various creativeness

I'm not really good with blogging :s

... but I'm having a creative phase- here are some results (bad bad picture quality, since my real fotomachine disappeared mysteriously last week)

Speculaas with Pauline! and yes, we do have a slight obsession with literature.

Some texts and thoughts from the last year, now bundled and with "title": De Leukste Halte. over denken in tijden

new buttons for my collection :) De Kringwinkel is such a treasure box if you're willing to spend some time there!

A cup I painted myself on a nice afternoon with naomi, max and mit.

scarf in progress, the colours are nicer in daylight, it are stripes in blue-greenish wool, a thick one for the winter..

home-made pencilcase in cutey-pink. Too bad you can't see the real colour (or any details at all..)

collage. it's one you have to read, it's rather a poem actually. about feelings, modernism, falling apart.

project with naomi: we refurbished a crappy 2nd-hand chair and the result is really nice :) the curtains in the background are selfmade as well.

.... and this is one of the many advent-calenders i worked on in the past weeks. There is one little bag for every day, filled with yummy things and little presents, from the 1st of December until the 24th, to make the waiting for Christmas ever so sweet :)

moving

I’m moving. For a month already, I am somewhere in between places.

So, I started to think about the concept moving and the terms in which we think and speak about it.

English uses really dramatic concepts, living somewhere and then moving. Live at/ in is so existential, to be at a certain place means to be, to exist, as if place were the only determining factor to exist. Moving is indeed moving. Moving moves people, nothing stays the same, it is inherently emotional. That is probably what I like about the English version, it is so vague and all inclusive.

My mothertongue uses umziehen for it. But Umziehen is also what you do every day when changing your clothes. It sounds so ridiculously simple and casual, umziehen. What I do like in it is the connotation that ziehen carries, it means to pull; trekken. Since I am 16, I believe that there are some kinds of forces that pull you around from one place to the other. You never really know what your next destination is, how long your stay is going to be and who is going to be your travel mate and neighbour.

The german word for train - Zug - stems from the same word. I like the thought of there being some invisible rails (Schienen) throughout the universe which will eventually lead us to wherever we are going. All the movings and movements I made in the last 3 years were really random, I never knew where I would land and if it would be good there. Something just drew me here and there and on and on. And somehow, in the end, things turn out to be fine. But it can be incredibly hard to trust in rails you cannot see.

Dutch then has a really different approach to the whole thing: moving is verhuizen. If you’d try to dissect the word and translate it literally, you’d get something like “de-housing” or “re-housing”. Dutch probably has the most rational and to the point word for it. It directly points at the fact that you are leaving one house and move into another. Sometimes verhuizen evokes a picture in me of people taking their houses along, like snails. That way of thinking makes moving less dramatic, it somehow implies that what your house, your home, is whatever you can carry with you.

If I count all the places I have lived at for at least a month in the last three years, that would make… (counting… Brussels, St. Genesius Rhode, Kirchdorf, Antwerp Lozana, Mortsel, Antwerp South, Antwerp North, Deurne South, soon Borgerhout) 9 different places. That is a lot. I love and hate all of these places to some extent, but right now, the only place I am thinking of is the next station coming up, the conductor has already announced “arriving shortly” and I am collecting all me internal and external belongings and trying not to forget anything.

I don’t know what language points at it, the fact that people more or less frequently change the places they store their things at, cook, love and sleep, most efficiently.

I do know that moving is very moving to me and that I do need some rest and a base of my own very soon.

buttons

playing with buttons...

PS

writing in English is awkward. I feel stuck and unable to convey what I really want. German and even Dutch would be a lot easier. But blogging is awkward anyway so why not stick to this dutgermenglish of mine.

