Another day in paradise

Yesterday was a good day.

It is Easter vacation for the schools around here, which means no morning traffic, which means K has an extra 20-30 minutes in the morning, which yesterday combined with a scoop of her awesomeness to mean that those last few odd-sized slices of whole grain bread in the bottom of the bag were beautified into French Toast instead of becoming a misproportioned peanut butter and jelly sandwich which requires a kombucha in hand to compensate for the stiff crusts.

Good start.

Then I had a slow morning for a couple hours, got some errands done, then went to work.  Back to work.  Back to the job I contentedly quit a month ago.

See, last Thursday sucked.  I was sitting here, another potential job avenue fading into unlikelihood, and Uncertainty, Insecurity, Intimidation, and Stagnation were lead weights making it hard to keep treading water.  I could feel something in my spirit screaming, while my body felt simultaneously enervated and ready to explode.

Then the temp agency called and said my old job wanted me for a short project.  Seemed like it might be…“lifeline” is not the right word, but maybe a nice buoyant log for my raft.

Since quitting I went back once, to wrap up a project I had started but the client had cancelled halfway through.  The best part of the place bad been the people, and now there was nearly no one there.  Seats that used to hold friends were empty but for the ghosts of a thousands farts, which are not nearly as good of company as their originators.

As I walked out the door that day I realized I would probably never go back.  It was kind of sad, but just like you realize you can’t stay at summer camp when the summer’s over, I was okay with it.

Yesterday I was going back.  Not quite sure how to feel about it.

But I walked in and saw Catherine, my utterly bodacious Kenyan friend.  Turns out the project is only four researchers and a project manager, but the other four are all kick-ass.  Furthermore, it quickly became apparent that the project is actually bona fide interesting.  I would go so far as to call it legitimate research, instead of “research.”  I will be asking questions whose answers I am actually interested to hear, and I go so far as so opine that the work is actually contributing to something worthwhile.

And stepping into the main work room, who did I see but the charismatic Mexican, the delightful Ghanaian, esteemed Americans (2 of them), scholarific Belgian, and the beguiling and sensational individuals whose ancestry I can’t currently remember.

I walked out on light steps, going back to my old friend the train station, though it won’t really be familiar until tonight when it is late, all the commuters and “normal” people already home, just us curious after-hours train riders and the never tiring kebab/falafel vendor.

Then I got home to my fantastilicious K, who had made lasagna, individual little pans so I could have extra cheese in mine.  Fresh veggies.  A deep red blanket spread out on our great balcony (a major selling point for the apartment), the pillows we brought back from the Chichicastenango market in Guatemala, the little end table sitting to one side with two glasses of red Spanish wine, and a benevolent Spring evening sun warming us to pleasantness.

Eat, drink, talk.  Tea and reclining with a book as the sun put the stamp on the day and mailed it to the past.

Oh, and we found Ben & Jerry ice cream this weekend, so I got my chocolate fudge brownie groove on.

La vita é bella, no?

Spring is here!

I caught a cold and am unemployed, so today I’m puttering around the house.  Both our pots are simmering sleepily on the stove (the wok has the night off), the kitchen is scrubbed, and I just vacuumed.  Cleaning under the bed I am amazed at what a hairy mammal I am (our dust bunnies are actually their taxonomic cousins, hair bunnies).

Puttering around being domestic is fun!  Women really had it made until feminism went and screwed it all up for them.

It’s been salaciously good weather lately.  Fondling breezes and licking sunshine, that type of thing.  Flowers showing up like popcorn when you put too many kernels in the pan and walked away.  (Just cooperate and pretend you cook your popcorn on the stove, please.)  Spring is in the air, suckers!  With weather this nice it is actually kind of embarrassing to have a cold.  It seems like a really lame joke, like CEO-at-the-annual-company-conference bad.  Or an anachronism, I’m sitting in commuter traffic in a covered wagon.  The cold dates to a previous era, which most people have moved away from.  Maybe it’s just kind of like wearing…at this point I would put in some laughably obvious fashion mistake of the late 90’s but unfortunately I’m fashion-blind.  Sorry.  Tapered jeans?

