Vienna by way of Daly City
I applied for my passport yesterday. There’s been all this drama and it’s taken me over a year to get my application in, for no good reason. Some weeks I just haven’t been able to justify the $85 it costs to get a passport, other weeks I just didn’t think about it.
But I’ve been wanting more and more to travel abroad for a number of reasons, including being obsessed with a young lady who goes to school in Austria. It finally dawned on me that this is crazy and either I have to go and meet her or else reframe my thoughts about her to exclude face-to-face meeting. And hey, I’ve wanted to see Vienna since I was like seven and I read about how entranced Beethoven was with Vienna.
I’ve had the application filled out for more than a year actually, but I also had to get a copy of my birth certificate and other stuff like that. I actually went down to the passport office in Daly City a month or so ago. The posted hours are 1 to 4pm, and i showed up at 3:00 and there was a line of about seven thousand people and they weren’t even letting people take numbers anymore. I was told that I should show up at 12:30 to get a number to be in line.
Somehow my mind slipped on this and yesterday I went down there at 11:30. I rode my bike down, which was OK. I got to ride over the Top of the Hill and locked up my bike, went inside and saw that they weren’t going to open for an hour and a half. Well, I took a number and went to get some lunch at a fast food place. I was thinking about Mays-Maria of course, because, hey, I was going to get the passport. I picked up a newspaper to pass the time and here was my horoscope:
CAPRICORN: Over the next four weeks you make a decision about the future of an association. Sum up the past year. Does this person add or detract?
Of course, it’s vague enough it could apply to anyone, but still. It’s back to thinking about the future and making decisions, which is not something I’m particularly good at. I just don’t have much practice. Of course, there are a bunch of other people that I should probably evaluate, and it could mean someone I don’t even associate with anymore.
Someone told me I’d have to get over V. recently and I realized that even though I don’t think about her much per se, I still have an entire worldview shaped by the breakup. My entire set of attitudes has changed and I do cling on to those ways of thinking. So that could be it too: that I need to evaluate the values I picked up only from pain.
Well, if fear of intimacy is what causes me to reach out to people on other continents, having a passport at least brings those people a little closer. It will be some small progress.
I’d also like to work in Europe. I think I could get a lot out of typesetting in other languages. English is visually a very bland language, whereas languages with accents and diacritics. Also, typesetting in a language like Arabic where the direction is the reverse of what I’m used to and the modality is based on predominantly horizontal strokes rather than vertical, well, that would be an amazingly cool challenge, but I’d probably need to know the language a little, which I don’t.
Anyne know of any graphic design jobs in Austria that don’t require knowledge of German?
