Dadnet

At the grand old age of 70-and-a-half my father has bought a computer and set up an internet connection. He’s made contact with a friendly IT-support-type and enrolled on a beginners’ course, so hopefully he won’t encounter too many problems.

Now all I need to do is scour my blog archives and delete all those “I hate my parents!” posts…

Big In Japan

So, we’re off to Japan first thing Wednesday.

We have the currency. We have the guidebooks. We have the “pointy” idiot tourist books. Needless to say, I have these two songs on the brain.

Finally, in order to fully prepare myself, I did what any sensible, urbane and culturally-sensitive traveller would do and watched all I could find on YouTube of Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish’s seminal BBC series “Adam and Joe Go Tokyo“, and committed to memory the lyrics (whose chorus consists of all the Japanese phrases they know) to Gaijin Invasion’s “Tokyo (Beautiful City)”:

See you in mid-May…

The wrong side of the tracks

As I stand on the platform waiting for the metro home at the end of the day, I notice a man standing on the platform opposite. I’d say he’s in his early 60s, glasses, wisps of white hair on the sides of an otherwise bald head, long black overcoat, briefcase. He starts to wave in a slow, robotic mime style, waggling his head in what he hopes is an amusing fashion, and smiling at a woman of a similar age opposite him, on my side of the tracks.

She smiles back. He pauses, then uses both hands to outline a curvaceous, hourglass figure, smiling all the while. She smiles back. Then one of his hands makes an ambiguous movement near his crotch, but he is interrupted by the approaching train, which blocks her view.

Once he has boarded the train, he stands near the window and repeatedly waves at her, trying to attract her attention, but she is no longer looking at him. As the train pulls away he gives up, and turns to smile at the woman standing next to him.

Out to lunch

Today I used my lunch break to pop into town and buy a wedding gift for our friends in Tokyo. As I entered the department store I was forced to make my way through the lingerie department in order to reach my destination. I hate it when that happens:

 

Purchase made,  I scoffed a disgusting burger and headed down the street to a nearby bookshop. As I walked, the bells of a nearby church began to ring. It took a few bars for me to recognise the song, which is not the kind of thing I’m used to hearing emanting from a house of God:

 

I guess the priest has a weakness for show-tunes.

I also passed a building full of rubble and workmen, obviously in the middle of some serious renovations/rebuilding. It used to house a rather nice Lebanese restaurant where we dined one evening with some friends. There was also a belly-dancing routine after the meal, and diners were encouraged to participate. The ladies in our group shook their booties with gusto, as I fondly recall. Needless to say, I remained seated. It’d be a shame if it’s closed for good.

Once in the bookshop, I picked up a free copy of a new creative writing magazine called Notes From The Underground (you can download a pdf of the entire issue from their site). So far I’ve only flicked through it and not yet read any of the stories, but one item caught my eye, about a web project called “Hitotoki“, which ties short stories to specific locations in a city (starting with Tokyo, but they’ve launched in a few other major cities too). I hope I get some time to read some of these before we go there next Wednesday…

Newcomer

From a book I’m currently reading:

“Initially the community may welcome us warmly - even overwhelmingly. But in every culture the newcomer is still exactly that - and newcomers by definition don’t fit in yet. Our basic position in the new community is one of statuslessness. We carry knowledge from past experiences - often including special knowledge of people, places and proceses - but none of that knowledge has use in this new place. No one knows about our history, abilities, talents, normal responses, accomplishments, or areas of expertise. Sometimes it seems they don’t care. Soon we question whether our achievements in the previous setting were as significant as we thought. [...] Even with an initial warm welcome, we may discover it’s not as easy as we thought it would be to make close friends. Circles of relationships among our new acquaintances are already well defined, and most people aren’t looking to fill a vacant spot in such a circle.”

More here.

Shelf life

For a while the appeal of box sets of tv shows escaped me entirely. My attitude was that it was only worth buying something if you were confident that you’d get your money’s worth by watching it several times over, exploring all the special features, and so forth. Even then, I found it hard to get my head around the fact that there were people out there willing to spend hundreds of euro/pounds/dollars on a complete set of, say, Thundercats.

