City Of Dreams

I am discovering, all over again, why I fell in love with Vienna in the first place. After a few broody days (everything sucks... I suck... I'll end up under a bridge chewing on my own clothes for breakfast...), my spirit is recovering. Where I yesterday only could make out a grey depressing haze of a town, today I am seeing with crystal clarity why this city is the city of my dreams.

Vienna is nothing if not inspiring. You get such terrific visual pleasure as these here bonbons, for example. Little chocolate masterpieces of human creativity. I mean, who would not want to suck on a pair of pink marzipan breasts with tiny, but oh so hard, little nipples? Or dig your teeth into a sweet marzipan baked potato with white sauce and let out a bark of satisfaction?

On the opposite side of the street, for another sort of pleasure, you get this to get you going.

Who could pass this exquisite painting without stopping as if hit by lightning? A bad bad girl, getting hit by a bad bad nun. There is a letter on the floor. I wonder what was in the letter that was sinful enough to get the girl a spanking like that? There seems to be a drawing too, and one can only begin to imagine the perverted things that were going on between the girl and her lover.

And that's then how stories are born. Through a walk in the city and looking. I am ashamed of all the time I spend inside feeling like shit, thinking I am shit, doing shit - i.e. nothing, when I could put on my boots and walk. No more wii fit, I guess. But Vienna, my love, here I come.

Tailbone quest

So, the tailbone pain is getting better, thanks to my die-hard attitude towards my wii fit training. I am getting a little confused though, as I started another program to increase my health and attractivity and reach my goal of over-all LIFE balance.

YOUR SHAPE. I realized that I was getting old when I had to gasp for air reading about this thing. Your Shape comes with a camera that scans your body and presents you with a transparent picture of yourself on screen! One of those blue ones with thin lines all over it! Sooo Matrix. Analyzing that picture, Your Shape will suggest a training regime of aerobic exercises. I remember my dad telling me about how he felt when those guys landed on the moon for the first time, like, If this is possible, anything is possible. That's how I feel now. The camera keeps watch over me as I unskillfully try to mirror the fit trainer-character on screen, Eva. Watch those arms! Eva keeps shouting at me. And then, the very next second, Perfect! You are getting so into this! Eva is sending me contradictory messages and I am getting increasingly insecure in which information I should choose to believe.

Watch those arms!

Perfect!

More energy!

You are getting so into this!

Hey, I can't do this by myself!

Of course I am the sort of person that almost unfailingly only listen to negative feedback about myself. So I desperately try harder to impress Eva, not really knowing what it is that I am doing wrong. The thought strikes me then, that maybe life is like this. Life might be a faulty software (not an original thought, I know...) that keep insisting that one is doing everything wrong, when, IN FACT, one is doing everything right. My epiphany for the day: All is well. Just keep on doing what you have to do. Be careful in believing what you think others think of you, or say to you. Be guided, dead friend, by your own wisdom only.

Unbalance

The christmas time is officially over and I am trying to find my way back to being someone who actually does something for a living. One part of me wanting only to plant tomatoes and take in stray cats, and the other wanting to actually move to LA and be all Ari Gold about my career.

As Ari Gold I would storm into Lasse Hallström's office, shouting and waving my hands.

'Lasse, you HAVE to read my script! You have to make my film! You used to be the best director ever, but you haven't done anything wonderful in AGES! Make my script and you'll be on top again!'

Of course, I don't really believe this, and of course Lasse would answer:

What do YOU have to show for yourself? At least I have made the GREATEST movie of all times.

To this, I can only nod my head in agreement and walk away with my tail between my legs. Which is funny, because that bone right at the end of the spine (and the top of the butt-crack too) has been seriously hurting for a week now. According to the german english translator it is, conveniently, called the tailbone. So, what does that mean?

I have flipped through all my Disease as Symbol books, and none of them seem to offer any spiritual clue to the tailbone problem. Conventional medicine only offers heavy pain medication, something I am not a fan of. So what to do?

At first I retreated to my old habit of creative visualization. I lit a candle, laid down flat on the floor and closed my eyes. Then, in my imagination, I stepped into my body as sort of an avatar of myself, and started visualizing drilling a hole in the bone where it hurt. I saw all the pressure burst out like a flood breaking through a crack in a dam. After that, I just sat down and sang to the pain. Which made me feel like a wonderful spiritual creature and I was sure this would heal me in no time. In fact, I was so excited about the healing singing that I had to stop singing in order to go tell my partner about it.

