But I am a lazy mummy, and if you ask me if it’s a shitty day, there is no better adjective to describe it.

Of course you have to teach your kid that swear words are to be used like most spices… sparingly. They should never be used during job interviews, oral university examinations, or other situations where you have to appear properer than you really are. And if you ask me to call someone an asshole, especially to his face, says more about you than him.

I admit that little man learned to say shit in two languages (Scheiße in German, if you must know) at the tender age of two and probably from listening to me. German swear words tend to be “anal orientated” as one Anglo-saxon author of German habits put it. If a German calls you an “Arschloch” chances are he or she doesn’t like you.

From my own observation Anglo-saxon swear words tend to be sexually orientated. “F..beep” is a prime example. To a Teutonic like me fucking is very enjoyable, shit on the other hand smells badly, but listening to beeps on TV while you mouth-read every word of it is probably strangely satisfying to all of us.

A while ago little man came home and told me that is school mate J. is “gay”. Gosh I thought, J. is only eight years old the chances that he is gay before puberty are pretty slim, so I asked little man if he actually knew what gay means. He told me that gay means acting like a girl.

Well, that’s close but not really what it means, and not wanting to play tag on a boiling hot day is rather smart not gay if you ask me. Sometimes being a parent is quite complicated, because you have to decide in a snap what to say to steer your offspring to the right direction.

I told him that J. was right to go inside.

When he is a little older I will tell him that being gay is ok, and chances are that he will know that by himself by then, because in the end parents are the most crucial influences kids have.

Beeps on TV are useless if you ask me, and not letting your kids watch youtube videos is useless as well. They will hear it on the school bus anyway. On the other hand talking about it is very useful. Youtube videos in which people say fuck in every sentence are not bandwidth-friendly. My son knows this. They could be much shorter and to the point.

Teaching your kids what is appropriate by example and what will diminish their own worth is probably the most fucking awesome sweet thing you can do for them, not gay at all, nor sick.

To make my mistake even worse I stayed at a truly terrible business hotel in Osaka, which is close to Kyoto. If you are a road warrior you know what kind of hotel I am talking about: expensive, closet-sized room, musty bathroom, smelly (stale cigarette smoke with something more awful mixed in, and the whole night you wonder what it was that died under your bed), air-conditioning either too hot or too cold, and (help!) the window can’t be opened. After that you swear to yourself that you will never, never book your hotel room at the last minute.

I don’t want you to put off to visit Japan after reading the above. Normally, hotel rooms in Japan’s urban areas are tiny but spotlessly clean, and have free internet access (woohoo!).

Where was I? Japanese gardens. They are beautiful.

I have a coffee table book with beautiful drawings and pictures, which I recommend to any Japanese garden fan: Japanese Garden Design by Marc P. Keane. I think Japanese gardens appeal to the average European because they encompass design features that seem familiar to us. They are fenced in (that archtypical paradise garden), surprising after you round the next corner, abstract, and highly symbolic. Yet in other ways they are so different to what we know, and therefore exciting.

I didn’t go to Kyoto this time, but I stopped at every public garden we came across, and sucked in on all the details of road-side private gardens we went by.

A friend of mine likened Japan to the Galapagos Islands. A seed or animal flies in and adapts to its new environment, changes, and becomes something truly unique.  The beauty of Japan is that it embraces outside influences,but every new impetus gets adapted to something truly Japanese. I think that is one of the reasons what makes Japan so interesting to visit. You recognize so many things, but see them in a completely new way.

Japanese garden design has strong Chinese influences, yet I bet you would instantly know how to tell apart a Japanese garden from a Chinese garden. A Chinese garden repaints an epic landscape in a highly artificial way, a Japanese garden distills the essence of it and does so seemingly effortless. Ok, that’s the ignorant Western short version, but you are free to dig deeper.

