Oh, goody, the breathalyzer on my PC is broken.
"...excellent as a pre-dinner drink"??? WTF??? Here it is, 23.50 at night, I've been pouring this stuff for hours, and it's supposed to be a pre-dinner single-malt? Hell with that, I had a gin tonic as an aperitif, dude. Then a nice red with dinner (pasta), and since then, Glenkinchie.
I shant be embarrassing, my kid reads this. I'm never embarrassing to my kids. Around my kids. Whatever.
Heh.
Self-publishing is a double-edged sword, isn't it?
Two things: be careful what you hate, and not interesting in person:
Listen, I... listen, I was raised to hate Richard Milhouse Nixon with a white-hot passion. When I was 16, I was riding my bike somewhere and heard on a radio playing on someone's porch that he had resigned (wait, that was 1975, when I was 16, when did he resign? Could fit...) Anyway, I heard that on someone's radio at some age and thought, good. I'll never forget this.
And I never have. I've forgotten exactly what year that was, but not the general scene. Gold one-speed stingray bicycle, kid riding it in cutoff jeans shaking his fist in the air. Power to the people.
Be careful what you hate, because you'll become it, is my point here. I hated Nixon, and what the hell: here I am, a weasly old guy who's upper lip beads with sweat under stress, which is why I don't do television debates; to the left of Kerry, not to mention nearly any other US politician nowadays. Blonde wife, live in big house, give "peace sign" a lot. I'm sure Nixon had a turtle tortoise too.
Second thing: not interesting in person: you know who you are. So what, is all I can say. Let the others be the judge of that! I'm sure you're plenty interesting, especially compared to me. And even if you're not, so? 13 hours though, now that's an argument...
An old friend who had been underemployed with one crappy job after another (but a wide variety of them) for the last twenty-three years, all topped off with a period of unemployment followed up by another crappy job, this friend just landed a dream job. The job incorporates all the skills she accumulated in those other jobs. She beat out more than 200 other applicants for the position because she was a perfect fit. That last sentence almost but not quite sounded dirty didn't it? My point is some of us -- exactly how many I don't know, let's say 100% -- go through life like that, bumbling along thinking our life is going nowhere, when in fact we are becoming more and more unique and suited for our dream job, a perfect situation where all our unique skills and qualities we've developed are put to perfect use, empowering and fulfilling us and helping others at the same time. Some of us -- let's say 99% -- of course don't know exactly what this dream job is, and some of us are like, gonna drink all that gin all by yourself? Because maybe we never find that position. Not sure what that percentage is, but it's probably depressingly high. What I'm saying is, life has value and you're like a diamond, somehow, maybe, even if that dream job never gets invented, because you're getting better and better at being yourself. Not that diamonds get better at being themselves or anything, that diamond image just occurred to me as I was typing this, because a diamond is a small, hard expensive thing with faults, like a human heart or soul or third eye or something.
I found out yesterday, by the way, that the UN commissary here in Vienna does not stock absinthe, for heaven's sake. I've seen it in grocery stores in Vienna, but not there. I've never been inside the commissary, because you need special commissary status to do that, so I don't know what it looks like inside. Maybe it's logical that they don't stock absinthe. But it's just as possible that they do stock all these ususual drinks from various cultures around the world, such as single-malt. Which I know for a fact they do stock. I mean, I can imagine a conversation like this:
A friend of mine has a new political blog, Big Time Patriot, and so far it's pretty good.
There was an article in some newspaper I read, International Herald Tribune or the Japan Times, on the left page down low (maybe, if I remember right -- think twice before calling me to act as a defense witness at your trial), about what's-his-face that fat leftist who makes "movies" that (duh) win prizes in France, and Disney not wanting to distribute them in the US. And Eisner says this and those other guys on the other side say that, in the article. And Disney's excuse (in this article, which is a couple days old by now so maybe they have a better nother one now) is (and I paraphrase) "Some of our customers may be offended by the movie."
And it occurred to me that I am a major Disney customer (I have a 7-year-old girl, dude) who is offended by their decision not to distribute the film in the US and (it would seem) to delay as long as possible anyone else from distributing it in the US either. So I am boycotting them. No more Disney products, no Disney films (unless the name Pixar is also on them, that's my one exception), no Disney media or other productions of any kind, nothing licensed by Disney, no cereals or sheets or items of clothing, no nicknacks that glow in the dark or sparkle, none of that despicable shite (unless Gamma screams her head off, of course, in accordance with my parenting strategy of rewarding my offspring for screaming their heads off, on the theory that getting good at screaming your head off helps them out later in life). I estimate (conservatively) that our household spends about $2 million annually on such Disney products, so they'll feel this, man.
