Growing it out

Growing it out
Originally uploaded by udge

Or, things I didn't expect to be different and difficult when I moved to Germany.

I can't find a barbershop in Stuttgart.

In London there was, if not one on every streetcorner, at least one in every High Street. There appears to be none at all in Stuttgart.

There are plenty of hairdressers, mind you, and many of them will do men's hair too. But a hairdresser is not a barber.

A true barbershop is a tiny hole-in-the-wall place. It has cracked leather chairs and hairsnippings on the floor, and a stack of three year old soft-porn magazines to read while you wait (upscale barbershops replace these with real-estate or financial services mags, but the principle and the antiquity remain the same). A barber shortens your hair in ten minutes, and charges you ten bucks for it.

My inner cheapskate is really objecting to spending an hour and sixty bucks in a hairdressing salon.

Perhaps I'll go back to buzzcutting my hair myself on Saturday mornings.


In other news it is miserably hot and muggy. I'm really suffering in this heat and humidity. Roll on Autumn, I say.

Grim

I'm having a "Ballad of Lucy Jordan" moment.

I'm not quite sure whether what I am wallowing in is self-pity or self-hatred. (It's 6am and I was woken by toothache after four hours' sleep, this may play a part in both my condition and my inability to judge it.)

Toothache: in addition to the two broken upper molars that I wrote about last year, I've had an aching lower-left molar for a few days. I'm afraid that if I go to the dentist to fix these, that he will tell me why my teeth seem to be going soft and falling apart. I actually worked up the courage to send an e-mail to his office over Christmas, asking for an appointment in January and an invoice in advance of work for 1000 Euros as a token of my earnest intentions. Had they replied with a date and time, I'd have kept the appointment, but they didn't and so I have aching teeth and (presumably) another unpaid invoice somewhere in these mountains of unopened mail (think of the landscape of Wall-E).

My life is closing down around me, I'm unable to see farther than about a quarter-hour ahead and utterly unable to take any constructive action. Getting dressed and going to work in the mornings drains my supply of self-motivation. My kitchen table is piled high with unopened letters and empty cereal boxes, because in order to open the letters and throw away the boxes I would first have to empty my paper-recycling-box, already full to overflowing, and I can't do that because don't know whether there is room in the bins outside to put the paper into. That is the state of my soul: I am unable to organize myself sufficiently to go outside and look in a garbage bin. Dear gods.

I was in Malta on a meditation retreat last week. What a laugh. It seems like centuries ago and what happened there sounds like the absurdly exaggerated tales that travellers tell to gullible strangers in bars. It amazes me that I can sit in the meditation group in SL or in the office, and nobody sees that I am broken inside. It seems ludicrous that other people look to me for support and advice (which somehow I am still able to give, how odd is that) — and grossly unfair, too: who supports me? Perhaps maintaining this false front is what's consuming all my psychic energy.

I spend a lot of time in Second Life, actually, until after 1am every night; being there lets me feel that I am still functioning normally. Who knows, perhaps it's even true. I don't know what I'd be doing with my time if I weren't there. Reading more than I do anyway, perhaps, or drinking beer in front of the TV that doesn't actually work. Meh.

I understand the appeal of going mad — really mad, rubber sheets and no-sharp-objects mad; of abandoning all responsibility for oneself and letting somebody else take all decisions and instigate all actions. Psych wards have to be awful places staffed by sadistic scum, simply to prevent themselves being overrun by would-be inmates. Take it as a sign of my state of mind that surrendering and letting myself be locked away seems like a good idea. I'm not going to do it, but it sure as hell appeals.

There. I dare you to post this.

Don't worry, I'm fine, really; at least for certain values of "fine." I am not about to jump in front of a train, nor to have myself committed, nor even to bash out my aching teeth with a hammer. I just needed to get this shit out of my head.

Grim

Utterly miserable day yesterday: blood pressure near zero, jittery nerves, cold hands and feet and general shivering, constant nausea and diarrhoea. I spent most of the day in bed, at least sixteen hours asleep. Today is better but not good.

Late

God but I hate competitions. Just now home from the office, 1:40 a.m. — and it's not even the final getting-things-drawn-up phase. Bah.

