Sunday Rambling

Normally when I’m writing a blog entry, I write about something that happened or something I saw or heard or read, or at least with a general idea in my head about the content of the piece. Today however, I decided to try a different approach. While the first wintery scenery has materialised outside , I’m sitting warm inside, thinking about what to do with my last three or four weekend hours before having to face the first real cold tomorrow. I’ve already done some baking, cleaned the mess that was my desk, had people over, done my workout and watched some episodes so as far as I’m concerned it’s been a good enough Sunday and there isn’t anything I really need to do before turning in and waking up to manic Monday. So I decided I might as well use the time to write a little something.

On Friday, I went to a kind of festival in Brussels. Autumn Falls lasts for three days, takes place in several venues all over Brussels and hosts a variety of indie bands, singer/songwriters and instrumental bands. I had won tickets for the entire weekend, but only went on Friday to see Lambchop perform their much praised album Is a Woman in its entirety. Admittedly, the album is rather slow and the friend I dragged along with me even fell asleep (and snored) but I enjoyed every second of it. In the end, they played some up tempo songs from OH, Ohio and even blew the dust off their Sisters of Mercy’s This Corrosion cover. Hey now, hey now now!

Something completely different reached my ears last week when I went to see my uncle sing. He is a soprano in a choir that sings mostly world music, which isn’t really my thing, but I did enjoy the evening. I’m always amazed when I watch a choir – how the unity of the group still allows for singularity and personal expression in every single member, and how that is such an interesting sight when watched from a distance. While the singing is always in sync, the swaying is not – some sway this way, some sway that way, some use their entire bodies to accompany the music, some dance and some (like my uncle) stay their stoic selves throughout, hardly moving an inch from their allotted space but just doing their thing without any bells and whistles.

Speaking of bells and whistles, the festive season is nearing again so it is almost time to bring back good ol’ Sufjan’s Christmas Sing-a-long and Mercury Rev (who I for some reason always associate with winter and Christmas) and to prepare for end-of-year festivities and, sadly, cold weather and stuff. Luckily, this year I have taken a week off from work so I can do some serious hibernating in the middle of all that. I had my first taste of Christmas on Friday as well, as the Brussels’ Son & Lumière was already in its Christmas theme: imagine a giant Father Christmas somersaulting through the air in front of the cathedral and you get the idea.

And that concludes this Sunday rambling, which turned out to be all about music…

Exit Turtle

This week I ‘celebrate’ my one-year anniversary as a worker bee. The rat race makes time fly by faster than the speed of light, as the time in which one can actually do anything is reduced to a mere two days a week. The rest of it goes by in a grey rush from chore to chore, deadline to deadline so that it feels as if Monday has barely started when it’s already time for Friday night drinks. Weekday evenings are good for nothing and even during weekends I hardly do what I have been planning or wanting to do: it’s not just time, it’s mainly energy. And so books pile up on various to-read piles, I can’t keep up with my TV shows, no cultural activities get scheduled – and my creative juices stop flowing so this space remains as empty as a deserted turtle shell. Selling precious time for precious money, or selling your life in order to be able to live… depressing indeed. And I haven’t even added kids yet to that formula! Anyway, all this just to say that it seems a lot longer than one year and that my days of miserable unemployment and even those blissful university years are far far behind me by now.

Being the loyal introvert that I am, I can’t live with job-hopping so I can also celebrate my one year with the firm. Even before my temp contract had expired, I got offered a permanent position within my department, which I accepted. I still haven’t figured out what I would really like to do (and I doubt I ever will) so for the time being, this is more than OK. Plus, I get quickly attached to people and habits so I couldn’t bare walking away from my colleagues and bosses before getting to know them just a little bit better. Silly, I know. So I stayed, and have since given it all I got and have tried very hard to please, always to please: anticipating needs, smiling pleasantly in hallways and baking cakes to bring in on Mondays. As work is where I am most of the time and I don’t have a family to go home to in the evenings, it really is my main (if not only) dedication – even if that dedication probably goes unnoticed.

All of this is enough to make me at least content, until of course my inner demons start acting up, wrecking every aspect about my life, distorting my good judgment, leaving me sad, doubtful, paranoid and unworthy to live as every comment or look is turned into something negative and everything I have felt good about is suddenly worth less than nothing. But oh well, these are only phases and having them just comes with the territory of being me I suppose.