But the pain didn't go away, and I felt like a failed healer. So, what to do when spiritual singing in a visualization doesn't help?

I'll try anything.

My solution: Wii Fit. I have become such a fan. While swaying heavily to the left and right on this thing called a Balance Board, skiing and ski-jumping and head-butting footballs (as documented in previous post) I am trying to find my center of gravity. And finding this bodily center of gravity, I am planning to find my spiritual center of gravity. My hunch is that when the center of both have aligned (through the head-butting of footballs and avoidance of panda heads) the tailbone pain will go away as an award.

But, more importantly, I will finally find my balance of LIFE. Everything I do will magically turn to gold (success, obviously). All my talents will be used productively in whatever I choose to focus on. All my handicapped babies (unfinished work in drawers) will raise and stand proudly on perfect limbs. Men will love me, women envy me and Alan Ball will want to be my best friend.

Well, that's the plan.

Unless I decide to start taking in stray cats.

No More Soup

I have to finally admit that I won't be able to continue this soup-blog. I just can't cook anymore. It's like if some inner threshold has been activated and I am utterly unable to chop, slice, grate, fry and boil. I have no more cooking inside me.

But I don't want to bury the thing altogether, so I thought about just doing the writing bit. In this time of crossroads, it might be a good idea to throw a few sentences together every couple of days just to keep the writing ability on at least a low flame. And I just can't seem to get anything down on paper. Paper just ends up in a drawer. I have completely stacked drawers at the moment, and I refuse to put even ONE single sheet in one of them.

Therefore.

The NEW Amateur Soup Cook: Meaning, Soup - as in: Something (different words) in a pot (blog).

Spastic Mental Patient

So, it has been weeks since I have had what it takes to even write a proper email, much less anything creative or slightly 'professional', as this here blog. I have exactly 350 Euro to my name and approximately 55 000 Euro in debt from my six years of studying in the past fifteen years. My limbs are locked in constant tension from not having moved in about two years and I stopped my healthy food diet four weeks before completion. I am thinking that I might not ever write again. EVER. I just can't see myself ever having an idea, the right amount of motivational energy or creative flow again. Instead I have been resting in a fantasy about selling books in a large bookstore, one where I can fortunately disappear behind large shelves of thick travel books (or the tenth 350 page volume of Twilight) when a customer approaches.

Massive snowfall seems to follow me faithfully wherever I go.

I restent the cold.

So I hardly go outside.

This is why I got a wii, complete with a balance board and a game called wii fit.

Here is the product of two university educations. One in arts and one in writing. One therapy coaching education and several semester long courses in anything from chinese ink-painting to shamanic healing journeying.

A spastic mental patient dressed in a MJ T-shirt.

Dead Until Fried Buckwheat Paddies

I wandered around Waterstone's today pretending to just aimlessly look for nothing special, holding securely in my hand some Tolstoy, just to prove my literary superiority. Then, thinking someone might think I hadn't read Anna Karenina before (which I of course have), I decided to exchange it to something by Iris Murdoch.

In fact, I was on a determined search for the True Blood books by Charlaine Harris. It was almost as if I was pretending even to myself that I was actually there to get something by, let's say, Iris Murdoch, and then, oh, just by accident, sort of slipping in a Dead Until Dark just for some silly fun on the side.

I can only remember doing something similar when buying condoms those first times, and sort of hiding them between a toothbrush, some news magazine and a chocolate bar. When buying condoms, I remember being achingly aware to not get at the same time anything that would create a story. Like I could not get condoms and lipstick. Or condoms and tampons. Or condoms and even things like hair spray. I didn't want the person at the cashier to think Oh, what a slut! She must really want it, buying condoms and lipstick and hairspray and all...

I was not going to ask for those books. That would be too embarrassing. So I walked around with this la-la-la-lala face for some time, just hoping to stumble upon those guilty pleasure books somewhere. But even when I carefully went over the fiction A-Z/H section for the third time, I could not detect Charlaine anywhere. It dawned on me then, that they might not be under fiction at all, but under Horror. I sighed in relief. And so I sailed, slowly, unsuspiciously, along the long cashier counter where three handsome young men were working, hoping they wouldn't notice me, and if they did, that they would please see the Murdoch books in my hand.

