Curriculum Vitae

 

One, two, three, four, five and so on. The earliest memory, you say? Let me think. Ah yeah, that’ll do just fine.

In the beginning, there was only silence. I had just been flushed out of my intrauterine panic room, and my still gummy eyes were trying to adjust to the rather intense light. Where I had been until only a couple of minutes ago, there was no light at all. And now that strange person was holding me by my shrivelled-up feet. Upside down. I could tell, even with all the light and the state my eyes were in, that the woman wanted to raise me higher, but there was the cord. So, she cut the cord and lifted me up a little bit more. The loss of connection to my previous supply system and, of course, the slap on my behind made me scream at the top of my lungs. But I suppose that was the purpose of the whole thing all along, to see if my lungs were working properly.

The second pivotal memory. I can’t really put my finger on the point in time when this happened, you see. But there was this one day when my parents set me down and never picked me up again. I’m still trying to picture when that was.

Fast forward to the age of eleven. In the hospital again. I think the second time after the earliest memory. But I could as well be dead wrong. I was in pain, you see. A grumbling appendix, the doctors said, and had the nurses put a thick layer of ice around the appendix side. The pain didn’t stop, though. The appendix’s torture only made way for some more agony due to frostbite. In the end, however, it had turned out that they better should have applied some heat to the area. Supposedly, this is how you deal with a urinary tract infection. It was also found out that one of my kidneys – the one on the right-hand side – was way smaller than the one to the left, and severely crippled. A future kidney donation for monetary benefits has never been an option for me.

As a good German at the tender age of twenty-four, I pocketed my first masters in business administration and mechanical engineering. I was also offered a fully paid PhD research position to further the studies of my thesis. But for some reason, I decided to do something completely different.

At the age of thirty-one, I found myself working as a kindergarten teacher in a pre-school in Wuhan, China. My cheeky monkeys were all between the age of four and five. They had become quite fond of the exotic and hairy creature from the West. Sometimes they would even gang up on me, tackle me down and climb around on me. On one of those occasions, numerous tiny hands were all over my face, getting hold of my beard. I had been studying Chinese for quite some time and even passed for a native speaker (on the phone where I could hide my Caucasian features), but dialects and children’s voices made me walk right into the trap of homophony. With their little fingers combing through my beard, their high-pitched giggles and mumbled words sounded like they were calling me their big ape. That was when I started to call them monkeys, as kind of a revenge and also because most of them were born in the year of the monkey. It was only later that day, sitting in the bus on my long way home, when I realised that they weren’t calling me 大猴子 (dahouzi), big monkey but 大胡子 (dahuzi), bearded.

After mastering in Chinese and Mongolian literature, a friend of mine planted the idea in my head to work for his company, which also had a couple of offices in Ireland. Mainly to improve my English, which back then was not anywhere near a position to compete with my Chinese in terms of proficiency.

Now I’m here in a city situated on the picturesque Wild Atlantic Way, doing creative writing classes and again an idea of doing something completely different came out on top. And again, the countdown has started: five, four, three, two, one …

Oil on Canvas

 

I am restless. I don’t know why. It’s the night from Monday to Tuesday and I haven’t put anything useful on paper in regards to the assignment for today. Write either six haikus or a pro or anti Valentine’s day story. Sounds pretty straight forward, I’d say.

But what I’ve come up with so far is utterly pathetic and unentertainingly boring. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at it again. Is this writer’s block? It definitely feels like something I haven’t felt in a very long time. And even back then, when I did, I didn’t know what it was. A word like constipation then came to mind. Creatively constipated, I thought, I was.

Even if I left the whole assignment thing aside and try to write about anything that comes to mind, I don’t succeed. It’s almost like my creative channels have been glued shut.

It usually works like this: I just pick some random first lines to start with. Something that is catchy and draws the reader in. I like to think of myself as being particularly good at this.

Once I have the first sentences, which I rarely change as the story develops, the ideas spread like a wildfire. Everywhere in my brain the synapses go crazy.

Just imagine a calm surface of a random body of water. And then use an ordinary pipette and set one single drop of oil carefully somewhere on top. You can see how quickly the oily rainbow colours spread all over the water. That’s also the speed my ideas for the stories tend to grow.

Sometimes, if my thoughts run wild, it’s like you haven’t set the drop of oil gently onto the surface but let it fall down from a distance, the oily rainbow spreads in ripples, stirring the creativity up even more.

