Wit & Whim

Living where I do, I now regularly meet with a most pesky form of individual: the panhandler. Especially on our street, but often also on walks, I will be approached by individuals asking me for money, with cigarettes being the second most favourite request. There is always a pattern when they approach, such that, anytime now when I hear the phrase "sir, may I ask you a question," my internal dialogue responds "here we go again." Before any mention of money is made, I am given the first story. This story establishes why the person is in such dire straits. The variety of stories I have heard on this front are quite remarkable; this is the basic story, meant to engage. They may not have eaten in five days. They came to the city to visit family, but their family was gone when they got here. They are gathering money for a sick family member. There are many initial stories. The interest always comes with the details. It may just be perverse curiosity, but I always li...

I must clock in at work in just a little more than three quarters of an hour. For some reason, one entirely unknown to me, I find it difficult to relax in the time before I leave for the day. I will work somewhere between eight and nine hours, and instead of using the last hour beforehand, I always blow it on restless pacing, interwebz surfing, or staring off into space. No matter what I do, I can be fairly certain that I will not really enjoy it. I am always glancing at the clock--much more often than I really need to--and counting the minutes until I need to leave. On the bright side, I am never late. On the negative side, this has become something of a major time suck for me. I am going to try, however brief the time I am given for the task, to spend these restless moments writing from here on out. I have neglected to restore my old hard drive, so I am cut off from all of my old stuff for the time being, but I can go ahead and start again, start fresh. Three minutes have passe...

Maps give the illusion that there are no more secrets, that everything has been discovered, and that all is well ordered. But there are places and things that those maps do not show. I know. I have been there. This morning I left home with the intent of finding Immanuel Lutheran Church, where my friend Winston would be preaching. I left home in plenty of time to get there and mingle before the service. Unfortunately, I knew but loosely where I was going, and I did not have any maps in my car. After a smooth beginning on the wide, well marked, roads of the city, I departed onto the infinitely wilder, narrow, arrow straight yet somehow winding, roads of the country. The signs became smaller, and went by much too fast for a careful perusal. Despite my great care, I was soon lost on the back roads, little more than a single lane wide, with not another soul in sight for miles. It was there, lost in the fields of Indiana, that I found a place not marked on maps. A strange and wonderful ...

Facebook, besides being a fantastic tool for stalking old friends and acquaintances, also seems to serve quite well for destroying old friendships and acquaintances. In particular, the political rhetoric of Facebook seems to be the most caustic and least reasoned that I can find. This is part of the reason that I tend to assiduously avoid such discussions on said site, because, even if you are engaging an individual of upright character and great intelligence, everyone has a few friends who have more opinions than they have brains or courtesy. Perhaps it is because I am surreptitious, but I have never been unfriended for an opinion I have expressed, nor have I ever unfriended someone for stubbornly insisting that conservatives are neo-Nazis, although I may have had to filter posts from some people as things got closer to the election. The thing is, I know those people do not think that I am a neo-Nazi. They know that I try to be kind and generous as a rule, and they would never t...

I wonder if I am not actually just another hipster? I apparently dress the part. I flirted with keeping a beard. And I do try so very hard to find merit in folk music, essentially devoid of virtuosity, for the sake of its organic, homey, and therefore unassailable, pure form. Alas, to no avail. I make it through about 5 songs before I begin to suspect that I have actually only been listening to different lyrics set to the same tune, which consists of four repeated guitar chords. Perhaps I am a failed hipster, or an odd hybrid creature which exists on the outer edges of hipsterdom. Irony is fine, but is often cloak used to distract us from the fact that there is nothing much deeper behind it. I remember Lee once talking in class about how badly modern Germans abuse irony, to the point that its subtle use is almost lost amidst the crass sarcasm and lower forms. I appreciate irony, but to take it to heart as a defining characteristic--to mold oneself to a more contrary nature--seems a b...

Nights like these are simply not made for sleeping. Granted, the bed is never so welcoming as when the room is well chilled by the crisp night air. But the air is invigorating. Energizing. Vivifying. The sweet scent beckons me outside, so that is where I go. The cool is bracing, bringing out gooseflesh on the backs of my arms, something that feels like adrenaline follows. The peace, the isolation, and the darkness leave the senses sharpened. A heightened state of awareness and a feeling of restless vitality stir up discontent, perhaps because I seldom have this sharpness, and now I have nowhere to apply it. I settle down to read. There might be adventure out there somewhere, but probably not the kind I am hungry for. Books will have to do. I act like I do not get cold; that is all show. On nights like tonight, I linger constantly on the edge of discomfort, not putting on my jacket for the sole reason of feeling the discomfort. It is not pleasant, but it is an interesting sensation ...

Today we--yes, the royal we--are playing hot lava. Anywhere that the sun is not shining is the hot lava, and must be avoided at all costs. The only exceptions are class periods, and getting my coffee cup refilled. I find the sunshine most conducive to thought, including thoughts which should have occurred to me some time ago. Today, in particularly, it was just something regarding my research, which I really grasped for the first time. I had previously realized that Austrian national identity was poorly defined prior to the end of WWII and the Austrian Victim narrative. I had failed to reconcile, however, the real import of this. Austria is almost completely a post-WWII concept. The Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburg dynasty was a broad collection of regions, united under a central bureaucratic mechanism. Within that Empire, regions  ethno-cultural likeness were organized into provinces; there was no Austria, as such, but Tirol, South Tirol, Salzburg, and Vienna, amongst num...