But Spring is here with a friendly vengeance and the Belgians are emerging from their brick caves, white legs under dusty shorts, pale collar bones over new summer dresses (which they started selling well before the weather actually warmed up).  Today marked the glorious return to my life of the sound of flip-flops against the bottoms of my feet, and I rousted out my favorite pair of shorts from their hibernation in my backpack up in the attic.

…mmm…  It was nice to see my backpack too…

Here's part of the downtown area of my Belgian stomping grounds.  My grass stains today were acquired on that grass, and my caffeine buzz in that terrace-cafe.

Flip flop flip flop.  Sounds good.

I wore the new Moroccan ones I bought in Fes last summer, and they stained a wide strip across the top of my foot a nice tannery chemical red.  I feel like using it to kick someone who goes on and on about the free market.  Does the free market keep businesses from staining your feet with who-knows-what chemical?  Nope.

K bought a mud facial mask thing in Marrakech too, which actually came from India, and I won’t let her use it.  It is just too easy to imagine it being full of lead, mercury, and…I dunno…pigeon shit (oh wait, that’s the tannery).  Am I being paranoid?  Racist?  Funny how those two go together so often.

But that tannery gunk soaked into my skin reminded me of the children hanging out in the streets around the tannery in Fes…  Please read it without even a trace of levity when I say that I want to work with an NGO to fight birth defects.

But I am getting way off track.  Sorry about that.  I have been utterly mentally constipated lately, hence no blogs, and I feel the need to just put something on here, for crying out loud.  I have tried a few times over the past few weeks and have nonsensical little half-files cluttering up my desktop.  That thing about the weather was the most coherent of the batch, but now I’ve gone and rambled off.

So I’m gonna throw this mess up on blogspot and go read in the sun.  Barefoot.  And that's cool with me.

Hatchoo

Some mornings the staggering Beauty of the World leaks into the familiar environs of our apartment and provides a startling beginning to the day, complete with ill-advised attempts to photograph it.  (I have been so busy with school and work that my poor camera is getting all dusty, though taking it out still feels familiar and savory.)

Anyway, I opened our kickass Euro-window-shutter things to take a picture and had just enough time to look at it and be disappointed before I sneezed.  Then again.  Two more.  Today’s revelation: I have allergies in Belgium.

In California my allergies were kinda hit or miss, some years yes, some not so much.  The year I spent backpacking throughout Europe and Northern Africa I had nary a sneeze (I have a theory for that) and last year it hit me in Northern Spain, especially when I was working on that religious cult’s farm (remember those blogs?) planting corn, green beans, and giant gooey gobs of snot in every row.

Apparently Belgium is a sneeze-positive country.  Frickin great.  Not to sound too germaphobic, but when someone sneezes in the confined space of the train, I get annoyed and want to confine them to the weird little door-vestibule area.  Now the sneezer is me, and I barely resist the urge to stand up and explain in every language at my disposal (including enthusiastic sign language) that it is only allergies, not actual germs.

The really amazing thing though has been how suddenly and textbook accurately Spring arrived.  March 19 was cold windy winter, March 20 less cold, and boom! March 21^st, frickin gorgeous.  Sunshine and light breezes.  Cherry blossoms.  Flowers in the bushes, sexual tension in the masses, and pollen in the nose

Not long ago it was too cold to smell anything in the mornings, so I wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination that that second block smells like foot-cheese about half the time, and now I still can’t tell through the face-faucet that I now bear.  Time to learn the Dutch words for allergies, medication, and snot-rag.

I just quit my job.

I was hired at a “medical research” company for a particular project to last 6-8 weeks.  Last week was #10, and we finished the main part, with an additional 2 weeks to do the second phase.

After that?  I heard we are all going to get laid off.  No, I heard there are a few short projects for some people.  No, I heard there is work for English-speakers year round this year.  No, I heard they are going to make us into cat food.

