Decadence in the West

Last night I was in Kuta. Kuta is a town in Bali, full of...well, hedonists, I guess. It could have given Sodom and Gomorrah a run for it's money! You see drunk Aussies, cheap floozies (mostly Caucasian) in inappropriate dresses (not just too revealing, but they often don't have the figure for it) and it just seems like a place where 25+ year olds who behave like a bunch of overly hormonal teens misbehave.

It got me thinking: Compared to the 90s and 00s, this trend to more and more hedonism (hedonism is when basically all we do is just about our own joy and pleasure) is ruining our lives. 

Here in Bali, it has turned an area named Canggu (once rather quiet and peaceful) into a hellhole of IG-"models", "influencers" and other lazy bums and their rotten ilk! They usually have no visa, don't give a fuck about local customs or traditions (much less would they bother to learn the language) and just live a very decadent lifestyle of luxury compared to most locals. They rent big villas and hire locals as staff because they can. 

20-30 years ago, I don't think this would have been possible. At least where I live, parents wouldn't have spoiled their kids like that. And women couldn't make a living, just by having a cooter (vajayjay) and showing it online or something. 

It just makes me angry to see these spoiled, arrogant neo colonial jerks strutting around here without a care in the world. Aren't rules there for a reason? Shouldn't we all have to follow them?

I don't want the whole world to turn into a place where spoiled brats with money (money they normally shouldn't have, because it didn't require any real effort) can indulge in nothing but cheap sex, drugs and alcohol. 

For one, too much casual sex will harm us all. As it is, 99% of Western women seem pretty much undatable (much less are they marriage material) and I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot-pole. But it's also infecting Asia. The place where people still have SOME family value and some tradition. But that seems to vanish quickly too, as I noticed a bunch of girls in front of the "Mr and Mrs Dick" erotic bakery, their eyes glued to their phones while eating penis goreng or something (fried penis). 

Everyone talks about how they wanna save the planet. But for who? Those people? I'd say let them all go to heck! I respect decent, sincere people. Even when I had my "wild" times, I never acted that way, nor could I imagine doing that. And even though by mere sight, some of them are attractive to my primal "urges", I absolutely can't imagine to share any phrases with them, for I am sure we are SO not on the same page. 

How will this all end? Sexual segregation? Robots do all our tasks while we drool and are hooked on drugs? 

Human beings NEED a challenge! Eliminating challenges and making life too easy and convenient is NOT good for us, it ultimately makes us unhappy.

But of course THOSE brats won't learn that if there aren't some severe consequences to their lewd behavior...

Traveling with your mother (part 1)

Since last week, I am in Indonesia with my mother. We had planned this trip since 2012, but weren't able to go up until now. I wanted to show her Indonesia, hoping that maybe she would enjoy it as much as I do and that it might help her change some of her flaws, such as impatience, negativity, etc. 

Maybe I expected too much for a first trip though: Although I tried to make everything as perfect as possible, the complaints started early on: Travelling is too "rushed" and complicated, there is no time for bathroom breaks (although I told her dozens of times to go on the plane, she didn't go once on a 12 hour flight just to almost make us miss the connecting flight in Kuala Lumpur and earlier in Amsterdam), food is too cold, too spicy, the breakfast is too limited or foreign, the beggars annoy her (me too, but I bet every Indonesian feels the same?) and so on and so forth. 

It didn't help that apparently you can't use any non-Indonesian phones in Indonesia. Or you have to have your IMEI registered. Since I didn't know that and nobody seems to inform you, I had to buy a phone, just to use for the time being here. My mom simply can't or doesn't want to understand that it's not my fault or that the SIM cards aren't broken, but that it's a protectionist movement by the government that can't be changed. 

I was worried that some of this might happen, because my mom - sorry to say - is pretty incapable of doing many things that should be simple, even back at home in Germany. She can't go to the bank to get a new debit card, she can't or doesn't want to find her old one, she can't watch videos on YouTube in order to learn how to use Amazon or eBay, she doesn't know how to update or use most of her computer. And yet she is quick to assume and judge others and put blame on them or things without knowing the half of it. 

I really hoped that her tendency to be so negative about things would change, that she can see the positive in everything. 

For example, she seems to think basically everyone here is poor, that every female friends I have just want to marry me, that every person has a personal vendetta against her. Maybe I can't understand that because I have never been THAT negative and more logical/less emotional, especially after my first couple of visits to Indonesia and later Japan or Singapore. But I surely didn't think I would disagree with her so much or sometimes feel happy people can't understand what she actually says or thinks. And she seems to blame me for wanting to be on my own or with friends sometimes, although she had told me she is an adult and she can keep herself busy (this already lead to some arguments or "hurt feelings" with friends). 

