Not enough sleep

This morning we were all up sometime around 4 am. Theoretically, Peter and I didn’t really have to get up. Theoretically, Christopher and Paddy really are old enough to get themselves up and organized and off to school in time to be on the bus to Munich with their respective classes without support from their parents. Theoretically.

Practically, however, it somehow didn’t really seem quite feasible. Maybe I just don’t understand, because I am not a 16-year-old boy, but I could not imagine that Paddy’s plan of wandering around Munich for two days with an extra pair of boxer shorts and a toothbrush in his pocket, taking nothing else with him (except his iPod and headphones, of course), was likely to be a good idea. And I couldn’t imagine Christopher going anywhere beyond than three steps out the door without needing extra money. Therefore, as penance, so to speak, for having raised our sons so badly, Peter and I got up to see them off.

Once the boys were gone, being up at five in the morning didn’t really seem like a good idea, so we thought we would just go back to sleep. The only result of that, of course, was that we ended up waking up late and not feeling very rested, so this has not been an altogether very productive day.

One of the great disadvantages of the boys being away (and with them, in this case, a substantial number of the kids generally around at meal times) is that thinking about cooking doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. After staring at the screen blankly for some time, I finally figured out that I had forgotten to eat anything all day. As I have learned in the past few months, insufficient sleep and no food are a bad combination for coherent and intelligent mental activity. Now I am just annoyed with myself for wasting so much time staring blankly at the screen, when I could have easily put a frozen pizza in the oven hours ago.

Prompted by association, however, I finally managed to make a phone call today to ask a great favor from my friend Aida, who generously agreed to let me take her out for a nice dinner on November 3rd. I keep seeing that date looming ominously in my calendar, and I was dreading it, but now I have something to look forward to. The reason why I want to take Aida out for dinner is that less than twenty-four hours after Amy was born in Southern California, Aida was born in Bosnia, and 30 years later Aida and I met in Austria, when our sons Paddy and Vedad became friends in kindergarten.

Now I feel better.

2 sentences

How am I to write a blog-post if I'm in a position where I feel it hard to write anything. Not to seem melodramatic, writers-block simply is a pain. I just read through all the latest blog-posts and feel the need to write something about Amy. About how I don't really want to add another post, but feel that writing about the democratic burp in Austria, or the difficulties that the final year of school brings, would be in a sense ignoring something. I know what to say just not how to do so. I don't particularly want to echo my mother, but...

I have to say how special Amy was to all of us, that I didn't really know how to react. That I still feel like Amy has to be there, though my brain screams the opposite so loud that it's almost audible to other people, there to make sarcastic remarks, just there, across the pond.

The more I think about the whole situation the more frustrated I get. With myself really because my mind keeps on racing until I end up somewhere where I begin to wonder how in Gods name I even got there. Even a thought like this one makes me think of school again. I must have taken the wrong subjects, I feel compelled all of the time to compare things to things I learn in history, which can get very disturbing.

I've been thinking about Joseph a lot lately. I think that I don't even want to imagine how bad it was/is for him. Yet even writing that makes me feel bad in a way. I'm so unsure what to write lately, or better put how to write what I think, or even what I'm thinking. It's constantly like I'm walking into the store to buy light-bulbs and forget the German word for them so I can't ask where they are. When it comes down to it, this short post describes my sentiment perfectly. I started out by saying that I wanted to write about Amy, I ended by realizing I didn't really. Here I am laying out my plans like I'm always told to do in school and I write 2 sentences about Amy.