argh

@dad and mom, sorry about the vulgarity in this one, but I have to start speaking on this blog the way I really speak. Anyway I'm 32.

I work as a technical writer here in prague. today I got chewed out in a meeting at work for not being able to tell my boss what the software I write the user guide for does. There are a lot of reasons why I don't know. You could say it's because all of us writers here write about hundreds of different bits and pieces software, and it's hard to know what any of this shit does or why. But the BIG reason is I don't care. I've never given a shit about telecommunications in my whole life. I work here for the money and because there isn't much work. So I can write or do whatever. It's not that I don't work hard from time to time. When it's necessary I do. But it's rarely necessary. I probably could have bullshitted an answer today too. I've done it before to not look weak. But today I just said I don't know. My boss is actually my friend. He's a good guy. But there are rules and one of them is you can't call bullshit in a meeting. It never works. There's no ground swell of support. No one says peep. I'm tired of status reports. I'm tired of meetings. We all have email. Let's all just type to one another so I don't have to get out of my seat to go to another seat and talk about what I write about. I used to actually care though. Things have changed so drastically since I was hired four years ago it's not even the same job anymore. So many douchebags have come and gone. Seeing high up people come in, change shit up to show how proactive they are, and then move on is fucking exhausting. I disconnected myself a long time ago and told myself just to work on other stuff, write, put up a blog, post, make books, make pictures. Justify getting paid to sit here at a desk in front of a computer all day. I can imagine leaving this place but I can't imagine going for another interview somewhere. I'm so bummed by this stuff. People put their whole lives into this shit. It means nothing to me. Telecommunications mean nothing to me.

With Pavel in the barn

I’m standing with Pavel in the barn watching him clean the mousetraps under the rabbit cages and toss the dead mice into a pile by the door. Pavel is my girlfriend’s dad. Here in the Czech Republic you call people by their first name if you know them, so Pavel, not Mr. Veik as we might stateside.

The mice are smaller than I thought mice are. I thought mouse traps snapped further down the body. They actually snag just the head. I didn’t see any blood.

When you travel to North Bohemia where her parents live, you get the sense that it’s no-bullshit living. Pavel kills the mice so the mice don’t eat the rabbit food so we can eat the rabbits. Pavel shoots the birds in the cherry tree so we can eat the cherries. I wasn’t sure if it was actually even possible to kill a bird with an air rifle but birds rot like any other animal and one day I was walking in the garden and I followed the scent and came across a bird lying right there under the tree.

I have always had two feelings that I feel like are opposing. The one feeling that living things (animals, people, nature) are so beautiful and interesting. When I get in the right frame of mind like that (coffee helps), I feel like I’m seeing through things to how cool it is they’re even there at all. I get these intense overwhelming feelings of wonder. Then there’s the other feeling, the feeling that that’s shallow. That I might see beauty, but that I’m seeing just part of it. That there are things built into the nature of nature that aren’t beautiful at all. I’ve never killed a rabbit or any other animal for food, but I haven’t had to. It’s weird that there are two views of one thing. But maybe it’s about seeing both, or that it’s okay to some days see one, and other days the other. Or that maybe it’s okay to be confused about it. Maybe it’s supposed to be confusing. Maybe all that sounds obvious. Maybe it sounds nuts.

Anyway, the weekend was great. I wanna tell you more about Pavel and his wife Jana, my girlfriend’s parents, and how they came to be living here in Nová Ves v Horách. I’ll tell you later tho. This is long enough as it is. Stay tuned for more about them though. It involves Nazis.

Here are a couple other pictures I took up there:

pavla and her sister

pavla

the field behind their house