But recently two things have changed my mind. Firstly, the fact that I’ve missed all or part of some things that I would have enjoyed, due to a period of country-hopping around the turn of the millenium. For example I watched, and enjoyed, the first series of The Sopranos, but immediately afterwards we moved to Dublin, where we had no tv, and then shortly afterwards moved to Italy, where we only had access to Italian tv (and an inordinate number of German channels via satellite). So it wasn’t until we arrived in Belgium that I was able to watch English-language series again - we get BBC1 and 2, and most of the Dutch and Flemish channels show British and American shows subtitled rather than dubbed, although we have been known to watch stuff dubbed into French (Lost, Battlestar Galactica). But by that time I’d missed a series or two, and I’m anal enough to not bother with something unless I can watch every episode, in the correct sequence.

But there are also the frustrating scheduling practices to deal with. Seasons are sometimes cut in half, and it’s hard to know when, if ever, you’ll get to see the second half, let alone subsequent seasons. I saw, and fell in love with, the first series of Six Feet Under. A pause of a couple of years and I finally found a channel showing seasons two and three. Then another pause. Occasional episodes popped up on various channels, but they’d jumped ahead, or it was difficult to actually establish which season they were showing. It was at this point that I caved in and bought series four and five on DVD (just started watching them now - no spoilers, please).

But the second reason for starting to watch things this way is the realisation that, if something’s worth watching, it’s not only worth watching the moment it’s released. So what if I’m behind everyone else, and I can’t have those “water cooler” discussions? If I’m reading a book, it doesn’t bother me whether it was published three months ago or three hundred years ago. If it’s good, it’ll keep until I have time for it. If I’m always scrambling to keep up with the latest thing, I’ll miss plenty of older stuff more worthy of my attention.

 

TGI Friday!

A recent change in my responsibilities at work means that Friday is now the busiest day of my week. I think that this is probably a good thing. If I’m going to have an empty afternoon stretching out in front of me, when I sit idly refreshing my inbox and rss feeds in hope of distraction, I’d rather it wasn’t the afternoon immediately before the weekend begins. This way, Friday flies by.

Mondays, as you can see, are a little more relaxed…

I’ve always had a somewhat different perception of time, and while I’m all too fond of days spent doing nothing but pottering, musing and lazing, when it comes to sitting in an office under flourescent lighting, breathing conditioned air, next to wittering colleagues, I’d rather have something that distracts me from my situation and fills my hours. 

Not that being busy is only a way to kill time. I remember my years at university being enjoyably full. Not, of course, with study or evenings researching in the library. Heaven forbid (I was a literature student, after all). But I was kept occupied with the student TV station for which I was constantly filming or editing something or other, as well as being its secretary and newsletter editor (which, in reality, meant that I wrote the whole thing myself). Add to this the occasional essay, written in a few frantic hours the evening before the deadline, plus an embryonic social life, and I found that the days were so packed that I often barely had time to remember to call my mother (*cough*).

 

Milky

The old lady sits down at the table next to mine in the café. Her head, with its bulbous eyes and straggly hair plastered against her skull, reminds me of Rottcodd from Titus Groan. She takes the complimentary square of chocolate she received with her coffee, and spends a good five minutes trying to open it with her soft, trembling fingers. Once she has succeeded, she drops the dark tablet into her milky coffee and stirs. On the tray in front of her is a large tiramisu, as well as a not inconsiderable slice of cheesecake.

My three year old daughter, on her way back and forth from the play area to our table, pauses to stare at her every time she passes.

Frills

Taking the escalator out of the metro today, I noticed a woman standing in front of me carrying the frilliest, laciest handbag I have ever seen. It was less like a bag and more like a piece of lingerie.

In the lift up to my office, a man in his 50s stood in front of me. Despite the fact that he had obviously shaved this morning, a line of white hairs ran down one side of his neck, from earlobe to collar. The hairs were long enough to suggest that he has managed to miss shaving this particular strip of skin every morning for several weeks. As he turned to wish me ‘Bon journée” before leaving the lift, I noticed another line of unshaved hair just under his bottom lip.

Maison et Confort

Not that this blog is going to turn into an endless series of posts mocking catalogue tat, but I found this one lying around, inexplicably abandoned in a bookshop the other day, so I had to pick it up. Pictures can be clicked to view large on flickr.

Erik and sgazzetti - you’ll both be receiving a set of these next Christmas:

Below: “The friends of Nature know that all trees have a soul. But now they also have a face! The separate elements are in synthetic stone; the eyes shine at night.”

Below, extract: “Simply plant the character in a hedge or behind a barrier with the aid of the large metal bar, and observe the magic effect he has on passers-by. He’ll put even the grumpiest people in a good mood!”

And finally, in the bathroom section of the catalogue…

 I love her pose and expression. Does she think it’s a telephone, or is she just cuddling it?