All the Things She Said

Wow, it’s hump day again! Hamburg beckons in only a couple of days…

Let’s do a short wrap-up of stuff that’s been mentioned over the past week:

1. The Hairdo
Remains undone. Instead, I went to the river with my husband, our friends and our dogs (yes, it’s OUR river, too!). I will sacrifice my lunch hour tomorrow to get a trim at the place with the young woman who cuts hair like an old lady. C’est la vie.

2. The Movie
As yet unseen. We could not get decent seats for last night anymore, so we took a look ahead and booked for next Tuesday instead.

3. The Welsh
I have conquered lesson 13 and got halfway through 14 before a technical hiccup tried to force me to start over. I’m hoping to finish 14 today sometime. Only one month to go until the visit… if you googled “Wales” and “mixxt”, you were probably looking for -hold on to your seats now!- wales.mixxt.de. Come join us there. We have folks writing in German, English and Welsh; that covers all our bases and leaves nobody out.

4. The Vampires
Seriously, if you still haven’t figured out the basic rules like how to waste favorpoints on readjusting your stats, you need help. Read the Help section already! Here’s some advice: don’t fight anyone who’s got more clan and a higher ranking than you. Never be too cheap to have someone hitlisted, it’s good revenge for zapping your rank. Use your favorpoints for the useful stuff, play Santa to your clan members, gamble with Akem every day, spin the wheel and share the joy, and be prepared for LONG friggin’ stretches of no mission fun! I’m stuck in combat hell for three more levels. It sucks.

5. 4th Street Traffic
The boys are playing a gig in Cardiff in a few days. Check their MySpace site for tour dates. While you’re there, sign up for the newsletter. And download the toolbar, so you don’t have to check back all the time.

The weather is grand, I wonder why I’m here (*sigh*), and I think that’s all I wanted to say about that.

If I Were Dennis Miller

If I were Dennis Miller, then writing a rant would be a funny thing. He has such acerbic wit. Adam Sandler would be ok. He’d turn the rant into something goofy. At the end, you’d be left wondering why you were all pissed off to begin with. But really, the best thing would be to have Dave Barry write a rant, because then it would turn out truly bizarre to the point where I’d “swear I’m not making this up.” Sadly, I’m just me. And I’m simply mad and not feeling one damn bit humorous.

Today, I was having a good morning until I got to my place of employment. I work for an organization which stresses its safety greatly. By this, they mean regularly harassing regular people who come to this drab and dreary and entirely unimportant and uninteresting place to sit off their nine hours in their offices and then go home. Nobody on this installation is anyone of any importance. If they closed us tomorrow, hardly anyone would ever know.

But obviously, we’re all being watched. Paranoia is becoming part of our genetic makeup these days. Some have it in their blood more than others. Sadly, one of these somes rules this roost. And because this one overinflated ego apparently lives in fear of everyone, our security folks do more vehicle inspections than at any other place I have ever lived. Seriously, I have lived near many companies that carried a lot more weight than this place. At some of those locations, I lived for years. Yet, the number of times my car, roughly the size of a large bathtub, has gotten inspected more often here than in all the years I lived in, let’s say, Maryland!

My driver’s license, which was issued in 2005, has become nearly unreadable due to the fact that I keep having to pull it out of my wallet. On the other hand, since I spend so much time being scrutinized, I have had the opportunity to observe a few things: more than 90% of inspectees are female. One might say, this merely reflects the constitution of the local workforce. However, I’ve also seen this: two cars in each of the check-in lanes, the first two were male, the second row had one man, one woman. Who got pulled into the bay? Yup, you know it.

Secondly, for the longest time they would target host nation vehicles. It is getting more difficult, but whenever possible, they still do. So, if you’re a carpenter or a mover or a bricklayer or just the garbage collector, I will see you in the bay, no matter how many weeks you’ve come here to work. They do mix things up a bit when the guards get too bored. Apparently, yesterday was “white car” day. A colleague of mine got pulled over three times as part of this brilliant scheme. One guy blatantly admitted that he chose my wheeled bathtub because I have an out-of-town license plate. At least they’re not profiling. We all know how wrong that would be.

Crap like that makes me mad. So, I’ve decided that this is the year when I win the lottery. Then, I’ll quit this job and never come back here again. I’m not making this up!

About Pointlessness

I wanted to write a nice post about enjoyment. Because that’s what I did with the weekend, I enjoyed it. But I can’t. It’s Monday. It feels like a Monday. The pigwig has to go back to the vet, because after doing great on Saturday, he’s now breathing oddly again. My friends think they can fix my hormones after generations of doctors have been unsuccessful in the past 20 years. This is what I look like. Get used to it. I did. Why, at a point when I’m finally happy, serene and content, people think I need a fucking makeover? Will it make the world a better place? Will it make me a better person or a less embarassing friend to be seen with in public? Leave… me… alone! I like being happy, serene and content, and I don’t need a new face, a new body or a friggin’ walk-in closet full of clothes I can’t afford to improve my chances of being hit on by one of those degenerated males YOU people don’t want for yourselves!

It really is a crying shame that I don’t get those customary fifteen weeks of vacation my German friends seem to get. Because if I did, I could finally really disappear for a while.