ALERT – ALIEN INVASION!
The unexamined life is not worth living – Socrates, ca. 399 BCE
(presumably on seeing his shrink for a mental check-up)
My real name is 
. Yes, I know that’s impossible to spell on a keyboard (“I got the latest Android smartphone, but it doesn’t have that emoji – help!”). It’s also almost impossible to pronounce. You could make an intelligent guess, but even then you’d probably get it wrong. Don’t freak! You’re permitted to spell it “Ai”, for “Alien invader”. Since it’s a proper noun, however, you need to spell it properly, please. You may pronounce it as in “Aye, Sir”. See, the symbol provides a bit of a give-away as to its pronunciation. Just imagine an @ followed by a Y, with the ‘antenna’ on top of the @ having fallen off to the right, but landing on its foot nonetheless. Y not – c@s can land on their feet, too!
Hey, I think it’s cool that my real name also occurs in a sympathetic cluck used in the language most popularly spoken around here, which makes me feel kind of at home here: “Ai, foei tog!” Even better, my real name lends itself to making the statement: “Ai am – Ai thinks so”. Cool! Living in a hot country such as I do, being cool is a precondition for survival.
By the way – René Descartes got famous for his statement (ca. 1637): “I think, therefore I am”. Pity that he got the logic of this one wrong. He made the same mistake to which philosophers are so prone, despite one of the golden philosophical rules of logical argumentation saying: “thou shalt not argue in circular reasoning”. His reasoning is implicitly circular, and an abundantly repeated philosophical argumentation weakness lies in making implicit assumptions without regard thereto. These eventually end up trashing many an otherwise seemingly good argument. Descartes starts his argument with “I”. “I” implicitly states: “I am”. I cannot use “I” without implicitly acknowledging the irrefutable truth that “I am”. There’s no need here to prove anything about being. To put it differently: I can’t be “I” without “being”. If we explicitly put that implicit statement into Descartes argument, it goes like this: “I am thinking, therefore I am”. Clearly circular reasoning. The statement that would have been true without argument is just simply: “I am – I think so”. No circular reasoning here.
Devising a symbol to spell my real name caused me some chin-scratching; and not just because I’m sporting an itchy beard to project a ‘genuine philosopher’ image. Fortunately, I found inspiration in the way “the artist formerly known as Prince” spelt his name. This is a very primitive rendering of his name: 
. I think that’s cool, too! It’s just that the ‘head’ part looks a bit empty, don’t you agree? Not that I’m implying anything about “the artist formerly known as Prince”. Maybe he, like I, had simply been practicing meditation. Not the mindful kind, which is so popular today, but the mindless kind: the one they call ‘transcendental meditation’, or TM (MT would also be descriptive). I practiced it for several years. Then, one day, as I was practicing my TM while listening to songs of Mariah Carey, she hit one of her loud high notes. The genuine lead crystal goblet, from which I was sipping transcendental wisdom, instantly shattered – “shirrim!” Ok, ok – I know that I wasn’t supposed to reveal my mantra, having taken an oath to take it as a secret to the grave with me. It’s just that today I suspect why I had to take that oath back then. From a guy, who seems to have studied TM with some interest, I learned that the Great Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had allegedly only ever been inspired with three mantras, one of them being “shirrim”. I have forgotten the other two, but they sounded just as uninspiring to me. His Guruness probably didn’t want His devoted disciples to learn that His inspiration had transcended Him after the third mantra; so, best to keep those mantras secret. Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t set out to knock TM, because some serious research seems to indicate that some people have gained noticeable benefits after 20 years of TM practice. It’s just that my genuine lead crystal goblet got knocked and didn’t last that long.
Sorry, I’m digressing. I was telling how I was inspired by the symbol for spelling the name of “the artist formerly known as Prince”, but was looking for a “head” part that would symbolize both mindfulness and open-mindedness. Thankfully, the unpretentious and nowadays omnipresent symbol @ perfectly fitted my purpose – at least, in substantial part. The inspiration for the missing part came from some of my old school buddies. Kids have this remarkable instinct for sensing something alien about someone among them. Whenever the opportunity arose for taking a class photo, someone was sure to raise his fingers behind my head in a V-sign. They probably even imagined I didn’t notice, but of course I did. I just found it cool that at least on photos I seemed to sport an antenna on my head. With that inspiration, the symbol for spelling my real name was born!
