Vote or Die

Dutch universities have student bodies. Like most student bodies in the Netherlands, they have no power whatsoever, nobody knows who's in them, what they do all day and if they actually achieve anything. So, a bunch of lazy students (ehm... active students with an interest in their environment) take part in it and the rest of us don´t care. Spins like a kitten on drugs.

One flaw in the situation: the lazy sons or daughters of bitches need to be chosen.

I guess they could have solved it with a game of cards or a duel but that would have been too easy and therefore once a year university wide elections are being held. So far so good, aside from the fact that to have elections you need voters, and that's where the plot thickens.

Last year only 17% of students at the University of Amsterdam voted, and that is one of the lowest turnouts in the country. I believe this is mostly because the Amsterdam student bodies are among the most invisible, although the fact that we Amsterdam students actually have a life (unlike those damn Leiden people) might also play a part.

Personally, I like politics and I feel you should always vote, if only to be able to feel utterly betrayed by your political party the day after the results are announced, but I generally can't be bothered to vote for these student bodies either. Last year I felt guilty and did vote, but I voted on the guy with the nicest smile on the posters so I'm not sure that's how the system is supposed to be. This year again none of my friends are candidates (all: yeey!) so I'm down again to having to pick one of the 40 total unknowns on the different lists.

Crap.

Anyway, I went through all the candidates' descriptions of themselves and managed to pick out two. Since none of the candidates really had any surprising points (more freedom! more vacation! more money!) it's down to looks and general writing skills again.

(drum roll)
Candidate 1:


- pro's; seems to want to make studying more difficult.
- con's: studies language (not a language but language in general), which can't be good. Also, is member of a party that my buddy the Squirrel describes as 'the cool kids'
- not sure yet: makes word jokes



Candidate 2:



- pro's: history student (we's smart folk you know), also made the effort to make up a big comparison between a university and flying an airplane
- con's: made up a big comparison between a university and an airplane
- not sure yet: independent candidate. feels like throwing away your vote doesn't it?



So to make it all as democratic as possible; faithul readers (that would be you Merel and Jari) can vote which of the two and then I'll probably ignore the result but at least we had fun.

25 hours of flu

Yep, I got the flu again. Last time was in January (see archives), therefore no coherent blog with jokes and amusing stories but some random fever infested thoughts. Enjoy!

THURSDAY

3 PM: Jump into bed. With jump I mean stumble. With stumble I mean drag. With drag I do not mean the other meaning of ‘drag’.

4 PM: Bored. Start watching the first season of the American version of Queer as Folk

4:05 PM: Decide that, despite better judgment, I like the American version of Queer as Folk.

4:50 PM: Finally recognize the woman playing Michael’s mother. Nice to know at least one person still has a career after Cagney & Lacey. Wonder if Cagney & Lacey is out on DVD yet. Wonder how I can avoid it if it is.

5:10 PM: Text my friend Merel (not the Merely one, she’s in the UK watching 21 Jump Street 24/7) to tell her that I won’t be coming over for dinner. She texts back that she hopes I’m doing better soon since it’s no weather to be sick.

5:25 PM: Decide I like how Showtime can show naked people and not have Oprah or George Bush complain about it.

6:30 PM: Stop to watch the news. Want to physically attack former politician for talking complete rubbish. Consider this a good sign of recovery.

7:40 PM: Starting to get really good at the self invented game “Find the lines the writers of US QAF stole from Russel T Davies, the writer of UK QAF”. Wonder if English QAF would have been interesting for 22 episodes. Realize nobody cares but me.

11 PM: Turn off TV.

FRIDAY

7 AM: Wake up. Therefore start watching the rest of the Queer as Folk season. Ah well, made sense in my head.

11 AM: Finished QAF. Hate the ending. Officially want to hurt the guy playing the guy with the baseball bat (confused? Me no care… notice how flu makes me so friendly). Probably can’t listen to “Save the last dance for me” again… bastards.

1 PM: Text the Squirrel to tell him I have to cancel movie night. He texts back that he hopes I’ll be doing better soon since it’s no weather to be sick. Wonder if my friends secretly communicate with each other.

