Repeat after me: ¿Dónde está mi pasaporte?

I’m leaving on Sunday! I’ve started my mental list of Things to Bring with me to Granada.
Spanish slang glossary.
French-Spanish dictionary.
English-Spanish dictionary. Just to make sure.
Extremely cool-looking sunglasses to hide behind and watch people.
Strappy tops and other minimalist garments (38°, people).


2. I’ve also started fretting pretty much full time now. Will I cope? What if the Andalusian lack of consonants really really throws me and I have no idea what they’re talking about and I can’t find the words to respond? Words are my crutch, my insurance, my passport. I’m not pretty enough for people to like me if I don’t talk, you see. I need words, I need speech to flow freely out of my mouth, or I feel like an invalid.

One of my (very distinguished) university professors accepted, at the pinnacle of his career, to lecture for an academic year in some L.A college. He lasted two weeks; everything was just too frightening. The food was wrong –eg, neither French, nor English.). The people behaved strangely (neither in a French, nor in an English manner). He kept getting the wrong impression, getting the rules wrong. There were huge whale-like places called malls instead of civilised town centres. He had to drive everywhere. One evening, he was picked up by the police for walking around his neighbourhood in a city where no one walks. They thought he must have been some kind of illegal immigrant.
At least, he had the words to talk himself out of the police station, hand in his resignation letter and fly back home.

4. Note to self: make sure I look around carefully as to get the rules right. From behind extremely cool sunglasses.

Montagne russe

Minus
My Special lady Friend has been in a bad mood for the past two days, and I didn’t manage to make it better. Nor did I really have the time or the energy to try harder because work’s been a bitch.

Plus
Today, someone at work who likes me gave me various Italian delicacies in a basket, and a bottle of champagne.

Minus.
Italian food. Perhaps it was a subtle way to allude to the world cup final?
I don’t like champagne.

Plus.
I don’t give a rat’s arse about football, and if you add Crème de cassis to a glass of champagne it’s a drink worthy of the gods.

Minus.
Yesterday, someone I know lost three fingers in an epileptic fit/freak hairdryer accident.

Minus.
She is was a pianist.


In my most childish, impossible, fairytale daydreams, I’m always a healer. Of moods, bumps, bruises, breaks, pains, and of lost fingers. Once I read somewhere that wishing for magic was one of the signs of depression. I do it all the time! Don’t you?

The Pink Badge of Gayness

1.People of blogland, something disturbing is happening – Abi wants to take away our gay badges for not staying out on Pride night!

2.After all there were thousands millions of gay homosexuals revelling around Soho square that night, clad in gay rags/gold leather hotpants/matching suede lederhosen, and we could have been two of them for a little bit longer!
I can tell you what happened, blogfolks, it was the gold leather hotpants, I just had to take my special lady friend home.

3.Therefore Abi wants to remove our pink badges of gayness from us.
What she doesn’t know is that we went home to do further gay things, which also involved lederhosen.

4. What did other people do?
look after a drugged up ex. (Perilous behaviour factor: 2/5)
kissed an ex. (Perilous behaviour factor : 9/5)
proceed to have a fight with an ex.(predictable behaviour factor: 12/5)
received the obligatory apologetic 2am phone call from said ex. (pathetic behaviour factor: 5/5)
got dumped. On Pride night. (duh factor: 22/5)


5. Perhaps Pink badges of courage shouldn’t come with compulsory drunkenness.

6. We don’t care. We’re way gay.

Pilgrimage…

1.Last night, I dreamt that Britain’s pigheadedness reticence to join the euro was the result of occult lobbying on the part of a group of cashiers from bureau de change around the country. Something about fears about losing the business of millions of holidaymakers en route for Málaga.

2. Why the dream, I asked myself; and myself answered: perhaps because I have to jet get the train over to France tomorrow morning; and in the little purse where I keep my real money, there are only 2 euros left.

3. What can I get myself for 2 euros, blogpeople? I don’t know! How do I know how much things cost anymore?! I leave my country for a mere 13 years and hey, everything’s different. Government. Currency. The National Front’s score in the presidential elections. The price of beer. The price of espresso.

4. When I was an impoverished student (not impoverished as in ‘I’ll be paying back my loan down to the 13th generation’ like over here, since higher education is pretty much free in France), an espresso was the cheapest thing you could order in a café. That was around 5 francs –50p- at the time, and I wonder how I didn’t suffer from caffeine-induced tremens between the age of 18 and 22.

5. Sometimes we would splash out on something really special – half a pint of Guinness.

6. Next time if you’re lucky I’ll let you know how much an espresso is in Lille. I might also tell you why I’m going there, although it’s a really personal story; you and I don’t know one another that well.

