Waiting for the old year to be over

Crossing over from one year to another in reality is as insignificant as can be.  The term “year” being simply a human measurement of time.

Nevertheless we celebrate it. I don’t know if this is mainly because we are glad that we have endured one more of those 365 day-packets or if it is that we are happily awaiting the next bunch of time to live through.

 

For some people christmas is already in october.

Most often I’m just in it for the party. I like to have a drink with nice people but I hate those firecrackers and the “duty” to have the best party of the year.
This year I feel more disconnected with the event than ever. And moreover I found the days between christmas and today too long and senseless. I had the feeling that I just have to get it over with new years eve. If I will finally be able to write the year “2011″ on everything, I will be relieved. Reached it, left the old one behind, yeah!
Like waiting for your boring military service to be over or the three weeks mother grounded you.
Probably I will not change my life in 2011 and I will not go out on january the 1st and accomplish something I couldn’t do in december 2010. But it feels like an invisible barrier.

 

Strange.
Some years I had my post-christmas depression and some years I was in constant party-mode between 24th and 1st. This year I’m just lazy, unmotivated and absent-minded. I wanna reach tomorrow!
As if there would be any doubt about that!

Will I write more often for this blog in 2011? Can’t say.
Maybe I will quit it altogether – having announced just that some time ago. Maybe not.

Wishes for the new year?
Don’t have any. Call me disillusioned or call me perfectly happy. I think it’s both.

I wish you a great party tonight. And if you’re on your own: don’t be sad, it’s a silly occasion to celebrate anyway.
Good luck for your new year’s resolutions!

 

Winter in Germany.

 

 

Pilot in the city

Recently my mom told me that she is worried about finding her way in big cities. She even said, she’d not visit a city with 500000 population or more, if she would be on her own.

At first I was quite surprised.
My mother has been in nearly every major european city in her life. And although I knew for a long time that she has a tendency to panic and is getting slower in judging situations right, I didn’t think that she would feel uncomfortable in a city.

My good friend Gimli lives in a medium-sized city: Reykjavik

I asked my mother if she had a reason for her feelings and she said that she has always lived in small towns and that she often gets lost in big cities.

That – once again – surprised me. Because as a kid, I was on holiday with my mother and my sister and she navigated us from A to B and even to C. And we arrived at our destination! We visited Amsterdam (only one day), Athens, Berlin, Cologne… cities with more than 1 million inhabitants.

But my mother insisted that she has difficulties finding the right way and gave me two or three examples of that. Well, I thought, maybe I didn’t observe this as a kid.

As I’m very much influenced by my mother (regarding my character) I thought about myself after the conversation.

My self-inspection led to the following insights:
I like exploring big cities! And I am a good map-reader and I nearly always find the right way. Going in the wrong direction for some blocks doesn’t bother me at all, I don’t panic. And I’m quite tough regarding walking for hours in a foreign town.
I think of myself as having a small compass in my head which does not show “north”, but shows the direction I’m facing in regard to the direction I was facing when I started.

Today I went with the public rail to get my car from a garage where some bits have been fixed. The first train in my direction was not the one I used, when I left the car at the garage and went home. But I did know the name of the station I had to get out. What I didn’t know was how I would get from that station to the garage. But I thought that I would find the way.
I left the train and saw no sign of the garage. And even while in the train and on the way I only recognized where we left the street the other train would have taken and then I did not know anything I saw to the left and right.

Nevertheless I knew immediately in which direction I had to go.
A big residential neighborhood was nearby. The streets were crisscrossing, no right angles anywhere and I marched through this whole mess and ended up on a promising looking road. I didn’t know if I should go right or left, decided for left and after 100 meters realized that it was wrong. I turned, walked for half a kilometer, and there was the garage.
On this walk I never felt lost or helpless and I was in good humour even though I had my heavy briefcase with me and it was raining slightly.

Ok. I’m not like my mother. Good.

But than again…
I remembered an incident when I was 17. We were in Berlin at the funeral of a relative. And our car broke down. Because of that I had to get home (nearly 400km) on my own. My mother wanted me to take the train and I had to go to the train station by public rail, get my ticket and board the train.
And that REALLY made me nervous!
As I walked into the train station I had 15 minutes left ’til the train was to depart. But the queue in front of the ticket desk was 15 people long. I lined up but quickly realized, that every person needed more than one minute and therefore I was going to miss the train.
Now comes the tricky part: I knew that my mother and other relatives were to leave by car at the same time that I should have left by train. I tried to call my mom with a public phone after I left the train station but the phone was broken. Then I panicked!

In the end everybody was still there and they arranged for me to go home by car (booked at a car sharing agency) and train (which I had to catch at a small town at 3 in the morning – had a fun time at the train station pub where a whole bunch of winos was hanging out).

That was the story.
You can say, well, he never had been in Berlin before.
Yes. But he was used to travel by train and he was already 17 years of age! I know guys who relocated to Berlin at the age of 17 to start life on their own!

So recently I thought there is or was probably a bit of my mothers’ fear of getting lost in me.
What I do not know is how much of this is still active and working.
In two years time I want to go to Amsterdam for a few days.
That city is full of canals, fog-minded Smokers and Prostitutes!
Could be dangerous to leave the hotel.
They’re not even speaking my language!
I’m dizzy already…

 

High on boardgames

Just a short look back at SPIEL 2010, Essen’s game convention, the biggest in the world.

While I was waiting at the train station the first two gamers caught my eye: a big guy with a ponytail and old-fashioned clothing (let’s say: 80s) was talking much too loud to a not-good-looking woman with even more out of date-clothing.
They were talking about games, of course. And they entered the same coach as myself!
But, luckily, their seats were far off from mine. But nevertheless I could hear the giant gamer talking all the time…

Only a section of the whole queue. Had to wait one-fucking-hour!

