Land of In-between

No more questions, asks our professor, and, knowing of his pinched shoulder nerve and the bravery it must have taken him to give the lecture anyway, we say no, and off we go, out of Afghanian marriage networks and relationships between clan nobility among Baluchi and Brahwi into the warm early Cologne afternoon. Thinking about it, I shouldn't go to the Mensa again. I guess I'll just risk going to the WG and hope that at least one of them is at home, elfy, perhaps; the train is coming right now, so I board it, competently or no, in front of everybody. The streets are bustling with young people, going to university or coming home, shopping or meeting friends, there are very few people that are beyond their mid-thirties, and those who are seem a bit lost, shuffling along, but not entirely sure they want to go where the crowd takes them, thinking things over, taking in the children and the students with confused looks: They may have spent more time here, and yet their experience doesn't help them, this is our time, - like in that poem: This is no country for old men... (By the way, I hope I haven't missed the Reading Course lecture on Yeats, I love Yeats; we had Wordsworth this week. I wish I were better with dates and biographies, but I can't keep them in mind when all I really care about are the poems). The streets are bustling with young people, and isn't it strange that though many of us probably have at least our year of birth in common, we know nothing of each other? (Here I get off the train.) Meeting, we acknowledge one another's existence, moving out of the way, smiling or frowning, but we have no idea what the other person may be thinking, and what does it matter? Yet, wouldn't it be interesting to switch identities in passing, to pick up a completely different life of a random stranger who walked past you? And all those people we never meet and who still exist, who lead lifes of their own, from beginning to end, and yet we never know they even exist! Moving in groups or alone like me, but at least my boyfriend is returning home this afternoon. The wind makes fallen leaves dance in the street, but why fallen leaves? it is only June!
A homeless man is telling stories to his dog as I buy some salad for my lunch, and then I'm on the next train, where a boy of maybe 12 occupies 3 seats at once, having set his bag on the one and leaning across the other two: I take the last free seat opposite his outstretched legs, but I can't help brushing him when I get off (Idiot, he's probably thinking, look out where you're moving), and I really have to stop reading too much Mrs Dalloway, for it assimilates my brainwaves.

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( Irgendwo dazwischen )

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ハインリッフ!

So I learned that there is a pseudo-opera ("Map without Borders", forgot the original name) about the fall of the Berlin wall, combined with a tragic love story between a takarazuka singer/ dancer from Eastern Germany and a Stasi official. Good grief. Now I am only waiting for a takarazuka opera named 九月 十一日. About... the short and tragic love story between an Al Qaida terrorist pilot and an American Stewardess that ends... well, we know how that story ends. For heaven's sake. Only the Japanese.

Also learned that our strange and fascinating Cultural Anthropology professor (yes, the one with the pinched shoulder nerve) has connections to the former royal house of Afghanistan via... Jhalal Khan, I think, who was "his favorite informant... and some more". Ilúvatar gracious. Professor Orywal/ Jhalal Khan slash. (Let alone that someone named Professor Orywal sounds more like Hogwarts than the University of Cologne.)

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( ベロニカ, der Lenz ist da )

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