That’s the theory. Then you go to Japan and notice that space for gardens is limited. You walk through Tokyo. Skyscrapers, pavement, smelly cars, and endless sprawl with these gray apartment buildings. You stay in a hotel near Shinjuku Station, and discover the beauty of having your own, tiny, private space. And it has a bath tub. Japanese need bath tubs. As a Westerner (me at least) you are ok with a working shower. After I went on a pan-European business trip with a Japanese colleague I knew that a bath tub is essential for surviving, otherwise you will hear about it all through dinner.

But even in noisy, packed, central Tokyo, you round a corner and suddenly there is silence. It’s a quiet street. There are two storey homes right  next to the high-rises. They have a tiny parking space (don’t ask me how they rear-park-oh no!-bang-park-their-car) and a highly clipped pine tree.

The average American home has one-millimeter lawn, the Japanese house has a tightly clipped pine tree or two, and Germans have their garden dwarfs.

The charming feature about Japanese cities are tiny plots in the middle of town with detached private homes. It makes these cities human. Other nice features are carefully clipped hedges in between skyscrapers. It’s built up in a higglety pigglety kind of way, which makes it kind of cute, like Japanese cartoon characters and cars. You know what I mean when you visit.

Normally when I am a tourist I walk a lot, this time I had a Toyota Prius. This has nothing to do with Japanese gardens,  but why anyone would buy a Toyota Prius beats the :peeeeep: out of me. Ok, you save bucks at the gas station. It’s supposedly ecologically friendly, but if you look into what the hybrid battery is made off you know that’s not true. And then when you drive one, you know that any old Volkswagen is much better than this. For starters, they put the “hand” brake next to the gas petal down below, and when you  try to find it with your foot you snap apart some loose fitted plastic thingy (black) and something more complicated looking ( white, possibly from the air-conditioning outlet). The visibility back into your rear-view window is minimal. The overall feeling is that of driving a U-boat . Driving through a city at minimal speed is OK, but when you try to get to Hiroshima from Kagoshima on the Expressway or drive along these beautiful curving roads on Kyushu, you notice that the Toyota Prius’ handling is truly awful. It’s similar to steering a cruise ship down a mountain creek.

Have you ever stopped at a gas station in Japan at 1.30am? You will be greeted by a gas station employee with a deep bow. He looks like he is about 75 years old, and you have the urge to serve him not the other way around. He bows again and shouts a lot in Japanese that you don’t understand. You keep thinking that your generation is no good at all. There is this feisty silver-haired man filling your car’s gas tank in the middle of the night while you are thinking about a nice soft bed. It’s all going down hill from now on for sure.

Back to Japanese Gardens.

My Dad is finally out of the hospital. One foot is gone and during the summer his spirit was gone as well. I told him that we needed him foot or no foot, and I like to think that this is what pulled him through.

When we took care of my grandma who had Alzheimers and couldn’t walk anymore, we always agreed that her sitting in a wheelchair was the lesser of the problems.

The last words she lost was “Manno!” (hard to translate…  “Eh! Man!”) Which told us that we had done something wrong. You can’t imagine how important it is to know that you have done something wrong.

My dad is my soul mate, which is unfair to say because my mum took care of me more than he did. She once said to me “For you, he can do no wrong”.  No, he can’t, because he has the same faults as me. I know it’s unfair. For my mum, her soul mate was my grandmother, her mum, I can’t forget how much she cried when she died.

So that was the summer, but the autumn is definitely looking up.

Sometimes life reminds you that it is not all roses and that you really should hold, enjoy, and “einbrennen” (burn-into) your memory all that is and was good.

The garden is good. It’s full of mosquitoes and construction waste (gloves, concrete slabs, and iron bars), but harvesting yard-long beans and swinging my pickaxe to plant and move plants has been sweaty and satisfying.

Little man is the joy of my life. I don’t know if I will be his soul mate but he is mine. He just needs to smile and stand in front of me in his “Hochwasser”  high-water pyjamas (“Yes, I have brushed my teeth!”) and all is good.

And there is so much more. I love life even if it has it’s up and downs and if you ever wonder… yes, go forward.

