Hail Mary

I spent Sunday afternoon juggling at the summer festival of the church of St. Mary in Bochum Langendreer. The party was disrupted by the biggest hailstorm that I've ever seen (I may have led quite a sheltered life). At first we thought that God was angry, but convinced ourselves that it was a signal to his flock to drink more caipirinhas. Here is a photo of me juggling a 3-hailstone Mills Mess.

Noughts and Crosses

I am being trained to be a Databank System developer. I don't quite know what this is, or whether I want to be one, but it is better than lying in bed all day. I have been learning to program in C#, and wrote a very nice object-oriented Nought and Crosses program with an omniscient artificial intelligence. Game theorists call this game futile, because it ends up in a draw unless one of the players fucks up. I think that programming it wasn't quite futile, though, as I learnt quite a bit.

Even though I'm learning some useful computer programming things, the most useful thing is re-learning to live. I managed to send two letters yesterday. This used to be easy, but I haven't sent one for ages. I had to find a pen, an envelope, the address, a stamp, the current rate for a letter (still 55 cents), and a postbox. I'd been trying to send it for 10 days, but kept putting it off.

I'm blogging from my flat, and the neighbours are having a loud garden party. I was going to congratulate them on their musical taste (The Wall, Money for Nothing, Spirit in the Sky), but they just started playing Cotton Eye Joe by Rednexx. Now they are on to the Weather Girls (link as seen on b3ta). I know this is going to end as a Schlagerfest. I am going to go out.

Routine

Life is complicated. Suppose you had to describe your day to a men who just fell to earth.

Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head, found my way downstairs, filled the kettle, switched it on, found a cup, removed the mould from the cup, located a teabag and the milk which hadn't gone off, drank a cup...

Six months ago it was too complicated for me. I ate in cantines and pizzerias (saves shopping, cooking, and washing up), wore the same clothes for ages or bought new ones (saves washing, drying and putting away). It was easy to describe my day: I slept, sat around for hours on end, and swallowed three meals a day in various cafeterias.

After weeks of psychotherapy, I tried to do more. I wrote down a list of what I wanted to do, and when I wanted to do it. I can now look back at what I did. On the 26th January, for instance, I ate breakfast at home, got money from the ATM, bought food, drank a coffee, read the paper, tidied my room, jogged, showered and shaved. This was a lot for me to do in one day, and a really big improvement. After I'd done something on the list, I had to push myself to do the next thing. Part of me wanted to go give up and go back to bed, but I managed to do everything.

Now I can do these things more easily, because I've been doing them regularly. I eat porridge for breakfast at home every morning, and it's now easy to make. A cup of tea is a welcome break, not a challenge. Washing clothes is tricky, but possible. I still mentally break it down into the steps of starting the machine, waiting 1h, putting the clothes on the dryer, waiting 24h, and putting them away. The hard bit is finding the motivation to continue after each step.
I have got my life in enough order to start a training program in IT systems. I can spend seven hours at the institute and still manage to do the other things. I celebrated yesterday by drinking vodka and trying to catch the hot end of a burning torch with my throat.

p.s I wrote this a couple of weeks ago offline

Torpedo Entenhausen 3 - Taxi Zentrale 2

In his book "Fever Pitch", Nick Horby describes the perfect football match for a fan. Of course it isn't a game where your team wins 5-0 and play like brazil. That is just boring. The perfect match is one where your team win after going behind, one with amazingly bad refereeing decisions, stupid mistakes, fouls, lots of goals and a scene where the TV commentator claims "Nobody wants to see that kind of thing".

This may have been the perfect Freizeitliga game.

1/ We went 2-0 down.
2/ We won 3-2.
3a/ The referee gave us a throw-in, but the opposition took it, and he let them play on!
3b/ The referee blew for a free kick, I played on, and he gave me the advantage!
4/ A Slanging match between the trainer of the opposition and our hattrick hero Sajid.
("Nobody wants to see that kind of thing").
5/ The winning goal arose from a terrible pass in the Taxi-Zentrale defence. It started in the wrong direction, curled even wronger, and stopped by the feet of Sajid, who nonchalently lobbed the ball into the top corner of the goal.