Cosima Underwater

Thursday, as I read through Osbasso’s post about the death of his blogger friend Betcha, I couldn’t stop thinking how unpredictable life is. You can have the best of plans, and having the most of fun, and then suddenly in a second everything changes. We kid ourselves that we can somehow direct life, and sure we do have choices, but there are times, moments when life is out of control, and all we can do is watch, paralyzed in stunned silence.

As I thought about Betcha’s family and her friends, I just knew that they must have felt something similar, when the mind knows the unthinkable and worst has happened, but the heart just refuses to believe in it.

I didn’t know Betcha, but from reading Osbasso’s and Stealth’s posts I could sense what a wonderful and fun-loving person she was. My heart goes out to her family and friends.

-The longest word you can type using only the letters on the top row of a computer keyboard is “typewriter”.

-The longest words you can type using only the right side are “homophony”, “homophyly“, “nonillion“, “pollinium“, “polyonomy” and “polyphony”.

-The longest words you can type using only the left side are stewardesses”, “desegregates”, “desegregated”, “reverberated”, “reverberates” and watercresses“.

Aren’t you glad I shared with you this piece of pretty useless information :)? And no, I didn’t think this up on my own. Geesh, I have a life… sometimes.

Now, what would be the longest word you can type using only the middle row of your keyboard… fad, gala, hall, glass… where is my Oxford Dictionary…

I am all jittery with excitement. In front of me is an entire day all to myself. I am going to do some extracurricular body maintenance and pampering, will surf the internet to my hearts content, will try to finish the book I have been reading for the last three months, go for a swim, will read at least one newspaper from front to end, and try to do some writing.

What to do first? Aaaah, all these wonderful choices.

I came home from a grueling day at work, kicked off my shoes, sat down on the sofa, and turned on the television. The screen showed the World Trade Center, one of the Towers was burning in the middle. One part of my brain was hoping it is a movie, the other knew it was not. I had turned on CNN, and it was live coverage from New York. A reporter was telling that a kidnapped passenger plane had crashed into the Tower. I cannot remember thinking anything, I just watched in shock. Shortly afterwards my boyfriend came home. An American friend living in Hong Kong had already sent him an SMS, telling him to turn on the television. He was home only a brief moment, when the second plane crashed into the South Tower.

For the next hour, we watched in shock, in near silence. The only thing, I remember we talked about, was how the people trapped in the top halves of the Towers could be rescued. With helicopters? With the fires burning, probably not feasible.

The journalists were reporting about the rescue efforts. Fire fighters going up the stairs to assist people getting out of the buildings. Then the cameras zoomed in on small black dots falling off the towers. People, trapped between the fire and the windows, jumping off the buildings.

People trapped in the top halves were calling their loved ones.

Then the first Tower collapsed. Half an hour later, the second.

The next day, Hong Kong, normally a very loud city, was eerily quiet. People went to work and opened their shops, but no one talked much. The shock and sorrow people felt was visible. People were trying to get more information, watching television, reading newspapers, or directly calling relatives, friends, and colleagues in New York and the US.

I have visited New York many times and always feel at home when there. I know, that so many people around the world feel the same, because it is a true world city.

My heart goes out to the families, who lost their loved ones on September 11. I feel that today should be about remembering them and celebrating their lives. Only about them.

tags: 9/11

Today, half of the day passed without me. Yesterday evening I brought my son to bed around nine o’clock, and after I read him his bed time story I fell faster asleep than he did. I woke up at half past eleven, lying next to him in his bed. Despite the late hour, I was wide awake and ready to go.

I always have a hard time getting over jet lag. When flying westwards, it is not so bad, because you just wake up earlier, but going back to Asia from Europe turns my inner clock upside down.

Yesterday night, I entertained myself with some easy house cleaning and then went to bed again and tried to fall asleep. I wasn’t successful. After listening to the regular breathing of my sleeping man for half an hour I gave up, and went into the living room. What to do? Watch television? There was nothing interesting on at this hour. Reading a book? My brain was too jumbled to concentrate. Mindless computer games? Yeah, let’s try! I am embarrassed to admit, but I played various silly games until it was three o’clock in the morning (I recommend www.zylom.com). Then I dragged myself to bed, and was rudely awaked by the alarm clock at eight o’clock (normally only used as back up, because we tend to start the day much earlier).

