Author Archives: Dennis

A lot of shit has happened over the last couple of weeks. I’ll try to capture the most relevant things:

House-mate:
Since a couple of weeks, my good friend Samantha has moved in with me, and so we’re sharing my house. She has a bunch of crap, stuff I would’ve tossed out a long time ago, stuff she doesn’t even use, stuff she’s not even sure what purpose it serves, or what it’s supposed to do. With some gentle massaging I managed to have her toss out a bunch of junk before we moved the contents of her flat, roughly 100 kilometres, to my house…no, wait; our house.

The move went relatively well, no real complications, except that the window of the living room, at the front of the house, had to be removed by carpenters/glass-service people in order for Samantha’s sofa to be carried into the living room. It’s a two seater, but it could seat three, and it’s a sofa-bed to boot, so it’s deep. It’s very comfortable, and it fits well with the two chairs I had in place already.

After shuffling the furniture around for a bit, and after cursing a lot when we found out that the size of the sofa-bed make it very hard to place it anywhere in the room without sucking all the enthusiastic potential out of the room, we finally found a way to position things that wouldn’t let me slip suddenly but comfortably into a frustrated, murderous rage everytime I stepped into the room.

Things have settled down by now, and I’m relatively happy with the move.

Car Crash:
I probably had the worst car-crash I have ever been in only a few weeks ago, and I am happy and surprised to tell you that even though I went off the road, aiming my car for very solid and tall street-lights at about 80 kph, I am fine. My car has suffered a lot of damage to the bottom of it, in particularly the two axles are supposedly bent. The exterior is reasonably alright, but it’s the least of my worries. If too much of the chassis has been bent, it means I can kiss my car goodbye.

*sigh*

I only had it for a couple of months, and it cost me a shitload of money. The repairs are going to backrupt me, I’m sure. So I’m not entirely sure what to do yet.

New Job:
January 13th, I start my new job at OWS Strategical Media Systems as a software developer. I have a very good feeling about this company, since they concentrate on one product, using multiple technologies, and from what I can gather, the people are very nice and enthusiastic about me coming on board.

Sadly, it doesn’t pay quite as well as I had hoped, and I have to admit that since I signed the contract, I turned down an offer for a job that paid a lot more. But, I am silently showing my dedication to this company, since I think it’s a lot better suited for my needs.

Moulsari:
In a few days, I’ll travel to the United States to visit Moulsari. Words cannot express how much I’m looking forward to this. Three weeks of Moulsari, three weeks of New York City, three weeks of bliss.

Even though I wouldn’t trade that for the world, a lot of my friends are visiting a friend of ours in Prague. It fucks me off to no end that I can’t go with them. But, then again, I’ll be in fucking NYC with my baby!

Monetary Situation:
I am so broke.

Other:
There are many, many more things that are going on right now, all of which involve other people, and all of which are emotionally draining. People who are interested enough can send me an email and ask some pointed questions, perhasp I’ll be a bit more forthcoming.

This morning I was on IRC, and Toryu was looking for the movie “Soldier” starring Kurt Russel on Grokster. He had launched a search query and he was listing off all the silly things it returned, including something that caught my interest. There was a supposed execution of a russian soldier among the entries returned…and out of a morbid facination I looked for it. I found it, and downloaded it, expecting to see something like a firing squad or similar.

It was a short movie, maybe 20 or 30 seconds in length…I saw a soldier – only a soldier because he was wearing combat fatigues – pinned with his head to the floor by an armie boot…a hand came from outside the top frame, holding a combat knife, and put the tip of it to the neck of the soldier, right underneath the jaw. The soldier began screaming in protest, and with a bit of pressure, the hand stuck the knife all the way in the neck. You could hear it hit the pebbles on the ground on the other side of the neck. The hand began “sawing” a way through the front of the neck. The soldier was gurgling and grunting.

I was faintly nauseous.

I had a lot of trouble getting it out of my head, and I spent a long time thinking about violence…and how I didn’t understand people. It also made me think of all the violence I had seen myself, and I came to the conclusion that there are some forms of violence that I couldn’t possibly surrender myself to. I can imagine wanting to kill someone, I can imagine killing someone by shooting the person, or pushing the person off a building…

…but something quite that…

Cruel? Unsophisticated? Messy? Primal?

…I can’t get myself to come to terms with. Now, I am not an agressive person at all. I’ve seen too much of it for it not to frighten me, and to realize its total ugliness. I find no beauty in aggression – not violence, mind you – nor can I accept it very well in my entertainment if it is done to realistically. And I remember the “are you able to kill” thread, in which a lot of people – myself included – were very quick to admit their capability to kill, to violence, to agression.

I don’t know exactly what the point of this post is…I guess to share how disturbed I’ve been all day long.

Links:
· The discussion I started
· The movie in question [Warning: Do not watch this at work, or if you have a weak stomach.]

Don’t worry, don’t worry, this is not going to be one of those karmic, leaf-eating, granola topics, but rather a confession. One in which I explain that I find it incredibly difficult to be a vegetarian.

You see, after talking to Moulsari at some length about vegetarianism, I decided that it shouldn’t be that hard to abstain from eating meat, and to see if I could actually do it, I’d give it a shot for a month. That month started August 19th.

