for serious? no, for JOKE

Jet Plane

It's been a busy week - I was on a hellbent mission to get the largest chunks of my work done before leaving for christmas holidays.  (I was at work until 2 am on Tuesday night).  Additionally, I've had several out-of-the-office meetings that sucked the energy right out of me - out of nerves for prepping for the meetings in the first place, and then because they were all located so far away in corners of Holland that I could only reach them by taking a bike, three trains, and a half hour walk.

So!  I am leaving my house in about two minutes to take the plane to NYC, where I will land not knowing whether the strike is still going on.  Thank goodness my parents will be able to pick me up from the airport - I didn't feel like hitchhiking my butt and all my Christmas presents all the way into Manhattan's Upper West Side!

So, adieu!   Next time I write I will have already kissed Anuj and I'll be "home" in New York amongst loved ones.

Inclement Weather

I think besides my rain poncho and clip on front and back lights, I am going to have to purchase some additional gear in order to survive winter biking in Amsterdam:

1. Chains for my bike wheels, or at least some snow tires. Maybe a little personal salt spreader in front of the bicycle? Something that will keep me safe from slipping and sliding on the icy road surface.
2. A paint-ball player’s mask, for face protection against aggressive hail. I was pelted badly with ice cubes on my way to the gym this weekend.

Also, unrelated, but you know what my (new) favorite feature is for holiday online shopping? LIVE CHAT HELP. It’s so fantastic – it’s like instant messaging with customer service. Long waits don’t piss you off anymore, because you can continue surfing the internet while you wait for a personalized answer on your specific question. Truly incredible – every online store worth its salt should offer this service!

My first TV appearance

Yesterday, I died a thousand deaths out of nervousness.  I was being recorded for a TV show.  It’s actually a pretty stupid television program, but they wanted to feature the work of my organization and a company that we work with, so we could hardly turn down their offer to interview us.   I prepped for these interviews for hours, because the program is notorious for being frank and brutal.  Scary!  You all know I have been nervous about speaking in front of journalists several times before… but this was unparalleled.   

First of all, the place was over two hours away by several modes of public transportation, and so I had to wake up at the butt crack of dawn and arrive pretending I had not just been snoring and drooling open mouthed all over myself on the train ride down there.  While I tried to smooth out the wrinkles of my suit the camera was pointed so closely to my face I think the camera guy was studying how many pores he could count and what the exact shade of color my nose ring is.  Ew, I can only imagine what this shot is going to look like. 

I wasn’t terrible, but I’ll be honest, I wasn’t great.  I tried to loosen up by cracking a couple of jokes but instead of coming across as in control and relaxed I think I came across as a little ridiculous.  I had to re-do a fair amount of takes because I stuttered out of nervousness.  Stuttered!  Me!  I never stutter!  It was extremely frustrating.  At one point I made a blunder, and at the end of the take I ask the journalist whether that sounded stupid.  "Yes," she said. "That sounded stupid." *gulp*.  Okaayyyy let’s re-do that one as well, shall we?

After two hours of recording, I am hoping that the final four minutes (yes, that is all it will end up being! Cutting room floor for me, baby!) end up being presentable, but I am secretly glad I won’t be in Amsterdam when it airs – I’ll still be visiting my family and my hot fiancé in New York City that week.

Unrelated but still interesting tidbit to blog about:  My aunt called me yesterday just as I walked in the door from my unfortunate first television appearance, and said she had extra tickets to go to a lecture of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.  He’s a scientist who has developed a theory of “morphic resonance”, studying phenomena like telepathy and pre-cognition in an empirical manner.  Mad scientist?  Yes, but also a fascinating man to listen to!  If you’d like to participate in some experiments that he has been conducting on a global scale, check out his website.  I want to try out the The Online Staring Experiment and the Telephone Experiment with my sisters!   Also, I think the whole audience was a little freaked by his N'kisi project, a woman who has a telepathic connection with her grey parrot. 

Not feeling very "bloggy" ...

Sorry about that! So not much of a post today...

I will say that I had a fabulously productive and relaxing weekend.  I finished my christmas cards, did most of my christmas shopping, started mapping out our honeymoon, and... reorganized my closets.   In the midst of missing Anuj so much I look for the gems that make living alone actually pretty do-able... and one gem is HAVING ALL THE CLOSET SPACE JUST FOR MEEEEEEE.

It's fabulous.

Here is what my closet looks like right now, after two hours of taking everything out, refolding, and reorganizing. (I'll spare you a shot of the shoe closet, linen closet, and clothing hanging racks).

What?  Don't tell me YOUR closet is MORE organized is it?  I mean, look at all those neat little piles!  I should have taken a before picture - you could have witnessed how I tend to cram shirts until they are within an inch of their life into every possible open space in the closet...

Imagine

Today is the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's death.    Any date involving John Lennon used to be psychotically observed by me from age 13 until about 17 - I was obsessed with the Beatles, and even more consumed by John Lennon.  Really, I don't know how people tolerated me - all I could talk about was the background story of one Beatles song or another, or another biography I had read about John Lennon.  I cried at John Lennon documentaries.   I can't quite express the magnitude of how much the Beatles consumed me as a teenager, but ask anyone who knew me at the time. I suppose it wasn't too unhealthy an obsession to have, considering what teenagers can potentially be fixated by, but still.  I was insufferable.

Still, I can't neglect to mention that it made me incredibly happy to watch tributes to John Lennon this morning while having breakfast - It was nice to see images of him again.  And this morning, as I biked past the hotel in Amsterdam where John and Yoko held their famous "bed-in for peace", I thought it was also nice to know that there are still fans out there who keep the memory of him alive.  Including me.