Luckily, the man in my life is self-employed, and after taking one look at me in my delirious jet lagged state, he decided to let me sleep (thank you!), and get my son off to kindergarten on his own.

I woke up around ten o’clock. In panic, because of the late hour. After realizing, that the family had organized the morning without me, I passed out again. At half past eleven, someone in the house started to renovate his flat. Judging by the tremendous noise, I am guessing they took off bathroom tiles with a jackhammer.

So this was my morning today, and I am already afraid of the coming night. I hope, I will manage to fall asleep.

Sorry guys, there will be no HNT picture today, because of my jumbled up day. I make up for it next week :).

I have been thinking about words, and the effect they have on me. I have always loved language. Even as a little girl, I have cherished my children’s books and loved the bedtime stories my mother and father read to me. They set off my imagination in all directions.

Later, as a teenager I was the best client of our neighborhood library. My reading addiction lead to mild conflict with my mother. She doesn’t share the habit, and was worried that I wouldn’t get enough sleep and thought that it is very lonely pastime. In a way that is true, but I still met with friends and had time to do other things, and I never felt lonely when reading. From the outside a reading person must look very alone, but from the inside he or she is at a very intimate place, right in the mind of another person. It cannot get any closer.

I like to watch movies as well, but very often written stories create stronger images in my head than films. I also love the flow and rhythm of language. I am especially in awe of poetry and prose that through words and sentence structure force a certain rhythm or tempo of reading.

When my son learnt to speak, I was reminded of how brusque, and shocking words can be. I still remember, when my son said his first vulgar word. I was shocked, because the little, cute person who said it stood in no relation to what came out of his mouth. I wish, I could say that my son overheard it from older kids, but he probably learnt it from me. From then on, I put much more effort into avoiding slips of tongue. The second mistake I made was to look stunned. He knew then, that whenever he would say the word, he would get an effect. You guess what happened next. He repeated the word in increasing volume, and grinned at me full of pleasure. When he was a little older, we bought a piggy bank. Whenever his parents say a bad word a little fee gets added to the piggy bank, whenever he says one we take threaten to take money out. He plans to buy his first real car with the money.

And then there is the mind game, often set off by words. Reputedly, men get off more by visuals, while women need the right mind game. I don’t know if there really is such a big difference. Often the right visuals set off the mind racing, and the imaginary game is just a series of pictures in one’s head. A flirt in words is one of the greatest mind games there is, to tease and to challenge, innuendos, double meanings…wonderful.

I remember being in bed with the man in my life. He had spoiled me with kisses in all the right places, and was in the midst of …well you know…and then he asked me a naughty question. The question did not require a long answer, but still a sentence with more than three words. At the state I was in, it required enormous concentration, but still I tried. The answer came out rather incoherent, with lots of stops, and I think the end was missing. Still my words had a magic result. Certain words, said in a certain way, can be such a turn-on.

And not only me. Cosima was one of what felt like ten million tourists visiting this very picturesque city at the Vltava river. While I get my pictures in order, read about “problems” of people living abroad.

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One of my pastimes is reading internet sites were expats, tourists, and exchange students air their peeves about the countries they are visiting. While I do read political comment sites, I find sites where cultural idiosyncrasies are discussed equally as interesting.

First of all it amazes me how passionate people can argue about things that are in the grand scheme of things rather unimportant. A while ago, I stumbled over a blog where the differences in American and German toilet bowls were discussed (?!?). I just have this to say: both designs have their pros and cons, and pale in comparison to the latest toilet technology from Japan.

Another problem discussed is the German illness of “draftomania”. I only admit it grudgingly, but many Germans, especially of the older generation suffer from this illness. Here is the scenario. You enter a very hot room or train compartment. While sweat is running down your forehead you open the window to let in a cooling breeze. Shortly after, someone in the room yells “Es zieht!” (it’s drafty). You argue that the room is very hot and you will close the window in a few minutes. Most draftomaniacs are ok with this, but some will accuse you of causing their immediate death. I am firmly on the side of my American friends on this one.

