Maru's Mun Journal

Finally, the Nazgul and I went to have our hair done again. We had found our hairdresser, Muriel, again. She's at a salon near the university now where lots of students go to have their hair cut. She did really good work on us.

Afterwards, we went to the Starbucks at the square where the demonstration had been two weeks ago, and took pictures of each other, for documentation purposes.



Here is me, with my freshly retouched Tracy-Turnblad style blonde stripes in my fringe.



And the Nazgul, with a green streak instead of a blue one this time. The lady Muriel had forgotten the pot of blue at home. Seems they're not keeping those extreme colours in the salon; they're her speciality.

In the Starbucks, people were a bit odd. To my left, there was a little high-heeled orcette trying to read a book by marking everything she had read with blue highlight marker. You could see the Nazgul's librarian heart flinching, wincing, and cringing at such a senseless sacrilege. On my right, a Japanese girl was reading and listening to music when suddenly, a very odd old man appeared and told her and me to take our stuff away, he had to sit there. "No," I said, while stowing my bag and denim vest behind me, "you don't have to, you want to." He sat, there, drinking tea and smelling slightly of used book shops, ramrod straight, with no hair, and a terribly, terribly green pair of trousers. In our usual drama coffee shop, we don't get quite that sort of terrifying dryness and oddity, or the sort of Essex girl (mutatis mutandis) that was mutilating the poor book on the other side.

We drank up, and fled.

The Nazgul and I went to the Australian pub to celebrate the cativersary as well as her first-ever point scored in a kendo tournament.

There was football there, but hardly anybody was there. To make it more fun, the staff distributed betting cards where you had to guess in what minute the first goal would be scored. I thought of North Korea, and bet on 52, the Nazgul was more optimistic and bet on 27.

Then, we had fudz. I had kangaroo and the Nazgul had emu, and they both were delicious. For entertainment, in addition to the football game, there were these two chicks sharing a bottle of wine and giggling their heads off. We speculated whether it was their second bottle or whether they were really such lightweights. They were looking at pictures on a digital camera and giggling, talking in English and giggling, looking out the window and giggling, and so on...

Then, the 25th minute came, and the first goal, and the giggling chicks started screeching and claiming one of them had bet on the 25th minute, and wanted their reward.



The waiter came with a fake plastic top hat and started looking through the betting cards of everybody, and did find theirs, and agreed to serve them free beer.

However, the chicks didn't want beer as they had had wine all evening, so they haggled with him over their prize, so finally he agreed to serve them a glass of free wine instead.

We left before those drunken lightweights could start dancing on top of the fish tank.

My big red cat is fatally cute when he sleeps with his upturned face half-covered with a paw. And my little black cat has incredibly long legs. Like a Barbie.-

Just now, in the train: a bloke and his dog. The bloke was sixty if he was a day, and looked like a character portrayed by Clint Eastwood in a movie: hard-bitten, work-roughened hands, very lived-in face that looked as if the man had spent time in a war, in prison, on the road, or a combination of it all. He could have been a demon-hunter, too, as in 'Supernatural'. Yep, he definitely had a touch of Bobby about him.

The dog was a sensible-sized critter of the collie type, with longish silky hair, black and white and some hints of brown, and fluffy upright triangular ears. I think an Australian sheepdog looks like that, but I don't know if that breed isn't a tad bigger.

The dog kept asking his human for cuddles and scritches, and the man provided them, to the open, blissed-out and abject happiness of the dog. He kept putting his paw in the man's hand, nudging the fingers with his nose, and leaning his profile against the man's jeans-clad leg to have the fur at the throat ruffled. And the man did as he was told, with a sort of dry, wry amusement, but with great, infinite tenderness. The love between dog and master was very, very obvious and palpable.

This wouldn't have been so cute if the human hadn't been this Bobby type, with those hands you'd expect to see working with big tools, chopping wood, pumping a shotgun, or throwing punches in a brawl. His face had that monosyllabic Clint Eastwood expression, too; but the dog gave him away. Soft-cored, very gentle inside, and he was the centre of the world for that adoring, fluffy animal. They meant everything to each other, and they were happy to have each other in a big, bad world where you have to be tough as nails or go under.

Together with essayel's link to the vid of the orang-utan and his hound dog yesterday this reinforces my impression that people and dogs belong together, that is, evolution has driven primates and canines together in order to cooperate, seek safety with each other, and face the classic nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw together from very early on. Cats are charming companions, but humans and dogs are meant for each other on a very deep-down level.

Like those two on the train just now.

So nazgulwears and I went to Theresienwiese tonight, where the Oktoberfest takes place every September (duh!), to look for falling stars, because it's a large open space with not so many streetlamps, in the middle of the city.

We hung out there for perhaps 45 minutes to an hour, and saw three definite big ones, and a few smaller maybes.

When I came home, some strange cats were snarking very loudly in the courtyards, and mine ran from one window to the other, tails very bushy, eagerly observing whatever feline wank was going on outside.-

In the train home just now, there were two businessmen in suit and tie, talking. One was about 55, with a neat little beard, the other perhaps 40, and a bit pudgy.

Beard was talking about having been on a Jesuit-style retreat, and then Pudgy said he'd been was practicing za-zen of some Korean flavour for five years now. They started talking shop about postures and supports for meditation, and about the books of a Jesuit named Lasalle who'd written a book about zen for Christians which both Beard and Pudgy had read. Then, they continued to mysticism, and bemoaned the fact that rational thinking had discredited it in Christianity and Islam alike.