The moon is enormous and much brighter than usual tonight: it's at perigee, some 50,000 kilometers closer to the Earth than usual. Walking home on the snowy streets, the moonlit world was as bright as the hour before dawn. Amazing, quite lovely.

That is all.

On answering a good question

Dale asked, "Why do you guys *do* this to yourselves? Isn't life hard enough already?"

Why, indeed, do we do this to ourselves? In my case, I was trying to use NaBloPoMo as a jumper cable to recharge my batteries which had gone flat sometime this last year.

I had hoped that writing every day would help me recover some of the joy that leached out of blogging during this year. That hasn't happened, this posting-every-day routine remains a burdensome duty which I will hereby lay down. (NaBloPoMo that is, I shall continue to blog at semi-random intervals.)

I was also hoping to recover some of the joy that had leached out of my life during this year. I have been living in monochrome for quite a few months now, maybe most of the year. I can't tell you when the colours went missing, I hadn't noticed until quite recently. I had thought that my malaise was situational: everything will be fine once I get the competition finished, once I get the scripts written, once I get the database sorted out. Well, those things have come to pass and I am not fine, and the world is still mostly grey.

Oddly enough, this comes at a time when I am actually working on the state of my soul, trying to bootstrap myself into calm and happiness. My alternative, now principal, Second Life avatar (whose name is not Susan) joined a meditation and discussion group in SL, and the three of us (SL-Udge, Susan and the blogging Udge who is also the physical Me) have been trying out the practices, with much talking and listening and feeling and thinking. It is having an effect, slowly but certainly. That I have spotted the greyness in me is due to the inward looking-and-listening that we have been doing. It is also in large measure due to the assistance and encouragement of many dear SL friends, even if they might have thought that they were asking me to help them. I am very grateful for your kindness and your company, my dears.

I don't know what happens next. I have work to do and enough spirit to get out of bed each morning, I have friends physical and virtual to stand by. For now, I guess that will have to be enough.

I'm done.

More nonsense

Yes, you guessed it, some of these 23:59 last-minute posts were actually written after midnight, technically speaking on the following day. So sue me.

Slept very badly, woke at 4 a.m. with Föhn fever (nausea, headache, blurry vision, dizzy) which kept me up until around 6, then to bed until noon. The rest of the day was spent in my pyjamas until dressing for dinner this evening. Ah well.

Nine down, twenty-one to go.

Six more days

... until we hand in the competition. Bad day today, came home utterly fed up with the job, the project and the architects. Wondering now whether my attitude is justified or merely self-indulgent.

Storms today over much of Germany: trees knocked down, trucks blown off the highway, flooding. One sharp, intense downburst in Stuttgart, we got off quite lightly.

Time for some more pleasing diversions.

Report: Progress, lack of

Preparing madly (as in "insanely" not "with great haste and effort") for another week in London, to celebrate my fiftieth birthday this weekend. I have been avoiding thinking about this for weeks if not months now, because I find it just too depressing for words. How can I be a half-century old already with so little to show for it? Blah.

Flights booked, again through Zurich: trading money for time in well-established late-capitalist manner. Readers in or near London who might wish to meet for a drink (or a bookshop or whatever) are encouraged to send me a tickle by e-mail (top left).

I hesitate about the job in Münster still. Part of me says — with a certain amount of impatience — that the universe has given me the nudge that I wished for at Easter, and that I should bloody well grasp the chance to make some long-desired and overdue changes. I should therefore embrace this earnestly and with both hands, and move to Münster as soon as possible. Another part reminds me that it means leaving all my contacts, friends and customers, leaving the shops and cafés and restaurants where I am known; in short, leaving behind most of what makes my life comfortable. This part suggests that I should rather delay moving as long as possible, to wait and see whether the Münstermeister will really insist on my presence there.

To tell you the truth, I am getting somewhat tired of that second voice. It sounds like the backdrop to every decision I ever made (or fudged for so long that Life let me off the hook by making it for me). I think I should fire that voice and get some new advisors.

Fragments of a recent conversation in Second Life.