***

More "Seen Today in Amsterdam!"

Well, last night actually.  I thought I had seen it all at this point, what people can carry on their bicycles: entire families, a week's worth of groceries, even a full grown Golden Retriever in an open plastic tupperwear container. I myself have been known to bike to the airport with a week's worth of luggage balanced on my steering wheel.  But last night topped it all; I saw a biking man transporting... a couch.  A COUCH people.  And not just some little loveseat either.  He had rigged up some kind of wheelbarrow contraption to the front of his wheels and was slowly but surely navigating the bridges and streets of Amsterdam with his new living room furniture.  It was brilliant. 

You didn't think I was done talking about Paris did you?

I think I might be developing a little addiction to public speaking. I imagine it’s a bit like skydiving – sweaty palms, stomach cramping and beating heart type fright beforehand, but it feels sooo good afterwards.

I was in Paris to participate in a conference; I was a speaker at a round table discussion, and I had to do the presentation in French. I used to be fluent in French, but I wasn’t sure how fluent I was at it anymore.

So the morning of the roundtable I am feeling a bit like an athlete in training. I had practiced my talk until late in the night. My “speaking muscles” were feeling kind of sore and in knots from speaking so much French the day before. You know how it is – a foreign language on your tongue is like working your way through chewing a too large piece of caramel. So I tried to loosen up – I did some jumping jacks in my room, rolled my head round and round, and did some high school drama club exercises; pronouncing in an exaggerated fashion the vowels: aaaaa eeeee iiiiiii oooooo uuuuuuu! I put my suit jacket on and I was ready to go.

I wanted to die as soon as I walked into the discussion room. What was supposed to be a cozy round table discussion turned out to be a U.N. General Assembly type address! Nothing cozy or round about it – but a big scary official looking room with a lot of old white men on a raised speaking platform… and me. I tried to look as in place as possible, but I stuck out quite a bit.

The people who shared my panel were: a well known economist, a university professor, the former minister of environment in France, the mayor of one of the arrondissements in Paris, a geographer, the head of the National Post… and me.

I did my best to act composed. Of course, I almost spilled a cup of water all over myself the second I sat down, and I definitely did the whole lean-my-elbow-on-the-table-but-fall-off-the-edge-of-the-surface-therefor-stupidly-and-suddenly-pitching-forward thing. Classy! I was the embodiment of composure and grace obviously.

In the end, my talk went well. My French was fine; I used the subjunctive tense and everything! Obviously when I speak in English I can play the talk by ear a little more and adapt to what others are saying. In French I kind of had to stick to the script I had prepared the night before. Still, I’m always pretty excited about the work my organization does, so I managed to at least translate that enthusiasm well into French. I felt elated that it had gone so well! The current minister of health in Marocco even directed a comment at me specifically, and I managed to give a convincing counter-argument.

I was happy with myself, but now I am glad it’s over!

What’s that I smell? or: Observations from Paris

They say smell is one of the biggest memory triggers.  It’s sort of amazing – how one whiff take you right back.  Some of those smells are really easy to identify – my first boyfriend wore a particular British deodorant that never fails to remind me of high school and puppy love.   Another obvious one that I probably am not alone in having is that smell of humid baked asphalt after a surprise drenching summer rain – reminders of New Jersey carefree days for me.  (Throw a Bruce Springsteen song on the radio and the memory is complete).   But then there are smells that are harder to put together, harder to describe, and maybe that’s why those are the ones that take you by surprise, that catch you off guard because until the very second you smelled that scent you didn’t realize what memory it was tied to.  Smells that might give you a startling flashback to things like your grandmothers’ house, an embarrassing moment in college, or a concert that rocked your socks off.   You remember them in an instant, but you wouldn’t be able to describe them beforehand, or even immediately after.   Still, they are viscerally enjoyable.   

This long paragraph is to tell you in short that Paris smelled like memories.

I graduated high school when I just turned 17, so figuring I had a gap year to fill, I deferred college for a year and spent the first 4-5 months in a French Boarding School in the south of Belgium, redoing my senior year to perfect my French.  I have an arsenal of boarding school stories that I can tell, but suffice it to say it was absolutely horrible; everything you’d expect to experience when you’re transitioning from an American public high school to an old fashioned Catholic all-girls boarding school with uniforms and nuns in rural Belgium.  Maybe the nuns were the breaking point, but I sprinted out of there after one semester.  Then my family arranged for me to spend the rest of my gap year with a host family in a small town near Paris and a part time administrative job.  When the only thing you need to do in life is work 17 hours a week, you have a lot of extra hours of free time.  I spent a lot of those hours wandering up and down every street in Paris, writing in my journal while sitting in street cafés near Montparnasse, sketching (bad) copies of masterpieces at the Louvre, and all those other artsy fartsy things you’d expect a lonely and melancholy 18 year old to do if alone in a city like Paris.   It’s a long time ago, but I used to know Paris extraordinarily well.

So the smell that triggered this entry is the Paris Metro.   I don’t know if that smell has crept into the white tiles of those sloping underground walls or what; I sort of suspect its emitting from the garbage cans.  But it’s this combination smell of the rubber tires of the metro and a sort of cheap bubblegum smelling deodorizer that must be part of the cleaning product Parisian metro janitors have been using for years.  See?  Impossible to describe a smell.  But I can’t believe it still smells like that.  Readers who have been to Paris, help me out here.  What did Paris (specifically the metro) smell like to you?   

But it was sooo nice to be back.  God, I love my job.