Well, if it's a choice between my personal interest and the good of my country, how can I waver? No one shall say Ninotchka was a bad Russian. - Ernst Lubitsch, Ninotchka
The good life
Ecological sustainability, self-sufficiency, community building, everyday wisdom
Habit #4: Real movies
When I am tired after a day's work, I open up my browser window and surf to Netflix or one of its illicit equivalents, to imbibe a mindless action movie that allows me to identify with a hero who slays its opponents with moral indemnity and righteousness. It is fast food for the soul, full ...
Urban sketch #3
On today's walk I go further than ever before: all the way to the Sky Park and the Sunset Park, two wonders of urban development right next to the neighborhood I live in since March. The Parks were formerly the world's largest mound of municipal waste, spreading an unbearable stench and belching forth methane, which ...
Urban sketch 2
In the library I see an old man sitting at a table and a large dictionary. I stand behind him to pick up a newspaper that includes New York Times articles I want to read because of the recent hydrogen bomb test in the North. The man greets me and asks what 'rags-to-riches' means. I ...
Urban sketch #1
...and then in the subway station something beautiful happened I was waiting for line number 3 to take me home and saw an older man at the vending machine going through his bag for some coins to buy himself a cup of instant coffee which tastes like yesteryear as I told him and he replied ...
Habit #2: Language learning
Habits seem to work better if you can divide them in smaller chunks that can give you an instant sense of accomplishment without taking up too much time. One very 'chunkable' habit is language learning. We have a plethora of resources at our fingertips, so I won't go into that here. Google yields all the best ...
Habit #1: daily summary of famous literature
Like most people on the Internet, I'm looking for better
Bilingual child’s creative translation
Today, like most days, my four years old daughter Miru sang a song in kindergarten. When I asked her to sing it to me after I picked her up and she was enjoying an ice slushy that colored her tongue orange, she rendered a perfect translation in Dutch. Good, the song consisted of three distinct ...
On people who live on in our dreams
I dreamt that the late British American public intellectual Christopher Hitchens was walking next to me. He was bald, like in the last months of his life when he underwent chemotherapy, but appeared in excellent health and was obviously not aware of his impending death. The image was so vivid that I could see the ...
Don't attempt to choreograph the dancing child in you
Traveler
In foreign places I become a mere observer of life, a smile suspended in between the heavens of my imagination and the flat earth of the toiling people. I look out of the window, squint my dry eyes and gaze in the wild distance. The people on the marketplace this morning, I was not part ...
Thank you for the kind birthday wishes!
To all who wished me a happy birthday on our beloved social media, and in particular to those well wishers I couldn't reply personally: Thank you very much for all your kind words, they inspire me to celebrate my 38th birthday with 365 days of inspiration. I am determined to keep up my writing in ...
Bubbles
During the last days of a year that was filled with the perceived horrors of the untimely death of several celebrity actors and popstars, as well as the real horror of the destruction of Aleppo, I want to sit back and reflect. A word that illustrates our quick march towards unadulterated cynicism that characterized the ...
Relabeling
Since it has become part of my daily life I would like to describe once again my thoughts about coping with bullshit labor.
Netpoetry #11
Perform your bullshit jobs on music and a 30 minutes task becomes just too short for a Mozart sonata
Upbringing
Authoritarian upbringing: If you misbehave, you don't get any food.
Modern parenting: If you misbehave, your food won't taste good.
p2p housing experiment
We are a Dutch-Korean family; our daughter was born in 2013. We work as independent writers and we get by. We are not dependent on any specific location for our work, so when we choose where we want to live we ask ourselves “do we fit in?” or “do people like us here because of ...
Fearless
Dear Miru, There lives an intuition in me that wants you to be fearless. I know that fear has a vital function, but it only works when you experience it against the background of fearlessness. When your mind is troubled by unprocessed phobias, the fear that might have saved you will become useless and irrational. ...
On Education
Dear Miru, Today, I want to tell you about Education. Even if we would want them to, our children don't accept the concept of schooling as the transfer of a canon of established facts. They are so much used to Wikipedia and Google that it would be practically impossible to convince them that carrying knowledge ...
Coming out
When people ask me "when are you publishing"?
It sounds to me like "when are you coming out?"
Well, with everything I do I am coming out.
I am always coming out.