 

Fifteen Minutes Of Pain

The complete and utter silence on this blog is mainly to be attributed to my changed status (student to unemployed to part of the daily rat race) and the consequent lack of time and/or energy to keep up with the writing. Lately, however, I felt I had become used to my new life as employee and that my biorhythm had changed accordingly. I felt I could finally start doing something besides work, find a kind of project to take on, something I can do every day and improve myself at, either intellectually or physically. Reading books and listening to music is all nice and dandy, but it does not leave you with the feeling you’ve actually accomplished something. It was this feeling of accomplishment I was after when, on a whim, I decided to start running.

Before I go on I must tell you that I am by no means athletic. I didn’t much like sports at school, and I was never really good at it. I tried running two or three times before, I tried bicycling, but every time I gave up rather quickly. This time, my purpose differs from my previous efforts, so I think (hope) that I can keep it up, even make it into daily routine. This time around, I don’t necessarily want to loose weight or “do some sports”, I merely want a feeling of accomplishment, I want to stimulate myself not only intellectually, but also physically, I want to take those weak legs of mine and, step by step, day by day, mould them into a much finer specimen. I must admit I have been inspired by Haruki Murakami’s book on running, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I started reading simultaneously with my decision to start running. I didn’t much like the book, but I was motivated by his insistence on focusing on “the big picture” and his ability to talk himself into keeping it up every day and shape and control his body the way he wanted to. I must also tell you that I haven’t read up on the subject or consulted training manuals or anything, so my method may not be very efficient or effective. “In order to run you just have to run”, I thought. “No excuses, just put on a pair of running shoes and hit the road, that’s all you need to do.” So that was what I did.

How horrible it has been! Before I set out on Monday, I had pictured the course I would follow and see how far I could get. As expected, that wasn’t very far and I was back again in fifteen minutes. During those slowest fifteen minutes of my life, I had to repeat again and again to myself to look at the big picture, to endure the pain in order to gain. “What’s fifteen minutes of pain in a whole day?” I kept asking myself. But the truth is, it’s not just “fifteen minutes of pain”, it’s much more than that. Sure, the running itself adds up to a measly fifteen minutes a day, but it takes me at least half an hour each time to recuperate afterwards. I get home heaving and panting, breathing like a madman, and, after some half-hearted stretch exercises, have to throw myself in the nearest couch in order not to faint. But the worse is the pain in my lower abdomen, which goes on long after my breathing has normalised and after my face has stopped looking like an overripe tomato. It’s the weirdest thing, as if all my intestines are so badly shaken that they continue to cramp up for minutes on end. It’s excruciating, really, and every time I feel as if I’m going to die so I always think “never again”. Still, for now, I’ve managed to keep up my rigorous (sarcasm) training schedule as a result of which the muscles in my legs are as stiff as a post and I now have the gait of a woman of eighty. On top of that, I had an outburst of migraine this morning. I get migraines at least once every month (hormone thing) but also when I’m stressed, when I’ve had something to drink and when I’m tired. Now, it’s not that time of the month for me, I’m not stressed and I didn’t drink so the only possible reason for this morning’s outburst can be fatigue. Apparently, three fifteen-minute jogging sessions were enough to set off alarm bells and trigger protest actions from all over my body.

Embarrassing indeed. At least it’s already after sunset when I hit the road in my fluorescent jacket, so I usually don’t run into anyone I know (or don’t get recognised). And, who knows, by the time it’s still light at 8:30pm, my body has adapted in such a way that I have no reason to be embarrassed anymore…

Divinely Delicious

After a month of working, I have made one important discovery: I get cranky when I don’t get enough ME-time. The first two weeks were all jolly and good, but then the weather changed. We’ve had some snowfall and freezing temperatures, which meant getting stuck with my wheels in the muddy snow, not seeing a damn thing through my frozen windshield and trains arriving shamelessly late. Consequently, I had to get up even earlier and was home even later than normal. I have thoroughly enjoyed my long Christmas weekend because in the two weeks leading up to it, my exhausted mind/body wouldn’t let me do a thing. I have missed my cat, I have missed my books, I have kind of missed my TV shows (have to save them up for the weekend), I have missed my guitar game, and I have missed my cooking. Luckily, the start of my working life coincided with my discovery of The Two Fat Ladies and, more specifically, with their DELICIOUS onion soup, which is a real easy pick-me-up meal to finish off the week.