Books and stuff

I love books. I always have.
When I was younger, I always pictured myself studying literature.. with piles of beautiful fat and oh-so-wise books covered in dark brown leather next to me.. (well, after a rather turbulent flight made me realize that Stewardess as absolutely NOT what I wanted to be and also the spririt to study medicine had left my brains, that is)
One of my first books was called "Mein Kleines Pony" and I knew it by heart when I was fourandahalf. Then there was this huge book about a witch (a good one of course), who bewitched the whole world and made the sky green and the grass blue, oh I loved that book! During the primary school years I read a lot... Really. About 4 books a week... Man, I wish I'd still be able to do that! Back then I loooooved those girly books about boarding schools and stewardesses, I even had three pink adventures of Barbie in bookform (they are still in my basement, anyone interested?).
A very special day was the day I first was allowed to take a look at the department "Youth Books" in our local library... a whole new world opened up to me (since I have read all the children's books of any interest to me). Last week I found back one of my favourite books from that time, I must have been 12 or so when I first read it. It's called "Die Mädchen vom Dachboden" and it is indeed as kitschy as it sounds... I read it again this summer. And found it fantastic!
It is only now that I'm studying literature that I realized, how impossible it is to know it all. Even to know a lot. Thinking of how many books I'll have to read next year and visualizing them next to the books I want to read for myself or additionally... oooh. Every single year I promise myself to read more, be more patient, appreciate difficult or boring bits and pieces.. it's time to renew these intentions.. and stick to them faithfully. yes. I do.
At least I have already read some good books in the last weeks: Oranges are not the only fruit, The Great Gatsby, 2 books of Daniel Glattauer, the Dachboden book, and now Virgina Woolf. You see, I'm trying :)

well, what I actually wanted to post is a poem. I got myself a new book yesterday: It's called "Neue Liebesgedichte" and it's home to a collection of german love-poems of the last 30 years. It has a beautiful white soft-cover and so on. The first poem I read was one of Peter Turrini, at first I didn't find it that great.. by now i quite like it.:

Liebe macht blind
sagt man
und folglich
werde ich
in den Verein der Blinden
und Sehschwachen
eintreten.
Einen Blindenhund
beantragen.
Die Wohnung blindengerecht
umbauen.
Und jede Nacht
werde ich
an den Erhebungen deines Körpers
die Blindenschrift
üben.

some London tea-impressions

(Some random London Tea: at Apostrophe, Strand 215, next to the Twinings Shop in number 216, Michael Graves' kettle at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Exhibition Road, tea, fancy Earl Grey with blue flowers at the Tate Modern, breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien near Waterloo station.)

summersomething

all the modern things like cars and such have always existed they've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment listening to the irritating noises of dinosaurs and people dabbling outside all the modern things have always existed they've just been waiting to come out and multiply and take over it's their turn now...

(björk)

the song has been haunting me in my head for quite a while now. I just like to picture it (in a lego kind of way)

It's summer.
summer multiplies my usual amount of thinking by 21. emptyness again.
It's hard for me to do nothing at all, still have the feeling that I haven't arrived anywhere and that actually I'm not going anywhere. I'm feeling blury and my perceptions and feelings are blury.

Paris has been great, I love the city the people we met the language the heat.. most of all I love the persons I am with

London started off lonely. its name suggested it already.. I realised that I cannot travel alone. First I thought it were the city I couldn't stand but no, London is nice. It's being lost and lonely that makes me doubt the myself and the world. The label "home" has to undergo a shift in meaning: home is an abstract place with people around who understand me, not necessarily know me yet, but people who believe in opening their hearts and minds as I do. Only with the knowledge that I can come back to people like that I am able to experience alone not only as lonely

Antwerp was sundayrelaxing and mondaystress. I was glad to leave the city for a while. and I miss it already. Lately it carried too much of a connotation of meanman, stress and disruption, the taste of its name got bitter on my tongue. But Antwerp in summer is great... Summer in the city

Tuesday was Trainday. left at 5.45 am and arrived at 6.30 pm. I spent the time sleeping. It is such a special kind of sleep.. knowing that you are being carried from your one life into your other, seeing and feeling that movement only in tatters... I like my traindays.. yes they are so annoying but I would not want to miss them

Austria now. It's so green. During the year my eyes forget how many shades of green they can perceive.. summer after summer they learn it again. I'm meeting old friends enjoying my family my cat books under the walnuttree storms and stars.
but my head has not yet completely arrived

...though I've stopped thinking that that is actually something I should still be waiting for ;)

I want to build a lego town. like I used to in younger summers. and build all the modern things and the dinoaurs and figure out how to sensibly unify them.. break down the boarders and be a child of summer...

summersomethingreportanddream.