Mar 24, 2008

Religion: A Useful Aspect

It's blamed for wars, stops human beings from different sides of the world trusting each other and promotes a lot of mistrust all over the planet. Sure, it provides spiritual guidance to those who need it but I think we can generally argue that religion has caused as much harm as good over the centuries. However, today I have it to thank for my situation. It's Monday, it's nearly 1pm, and I'm in bed and not planning to get out any time soon. Even though I'm completely unreligious, I still get a day off work to honour the memory of Christ. Fantastic.

Paris was fun, and longer than expected too. Last week I found out I'd get the Friday off work as well so I started looking for options to leave to Paris on the Thursday night instead of the Friday night and have an extra day there, an extra 24 hours is the company of M and her friends E, who I know well from Helsinki, and L, who is from England and who I didn't know at all. The buses were completely full for the weekend and so I wandered off to the Gare du Nord to see if I could pick up a train ticket there. 10 minutes later I wandered off again with a first class ticket (and yes, it was the cheapest one i could find !!) on the Thalys which cost half of the money I owned. For some reason, this seemed like nothing at all and left me wondering how much love warps all of your senses. At 10pm that night I rolled into the Gare du Nord, dropped my stuff off at the flat and headed straight back into town for what was to be one of the 2 main scenes of this weekend - the pub. The other main scene was on the sofa in the flat watching "The O.C.". Having already risked the ire of the religious with my comments on how pointless and destructive it is, and knowing how O.C. watchers are no less fanatical than church, synagogue and mosque-goers, I'll decide not to publish my thoughts on this particular series. Once again though, it's brought me one advantage. If I ever get a Trivial Pursuit question on series 4 of this vacuous show, I'll more than likely know the answer. Friday night, after a day of O.C. I got unreasonably battered, Saturday we watched O.C. and then proceeded to go to the pub again. Sunday we cleaned the flat and by midnight I was back in Brussels after a 4 hour Eurolines ride. We did manage to get out and about in town a bit as well though, took a lot of pictures and arsed around aimlessly, obviously the best type of arsing around. Another 4 days passed before the big move back to Helsinki then, and onto my final week in Brussels with everything nicely lined up. Tomorrow I'm back into the hamster wheel at the office, Wednesday there's France against England on TV, Thursday the BAT is arriving for a long weekend, Friday there's a Youssou N'Dour concert, Saturday there's the sister's birthday party which I'm going to shamelessly gatecrash as a leaving party, Sunday will be a lazy day and Monday I'm packing up, and staying up through the night with unreasonable paranoia as my train on the first leg of the journey up to Finland leaves at 5.30 in the morning. Hmm.

End transmission.

Mar 16, 2008

Rgh.

The hamster wheel of life completes another revolution - it's Sunday, it's raining, I have a hangover. Yesterday was the end of the football season, which means that for most of the guys it'll be many months before they can return to sticking their boots on, running around in a swamp and occasionally getting kicked. We drew 3:3 and when the chance fell to me to make a hero of myself and win the game, I took the ball down like a rock, snaked my way past 4 defenders in the box and then fantastically lost my footing in the mud, managing to swing a leg towards the ball. It bobbled up, I smacked it into the ground and it rolled lamely towards the keeper. Ah well. The final whistle, however, didn't signal the end of my day on the wing, as shall be revealed !

The whale of a crew was reduced down to two as Ross and I headed back to the flat, snapping up bottle of vodka from a night shop on the way, greatly amusing the guy behind the counter with our discussions on what mixer to buy. We ploughed into the vodka-7up, watched some videos, chatted some crap and got slowly warmed up while we carried out the main activity we came back to the flat for - prowling the internet for a new place to go, just to put some variety into our Saturdays. Teklands, a party on the VUB Flemish University of Brussels campus seemed interested if mysterious. We went down there, paid our 5€ entrance, stepped in, looked around, looked at each other and laughed. It was a small room, half empty, and those who were there all appeared to be entranced, hoodie-wearing wasters jigging around disjointedly to the most bizarre "experimental electro" music (and I use this word very loosely). We wandered up to the bar only to be informed that they didn't accept money, only coupons that we could buy from the entrance. This little chopped up pieces of card, which I imagine could easily be forged, was then traded for the most immensely strong whiskey and coke I've ever had, one of the 2 items on the drinks list. The other was a small plastic cup of beer. We tried to dance a little, but the music was too crap. We tried to talk to people, but they were too out of it. We went to sit in the chill out room, but it was just another room where the music from the main room blared in anyway. Emerging from this bizarre little joint into the concrete wasteland of the VUB campus, we got absolutely drenched and decided that maybe the Fuse wasn't such a bad option after all.

