Instant birthday celebration (in a single sentence)

Wow yes let's celebrate the 50th birthday of the German Federal Armed Forces, aka Bundeswehr, let's ignore all protests and make sure all demonstrators stay far away from the scene in front of the Reichstag by fencing off a huge area around it so that their whistles can't drown the fascinating traditional march music, let the police use clubs against demonstrators who dare to noisily insist upon their right to move past the locked area, invite 4500 special guests, choose some special people to hold speeches full of praise and self-praise, let foreign guests come and emphasize the importance of the German army's work abroad, remember to mention the historical development, use lots of special effects like torches, rhythm and discipline in uniform and then yay! you've got the most perfect(-ly ridiculous) birthday party!

Joining the past, the present and the future

Ok, so this time it was my turn to sit on the floor today. The price of coming late to a lecture, well, experience everything the students' life can possibly offer you. Says the optimist in me who always needs to give things a positive interpretation. The professor was so enthusiastic that I forgot the discomfort of the floor, he was raging about how journalists didn't take enough time for proper research but nevertheless write their articles proclaiming a strong and sometimes extreme opinion which is why newspapers are so bad, and by the way, nobody appreciates sociologists and their work anyway..
Today I met two of my former school mates on the campus, within 5 minutes, on the same day, within some 100m distance and I had no clue they were there. These kind of things freak me out. I never thought that staying in Berlin to study would mean meeting all these people again. They seem so out of place, seeing them at uni. But I guess many more amazing and fascinating things than that are going to happen to me there.

The obvious vanity of a media career

There's fascination, and then there's reality. Take, for example, the world of media. Last weekend I went to the studio of the television channel ARD with a friend because the channel offered people to sneak a peek behind the curtain.. quite an interesting visit. There was a little stage where various people went on and off to present their jobs to us, the audience, which mainly consisted of 15-year-old high school kids whose fascination with media jobs was still unspoiled and who possessed this enviable idealistic belief in themselves to get high up in the world of television where only beautiful people make it in front of the camera.
Producers, camera men, graphic designers, cutters, directors, presenters and so on, they all enjoyed the spotlight that afternoon. And although it became clear that teamwork was essential, indispensable even, each of them seemed to think of their profession as being the best, the most important and the most difficult of all. Of course. The overall vanity of a career became especially obvious when they talked about how their achievements brought them to the top of their career and how oh so hard it is to stay up there, all that competition you know.. at the same time, their encouragement that people who are really determined should not give up trying. Easily said once you've succeeded.

In the studio of the cutter and sound engineer they showed us their daily work, and also how, in theory, you can manipulate word and picture of politicians and the like. It's unbelievable how easy it is to change the magic of words or the atmosphere of a certain look, the singularity of a gesture, everything can be lost with the click of the mouse. Sorry, the rat. Yes that's right, ignorant people like me used to think only mice existed in the rotten world of computers, now that I've seen a rat I will believe everything.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that I'm older now, unlike these other teenagers around me who visited the studio, that I was able to see past the glamour and realise: not all that glitters is gold. But I can understand that most young people (not that I'm old or anything..) are attracted to the thought of being famous, or sort of famous. In the end, we all want to be special and being recognised on the street by strangers would seem like an obvious proof of being special. Push the self-esteem, or rather: let others push it and collect the fruits. Well, I decided to look out for fruit-trees some place else.

Absurdistan

There are about 4,6 million muslims living in the U.S. so it's only fair that George Bush (notice how I dare to ignore the "Dubya") should care about them. And as symbolic gestures are the best way to show how much we really care about someone, a copy of the coran has now been put into the library of the White House in Washington. In order to show that communication and dialogue also works well, Bush has held a little speech at dinner which he had with embassadors and representatives of muslim groups in the U.S. the other day. In fact, he preached to them about the true meaning of the coran, quoting the part where it says that the murder of an innocent human being is murder of the whole of humanity or something like that and he said how the islamist terror didn't have anything to do with the true meaning of Islam.. like he knows best and look who he's talking to! Weird guy.. who knows what else he said that hasn't been made public?
This has made its way to the press though, same occasion still: He also appealed to all "responsible" islamic leaders to clearly condemn the terror.. putting them under pressure, so all those who refuse to jump like a dog to his demands are going to be declared the "axis of evil" again I bet.. is he looking for excuses to invade another country or what?! Just thought you should know, actually it quite amused me when I read it in the newspaper.. some things are too desperate and hopeless to be taken seriously.

