Happy new year, belatedly, as always. In a tiny bit, I’m going to post a translation of a long interview So Jisub did for Vogue Nippon. I did that translation almost two months ago which goes to show that I collect all sorts of things to update with but then I never get around to actually posting the stuff. Haaa (<– the ultimate sigh of defeat).

This is going to be a massive post about … sheep! Yes.

My grandfather used to own a couple of sheep (5 or 6?) so I should have been able to form a valid opinion an these animals but to be honest, sheep have always been a bit of a mystery to me. They were just standing in a shadowy corner of the field, slowly chewing their daily doses of grass. And that’s it. They don’t exactly have a wide range of facial expressions and they aren’t really as soft as you’d think.

And then there’s Murakami Haruki who made it know to the book-reading public that sheep are, yes, mysterious creatures. I highly recommend Hitsuji wo meguru bôken/A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance to anyone who hasn’t read it yet to see what I mean.

Do I think sheep are cute? No. Do I find them disgusting? Not at all. Do I think they pose a threat to those of us with a historical sensibility, especially if they have a star-shaped mark on their backs? Hm, maybe. Do I find them a bit fascinating? Yes, certainly. Do I think that it’s work collecting anything and everything related to them? Yes, absolutely!!

This is what one small area of our kitchen looks like:

Now, this is what our kitchen table looks like as a background for my growing collection of sheep mugs:

Aren’t they true pieces of art? All of these were bought in the past year and I hope to hunt out a lot more in the years to come :)

PONY BROWN, one of those great little Korean stationary designers, made a really great window stickers set that also featured a white sheep with a black face, my favourite kind when it comes to sheep. One of them went on the door of my room at my parents’ house, along with a sign consisting of alphabet stickers which I arranged to say “Schafzimmer” which is a little play on words because “Schlafzimmer” is German for “bedroom”, “Schlaf” means “sleep”, but “Schaf” (without the “l”) means “sheep”, so it means something like “sheep room”, or “the sheep’s room” :)

It looks like this:

And Topshop has awesome sheep ankle socks this autumn. They were available in boring grey, in red (which weren’t in stock anymore when I wanted to buy them) and in pink. I bough a pair in pink. They have white sheep with black faces and black sheep with white faces ♥

And that’s enough sheepish nonsense for today.

I’m too busy to make a new layout for this place (and I still like it a lot too), but after the (invisible) WordPress update earlier this week I modified the blog code a bit based on the new WordPress version so we now have tags for every post and a tag cloud in the sidebar. Yay!

I’ve sorted through the huge backlog of entries and have tagged everything back until the beginning of 2005, I think. I might tag older posts whenever I have some time to spare. Going through all the older posts, I’ve realized how much I used to blog until four years ago, before I moved to Berlin. I don’t think I’ll ever again have that much time to spend on the internet like back then, but oh well, it’s not that I’m not happy with the way things are now either.

Updating this blog to latest version of WordPress: done.
(Should have done it ages ago, it looks so much better and is so much easier to use than the one I had installed previously. But I’m always worried about the update process going wrong or losing my database or something so I try to postpone updates as long as possible.)

I have nothing really important to say at the moment, except that I’m very sad and worried and at the same time I feel completely powerless because I’m not feeling sad or worried about myself. So there’s nothing I can do except write this cryptic paragraph down which must be frustrating for you, the readers, and I’m sorry about that.

Tomorrow’s November 12. End of the ultimatum.

It must have been maybe three years ago, when simply everybody, especially offline media, started talking about the so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon, that I started to have difficulties with expressing myself properly online until I felt I had to become completely silent. I think I became so sick of coming across all this meaningless triviality both in words and in pictures (15-year olds camwhoring on MySpace etc.) that faced with this flood of trash I just didn’t want to be a part of it anymore and help increase the word pollution.

Now, I certainly haven’t been going online for serious business only. That’s what real life is largely all about, after all. The internet is mainly for keeping myself informed on the more fun stuff, for entertainment. It also used to be about communication, but somewhere along the way, as described above, I simply lost the ability to communicate online, in every form imaginable. This isn’t meant to sound dramatic in any way. It was just a natural process, I guess. And so I became an invisible internet user who didn’t make much noise, who only consumed quietly what the people I still cared about posted. The internet in small doses. That was enough for me.

Slowly but surely I want to start writing again, here and in other places, but I’ve tried to do that so many times and always failed in the end but… maybe this time will be different. I’m so used to doing my fangirling, my obsessing over the things that I appreciate on an academic, hence offline level now that just posting little things and quick notes online isn’t as easy as it used to be. There’s this huge wall that keeps me from finishing up stubs and sketches and finally publish them here because I guess I’m still hesitant when it comes to making noise, making myself visible.

(That said, I don’t think I’ll ever have a page on MySpace or Facebook.)

Now that I’m more or less free to do what I want until next Monday when classes start again, I decided to look through some old stuff that’s accumulated in my room in my parents’ house to throw away the things I don’t need to keep and make room for new things. I found a huge stack of Italian manga which I bought when I was, well, in Italy. They had all the cool stuff back in 1999 or something, when the manga market here wasn’t really as massive as it is now. I bought lots of random stuff, basically anything I could get my hands on, mostly shounen and seinen titles like Macross 7 Trash, Gundam and Cat’s Eye – sadly no shoujo manga, though. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t find any manga for girls even though they were said to be already quite popular in Italy at that time. (We only had Sailor Moon back then.)

I also found old manga scripts that I’d printed out to read Japanese manga. Ah, the good old days as a manga reader! Yes, we actually bought Japanese manga and tried to read them in Japanese with the help of scripts kind souls with admirable Japanese skills had provided for us on the internet. This is how I learnt Japanese! I taught myself hiragana and katakana, got myself a good dictionary and started reading manga with the help of English scripts. I found scripts for Tenshikinryouku/Angel Sanctuary and other old Yuki Kaori titles, CLAMP stuff like X, Tokyo Babylon, RG Veda and Clover and more light-hearted shoujo series like Emura’s W Juliet. This way, I acquired quite an impressive range of vocabulary which I’d probably never been able to use in every-day life in Japan, including words like “organic angel” (yuukitenshi)…

I might not be doing what I’m doing now if I’d gotten into manga just three or four years later when the scanlation business took off and people became lazy and didn’t buy manga anymore but downloaded it and read it in English. Back in the days, you just had to learn Japanese if you wanted access to all the good titles…

(Does anyone remember fansub tape trading? So last century!)

Today is the first day of my postgrad life. It’s also the day after the day I accidently found out how to connect my phone with my MacBook via Bluetooth. It’s kind of amazing to think of all the data that gets transferred without any cable at all, and it’s happening everywhere, all the time. Admittedly, this thought is also kind of scary and makes me long for the good old analogue days.

Today I continued my series of surprising realizations: I had to learn the hard way why autumn is also called fall when an unusually large acorn crashlanded – massively accelerated due to the height of the tree and the raging storm – right on the top of my head. The sound of the impact was amazing from the inside! And from the outside too, I was told. That little fruit of autumn left a nice throbbing bump on my head. I thought it had also cracked my skull but I’m not so sure anymore. Should I go and have an X-ray or not? I’m kind of hard to crack, though, so I should be OK.