Bored and hyped up

Yeah.. does that work together?

Obviously it does.

I have my final exam next Wednesday and my brain just wont shut off.

Especially, since 3 different stories are taking up room in my mind.

Life sucks.

I can´t relax and can´t get myself to write either.

Bleh.

Still not having a job.

I want to run around screaming (hellooooooooooooo Amora... you´re contagious!)

And at the same time I want to curl up and cry.

Life sucks.

Can someone please turn my creative side to >write< and the rest off?

I need to get it out of my system.

Short and narrow

"Soccer is a game for 22 people that run around, play the ball, and one referee who makes a slew of mistakes, and in the end Germany always wins." Gary Lineker


4:1 against England... holy soccer ball, that was huge!

Random scribblings

Finished Project today, sat down and started to write. Hell, does it feel good ;)

Hurts.. body hurts, soul hurts.

The torture, the betrayal.

He wanted to scream, but the only sound was a gurgled breathe.

"Please" barely audible.

He was beyond pride.

They had sold him. His comrades, his commander.. they had sold him to the worst enemy imaginable.

Chary'ak.. living dead. The Nekromancers.

Why? Because he was a half blood, because he was the one, they wouldn´t feel bad about, after they had made him their toll, to pass through the Kyin mountains.

They had deemed him less worthy and that had been the first tear in his mental armor.

Before him in the dim dungeon cell stood a man as scary and as cold, as any.

The one man, Jaimé had learned to fear.

This man had seen all of him, the strength, the courage, the rage, the pain, the fear.

Jaimé´s body and soul bared to him.

And now he was smiling.

"Fear not, you will not suffer for longer."

Jaimé did´t have anything left in him to suffer. All he wanted to do was die.

Just, please, die. Relief him from this agony.  Kill the memories of his wife and child. Kill his sense of duty, his oaths, everything he believed in.

Go and fade and be no more.

He couldn´t stand one ore day when the skin pulled from his body, when cold unfeeling hands touched him, whispered soothing words, that made him sick. Not one more night of fever, when his body tried to battle the inevitable.

The man, Orthen, knelt before him, the slim, perfectly crafted ritual sword in hand, Jaimé sobbed from happiness.

"Wont you thank me, young one, for the privilege I am granting you?"

Pride? Which pride? There was nothing left, to be proud. Nothing, that kept him from demurely lowering his head and whispering.

"Please.."

All hail the king!

I´m a monarchist... I admit it.
And my king´s name is ... football (or soccer, for the US citizens among us)
and all of those belonging to this strange nation are celebratin their national holiday now!
For one month the world is a ball, a game lasts for 90 minutes.

We laugh, we cry and cheer for heros and warriors fighting nerve wrecking battles in an arena spanning the whole world.

Nerve wrecking battles? Fighting? Hold on for a sec? What is she talking about?

I´m talking about tall, muscular guys sweating, bleeding, falling, getting up again and whole countries falling or rising.

Don´t be mistaken, soccer is an exceedingly violent sport. ( And I will stick to soccer know, everybody knows, what it means, no matter if they´re soccerites or footballites)

Bruises, strained muscles, ripped tendons, fractures. You have it all.

And it can be very elegant and beautiful. There is not many things as awe inspiring as 11 people moving in perfect harmony, each knowing where the other is.. without looking.
Though that perfection is rare. Most of the time it´s just fighting spirit, stamina and pure will.
But that has it´s very own beauty.

On a soccer field heros are made... as shown very clearly today in the US´ first game at the worldcup.

Keeper Tim Howard got kicked in the ribs by an English forward and let me tell, that looked painful.
Bruised ribs always are just ouch!
But after treatment on the sidelines, he got back into the game and held everything shot at him with absolute world class.
He was injured and it´s not clear, if he will be able to play in the next game, but I bet he will try.

And isn´t that all a girl can ask for. Modern gladiators fighting in the worlds biggest tournament?

Soccer is just sexy!

More Layout and random ramblings

Fiddling with the layout again, not happy though, it makes the blog awefully slow.

