Journal Entries
Sun shine
Posted Apr 17, 2003
The brighter and warmer the sun is, this April 2003,
the deeper I seem to long for the mountains.
It appears, that I still can't cope with it,
after so many years,
that I won't be walking there anymore.
I thought,
these wounds were healed.
They made my heart sing,
these mountains.
Tomorrow
another
day.
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Apr 17, 2003
Not talking about the ...
Posted Apr 9, 2003
Since talking about the ... has been centralized by and at the BBC, thoughts, feelings and opinions about it cannot be shared at this H2G2.
Even postings with comments about that policy at h2g2 were/are deleted.
And because of that silence, h2g2 feels now to me as an impotent and sterile Disneyland, where we are alowed to spread black cats all over the place, but can't share a word about the ...
When the harsh life of the ... is kept outside h2g2, it seems to suggest that h2g2 is only playground for digital irrelevance.
This kind of policy kills my passion to write here, even if it has nóthing to do with the ...
Because fantasy needs real life as much as real life needs fantasy.
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Apr 9, 2003
It's all very simple
Posted Mar 29, 2003
Friday afternoon, the seventh of February 2003.
It's half past eleven in the morning and someone rings the bell of my door.
I live in a small apartment at the corner of the street, so I use to open a window of the kitchen to see who's out there for me.
It's a neighbour from the other end of my street.
She looks at me and says;"I've come to ask you to drink some coffee at my place".
"Well,that's ok", is my first reply with a slight doubt in my voice. But rather soon I get the spirit and I continue;" give me half an hour and I'll be there" . In my case that is very fast, because I'm a slow starter.
It will be the first time I meet the woman so personally during all the years that I live in this apartment.
She and her husband are in their fourties, with two daughters between fifteen and twenty. A very peaceful and friendly family in my point of view.
Precise as I am, I was there just in time.
"This is my chance to see the construction of your house from the inside",I confess honestly.
Because this house is an old farmhouse at the edge of the inner cilcle of the old centre of the city. And I expected to see an exciting and romantic ordering and construction of rooms, halls, etc.
And yes, it was even more than I expected. "This house would also for me be a favourite place to live", I tell her.
"Do you know which impression about your husband I remember most vivid"? I continue.
"Well,what"? is her inviting reply.
"That your husband made a chimney in a very skillfull way in one single afternoon and it survived all storms" .
"Is that so? Yes, he did make that long chimney. That's true. But, you know, he has also a profession in the building sector. He's an architect and he learned the knack from the buildingworkers around him. That's why", she explains.
I propose, that we will sit around the kitchentable, "for those chairs are the best for me to sit on."
"Well, that's oke; we'll sit in the kitchen".
And I inquire after the development of her two daughters. And when my picture of them becomes more and more complete, she suddenly says; "Rob is gone".
"Who,s gone?" I reply. For although I had studied a list of names at home, I had already forgotten half of it.
"Rob is gone" , she repeated, while she stared.
"Rob is gone? Rob is gone?"
It is her husband......
"Why? How?", I can speak as my first words.
"Well, he suddenly has become very agressive - very unpredictable -and because of his behaviour my backbones are broken. Probably for the rest of my life. That's what the doctors in hospital told me.
I didn't want to have a corselet of plaster for at least four months in a row. So they finally gave me one which I can take off when I take a shower"
I am perplexed.
"Rob, agressive? He was always very calm and friendly" I reply.
"Yes, that's true, but at once he exploded and acted very strange and became very agressive.
Rob lives now in a house where they work at the construction for a long time.
Didn't you know this story?"
"I never talk about neighbours in my own neighbourhood"
"Yes, he's gone already for three months and he acts very unpredictably.
I have put new locks at all my doors, for I have become very frightened.
Some nurses in hospital told me, that I'd better go to a psychiatrical setting for a while, but that's more something for him, isn't it?!?
He was agressive. Not me. Am I wright?
Years after years he swallowed aspirins, because of headaches and I often told him; "it's getting time you stop taking pills Rob",and he always reacted like; "well, it works and it's all very simple, isn't it?"
That's in fact the only thing he says nowadays, to my daughters when they visit him.
"It's all very simple. Yes, it's just very simple" ".
"I am afraid, I recognize a lot about myself in his situation. Not the violence, but the daily use of apririns as the simple way to solve problems that won't be solved this way", I confess.
"What do you mean?"
