I am
...getting rained on in Tokyo.
...old enough to drink alcohol but not old enough to know when to stop.
...blogging since 02/22/03.
Saturday, February 28, 2004
No pineapples but still a vacation What I have done during the week I didn't blog:
I hosted an unsuccessful cocktail evening where all the cocktails consisted of alcohol, juice and grenadine due to a lack of other ingredients;
my streak of nightmares was interrupted by a dream in which I star in Troy together with Brad Pitt;
I watched a horrible TV show where people told jokes in front of a jury;
avoided celebrating carnival (the few days in the year during which Germans think it's okay to dress up as pirates and slutty nurses, frolic, throw candy, get drunk and cheat on their spouses);
bought TS more beauty products; and
ate vegetables.
I would have added the bullet point "walked around the apartment naked" because my roomies are gone for this week but my apartment is on second floor and all the neighbors as well as the pedestrians would see me through the windows. Such is life in a village.
As far as I know hyplation means hyperinflation in dream-language Tonight I dreamt that I wanted to print out my thesis and couldn't find the floppy disk I saved it on among the hundreds of floppy disks lying around in the computer lab. What made it worse was that I'd also had forgotten what I named the file. So the only clue I had was that I'd written one unusual word in it: hyplation. So I started searching for the word in the files but then I missed the deadline.
Now that I'm back in reality I figured that there's no such word like 'hyplation' and that I've already handed my thesis in. I need a vacation, preferably a trip to Asia where I would eat fresh pineapples until my tongue starts to dissolve. That would definitely do away with my anxiety issues.
No matter how early you start, there's never enough time I handed in my thesis in yesterday. I wished I'd have had another day before the deadline, a wish shared by most people that aren't organizational geniuses. When I was little there used to be a sitcom with a girl that was half-alien so that she had the gift of stopping the time when she put her index fingers together. I regularly regret the fact that my father is not an alien.
Gagging and the happy place Remember that gag reflex that I got during the last semester? At the beginning of this year it got better but it never vanished entirely. Now it has come back with a vengeance. It seems that every time I come close to my desk where my thesis awaits me, I start to retch. Fortunately, I don't care about it anymore because sleep deprivation has put me in a happy place where I giggle incessantly about anything, especially about the fact that I have actually nothing funny to laugh about. Everything seems so surreal when you're tired. Especially the occasional rope skipping that keeps me awake.
I'd marry him if he let me TS is a darling who agreed to be some sort of personal slave assistant for the time until the deadline for my thesis. He just proof-read some parts of the far-from-finished mental vomit that I later will hand in to an unfortunate professor who has to give me a grade for it. There might be no grade suited for that level of mediocrity though. Currently TS is doing some grocery shopping so that he can cook me a nice dinner tonight. He's a keeper.
The "worst weeks of my life"-line up This is the final week before I have to hand in my thesis. Therefore this will be probably one of the worst weeks that I've ever had in my entire life, probably as bad as my tenth grade school trip when we visited the Baltic sea in April. It snowed. I was either totally wasted or completely hangoverish. I shared a room with two girls from my class which lured me into eating pasta cooked in vanilla milk with a topping of plum jam. If I can draw conclusion from their delicate build, I would say that these gals love to eat the noodles from hell so much because it will take no effort to spit it up again.
This week will be bad in a different, non-alcoholic, "I'm gonna scream if I have to write 'economic growth' one more time"-way but the badness level's just the same.
"February 14"-messages to the world To all the people who'll receive heart-shaped gifts today: Happy Valentine's Day!
To the rest: There's still something to look forward to: discounts on heart-shaped candy on Monday.
No chocolate tomorrow TS is on his way to Birmingham to visit one of his high school friends. This will leave me utterly alone and deprived of any loveletters, chocolate or sexy new lingerie on Valentine's Day. TS claims it's for the best as I will be able to focus better on my thesis in his absence. He also reminded me that I am the kind of person that doesn't care for commercial holidays. He's totally right, of course. And don't forget how uncomfortable sexy lingerie is. A usual Saturday beats Sappy Romantic Day by a mile.
Unfulfillable wishes are the best ones I first encountered the "boneless panda", aka "tare panda", when I saw my co-worker's tare panda-cup at an internship. In the beginning, the "boneless"-quality of the pandas startled me as they're basically blobs of muscles and connective tissue which will never be able to properly walk or sit up. However, these little creatures grew on me after I forgot that they're nothing more than slugs in a cute wrapping. Now I wish they'd be for real so that I could hold a living tare panda once in my life. It must feel like holding a furry water balloon.
Postponing the urgent Early this morning I woke up with a pressing need to go to the bathroom. However, I was too lazy to get up so that I fell asleep again and had about five different dreams involving the act of peeing. This included a realistic dream about me getting up and going to the bathroom and another one about trying to use a toilet situated in the middle of a hallway without anyone passing by. I should count myself lucky for not having wetted the bed. When I woke up three hours later and realized that I hadn't gone to the bathroom yet, it took me another ten minutes to motivate myself to get up. That's what you call deeply rooted laziness.
On the attractiveness of blue food Today I bought the new Fanta blue berry. It looks like mouthwash, smells like shampoo, and tastes like none of the edible berries known to mankind. How great is that?
An explanation for my obsession with blue food might be the sparsity of it. In Germany garish food coloring has been démodé since the realization that artificial colors cause allergies. Therefore you seldom find any blue food besides blueberries (which disappointingly are only blue on the surface) in German grocery stores. The rarity of blueness makes it so attractive to me. Nobody would be any keener on diamonds than on sand if you could pick up diamonds at every beach.
I'm a Japanese stereotype Back from Munich. I didn't get a job offer but at least I didn't have to sweep away the little shards of my broken ego either because the recruiting people didn't even go so far as to scratch it. It seems that my case solving and analytical skills are great but they hold it against me that I am too consensus-driven and therefore wouldn't fit the profile they were looking for. I don't really see this as a weakness really so I'm pretty happy that I won't have to work with people who actually do fit the profile. I got some satisfaction out of the fact that the company spent a lot of money to pay my business class flight and my hotel room for nothing. Flying business class intra-Germany doesn't make much sense because the seats are the same as in economy and the only extra you'll get is a sandwich and a magazine during the 40 minutes you're on board. However, the bathtub of the hotel room was divine after four years of taking showers.
So, let's sum up: No job but ego is still intact and I had a bath. That's what I call a felicitous day.
Why would you ask me that? Is that a cross examination? On Friday I have a job interview. I already picture myself as a puddle of tears in a suit bereft of whatever self-respect I had before. In order to prevent that horror scenario from becoming reality, I have tried to prepare myself for the big day but I can't even come up with a decent reply for "What is your major weakness?". And you stupid advice givers of the "Be positive; turn a weakness into a strength"-kind, go stick your head into an electric blender because every time I come up with a weakness of me, it sounds as if I'm an escaped mental patient and there sure is nothing positive about that, right? I will probably resort to goofy answers such as "Licorice" or "Not being able to ride a bike without getting fatally injured."
Hey, I really should be doing something productive but that would be even less fun It is quite interesting what I will do in order to avoid working on my thesis. After three years of telling everybody that "a class reunion would be really cool and somebody should do something about having one", I finally got around to writing an email to the class of 2000 in order to ensure that they will have some spare time on New Year's Eve to meet their old friends and enemies. Normally, I would never dream of organizing anything voluntarily because the scent of responsibility is more nauseating to me than the odor of roadkill in late August, but in times like these everything becomes more pleasurable than leafing through academic articles on countries in transition. Of course, this will be an unmentioned fact when it comes to telling my former classmates about my fabulous life at the reunion.