Whatever.  In the last 10 steps to work on Wednesday the notion of finishing the project then quitting had just concreted in my mind like a massive belch relieving a churning stomach.  I was going to wave my hand to disperse the air and walk away.

The first phase was calling doctors and CEOs, who are notoriously challenging and whose secretaries in the US are frequently difficult/dreadful/bulldogs.  The second phase was calling business owners, and the expectation was that it would be a piece of cake.  They were collectively a piece of something alright, but it ain’t cake, ya dig?

These people were disgusting.  Truly just jerks.  When did it become acceptable behaviour to hang up on people?  Do their mothers know they behave this way?  I don’t want to go on and on about it…but seriously…fuck these people.  (Speaking of mothers, sorry Ma, I know you hate it when I swear, but sometimes it’s warranted, you know?)

It is a rare thing for me that I feel the desire to do harm unto others, either verbally or by flying over there to smack some manners into these ass-mongers, but I found myself wanting to call them back, not to magnanimously remind them that this was uncivilized behaviour, but to tell them off.  And that just ain’t me.

I sat at my desk and felt a weight on my chest, sickly constriction, bone-bending disgust.  I could barely muster the energy to call another one.  And when I did, it was another craptastic wheelbarrow-full of chumpholery.  Repeat.

Everyone feels down sometimes at work and I had slogged through a bunch of those low points before, but it was suddenly more than I was willing to bear.  (Actually it was a graph of an exponential equation.  The x-axis is time, and the y-axis is soul-drainage.  It was already an upward slope, but all of a sudden that shit took off.)

So maybe I am a wimp who couldn’t stick it out.  Couldn’t finish what he started.

Or maybe I am courageous enough to leave something once it passes a threshold of suckiness, despite the inner obligation-voices telling me I should stay, obey the comfort of a reliable paycheck, don’t hope for more.

I have too much love for my beautiful soul to mistreat it like that.

When I look at the blank faces of rush hour commuters, their road rage as they go to and from jobs they don’t love or even like, or I hear the universal small-talk of hating one’s job, it feels like disappointment.

Disappointment that this is all life is.

This disappointment doesn’t occur on playgrounds.  Or at junior high school dances.  Or at graduation ceremonies as valedictorians spout clichés about finishing one chapter and beginning another, or lighting candles to light the future, or any of that shit.

When does that enthusiasm and optimism die?  Is it inevitable?  Is it as universal as I feared, sitting on a train full of people who didn’t even think about interacting with each other?

Back at the job, I will miss are the people.  I won’t be there for the last week, as everyone winds down together, and says goodbye with awareness and pacing.  I said goodbye as I was walking out the door, basically.  Literally in several cases.  There are some people I didn’t even say goodbye to.

But tomorrow I will go to class, run an errand, then fucking go home.  Make dinner for K.  Go to the gym.  Go to bed relaxed.  Not annoy anyone.  Read.  Did I mention actually SEE my girlfriend?  Have a conversation with her that doesn’t consist of “hello, how was work, good, me too, good night.”

After quitting, I came home and starting making a surprise dinner for K.  I stood in the bathroom window, pinning the cutting board against the windowsill so I could watch for her to get home, so I could call her as she was coming up the stairs and ask “what do you want to have for dinner…together?  Surprise!” as she was opening the door.  But it turns out, not wanting to spend another night here alone, she had gone to her parent’s house to have dinner there.

While inconvenient for my attempts at a surprise, that really underlined that I made the right choice.  I have no idea if I will be able to find anything better or if I will regret walking out of the giant fart-container that was the call center, but come on home, babe, I’m here again.

Well hello my friend.

Another Midnight post...uh oh.  But I kinda think I should put something else on here to move any mention of prostitutes further down the page (my girlfriend's mom reads this blog, man).  Of course, by discussing that I have immediately defeated the purpose...too bad my honestly clause of the night prevents any usage of the backspace key.

