it’s been such a long time and quite honestly I am afraid of it. Finland, my secret dream, the country that I hold by my heart like my home - and finally i will take astrid there. We are leaving September the 2nd, just booked our flights. Honestly it feels like going home. And it’s one of the most important things in my life to show her what my life was like - back then. Or probably still. As I said - it is where I came to be. I became myself, I became the believer I am today.
I had a memorable conversation with someone from our newspaper. it was about making progress, learning, getting new inputs. I’ve been working for five years there now and sometimes I feel like I have reached a point where I need to get a bump from somewhere. Not career-wise, but knowledge-wise. It feels like I am turning in the same circles - simply, I need education. It’s like I do know the basic stuff, but nothing more - and to me that is definitely not enough. So we talked about a course you can take with the KFJ, one of the official agencies to educate journalists in Austria. It stretches over twelve weeks split up into four different parts. So when I suggested I should go on and least check it out (or look for any other way I could gain new inputs from - e.g. take an internship over the same time with an English/American newspaper) I got an answer that still stuns me: “Why would you want to go there? We need you here, you are a gifted writer, you already know how to do it.” Basically it was telling me I should forget about the whole thing. Now I’d love to willingly accept the compliment and go on. But I know it’s simply not true. I might have potential, but I am nowhere near of exploiting it the way I’d love to. It felt like that if you show skills at some level, that’s been it for you - congratulations and have a nice next 40 years sticking around on that level until you retire. I do not want that but I have absolutely no clue on how to make myself understood.
yesterday i figured that it only takes one question to determine is somebody is a friend or not: can you help me? some people might answer: what is it? friends will ask: when?
I always thought of myself as a house. I was always what I lived in. It didn’t need to be big. It didn’t even need to be beautiful. It just needed to be mine. I became what I was meant to be. I built myself a life. I built myself a house.
The call came in early in the afternoon. It had barely taken us five hours to move all the money and now the apartment was ours. It’s been such a stressful summer so far, I just took it as a fact that it had worked out and didn’t think too much anymore. Right now I feel like being at a point where I kind of move from one point to another, without looking back but without looking forward either. I remember a good conversation with Franz once - it was about making mistakes and he told me “It all comes down to this: once you start being afraid of actually making them, they will inevitably strike.” Now I don’t think I am afraid anymore, I might just worry too much every now and then. I strive for some things: Being a good journalist, lead a department at some point. Why would I, why should I aim low? I do understand some things need their time, and being patient is not one of my particular strengths but I do not see why I should constantly excuse myself for trying to change things, for being different? I remember something I was told a long time ago: Only people who never move can’t take the wrong path.
The race is long and in the end, it’s only with yourself.
after the Chinese government continues to block free internet access to the internet for journalists covering the Olympic Games, Reporters without frontiers and other organizations have started to publicly protest. the story however got a whole new twist once voices arose that Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee has personally assured the Chinese government that they can handle all internet-related decisions according to their own will.
ABC Austrlia and hundreds of others sources report that:
sites that are blocked include those for human rights group Amnesty International, the Tibet government-in-exile, press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders and various Chinese dissident organisations. No high-ranking IOC official has been available to comment publicly today about the breaking of the promise of a free and open Beijing Games. But privately IOC members are enraged by the blocking of sensitive websites and the use of spyware in media hotels to monitor internet use.
Fair and free games you promised Mr. Rogge. But what’s a promise worth these days?
while i am writing this i am looking out onto the lake. i just did an interview, had our photographers take his pictures and finally wrote down the story - all with my laptop, sitting at the water’s edge. funny enough today, we have all the means technology-wise to work differently, live differently but we hardly ever use them the right way. we do see push-email and blackberry more as a curse than as a gift. a gift that with the right perspective could change our lives. change them in a way that we do become independent of offices, desks, file cabinets. i love to work, i really do, but i hate to be “at work”, crammed into an office with the hours ticking by. here, by the lake, my thoughts are afloat and being a nomad for a day - even if a connected one - has never felt so good.
i just couldn’t fall asleep though it was a hard day, awake astrid and me lay there. up until this point it was a chain of one thing leading to another - finding an apartment, getting the loan approval, choosing colors, a new hardwood-floor, making dozens of decisions big and small. then i sat there, the loan contract in front of me. 25 years. i thought of the big yellow house and my ever-present fear of committing myself fully to something. fear is a bad adviser, but i accepted it, i listened to it, heard its arguments. they weren’t any good. then i signed.
