Marcus Aurelius to keep you going in the morning

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: "I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?"

- "But it’s nicer in here..."

So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

- "But we have to sleep sometime..."

Agreed. But nature set a limit on that — as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota.
You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.
Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

(Meditations Book V)

Sarah's journal August, 16 2017

Pigeon carcass on pavement this morning.

When Rorschach writes something similar, there is something poetic about it, although in a very dark way. At the very least reading it or hearing it spoken in the movie. But there is nothing at all poetic in reality.

Haven't eaten or drunk anything for the last 12 hours. Eating wasn't the problem. Even though after this time I did get a little bit hungry after all. What really annoyed me was not being allowed to drink because of the blood sampling. Because it was for an allergy test, I'm not even sure I really had to be sober at all this morning. The woman asked me, if it was for the allergy test. I told her yes and asked her, if there's a difference to other blood samplings. Of course, I thought immediately, stupid question. She confirmed to me then that other data would be checked.

Thought for a moment of going back home and writing to the city about the pigeon. Also thought of taking the pigeon and bringing it to the park like on New Year's Eve with the blackbird. Drove straight into the city in the end. Sometimes others don't matter, it seems. The pigeon was dead anyway and nothing that could have helped it. First got a bit of money, then to the bakery. Two Franzbroetchen (puffy pasty with cinnamon) and a hot chocolate. The bakery is in a shopping mall with lots of shops. At about 8:30 when I arrived the exit I wanted to take was still closed. A man who wanted to take that exit before me informed me that it was closed. So I took another way out and passed a contruction area. People already working there. With a noise volume that I turned off my mp3-player until I was half way down the escalators. I looked at the time scale of the mp3-player: 1 minute and 07 seconds. I hadn't heard a single note from “The Sound of Silence” by Disturbed although I had the volume full up. So much for the sound of silence, I though on the escalators.

On the middle floor a young woman was in front of me with a jacket that had in all capital letters “DON'T TALK TO ME” on her back. I resisted the temptation to tell her “I'm sorry”. She didn't seem aggressive in any way and was friendly enough to stay on that middle floor to have a smoke, unlike so many other people who go down to the smoking free area to smoke there. Not my style to start a talk with strangers.

Rorschach's Journal: October 12, 1985:

Dog carcass in alley this morning. Tire tread on burst stomach. The city is afraid of me. I have seen it's true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout, “Save us!” and I'll whisper... “No.“

Porn

This is an entry I meant to write last year already, but didn't write. In January last year “The Revenant” came out with Leonardo DiCaprio. I haven't seen the movie. Although the movie is based on a true story, which usually interests me, it didn't interest me at that time. But I have noticed discussions about a scene or a moment in the movie. Namely a scene with a bear and that context there was talk about rape. In the end it just seems to come down to what could be called an inconvenient camera angle and nothing more. On English websites there were writings of “porn”. Carole Cadwalkadr wrote in her review for The Guardian even in the headline already “The Revenant is meaningless pain porn“ (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/17/revenant-leonardo-dicaprio-violent-meaningless-glorification-pain). German webistes as well mentioned the amount of violence in the movie. http://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/neu-im-kino-the-revenant-wuchtiger-kampf-ums-ueberleben.2150.de.html?dram:article_id=341768 used the word “Gewaltporno” (“violence porn”). Apart from the fact that I had little interest story-wise, the mass of violence, which reviews already focussed on a lot, was just another reason for me not to watch the movie. What puzzled me however was the word “porn” with all of this. A reference to the bear scene and with the connection of the amount of violence making it “pain porn” and “violence porn”?

I am one of those people who noticed Mark Gatiss rather late through “Sherlock”. Once I was searching the internet for pictures of him and found a website with a collection of pictures of his hands. “Hand porn”. I understand that someone is impressed, if not to say obsessed with another person. I too may like certain aspects of a person or I may not like them at all. But “hand porn”?

Dear me! I just typed in “food porn” on google to find a certain article again. There is an article on that on the English Wikipedia on that! Prefaced with the notion: “Not to be confused with Food and sexuality.“ The following headline from The Guardian a while ago made me think of the porn thing again, namely: “Unicorn lollies and six million avocados: our insatiable appetite for Instafood“. (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/01/all-food-fit-to-instagram-have-we-reached-peak-food-porn-photography). I didn't find a picture of the unicorn lollies in the article, but it is about food and lately it seems that the word “porn” isn't far away. As it's the case in the article. I don't really get it. Maybe I'm just naïve or clueless. After all I'm one of the few people who don't have an account on Facebook, also I'm not on Instagram or Twitter or any of those other sites where everything is shared. Can somebody please enlighten me.

Maybe I'm thinking too negative about this or something. I don't know. But regarding sex I've watched a couple of documentaries. One was about young people with sick abnormal sexualities. Not criminal, but not normal either. I remember a young man in that context who saw a young woman while driving in the car and he had to stop and left the film crew for a short while to go to the toilet and shortly after that he came back again and I think he even excused himself at the film crew. He was very aware that this wasn't normal behaviour and I think he felt sorry about that. I felt sorry for him. Another program was about teenagers, sexuality and porn. With the internet children and teenagers have easy and unnoticed access to porn and “sex movies”. Such movies, the teenagers told openly, are shared with others, too. Someone in the movie made the comment that shaving, for example of the legs of a woman and also young girls has its roots in porn. They shave for such movies for a good view. I didn't see it that way until then. Certainly that's not a thought most women have when they shave today.

Back in my school time a company would drive me to school and back home again. I remember when I was in my final years the drivers and boys on the drive were talking about women and girls they saw on the street. Words like “Schlampe” (“slut” or “bitch”) were used. Not always, not necessarily weekly even. But regardless the fact that I was a young woman and present with them, the word was used freely. In English the word “bitch” is equally freely used for a certain type of women or also girls. On the other hand there's also time and again discussions if a victim of rape may have provoked this act because of their behaviour or their clothings.

What does that mean for our society and it's progression? I'm getting the word “sexualisation” in my head. But I don't get any further than that with my thoughts. I don't understand it. Can't the encounter of a bear not simply be the encounter of a bear? Can't hands and food simply be hands and food? I don't think I like this progression. Maybe only because I don't understand it. Maybe because I really don't like it.

Comments more than welcome. I think I'm open and I would like to understand more.