Oh and I was thinking, on the theme of the word "arguement" coming to be customarily more combative than it presumably used to be, I'd say the same goes for "provoke." That word brings to mind (for me at least) images of bullies on the playground, world leaders, and maybe idiots at the zoo (a perfectly natural grouping), but nothing, for example, thought-provoking.  That phrase now seems innocent to me.  Or at least I would like to present that arguement.

At work we finished the main Saai Project (saai - Dutch for boring, though the online dictionary I just checked defines it with the synonyms "anodyne, jejune, prosy" so now I just need an English-English translator) and the company took us all out to celebrate.  I was expecting a trip to a bar, and was having the customary pre-bar discussion with myself of "wear something nice and get it smoke-stanky, or just go with a tired old T-shirt?" when they announced that we were going to play lazer tag.

To be honest I was sceptical at first, but it turned out to be a funilicious.  I am guessing the open bar helped things (actually I am only required to say that, as usual the conversations were awesome while sober, and only good as drunkenness increased).

It was fun to lurk behind barrels and peek around corners, both of which activities are generally considered strange at bars.

When you got shot the vest thingy would encourage you "don't give up, don't give up, don't give up!" which just seemd so darn kind of them.  Reminds me of Mitch Hedberg discussing the encouragement he gets when he opens a package and reads "try again" under the lid.  (Is making offhand referrences not a good idea in blogs?  Did I mention it's midnight?  Why did I capitalize midnight the first time?  That shit ain't no title.)

Other than that...awesome weather today, well above freezing.  The Belgians were out bicycling en masse and sidewalks were bustling.  We went to Leuven and had a delicious dinner followed by banana and lychee beignets with some other interesting ingredients I cannot quite recall at the moment but I think included sesame seeds.

Oh, and one other happening, but that deserves more than an offhand mention, so I'll post it later, unless I can't sleep...but that shouldn't be a problem.

Sweet lychee dreams to you all.

Man, I ate a lot of food today, or, where are the prostitutes? or, warning.

Are my blogs boring as all hell?  “Today I rode a bicycle home from work and it was cold.” Yeah.

Not sure what else to write.  I want to interview prostitutes.  Is that more interesting?  It is for me.  I want to know how they feel about it.  Do they ever enjoy themselves?  Are they friends with each other?  Do they have to work in a different region of the country from where they live?  How long do they do that work for and how are they different after their first two weeks?  Do they view other customers in line at the grocery store differently than they did before?

But right now I’m just full of great Thai food.  One of K’s friends is rather impressively sick of Belgium so in order to change her life is moving to Austria.  Not exactly a complete paradigm shift, but still impressive that she’s doing something instead of just bitching about it (maybe more about that later, if I am not overcome by chicken satay lethargy).

So to farewell her a bunch of us met up at a fancy-pants Thai restaurant in Brussels that has a Michelin star.  Sounds embarrassing to be a one-star restaurant, but, tremendously counter-intuitively, getting a star from a tire-company means you’re hot shit.

So we ate beef and chicken and calamari and scallops and oysters and probably pork and there were massive prawns.  Meat lurked or strutted in most things, but they brought K some specially made vegetarian spring rolls, which scored them big points in my book.

This place was kinda nutty.  They had their own brand of cloth napkins, toothpicks, and even the bottles of beer had a special Blue Elephant label on them.  Que chic, eh?

We went in there before noon, and here I am at 22:49 still feeling full and burping well-seasoned red curry.

Now, this blog makes no sense, and while waiting to see if I would post it I just typed up another one that is way worse.  I’ll post that one first, so an innocent visitor like yourself will see this relatively harmless one first and allow me to warn you that the big one below is a rambling stream of consciousness and really not worth your time, I just feel like I haven’t posted much on here lately and want to use up a few more of google’s infinite memory bits.  Why do I feel like tomorrow morning  I am going to regret posting these?

Yikes, don't read this one unless you are really bored.

I was lying in bed just now, full of that Thai food from the last post (the one with the red curry burps) and was thinking about regrets.  Or maybe Disney.  Or maybe large automobiles, I don’t remember, but however it came about, I remembered driving through Africa this summer with K and our friend Lisa.