And anyway, be honest: Disney is fucking creepy. Walt was the philosophical father of Michael Jackson, wasn't he? He had a thing about kids too, didn't he, and putting them on rides, that whole pre-pubescent thing, Annette Funicello and Britney Spears and Mouseketeer and all that shit. And Disneyland is so clean and sexless and usually always works and people wait passively in very long lines and don't get pissed off and childhood is worshipped as some special place instead of the
You ever have one of those mornings where you get to work and just cannot remember a single detail about driving to work? Then after a minute it dawns on you that you rode the train to work today because you forgot to pick up your car at the mechanic in time on Saturday, and they closed at noon and you didn't get there until 12.30? And this makes you sigh in resigned acceptance of the consequences of your being able to see into the future but not the past and you see yourself standing out on the street in front of the office later that day, at one minute after five PM wondering where your car is parked and why the keys aren't in your pocket? And you consider writing yourself a note, Dear Self, take the train home, that's where your car is?
Anyway, train was great. I got to sit next to a pretty teenaged girl, my daughter, who was studying for her French test, which this time focuses in part on giving directions. Like:
Had a nice anniversary. Alpha and I sat at the table, with the kids, and looked at our wedding photos. "Who's that guy? "Daddy." And all the guests: "They're divorced. He's dead now. She's dead now. She's also dead now. They're divorced. That little baby there was in jail in Mexico last year."
Alpha gave me a very nice belt, which I needed. I gave her an IOU for a nice evening out. We're too busy at the moment to go out like that, not to mention broke.
Weather was cold so we left the tortoise in the kitchen all day and she didn't "make a poo": big plus day-wise.
Also, I read a good book I bought on Friday while waiting to pick up Alpha at the airport, before buying her some roses at the florist there, which is not only a little shop with so many great flowers I can never make up my mind, but also this chubby, charming guy -- he's just really nice and proper without being stuffy; the book is called "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" and it's a fictional novel about a kid with Asperger's syndrome and I recommend it, even though it won a prize and says something along the lines of "cracking good read," on the cover.
A cousin of mine is convinced that the males in my family, on my mother's side, have Asperger's to varying degrees. After reading this book, and that article linked above, I have to say she has a point. I would put myself at the mild end of that scale, but still on it, although you must realize this is pure speculation as none of us, I don't think, has been actually diagnosed with it. Except maybe her son who knows all the Disney characters by heart and can tell you about them at great speed. He also knows a lot about computer games, I found out last time I visited. There is also my uncle, who just turned 80, and whom I called on his birthday and for laughs asked "how's the weather" knowing full well he'd know, and would tell me in meticulous detail: 56 degrees Fahrenheit, light S-SW wind. History, and weather are, among other things, his specialties.
And so on. My brother knows the Latin names of most plants. I don't think I have any such superpowers, although I usually do okay at Trivial Pursuit, just don't ask me any sports questions...
My life is holding me incommunicado. At an undisclosed location.
(Recent photo of Janis Joplin and her good friend Jim Morrison)
Normally I'm a private person but I'm taking Mig up on his offer (thanks, Mig!) to give me a soapbox to express my dismay at the recent hoax involving reports that Andy Kaufman had faked his death. Extremely poor taste, people. Janet Jackson's nipple is nothing next to this.
Despite high-quality support from the in-laws, last and this week's coincidence of the convening of the *ahem* conference on *ahem* and abandonment by my wife (allegedly she's coming home on Friday, but seeing is believing) has proved more fatiguing than expected. At my cello lesson yesterday evening, my teacher couldn't believe it when I told him how little sleep I was getting by on. I told him it was okay, I didn't really feel like sleeping anyway and it was partly research for a story I'm writing about a guy with sleeping problems. And he told me about how tired he would sometimes get on tour (so tired you'd have to drink a cup of coffee before a concert!) and I told him about sitting at the conference yesterday, taking coherent notes, and simultaneously dreaming: it dawned on me after a couple minutes that these were not normal background thoughts I was having, but actual dreams.
So I went and got a cup of coffee.