Me: I have noticed in myself that I often aim to miss, because success brings responsibility and the risk of making changes to accomodate it.
Me: I have been quite thoroughly irresponsible all my life, really.
She nods understanding.
Me: Here I am at age 50 without pension or health insurance, living alone and from month to month, no savings at all -- and the second-largest chunk of my time and energy goes on Second Life.
She strokes [my] forehead.
Me: He needs it.
She: Yes.
She: You have been sounding lonely lately.
Me nods.
Me: Yes, I have been lonely. I am coming to terms with leaving Stuttgart and all my friends and business partners and the stores where I am known.
She sighs.
Me: And frankly I don't want to do it.
She nods.
Me: But I sure as hell need the money. And the health insurance and pension that it would bring. The hourly rate isn't great, but there are enough hours that it would increase my income by over a third.
Me: There is no reason I could not save that third right off the top.
Me: I don't know whether to mourn this or welcome it.
Me: And I cannot talk about it with anyone in RL because they are all involved. G and U are furious and heartbroken at my leaving, they feel abandoned.
She nods.
Me: And I have realized that they are about 70% of my social life here.
Me: I will have an *enormous* amount of time to fill in Münster; either tango or SL or the gin bottle. and god help me if it's the latter.
She: I hope it's SL.
Me: Well, no, I don't fear that. I have no inclination to drink or drugs, none at all. Unless you count this as a drug
Me: or Internettery generally.
She: Misread that as "internuttery"
Me: ha!
She laughs.

What now?

Being a short exercise in self-flagellation

Blogging in the not-so-new office, on my own on a partly-sunny day, Beethoven's 6th Symphony (filtered through Liszt) is playing quietly, throat and lungs behaving only moderately badly.

G and U invited me to move my office here should I wish to do so, and I am thinking of taking up the offer. Several reasons: first, the one or two cappuccinos I drink here are healthier than the half-litre of filter coffee that I would drink at home; it would give me a guaranteed minimum of 2 x 8 minutes' walk every day, which I sometimes don't manage otherwise; thirdly, the discipline of coming here to work, and really working when here, would be very good; but mainly because my landlady has given me notice to quit. (Yes, not even the scare last summer could make me pay my rent regularly. Am I not the biggest idiot alive?) I am looking for a much smaller apartment to save on rent, so moving my office here would be a sound first step.

Discipline would be a fine thing too. I charged 55 hours to the Münsters for January, eleven half-days, in practical terms a quarter-time job. What sort of arsefoolishness is that? Do I expect to keep this job with that piddling pittance of work? To put things in perspective, I spent nearly three times that long lollygagging about in Second Life last month. I haven't touched my own database since before Christmas, customers and partners are beginning to grumble and whine.

The plan for February is to find a new small apartment ASAP, do 120 100 hours work on the Münsters' translation and 50 hours on my own database, and get caught up on taxes for 2007. SL can have what is left; how annoying that I should have just yesterday been offered a Second Job there, but it's highly unlikely to pay an hourly rate that is comparable to what I can earn from the Münsters or even from McDonalds.

So I sit here and wonder in more practical terms, how to move my office here. What is "my office"? Four dictionaries and a computer, really; the translation needs nothing more now that we have access to the Internets here. If I were to do this sensibly, I could get by with hardly any new investment at all: I could use this current (office) computer's keyboard, monitor and mouse with Alberich, carrying him back and forth (because I would still need to send and receive e-mail at home, and no other machine there can run SL. Priorities again, bah). The second-most cost effective step would be to buy another Mac Mini and leave it here, still using the existing KVM setup. Probably the least cost-effective step would be to buy a new laptop as I fantasized before Christmas, when I thought I'd be earning 5000 Euros a month from the Münsters (an impossible dream, I now realize, given that my brain starts dribbling out through my earholes after about five hours' translating; but the real obstacle was and remains my laziness and rabbit-in-the-headlights hysterical frozen-stiff panicking).

Make it so. I shall arise now, and go to the local Mac dealer, and a KVM adaptor buy there, and try carrying Alberich back and forth for a week or so. We shall see.

With that in mind, dear friends there may be some interruptions in blogging and commenting (as there were during the last few months, I know)—and should be some interruptions in SLing—in the weeks to come.