Typical for Clarissa and Jennifer, the soup is made with way too much butter to be good for a person. When the butter is melted, you have to add the chopped onions and after they get the desired colour and texture (that’s up to the cook in charge – either you make the onions caramelised and brown, or when you don’t have much time or patience, you can just leave them soft and yellow), you add stock mixed with some beer or wine to give your soup more “umphf!” (that’s just brilliant), some thyme, and salt & pepper. Let it simmer for fifteen minutes, add the ladies’ Secret Ingredient, Stilton Cheese, let it simmer for another fifteen minutes and enjoy the best soup you’ve ever eaten. I still haven’t had the opportunity to use real Stilton and have therefore experimented with various kinds of (blue) cheeses, but even then every try has been delicious.

On the show, Clarissa also made some home-made croutons to go with the soup. When it comes to making croutons, two things are important, she said:

1. One can never make too much croutons; however much you make, your guests will eat every single one.
2. Heat your oil through and through, or you’ll end up with soft cubes of bread soaked with oily fat instead of delicious crusty croutons.

Today, I added a small variation to my croutons: after I baked them in the oil, I smeared them with the blue Roquefort cheese I also used for my soup and popped them in the oven for five minutes or so, so that the cheese melted into the croutons. When these were done, I added some to my bowl of damping soup, grabbed a spoon, put one of these cheesy croutons floating in the Roquefort/onion soup into my mouth and thanked God I was alive – it was simply Divine. I can’t wait for my friend to return from the UK with some proper Stilton so I can finally try The Real Deal.

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It may be old for some, but I have just discovered the BEST cooking show in the history of cooking shows: BBC’s Two Fat Ladies, starring Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright. It ran from 1994 to 1996 in the UK, so it’s quite old, but I had never heard of it until now. Unfortunately, the show ended because of Jennifer’s death.

In every episode, the two ladies drive across the UK with their old sidecar and cook lavish and mostly traditional English meals on location. They cook two dishes each, visit locals to get their ingredients fresh from the garden/sea/farm/whatever, and use LOTS of butter. Their small talk in between is hilarious and they often burst out singing while cooking. Especially Jennifer makes me laugh every time, with her rolling r. Oh, and the theme song is brilliant. I’m a fan!

RRRRRavishing!

Whining Works

It looks like last week’s whining paid off because I have got a job. Temporary, as a legal secretary, in Brussels, but still: a job. Starting Monday. That’s suddenly very soon, but that’s OK, I am ready for it. This is such a load off my shoulders, and I am SO relieved.

Now I can finally join in with the whining about traffic, the long daily commute, train strikes, working late, impossible deadlines and other such working-life nonsense. Oh, and instead of decorating a tree this year I can decorate my very own cubicle, how neat is that!

Other than that, I had a sudden surge of Christmas spirit this week, and wound up listening to dear old Sufjan singing carols with that angelic voice of his. Which, if memory serves me right, was one of the first posts I made when I started this blog. Which means that another year has passed, and it’s almost time again for Christmas parties, presents, end-of-year-thoughts, best-of-lists and New Year’s resolutions. Oh, and it may also be time to reassess the proportion grey hair/regular hair on my head – I’m afraid I’ll see a dramatic increase of the former. Last week, my sister went through it for five minutes or so and ended up with a handful of silver locks!

A Grinding Halt

As much as my eleven-day road trip rejuvenated me, from the moment my bags were unpacked it was back to reality for both me and my travelling companion. While she had to go straight back to work and deal with all kinds of deadlines and meetings and appointments, all I went back to is the job market’s waiting room in which I write application letters and wait around for rejection letters. In other words, I just sank right back into the huge still lake that is my life.

I may sound ungrateful, but all around me, people are busy-beeing around, and I can’t even fathom what that must be like. I have all the time in the world to read the books I want to read, watch the television series I want to watch, play the games I want to play, visit the places I want to visit and yet I’m far from feeling satisfied. It just isn’t the right time for anything like that – I am NOT a retired person, I’m in the spring of my life and yet NOTHING IS HAPPENING, I have no control over anything. A year ago, nothing was happening either, but then at least I was in control over my thesis. I had the power and the responsibility to shape it as I saw fit, add a piece here, rewrite a piece there, I could even tear it all up and start over if I wanted to. Back then, however, I saw my thesis as an obstacle that paralyzed me and was standing in the way of the rest of my life. I was convinced that once I had overcome that obstacle, I would be able to move on. But now that that’s been dealt with, now that there are no more deadlines to meet, no more words to write, and no more library visits to make… what’s left? There is no huge gaping black hole like I feared there would be, there’s just nothing left to shape, nothing that can bring me any satisfaction. I’m standing still and the world has ran out of colour. As a result, I haven’t been feeling very creative or inspired, hence the utter silence on Books, etc. I couldn’t even bring myself to write the monthly wrap-ups of books I’ve been reading.

