No happy ending...

And suddenly you realize your life has turned into a soap opera of a level nobody even wants to watch. You go over the cliche lines of musicals and pop songs as a soundtrack for your personal drama. There have been many soundtracks so far, acquiring more meaning with every listening. Some even manage to make you cry.

I will meet more MEPs in Brussels today. Finally. Think About It must be disappointed by now, after almost one month of silence. And I am going to take up my life again between the lines. That's the plan... at least. This soap doesn't need to go on. Fairy tales or subtile fiction would be welcome ...

'Juicy meat', bloody corpse

My life a labyrinth, my weekends a quest. An emptiness that desperately needs to be filled. Images, words, these endless thoughts. The third weekend in a row the railroads lead me to Leuven and Brussels. My country. Brussels, my capital. Leuven, the student's heart. I was a tourist in the Katholic University of Leuven, taking pictures during the Anthropology and Disability lecture, executing my own anthropological research of 'the Belgian anthropology student'as a participant observer. One desillussion richer?

I don't know. What I know is that my first impression of the boy with the colourful South-American bag was disrupted after 2 minutes. He was sitting next to me, totally in line with my positive prejudice of the alternative, open-minded 'I love culture'-student. But then he grabbed a paper bag. I could smell the odour of baked dead corpses. Suddenly I tried to distant myself from the situation, imagine myself in a fake world. He became a wild animal, clawing his fingers in the dead flesh of another animal that he didn't even kill himself Ribs. Í've seen people eating 'meat' before, 22 years long. But never so close, never so particulary devouring, never during an Anthropology of the Body lecture while a confused professor talked incessantly about the traditions and symbols of the Himba-tribe in Namibia. The boy kept tearing the muscles, skin, veins, fat from the animals bones. Cooked and baked of course, the mimicry of seasoning and deformation, but that didn't fool my eyes to see the animal inside. The boy, a coward lion, licking his lips by putting the body parts of another's pray in his mouth. A pray that was still alive some days before. A pray he probably wouldn't have want to touch with his lips and tongue when she (the animal) was still an innocent victim in a factory farm, a pray he wouldn't have dared to kill. How many people would eat animals if they had to kill them with their bare hands and devour them uncooked without the sauce of transformation. An absent referent. When the dead animal corpse becomes 'meat'. The lion/boy kept putting pieces of animal in his mouth for about half an hour. There was a girl sitting next to him. His girlfriend? "Wilt ge ook een stukske? (do you also want a piece?) he asked her. She took over the half eaten skeleton and ripped a bite a flesh from the bones. You could almost hear the muscles break. The female lion gets the left-overs, the male takes the lion's part.
When there were only bones left, he put it back in the bag. The bag on the writing desk in front of his chair. Too make it worse he told his friends how 'tasty' and ' juicy' the flesh around the animal ribs tasted. The girl confirmed as a faithful female lion does. Maybe I wouldn't be a good anthropologist anyway. Even my 'own culture' takes me to the edge of vomiting from time to time...

(me, reading The sexual politics of Meat on the train)

Foolish

1 april 2009, probably the first April's fools day that I didn't fool anyone. Why should I, when the world is fooling with me all year? I am the fool in the cardgame. Foolish. Fool. A strange tasting word, slightly bitter. Synesthetic, you would say, tasting words on your tongue while you write them, happy to use an unusual blue-ish one in a banal context.

There are things I can write. About the young purple heath in Zonhoven, the dog's tail dancing some meters in front of me, my grandparents showing their love in fresh tomatoes with spices, in watching a daily tv-quiz together and correctly guessing all the answers in the second round (even though we know we are only correct because the other candidate answered the same series of questions just some minutes before), by an soja dessert they kept in a corner of the fridge in case their only vegan grandchild would visit them finally. I love them. On my way I had been reading a book about a grandfather begging for euthanasia. Damn, euthanasia is everywhere the last week: a Belgian 93-year old went on a hunger strike because the doctors refused her a death in dignity, a documentary on the television about EXIT, an NGO in Swiss that helps people in killing themselves. Just knowing that my grandfather personally went to the city office on his bike to declare he wants a 'humane death' in case his health doesn't allow him to cut trees and collect stones anymore. Will life loose its worth for my opa when his bike does not allow him a ride anymore? Come on, he is only 81, is healthier than any other person his age I know. I understand the wish of a goed-death, I am just too selfish to think about saying goodbye. Even my 17 year old cat, whose furry skin has grown too large for her boony body, will live an eternal life in my perfect world.

There are things I can't write about. So I do. And fail... and miss... more than ever.

When does my reflection show who I am inside...

Twintig centimeter haar armer. Misschien wel net zoveel als ik spaarde in 5 jaar. Twaalf veganburgers rijker, twee statistiekboeken armer (die leven nu weer veilig in de Hasseltse bibliotheek). Het leven is altijd een beetje geven en nemen, het wordt gezegd, zeggen ze, ach wat.