What can I tell you about the conference? Style-wise, the Africans are once again setting the pace. The shoes on the female delegates! The hats on the men! Wonderful. And several of the women are still doing this thing with their hair, wearing it in long, thin braids that are natural-colored at the top, and get lighter towards the ends, say the last six to eight inches, said light ends of braids being worn open as well, so these black/brown braids gradually turn into loose brown/blonde hair. It looks really cool, I might try it myself.
Also, in general, the delegates -- male and female -- are about 25% hotter this time than the ones at the last convention I attended. I fell asleep only once, next to one of my bosses unfortunately, but fortunately he fell asleep too.
Anyway. No one is hanging out in the press gallery, which means I can't either, without looking like the last fish in an aquarium because although quiet, comfortable and climate-controlled, said gallery is a sort of big glass box hanging up in one corner of the ceiling of the conference room, and a lone person sleeping up there would be too conspicuous.
So, yeah. Lots of work getting done at the conference.
No one has written asking what progress I'm making on the quitting smoking. This morning I filled the tank of my car and when I was paying I bought some Altoids, some Fisherman's Friends, some mints and several packs of gum. The cashier gave me a look that I figured required explanation, so I said, "quitting smoking is expensive." She said she'd tried to quit once, she knew. I said, that's nothing, I've quit several times. She said customers had recommended those fakey plastic cigarette things. I said I'd give them a try if the mints didn't work.
They weren't working earlier this week. Yesterday I was like, chewing gum and smoking at the same time. I got so disgusted I threw the pack of smokes into the garbage can and said, That's it, no more cigarettes.
Five minutes later, of course, colleague walks in, sees me rooting through my garbage and is all, "lose something?"
"Somehow my cigarettes fell into the garbage, imagine that. Gotta light?"
Apocalypse, Pokemon-style.
Via Joeri, who makes me wish I were Belgian, or at least want to go there and eat fries with mayonnaise and drink beer.
And to whom I am thankful for reminding me of one of my favorite posts here, (because of the comments).
Somedays one just has nothing to say, and isn't in the mood to write about cats, turtles tortoises or children.
This is when we quote Rumi:
Anyway. Where the hell is this fucking Rumi poem? You know the one, the "meet you in the field beyond the knowledge of good and the knowledge of evil" one.
I left my book at home, you see.
After a year of solitude and deprivation he returned and knocked.
A voice from within asked, 'Who is there?'
The man said, 'It is Thee.'
The door was opened for him."
Eh. So many websites quote this poem - Unitarians, hippies, therapists, yoga guys, every stripe of mystic. We won't quote it after all. There I was thinking I was all unique, and here's a "homily" website where it's quote of the day.
Alpha is out of town until the end of the week which means I had a great opportunity to get some quality time in with the girls. Low point was the circus, although I managed to get out of there without spending more than 27 Euro including popcorn and a pony ride for Gamma (stupidly I tried to be polite and wait in line for that while all the other parents took cuts and so my kid was the last one to ride a pony, sheesh. The high point of the circus was a chubby 11-year old girl doing something with a bunch of hula-hoops; the five-foot tall 200-pound lady in a glittery off-the-shoulder evening dress doing animal tricks was entertaining, though, especially when her doves got loose.
The high point was the Roman festival in a nearby town. The town was founded a couple millennia ago, give or take a couple centuries, by Roman forces as a military base and they still have Roman ruins around. The fest featured an authentic Roman encampment where they demonstrated the various uniforms and equipment including a catapult (narrowly missing some audience members when a large arrow they fired bounced off some pavement) and a bunch of archers (who shot a bunch of arrows despite kids sitting in the line of fire - obviously the liability laws here in Austria are not quite as strict as in the United States). The best part, though, were the gladiators.
The gladiators were a group of people from Hungary, men and one woman ("Enya") who staged "mock" battle (I use the quotation marks because all of them had bruises and welts from getting hit with real, but dull, swords, tridents, shields, and other stuff) wearing authentic equipment. There were different types of gladiators, you know, and they represented the most common ones. Enya was a retarius, for example. That's the one without a shield or helmet, with a net and a trident. They also had a secutor, a murmillo, a hoplomachus, a provocator, and I forget what else.
According to an article I read this weekend, they used their shields a lot. The article was about errors in gladiator movies, such as "Gladiator" with what's-his-face from Australia. Judging from that article, these Hungarian gladiators were rather authentic, because they whaled on each other with their shields a lot.