2 PM: Start watching Brokeback Mountain on my computer.

2.30 PM: Wonder if the sex scense would have been more attractive if they hadn’t been directed by the man who previously made the Hulk but by the Queer as Folk guys.

2.50 PM: Deeply confused. I was convinced that everybody in the world had agreed that a) Dawsons Creek actually sucked and b) all the actors involved should remain off screen. Katie Holmes was bad enough, do we need to keep Michelle Williams in business?

3 PM: Want to hit Michelle Williams. Also consider this a sign of recovery.

3:20 PM: I don’t like Jake Gyllenhaal’s father in law. Also, start wondering if, just like the sheep, Heath Ledger’s accent is also computer generated. Would explain a lot.

3:50 PM: *#$%^@&*^#%@^&*!^@^!&^@!!!!!!!!!!!

4 PM: Just fucking great. Wonder if I should pull out my DVD of Beautiful Thing, but figured I’ve seen enough gay drama. Decide to watch Oprah instead. Realize this is probably a contradictio in terminis.

4:10 PM: Text message from my mom. Hopes I’m doing ok, especially considering the weather. Am now convinced all my friends and close relatives spent their free time calling eachother.

Blackbird

There's a few questions life throws at you that you never get to answer. Questions like "If you fall off a really high building, are you dead before you hit the ground?", "How long would I survive on the North Pole" and " "Do I look fat in a rubber suit?". Questions like these, at least if you're lucky, never get answered beyond a doubt (although if I can guess: yes, probably less then a day and yés) and that's the way the world is supposed to be.

And yet since last week I can answer one of these questions, namely: how long does it take to capture a bird. The answer? The better part of an afternoon, with help.

Last week I was walking through the east side of Amsterdam with my friends Merel (not the Merely one listed to the left, at the time I think she was feeding mineral water to a cat that is not hers...) and Sarah and we were having a lovely afternoon. We had spent some time dissing 1980's pop music, people asking you to join charities on the street and Merel's addiction of doing so (doing good things is so 1999) and some annoying Christian girls who were trying to persuade people to give their life to Jesus.

The normal stuff.

And then we walked past some birds and my, otherwise beloved friend, Merel noticed something was wrong with one of them. Apparently, something to do with his paw. I shrugged and was ready to move on (birds die, women make less money then men and untalented people make hitsingles, it's nature) but Merel had decided that this bird needed to be rescued.

Why we had to save it was never really made clear to neither Sarah nor me. But we love her and so we fully cooperated in Mission Blackbird (actually it wasn't a blackbird, it was a meerkoet but I don't know the English word for that and I honestly don't care). First we looked up the telephone number of the Animal Ambulance (I did not make this up and yes we have too much money in this country) who then told us that, yes, they were willing to come pick up a wounded bird but we had to catch it first.

How do you catch it? Merel asked.

Throw a blanket over them and they'll get calm.

And so, armed with one of Sarah's towels and a box we went to capture a bird. A bird that did not really want to be captured. And a bird that, despite a hurt leg (paw? foot?) managed to get around quite well while Merel and Sarah chased it and I tried to stand as far away from them as possible without them hating me. On the plus side, I did help by explaining the situation to the people that were crowding the bridge wondering what the hell was going on.

Soon two girls, who dressed like 19 but were most likely 15 or something, decided to help with the bird-catching (or better said the bird-not-catching) while I was sent out to get bread for the animal. When I returned with my hamburger the bird had managed to get into the water and as a way of 'catching it' the two girls were waving the towel at it from the side.

Sarah and I were ready to give up and abandon the towels and we were about to convince Merel to do the same when this woman (who was either a performance artist, a junkie or both) emerged and asked if we needed her to go into the water to catch the bird. Amsterdam canal water, I should add, is pretty much black and the swans who swim in it gray. Merel would later describe the woman as "very nice" while Sarah and I preferred "a total lunatic".

Before one of us could tell her "Yes please" or the far more appropriate "Are you mental?" the woman was already taking off her shoes and socks and walked into the water to catch the bird, who, if my mind reading skills are still ok, was thinking "what the f---". After a few tries she did manage to catch the bird but the box was to small and it escaped, swimming to the other side of the bridge.