Inside the Fuse, I carried out the duty that all men must when their time comes. That is, to play the wingman. Scenario - Ross bumped into a girl on a long weekend from London, ironically, who was with a friend. Ross tries to pull this particular girl, but obviously said girl wouldn't leave her friend just to hang around alone. This is where the wingman comes into his own, and I spent a while attempting to entertain this character (who will remain anonymous in order to protect her honour). The conversation (and again, I use this term in the loosest sense) was short, uninteresting, uninspired. She appeared to have some sort of social defect which impaired her ability to talk to someone else, and instead spent most of the time just staring off into the void.

- So why did you choose to come to Brussels then ?
- No reason really...
- Aha ok... what do you think of it here ?
- It's alright I suppose

It continued along this vein for much of the evening, and in this context I spent a lot of time contemplating matters in the bottom of a glass and ended up getting rather wrecked. This probably didn't help my conversational skills either but, eventually, she cleared off and I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. I don't mind doing this duty at all, but you, all the ladies out there, please show some compassion when you're being entertained by a wingman. Sure, we'd rather be doing something else too, but we're in this boat together and let's make it as interesting as we can, shall we ? Thanks. Got home, tried to write an e-mail to M. Typing correctly was a big struggle. She's leaving for Paris today, another week in the hamster wheel at the office and I'll go to meet her there. And this time, I'm not going to choose where we go out to.

And, dear reader, I leave you now in order to carry out the most familiar of hangover activities - the long trek to the shop, in the rain, to buy hangover food. I love you all.

Mar 10, 2008

Back to the Grindstone

The pint of beer costume didn't work out. This was for several reasons - firstly I had to go straight from work to the shop to buy the materials, and secondly I had to meet ATS on the way. The first part of this plan was easy, the second was less so. ATS is as much of a great guy as he is a useless guy. He forgot to show up. We went dressed as plants instead, which was difficult but well worth the effort - delicate operations involving brown wallpaper, sticky tape and pieces of tree stolen during a night-time raid into the university gardens down the road armed with a pre-mixed bottle of vodka-lemonade and a pair of scissors. Being a pushover as I am, I was talked into going clubbing after the party, got to bed at 5am and felt pretty out of it at work the next day. Saturday I woke up feeling better, played football, went and got trashed once again at Momo's leaving party and felt out of it the next day. This morning, once again, I've woken up feeling better and I intend to keep myself feeling that way for a while at least.

Momo is going back to his home town of Marseille this weekend - that's how things go here. Friends come and friends go, but we're usually good at keeping in touch and I have no doubt that it's not the last I'll see of him.

As for me, I'm getting closer to the date - I'm leaving for Helsinki on April 1st with a typical poor student over-complicated route which serves the purpose of saving a little bit of money. I'll be leaving Brussels at 5.30am on the train and with stopovers in Luxembourg, Frankfurt-Hahn airport (which is nowhere near Frankfurt) and Tampere, I'll arrive knackered in Helsinki about 13 hours after leaving. I usually travel this way, even though the money I save on the cheaper air fare usually goes out the window again on overpriced airport sandwiches and bottles of coke and, quite honestly, I don't really know why I do it. For the fun I suppose.

Moving back to Helsinki will be accompanied with a shifting of focus from that side of things as well - whereas whenever I get into money in Brussels I'm looking at airlines flying for cheap out of here, my eyes in Helsinki are looking more at maps of Russia and Eastern Europe. I've wanted to go to Moldova and Belarus for quite a while and hopefully I'll make it this year before running away to Africa at some point in 2009. Either way, it's been on my mind a lot recently. Sitting in an office is probably more comfortable physically than burning yourself on oven dishes working in tapas bars but throughout this job (my first ever office job) I've been thinking to myself - surely there's another way to live than this ? Everyone seems to aspire to it, to get their feet on the ladder with the aim of going up. I aspire away from it, but I haven't really managed to work out how to get out of the rat race before I'm sucked in and it's too late to escape. All of the ideas have gone through my mind - take up freelance photography, journalism, travel writing, development projects around the world, opening a bar or a campsite somewhere, but it seems that everyone with my best intentions at heart is telling me to get something good on my CV, get a serious job and be happy with my 3 weeks of holiday a year so that I can get off to the Costa del Sol and get bored stupid on a beach. It's pushing me to try harder to prove them all wrong but I'm also setting myself up for a harder fall if it goes wrong.

