Restlessness

In German, they call it having a “bumblebee in your bum”. In English, restlessness. I like the German expression better. The weekend has passed by jerkily: movies, meals, books, and shopping.

Talking about bums... I was in a restaurant the other day, and a three- or four-year-old (precocious) girl asked her mother how you spelled caca (in German, aa). The mother explained to her daughter that one does not write caca, but it would be written aa if she were to write it. The girl spent the rest of her lunch writing aa in her soup over and over again.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Starless Night

Cold. Black. Starless night.

The first of Advent is tomorrow, though the Christmas Market started yesterday. This old Unesco city sets a magnificent stage for such celebrations. It also means that those of us who live on the island must crab-walk through the crowds for the next four weeks.

Read an article in the New York Times today. Even the title, “As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way, Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation “, made me want to wince. What rebel reputation? Maybe Ms. Story should first go back a few decades to the founding of the telephone.

The telephone was initially an alternative to the telegraph: purely a means of information exchange. It took all those women working in the post offices to transform an information device into a communication device. It was this shift in content which started a revolution.

The same revolution, not an act of rebellion, has been happening for the last two years in the Internet, driven partly by bloggers and podcasters. The times of rebel or cowboy bloggers have long gone. Journalists, politicians, educators, parents, lovers, priests, and even, yikes, lawyers are using blogs these days. The fact that some of the bloggers have found schemes to earn money doing this seems very secondary.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

First Snow

It might be hard to see the flurry of snowflakes, but they are there. Our first winter snow. It’s Friday and time to go and luxuriate in a café.

The one café I go to has a non-smoking section. Revolutionary. When the café first opened up, the non-smoking section was at the front of the café: drafty, small tables, uncomfortable upright chairs. I asked the manager why the sofa-section at the back of the café was just for smokers: didn’t they think non-smokers like to laze about?

They kindly made half the sofa-section non-smokers, but it doesn’t work: the smokers still sit in the non-smoking section every hour of the day.

So, I started a new sport. While ordering my coffee, I ask the café employees whether they could please ask the smokers to reseat themselves. And then I go and sit down and watch how ineffectively the employee carries out her job (e.g. informs the customers that this is a non-smoking section, but doesn’t ask them to leave) and how huffy and put-upon the smokers react to the news.

Oh, I know this is petty, but it is better to be petty with a sense of the absurd, than a militant self-righteous non-smoker.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Mobile advent calendar

Our mobile advent calendar school project is starting next week. It is an organizational (nightmare) wonder. There are over a hundred 5th-grade children participating in the affair, ten mentors (grade 10 students) supervising it, and approximately 10 teachers involved, and that is not counting all the people involved “behind the scenes”.

Four groups of children, one from each of the fifth grades, new to the school and surrounding neighbourhood, go out each day during Advent equipped with PDAs, GPS, and digital cameras and open up specific doors and discover surprises behind these doors.

Not only are the fellow students and teachers of the school involved in creating surprises (e.g. Christmas carols sung in Latin, Spanish, French and English, as well as Christmas poems recited to the children by other children) for the 5th graders, but the neighbouring institutions (e.g. museums, grade school, hospital, churches, and daycare centre) also have prepared surprises.

You can imagine it like a mobile digital multimedia treasure hunt. That is if these words mean anything to you. I had a brainwave for the project in September, and since December seemed so far away, I decided we should go for it this year. Silly. Why didn’t I take into consideration that we (me and some university students) are also supporting about fourteen other projects in the schools?

Thus, long work days and frazzled nerves, but there was definitely a tingle, which tickled me awake at three this morning, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. Definitely, time to set in new life-work tactics.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Golden-Pink Haze

There was a spectacular sunrise this morning. The whole city was engulfed in a golden-pink haze.

My mother called to tell a tale from her island in the sun. It concerns a British couple who moved into the neighbourhood. Very British. Very Hoity Toity. The type of British that makes all citizens of previous British colonies or Commonwealth countries feel very insignificant, unworthy, and, the worst, very bland.

(Something to be equalled to attending a dinner party as the only non-French woman. French women are masters at giving other women The Look.)

My mother was all in a stir: it turns out that Mrs. Hoity Toity was, in a past life (twenty years ago), a porno star. My mother’s glee has no limit, “You can even google her and see it on the Internet!”

It’s amazing how the verb “googling” has even reached the vocabulary of a 75-year-old?

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Spare Time

This week: exhausting, busy, and crazy.

I was sitting in one of my favourite restaurants this afternoon with Sara. Joan Armatrading was playing in the background. I suffered such a severe rush of nostalgia that I nearly got whiplash as I whipped back twenty years or more in time.

I was listening to her LP (we bought LPs then and not CDs), reading Jane Austin, drinking a generous portion of scotch, and generally drifting aimlessly through the weekends with time to spare. I was also addicted to T.S. Elliot, Keith Garret, rare glimpses of Sam Sheppard on the movie screen, and holding my wardrobe together with safety pins (not as a fashion statement, this was Way Before punk, but as a practical solution).