Which would have been the right moment to actually give up.

But noooooooo. Armed with a new bigger box Sarah and I were send out to get (there's three stores in her own neighborhood she can no longer visit) the two girls and Merel chased the bird to the other side of the bridge where the hunt started yet again. And to my sruprise, this time succesful.

We caught a f-ing bird.

The animal ambulance people managed to show up three hours later and when they took the bird out of the box we had kept it in they looked at us like we were 10 year olds. "Did you three rescue this birdie?". When one of the women (who looked like she was a founding member of the Green Party) examnined the bird she told us probably nothing was wrong with it, but they'd send it to the bird shelter anyway.

Saving those who did not need saviour. I felt like one of those Christian girls singing in the mall.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

My before mentioned friend who recently moved to a student building in the Northern part of Amsterdam (see below) has been complaining that ever since he moved in, he's hardly met any of the other people living in his hallway. This also means that he has had no problems with loud music or an overcrowded kitchen but he likes to have people around him a lot.

You guessed well, he's not from Amsterdam.

A chance to really get to know his fellow hall-mates came this week when a meeting was organized to discuss who should clean the kitchen and what should be done about the recent discovery of bugs living there (ladies, my friend's single and there's cochroaches in his kitchen! e-mail address available on request). When he arrived at the meeting it turned out that only four other people (of 14 people living in the same hallway in total) had showed up. Seven people were just not home, and two people were in, but refused to leave their rooms.

Right.

As said the meetings main focus was the state of the kitchen, but one of the guys present managed to change the subject pretty quickly to how he used to have an XTC addiction. He had been clean for more than a year now, he told them, but was considering picking it up again. Personally, that would have been the moment for me to wonder if he had been the only one who had seen the bugs. Another guy present threw in his drugs story, explaining that whenever he smoked pot he had to throw up. Thankfully I do not believe he actually demonstrated it, but I think we can safely assume that can't be more than two weeks away.

The conclusion of the meeting was that everybody was going to cook together the next day as some kind of team building. I told my friend he should probably stay away from drinks arranged by the XTC guy. You know. Just in case.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town (yeah, for the movie version of this blog I'm getting Sarah Jessica Parker to do the voice over) a new person moved into the appartment above mine. That in itself is not that surprising, that place has been illegally subrented since I moved in and every three months new people (usually non-Dutch women) take over the place. This one, however, has the most disgusting taste in music.

Trance.

*shiver*

Now, I understand people liking music. Obviously. I also understand people liking music that is not specifically meant to be listened to as much as to be felt. Barely. I even understand people liking music I hate. Sort of. And I understand why people go to clubs, listen to insanely loud music and have their ears ruined...

OK, I don't get that, but it doesn't bother me, so: go in peace and use condoms.

What I don't understand is why Satan's Little Helper upstairs has to play this crap from 8 in the morning until 9 at night (when she leaves the house for what, I can only assume, must be some quiet time) at a volume level that would make Pete Townshend frown.

Conclusion: you can buy up a big house in the middle of nowhere, put all your friends there and make the house rules that include paragrahs on kitchen cleaning, cocroach killing and music (both style and volume) or else you're fucked.

Dear Bruce Springsteen (2)

Hi Bruce,

I think I might as well be as open about this as I can be: our music maker, music listener relationship is in deep trouble. I'm sorry to shock you but I do mean deep trouble. I think we're not yet in the unsafable 'Tom-DeLay's-career' trouble yet, but I'm afraid we are definetly heading into 'Oprah-without-make-up' county.

You see, I thought this thing we had was clearly a win-win situation for the both of us. You sing about how crappy your life used to be, or about how your father doesn't understand you, or how you're confused or something like that and I sing along as loud and out of tune as I can. Occasionally, with my curtains closed, I even might have thrown in some sad airguitar moves (although honestly, is there any other kind than sad ones?).

So, we were having fun.

