Did I Say That?

random thoughts and other junk

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

¡Viva España!

And before I become too ethusiastic, I only have ten minutes left, so it'll be a short one. Formatting will be edited in, I suppose.

I'm having lots of fun here in Barcelona, Spain. The Sagrada Família and Parc Guell are worth the trip alone I think. The weather's fine, but a bit too hot for my liking. You have beautiful panoramic views over the city... I love it!

I'm not too excited about my physical condition. I'd be glad when someone would saw off my legs from just above my knees. Everything below is just one painfull aching mess. My stomach's pretty upset today do. It made me empty it already, so now I'm being very careful what I eat today.

I'll be back in The Netherlands tomorrownight, and back in Amersfoort on friday for a job interview. Time's almost up, so see y'all later.

Friday, September 24, 2004

Wait a minute!

Is this actually my second post today?

You betcha!

Had an interesting conversation on the phone this afternoon, and next week (after I'm back from Barcelona) I'm going to have a job-interview. Thought that was worth an update.

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came

The postman delivered my (and Arie's) copy of Stephen King's The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower today.
By just opening the packet I knew I would do something I said I wouldn't do just yesterday. It's coming with me on the plane to Spain monday. I don't think I can keep my mind to any other book until I finished this quest.

Plane to Spain, you ask? For those of you that didn't know it, I'm going to Barcelona for a couple of days. I don't have a clue what I'm going to do when I'm there, but I'll figure something out. Seems to be some fuss about that you have to see some cathedral that still isn't quite finished. I'll see.

And tomorrow (that's saturday), I'm gonna hunt people with a paintball gun. Nice week coming up? You betcha.

The pattern juggler lifts his hand
The orchestra begins
As slowly turns the grinding wheel
In the court of the Crimson King King Crimson, In The Court Of The Crimson King

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Hi, my name is William and this was my weekend...

Fridaynight I peddled 15km to Alphen aan de Rijn to see Lana Lane and Erik Norlander. The show rocked, beer was good, and I got to meet most of the band too.

Saturday I woke up, and did a whole lotta nothing. 'Round seven o'clock I was driven 15km to Woerden to have dinner with some friends. Food rocked, beer was good, and I had a great time.

Sundaynight, after a whole lot of doing nothing during the day, I went home to Amersfoort. Every train was delayed, nothing connected and it sucked. To top it off, I found a letter which was 5 lines long. "Thank you for trying, but we're not going to hire you" would've been shorter.

And I'm like, *shrugs*, whatever.

Thursday, September 16, 2004

I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday

Today I received three CDs. Bootlegs. One of Meat Loaf live in Toronto 1995, and one from Brussels, 1996. They're both recorded on the "Born To Rock World Tour", which was somehow still missing from my collection.

I'm particulary happy with the Brussels' show. It's a complete recording, and it sounds great. Also, it contains four songs that were only played on that tour. Two of those songs I didn't even have a live version of.
That concert took place on the 2nd of May. The first time I saw Meat Loaf live was on the 3rd of May 1996. Nostalgia time!

One thing that I've always remembered vividly from that concert was how long the version of Paradise By The Dashboard Light was. In my mind, it must have been at least twenty minutes, maybe thirty. On this CD, it's twenty-six and a half minutes.
I'm at a point where I'm completely done with Paradise. I've heard it too much. The last three times (out of the four I saw him in total), I wished he played a short version of that song. Ten minutes or so. But no, every time he seemed to have found some way to stretch it up some more.
At the Night of the Proms the song went on and on and on, and finally, they came to the fight scene at the end. Meat has this routine where he goes "and it never, ever, felt good with you". So when I heard him say "and it never", I counted to three, yelled -in sync- "EVER!", and watched how the scene develloped. I've never seen anyone looking as spooked as the guy standing next to me. He didn't quite believe that. I told him that I've heard him do that a lot of times. Normally, Paradise is the last song of the regular set, followed by either an acoustic set or the encore. But at the Night Of The Proms it was the last song. It lasted for almost half the time he was on stage, and there was no encore, so no Bat Out Of Hell to rock your socks off. Damn shame.

Anyway, I'm a happy camper right now.

Sunday, September 12, 2004

I might as well put a title here

I just opted out of a discussion that is going nowhere. It's a discussion about personal conversations on IM. Apparently, I'm a bit of jerk and not much of a nice person in real life, because I have a slightly different opinion on the use of the medium.

The most common opinion is that you should drop everything you're doing and gawk breathlessly at the screen awaiting the next message. They go as far as demanding total dedication to the conversation. Personally, I think that's a load of crap and very egocentrically, but hey, I'm a bit of jerk and not much of a nice person in real life anyway. And a wonderboy! Or at least, that's what someone called me.
When I'm in an IM-conversation, most of the time, I'm totally dedicated to that conversation. To what's been said, to the message. Not to the time I have to wait to get a response. I might be working on my website, surfing the web or playing Sollitary or Minesweeper at the same time.

I am able to do that. If others aren't, how much of that is my problem? None I'd say, so when the whole discussion went to the territory of character-deformation because of things I didn't say in the first place, I drew the line.
I have very little respect for people who first talk of respect and that you have to concentrate on what is being said, and then ignore that rule and make some highly inaccurate mental picture of me.

As miss Loeb said,

You don't know me, you don't know me at all. Lisa Loeb, You Don't Know Me

Saturday, September 11, 2004

If I could only find the words I would write them all down

It's not writers' block. It's just that the words don't seem to come. I know what I want to say, but I can't seem to find the right way to say it. And that's a real pain in the butt.

I think this is the seventh time I started this post from scratch. The first try didn't get beyond the first line, which was just a quote. The next few tries were better, but they didn't seem to go where I wanted them to go. I was trying to make some comment on why I am still bothering with this blog-thing. That didn't work. The best thing I came up with was an example of what I don't want to write about. I don't think this is the right place to be talking about politics. So something like "the world is going to hell in a handbasket and apparently we asked the US of A to lead the way" is a good find (well, not really of course, but I'm quite happy with it), but completely pointless.

The reason I started with this blog-thing is that I need to say things. About how things work. About how I think things should work. About things I've read, or a movie I've seen, CDs I've bought. About things I don't understand. About me.

If there is one thing I loathe, then it's talking about me. As I've said before, there are people who insist that that's not true, but they're wrong. So very wrong. I might talk about things I feel strongly about, or things I think I have an opinion of, but you'd rarely hear me talking about how I feel. Almost always when I try to talk about me, I lock up. I just can't do it. And I'm seriously fed up with it. So I'm working on it.

The reason why I've started this blog-thing is that I needed a place where I could talk about me, without anyone talking back. My psychologist made an observation that when I talk I'm making some sort of clinical analysis, without getting emotionally involved. And when I'm analyzing my emotions, I can't seem to form one coherent sentence. I just sit there, thinking, and I can't find the right words. And that drives me mad.

Maybe it's just that I'm too concerned what others might say of what I think. When conversations get to some more personal territory, there's always this voice in the back of mind which urges me to keep quiet, "cause if you say that, then..." Then what? Then they might laugh? Then they might think I'm some insecure, sentimental fool? Maybe. I know I shouldn't care about that at all, but just like sarcasm, self-contempt and some other stuff, it functions like a defence mechanism.
I've found that writing down what I'd like to say about myself keeps the inner voice quiet. Or at least, I seem able to ignore it. And it's not that I think that anybody will actually read this, so who cares what they think? ;-)

That's pretty much all I wanted to say for the moment. On this subject at least. There's some other subject I really want to write about (and not one that my Constant Readers would actually expect from me either), but that's for another time.