Hors d’œuvre

There is a startling woman in my office. Her hair is black as November Noon, her skin as white as April Legs, her robes as dark and flowing as her repartee. 

We have found each other, through a shared tendency to kick at copy-machine instead of calling tech-support, and grimacing at coffee, instead of adding creamer. Last night, she staged a prison break: springing me from the office, into the setting sun, and into a huge-ish glass of red.

She then proceeded to tell me Scary Rock n’ Roll Accidents from her past (many of them involved electocution, all of them resulted in horrible scarring, she deemed them happy endings as long as they did not damage the guitar playing hand of the victim). I repayed her with stories from the allotment garden (quite a lot of turnips this year).

All in all, it goes to show that the biggest humanitarians amongst us may wear the face of fury, and be kittens, really, on the inside. 

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In related news, it turns out I am a prostitute. Why? Well, the Webster definition of Journalist is: someone who likes to crap on people but isn’t allowed to do it to his wife.  Which makes working in PR just so much grinning and bearing.

(Yes, there is a specific name and a specific paper behind this last entry. My one pleasure in life is not telling you which. Or not immediately, anyways.)

Going Pro

There are times when work will make you cry. Not visibly, perhaps. But on the inside. On the cold, deadened, suffocating, demoralised and steadily more cynical inside.

Some of those times, I have listed here:

-working in any type of system with the word “pro” in the name. It is bound to promise miracles, but in truth be but a very complex way of achieving what was previously quick work.

-knowing that your best friend is sitting on her patio, in the sun, tanning her legs and nursing a cold glass of rosé wine while nursing her sweet smelling baby

-being confronted with the ”logic” of the previous “colleague” who worked in the system with the “pro” in the name – not compatible with your own sense of right and wrong

-knowing that, as you have you’re five o’clock coffee and buckle down for another six or so hours of work, your travelling Boyfriend sits in a sunny square, having his five o’clock beer: buckling down for another six or so hours of drinking and munching nuts

-getting so maddened by all of the above that you inadvertedly strike the wrong key in the “pro” system, undoing a whole day’s work and thusly adding another six hours to your previous six hours of over-time.

Foul.

Mouse Will Play

The Boss is away, and so is the Boyfriend. One calls every hour, on the hour, demanding to know what is knew in my life.

The other sends his – scarcer – missives from some little French town, where he’s staying at what he has dubbed a “traditional” French Hotel, but I have on good authority to be a house of…mirth.

You may guess which does what.

In the meantime, I spend evenings with an assortment of friends, re-stocking reserves of gossip and potential defamation. So far, I’ve raked up an imminent divorce, a sharp turn for the far right, a bun in the oven, and a kidnap (!).

 

The best story, I got last night, as J came out for rather a large glass of wine. It was deserved: her afternoon had been spent randomly Googling her lover, and surprisingly, finding his as previously undisclosed wife’s blog.

 

(The wife being the secret, I mean. The blog seems rather popular.)

 

Which makes me question the sanity of any adulterer who allows his wife on the internet, much less his mistress.

 

Oh, and naturally, I have spent a portion of the afternoon persuing the entries of the wife. J, I completely agree: she cannot write to save her life. Cup-cakes my ass.

 

 

It Is the Evening of the Day

I was sent rather disheartening diagram today. It plots happiness at different ages, from 18 to 80. Not so good news, this time. After your thirtieth birthday, you are in for a downhill spiral, growing more and more dismal every year, until you reach -0.105 happiness at 58.

Why this diagram was sent to me, (along with a length of rope and some calla lilies), I’d rather not analyse.

On the same note, I had lunch with D. He gave me some very bleak news from our old Uni town, Lund. Apparently, the 500 year old building that currently houses the philosophical library is being turned into a janitor’s closet. The antiquarian book-seller I used to frequent has relocated to a barn outside of Åkarp, its place being taken by a boutique peddling Balmain. And to add insult to injury, the rat-infested café where I used to study has finally been closed by the health inspectors.

While I waited for D, I browsed some books. For the first time in my life, there was nothing that tempted me among the novels. All the available Penguin Classics, I had read. And also, I am starting to realise, that no matter how many A. Trollope I read and re-read, neither Victorian morals nor Victorian thigh-friendly skirts are coming back into fashion.

I ended up with the non-fiction We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch. But really, I have no great hopes that 450 pages on African genocide will take my mind of the complete lack of heaths in my neighbourhood, or the sudden impossibility of getting an egg-sandwich at my Alma Mater.

Finishing the day off in style, I experienced the female equivalence of impotence, tripping on my heels and whacking my knee on the cobble-stones. Had it been next week, my bones would probably have shattered in brittle shards. Or rather, had my knees not been swathed in age-related cellulites.  

Oh, and about the diagram? Apparently, suddenly at sixty, you perk up. I suppose it is the promise of imminent release from the misery that is life that cheers those final years.

I Left My Heart In San Brantevik

You wait all winter for it. Through hail and sleeth, you grit your teeth, and think of those sweet rolling hills. With woolly socks on, and woolly mittens too, you pray for those glorious days to arrive. Easter.

The Man and I had the cottage to ourselves, no bunking with Mother, who’s biking around Asia with her 80-year old lover, sending increasingly cryptic e-mails from various dodgy internetcafés along the Ho Chi Min Trail.

The sun was out, and there was milky fog, and the nights were very silent. We drove up and down the winding roads, stopping to pick amber, stopping to eat cheese on the warm grass, stopping to sift though garage sales, and touching the icy cold stones of various bronze-age graves.

