I, Muehlenhaus. U, Riedermaus.

Yes, I finally slept well and scholastic life is back on track. Amazing what a good night's sleep will do. I think I was nervous about the interview. I hadn't slept well for days. Quite bizarre, really, but the truth of the matter is that I am excited about the thought of teaching in another discipline, but I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I think that is what threw me off the most -- with the CIA I knew I was going to be polygraphed, and I knew I didn't really want to work for them. This, on the other hand... I didn't know how formal of an interview it would be, and I knew I wanted to work for IS. The mind is a real humdinger at times... it plays tricks on me.

I am working at home today cranking Bob Dylan's most recent album and working like a mad hatter on my dissertation. It is all coming together now! I'm going back to Donis Dondis and using her techniques of visual literacy to analyze political cartographic manipulations. It is going to be so cool! I'm finding a ton of good maps to dissect recently too. You know what is ironic is that, though Nazi Germany is renowned for their Geopolitik propaganda maps, the US has far superior, less campy propaganda maps from the same era. Most of them appeared in popular magazines, though, and were not as obviously tied to the state government. Life and Fortune magazines back in the 30s were littered with crazy propaganda maps, such as the one of Italy's ambitions in Ethiopia shown above. It is like a Edgar Allen Poe meets Mussolini in Wonderland!

Birgit and I are continuing our quest to be totally digital by 2009. Last night we nearly completed dismantling every single photo album we own. The pictures are now weeded out -- including a bunch of photos of people I don't remember from summer camp in 1984. The keepers, of which there are still thousands, have been sorted into photo boxes, which take up much less space and don't threaten to decompose the pictures with PVC or whatever chemical turns brown in 1980s photo albums. (Man, some of my pictures were actually decomposing in the album, inseparable from the page itself!) The goal is to now select the "best" photos for scanning. We hope to scan those and chuck them too. I have already been scanning old report cards and a ton of other childhood keepsake stuff that is covered in dust so I can just throw it out and not feel guilty -- Twins Homer Hanky be damned! It's been scanned. It is now a rag. Ha!

In other news, I'm bumming about the Matt Garza trade between the Twins and Rays. I'm not sure this was a wise move, but generally I am incorrect about such things and that is why I am not a baseball GM. Still, I liked the dude, and all we get in return as far as I can tell is someone who "might" become a good hitter, if he doesn't get thrown out of the league for throwing bats at umpires. I'm sure he will fit in well here in a state that can't even handle Randy Moss mock-mooning ("mock" mind you!) a bunch of Packers fans. Heavens to Betsy... whatever that means.

This winter break I will write up the surreal experience of being recruited by Langley. Note, I never applied -- they grabbed me at a geography conference and dragged me into a back room and then flew me out to DC and paid me in wads of cash (sans receipt) to reimburse me. Completely surreal. The place I went -- which was just like a Hollywood movie, with long white corridors that zig-zagged around led to nowhere in particular -- doesn't even show up on Google Maps or Google Earth. It doesn't bloody exist! Creepy. I think my German in-laws scared them away. Or that I hung out with a Soviet when going to school in China. Or maybe that my mum is former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's second cousin.

But what it really was, I think, was when I said I was an "internationalist"... the reaction of the interrogator basically said that I had struck out. "What do you mean by 'internationalist'?" was the response, as I recall. (He had a thick southern drawl and was inches from my face.) And instantly, I remembered John Kerry, foolishly saying that before invading a country to see if it has weapons the US should have waited for "an international consensus." This was in his first or second debate with Bush. The next morning Cheney lambasted him, with a ferocity that only Cheney could muster, for not being nationalist enough, even though Kerry of course has shrapnel in his arse and all Cheney has is a bum heart.

If the "internationalist" comment didn't result in a strike out, answering "yes" to the question of whether some people might consider me an extremist certainly did. Of course, I didn't know they meant extremist in the Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden variety. I figured they thought voting for Jesse Ventura was extreme. But it was too late to explain, because by that point my blood pressure was high, my heart was pounding out of my chest, and I could feel sweat on my palms. I knew the gimmick was over. They had caught me. I was just seeing how far I could go, because it was so surreal.

I'm not the CIA type! I have a website made out of crayons!!! I like Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson novels! When I watch Platoon or Blackhawk Down, I critique them as instrumentalist tools to foster a "collective memory," not as movies showing how things were. I'm not even god fearing! Cripes... they recruited the wrong person. But at least they found their wits and realized this.

So I took the $1000 in cash they handed me and ran home to Birgit and Mette and decided the CIA isn't as dumb as the book "Legacy of Ashes" lets on. There is no way I belonged with them, and they figured it out, albeit quite slowly. The good news about the whole thing? I made $500 off the trip, which I suppose is like getting a tax rebate in a way.

But I have to save something to talk about when I write up about the entire experience over the holidays. So I will stop here. If I disappear before the holidays, please send an attorney to Camp Delta. They "asked" me not to tell people about the specific questions they asked during the actual polygraph exams. I haven't... The above questions were simply warm ups.

As I waited to be picked up by my cab after the second day of interrogation and psychological testing, my day dreams of making maps for the Secretary of State were rudely interrupted as 15 security guards ran out of nowhere, drawing their guns and shouting "Stop right now, "Mother f*cker!" on a car that had pulled up in the circle unexpectedly. It was an extremely terrified mother with two kids in the backseat who had taken a wrong turn and wound up entering their compound's parking lot instead of a nearby museum's. I was waiting for my cab as this happened thinking... "Who would want to work for, much less become one of, these assholes?"

Back to the dissertation. Dylan's "Modern Times" just ended. I think I should pop in one of his old school albums now.

Keep your eye out for an upcoming blog entry in December entitled: "Mamma didn't raise no spook!"