Tag: Life

Friends March 30, 2009March 30, 2009

Hooked

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive. ~Anäis Nin

Once a week my friends from London and I get together, nominally to watch The Office and 30 Rock but really to gossip and catch up and reminisce about England. I’ll never forgive Marie for going back this summer while I’m here, but I’ll be back in Cambridge for Christmas (this year with a husband. Weird) so I just have to hold out strong until then.

84_charing_cross_road Anyway, in the spirit of Anglophilia, Marie had rented a movie for us to watch and I’m completely smitten! It’s called 84 Charing Cross Road and chronicles a based-on-a-true-story 20 year correspondence between an American writer and the proprietor and staff of a bookshop in London that specializes in antique books (incidentally, a 200 year old edition of Newton from this place cost less than £5! Why couldn’t I have lived in the 1940’s?!). This film is absolutely charming, and I don’t mean it in the patronizing way that word gets used, it’s an engaging, delightful film and you get completely engrossed in the story. I may have to go on another Amazon.com spree here shortly! That and the next time I’m in London I’m going to have to find the real 84 Charing Cross, even though I understand the shop isn’t there anymore which is tragic in my opinion. Excellent choice, Marie.

coldcomfort1 But this incident got me thinking: I’m indebted to friends or circumstance for so many of life’s little gems. Way back when I was living in Micronesia my friend Biscotti Rose, during one of our many slumber parties, declared, “I have a movie you just have to watch!” And thus I met Cold Comfort Farm, with some of the greatest English actors working today: Kate Beckinsale, Aileen Atkins, Rufus Sewell, Joanna Lumley, and Sir Ian McKellen. Years later I bought the novel and laughed even harder at it than the film.

Angel introduced me to a science fiction series that I was initially dubious about. After all, scifi? Isn’t that for people who go to conventions, think Klingon is a legitimate language, and don’t make physical contact with the opposite sex until their 30’s? Not so! You want a series that delves deeply into human psychology, valor, and vice? Lois McMaster Bujold is the writer for you. Peregrine, I maintain, is responsible for much of my cultural happiness. Even though I resisted her civilizing efforts for years. She first exposed me to Chocolat and Amelie, plus more books and fine food than I can name!

BBC and PBS stations! Where would I be without them? Agatha Christie’s indomitable Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, the upstairs/downstairs dichotomy of London’s 1920’s in You Rang M’Lord?, the hilarious, frantic antics of Hyacinth “Bouquet” (actually pronounced “Bucket”) in Keeping Up Appearances. I stumbled upon each of these gems while doing late night laundry across the years and they fulfill my need for British TV (even though You Rang, M’Lord? never shows up here, blast). I also watched my first opera on PBS when I was 9 and have been hooked ever since.

French classes exposed to Gerard Depardieu as Cyrano de Bergerac and Le Comte de Monte Cristo, as well as Marcel Pagnol, and the first time I read Rousseau it was his La Nouvelle Heloise. I read my first ancient Greek play on a whim after pulling down a random book from my mother’s library, but I was hooked and at 13 I wrote a short play on the ancient model that won me a competition and was produced by Theatre Virginia.

IRS Guy introduced me to a fabulous little restaurant called Gloria’s Little Italy and while he didn’t make it past a second date, Gloria and I have been very happy together ever since. Peregrine (again!) first took me to Bombay House for Indian food. J., who lived in Korea for 2 years, has completely addicted me to Korean cuisine and knows the best holes in the wall for oriental food, to say nothing of the local hotspots (he’s lived here longer than me).

What sorts of treasures have you discovered through other people?

Home, Snark March 27, 2009March 27, 2009

Hot Hot Heat

“Val, at this exact moment, I might love you more than my fiance!”
– C. (Don’t worry, J., I didn’t mean it)

I have heating! Venice’s husband got it up and working last night when I showed up on their doorstep (two doors down from my own) asking pitifully, “I picked up dinner, but can I please eat it here because my place is freezing!” Val, wonderful guy that he is, grabbed my keys and was off to sort out the problem and by the time I’d finished dinner and dragged Venice back to look at our place (much improved since J. had put furniture together that day and I’d unpacked and sorted a lot of stuff) the temperature had risen significantly. Thank gosh because the night before last I had to put on leggings, followed by my flannel pajama pants, followed by a thermal shirt, followed by doubled blankets before I could feel the heat stop escaping. And I like the cold! But when there is no discernible difference between one’s apartment and the below freezing temperature, I draw a line!

Humor, Life March 9, 2009March 10, 2009

Another Five Minutes…

(J. looking at our future apartment) “Number fourteen sixty-nine. Seven years after Columbus.”
“…Fourteen NINETY-two?…”
“I’m tired!”
-J. and C.