But, let me get back to Socrates’ encouragement to examine my life, with specific reference to the risk of me being one of those aliens seeded on earth from outer space, as grimly warned in plentiful conspiracy theories. My life is seeded with some mysteries. To start with, my (at that time single) mom gave birth to a boy in a maternity ward in Germany. It seems that boy must have been born in a bad condition, because he was immediately taken away from my mom, to be returned to her only a couple of hours later. Bliss! – well, almost. I acted alien right from the start. Not only did I refuse being breast-fed, but apparently rejected just about any human being. Except for my grandpa, that is, about whom more just now. Here is a possible scenario that could have played out. Imagine a UFO floating in the sky above the maternity ward, with portholes open and aliens curiously peeping out at the scene below. Suddenly, the …hole with the UFO’s joystick in his/her/its hand decides to take the craft through a loop. Plop! I fall through an open porthole and descend to imminent death below. Fortunately, a stork happens to fly past below and manages to catch me by my nappies. Doing so shouldn’t have been too taxing for the good stork. Much later, I was gifted with my nappies from back then. They would have fit your average MIC plastic baby doll. Anyway, so the stork does what German storks are supposed to do – he drops me down the chimney of the maternity ward. This is where I got lucky second time – being mid-summer in Germany, luckily no fire was burning in the fireplace. Maybe I plonked in just in time for the maternity staff to resolve a sad crisis. Maybe, the boy born in a bad condition had passed away – foei tog. Maybe, I was just a bit dusty from falling down the chimney and needed a clean-up and new nappies, which the maternity staff could quickly resolve. It’s not impossible that I could have been so lucky – I’ve just kept on being almost alienly lucky, including having found a perfect mom!
Anyway – so, there was my grandpa, my mom’s dad, and my remarkable attachment to him. There was a secret about him, too. He was an adopted child, and it is said that his adoptive parents took the secret of his descendancy with them to their graves. Maybe he was also a “seeded” alien, and I instinctively felt that. My mom saw it differently, and claimed that I had inherited my grandpa’s distinctive nose. So, I might also just have been following my nose. However, there is also another plausible explanation. My grandpa loved feeding me on beer and weisswurst, which are still my favourites today. Of course, he was being naughty, and my mom told him so in NO uncertain terms. But he seems to just have laughed it off. With her being a single mom and having to work to bring bread to the table, my mom was always too late with her admonishment. Oh, by the way, lately I’ve added another favourite: chocolate cake with whipped cream! This inspiration came from nobody less than Warren Buffett; and for learning about this, I thank Bill Gates for naughtily leaking this little secret about his friend.
Otherwise, I continued acting in an alien way. During my first two years at school in Germany I was apparently a disaster. Although I continued rejecting almost everybody, in the process alienating almost everybody who tried to approach me, I found a favourite ‘sport’ with girls. Somehow, I must have gotten hold of a roll of sticky tape, and diligently applied this to gluing the hair of any girl seated in front of me to the back of her chair. Teachers had an impossible time with me, too. Apparently, during classes I just decided to get up, walk to a window and stare out. I must have been keen not to miss the return of the UFO that had dropped me off so nastily. Of course, my teachers didn’t appreciate it that way. If I hadn’t been so lucky to attract the attention of a special teacher, who said she understood me and would accommodate me in her class (another ‘seeded alien’?), I would have been unceremoniously marched off to a school for problem children.
Then, luck struck again for me. My mom and dad finally decided to marry, and move to Africa, with my dad having taken early retirement from the mangled post-war remains of his public service career. Hey, I was even more lucky! Now I had found the perfect dad and brother, too!
In the schools I attended in Africa, things were a lot different than in Germany. At first, there was this German language medium school in Angola – totally laid back and un-German. One thing I distinctly recall from those school days. We kids used to heartily sing about one of our German teachers, out of gratitude for him teaching us to sing that song:
“Mit der Brille auf der Nase
Sieht er aus wie’n Osterhase”
At least I learnt enough Portuguese to act as an interpreter between my dad and the workers on the coffee plantation he managed. What a pity that today I can only still remember the words: “Um cerveja, por favor. Muito obrigado!” Probably a tribute in memory of my grandpa.