Weather here is beeeeeeeee-uuuuuuuuuuuuuh-teeeeee-ful! Absolutely. I hate it, when it´s too hot and too bright, but today it´s just perfect.

Got a call yesterday, a big e-trader wanted to do some follow up on my application. Heck, I could have gotten the job, but I´m not available until August. Bugger. But they want to keep me in the files for the next time.


I seriously need surgery, my right foot is killing me. Thanks to my rheumathoid arthritis is got bursitis under the toes of my right foot and the one under the big toe is growing again. Why now, after 6 years?
Hurts like a bitch and the fact that my toe starts to twitch randomly doesn´t help.

Am on facebook. Tried it already a while back, was so boring, that I quit. Now the totally funny Amora asked me to come over and I gave it another try.

Still didn´t finish with writing my project.

My brain is buzzing with ideas. Spend the whole of yesterday listening to Lili Marleen. That song is so extremely sugary it makes my toes curl, but you just can´t forget it. I want to put blame on Alexandr Voinov, since my man swears he is innocent ( I don´t believe him, no worries)

Have had a book in the works for the last two years.. so basically since before RL threw my life upside down.
Angels, Demons and bad guys.
Have to finish it at some point. Needs alot of works, but I just like the main character, oh and his lover... and their girl... and the mains brother...

That brother is one reason my head is so messed up right now, he just wont stay quiet.

Then I had some glimpse of some kind of Cyberpunk/Paranormal setting in my head.

Have a scifi waiting to happen.... already wrote it, but I´m so not happy with the love story. It works, the hero and his girl are cut off, before they can really start, but I need to go on, next book, sell the first one, but how can I sell it, if I don´t know if I can pull off the sequel.
I know what will happen, I just have to make it.

Gnah!

I need... an end to all exams. Heh.

Then I perhaps will find some calm.
Three weeks and one project to go.

*off to actually do some work*


"2 AM and I'm still awake, writing a song
If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me,
Threatening the life it belongs to"

Breathe - Anna Nalick 

A WWII Love story

This http://aleksandrvoinov.blogspot.com/2010/06/author-interview .html reminded me of a story I have longed to tell for ages...
A beautiful love story and the kind of background that tells so much about my country and about the things, people went through in and after WWII.

Before you scream bloody murder... I know I know... but there always are victims on every side.


I still remember how my Grandmother told me... I was 13 and staying at her house during summer, while my mother prepared to move us in with her new man.
It was actually the evening of my birthday and a huge thunderstorm rode the village. This village you see, was in a valley, surrounded, at least back then, by monstrous mountains of uranium mining waste.
THe thunderstorm would sink down over the valley, effetively engulfing the lower parts of the village in horrendous village, and stay there, until it lost its power because it was caged by those "mountains".

My grandmother and I sat by candlelight, out of fear of lightning strikes and she told me, how she had gotten a new father at the age of nine. I asked, what had happened to her father and she began to tell me, with a silent, yet strong voice about the winter of 1944, when at night the Gestapo came to raid their house again, forcing her, four years old, to stand outside in the snow for hours staring into the muzzle of a gun.
Her father not only was communist, his father had also been a jew.

And while we were sitting, by candle light, while outside the thunderstorm raged, she told me, how she had met my grandfather.
You should know, my grandfather was the bastard son of the highest Nazi official in Pommerania and his housemaid. He went to the Nazi elite school, the Napola, and frankly was the poster boy of a young, striking, very blonde, very arian man.
But the war came and went and he and his mother were driven from their home in Stettin, to live in the northeast of what would become the GDR. Their living circumstances were not truly good and his mother didn´t take well to being driven from her home and being a fugitive.

The GDR government wanted him to study, after all he had received the best education, there was, even if it hadn´t been conform to their ideologies. And he refused.
My grandfather was very stubborn, very proud and pretty passionate in his beliefs. And they were that he didn´t want to leave his mother alone.

So they made him work in a fish processing plant. There are several kinds of torture and he couldn´t stand the smell of raw fish to the end of his life. My strong grandfather would just turn green, then a little greener and would rush for the toilet. And he never... NEVER lived it down.