I stopped reading 'Flight Of The Raven' and just listened. Anybody dare claim modern times are utterly un-spiritual...

Last night, when walking to the station from work at half past ten, a car stopped beside me trudging through the snow, and the driver offered to take me to the station.

'Never get in a car with a stranger.'

But I, trusting the mean sharp ends of the Nordic Walking sticks I was using for walking in the snow (without those, I'd be lost) plus, in case of an emergency, the frightening edge on my broken-off tooth, and the fact that I can call on some pretty tough entities within me, was lazy and got in.

It was a Nepali; his features somewhat Indien, somewhat Chinese, the writing on the orange banner hanging from his rearview mirror the same as the one on the Tibetan prayer flags you get in New Age shops.

There were indistinct things in his car that suggested he was coming from some work assignment: tool boxes, the like. He took me to the station. I politely declined the polite come-ons he couldn't suppress. When I got out, I touched the orange banner and said, "Well, at least your karma will be better for having helped me", and walked down the path to the station with my Nordic Walking sticks. It was a quarter of an hour until the train I had hoped to catch on foot was due; I might not have caught it, I though. But when I came to the platform, there were people; the last train was late and arrived the moment I sat down on a bench. I didn't have time to get cold, even. I was home shortly after eleven, and in bed by midnight, and am now widely awake, fresh as a daisy, and have taken even more Spartacus screen shots, and put them in my bucket.

Sometimes, you've got to effin' trust the universe.

A few good things today:

Dramatic events with police involvement unfolded on our parking lot at work to the entertainment of all. Village gossip was exchanged by the bucketful. I get the conclusion of the story tomorrow, and am so stealing it for cpt_tantony as this is totally the kind of thing he'd have to deal with on a regular basis. Plus, over all the drama I fell back in with Lydl, our book-keeper, with whom I had recently fallen out. I don't like being fallen out with people; it grates so to always have to remember whom I am supposed to hate. I feel much relieved, somehow.

Because of yesterday's rain, I had left my bike at work and taken the bus. I remembered this factoid when I arrived at the train station of the suburb/village where I work. So I walked to work. It did me no end of good; nothing's better than walking through that deathly boring village to start thinking about really interesting and creative things. And I have to do it again on Monday, because Lydl drove me to the station after the drama.

Monday, because my boss-ess, totally worried about me dragging all that overtime into next year, has required me to take off the rest of the week. So, I am going to fall out of time again and live half in Australia, half behind the moon. I must remember to turn up for the concert of nazgul_nr_5's amateur orchestra on Saturday, though. According to her, both the second and the first violins are disgraceful this time.

I just got an email which told me I won a place on the guest list of the Apocalyptica pre-listening event for their next album - complete with the Alpocalyptics themselves. And so did the Nazgul. We've met those Finnish cellists quite a few times already, so it's not all that exciting, and we don't even know whom we're going to take along as a fourth person (two people per name on the guest list). The third, of course, will be the Lady Iris, who with the Nazgul and me forms the aimless world-wide conspracy which is unknown under the name of "Three Shieldmaidens of the Apocalypse" and not nearly feared enough, although we are quite dangerous.

On the less-than-bright side:

The jar of Japanese plum wine with real ume plums in that I bought today absolutely and categorically refuses to open and will not even budge to raw force. And ume plums are so terribly healthy!! *wails*

My CD ripper is on crack and can only count to five; so I yousendited only the first five tracks of "Wishmaster" for schiarire. Here they are again, because others might enjoy them as well:

She Is My Sin

The Kinslayer

Come Cover Me

Wanderlust

Two For Tragedy

At the bottom of the escalator in the train station where I get off to go home, there was a puddle of blood this evening. Just sitting there. Not smeared, not nothing.

And on the way home, I bough two fresh figs entirely because there's something utterly salacious in the way figs lie in your hand, soft and plump and taut and just begging to be squeezed, let alone bitten into...

This afternoon, I was re-reading (an re-giggling-over) the Great Hairy Monster of the discworld_rpg, the Bad Iconography Contest of 300+ comments, when I noticed some unholy racket outside, like thousands of metal oil barrels being rolled by at once. Being a bit ditzy (thanks for the definition, wiebke!) at the time, I took some minutes to realise it was the St. Patricks Day Parade going by. We have one in Munich, and it's getting bigger and bigger every year.

So I put on some street clothes, grabbed my sunglasses, wallet and käkätin, threw over my Djelibeybian Egyptian woolen plaid/shawl/wrap Falk the Metropolitan had brought me from his jouney, and stormed out, following the noise.

There were marching bands of all descriptions, drums-and-fives from Scotland, an Irish ceili band on the back of an open lorry, enormous amounts of happy people, lampposts being sprayed with green paint, and even a Brazilian street samba school. There was an Irish Folk Dance group with a plethora of little girls in green velvet costumes reminiscent of "Riverdance", a few of them clearly of Japanese extraction. There were part-time Scottish warriors in wild tartans, with shields, swords, long hair and axes, half-Highlander and half-Nac-Mac-Feegle, who spoke German with a Saxonian accent among themselves. Diversity was achieved.-

( The Parade and an insight )

( The Name Meme as applies to me )

I have decided to listen to Irish music for the rest of the evening and will try to get a move on with re-reading "Pyramids", breaking off occasionally to do the effin' laundry. And if there are pictures in the online newspapers of the Parade tomorrow, I'll post links.