done (i had 0,08, the limit in austria is 0,5) we chatted for a second and they waved me off with a smile saying “at least sometimes there is people who actually tell us the truth”. well i try to, most of the time.
i went out with my hockey team last night. i don’t know, but at some part i ended up standing in a corner of the bar by myself. and all of a sudden images started flowing through my head. austria, sweden, finland, belgium - now being back here. all of a sudden i felt lonely. i was surrounded by people i knew and who knew me - but nevertheless they all faded away. can you feel lonesome in a crowd, a bar, a busy street? while everybody got drunk, i had about 5 cokes (i had to drive home) - and at some point on that 40 km drive home i found out why. while there’s the hockey team experience we share three times a week, i am wondering if i belong to them. am i one of them? (what a trivial question you might ask..) but to me belonging was always a big issue, i guess after school and a time where i certainly did not belong to anything or anyone my greatest wish was probably to turn things around. to be seen as who i am, not who i seem to be. i am not sure where i am going, actually i wonder every day. today i belonged, but then i didn’t again - my so called life. welcome.
päivi was the first finn i got to know. we met during the time i was in the army and georg had founded entree. after she left i vowed that i’d go there one day - finland, to see what is like. the rest is history, i went there for the first time on august 1st 2001 and it became my home. i never made it to tuusula, where päivi is from, but i drove by that little town time after time making my way back from helsinki to jyväskylä. yesterday, an armed high-school student shot eight people in jokela, next to tuusula. he shot them merciless after posting a video about his plans to youtube. it was after hockey practice i got the news by short message on my cell - and i couldn’t believe it. i still can’t. finland is small, a small peaceful country, a language island, mostly tightly knit communities. when i talked to päivi today, we always kept in touch over the years, she couldn’t believe it either. it’s a thing that can’t be erased from memory from now on. finland lost its innocence in one way or another.
the graveyard has one long alley, which divides the park into two sides. my grandfather’s grave lies right at it, close to the gate that divides us, the living people, from the memories inside. i saw the new marble stones encircling it right away and it looked beautiful, as beautiful as he deserves it. as most of the time when i visit his grave, i walked up to benjamin’s as well. i didn’t know him so well, i was a kid when he died. we both were. but while he died of a tumor, i was allowed to live. i was allowed to smile and laugh, to cry and moan, to love and be loved - and whenever life gets at me (as it did today) i think of benjamin. of the things he never was entitled to see or feel. the walk from my grandfather’s grave to benajmin’s is 283 steps, a small walk. but it gets me back to understanding that this is my walk. i can do it.