One summer he was a "volunteer" in a summer camp by the eastern German youth organization (Free German Youth - you may laugh now. participation was anyting but free) and my grandmother had been sent there, I don´t remember for which reason... good grades, or recreation...

My grandmother came from the south of the GDR, about as far from where he was living with his mother, as it got.
It was a typical summer romance, she was 17 or 18, he was 25 and between them lay the whole of their country.
Theirs was an almost impossible match, even with the uniformity, the communists proclaimed, their mothers very well remembered, who their fathers had been.

But, what can I say, sometimes, it just takes the right motivation. Did I mention, my grandfather could be very single minded?
In October that year, my grandfather stood at my grandmothers door and told her, he was studying at the university closest to her now.
It was 60 kilometers (for the Americans: 38 miles) away from her village. And he had decided to pay her a visit... by bicycle.
They married a year later. And as long as he was studying there, he did the ride every weekend, until it got too snowy for it.

I have never in my whole life seen a couple as much in love as them.
Whenever he came home from work, he would first of all things, seek out my grandmother and give a big, loud kiss and hug her and don´t get me started on him coming back from his travels around the world. He lavished on her present from China and India and Russia. (I must say, after he had finally relented and studied, as they wanted him to do, he was just as good as everybody expected of him, Pphysics and economy and he mastered both)

Or as she told me, years after he had died: I have never loved a man, but your grandfather and I never will.

None of them ever truly talked about their time in the war. I am most likely the only one, my grandmother told about her childhood experiences and not even to her did my grandfather really talk about his father, or his time in the Napola school, but he never took well to the thought of anyone driven out of their homes, no matter by whom. You could see it in his face, how it had always bothered him. I know, he left Pomerania on foot with his mother and 5 younger siblings, the youngest of which was just a baby, and they walked, several hundred kilometers, driven by the red army through a destroyed country. I don´t know, what he had seen, but I know it had been bad.
 He was just old enough to be drafted as the "last line of defence" during the last months of the war, being elite Hitler youth and all. But as I said, he never talked about it.
On the other hand, he was just the kind of driven hero, you´ll find in a romance novel. Did I mention he pushed his step-father down a flight of stairs, when that man had beaten his mother, as a boy of no more than 10?


Between them, they had a life time of bad memories, yet managed to built a life of happiness together and , that´s just all, we can ask for isn´t it?
It surely wasn´t all leisure. After his mother died young, they took in his younger siblings and raised them, in the same house, he shared with his mother and father in law, but they managed together.

And they surely didn´t care, who their fathers were.


I guess, the next story will be about the other set of grandparents and how my grandmother insisted to marry in a black dress ( and she did! and looked stunning). Oh, the scandal!

Layout

Played with the layout a litte, added pictures.
Looks ok, better than before, but I still want to know, how Amora did her place, because it´s awesome!

And no jokes about IT guys please, at least I can tell the difference between NAS and SAN!

Funny - If you know what a C64 is

As I´m writing this, an intellligent, well muscled, darkly good looking man with the most beautiful eyes, I´ve ever seen, sits next to me and installs some 15 year old games on his high end Windows Vista PC via DOS console.
Which is funny enough.

The total breakdown though, came, when the words "Fast! Unzipping Utility" appeared on the screen and you could watch every byte being extracted.... every single byte.


I´m an IT-Girl, I see a lot of funny things, but this just made my day....

Alright, alright, I might admit, the rest of the world my find it less funny, but hey...

Embrace your inner Guybrush!



Post Scriptum: Yes, he still knows the complete intro of Ultima Underworld by heart ...

uhm...no

No comment, no explanation, just raw opinion

Germany minus a head of state.

Ok, everybody, now it gets political. And German. German-political. Feel warned. 


The reasons for Germany´s engagement in Afghanistan are manifold.
There is a commitment to the Nato. A mutual commitment of "I help you and you help me", which of course means, even a country as conflict-phobic as Germany cannot always avoid being drawn into international politics.
It was either Iraq or Afghanistan and since it had been impossible to justify the participation in an attack on Iraq in the light of the German constitution, or against the rejection of the German people, Afghanistan it was.

