Teun

Another note written on my phone! So this one might be a bit shorter, since the phone keyboard is not the ideal tool for comfortable writing. Actually, I'm writing this from a train, I'm on my way to Brussels. It'll be the first time that I'm there! I'm really curious to see the European Parliament, visit the museum of fine arts, and see Manneken Pis and Jealenneke Pis, two statues of a peeing boy and girl respectively. About these, the boy was there first, and it's a true symbol of the city. Ev...

Good morning, world! I slept like crap last night. Sorry for my language, I guess I have to mark this blog 18+ or something, but today is the day for such language. It is how it is.For a few days, mosquitoes have been plaguing our apartment. That sounds really dramatic, I know, and it's not as bad as I'm making it seem. It's mostly that I feel plagued by them. Also, it's freaking January, they shouldn't even exist for another few months! Anyways, last night was the worst in the mosquito story. I...

Wow, I skipped an entire three days of writing. I think I've already made peace with the non-obligatory nature of this exercise. In any case, if I'm not determined to strictly write every day, I am definitely determined to continue to 100 posts. So I'll blast past 100 and continue until I actually have a hundred of these things. Right now there's so much on my mind that I don't know what I'm going to write about. That's not such a bad thing though. It's mostly my studies that occupy my thoughts....

Sometimes I'm aware throughout the whole day that I have to write and then I forget, and sometimes I don't think about it in the slightest. Yesterday I didn't think about it in the slightest. I don't feel too bad about it though. I'm doing this for myself, and there's no point in making myself feel bad about missing a day. I think. Of course routine is good and stuff. But I already have routines in meditation and yoga, and this writing is yet another thing I want to do every day. Of course I'm h...

Just today I went through some of the notes that I wrote when I was younger (not that much younger, just a few years really, I didn't mean to make it sound so dramatic). I have a tag in my notes app (where I'm writing this) called 'thoughts', and there are thoughts there that go back to 2012. Well, only one actually, and it's a mildly cringey list of my favourite albums at the time. Not so much the list itself is cringey, but rather the things I wrote next to my choices. Let's just say there's a...

It's fascinating how different my girlfriend and I write. I mean, I don't consider myself much of a writer at all, but I do write occasional movie reviews on Letterboxd (which I enjoy very much), so that's something I guess. Anyways, the way I tend to write is analytical. I pick stuff apart and try to make sense of the parts to make sense of the whole. So in a movie, I usually go for the characters, story, cinematography (camera moves and such), acting, etc. and talk about how each part fits int...

To be honest, I probably wouldn't be writing this if I didn't feel so bad about missing yesterday. I'm already in bed, and my love is (almost) asleep next to me, and all I want is to caress her face and fall asleep together. But instead I'm writing nonsense because I told myself to. Great going!So the first movie of the new year turned out to be a blast. I saw Knives Out in the cinema (a very, very crappy cinema at that) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. What I loved the most was the compassion that ...

This is one of these writing days where I have no idea what to write about. On some days, like yesterday, I enter with an idea in mind, and usually I manage to expand on it enough for a whole post. But on other days, like today, I just go in blank. Writing as therapy. I think that this is what the challenge is supposed to be. Also, I suspect that the challenge is supposed to be way less "thinky" and more creative, like with fiction and stuff, once upon a time, that kind of stuff, but that's just...

Aristotle's concept of god is fascinating. I mean, the man can be faulted for accepting slavery, or more generally just confirming the ethical notions of the time he lived in (shouldn't a philosopher be critical of the status quo?), but the way he describes god is really interesting, if you ask me.So basically, what he calls god is actually more of a principle of rationality. So it's not a person, or even something that takes the shape of a person. It's not a religious god at all, just a philoso...

When I go to Medium, it seems that the people on there can be summarizes as follows: they buy an Apple Watch, so that they can write thinkpieces about how awful its tracking is. People seem more two-faced than ever. They throw themselves in the ratrace of career-ism and commercialism, and when they realize it's making them miserable, they throw themselves into meditation or minimalism or yoga or whatever happens to be hip at the moment. (Apparently dopamine fasting is now a thing? Are people eve...

Some people think I'm a snob. More specifically, a movie snob. What I understand this to mean is that I'm picky, I'm critical of what I watch. I think about movies, I analyze them. But I also suspect that people think I'm a snob because I don't watch (or like) superhero movies, Fast and Furious, and many other popular things. I'm not sure why this triggers people, but somehow people care a lot when they find out that you don't like what they like, especially when that thing happens to be popular...

