Email Love

I sometimes receive a lot of email for work related reasons. I have colleagues distributed all over the world and email is our favorite communication medium for coordinating activities. So one would get dozens of emails a day from each colleague.

The continual email arrival together with my own obsession checking and refreshing is very disruptive for my work rhythm. At some point it becomes annoying and you wish they would leave you alone.

And then they leave you alone. Once the task is arranged and scheduled, the relentless flow of emails stops. In vain I refresh the email server to find nothing but newsletters and announcements. That is when the feeling of abandonment invades you. You feel they do not care about you any more. It does not matter that you know they were all merely work related questions. You are not on their mind. Who are they emailing now? You have been left. You are not loved by email love.

Update: If I edit this, what happens?

Aalto Savoy

I recently bought an Aalto Savoy vase. It is not for me, but meant as a present.

I had seen the Aalto Savoy vase before, and found it interesting and curious. And thought who would buy something like that. Having now looked into the product history and going through the choice and purchase decision, I have changed my mind. The Alto Savoy is an exceptional piece of design. It was created by the Finnish designer Alvar Aalto. The first designs were created by blowing glass constrained by a set of parallel sticks on the ground. If you want to know the story, it can be found here.

According to this source:

"It was a part of a series of designs for vases and dishes with which Alvar Aalto entered, and won, the 1936 competition organized by Finland's prominent glassworks, Karhula and Iittala. The prime aim of the competition was to acquire designs suitable for showing at the Paris World's Fair next year. Aalto delivered a sequence of sketchy, and in several cases almost ostensibly casual, drawings, some of them reminiscent of cubist still-life collages, and gave the entry a Swedish code name of Eskimoerindens Skinnbuxa, i.e. Eskimo-Woman's Leather Pants"

The vase encompasses so perfectly the organic beauty of silent flora, perhaps Scandinavian landscapes and ghosts, modern art and simple functionality.

We recently got one. Not the Savoy exactly, but the slimmer, taller version. Blue.

Can we abolish a nationality?

I read an article by Tanya Gold about Germans that after the Second World War converted to judaism, sometimes to orthodox judaism, and moved to Israel. The article is intriguing and interesting throughout. I will quote one part that impressed, me. This bit is by no means representative of the content or the tone of the article and, admittedly, the context of this quote is broader, so go and read the whole thing.

About one convert,

"Today, he believes Germany is doomed. "People there don't get married, and if they do they have one child," he says. "But the Turks and the other foreigners have many children. So it is a question of time that Germany will no longer be German." "

I am not German. But I like Germany and I am attached to the country in certain way. I ask, does it matter is Germany ceases to be German? Even more, can it cease to be German at all? Even if Turkish people overcrowd the ethnic Germans ... it will still be Germany, perhaps with a few cultural variations to the Germany we know today. As an Argentinian, I do not care if Argentina ceases to be Argentinian. It will be something else.

Like language, nationality is an invention. Unlike language, nationality is an abstraction that is only built from the imagination of the nationals. We lose nothing by losing a nationality. I am not worried about culture, because culture remains, even if it is mutated like a post-nuclear cockroach.

As the perpetual foreigner that I am (and like to be), I see that my nationality is something I invent every day. My nationality is my vision of the world.

The article is good, with descriptions of converts who are "annoyed" at how clean Germany is and those that criticize Israel becauase of their treatment of Arabs and Palestinians. They find some of these attitutes a little bit familiar.