Stranger in a strange land

Just back from Krakow. I started from Novotel Bronowice at 5pm, Polish time and reached my place in slough at 2:15 am, Polish time. A 9 hour trip, which included a 2.5 hour flight, what seemed like eternity in the various immigration counters, hours of passport checks, a 45 minute wait in the Heathrow airport for a taxi at midnight in the freezing weather and a rambling coachride from Gatwick to heathrow. Getting to Slough from Gatwick, especially when you don't own a car is painful in the extreme. Oh, and there was this really irritating lady who took almost an hour to my 900 Zlotys to Sterlings. But, all said and done, the real pain in the backside was the amount of time I has to spend in the Passport checking counters. I mean what the hell do these people do for the hour and a half that we are made to wait for looking/ feeling like common criminals? Just because we dont have European passports? What bullcrap is that. I mean what do they have on their passport that I dont have? and I still dont understand what these people look for in the Visa when they stare at it for three quarters of an hour. For heaven's sake, first of all, the bloody embassy has granted me a visa after finding me qualified to enter their stupid country one week before. What could have changed in the last 7 days. Things in countries like Poland are even worse. An hour and a half wait in front of the bloody counter when those having European, British or an American visa sauntering in as if they owned the bloody country? Ridiculous. Why dont they spread their legs while they are at it. What's worse is I had to wait the same amount of time while getting out of their stupid country...... How silly is that...... Here I was in front of the counter, trying to find out what was going one when the Immigration guy looks at me as if I were a bug and disgustedly asks me not to peek in to his monitor... Yeah, dude its information about me you are looking at... if you can see it... I have rights too.. I mean I am entitled to look at what you are entering in to the system about me..... Meanwhile a hundred copassengers with European passports have filed past......
Well... What the hell????? Sod it all... I am glad to be back amongst civilization again.

Extracts from some lyrics that I love- WIP

i'm sick of dour faces staring at me from the tv tower
i want roses in my garden bower, dig?
- The doors

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when
you're tryin' to be so quiet?

And Louise holds a handful of rain,
temptin' you to defy it

The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles

The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
- Dylan, Visions of Johanna

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.

While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.
- Dylan, Its alright ma

So now I'm goin' back again,I
got to get to her somehow.
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now.
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenter's wives.
Don't know how it all got started,
I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.
But me, I'm still on the road
Headin' for another joint
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue.
- Dylan, Tangled up in blue

Can people Get any cheaper?

Just when you thought people couldn't get cheaper JKR comes up with this!!! Disgusting!!!!!! Got this from http://contemporarylit.about.com/

J.K. Rowling Outs Dumbledore
At a Friday night reading from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at New York's Carnegie Hall, J.K. Rowling revealed that Albus Dumbledore is gay.
The revelation came in answer to the question of a 19-year old Colorado reader about whether Dumbledore had ever fallen in love to which Rowling replied, "My truthful answer to you...I always thought of Dumbledore as gay."
"Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald [an infamous dark wizard], and that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent, but he met someone as brilliant as he was and, rather like Bellatrix, he was very drawn to this brilliant person and horribly, terribly let down by him."
The revelation prompted prolonged applause in the Carnegie Hall audience to which Rowling reportedly responded, "If I had known this would have made you this happy, I would have announced it years ago."

Futility- Plot Development

I Got the list of questions from Elegant Variations. I am ansering this for Futility

1) The Passover Question: Why is this night different from all others?

Because it marks a change, a point of inflection

2) Who's my protagonist, what does s/he want, and what does s/he think s/he wants (it's not always the same thing)?
Me. And the Protagonist wants to be happy

3) What is s/he going to do to achieve these wants?
Dunno. Try and chalk up a successful career

4) Who's standing in the way of his/her achieving these wants?

Himself. Existence. Everything?

I am staring at this blank, white screen. There is this burning desire inside me to write. To create some thing…. to leave behind something. Something more substantial than the faded receipts in the drawer and limp, worn shirts hanging in the closet. I don’t know where I am going with this spurt of key-tapping, but it is more than what I’ve done in quite some time. Although, given half the chance, I would like to write some thing meaningful, a piece of craft, something like the Gravity’s Rainbow, but I am too lazy…. No, wait. It’s not laziness. As long as I don’t actually attempt anything, there is chance that I might be good at it, right? You know what? The whole scene is like the farce with the Cat in the box? You don’t know if it’s dead until you open it. Did a parallel universe come in to being when I typed in Key ‘I’? Did million possibilities spring in to existence through that one single act? Is there a Hari right now, tapping these very keys who goes on to become a celebrated Nobel laureate or a cynical playwright, a philandering novelist, a budding poet? Why even another Shakespeare? If all these universes exist right now in parallel, does it not mean that right now, I am in fact writing my ‘V’? Does the fact that it is not happening in this universe make it any less real? But then, there could be this universe in which I picked up this laptop and smashed in the heads of the couple living upstairs. Should I be guilty of that? So, like that particle that turns when its partner is forced to turn, will what happens on those other universes affect me? But then, the theory of infinite universes has not really been convincing, has it? Thank God for that! But wouldn’t it be fun to go the other way from infinite universes and take anything that is as completely arbitrary and whimsical as reality and thrust it in to a quarantined and completely closed environment creating a Russian Doll like Hyper reality. A mental Carnot engine, if you will, which feeds upon our desires and fears and projects the reality limited to its own limitations on us? Maybe that’s what our perceived existence truly is. How many times in our life are we shocked by something absolutely unexpected? The ability of man to imagine something that does not have its roots in the mundane everyday is nonexistent. We all create things based on what we know. If that was the case, God could not have created us out of nothing. We are in fact his image aren’t we? But we can’t just be physical reflections. We might have similar mental faculties to God, right? But then, I am sure the doll was sure that the carpenter’s son had no life because the carpenter painted the doll with his face. The puppet may have the dimple but nothing else besides.