We're currently on our way to Bali. I hope it'll be better there, because it's less crowded and leaving your mom at the beach for 8 hours, 5 mins from your hotel isn't the same as leaving her in some mall or at the hotel all day. 

I do feel like I am the parent, only with the added disadvantage of having a "child" you can't teach anything new out of sheer ignorance or unwillingness (ironically the exact things she ALWAYS blamed my grandma for who at least had us give her a Nintendo for her 60th birthday or tried inline skating and other new things). 

I love my mom, despite a lot of the crappy things she did or how unfair she has been sometimes, but I really wonder if this trip will bring us closer together or further apart...

Tbc

Nostalgias

After my mom and dad divorced in 1990, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents if I wasn't with my mom. It wasn't until I was 8 or 9 that I got to see my dad more than a few times per year (or at least it felt that way), but I still remember some of it. Like how he gave me a Playmobil Truck, a crane, a Lego truck that I built at my grandparents New Year's Eve party in 1992(?)...

And a lot of my memories of my father or grandparents somehow seem to be linked to movies. 

Crocodile Dundee always reminds me of my grandpa, because we used to watch them together. The James Bond movies on the other hand remind me of my father, because I got to watch them on video (kids, google it!) when I was actually too young for it.

My mom wouldn't even let me watch harmless movies (I never saw Edward Scissorhands!) and sometimes I think that that's why I became such a huge fan of movies. To me, they represent windows into a time that's already gone now, a "better" time.

Now, every generation seems to have this feeling. Just go to YouTube and check some songs from some era and people will say "this was real music, our era was the best, it will never be the same". And they aren't wrong. It's normal that we feel this way as we grow older. I guess it's because getting older is still something we are not always fully aware of or that's difficult to understand.

So having movies or music or books or pictures that help us to remind these times seems like a nice thing to me :). 

My "poison" are mostly 80s movies, although I also enjoy anything from the 60s to 10s. 

Looking at those times (I was born 85 and turned 5 just as 1990 ended), I obviously don't have many real memories about it, but I still have this yearning and wish I could live in that time. Life seemed slower and less convenient, yet it also had some new things that seemed groundbreaking then.

My favourite James Bond movies came out in 1987 and 1989 respectively and especially with the latter, I have great memories of the day I first saw it. Even my dad remembers that I told him that this was "the best day of my life".

Back then, he had picked me up after school and we went to Stuttgart (until 2010, going to Stuttgart, the biggest city of my area always was like a small adventure) for some window-shopping. I still remember how happy I was in those electronic stores that sold things such as VHS tapes, PC Games, had Super Nintendo sets to play and of course CDs. 

We also ate at McDonalds or one of those places that can make your day when you're still a kid and happy so easily. 

In one of the department stores, I got one of those free magazines Nintendo used to release and that was great too!

After our shopping trip, I got to watch "Licence to Kill" for the first time (rated 16 or above!) anr I loved it! Truth be told, I am not even sure if it IS the best Bond or it is just the nostalgia, but the opening and end music always make me feel quite melancholic and sad.

To top it off, I got to sleep at grandma's place that day, so yeah, it was a really amazing day and I happily read my Nintendo magazine while we all ate dinner together and was daydreaming about all the games I wanted one day. 

Now that I think of it, we did that a lot back then (or at least I did): read some PC or game magazine or even a Lego catalog and we dreamt of how much fun it would be to play with it. We call that Vorfreude in German, the joy or happiness before something. 

Nowadays, we can get pretty much everything we want at almost any time and it has made so much less special:(. I mean, even back into the late 90s, you had to wait 6-12 months to rent a video (or dvd if you could afford a player, which cost like 2000$ then) of a movie that was just in the cinema. And my dad had MANY videos, so I loved visiting and watching them.

Every Friday and Saturday, we would watch movies (mostly 80s and 90s) and dad usually fell asleep when the second started after drinking too much strawberry bubbly and eating peanut flips 🤣.

So maybe this is also where I became kind of an insomniac? 

Still, I do miss this time and the feelings that came with it. It felt like family and it probably made many of those movies we saw much, much better in our mind than they are. 

I mean movies like "Baby's Big Day" or "Romancing the Stone" aren't exactly Oscar winners, but boy, can I still remember the previews or even some of the commercials from 27-30 years ago...

Do you feel this way too sometimes? If yes, about what? In which decade would you want to live and why?

Being an adult

Do you remember when we were young teens in the 90s? How we had our own first room, our toy boxes, teddy bears, Super Nintendo? How we slowly felt embarrassed by some of it because we felt it's for kids and felt proud to have our first adult items like a stereo system, a TV or even a DVD player or PC? 

Earlier, I was cleaning "my" apartment, which is actually my father's old apartment on the ground floor of our house. 

Since I had to move from the room I had upstairs in 2018, I tried to make it "my place" step by step. 

