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Following my dear teacher and fellow Anglistik-Department member Rebecca Davies’ example, I asked her to come up with five things she’d associate with me. Here we go.

1. Morrissey (it was you that wrote about him, wasn’t it??)
It was indeed. I must admit that I cannot recall the exact reason I opted for that topic but I think I was basically just sick of _your average university paper topic here_ and I was hooked on Irish Blood, English Heart when I had to write that essay. I do listen to a lot of Morrissey’s stuff lately and I certainly like The Smiths but I would rank neither in my personal Top 5 (Top Ten though). Apart from Irish Blood, I have kind of fallen in love with Let Me Kiss You and Life is a Pigsty, the latter having been my personal soundtrack for the past months.

2. Studious glasses
Thanks for noticing . What you call studious, I call nerdy and I think buying these glasses was very much a step to fully accepting and celebrating that aspect of my personality. Apart from that, I was just sick of people telling me I looked like Harry Potter with my old glasses – which, just for the record, is a lie punishable by a slow and painful death. I did try contacts for a while but felt terribly uncomfortable with them. They had a rather strange but funny side effect though: I could roam around my tiny little hometown perfectly incognito, people apparently being so used to only seeing me with glasses.

3. Pursuit of British swearwords
I must confess I have become a little lazy at this. But if there’s one thing Brits are good at (apart from dressing horribly when they go out, which I just pray they are doing on purpose), it is creative cursing. What I like so much about British swearwords are the many different levels you can insult someone on. While there are considerable differences between a wally, a nutter and a dickhead, German cursing just feels much more restricted. Since I explored this wonderful word of bloody British bollocks, Wichser and Fickfresse just don’t feel the same anymore. Phonetically, the advantage of British swearwords is that they don’t necessarily sound like such (German words do, just listen to the fricatives in Fickfresse or Kackbratze) yet don’t sound anywhere near as ridiculous and anything-but-intimidating as French swearwords do.
I should publish an essay on this sometime.

4. Reading (the place, not the activity )
I would happily choose the activity over this place. Matter of fact, I am desperately working on blocking out the reality of this place by seeking shelter in the wonderful world of literature (current read: Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club). Reading with a capital R is, I am sorry to say, the most boring place I lived in since I left the above-mentioned hometown. Despite being home to a university and having no less than 150.000 inhabitants in the borough, this place is amazingly zombie-like: you can only wonder if it wouldn’t be better off dead and stopped struggling. Its biggest tourist attraction is a shopping center containing such amazing nowhere-else-to-be-found shops as HMV, GAME, H&M and Oasis. The only cinema in town rarely shows movies I’d bother go see. What does redeem this wretched place to some extent is its geographical proximity to much more interesting places like London and Oxford.
On a more positive note, I should admit that in terms of my work and my students I am pretty well off. I really got lucky with both my schools which certainly does count for something.

5. Converse boots (I guess that is partly down to your Twitter avatar)
Said twitter avatar, on the other hand, certainly was inspired by my non-foot-fetish-related (I cannot stress that enough) crush on sneakers, especially Converse. The photo used for that avatar shows my then new Converse on Broadway in September ’07. While I can get used to wearing suits and shirts and ties (even without a suit), I still have my adolescent problems with “proper” shoes. Converse may be overpriced (which is why I bought these in the US for an amazing 25$) and sloppily glued together but they certainly are comfortable, especially in summer. I also have a pair of red Converse-like nosweat sneakers and another bright blue pair of Converse clones and despite my rather hardcore vegetarian identity, the last suede shoes I bought were a pair of Adidas Gazelle I still wear quite often. To make up for that (even though I bought those a few years back), I will try and get a pair of fake suede sneakers at Brighton’s Vegetarian Shoes before I leave England for good.
And quite frankly, who’s ever seen a leftist student of humanities that doesn’t wear Converse? There you go. I need that part of the uniform.

That said, would anyone like to join this 5 keywords thing? Or does anyone disagree with the ones I was given?

…für gleich zwei bemerkenswerte Beispiele in Sachen pseudo-seriöser Schmierenjournalismus.

Bemerkenswert nämlich, wie du eine Studie über Computerspielsucht bei Jugendlichen in deine Berichterstattung über den Amoklauf von Winnenden einbindest und dabei ganz nebenbei einen Zusammenhang zwischen Computerspielsucht und Amoklaufrisiko konstruierst, der, soweit ich deinen Artikel verstehe, überhaupt nicht Gegenstand besagter Studie war. Nichtsdestotrotz stellst du gleich eine ganze Generation so mir nichts, dir nichts, unter Generalverdacht.

Ebenfalls bemerkenswert ist folgender Ausschnitt aus Claus Christian Malzahns Kommentar “Was machen Ihre Kinder eigentlich gerade?” (erwartungsgemäß mit dem Standard-”Terrorist im Fadenkreuz”-Counterstrike-Screenshot illustriert):

Wer sich nicht um seine Kinder kümmert, wer nicht weiß, was sie umtreibt, welcher Kummer sie plagt, welche Filme sie gerade im Kino gesehen und welche Seiten sie gestern Nacht im Internet besucht haben, der macht sich schuldig – zunächst mal an seinem Kind. Und im Fall von Winnenden an einer ganzen Stadt, einem ganzen Land. [...] Aber bevor wir über eine Familie herfallen, die wir nicht kennen: Wie heißt eigentlich der Klassennachbar Ihres Kindes? Welches Buch liest es gerade? Liest es überhaupt? Wie lange hat sich Ihr Kind gestern bei SchülerVZ herumgetrieben – und mit wem?

So sehr ich Herrn Malzahn in seinem Schlussstatement (“Das größte Problem sind Eltern, die ihren Job nicht machen.”) zustimme: Seine Behauptung, es gehe ihm nicht um eine “Diktatur im Kinderzimmer”, klingt wenig glaubwürdig. Glaubt er denn wirklich, der Amoklauf eines Jugendlichen wäre dadurch zu verhindern, dass seine Eltern seine E-Mails lesen, seinen Aktivitäten im Internet und beispielsweise SchülerVZ nachspionieren? Die Pubertät ist eine schwierige Zeit für alle Beteiligten, die garantiert nicht dadurch einfacher wird, dass Eltern ihre Kinder pausenlos überwachen, sie unter Generalverdacht stellen und ihre Kommunikation nachverfolgen. Es geht die Eltern eines pubertierenden Teenagers herzlich wenig an, welche Bikinifotos welcher Mitschülerin ihr Sohn sich im SchülerVZ heruntergeladen hat und mit welchen Freunden er wie über welche Mädchen und seine Erfahrungen redet. Wenn Sohnemann sich freiwillig seinen Eltern öffnen möchte, ist das höchst begrüßenswert; Ihn auszuspionieren und jedes Vertrauen zu zerstören allerdings ist in aller Regel, nunja, destruktiv und der Persönlichkeitsentwicklung wenig förderlich.
Ein Klima permanenter Paranoia und Überwachung jedenfalls war das letzte Mal, als ich nachgeschaut habe, bestenfalls kontraproduktiv. Und ich frage mich ernsthaft, wie Herr Malzahn das für einen Schritt zur Lösung des Problems halten kann.