Tuesday, November 08, 2005

It is common knowledge that I have a superpower. Don't pretend that you don't know. It's common knowledge. Everybody knows. Everyone. But along with my long-standing and well-developed power to incorrectly cite bibliographical information in any notation style at any given time regardless of prior preparation or instruction, I have discovered that I have yet another, a Secondary Power, if you will. It breaks down like this:

Superpowers as a general rule can be divided into Main and Secondary catagories. For example: Galactus, Destoyer of Worlds can, as his Main power, well, devour entire worlds along with thier inhabitants' while belching fumes of pure evil and unmitigated self-infatuation, but he's also GREAT with kids, and can do a bad-ass Donald Duck impression when the situation requires. It never fails to lighten the mood of any inter-galactic refugee camp. He's a hit at parties. He doesn't normally let this out, you know, for obvious reasons, but we're cool, so it's OK. True be told, we're nigh Homies. But that's beside the point.

The point is, that besides my powerful ability to incorrectly cite things, I also attract random events. This is my secondary power. Since arriving in Germany, I have had a man open the phone booth while I was talking with my brother to lean in and make the sound like a telephone ringing, after which he walked away laughing, and have had a Polish man offer to sell me his cell phone out of his pocket while asking about minimum wage and working condition in the United States. Weird. When I said I didn't want his phone, he just disappeared.

I should say that this post is ommiting certain events in the United States, but since some of them are frankly disgusting, I won't mention it. OK, so only one is disgusting, but you get the point. The rest are just annoying.

TO THE POINT, MAN!

OK, sorry. Yesterday while walking to Jens Markt (a moment of silence, please, for the Palace of Pork), a man yelled "Wohin gehst du (Where are you going)" across the town square at me. My "Who The Hell Are You Sense" was going off, so I just pretended not to hear him, but he walked up to me anyway. So much for that. Apparently, he had noticed my limp and was intrigued by it. Let me just say before I go on that my limp is rather pronounced right, because I pulled some muscle sometime, somewhere, somehow, and it really hurts to walk pretty much any considerable distance at the moment.

His little brother, he said, limps just the same way. OK, that's nice. At this point, I was torn: my brain was about to explode trying to understand what this whole conversation meant, but he was a nice guy at the same time. "Where is your brother from," I ask.

"Afghanistan."

"Where are you from?"

"Iraq."

Huh? My German's not great, but it's not that bad. Then he goes on to talk about his brother's limp, whether it's my foot that's bothering me or something else, about hospitals and care for orthopedic problem, etc, at which point I tell him I think I hurt myself somehow. That confused the hell out of him. He just stared. "How do you like Germany," he asked, "is it better than America (I had already told him I wasn't German)? Is the work good in America?" And so on, and so on. Then we shook hands, said "Tschüß," and walked our seperate ways. That was it. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, and I'm not going to try to figure it out. This stuff just seems to happen to me.

It's my superpower.

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