Always entertaining is the culture clash concerning Germany’s relaxed attitude of public nudity vs. Anglo-Saxon prudishness. The internet is full of accounts by shocked Americans and Britons, who went into a mixed sauna or stumbled onto an unofficial nudist area (especially popular in Eastern Germany). Also legendary are the hordes of topless German women sunbathing on Mediterranean beaches. While I prefer to leave my bikini on, I think Anglo-Saxons could be a little bit more relaxed about nakedness and their body in general. What’s so awful about seeing someone naked? It’s the way we are born.

“Sauberkeit” (cleanliness) in turn is a “Steckenpferd” (special interest) of some stuck-up Germans. They rate their travel destinations by the amount of waste in places where it shouldn’t be. While German waste collection and recycling is pretty good, my fellow Germans should keep in mind the dog shit that lines the side walks in our larger cities. These “Tretminen” (landmines) need to be cleaned up first (preferably by the dog owners themselves), before they can criticize others.

Another one, involves English-speakers, first- and amazingly enough also people who speak it as a second-language, getting exasperated by the unsatisfactory level of English by natives. I have witnessed a few of these exchanges in Hong Kong, and they never seize to amaze me. Firstly, while English is an official language in Hong Kong, most Hongkongers’ first language is Cantonese. I am just incredibly grateful that I can live in Hong Kong without having to learn this extremely difficult language, and I can certainly live with a few instances of non-understanding. Especially hilarious are exchanges of heavily accented Europeans getting angry about Hongkongers, who don’t immediately get what they want. For some reason, people from Mediterranean countries are especially prone to do this.

To end this post about prides and prejudices, I would like to say that when people visit other countries they should keep in mind that different doesn’t necessarily mean better or worse, just different. And some of the down-right hateful comments, found on the internet, say more about the arrogance of the writers than the alleged flaws of the country they are criticizing.

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Further German idiosyncrasies are listed in Spiegel’s Survival Bible Forum. After your next visit to Germany, don’t say you haven’t been warned ;).

The world has a new Miss Universe, Zuleyka Rivera Mendoza, 18 years young from Puerto Rico. I didn’t see the actual event on TV but http://www.spiegel.de/ has a photostream on their site of all contestants.

Over here in Germany there is a lot of hypocrisy concerning beauty pageants. No one admits to watch them, but like tabloid newspapers and gossip magazines, they don’t go out of business. And of course the press just loves to report about them, because they are a welcome change from all the usual death and destruction.

While men ogle the female flesh on display, women bitch about the supposed flaws of the candidates. Me too. Just envious, you say. Yeah, you’re right, but it doesn’t stop me from doing it. So, boys just look at the pics! Girls read on!

Miss Albania looks kind of familiar…

Miss Albania: I want my lips to look just like Angelina Jolie’s.
Surgeon: That costs one thousand dollars extra.
Miss Albania: I have some savings.

And her boobs do not look natural.

Miss Bolivia: Gimme some more!
Surgeon: That’s one thousand dollars per pound.
Miss Bolivia: I take two pounds…on each side.

After intensive training in front of the mirror…

Pageant coach: Remember, do the dangerous-sexy-look when they do the close-up.
Miss Denmark: Aye aye, Sir!

Boy, who is her hairdresser?

Cosima: You should sue him!
Miss Latvia: Well, we were trying something new, the mermaid look.

I am not an expert, but…

…I am willing to bet that Miss Lebanon’s nose was bigger before the operation.

Kudos to Miss Mexico for her facial control.

Cosima tried, but she could not get her left eyebrow to arch like that.

Half of the contestants hook their thumbs into their bikini bottoms like Miss Slovakia.

Photographer: Let’s have some fun!
Assistant: You think their bikini bottoms will fly off?
Photographer: It’s worth a try!

Cosima’s final question: What do the Tour de France and the Miss Universe Pageant have in common?
Answer: You don’t know for sure who is doped.

Photos: Reuter, Miss Universe L.P., LLLP

tags: miss universe, girlie stuff