And finally here's Régis Debray writing on "the material forms in which [ideas] were transmitted" in the New Left Review, in which he suggests a new way of looking at historical, cultural, time:

First, what we may call the logosphere: that long period stretching from the invention of writing (and of clay tablets, papyrus, parchment scrolls) to the coming of the printing press. The age of the logos, but also that of theology, in which writing is, first and foremost, the inscription of the word of God, the ‘sacred carving’ of the hieroglyph. God dictates, man transcribes—in the Bible or the Koran—and dictates in his turn. Reading is done aloud, in company; man’s task is not to invent but to transmit received truths.

A second period, the graphosphere, runs from 1448 to around 1968: from the Gutenberg Revolution to the rise of TV. The age of reason and of the book, of the newspaper and political party. The poet or artist emerges as guarantor of truth, invention flourishes amid an abundance of written references; the image is subordinate to the text. The third, still expanding today, is the era of the videosphere: the age of the image, in which the book is knocked off its pedestal and the visible triumphs over the great invisibles—God, History, Progress—of the previous epochs. […]

Yet although these three regimes succeed each other in historical time, each asserting its own predominant forms and modes, it should go without saying that any one of us contains all the ages at once. Inside each of us there lies a calligraphic East, a printed Europe, a widescreen America; and the continents negotiate within us without losing their respective place. Each one of us is, simultaneously, God, Reason and Emotion; theocrat, ideocrat, videocrat; saint, hero and star. We dream of ourselves as standing outside time; we think about our century; we wonder what to do with our evening.

Love that last sentence; how true, how sadly true. Even if you don't want to read the (long, slightly pompous) article, do please follow the link and scroll down to the bottom, and have a close look at the comparative table there (from which the tripartite examples of the last paragraph are taken). I found it fascinating.

Shabbat shalom, my dearies. Enjoy the weekend.

Blah, Sunday edition

Still headache and general blahness. The meeting this afternoon will be a trial, I fear, but with only nine days before hand-in it's not one I can miss. Bah.

Dear Blogger.com I see that you have updated your software to include automatic spellchecking. I am embarrassed beyond belief to state that Blogger is (for once) not at fault. The automatic spellchecker belongs to the new, updated version of Safari. I have turned it off.

Who would have thought that a web browser would require spellchecking? Apparently it does; presumably it costs nothing to add it in since the checking software already exists as a generic core routine. There are a few useful improvements in Safari, what makes me happy this evening is that the Home/PageUp/PageDown/End keys now, finally, work in the bookmarks page.

Eighteen down, twelve to go.

Grey

I did go back to bed, and slept for over two hours; then went to the office for a few hours' nonproductive work on the competition. We too are floundering, but from lack of theoretizing rather than of bums-on-seats: we're moving so fast that neither of us can tell whether we're headed the right way.

Had a low-blood-pressure day: slow, weak, muffled and creaky, like a flash-forward to being eighty years old.

To bed.

But first, because I can't let go: here's the weekly Friday Favourite, a happy little song that never fails to cheer me up. 1989, already eighteen years ago.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. I wish you all a pleasant, peaceful, restorative weekend.

Pleased

Spent most of the day (well, from noonish onwards) transcribing a single eight-page screen formular and its associated object actions (i.e. how a button knows what to do when you click on it) for the Münsters; packaged that up and sent it off.

To the office for two hours during the afternoon, to discuss both competitions with G, U and the two new hires who will remain anonymous for the time being. The second competition is floundering in waffling indecision, due in my 'umble opinion to too much theorification and not enough butts-on-chairs time. Architects have a horror of signage and would like to pretend that an ideal world could function without it, and therefore that this world must function without it. This leads to long and futile discussions of urban-planning theories and viewing angles and suchlike, whereas out here in the real world we all know perfectly well that the client will tack up a half-dozen signs the second your back is turned, dear Architect, so just suck it up and let us move on to something important, please.

I have sadly, after much struggle, decided not attend Princess' birthday jamboree tomorrow. It's just irresponsible to walk away from the competition for three days (I'd thought it would be one and a half days, with a single overnight stay) less than two weeks before it has to be handed in; and the Münsters need to be fed regularly to keep them happy. Sigh.

