June 27, 2003 : one just has to laugh.

No really. I just have to laugh about the order of events lately. I can always say, "when it rains, it pours" but I didn't know that it could be thunderstorms. So now Eva and I just chalk up these adversities as laughable matter.

It is no real laughing matter that our little car is in the parkinglot of a Nissan dealership in some random town in Luxemburg. That's not really funny...but in the context of the week, well yes...sort of.

More laughable instances? Let's look at yesterday and today a bit more closely.

Thankfully Eva's mother and boyfriend (what else can one call him?) decided that we could borrow the Opel Kadet (also a very cool car) so yesterday I drove into Brussels seeking out the last-minute purchases for me to put up my part of the exhibition.

At the clusterfuck (there is no other word to describe it) intersection over by the park by our house, some delivery man trys to zoom forward while I was entering the other lane. This is not, of course, my problem, it's his. He didn't even want to be in the lane I was changing into. I didn't "almost cut him off" he was just being an ass. (I'm cursing more in this entry than I have in the entire history of the journal!) I pull up to my light, and he almost misses his light because he's rolled down the window yelling things I, thankfully, cannot understand. What a jerk!

Moving on along to Brussels, I was on a quest for fishing line. Where one buys fishing line in Belgium, well I have no idea. I went to a couple of do-it-yourself shops and came up with nothing, so I bought string.

I bought string as my only purchase in a suburbian Carrefours in Brussels, and me and my string stood in line in the 10 items or less line for 10 minutes and then came out to the Opel to find it not wanting to start. (I just laughed.) I called Eva and said, "Eva, you're not going to believe this, but I can't seem to start the airplane." (airplane being the pet-name that Rita and Lucian have given the car.) I waited in the stifeling heat for both myself and the car to just rest a bit. It's not that it didn't want to start, it's that it starts differently than the Micra, so I've just got to get used to it. Finally, it started like a charm. (which pleased us immensely)

On at school I set up my project and manage to get things in order enough that I figure I can come on home. (by the way, someone else was using "nylon string" to hang her project, and it cost 15 Euro! Since we're car-less, and on a budget, well I think my string was a wonderful purchase!) On the way home I start thinking about the week's activities, and I start coming up with all of the additional things that can "go wrong" over the course of the week to make it "that much worse." Outside of untimely deaths and catastrophes, I come up with "a missing wallet" which would probably send both Eva and I into an asilum at the moment.

Now I realize that no one will really believe that this really happened, or that I really thought that very span of thoughts, but I did. Sure enough, I got home only to realize that I didn't have my wallet on me. I had everything else I had had in my bag, but no wallet. I had taken the metro earlier in the day and was just positive that it had ether gotten misplaced at the space itself, or someone had very keenly taken it out of my bag somehow. Basically, I was a nervous wreck. I called to see if I could get into the exhibition space, but it was already closed for the night. Ah...nerves! It wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact that Eva had given me her bankcard as well, so that meant that we had absolutely no way to get any sort of cash...which leads me to today.

I get up this morning and as I'm driving around the block I notice that the petrol levels aren't coming up to the petrol levels I had yesterday evening. I knew I was running low, but figured on having enough to get me to Brussels where I was pretty sure (hoping) to find my wallet. I just couldn't allow myself to make it to the outskirts of Brussels and run out of gas. It would not only be embarrasing, but really, really be too much! So I rang at Susan and Leila's and asked if I could borrow 10 Euro for gas. It's not that I really wanted to have to ask for cash, but I couldn't allow myself to test fate, seeing as how fate has been pretty devilish this week.

Susan said no problem, and for her lending me 10 Euro, I dropped her off back in the center of Antwerp and headed into school. Enroute, I received messages of, "where are you?" and such, and I simply had to admit that all of this was pretty much "out of my hands" completely. Completely!

I finished setting up at Argos, participated in "the opening" and Eva showed up at the tail-end, just in time for us to hang out with fellow transmedians in Brussels. I can sum up the evening by saying that living in Brussels might just be the best thing to ever happen to us (on the horizon.) We ate out in mass dropped by to see a performance/exhibition via Agnes, and sat out on the terrace of the Walvis cafe until 2 something in the morning. We parted ways and dropped off Wim and Jesus at their place, had a cup of coffee, surveyed the room one more time (I don't think Eva has made up her mind if she wants to digress even further than living in a studio to living in a studentkamer...) and tried to concentrate with two extremely tired people and two enthousiastic people enough to coerce the dead into communicating with us. (It didn't work.)

Eva was open-mouthed sleeping all the way home, and I consequently took the Boom way home (Belgium's highway of death) which we try to avoid to a certain extent. Upon our arrival, as the morning was showing signs of a new-day, we climbed into bed thankful that we were both home in one piece, and that our stack of fate-responsible-problems didn't increase.

IN THE NEWS:
What gay men and women do in the privacy of their bedrooms is their business and not the government's, the Supreme Court said Thursday in a historic civil rights ruling striking down bans on what some states have called deviate sex acts. In a lengthy, strongly worded dissent, the three most conservative justices called the ruling a huge mistake that showed the court had been co-opted by the "so-called homosexual agenda." The court voted to strike down a Texas law that made homosexual sex a crime. The law allows police to arrest gays for oral or anal sex, conduct that would be legal for heterosexuals.