K and I disagree on some things, but demographically we are pretty darn similar.  We have interesting conversations of course, but we share enough assumptions that there are a number of areas we don’t really wander into.

At work I have conversations with M (look at me, being all circumspect and shit) who was a cop in Detroit before serving in Afghanistan for a year.  A conversation about gun ownership or US foreign policy is more interesting with him than with…I dunno…a mirror.  (You get the point.  It’s late, okay?)

It seems clear to me that one of the fundamental problems with the US and the world today is that we are unable to have actual productive and respectful discussions with each other.  I doubt I would be able to be in a room with Sarah Palin for more than 20 seconds without having an aneurism or breaking something.

The word “argument” immediately brings to mind shouting and airborne spittle, instead of exchange of opinions.  Saying something like “one could make an argument that Top Gun is the most homoerotic movie of all time” sounds almost out-dated in it’s use of the word to refer to simply an interesting notion, not adrenaline-based emotion.  (I am wilfully ignoring the awareness that anything touching on homoeroticism will inevitably rile up certain folks cuz I’m being optimistic like that.)

Shit I am off track.  The point was that it is good and right and necessary to talk to people with different fundamental ideas than oneself.  That’s what I meant to say, and it’s late enough that I just don’t feel like editing, okay?  Fair warning.  (Albeit too late.)

One of these different-assumptions-people for me is Lisa (from way back in Africa and the beginning of this mess) who wholeheartedly embraces a certain zone of Christianity and its associate edicts.  Not to simplify her entire belief system into a single demographic label (because that is what pissed me off in the first place) but in a blog already long enough that I don’t actually expect anyone to read it, it serves the purpose.

During those hours and hours of driving across Botswana we could have been talking about any number of interesting topics, but instead we just sort of zoned out most of the time, then the frustrations and irritations of having spent days of low blood-sugar in an automobile with the same people further limited discourse so that when the topic of Disney came up one evening, I had zero energy or enthusiasm for expressing my opinions, and I didn’t particularly care about the 1% representation of them.  I just wanted to enjoy the sunset and keep a watch for mosquitoes on my ankles.

Lying in bed just now I was thinking about Disney, it’s portrayals of yellow-jacket-shaped females (are they generally wearing Victorian intestine-crushing corsets below their relatively voluminous bosoms and insanely large Maybelline eyes?) or its reliance on tired racial stereotypes (that stuff about all the “Arab-looking” guys in Aladdin are the villains and the Tyler-Perry-esque one dimensionality of black people) or the possible links between Disney/ABC (www.disneyabctv.com) and the military-industrial complex (way too big of a topic to mention off-handedly, but in a couple minutes of googling I show $14,598,158 in contracts since 2000 between Disney and the Department of Defence & Homeland Security at http://www.usaspending.gov/) but now I realize there are a million-and-one term papers about each of these things, and it really isn’t the point.

Not that I have a point.  It’s 23:37 and I have been typing this up for the better part of an hour on top of the dirty laundry hamper in the bathroom to avoid disturbing K, who has a cold and is having trouble sleeping tonight, and the only seat available is the Porcelain Throne and my thighs are cold and sore and when I stretch my back it sounds like chewing gravel and I really don’t remember what I thought might be worth getting out of bed for, and like I said I don’t feel like editing or worrying about coherency, because my true purpose is to make myself tired enough to sleep and you just had the bad luck to stumble into my midnight stream of consciousness.

So yeah.  I wish I had had better conversations with Lisa, and I suspect Disney is a massive modern octopus of corporations with tentacles in unsavoury things (Gasp, right?  Who’d a-thunk it?) and they could do a better job of not perpetuating our culture’s bullshit and I think, judging by the ache in my upper thighs, that I am ready for bed.

Damn, and I didn’t even get to the part about my other coworker and race identity.  But I don’t have the energy for the disclaimers so maybe we’ll talk about it some other time.

Man I love Thai food.  Man I love food.  Did I mention I am trying to plan a trip to Thailand and radically alter my life again?

Good night.