Yet still, Germany is Germany and it was hard enough to make anybody admit, that this was not just a humanitarian effort, but that our soldiers were dying in a war. It only took them what? Six years?

And then there is our Head of state, or, the President, who is not, as I might remind you Angela Merkel. The Chancelor is the leader of the Parliament.
A division that dates back to the Weimar Republic.
The post is mostly ceremonial, only weilding real power, when the chancelor wants to step down and when he signs laws, the Bundestag has passed, to make them official.

Now, what´s the problem and why are we all of the sudden without a president.
Well, it seems, he didn´t like some things that were said about him after he uttered those words in a radio interview:

for an export-orientated country like Germany, it was sometimes necessary to deploy troops "to protect our interests... for example free trade routes".

Indignation in Germany was huge, I can tell you, at least, with those, who cared.
Mind you, we just won the Eurovision song contest for the second time since it exists, and most people didn´t quite give a damn about Afghanistan.
I even daresay, Germans are just overwhelmed by the whole thing, war, dying German soldiers, whatever.

But of course, even hinting at things that are un-constitutional in a public interview, when you are the German president, is a no go.
And he went there.  (And I wont say, he was wrong, but that´s a totally different matter and has alot to do with how Germany treats its soldiers)

Now, let´s take a look at Afghanistan and what economical interest Germany might hold in a place that´s as desolace, backward and barren as they come...
There is oil in Afghanistan, there is copper, iron, coal, Lapislazuli and all of that might be enough to at least finance the country, but not enough to justify the costs of several years of war.
And there is TAP - Turmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan Pipeline, which would connect the Turkmenian oilfields to the Indian ocean... wait, that´s the Indian ocean.
India and Pakistan would be delighted.


And that is that, Afghanistan isn´t Iraq... while there may be a lot to be gained there, a strategic point with connection to Iran, Pakistan and China, there is  no real money.
There ARE private companies who run mines in Afghanistan, but the only guys crazy enought to try this, are the Chinese, which isn´t exactly what aides Germans economical interests.

Now why am I doing this funny little excourse about Afghanistan?

It might be my wacked sense of humour, but somehow, I can´t help but find it very funny, that the German president stumbles over a comment about war for economical reasons in an interview about Afghanistan.
Especially, when he actually was talking about fighting off piracy in international waters.


The truth rarely is pretty and many of us like to believe our boys and girls are dying for something important. We need to believe this.
We don´t want to know, that the evil dictator we are throwing down, to free his people, just had power over way too many oil wells for our liking.
We don´t believe, that hundreds of people died, just because this one street/pass/bridge shortens the route to the harbor/trading partner/airport by two or three dozen miles.
But that´s how it is. That´s why young men die and children are killed.
And yes, even Germany might have to deal with it one day, no matter how much they try to make the evil w-word go away, by ignoring it.

That he brought it up in a public interview... I like that.
That he tried to justify it... was wrong.
But that he now, with stepping down, creates a public discussion about his words, and this very subject, is just very very right.
I like my country, as war weary and conflict shy as it is and I´d like to keep it that way.

We are at war in some godforsaken, barren place with totally insufferable weather and way too much sand and it costs us.
Do we have way less dead than the US or GB, yes. And who wants to go to the mother, who lost her son and tell her that?
(I deleted a huge part here, even if it burns holes in my soul, I can´t write it, because it will get someone in trouble, but believe me, the subject of war and when it´s justified to destroy people, by making them kill others, is one that´s very close to my heart.)

In the end, it´s the people who decide for their country, if they dare to do it. Take the responsibility and do some good long thinking, if all the money our companies could be making is worth the life of one German soldier.
Letting the government decide is the coward´s way, the way, that lets us all say in the end "we didn´t know about it" and we had that one already, didn´t we?

So, if out president stepping down is starting a discussion about the costs and the gains of war and what´s worth fighting for and what´s not, then, thank you Mr. Köhler for serving your country well for 6 years and for publicly opening your mouth without thinking.