But, weirdly, there were no Charlaine to be found in the horror section either. I sat down then and opened instead Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea. I couldn't manage to read even one sentence without wanting to strangle myself rather than to continue reading. And so I ran up to the cashier and pleaded for someone to please show me where the hell they were hiding the True Blood books. He pointed me in the direction of Horror repeating (sensing my urgency) To the left, the Left...

And, finally, there they were. All glossy and shiny and lined up one after the other. I couldn't believe I had missed them before. And so I had to put down The Sea, The Sea in order to stack my seven True Blood books. Ahum. And then I sort of just forgot it there, among Lovecraft and Stephen King...

Dead Until Fried Buckwheat paddies with basil yoghurt

3 dl cooked buckwheat

handful of basil leaves

a few capers

sun-dried tomatoes

a pile of grated parmesan

samlal oelek

vegan stock

pinch of salt

Mix (with a handmixer) in a bowl the buckwheat, basil leaves, capers, sliced sun-dried tomatoes and sambal oelek, a minute until roughly 'chopped'. Then add the rest (the parmesan, a teaspoon of stock and salt) and mix to a nice dough.

Make nice paddies and cover them in a mix of black and white sesame seeds and poppy seeds. Fry in a pan until hard on both sides.

Yoghurt: Mix together goats yoghurt with a 2 cm piece of ginger, 1 clove of garlic, basil leaves, and a pinch of salt. Make some avocado dip too so you have some range...

Non-Robotic Lamb Meatballs

I haven't spoken to a single person today. Not in person, anyway. Even at Sainsbury's, as I desperately wanted to pay at the human cashier, a tired looking man just shook his head and pointed to the robot cashier on the other side.

At least, the thing had a voice. Please, take your bags! Please. The metallic voice might as well have shouted Hurry up you lousy good-for-nothing, you are yesterdays news! Take your shit and move along! Please! We are trying to work here.

I was strangely depressed walking home with my two orange plastic bags, feeling a little guilty. I had, once again, forgot my canvas bag and so used the worlds resources shamefully and selfishly. And was I, on top of all, a part of the worlds economic down-fall, as I am just too slow to pick up my bags, slowing the cash-flow down in a way that someone could calculate to the precise percentage... I'll stop here.

To my great joy the phone rang the moment I stepped in the door. Oh hurrah! I basically threw the bags on the floor (not caring about my dad's voice in my head Caroline, for God's sake! Never pack the eggs lowest in a bag! You must put them on top! Why? Why can't you ever learn this?) and shoot like a rocket, grabbing the phone on my way, to the sofa.

Hello? I answered excitedly. For all I knew, it might be Alan Ball or A Friend or at least my mother. After a moments hesitation, a strange woman's voice talked back.

V: Have you considered changing bank...

No, I said back, but she didn't stop to hear me out. I realized then, that I was trying to communicate with a robot, again. And that's how it went the hole day.

Hello? Friendly me.

Have you considered The Kitchen Specialists Special Christmas...

NO.

Ring-ring.

C: Hello? A little less friendly, but hey, how many such calls can a girl get in a day?

V: Have you considered changing your cars tires...

C: NO. NO AND NO!

Ring-ring.

C: Yes?

V: Have you considered paying your bills...

C: NEVER.

Ring-ring.

V: Have you considered the home service of...

V: Have you considered renting a car within the...

V: Have you considered joining the worlds largest...

C: Have you considered to shut the fuck up?

Man does it feel good to shout at the top of ones lungs. Even if only to a robot.

Non-Robotic Lamb Meatballs

500g minced lamb

1 egg

a spoon of breadcrumbs

a cup of water

the rind of two lemons (grated)

parsley, finely chopped

2 big cloves of garlic, finely chopped

salt and pepper

Mix all the above in a bowl.

Sauce

1 yellow onion, finely chopped

1 can chopped tomatoes

a little sugar or molasses

salt and pepper

Let the onion fry for some minutes before adding the rest, then let it simmer for about 10 min. Make nice, big balls with the meat and pop into the pan (must be a large pan!). Cook for about 15-20 minutes. Serve with red or black rice. Sprinkle over fresh herbs, like basil or thyme...

Yum. Thanks Anna for recipe!