The SMS tone on my phone goes "ding-dong' and it gets everyone 90% of the time and me on mornings while I'm snoozing, and only then, which is a pretty good payback I guess for everyone else I've annoyed with it. The best (worst) time was when I was still asleep in Joris's apartment and he'd already long gone to work (I'm not lazy, it was 9 a.m) and it rang and I thought it was the maids. So I jumped out of bed in a panic, looked for something to put on and went to open the door. Nothing. It took me a few seconds to realized I'd just fucked myself.
Still, funny things like that always put me in a weird but good mood for the rest of the morning, a little reminder of how retarded life can be sometimes, and how despite the fact that I have not heard a door bell that actually sounds like a door bell in a long time (they all go buzz these days), my concept of what it should sound like is still there for ancient times before key cards and such.
Phillip has also now managed to lose a bunch of his cards, or rather he has forgot their hiding place. Everyone has that. You know, a certain article X that are always lying around until one time you think, fuck that, I'm going to keep it in a safe place. And then you do, and then you damn hell can't remember what that place is, or whether the maid has mistook it for rubbish and tossed it away (Joyce Supermaid never does actually, you think she has, but she's actually just kept it in a really safe place. In fact, she's so good at her job she can find un-used condoms (i.e. still packaged) from the previous tenant the morning some of her children complain they're out of condoms. She does this while airing the room and chastising them on what dirty little boys and girls they are).
Back to the lost cards.
While I was in Budapest, Trina came to visit me, arriving at some ungodly hour like 6:30 in the middle of February. Where it's fucking god-ass cold in Central Europe (And damn you Central Europe deniers, the CE does exist, it consist of the Eastern part of Austria and the Western part of the former Soviet Bloc. Uh... Duh. There's even a university called the CEU, but uh... yeah it's in Hungary, and they really want to differentiate themselves from neighboring Romania, I guess. Only when they get back Transylvania will they begin reconsidering this geographical labeling)
Trina arrived and I was about to start shouting at her because she hadn't picked up her phone since last night, so I was starting to get worried... and then she told me a really weird story.
Trina: "Oh my god, my phone battery is gone."
Isabella: "You mean you've gone flat."
Tri: "No my battery is missing. The battery is not in my phone."
Isa: "Huh? Maybe you took it out?"
Tri: "Why would I do that? I was on the train. The last message I sent you was just after I set my bags down. I had a sleeper carriage with another girl."
Isa: "Someone must have taken it then. Maybe they really needed a battery. Man it's weird."
Tri: "I was sleeping on my bag. Like a bolster."
Isa: "You're a heavy sleeper...."
Tri: "Yeah but still!!! My phone is still here, only the battery is gone! Fuck, it must be supernatural man. Spirits or something."
Isa: "There's always a rational explanation for everything that does not require the presence of phantoms."
Tri: "Fuck how you gonna explain this then?"
Isa: "Someone played a prank on you?"
Trina: "No way, I was sleeping with my bag!"
Isa: "Okay, okay, but I still don't think it's ghosts. I prefer some other explanation other than ghosts."
Trina: "What else? Ugh, I don't believe in ghosts either. Man I'm still freaked out."
Isa: "You know sometimes wormholes might appear in the space-time continuum when uh... parallel universes brush against each other. One just happened to occur right at the point when your train was travelling at 150km/hr from Prague central station to Keleti station at the point X in xyz space, devouring your phone battery and nothing else."
Trina: "What the fuck. It might as well have been a spirit."
Isa: "I think you were just fucked off your head to be honest sometimes there's convincing holes in our memory that has nothing to do with parallel universes, especially if you started binge drinking and becoming a vegetarian at an early age... "
The rest of her stay in Budapest was peppered with me offering this ridiculous SF explanation everytime she brought up the topic of the lost handy battery and of Richard siding the strangeness of the whole damn thing (he believed in the homeopathic machine with the silver balls)* and Ruiter swearing to god there was a reasonable explanation for it all.
*This machine had 2 parts. The silver balls and the machine the silver balls were connected to. The machine was a box with electrical mumbo-jumbo in it. You could put in something you were allergic to into the machine, connect it to the mains, and fire it up, while holding the electric balls. If you were allergic to say.. dust, you could put dust into this machine, hold the fucking balls, and you would be cured of your dust allergy. Yeah right.
Hey SPG, have you been to China ?
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