23rd to the 29th of January

Hello, again my friends and dear readers. The last week has been pretty stressful because Kindergarten sometimes gifts you a virus that then leads to you and the wife working from home with a sick child that also demands, needs and gets attention. We are on the up again and there is only a slight cough left. So after going to Ikea and building stuff for the room of the little one, I can sit down and type away for a bit.

23rd of January: “Describe a memorable person you met just once and might not see again”

Easy. First time in Shanghai, the year is 2009 and everything is in full swing to prepare for the Expo next year. On my rides on the subway there I make it a habit to colour in the lives of people there with me. So this might be the first or second time with me alone on the train. I stand as I don’t want to take a seat better suited for someone with a handicap, an old person or a pregnant woman. There, right next to me is a woman. Not pregnant. A pretty woman. In a green dress. A traditional dress. In matching colours her make-up and some sort of ribbon in her hair. I listen to the Amity Affliction on my headphones. Something about water and dying. Their music makes me happy. I smile. The woman in the green dress smiles back at me. She is maybe in her mid-thirties and her smile has something warm and motherly. She looks Malaysian. I think. And I wonder what her job is. In my mind, she performs an instrument. Something I don’t know the name of. The thing where when they fight in the rain in the movie. To me, she played that part in the movie. She is relaxed and handles the strings with skilled long and strong fingers. On the subway she now runs her fingers through her hair on one side, the side without the ribbon and he fingers are long and strong. I smile again and am probably right about some things.

24th of January: “Alternate universe revenge”

The prompt is to get revenge on someone in a parallel universe without consequences. I don’t really know where I would execute revenge of some sort. I usually forgive and don’t believe in revenge doing anyone any good. So far things have turned out in sometimes surprising, mostly positive ways. If there is some sort of revenge I wish there would be to see people that wronged you and are on horrible paths just have to live with the consequences and their conscious. So I wish them a conscious. A guilty one and for them to feel that until they make it right. In an alternate universe, I would probably try to get revenge on Nazis. I’d be a Nazi-punching version of Captain America but me and German. That’d be cool but is also a bit on the nose.

25th of January: “There is power in the hair”

Now, this is fun. The prompt mentions characters that have power in their hair. But who would be Rapunzel, Samson or Lady Godiva in a modern story? Mine would be Chris. Chris is a metal singer. He wears leather trenchcoats and his long black hair just ends right below his belt. A usually studded belt. Chris feels with his hair. He can sense people’s presence anywhere around him for what might be about two meters. He can read what they feel and feel with them. This is so overwhelming and exhausting that only one thing helps. Scream and shout and be in the moment and produce fine, heavy music that lets crowds go wild and ecstatically mosh. Then his head and hair go wild but inside him there is calm. A tranquillity that lasts for hours after a gig and helps him go about his life with the power. His life as a psychiatrist. Where he goes deeper and helps in the most effective way. Through his hair, but no one knows that. Just that this great psychiatrist is also a heavy musician. This does seem unusual for some, but man, have you seen his luscious hair?

26th of January: “The most enjoyable moment by yourself recently”

Easy. This moment was this morning. After a stressful week of balancing a lot of things with a small hint of comedy throughout I looked forward to my trip to the lake. Today has been -4 degrees (Celsius) and the water in the lakes around Leipzig is about 3 degrees. So I have a bike ride of roughly 12 kilometres one way to the two lakes I frequent and alternate between. The bike ride alone is something I enjoy tremendously it comes down to an hour of uninterrupted podcasts. Podcasts about comedy, music, politics or interesting people. Time for myself. I then shock my body after the first half of podcasts into a more awake and even happier state. I walk into the water. I stay there. Breathe deep. I watch how the seasons and weather influence me and everything around me when I am just a tiny sexless human in a body of water. Only to get out, grow back my sex and bike back with smart, interesting or funny people in my ear, but alone otherwise. That is 1 hour plus that I tremendously enjoy and gives me more energy to deal with whatever comes at me. The cold might sound harsh or the whole ordeal difficult. It’s not. It’s energizing and just like going to the gym sometimes I don’t feel like going but every time I feel better having taken that time to myself. The gym is just something more people do and relates to I guess.

27th of January: “A drone eye view of your neighbourhood for aliens”

The aliens would feel right at home right away. The first thing they see from their tiny bug holes of windows is another star. I white star inside a red circle. For us humans it’s clearly a huge bottle cap, for them a star that might indicate our alliance to some sort of galaxy politics. As opposed to the favourite beer of Punks and alternative people in Leipzig. They don’t know it is a brewery and I believe they would be surprised by the smells that greet them. Theo Von once said he would offer Aliens something to eat first. The smells of the brewery might give them wrong ideas about the diets we humans are on. They would then notice all our primitive multicoloured spaceships that take up most of the room where we could roam and they would ask themselves how they push their baby carriages through the streets as they have litters of five that sit in big strollers next to each other. I am sure they would also right away be able to make out differences in the status of us humans. Like some live in big concrete buildings but there are also neatly arranged tiny houses with lots of green bushes used as walls and fences that are all exactly the same height. Neat, but probably for poor people as the houses there are small. They would also find the Kindergarten in front of our house and deem that too small. The 150 tiny humans in there would basically just hold the litter of 30 families. Very small!

28th of January: “100 miles per hour. Scared or exhilarated. Who is driving?”

I had to convert this to more commonly used metrics. That is 160 kilometres an hour. Given we would drive in Germany I am not scared at all. That is only 30 kilometres an hour more than the maximum limit I would wish this country has. If the person driving has a driver’s license this is not something to be scared of. Now if my wife drives, I might be a bit scared. I have never seen her drive, but if she renews her license and gets a German one and brushes up on the rules. Safe! Anyhow, I like to do the superman thing. I roll or let the window down and have my hand form the silhouette of Superman and fly through the wind. At 160 this is only fun for a couple of seconds as the wind is strong and everything is loud. So up the window goes and my hand grasps the handhold above my door. Not because I am scared, just to hold on to something and because it is there. Am I the only person using these things? Why are they there? I wish we had a limit of 130 kilometres an hour. Or maybe 160 kilometres. All the tiny penis-plagued car fans would now have cars that are rather useless and the Autobahn would be safer and people would drive more relaxed. I take my hand off the handle above the door, reach for a beer in my backpack and open it. It’s a free country. Exhilarating a bit. Scary not so much.

29th of January: “A sphere beneath a tree”

There it is. A tiny sphere. Something shiny. Something that glows and moves erratically. I get closer. There are more of those spheres. They glow in a greenish yellow. All moving around. No sound but the birds in the tree. No light but the little glowy spheres. I get closer. Some of the spheres scurry into the leaves of the tree. One remains. It moves closer. Closer to the hand that I held out. It’s a Firefly. Glühwürmchen. Glowy worm. I think both descriptions are wrong. They should be called charge flies. They don’t charge you. They just glow like the star stickers we put on our children’s room ceiling. The ones that you have to charge with light so that they glow for a bit. This is how the butt of those charged flies looks. It’s more like a charging sticker that gives off some light rather than the inherent shine and glow of a light bulb. Still cool that something out there in nature can “glow”. Worms don’t fly. There is no fire in any insect but the creatures are fascinating nonetheless. Have a great week and look for a sphere beneath some trees. They might be fallen apples and there was some dude who got great ideas from that.