Looking for a morphing. Me ==> a real somebody

Jack Adams (a hockey player, but that doesn't really matter) said this about advice.

If it's free, it's advice; if you pay for it, it's counseling; if you can use either one, it's a miracle.

I'm still gonna need yours.

This is a question to people who have already seen me live.

What the fuck is wrong with the way I look? Seriously, what is it? The clothes, the haircut, the overweight? It'd be a lot easier to do something about it if I knew what it was. And if it's the combination of the three and even more, which it probably is, pray tell me where I should start the adjustments.

There must be something wrong. Question for you, Great Red Haired Dance Machine, did I imagine it or did your almost-but-not-quite best buddy cringe when he was paired up with me for salsa? That was a lame-ass excuse for getting out that he used, and you could see and smell the flight reflex of the boy. Everybody saw it, hell, even I got it and God knows I'm not good at reading people.

Seriously, I have a problem. I'm a 17 year old overweight girl whom people almost always identify as her brother on the phone (yes, even my parents), and who keeps getting called 'young man' by polite strangers. I don't even correct them any more. What's the use, it's not like I'm gonna be seeing them again.

Soon, my Alzheimer suffering neighbour will start confusing me with my dad or her dead husband or something.

Seriously, what should I do? I admire androgyny, but it's not something I want for myself -- certainly when it's not on purpose.

I guess the first thing my mother would say is go shopping. Then it would be lose weight. I think she's given up on the hair a long while ago.

I think her ideal plan for me 'd be have me lose weight, drag me of shopping and then teach me good posture. Apparently I walk around slumped all the time and one day I'll look like Quasimodo.


Fuck me, who knows, it might even be an improvement.