Now, let me get one thing straight; I am of the vegetarian pursuasion that eats eggs, drinks milk, uses butter and wears leather shoes. So I’m not a vegan, I just don’t eat meat. Now you can squabble amongst yourselves on what the right kind of vegetarian is [if anyone says “a dead kind of vegetarian” I’ll be very disap*…aw fuck it, I’d laugh!] but the fact still stands that I’m a vanilla icecream vegetarian. Not quite like Cash, but still, not the real thing.

So far, I completely forgot about my abstinence when Eva, Sam and I went for junkfood, and I was sort of forced to eat meat tonight, since the restaurant I was eating at with my father sports two vegetarian dishes, which both suck. So that’s one fuck up, and one convenience fuck up. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

…since I posted a journal, so I thought I’d make the effort and tell you guys what I’ve been up to lately. Actually, what I’ll do is tell you what I’ve been up to in the last two months: Travelling, buying a car and looking for work.

Travelling
Somewhere prior to June 21st, I got an email from my good friend Marco, telling me that his ass was going to get married two weeks from then. Personally, I thought it was about time he got his fat ass commited to his then-girlfriend-now-wife, and I was very happy for him. He told me that I had to get myself over for the ceremony, since I was the only one actually invited, and supposed to be the best man.

Now, that sounds a lot easier than it really is, seeing as how he moved to live in Austin, Texas about two years ago. So I went to book a ticket, and on the 21st I flew over to Houston, where he was supposed to pick me up. Upon arrival, I find out that the actual wedding would be held on the sandy beaches of Paradise Island, just outside of Nassau, in the Bahamas. He’s made all the arrangements for our travel and stay in Nassau – or rather, his girlfriend had.

So we stay in Austin for a week, then fly out to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and drive ourselves over to Miami, Florida, in order to catch a flight to Nassau. We stay there for little under a week, and have a blast. They get married, I cried…it was brilliant. We fly back, and we spend the next week goofing around and celebrating Fourth of July.

I go back for two weeks, and prepare for my “vacation.” My vacation entails the following: 1) Flying out to San Francisco. 2) Roadtripping through the west and mid-west of the United States. 3) Attending the Bulldrek Gathering. 4) Attending GenCon. 5) Roadtripping our asses back to California. 6) Flying back.

Flying out was easy. So was the first Roadtripping leg. San Jose, Ca – San Francisco, Ca – Portland, Or – Seattle, Wa – Billings, Mo – Fargo, Nd – Fox Lake, Wi. Fox Lake is where this year’s Bulldrek Gathering was being held. Which basically meant a week of drunken craziness near a lake in the middle of the Wisconsin corn fields out in the middle of bumblefuck. I had a lot of fun.

Then we went to Milwaukee, Wi where we attended the largest gaming convention in the world; Gen Con. And with “we,” I mean most of the Bulldrekkers at the Gathering. We met up with a bunch of people from the Dumpshock Forums and we had a blast. Another week of drunken craziness.

When I woke up, in a dark hotel-room in Milwaukee, with five or six others sleeping and snoring all around me, and I found my liver next to me on the bed, crying…begging me never to do that again, I knew that it was time to go home. Luckily it was the last day of our stay in Milwaukee.

We went to Madison, Wi to stay with two of our friends that lived there. We had two days of maximum chillage. We did nothing except for watch XXX, staring Vin Diesel. Caz is the best when it comes to watching movies, he’s about as loud and enthusiastic as I am. Bad. Ass.

Then we headed out again, st*…hang on, I haven’t even said who I was doing this trip with; Erik – a guy I know who lives in San Jose, California, and the instigator of this hellish roadtrip, and Eleanor, a girlfriend of mine who lives out in the ass-end of the world, a.k.a. Australia.

Anyway, we headed out again, travelling past Des Moines, Iowa, Salt Lake City, Utah and into Nevada. As it so happens our car broke down in the middle of the Nevada desert. There are only three places I could imagine are worse to have your car break down in or near: 1) The Sahara Desert. 2) Zagreb and 3) Lebanon. Luckily we found people who offered us a ride to the nearest city with more than 20 inhabitants: Reno. There we paid an arm and a leg for a rental car, and we drove on to California so I could catch a plane back home.

You see, normally, I would’ve said; fuck it, let’s just hang back a little bit, and I’ll reschedule my flight. But upon entering the United States, I got a lot of bollocking from the immigrations officer for coming to the U.S. too often over the last three years. He restricted my tourist visum from the normal 90 days, to August 18th, the day on my return tickets. So I had to leave, otherwise I’d risk being withheld access to the U.S. for the next three years.

Car
I bought myself a Honda Del Sol [or the new Generation CRX, for those not living in the United States], in light of my job ending September 1st, and having to hand over my company car.

Looking For Work
Yes, still looking. Things are looking up a little bit. The Airforce ball is finally rolling, and I have several other options. All in all, it’s looking good.

I don’t know if you’re completely familiar with the concept of a Power Plate, but basically it’s a vibrating slab on which you stand and the vibrations send impulses to your muscles to make them contract and expand rapidly. It’s supposed to be a good work out, and it won’t take you that much time and/or effort. It’s the newest thing in our gym, and a lot of people are doing it. I however, am not one of them.

You see, I think it like an easy way out. You do little and your supposed to get a lot, there’s something wrong with that deal although I haven’t figured out what it is yet. However, my major gripe is that the people who do need that work out, are encouraged to take the easy way out. Do we really want to encourage these people to be lazy?