But after I finally got into the sacred halls everything was ok. I met two old friends, played some games, bought some rare roleplaying material and only had it wrong with one book (which I already had but happily thought of as my great bargain).

Relatively few Metalfans this year, relatively few Girls with metal bras but lots of weird-looking geeks, as always. But that’s just right, I like gamers and this convention always is a high point of the year.

I think this game was made just for me!

Okay, till next year!

Well, I hope that – maybe – I have read some of these 50 or so roleplaying game-books I bought at Essen.

Play on!

King for a day, fool for a lifetime

In Germany there’s a saying: “customer is king” . It means that a customer should be treated with respect and his or her wishes should be lip-read.

Well, that’s the theory. I think probably twenty or thirty years ago – with more small shops and without the internet – you were treated more friendly and helpful if you wanted to buy something.

 

I live in a car.

Today I had three things on my wish list: a dentist’s mirror (small round one on a pole), an ink cartridge for my pen and something to eat.
I went into a copy shop first and asked for the ink. The employee had a faint smile on his lips as he said “No, we don’t have them.” He did not say “sorry”. (As per margin I am a regular customer of this shop. I buy and copy things there about five times a year. But they never recognize me. But I’m used to this. I think I’m the unrecognizable guy. Or maybe just too normal. Even with long hair they never recognized me. I just can’t stick out of the crowd.)
The next shop was a stationery store. I was the sole customer together with two staff members. And after a little bit of looking around I saw the ink cartridges. I bought the last two. Before I did have in mind to buy at least three, because I knew they were “hard to find”…

For the dentist mirror I went to three drug stores and two pharmacists. One drug store said “I know we had that some time ago.”, another kept looking for it but did not find it, the third one said “go to a pharmacist”. The first pharmacist wanted to order the product for me “eight hours and it’s here” and I – being somewhat overoptimistic to get it directly – refused. The woman behind the counter looked really sad and did not smile. Well, the last pharmacist did not have it either. After all I seem to be pushed to order it from amazon…

At the supermarket I went for some muesli. But there were three different packages/flavors on the shelf with only two price-tags under them. In addition these two tags were nearly pasted over by a third one which said “bargain offer” and had a low price on it. Unfortunately the new price-tag was for a fourth flavor which was not there. And the two other price-tags were not readable anymore, because they were half covered by the new “bargain” one.
I remembered the time when I myself worked in a supermarket. I had some departments to care for and my price tags would never have been this confused. And as I stood in front of the spiceshelf I recalled how I had stuffed the products into the shelves and at the slightest indication of a customer needing help I did jump up and stood on my heels.
Today a trolley was blocking my sight at the spices and this trolley belonged to the clerk kneeling on the floor and putting things into another shelf. He did not react, he did not even register that I was there. And so I had to stand on my toes, look left, walk around the trolley and so on to get my pizza-spices.
At the checkout I was greeted with an emotionless “Hi!” and a saleswoman not even looking at me as she said the words. I had to pack in my groceries with record speed, because at the end of the desk there was only a tiny 30cm*30cm space for my things and after I paid the next customers’ purchases were shoved into this place immediately.
But she did wish me a “happy day”. Without a smile.

Still wondering how anybody can assume to sell things that way, I drove home and went into a roundabout on the way. There was a cyclist in it and knowing how dangerous it is to be on a bike I went slow to let him pass before I would turn right and leave the roundabout. But the cyclist went right just before me, without pointing the way. Then just as I followed him a bit annoyed, he crossed the road right in front of my car and drove over a crosswalk to the other side. If I had been a little faster he would have ended under my tires! On the other side of the road he cycled parallel to me in my direction on the sidewalk.

I’m not an old hippie, but wouldn’t life be nicer with a little bit of respect and caretaking for others?

But why betray our feelings? Nearly 30 years ago a german punk band released a record called (translated) “All against all” or “Everybody against everybody else”. We hate one another, we want to kill everybody else, we loathe our jobs, we reject public rules, thus…

Back for good

My beer is frozen.
I put it into the freezer for half an hour and now it’s nearly frozen solid. Can’t drink that, shit!
That never happened before when I used the freezer (it actually is only a small compartment in my fridge) to cool down beer I had just purchased. Don’t know what’s different today?!

Look at this and you know why I spend my afternoons at the dentist.

Okay, this so-called blog is getting nowhere.
I had good hopes and I wanted to write every week, but it wasn’t possible.
Why? you may ask.
Well, I had better / more fulfilling / more pressing / more interesting things to do.
Yeah, that’s the truth. Don’t babble about shortage of time and stress levels: if you want it, you can do it. Consequently I must admit that I didn’t really want to.

Maybe I’m out of words. I wrote so many, I nearly puked out pages full of words for years.
Maybe I’m not good enough with the english language. Yes, it’s harder for me than writing in german. I have to look up words, I can’t express everything I want and it takes longer.
Maybe everyday life and all this boring stuff happening in the “real” world doesn’t interest me that much. Music is what interests me. So probably, after all, I’m going to write a music related blog next year. And I think it will be in german, just because it’s easier. And if I have reached much more people with these english texts, then they have somehow got round the “Stats” counter. Disappointingly few people looked at my outpourings and nearly nobody reacted in any way (apart from some friends).

Ok, just to cheer you up: this is not really the end.
Yes!
I will post some more photographs during the next weeks. And by any chance I will write something around them. Possibly I will not do that. Or just a few senseless sentences. (Oh, this is a tongue twister!)

Meanwhile: have fun!