I know – jobs can be stressful, jobs can be boring, colleagues can be irritating, the pay can be lousy, bosses can be incompetent, your own free time can be compromised, but all that sounds like music to my ears right now. At least there would be something going on, I would be moving again, and maybe I would even be writing again.

On the Road (2)

Now maybe for a more detailed description. We were happy to arrive in Port Leucate: at last, the sea! It was a very quiet sea town so the beaches were as good as empty this time of year. The weather was great so we went for a quick swim in the morning. Then we decided to cross the country to the other side. We stopped in Carcassone, where we stayed maybe for half an hour. Too many tourists, too little authenticity, it wasn’t really our thing. Lourdes was on the way, so we wanted to see what that was all about. The way from Carcassone to Lourdes was very nice: with the Pyrenees constantly in view in the background, we drove on little roads with The Sound of Music-meadows on either side, up down left right, until we arrived at the city of Lourdes. Although there were many tourists here as well, at least there was something beautiful to see: the basilica was amazing! The grandeur of the whole thing and the mosaic paintings… incredible. We also washed our hands with holy water, visited the grotto and received a gift from an Italian bartender who had worked in Belgium: a little medallion of Mary and a prayer. He also wished us a good pilgrimage…

Strenghtened by all these blessings we drove on to Biarritz – surfer’s paradise and home of the hip, the trendy and the fashionable… we felt slightly out of place at first.

However, our discomfort soon evaporated when we noticed the unusually high concentration of hot men. Seriously, I have never seen so many gorgeous men in one place before. Young or old, short or tall, bearded or non-bearded, surfers, bar tenders and delivery boys alike, they were all tanned, muscled, had a body to die for and had nice faces. It was a real feast on the eye and we spent most of our time in Biarritz just sitting on the beach watching the surfers getting in and out of the water… I’m ashamed to admit it but that’s what you get when two single women visit a place like that.

On our second day in Biarritz we decided drive over to Spain. Big disappointment. The moment we crossed the border there was total chaos on the roads. Lots of traffic, road works and bad signalisation. I wanted to turn back there and then but my companion wanted to drive on to the city we had planned to see: San Sebastian. It was even worse there – we kept driving around in circles, didn’t find a place to park the car and kept getting closer to the city when we actually wanted to get out of it. We had to eat our picnic in the car while standing in a traffic jam… I did buy a cheap little tent of my own there, so that was one good thing that day. That, and the fact that we went back to the beach in Biarritz in the evening after we had dinner. We wanted to catch a last glimpse of our surfers who kept at it until sunset.

Our hormones were going crazy by now so it was probably a good thing that it started to rain that night. It stormed all night and continued to rain all morning so we decided it would be better to pack up and leave, and look for more sun…

We drove on to the North and decided to visit “that little island over there,” which turned out to be Ile de Ré. As we drove over the bridge we had to trade our hip surfers for nature-loving fishermen and farmers – quite a culture shock. Oh well, at least they could provide us with delicious food from the sea. Apparently all the people on the camping took off in the morning with their buckets to search for oysters and clams on the shores. That looked like fun, so we did the same thing. After we spent an entire morning looking for clams (and became totally zen in the process), we still didn’t have enough to make a decent dinner so we also bought some other sea things at the local market. Then we started a fire for the BBQ, prepared Jamie Oliver’s seafood vinaigrette, roasted some bread, cooked our clams and ate our meal. Delicious! We were so stuffed we needed a siesta afterwards, so I finally started in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which was ideal for this kind of lazing around. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, which I was reading before we left, proved to be too much of a strain to read when on holiday.

The next morning we did some souvenir shopping and off we went again. Destination: Saint Malo. The next stop was Cherbourg. On our way there we passed the famous Mont Saint Michel and noticed they were doing some kind of WWII re-enactment and were dropping paratroopers from a plane… amazing thing to see!