I is someone else/Je est un autre/Ik is een ander

Who am I? Have I even got the right to ask such a question? To someone else than myself, I mean. Besides, what is a human being anyway? More than a name, what is it that makes us who we are? Is it our thoughts? Our memories? Our histories? Our relationships to people, animals or even things? Our genes? Our character? Our tastes? Our behaviour? All of the above? Or none of it, maybe? Is what we are in the end not who we are in the eyes of others? When you're an individual among 7 billion others, what you think of yourself hardly matters. It's what the others think of you -- as they are a bigger part of the 7 billion -- that puts the most weight in the balance. I've always thought myself observing, bordering on voyeuristic, but others often characterise me as shy and discreet; if only they knew. Voyeurism is a part of the XXI th century. What is Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever social network, but a pair of enormous goggles pointed right at all the acquaintances you 'spy' on? And not only do you spy, they also give you all the information, it's like they've installed big display windows, showing us their lives like stores show us things to make us buy. Doesn't it have something obscene? Yet we love it. We love it so much we can't stay away from it; we love it so much we're not letting our friends and neighbours do it on their own, no, we now all feel compelled to tell the world how much homework sucks, that we've run of chocolate, that we really don't like X or Y, who of course in the end will stumble upon that statement. "Never put anything in writing, son, and never trust a man with a small black moustache." Thank you PG Wodehouse, point taken. Points to Mr. Andy Warhol also, for realising long before the prime of Facebook, Netlog, Twitter, MySpace and all their siblings that everybody would be famous for 15 minutes. Perhaps we expose ourselves like they expose themselves because that way, we feel even, and don't feel like stalkers? Stalkers who are themselves stalked stay stalkers. Of course I have nothing to say. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. I have a blog where I talk about my life and my views. But paradoxes are a common thing, especially when it's about paradoxical differences between the way we think , talk, and act. Je n'ai jamais prétendu être parfaite, personne n'en a le droit et très peu de gens le font, pourtant beaucoup d'entre nous se servent de cette non-revendication comme une excuse pour leurs erreurs. N'est-ce pas ça, aussi qui définit qui on est? Nos erreurs? Comment on les corrige? Comment on les prend en main? Mon père a essayé de m'apprendre que la personne qui reconnait sa faute et vient demander qu'on l'excuse n'est jamais ridicule, que seul celui qui se trompe, le réalise et campe sur ses positions est ridicule. Et pourtant, on ne se sent jamais aussi petit et ridicule que lorsqu'on vient se présenter devant la personne à qui on a fait du tord. Pas pour le fait qu'on demande de se faire excuser, on se sent ridicule d'avoir commis la bourde qu'on a faite. Est-ce que notre manière de réagir n'a pas son importance non plus? Mais ça voudrait dire qu'on est différent à tout moment, et qu'il n'y a pas de vrai 'je'. En soit c'est pas plus mal, ça voudrait dire que qui on est, c'est nous, en direct, là en face de vous. Il faudrait qu'on soit assis et que vous nous ouvriez le crâne et analysiez toute la merde qui se trouve à l'intérieur. Un gros paquet de merde avec de rares diamants à l'intérieur, tellement petits et rares qu'on a du mal à les trouver nous-mêmes. "Le génie, c'est celui qui a deux bonnes idées." Comme c'est vrai, et je sais même plus qui l'a dite, celle-la. Je sais que c'est Proust qui a dit que les années sans souffrance étaient celles où on apprenait rien, que l'enseignement venait avec toute la merde qu'on a à traverser. Pas étonnant qu'il y en ait qui se retrouve à l'intérieur. J'ai dix-sept et il y a des jours où j'ai l'impression que l'humanité toute entière m'en veut, où mon corps est fait de plomb et où j'aurais aimé mourir. Comme n'importe quel ado pur jus, quoi. Ce ne sont que des coups de blues qu'on envoie bien vite valser. Celle-là est de moi. J'en suis relativement fière, à cause du blues/valse. Je ne suis pas fière de grand chose, alors si c'est ça ma plus grande réussite, vous voyez de quoi je tiens? D'un jeu de mots pas trop minable, mais franchement pas transcendant. Bon Dieu c'est déprimant. Ik ben wat ik ben, trek je plan daarmee -- wie is diegene die zich zo'n uitspraak kan veroorloven? Niet het buitenbeentje. Niet ik. Wat een drama is dat geweest, nu twee jaar geleden. Ik kom naar school met een hoed. Een mannenhoed. Duidelijk geen modehoed: simpel bruin, simpel vilt. Een beetje een werkhoed. Was het de kleur? Was het het model? Het duurde nog geen dag eer de tweedejaars door de school de bijnaam 'Indiana Jones' hadden gelanceerd. Na een maand deed ik de hoed niet meer aan. Tegen mezelf zei ik 'omdat het onpraktisch is op de fiets' maar ik wist het wel beter. De meesten waren met de bijnaam gestopt nadat ik hen vriendelijk had aangesproken, nog meer nadat ik hen iets agressiever berispte. Maar de jongens die het hadden gelanceerd stopten er niet mee, en toen ze de naam beu waren, begonnen ze met het deuntje. "Ta ta da taaa, ta ta daaa..." En dat bleef, ook het jaar erna. Ik was toen al intelligent genoeg om te weten dat hen klappen uitdelen niet de oplossing was. Maar ik was wel te laf om wat dan ook meer te doen dan op wraak zinnen (en alleen zinnen). Ik vind dat dingen moeten worden gekocht om gedragen te worden. Wat heb ik aan een hoed die ik enkel buiten schooluren draag? Niet veel. Dat verhaal blijft mij achtervolgen. Ik koop nu nooit meer hoeden. 't Zal voor na het secundair zijn. Bijna niets illustreert wie ik ben beter dan dit verhaal. Een beetje een pathetische figuur. Een speelbal. Iemand die niet echt voor zichzelf opkomt. Ik ben wat ik ben, en wat dat is weet niemand. Niet jullie die dit stukje hebben doorgelezen, waarvoor dank, niet ik die het mijmerend heb geschreven. Wie ik ben kan morgen drastisch veranderen. Wie ik ben kan morgen niet meer bestaan. Daar hecht ik geen aandacht aan. Ik wil mij enkel over iets uitspreken als ik kan garanderen dat mijn antwoord vastligt. En ze zal nooit helemaal vastliggen. Maar op vrijdag 5 november 2010 om 1:05 en het uur ervoor, was ik deze woorden. Magali Françoise Geraldine Marie Ghislain Bosmans aka babeluda.

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I'm looking for inspiration, the real thing, the real deal, the real Tabasco, neatly packaged and shipped directly to my brain, thank you.

If you know where to find some, please contact me.
If you can sell me some, I'll pay handsomely.
If you can give it to me in unlimited shape, I make you God.

I'm not the first or the last in search of this precious thing, but boy would I like to find it. I need it more than I love food (and believe me, I do love food).
Apparently it comes almost naturally to great writers. If you have to fight too hard to get it, writing is not your vocation.

... I guess I pretty damn well missed my vocation.
Yet I love writing! More than I love food. When I write I do not think about food or eating, and believe me I'm thinking about that most of the time. No wonder all my attempts at dieting fail.

I used to love the autumn holidays. They made me want to go out and live like a gamekeeper, with a dog, a gun and a battered jacket, spotting and hunting wildlife.
Now I just hate them, because they mean 'work until you drop'. Work for school, especially. I'm not thinking in terms of 'I have a week vacation', but in terms of 'If I finish everything by Wednesday [which I won't, sadly] I'll have half a week's worth of preparing to go back to school'.

Which adult I know told me the last year was the best? Oh, that's right... About all of them! And I haven't had a year where I've wanted to throw up from sheer disgust more than this one. Even my mother thought they had us overworking. Go figure.

Worst of all is the teachers complain quality of the work has diminished over the years. Why the fuck do you think that is? It's simple logic, a fucking law of fucking nature: increase the quantity, decrease the quality. We only have so much time on our hands, if everything gets less time, well of course it's going to be less good. And they are the teachers?

Time, 'til we have enough of it (which won't be in a near future)

Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time. Time.Time. Time. Time. Time.

