Hello Dali!

The absurd and surreal story:

My friend Vreni was here visiting this weekend. And it was just about the most bizarre weekend ever. For blogging purposes, though, an excerpt will suffice. Hence, I bring to you: Saturday Afternoon Live.

The opening dialogue, if you will, was our educational visit to the Melanchthon House--entertainment for the nerdily religious and/or historically-minded. There, who did we meet but "Joe," an extremely bizarre and possibly psychopathic or chemically imbalanced student of my alma mater (why, oh why, did I have to wear that particular sweatshirt today?), who just happened to be visiting from Ancient European Country, where he's studying for the semester. Try as we might to be brusque and off-putting, we nevertheless acquired a weekend stalker. As we were leaving the Melanchthon House to walk to the grocery store to buy ingredients for making scrumptious Ethiopian food for dinner, we found that the entire block had been converted into a car-racing strip complete with flags, officials, and racers in funny blue uniforms and no mufflers. (And looking to our left, we saw melting watches in the desert.)

But that's not yet all. Having successfully purchased the ingredients for our African feast, we set about preparing it. My long-awaited and much-adored rice cooker was given the task of boiling the split peas for the stew. Unfortunately, it was also given two full liters of waters, most of which it regurgitated 20 minutes later onto my kitchen counter, covering everything with pea-green slime and foul-smelling water and shorting out the machine, which then blew a fuse (or a circuit or however they hook things up over here). Anyway, the refrigerator, microwave, computer, TV, hair dryer, several lamps and of course the rice cooker were then out of commission until I could find the Hausmeister to come and rescue the damsels in distress, which was the next morning. So the fridge had to be evacuated and its innards displaced to the windowsill for the evening.

The "No, we are not idiotic morons" disclaimer:

• No, those appliances were not all hooked into the same outlet. They are not even all in the same room.
• Yes, by the way, we do know how to fix a blown fuse. And we monkeyed with the circuit breaker/fuse box for about half an hour, and our (male) neighbor came over and helped, and we called my very-handy-with-such-things father on the phone, all to no avail. But with one magic touch of the Hausmeister's hand, my appliances were restored. Amazing.

On a completely unrelated note:

A particular German phrase has been repeatedly capturing my attention lately: "Der innere Schweinehund". As far as I can tell, it is approximately the equivalent of the "devil on your shoulder," though it seems to lack an angelic counterpart and I am sure it gets less cartoon footage. Literally translated, this devilish little imp is called "your inner pig-dog," and man, is he baaaad. He's the voice who tells you to be lazy and give noogies and torment your little sister. He whispers "that can wait until tomorrow" and "why not just one more sitcom?" Your inner pig-dog prefers procrastination to professionality, id to superego and any vice to the virtue you'd most like to have. He's powerful, he's persistent, and he's yours. It's 1:00-- do you know where your inner pig-dog is?