Evil with meat

A date.

I've known this fella, who we'll call Mac, for quite a while. Until recently though, we were merely aquaintances, notwithstanding the fact that we engaged in some heavy petting, 50's style, the first day we met. But that was a long time ago...I was about 16 I guess. Anyway, a coupla weeks ago, I ran into him at a friend of a friend of a friend's house.

We talked. Since the last time I saw him, he'd gone and graduated. Currently working on a masters in something or other. Assuredly swung his arm around my shoulders as we sat on the floor of the friend of a friend of a friend leaning against the couch. Quoted Pablo Neruda (famous Mexican poet)...a total line, but it totally worked. Said he cooked a mean stir fry and would I like to come over to his place for some sometime? I thrilled him with the heroic tale of how I've managed to completely avoid stir fry in my 20 years of existence. And a "sure."

Numbers exchanged.

After 2 days, he called. The next day he called again. And three days after THAT he called again. We didn't really have a whole lot to talk about, but that's mostly due to the fact that I'm not much of a phone person. The exciting conclusion??? He re-invited me over for that world-famous stir fry. I declined on the grounds that for all I knew, he could be a total creep. No way was I going to his apartment alone. So we decided to go out instead.

BUT WAIT! That's not the exciting conclusion!

The real exciting conclusion came after we played pool. After dinner. After coffee. After we talked about all kinds of relevant, interesting things. After we took stupid pictures on his camera phone. After I went to his place afterall. After I met his roomie. After I played with his adorable dog. After 2 and a half beers. After we watched a movie. Well, in the middle of the movie actually. But definetely after the sloppy half-assed kissing.

Yes friends, the true exciting conclusion to the evening came when dear, interesting, relevant, intelligent Mac engaged in some...shall we say...inappropriate behavior/placing of hands.

The 2 people that I told busted out the big ADR, but I prefer inappropriate behavior/placing of hands. And I'm not one to belittle such things. As a former friend pointed out, I flourish in sadness. Not true, but still...

Everybody plays the fool sometimes. It may be factual, may be cruel

OF COURSE I knew what to do to keep him.

I am a woman afterall. As a formerly slutty girl, I knew I could move just so and put my hand on his leg just so and say things just so and he'd stay with me. And yet, I didn't.

So he, with his perfect shy smile and perfect house and perfect dog and perfect body and perfect fucking accent and perfect everything got back together with his ex-girlfriend. Maybe it was just too soon to be in something so perfect. Truth be told, I'm still reeling from XBF.

Or maybe it was something slightly more noble. Maybe I can see why she'd call 50 times a day. Maybe I can see why she would do everything in her power to be with with him. Maybe she feels the same way about him as I do XBF. Maybe he looked just a tad too guilty in the morning. Maybe I didn't trust his closed eyes when we kissed. I mean, closed eyes are a must of course, but untrustworthy closed eyes bite the big one.

Regardless of anything else, the only conclusion I can come to about anything right now is that I need, NEED two things: heavy-duty-super-ultra-garunteed-not-to-leak therapy and a man that can and wants to take care of me. Not money-wise. But other stuff-wise.

I'm new to all this. I havn't been alone (or that is to say, I havn't been without someone loving me) since tenth grade. So what do I look for? I dunno. Someone that smiles at me, not just around me...that can plan something to do...a good kisser...believes in something...grabs me (hand, hips, um, et cetera) I def. don't wanna always be the one doin the grabbin...pays...laughs...wants me to meet his friends...better yet, wants to meet mine...cuddles...doesn't always have to be saying something...asks about the stuff I'm up to...I dunno???!!!???

Fairly low standards in my opinion, and yet, it seems like no one meets them.

Men are idiots. Women really just want someone interesting that can slow dance and slow kiss and give some good lovin and hold them. C'mon dudes! Get it the fuck together!

Love ain't worth makin when it makes you the fool.

Everyone has their quirks. One of mine is an obcession with remembering. My many scrapbooks and boxes of pictures and--most importantly--the various notebooks I write my stories and quotes and poems in are all testaments to that. I'm borderline psychotic with it all. OK, maybe psychotic is a bit strong, but I cherish my memories more than most nonetheless. They are what give you perspective and they are what you learn from. In the end, when you die, they are all you have. And, with a little luck and a few random acts of kindness, you'll go into someone else's memory.

