Super Dumb

-"Is it a bird?
Is it a plane?"
-"No, it is a bug.
And far less annoying than the one living in your skull, you MORON!"

How can you be like that? It is unbelievable. I, for one, wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't had the colossal misfortune of meeting you. You are on Earth just to make me loose faith in the human race. But now I got it: you are not even human. No, you are a shape shifting slug from Antares sent to conquer us. Your overlords have modelled you from early TV transmissions, you are coming straight out of "I love Lucy", without the tired laugh factor.
The scary thing is that you are a father. For the third time.
Seriously, what did you think you were doing? Lasagna?

You are dumber than a dead tree trunk. At least the jungle niggers may have used it to pass information, sculpt a totem, make something beautiful. You are only fit to pass viruses, the worst being your infective idiocy. Your super power is "terrifying befuddlement". Nobody can bear to believe that you may be so stupid. They just assume that they have made a terrible mistake, that they must be missing something, and they just let you go on and on.
Were you mine, I would kick your ass so hard that all the fat would go up, expel all the shit up there and make you something like a brain.

I have met oysters with more character, punch and intellect than you.
But, I'll grant you that, you are an hidden gem. Of the hidden fossilized snot kind.

I have never felt this way for anybody. The only thing you have ever managed to create in your whole worthless life is hate. In me.
Your utter lack of professional and human skills is far beyond what may be expected of a worm dangling from a hook. Even it has some use.
You have not. You are just a waste. It would be bearable if you kept it to yourself, but no, you have to display and practice your abysmal cretinism and make me loose my time. You are totally unacceptable in my work environment, and, as far as I am concerned, in any place fit
for mankind.

You are beyond hope, redemption and healing.

I hate you. Truly.

Ahhh, feeling better :-)
It just had to come out.

no life (continued)

The good thing about being overworked and besieged by the great morons' horde is the conversation.

-"Do you often go shooting people in the streets?"
-"No, not in Europe. (waits a sec, thinking) For now."

The girls are talking about clothes, one of them then says that she likes Esprit jeans.
-"Comme la tête dans le cul quoi."
-"Mais non, à l'envers!"

Another girl is eating some stinking fish.
-"Smells like my girlfriend coming back from camp."
-"Your girlfriend is a girl scout leader?"
-"Not a leader, no."

-"My wife has lost two stones."
-"Good for her."
-"Now I can see my watch when I hug her."
-"Sterling performance. Carry on."

Getting old

This thing is actually my mother's birthday present to my father.
We do have the humour gene.

Bunker Palace Hotel: The People under the Stairs

"Urbi et hourdis"
Lame.
I know ;-)

no life

It has been two hard weeks since they hatched. A little bit before the kittens and a few weeks after the swallows is the time of the morons. It is a seasonal phenomenon. One usually anticipates their arrival by preparing a few traps: they are not really mean, just vastly annoying. I do not know why, but this year, oh boy, did they come in force: potently, from everywhere, and in large numbers. You cannot escape, you cannot run, you just have to deal with them. They are protecting their budgets, their projects like a mother hen on steroids. And they are truly unbearable.

As the Archi would put it, they are somewhat like penguins: overrated, gregarious, striving in the worst possible environment at the worst time, too stupid to make the difference between an egg and a rock, insufferably noisy and their dumbness has a kind of Nietzschean quality that makes it almost attractive. Better not stare too much into it...

On a train to nowhere

It is funny how the same subject sometimes comes up again and again in widely different contexts, and how seeing the same thing under different lights gives you insight. These days it seems to be how we compartmentalise our live(s).
I had separate talks about this with a colleague and two friends. One of these friends, Mr G., is a past colleague of mine. We do not work in the same line any more, and while we do have a professional relationship beside our comradeship, we no longer need to compartmentalise our lives. But we still do. Old habits die hard. We talked about it, and our conclusion was that our shared experience most intense moments happened when we were playing the Game. So, for us, it is a bounding behaviour, a deadly serious private joke of a kind.
Looking at it in different contexts made me think, which is always dangerous for me ;-) Compartmentalisation has many flavours: it goes from behaving differently depending on who you are with, a thing we all do, consciously or not, to living different lives. It has many causes too: from it being part of your job, to a comfort option you choose to be polite. Whatever the how and why, doing it is not that hard when you have the right aptitude and, possibly, training. It is in fact surprisingly easy. The trouble comes when you have to merge: filling these blank spots in your live, your CV, telling without compromising. This is what they never tell you: you may go back, but never fully. Up to a point, there will always be a part of your backstory you will have to stick to, however small it is. The trouble is that a backstory is just a mean to an end. And you do not want to be just a mean.
Except if you are a true bastard, of course ;-)

An evening with Miss E.

Miss E., E stands for "Emboutie" here, and I met by accident, literally: I bumped into her car a few years ago. She is petite, has very short hair and a big smile full of teeth. I took her to lunch while we were filling the forms. I think that what brought us close was our common way to react to stress: with a cheer. Apart from that, there was not much. She introduced me to Flemish contemporary literature (translated, of course ;-), I introduced her to independent Nordic cinema (translated too;-). It went on for a few months. It was fun, went nowhere fast, and eventually arrived. Once this phase was over, we used to meet accidentally at cultural events and lost touch two or three years ago.
I lost her phone around that time, and my number had changed too, so her call came as a surprise.

