Today I must turn over my desk agenda to reflect the current date. On the page showing now is “Get Deported”, which event was originally inked in for last Tuesday, 26 February. Now a full week has passed with no deportation, and I have no point of FOCUS. If they are going to threaten to deport you, like, with an actual deadline, they should come and jackboot down your door on that date, or else politely notify you that they were only joking about the deportation crap. Ironically enough, pending resolution of this issue I am not supposed to leave the country, which means no weekend jaunts to anywhere more interesting or distant than Ljubljana. It sort of casts a shadow over Edinburgh, too, though you can bet your best haggis that I will be there one way or another. But this wondering waiting worrying is simply not right nor productive, and so neither am I. Today I am most effectively radiating the ‘speak not to me’ vibe here at work, where I am being paid handsomely to bother you all with these complaints and listen to whatever Winamp brings me, at the moment Jonathan Richman. I have my office door shut, both to drown out the panpipe-version of 'Ode to Joy' that someone is inexplicably blaring down the corridor, and to make clear my lack of desire to answer inane questions about how to clear the paper feed of the copier. I also have nothing much I must accomplish this side of Thursday. In twenty minutes or so I must go and perform and mediate and instruct for ninety minutes, smiling my fakey smile, but after that the day is mine. My Slovene office mate is not even here today, although we get along very well and I’d just as soon she were here, hiding in our office with me, playing Snake II obsessively on her mobile phone. Her high score is 756 on level 7 and she only got the thing a week ago! She obviously has a natural talent for not biting herself in the ass; for those of you unfamiliar with the vagaries of Snake II, that is the primary objective, not unlike life. It is trying rather fecklessly to be sunny today, which is well since we have had sixty solid days of grey damp weather. This is supposed to be the sunniest region in a country famous for being sunny, but since I arrived 65 days ago, I can count on one hand the number of days I’ve seen the damn sun. If one more person tells me that Slovenija is called “the sunny side of the alps” I am going to kick them in the eye. Least Favorite Coworker jams photocopier and slithers away without fixing it. I know it was LFC because ten minutes and many curses later, I extract a final rumpled, accordion-shaped artifact: a page from the Book of Jonah. This is a man (LFC, not Jonah) whose only conversation-starting gambits are: 1) “You know, many years ago…” (relates dullest fact ever known about horse liniment industry) 2) Interrupting: “You know, similar thing happened to me…” (relates thing entirely dissimilar) 3) “So, are you married? Do you have a boyfriend?” The Book of Jonah, for crying out loud. Apparently Jonah ended up in that whale because he was unwilling to go to Nineveh and tell all the Ninevetians how evil they were and how wrong their life-style and gods of choice were. I so much prefer a good Just So Story to Bible tales. “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin” beats the Book of Jonah like a damn gong. As you have probably guessed based upon the above numbered list, I am writing to you according to the U.S. Army manual of style, about the most oxymoronic idea if ever there was one. Here is what it states, in FM 101-5, “Staff Organization and Procedures”: “Keep paragraphs short to avoid losing the reader’s attention. Limit them to four or five sentences at a maximum.” It goes on to say, “Kill, kill, kill.” Gordons among you take note. Of the brevity bit, not the homicide. This is not to say that I did not entirely enjoy his account of rubbing elbows with cider barons. I just followed him to the duckpond and wondered where it was he was going to take us, and then, when we got there, I wondered where I was. Oh, right. Inside a cloud. How pleasant to be taken into a cloud with so little warning. Stacey will have already heard that I have won a bet with a female friend of mine, regarding a certain self-control issue, and that the prize is a bottle of vodka of the winner’s choosing. Since she cheated to begin with, the victory is either hollow or sweeter than ever, I can’t tell which. And I am not sure that it doesn’t enhance my negative mood to refuse to collect my hard-earned Finlandia. I am always one to seize the moral high ground. Plus, the less vodka around the house the better these days. The much-crowed-about potential date/deportation-preempting wedding failed to materialize. This is not so much a cause of my embittered state as an addendum to it. When Friday arrived and she hadn’t phoned I decided to go to Ljubljana and drink all the Finlandia there, but Zoran took so long completing the installation of my car stereo that by the time I had music for the ride it was too late to take it. So instead I just sat brooding in my apartment and drank all the Finlandia there, and painted my mobile phone with model airplane enamel. It now looks like a barracuda, and rings about as often as one, too. Speaking of which, no one has responded to my requests about info/etc. surrounding the Edinburgh gig. I would really love to meet up with some people, and especially attend other music-oriented entertainment events. Drink myself legless if appropriate, etc. And time is getting pretty short now before Peri and I come up to London/Edinburgh/Glasgow. I promise I won’t be morose by then, legless or not--anyway, how could I be morose in Scotland in early April? If Carlos in BsAs is reading this, he must write to me right away. Thanks for your attention. That is all. JDS Conectate a Internet GRATIS con Yahoo! Conexión: http://conexion.yahoo.com.ar +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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