Today kindergarten started after a 2 week break (holidays). Unluckily, little C. has to stay at home because she is sick.

I have only two kids in two different kindergartens (we have different institutions for children aged 1-3 and 4-6). And I have at least one of my kids at home about half of the year: Three days because little C. has a cold, 2 days because little A. vomits, a week beause of the flu,… Three weeks  the authorities close kindergarten 1 because of some epidemia, one day of for paedagogical super-day at kindergarten 2, 2 weeks Christmas holidays, 2 weeks Easter holidays, 11 f***ing weeks because of the summer holidays…

It drives me crazy.

I haven’t changed much.

I still like coffee and kids and literature and law and taekwondo. I still like to think about heroic deeds, I still like to poder about things until I feel enlightened by my own ponderings, I am still totally sure that I’m meant to do great things concerning justice and coolness.

I still dislike being tired and bing cold and being hungry – yet in my mind I am unmoved by any possible inconvenience. 2 hours of sleep and still laughing and fighting, not knowing pain, not knowing fear, that’s what I’m like in my mind. In reality I’m mooody and whiny after only 2 hours of sleep.

Here’s my New Year’s resolution: I decided to do some kind of self-improvement.

I want to keep up what I think I’m good at: I am responsible, trustworthy, honest, mature, brave. I’d like to improve in these areas but I think I’m on a good way.

I also want to learn about a few things I’m not very good at: I want to learn how to be grateful and how to be cheerful (cheerful not in a giggling way, but like someone who accepts things and knows that there’s a time for everything) and how to be unmoved by other people’s expectations of what I should be like. I am bad at these  things so it should be easy to improve a little bit.

I also decided to blog at least once a month.

From time to time I feel like I’m supposed to be this flawless, perfect image of perfection and flawlessness, but I fail to deliver.

Like you are supposed to be a goddess, but you aren’t even a properly standing human.

Society wants a woman’s body  to look like the body of a petite 16-year old girl. 

Unfortunately, I look like a petit 19-year old boy. My legs are a woman’s dream (= male legs). I have a fabulou amount of muscle. You  really should see my various strings of muscle stand out in when I move my calves….Oh, and my thighs, long-strong-wood-shaped strong featured muscle with  sweet blond hair… like a gay man’s dream.

I could leg-model as a gay greek god in a B-movie any time if it wasn’t for the scars.

Society wants my face to look younger and my nose to be smaller. 

Maybe I shouldn’t look in the mirror after browsing through H&M ads.

When I look in the mirror I feel old and tired. There is this thing about my not flawless skin, my not childlike face, my flat hair, my not so white teeth, about the deep hollowness under my eyes. How can you dare to exist, you ugly, old, weak, tired shadow of a human?

Society wants me to gracefully research the glorious case-law of Austria

I’m supposed to be Julia Roberts in this Grisham movie, a beautiful, determined young lady who stays in the library doing research 24/7. Steadily reading file after file, case after case, until she comes up with results. Thinking and writing and never tiring, rejoicing over the beauty of law.

Yet there’s this thing about my non-finished thesis and how I can’t push myself. There’s me staring at the computer screen, doing literally nothing. There’s my re-checking my e-mails, having the tenth look at facebook, having the twentieth look in the fridge (There is this very slight feeling that finding frozen youghurt in the fridge might lead to great research results, only that you haven’t bought frozen youghurt and that looking for frozen yoghurt the 20th time won’t change the yoghurtless reality….).

Society wants me to have a career

Look at this gorgeous young lawyer in her wonderful business clothing, marveled at by young law students. Look at the graceful way she moves, look how talks about her case, oh how fluent and clever is her speech. Her knowledge of law is deep, her authority unshatterable, her rhetorical skill excellent.

She could be you.

Only that you spend your days non-researching for a useless thesis, getting dirt on your casual clothes by little kids (Playing with kids is fun, but society doesn’t really think it makes your existence valueable), cleaning and cooking and carrying around toddlers.

Society wants your motherhood to be graceful. 

You are supposed to gracefully smile, to tend your kids in this perfect environment. Your kids are supposed to be little sunshines, ever so happy, their clothes ever so clean, their actions ever so sweet, their words ever so nice („Mommy, I love you.“).

Why do your kids puke and scream and cuss and destroy things and kill snails and pull your hair? Why do your thoughts revolve around what to cook and how to cook while cleaning the kitchen while stopping kid 1 from scratching kid 2, aren’t you supposed to have food ready to give it to your peacefully smiling children?

Society wants to spit right in your face for not being a mother like you see them in advertisments.

Maybe society doesn’t care. 

I don’t know, probably society has no such demands from me and they are just my own. Which is because society doesn’t give a f*** about a male-legged tiredlooking non-researching unemployed toddler mother.