It reminded me of how things change and don't change as we grow up. Now I still am somewhere between messy and neat (order in chaos?), but the feeling to want to make a place your own as a status or so that it represents you is still the same. 

And this is just one of the things I feel we experience as teens, but also adults. I am almost 37 now, but I still feel like 20something at best. 

Now that I prepared our entire trip to Indonesia for my mother and me and have helped my father through his lonely days after his wife cheated and divorced him, I sometimes feel like it's me who slowly has to be the parent as both of them can act childish at times. 

So what actually makes us an adult? It seems society feels you are one if you have a place of residence and maybe a job. It still doesn't seem to matter that (at least in my opinion), an adult should be mature and wise. And by that, I mean responsible, levelheaded, able to control our emotions and to having integrity and not just givig in to any temptation or taking the easy way. 

Too many people these days seem to be hypocrites who expect others to be that way while they themselves keep cutting corners.

And didn't we hate such kids when we were kids?

Woaw(?) we're going to Jakarta

After years of planning, my mom and me will finally visit Indonesia together one week from today. We have had plans since 2012, but only now can we finally realize them. 

I should be happy and excited that I can finally show my mother Indonesia, a country I grew to love. But somehow, it feels different this time. 

Maybe it's because of all the changes that have happened over the last 16 years? When I first visited Jakarta in 2006, I just loved how it was a country where people would still socialize and talk to each other and you could see culture and traditions. Another big plus was that smartphones didn't exist yet (I think Yahoo Messenger just became a thing?) and it was so good to be offline for a while.

And although I can still choose to be offline, most people these days aren't. There aren't ojek (motorcycle taxis) in the traditional sense anymore. In the past, you had to find them and haggle about the price. Thanks to "apps", you can just order them now to any place amd although that's convenient, it also makes everything less special

 

In 2006 on my very first visit, I stayed in 'Permata Hijau' (Green Pearl) in a guesthouse owned by a professor in his late 60s (?) and we talked about his country. He had been around for the time of Indonesian Independence and he already warned me/prophesied that Indonesia is changing and not for the better.

At that time, I didn't know the country well yet, but even then a part of me agreed with him. I was never a big fan of fast change. 

See, it used to take 20-30 years or more for society to change drastically. Like when we invented electricity, when we had light, tv, radio, etc. But people had time to adjust.

Now things seem to change every 2-4 years and maybe every decade a decade ago. Where will this end? 

In 2006, I was just amazed by the huge shopping malls (we don't have that in Germany), the streetfood, the traffic, the skyscrapers and the examples of tradition existing right next to modernity. 

That has changed on every subsequent visit and I think it might be why I hear from more and more Indonesian friends how unhappy they have become. 

Gone are the days when colorful ladyboys would loiter at traffic lights, begging for some spare change, of street kids doing the same, of teens hanging out in malls in lieu of the internet. Gone are the days when a simple taxi ride felt like an adventure and the mere smell of the warm air inside the airport made my knees buckle in anticipation. 

Even flying has become more like taking the bus after 400-500,000km. 

Not all of this is the case for Indonesia only, but I think it's why I don't feel as excited and yet very anxious. 

I was hoping to piggyback on the excitement of my mom, being there for the first time (can anything beat a first visit to a new place?), but I am not so sure anymore if I can emulate that through her :(. 

Jonesy

Have you ever seen the movie "Alien" or "Aliens"? In said movie, Ellen Ripley is captain on a space freighter that follows up on a distress beacon signal on some planetoid and has their ship infected with an Alien. 

On the ship, there is also a cat named Jones or Jonesy, as the crew likes to call him.

He and Ripley are the sole survivors of the first movie and he can be seen again in the second movie.

Why I ask this? Well, in early 2022, I met a red cat that looked just like him near my neighbors yard. I thought he belongs to her, but she told me he doesn't, he just likes to come to her house and that the real owner doesn't seem to care that much about him.

He is a very, very affectionate (male) cat who just seems to be like me and doesn't like to be lonely and loves to cuddle. 

After seeing him a couple of times and even inviting him in my apartment once in early 2022, I didn't see him for a couple of months in until late September. Since then, I ran into him more often again and his stays became longer and longer. I liked having him there because it always feels good to have company, even feline. 

But as his stays become longer and longer and he often sleeps there, I also worry how to feed him or where he can do his "business". 

One could argue that he only visits me because I started to feed him, but I actually don't have much cat food to give and he stays, even if I refuse to feed him or have nothing (although I always feel sad if he meows sadly, he surely knows how to push my buttons). 

Since I will fly to Indonesia with my mother in 8 days, I wonder if he will be ok while we are gone. I noticed he seems to sit under my father's car or spend his night in our yard if I didn't find him before going to sleep. And I wouldn't want him to freeze or suffer because of me :(. 