But lately I fear we've been growing apart. It started with your album Devils & Dust. Although there were some pretty darn good tunes on there a lot of the songs were completely lost on me. And with "a lot of the songs" I am, of course, talking about "Reno" (or as I like to call it "prostitute song nr. 1"), with the completely unnecessary sentence "Two hundred dollars straight in, Two-fifty up the ass" (enjoy that mental image friends!).

Now comes the news that you are to release a Pete Seeger tribute album. Personally, I am not a big folk fan - I can barely stand Bob Dylan when he's not plugged into something - but you performed this album together with a new 17 piece band so I was getting quite interested in this new work of yours, especially when the news came that you were going to do a gig in Amsterdam in a few weeks. But then the ticket price was revealed.

75 bucks for one frigging ticket? Are you out of your mind?? I could have expected this from Rod fucking Stewart, but didn't we all agree that you were the working class man's hero? Granted I'm not that working class to begin with, and I occasionally giggle like a girl but darn it I'm a Springsteen nut and I don't have a lot of money.

So I did some soul searching (and with soul searching I mean watching Dr. Phil bash some fat people) and I've come up with the following solution: I will not go out on saturday to get a completely overpriced ticket, you will do that tour and I will then read fantastic reviews and curse myself for not going after all. After that you will get into the studio, call your E Street Band budies, make an album that is at least half as good as The River and do a big tour with normal priced tickets, and I will then try to be present and scream "Bruuuuuuuuuuuce" at you at an annoyingly high volume.

Deal?

love, boris

PS. You're Italian-American, right? Could you call some maffia buddies of yours and get rid of James Blunt? Grazie!

Go North

A friend of mine asked me if I wanted to help him measure up his new apartment and, despite the fact that it was Desperate Housewives night (how dare you suggest I have no life!) I went along. Partly because helping friends is second nature to me (if you read this, you’re a Nazi… see below) and partly because this particular friend has a pretty lousy track record in apartments and I was rather interested in what he picked up this time.

For instance, he once rented a room with an insane landlady who didn’t allow him to have a fridge or a computer on his room and who demanded that he’d be home each night before eleven. On that point he decided to call the renting process quits and announced he’d move out the next Saturday. When he and his father arrived at the house, the lady had dumped all his belongings in the rain outside.

Currently he rents a small room in a house in the most southern part of the city (there’s cows walking 20 feet away from his place, I kid you not) that ended up not just being subrented to him but also the lady he rented it from, the man she rented it from and the woman he rented it from. When large water bills started appearing out of nowhere this was a nice warning sign to get the hell out.

From the one end of the city he found a place to live on the other side: a room plus bathroom in a big student building in Amsterdam North. For those not into the Amsterdam Know How: North is known as a pretty bad neighborhood with houses built around the 1960´s (need I say more?). An American friend of mine once went there because he thought it would be `nice to see how the working class lives´, to which I replied that the entire problem was that they weren’t working.

But I digress.

According to my friend getting there took only a 10 minute bus ride from Amsterdam’s main train station and so last Tuesday after dinner at the university we went on our way. After 25 minutes in the bus my friend admitted he did not recognize anything and went up to the driver to ask which stop we needed, which we ended up having missed. I believe I gave him the same look I gave The Squirrel when he admitted a secret love for James Blunt music.

After exiting bus 1 we entered another bus which delivered us somewhere in the direction of where we needed to be. But not quite there. We walked through a deserted mall and passed a snack food place with the name Fries Plaza, which saddened me for so many more reasons than one. We climbed up a hill to get to the street because my friend (and by then I was using the term loosely) believed he saw a bus stop. He did, but not one where the bus we needed stops.

In the end he walked into a gas station while I stayed around a DVD rental place to look at the Hooligans poster they had and wonder what the hell Hollywood has done to Charlie Hunnam’s face (I give them one week to undo it).

The apartment was in fact fine, and bigger than what he has now. The measuring took 5 minutes and his view at night is quite good (he’s on the 13th floor and even though North’s a criminal hell hole, with all the lights at night it’s pretty nice). But while I was sitting in the tram, on my way back to my apartment with my own kitchen and my own bathroom and more space than most of my friends former rooms thrown together for only 2 euro 50 per month in one of the nicest parts of the city. I wondered, why didn’t he just get a deal like I did.

