Rolling Out the Barrel at the Hoffbrauhaus in Munich

I've finally got my Europe pictures on my computer. I'm sure they're not as good as Ann's--if she ever has them digitalized.

Travis wanted to see this one. The mugs weren't as big as they look--they were only a liter.

I generally don't like beer, but in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, each town has their own beer of which they are very proud--I felt that I was supporting localism.

Various and Sundry

My blog looks a bit boring...I have every intention of putting up some pictures; I'm just too lazy to load them onto my computer.
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Brianna and I have a theory: Power tools, lawn mowers, motorcycles, etc. are not actually loud of necessity. Rather, as men grow up it looks dumb for them to make as much superfluous noise as they did when they were boys. Therefore, they made necessary tools unnecessarily noisy in order to vent their inner child.
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Despite everyone's wonderful advice about FSU, I have decided that $14,000 of debt is not enough to keep me from choosing the better school.
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My mom asked my brother and I if we had been throwing rotten tomatoes at each other in the basement. Evidently my grandpa brought some with him last week and left them there, along with a package of instant yeast. Not an unreasonable hypothesis, though......

Indecision Crisis!

Ah! I don't know what to do. I have been accepted to the Information Studies programs at Florida State and University of Michigan. I had settled on Florida because Michigan had outrageous tuition, but now Michigan is offering me a partial scholarship! What do I do???? There are pros and cons on both sides

Michigan Advantages:
Top-rated program.
On-campus so I would be in a real-classroom setting with real people (like, people who understand computer things).
Possibility I might get some cool assistantship/internship starting next semester.

Flordia Advantages:
Still $6,000 per annum cheaper than UM.
Distance-learning so there would not be the stress or cost of commuting and more flexibility for my job.
I just bought a computer compatible with their tech requirements.
They offer the flexibility to get an MA instead of an MLS.

Sic or non? I hate big decisions!

I Miss My Roommates...

My parents are much more helpful than my roommates. They do lots for me without my asking...sometimes too much. You see, I like the majority of household tasks. I like doing dishes, sweeping floors, hanging laundry, dusting, even cleaning the bathroom and taking the trash out. But I do not like mopping, vacuuming or cleaning the shower. Emily and Ann were always lazy enough that I could do the chores I liked and then put them on a guilt trip until they did the ones I didn't. I felt diligent, wiley and responsible. Now, my mom does most of the housework and I can't refuse if she asks me to do something--even if I don't like it. Ah the trials of living at home.

Lucas County Fair

I have a weakness for County Fairs. They didn't have them in Puerto Rico. Instead they had Patronales, or Patron Saint Festivals, where hanging lights and a few sorry rides would excuse the men sitting in the town square getting drunk. I am learning through absence to appreciate my place of origin, but local festivities were not strong points.

So the two or three times I got to go to a real American County Fair were exciting. I loved the smell of the animal barns and I would look at every single goat, horse and chicken. The food exhibits always puzzled me--the stale, petrified, prize-winning cookies and cakes always looked less appetizing than the fresh ones at home. I always had an elephant ear.

Wednesday my brother and I went to the Lucas County Fair here in Maumee, OH. It's pretty dinky. The rides come with the admission, so we went on all the circle rides. I NEVER get sick on roller-coasters--even the big ones at Cedar Point--but all the dinky, circular rides at the fair create a whirlpool out of my digestive juices. Especially when you throw an elephant ear and a deep fried Snickers into the equation. It takes powerful faith to believe that the sticky dough dunked in the rancid oil will create something good to eat, but it always does--so much so that it justifies the year's worth of trans fat that comes with it (pace, Dr. Gruenke). To top it off, I won a very ugly goldfish from a huckster with a ping-pong toss game. His name is Feo and he is supposed to replace my beloved Leviathan, but so far there is still a fantailed-goldfish-shaped vacuum in my soul.

My Unusual Job...

Unusual for me, that is. I'm a Comfort Keeper, or companion to elderly people. Yes, Michaela the Narcissistic, the Caustic, the Impatient. But I haven't been fired yet. And I'm mostly enjoying it, at least as a break from my customary self-absorbed, stressful, cerebral activities. It's theraputic to be professionally calm, friendly and helpful all day. And old people are interesting. At first they seem like a different species altogether from people in the prime of life. Most of them sleep, sit, and eat. They like to talk about when they were young, and they crave attention and respect from younger people. They're set in their habits and cling strongly to their beliefs. But on better acquaintance I realized that age is not the fundamental difference. Personality still prevails. One man I take care of likes to eat and watch television-he dreads having to get dressed and go out. Another has dementia, but has been energetic all his life, so he needs a new activity every 15 min (at least you can return to an activity you did earlier and he won't remember)! If you took mobility, sharpness of mind, and the expectation of a future away from a twenty-two-year-old, he would probably live with less dignity and fortitude than a ninety-two-year-old.

Quotes from Foucault's Pendulum

If the problem is this absence of being and if what is is what is said, then the more we talk, the more being there is.

The dream of science is that there be little being, that it be conentrated and sayable, E=mc2. Wrong. To be saved at the very beginning, for all eternity, it is necessary for that being to be tangled. Like a serpent tied in knots by a drunken sailor: impossible to untie.