So, what with the craziness about memories I've got, it's all the more painful to me when I have to block something out... especially when it's something that was really really great. I'm thinking specifically of Mr. Mc and XBF. I cut myself off completely from XBF because I'm ready to be loved the way I want to be loved. So he's gone. And Mr. Mc is dead. So he's gone.

I can think about them in generalities only. If thoughts of Mr. Mc's sincerity or pain or arms or XBF's eyes or the way he hated that I wear sunglasses in the rain, it hurts too much to stand. I can't do it. It isn't nearly as intense with Mr. Mc as it is with XBF, because my feelings for him weren't as intense. A fact I am now sad to say I regret. And I know that in time I'll be able to remember every detail without wanting to curl into a ball and sleep for a week.

And the odd part (I'm sure you can all relate) is that I'm fine 23 hours and 58.77 minutes a day. More than fine...I'm stu-fucking-pendous....single, pretty, ambitious, happy, busy, smiley....all that good stuff. The blocking it all out is really working out well for me.

In other news--Fuck the superbowl, fight Fox. But I can't be too angry, they were the reason the get-together was held at which I got nice and fuckered up. {drunk and bitter Boo :) just kiddin} DAMN I love drinkin all night then sleepin all day!

Yes, to rock out is a very good thing

Hello my darlings, I have returned! We finally got the internet at home, though I daresay we can't really afford it.

Speaking of home, this apartment is the best place ever. It's actually home, not just the place I sleep or the place I visit three times a year or the place I try to avoid my parents. I look forward to coming back after work and I'm loath to leave in the morning. Admittedly, though, that's because I am horrible at waking up. I generally sleep through 4 alarms and S doing her darndest to get my ass off the futon mattress on the floor that is my bed. Regardless, though, I love this place.

We couldn't have found it at a better time. My parents are in the middle of a divorce. Dad moved out about a month before I did. As weird and stressful and hurtful as the situation is to me now, it was tenfold when I was living in that house. My parents have divorced each other before, so they know how to bull-face lie just to stir up trouble on the other persons' end. And the battleground (or so it sometimes seemed) was located right on the tippy top of my head. A crushing force, to be sure. But better I than my little sister, who, by some miracle has remained somewhat unaffected and unjaded. Los parientes have done a good job of leaving her delicate psyche the hell alone. Mine, on the other hand....Well it isn't delicate anymore.

So huge changes have been, and are, in effect. And despite the negativity of it all, I couldn't be more grateful. They are so so so much better apart. Dick Lucas, in particular is a completely different dude. I have never seen my dad so.....human. And happy. Mom never really changes. Thank goodness, 'cause she wouln't be my mom if she did.

I'm so happy with my little slice of twenty-year-old heaven. Got a little bit of money, a little bit of beer, my best bud, a swank place and cute dog. And a stone-cold crush on my boss.

Next time my baybays, next time.

You say love is a temple...you tell me to enter but then you make me crawl...

U2 is one of the most overrated bands of all time. Don't bother getting your panties in a bunch, I'm apperantly the only person in the English-speaking world that thinks so.

However much they do, in fact, suck, their song "One" is just about as perfect a representation of how I've felt lately as a song could get. XBF constantly has me up and down in mood, and I've grown so tired of it that I can't pull any joy out of what used to be the most amazing relationship the modern world had ever seen. Alas, he will be moving in six months, filling me in turns with relief and dread. And also leaving me with quite a pickle. Do I spend time with him at the cost of my own pride and feelings of self-worth? Or do I write him off now, at the cost of not only the love he's forced deep down in me but an amazing friendship as well?

Pickle indeed. No advice on the matter, please, I'm bored to death with advice, most notably when it comes from people I don't even know.

In other news, let me tell you about my job.