So we met at one of our old haunts, and did what I do best: I listened. What she had to say was quite unimportant: she had a garden party a few weeks ago, wanted to invite me, was unable to reach me, met a common acquaintance and got my new number. We talked about the years gone by, her funny family, her job, her pets and her new house. Apart from that, all had already been said long ago, and none of us apparently wanted a rerun. Apparently being the keyword here for reserved persons such as us, I had to make myself subtly clear. As I do not usually do subtle, all I can hope for is not to have given confused signals. All in all, it was a somewhat pleasant evening.

A lunch with The Man Who Rules The World

TMWRTW has unbounded ambition, passionate dreams, expresses his ideas emphatically, limited support, reluctant funding, and uses charisma violently: if it does not work he pours some more. TMWRTW cannot stop dreaming, talking about his dreams and is perfectly immune to reality.
The Man Who Rules The World cannot even rule Himself.
Sometimes, I am getting tired of runaway horses...

Miss I?

Once again, I have spent a delightful and insightful evening with The Pickle.

The Pickle seems to have developed a liking to "Il n'y a pas mort d'homme.", something I told her a few weeks earlier. Apparently, she is eluding the whole sentence, which went approximately like "Nobody's dead, nobody's harmed, your team is not at fault, you did nothing wrong: no harm, no foul.". Be wary of elisions: they tell more than they hide...

Among the insights of the day are the fact that I probably should try to consider my relationship to my brother through different lenses, and that I probably should strive to being impartial when he is concerned. I do not fully like the idea, but her comments made me realise that I was indeed missing a few key points here, so she is most probably right.
She pointed out that I probably should try to envision the place where I am living not like an office cum squat, but as a living place, which is very true too.
She also remarked that I do not let the initiative go out of my hand easily. Now, it may seem true, and I must admit that it is generally so, but it is a strange one nonetheless in this particular context.

Now comes the weird part. We were partaking in the usual end of evening conversation, when I asked her whether she liked her apartment. She immediately entered defensive counter mode, told me that I was messing with things I was not concerned with, that she didn't questioned my own choices and then asked in substance why I was being so confrontational. I just told her that the way she talked about her apartment reminded me of the way she talked about her last job: highlighting the negative points and mulling over them. She was on the brink of going ballistic, starting by "Is this how you deal with inconveniences? Just by moving away from them?" when we were saved by an incoming phone call. I took my leave, her last words being "You really have a way to shift the tides.". So, no, the end was not good.

As to this defensive reflex cause, I can only guess. And my first guess would be that I am not the first one to ask her the very same question, possibly highlighting the fact that this very place was a contentious point. My second guess would be that she has not gone over this place context, and that her emotional involvement is still quite high, which is perfectly normal given what I know of the afore mentioned context. My third guess would be that she is expecting something of this place, perhaps a reassurance in the fact that her environment is steady. My fourth guess is that she does not want to be seen or see herself as a quitter. Only guesses anyway, but I would very much like to get to the bottom of this issue, or, to be honest, I would like her to go to the bottom, and to the bottom's bottom while she is at it but that is for her to do, and I kind of suspect that she is not really in the mood for this. Which is a shame for such a nice person to put herself in such a predicament. Then again to each one his own cross. And God only knows how dearly we love our crosses ;-)

Were it not for this phone call, I suspect that I would not have been able to "shift the tides" once more and leave on speaking terms. I was ready to tell her that I indeed do not leave things as they are, moving away when they get inconvenient or uncomfortable, but that I do not mull over them either, because I know why I am where I am, how much I had worked, what I had to sacrifice and renounce to to be there, and that when you are experiencing inconveniences, the only way not to throw away your effort is to put some more effort on top of it. Then, we would have gone into the whole "I am just emotional, you are too logical" argument over again. Not that this argument is pointless, it is indeed very relevant, but taking it headfirst won't take us, or at least me, any further...

Perhaps, just perhaps, is The Pickle a pickle to herself. As we all are, to some extent ;-)

Meeting Mrs. F.

- "I have had a dream about you last night."
- "Huhuh"
- "It was funny."
- "Yup, I usually do that."
- "What?"
- "Make people laugh... in their dreams."

15-15, I guess ;-)

As the Pickle will soon say, I do have a way to shift the tides.

Thinking outside of the room.

Yesterday's last BBQ was a family affair scheduled to be over by midnight. At around 0015 everything has already been packed up and three friends and I were chatting in the kitchen. Then Mrs N. came up with this:
"There is a closed room with three lights in it. On the outside of the room are three switches, one for each light. However, from where the switches are you cannot see the lights. You are free to operate the switches. Associate the switches and lights, but you may enter the room only once."
It is supposed to be a classical enigma, but none of us had heard it before. Anyway, with more than 20 years in combined engineering schooling (and more than a few glasses of wine), it took us the better part of an hour to solve it.
Never underestimate the power of fresh wine on a warm night ;-)

Converted

- "It's well below 9.5 miles per gallon."
- "How much is it in litres for a hundred kilometres?"
- "You know, Europe would be a really nice place, were it not for this damned metric system."
- "Tell me about that engine again."
- "It's a 310 hp 6.8 li... Bastard :-)"

Killing in the Name of

As Mr. G. put it: "We are what we are because we can afford it."

It doesn't make it any nicer, but brings some satisfaction.

Moo

Sometimes, testing is like watching trains.

I am like a tesseract: spongiform.