But at the moment, nothing like this is happening. Far from that. It is more like having a huge bathtub full of oil and a single drop of water tries very hard to merge with the oil. It’s simply not going to happen. Physics, pure and simple. Or chemistry for that matter. The drop of water will be sliding across the surface of the oil without any effect at all. Nothing, niente, nada, nix.

 

While I was trying to put my current dilemma into words here, some thoughts got caught in my frontal lobes’ selective attention department. One of the thoughts was about how unfortunate an institution this Valentine’s day actually is.

Come the first of February, a big cloud is approaching. It gets heavier and darker with every day it comes closer to the fourteenth. Romantic relationship’s judgement day. The performance of this particular day is a measure of how successful your relationship skills are. At least it feels like this.

Did you manage to get a reservation for the best restaurant in town, or are you taking her out for pizza at Napoli’s? What’s her favourite food, anyway? Maybe take her on a short city trip over the long weekend? But where to on this short a notice? Admit it, you weren’t paying much attention when she had her hint dropping day in late January, am I right?! How about roses then? How many did you get for her last year? Does she even like them? Or was it lilies? A fucking booby trap of a day!

And it is even worse for singles. So, what do you do? Probably call up your last mistake and see if she is available and desperate enough to do this. Then you have another awkward date. It doesn’t matter where you take her, but make sure the booze is cheap. So, you get drunk and have bad sex. Then you sneak out of her apartment as soon as she’s fallen asleep, delete her number and go home. At least you haven’t spent Valentine’s alone watching a film on your laptop; that would have been depressing, wouldn’t it?!

And if you nevertheless feel a little bit weary on the morning of the fifteenth, you still have the option of calling in sick or hope that Pancake day on the twenty-eighth will be more successful.

Confessions of a Feline Mind

I do not seem to care about anything apart from myself. I like to ignore people, they say. But you know, it is not just that I blank them, I really ignore them. So I put a lot of effort into the action.

The thing is, you always have to be aware of what is going on around you, or otherwise you will miss ignoring people. By that I mean, I withdraw attention from a person deliberately. I always do that to get their attention. You see, that is how it works. Reciprocity is out of balance and needs to be restored. At least that is what people think. Cat people they call themselves, and live under the impression that they understand us. But under the cold prism of truth they do not – nobody understands cats, not even we ourselves.

I only ignore certain people. All would be too easy and that is boring. I like challenges. It challenges me to just ignore a particular group of people. That is usually the group that gives me the most attention already. And that is why I can afford to ignore them.

I do this because I am proud. Too full of pride, some might say. Some might even venture to say, my pride eats me up from the inside. But I could not care less. Well, I do care, but only briefly. Once I am sure, I have got their attention, I carry on ignoring them.

You may also have noticed that I tend to ignore people when they have crossed or criticised me. That is right. But I do not do it just for fun. I do it only when I do not agree with them. Which I never do. That is why I ignore them. I never agree with any of them because they are beneath me.

And then there are the people I do not ignore, because I cannot afford it. I pay close attention to them, because they do not take any notice of me. I suppose, deliberately. I have heard them referring to themselves as dog people.

Those kind of people usually have very little use for the likes of us cats. For me that means reciprocity is imbalanced. Then I generally take action. I jump on their lap when least they expect it. Or just prowl around their legs. Or I climb up the back of their armchairs, position myself close to their head and then I start purring into their ears, unexpectedly.

But if this does not help to get their attention I, in some very hard cases, have to resort to even more drastic measures. I remember one occasion where I had to climb up the drapes and jump onto the ignoramus’ back to compel that dog person’s attention.

But once I have got what I want – their attention –, I start ignoring them immediately. Of course, only after I have outrun them.

Changes

It is around four o’clock in the morning on a cold and windy summer day at the Irish west coast – no rain, though. You were just woken by the remnants of a birthday party next door. The last guests were still outside talking loudly, making noise. And then, all of a sudden, a vacuum full of silence. They were gone, from one second to the other. Now, someone is cleaning in front of the house. Sweeping the floor noisily. Since going back to sleep is not an available option at the moment, you decide to have a cigarette at the window.

It is one of those few moments, when you get the feeling that you are alone in the world. But there is no loneliness. There is only a certainty that you are a single human being – detached. The connections you usually have to other people, don’t feel as strong now as during the rest of the day. But now it doesn’t bother you. You feel like floating, free to go wherever you want to go and to do whatever you want to do, be whoever you want to be – probably your-self.

