Studious, stressful calm

I can barely concentrate, my mind is racing, all over the place. I have to rein it in and force it to halt, to just focus on what I have to do RIGHT NOW. And yet it wonders off... to tomorrow, the last day of classes in Berlin with that wonderfully international team of students and the role play an Iranian and an Emirati girl and I have prepared for that class... to the last paper we have to write by tomorrow, which I (of course) haven't started... to the day after tomorrow, where I will drive 900km south to my 'home' in Bavaria... to the day after that, where I will fly to Jordan with my nephew, where I have to negotiate the terms of my master thesis with my supervisor (although I haven't yet found the time to research it properly)... to the industrial ruin I climbed with Lisa last week, overlooking half of Berlin and the river Spree below us, scattering the lights of the beach bars in its reflection... to the weird club we went to afterwards, in a boat house with ducks in the spotlight and hammocks between the trees... to the job I applied for in Ramallah, about which I am to receive news one of these next days, too... to the restaurant on a parking lot, where I met my uncle a few days ago and the stories he told me about his and my mother's childhood in the 1950s... and to a million other things.

But what is there to do now?
One name: Judith Butler.

This person has achieved a remarkable feat. She has uncovered what lies beneath the dusty road we walk every day, underneath the path that makes our everyday life, the path that our feet have become to accustomed to tread, that we don't even notice it's there. In fact, we don't even notice we're walking on it.
Who would have thought, that underneath this dusty track, just below a layer of nondescript earth, there lies a mosaic of such purity and simplicity, of such honesty and frankness, that we cannot bare to see it. She has, with immense clarity of thought and inquisitive pursuit of the subconscious, uncovered this mosaic, chiselling away the hardened earth bit by bit, stroking off the dust with a soft brush till it all appeared in its whole explosive nature. So shattering are the impression of its plain colours and the implications of its simple patterns, that it threatens our whole existence. It threatens the way we understand our interactions with people and the world around us and most of all: the way we understand our own self, who we are or more precisely: how we are being.
And that is why we don't walk on it, but on the dust, whose mundane greyness quietens and denies a deep intrinsic knowledge of the mosaic's existence. It disappears from our conscious and we can live a quite and calm 'reality', occupying ourselves with our little worries and fears.

My worry: will I manage to write a paper about her groundbreaking text on performative acts and gender constitution in the next hour and a half?

The horizon turns purple-gold, as I tread on along the dusty track, in the safe knowledge that I am me.

Remnants from the industrial age

These lovely remains of a glass manufacturing industry stand on a big open space just around the corner where I live. It's one of the beautiful elements of Berlin, these remnants from a mostly forgotten past, where industrial architecture was often a pleasure to the eye.

[photos stolen from Ralf Pätzold, DrRusty and otsego_amigo respectively. Thank you! }-: ]

Shisha and WLAN

What a good combination!
Sitting on the sidewalk of a street in Eastern Berlin, frequented by the efficiently running trams and scores of cyclists, I'm looking at the beautifully decaying old buildings opposite, lit by ambient street lighting and the occasional blue flashing of a passing police car, as I draw on a shisha and stuff a piece of khubz dipped in fresh hummus into my mouth while I type these words into my beloved mac, connecting to the rest of the world.
Heya ad-Dunya hek, habibi! - Such is the world, my friend!
Al-hayat jamil! - Life is beautiful!