"Emotions are very strong and tough. If you swallow your own feelings, or hide them, because you can't get along with them, they start to live a life on their own inside your mind and body.
They litterary start eating your body; ulcers,headaches, eczema,bad sleeping,etc.etc.
Feelings that are pushed aside, always return many times stronger.
Inevitably.
in 1984, I suddenly became extremely depressive and lost a lot of weight.
In those days I appeared not to have any feeling with my own inner self; my own emotional life.
It's a severe revenge by the same emotions that never got any chance to be expressed by me.
Do you think, that I ever voluntarely joined therapies?
Those people hardly exist.
I lived with my back against the wall. I started to realize; "if you don't do anything NOW, it is finished, Alfredo" ".
"He believes it is all bulls*t. All those therapies and talking about feelings.
So he won't join any.
I am still very bussy what drives him.
I want to understand him.
But my back is broken.
And our divorce is sure".
"Well, it might also for you become confronting, when you start discovering how your own way of living became so interwoven with his.
Realising how you ever ended in this situation".
And after these words I'd just spoken, I can see at her eyes, that she understands.
She feels that this is the beginning of a long and tough struggle to learn painful lessons in her own benefit. To learn to focus only at her own life and that of her two daughters.
I can see in her eys, that she starts to understand, that she has come at the beginning of a total new direction in her life which - in the very end - will only make her stronger and stronger.
But how far shall she come?
How many setbacks can she cope with?
How much lonelyness can she finally bear?
You don't really know where her limits are.
Not even when someone takes a positive turningpoint in the nightmare of her life.
Searching, feeling, analysing,trying, fighting, conquering, losing,
understanding,growing.
This coming night will be about number hundred in that horrible corselet.
Her sleeping room is empty.
Her house half empty.
Only her two daughters.
Even this house, she'll have to leave this year.
No money.
Men, living as emotional handicapped, as autistic beings.
Women, who pay an incredably high price for a crisis like this and the long road that leads to it.
"My back is broken and probably for life", she almost carelessly told me in her story. Asif it is one of the many small dead end streets in her new nightmare ,"Rob".
First she's got to free her life from his name while conquering her own name again.
"I told him so often, he had to quit swallowing all those aspirins"..........
Don't ever say to me, that talking about emotions is soft.
Ask her backbones.
I am going to bed.
It appears to be sleeping time.
Twelve o'clock and seven minutes.
Tomorrow another day.
The h2g2 link is F113204?thread=250249
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Mar 29, 2003
It's all very simple.
Posted Feb 20, 2003
Friday afternoon, the seventh of February 2003.
It's half past eleven in the morning and someone rings the bell of my door.
I live in a small apartment at the corner of the street, so I use to open a window of the kitchen to see who's out there for me.
It's a neighbour from the other end of my street.
She looks at me and says;"I've come to ask you to drink some coffee at my place".
"Well,that's ok", is my first reply with a slight doubt in my voice. But rather soon I get the spirit and I continue;" give me half an hour and I'll be there" . In my case that is very fast, because I'm a slow starter.
It will be the first time I meet the woman so personally during all the years that I live in this apartment.
She and her husband are in their fourties, with two daughters between fifteen and twenty. A very peaceful and friendly family in my point of view.
Precise as I am, I was there just in time.
"This is my chance to see the construction of your house from the inside",I confess honestly.
Because this house is an old farmhouse at the edge of the inner cilcle of the old centre of the city. And I expected to see an exciting and romantic ordering and construction of rooms, halls, etc.
And yes, it was even more than I expected. "This house would also for me be a favourite place to live", I tell her.
"Do you know which impression about your husband I remember most vivid"? I continue.
"Well,what"? is her inviting reply.
"That your husband made a chimney in a very skillfull way in one single afternoon and it survived all storms" .
"Is that so? Yes, he did make that long chimney. That's true. But, you know, he has also a profession in the building sector. He's an architect and he learned the knack from the buildingworkers around him. That's why", she explains.
I propose, that we will sit around the kitchentable, "for those chairs are the best for me to sit on."
"Well, that's oke; we'll sit in the kitchen".
And I inquire after the development of her two daughters. And when my picture of them becomes more and more complete, she suddenly says; "Rob is gone".
"Who,s gone?" I reply. For although I had studied a list of names at home, I had already forgotten half of it.
"Rob is gone" , she repeated, while she stared.
"Rob is gone? Rob is gone?"