You feel like leaving. Leaving the place and people behind – only taking the memories with you. Just some change. You read somewhere that this hour of the day is called “the hour of the wolf”. It is the hour of change, the hour between night and dawn, when the new day is about to begin. A new day full of change – new opportunities, new people and new ventures.

You still feel a bit tired, but you are not ready to go back to sleep, yet. It somehow feels like travelling. When you have arrived in a new place, early in the morning. Everything is completely new and everything is still possible. Everything is exciting.

Watching the clouds go by. Listening to just a few seagulls – the early birds – while most of their kind have still their heads dug under their wings. You’re making plans. No, not really making plans, just letting the mind wander. Like brainstorming, only without the storm. Everything comes by itself, nothing is forced. Thoughts come and go, some stay, others just fly by.

Slowly, with time, people and places come back to you. (Or are you coming back to them?) No, not really places, but definitely people. People who are important to you. People you don’t want to miss in your life. People you deeply care about. People you love. And this love turns detachment into attachment. Not instantly, but slowly and surely.

And this very comforting feeling of attachment wraps you up in a warm and cosy blanket and you are eventually ready to go back to sleep.

Ovary

Ovary in itself is not a weird word. Not at all. As we all know, the ovary is a very essential part of the female reproductive system and that fact makes the word ovary an important rather than a weird one. It is, moreover, the circumstances it has been used in, which makes it a weird word to me. Or was it the circumstances that were weird in the first place?

I don’t remember his name. But this shouldn’t prevent me from telling the story, should it? Of course, he had a real name, a Chinese name, but I can’t remember it, because the events have obscured my memories. Maybe later it will come back to me, while I am reading to you. If so, I am going to let you know. But for the time being we’ll have to go without it.

There’s something that I remember about him, though. He was balding. That’s what it was. And you could clearly see that he was overly conscientious to hide it. The comb over looked so desperately elaborate, it could have been easily taken for one of those traditional Chinese ink paintings – an abandoned pavilion on top of a lonely hill, surrounded by weeping willows, mourning the bearer’s receding hairline.

He was one of my student at the time when I was giving language classes for adults in China. He was one of those students who never said a word during class but became quite inquisitive after all the others had left the room. He always allowed himself plenty of time to get his belongings back into his knapsack. This way making sure that the other students had already vacated the room so that he could ask his questions without risking to make a proper fool out of himself. But he wasn’t a fool, he was only a bit bloody-minded.

There is something else that I remember about him. And maybe it will help me to recall his name. When he was smirking, his mouth and overbite looked like an excavator’s shovel covered by too small a tarp. The shovel prongs – it seemed – were sticking out from under the tarp.

When learning a foreign language one ideally tries to study it with the assistance of a native or near native speaker. And since most of the Chinese people could not afford to go abroad and study their preferred language properly first hand, so called foreign experts were called upon to upskill the people of the People’s Republic of China in any desirable language.

However, not all of us who came to the Middle Kingdom had an inkling of how the Chinese language works, let alone the pronunciation. To be honest, only an insignificant number of foreign experts were able to speak Chinese. To help all the others, the Chinese were more than willing to find a suitable solution – names more familiar to the foreign expert’s ears and tongues were taken on. The class rooms where filled with Peters, Pauls and Marys during English lessons, while mostly Wolfgangs and Hildegards attended German classes and Chinese Carmens and Fernandos could be seen studying Spanish.

I mentioned the near native speakers because it was a common practice to sell non-native speakers for native ones. People will pay more money when they are under the impression of being taught by native English speaker, for example. I had been chosen to pretend to be Marcus from Scotland. This was my boss’ idea. He was a sleazy spiv from Hong Kong. And proud to be in the possession of a British passport, he hated his fellow Chinese brothers and sisters from the mainland. Instead he liked to fleece them by selling them fake mother tongues.

I watched a lot of Sean Connery films, back then, to get an idea of the Scottish accent but gave up soon, because what is an accent to a person who doesn’t even know how to speak the language. I don’t know what my colleague Natasha, the enigmatic beauty from Siberia, did. A pale and lanky ginger herself, she was supposed to come across as Irish. Maybe she developed a liking for Liam Neeson?

It was in one of my first classes that I gave in English when I met him. There was something disturbingly eerie about this man and I don’t know what exactly it was. I don’t think it was his frog-ish appearance – his flat head with gibbous eyes, prongs for teeth; neckless, stout, square-ish torso and thin but short-ish limbs. The longer I looked at him – at his over bitten shovel smirk, his puffed-up eyes and his artsy fartsy hairdo – the more I knew that he was going to be difficult to deal with.