When we got home, we had dinner (grilled chicken on curly hollow noodles, which are most delicious) and various other things. No, wait, that was lunch. For dinner we had cheese and stuff, which Gamma refuses to eat, so she had left-over noodles. And I had a glass of wine, or two. Then, to get the girls calmed down for bed, we had a little gladiator fighting in the kitchen and living room. Since we have a new cabinet in the living room -- with glass doors -- (assembly was easy this time, it came in only two pieces) I tried to concentrate fighting in the kitchen, though.
Gamma was a pillatrix, which is a lot like a retarius (i.e. no shield or helmet) except with a sofa pillow instead of a net. Beta was a spoonatrix, which is like a provocator only with a long wooden spoon instead of a sword, and a pot lid for a shield. And I was the spatulator, with a spatula for a sword, and a small round cooking pot lid and first a large pot for a helmet, which was soon traded in for a large plastic mixing bowl which had the advantage that it didn't entirely cover my eyes, and didn't make so much noise when hit with a spoon.
After they were all calmed down, I put them to bed where they of course fell right to sleep. This single-father stuff is a cinch.
One more thing: Beta tells me futatrix (and, I suppose, futator, depending on gender) means "fucker", which makes me want to watch the chariot scene in "Ben Hur" again, to see if anyone yells "watch your spiky axle things, you futator! Geeze!"
Once upon a time I had a photo, clipped from a newspaper, taped to my PC monitor. It was a picture of a young entrepreneur in some conflict region, former Yugoslavia I guess, sitting behind a big stack of open cannisters of black-market gasoline, a lit cigarette dangling rakishly from the corner of his mouth.
I threw it out along with a bunch of other crap when I moved offices, but I've been thinking about that picture a lot lately.
Also, complete change of topic, I've been wondering when we stopped calling them "mercenaries" and started calling them "contractors". My mistake, I know, but when I first read that expression, I imaged guys with shovels, bulldozers and cement mixers, rebuilding Iraq, you know? And it turns out they're mercenaries. Why does the US military need mercenaries all of a sudden? And what are they doing in US-run "prisons"? Rhetorical questions, I guess.
I try instead to think about the decent young soldiers who reported the abuse to their COs.
remember the good old days when sn*ff movies were just a horrible rumor?
First off, I'm a tortoise, you moron: Testudo hermanni. Not a fucking turtle. Get it straight, finally: Greek land tortoise. Protected species. That's why I have my own freaking passport, and papers proving I was born here in Austria and not, say, Greece and smuggled into the country in someone's kid's luggage. If I hear "turtle" one more time, I'm going to take another giant shit in your kitchen and step in it and do another Jackson Pollack all over your white tile floor.
Have you ever had one of those days that start out nice, you know, the sun is shining warm and a human puts you in the flower bed out in front of the house but unfortunately they put big rocks in all the holes by the fence so you can't book the hell out of there and escape, so you make the most of it by nibbling the lettuce and catching some rays on the sun-warmed slate tiles, and then a little shade under the wilting tulip leaves or the thicket of helianthus growing wild and then you see it: the world's biggest protein pellet? And you stretch your beak as wide open as it'll go and take a big bite thinking, man, week's worth of protein? Only it turns out to be someone's dessicated turd, a dog or more likely one of those fucking cats that keep waiting for the human to turn his back so they can see what this camoflagued shell on legs is all about, or maybe that rodent-like thing that nibbles the cars' electrical wiring systems at night? Only by the time you realize this it's too late, and you have this rock-hard piece of shit stuck in your beak and you can't spit it out, and you can't bite it off and swallow it, and you can't open your beak any wider to get rid of it and you can barely retract your head into the shell while you think about what to do other than choke, and once your head's retracted you can't fucking get it back out again so there you are wandering around blind, head stuck in shell, mouth stretched as wide as it'll go around this huge piece of dried turd, bumping into things until you're stuck there finally between a rock and a tulip stem with a red cat two paces away, watching? Let me tell you what it's like: as much as you hate being picked up, when a human finally notices that you're not just fooling around, but choking, and picks you up and carries you into the kitchen and starts trying to pull the turd back out, and pieces break off instead but he keeps trying and finally the whole damn thing comes out finally, you know what that's like? It's a good feeling, let me tell you. And when you can finally stick your head back out, and he tickles you under your throat and puts you back out into the lettuce patch, fucking priceless. The moral of the story is, if a delicious-looking protein pellet is bigger than your head, it's probably a turd.