And now, to bed—well before midnight! [Updated] Wrong! I looked into Second Life "just for five minutes" and spent an hour chatting.

How's business, you ask?

Thought for the day: a business plan that includes the words "win the lottery" is not planning a business.

I've spent much of the last two days looking through online job-ads, and a disspiriting time it was too. There appears to be no market for the database toolkit software that I've spent the last five years learning. Much as people talk about continuing education and career flexibility and such, there appears to be only a tiny market for people without a computer science degree. And while the population is ageing rapidly, there is apparently no place in IT for people who are more than five years out of university.

I really don't know what to do.

Ageing Yuppie isn't answering mail or returning phone calls. I assume he wants to wait until he can tell me some good news, i.e. a job that starts "tomorrow morning," not realizing that the information "there's nothing before December at the earliest" would be nearly as useful.

The Münsters are still farting about. It appears that my contact there is only a middleman, that his company is offering translation services to someone else, and that this someone is being terminally indecisive.

G and U have been selected (drawn from the hat) for another competition, which we have already started and hope to have finished in mid-October, shortly before her baby is due. But that's like playing the lottery, I will be paid only a nominal amount (250 Euros) for my time.

I need to spend 5600 Euros to update my copy of the database toolkit to the newest version. Sales of my database and associated consultancy have earned me 2177 Euros so far this year.

Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn and damn.

I shall now do the logical thing and walk downtown for a cappuccino before heading to the office for work on the competition. To leave you in a better mood, here's XKCD on romance and dating, a former ad executive who loves his job at Starbuks and nice short post by Jeffrey Zeldman on his daughter's first day of pre-school:

Nothing says Buddhism like raising a child. To cherish what has already changed as you look upon it. To hold most tightly what you must most let go.

[Updated: a kind of follow-up on the former-ad-executive story, about the store manager who hired him.]

Olite

Well, there has been very little walking done so far (at least not by myself, others have been more active). Yesterday should have been the first walking day, but it was windy as Hell and even worse the Foehn was blowing. I have never experienced it so strongly, it woke me at 5 a.m. as the wind changed, even before the storm began. I did not do an inch of real walking. Today alternated brilliant blue sky and torrential rain, so there was generally little walking done. I managed three kilometers before saying "this is absurd" and getting back on the bus. We are hopeful that tomorrow will be better.

Had a few hours in Pamplona, home of the famous bull run; tonight in a 15th century castle, supposedly the most opulent hotel/hostel/parador of the trip. Marvellous rooms redolent of wood smoke.

Very B.S.D.T.

And the punchline is: I can't even format the hard disk and start again. An error message appears, saying (and I quote at full length) Windows konnte die Formatierung nicht abschliessen. You will note the absence of explanations or reasons or suggestions or even ways to go about finding out what happened.

I am going to throw this fucking thing out of the window.

What enrages me most, as a pampered Mac user, is the utter opacity of Windows. "The operation failed." Whaddaya mean, you want to know why? You are not entitled to know that, you pathetic little (scornful sneer) user. If you were entitled to know why the operation failed, it would not have failed. Just because it's your computer does not mean that you have any say in what it does or doesn't or should or shouldn't do. So there.

And people voluntarily buy this stuff? Does not compute.

Blah.

Work. Blah.

Rain. Blah.

Princess has an exhibition opening tonight. Hooray.

That is all.

In other news here's today's favourite song (3.6 mb MP3) from this album, re-released in expanded and extended form after nearly thirty years. (Be warned, the linked song is not typical of the style or mood of the album! Most other songs are very rough and loud.)

On the suckitude of certain RSS feeds

Dear Blogger*,

you may remember that I have complained many times in e-mail and once here about the godawful suckitude of the software that generates RSS feeds. Having upgraded to the ex-beta Blogger2 I am saddened but not in the least surprised to find that this is still crap—but in a new and exciting way.

Two problems of the old feed software have been solved: all posts are short-form, and the strange jumping back and forth between paragraphs of some feed items no longer appears (in this sample of posts). Well done! Thank you!

