#vorgluhen

[murrde-blog]

Vorgluhen

The german word for pre-gaming. Very important.

[nicetweedjacket]

BACKATCHA

As you are quite well aware, I quit my job last month.  Just before I did, the company downgraded the internet and *poof* just like that I couldn't waste my days tapping away at the keyboard dispensing all the shite heard round the office onto the internets for all to read and at which every person on as high a horse as me could scoff.  The dial-up internet made it impossible to post any entries, and I'm still not well coordinated enough on the Droid to thumb out an entire post (as proven in a few that I did post in drunken hazes to read the next morning and ask myself WTFuck), so I just spent the last two weeks at the office banging my head against different objects. No one seemed to notice, or if they did it was politely ignored and then probably became the topic of conversation in the lunch room later (Look, Ma!  I'm contributing to the workplace!!!)

Hennnnyway. Jobs over. To save money between the job and school I spent the last two months "living" with my parents - by which I mean I had my summer clothes in the closet there, and a few valuables I didn't want to leave in my subletted room; I stayed out every night as late as I could, and packed my Jansport full of clean chonies in the event I found another place to crash the next night.  Still, it was nice knowing I could come "home" after the gym/bar to open the door and have Pops ask how my day was, eat some of Mom's homemadewhatever and cuddle with my cats (which I'd dumped on them several years ago after a nasty breakup in which I got custody of the children despite my complete inability to care for them).

Before the yob ended I also had the fortune of finding out just how effing frustrating it is to have to wait an extra hour and a half to get to work because I couldn't ride a commute hour train with my bike, but mostly it didn't matter because by that time no one cared what time I was showing up.  I had a foot and two knees out the door, had already planned my summer vacation (camping, road trips, hiking, beach days, whitewater rafting, wine tasting etc etc) and was looking so forward to being out of the controlled climate and in nature for a few weeks before I hit the books.

Alas, it all went to shit when the Germans got here. Yep, those damn Germans, with their acute taste for fine cheese, thick beer, strong coffee and juicy meat. Their thick accents, affinity for calling shorts "panties", underwear "pants", and pants "trousers".  Their complete inability to understand why in Amerika it's so &%($*%$ easy to get a gun, but not medical care (duh!) and their insatiable appetite for pictures of EveryFuckingThing.  Fucking Germans.

Actually, they were cool. Well, a few were.  Without going into too much detail, Moms lived in Germany hellllllla years ago and after the invent of the social network found all her old friends from there and they've been getting together to talk about what they did back then for the last few years. (Sidenote: I pray to GOODNESS GRACIOUS WHATEVER THERE IS that in forty years some of my friends from now can't find me on the internets, or whatever comes next...  they's my fahnow friends, as in, "You's all good fahnow, but not fahevah")

The Greek German brought his daughter (my age) and she went along with me on most of my adventures. She taught me a German word - vorgluhen - which means "preglow".  I immediately knew she meant pre-party, and added that some people say "pregame", so then I had to explain what that meant, so I used tailgating as an example, and then had to get all into American sports, most of which she didn't understand and some of which she'd never heard of so then I had to go over football, baseball, and pretended to know something about golf and hockey...... but then got tripped up because she maybe thought that "immigrants" were very popular sports figures here (although what she meant may have been lost in translation because she also kept asking where my Black and Hispanic friends were born and weren't they also immigrants? Only she didn't mean it in a racist way, just that most "off-white" Germans are first or second generation, so the fact that you could be black, white, yellow, purple, green and be a 20th generation American didn't quite compute).... and that's pretty much how every conversation went, with me trying to explain something by giving her many more words which I also had to explain (Apparently I use the following words A LOT, as she wrote them in her journal to teach her friends back home: douchebag, hella, mothafucka, hipster, guapo, bangs, dickwad, fixie, "fuck that", prick, frotteurize, "talking to", "hooking up", "bed bugs", holla, "five on it", trashy, puta).  And the only German word I've learned the whole time has been "vorgluhen" so clearly I have to travel to Germany to get the dirty vocab, or else just learn to shutthefuckup and let someone else talk for once.

Unfortunately we spent last weekend in Reno. I lived there in 2009 for nine months just long enough to have an illegitimate child and sell it to the Mormons  because I hated it so much I couldn't complete the one year contract I'd entered into.  Yeah, three months to go and I could not hack it. PUSSY!  No really, Reno is just that fucking awful.  (See: this and this and this and this).

But....... the summer is finishing strong. Reno was book-ended by a sick ass whitewater rafting trip on the American River and moving back to my digs in SF so all's well that end's well. Or some shit. (I should maybe not finish this bottle of wine right now.  Wait, did I really just say that?!)

I'm pretty sure I'll wind up in Germany either on a summer break from or the summer right after law school which is a TOTAL turnaround from how I'd felt about traveling there before (which was: "NAZIS, every one of them!").  Glad to have spent the last few weeks analyzing my own vocabulary, my own history, and what the fuck it means to be an Irish-German-Jew as well as a San Franciscan-Californian-American, a college graduate, and (almost) a law student.

New goal for this blog: If I can't say it in one to two paragraphs without having to explain every (*&$)@$ thing I say, I'll just shutthefuckup.