Today, I came back to my digs in
Namur in order to bring last year's course notes and syllabi, but also clothes and food. Staple elements.
At 11 am, I went to the city hall in order to hear the mayor's speech on the occasion of the
Fêtes de Wallonie in Namur. The matter is this speech only started at 11.40. If there is any non-Walloon who reads this, I have to say there is an urban legend that says that Namur is a slower city, where people talk slower and… think slower. Even technology works slower. It appears to be true on some occasions.
Anyway, after the speech, we were offered a drink (beer or orange juice). I walked back to my digs. With no internet connexion, I was unable to do anything useful (and I'm not talking about writing posts on this blog), then I decided to go… walking, once again. I knew there would be another official speech to be given by Rudy Demotte, our
Ministre-président.
I climbed at the top of the
Citadel, and so did official vehicules transporting ambassadors, members of parliaments and ministers. But I realized I wouldn't be allowed to listen to the speech, for it was to be done in a giant tent that you could enter only if you were a VIP. On the opposite side of the road, roughly 50 people beloging to the
RWF (Rassemblement Wallonie France, "struggling" for Wallonia — how dumb can be!) were demonstrating. Rather silently, I must say.
Later, I went walking in the city, where groups were singing and people drinking. The streets were slightly being filled with waste. I walked and I nearly bumped into Alexander, that old friend of mine. I was glad I met him, because I hadn't seen anyone else I knew. We both went eating crisps (delicious food, believe me), then we made our way into the overcrowded streets of Namur. At 10, there was a fireworks show to be seen. It lasted 30 minutes — definitely the longest in my entire life.
Then I met another friend of mine, a girl that was living in a digs in the same building as me and with whom I've always got on very well. I spend the following three hours with her and two friends of hers, we were all drinking tiny glasses of
pékèt (the local Walloon drink). Round 1 am, just before my friend left us to go back to her flat, I was foolish enough to dare asking her "the" question (basically if she wanted to go out with me), because after all I was a little tipsy, otherwise I'd be too shy.
To make short, let's say that she turned on my invitation by saying that she wasn't interested in me and that I was the exact opposite of what she was looking for.
The last time I got rejected was 14 months ago, and the reason was that the girl I asked out had just been asked out ten minutes earlier!!! You can imagine how I was: destroyed, shattered, annihilated, obliterated. Something like this in my mind:
(Illustration for Magic card "
Obliterate", by Kev Walker.)
And I looked like this:
(Illustration of Magic card "Assassinate", by Kev Walker.)
Or that:
(Illustration for Magic card "Incinerate", by Zoltan Boros.)
Basically the "Wrath of God" effect:
(Illustration for Magic card "Wrath of God", by Kev Walker. Man, that guy's great at drawing destruction and pain! By the way, this is my favourite piece of Magic artwork.)
So, I was devastated back in that time. And I had to deal with it alone, because it happened just before the summer holiday. I had hardly anything to do to busy myself with. I don't like losing social contact. That's why I'm so happy to go back to university — even if I know I'll regret these words very soon…
Back in June 2006, I got rejected because of a question asked too late, or else she'd accepted.
Since then, I never practised courtship with a girl. Maybe because I feared I'd need a great deal of time to go out with a girl, but also because I'm hopeless at asking girls out.
I went surfing Wikipedia to look how to translate "se prendre un râteau" and I found a link to another article about
love-shyness. Here are some interesting bits:
Love shyness is a phrase created by psychologist Brian G. Gilmartin to describe a specific type of severe chronic shyness. According to his definition, published in Shyness & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatments (1987), love-shy people find it difficult to be assertive in informal situations involving potential romantic or sexual partners. For example, a heterosexual love-shy male will have trouble initiating conversations with women because of strong feelings of anxiety.
Dr. Gilmartin researched this phenomenon exclusively in heterosexual men, concluding that (1987, p.1) love-shyness "afflicts approximately 1.5 percent of all American males...[and] will effectively prevent about 1.7 million [U.S.] males...from ever marrying and from ever experiencing any form of intimate sexual contact with women."
There's also a list of criteria, enlightened by reseach on a large number of heterosexual men. I don't correspond to most criteria, but this one struck my mind:
(…) he is a male who desperately wishes to have a relationship with a woman, but does not have one because of his shyness. In other words, he is not a man who consciously chooses not to have romantic or intimate relationships; rather, he wants such relationships but cannot establish them.
That's my problem, I admit it, and I'm dealing with it. The proof is that I actually dared ask someone out. Real love-shy people could not. And most criteria don't apply to me, for instance because I do have many social contacts (I mean at university), including with girls. Apart from that, I also discovered I'm afflicted with
involuntary celibacy:
Involuntary celibacy is the state of a person who has not established an intimate relationship or engaged in sexual intercourse for reasons other than voluntary celibacy or sexual abstinence. The term is used especially for adults who, despite general expectations, have had little to no sexual or romantic experience.
Definition
An involuntarily celibate person is someone who fails to initiate or sustain a sexual or romantic relationship, despite his/her desire to experience such a relationship. Afflicted people may suffer from loneliness, frustration, (…).
They also say there are criteria, but just a couple apply to me. My case isn't hopeless, after all. I really want to have a girlfriend. I'll turn 20 in five months' time and that's one of my goals up to then (apart from passing for all my exams). Wish me luck!
