The Westmonster Daily

Thinking in categories is essential to life. Just look at this blog, or any blog for that matter: All the posts are tagged and assigned to categories. Life is just that much easier when you have drawers in your brain – figuratively speaking – that you can put all those experiences and people into. Imagine how stressful your life would be if you had to figure out everyone and everything bit by bit. If you didn’t have any previous experiences to draw from in order to determine the right drawer for someone you just met.

“He’s a lawyer. I don’t know what a lawyer would be like. I’ll ask him and look like a total mossback. Or I’ll just spend some time with him to find out. Oh. He has to leave for some ‘trial’ thingy and can’t talk to me? What’s a trial? I’ll ask hi… oh. Gone.”

Ugh! But:

“He’s a lawyer. So he’s basically like Ally McBeal. Check.”

So convenient!

Where was I going with this? Oh, yes. Sometimes, very rarely, there are occasions when something won’t fit an existing drawer or, in this case, category. That’s where this category comes in. It replaces all the myriads of drawers I could install in my brain to embrace every single thing I could possibly conceive of.

In a nutshell, I am going to post under this category whenever I would otherwise open up a new one, thereby preventing the creation of an inextricably chaotic mess of categories.

You may thank me later.

My niece likes to talk. A lot. Of course, it’s a little hard to understand what she means at the moment when everything she says sounds a lot like “da da da”, but there are two distinct words she is already using appropriately. Those are “please” and “thank you”.

Over the Easter weekend the whole nuclear family gathered and I had two days to observe her. She likes giving things to people and getting them back. It goes like this:

She picks up something and holds it out for you to see. But when you try to take it, she won’t let go. You have to say: “Would you please give this to me? Please?” before she actually gives it to you. And she repeats the “please” back to you. When you say “thank you” she repeats that as well. Of course, the next thing you do is give the item back to her, saying “there you are” (which is the same word as “please” in German) to which she usually replies with her version of “thank you”.

How cool is that? Can’t talk yet but she’s polite like a pro!

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On  a different note: She also imitates a certain animal. While other children may know what the dog says or how the cow goes, my niece knows what the hedgehog says! Unfortunately, that curling of the nose and snuffling and lip-pursing can’t be put down in writing… *dying of cuteness*

Wow!

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I know I am, as always, a couple of decades behind, having just now finished reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. But – oh! What a book! What a writer! What a poet!

I keep telling people how Rilke breaks my heart with his way of weaving the same words I use every day into beautiful, heartstrings-tugging works of art. But Margaret Atwood? I mean – is she even trying? Yes, the story is compellingly interesting. Yes, I wanted to know what was going to happen in this strange, yet eerily familiar world she had fabricated. But what really had me hooked were the words! The same type of words I use (okay, maybe not “palimpsest” [p.1] and the like, but I swear, it’s mostly everyday vocabulary), but combined SO gorgeously that I had to smile and gasp and marvel all the time at the sheer force of poetry chasing me to page after page.

My favorite quote about the handmaids having to live between the lines of society (or something like that) is lost somewhere in the book (*kicking myself for not writing it down when I had it right there before me*), so the last lines will have to do for now (here be no spoilers):

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Applause.

Are there any questions?”

…

Bookmark check: You need to search everyone for the individual spot in which they are unique [Man muß an jedem Menschen solange suchen bis man den individuellen Punkt findet wo er originell ist]. J. Paul

Stumbling around the internet I just happened upon this site full of puns.

These two made me laugh out loud (yes, I actually lol’d):

…Baby seal walks into a club… what a tragedy…

and

…A guy walks into a bar. “OUCH!”…

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Another one on the puny site (*heehee*) reminded me of a joke my favorite ex-roomie tells a lot:

What do Budweiser and sex in a canoe have in common?

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They’re both f***ing close to water.

Here’s a poem-y text fragment I wrote in my poem-y diary just about three years ago:

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This summerly, lighthearted, sanguine literary masterpiece was obviously B.H. – before Hubby. I can’t remember feeling that way since we’ve been together. I am happy to report that these days, I mostly cry about other people’s misery, preferrably people in movies or books. Hardly any romantic self-pity involved anymore. Growing up – check. About time, too!

I wonder… do dogs yap on about how doggy they are? Do butterflies feel inclined to tell all the world how they are butterflying around? And… do Grown-Ups even call themselves that?

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Tonight, while I was asleep, as good girls should be at night – which doesn’t tell you anything about me being good or bad or a girl of either of these convictions because for all you know I could be an averagely okay-behaved boy who just happened to be asleep at night because he accidentally misread the clock – I had a great idea.

For a book.

I have great ideas for books all the time when I’m asleep. They usually involve me being chased by someone in a very complex and intriguing manner.

This one was different and I even remember what I think would be a great quote for a movie trailer (yes, when I dream, I dream big): “You don’t think my soul stays in this box of sand the whole time I’m gone, do you?”

Okay, so here’s the kicker: The quote is unaltered because the dream was actually in English. The whole thing, I swear.

I don’t usually dream in English. I admittedly talk to Hubby in a weird English-y kind of language most of the time we’re horsing around, and I have spent some time in English speaking countries. I sometimes can’t think of the proper expression in German and just blurt out the English one, making myself sound like a total douche showing off her mad English-language-Skillz.

But I don’t dream in English.

Well, I didn’t use to dream in English up until last night, to be perfectly accurate.

I had applied for the Green Card Lottery the day before, so maybe that had something to do with it, who knows. I just had the weirdest feeling when I was done waking up and noticed I hadn’t felt weird at all the first couple of seconds after just having awakened from a dream I had dreamed in English.

Anyway, the great idea for the book: There’s this man, who’s a strange kind of traveler. At certain points in his life, he turns to sand. In a box. And while the sand is in the box, his soul goes places. Which is why his soul doesn’t stay in the box of sand the whole time he’s gone, you see. In my dream, there also was a girl (very pretty, looked just like me) who held the box and had a very interesting look on her face.

There was more, but I forgot after having memorized the cool quote sitting on the toilet right after waking up. Well, there was of course a small time span between waking up and actually sitting on the toilet, because, a bit off as I might be sometimes, I haven’t resorted to sleeping on the toilet yet. I’m pretty much grossed out by toilets, so the chance of me falling asleep on one, which would entail me touching all kinds of parts of the bowl and the seat and… huh. This post is going places I hadn’t intended it to go. Go. Get it?

So, anyway, I guess there goes the book deal. I think there was something about shoes and interesting conversations with bums at a train station…

Oh well. Fame’ll have to wait a while for me.