As of December 2010 and it will stay like that for a while. Received 50 postcrossing cards in total, but not all are shown in the picture.

The physical postcard wall as of the 12th of October.

Recovered my old book with a collection of postal stamps.

Before the concert I spent the day at my younger brother’s place where I was staying for the night, ’cause I wasn’t going back to my own place at the ungodly hour of 1 AM. Blah blah blah. We ate spaghetti. Blah blah blah.

Anyway, here’s my review of the evening. This marked the first visit to the Melkweg, which was somewhere hidden in an alleyway and the GPS on my phone wasn’t working. Can I blame the weather? We got in and went to sit on the left balcony where we got a pretty good view if we craned our necks to the side.Another fellow from San Diego, Phil Wickham opened up for the band. I only heard him by name and not from his music, and I thought he was pretty good. Although my brother who had listened to a couple of his songs was slightly disappointed for whatever reason. I suppose he did pale in comparison to what came after him.

Then many long minutes occurred before the band came up, until then we observed the crew setting up the stage.

With the appearance of four of the band playing Needle and Haystack Life, Jon suddenly appeared on the balcony directly opposite us! Yeah, first time I regret sitting on the wrong balcony lol. Anyway, he did many things like jumping into the audience, stealing some dude’s sunglasses and pretty much boggling us how he kept going on singing perfectly during these antics. I remember shedding tears of joy halfway through the song, because I couldn’t believe the concert was happening. More tears rolled during This is your life and Your Love is a Song. My emotional connection with the songs got hit pretty hard there.

We learned a couple of unbelievable things about Chad, or already knew from wikipedia. The first that he had been playing with a chronic shoulder pain and secondly that he was born on a boat in a canal behind Amsterdam train station. Then Jon said that this was his homecoming and the crowd cheered for the drummer.

The crowd was absolutely wild and there was a really good atmosphere. It was incredibly packed, much more than I thought there would be. Never before have I seen that many Switchfoot fans in one place. Man, everyone was so crazily enthusiastic, singing along and having fun. Exactly how it should be.

Setlist:

Needle and Haystack Life
Mess of Me
Stars
Oh! Gravity.
Gone
Your love is a song
Enought to let me go
Bullet soul
This is your life
Free
This is the Sound (John M. Perkin’s blues)
Yet
On Fire
Awakening
Meant to Live

Encore:
Hello Hurricane
Only Hope
I Dare You to move

I’m unable to choose a favorite, but I remember that Only Hope was particularly wistful.

Then it ended, I went home with a sense of relief (yes, within those 90 minutes me and many others confirmed with own eyes and ears that the guys are really that awesome) and an euphoria that still lasts until this day.

Overcome I tweeted:

@switchfoot: perfect, crazy, amazing, passionate, connected and I cried. so many things I can say. Thanks guys.

It was incredibly impressive.

Tot de volgende keer (Until next time), Switchfoot!

ps. my brother wants to know the title of the song that played just before the concert began. It has an addictive bass sequence.

Photo credits: Xnoizz

The short stories have to

1. contain at least 300 words.
2. have a bit of daily life scenario
3. the world as it is then
4. a hindsight on the previous decade

Content tips: technology, education, politics, natural environment, society, etc…

For the years: 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050

So.. a bit like that other story, except written with a mature mindset. Sadly I do not think I can go back to being a child again. It makes me wonder how those who are current children view their world for upcoming decades.

The Friendship and Counseling Forum

• Nigerian phone subscribers exploded from 400,000 to 70 million in nine years, helping Mobile Television Networks become a global telecom player in the process.
• It is a dramatic illustration that, historically, Africa’s growth has seldom been gradual but rather in leaps.
• Africa has the world’s youngest and fastest growing population, a consumer base capable of benefiting from the diminishing costs and simultaneously pervasive benefits of technology.
• Africa controls the world’s largest stock of precious metals.
• To grow further, Africans need the things Europe needed after 1945: infrastructure; energy; integrated markets linked to a global economy; and a vibrant private sector.
• Africa will become an important continent on many fronts – as a market, supplier, tourist destination, generator of ideas, source of clean energy, and home to unique biodiversity and cultures. Africa will always be humanity’s common place of origin, the unique home base for our global society.
• Africa is already a leader in innovative uses of technology to deliver banking and financial services to the poor. The coming years will see even more innovation in putting news and information in the hands of the people. And that will build a stronger, more capable, more reliable Africa.
• African women – by joining forces, by fighting stigma and discrimination, by changing mentalities – are rising up and should eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV by 2015. This is already happening across the continent.
• Africa also has a chance to pioneer a new green economy. While industrialized countries remain largely dependent on coal and oil, African countries – with their abundant solar, wind and geothermal resources – can become important users and exporters of clean energy
• But as the damage created by current models of economic growth, consumption and waste disposal and their unsustainability become more obvious in richer countries, Africa will be seen as an integral part of efforts to save the world from itself, as the globe’s largest provider of low-carbon energy, including solar, hydro and thermal.
• At the moment, Africa is viewed as part of the problem, not the solution.
• The big surprise is going to be the recognition that Africa is essential to a safe and secure planet.

