- If you are ever going to attend France’s National Day parade on 14 July, watch out for the pioneers of the Foreign Legion.
- More Orwellian news out of Russia.
- Romania: “Look, USA, that’s how you do an impeachment. Quick and easy.”
- I have great admiration for people who know how to format Microsoft Word documents.
- You may have missed “Bring your Child to Work” Day, but Queen Elizabeth II didn’t.
- And did the Queen wear a hat symbolizing the EU flag?
- Speaking of the Queen, it was nice of her to visit victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. But if you live in a palace with 775 rooms (and have a few more palaces on hand), the proper thing would be to offer shelter, not handshakes.
- The devastating forest fires in Portugal touched me even more because I had just been hiking there – and noticed the dangerous combination of pine trees and eucalyptus – and had been hosted via Couchsurfing by Joana and Tiago, who is a firefighter and working against these forest fires now. Good luck!
- Thank to Sonia Ninova for The Death of Expertise, a very timely book and one which hopefully adds more context and explanation to the phenomenon that I witness myself far too often: that experts are not believed or that every opinion counts the same, and sometimes even that expertise and learning are regarded as something negative.
- When your employer gives you the number 007, shouldn’t you ask what happened to 001 through 006?
- 1963, when US Presidents where still interested in the physical fitness of the people – and the President’s brother was the first to accept the challenge of a 50-mile walk. Successfully so.
- I prefer the SOE over SEO.
- Thanks to the anonymous donors of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Three Letters from the Andes, Juan Gabriel Vásquez’ The Informers, Nick Thorpe’s The Danube: A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest and Artemis Cooper’s Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure.
- I still don’t understand how airlines can offer flights within Europe for less than 10 euros. Often, it costs me more to get to the airport by train/bus than to fly across the whole continent.
- The US President bans a certain part of the population from serving in the US military based on their identity. Let that sink in.
- The young
- and the still young are happy about my postcards.
- Afghanistan has a Sesame Street, too:
The Happy Hermit 
5.) BRING YOUR CHILD TO WORK: I can feel with Charles and understand his grim face. I also hated to be taken to my mothers work. No surprise, she was a school teacher.
7.) Queen visits the Grenfell Tower fire victims. In fact, since the 1992 Windsor Castle fire she knows how one feels if many personal belongings went up in flams. I have much more sympathy for the Queen than for the pale Mrs. PM Teresa May, who went to the North Kensington neighborhood as if she was visiting an alien park.
17.) Now I understand the catch with your exotic postcards offer: you want to get pretty blond girls as “pen friends” (perhaps with some future development potential)
Micha
5) My father was a printer at the local newspaper. That was actually quite interesting to visit. Once, I squeezed my thumb in a printing machine and almost lost it.
7) Oh yes, now I remember the fire in the castle. Maybe that’s why the Queen could display more empathy, although I think I could do it better than Mrs May although I never had my office burn down.
17) Unintended consequences are often the best ones. ;-)
I thought, you are not interested in girls and relationships.
Absolutely not. Generally.
Except for?
Well, sometimes there is an exception.
What is the exception?
I am still curious. What is the exception? Should I guess, and show off all my thoughts about commitmentphobic men and the problematic aspects of contemporary dating culture?
I am not commitmentphobic, I just don’t find most people interesting enough over a longer period of time.
Commitment phobia shows itself in very different ways. Commitment phobia can be constantly running away from intimacy and always breaking up when someone shows deep emotions and comes to close. It can also manifest itself as promiscuity or never wanting to get steady with someone but having uncommitted relationships. (The very popular “friends with benefits”-relationship [in social networks in Germany it is called F+] is ideal for a commitment phobic.) Commitment phobia also means having an unrealistic ideal of women, no woman can ever fulfill. In todays world this often represents itself in hateful, stereotyping misogyny towards women.
Also, this behavior is a sign of low self esteem due to needing to belittle people on one’s behalf because of who they are.
Considering the partner as an object by having to fulfill certain aspects of the female uber-ideal of a misogynic man is also a sign of a low self esteem of the man. The woman is not seen as a person but as an object fulfilling his needs.
Of course, the one you want to be with has to be interesting. There has to be a certain passionate and intellectual connection to the other person you are attracted to. If the other person feels the same, it is real love. Nonetheless, this is extremely rare and might never happen.
Also, normally most people have a life full of routines. Therefore their real physical lives might not be as interesting as they seem on social networks.
And the people who commit themselves have phobia of being alone?
Your answer is just a distraction from the real problems of commitment phobia and misogyny by using simplistic misinterpretations as counter arguments.
This is a distraction from my question, then?
My point is that not everybody who does things differently from you has a “phobia”. That would be like me calling people travel-phobes just because they haven’t visited 57 countries. Or education-phobes because they don’t have degrees in law and philosophy. In a world of 7.4 billion people, I find it quite normal that some people neither need nor want relationships.
You can only change if you admit, you have a problem.
The fact, you intensely and aggressively try to show you are not a commitment phobe by showing off an ad hominem attitude while arguing shows, you must have deep routed commitment issues.
That’s a non-sequitur fallacy.
But it pales in comparison with the desire to psychoanalyze strangers without having spent considerable time with them.
It’s easier not to admit personal problems.
The sad fact is, one needs to personally truely admit the problem to really change.
You miss out so much in life if you don’t work on this issue.
You’ll be shocked to learn that not everybody wants to be like you. Some people have different wishes, different priorities, a different idea of life.
I know that very well and that’s perfectly fine for me.
Nonetheless, I just wanted to help you. You don’t have to follow my ideas and advices. I am only an imperfect human being. Just go on living your life as you wish to live it.
Hopefully, you’ll be happy.
By the way: you are an awesome blogger. It takes so much guts to really blog.
Thanks Andreas for the acknowledgement. How did I missed it before while reading your blog! Believe it or not, I was showing your blog to a young girl yesterday and we had a discussion about the expert knowledge. She was passionately telling me how “companies are firing their know it all clients”. Interesting, isn’t it?
Sorry, I did not intend to post as anonymous. It just happened by mistake.