Life reminds me of Fight Club the way it beats you up. Sometimes you just have to take it, you have no other option. When it became inevitable for me to attend training sessions for the old guys’ rowing team I accepted my fate, packed my athletic bag with a towel and extra tee shirt and went to the session. No, wait, first I had my cello lesson, where my instructor told me not to be so impatient with myself and not to get so mad at myself so fast.

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Got an inch or so last night of the wet stuff, good for snowballs and tiny snowmen. Not so hot for driving, so the ride to work took longer but that was okay because I had just that much longer to listen to Austrian radio, which is as scintillating as you could imagine. At one point an announcer, she does the traffic news and celebrity gossip, sang a Christmas carol. The DJ joined in. One of them played the guitar as well. Someone once said he imagined me here, doing a lot of singing with the family, due to the Sound of Music image thing. And we do sing quite a bit, especially around Christmas, but not in harmony and not lined up and not in uniforms. We sit down around the table and light the advent wreath – the candles on the wreath that is, between one and four depending on which week of advent it is – and sing. Except yesterday evening, we’d been sitting around the woodstove all day warming up and were so relaxed by the time we lit the candles that we blew them out again after fifteen minutes or so, too lazy to sing anything.

We briefly glance in on a random bi-cultural couple shortly before Christmas:

Miguel: You in an autoaggressive mood or what? Just tell me where the Christmas tree place is.
Alpha: “Auto aggressive”? Big words, little man.
Miguel: Grrr.
Alpha: Same place it is every year.
Miguel: Where. Is. It.

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They’re persistent.
Trying to get me to join.
Not the Witnesses. If it were them, I could just strike up a conversation about anal sex until they abandoned my porch.
The rowers.
At first, I thought if I gave them my first-born they would leave me alone.
But they need an old guy for their masters’ team.
“Monday we do circle training,” I was told. “Thirty seconds at one station, then thirty seconds rest, then thirty more at the next.”
“Mmm.”
“And so on.”
“Mmn hmm. Well, Mondays, I have cello, theoretically.”
“Wednesdays we have weight training here.”
We were at the club, eating fondue and drinking beer or mulled wine. The fire in the fireplace was roaring. The place was quite warm.
“Thursdays we have a less intensive training at the school. Saturday is more weights or something here, we haven’t worked that out exactly yet.”
“That’s at two.”
“Something like that.”
“This is for the four-man team. Sculls.”
“Yes. Although our ultimate goal is to get eight old guys for the single-oar thing whatever the hell that’s called in English.”
“I tried that once and thought I’d broken my arm.”
“We’d explain better how to do it exactly.”
“Hrm.”
“Get you another beer?”
“Sure.”
And so on.
They’re also planning a week-long trip rowing through Hungary someplace this summer. Every time they try that they seem to get rained out or sink a boat or something.
Today a kid fell through the ice on the creek next to the club, but only part-way.

I had dinner first, Alpha made something with wide noodles in three different colors, with zucchini and bits of ham, it was tasty so I calculated exactly how long it would take me to get where I needed to go and ate until the last possible minute. When I did my final Bat-Turn and parked in front of the dermatologist’s office it was exactly time for my appointment. Then I went into the waiting room and read a dog-eared women’s health and beauty magazine for the next quarter of an hour – “Affairs at the Company Christmas Party!” (two main points to the story, basically, “they’re bound to happen” and “if you tell it’s your own fault” which makes me consider sending one of the kids to Alpha’s office Christmas party this weekend) – until a mother came out with her pimply-faced teenage son and the doctor came out and summoned me inside.

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Happy birthday, kd.

A koan:
Three-lane freeway parallel to the river. From right to left, slow, medium and passing lanes. Today’s morning commuter traffic results in the following estimated speeds (official speed limit on freeway = 130 kmH): Slow lane = about 100 kmH. Medium lane = about 120 kmH. Fast lane = the sky’s the limit, right now about 130 kmH.

A man is tootling along the middle lane in a Dobl