darph.plock

You know who your real buddies are when you are foolishly trying to move a mattress that has the dimensions and weight of the Juan de Fuca plate by manpower only and are in desperate and immediate need of a motorized vehicle at 9:30 p.m.

Or when you are moving and more than fourteen helpful hand move the complete interior of a luxurious 3-room-apartment (and then some; I really need to start throwing things away)  on a hot July Saturday from one part of the town to the other in a whiff.

Or when you realize you can’t pay that luxurious rent and are invited to „just move in, why don’t you?“.

That’s when you know who your friends are. Thanks a lot, guys!

Ich kann nur mutmaßen, daß damit der Scheidplatz gemeint war, war dies doch die nächste Haltestelle. Wie sich das dem Ortsunkundigen erschließen soll, bleibt mir ein Rätsel.

Bitte bitte, liebe MVV, tauscht die alten U-Bahnen aus oder rüstet sie wenigstens mit der Sprecherin aus den neuen C-Zügen aus!

Einer ziemlich komplizierten Umrechnungsaktion war es geschuldet, daß die Eine mir einen Betrag von rund 50 Euro ebendiestat, nämlich schuldete. Das Geld gab sie mir Sonntag abend in bar. Sie meinte dann noch “Das reicht für die nächsten anderthalb Wochen (die wir in München verweilen werden, Anm. v. mir), nicht wahr?” 

Vorhin (es ist jetzt Dienstag) habe ich online meinen Kontostand geprüft, um zu sehen, ob ich die Einkäufe mit der EC-Karte zahlen kann …  ;(

As I mentioned before, I am currently working at the BMW-Plant in Munich, which is kind of a new condition for me. Mandatory presence of my tired early morning self had not bothered me since I left school, so after two weeks now my body (and mind, mind you) is still acclimatizing to the new condition of having to get out of the house twenty to eight (I know it’s not that late), which would be a hell of a lot easier, was it not for the English speaking bitch of the appartment next door who needs to throw parties in several consecutive nights, singing “We’re not gonna take it” (Oh, the irony ) until three o’clock in the morning.

What the fuck is wrong with you people that you don’t realize, how much you are annoying your neighbors and floor-mates, if you practice singstar with your drunk buddies at times where any songbird refuses to make as much as a sound out of respect to his fellow singers and the god damn rest of the world? It’s darkest night, so shut up! Or at least keep the noise at a civil level.

As you must be intentionally having your conversations at a level which (be it voluntarily or not) includes the next three floors in any direction, I happened to witness one of many statements of yours, which I would like to comment on. No, my dear, your boyfriend is definately lesbian. No decent man would ever put up with as much dumbfuckery as came out of your appartment last night. That leads us to the undeniable conclusion that you man (ha!) is a pussy. Thus he is, being your boyfriend and all, obviously attracted to … uhm … other members of the human population (in your case highly debatable I might add!) of the same non-masculine variety. Hence lesbian.

Which is perfectly fine, we are all grown-ups and everyone is entitled to his (or her) own sexual fulfillment, but, please, keep it to yourself! I don’t want to know. Especially not at 2 a.m. Thank you.

Not so great accshully

Emma, of course, had to show up when I was planning to go to Munich. Last Saturday I boarded the train towards the new home for the next six weeks only to get as far as one station. According to the crew another train had hit some trees that had been blown onto the tracks and the only (!) railway towards basically the rest of Germany had been closed down. After an hour wait we were hauled back to Passau and returned home, cold and wet.

The second try on Sunday went a lot smoother and was only remarkable for the conclusion that fifteen year old girls look a lot older than they are supposed to. How do you hold up a conversation with an attractive, smart and bright woman after she casually drops that she is only little more than half as old as you and legally not entitled to do the two pleasurable things that adolescence brings with it (Rock’n'Roll works at any age, at least if you live outside the United States of Prudery)?

So I am now housed in a walk-in rooming-toilet with shower curtain in the Olympiazentrum in spitting distance to the BMW facility where I am working with Marposs in testing the leak-tightness of a new generation of motors using pressurized Helium.

Work has so far been quite boring. But that is, I am told, about to change when production increases. We will see.

Read:

The abiding, distinctive feature of all crashes, whether in stock prices, housing values, or hit-TV-show ratings, is that they startle but don’t surprise. When the euphoria subsides, when the volatile graph lines of excitability flatten and then curve down, people realize, collectively and instantly (and not infrequently with some relief), that they’ve been expecting this correction. The signs were everywhere, the warnings clear, the researchers in rough agreement, and the stories down at the bar and in the office (our own stories included) revealed the same anxieties.

Which explains why the busts and reversals we deem inevitable are also the least preventable, and why they startle us, if briefly, when they come—because they were inevitable for so long that they should have come already. That they haven’t, we reason, can mean only one of two things. Thanks to technology or some other magic, we’ve entered a new age when the laws of cause and effect (as propounded by Isaac Newton and Adam Smith) have yielded to the principle of dream-and-make-it-happen (as manifested by Steve Jobs and Oprah). Either that, or the thing that went up and up and up and hasn’t come down, though it should have long ago, is being held aloft by our decision to forget it’s up there and to carry on as though it weren’t.

Wonderful.

Es zeugt generell von einer schlechten Idee, zu versuchen, eine Matratze, in der Grundfläche von französischen Maßen, in der Dicke eher an die Oberarme eines schottischen Caber Tossers gemahnend und genauso schwer (wie der ganze Schotte, nicht nur seine Arme) zu zweit und ohne fahrbaren Untersatz den Berg hinauf zu transportieren.

An der Stelle dann nochmal herzlichen Dank an den selbstlosen Fahrer des blauen Polo für seine spontane und aufopferungsvolle Hilfe.

Die Wohnung unter uns, aus der kürzlich eine nette Familie ausgezogen ist, wird gerade renoviert. Da wird an Wand und Decke geschlagen mit einer Intensität, die an tektonische Aktivitäten während der Kontinentalverschiebung zur Zeit des Paläozän gemahnt. Die kleinen konzentrischen Kreise in der Kaffeetasse scheinen in der Tat die Ankunft eines entsprechenden Kleintieres zu verheißen. Scheinbar werde ich von sowas ja wirklich verfolgt.

Naja gut, daß die Wohnung renoviert werden muß, ist durchaus nachvollziehbar. Immerhin hatten die Nachbarn Kinder. Daß der Handwerk auch nicht gerade warten kann, bis ich aus dem Haus bin, ist auch nachzuvollziehen (Obwohl … ). Aber ich hätte mir dann doch gewünscht, zwei oder drei Tage vorher informiert zu werden.

Handle of window blinds on a house in Murano, Venice.