…Except they spelled my surname mistakenly in the book and I remember having been upset, because my name is easy! They messed up by inserting a random t in my name! It’s not like I have a foreign name, so why the mess up?! I was the proclaimed spelling wonder among my classmates. Why can’t an adult spell my name correctly?!

However, I remained quiet about that, since I was far too impressed and shocked with the entire happening! I got my story in a book! This was probably where I got my huge inspiration to continue writing fiction.

So I asked my mom about the book, who indeed thankfully kept the book and the original (it had no spelling mistakes) saved, but I was most surprised by the title of the book: 

The city, the street, the society. Maastricht in 2010

…well! That’s in the present. It’s basically about how the city will or should be like in 2010. There are tons of complainers in the book; mostly about the lack of multiculturalism, things that need to be changed, the locals who live here don’t accept outsiders, lack of disco, blahblahblahboring… and suddenly! Sci-fi creative writing from elementary students! According to my mom, out of all elementary schools we were the best.

A translation if you can’t read Dutch:

Laura: “Floating houses were invented 5 years ago and that was very useful. On the ground it won’t become that busy any more. With the atmosphere there were in no problems, because of the silent cars. Bad gasses are no longer used on the Earth and you only get your driver’s license at the age of 25.
While looking through the super strong crystal windows I noticed a girl who could run 5 meters with each step. That’s probably due to the C5 pills.
I push a button and suddenly the doorbell rang. A robot is standing before me, and he asked in dialect to pay up 25 euros. So I gave him the 25 euros and stuck it in his mailbox. He put down the groceries and flew away. What I found between the groceries was a lottery ticket and if you won, you would get a free trip to the moon. The moon probably became fertile, I think? But the food also changed a bit. I didn’t get normal food, but eating pills. You had to do it like this: you put the pill in your plate and sprinkle some water on it. For example, a hamburger appears on it.
I sat down in front of my 3d-television and watched the journal. The journalist said there was poverty on earth and that they invented a video phone in New-Mexico.
It’s only 7 ‘o clock, so I sat down in front of my school computer. You didn’t need to go to school if you had a computer. The exercises you don’t get will be explained by the teacher. I was ready at twelve ‘o clock, that’s two hours earlier than in the year 2000.
Then I read in the news paper that the hurricane Gregor had been in Mexico. That’s pretty bad, but maybe in 100 years everything has already changed.”

LOL. I frowned several times. (Driver’s license at 25?!)

The other boys had pretty much the same crazy and over-active imaginations about the future.

Boy 1 (13 years) made a fantastic wishlist of pure win for the future:
- flying cars and skateboards.
- driver’s license at 14
- driver’s license for a skateboard (because they can travel 100 kms per hour)
- a skateboard costs 100 guilders (old currency)
- cars run on solar energy and each car has a video phone.
- Video phone contains a real-time translator.
- phone costs are 1 cent per hour
- secondmachines that take you anywhere in just one second. He’d make a trip around all the countries in the world!
- it’s possible to fold all the things that were listed above into a small package that you can insert in your trouser’s pockets.
- the foot balls in 2010 will be softer, but if you kick it, it will go faster, because it contains some kind of motor. It’s a prevention against brain damage and the players will get better.
- the local club MVV will be the world champions in 2010.