I work at the local Fed Ex. Well, actually there's one closer to where I live, but the one I'm at suffices. Anyway, I SWAK. Sort, Weigh and Key. Boxes come off a conveyor belt, drop down a slide, at the bottom of which I await them. I take the box, sit it on a scale, key in the zip code of where it's going and scan the various bar codes on the boxes, telling the computer what to do with the different codes. Then I send the boxes down another line. Monotonous. But I love it.

The SWAK side is about as long as a professional football field, I work at the staion at the very end. This is a very special station. As the keeper of the station, I am the chosen one. Chosen, that is, to remove anything that jambs up one of the four lines coming in and out of SWAK. It sounds much easir than it really is.

For one thing, I've been terrified of ladders my whole life. Don't know why, that's just the way my brain works. On a mission trip once, where we were re-roofing a poor old womans house, I went up the ladder in the morning (after much coersion) and opted to jump off the roof at the end of the day. I was burnt to a crisp at the end of the trip, but it was worth it to not have to go up and down that damn ladder. So you see that this is no trivial matter. They scare me.

Well, at Fed Ex, there is an intricate system of ladders around the whole place so that every inch of every conveyor belt can be seen at any time. Also, they come quite in handy when fixing jambs. You should see me now, I'm like a freaking albino monkey, hopping all nimbly-bimbly up, down and sideways around SWAK.

See what this job has done for me! Also, my forearms have never looked better.

And, after giving it far more concideration than the matter warrants, I've come to the conclusion that spending five hours a day surrounded by about 400-- 300 of whom are totally hot-- young men, is not a bad thing to do at all. Not bad at all.

I will be the one...

"You're dude department sounds about as busy as the returns counter at wal mart."

Well, no. Now exactly. The fella that said that hasn't actually seen or talked to me in quite a while, so all he knows is what he reads in this blog. I told him that everything in blogland is just a condensed version of real life, so it isn't really all that bad. Then he made a lame attempt at a dirty joke about condensing something else. Moving on.

The fact of the matter is that while my life in dudes hasn't been all that enthralling, my time, energy and mind have all been pretty much consumed with matters of the heart and, more frequently, the libido.

The faces change, but there is inevetibly something wrong, dirty and rotten and wrong, with the core of every dude that's come around in the last five months.

Not the least of whom was that one guy I had been seeing (I forget the code name I used for him here). Yeah, he attacked me. Choking and hitting for a minute of two from his end and one swift stabbing from mine. The fork I lodged right under his bottom rib, $2, the look on his face, priceless. I found out later through a mutual friend that he'd been tripping on "acid or shrooms or something. Man, I don't know. That's so fucked up."

Then of course there is XBF himself. I finally put his mind games to rest just this afternoon. A girl can only take so much of that stuff. I'm sensitive, damnit, and I'd like to stay that way.

Hmmm, my first, last, and only one-night-stand. That was ineteresting.

My roomates boyfriends twin brother. All I can say about him is that, as a very recently devirginized young man, he should be a whole lot more grateful than he is!

And maybe one or two more drifters that wandered into my bubble but then were sent immediately packing or ran off with their tails between their legs.

But alas! I come to my latest diversion from work, school and play. We'll call this guy Joe. I went to my junior (his senior) prom with Joe. He was soo so so so nice and way cool and hilarious. And I, in turn, was a total bitch to him. I was young and stupid, I have no excuse. It didn't take me long to realise the error of my ways, but by the taime I'd figured it out, he'd graduated. So, for the last 4 years, I'd been wishing I could see him so I could apologize.

But the shamed have to wait. S and I concluded that I may never see him again. So hope was basically lost.

Then, we got hit with that terrible blizzard on the day before Christmas Eve. My apartment complex was, coincidently one of like 2 communities that didnt lose power. So S's parents stayed with us to escape the cold. They left the next morning before I woke up, leaving $20 as a thank-you. S and I were excited about eating a real piece of meat for the first time in a month. So we went to one of the best places in town to get a steak. But they were closed, no electricty you see. So we went down our mental list of places we could go. As it turned out, the last joint on the list was the only restaurant in town (or any surrounding towns) that had power. So we ate there.