It is her husband......
"Why? How?", I can speak as my first words.
"Well, he suddenly has become very agressive - very unpredictable -and because of his behaviour my backbones are broken. Probably for the rest of my life. That's what the doctors in hospital told me.
I didn't want to have a corselet of plaster for at least four months in a row. So they finally gave me one which I can take off when I take a shower"
I am perplexed.
"Rob, agressive? He was always very calm and friendly" I reply.
"Yes, that's true, but at once he exploded and acted very strange and became very agressive.
Rob lives now in a house where they work at the construction for a long time.
Didn't you know this story?"
"I never talk about neighbours in my own neighbourhood"
"Yes, he's gone already for three months and he acts very unpredictably.
I have put new locks at all my doors, for I have become very frightened.
Some nurses in hospital told me, that I'd better go to a psychiatrical setting for a while, but that's more something for him, isn't it?!?
He was agressive. Not me. Am I wright?
Years after years he swallowed aspirins, because of headaches and I often told him; "it's getting time you stop taking pills Rob",and he always reacted like; "well, it works and it's all very simple, isn't it?"
That's in fact the only thing he says nowadays, to my daughters when they visit him.
"It's all very simple. Yes, it's just very simple" ".
"I am afraid, I recognize a lot about myself in his situation. Not the violence, but the daily use of apririns as the simple way to solve problems that won't be solved this way", I confess.
"What do you mean?"
"Emotions are very strong and tough. If you swallow your own feelings, or hide them, because you can't get along with them, they start to live a life on their own inside your mind and body.
They litterary start eating your body; ulcers,headaches, eczema,bad sleeping,etc.etc.
Feelings that are pushed aside, always return many times stronger.
Inevitably.
in 1984, I suddenly became extremely depressive and lost a lot of weight.
In those days I appeared not to have any feeling with my own inner self; my own emotional life.
It's a severe revenge by the same emotions that never got any chance to be expressed by me.
Do you think, that I ever voluntarely joined therapies?
Those people hardly exist.
I lived with my back against the wall. I started to realize; "if you don't do anything NOW, it is finished, Alfredo" ".
"He believes it is all bulls*t. All those therapies and talking about feelings.
So he won't join any.
I am still very bussy what drives him.
I want to understand him.
But my back is broken.
And our divorce is sure".
"Well, it might also for you become confronting, when you start discovering how your own way of living became so interwoven with his.
Realising how you ever ended in this situation".
And after these words I'd just spoken, I can see at her eyes, that she understands.
She feels that this is the beginning of a long and tough struggle to learn painful lessons in her own benefit. To learn to focus only at her own life and that of her two daughters.
I can see in her eys, that she starts to understand, that she has come at the beginning of a total new direction in her life which - in the very end - will only make her stronger and stronger.
But how far shall she come?
How many setbacks can she cope with?
How much lonelyness can she finally bear?
You don't really know where her limits are.
Not even when someone takes a positive turningpoint in the nightmare of her life.
Searching, feeling, analysing,trying, fighting, conquering, losing,
understanding,growing.
This coming night will be about number hundred in that horrible corselet.
Her sleeping room is empty.
Her house half empty.
Only her two daughters.
Even this house, she'll have to leave this year.
No money.
Men, living as emotional handicapped, as autistic beings.
Women, who pay an incredably high price for a crisis like this and the long road that leads to it.
"My back is broken and probably for life", she almost carelessly told me in her story. Asif it is one of the many small dead end streets in her new nightmare ,"Rob".
First she's got to free her life from his name while conquering her own name again.
"I told him so often, he had to quit swallowing all those aspirins"..........
Don't ever say to me, that talking about emotions is soft.
Ask her backbones.
I am going to bed.
It appears to be sleeping time.
Twelve o'clock and seven minutes.
Tomorrow another day.
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Feb 20, 2003
Choosing five songs
Posted Feb 1, 2003
The other day, I asked myself in public which Beatlessongs I would choose, if I had to leave them all behind, except five of them.
It would be;
x Girl
x Penny Lane
x Eleanor Rigby
and
x Yesterday.
I think I couldn't choose a fifth one; paralysed by the thought that I would automaticly exclude all the others.
So I would take four and comfort myself with the thought that the fifth one could almost be any other......*
F31870?thread=241897
*Except Octopus's Garden!
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Feb 1, 2003
Alfredo
Researcher U200370
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