it was my first day of high school. tanzenberg, an old monastery, sits on a hill about 15 kilometers from klagenfurt so basically you have to take the bus there. it was my grandfather’s duty to get me to the bus stop which is pretty close to where i work nowadays. when we arrived there wasn’t a single soul but only a deserted bus stop. i remember the look on my grandfather’s face, he was a always a person of respect to me. he looked lost and vincible, he had failed, it was him who had looked up the departure time in the wrong timetable. minutes later i was sitting in the comfortable backseat of a taxi that drove me to school that day. i arrived just as the other kids squeezed themselves out of the packed bus. yesterday while driving home a taxi stopped next to me at a red light a little boy not older than 10 or 11 on the backseat. i must have looked just like him and my grandfather - at least for me - became a hero that day.
i spent two hours today looking at different kitchens. i looked at panels, refrigerators, stoves, microwave-ovens, dishwashers, i was sitting there choosing colors, surfaces. i took me really 1 1/2 hours to decide on everything considering the budget astrid and i have for our kitchen. i took me a good 15 minutes to realize what i was doing there. i was literally choosing something that will stay with me for some time to come. we are buying this apartment, because we do believe in the beauty of our dreams. yes, sometimes it is scary - to think of a time of 25 years. i am 27 now, so multiply my life by the factor of two. am i really ready to commit myself like this? right now, i do believe i am. whatever i did - Sweden, Finland, Belgium - there was always a risk, something i could not calculate. sometimes it was love, then it was life, then it was money. but then there almost always was a big picture i considered and my judgment hardly ever proved me wrong. life has led me to some of the most real and unreal places i could imagine but this time i am bit scared, i openly admit it. but it’s a good feeling of being scared.
i’m right back to normal working life, getting there around 11 and leaving at 8. go through some stories, try to get pictures from a German agency who apparently only consists of one person. talking to michael hennessey about his cause (ironmanforkids.com). we ended up at the sunset bar with a friend of mine, talking about the new appartment we’re buying with astrid, what it means to us. he’s got two amazing little girls, he’s happy. and i guess i am slowly starting to understand that our view of happiness constantly changes. there’s no way to pursue happiness by setting out a path and then just trying to follow it. the dog? it’s waiting for me back home in our bed helping me to dream.
me: so what have you been doing lately?
you: studying, going out - yesterday i had barbecue with my friends.
me: wow, why didn’t you call, i would have loved to be there.
you: stefan, it was just people my age.
me: what ?!?
you: you’re nearly 30, you’re too old.
me: …
i sometimes wonder why i am so easy to hurt. the past four or five weeks at work were hard and still i felt good about what we did, because we were a great group working together, spirit and weird songs on youtube included. but that was in graz. not that i feel bad back here in klagenfurt. it’s just a different general feeling - like i have to stand on guard all the time. there’s those little things that irritate me: people (actually one person) not even saying hello when i drop by the office, pretending to not notice i am there. i know you can’t always choose on whom you work with. but neither can i ignore it. funny enough i am good at managing complex scenarios, private and professional. but if someone just behaves boldly unfriendly or stupid towards me, it simply blows me off my feet. darn, i would be a bad interrogator.
amazingly enough this group of around 20 people has worked nearly four weeks without doing major harm to one another. we laughed, cried, sang, ate, slept, played, joked and fought throughout the euro 2008. the late nights and long days took its toll and still it’s been a truly unique experience. oh and don’t forget: the print run starts at 10.30 pm today.
on buying an apartment, old people do that. they buy apartments to settle, grow even older, see their children being born, raised, leave and come back with grandchildren. we decided to buy an apartment in klagenfurt. a huge step. our very own place. ties that bind. for now i trust in my inner voice. the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
the news came in late, a local football player had committed suicide without an obvious reason. i worked late and we started shifting things around at the newspaper making room for the sad story. it kicked in and like robots we took the story through its paces: police, biography. we made it just in time. only after things were done, i realized that i only met him some days ago. a little boy on his lap he was sitting in a café where astrid and i had breakfast. he looked happy.
sweden-greece. salzburg. 30.100 people. national anthems. no catcalls. first “du gamla, du fria” then “hymn to liberty”, silence, applause. shivers down the spine, the swedish colleague next to me tears in her eyes. beauty. peace.
