melancharisbron (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} melancharisbron) wrote,@ 2009-09-11 21:40:00 |
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One more day
These past several weeks have been a process of putting one foot in front of the other.
There were exams. There were re-sits. There was waiting.
There was rediscovering reading a fiction book for sheer pleasure. There was plenty of self-doubt. There was a quick trip to Amsterdam - Mr Sweetie's editor activities, and this time I decided to tag along.
The event was an author's reading, a book launch, a first book launch. The author's wife (as he told us in the little speech) had thought carefully about the book her loving spouse had asked her to read, and suggested the perfect venue - so, about 50 of us gathered in a little group by the light of a few fluorescent lamps, 40 meters below the Nieuw Amsterdamse Peil (the "New Amsterdam Level", or what passes for sea-level in the lowlands...), listening to two fragments of the novel, itself set on a non-Earth location deep beneath the planetary surface.
It worked. It really did.
The day after, Mr Sweetie and I wandered around Amsterdam, just drinking in the sights of canals and rowhouses, without any schedule at all. It was heaven. At one point, Mr Sweetie said, "Oh, hey, we're near the apartment of S.!" A couple of text messages and one phone call later (over the relaxed course of an hour, in which we sit on at a corner café, on a specially-built bit of furniture, of wood, two lovely relaxing chairs attached to a table, with a sun-brolly over it), we meet with her at a local flea- and antiques market, and talk up a storm between the stalls of old jewelry, new "vintage" clothes and enameled signs hawking soft drinks in faded hues.
She's here before a visit with an osteopath, one more step in her journey to health (she's got more allergies than you can shake a stick at), and I get a slight headache from delaying my lunch (she can't eat much that's on offer in any restaurant, due to too many wayward glutens, citrus juices, and other things), while we drink tea (hers is fresh mint - a lovely fashion adopted in recent years around here).
It's the little things that remind me - every day is a gift. The evening spent with our host L., watching Kung Fu Panda, relaxing after an easy meal in a local Chinese restaurant, and then a DVD (love the new technologies!) of a German science fiction series from around the time of Star Trek Raumpatroille ("Space Patrol"). L pities me because my German isn't up to the needed level - I acknowledge his pity, but say, "Actually, I think it's brilliant - I actually don't get to try out my language skills with science fiction very often, because it's so often only in English...." and L nods thoughtfully, surprised by the notion that my luck in being born with a mother-tongue of English might have taken away some pleasure. Over breakfast on the day we leave, we tease one another in "baby-Deutsch", repeating choice lines from the evening's episode. (Vocabulary word: Zauerstof, or "oxygen".)
Somewhere, always present, a time from 8 years ago. The banal moments - my strained shoulder that day, the smell of exhaust and dust on the Rathmines Road in Dublin, the jumble of the bric-a-brack shop on Wexford Street, where I wandered, dazed, after Mr Sweetie and then my good friend Mags text-messaged me about That Event - forever set in memory. It takes no effort; in fact, the implication that one might forget, in the favored tactic of a few adrenaline junkies and right-wing manipulators? A dire and unforgivable insult.
Recover. Rebuild. Remember.
We haven't even begun to recover. If anything, a hole that was opened has been dug deeper into, by people who are those wolves in sheepskins we are warned about in sacred texts. Terrible, terrible things have been done, in our name. I hope, naively but still, I hope, that there will be a putting to rights. If we don't manage to do something worse to the world, and ourselves, in the meantime.
On the personal scale, life has still been kind. I have my exam results today. The language classes were about what I expected, and I'm anticipating the repeat of them, to learn even better what I'd only been able to scratch the surface of. The other class, the one I thought I did somewhat better on, turns out to have been a lot better. Which pretty much confirms my own approach, which remains somewhat counter to that of the Big Name Authorities in charge of the university - I need to be able to concentrate on only a very few classes at a time, and give myself over to their study without the distraction of an overloaded schedule. I'm not 20 any more. (Thank goodness. That was a tough age for me.) I hope the university will take notice, in a nice way.
