Hummenah, now?

I have lots of thoughts, but rather than give them to you one post at a time, I'll just make one big messy post, mmkay?

• Caramel ice cream is always disappointing, and I know this, but somehow it has become my emergency fall-back flavor—the one I choose when I don't have time to think of something else.


• I broke one of my cardinal rules of life today: never buy capri pants. However, these were cheap, comfortable, and decorated with shiny silver studs. I plan to wear them with shirts that have 3/4-length sleeves and tell people I stole my clothes from a dwarf.


• My teacher Heinz cracks me up. He was supposed to be helping at the café counter at the school party last night, serving cake and coffee, but mostly he just sat around and talked to me and a couple of other friends. He joked at one point, "I can't just sit and watch while women work...so I look away." I had heard the line before, but it's about 10 times funnier when delivered to two women through a mouthful of stolen cake.


• Number of times I've heard the line "I hate students" or its German equivalent in the past two days: 8. Number of those times it was coming from my own mouth: 2. Remarkable restraint on my part.


• I've decided I'm going to start saving up my change to buy a house in Stegersbach. I can get a decent two-bedroom for approximately $50,000. They'd probably even throw in the resident chickens for that.


• Best ads I've seen lately: Raiffeisen's series of Hermann Maier ads. One has him lounging shirtless against a black background, promoting "MaierFire," a men's fragrance, and the other has him in a suit, baseball cap, and goofy grin, standing in front of a plane with "fly maier" painted on the wing (slogan: Fly Maier, Fly Higher). The idea is that Raiffeisen is the bank for all your business needs, but I just like the fact that they're a) making Austria's greatest, most beloved athlete look like kind of a goober, and b) they're making rhymes in English.


• Does anybody else have an irresistable urge to call Eric Bana "Eric Banana"? No? Just me? All right.