Ah, I kill myself.

Realism Sucks

Last saturday there were protests all around the world against the Iraq War, which recently had its third birthday.... oh those military disasters grow so quickly don't they, but the logic of taking part in these demonstrations was somewhat lost on me. I can understand why people took part in demonstrations against the war in 2003, seeing that they believed that 1) invading Iraq was silly (I believe the term was) for many different reaons and 2) that maybe they could somehow make a difference and stop the invasion, which, obviously, was also silly.

The silly-ness (I'm planning on using the word 'silly' more often, it can not be that my bestest friend Merel's blog is more gay after one Johnny Depp related post than all of my posts in the past year combined have been) continues with these same people, although smaller in number, reuniting this weekend. Not to throw the biggest 'I told you so' party ever (that I could relate to) but to demand that the U.S. and the U.K. withdraw their troops immediately.

The point isn't so much that they're fighting a war they can not win (or even if they win probably did not really influence) the point is the illogicality of their ideas. Personally I have not been in Iraq recently (I'm considering going the Italy this summer, but I hear Baghdad in august is also very... swampy) but from what I've read it's a little civil war like at the moment, you know with the bomb explodings and such. Considering the current situation, can anyone explain to me how pulling out all foreign military and leaving security in the hands of the 20 soldiers and 6 horses the Iraqi regime currently has of their own would make Iraq that wonderful succes intellectuals like George W. Bush thought it would become?

I'm not saying going into Iraq was such a smart thing to do, and certainly not that going into Iraq without a plan of what to do when the country was taken over was a smart thing to do, but the reality is that it happened and now the situation as it is now has to be dealt with. My personal gut instinct is that militarily abandoning a weak country usually does not pay off (COUGH Vietnam COUGH). The other option, sticking around until there is some kind of stable regime and some kind of military force, is definetly not pretty but it almost has to be prettier than the former solution.

However, to all those who demonstrated in Amsterdam last saturday I would like to ask a favor. Could we all get together this saturday to protest the weather? It's frigging March and it's still freezing out here! I'm sure that if we combine our forces and have some good lines (ehm, first shot: "1, 2, 3, 4, sun is what we're going for!) we can break Mother Nature!

Sure as hell got a bigger chance than changing George W. Bush's mind.

Proud

I would like to get political for a moment. Granted I get political a lot (for instance when I call high school friends Nazis, see below) but usually on this blog I keep the focus on American poltics (my hilarious letter to John Bolton for example, see archives). But today I would like to talk about Dutch politics. Americans, English people and Finns (hi Jari) feel free to skip this and go straight to the picture below, Dutchies; this is mandatory for you and I will ask questions about it during the test.

Last tuesday we had local elections here in the Netherlands. During those elections about half of everybody who is allowed to vote goes to a local school or old peoples home and votes on parties that will then, together with other parties, rule their cities or villages for the next four years, screw up majorly and then get reelected during the next local election. The system usually works the same: the Christian Democrats get a lot of votes because their people turn up to vote and the other parties don't because it rains.

In 2002 we had a big political shake up here; Labour had been in power for 12 years and had been the biggest national party for 8 years. Lower middle class people felt the party wasn't listening to them anymore and they got their asses kicked in the local election and later on, after the murder of one of the right wing politicians rallying against Labour, during the national elections a few months later. In 2002 I was not allowed to vote since I wasn't 18 yet and so I had to sit by and watch the Labour party get the shit kicked out of it by the general public.

In 2003, after the government collapsed, we had new general elections and Labour made a huge comeback thanks to the new guy (Wouter Bos) in charge, unfortunately not enough to actually take over government and they've been in opposition since having the right-wing government screw up health care and social security.

Last tuesday we (I say we because I pay them 3 euro a month and I campaigned in Amsterdam) won 617 seats throughout the country, that's about 417 more than we had in 1998 (in which Labour did quite well). I, together with a good friend of mine, was present at the official Labour party where people gathered to watch the results and we was muy happy as the following picture, which was published in the Dutch newspaper NRC shows.