First we take Manhattan . . .

Still hardly managing at the office. It's got a little better this week but not much. The mind does flash to a million other places one would rather be. But there are benefits: when I'm done my driving crap, which is hopefully May 4, I get to take Spanish lessons, but much more soon and tangibly, in a sense, I'm going to Berlin. I love Berlin. I'm going to the Altes Museum to look at Nefertiti's bust (heh heh heh . . . bust) and on the Sunday I'm going to go see this ballet at the Staatsoper and it will be awesome. I'd go to the Aida on the Saturday but instead I have to go out and eat lots of food with a friend of ours who lives there. And it will be sushi because you can't get good sushi in Brussels. And it will be wheeeeeeee! Going to Berlin is like Christmas for grownups.

Am I building it up? Yes. The thing is, obviously, I'm going to Berlin for work, for a conference, and I've come to hate conferences a bit. All the gladhanding and grinfucking and not saying what I think about how evil everyone is gets to me. I should enjoy it while I can, though. Once I hippy out I'll probably never stay in a hotel again whose gym is named after the place where the upper Greek pantheon of gods lived, and is described as as a 'temple of well-being', and which charges Euro 85 an hour for a fucking Tai Chi course . . . yeah, I'm starting to hate five star hotels too. They're annoying and for all the little extras they flog - and make you pay extra for after already charging your business a few hundred euro to let you sleep on their beds - they're nothing but a way to keep the smelly proles away. But I've blathered about that before.

Well wah wah, me. Conferences are sending me to five-star hotels in Istanbul and Vienna this year, and there are children starving in at least three continents, probably on all the fucking continents, even Antarctica in these naughty times, and I'm still complaining. Fuck, I annoy myself sometimes. I have to keep reminding myself that while things may be rather uninspiring, even nauseating when you combine them with reading Commielit about how evil all the evil people you engage with and therefore you are, it's teaching me a lot if I keep my mind open, and it's letting me travel to places for free that one day I won't travel to, either because we'll live in a very distant hemisphere or because I'll be an impoverished hippy or because, no matter how much money I have in the future, the five-star milieu I'm exploring now isn't one I would touch with a bargepole if there weren't professional obligations to do so.

So I should learn. I should be an anthropologist. I should connect with the Pampered Businessmen in the Mist . . . they are, after all, getting to be an endangered species. With any fucking luck at all.