We waited to be seated. We sat. We smoked. We placed our order. We gobbled down the chips and salsa. I had to pee. I came back from the resteroom and related to S how the sign about the sink read: EMPLOYEES MUST "WASH HANDS." We chuckled. I glanced to the right toward the register (we had been seated near the bar, where the only cash register was see). "Is that....it is!" S turned to look. It was Joe! "Joe!! Come here!" Joe and his best friend Zak were at the register buying gift certificates.

They came over. Joe has gotten even cuter. We small-talked. They left. S and I looked at each other and blurted out the same thing at the same time, "Why in the hell didn't I/you give him my/your number!?!"

Ahh, but the moment had passed. They were gone.

That night we remembered that he'd said he sells appliances at the mall. So S and I decided that she would go in next weekend and ask if he had a girlfriend. I got goosebumps just thinking of it. But this morning at school, after another night of assholery from XBF, I decided that I was, in fact, not in the third grade. I had to ask him out for myself. Further more, I had to do it right away. So I left, went home, took a shower, got prettyfied and went to the mall.

I saw him right away but he was talking to someone so I decided to wait. Walking through the washing machine aisle, a man with BOB on his nametag came over and asked if I needed help.

"Yes, actually, is Joe here?"

"Yeah, he is, is that all you needed to know?"

"Yep, thanks!"

"Hey Joe, this young lady wants to see you!" He was yelling across like 80 feet.

Joe walked up, "Hey Amanadoo! What's up?"

"I, ummmm, I need your help."

"With what?"

"Well, I, er, um, S and I need a washer and dryer."

"I can't help you. I sell everything but washers and dryers. But Bob can help....Hey Bob! She needs a washer."

Bob smiled and started toward us. Whispering to Joe, "Do you sell refridgerators?" He does. "Well I need a refridgerator. Let's look at those."

He waved off Bob and called me a dork. We small-talked agin about the apartment and his karate class. I whipped around to face him (I think I scared him a little), "I want to take you out to dinner." It's a little blurry after that because all my blood went straight to my face and I got lightheaded. The important part here is that he accepted and we exchanged numbers and he said he'd call me. The I told him a secret...that S's boyfriend had bought us a washer and dryer before we even moved. He called me a dork again. I wanted to hug him, but I said bye-bye instead, walked swiftly to the parking lot where I did a little dance.

I don't think this is what Ray Charles was singin about

Georgia.

Let me tell you about Georgia.

At my school she's infamous. She's beyond infamous. She's a legend.

No one will do her...which is why all the juniors get her. They don't know any better. Georgia is a nasty old lady. And the nasty goes far deeper than the old lady crud behind her ears. She's mean. And racist. Once, a black student was doing her hair and Georgia looked her staright in the face and said, "We owned 2 of you back in West Virginia." Didn't even bat a fucking eye. She constantly berates everyone she comes into contact with, including teachers, students and her husband, whom she refers to as "the man." As in, "Mrs. [teachers name], why in the hell can't you do your job and get these young women off their fat behinds and have one of them do my hair? The man is waiting for me in the car and I don't have time to wait for all these obese girls to jump off the ugly train." Snapping is involved. And yes, that is a direct quote.

Well, wednesday, all the juniors were busy or on lunch, so Christina was forced to take Georgias ticket. All was going well with the roller set until I showed up. I sat in the chair next to Christina. I crossed my legs. And my foot instantly began shaking, a tick I inherited from Dick Lucas.

Georgia looked over at me with hell fire in her eyes. "You're a lucky young lady that you didn't have my mother."

Without prompting, she continued, "She'd have killed you for sure."

Startled, I asked why.

"You ought to stop shaking your leg like that, it's an ugly habit and my dear mother'd have killed you for it."

"Well, I guess I am lucky I didn't have your mother. She sounds horrible!" Now, dear readers, I'm willing to admit that perhaps that statement goaded her on a bit.

A few minutes passed. Christina swiveled Georgias chair around so that my offensive foot wasn't in her direct line of vision. Alas, the old bag turned herself back around.

Shooting me the evil eye again, she insisted I stop shaking my foot, "You stop that right now or I'm going to bop you in the face."

Again, maybe I had something to do with what came next after I responded, "Do it!"