He truly is a good and kind cat who just seems to need a lot of TLC, just like most of us...maybe that's why he is special to me?

Dreams

Two nights ago, I dreamt of my school times. 

I failed to pass 11th grade, which ultimately didn't allow me to study and my dreams often revolve around that final year. I have to repeat the class, but either I fail each time or I don't even get to see a report card and thus don't even know if I passed or failed. 

So this dream was similar. I got to see former classmates and felt very disappointed that the two or three guys who were my friends back then all didn't seem to consider me as a friend at all. One of them left me standing to go swimming at the Freibad (a communal pool), the other just spent time with me or even acknowledged me if no one else was around. Only the third (who in real life had moved back to a city near Berlin) seemed to be loyal. 

This depressed me deeply in my dream and I felt really, really depressed and also sort of clingy to the one remaining friend. 

I also dreamt of Martina, a girl I didn't have much to do with, other than a few chit chats here and there. In real life, I found out 2013 or 2014 that she had committed suicide, apparently over a mix of depression and love sickness. And although we weren't close in real life, I always felt she seemed like a very nice girl actually. In my dream, I somehow approached her parents for some kind of closure, which seemed odd/inappropriate to me, even in my dream.

I do have to say that my dreams often seem very layered. Seemingly weeks, months or even years seem to pass in the few hours I actually dream and my feelings are therefore enhanced and increased. That's obviously not always good, especially if it's negative emotions.

I also start to feel very confused at times, because I am always fully or at least partially aware at some point that I am dreaming and don't always know if my "memories" were other dreams I remember within my dream or if this actually happened in real life. It also doesn't help that I re-use the same "stages", which are an enhanced and larger version of my real school (but 5-10 times the size, including some Olympic-sized swimming pools and huge shower and locker systems) or hometown (which was inhabited by ~11000 People back then, but easily has 10 times as many inhabitants in my dream). 

I often wonder what my dreams mean and why I often seem to use former class mates as avatars or actors in them when in real life, I am actually no longer in touch with any of them. 

I guess they are merely symbols for something, such as a romantic partner/perfect love/a good friend.

It is odd though that I hardly do seem to dream of people I actually do know, spent time with or met.

Some of those dreams also involve severe sexuality, yet no matter how intense or degrading it seems (good that some feminists can't see them), there is always a feeling of pureness and sincerity absout them. 

So I already learned not to take my dreams at face value. 

E.g., many dreams involve train stations or airports. Sometimes a lot of toilets or elevators. Many times, I also dream I have to pack my luggage (with odd things like steel beams, toasters or book collection, stuff nobody would take on a vacation and whose only purpose seems to be to make sure I will be late). 

I don't think dreams about toilets for example mean that I have to pee. I did read that it's about "overflowing problems/stress" or that dreams about flying actually have a sexual meaning (I just feel freaked out my teeth just fall out!).

So what do our dreams actually mean? Or do we need to even know? Maybe dreams are just a way for us to cope with emotions we suppressed? 

Getting older

Today I visited my grandparents who are living in a nursing home since late July. Their physical, but especially their mental state has quickly deteriorated for the last 6 months.

We didn't want them to be at this home, but my aunt pushed for it and sabotaged our attempt at getting them a housekeeper/nurse, so they could have stayed at their apartment. In fact, they now will lose their apartment and the money from the sale will barely cover the cost for 3-4 years of said nursing home. 

My brother told me that he doesn't want to visit them anymore because "those aren't my grandparents anymore".

I do understand that it's hard to see two people you knew in a different state now being like Guy Pearce's character in "Memento", forgetting everything you talked about quickly. But I also think ignoring them or pretending old age doesn't exist is the wrong way.

My mother was taking my grandma to the cemetery to put down flowers on her (my grandma's) brother's grave. So I was alone with my grandpa who seems really confused these days and also can barely walk anymore. 

I was setting up their tv that my aunt had messed up somehow, so they can at least watch tv again. Although I think it must be difficult to watch tv if you already forgot what happened after 3-5 minutes. 

I was having a half day internship at a nursing home 2020 and it opened my eyes to some of this. It's why I think you can't start early enough to look after your health! Too much salty food, fat, sugar etc and we'll pay a high price when we're older. It must be hell to be caught inside your body, just being able to sit around, waiting for death:(. It's definitely something I want to avoid. 

My grandparents don't even know that they'll never go home. They still believe that "tomorrow", they go home, but tomorrow never comes. 

I was wondering why we don't take care of our Elder at home like we used to. Maybe it's the low rate of home owners (Germany has one of the lowest rate in the world), so people don't have the space? And of course it isn't easy, especially with dementia. But I hope I can take care of my family as long as possible. I think it's mutually beneficial.