6kbps maximum upload speed. That’s what you get for annoying O2. Thus from now on blog post will be accompanied by the best thing I can scrawl on Windows Paint using my Wacom. Apologies in advance.
Now that I’m over ‘hump-week’, the week the language school warn you about where everything is terrible and you think about quitting every minute you aren’t trying to stop children killing themselves and each other, my actual physical hump is starting to grate like NEVER BEFORE. What I mean, of course, is the rucksack which is an essential part of the kit and without which no teacher at my organisation could possibly survive. In my rucksack I carry, on a daily basis, a pencilcase full of stamps and bubbles, a CD selection, hundreds of large laminated flashcards, a dolphin handpuppet, stories, attendance lists, handouts, a whistle, gum, mobile phone, book, painkillers, water bottle, tissues…essentially life has become more materialistic than I had ever thought possible simply because all the things I need to carry out my day at minimum effectiveness are so copious and so crucial. And like someone carrying a bale of hay with their bare hands, in an effort to keep most of the hay in the bale a few stalks are inevitably going to fall out of the sides, by which I mean that I am losing EVERYTHING I own which isn’t completely vital; I have been donating gloves to the homeless population of Berlin with admirable frequency. But now to the actual thing I am thinking about and not moaning about.
‘Die kommenden Tage’ is a new German film with Daniel Bruhl (a high-quality German Tobey Maguire), August Diehl (a low-quality German Sarah-Jessica Parker) and that guy with the huge forehead and glaring eyes who plays every single ‘Ooh I don’t like the look of him’ character in the film world. It is about a woman who, in the near future when wars over resources threaten to turn our world into a hostile dystopia, gets briefly into a tryst with a sweet bloke who unfortunately can’t give her any children. (She should do my job and then her mother-lust would dissipate for sure.) She then proceeds to make every wrong decision she could possibly make for the rest of her life, while her sister and sister’s boyfriend get more and more ingrained in an underground resistance movement. It sometimes takes itself too seriously without noticing its ridiculous bits (I particularly liked the members of the underground resistance sneeringly laughing about the moronic bourgeois pigs whilst lying on leather hammocks and vintage chaise-longues) and ends on a very sad note, but I still recommend this one; it remains impressively realistic even with the usual ‘future’ tropes of rubber clothing and cars that go ‘wooooooo’ and it’s got some good birds in it. You’ll see what I mean.