She reached over and punched me in the shin. Those old lady knuckles hurt like a mother fucker! I said "that was completely unneccesary," and started to get up.

Right at the moment, Christina was walking back from getting hairspray and didn't know what had just happened. Georgia yanked the hairbrush out of Christinas hand, got about 2 inches from my face, shouted "thank you very much!" and slammed the brush down on the station. Rollers and pins went everywhere. She stormed off.

A teacher saw the whole thing and she was ab-so-lut-ely livid. She called the director of our school and told her that Georgia was not, under any circumstances allowed back in the school again.

So there's that. Crazy old lady.

DRIVING WHILE SCANDINAVIAN

You might know that Germans have a very intimate relationship with their cars. We like them. Most of all, we like to drive them fast. On our Autobahns, people check if their Mercedes really can do the 250 km/h as advertised. There's tailgating, there's swearing and cussing, co-drivers (women, of course) shaking their fists at you and copious amounts of adrenaline being discharged.

Unlike the French or the Italians who partake in risky driving with a nonchalant elegance, we take it all very seriously. You insult my car by driving too slowly in front of me? You're one BAD person, you have no RIGHT to be there, you should be REMOVED. In the monthly magazine of Germany's automobile club, I once saw a (photoshop)picture of that terrible car, that hideous obstacle in front of you being taken away by helicopter. The caption read: A dream come true.

And now, I have been to Scandinavia. The maximum speed on Norway's highways is 90 km/h. 90. That's VERY SLOW. The country has more automatisk trafikk-kontroll thingies than other places have traffic lights. And fines for speeding are high, presumably starting somewhere around 100 € - which results in a religious compliance with the speed limits. Snails' gallop, JH called it as we slowly, slowly passed forests and lakes and forests and lakes.

In Norway, people drive in a very civilized way. I'm sure they have very few traffic accidents there. Everyone keeps a safe distance to the car in front of them. No swearing, no adrenaline. Once or twice, we saw people going too fast, and I said to JH: Look, he's going over the speed limit! And together, we watched the exotic figure disappear in the distance with maybe just the smalles bit of envy, and homesickness.

OSLO II

We are back in Oslo. The last week was spent in Hørte, about 20 km South of Grimstad in Southern Norway. It is an area where the places have the same names as the people: Hørte is also the name of the family of farmers who supplied us with fresh water and ice for our "fridge".

We lived in a small wooden house on a hill amidst the trees. No electricity, no running water. Lots of silence, wild raspberries and blueberries to pick. Lakes with clear water that was so soft it made my hair all curly. Aggressive moscitos and kind people who came by with cars and, one time, a horse to see us, who told us about life as farmers in a remote place, who listened to what we told them about our lives. My daughter, who finally found the courage to swim with me, clinging to my back. And Rømme, the fresh, thick cream that is had with jam on flatbrød.

Norway is beautiful in a way that Germany just isn't. We don't have pristine forests like the ones I saw, we don't have wilderness or areas where there are no well-marked paths to guide you. Unpaved roads are unheard of, too. We don't have stretches of countryside where all you see are forests, and lakes, and red and white houses - seemingly similar, but so rich in their differences.

I was happy in Hellelandshaugen (this is the little house's name). I felt at peace like I haven't for a long time. There were difficulties, of course. My daughter got on my nerves. JH (aka The Lover) had to, has to get used to being so close to me, and to a little sucker-upper of energy. In the beginning, my daughter was really worried about there being no houses around - but she got to like our little house. I could get tearful in a second thinking about the fireplace, and the view of the wooden shed from the front door, and the taste of those berries. So I will try to make it into a place in my mind that I can return to when I want, wander up the hill, into the front door and through all the rooms, smelling and seeing and returning to a feeling that touched me so deeply.

And since you asked: yes, Oslo is stunningly beautiful, too.

OSLO I

Dresden to Rostock, ferry from Rostock to Trelleborg in Sweden, Trelleborg to Lund where we stayed at my friend A's beautiful flat. Somehow, Sweden seems to be even more orderly and well-organized than Germany: the highway are sparklingly clean, even what looks like public housing estates are well-designed, and the sign-posting is unsurpassed.

