Changes

President-elect Obama will probably have slept in - I wish I could've too. I hate time zones...
Also, I'm very disappointed in Californians - taking away the rights of fellow citizens. In Florida and Arizona I didn't expect them to vote NO on the ban of gay marriage, also one could argue that they didn't know what they would get themselves into. But Californians already experienced that the world didn't end when the first gay couples showed up to get their marriage licences. So why the ignorance and hatred? I sincerely hope that the Obama administration (ooh that has a nice ring to it!) will somehow find it worth getting a modern and secular solution for the US.

Other than that, I'm temping at my Dad's company and feel a little overwhelmed by doing nothing. Which on one hand is nice because it gives me the time to find my way around here, but on the other hand I'll only be here till the week-end and I find it hard to motivate myself to find out how everything works for only 2.5 days at the office.
Anyhoo, I'll earn a little money on the side and sleep a little better at work because of that. It's worth it.

Did they think people were too busy standing in line to vote?

What were they thinking? I mean, seriously...seriously? Fireing Brooke Smith was about the most outrageous insult to anyone with a brain and half the wits to use it.
Did they think the story would just be drowned out by the elections? There are better writers all over the interweb, who expressed my feelings already to the core, so I won't even start with the raging and fury. If you wanna read more go to Dorothy Snarker.

On a more positive note, my current job situation seems to take an upward trend but not wanting to jinx anything, I won't say anything until I have or don't have the job...

Also, gf and I will probably be up all night (damn time difference) watching the election, maybe we'll also live blog a bit, giving an insight into how bad the Austrian Broadcast Company is and how Europeans see the whole thing...
Which means there is nothing left to do but to remind you guys to go VOTE!

how to go in circles and circles and circles again...

We're back from Sweden. We voted.
All these things mean nothing anymore after an afternoon at my grandparents.

I bought these pants that turned out to be good pants but a tad too long, so I asked my grandfather - a tailor - to make them shorter for me. In return for the favor I'd drop by for coffe and cake.
That may sound strange but it is in fact more fun for my grandparents to make coffee and cake than it is for me to be there and engage in a conversation most likely to make me go nuts.

So while grandpa was tinkering with my clothes, I taked to granny in the kitchen. She repeatedly told me that her neck hurts (what's new?) and that the went to a gym class today which she didn't like (no news there either). Mom and I think she's got some sort of Alzheimers or Dementia or something (test results still unknown) so I don't mind her being repetitive.

But then she started to tell me about how great the elections went yesterday because the social democrats won. She's right they won, but when I tried to explain that our great coalition parties may still come first and second, but they lost almost 6 and 9 percent of their votes, which technically makes it a loss for them, she started arguing that the front-runner of her preferred party (W. Faymann) is most qualified and that he at least is not as weak as his predecessor and all will be well now.
In an whim of attempted self-torture, I plunged into explaining that the chances are very real that her party will not be in government even though they came first (insert complicated coalition system here), and that we might very well have a right-wing government for the next period. Her mind bailed on me and she kept explaining to me that this won't happen because of her very strong front-runner. I wanted to give up on that issue right there and then and my mind screamed at me to let it go and be happy she didn't vote for the right-wing party, but somehow I couldn't and kept on discussing politics with her.
I do this every four years after the elections. Lately, I've been doing it every two years because of the instable governments we've had. I should know better by now. It seems I don't.

So coffee and cake was served and grandpa joined us and we started talking about the social justice problems in Austria and I was blind sided by xenophobic remarks. My grandfather had voted for the social democrats, I know that, because he votes for them since he turned 18. But somehow the xenophobic rhethoric of the right-wing front-runner of the freedom party (H. C. Strache) crept into my grandfathers vocabulary and stayed there. He probably had watched the speeches and discussions of that guy before the election and this is what happened.

In a way I'm thankful that this happened today. Because now at least I can explain to myself why those right-wing idiots increased their votes by 7 %. But on the other hand I still feel the urge to bang my head against a wall.

Observations...

Am I really the only one who sees the similarities...?
Exhibit # 1



















Exhibit # 2















My apologies to Nick Park though, I'm sure he had someone else in mind when creating Wallace and Gromit.

The great country of Austria or why change will not happen here

As you may have known from my Shelfari on the right, I'm reading Valerie Plame's book about her being outed as a CIA officer. The book really got me thinking if it would ever be possible for such a thing to happen in Austria and I came to the conclusion that no, it really isn't.

We don't really have an Intelligence Service comparable to any IS of the States -that's how unimportant we are. We have only one Intelligence Service that can be taken seriously. They are part of the military which is a joke by itself. They are responsible for things happening abroad and apparently were (maybe still are) THE Intelligence Service to talk to when it comes to questions on the Balkan area. BUT here, no one gives a damn. Most Austrian citizens wouldn't even know the name of our IS (btw they don't even have a website, that's how secret they are!) let alone be interested in what they are doing.
I think - apart from it maybe being illegal to out a secret agent - no journalist would think twice about publishing the name of an agent if they had one, they simply wouldn't because no one wants to read a boring thing like that.

I could go on giving you example of how no one cares about Intelligence in Austria, but where I really wanna go with it is the level of political resignation here. There is a lot going on with the elections in September and all, but people are generally uninformed, me thinks.
I get the feeling that people only care about politics - and instantly become experts on the matter - in times of elections. I admit that happens quite often given the fact that we seem to have quite an instable government that can't keep it together for the 4 years of their legislative period (thank god they decided that with the beginning of the next, the legislative period will be 5 years). People love to complain though. Austria harbors the best complainers worldwide, we do nothing but.
Given the general sentiment of complaining about how bad it all is and that the parties really can't govern properly, I don't understand why people still vote for the same two or three big parties. Wouldn't it be logical to say, "It seems that these guys couldn't get it right for 60 years, maybe we should give the small parties a chance?". No, it doesn't happen, because that would mean change and a chance that everything might turn out for the better and who can guarantee that people will still be able to complain?

I'm thrilled to see a new party (LIF) on the ballot. It was there before (in the 90ies) but it's back again bringing fresh blood into the election "campaign". I'm curious to see how many votes will be taken from the other relatively small left wing party (Greens) and how many will vote for the new party only because they don't wanna vote for the same old big ones...My guess is the LIF will cause trouble for the Greens and no one will be in a position powerful enough for a strong opposition.

I'd really love to see this country change and open up and make step into a modern future, but I'm too frustrated and too disillusioned to really believe that can happen. Because if you get honest answers from Austrians, THE DON'T GIVE A DAMN about anything if it doesn't directly concern them.

My guess is, that being a neutral country fed the Austrian tradition of looking the other way with a concerned face. "We can't do anything, our hands are tied because we are a neutral country, sorry!" Over time this has trickled down from high ranking politicians to the average joe on the streets. People will not help you or do anything to improve their situation, because they don't care if they are not the victim and when they are they will complain a bit to vent. They are bored with foreign politics because we are neutral and nothing will happen to us anyway. They are not the victim, they don't care. They are bored with Austrian politics because politicians are all liars no matter which party they're from, what can we do anyway, let's whine and complain a bit.
Austrians are passive, we didn't even have a revolution back in the days. It even seems that Enlightenment is a strange concept to some - it's too risky, let's not think for ourselves and demand a change for better or for worse.