At least here's one advantage of being next to the 6-lane road in a moderately sized European city - you haven't fallen yet, your life is in front of you and you're going to give it a damn good crack, and you're all invited to my bar in suburban Kinshasa for free beer on the opening night ! A good dream to take back to the office tomorrow.....

Mar 5, 2008

Victory Over Flu, Defeat Against Manchester United

...can't win em all, can ya ?

The day progressed, I stayed in bed. The Simpsons floated in front of my eyes for several hours as the clock ticked by and, having slept for 16 hours last night and complemented that with some high class laziness during the day, I felt better and decided to celebrate this by heading down to the Old Oak to watch Lyon destroy Manchester United. This sadly didn't happen and, tail firmly between legs, I came back home again. This is where the big thinking session of the night came. On Thursday night I'm invited to P's birthday party where the theme, interestingly, is the letter P. I have my poncho as a back-up option but I've come up with an ambitious plan with ATS to go dressed as a pint and a packet of Pringles respectively. We're going to meet up to work on it one of these days. ATS studies at an art college and so we're hoping we can skank some supplies from there and make this great. If it works, expect to see some pictures. If it's a horrendous flop, just imagine me in a poncho and accept my apologies for the lack of illustrations.

From yesterday, a cautionary tale. Why should one never trust sisters ? Probably for reasons like this. As I went down the elevator to attempt my aborted day at work, I looked in the mirror and realised I looked like some kind of overgrown bush. On the way home, I looked in the same mirror and thought the same thing. At this point I decided to ask my sister for a haircut, given that she has one of those cranial lawnmowers and I still only have 2€ in the bank. Sure, she says, how long ? I ask her for the longest one, and she says "9 then ?" and, being the idiot I am, I say well yes. 2 minutes later, in the bathroom, comes one of those little giggles. "Oops !! It put itself on the shortest one !" Yeh right. "Well feel it !" As my quavering hand reaches towards the back of my head I realise that there's not much hair left there. And by not much, I mean hardly any. And it's a big stripe down the side of my head. "I can probably salvage it by doing you with a 6", she says. And if that's halfway between the shortest and the longest, it shouldn't be too bad. This is where having flu and a haircut at the same time is a problem. You become some kind of moron who floats through the day and is incapable of intelligent thought. I firstly believed my sister (error number 1) that there were only 3 measurements on the razor (error number 2) and then didn't wonder how the middle of 3 lengths with a big stripe of the shortest length would appear seamlessly on my head (error number 3). After a while, I was informed all was done and that I could admire myself in the mirror. The result was quite impressive - somewhere between a chemotherapy patient and a neo-Nazi militant. Fantastic. "It looks good !" she assures me. It seems the flu has disappeared somewhat because, for the first time, I'm not sure I believe her. After some prolonged niggling I find out that the longest cut is actually 21. I decide to do it myself next time.

In 16 days I'll be off to Paris. I've been there a few times before but never for very long. Actually my most recent visit there was also my longest. Given that this was in 2001 and that I stayed for 2 nights, it's quite obvious that I don't know Paris very well. This time I'm going for.... 2 nights again. Being an office monkey as I am now, however, I can't go there for longer so I'll just have to take what chances I have. Given the Lyonnais roots of 50% of myself, I spend most of my time poking fun at Paris and disdaining Parisians as snobs, bad drivers and various other things Parisians are well known for being. So why I am travelling 8 hours on the bus in order to spend 44 hours there, you might ask ? The answer, as it often is, is M. She spent 6 months studying there and she's now going back for a week, to immerse herself in culture, sunshine, and beer. Or maybe just the last one, but it is impossible to go to Paris and not immerse oneself in culture, is it not ? This jury is still out... In any case, it was impossible to know she would be so close to Brussels and not to see her. So I'm going to arrive at 10 on the Friday night on the bus and take the metro across from the Porte de Bagnolet to Neuilly-sur-Seine to the apartment she'll be staying in with some friends. So what's the plan, M ? "We're going to Coolin for some beers !!!" A good respite from the week !

And once again, as they did from the jungle paths of Cameroon a few nights ago MSN windows call me back from the bars of Paris to an Brussels apartment where I can continue dreaming of the big wide world............

