And the best work email ever

Eloise Myname,

It is my pleasure to inform you that you are being considered for inclusion into the 2008-2009 Princeton Premier Business Leaders and Professionals "Honors Edition" section of the Registry.

The 2008-2009 edition of the Registry will include biographies of the world's most accomplished individuals. Recognition of this kind is an honor shared by thousands of executives and professionals throughout the world each year. Inclusion is considered by many as the single highest mark of achievement.

Upon final confirmation, you will be listed among other accomplished individuals in the Princeton Premier Registry.

For accuracy and publication deadlines, please complete your application form and return it to us within five business days.

You may access the application form using the following link:
http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/5882

On behalf of the Managing Director, we wish you continued success.

Sincerely,


Jason Harris

Managing Director
Princeton Premier

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha....

The best work-email subject line ever

"tractor for sale"

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Philip Larkin

just awesome

Today I came upon what in my opinion is the most awesome website ever. Odd places, odd buildings and structures, odd customs and activities. I want to go to pretty much every place it talks about. Read it, you'll love it - though it might leave you with itchy feet! (Luckily, I think that oddity, and thus the potential for adventures in oddness, is to be found all over the place, if you only keep your eyes open. We just need the odd reminder.)

How pleasant to know Mr Lear

I cannot tell you how tremendously I like this picture, stumbled upon on Wikipedia. Apparently there were rumours that Edward Lear was a just pseudonym for someone else, and it really happened.

Cosmic conjuring

At five minutes to nine last night I was standing on the pavement outside the Argentinean restaurant where a group of us were having a meal to say goodbye to one of our number, staring up at the moon with one of the waiters.

The moon was a dull, shadowy red, with a white crescent of light slipping away in the top-right corner (if circles can be said to have corners). I imagined bright valleys and mountains fading into darkness, though I suppose the moon is more craters than valleys.

And then the white light was gone, and there was nothing but the dimming, rusty edges of the perfect circle of moon.

And then quite quickly, at 9.01, the shadowy centre stretched out and ate the moon. And there was nothing there but ink-black sky.

It was amazing. I know that that is rather the point of an eclipse and I am probably quite obtuse, but the utter disappearance of the moon sort of surprised me. It felt like stumbling upon something secret.

I think this is because in all the pictures of lunar eclipses – and google will find you thousands – you never see a picture of absolute black nothingness. Which when you think about it is not altogether surprising. Nothing is not nearly as impressive as bitemarks in a brilliantly silver moon, or the slow fade to red. But watching the moon disappear is the most astonishing part of the whole thing.

No wonder ancient cultures feared the vengeance or the abandonment of the gods. It’s like watching black magic. And remarkable to think too that in those few moments – and only in those moments – the whole surface of the moon must be completely dark.

And people were watching all over the world, all kinds of people in all kinds of places, wherever it was night. I like that.

Happy thoughts

I fucking hate Valentine's Day.

Such was the sentiment with which I began my day last Thursday, but since it is neither original nor timely I shan’t go on about it. Except, good God all the noise and the couples and the balloon sellers and and the teenagers clutching their love tokens and the PEOPLE EVERYWHERE did not add much to my mood when I ventured out to buy food and run errands in the evening.

However, the crass, depressing commercialism of VD and its smug way of reminding you of your freakish unloveableness if single was not really enough to explain my vile headache on Thursday morning, and neither was the two thirds of a pisco sour I had drunk the night before at the party of some delightful, mostly only temporarily-resident, Peruvians. (Palatable, but with a weird yeasty smell, and the raw egg yolk is fundamentally disturbing. Licking limey sugar around the rim is the best part.) This headache had its main encampment in the bridge of my nose, but established some strong beachheads in my eyeballs and occasionally sent raiding parties to other bits of my head, and seemed to have rebel sympathisers in my gland. Subsequently, thanks to my lovely officemate talking me into going to the doctor, it transpired that my recently-permanent cold and/or sore throat and/or cough has amusingly turned into sinusitis (though I’m taking the pills now and feeling much better – at least, I’m back to just cold/sore throat/cough).

And then the technician who came and took away my sadly sick and broken computer finally phoned me. And told me that the motherboard was fucked and that fixing it (i.e. getting a new one) would cost about the same as a new computer. And I cried and cried. Which I know is a bit pathetic, but for the past few weeks of my computer being broken I have missed it like crazy and I cannot handle the prospect of being without it. My computer is my ability to listen to my music; read things on the internet; talk to people over skype and voipstunt and messenger; write emails; sink into the comforting cosiness of comedy and drama over BBC internet radio; look up recipes when I need them; upload and organize my photos; blog; record my thoughts.

As a result, I believe the words “I fucking hate today. I fucking hate everything” may have been spoken on Thursday, when my inner (maybe not so inner) petulant, foulmouthed fifteen-year-old took over for a while. She was around on Saturday too, when I wasted most of the day trying and failing to get tickets to see awesome Mexican rock band Maná and walking through a dark and strange neighbourhood trying and failing to find a shop that turned out not to be there.