Happy new year! Fireworks used to be a very big thing for me. As in, as a teenager I spent hundreds of euros each year on fireworks, to burn through on a single day and night, on the 31st of December. I really loved it. Actually, I think that the pre-fun (voorpret, a very underrated Dutch word) was much bigger for me than the actual fun. I used to spend months looking at videos, checking out fireworks catalogues, and making lists of stuff I want. I had a blast just anticipating the last day of t...

I just read a rambly update by Brian Mimpress, and it really inspired me to keep writing these things. Okay, a bit of background. Brian Mimpress is one of the managers of a group called the AF Gang. It's an online community, really, that's built around the British punk/post-punk/hardcore-punk/whatever-punk band IDLES (yup, all caps). IDLES is probably the most wholesome and loving punk band I've ever heard, and the existence of this community only solidifies that. It's a place where fans can cha...

I had a major epiphany about love today. Okay, that sounds a bit pompous, but I do think it's a bit of a breakthrough. (Also, I'm allowing myself to backspace again.) So yesterday I wrote that philosophers shouldn't spend so much time and energy trying to figure out "what love is", because there is clearly not one universally-acceptable definition of love. Love means different things to different people, end of story. But (and this is my realization) philosophy is in essence the analysis and cla...

I'm writing at a decent time today, and not at 2 at night like a savage, which is nice. I'm going to try something new today: no backspacing. No fixing typos, no correcting grammar, nothing. So prepare for a nearly unreadable ride. Today I read 32 pages about love. It wasn't straightwforward. It was abuout 2 questions: what love is, and whether it can be justified. What love is, I still have no idea of after reading these pages. A lot of people think a lof of ldifferent things. (unrelated: I'm c...

I think that games with an element of chance are objectively worse than games without it. Bam, that's my universal truth for today. Also, Yathzee (how do you write that?) and Monopoly are terrible games. I'm on fire with my controversial opinions today. Also, I'm going to keep this short, because it's way too late and I'm tired (it's interesting how much of my writing is about being tired. hmmm). Actually, I literally just want to write random words until I've reached a satisfactory number of se...

One of the biggest pleasures in life is to wear comfortable clothes and lie under a big, heavy blanket when you're cold on the inside. I'm trying to fill these writings with universal truths, preferably at least one per post. That would end up being 100 universal truths (actually already two less, but still), which is maybe a bit much to ask of myself. Nevertheless, I think finding these truths is a good thing to strive for. And I'm convinced that heavy blankets and happiness are very closely re...

I'm tempted to once again write about tiredness. Because this is by far the sleepiest entry I've written so far. But let's not go there. Instead, let's discuss the Efteling. By the way, obligatory apologies to myself for missing another writing yesterday. I'm a terrible promise-keeper. I'm really trying, just bad at making habits. Anyways, the Efteling, for those who don't know, is the bestest theme park in the universe, and it happens to be about 20 minutes from my home town. It's an entire par...

So what even are movies? I ask myself this question because I watched Heathers yesterday, and it's the most profoundly confusing movie experience I've had in a long time. So that made me wonder what movies are in the first place. Technically, they're a series of still images projected in sequence, giving the illusion of a smooth 'video', combined with sound. But what do they do? I feel like it's not a stretch to say that movies are always about the human experience. Since they're all made by hum...

So yeah, I didn't write yesterday. I just forgot. It's really not in my system to write every day. I just got daily yoga and meditation in my system (which was difficult enough), and now another thing is, for now, difficult. I do want to continue though, I always feel quite good after writing whatever is on my mind. I don't care about the quality, I don't write with a reason other than to purge the contents of my brain. It's like a second meditation, in a way.In meditation, the idea is that you ...

When your mood is down, there's no way you feel like writing. So here I am, forcing myself to write. I guess that there's a purpose to all of it, after all, if I really felt like writing every day I wouldn't need to do this gimmicky series.What is tiredness? These kinds of questions are typical for an amateur philosopher. Just write "what is" and then a word, any word at all, and bam, you have a deep-sounding question that nobody has a good answer to. Philosophy degree finished. But seriously, w...

Second day of writing. I actually almost forgot it already. That's promising for the 100 days.Also, commercials are really terrible. TV commercials, I mean. They're always louder than the programs, which should be illegal. And if your product or service is really so good as you think it is, why would you need deceptive commercials with happy people and bad acting and misleading prices to convince people to buy your stuff? It almost feels as if us consumers need to buy more crap than we actually ...

First day writing, only 99 to go after this one. I honestly have no idea what's going to come of this. I know that mindless writing can be a good exercise for getting the creative juices flowing. But still, I'm not even sure what I need my creative juices for. I'm studying philosophy after all, nothing creative about that. It depends on how you approach it though. A lot of philosophy is so rational and principled and straight, which I find interesting but also limited somehow. It's a very mascul...