Pretty much everything the Bush administration has pulled so far has failed to surprise me, except for how fast it happened and how much approval it's met with at home. Afghanistan surprised me a little, since I'd expected him to march into Iraq directly. But Iraq itself, and reestablishing the budget deficit, and hurting education etc, no big surprise. Torture, though - I can remember when the United States used to be the good guys, and stand for things like democracy and human rights. I am speechless at the moment, so will spare you any more words on that, reserving the right to pipe up at a later date, though. Still, though - torture and rape, wasn't that what the Iraqis were going to be "liberated" from? Has anyone involved claimed, yet, that they were "only following orders"? Because claims that "we didn't know what was happening" are really ringing historical bells, with me at least.
Anyway.
Change of topic. Here's a fun creativity exercise next time you read a book to a kid (Gamma is sick and I got the opportunity to read a few over the weekend): when you read the book, read each page in a different voice, which the kid(s) get to pick. Yesterday, for example, I read "The Aristocats" in the following voices, as far as I can remember:
I'm not saying Gamma is a girly-girl, but pink is the shortest coloring pencil in her pencil-box.
Speaking of Gamma, the other day I was shaving and she came in with a smile on her face and reported that she'd just heard a report on the radio about a woman who slipped and fell in her bathroom, fatally, after which her two-year-old child went to the fridge and brought her first some yogurt, and later a sausage. Trying to take care of its mom. Found hours later by someone. And it took me a minute to realize that Gamma's smile was not one of humor, but the smile a person sometimes might get upon realizing that there is horror out there, bad things from which no one can protect us.
Disney blocks distribution of new Michael Moore film.
In a front-page article by Michel Marriott, today's International Herald Tribune reports that Adidas plans to market high-tech running shoes that adapt to running conditions mid-stride.
They say advice is a waste of time, because those who need it are too dumb to take it, and smart people don't need it in the first place. On the other hand, I am turning 45 in a few days (to say exactly on what date would be self-indulgent so I won't, but it's next Monday) and so I figure since that's fairly old, I have now the responsibility to share with you the few nuggets of wisdom I've distilled from those years of experience, not to mention all the self-help books I've read.
So with the caveat that I haven't tried all this stuff myself, and am just making some of it up, here's my advice (the first installment):
Life has been cutting into my other activities of late. Visits, parties, trips. Concerts, doctor and dentist visits. Hanging out while my father-in-law takes the Dobló to the mechanic (god bless him) (my father-in-law, I mean. Well, the mechanic too: grant him the skill and dexterity to work fast, and the ethical convictions not to charge me an arm and a leg for inventing a little piece of metal and welding it onto my rusty exhaust instead of reinstalling the entire system, as Fiat wanted him to do). I rode the train into work today. I love the train, when the weather is warm and I can read and don't have to wait for it in freezing weather, or walk from the station to work in the rain. I hate driving, man. I hate cars.
Where was I? Life. I had yesterday off and did a little cleaning. I'm reading this one self-help book, as I am wont to do, and it's all about getting organized. I managed only to select about 5 t-shirts for the trash, the others having possible uses as painting smocks for the kids or collectors' items, so I switched to paper rubbish and tossed a bunch of duplicate manuscripts, useless receipts, etc. Whole garbage-bag full. Cleaned off my nightstand. Boy was Alpha happy. I'm not going into detail here, but the lava lamp was on last night, dude, is all I'm saying. So, more cleaning on the horizon.
Also, toilet seats? Who would have thought they'd be easy to replace? They go on with WING NUTS! I had to loosen the old ones with a wrench, but still. The whole job, including pretending to read the directions, took maybe a total of 5 minutes apiece, including cleaning the icky greenish grime from around where the bolts were. It was so quick and easy, I even admitted it to my wife, rather than pretend it'd been a horrible job, as I usually do, in order to squeeze a little more bargaining power out of the process. For the rest of the day I was all, I love toilet seats.
Look, I would post something, only I have the day off and a little boy is visiting my little girl. They were out trying to tip over the swingset, but now they're in her room. The door is open, and they're making a lot of noise with her recorder and drum... wait, now they're downstairs harassing her grandmother. This is not the little boy my wife caught naked with her a while back, it's the one she caught (fully-clothed) under her bed with her a couple days ago. He is one of the naughtier boys in her class, but he's scared of me (his mother, who is quite hot, dropped him off and stopped to chat with me for several minutes, which he spent two paces from me, leaning against the house, quaking and trying to render himself invisible) and Gamma appears to have him entirely under control. So I don't suppose I'll need to give him a tour of my collection of knives and swords for a while yet.
