Apparently, if you're stuck in some voice mail hell, the kind where you have to say your reqests by voice over the phone, if you say "mother fucker" really loudly, you'll immedaitely get sent to an operator.

Ever since I've been back, I've been having trouble being motivated about anything. Work, writing, sports, going out, TiVO (!) I just don't seem to be movitated. I know, quelle difference. It's kind of a weird thing too in that the trip was great and I feel totally refreshed and rejuvinated in going, I just don't feel like doing anything. And it's kind of weird too in that for the entire trip, I was Mr. Motivated, Mr. Energy, Mr. Let's do This and Let's Do That and Who Needs to Sleep?

So, I'm thinking my lack of motivation is just plan ole recovering and tiredness and being burnt out on being Mr. Motivated. Or maybe it's just right now everything's one big let down. Going to the Love Parade and watching a bunch of ecastasy laden freaks dancing? Going out for drinks with friends? Going to parties? Who cares? I was in the friggin Alps last week hiking and bobsledding down a moutain. Top that, bitches.

Or, who knows. Maybe it's just that I had so much fun I'm totally satisfied for now. Spend all weekend on the couch catching up on "Battlestar Gallactica" (a show I found myself totally addicted to and I'm still not sure why)? Why not? I've had enough fun for awhile. Don't worry about me, I'm fine.

PS- Lost was sooooooo good last Wednesday. I think I'm now head over heals in love with that show.

Tonight, I watched the season premiere of "Lost" and an episode of "Battlestar Gallactica" while waiting for my luggage to be delivered. Lost, of course, has with it a huge theme of faith vs. logic. As does Battlestar. My luggage wasn't being delivered. I waited and I waited and I waited, but for some reason, despite all my best attempts to stress myself out, I had this strange feeling it was going to be delivered. Late. Like around 10:30 or so. 10:30 rolls around and the doorbell rings. My luggage is here.

Crazy, huh?

As we wait for the premiere of Lost the TV show and Lost my luggage, we decided to get back into this blogging thing. So, I’m back.

And before we start the Big Holiday Recap, I’m going to go with the rant, of course. Because that’s way more fun. Today’s rant? Airplane trips, yay! Because bitching about plane flights is never done.

Coming back from Munich, I had two flights. One of them involved me waiting in line for an hour and a half to get checked in, luggage cluster fucks, pulling an O.J. through the airport, and making it onto the flight with about two minutes to spare. That wasn’t the hell flight.

No, the hell flight was much worse.

Where do I begin? With the fact that even though it was a five hour flight (Charlotte to SF), it was one of those tiny, sardine can type flights. The kind where everyone is stuffed in and completely uncomfortable and there’s so many people stuffed in there that no matter how much ventilation they pump into the airplane, the flight is still going to be all hot and stuffy because of there being too many people in too small a space. The plane was old looking too, like it had faded carpeting and rinky-dink viewing screens and I swear I saw stains in the carpeting and it wouldn’t have surprised me if first class had wood paneling.

Flight takes off and they announce that in order to see the movie, you’ll have to pay $5 for the headphones. Which would be okay if it wasn’t for the fact that the movie was "The Sisterhood of the Lost Pants," a movie nobody in their right mind would want to see unless they were a thirteen year old girl. Didn’t really matter, though, because the video broke about ten minutes into it and so there was no movie to watch.

The food you also had to pay for. $7 for a sandwich or a salad. Since I was really hungry, I was kind of into the food, especially since I had this wacky idea that I’d get served on the plane and so didn’t buy some food at the Charlotte airport. Unfortunately, I was out of luck with the food because they ran out. The sandwiches were gone halfway through the plane and the salad about three rows in front of me. Now, how do you run out of food on a five hour flight that’s sold out? And thanks for making it fair for all the people sitting in the back, people like me.

But the final straw, the kicker in all this was the one, the only, the thing that makes everyone on a flight go "oh shit" -- the screaming baby. The screaming baby that sat in the row in front of me. And it wasn’t like the screaming wasn’t that bad, it was the occasional messy diaper and the messy diaper smell that wafted through the stuffy air. Then there was the fact that all the women in the plane thought it was just the cutest thing ever and so whenever they stopped by, would bend over and do the goo-goo-gah-gah’s with the baby. Oh, and did I mention the baby let loose with the binky towards the end of the flight and hit me on the head?