Mar 2, 2008

Sundays

Sundays eh ? What a pointless day. Physically, it's not yet Monday but psychologically it is. I'm still ill and have done absolutely nothing all day. And for once, my call to the clock was "hurry up you bastard !!!" I haven't left the flat, I haven't thought about anything, and the only idea of any consequence that I've had is that I should buy shares in UPM-Kymmene, given the amount of toilet paper I've ploughed through on blowing my nose today. I also ate some salad and some pasta.

To make things worse (or maybe better, and probably a combination of the two) I spoke to Marsh online today. He's in Cuzco. The conversation was interrupted by me looking out the window at the 6-lane road and imagining little red lines criss-crossing South America.

Back to the office tomorrow for another week on the countdown.....

Mar 1, 2008

An Ill Blog Brings No Good

I woke up this morning and realised two things.

Firstly, it was Saturday. I always like Saturdays and I always have. It's always been the kind of day where not going to work or school is a novelty, unlike Sunday where it's completely worn off and you're just looking at the clock thinking "slow down you bastard !!!". Saturday means sleeping in, watching football, playing football, having some beers and generally basking in the warm feeling of not having anything in particular to do. When I was a kid, Saturday was the day where I'd really appreciate having lunch at home, just because it felt like a weird thing to do. Almost like I was given a day off school. A Saturday is the first time in six days where you can wake up in the morning and then go to sleep in the evening without having got out of bed. Not that I really ever have, and in practise that would stink, but it's cool to know that the option is there all the same.

The second thing I noticed this morning was that I was cold and wet, and that this was a familiar feeling. This, fortunately (or unfortunately ?) was not a flashback to the toilet training days, but the familiarity came from several times in the night where I woke up in a cold sweat, with a sore throat and a headache. This is the downside of Saturdays. Much like Christmas or your birthday, it's almost a guarantee that if you're going to get sick, you'll keep it for this particular day that you've been looking forward to for ages. My sister, has been sick for several days with the same thing and as soon as I knew this, I was sure I'd catch it on Saturday morning. QED, karma strikes again.

These two realisations led me to my first mental process of the morning. What the hell was I going to do today ? Being ill, just like being hungover, inspires many feelings in me. I'm generally lazy and apathetic towards life in general, but I'm also very easily bored and look for something to do. Without any energy at all this generally leads to me sitting on the computer for half of the day and reading a book the other half of the day, and I get bored with sitting around. I then look for something else to do and don't find anything that satisfies my low-energy-requirement quota, and then go back to the computer. Today I've made the time pass ("go quicker you bastard !!!") by chatting with anyone who would care to listen, let my mind wander around Google Earth (of which there should be compulsory ownership for everyone in my opinion), downloaded maps of Africa and drawn lines on them. This is what I'm plotting with M. Going to Africa, that is, not drawing lines on maps. In the last couple of minutes I've entertained myself by trying to keep my sister's dog out of my bowl of tortellini.

Maps though, are they cool or what ?? I've never seen such an inspiring red line as the one that goes between Nkongogonogorogo and Mbolomboloudougouni in Congo or Cameroon (or wherever else these two fictional villages may be representing are) which is, may be, isn't, or never was a road. What it represents is a dream, a possibility that one day I may leave Nkongogonogorogo, looking out for monkeys and hippos, getting out to walk when those potholes get too damn big, and eventually arriving in Mbolomboloudougouni and being irrationally excited about the whole thing, despite the fact that both of these places look exactly the same and I didn't see any hippos on the way. Maps are documents which say to you "I know you're bored NOW, but one day you'll be walking around on me !" It's frustrating in one way, but a straw to cling to in another way. They give funny impressions too. I remember when I was a kid I had a map, and Senegal was coloured in green. Being in Africa and being green, I assumed that Senegal was completely covered in tropical forest, monkeys and hippos, and it took quite a long time for me to realise that this wasn't the case. In the same way, I'm hoping to find out, once I get to Nkongogonogorogo that the red line to Mbolomboloudougouni isn't a road at all, but a little path through the jungle to be walked along and hacked through with a machete and where you have to sleep in a tent when the night falls. As usual, at this point, MSN windows start flashing and you realise that you're still in your room next to a 6 lane road in a moderately big European city, and you've suddenly become bored again.

Third thought of the day. Will anyone actually bother to struggle through this uninspired and uninspiring post ? I haven't read it again and probably won't be bothered either. It's been a way to make the time pass more than anything. If you fancy something more interesting, go to the Google Earth home page, download it and zoom in. That's what I'm off to do right now. Wishing a good Saturday night to all...