Off
The bus is packed and ready to go. We are off! See you in September.
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.: posted by Vera 
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Almost off
Tomorrow morning (Saturday) I leave for Burning Man. A little yellow school bus will be my transportation and my house. The van I was going to share with Marc fell through, but I found this bus on Craigslist. The owner, Miguel, has been super nice and accommodating. He delivered the bus to my house last night.
Tomorrow morning we take off! Kean and Gerry are both riding with me. I am nervous and excited.
Here is what I want out of Burning Man this year:
- I want Kean and I to have some quality time together and some quality time apart.
- I want Kean and I to grow together.
- I want to run into people that I really enjoy spending time with.
- I want to explore with sex, sexiness, voyeurism, and exhibitionism.
- I want to always be in the right place at the right time.
- I want to accept everything as it comes and flow with it.
- I want to feel connected, safe, and at peace the entire time.
- I want Betty the bus to be a fun and reliable part of the experience.
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.: posted by Vera
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What have I gotten out of my German upbringing?
About three and a half years ago, I started questioning everything I have ever been taught. I started creating my own beliefs about everything; I started creating the life I wanted to live; I stopped doing what was expected of me and started doing what really pleased me, regardless of whether that pleased others.
That's when I turned my back on my German past, started really denouncing it, feeling very bitter about. I felt that having been raised by my parents in Germany had made me uptight, had made me beat myself up constantly, had made me look at everything as either right or wrong, good or bad, black or white, had made me overuse my head and underuse my intuition, had made me look for advice and validation outside of myself instead of within myself.
I felt that having been raised by my parents in Germany had put me in the mental hospital and had made me convinced that there was something wrong with me.
I started thinking that Germany sucks, that Germans suck, that German culture sucks. I started thinking that being German is equal to being oppressed, suppressed and repressed.
I was fucking pissed off and bitter that I had been raised to be an overthinking, overanalyzing, sexually and creatively repressed, and stiffly polite being!
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Get that junk out of me and away from me! I want to be free!
Then, maybe about a year ago, I realized that this kind of thinking doesn't really serve me either. It is just another way of judging things as "good" and "bad": how I was = bad, how I am now = good; German = bad, not German = good. I realized that I needed to find balance between shedding from my past what didn't serve me and being appreciative of the things from my past that did serve me. I resolved to find that balance.
But I still haven't found it. I am still having a REALLY hard time coming up with anything positive that my German upbringing has gotten me. I am still really, really bitter.
The only thing I can think of is punctuality. I tend to be pretty punctual. I think it's because I grew up in Germany. But does that really get me anywhere, besides to places earlier than most? The other day I was 15 minutes late for a massage appointment and I beat myself up over it for hours. Is that what being punctual has gotten me?
I asked Kean about it, and he said that I was very organized. Yes, I suppose I'm pretty organized. I suppose that helps me in many ways.
I asked Nico about it, and he said that he has never met a German who wasn't smart or polite. I suppose I am smart and polite. That German school system did teach me a lot. It sure kept me in line too. But is that really doing anything for me? Am I not often lying and pretending for the sake of being polite? Besides teaching me many things that make me look smart, has the German school system not also instilled in me an enormous fear of failure and an enormous desire to please authorities?
One thing my parents have definitely provided for me is stability. They are still together; they still live in the same house that I lived in my entire childhood; my dad still works for the same company he worked for when I was born. They still have the same phone number that my friends used to dial to call me when I was a kid and teenager. Even though I get bored of things pretty easily myself and don't value stability that much in my own life, it somehow feels very comforting to know that my parents are in such a position of stability. It's perhaps what has enabled me to do my own thing, knowing that I had an anchor.
And there is something I had as a child that no American I have ever known had in the same way. It was this co-ed group of friends that I spent most of my free time with. There were four other kids exactly my age that lived on the same street as me. Tobi, Mone, Sandy and Ingo. We were really good friends until our early teens. We skateboarded together, we played hide and seek together, we took long adventurous bus rides togheter, we watched movies together, we camped together in each other's backyards; Tobi and Ingo made me mixtapes when I was in the hospital. We were an autonomous litte tribe. Our parents trusted us because we lived in a quiet neighborhood in a small town. I imagine it was somewhat similar to living in a tribal village. No car rides and parent-arranged play dates were necessary for us children to be together. And none of us ever moved away because Germans don't really move. I am amazingly thankful for the little autonomous play group I had.
But I feel like that was circumstantial, coincidental. Germany didn't give that to me. But maybe it did.
Maybe everything is circumstantial. I remember my parents telling me as a young child that I was overanalyzing and overthinking everything, that I worried too much. Maybe I didn't learn that from them. My mom used to answer very openly and honestly all the questions I had about sex. Maybe I didn't learn sexual repression from her.