The villagers start to sing and dance and praise L’s great deeds of the past year: How she nearly finished the thesis once again, how she got the terrible wound on her right fist (Even though L. says it was just a little accident in the dojo, the villagers believe to know the truth: She slew a dragon with her bare hands), how wonderful her strong fragile body glimmers in the pale moonlight of the sunset.
L: „I appreciate your efforts but I’m not a hero. I’m just back.“
Villagers: „Our heroine is back! Praise her!“

*

Scene 2:

Cassius-Anthony and L.
Cassius-Anthony: „You’ve gained such a victory, L. Your thesis is nearly finished.“
L: „Do you know what the term „pyrrhic vicotry“ means, Anthony? I’ve been nearly finished for two years now.“
Cassius-Anthony: „Which just proves you are both victorious and modest, L.“
L: „… I’m tired, not victorious.“
Cassius-Anthony: „In a few weeks you will be both tired and vicotrious.“
L: „Sounds good to me.“

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials trilogy – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (unfortunately–> this is Deadra’s commetn, but it’s very fitting)

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (heard it as an audiobook)

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia series – CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Ich denke jetzt schon minutenlang drüber nach und es fällt mir nicht ein… (Ich glaube es beginnt mit „Er schuf…“)

1.) When someone tells me „I trust you“ or „Do this for us“ I feel an obligation so strong that I’d like to move mountains for this person.
2.) I love blistering cold days with blue skies, when the air smells so fresh and the cold tickles your cheeks and you can see so very far over the mountains. (Of course it is essential to wear a cap.)
3.) Recently I found out that I a) feel and b) enjoy my anger rising when facing a situation where I’d usually feel myself on the edge of tears.
4.) Sleep is the drug.
5.) I can now live with not pleasing and not being loved by everyone. (Not that everyone loved or was pleased by me before… but I wanted it.) I think this is something that comes with age and getting wise. But still, sometimes I feel sad about acting against someone’s wish even though I think that I’m doing it right.
6.) Sometimes I think that the future holds very cool things for me. Then I think that everything was lost from the start and everything will be very rotten and I’m never going to score. This concerns my career.
7.) Sometimes I am so in love with dreaming that I don’t practise (like thinking about being so great at taekwondo or having my thesis finished or conversing in Russian … but I neither practise taekwondo nor Russian nor do I write my thesis.)
8.) I’d love to stay my cool self when I’m tired or hungry or hurt. But I’m more of my sarcastic, grim, evil-tempered self.
9.) I’m like a teenager in my plans. I’m so totally meant to be a law-person/judge/lawyer/pol/teacher/poet/full-time mother of 12 kids. And I intend not to decide but to do it all because I want them all. … My rational self tells me that some combinations aren’t possible (and, indeed, you can not be a judge and a lawyer at the same time). But my semi-rational self tells me „You are so cool, L., you don’t have to decide. You can totally raise and educate 12 kids, be a lawyer and a politician and in your free-time you are going to write poetry and from time to time you are going to hold cool speeches about the spirit of law at local schools.“ … err, well. Maybe I have to face the reality of having to make choices.
10.) I think I changed.

Das Fass gefüllt am Höchststand wäre also (für die, denen diese Allegorie schwerfällt) der höchstmögliche Stresspegel.
Und jetzt stellen wir uns vor, dass dieses Fass randvoll ist. Und dann kommt noch ein Tropfen hinein. Und er schwappt deutlich mehr über als nur der eine Tropfen.
… Ja.

Nur für den Fall, warum jemand wissen will, warum ich 2 Stunden lang nicht arbeiten konnte und in tiefem Hader mit der Welt bin, weil der Geschirrspüler Geräusche macht, als würde er demnächst eingehen. Ein eventuell kaputtes Gerät, das noch nicht mal kaputt ist, das ist doch keine Aufregung wert. Das ist Peanuts. Ein Wassertropfen bestenfalls.

*

(Bei der Waffenausgabestelle).
L. und Cassius-Anthony verteilen die Waffen: Einen Locher, Gesetzesbücher, Bleistifte, Kugelschreiber, Papierflieger und zuletzt die besten Waffen: Eine Spule CDs (zu verwenden als Ninjasterne) und zwei Bürosessel. Die Gegner der Dissertation sehen ein wenig betrübt ihre Waffen an.
L (motivierend): „Denkt dran: So ein Stuhlbein ist eine gute Waffe, damit haben die Senatoren schon die Gracchen erschlagen.“
Cassius-Anthony: „…err… L.-Sir, die mit den Stuhlbeinen waren die Bösen.“
L.: „Hm. Egal, jedenfalls ist ein Stuhlbein eine gute Waffe.“
Cassius-Anthony (greift seine Bleistift wie Gizmo): „Gegen die Diss!“
L. und die Anhänger: „Gegen die Diss!“

Sie ziehen los und singen famose Lieder über Freiheit und Solidarität und den Sieg der Vernunft. Ihre Bleistifte und Papierkugeln sind bereit, sich gegen die Dissertationsorcs mit ihren Streitäxten und Panzern und Haubitzen zu stellen.