Yesterday, we drove further North. The landscape change from hills to rocks, finally views of the ocean, and fjords - and we had made it to Oslo. The Lover's aunt is an architect an owns a gorgeous house right on the Oslofjord. We went swimming when we arrived, played cards with a handful of female cousins. Watched the full moon hanging above the water as The Lover smoked his last cigarette (he says he's going to quit at least until the next holiday, so I'm not sure if this is a definite decision).

These two days of driving have not been without strain. I have to get used to caring for my daughter all day long. The Lover has to find his place between her and me, between being my partner and something-not-yet-defined to her. And really, hours in the car with a three-year-old just aren't fun. But the sum of these many parts is positive, tired yet happy sums it up I guess.

We will drive on to a place that I think is called Hogen today, to said little cabin in the woods. And continue our experiment in threesomeness.

TOMORROW, TOMORROW

The longest day at work is the day before your holiday starts. It is another 7 hours until I get to leave not just for the weekend, but for TWO WEEKS! The Lover, my daughter and I will be going to Norway. Tomorrow, we will be taking a ship from Rostock in Northern Germany to Trelleborg in Sweden and then continue in a West-Northerly direction.

My daughter, of course, has no concept of what a holiday is. She understands that I have bought salami, chocolate and drinks that cannot be consumed until "the holiday". She also understands that I won't be going to work, that she won't be going to her Kinderladen and that we won't be at home. And she thinks about The Big Ship a lot, the ship which will hold not only the three of us but where The Lover's car will also be parked. What kind of icecream will it have, she wonders? She has taken ships on the Elbe with her grandmother twice, and they had different kinds of icecream. We discussed this yesterday: maybe the Big Ship will have blue icecream, she suggested. Or cucumber icecream. Or, best of all, vanilla icecream.

Me, I have never been to Norway. In my mind, I have patched together things I have read, things I have been told, places I have been in other Scandinavian countries. We will be staying in a cottage in some remote place. I haven't asked The Lover all that much about what it will be like, because I want to picture it in my mind: lots of wood, very quiet. Beds that have to be pushed together to create a double. A veranda. A view over hills and forest. Personally imported wine drunk from the bottle.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Monday

Mondays are very special to me. My daughter stays with her father each Monday. Which means that for one day a week, I come home after work and it's quiet. It's a beautiful thing.

Yesterday, I cleaned, sweeping the floors, picking up toys - and because for once, it was done without thinking that really, I should be playing with my daughter and not do housework, it was fun! On all the other days, I have about 3 hours I get to spend with my daughter after I come home from work and before she goes to bed. This is her time, and I always feel slightly guilty if I do things that aren't part of what she wants to do. After all, I could always do laundry and dishes and whatelse after she's gone to bed. At which point, of course, I am tired, want to spend time with The Lover or just sleep. It's a dilemma. But anyway: yesterday, cleaning all by myself was great.

Then I spent time listening to The Lovely Bones, an audiobook that Radmila generously sent to me. The internet is a generous place: she sent me these 10 CDs, and more, just because I mentioned that I liked audiobooks! The Lovely Bones is a wonderful, touching story. I would never have thought that it could work, a story told from the perspective of a murdered girl, watching earth from her personal heaven. Sounds cheesy, doesn't it? But it's not, it's delightful. Thanks again, Radmila!

Finally went to see Supersize Me with my friend JM. JM lives on sweets, his drawer at work is full of plastic sacks with colourful candy inside. As far as I know, he never eats fresh fruit. He loves fast food, and all through the movie, as the protagonist shoveled mountains of disgusting foods into his mouth, he kept saying Oh man, that looks great! I feel hungry now! Mm! Ah! I had kind of hoped that the movie would, maybe, somehow, reform him, show him the error of his ways, but that didn't work out at all. Not at all at all. JM, I should add, has an enviable body, firm and muscly, broad shoulders, slim hips, a flat stomach with ripples in all the right places... somehow, the world isn't fair.

HAPPINESS

What is happiness, we asked ourselves last night. You didn't laugh much today, he said. You were quiet, you didn't seem very happy. But I was!, I said. I was so glad I didn't have to do anything, just watch you and my mother and my daughter. I am a quiet person, a serious person, I don't giggle all the time. I am also frequently very tired. But neverthelesse: I'm happy.

