I have spent most of my weekend in the capital of the Basque Country, named Vitoria-Gasteiz. I traveled there by train because on Sunday I had to pass an exam that would determine how often they would keep calling me to work as an IT guy at the local public health care organization, for which I’ve worked on-and-off since 2018.

Half of the city was upended because it happened to be hosting the Ironman Triathlon at the same time, which filled most of the hotels. I ended up spending my Saturday night in a two-star hotel with rusted lamps, and that seemed to have been built in the late sixties or seventies. Check out the photos I took:

I didn’t appreciate the whole vibe of that area, so I didn’t dare leave my valuables inside the room. That night, a couple of dickheads spent about two hours having a shouting match in a nearby alley.

Big cities make my head pound due to the noise and to being surrounded by the dangerous, unpredictable beasts known as human beings. I don’t understand why anybody would willingly want to live in such a place. Dazed, wanting to spend that Saturday afternoon productively, I made the worst mistake of my life by visiting the local museum of modern art.

I was assaulted by the muddle of abstract words grasping at coherence that passed for the exhibition labels, by doodles that an eight-year-old would be embarrassed to show to his or her parents, by sculptures that resembled refuse, etc. Most of it done with a pompous sense of self-importance, a disdain for beauty, and a rejection of meaning itself. I came to the obvious conclusion that, in my daze, I had wandered into a den of marxism. A couple of exhibitions later I was standing in a large room, empty other than for the film that was being projected and that featured footage such as a sunny sky, waves coming on to shore, a hand peeling a fruit. When the credits rolled, I turned into this GIF of DiCaprio:

The mastermind behind the video, a Basque woman, proudly identified herself as belonging to the communist party, and added that when she traveled to California, she contacted a local communist organization in part to help her put together the film. How heart-warming. Fuck you communists and your CBDC.

On Sunday I visited a museum of natural sciences, where I stared at fossils, rocks, and taxidermied animals. They had an exhibition of drawings made by schoolchildren, featuring the animals and insects they liked the most, and they were lovely.

Anyway, I passed the exam, scoring 62. Perhaps I should be content; the shitheads in charge of putting together the exams for this organization never fail to screw up somehow or pick questions that are rarely related to our job as computer technicians; it has happened for the four exams of this type I’ve suffered through. In this case it was even worse: we were given a list of 266 questions featuring laws and normatives whose contents often seemed arbitrary, and I had gone out of my way to code in Python a system that would allow me to nail them, as they would make up about twenty-five percent of the exam. It worked so well that I was regularly passing those mock exams in Python with scores of 95-100%. But the imbeciles who decided the exam questions ended up mistakenly putting in laws and normatives from a different department (stuff related to contracts and wages). All those questions ended up being invalidated. I wasted days and days studying the obnoxious 266 questions that corresponded to our department. Regarding the remaining questions in the exam, they were more often than not only tangentially related to how we spend our time at the office, but that’s par for the course.

Twenty-seven people with a disability equal or higher than 33% signed up for this exam, including myself (thank you high-functioning autism, OCD, IBS, a pituitary gland tumor, and clinical depression), and I’m proud to say that my otherwise low score of 62 bested them all. King of the retards!

The train that would carry me back home came in late. I got off at Donostia, where I waited for another train that was coming late. When we reached the Renfe station at Irún, the employees in charge of letting us pass through the gates had clocked out, and two security guards ended up helping us through. I arrived home at half past nine. Thirty minutes later I went to bed so that the next day, at six in the morning, I could wake up reasonably refreshed. New week of work and all that.

I’m beat, back at the office and being forced to listen, except when I shove earplugs deep into my earholes, to the neuron-killing conversations of my coworkers. This afternoon I hope to finally start writing the next scene of my novel. Other than that, I’m eagerly waiting for Baldur’s Gate 3 (possibly the best RPG in twenty years) to come out on the 3rd of August, and Starfield (the first single-player Bethesda RPG since Fallout 4, and their most ambitious), that comes out in September.