Life - a roller coaster

It was just a few days ago when I sat down at my typewriter and, filled by the overwhelming emotion of a day well spent, brought down on paper what I figured an accurate account of my current mental state – in principle one of happiness. If the rest of my time in Gmünd continued the way everything was going at the moment, I philosophized, then it was destined to be a big year.

A talented young photographer captured this frontside slide on my personal surf zone.
For more of his great works check this link. Copyright JG Sobez, 2008.

Not a day later, I found myself caught in a nightmarish patch of bad luck that lasted for some 48 hours. It has since abated, leaving me dazed, but for the most part smiling, in wonder at how the world has its own way of dealing with hubris.

It has to be said that SFG in the last few weeks really made a tremendous effort at passing for a cool city – tango events, longboarding trips, and student parties have significantly raised my adrenalin level and, at the same time, my overall contentness. Tearing down a hill on a piece of plywood at night holds unsuspected joy, as does the embrace of a stranger on the dance floor.

However, just when things could not seem better, life threw me a stick in the inconspicuous form of an E-mail - that I half ignored, partly due to lack of attentiveness (tearing and embracing do require an awful lot of focus, add sleep, that may be missing in other places), partly because I was convinced it wasn’t really relevant to me. It was an information that our school servers would be exchanged.

Two days later, when I was preparing lessons, smiling at the world and the birds singing outside my window, it dawned on me what that E-mail had really meant. My complete files of five years of pedagogical work had vanished from the school’s network. Worksheets, presentations, concepts for complete units, exams – everything had left for the electronic nirvana. My personal folder leered at me emptily. That one did it for the day - however it was only the first warning sign that the world was out to get me.

The next evening, when I had just consoled myself that maybe it was all for the best if I was forced to rethink and perfect all my working materials, my car gave up on me when I was on the way to Tango in Stuttgart. Almost without warning (I must admit I did ignore that red flashing light a couple of times previously; nothing had happened), first my headlights died, then the radio, and in the end the motor came to a sputtering halt and could neither be coaxed to revival with charming words nor with a pretended-professional check under the hood. The only noticeable result was that even the hazard flasher seized to function.

If there ever could have been any doubt that I was on a backswing of fortune by now, the incontrovertible facts were made plain on the Thursday evening shift in the boarding house. Charged with incredibly bad luck, I lost game after game of backgammon against any opponent willing to rub my nose in the dirt. Tired, sad, and beaten, I killed the lights and locked the door.

I leave it to the reader to figure out which of these afflictions affected me the worst. To maintain the balance, however, I can report that chances are good to retrieve the lost data (if the trusted specialist finds the time for that unpleasant job), the mechanic could not find ANYTHING wrong with the car, and calls it the will of Allah, and I did beat an unnamed opponent to pulp at abalone. So there. Ups and downs and all that. Hooray for boobies.