Kimchi family

Well…what is there to say?

Last week was not the best week. Beirut…..Paris….. In my humble opinion, that’s not about religion. All organizations, no matter how small or large, are political. And the fights Daesh or ISIL or ISIS are fighting are about power and overcoming powerlessness. The members are motivated by deep insecurity and intolerance, and ultimately fueled by their own doubts. I believe that only those who subconsciously question their own righteousness need violence to make other people believe their truth. If you know you’re on the right path, you don’t need force. You don’t need to destroy the opposition. People will follow you all on their own. It is that tragic tendency that we all have to want to shape the world according to our limited thoughts, and to think that once we do, it will all be okay.

On our home front, we finally moved into our apartment last Monday. We unpacked our goods and found homes for each and every single one of our possessions. Which you would think would be pretty straightforward, cause they are the same things we owned in Munich. But apartments are laid out differently, closets here are built-ins, the cupboard shelves have different heights. So it all took its time.

While unpacking, as the pile of packaging debris grew, I thought of yurts. There was a good reason that they only get up to a certain square footage. If the Mongolians had to drag around as much stuff as we did every time they up and went, they would never, ever move. Modern man is quite removed from his nomadic past, for good reason. It’s a royal pain to uproot your entire existence from one corner of the earth and plant it in the other. Who wants to do that on a regular basis?

By Thursday, order returned to the flat. We were and are still missing some plants and other elements to soften the rectangular edges of our windows and furniture. But those will come with time. And now that that is done, you’d think we’d be over the moon. We are glad, for sure, and happy to start settling in the US. But there is always something nagging in the back of our heads, an underlying tension and melancholy. Europe and the Middle East are calling.

As we try to make sense of this senselessness, I think of yin and yang. Many in the East, and more and more people in the West, believe in concepts akin to the yin and yang. Nature, including human nature, is neither only good, nor only evil. Where there is light, there is also darkness, where there is creation, there is destruction – the two forces live in balance, and neither should outweigh the other.

So I am hoping that this is part of a giant scheme whose purpose I’m just not yet aware of and that one day, the overall balance will be restored.

And on a lighter note… Our lives here have either just come into or will soon be thrown out of balance. (Which one, that remains to be seen.) Today, we were hooked up to the
nonstop audio visual IV that streams through every American home’s veins…  HBO, Netflix, HGTV, the Food Network, OWN, CNN, The Travel Channel, Showtime, You Tube – all available at the touch of a button. As Boris Becker (almost) said, “Wir sind drin…”

We are both a teensy bit concerned about the amount of time we will end up couching in front of our monstrous 55″ screen. I’m optimistically thinking that once we have more friends, our focus will change. But for right now…it is our imperative to indulge. We both have circa 18 years of programming to catch up on, and that demands some attention.

In that vein, I want to share with you one of the best clips I came across recently. Direct from “The Mind of a Chef” – a balance of sweet, sour, garlic, kitsch, happy, and absolute hilarity, this has since become one of my all-time favorites:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfJETqgWNK4&w=560&h=315]

May we all be one big happy kimchi! family one day.

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