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Invent, invent wildly, paying no attention to connections till it becomes impossible to summarize. A simple relay race among symbols, one says the name of the next, without rest. To dismantle the world into a saraband of anagrams, endlessly. And then believe in what cannot be expressed. Is this not the true reading of the Torah? Truth is the anagram of an anagram.

Anagrams = Ars Magna

I have a new computer!

It has a network card, a working battery, and no PHC-loaded gobbly-gook on it. It's another laptop--a desktop replacement. Desktops scare me--too much commitment to one location. Somehow computers don't seem as much fun as the old Tandys and IBMs we had when I was a kid. Maybe it's because I have to do my own installing and upkeep. The Sims don't seem as fun as Sim City and the X-Box-esque games aren't as addictive as Tetris and Chip's Challenge. For every Window I open, there seem to be five security warnings/update offers. XP is incredulously challenging the most basic changes I try to make like I am some sort of lunatic. Maybe manufacturers have tried to make computers idiot-safe to the extent that they frustrate ordinary users.

An Onslaught of Times and Cultures

One of my bad habits maintained since childhood is reading multiple books at once. Two of the ones I'm most interested in right now are the Satanic Verses and Foucault's Pendulum. Their content and authors are very different. One is written by an English-Indian about Indian actors in a plane crash with flashbacks to the cosmic struggle in Muslim theology. The other is written by a Milanese semiotics scholar and set in contemporary Italy with references to the Knights Templar and Cabalistic Judaism. Coincidently, perhaps, both were first published in 1988. There are other similarities. Both are disorienting at first with their overwhelmingly diverse allusions to different cultures and times. Both are from the viewpoint of supposedly modern men with modern presuppositions, who seem to be taken over, against their will, by mystic forces latent in the universe. Eco, in Foucault's Pendulum, particularly focuses on the distinigration of positivism into cynicism into mysticism and loss of reason. Rushdie's method of transition between normal, modern existence and the mythical is near-death experience. Neither of these books, particularly the Satanic Verses, can be called fantasy in the traditional sense because they are not in the least escapist--they are dealing with contemporary problems. The breakdown of normalcy serves to disorient the reader and make him more vulnerable to the books' messages.

Europa Aliena (Our Three Strangest Continental Incidents)

1. Metz: Freestanding Shower

At the Hotel Bristol we asked for a three person room. The receptionist looked at us strangely. When we saw the shower, we knew why. It's position and size created, um, modesty issues, since it stood in the middle of the bedroom and had glass walls.

2. Interlaken: The Funny Farm: Laundry

The name says it all--dirty carpets anonymous bedmates (human, canine, insect and rodent), Australians (drunk, high, smashed, stoned). After 10 days on three pairs of clothes, we were desparate to do laundry. We should have waited. The machines out by the "potshed" were broken. The ones inside were out of tokens. So we did laundry in our questionable looking bathtub. I washed, Ann rinsed, Matthew dried. In his boxers. On the terrace. A bus suddenly disgorged 2 dozen Japanese tourists who started taking pictures. He thinks they were taking pictures of the Jungfrau in the background.

3. Rome: The Metro

The train is so crowded that we have nothing to hold on to and Matthew bumps into a dark skinned and sinister looking man who offers him a drink from his whiskey bottle. Matthew declines. The man explains in broken English that there are many pickpockets in Rome but he is not one. Further, he is from Translyvania but is not a vampire. Later that day Matthew is offered a sandwich for one of his sisters.

Back from Europe!

...back from absorbing foreign cultures and microbes. Back from the splendor and squalor of Rome. Back from the polite murmur of Parisians and the cheerful gutterality of Germans. Back from the crusty bread, ripe cheese, and new wine. Back to the Baptist heartland where water is ever so much more common than wine. Back to the world of macro-cars, macro-breweries, and macro-fat cells. No more paying for water, sleeping on trains, and traveling like turtles. Don't ask me how I liked it--my mind is still processing flying butresses and exchange rates.

The USA's New Lake-Snatching Conspiracy

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian village was left baffled Thursday after its lake disappeared overnight.

NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately.

"It is very dangerous. If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost no chance of survival. The trees flew downwards, under the ground," said Dmitry Zaitsev, a local Emergencies Ministry official interviewed by the channel.

Officials in Nizhegorodskaya region, on the Volga river east of Moscow, said water in the lake might have been sucked down into an underground water-course or cave system, but some villagers had more sinister explanations.

"I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us," said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house.
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Preparations

It's raining and I've been reading travel books all day (I realize that was a run-on). It seems hard to believe that in less than a week Europe will no longer be seen only through the media of guidebooks, hostel websites, and Ricola ads. After booking so many hotels and reading so many travel logs, it seems as much of a created world as Middle Earth or Dune. By creating an itinerary, I have compiled, from snippets of other people's experiences, a set of presuppositions about what we will experience. I hope it is something entirely unexpected.

Disconnect

There are three types of people: those who like to rule, those who like to be ruled, and those who like to be left alone. People in the first two categories understand one another other. People in the third category resist those in the first and despise those in the second.