At night there was bread baking, red wine and lamb, fire, and scrabble by that fire. The wine and the fire made me loose at scrabble. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night, when my phone would signal new text-messages from Mother. “Rice Paddy” said one. “On River” said another.

Sup(pe)rise

We’re going south.

I am extremely pleased about this – the man slightly less so, even if he doesn’t let on, bless his heart. He has to drive us there, all six (or nine, depending on traffic) hours. He doesn’t have a lifetime of memories from where we’re going. It is not his bawling, puking niece and nephew who’ll be hopped up on candy…and so forth.

So, after work today, as I went to the (nice, fancy) market to pick up the (single biggest) lamb steak money could buy, I decided to get a few rewards as well. Things he might like on arrival. Things to add some charm to rustic country life. Things, in short, to be et.

Things I plan to whip out, surprise like, after lighting a fire in the living room, making the bed with sheets dried in the wind, and leaving him to enjoy his paper in peace. Things I plan to serve with a big smile, a kindly disposition, and the implicit promise of…well, let’s call it dessert.

Great plan, no? Only one problem. Wandering the aisles, I felt inspired by the poultry, interested in the cheeses, and enthusiastic about the produce. I bought a little bit of the XXX, a thin wedge of the YYY, some assorted ZZZ and a mini bottle of CCC. It was only at the end of my spree that I realised I sort of spent all of my money on stuff to serve at the END of the road – leaving no buffer for petrol to get us there.

Guess will have first opportunity to surprise him at the gas-station.

You Tarzan?

Back when I was a student, I used to work part-time in a bookstore. It was a small, independent affair, specializing in biographies on forgotten Jazz musicians, old-school detective stories, and comics. We weren’t insanely busy.

My prime function was to wear low-cut tops and flirt in a non-threatening way with the few but faithful geeks that were the only patrons of the shop. When they were at their advanced physics lectures – either as lechers or students, depending on their age – there wasn’t much for my Satanist, mulleted, diabetic death-metal co-worker and me to do but share chocolate-bars and chat. Good times.

My co-worker (who has since taken over the store) specialized in comic-books. He was very knowledgeable in this field. When he wasn’t telling me about his girl-friend’s tendency to shag other mulleted, Satanist death-metalist on the “sly”, he would dissect, for my benefit, the plots, sub-plots and specifics of artwork of different cartoonists. In profuse detail – as a matter of fact, he would often re-tell epic sagas frame by frame.

Which story I tell you to let you know that I do know a little bit about cartoons. Like for instance: there is always an arch-nemesis.

Cartoons lead you to believe that an arch-nemesis can be quite easily recognized. He will be a physical oddity. His fist, or indeed, his Mega Death Blaster, is likely to make the sound KA-POW. He may live in a ruin, he may have been raised in a cave.

But beware children. Cartoons do not tell all. Your personal Arch-Nemesis may also be sitting right next to you, sipping coffee. He may wear a drab suit and a frown. He may be paying your wages. He may be (Da-dum-da-dum-da-dum): your boss.

For my part, in my first job, once I realized that I had face-to-face time with my own personal DOOM for nine hours a day, five days a week, I immediately started fighting the good fight. But it is tricky, with this type of villain.

I considered turning up at the office in a spandex body-stocking. But my cape would probably get stuck in the mail-cart. I pondered locking him Forever in the Cave of Doom that was our canteen. But then we’d all starve. I contemplated a Trap With Jaws of Death by the coffee-machine, but the few scraggly London Planes that passed for greenery at our office didn’t offer enough camouflage.

And then, another thing. In the middle of this strategizing (I was hard at work sharpening a few pencils into wooden picks to aim at “heart”) something dawned on me. There is one SURE way of recognizing a bad-guy – whether he be real or crayon.

He has minions. And the minions always die first.

And the minion, in this particular scenario, would be…

( BTW, this story applies to past boss, not my current one, which is eye-candy and inspiration rolled into one and wrapped in silk).

Tomatoe Salad

Such a lovely evening. Suddenly, on the train home from work, I realized I did not need to be on it. So I got off, and wandered the waterfronts of Stockholm, sun in back and then sun in face and then sun slowly setting over small island, naked in its woods.

Came home, and the Man being out, I could indulge in real luxury dinner – sliced tomatoes.

The Man, while he will happily treat me to lovely dining and no limit cocktails, finds tomatoes too expensive. He eats steak instead.

His reasoning is like but not the exact same as I use to calculate shoes affordable, but a pension plan not. It is a very interesting arithmetic, and it goes a little something like this.

From the actual cost of a thing (A), you subtract an increasing amount, relative to how much you want (not need) A. Then, you subtract the amount that could have been spent on an equal but more expensive object (B).

Ending up with a negative amount, this is how much you will save buying A.

And opposite:

Should you find yourself forced to buy C, the amount added to the actual price is: the annoyance you feel at involuntary expenditure, plus the assumed difference to what it should have cost, had you gotten a better deal, plus the difference between the final number and the amount you last paid for an equal object, back in 1983.

Which pans out thusly: I just made a killing on a pair of really nice pumps, and was taken absolutely to the cleaners by the man who fixed the hole in the sole of my boot.

And I am supposing that this  rather subjective than gold standard reasoning might add some spice to the  conversation of two individuals who suddenly share expenses, but not, so much priorities.