P is for..

Blogpeople, have you had a good Saturday? I have. This morning I set out to meet up with my Special Lady Friend and be Proud. We were Proud for a few hours but mostly we people-watched from a Perfect Vantage Point (a bench in heaving Soho square.) There was very little leering involved, and it mostly involved gay homosexual boys rather than girls. There are some couples out there I would gladly watch, let me tell you that. Later on I panicked a little when we almost got swallowed up by a forest of sweating torsos; I let my SLF lead me by the hand and tried to banish any thoughts of crushing and crowd-induced dismemberment from my mind.
People of blogland, my Special Lady Friend missed the England-Portugal match to hang out with me! She must really love me. I did push her into a pub to allow her a token five minutes of footbalistic action, but I spoilt it for her by repeatedly nibbling her earlobe, at which point she gave up.

(Un)comfortably numb

This morning

-I’m just… bored, I blurt, looking at my shoes.
-I don’t believe in boredom, he says.
-Fine. I’m lazy, then.
-I don’t believe in laziness either.
-As it happens, I agree with you. But I’m being morose, and I need a word to explain that I’m not doing anything with my time. So if I call it laziness, at least I take full responsibility for my lethargy. I don’t want to blame anyone else for it.
-There’s no such thing as boredom. It’s only lack of stimulation. Where do you get yours from?
-Myself. Or at least I should. But I’m not. I don’t want to relinquish responsibility for my limbo. What if I traced my lack of stimulation to someone else, what shall I do then? Cry, have a tantrum, eat a cookie?
-Then maybe you could see it as a mechanism that you can undo; then use all the stored-up momentum that hasn’t been released because you didn’t get the stimulus.

Over the past two days, I’ve been sleeping a lot, and looking at the clock when awake, to check how long til I can go back to bed.
I don’t like getting people worried.
I’m lazy.

People of blogland, I'm bored, so are you, I'm boring, so is this, therefore this blog is dead, or at least hibernating. I'm thinking nothing, doing nothing, I have nothing to say. Bye.

L is for..

The pettiness!
Yesterday I tried to open an attachment sent by the school I’ll be attending in Spain. The firewall at work wouldn’t let me. It called it inappropriate. Just because it’s entitled ‘Oral self-assessment.’
Just.. please.
Oh, I don’t know.
This time of year for me is some kind of limbo. I have things to do, places to go but work keeps me tied for another month. I’m grumpy. Ask my special lady friend. Today especially has been a strange mixture of boredom and laziness; there will be mjitos later on, so things should improve. Do come over.

Emulsion

Blogpeople, I hope you had a good week end too and that you didn’t complain about the heat, not even once. Did you have a picnic? My Special Lady Friend and I did. Then we painted my bathroom and we almost ran out of paint. That wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t insisted on painting her eyeball, but she has moments like that. Once we were done I suggested she put her signature in a corner – it was her baby too- but she didn’t need to- she’d left a footprint on the windowsill, something to always remember that moment by. I’m being grateful.

Silly socks

Last night my Special Lady Friend and I were sitting on the step outside. I was stretching my toes, just freed from the stupid girly shoes I wear for work. We’d just opened a bottle of Rioja; Pancho the cat was waging a trench* war against Sid the neighbour’s moggy (we call him Sid because he’s vicious), life was good. Yes. Then, seemingly out of the blue:

You have goose bumps! I exclaimed.
I do, she smiled.
How come?
Well.. football. The world cup is starting on Thursday.

I thought I was the one giving her goose bumps, but seemingly I have competition in a bunch of men wearing shorts and silly socks. The next five weeks are going to be interesting. I cannot abide football, you see. It’s not a point of contention between us as long as she doesn’t wear loud nylon shirts or display flags. Flags! They’re on my list of obsolete horrors right after army uniforms. I reckon they should do away with national teams anyway, and call them after animals. The Weasels against the Silver-haired rabbits. Or is that specie-ist? Specist? Or foodstuffs. The Crispy Waffles against the Broiled Cutlets. Although of course vegetarians would have little choice as to whom they’d support, so that’s silly. I’d rather watch Mexican Lucha Libre any day, mostly because they have fan-ta-stic costumes. Football. Can’t stand it. Possibly because as a child I had to spent too many of my Sunday afternoons on a football pitch – well, outside of it really- because my brother/dad/uncles/dad’s mates were playing. I can’t even pretend to care. I do hope England will lose, and soon, and spontaneous combustion of the French team would probably make me merry.
So, yes, competition.
Luckily, I have ways of competing, and of provoking lots of goose bumps.




*a hole was dug for two rosebushes that still haven’t arrived. It’s currently being used as a trench/toilet.