Be yourself, not matter what they say, says Sting in his “Englishman in New York”. It changes your whole perspective once you get a reader. I wonder how novelists write: do they write already knowing somebody (in this case ‘many bodies’:-)) will read what they’re writing?

It’s beautiful outside… gorgeous I would say. Another of New Year postcard days. This is an interesting day as well: (a) found the coat button I lost on Friday (it was really funny: I’m walking out with Monique and throw in very casually, between our conversation about Monday “Mon, wish I could find the button”. A minute later I look down and see the button… Experiences like this have always baffled me…) (b) I’m learning that I’m a project coordinator of a project I have no clue about or to be more accurate, have been only a very small part of the whole thing, (c) get a call from Karen. I have a big problem: I can’t say no. But I have to say no, since I can’t stand cheesy poetry recitals on the phone smelling of tasteless butchery of the verse. And especially if that's the song I love so much…I wonder if the parrot story was true though:-) Karen is the reality I’ve always managed to avoid, or rather he’s not a player in my reality: a normal, ordinary Armenian guy taking advantage of Armenian demographics and one summer day when I was too tired to think strait:-) (d) listen to Wilco which appears in my CD collection from nowhere. I wonder whether it’s Eric who gave it to me or whether it’s Edgar’s. and I told Warren I don’t know the band:-) (e) finally made up my mind to call this studio about the ballroom classes. I want to start again. If I can’t take classes with Gagik, I’d rather go on with what I’ve started. (it still snows in small fluffy flakes!) Why ballroom will come next:-)

The Namesake reminds me so much of the White Teeth by Zaide Smith. Though I’ve read only 1/3 of the novel, I can’t stop thinking of the one I read last year. Why have such novels become so popular? No, I’m not saying I don’t like either. I enjoyed White Teeth and I'm enjoying the Namesake. But I’m wondering about how we’ve changed: we seem to have engaged in a war of identity survival. I know the reason is the shrinking world. Homer, Cervantes, Mauppassant, Gothe, Shelley etc etc were concerned of who the human is, and contemporary novelists seem to be concerned of who an individual is. No, this is not what I mean really and what I write does not make any sense:-) All these writers and the ones I’ve not managed to mention here have traveled a lot back then - I remember reading Weininger and the sudden shock when I suddenly realized a simple fact I somehow have never noticed: at the end of the 19th century this man has managed to learn of such huge diversity of cultures, to cite Russians, English, Americans, French etc, being an Austrian himself. Today we talk of globalization, mobility and of other buzz words to describe the contemporary international society and treat these factors as sound reasons to explain the life today. But back then all this was happening as well, right? Perhaps the only difference is in numbers that have accumulated into quality: in the Middle Ages an average European carpenter could not travel to Thailand for a vacation:-) So, today we’ve got the novels about statistically average humans, whereas before we had the novels about the human who’s on the quest… again this makes little sense, but I’ll edit all this in couple of days, when I finish the novel and have more tangible feelings and thoughts:-)

Now, home!