When did the term “spare time” last cross your lips? Seriously. When was the last time you actually had spare time?

They don’t even have a word for it in German. They have free time, which, if you know anything about anything, is not the same. Spare time is to be frivolously discarded, wasted, enjoyed or not enjoyed, depending on your mood of the moment. There is an element of timelessness about it. You learn what it is like to float in space while travelling in your spare time. Ok, this might be getting ridiculous because, obviously, I have never floated in space. So, the end.

P.S. For those that do not know, I am dyslexic and therefore don’t know how to spell names properly, let alone important masterful words. I am a slave to my spell-check program.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Two Eyebrows are not Enough

There is a wonderful critique of the “Pride and Prejudice” film, directed by Joe Wright, in the New Yorker.

If going to see the movie is as much fun as reading the article, then I am all for it. Here is a precious observation,

“What would Mr. Bennet make of the film? He would be left wondering, I suspect, why God gave him only two eyebrows to raise.”

Rainy Friday. Thank heavens. I've been so wanting a lie-on-the-sofa weekend, and now it has come.

What to do…

I received an email from a friend of mine who wrote the following about my blog:

“Just revisitd your blog site - it's disconcertingly like reading someone's diary but also a lovely sort of indirect connection, in at a tangent as it were. Should I send comments? Is that the idea? And then whoever logs in gets to listen in on the conversation? I am not very familiar with blogs yet.”

The answers to her questions are yes, and yes. To anyone reading this blog, it would be nice to know your thoughts on the topics I write about. It’s not a must, just a can-do if the notion hits you.

My blog does not have a general theme and purpose as yet. I am sorry; it is going to take me a while to figure this out. Most blogs I like and visit have a political, social, or personal message. Mine doesn’t. I am very open to any suggestions.

Generally, blogs are public documents. At the moment, my blog is an honest, humble, but important alternative to sending serial letters.

Don't get me wrong about serial letters, I don’t mind receiving them, but I sure do not like writing them. A blog is something that you can read if you want without you feeling it is actually meant for you.

I like to share some of the mundane incidents or conversations in my daily life with friends and family. Blogging is an opportunity for me to relive those moments, as well as for you to gauge where I am sitting on a precarious seesaw between balance and chaos.

Hopefully, with time, I'll find some meaningful content to share with a public audience.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Extracting Wisdom Teeth - I'm Off Podcasting

I am just about to go off to a school where the 6th-grade students are making a podcast about “Barrier-free Luebeck“. The idea is for the children to explore how people in rolling chairs go about town. They interviewed bus drivers, taxi drivers, and someone at the German Railroad Co.

The only thing they haven’t done yet is reflect on what they personally think it would be like for someone in a rolling chair to move around town and articulate these thoughts to the other students in the school. Giving interviews is fine, but actually creating posters about this topic is difficult. It is a bit like pulling teeth. Gosh, I hope I can extract some wisdom teeth today.

Sunny Cool Days

Off to a school in Travemünde this afternoon. The computer club is making up a ubiquitous learning/ website presentation about the Baltic Sea. One of my favourite teachers is working with the students (grades 6-10).

It’s a sunny, cool day. Wonderful to drive to the coast with.

I won a (virtual) prize from the author of one of my favourite blogs (360 degrees of sky) for guessing that all of the strange stories she told in a blog entry were correct.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Mid-afternoon Twilight

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and twilight. By the time Christmas comes around, it will already be pitch dar. November and February are definitely difficult months; they weigh heavily on my heart. But, soon, my spirit will pick up for the holiday season. It’s just the before and after which wears the soul down.

Everyone I know (practically) is down with a grippe. Strange, don’t remember all these winter flues hitting everyone simultaneously. I remember we all used to get one or two colds a year. Sometimes a winter cold, sometimes a summer cold, which, oddly, we thought was worse than winter colds. Or maybe not.

Sara has her gym tournament tomorrow. Hammed, our neighbour, knocked on the door to ask when we (her loyal father and mother) were going over, so we could pick him up on the way over. Feeling Rather Guilty, I said neither Sara's father nor I had thought of going to the tournament. So, Plan B, I will pick Hammed up at twelve, and my loyal husband generously says he’ll do the ironing.

Reminds me of the last year I danced in the Nutcracker at Les Grand Ballet Canadiens. My mother's friends kept on saying how wonderful I was and my mother had to admit that she hadn’t seen me that year: though to give her credit, she had seen me all the previous years. There was a lot of tisk-tisking and so off she went with my grandmother to see me.

