Mission Accomplished

So, I’m done whining. Isn’t it great? I had a 8 hour flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, which was ultimately ridiculous. Though it was very peaceful. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a turbulence-free flight. Based on my experience with Lufthansa and now my first German train ride, I feel quite safe relying on German mass transit.

Since I’m sure you want to know about every second of my flight, here we go: I started off by watching Date Night. I’ve already seen it, but it was worth a second screening. However, I love both Tina Fey and Steve Carrell enough that I could watch them in anything at anytime….including a collect call agency commercial from 1995. HA! (I’m Andrew Daniels)

I then moved onto the Bounty Hunter. Yeah. Seen it yet? Don’t. It’s absolutely terrible. I mean, I wasn’t expecting a shoe-in for Best Picture, but that is just bad storytelling. Why is it that movie studios can’t just produce a stupid romantic comedy/opposite sex buddy movie and let it be a stupid romantic comedy/opposite sex buddy movie? Why do they have to try to include some element of intrigue, some overarching mystery? They didn’t even market it that way. They marketed it as a fun date movie. It wasn’t fun, or interesting, and even Jason Sudeikis couldn’t make me interested.

Anyway, I then watched an episode of 30 Rock. For old times’ sake. Then, I watched an episode of Glee. Finally. It was a relatively uneventful episode (no stars of Wicked guest-starring or anything like that), but as I learned when I tried to watch a random episode of Desperate Housewives, that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you have no idea what’s going on. I’ll say this about Glee. It had some sharp humor. I mean, it makes sense that I would enjoy elements of Glee, as I absolutely love Popular, Ryan Murphy’s first shot at a TV show. That was just golden, but even then, I couldn’t hack the corny teen message aspect to it. And that’s also where Glee loses me. I like some of the music, but other parts are just like…..what the fuck. I mean right? Like, ok it’s just a full-on musical now. That, or they are the best sight-readers ever. Jane Lynch grew on me though in those 40 minutes.

So, because I still had like THREE HOURS after finishing my episode of Glee, I then experienced the massive fail that was trying to randomly watch Desperate Housewives. I didn’t think I could hack another feature film, so I browsed the rest of the tv selection. Luckily, they had the pilot of the Good Wife. Jason’s only told me good things about this show, so I was like fuck yeah let’s do it.

It was pretty good. As in, I’d come back and watch more. But the leading lady (Juliana Marguiles or someshit?) has this tendency to just open her mouth and let her jaw hang there while she looks around like a lost little girl when it’s time for her character to be anything that isn’t happy. Like, this is her thought process.

JM: K, it’s time to act. Ok, my character’s supposed to be confused. Open the mouth. Let it hang there awhile, look around, ok now I’m scared. Close the mouth, open it again….

And I didn’t realize it was about a previously married woman. Like, she’s not even a wife. Well, maybe she is, but she and her husband aren’t together. At least…wait. I don’t remember. It was getting hard to concentrate. Her husband was in jail, but they seemed on good terms…whatever, it’s not about a a senator’s quiet, quaint housewife. And neither is the Real Housewives of DC. Everyone tell me how this week’s episode is ok?

So anyway, I got to Frankfurt and was like ‘oh fuck’ but it was such a piece of cake to get around it was awesome. Everyone’s like ‘This isn’t really Germany, because everyone speaks English, so let’s talk!” And literally 30 seconds after I sit down at the train station, I find myself talking with someone from Wisconsin. So we had like a 10 minute conversation about Big 10 Football.

I know. I’m the most annoying American ever. I’m in Germany and all I want to do is cavort with another of my own. But to be fair, I then struck up a conversation with a German fellow who just got back…FROM INDIA! Yeah, that was fun too.

And did you know that German trains have wi-fi?? Fuck yeah.

So anyway, to sum it all up, I’m very happy and excited to finally be in Europe, and abroad. I don’t know what my schedule is the next month, I don’t know if I’m gonna chicken out and come home a month early (or maybe love it and stay longer??), and I don’t know what’s going on with my friends and family at the moment, but I’m glad to be here. Hence the title of my post. It doesn't matter what happens from here on out, I made it and I'm happy.

If this morning is any indication of how the rest of my trip will be, it should be awesome possum.

My train car smells like a hot dog. Oh, and as I always inevitably say after I fly anywhere, I would absolutely love to take a year off and just be a flight attendant. Who's with me?

- Josh A