the euro has arrived at klagenfurt. germany and poland kicked off yesterday putting an end to months of preparations in and around klagenfurt. so far it has been a peaceful come-together of people simply wanting to enjoy football. as always there are a few exceptions. and sometimes they seem to ruin it for everyone around them. 140 hooligans were arrested yesterday after they started marching through the old town of klagenfurt singing “polish people should wear a yellow star” referring to nazi germany’s rule of jewish people having to wear a yellow star on their clothes identifying them. it makes me sick down to the stomach and though police surrounded and arrested each and all of them there’s a bad taste to be left back. it even goes as far as me doubting sometimes the world is as good sincere and beautiful as i still believe it is. in the movie matrix, one of characters states something i was boldly reminded when i heard about what happened downtown:
I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.
Silence, why won’t you listen
Maybe it’s just me
but sometimes it’s impossible to breathe
A violent whisper
Maybe this time it won’t heal
Maybe this time it will bleed until I’m free
the passion never dies. and as in hockey (or any other sports for that matter) once you have reached your goal, the road there suddenly seems like the easiest one you have ever walked.
sometimes the hardest things is to realize that you don’t belong to something anymore. or that you never did. and those things you really feel you belong to are thousands of miles away.
Und wird manchmal das Herz zu schwer
Und wird ihr Atem ruhig und leer
Dann denkt sie sich zu ihm.
today we all got an email from our editor-in-chief. i love it so much, i’ll keep it in my inbox.
In accordance to what I answered to one of our readers, I ask all of you who are responsible for putting the weather forecast on page one to make sure it’s written in a neutral way. Rain doesn’t always mean the end of the world (if however it has rained for ten straight days you may choose the underlying tone accordingly). Otherwise please remember that nature and loads of gardeners can almost always make good use of rain. Your may let got of neutrality if we are talking about a hurricane.
I love our boss not only for his great sense of humor, but also for the small little things he does to make (at least) me feel that sometimes it’s the little things that count.
i was standing down at the waterfront. one of our friends had recently opened a new bar there. it stretches out in the lake and if you stand really close at the edge, it feels like the lake is all around you. it’s the place i have always come to when i was home and nowhere does carinthia or austria feel more like home to me.
to me being a journalist is more a calling than a job. i never wanted to become one, but once i started i instantly felt it was the right thnig to do, to believe in. i suppose that’s why the setbacks hurt even more. especially if you figure at some point that the energy and the passion you have been putting into things, the days off that you still spend at work because things have to get done - they get you into nothing but trouble. they get you half-whispered comments behind your back of doing too much, wanting too much. do i want too much? i don’t think so, i just want to work on something i am happy with.
The songs are in your eyes
I see them when you smile
I’ve had enough of romantic love
I’d give it up, yeah, I’d give it up
For a miracle, a miracle drug, a miracle drug
God I need your help tonight
Sometimes I wonder about those small things I consider being problems in my life. Being so insignificant and small as David Gray would put it. Not always does it take a miracle drug.
sometimes it’s all about pushing things through, about making decisions, about falling and rising again. or as winston churchill put it: we shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. i last saw it on a poster in a window in canterbury, kent. his message never lost its power.
never have the nations of the world had so much to lose or so much to gain. together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames. save it we can - and save it we must - and then shall we earn the eternal thanks of mankind and, as peacemakers, the eternal blessing of God
miteinander werden wir unsere erde retten oder miteinander in den flammen ihres brandes umkommen. aber retten können und retten müssen wir sie und damit werden wir uns den ewigen dank der menschheit verdienen und als friedensstifter den ewigen segen gottes.