I have no idea what my problem is, but these days I am well and truly exhausted! The past few nights I go over to J.’s to hang out and have ended up unconscious on his couch for at least an hour at a time. Daylight Saving didn’t help either. In fact, this morning when my alarm went off I thought I hit snooze but apparently I just turned the sucker off and when I again fluttered my lashes open it was 7:41 (when I have to be at work at 8). A really promising start to the week…

Life March 3, 2009

Buy, Borrow, or Steal?

“Seriously? I work for the police, it says so right there in my signature. They’re still trying to sell this? Seriously?”
-C.

The major project these days is selling my current housing contract to move into the flat where J. and I will be living post-nuptials. I’ve told my landlords to sell if they can, posted an advertisement on Craigslist and local classifieds, but so far the only inquiries have be blatant scams.

sale It’s a common set up: pretend to be interested in something someone is selling, volunteer to send a money order to lock in the deal, send a fake check set up to electronically tap into your victim’s bank account when they try to cash it, steal every penny they have. You wouldn’t believe how many fraud and theft reports I’ve taken for exactly the same scenario. Nevertheless, I send out my normal formal response most of these inquiries with my landlord’s information and telling the writer to contact him for more information. “University Police, Investigations Secretary” is written right beneath my name in my electronic signature. Still they ask me to send money on to their starving relatives in Uganda, China, and Bolivia!

I checked the names against our cases, no connections, and deleted them. Would the universe please stop messing around and send me one person who is legitimately interested in buying my housing contract?!

Home, Humor February 26, 2009February 26, 2009

Sugar Mamas, Inc.

“Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and serve them one’s self?”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A storage receptacle, NOT our future home, yeah!

Once upon a time Venice got married (while I was out of the country and couldn’t come to the party!) and moved into an amazingly inexpensive apartment. A year later, C. was proposed to by J. and thought, “Gee, not only would it be awesome to live by somebody we actually know instead of moving into a new complex surrounded only by perky, happy newlyweds whose major life ambition seems to be reproduction as soon as possible, but it would also be awesome to not have to spend nearly twice as much on a place as I do now while halving the space. I wonder if there are any openings in their building?” And behold, there were! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are not going to kick off our married lives in a cardboard box under a bridge somewhere, we will be card-carrying adults with a place of our own!

Pity our respective men, we’ll be living two doors down from one another!

Now, the moral dilemma. I have a rather nice tax return this year and no computer, do I use part of my return to buy myself one, or do I put it all towards outfitting my newly acquired flat? The correct answer of course is, “furnishings,” but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss having a computer.

rain1 There are other options as well, should I use the money to help my parents out with the wedding? Pay for at least part of the photography J.’s parents have very generously offered to take care of? Sleep on an air mattress and use crates for furniture, and investing the money in a valiant attempt to stimulate the economy? Turn on a really big fan and dance around in a rain of cash? (The first two have obvious karmic potential, the third I’m nixing for obvious reasons, the fourth is oddly appealing…)

Life, Sad, Work February 25, 2009November 3, 2009

The World Sucks Today

“Every wrong seems possible today, and accepted. I don’t accept it.”
-Pablo Casals

Most of the time my job is at least moderately fun; good people, the occasional idiot that entertains me, minimal paperwork except when said occasional idiot has managed to create a mess of epic proportions, etc. But today I’m reminded of the dark side of police work. A lot of good gets accomplished, but so much more has to be done and people are limited creatures.

To combat the chronic under-staffing, a bunch of us are being trained to help police dispatchers handle the huge influx of information that would come in an a major emergency, as well as threats to the campus. We had to listen to dispatch records from school shootings to see how such things were dealt with from a dispatch viewpoint. That was bad. Then we had to listen to a phone call from a girl from our campus who committed suicide.

The dispatcher who worked with her was amazing, he kept her talking for almost an hour I think while the police tracked her down. But in the end, she went through with it. We heard the whole thing. EMS rushed her to the hospital where she died, her parents had to tell the doctors to remove her from life support because she was brain dead.

Like I said, most of the time my job is good. Today, my heart hurts.

Drama, Life January 28, 2009January 28, 2009

Mad Place Called Vertigo

“Intimacy is a four syllable word for, ‘Here’s my heart and soul, please grind them into hamburger, and enjoy.'”
-Meredith, Grey’s Anatomy

Some people are naturally good at relationships: they buy presents constantly, have cutesy nicknames for each other, and count and celebrate every single week/month/whatever of their duality. They wander around in a fond fog until, 9 times out of 10, it crashes spectacularly around them. Then they take some time, recover, and bounce right on to the next lover with varying degrees of trepidation but probably with that butterfly-in-stomach feeling still intact.