These past several weeks have been a process of putting one foot in front of the other.
There were exams. There were re-sits. There was waiting.
There was rediscovering reading a fiction book for sheer pleasure. There was plenty of self-doubt. There was a quick trip to Amsterdam - Mr Sweetie's editor activities, and this time I decided to tag along.
The event was an author's reading, a book launch, a first book launch. The author's wife (as he told us in the little speech) had thought carefully about the book her loving spouse had asked her to read, and suggested the perfect venue - so, about 50 of us gathered in a little group by the light of a few fluorescent lamps, 40 meters below the Nieuw Amsterdamse Peil (the "New Amsterdam Level", or what passes for sea-level in the lowlands...), listening to two fragments of the novel, itself set on a non-Earth location deep beneath the planetary surface.
It worked. It really did.
The day after, Mr Sweetie and I wandered around Amsterdam, just drinking in the sights of canals and rowhouses, without any schedule at all. It was heaven. At one point, Mr Sweetie said, "Oh, hey, we're near the apartment of S.!" A couple of text messages and one phone call later (over the relaxed course of an hour, in which we sit on at a corner café, on a specially-built bit of furniture, of wood, two lovely relaxing chairs attached to a table, with a sun-brolly over it), we meet with her at a local flea- and antiques market, and talk up a storm between the stalls of old jewelry, new "vintage" clothes and enameled signs hawking soft drinks in faded hues.
She's here before a visit with an osteopath, one more step in her journey to health (she's got more allergies than you can shake a stick at), and I get a slight headache from delaying my lunch (she can't eat much that's on offer in any restaurant, due to too many wayward glutens, citrus juices, and other things), while we drink tea (hers is fresh mint - a lovely fashion adopted in recent years around here).
It's the little things that remind me - every day is a gift. The evening spent with our host L., watching Kung Fu Panda, relaxing after an easy meal in a local Chinese restaurant, and then a DVD (love the new technologies!) of a German science fiction series from around the time of Star Trek Raumpatroille ("Space Patrol"). L pities me because my German isn't up to the needed level - I acknowledge his pity, but say, "Actually, I think it's brilliant - I actually don't get to try out my language skills with science fiction very often, because it's so often only in English...." and L nods thoughtfully, surprised by the notion that my luck in being born with a mother-tongue of English might have taken away some pleasure. Over breakfast on the day we leave, we tease one another in "baby-Deutsch", repeating choice lines from the evening's episode. (Vocabulary word: Zauerstof, or "oxygen".)
Somewhere, always present, a time from 8 years ago. The banal moments - my strained shoulder that day, the smell of exhaust and dust on the Rathmines Road in Dublin, the jumble of the bric-a-brack shop on Wexford Street, where I wandered, dazed, after Mr Sweetie and then my good friend Mags text-messaged me about That Event - forever set in memory. It takes no effort; in fact, the implication that one might forget, in the favored tactic of a few adrenaline junkies and right-wing manipulators? A dire and unforgivable insult.
Recover. Rebuild. Remember.
We haven't even begun to recover. If anything, a hole that was opened has been dug deeper into, by people who are those wolves in sheepskins we are warned about in sacred texts. Terrible, terrible things have been done, in our name. I hope, naively but still, I hope, that there will be a putting to rights. If we don't manage to do something worse to the world, and ourselves, in the meantime.
On the personal scale, life has still been kind. I have my exam results today. The language classes were about what I expected, and I'm anticipating the repeat of them, to learn even better what I'd only been able to scratch the surface of. The other class, the one I thought I did somewhat better on, turns out to have been a lot better. Which pretty much confirms my own approach, which remains somewhat counter to that of the Big Name Authorities in charge of the university - I need to be able to concentrate on only a very few classes at a time, and give myself over to their study without the distraction of an overloaded schedule. I'm not 20 any more. (Thank goodness. That was a tough age for me.) I hope the university will take notice, in a nice way.