Zonnig Limburg in de lente, narcissen en blauwklokjes in een Maastrichts stadsparkdeel waarvan ik het bestaan nog niet eens besefte. Dromen van Maasmalecon-romantiek. Cliche's van lichtjes en reflecties. Wie reflecteert welke frustratie op wie? Cluedo mysteries zonder monopoly-kanskaartjes. En ik blijf me afvragen hoe vaak een mens haar identiteit verliezen mag, als het al zover komt dat ze zichzelf niet meer in de spiegel herkent?

Living the fiction without fast forward or protecting past...

Soms vraag ik me af of personen op internet wel bestaan. Of ze fictief zijn, niet meer dan een profiel, een gephotoshopte foto met zogenaamd elementen die een mens uniek maken. Alsof het personages zijn in een boek dat je las, en je je bedrogen voelt als je het boek dichtslaat en je even zo verbonden voelde met levens die helemaal niet bestaan. Je hebt in hun gedachten gezeten, je bevriend gevoeld zonder dat je zelf in hun verhaal betrokken was. En opeens besef je dat je voor hen al even onbestaand bent geweest als zij zelf waren voor de werkelijkheid... En je voelt hoe onzichtbaar je bent. Het is als spreken tegen een antwoordapparaat, een chat tegen een offline-chatter die nooit echt weer online komt.

________________________________

Sometimes I wonder if people on the internet really exist. If they are fiction, nothing more than profile, a photoshoped picture with so-called elements that make a person 'unique'. As if they are characters in a novel that you read, and you feel decepted when you close the book. You felt so connected with lives that didn't exist at all. You were living 'their' thoughts, you felt befriended without even having been a part of their story. And suddenly you realize that you were equally non-existant for them as they were for reality... And you feel how invisible you are. It is like talking to a voicemail, an instant messaging chat to an offline-chatter that never ever really reappears online again.

Too long, too quiet...

More than one month passed. I am still alive. If I was a pool, you could diagnose me with a drying out-disease. I drink liters of soymilk though, but my thirst is not easy too satisfy. There were things to discover last month. I feel as if I play the game 'find the 7 errors'. Did I find all of them or are there still black holes hiding within the framework of my life? Some people hate me for what they think I am and some love me for what I think I am not. In the end you die with empty hands anyway.

Life of a tiran. I have been writing a lot this week: letters (especially to myself), papers about Shakespeare's Richards the Third. No books, no substantial things, I am even desperately behind in blogposts for Think About It. I am motivated. I want to change the world, spread the call for change, build peace as ISFIT thought me. But conflicts appear around every corner. I see conspiracy in the footsteps of silence, read corruption in the curtains. And unfairness... I have been seeing it all my life, but it strikes me more with every bloody confrontation. Dead animal bodies everywhere, devoured by mouths that preach peace... it makes me sick, drives me mad, sad, crazy...

I saw you, that makes life better, real, more inspiring, gives sense, maybe even something to live for. A life to live in the wish that I can make you feel the same way... some day.

First memories of loneliness

Vote for my blogposts in the European Bloggin Competition --> http://www.thinkaboutit.eu/author/veerlevrindts/
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Some people say it's easy to measure one's luck. Count one's friends, test one's health, rate one's smile, evaluate the probablity of one's dreams coming true, minus the losses and goodbyes, multiply all by the love given and received and standardize the result to a comparable z-score.

Statistics just don't work for luck. It can change in one eyeblink, you can forget to take it with you when you leave a place and not manage to find it back at another place. I wish it could be send, by post, email, phone calls or even in chat messages . But luck is difficult to transfer, it slips away when you lose the grip.

Luck is the Golden Snitch in Harry Potter's Quidditch-games.
Only, I don't seem able to get myself a broom to practice ...

European Blogging Competition Th!nk About It

Maybe I am not that active here, but feel free to visit my competition blog for the Th!nk About It contest.

http://www.thinkaboutit.eu/author/veerlevrindts/

I would be very happy if you could vote for my posts by choosing 5 stars under each blog post :)

Thanks in advance,
A new post is coming soon...

Veerle

Romance, or "the greatest thing you ever learn..."

Almost Valentine,



I wanted to be so much more for you
offer my life on a golden plate
and serve you sparkling eyes and sunset skies
tickle you with caresses
of the butterflies in my voice

I wish I was your Sunday morning miracle
waking up with warred locks
unravel unspoken tenderness
be the sweet note in your pocket
the secret gift you find at a lonely afternoon

I wanted to be your angel
your creativity and cliché
maybe your inspiration (even though that would have been too ambitious)
your smile, your flashing light house...
when the world pushes you down

I wanted to be so much more for you
I wanted to be your poetry
but what you get is bad prose
and maybe you will even manage
to see ‘me’ shivering between the lines