All this too, after a ten hour flight out of Munich, after a long week long trip through Europe, and after getting not much sleep the night before because two drunken Irish dudes knocked on my hotel door at 3:30 in the morning to ask if I wanted to go to a strip club.

Off to Europe for a couple of weeks. Be back in a week or so. Maybe I'll post from abroad, maybe I won't. We'll see.

Okay, we’re going to do this in two parts:

Years ago, a friend and I decided to travel through the South since neither of us had really seen much of it. We flew into New Orleans and drank in the French Quarter, ate crawfish, wandered through the streets of all the neighborhoods, saw a band play at a famous club, bought voodoo charms, and hang out in hundred year old bars named for Napoleon and pirates. The highlight of the trip was a haunted ghost tour we took at night. The tour guide, who could have been completely making it all up, took us around the city and told us all the various ghost tales. We half believed it all. It’s just that there’s this weird vibe to the city, like it was part of our world but not part of our world.

Then we took the highway up Mississippi to Jackson Mississippi for a blues fest. In a cotton field right near where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, we saw B.B. King and Little Feat with hundreds of locals. The next morning, we discovered the glories of Waffle House.

Now, it’s all gone.

Second part:

I’ve read that the latest polls have Bush’s numbers pretty much where they were when this whole thing started. Somewhere like in the low 40’s. His poll number on how he handled all this were around 45% which pretty much means that all those people who’d support him normally are there with him. Which raises this question: WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!

SERIOUSLY, COULD SOMEBODY SCREW UP MORE? COULD AN ADMINISTRATION COME OFF AS MORE ARROGANT, MORE INEPT, MORE JUST PLAIN FUCKED UP THAN THIS ONE? WHAT PART OF THIS WHOLE THING COULD YOU APPROVE OF? THE BEING LATE PART? THE BLAMING OTHER PART? THE PHOTO-OP FAKERY PART? HOW ABOUT THE JOKING AROUND IN NEW ORLEANS OR THE JOKING AROUND BY HIS MOTHER? AND WHERE THE FUCK WAS CHENEY? NOW THEY’RE DOING THEIR USUAL LIES AND USUAL SPINNING AND THEY’RE TRYING TO BLAME OTHER PEOPLE. SERIOUSLY. HOW MANY TIMES CAN THEY FUCKING SCREW UP, BLAME OTHER PEOPLE AND GET AWAY WITH IT? ARE YOU EVEN READING THE NEWS?

I mean, I’ve been watching the news and watching the media actually rise up and show a backbone. I’ve seen the media clips. And I watched Keith Olbermann today drop his aloof ironic-self and lay into the President. Christ, even the reporters on Fox News have been getting uppity. I’ve even been reading the Republican blogs and have been enjoying the fact that they’ve been all kinds of depressed and in denial about it. Some of them have even been saying blasphemous things like "oh, maybe he shouldn’t have taken such a long vacation" or "Geez, that Brown guy sure is an idiot." But now even they’re starting to spin the whole thing "oh, it’s not their fault." Which raises this question? IS THE PRESIDENT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING?

AND CAN YOU REALLY LOOK AT ALL THIS, AT THE WAY THE POOR WERE SCREWED OVER AND THE WAY THAT ALL THE VICTIMS WERE PRETTY MUCH BLACK AND SAY "WELL ,THAT’S JUST THE WAY IT IS?" SHOULDN’T THAT BE TELLING YOU SOMETHING? YOU KNOW, JUST BECAUSE AL SHARPTON AND JESSE JACKSON CLAIM RACISM EVERY TEN DAYS OR SOMETHING DOESN’T NECESSARILY MEAN THEY’RE NOT RIGHT A BUNCH OF TIMES. AND IN THIS CASE? OH, THEY’RE FUCKING RIGHT. DON’T YOU JUST FEEL LIKE ALL THE FUCKEDUPNESS OF THIS COUNTRY JUST GOT TORN AWAY AND EXPOSED FOR THE WHOLE WORLD TO SEE

IF THEY GET AWAY WITH THIS, I SWEAR. I’M SO FUCKING PISSED OFF I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MYSELF AND NO, THIS WHOLE POSTING HAS JUST MADE ME EVEN MORE STEAMED.