Every time I came on stage, my grandmother would say very loudly, “There she is. Isn’t she wonderful?” After the initial ruffling of feathers of the nearby audience for talking out loud, my mother said most people got into the spirit of my grandmother’s enthusiasm, and someone even pointed me out to her later.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Bruised Heart

Just fooling. Actually, I don’t have a bruised heart but a bruised rib. Though there are moments when I think the rib is broken with a very sharp end sticking into my lungs, why don’t I go to a doctor? Really, my rib is only bruised.

We started a new blogging program at the high school. It is about women's literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. It will be interesting to see what the grade 12 class comes up with.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Lost in Paradise

I wrote a particularly witty piece about my weekend retreat, only for the computer to bugger out on me.

So, now you are only going to get the photos.
They were all taken at the estate/wellness centre

or the nearby beach.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Lugury...

I am off to a four-day “retreat”… translation: time on my own. I am going to an old estate that was restored a few years ago to a wellness resort. I can’t afford any of the wellness programs, but the food is supposed to be excellent, the surrounding area is filled with walking paths, and the Baltic Sea is nearby as well. I bring music, podcasts, books, and game scripts to edit and plan to do whatever I feel like doing. Such a lugury!

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Stuffed Animal Love

Good day, except for the fact that my boss said he was not in agreement with one of the projects I have initiated. Oh well, win some, lose some. Now all I have to do is figure out how to change the “concept” of the project to suit his and the financial sponsors' expectations.

I am off tomorrow on a vacation-from-family weekend. Yes, my weekends start on Thursdays. Oh, the joys and delights of a part-time position. There is obviously a long list of disadvantages (e.g. economic belt-tightening, jealousy from colleagues, dead-end-street as far as possible promotions), but, on the other hand, turning off the computer on Thursday afternoon and knowing I won’t be turning it on until Monday morning, gives me a buzz every time.

Sara asked me whether stuffed animals ever die. I managed to quickly reassure her that they never do. The comfort and joy they give to her will always be there as long as she believes in them.

Sara worries that she is not distributing her love and affection evenly throughout her large stuffed animal menagerie. She takes two of the animals with her to bed each night but often feels that the other animals are coming up short on the deal: even though she rotates the pick of the evening.

So, the question is…. is this little obsession of hers stemming from the always-feeling-guilty Irish gene, the tending-towards-melodrama Italian one, or the let’s-make-things-complicated German favourite pastime?

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Heart-to-Heart

Last night Sara and I were having a heart-to-heart talk about life and death and why there is so much suffering in the world. (For those of you who feel this is not necessarily a topic that a ten-year-old needs to discuss before bedtime, it is Her Topic, not mine. A friend of hers told her about a boy in her class who had died of brain cancer last year.)

It was a rather teary and sad discussion. We twisted and turned around many aspects of these topics until she came to the conclusion that she just feels so bad that other children are suffering. My advice was to say, “If you don’t want to feel bad, then obviously you want to find a way to feel good. Maybe you can do this by doing something good”. So, she said she was going to make another drawing for Busayo* today and promptly fell asleep.

How I wish all of such discussions could be resolved so easily.

* A child in Kenya we are supporting.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Celebrity Obsession

Today’s Dr. Phil show is about celebrity obsession. Gosh, do any of the people caught in the spiral of celebrity promotion or presentation know what living life meaningfully is about? It’s not only the ridiculously pitiful position of celebrities being stalked, but the lack of professional integrity on the part of the graphic designers (sheesh!) and photographers that feed into the complete silliness of the fans’ obsession…

This whole aspect of the American culture is bizarre.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Oh, Rawdon!

Brilliant weather persists. Just want to get it down on record: this has to be the most fantastic late summer, or early autumn we have experienced in the last twenty years.

Just watched the movie “Vanity Fair”. Hats off to my husband and son for sitting through the movie and offering some proper discussion about it afterwards. I liked it very much. Though I couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t fall in love with Rawdon (James Purefoy)… beyond his gambling, weak character, and lack of moral fibre, he was a great father.

1st Choice of Dinner Guests

Let’s say I could listen in on a dinner party of my choice… Below is a list of the guests who I would love to listen in conversation with each other:

• Margaret Atwood
• Jodie Foster
• Maureen Dowd
• Michaëlle Jean
• Kofi Annan
• Joschka Fischer
• Barack Obama
• Bob Herbert
• Michael Ignatieff
• Michael Ondaatje

They are not listed in order of preference. I find each equally fascinating.

(Note: ten years down the line, my dinner guest list has definitely evolved since this post.)

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

Age Wave

I heard an interview with a fellow (sorry, I forgot the name…) in the States researching the possible ramifications and implications of the “Age Wave”.

The age wave is my generation of people in about ten to fifteen years' time. At this point, the kinks in the pension plan will be blatantly apparent, as well as just about every other thing concerning the medical system, housing, taxes, the work world, etc. … the political, social, educational, and governmental systems will experience massive changes.

In other words, we are finally going to be able to whup ass when it comes to making ourselves heard and making choices that could, hopefully, positively influence times to come.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)