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?