shimweasel

I’ve always wondered why coffee from the clubhouse was a little subpar. Turns out:

1. They froth the milk while it’s in the cup with the coffee.
2. The brown stuff on top isn’t chocolate or cinnamon. It’s Nescafe Instant.

Ah well. Happy New Year to everyone - I’ve been a bit quiet recently, for the simple reason that there hasn’t been much going on.
For a while it looked like I might get the job at Georgetown, but I heard recently on the grapevine that even though they couldn’t get an internal hire to come out (there being a very strong preference for main campus employees), they’ve declined to offer the job to any of the local applicants, instead choosing to fly a succession of temps out. While this is entirely their decision to make, a pettier man than me might have called them up and bitched a little about their lack of elementary courtesy in informing potential hires of what’s actually going on. Me, I’m just going to bitch here, to my audience of three. (You know who you are, you special, special people.)

In the meantime, my time has been consumed with XBox games (until some trivial flaw like lack of inverted controls drives me insane enough to throw the controller at something), programming (until something shiny crosses my field of vision and my ADD kicks in), and lengthy gym sessions. I went to a kickboxing training session with Hamad yesterday, and, to my surprise, enjoyed it quite a bit: it’s quite a different physical discipline to judo, and needing to learn how to walk again is a humbling experience. My right hook is hard but extraordinarily slow, and my kicks resemble the flailings of enraged chickens, but it’s remotely plausible that if I dedicated ten years to this particular brand of bad-assery, I might attain mediocrity. (We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars)

In any case, I’m out of here in a few days: I have a ticket booked for Bangkok on the 13th, and very soon will be celebrating freedom from the jackboot of Muslim oppression. (Hamad, if you’re reading this, you know I’m joking. Right?) Qatar’s a nice place in a lot of ways, and the locals are far more friendly than I’d previously thought, but it’s very hard for an alcoholic music snob like myself to live in a place where Jane’s Addiction and Cooper’s are equally haram. Ma-salaama Qatar, sawa-di-krup Bangkok….