In Balgoij we sleep in an authentic Ikea bed with curled bars and large round buttons on every corner. The large sloping wooden beams above us are not made by Ikea. I lie in the middle between my lover and my child. My child snores relatively quickly, with a frequency of about a second per snore, my loved one snores much more slowly.
Whenever my child is sleeping next to me, I count his breaths. I don’t do this on purpose, it comes naturally. At one point I notice that I am counting: twenty-two, twenty-three.
Look here, I think. That would be a good text for a very large facade painting. And then in the place of the I and the E of ‘here’ again the text ‘look here’. The I then consists of the letters of ‘look here’ and the E of the letters of ‘here’, but there the I and the E are again replaced by the text ‘look here’, and so on, until it is so small that you can’t read it anymore. It’s just a pity that the E has three legs, while ‘here’ consists of four letters. But we’ll figure that out.
‘If the concept gets in the way of user-friendliness, then you’re doing it wrong’, I once heard a renowned architect say. I was 25 years old, and I had been seated at the front of the class, not because I wanted to hear the renowned architect speak, but because I had to be in place in ten minutes to explain to a group of Facebook and engineering students how to write a scientific article. writes.
The renowned architect showed pictures of seating pits, a concept he devised in the 1970s. When I was in seventh grade, we had a big sitting area in my high school auditorium. At the end of the break, the pit was full of uneaten sandwiches. When you were on duty, you had to sweep all those sandwiches together with a big broom and throw them in the trash, breathing through your mouth so as not to smell the sickly smell of butter and luncheon meat.
Minutes before my lecture was due to begin, the renowned architect asked if there were any questions. I raised my hand and asked if he might be able to finish, because my lecture started in a few minutes.
The renowned architect turned red. “Are you asking me to stop my lecture now?”
Confusion in the room. A high-testosterone student ran up to me angrily to whisper the architect’s name to me and ask how I managed to address him like that.
Later, when the misunderstanding was cleared up, the architect apologized. He had mistaken me for a student. I said it wasn’t a big deal, that I learned a lot from his lecture.