Don’t you get it? WAKE UP WHITE PEOPLE, WAKE UP!

All I can say is that it’s a really good time to get out of this country. And if I somehow declare myself a political exile in Germany, would anyone blame me?

Oh, New Orleans……

(Yes, I realize that in light of what's going on, this next post is a little bit over the top, but remember, it's all about comic effect here and I actually was able to keep things in a lot more perspective than I'm about to make it sound. Anyways).

Friday night comes and my after-work drinks plan never came to fruition. So I decide to make a nice mellow night out of it. Go rent a DVD, watch some TiVo, and hit some sleeping pills so I can get some good sleep. I've been battling some nasty-ass insomnia lately (seriously, some of the worst ever) and was a bit ragged. Plus, with me off to the Fatherland in a few days, I got plenty of excitement coming to me. So what's a nice, mellow Friday night?

I pick up a DVD of Anchorman, a movie I only saw on an airplane and which some people swear by and which I really wanted to see. Since I have an old TV, I have to actually switch some chords around to get the DVD to play. The problem is that I rent so few DVDs due to the wonders of TiVo that I kind of forgot which chords had to be moved where. Which I kind of knew was going to happen.

I move a few things around and nothing. No Anchorman. And then after a few more moves, no picture on the TV screen. Nothing, Nada, No TiVO. Hell, no TV. I got nothing but snow.

Well, now what do I do? I'll go play online. DSL goes out. But wait, it gets better. You know that quiet night I was hoping for? The courtyard neighbors decide to throw a party that night so at about ten, their stereo cranks up and I hear all these people downstairs partying.

So now I have no TiVO, no TV, no DVD and no internet connection. In other words, I HAVE NOTHING. What does one do without TV or the internet? And even worse, there's a party going on across the way guarenteed to go to like three in the morning.

Luckily, I still managed to pass out around 11, more out of sheer boredome (and Tylenol PM) more than anything.

Ahh, so we're back. You know, I meant to post all this week, but blogger wouldn't let me in. I actually had to reconfigure a few things to get back in, including getting rid of all my cookies, which now means I have to resign up for all these things I was already signed up for. I usually use the same name and password, but sometimes I don't depending on the site and now I have to remember which user name and password I used and which e-mail address and it's kind of a pain.

Oh well.

It's probably a good thing too I wasn't posting because it would have been a week long rant about you know what and I'm trying to affect an attitude of Serenity Now in all things politics again as just a dip into say Salon or Wonkette was raising the blood pressure up to bad levels. But we'll all get to that later.

So, what can we catch you up on.....oh, I know...my volleyball game on Tuesday.

Going into the game, we were 7-8. The team we were playing were 8-7. So you can see the level of importance to the game. First game comes up, we rally from like 7-1 to win 11-9 (the games are up to 11). Second game we get blown out and lose. Which leads us to the third and final, game. We go up quickly 5-0 and are cooking. But then disaster falls as some guy starts watching us play. Now, I wasn't sure whether the guy was just crazy or just annoying, but he started watching and then started to make all sorts of comments towards one of our woman players about how hot she is. Which she kind of is, but that's neither here nor there. The thing about the guy is that he basically walked up and started in, making me think he was just your typical crazy dude, except he was a little too nicely dressed and looking like he was working out to be a crazy homeless guy. On the other hand, we were playing in the Marina. He was also black and some black guys have no problem telling women how hot they are when they walk by, which is something I've never been sure of is something I'm apalled by or kind of jealous of. But that's also neither here nor there.

So anyways, this guy is getting into her and the tension level just shoots up because there's really nothing we could do, or at least nobody willing to step up and say something back, least of all the girl who just tried to shrug it off (no holla-back girl her, but what are you gonna do?). We fall apart. After they quickly tie us and vault into the lead, the dude changes his comments and just keeps on shouting "relax, baby, just relax." The other team is getting pretty tense too and making snippy comments back to him. Total tension city.

But then, down 10-5 and down to match point, the dude leaves. And then we go on a rampage and quickly tie the game at 10-10. We go back and forth a bit, trying to get match point and then finally, after one of those sets that involved a lot of people running around and making tips to other players that had no business actually getting to where they were supposed to be, we won 12-10.

Pretty gosh darn inspiring story, ain't it? Total "Rudy"?

Well, I thought it was a good story.