The Old New Me

Oops. For the second year in a row I forgot to take note of the anniversary of my new surname. Which was about a week ago now. Happy 3rd birthday, my new name!

Blog Nerdery, part 2

It's that time of year again, when I pinch someone's idea about putting together the first sentence (or sometimes two, if the first sentence was useless) from the first post of each month and see what my year was like.

Last night at the NYE party that I went to we were all thinking of what our highlight of 2007 was.

Well, I'm back.

Well, depending on whose opinion you listen to, it's either not summer any more (yay! That's my opinion), or it's still winter (also yay! That's Reto).

Congratulations to Reto, who is rejoining the world of employed people today!

All my best intentions of sleeping in were thwarted this morning, not only by my mock-insomnia, but also by the band (as in group of people with uniforms and instruments) of morons (as in people who go wandering the streets at 7am making a racket) wandering down our street and making a racket!

The potatoes have had their day, look who coffee is celebrating now!

Sigh. Reto's been off killing people (or whatever it is they do in the army) for a good day and a half now, and I am apparently incapable of coping without him.

Note that I chose that cat for its William-Tell style enthusiasm for apples.

I'm orf on my honeymoon.

Happy temporary unemployment to Deonie!

Well. Recent(ish) reasons for not doing any blogging: nothing much has been happening except me being full of french-rage, and that's not very interesting.

Just when you thought you were getting a coffee set for 6 people for your birthday, it turns out there's actually a possibly drunken cat in the box instead!

Hmm. I think I preferred last year's verision. Although it's nice that 2008's list started and ended with nice things.

Not Doing Anything Rash

Since Reto and I have become the owners of Powers Of Taping Stuff On The Telly (which is a few months ago now), I've been watching the episodes of Sex And The City that have been on SF2 (TV station) in the dead of night, every night. Before you get too excited and say "ooh, that sounds nice, I haven't seen that in ages", don't get carried away with programming your recording device, because the last episode was on last night.

And wasn't it annoying? Not that I haven't seen it before, but it was annoying this time around for a whole bunch of new reasons. Yes, obviously the sudden change in her boyfriend's behaviour (the bit where he suddenly went from being totally self-reliant and interesting to needy and pathetic in an implausible but extremely useful piece of plot twistery, just so we would all think it was okay when she fell back into the arms of her relentlessly disappointing other boyfriend) was annoying, and the way she always happens to fall over or be scrabbling around on the floor or something equally charmingly undignifed at just the right moment, but more annoying this time was how atrocious her friends were.

For those of you who don't know, in the last few episodes of Sex And The City, Carrie chucked it all in and moved to Paris with her boyfriend. She got there and had, as we all do, an excellent time having all these shiny new experiences, and a horrible time what with being lost with no language, no friends, no family, no understanding of the culture, no one to rely on except the boyfriend (who already has his own life there and doesn't necessarily have all the time in the world to help her adjust) and the constant feeling of not belonging. Possibly I am exaggerating that a bit with regard to what happened in the TV show, but I think in terms of the daily life of people who have emigrated, it's not too far from the truth.

Anyway, Carrie phoned her friend to complain and to speak to someone familiar and her friend said "If it's so atrocious there, you should come back here!". That, in my opinion, is not a nice thing for a friend to say. Yes, it's nice to know that your people miss you, but surely we all know that already? I think a far kinder thing to say would be "Wow, that sounds terrible, but what a weird problem to have, the fact that you don't even know your own phone number! Today I went to work and then I came home and I did my laundry and I watched Australia's Funniest Home Videos. Look how bizarro your life is in comparison!". People don't move to a new country on a whim, and I think it's a bit belittling to encourage them to chuck it all and move back on one (note that in the show she had been in Paris for a week or something). If my friends encouraged me to wallow in the difficulty of living here and then to throw my hands in the air and say "it's all too hard" rather then providing the emotional support and good sense that I need from them (even from this vast distance), I would be very unimpressed (take note, friends. Not that you're not all doing a lovely job).

Living in another country and being distant from all your dearest people and not understanding the language or the social expectations or the way you buy vegetables in the supermarket (you weigh them before you go to the checkout!) is difficult and frequently infuriating. Not living half a world away from your international boyfriend is rather excellent (depending of course on whether he's an idiot, as in Carrie's case, or not an idiot, as in mine), but it doesn't necessarily mean that life is going to be a basket of puppies. If there's one thing I've learned from reading all these blogs about people moving to new countries, and of hearing the stories of people in my language classes, it's that we all have exactly the same experience of having difficulty making a new life in a new country, and I suspect that what we all need is support and sympathy and people to distract us with stories of their own problems, not friends saying "if it's not fun, why bother?".

Also note that this rant was not brought to you by my friends or family or the quality of my life at the moment. Those last few episodes of SATC really annoyed me a lot.

No Wonder It's Hard To Find Jeans That Are Long Enough

As it turns out I am far taller than I used to be (and when I say that I mean taller than I was when I was 18, not taller than I was when I was a baby). I think that the last time I actually checked how tall I was was in the dwindling days of high school and now, a decade or so later, I find that I am 3cm taller (which I suspect may be due solely to improvements in posture rather than any sort of belated growth). Well, given that I measured myself by putting a packet of blu-tack on my head (to make a straight line to the wall so I could draw a mark on it) and then measuring the distance with a 10cm-long set square (apparently the only measuring device we have) it probably wasn't as accurate as it could have been, but it feels right. By which I mean it feels as though Reto is getting shorter and shorter. Sigh.