The Love Life of Rags

Male: Hello!
Hello, I am Dominik.
And what’s your name?

Female: I am Jacqueline.

Male: Oh, that’s a beautiful name, oh, such a beautiful name!
And what are you studying?

Female: Biochemistry.

Male: Oh, that’s fascinating, how fascinating, fascinating, fascinating. Well, I am studying social… that’s also totally… well… boring.
And, you want to fuck me?

Female: Pardon?

Male: You want to fuck me?

Female: Yes, of course.

Male: Well fine, are we going to my place or yours?

Female: Don’t know.

Male: Well, don’t know either. Perhaps we could… or rather… or rather…no, don’t know.

Female: Well, I don’t know either.
Bye, Dominik.

Male: Bye, Jacqueline.

The End.

The human mind is at its best when limited to a few ingredients. We don’t cope with infinity that well (I at least). The items available at 11 am were a hungry stomach and green beans (cheap and looking good at the supermarket yesterday), a can of chopped tomatoes (something that I always have in my cupboard), and three beef sausages (from a package of six of which three were wolfed down by little man yesterday).

So I chopped up two small onions and four cloves of garlic to get going. Then my eyes fell upon the blue cast iron casserole I bought at Ikea a few months ago and had never used. It looks exactly like the fancy French casseroles on offer for an insane amount of money, because they are called “Le Creuset”… mine was way cheaper (and I am always drawn to kitchenware that is so heavy that is can double as a defense weapon). What do you cook in a casserole you have never used before? A leftover-stew of course.

I don’t have pictures, but you don’t need them because you have leftovers in your kitchen too, and your tummy is hungry and your mind is racing already. What could I cook for lunch today?

I prepared the green beans for cooking. Fired up the gas stove, heated oil, threw in the onions and garlic, waited until their aroma wafted through the kitchen, then added the can of chopped tomatoes and the beans. Then I added a glass of water, some salt, two dried chilies (because hot is always better), and two bay leaves.

There was not enough fluid in the dish, but an open bottle of red wine in the fridge. In went some wine. You can never go wrong with some wine, especially if you are cooking with a fake “Le Creuset” casserole.

So leftover-stew a la Ikea was well underway, when I thought of the five miniature potatoes that were leftover from a bag of full-sized ones. When I got them out of the fridge, my eyes feel upon the glass jar of foie gras house guest had bought at her stopover in Paris. The proper foie gras is long gone, but the jar still held some leftover goose fat that your doctor tells you to throw away, but is far to fragrant not to use.

I cooked the potatoes in salt water. Chopped up the beef sausages and fried them in goose fat (yeah, I know… cholesterol… heart attack…bla… bla), then added them to the casserole.

When the beans were cooked but not mushy and the sauce had reduced to a yummy goo, the potatoes were ready as well.

There was still fat in the skillet from the goose fat and beef sausage bonanza. If a heart attack, then a proper one. So I fried the potatoes in the leftover fat to yummy crispness.

Lunch was crispy, fragrant potatoes and bean-tomato-sausage stew with a glass of red wine, and it tasted especially good because it was half-hazardly thrown together.

This year will not have it easy with all the doom and gloom that professional naysayers predict, but I have a thing for underdogs and think that 2009 has great potential. I hope that many people will stop, think, and reassess their lives and make small and big changes for the better.

I am not a person that is good at keeping New Year resolutions, but I will try to walk more consciously through life. Enjoying more what I have, pursuing what is important to me, and changing things here and there. For the better, I hope.

I am very thankful for the past year. I was very happy, I loved and was loved back, and I mastered all the challenges that the year threw at me, and maybe grew a little wiser because of them.

Here is to a wonderful New Year and many new adventures!

I already had one in blue, and now I have one in pink too. The blue one was already pretty nifty. It’s a reusable shopping bag from a supermarket here in Hong Kong. It has become my favorite shopping bag, because it has about the same size and shape as a normal plastic bag, and is very convenient to carry. Other reusable bags were dangling around my legs or too heavy when filled up. It also comes with a little pouch to store it in.

