Journal

Yesterday my BJJ class was cut short a bit as a rookie (who had been training twice as long as I have, don’t get me wrong) broke his arm while trying to defend a take down. He held his arm outstretched behind him, trying to catch himself as he fell. All his weight – a big boy, like me – oh his static arm…something had to give, and it did. Ouch. We held his arm to his chest, wrapped him and his arm in tape and the instructor drove him to the hospital.

My relationship with Moulsari is just going from bad to worse and has lately taken a tremendous nose-dive. I feel like I’m being treated like a stranger, with a cold onpersoonlijkheid that I find very hard to stomach, even though I know that this is the way it’s supposed to be. As a result, I feel a deep sadness due to her absence, and, paradoxically, a frustration when we interact. She’s been such a pillar in my life for a few years shy of a decade that it’s just really hard to stomach that we’re going down this road. I’m really tired.

To quote Henry Rollins; “My mind is a block of obsidian coated in Teflon, impervious to the uptake of knowledge. I torture myself with books I don’t understand in the vain hope something will finally seep in.” I feel much the same way about myself, especially in the realm of the natural and humanistic sciences. For years I’ve been reading physics books that claim they could teach the fundamentals of the universe as Man understands it to an eight year old retarded child. It seems either they overestimated their ability to teach or people have overestimated me (in relation to an eight year old retarded kid) because there are so many things that I simply did not understand, and still don’t.

But yesterday, while reading Simon Singh’s “Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe,” I finally understood Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which governs, for me, one of the hardest fundamentals of physics to grasp due to its counter-intuitiveness; that time is relative. It is the foundation of the until-yesterday-baffling Twin Paradox. Finally having it set in an example that finally let it make sense to me, I could literally feel a barrier in my mind give way and understanding flood in. Those eureka moments are few and far between for someone en par with Timmy (aforementioned eight year old retarded boy), but the sense of elation is addictive and exhilirating. It makes me hopeful that one day I might be somebody.

The thing that is starting to get to me more and more lately is the fact that less and less people seem concerned with their garbage and where it ends up. I am not talking about their accumulated waste, or the environmental consequences of a society, but rather of cigarette butts and candy-wrappers. So many people are prone to just toss them on the ground without even giving it a passing thought. I have started to wonder if my objection to this is another symptom of the mild neurosis I think I might be affected with, where I try my best to minimise the clutter in my life.

I never really saw it as a problem until Moulsari told me several months ago that she didn’t want to be subjected to my insanities when I felt the urge to tidy up the kitchen a bit while she was preparing a meal. I’m not a clean freak, but I do get uncomfortable in a chaotic and messy environment. I start to get distracted and annoyed at the disorder, and I start to wonder if all the stuff that’s bugging me is really stuff that’s even necessary. Can’t we just get rid of it?

I like my environment like I like my supermarkets; spacious, clean and with limited options. Why have twenty types of breakfast cereal when a maximum of four will be more than enough to satisfy 95% of the shoppers? Do we really have to bend over backwards to cater to that last five percent? I am sure the market will take care of it. If there’s really a demand for those other sixteen types of cereal someone will open up a Fussy Douchebag Store that has a selection of 101 Different Breakfast Cereals, with a whole section of East Asian breakfast cereals to cater to the Yellow Fevers among us!

Just like physics and fashion, life is most beautiful when it’s clean, streamlined and simple, leaving you with enough space to pay attention to all that life has to offer. All the stuff we clutter our lives with we keep to mask our self-loathing or to superficially placate our dissatisfaction. Rant over.

The skin on the top of my right foot, just above my big toe, as well as several other, smaller places, had been chafed off during BJJ. In order to do a proper single or double-leg take-down you have to kneel and step through, and oftentimes it makes you slide the top of your foot across the mat, which sometimes scrapes the skin off your feet. Eva, who came to watch, luckily had some awesome bandages for me. I just tried to remove it and found that the skin underneath, which hadn’t healed very well yet, was stuck to a part of the sticky bit of the band-aid, and when I removed it it took the scab, and a large part of the skin along with it, making everything a hundred times worse than it was before I put the band-aid on. Ouch.