I’m so sorry, but I still can’t remember his real name. And no matter how hard I try, it won’t come back. At least not in time for me to finish the story here. So let’s just assume that his name was Li, Mr Li.

Everyone had already chosen a name and most of the names were actually nice and real ones. Only one wasn’t. But Mr Li insisted on keeping it. We told him what it meant in Chinese. Even showed him pictures. But he liked the sound of it. It had a very nice ring to it, too, he said, and stubbornly refused to take on another name. That’s how the word became a weird one to me, because of these peculiar circumstances. He was so adamant about being called Mr Ovary Li.

Ennui (In Praise of Philip Glass)

You’re wondering, if I am bored. And I say, yes, I am bored. Which is not to say, I am boring, mind you. But this is for others to judge. To be bored usually is a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement. Boredom, as it happens, is defined as an unpleasant, transient affective state in which one feels a pervasive lack of interest and hence has difficulties concentrating on the current activity.

Being the person that I am, I happen to have a low boredom threshold. This basically means that I am hardwired to pursue novelty and inspiration, and to run as fast as I can from admin work and drudgery.

Susan Sontag is supposed to have said that “The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” But as with many things in life, I venture to disagree. It is not to be avoided, it is to be sought after.

I am sure he does not like it when I say this and most of you will definitely not agree with me on it, however, I think Philip Glass’ compositions are boring, causing boredom. But I will come back to my claim later in this essay – if only for the sake of contradicting myself.

I am bored when I am on the train. That is basically the reason why I get on a train, in the first place. And I try to get a window seat, as well, all the time. Seeing houses, people, cows and sheep pass by, I soon get lost in thoughts, space out, which already is a reactive response to boredom. It is a meditative state in which I can become my most creative self. And do you know who helps me with that? You may not believe me, but it is Philip Glass.

I am bored and I sit there close to the window, listening to Philip Glass’ pieces on my headphones and my mind won’t stop coming up with idea after idea and thought after thought. And my hands won’t get tired of putting those thoughts into words in a file on the laptop in front of me, while houses, people, cows and sheep fly past. The trick with being creative with the assistance of the new technologies is, to be able to withstand the temptations of ordinary distractions like the deep spaces of the internet. Do something for you, instead of with you. Use your boredom wisely.

I have to correct myself yet again, Philip Glass’s music is not boring at all, but it helps me to get the most out of a situation when I am bored. It is like a state of ecstasy. Boredom does not only give us the time but also the freedom we need to do the things that are good for us. It smooths the way for us to disconnect and gives us free rein over ourselves, meaning our mental faculties, our very own creativity.

If you have come to the point where you can accept boredom for what it is – an opportunity and not a threat, to be avoided – then you will be able to get the most out of it for yourself. Use your boredom wisely.

I am bored at work. Everyone might have already been given the opportunity to attend meetings and workshops, which seem specifically designed to put all attendees to sleep. From an evolutionary point of view, sleep – with its inherent exposure to dangers of all kind – poses a threat to the individual’s life. Boredom, like pain, is often protective, serving to spur us away from repetitive and predictable experiences and situations of entrapment that it would be in our best interest to escape.

I am bored when I am out with people who I do not have any connection to. From a spiritual point of view, this can be life-threatening as well. Boredom, it seems, might also be so universally despised, because it is indicative of an unhealthy mental state. Being surrounded by people who do not share your interests are preventing you from becoming who you are supposed to be.

And yet again, Philip Glass’ compositions are not numbing my senses, they rather spur my creativity with their repetitive waves of innovation. An explanation for this rather oxymoronic phenomenon is that the repetitiveness of his compositions lures you into a boredom-like state which the music itself is going to interrupt soon enough when he changes only one single note in a sequence, at a time. This very note drags you out of your lethargy and sends you off into the realm of inspiration. It is like whipping a top. It spins and spins around, but keeps getting slower, which we may even want to call drifting into boredom. Then you whip the top, like Philip Glass whips the one single note in the sequence, and it picks (you) up again. You are back to attentiveness.

When I am bored, I see it as a reminder to change something. Boredom shows me that I am not developing myself further with the things I do. It shows me that I am stagnating. And this is what we have to avoid at all cost – inertia. Boredom helps us to identify our indolence. And by avoiding lethargy we can also spur our creativity.