dissertating, again

It has been a while since I've posted, I see, except for that cryptic haiku, which came about because I was thinking about a board game I used to love that had riddles, and I was also thinking that it should be a phrase to say, "Stop being so Web 2.0."

The most exciting thing I've done of late was to have brunch in a bowling alley. This is the kind of quasi-surreal thing that maybe would not seem so weird if it happened in America, but everything in Germany is already a little weird so stuff like this seems off the charts. I was having brunch with a bunch of other people yesterday, and there was no room in the restaurant. But then this one, apparently maverick, waitress, said, "Why don't they sit downstairs?" And all of the other wait-staff thought she was crazy, but she carried the day. We went downstairs, where there was (unadvertised!) a bowling alley, which was completely empty and dark. There was one table at the corner, at which we sat, and it had one flickering light bulb. It was all kind of like the end of "There Will be Blood." The best part was when people came down looking for the bathroom, and instead of a bathroom they found a huge dark bowling alley and 7 people eating omelettes. Then I went to another carnival, which was completely unremarkable except insofar as it demonstrated again the incomprehensible but enormous love that Germans have for carnivals.

Oh, and I heard someone say what I've decided is actually the most American phrase of all time. It is not, "There's not enough parking at this Chili's." It is not, "I'm gonna rip you a new one." It is, "Hang a louie."

Also I watched a German game show devoted to RV-parking. There were all these German Dad-type figures in lederhosen, and a studio audience. Their task was to park an RV as fast as possible. If this were in America, they would not be portly Dads, but celebrities in bikinis, and they would have to, I don't know, juggle while they did it. But in this case it was just very serious-looking Dads, looking the way that Dads do when parking, while the audience went wild.

But mostly I've just been dissertating, which is, you know, hard. The closest thing I can compare it to is putting together a puzzle, but the pieces are scattered all over the world, and you don't get to look at a picture while you do it. There are lots of ways to go at it: you could group everything together by color, but since you don't know what the whole will look like, maybe some objects will be multi-colored. Or you could start out by looking for the edges, which is definitely the way to go in puzzles and hopefully in dissertations, because that's what I'm doing now. There is always the possibility that, when completed, the puzzle will be of a completely stupid object, but that's best not to think about.

Maybe my mind first leapt to puzzles because I have a bad memory about puzzles. When I was little, I loved puzzles. But then, one fateful day, I sent a piece of a Hulk Hogan puzzle, along with twenty dollars in cash, to the Hulkster himself, who had pledged via the box to sign said piece and return it to me. He never did this, and I will never forgive him.