See The Fire

So this was it, the first week of my uni life is over and I got a slight impression of what is ahead of me, what I chose to do for the next few years. I'm relatively impressed while at the same time being relatively unimpressed, if that makes any sense. Ok, it probably doesn't. What impressed me was that after only three days of lectures I'd already got myself three presentations to do, partly in groups and was also informed about various deadlines of various essays I apparently have to write about stuff I've hardly heard of, including all sorts of commentaries and homeworks I have to prepare, plus knowing the dates of the exams which will be in a few months time already with having only started lectures now.. Yep. What didn't impress me on the other hand was the mixture of a "being back at school"-feeling and the "you're gonna do all of this by yourself"-attitude which left me a bit confused. We're expected to drink up as much knowledge as we can get but basically the profs say sorry but we're not really gonna help you much with that.. So, do we go to uni in order to get told that the profs aren't going to teach us but will turn us into loners teaching ourselves?
Not that I'm implying all those students sitting on their own in those huge lecture halls among loads of others are lonely, but they look it and our society is based on judging people by their looks and their behaviour which at the same time is the reason for all misunderstandings and prejudices. Especially when you meet so many strangers within a very small amount of time like I did these last few days then the temptation is great to dismiss certain people by putting them in the notional drawers with inscriptions like "interesting", "okay", "boring" and so on. Actually, this temptation to classify people like that might simply be the result of our brain malfunctioning because it can't cope with that much input, how can we expect our brain to quickly work through so many details and consider each thouroughly, which is what is needed to judge someone fairly well.
Hopefully time will tell each person's story but my experience is that some people are always left behind or overlooked. You know them by sight, you see them regularly in your lectures, they are an essential part of the picture like a white wall in a room, they have a fire burning in their heart but nobody comes to warm up at it.

Throw down an egg from the 4th storey and feel great

Apparently it has been done before and regarding the fact that it really is a strange idea in the first place I don't hesitate to believe it. Leave a group of completely mixed young people with an egg, several sheets of newspaper and thicker paper, cellotape and string, tell them they have half an hour to ensure the egg stays unharmed if you throw it down from the 4th storey. They never tell you why anyone would do such a thing, but then, there are a lot of things which are left unexplained in the world, so we simply accepted the unconventional challenge. "We", by the way, were 5 students who happened to end up together after having drawn the same coloured sweets out of the hat.. Don't worry if you don't get that, it's an inside joke which occurred repeatedly during the intro week.
The result is well worth mentioning, it's such a crying shame you couldn't see it. We built a proper basket out of paper, arranged the newspaper inside it so it would cushion the bounce. Usually we ignore the fact that air is all around us but this time we used it by building a double-parachute to slow down the fall. It was attached to the basket with strings in each corner. While other groups had wrapped endless layers of paper around their egg (which each landed on the ground with a huge BANG..) we finally put our precious egg into the basket, fixed it with cellotape but left it freely visible on top.
So what can I say? It was like angels had learned how to fly by watching our brilliant construction floating down! It was truly perfect and I'm sure the egg felt great feeling the wind rushing past its sides. We certainly did.

A Pot Of Colourful Impressions

Right, a white page, a new beginning. I feel my website is gonna take a more poetic turn, political issues are going to keep turning up but otherwise I tend to regard them more as the topic of a good discussion rather than a monologue. The minute that politics becomes a monologue is the point where all is lost. Maybe all is lost anyway but that's a different story.
So now it's official: A fragile bright green bit of paper informs the viewer that I am a student at the sorta famous Humboldt university in Berlin, studying the subject of Social Sciences, starting 17th October. This is where I've wanted to be for ages, this is where I saw myself in endless day-dreams in tedious lessons at school, this is what I worked for, the only reason that kept me going was the prospect of starting new, still in Berlin but in a new environment. Locked away safely in the back of my mind was the prospect of maybe changing more than just my life.
The previous week has been an introduction week at uni. Introduction quite literally, I've been introduced to my future fellow students and together we've been introduced to working techniques. But above all, what I learned was, again, that no matter how often you've been preaching against prejudices in the past, in the end the wrong first impressions you get of people overwhelm you and you're trapped again until you manage to free yourself. Something else, a very important enlightment: children's games are amazing when you play them with strangers, and besides, these games are only called "children's games" by adults who feel really grown-up and all that, so who cares?! It's the result in the end that counts and the result after a week was that my mind was a pot full of colourful impressions. What more can you wish for?

No Place Like Home

"The images have that kind of naivete of an artist living abroad, returning and very sincerely wanting to understand." Shirin

I would like to recommend an artist called Shirin Neshat to you, she's an Iranian but living in the U.S. so now she finds herself in the situation of not quite knowing where to feel at home. In her photographic series "Women of Allah", "Rapture" and "Fervor" you can see how she tried to examine the ideology of Islam and express it through art. I also warmly recommend you to read the interview which might help you to understand her photos. She talks about how she perceives the transformation of her country, Iran, over the years and how she rejects the stereotype about the women being victims. In her opinion the people of the western world don't understand Islam because they don't share the same historical perspective and have a different kind of rationality where e.g. martyrdom doesn't fit in.