I am not one of these people. I suck at relationships. My communications skills are nil and I have an overdeveloped Fight or Flight response. In fact I tended to avoid emotional commitment for most of my life and never dated anyone I actually liked enough to upset my equilibrium. Fairy puts it’s kindly by saying I’m “emotionally stunted.”

Unfortunately relationships don’t get easier with practice (sometimes I think I’m getting worse even after 10 months of practice with J.) and you can’t buy into all the mumbo-jumbo that magazines, prime-time television, and well-intentioned friends try to soothe you with: we’re all clueless. Just as soon as you figure out the rules, the ground shifts under your feet. Luckily I’ve gotten to the point where this sort of freefalling doesn’t scare me as much, mostly I’m left muttering under my breath, “Good grief, what now?” while I plummet. My problem when this occurs isn’t so much that I’m falling, but that I can’t get my bearings until I hit the ground again, at which point I try to reorient while recovering from the impact.

I can’t be alone here; I know my 203 VIPS at least have a few good stories on the romantic end, Venice is a newlywed learning to deal, and Tink just had a baby and is heading towards being a SAHM. My London girls AbFab, Red, and Marie are all going through travel, romantic, and medical drama. Anyone else feel like they’re constantly playing catchup with life?!

Life January 21, 2009January 21, 2009

Feel the Burn

“Beauty knows no pain, so what you cryin’ about, girl?”
-Frank Zappa

Quick update: exercise hurts. Running, which I’m used to, isn’t bad at all, but strength training should be somewhere in Dante’s hell. As a punishment for sloth, perhaps? I’m sure I’ll turn out toned and fabulous, but in the meantime ouch!

Yesterday morning after lifting weights, I was putting my makeup on and was more than a little embarrassed to discover my hand was shaking. My eyeliner was a bit dodgy and ragged around the edges, I looked like a raccoon vibrating from a caffeine high. Today just lifting my arm high enough to apply mascara was a chore.

I need a goal to keep me going at 6am on Friday morning instead of whimpering, “Stop the treadmill I want to get off!” Suggestions? My fallback bribe of choice, chocolate, seems counterproductive for some reason. And legally morphine is out.

Home, Life January 13, 2009May 22, 2009

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

“I hate the word housewife; I don’t like the word homemaker either. I want to be called Domestic Goddess.”
-Roseanne

I was up past midnight cleaning my flat for our semesterly cleaning check, even though out of sheer laziness our complex management simply decided to forgo it last Fall. Slowly over the years, as I’ve grown up and moved into a place relatively my own, I have become convinced of a fundamental war between good and evil: order and chaos locked in eternal combat, and their battleground is housekeeping. I’m pretty sure the Apocalypse will happen in my apartment.

I am become Cleaning, the destroyer of sanity

There are divine entities at work too, I’m positive. There is a malicious God of the Dryer who demands the sacrifice of socks to appease his hunger. These hapless cotton victims vanish into an alternate dimension never to be seen again, that’s the only explanation I can satisfactorily come to. I bought two dozen a couple months ago, I’m down to nine (not pairs, total). Also, my flat in particular is plagued by a Dust Demon that periodically covers all it sees with a tangible layer, courtesy of a filthy vent (thanks, management, for helping us out with that). Another entity is our resident Garbage Disposal Goddess who is by turns benevolent and heartless, currently the latter. Thankfully for us all the Second Coming of the Vacuum redeemed us all (three months after it died, a brighter shiny new version arose to take its place).

I’m sorry to say my flatmates aren’t always the cleanest (neither am I, but at least I try!) and occasionally they call Domestic Divine Wrath down upon us. The most recent and notable example is my flatmates leaving two plastic jugs of milk (I’ll call one Sodom and the other Gomorrah) out on the counter for at least 5 days. I woke up one morning, late as usual, and was scampering about to get to work on time when upon entering the kitchen, I found the jugs had exploded all over my counter. Something resembling the unholy love child of cottage cheese and sour cream had erupted everywhere and I was late to work because I had to clean it up or asphyxiate. I suppose that makes me a great crusader at some level but at the time all I was was pissed and, I feel, righteously angry.

This little incident broke the camel’s back for me. When J. came over that night I snapped, very uncharacteristically, “I’ve decided we should get married. Next week.”
Kudos to him, he understood perfectly. He just sighed and asked, “What happened?”
I will say one argument in favor of matrimony and child bearing would be the eventual slave labor offspring provide doing chores. Maybe that’s the reason my mother had four of us.

Anyway, after several hours scrubbing, chemicals, vacuuming, and many socks sacraficed, my flat looks pretty good. The forces of Good have prevailed, for a week at least.

Small Dog Syndrome