it’s been nearly seven years since i first moved out from home. off to sweden i went and after a short break in between onwards to finland. i just looked up what i wrote about leaving the place i called home for 20 years, it was more a question than an answer: would you trade your memories for freedom? mom asked me if i wanted to move back to the yellow house together with atsrid. she would take an apartment on her own as she feels the house is too big for her. and it all came back. the memories, the stories. my great-grandfather had bought and re-built it over 100 years ago. my family was by no means rich by then, but we owned some big pieces of land. he gambled most of it away. so when his father died my grandfather took over, the first one in our family to graduate from high school. he was so talented and working towards a career in academics when the war came. high school would be the last school he went to because when he returned from four years as a prisoner of war in russia there was a family to take care of. but there was also the big yellow house, which miraculously had survived the war and the bombs. as austria rose from the rubble, so did the house which gained a floor to accomodate an even bigger family: mom, her sister and her brother - my aunt and my uncle. including great-grandmother and another relative there was seven of them. and even if times were sometimes hard, my mom had a happy childhood. years later there was grandfather, mom and i. my aunt and uncle left for vienna to become a doctor and a diplomat respectively. the first memories i have of this planet are all about the yellow house, about grandfather, our garden and the summer days when we would take the bike and ride it only a couple of hundred meters down to the horse racetrack. i would get my ice cream and call it quite a day. i would walk to school and walk home because there was always someone around the big yellow house and it felt like the best place in the world - home. i could bring whomever i wanted because i was trusted. and even if grandfather was strict sometimes (oh yes, there were fights!) i probably had the happiest childhood i could imagine - being the spoiled single child i was. and now a circle closes. i am back in klagenfurt, sitting in apartment i like. i like it but its white walls bare no memories, the could barely tell you any stories. the walls back in the big yellow house could, for hours or even days. i do understand astrid. i do understand what her motives are for not wanting to move back there. but things are not always easy, because what for her is just some house, some pile of bricks in probably not the greatest neighborhood to me is home and always will be. and i could never imagine anybody else than myself, my children or grandchildren to make up for the stories its walls will go on to tell for the years to come.
another case of doping in austria, one more round of endless discussions. and it made me think of paavo nurmi. my grandfather told me about him when i was a kid. i didn’t know where he was from or what he actually had done, but my grandfather told me he was someone he looked up to. it must have been more than ten years later when i finally got to meet paavo nurmi. his statue stood and stands up to this day in front of the school of physical education at the university of jyväskylä. between 1920 and 1928 he won nine olympic gold medals, broke world records and won the 1500 and 5000 meter races in the 1924 paris olympics. a feat that took 80 years to be re-done in the 2004 athens olympics. nurmi died nearly blind and partly paralyzed in finland in 1973. he died a broken man who thought that he “didn’t leave anything of value behind”. what however he did leave behind is the memories that in some time long gone champions were made out of will, dedication and love for their sports.
i’m slowly starting to get sick of the International Olympic Comittee. while the olympics games still claim to be a peaceful come-together of nations it has long gone astray from its original cause. so it seems like bitter irony when IOC-spokesperson Kevan Gosper condemns the protesters all over the world and especially those who stepped in the way of the olympic flame yesterday for being “full of hate” and asking them to “give way to the peaceful olympic flame”. mr. gosper seems to be - as the rest of the IOC - ignoring the fact that giving the Olympics to China inevitably would draw those protests on every which level. it’s a sad story that the olympic movement, being the force that it is today even business-wise, hides behind empty words or - even more likely - looks the other way. i do hope, deep inside, that us, the world, the people on the streets, writers and journalists, every single voice that raises, will force the IOC to turn its head back around. I do belive it was a good idea to give the Olympics to China. I just doubt mine are the same reasons than the IOC’s but I have this feeling down inside, that this time they won’t get away with it.
whenever i needed comfort and solace as a kid, it would be waiting only a flight of stairs away. i’d sneak into my granddad’s room and within a couple of minutes i would sip away on a mug of hot ovomaltine sitting in one of his chairs. grandad died 12 years ago and the only ovomaltine i get today is from a coffee-dispenser down in the hall. it rattles and hums but it doesn’t give comfort and advice to a 27-year-old that doesn’t know what to do with his life.
the call came in when the day, another sunday at work, slowly started leaning towards its end. it was one of those calls you neither expect not wait for to happen. it was a colleague of mine, asking for advice. very specific advice, advice on one of my dreams: working or attending colleage or at least a summer school in the US (god, astrid and o.s. know it). he asked me to review a letter of motivation he drafted. a letter of motivation that with the consent of our newspaper will most likely get him to do a 2-month-trip to the US courtesy of the austrian academy for journalism. now that astrid and me spent three weeks in the in the states and i have been mostly talking of making this one dream come true one day - it felt like life took a cruel hit-and-run on me. don’t get me wrong, it was only a second but that small second i saw somebody else make this one - my - dream come true. i will gladly help him. not only because i respect him as a person and friend but because i do believe that he truly has earned his chance to be nominated by our newspaper. did it sadden me? yes, a little. but i also believe that one day god will help me make my dream, or at least what i will regard then as my dream, come true. why? for one simple reason: dreams prevail.