The only thing we did in Cherbourg was have dinner (I had the most delicious piece of meat I’ve ever eaten…) We arrived rather late and had to leave rather early because it was our last day and there were still so many things we wanted to see… Cap de la Hague, Honfleur, Etretat, the landing beaches, … And we also wanted to make a quick stop near Veurne to visit the village of Willem Vermandere (a Belgian singer) who had accompanied us musically on the entire trip. Nothing came of that though, Cap de la Hague was so beautiful and the weather was so nice in Honfleur that we didn’t get there in time… Maybe next time.

On the Road

What was meant to be a quiet camping holiday (staying on a camping in the South of France for ten days, reading books, enjoying the sunshine and taking the occasional swim) turned out to be quite the road trip. Both my travelling companion and I enjoyed the driving so much that we were actually a bit disappointed when we arrived at the planned destination after our two-day drive. Also, the camping site was in the mountains with lots of trees and we both felt a bit cramped – we craved for the sea and wide views. So despite the fact that the car was over-loaded and full of stuff that was useful for our initial plan but NOT for a road trip where we would have to pack and unpack every day, we decided to just drive on and see where we’d get. We just picked our destinations along the way, guided by impulse or by what we saw on the map. First we drove all the way to the South-East near the Spanish border, then we crossed the country to the Atlantic Ocean, with stops in Carcassone and Lourdes, then we slowly made our way back North along the coast. Total distanced travelled: around 4000 kilometres in eleven days… I’m normally not much of an improvisation person, but now it didn’t bother me at all. The driving cleared my head, all worries had been boiled down to the most basic needs (finding somewhere cheap to set up our little tents and finding something good to eat) and we were constantly standing in awe of the amazing surroundings we encountered. Great trip!

A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lessons in Karma, and Explosions in the Sky

Time flies. It seems to be an eternity ago when I ordered my ticket for Explosions in the Sky and yet, all of a sudden tonight was the night. And it proved to be quite an eventful night too.

For starters, it started to rain when I left home, which was a problem seeing that the concert took place in open air in the middle of a park. On top of that, it takes some fifteen minutes on foot to get from the entrance of the park to the venue. My car was parked another five minutes or so from the entrance, so I had a bit of walking ahead of me to get to my destination. When I was almost there, I realised I had forgotten to turn off the headlights of my car. I considered a moment, but decided to head back there to turn them off, so as not to run the risk to have a dead battery after the concert. So, I went all the way back, turned off the lights, and headed for the concert once again. At the ticket control, another unfortunate event occurred: I couldn’t find my ticket. I had put it in the inside pocket of my jacket – which I normally never use, but I stupidly thought it would be safer in there. Unfortunately, the pocket appeared to have a hole in it, so the ticket had probably fallen straight through the damn thing… Can you believe it?! I didn’t see any other option but to retrace my steps back to the car, hoping to find my ticket. So there I went again… my hopes were high, I tried to stay positive and kept saying to myself I will find it, all the while visualising the ticket on the ground somewhere – maybe with a footprint on it, but even so, visibly there, right where my eye would catch it. But no luck: I arrived at my car as empty-handed as I was when I began my search. By now, all my hope was gone and I started to inwardly curse everything and everyone. After some rest (I had been walking for almost an hour by now), I decided to go back to the ticket control and tell them what had happened and ask if I could enter anyway, pretty please? It was a long shot, and I didn’t feel like going back there for nothing, but I went anyway. I wanted to try every possible solution and not give up too easily for once. On the way back (fifth time), the inward cursing continued and I also figured that my inconveniences might have had something to do with bad karma. So just in case, I started to work on a karma list. But when I came to the ticket control and started to explain my problem, the guy interrupted me and asked for my name. After I told him what it was, he just said Here’s your ticket. Some nice people found it on the ground and brought it here. Wow, so nice people aren’t extinct just yet, thank you so much anonymous, honest finder! And with that, out went my karma list. No need for lists, karma had merely given me a little scare to teach me a valuable lesson: it pays off to think positive, it pays off not to give up easily, it pays off to explore every option, every possibility. Best of all, despite the delay (I arrived at seven thirty and was finally seated at a quarter past nine), I was right on time to see the Texas quartet enter the stage.

When they started off with the wonderful First Breath After Coma, I smiled: OK, my feet were tired, but here I was at a great venue, for what promised to be a great gig, the rain had stopped and was replaced by a soft, end-of-summer breeze and somewhere out there was a Very Nice Person. The band played non-stop for over an hour and ended with the awesome The Only Moment We Were Alone. They had no breaks, no talking in between songs, no encores, and despite the meandering and at times maybe slightly boring middle part, it was a nice enough concert. All’s well that ends well!