switching from daylight savings time back to normal time always causes my internal clock to be sort of confused. today seemed to drag on forever but at least i managed to look up the scenes of the sci fi films i intend to show on wednesday to illustrate my theories. big fun.
what is the sudden hype with Halloween here in good ol’ Europe? don’t get me wrong, i have nothing against Halloween, it surely is a great festivity and an American tradition. so here is what bothers me: why do we have to celebrate it as well? the media is full of it: a weekend with special Halloween-style movies and shows… and this phenomenon is not restricted to Germany or Austria only… but also in France! i can hardly believe it! France! for example, most European countries that adopted it, the sub-unit of the Euro is called the Cent. France is the exception, as it gained permission to continue to use the existing term “Centime”. they even have an institution (”académie française“) that decides what foreign (e.g. english) terms and expressions are “imported” to french, but with the overall aim to keep the language “pure”.
welcome to the wonderful world of globalization. or as Rammstein put it in their new song “Amerika”:
Musik kommt aus dem Weißen Haus,
Und vor Paris steht Mickey Maus.
i am supposed to give an one hour presentation about my thesis next wednesday. so i really wanted to get down to business today and start working on the powerpoint slides and stuff. unfortunately, i woke up with a splitting headache this morning that had gone considerably worse by mid-afternoon. i am reluctant when it comes to painkillers but when you have the prospect of inspecting the porcelain for the rest of the evening, popping a pill seems the better choice.
change of topic: they announced the stages and route of the Tour de France 2005 (deux mille cinq — i love this number!) today. what a surprise! no Alpe d’Huez or Mont Ventoux and only three stages finishing on mountain tops. but lots of flat stages, which are in my opinion sort of boring. however, i am curious if Lance is going to be in the TdF 2005. it would be fun, especially since parts of two stages are in Germany, home of arch-competitor Jan “Ulle” Ullrich.
actually i am making plans what to do after graduation. i expect to be unemployed for a while, so i guess i will be writing letters of application. i find actually some solace in the fact that many young academics are unemployed after graduation. i think the situation is pretty bad throughout Europe. and after all i want to take some time out as well. enjoy life, maybe travel to France to visit one stage of the TdF or to sightseeing-trip to Paris. who knows? it is hard to believe right now but there is a life after the PhD.
i am going shooo-ooooping. some of you may have already noticed: each time i feel sort of fed up with my thesis (or any matter related to it) i usually raid amazon.de. i am in the middle of reworking my Neocron case study and i am not particularly happy to do so… i want this stuff to be finished. now. the fact that today was a really gorgeous fall day makes matters even worse. i spent almost the entire spring and summer ‘04 in front of my computer, writing my thesis. now it is fall and although i thought it would be over by now i am still making some last minute corrections and changes. i am so done with it!
today i found yet another example of the so-called “perverse landscape of the media”. again, a show of MTV managed to catch my attention while channel-surfing. it is called “Room Raiders” and took “socially accepted voyeurism” to the next level. the (bed-)rooms of three male or female singles are sort of “investigated” and the investigator decides which one of the three candidates he or she wants to date. his or her decision is solely based on the rooms and what they tell (or do not tell) about their owners. it usually comes down to spicy details about the prefered choice of underwear (thongs in drawers!) or looking what porn can be found on the room owner’s computer. (and i always thought french television was weird.)
speaking of french television, which still continues to amaze me… it appears that one has to work only 4 days a week at a certain, not further specified french television station. *lol*
i am supposed to be of full energy since my head cold is almost gone, but somehow i am still tired. i drove 135 km today for a meeting that lasted 10 minutes. it was worth it in the end, because i’ve got a new “second supervisor” for my thesis. (my old one dropped my thesis on very short notice just two weeks ago.)tomorrow will basically be the same, i am going to drive yet another 135 km just to hand in the form with the new second supervisor. oh yes, don’t we all love bureaucrazy (pun intended)!? but things got started and are rolling smoothly to the december 3rd deadline…
today something funny happened… a french acquaintance asked me via instant message how to spell “somnambule”. *lol* luckily i have my french dictionary right here on my desk. this was really weird…
np: Devil’s Food Cake - Un Autre Monde
as i was reviewing the chapter on the key principles of Lacanian psychoanalysis today i had a revelation! i suddenly realized why i am learning French. it is not to understand Lacan better but to fill my lack. it was the same with the English language: i decided to study American and English literature because English gave me the feeling to be more complete, to be able to express myself better and to get a better understanding. but somehow this feeling subsided and was replaced by French a few months ago. this is what Lacan calls “objet a”, the cause of desire. it is impossible to have the “objet a”; it is dynamic, moving from one real object or thing to another, always in search for even greater desire (and jouissance). desire per se can never be satisfied - it keeps us (and our life) going.
i do not know for certain what i actally see in French or the french culture. however, it has a certain “surplus-value”, something that makes it desireable for me. you could also say it has a certain “factor” that is appealing to me. the most obvious answer would be to say, “it is a beautiful language”. but there is more to it and this “more” cannot be attributed to a single aspect; it evades our language because it is located in the psychic register of the Real — the place of ultimate jouissance.
my productivity is sort of limited right now because i came down with a full-blown head cold. (no, i do not think it was triggered by the flu shot… i figure i must have caught the bug in the waiting room.) as a result i do not feel very well because the dull feeling in the sinuses is rather unpleasant. oh well, things can only get better in this regard…
i enjoy watching “le journal” (i.e. the news) on tv5 as i mentioned a few days ago. usually i do not like watching the news because the anchors are mostly middle-aged men or women. but tv5 is different — big time! *g*
