It's off to Europe I go...

This evening, I finally head out on my grand French adventure.

For some reason I'm just chockfull of anxiety, much more so than excitement. Not really sure what the deal is with that, but I'm hoping somewhere over the Atlantic one dissipates into the other.

On the plus side, I found my camera and it's charger, so there's a good chance I'll be able to take some pictures of ... whatever I'm going to see.

I have a couple of books, some magazines, and around a week's worth of sleep to catch up on, so I'm hopeful the flight goes by quickly.

Ah well, vive le France!

Simon Wiesenthal

When I heard this morning that Simon Wiesenthal had died, a sort of chill went through me.

As the years pass, there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors remaining to tell their tale and be a living testament to the atrocities that took place during World War II. Growing up Jewish, the history of the Holocaust is part and parcel of my education and something that lurks intermittently in the back of my mind. But there are too many people in the world today who can easily deny the genocide that occurred and soon there will be no one left who saw these things with their own eyes.

After having been put into 5 concentration camps, Wiesenthal managed to survive long enough to be rescued by American troops and ever since has been a strident and important voice in the fight to bring to justice those that tried to escape it and remind us all never to forget.

With him gone, we lose one of our generation's most vital figures and I worry what the future, so far removed from what Simon Wiesenthal saw, will bring.

Sunny in Philly

I have discovered the next great TV comedy, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia".

I assume most people have never heard of this show; it's on FX and has barely been advertised. However, I have no laughed this much at a new show since Arrested Development.

IASiP is about 4 friends, 2 of whom are brother and sister, who own a bar in South Philly. The bar is a failure and the more you know about the main characters, the less you wonder why. Not only are they all pretty witless, they are also some of the most selfish people I've ever seen portrayed on the small screen. But I mean that in the nicest way possible.

The comedy on the show is surreal; episodes focus on big topics like racism, homophobia, and cancer but never are you made to feel that "awww" that most sitcoms would create at the end of any such episodes. The music is almost circuslike throughout the show and there's no laugh track which contributes to the surreality.

I've 5 episodes and and crave new ones. It's not for everyone, but for me? this show just slays me.

Random Birthday Thought

As much as it pains me to admit this, today I turn 29.

Sure I'm grateful I'm not in New Orleans or Iraq and all that other stuff that really makes live difficult to live. However, there are existential crises that one also has to weather.

I'm not at all where I thought I'd be by this point in my life; I thought I'd be married, and have a career doing...something.
Instead I'm painfully single and working at a job that is just a job without much future or fulfillment.

I thought that by this point in my life I'd know who I was and what my place was in this world. Instead I feel more confused and unsure than ever.

Of course in some ways I do know myself better and I do have more of an inkling of what the hell I'm doing on this planet, but no where near in the amounts I had hoped.

And then it's always a surprise who remembers.
I've had friends from childhood forget and friends from the past 5 years remember; I got a call from Australia and a card from a coworker. So far 3 of my 6 siblings have remembered and thankfully so did my mother.

Three people have made very serious statements about how much my friendship means to them, which is always nice. And 2 of the people I'd hoped to hear from but not really expected to, fulfilled my expectations and remained silent.

Next year is the big one, the big 3-0 as they call it.
If I am no longer living in LA, I think I'll be able to call my 30th year on this planet successful.

Horatio Hornblower

Now, I'm someone who loves tales of the sea, so to speak. I loved Moby Dick and all those classic tales of ships at sea, especially when it involved the British Navy.
When Master and Commander came out 2 years ago, I fell in love. Not just because of Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany, but the adventure, the pure unadulterated zest that these characters seemed to embody was infectious and the soundtrack didn't hurt none either.

So it would be a bit of surprise that I just started watching the A&E series, "Horatio Hornblower", based on the books by C.S. Forrester.

From what I can glean after watching the first episode, the series revolves around Midshipman Hornblower and his experiences in the British Navy. As stuffy as this might sound, it is precisely the opposite of that. War with the French, problems with other officers and internal struggles make this series tense and thrilling. Unlike - it would seem - the majority of viewers out there, I do not get confused when there are many characters with similar accents and possibly similar names, and as such, I have no problem keeping track of everyone on the show.
Must say I don't much get how people get so easily confused when watching television or movies, but I guess it is not my place to judge.

Anyway, I'm very excited to watch the rest the rest of the series and the fact that the lead is played by Ioan Gruffud is only the icing on the cake.

Some Resolution

The guy who committed the fraud quit.
Huzzah.

Of course this leaves us with a major employment shortage and the remainder of workers in the office are going to be overwhelmed, so that's fun.

But the guy just wasn't trust worthy and I'm sure it's better in the long run that he's no longer here.

More Office Drama

Today we discovered that one of our employees has defrauded the company.

He set up 40 multiple year subscriptions to be sent to his house, though not under his name. Then he changed the system to make it look like we processed the fake credit card he put on the orders. The total of the order was over $4000.

Once he found out that we found out, he deleted all the orders from the database and tried to delete them from the backup server as well.

I am now waiting for my boss to mete out proper punishment...which would only be firing.

It's Official

This morning I called the UK and shelled out a good portion of what is in my bank account to pay for my trip to France.

So I'm supposing this means that I really am going on that walking trip.
I'm excited, but I think work and life have worn me down to the point where I keep waiting for something to go wrong so I can't get too excited about it.

Of course, I imagine that once I'm actually on the plane, I'll get pretty hyped up.

The thing now is find a pair of shoes that won't make my feet turn into 2 giant blisters. This is surprisingly more difficult than one would imagine.

4:30 am

And I'm still awake.

Sigh.

It could be the five glasses of iced tea I had at dinner at 9 pm.

It could be the movie I saw tonight, "The Constant Gardener", which sticks in your conscious mind as strongly as it sticks in your subconscious one.

It could be that my youngest sister is headed back to college after a year off for personal reasons, leaving for the airport in 30 minutes.

It could be the thoughts that I will be 29 in 4 days and I haven't done anything of note with my life nor have I gotten my life to where I thought I'd want it to be by this point.

I sit here by my computer, occasionally getting up to help my sister pack, and I listen to music that puts me in a somber frame of mind: bits from the soundtracks of "The Last of the Mohicans" and "Finding Neverland"; a few songs from Sarah Maclachlan's latest album; a song or two from the Beautiful South. The advantage of having a ton of music on your harddrive is that all the music you'd want for your melancholic and introspective moods are right at your fingertips. I guess that's for better or for worse.

I wrote my sister a plane letter, encouraging her to be brave as she heads back to school. I told her how her life is really just beginning now and that she has spent this past year learning from her mistakes and gaining the strength to deal with them should they arise again. I reassured her that she is indeed a wonderful, bright, caring and beautiful woman who has the world open to her - all she has to do is realize it.

I wonder if any of that can or should be applied to my own life.
And can it when you're no longer 20?

Maybe that's why I can't sleep.