So whinge whinge whinge, everything is rubbish. Except that somehow it isn’t, and somehow I seem to be coming out from the slough of despond that I have been in of late. So here are some of the things that have been cheering me up since Thursday:

• Brussels sprouts. Shut up. I like them.
• A work Valentine's party on Friday which ended up going pretty well - so well, in fact, that it was almost worth all the stress of organising it. Dancing. The amazing realisation that I can comfortably dance salsa or cumbia and carry on a conversation in Spanish at the same time (though admittedly neither at an especially complex level) - both things that required all my concentration not so long ago.
• My new favourite bar, introduced to me on Friday night after the party by a dear Mexican friend, when we went into town and everyone else was too tired/boring to come. It is smallish and cosy, with wood-panelled walls and lots of ceiling lamps. A boy with a ponytail and a guitar started playing songs, mostly trova (folky ballads in Spanish), but a with the odd one in English - Pretty Woman, a Beatles song, and, hilariously, the Banana Boat Song. His first song was the most utterly bizarre: the Mexican equivalent of Happy Birthday, with the words changed from "These are the morning verses that King David sang to the beautiful girls..." to "These are the morning verses that [musician's name] sang to the drunk boys/people...", set to a Pink Floyd tune! We laughed, talked, requested our favourite songs, and I was immensely, inexplicably happy. The musician shot me mischievous grins. Other people came up on stage, playing drums and guitars and singing, taking turns and wandering off - more boys with ponytails and the owner in a stylish black hat. Their friends and girlfriends sat at the front and joked and catcalled and sometimes joined in. One of the ponytailed boys tried to help his drunk and arrhythmic friend play the clave. The lights went out and everyone laughed and squealed and got out the lights on their mobile phones. We went when we were too tired to stay and the band got the whole room waving goodbye.
• Photography, specifically a visit to Mexico City’s photography museum, the Centro de la Imagen. It is a perfect hour or two’s wander, and the exhibitions by Graciela Iturbide and Ernesto Ramírez were both amazing and inspirational. I have come to the realisation over the last couple of weekends that photography and modern art (20th and 21st century) are the things I like to go and look at most of all, and find the most rewarding. It is nice to know this. Helps cut down the agonising.
• Perching on a bench in a square, watching people learn to dance Son next to the central fountain.
• Two little boys, brothers, on the Metro, playing scissors, paper, stone. (It is more fun to watch here – rather than bringing your shape out on the count of three, the contestants have to sway their hands from side to side while chanting and then make their shape as the chant ends on a triumphant little shout). A little girl, instantly bored on an escalator, holding a plastic bag with a ball in it up to her stomach and saying “look mummy, I’m pregnant”. Shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe in quiet streets: fixed to a tree trunk and festooned with silver tinsel; a few candlelit tiles in a wall, flanked by two golden chrysanthemums; a grander statuette in her glass case. Handprints in the concrete pavement outside a little family-run store, with names written in next to them; a sun sketched into the concrete a little further along.
• The first line of Fluorescent Adolescent by the Arctic Monkeys, heard playing somewhere. “You used to get it in your fishnets, now you only get it in your nightdress…”
• The best chicken I have ever tasted, barbecued in the sunny, dusty square of a nearby small town. Wandering around the Sunday market, smelling of the leather of belts and saddles and cowboy boots. An ice lolly like a home-made strawberry split, with little yellow strawberry seeds sunk to the tip of the fruity part.
• Volleyball on Sunday afternoon. Sitting in a circle and bouncing the ball to each other until we were in a calm, giggly, zen-like state. Rolling on the grass in paroxysms of laughter. Feeling happy and relaxed in every muscle.
• The birth of a beautiful, healthy baby girl to a good friend and colleague and his lovely wife, their first child; his huge smile and running up and giving him a big hug. I saw the pictures of her first poo and her first feed, but I drew the line at the video of her birth!
• Black and grey stripey socks that made me feel like the Worst Witch.
• Affectionate teasing.

I guess it's the little things... except sometimes when it is the big things, and the medium-sized ones.

Like painting the...

The end of an era.

Innumeracy is always the best way

I was looking for pictures of cupid online, as you do, inspiring myself preparatory to making Valentine's party decorations, and I really, really like this picture, Venus Chiding Cupid for Learning to Cast Accounts, by Joshua Reynolds.

comics make things better

Hurray for geeky humour! This comic made me happy today.

O Tell Me The Truth About Love

Some say love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go around,
Some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn't over there;
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

WH Auden


[Today's stuck-in-my-head poem. Bloody Valentine's day. And it isn't even, yet.]

You only get one

This morning I took control of my destiny. This is quite a terrifying thing to do. I am still feeling a bit shaky.

I'll let you know how it turns out...

In the meantime, here is a photo, snapped in the supermarket just after I got back after Christmas. I love odd English on garments and other objects, and I would have bought this had it not been in the prepubescent girls' department.