However: the new software has a new bug which is every bit as irritating as those: it has no understanding of "newness."

I've been going through my archives, applying labels to posts that deserve to be thus hauled back into the limelight, and your software has picked up on this. The RSS feed now lists the twenty-five most recently labelled posts, some of which are three years old. No post which was written in 2007 appears in the feed.

This is absurd. Surely your software can be made to distinguish between "new" and "modified?" And furthermore: is your software really unable to tell the difference between editing content and applying a label?

love and kisses
Udge


* not you, dear blogreading person! I mean the company named "Blogger."

Tired part the last

Finished at last, thank God, an hour before the submission deadline. I am absolutely knackered, my shoulders and upper arms hurt, my heart is thumping (partly due to a recent change in weather). Friday off, no work on the weekend (though G and U persist in not believing this).

This is the first time in at least ten days, possibly two weeks, that I've come home during daylight (ok, twilight). I look forward to seeing the sun tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. I heard birds singing on my way home, and was surprised to realize how out of touch with Nature and the season I have become in these few days. I have no idea whether these were "normal" over-wintering birds which I could have heard at any daylit hour (and hence haven't heard), or whether the spring migration north has already started.

Now: lunch (yes, my lunchbreak at ten to six p.m.) and then to bed.

Tired part four

Damn us for the biggest bunch of fools in Germany, we are still not ready.

And damn me for a blind man if U did more today than: seventeen write-a-title-under-that-image, nine copy-and-paste, one draw-a-rectangle, three phone calls to her mother, and one hundred eighty-eight interruptions and gratuitous insults. (And one round of making sandwiches.) I would have fired her.

Tired part three

I got home from work just after midnight, made myself a little plate of goodies (an inch of thinly sliced polish sausage, two strips of smoked ham, two four obscenely good chocolate truffles) and will read blogs for as long as it takes me to eat them all; probably another three minutes.

We have nearly finished designing the competition project, I have to juggle the basement and carpark areas tomorrow to accomodate some rooms that we decided to move out of the ground floor. The elevations and sections are done "in rough" and need to be tweaked (better colours, a cheerful background, images of dogs and happy people glued in); the layout plan is done "in rough" and needs to be tweaked; the ground floor and representative hotel-room floor plans are done "in rough" etc. etc. etc. I'm sure you get the picture. We have roughly two more days' worth of drawing and printing work to do, and roughly one more day's worth of time available. Could be tight, is sure to be tense (although I must admit that U has cooled down considerably since the weekend).

The project is pretty good. We have sort-of recovered from a drastic and desperately stupid mistake, due to not reading the briefing document carefully enough. None of us spotted that one of the three public areas must have direct access to a private, enclosed garden; unfortunately all of these public areas are on the upper floors. G found a way of building an artificial hill and putting a ramp to it from the first (lowest) living area; it's a bodge but not a bad one, and the section even looks as though it might be a good idea. If we don't get thrown out in the first round because of this, we stand a good chance of being in the prize money. [Updated: results here.]

I am suffering from the bad working posture in the office (I usually don't spend this many hours there, and almost never this number of continuous hours on the computer there), I have aches in both upper arms and my left shoulder and neck. I shall take Friday off—come hell or high tempers—to do some relaxing and stretching, and if things aren't better by Monday I shall pay another visit to the chiropractor (for the first time in years).

Damn, but these truffles are good! The problem is that they're dusted in finely powdered chocolate which comes off on and melts into ones fingers, so I have to wash my hands after each one. (No, I can't lick my fingers clean, my tongue is coated in chocolatey truffley goo.)

An architect learns a lot about the personal habits of one's clients, sometimes more than one wishes to know. Example: in the public washrooms, the womens' section is required to have 2 toilets and 2 washbasins; the requirement for the mens' section is quite different: 2 toilets, 2 urinals and 1 (one) washbasin. Clearly the writers of the briefing document believe that men are filthy pigs. Perhaps they're right. (Since you ask: I put in a second washbasin. My little act of rebellion. (I also marked an odd left-over alcove as the site for a "prayer-vending-machine" but I doubt whether U will let that pass.))

To bed. Sweet dreams be yours, my dears, if dreams there be.