Rudolf Giuliani is known to be the mayor that cleaned up New York city. The effects are spectacular: criminality rate decreased and streets became safer, but also cleaner. Big Apple is not a "dangerous" city anymore. When I went there in April 2000, I was glad to see that we weren't attacked by gangstas — in the 70s my mother was driving through Harlem in a couch (as part of a school trip) and they were targeted by people that were throwing things at them…
Hervé Novelli is a French politician, currently State Secretary of the Minister of Economy and Finance, among others. This guy was originally linked to right extremism, but seems to have redeemed. (If that is possible…) Anyway, I saw his picture in the newspaper and I couldn't help but blaming him for his awful hairstyle. Yet another combover. Shame on him, thus.
In our enless series of famous combovers, I'd like to introduce you to bishop Mutien-Marie Léonard. I wish you didn't have to know him — for he's a jerk to me — but his hairstyle is just as ridiculous as he is.
Gabriel Ringlet is another piece from my collection of famous combover. Once again, we can assume that this man is intelligent, as a well-known theologian and professor of canonic right at Louvain-la-Neuve University. But two facts prove this to be wrong:
I was telling you about Bernard Rentier and his "Kubla type" combover. Well, guess what? Here's Serge Kubla's picture on the left. He was born in 1947, is a member of the Mouvement Réformateur (the French-speaking liberal party) and I don't like him because he is one of the numerous advocates of the F1 grand prix in Francorchamps. (This f***g race obliged our poor Wallonia to spend tremendous amounts of money just for a so-called sport for men who've got serious problems with the size of their reproductive organ.) For I long time, I was sure that this guy, who had been Walloon minister of Economy (1999-2004), had a toupee. But I recently have had to admit that the hair was still naturally stitched to his skull. However, his weird hairstyle is definitely a combover: he combs his hair from the left to the right, because he doesn't have any hair left in the middle. That's why you'll never see him walking against the wind.
He's probably gonna shoot me for saying that!!!
It seems that many university rectors have a sickness in common: the combover. As you can see on this picture of Bernard Rentier, who's in charge of the Université de Liège, the combover is kind of the typical haircut for a university headmaster, just like Michel Scheuer, who I was telling you about in a previous post). Both smart guys, but both looking like idiots. This world is definitely silly.
I climbed at the top of the Citadel, and so did official vehicules transporting ambassadors, members of parliaments and ministers. But I realized I wouldn't be allowed to listen to the speech, for it was to be done in a giant tent that you could enter only if you were a VIP. On the opposite side of the road, roughly 50 people beloging to the RWF (Rassemblement Wallonie France, "struggling" for Wallonia — how dumb can be!) were demonstrating. Rather silently, I must say.
(Illustration of Magic card "Assassinate", by Kev Walker.)
(Illustration for Magic card "Incinerate", by Zoltan Boros.)
(Illustration for Magic card "Wrath of God", by Kev Walker. Man, that guy's great at drawing destruction and pain! By the way, this is my favourite piece of Magic artwork.)
This picture was probably taken exactly six years ago…
Yummy! Who's feeling like having an ice-cream? This girl apparently perfers licking the rubbish bin.
Praised be our Lord, Jesus Cat!
"Don't try this at home."
To smoke or not to smoke: that is the question.
Who's never suffered from an Error 404, especially on Yahoo?
This should be given the award of the worse matched advertisement.
Dumb and Smarter.
Oh, look, new fashionable panties with carefully designed images hit the stores! I gotta have one!
Yeah, as you can see, this guy is part of the large community of man who are too scared of showing bald flesh on their skulls… His name is Michel Doomst. He's thus the mayor of Gooik, as I said above. He's also a member of Parliament. His party is the CD&V, the leading party in Flanders. The first time I saw him, it was of course on TV. The first thing that came across my mind was yelling: "COMBOVER!" Indeed, as you can see several threads of hair were combed towards his fronthead, giving him that ridiculous appearance. If I were living in this remote village of Gooik, I surely wouldn't vote for this man. If you drop an "o" in his name and add an "e" at the end of it, you have the word "domste", which means "silliest". Quod erat demonstrandum. (Or if you just drop "st", you're left alone with someone called "Doom". A Doom that's not even a judge… What a pity. [Explanation for ignorants (if any): I'm cleverly referring, as an Easter Egg, to the brillant "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" with Christopher Lloyd playing a certain Judge Doom.])
By the way, and before I go, this Michel Doomst appeared on TV because he was (and still is) an eager advocate of the so-called splitsing van de kieskring Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde. If you don't know what this awkward thing is, don't try to find out what it is: it's a symbollical division of a voting district around Brussels that is demanded by Flemish politicians. It appears that this division would cost several Flemish seats in the Parliament, but they don't seem to have noticed that… Anyway, that's an issue that they absolutely want to discuss as soon as the government is set. And for the record, the elections weren't taking place last sunday, but… nearly 90 days ago, on 10 July!!! … "At snail's pace", as they say.
In comparison to the cat I showed to you yesterday, this dog shown on the left is one of my favourites. It's called "dogue de bordeaux", just like the one we see in the terrific film Turner & Hooch with Tom Hanks, about a cop who's got to team with a dog who witnessed a murder. Anyway, this dog just looks awesome. It has a "je-ne-sais-quoi" to it… Maybe it's due to the eyes: when you face it, you fall in love.