Don't we all feel this way sometimes?

employ me, i'm brilliant

I was about to have a short moan about having to sit here writing my CV, but then I realised I was sort of enjoying doing it. Perhaps because, for the first time, I - whisper it -

almost feel that maybe I sort of have a set of moderately valuable skills.

Bloody hell.

How you know when they're The One

Today I was curled up in bed contemplating getting up, without enthusiasm but for once without urgency, and I thought about Cambridge.

Specifically I thought about Cambridge in the summer, summer rain on a hot afternoon. And the smell of rain on warm stone brought the whole city back to me - every street and passage and pathway.

I think Cambridge is the most beautiful city in the world, but there's more to how I feel about her* than that.

I love her deeply, with a love that is bigger than myself. I love her past, I love her mysteries, I love all the things about her that are beyond my knowledge.

I love her intellectually, but also intimately. When I haven't seen her for a while I just can't keep myself from stroking her warm, lovely stones.

When I see her, she makes me happy. Happy in a non-trivial way, tinged with the opposites of happiness.

All her failings, her flaws and pomposities and contradictions, only serve to endear her to me the more. Even though sometimes I can't stand her, I always love her.

I wouldn't want one of those jealous, intense relationships - I'd want to spend time with other cities and I'm happy for her to have other people in her life - but I can imagine living with her the rest of my life and not regretting it or wishing myself anywhere else.

Things being the way they are, I can't see it happening any time soon, but I do hope, one day, we can be together.

In fact, I think she might just be The One.

Good to know.

[Hurray for the glorious oddities of life! I wrote most of this post yesterday but didn't quite get round to posting it. Then, yesterday night, I bought a Robbie Williams karaoke disc, the only one in English I could find in the bootleg CD shop, having discovered the massively exciting (to me) fact that one of my friends has a karaoke machine, which means we MUST have a karaoke party. It is hilariously bad, with videos that are not the actual videos for the song, but instead seem to have been made my someone wandering around moderately unscenic places, or places that manage to look unscenic on murky camcorder-type film, ocasionally filming a girl with 80s hair bopping (I use the word bopping advisedly - dancing doesn't quite cover it) along to the music and "being sexy". And this morning I discovered that a couple of these videos were filmed in Cambridge, and I was so very cheered to see her. "Angels" is particularly charmingly set to wobbly shots of my dear Cambridge market, my favourite being a close-up of some fen celery and its little price placard. It really fits the imagery of the song, don't you think?]

[None of this negates what I said about my fear and misery over leaving Mexico. It's a bitch leaving pieces of your heart in more than one place.]

* This is the correct personal pronoun for a city. It just is. Like ships and trains and countries. And interestingly, bells: even though bells always have male names (like Big Ben) they are always referred to as "she". Such are the things one learns from Lord Peter Wimsey.

Ungrateful

I may be going to Thailand, and China.

I have wanted to go to Asia for a long, long time.

And yet, I am not happy.

Because I am a wretched ingrate, that’s why.

It looks like I am going to be sent on a trip for work (and I’ve never been sent anywhere exotic before) for about a week or so in March.

Ordinarily, this would be pretty exciting. It will be mostly a trip of the going-to-a-meeting-and-talking-to-scientists-and-writing-about-it variety, rather than going-into-the-field-and-talking-to-farmers, and with all the stress of worrying about doing a good enough job, and guilt about my carbon footprint, but, nevertheless it will be new place and new sights and all the joys of going somewhere.

But, I will be away for:
- the Friday I was planning to have a party and go out dancing to celebrate my birthday.
- my birthday itself.
- the holiday days we get for Easter, and perhaps Easter itself, and all the celebrations and strangeness and possibilities of spending time with friends that go with Semana Santa in Mexico.

In other words, pretty much the last celebratory things before my contract finishes (at the end of March).

And it’s a week, at least a week, of not being in Mexico, when I only have seven or eight weeks left.

Leaving Mexico is on my mind all the time now, a constant miserable tension. But when I actively think about it it’s much worse. Every bit of me feels like it’s turned to dust, and my heart aches, and I’m sharply unhappy and fearful with the anticipation of it. Which, I’m quite aware, is not the ideal way to spend my last weeks here, and does not make me the most awesome company ever.

I’ll not be gone forever. I will come back – telling myself this makes it bearable. But, I’ll never live here again. I have to relinquish all the scraps of belonging I’ve slowly managed to claw to myself – a few friends to do things with, colleagues who invite me to the occasional birthday party or baby shower, a few stallholders who know me and greet me with a familiar smile, the dozens of daily smiles and how-are-yous and little chats with colleagues, the notoriety I have somehow acquired as organizer of volleyball sessions and Friday after-work parties, the routines. There are a few people I’ll keep in touch with, probably, but…

When I come back it will be as a visitor. This hurts more than I realized it would.

I sometimes think that most of the things I do, the decisions I make, are the emotional equivalent of sitting down and sticking pins in my eyes.