Boy 2 (11 years) had written in a similar prose style like mine:
- He sits in front of the computer, and is being able to talk to televisions and command them to change channels. Televisions have four monitors so he can watch 4 programmes at once.
- chairs can move around and take things from his pockets, in this case a megaphone with video. the chair has tons of buttons!
- One push on a button and you become invisible …and transported in merely one second to Japan. The next moment he’s sitting next to his Japanese friend.
- Said friend suggests making a trip to the moon. Friend has a villa and has flying skateboards around it. They get two skateboards and fly to the closest rocket base.
- A trip to the moon costs “5300 Worlds”. They arrive three hours later at a space station and walk to the city on the moon between the aliens.
- They go back to Japan, and then back to Maastricht. Friend’s name is Juribashi (. . .).
- The boy’s mother has a limo, which can fold its wheels and fly.
- Fly into the shopping center through a window. His mother buys ordinary things like toothpaste and bread.
- The boy says “Mom you’re so old-fashioned, why do you never buy a kavariet*?” They go back home and he sits in front of the computer again.

*does not exist

I’m surprised about the currencies used. For an eleven year old kid I was pretty up-to-date about upcoming events, while Boy 1 obviously didn’t know about the currency change… the other resorted to a global currency.

- Why did I mention (New-)Mexico twice in my story?
- Guys, what’s with the flying skateboards?! ^^; Fast trips are good…
- Boy 1 and I are at odds at the driver’s licences…
- I was the only one who thought about environmental issues and general concern about the world. :’)
- Trips to the moon are popular.
- Boy 1 is probably disappointed the local club never made it to the nationals in 2010.
- aliens on the moon?!

What did become reality was the use of a long-distance video communication, added television functions, computer-based schooling, groceries at the doorstep, robotica in the workforce… real-time videophone translating, in the near future, probably?!

Somehow I did end up doing something with future lifestyle technologies and am currently writing a science fiction (the teacher said that I’d probably be a famous writer by now…. lol!). …and I’m still thinking about how to get the moon fertile for humans to live on…

“Do you have advice for songwriters like me?”
“Enjoy music: treat her like the incredible gift that she is! …and write honestly. Pain, joy, anger, love, fear- don’t dumb your feelings down; express them in your art. Be Brave.” – Jon Foreman

“At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.” – Søren Kierkegaard

“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.” -  Harold Wilson

“Too many people are thinking of security… They seem to be more afraid of life than death.” -James F. Bymes

“The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but deliverance from fear.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The last two hit me quite hard, since this came up in one of the classes we had about technological security. In the Western world a trend exists that instills fear to the society in response to danger (whether it be terrorism, “foreign danger”, local criminality, etc). Okay.

Let’s change the perspective shall we.What about the people who don’t have that privilege and practically live in danger day by day? Try to think of a country like that. For them, that is life.

My mother repeatedly tells me how blessed I am that I was born in this country and that I didn’t need to worry about anything. Then I think of a young couple who had escaped narrowly from dying in a camp and being beheaded with their family next to a railtrack, somewhere accross the globe nearly 70 years ago.

Then along come the pampered generations that have enough to cater to their needs. In my mind I figuratively reside on neither a hill or a valley, just a flat… flat, constant, static, and perhaps neverending uncrooked paper. It’s not very exciting or heartbreaking. When dark clouds arise from the horizon, we only want more, more and more until every single asset and being has a security chip installed.

Although this is yet another try at blogging, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to do it again. Who knows what will come out of this. I have another journal around somewhere on the web, which is mostly for the communities I’ve joined there as well as for making fandom-focused posts. I don’t think I will say goodbye to it, but I do think it’s an end of an era (Echo: End of an era!).  I would have been wandering in a graveyard if I hadn’t made this change.

Sunken Glory is or was the title to a chronicle of stories which I am figuring out at the moment. Glory is a ‘glorious’ or ‘worthy’ thing, that was sunken into a ‘hopeless’ state. It’s kind of inspired by the title of The Beautiful Letdown album by the band I fangirl a lot.

Okay, I’m aiming to build some readership by plugging this thing into twitter or that other journal once in a while. Can’t hurt to have some people reading! Since I’m anything but talkative, I hope to give an understanding to what I’m experiencing and thinking about. Another reason is that I’m possibly moving away in the summer and go in a different direction in education.

Today was Mother’s day, and in a way I’ve become a “mother”… so to speak, something I never thought of becoming in a reality, and yet felt the need to so. It grew into a desire. I posted the mail today, and hopefully will get more info in two days. More on this Thursday, probably. I feel very excited about this!