Maybe this is just the struggle I chose for myself, the struggle for balance.
And no matter how bitter I am about my past, my life today is pretty damn good. And I am a pretty great person, to tell you the truth. And if the past is what has gotten me here, maybe my past wasn't so bad.
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.: posted by Vera
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Dot and the Red Hots
Anastazia asked me recently if I was available for another Bad Unkl Sista performance on 08/08/08. I hadn't performed since Emerging Illusions in May, so this request was very welcome.
We had a rehearsal last Wednesday. That's when the nature of the performance was revealed to me. It was going to be different. I mean, Bad Unkl Sista's performances are always different, weird, creepy, whatever you want to call it, but Anastazia knew that people were expecting that from us now. And if something is expected, how weird can it really be? So she decided to do something different and weird that the crowd wasn't expecting.
All night of the rehearsal and all night of the performance, Anastazia was in costume and character. Seeing Anastazia's acting was brilliant and inspiring. Her character was Dot, an old lady who runs a "professional" dance troupe with her friends. The dance troupe is called Dot and the Red Hots. We were all Dot's old lady friends whom she had recruited to be her dancers, and to whom she was going to show some special dance moves. We all wore gray wigs and lots of polyester. We all had different names too, to really embody the character. My name was Wilma.
The song we danced to was Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) by C & C Music Factory, one of my early 90's favorites. I was thrilled to be performing to a song like this. I had been wanting to do more silly dances to silly music for a few weeks.
Our performance was complete with the running man, solos by every lady, and a pyramid, and for our final position, I got to do a headstand while Holly aka Roxanne's face was as "close to my twat" as she could get.
Being part of this performance was one of the funnest things I have ever done. Dot is convinced that we are going to be "wanted" from now one, so maybe there will be more like this in the future.
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.: posted by Vera
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Desktop-free
On Thursday my new laptop arrived. I spent the last few days transferring all of my files from my five-year-old Windows desktop to the new MacBook Pro. I was completely overwhelmed at first. But here is what I have accomplished since Thursday:
- I hooked up the new laptop to my wireless network. Then I exhaled.
- Thanks to Justin, I discovered that my desktop is not needed to keep my network running even though the network was originally set up via the desktop. Then I exhaled again.
- I downloaded O2M from Little Machines.
- I used O2M to convert ten years worth of Outlook emails to .mbox files so that the Mac can read them. This took hours.
- I set up all my email accounts in Apple Mail. After having used Outlook or Outlook Express for ten years, I was scared of change. But I am quite happy with it so far.
- I imported my ten years worth of Outlook emails into Apple Mail. Then I exhaled again.
- I transferred all my personal files (photos, website files, Flash projects, etc.) to my external hard drive.
- I carried the hard drive over to my new laptop. I plugged it in. The laptop recognized it. I exhaled.
- I transferred all my personal files from the external hard drive to my new laptop.
- I installed Adobe CS3 on the new laptop. I had bought the suite over a year ago but had never installed it on my desktop because it was too slow for it.
- I downloaded and installed OpenOffice for the Mac (thanks again, Justin). Now I can still mess with my old Word and Excel files!
- I imported 15 gigs of music into iTunes. Right now I am going through every single song I have and listening to it once.
- I created a new administrative account for my friend Shu on my old desktop.
- I deleted all personal files on my old desktop. Gasp.
- I deleted all Outlook emails on my old desktop. Gasp.
- I unplugged my old desktop and took it over to Shu's house. It is now his.
- I moved my laptop onto my desk and connected it to my camera docking station, my scanner, my speakers, and my mouse. And I exhaled.
I officially consider myself a Mac person, now that the new laptop is my main computer. Even though I had had an iBook since 2006, I had still considered myself mostly a Windows person because the PC desktop had been my main computer.
Four days after my new laptop's arrival I feel very satisfied and accomplished. The move is complete. All my precious data is still safe. I have a much faster computer now, and it is taking up less physical space in my apartment.
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.: posted by Vera
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A great thing to hear
Kean played at Noc Noc again last night. He has regular Thursday and Saturday night slots now. Every time I invite a bunch of my friends to keep me company while he plays.
Last night Erin showed up. We had met in the spring of 2004 when I switched to the Central team at Macromedia.
We had a great talk last night. Out of the blue, I asked her:
"Do you think I have changed a lot since we met?"
She said:
"I was just thinking about the same thing! No, I don't think it's that you've changed; it's that you have grown more into who you really are."
I thought that was a beautiful compliment.
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.: posted by Vera
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