Oh, sorry. You there? I was asked to write a text about time. In the philosophical way. Which is, pardon my saying, a bitch.

Edit: here be a very bad piece of writing, which has been disposed of.

But we, humanity, made time. Hours, minutes, seconds, days, weeks, months, years, all those are human inventions. Screwed up humanity, to give names to that what hurts you most, which is supposed to heal wounds, but really it's only forgetfulness that heals wounds.

Time is our craft, so our responsibility. We can't blame time, time is our creation. We can only blame ourselves.
So not to have to do that, use your time preciously. Turn pages where necessary, let things go once the end has come. But care for what is worth it as long as it's worth it. And even a bit after.
Remember the past, dream the future, live the now but not in the now.
And learn. Never stop learning, because then you'll die. Of boredom.

I despise my brother's taste.

And especially I despise his taste in music. Do you know he's been listening to the same songs on the same Green Day album for 6 months? And do you know I share a wall with this guy? I can't even listen to Tom Waits properly anymore. When he's not playing Boulevard of Broken Dreams for the God-I-don't-know like millionth time, it's the other, even more tasteless little brother who takes over. He is eleven, while the older of my little brothers is 15.

And what does the Extremely Tasteless One play? About everything that's horribly commercial and/or comes from Eurosong. Ick. Eew.

He plays Hadize or what's-her-name's Dum Tek Tek at least once a day. Help.

The longer I live here (and that's been 17 years minus 27 days now) the more I realise my mother and both my brothers have a problem with the 'repeat' feature on their respective CD-players. And when I say that, it's figurative; they never use that particular button and Lord knows that could spare them a lot of 'backwards'-pressing...
Only me and my father seem safe of this horrendous habit, probably because we both have a too large music collection to afford listening to only one song.
And even in that logic there's a glitch; my mother owns countless CDs, yet she feels she needs to listen to them in stages.
Pattern is as follows:

1. Mum picks a CD. May be new, may be old. May be terribly scratched on some songs. Doesn't matter.
2. On that CD, mum picks a song. And listens to it for minimum a week. Or a week and a half (if it's Céline Dion). Or a whole two weeks (if it's Phil Collins' Face Value).
3. Once she's listened to that song enough (read: once her children's whining about it being always the same gets on her nerves too much) she goes on to the next song. 
4. Repeating above described action until she's been through 75-85% of the album (=the songs she likes. Watch out, with Best Ofs, you're rapidly at 95%) 
5. Then, she picks another album. She might have listened to it thoroughly two months ago, no matter, she'll just do it all over again. 

And I'm trapped in a vicious circle. I'm very tolerant to music, but my family is seriously helping me to hate some songs. Not good.

Well, I won't whine too much. I'll say something nice to end this post.

Because of all these repeats, I am the biggest hit on karaoke night. Thanks, guys?

What would normal people do?

Ever had an hour to lose? I like playing a game I call 'WWNPD' at those moments. What Would Normal People Do. Normal people mostly end up having coffee. Or reading, or shopping, if they're in the city.

I like playing WWNPD at the train station. Plenty of people who have time there. Most of them who have time to lose before their train listen to music, or phone people, or sleep on the bench. I like playing WWNPD there because it feels like I'm normal. I'm waiting, I check my watch, I listen to music, I text and look around, just like everyone.

The Worst Place Ever to play what would normal people do (for me) is a marriage. You know at a marriage everyone is always talking to everyone? Small talk, business talk, oh-my-god-they-look-gorgeous-together talk.

Well, I don't.

I am extremely shy. I don't talk, I never initiate a conversation and if you try to have one with me when I'm stressed you might as well stop before you even start because you'll get nothing out of me.

When you sit alone, dressed to the nines at a wedding, lookin' around like you're lost or reading a book, coming over as the family's autist, you look pathetic. And if you start playing WWNPD, you feel pathetic and are pathetic.

I like to tell myself I'm a proud person who doesn't give a fuck about fitting in, but truth is I do. Well, I don't want to fit in, I want to disappear in the crowd. I want to be that kid you see everywhere, on the street, on the Tube, at the train station or in a store, the kid you remember vaguely from somewhere but every time you see her you forget her after your next blink.

I once wrote a whole text text about becoming just that. It's in French, and I actually had the nerve to recite it in front of 50 strangers. The audio was recorded, and those who understand are welcome to listen.

Notice the speed at which I say that text? I tend to do that when nervous. I forget to coordinate my breathing and my speech and end up speaking way too fast to get to the end of the sentence to breathe. A bit like when I write too long sentences, except there is no backspace in speech. You can only lose your face. (Perdre la face like the French say -- I love literal translations)





But in the end none of that matters, because humans tend to forget strangers when they are ordinary. Well, most humans. The kind that doesn't look around and doesn't play What Would Normal People Do. The Normal kind.

In the end, the only thing that matters is that "Time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time." --  Betrand Russell.