According to the Hong Kong government, 23 million plastic bags each day are thrown away, about 3-4 bags per person, and they are contributing to filling up Hong Kong’s landfills, which will reach capacity in the early to mid 2010s. The largest supermarket chain has switched to biodegradable plastic bags, but those do not break down easily in sealed landfills and use up energy and land when produced, so using reusable bags is still a much more environmentally friendly option.

Using the blue bag was making me already feel pretty good, but the pink one is even better. A percentage of the sales price went to the Hong Kong cancer fund to support breast cancer research and supporting services. I think that’s a wonderful idea, and more supermarkets should copy it.

Is it selfless? Yes and no. To give and to take, and not to keep score.

It is acceptance. Of the other, to obtain an extension of oneself.

The wish for nearness. Not sameness.

A dance. Close, cheek to cheek, twirling around each other, pushing the other away, and drawing the other close, and sometimes

Merging to be one.

Strength.

Pain.

Amazement and wonder.

Dizzy happiness.

Can it be true?

Yes.

What is love for you? Sometimes I wish it would be as easy as in Cinderella. With happy end of course.

Women have the right to have a little padding on their hips, right? Especially if they had a baby and are past their 35th birthday. And what do you shake in front of men if you have no ass? The only problem is to get new jeans. A big-assed woman, one head taller than the rest of the women in Hong Kong, doesn’t have too many choices. I went shopping last week, and could only find pants that were either too tight around the hips or too wide around the waist. It was frustrating, no fun at all… the ass has to go… and who is designing these ridiculous jeans anyway?

Where was I? Aah yes, I wanted to boast about my new work-out regime that I actually enjoy doing. No measurable impact on the ass yet, but I am having fun. Every morning after I bring little man to the school bus, I walk up the mountain behind my house at a brisk pace. The first time I arrived at the top I could hardly breathe, but by now it’s quite easy to do. Last Friday, I arrived at the top and even thought that it had been a bit too easy, so I decided to walk further along a trail I had never tried before.

I am so glad that I did. It wasn’t an easy walk. The trail was narrow and slippery from a tropical downpour a few hours before, but at times it felt like walking through an enchanted forest. There were lots of sparkly dragonflies hovering above rain pools. Yellow butterflies with brown dots that looked a bit like enchanted leopards, and black ones that were so big that I first mistook them for birds. I crossed creeks and marveled at the vegetation around me. Lush, green, and still dripping from the rain in the morning. Trees standing so closely together that there was hardly any light on the ground, ferns with elegant long leaves, and beautiful blossoms in yellow, pink, and red. The trail went along a mountain range directly at the ocean, and at times the views were breath-taking, and bit vertigo inducing. Would they be able to find me, if I slip and roll down the 200 meter slope to the shore?

I made it home intact, and as I was standing under the shower to get off the mud and sweat, I was thankful that Hong Kong, more known for its skyscrapers, still has these wild places. I feel very fortunate to live right at the edge between concrete and jungle.

PS: I have just looked at my popo in the mirror, and I could swear it’s a tiny bit smaller.

What else is going on? I am in Hong Kong and trying to get ahead of all the pressing things I have to do for Cosima Inc, which accumulated during our extended stay in Berlin. It’s all the more pressing because the Chinese New Year celebrations start soon. That’s when roughly 1.3 billion people stop working, board crowded trains to their birth place, and celebrate with their families. In short… Christmas x 10. As my suppliers tell me, it’s also the time when quite a lot of workers decide that their last place of work pays not well enough, and they leave for greener pastures.

China’s economy is booming, and who wants to work in manufacturing when the service sector promises lighter work and better pay? What kills me is that Western media still thinks that China will take over the world by manufacturing everything cheaper, and start World War III. Here is the inside scoop: they are much too busy eating abalone, and carrying Chanel bags.

To wind down, I have been watching LA Ink. Please tell me why she wants to get a boob job. I don’t understand the world anymore.