It was a day full of experiences. I will begin at the beginning.
This morning I saw Mattias whiz by the kitchen on his bike, going off to work, and I thought "Let me see if I can catch him." I estimate he had about a 1 min. headstart by the time I finally pulled out of there. For the longest time I didn't even see him. Then I would see him rounding a corner off in the distance way up ahead. Gradually I gained on him, and finally overtook him just outside of Siemens after about 15 min. of riding--hard work!
I had to leave work early to try and get a residence permit. Even though I've been living here for over a month now, I still haven't taken the time to get this (bureacracy, bureacracy, everywhere, and not a drop to drink). Finally the pressure was put on me by HR so I had to. After waiting for an hour and a half, I was told that I had come to the wrong bureau, that because I lived outside of Munich, I wasn't in their jurisdiction but instead in this other jurisdiction blah blah blah. I asked them if the bureau in my jurisdiction used the same form, which was four pages long and tedious to fill out, so that I could reuse it. They said no. I left, thwarted. Kafka wrote books about such things.
The plan at this point was to go to the English gardens and have a picture-taking contest with Florent and Norman. Whoever took the picture of the hottest girl would win. I was in a pretty crummy mood after my dealings with The Authority, but it improved as I got nearer to the gardens and the impressive concentration of hotties thereabouts. It was a perfect hot day for such an endeavor.
Well, this was the plan anyway, but instead we played frisbee for a while and met a really weird guy from Barbados who threw a simple backhand with Baroque flair and claimed to be into all kinds of extreme sports, sometimes sounding Hispanic and at other times breaking into a Texan drawl. He offered to take us windsurfing, hangliding, waterskiing, "whatever we wanted to do," and he looked money, you know, but came across as a con man. After we parted ways we three made an attempt to do the picture thing but just weren't feeling it. What few pictures we took didn't turn out, and we felt kind of weird and covert about the whole thing.
Florent left for the beergardens to meet up with his French pals. Norman and I got to talking and found out we had come to the same conclusion independently: that the picture contest hadn't been fun because it had been planned too far in advance. It wasn't spontaneous enough. Planned fun is usually like this; it's almost work to go through the motions you've scripted for yourself ahead of time.
So we walked around for a while and did spontaneous things, and hey, what do you know, it started to get fun. We gawked and whoahed at girls instead of capturing them surreptitiously on film.
Why is it that German TV always shows the most sickening crap right when I sit down to dinner? I should have seen it coming this time. As I cooked my omelette, I looked at the TV and there was this huge, malformed breast completely filling the screen. It was from a botched boob job. Next, they had an interview with the owner of the malformed breast and she was expressing her dismay at owning such a malformed breast and not the Pamela Anderson Lee perkies she had paid for. (You see the rising action but I didn't at the time.) So I sit down and put the first bite of my tender, foamy omelette in my mouth, and what do I see on the TV screen but the very instant in the repair operation at which the implanted sack of whatever pops suddenly out the side of this woman's malformed breast? And this isn't the first time for such things. If it isn't a repair boob job it's some other horrendous surgical procedure, and you can count on it appearing at about 6:00 o'clock, as you're enjoying your dinner.
Meanwhile, somehow the hot sunny day had morphed into a threatening gray rainy one outside. I went out and had a cup of coffee in the rain, for the experience of having a cup of coffee in the rain. People need to go out in the rain every once in a while just like people need a good cry every once in a while. Standing out in the rain is like having a good cry, only you don't have to do any work at all.
Posted by Alan at July 9, 2002 08:46 PM