Let's Try This Again ...

Army life is disruptive. I noticed that my last blog entry was written almost four months ago. You would think that all the packing, travelling, and drama inherent in relocating to a new continent would motivate me to blog more freqently rather than less. However, my personality is such that the more "settled" I feel, the more I am able to accomplish. If there are boxes of stuff yet to be unpacked nearby, they will distract me. If said stuff is unpacked but strewn about in a disorderly manner, it will distract me. I often find myself standing in the middle of a room, gazing at one spot, organizing it in my mind.

Oh how I envy those fortunate souls who happily surround themselves with disorderly piles of papers and makeshift tables, who are content simply to put things somewhere with complete disregard for symmetry, or space, or color scheme. If I could just not care so much about orderliness, I might actually get some sort of writing career off the ground.

But thanks to the Army, we'll be moving again in about 6 months (to where, we still do not know yet).

So, this blog post marks the beginning of my attempt to become a writer (seriously!) despite the fact that there are three giant boxes leering at me from the corner of the dining room, with piles of Army gear, leftover Halloween candy, and half-empty Kleenex boxes sitting defiantly on top of them.

The Devil Made Them Do It: The Legend of Lubeck's Rathauskeller

In the courtyard of the Marienkirche in Lubeck, Germany, there is a bronze statue of a little devil sitting on a large boulder. The legend behind the statue and the boulder is that when the church was being built, the devil originally helped the construction workers because he thought they were building an inn (at the time, essentially a bar and a den of iniquity). However, when he found out they were building a church, he threw a particularly devilish hissy-fit and tried to destroy the walls. The builders managed to placate him by agreeing to build a drinking hall across the street - and it remains there to this day in the form of the Rathauskeller (actually, a rather nice restaurant).

Web-Surfing Gems

You know the drill - you are bored, and reading articles online, and one click leads to another, and to another, until you end up at a website that features a Spider-Man action figure commenting on the names of every crayon color from the Crayola crayon box. Well, here is the latest roundup of interesting websites I have stumbled upon in similar fashion:

Cynical-C Blog, which features the funniest one-star Amazon reviews of classic movies, music, and literature. I particularly like one reviewer's critique of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which he contrasts it with his favorite movie, Spaceballs (a film which, in his opinion, "knows where to draw the line" when it comes to humor), and claims he would probably kill himself if forced to watch the Monty Python flick again.

the dullest blog in the world is a hilarious testament to the ridiculousness of blogging about the minutiae of one's daily existence.

Chick Flicks in 140 Characters or Less. Surprisingly accurate. For example: "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days: Boy plays trick on girl. Girl plays trick on boy. Girl loses boy, gets boy back. Girl and boy make 'Fool's Gold.' We all die a little inside."

That's all for now. I will be back to grading papers next week and won't have as much time to devote to online meandering. Stumbled upon any other interesting sites lately? Feel free to share.

And Now For Something Completely Different ...

I hate to admit it, but my Great Western Literary Experiment has come to a standstill. I got as far as reading the beginning of the Oresteia, and after weeks of making little to no progress on the book, I began to reevaluate my literary goals. I realized I lacked the discipline and ability to concentrate needed to proceed with this endeavor; therefore, I put ancient writings aside in favor of the kind of literature I love and never tire of - 20th-Century Southern writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and William Faulkner.

That's not to say I didn't learn a great deal from my evenings spent with the ancients, Homer in particular. Who would have thought that Western Literature as we know it began with an action movie? I am referring to The Iliad - jam-packed full of gory battle scenes and rippling heroes who, in true action-movie fashion, never seem to get hurt while scores of extras bite the dust all around them, The Iliad demonstrates that people have always enjoyed this form of entertainment (even in epic-poem format). At what point, then, did the stuff of action movies become divorced from what we consider "literature" or "art?" I find it fascinating that in the ancient world, the battlefield and the poet are intimately entwined.

Maybe I'll pick up where I left off at some point. For now, I need simply to get back into the habit of reading, and I am turning to the familiar voices of the American South for some much-needed motivation.

Oh, How I Miss TV Commercials

One of the "perks" of being stationed at a military establishment overseas is the availability of U.S. television programming via AFN, which stands for "Armed Forces Network." The network provides a reasonable variety of current American programming, albeit with perhaps a tad too many crime dramas and a selection of movies that, as one of my friends put it, might have been found in the $5 DVD bin at Wal-Mart.

While I greatly appreciate the efforts of AFN to provide us with this excuse to retain our American couch-potato habits while living in a foreign country, I absolutely despise what AFN has chosen to do during the brief intervals where TV commercials would normally appear. I understand that our use of said programming is contingent upon AFN not airing advertisements; however, I maintain that there are scores of better ways to fill dead space than with, well, what follows. Judge for yourself - I present a sampling of the torture I am subjected to on a daily basis (more can be found by searching for "AFN commercials" on YouTube):

Vlad the Vizsla Goes to Weltenburg

Went to Weltenburg yesterday, which is the site of the oldest still-operating brewery in the world. The monastery is located on a bend in the Danube, and the surrounding nature parks afforded Vlad ample opportunity for reckless romping.

We rode this tiny ferry across the Danube:

From the opposite side we enjoyed incredible views of the monastery:

We also enjoyed, of course, plenty of romping through the woods.

Musings: March 27, 2009

One thing that puzzles me to no end is how anybody can tolerate living in a place where winter lasts from November to April, and where one must endure frequent peltings by tiny frozen pellets falling from the sky, even when it is sunny and partly-cloudy. As I was driving through a heavy, late-March snowfall the other day, I began to ponder, for my own amusement, what I would do if I were faced with the prospect of weather like this every day for the rest of my life, with no hope of seeing blue skies or feeling the sun's warmth ever again. It no longer struck me as odd that places like Tacoma, Washington experience some of the highest suicide rates in the U.S.; over an extended period of time, this cold, wet, inhospitable, biting weather acts upon one's psyche in the same manner as an illness that never clears up: one feels hopeless, weary, oppressed, and downright grouchy. Or, at least I do. Apparently, there are scores of people who don't mind it, or most of central Europe wouldn't be populated. But, anyway, back to my make-believe scenario. No matter how deeply I fell into despair, I would be far too chicken (not to mention morally opposed) to commit suicide. Instead, I am fairly certain that I would go insane. After my drive in the rain/snow/darkness, I spent the evening in typical borderline crazy fashion: I hurled insults at the T.V. when I found out the evening's programming had been changed and I almost wrote a furious email to the people responsible for said programming. Fortunately, I am not a full-blown crazy, so the little voice advising me not to make an ass of myself was still very much intact and I refrained from sending the email. However, I did spend a greater portion of the evening sobbing in bed, bemoaning my fate, and longing for winter to end.

The next morning, my senses restored and intact, I opened the Bible to Psalm 69 and read this:

"Save me, O God!
For the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire,
Where there is no standing;
I have come into deep waters,
Where the floods overflow me.
I am weary with my crying;
My throat is dry;
My eyes fail while I wait for my God." (New King James version)

I cannot tell you how many times something like this happens, where I just happen upon a passage from the Bible that relates, with an almost uncanny likeness, to my situation. The secret to maintaining my sanity seemed to jump out at me in those opening lines of the Psalm: why not pray about my situation? Why not turn my grumblings into prayer? I had to agree that praying would be a much more beneficial means of dealing with my unpleasant emotional state than plotting revenge upon television station employees.

So I'm giving it a try. And I must confess, I find myself much calmer and resilient-feeling when I pray on a regular basis. I recommend it to anyone else who might be feeling a bit on the crazy side lately.