This is a happy time in my life. Not happy as in I-feel-good-today, but happy in a more general sense. Happy as in content, as in maybe-this-will-turn-out-right-after-all. I never quite know what I want to be when I grow up, but lately, worrying about that has retreated into the background as I enjoy what is here right now: people I love, a job that challenges me, my homesweethome. Difficulties aren't scary obstacles that threaten to shake the foundations of my being. Anxious thoughts about the future come and go. I seem to do things right at work at least part of the time. My daughter only shits her pants but doesn't pee them any more. And I haven't smoked in four days.

GARDENING

The clinic has its own nursery (for plants, I mean). There are two adjoining greenhouses and a big garden full of flowers and vegetables. Patients work there, some very slowly, some seemingly not at all, but the two from my ward who go there every day feel a lot of pride in their work - there's nothing like seeing things grow to make you feel better.

It's a place I have loved to visit from the very beginning. You can wander around the grounds through the grass and the mud, touch the flowers, feel the soft ground underneath your feet, ask for the names of plants, smell lavender and roses. Then you can ask the guy who runs the place to pick you a bunch of flowers, that one and that one and a few more of those over there. I don't have a garden of my own (yet), so this one is a sensuous delight to me, a special treat for a few minutes each week.

A SOFA STIRS UP MEMORIES

Went to pick up my new sofa yesterday, a stylish red thing I bought on ebay. The Lover and I picked it up in Plauen, about a 2 hours' drive from Dresden. The sofa's description had been done very professionally, so I was surprised when the guy who sold it led us to a house where he stores all kinds of junk - and said sofa. He claimed that he had moved in with his girlfriend, now they have two sofas and don't need this one any more... But then again, he seemed to have no idea of how to assemble the sofa, he didn't seem like someone with a girlfriend (although that is, of course, hard to tell), and the sofa looked suspiciously new and unused. I guess it was one of those fallen-off-the-back-of-a-lorry type items on ebay where it's better not to ask too many questions. All I need to know is that the sofa is lovely, can be folded out as a guest bed and can accomodate two people sitting up or lying down.

When I was a child growing up in Western Germany, the names of cities in Eastern Germany had an exotic ring to me:

Jena.
Plauen.
Weimar.
Pößneck.

I knew that they were far away and hard to reach. The farthest away place I knew was Africa, and so I imagined that there were elephants in Jena, palm trees in Plauen, girafes in Weimar and a wide open savanna in Pößneck. We went to visit relatives East of the wall several times, going through frightening broders with mean guards, machine guns and barbed wire - it only contributed to the adventure I associated with the East.

Now that I live here, I am sometimes still disappointed to find that life in these places that once seemed so alluring to me is so very normal, boring even. Plauen was a case in point.

Out of my childhood list of East German cities, Jena is the one place I haven't been to. And maybe I shouldn't go. My mother was born there, and really, I would like to continue imagining it as I used to: an exotic, mysterious, dangerous place just out of my reach.

ON WANTING

Commentators on this blog have asked whether the decision to separate from The Husband is a final one. Yes, it is. And also yes, I do not want to try any more. I think that while love and romance are very important for a relationship, at some point, there also has to be a decision: this is the person I want to be with. I will make a serious, serious effort here. I could not bring myself to make that decision, sad as it is.

It is all only a few days ago (four, to be precise). The Husband has been away at work, avoiding me. Which I can understand. Our daughter misses him. Small as she is, she knows that something is up. She keeps asking for her Papa, and she keeps telling me how good he is at making pancakes: Papa kann super Eierkuchen machen.

Laura wrote that "relationship problems are nothing compared to single-mother problems". That has had me thinking a lot, and I will admit that during the long lead-up to this separation, I have had thoughts like that: I will then be a single mother with a small daughter, no time and no going out ever again. Thoughts like that are no reason to stay together, though. And on reflection, I do beg to differ: I will be fine. The Husband will not permanently withdraw from his responsibility as a parent. I have wonderful friends. There are two sets of grandparents here in Dresden. I have a roommate. All in all, there is a finely woven net that holds me and my daughter, keeping us happy and making things possible that may be out of reach to the average single mother.

