We like tha moon

I'm off to a new job today, so obviously I reverted to first day of school mode and picked out a new notebook and filled all the pens and worried all night about what would look business casual enough without being too tryhard because obviously the thing a bunch of programmers are gonna care about is whether you've got the exact right level of nerd t-shirt?



Meanwhile, the cats are cute.

Getting back in to checking and posting here, I find myself struck by how delightfully word-driven it is, and how UTTERLY out of practice I am at doing that thing. Surely, given how long I've been here, I used to know how to write full sentences and even paragraphs and not just dash off a quickie thingy?

It's been a while, no? 6 years, from the looks of it?

So after 10 years of dearly wishing anyone would ever show my beloved sport anywhere, like at all, it's kind of interesting to have it turn into the ZOMG WHAT WAS THAT GIANT CLUSTERFUCK of the week.

Starting one of these lovelies. See you in a few years, if I still have hands to type with.

Pattern: Dice Bag of Doom!

When I was a child, I thought all old people had Central European accents.

After all, my grandmother did, and my great-grandmother, and absolutely everyone in my great-grandmother's nursing home. My great-aunt, and every one of her five husbands (and a near-miss!). The remaining cousins. The university friends who periodically turned up for tearful reunions. Whether they now lived in Australia or Israel or Germany or Texas, every one of the older generation had the same highly specific accent: Educated Austro-Hungarian-Empire Turn-Of-The-Century German-Speaking Jewish.

As I got older, I knew enough to know that some of these cousins were from Austria, others from what might (at certain times, but not others) be Germany or Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Poland. Those details were interesting, but didn't matter next to the basic fact: they were all cousins or friends; all ultimately from the same place.

It disconcerted me to meet other people's grandparents: they spoke American, which inside my head made no sense for that generation.

(When I finally studied German formally, my native-Berliner teacher was amazed that I knew nothing of grammar but whenever I said anything it came out sounding exactly like a senior citizen from a completely different dialect than we'd ever heard in class.)

Today was Yom Ha-shoah. While that's a certified big deal in Israel, it's hardly even noticed here: Some small-print mentions, some blog posts. The BBC World Service ran a story as I fell asleep last night about soccer leagues and cabarets in Theresienstadt, and I wept at hearing a 91-year-old man's voice -- not because he himself was anyone I knew, but because the sound was precisely that of a generation of refugees I knew who are now all gone.

I...

I have lost all my words! No words! None are left!!

I've started and erased an entry half a dozen times, which is usually a good sign that I'm Not As Over DC as I used to say I was. Fuckitall.