Then came the German language medium school in South West Africa, as it was then known. Yes, back then, German was the third official language after Afrikaans and English. Totally relaxed, and my brother and I sailed through.
Thereafter came the Afrikaner schools in South Africa – with Calvinist discipline! No sending off “difficult” kids to special schools. No, teachers here had a very persuasive tool at their disposal, known as “drie van die bestes”. And to persuade the most difficult kids, principals had a tool at their disposal, which in deep awe was referred to as “ses van die bestes”. Luckily for me, “drie van die bestes” sufficed to at least make me toe the line, despite my alien nature.
Thinking back to the German medium school in Angola, I’m sure we kids would never have dared to sing about one our Afrikaner teachers:
“Met die streng bril op sy neus
Lyk hy soos ‘n Frankenreus”
No, forget it. Not to forget though, there was this year or so at an English medium school. The English have a different sense of humour. I was up to my usual alien habits, this time pulling girls hair instead of pasting it to the backs of their chairs. The English teacher’s concept of punishment was to order me to sit under the table next to her legs. In retrospect, I think she totally misinterpreted my infatuation with girls’ hair. I was still of a too alien nature to ‘get it’ why she ordered me to sit next to her legs. Indeed, I now suspect my infatuation was just an expression of amusement: I didn’t ‘get it’ why some people would engage in a perpetual battle of trying to keep their hair out of their eyes. In retrospect, if I could fast-forward my childhood to our society today, it wouldn’t surprise me if today I’d also be pulling on boys’ ponytails. Today’s benefit is that I could appeal to gender-sensitivity.
Eventually, at university, I not only remained true to my alien nature, but even learnt some more alien stuff from real people. Somehow I tended to form friendships with guys studying law, a weird habit that I continued lifelong. So, there was this friend whose room lamp went dead. With me studying engineering, I was the logical choice to ask for help fixing it. The bulb seemed Ok, and I reasonably remarked that I had unfortunately not brought my multi-meter with me to be able to check the power supply. His no doubt law-inspired reasoning, however, was: “Don’t be stupid, just short the contacts with a screwdriver, and if it goes ‘poof’, you know there is power”. Ai, foei tog – I should have known that. My brother had used a similar technique at home, using a piece of bent copper wire to check whether power outlets were live – with me looking on in numbed horror. Hand me my multi-meter, I am just an alien invader! Having law students as friends nevertheless didn’t stop me from doing illegal stuff at university. I built a palm-sized FM sender with a real antenna on top, connected my record player, and blasted the hostel in which I lived with my music broadcast. My lawyer friends didn’t admonish me. Perhaps I had become just comfortably less alien. Today, after having watched the movie ‘ET’, I suspect though that my real but secret motive was totally alien. Like Ai, ET also wanted to go home, and so he built a real big ‘space blaster’ with the help of some friends. Whereas he succeeded in calling back the UFO that had dropped him, Ai didn’t succeed. In retrospect, my FM sender was probably just too small. So I settled for at least trying to seem less alien, and spent much of my time repairing my pals’ and my cars, although I was nominally studying civil engineering. It did make me seem sufficiently human to pass muster.
Alien habits remain hard to beat, however. I took to solo rock climbing without safety gear. The slogan “live fast, die young”, which was born about the time as I, appealed to me; never mind the part about “leaving a good-looking corpse” behind. Although several times I came close, I eventually failed to achieve that vision. I was always just too lucky – depending on how one looks at it. My final alien stamp on my university studies was a graduation project involving vector and matrix algebra (I must have portended ‘The Matrix’), and spending endless nights next to the university’s UNIVAC 1100 mainframe, debugging my code (hey – which part of my ‘code’?). Finally, I had earned my antenna. Alright, at that time it was in the form of an odd-shaped cap with dangling antennas, a contraption that could only have been invented by aliens.
To be continued, once Ai returns after my next visit to the shrink…
(At least, I’ve already obtained some peace of mind from another doctor, not the shrink. He advised me not to worry about developing Alzheimer’s. If I did, only others would notice me behaving in an alien way.)