That said, I sleep badly. When I am on my own, I can't eat. I worry. But no, I don't waver.

REFERENCE TO THEORY

I should, perhaps, elaborate a bit. In doing so, I shall refer to a theory one of my friends recently told me about. In honour of her, I will call it Andrea's Three-Pillar Theory of Long-Term Relationships.

The theory states that for a long-term relationship to function, it must rest on three pillars:

1. communication
2. sex/tenderness
3. managing day-to-day life together.

I have personally had relationships that were almost exclusively based on one of the first two pillars: we would talk all the time while the sex was bad and/or nonexistent, or we would have sex all the time with short breaks for futile efforts to communicate verbally in between. In both cases, day-to-day life was my own responsibility.

Now, with The Husband, our relationship has for what seems like a long, long time been based on our managing everyday life together. Which we excel at. We are perfect parents to our daughter, we both go out and see our friends, we always have enough milk and the kitchen is usually clean. All this worked so harmoniously that people often said to me oh, I want to have a relationship like yours one day, you always seem so content! However, we somehow lost the depths and the intensity that keeps a relationship alive. We rarely talked. We haven't had sex in months. Somehow, we drifted apart, slowly, quietly with never a harsh word spoken between us.

I am not writing this to assign guilt. Of course, I could compound lists of where we both went wrong, The Husband could do the same and probably come up with completely different lists. Fact of the matter is that we have long ago passed the point at which we could have made things better. Fact of the matter is that the saddest thing for me about our conversation on Sunday was the realisation that our relationship had been over for a long time, trying to rest, as it did, on only one pillar.

IN THE END

In the end, it was easy to say those words: I don't want to live like this any more. In the end, it was easy to say that while everybody seems to think that we are the most harmonious couple around, this is in fact not the case. I don't want to pretend any more. On these pages, you have so far read a carefully edited version of me , a Katrin who's presentable to the outside world.

While no untruths have been told, the truth is something much more complicated than what I have shown here. Yes, I am married. But no, being married doesn't mean anything to me. And no, I am not a monogamous person. Nor am I completely heterosexual. Yes, I am a psychologist. But no, that's not the only career I can imagine. And no, helping others has not made me a calm, well-adjusted person like I might have hoped. Yes, I am 30. But I feel like I have only just begun.

There you go. An end, a beginning, and hopefully more truth for you to read about in the future.

SPRING

To me, there is always one distinctive day when spring begins. This year, that day was last Friday, March 12. The air had a sweeter smell, and even though it was (and is) still, cold, winter is finally over.

This weekend was a busy one, comprising everything from a seminar focused on self-discovery (part of my psychotherapy course), the beautiful wedding I attended with my friend JH, a party where I worked at the bar and a visit from a long-lost friend. A rich, full weekend it was.

My daughter keeps asking me to sing a spring song as if she, too, knew that a new season has begun:

Kommt die Sonne, kommt die Sonne
kommt der Frühling bald,
kommt der helle, der helle Frühling
kommt der Frühling bald.

The sun is coming out,
spring is coming,
bright, bright spring
is coming soon.

Finally.

What is Intelligence?

Two men were digging a ditch on a very hot day. One said to the other, "Why are we down in this hole digging a ditch when our boss is standing up there in the shade of a tree?" "I don't know," responded the other. "I'll ask him."

So he climbed out of the hole and went to his boss. "Why are we digging in the hot sun and you're standing in the shade?" "Intelligence," the boss said. "What do you mean, Intelligence’?"

The boss said, "Well, I'll show you. I'll put my hand on this tree and I want you to hit it with your fist as hard as you can." The ditch digger took a mighty swing and tried to hit the boss' hand. The boss removed his hand and the ditch digger hit the tree. The boss said, "That's intelligence!"

The ditch digger went back to his hole. His friend asked, "What did he say?" "He said we are down here because of intelligence." "What's intelligence?" said the friend. The ditch digger put his hand on his face and said, "Take your shovel and hit my hand."