Wholesale

I've a bug infestation in my kitchen. I think I've seen a roach (albeit a small one), some ants, and something about halfway between the two. I reacted with what seems to have become my default response to life's nuissances: resignation laced with a sense of injustice. "I just don't have the mental or emotional resources to be dealing with this right now". Today I finally went shopping and bought some weird cubes of boric something or another that I'm supposed to leave all over the kitchen. The package has this comforting, industrial, DDRish look, which gives me hope. No bright colors, no fancy pictures, just blocks of text, all yellow and black. Because genocide is no laughing matter.

There was another storm today. I don't think we've had a single day without one over the last week. I was walking back home from lunch as the skies darkened and the wind started gathering strength. Always a smell the roses moment for me.

There was this quote... something about life being all the stuff that happens between the noteworthy moments. I think I'm slowly maturing into that school of thought, and it seems that way comfort lies. Barring any paradigm shift (and the only one I can think of is having a kid, so.... yeah) this seems to be the proverbial it. Get a place. Make ends meet. When in doubt - treat yourself to some sour jellybeans. I have a nagging feeling that this realization (or delusion, take your pick) should come as a disapointment, but... not so much. Stuff seems fairly groovy, in a restrained, Canadian anarchist kind of way.

I guess I'm having some sort of not-quite-midlife anti-crisis.

The pegasus lands again

I'm beginning to think there is nothing that can't be made better by the addition of Michelle Forbes, series-wise.

Apart

I've finally experienced this thing most of my friends complained about at one point or another - having all this stuff you want to write down, and losing all interest in going through with it as soon as you sit down at the computer. Hence the prolonged - for me at least - silence.

Work has really picked up. The festival preparations are gradually getting more and more frenzied, but we haven't yet hit the hysteria threshold. Me mostly because I have no way of gauging our progress and so I'm completely oblivious as to how much work awaits us still. Then again, there's the other translating stuff I'm doing at the moment - nothing gruelling, luckily, but the deadlines are absurd. I definitely feel the strain, but at the same time i'm almost grateful for being able to alternate between the two when one gets too stressful or unpleasant.

And things did get unpleasant at one point. The moment I got back from England, I had almost simultaneous head-on collisions with two translators who didn't take too kindly to my proofreading. To make things worse I wasn't without fault either, at least as far as the tone of my initial messages was concerned. It's all over now, and won't ever happen again (one of the few perks of this sort of job - I get to pick who I work with), but I just don't handle that sort of shit too well. But that was literally the only grain of salt so far. I get along with my current boss swimmingly, we babble away on gtalk all day long and I think it's safe to say we're having a blast.

Ana left for the US and it's very weird, even with the transitional phase of her being totally overworked and zombiefied over the last few months. With her gone, and the family no longer providing the background static, it truly feels like I'm flying without a net. Except flying implies motion, and this is just some sort of... stasis, I suppose. Not unpleasant, but confounding.

I feel like I don't see my friends at all. I just don't have the time. And somehow that doesn't really feel bad either. Things just move forward, and I with them, carried by the current. The loneliness thing just got misplaced somehow, I don't even know when. And obviously I'm not exactly turning the place upside down, trying to find it.

They're admitting dad on Monday. They've found another type of cancer in the meantime.

Maybe I'm just not processing all this properly. Maybe processing is overrated.

Bring your own sun

I stopped writing about Birmingham mostly because everything I posted was instantly sucked into my host's RSS feed.

But now I'm back, a wee bit wiser about group dynamics, and ready to mold this episode into a spectacular memory. I expect it won't be difficult at all:

Lest we acknowledge it

It's my second night in Birmingham. I'm writing this from an inflatable mattress in my hosts' workroom, accompanied by two laptops, a sewing machine and a small mirror, which I unsuccessfully attempted to break (I was cursed by a disposable Urban Outfitters bag, you see...)

As you can probably tell, I should be sleeping instead.

Last night was really cool. My hosts threw a birthday/anniversary bash, inviting their various friends from all over the map (I was pretty disalieved with the turnout). Everyone got dressed up in full noir regalia and converged in Mmffbb Mmmm Mffmfff (that's the name of the pub I can't recall) which looks like a full-fledged freemason joint, just without the secrecy. Opulent like you wouldn't believe. After a few drinks we moved to a retro cinema for a private screening of Chinatown (God this movie's weird at times), and finally ended up at Bohdan and Karolina's apartment, concluding the festivities at around 6 a.m. Laughs were had and photos taken, though once again I ended up without a single glamour shot. Mind it, there's some cool and funny ones, just not anything i could look at and say Ok, that's a good one. Which is all the more frustrating since it's not like I'm the Ass-Faced Boy and I'm pretty sure there has to be an angle that doesn't bring out my inner potato.

It's a bit weird visiting the UK without Ana. Instead I share the roof with the Three Graces, a gaggle of delightful - and contrary to this abbreviated description quite different - girls whom I nevertheless hardly know, and who on occassion seem a bit... overwhelmed by flashes of unfiltered me. Much as I would like to just let my freak flag fly, I can't help feeling somewhat self-conscious. Especially when confronted with queries like Seriously though, why are you staying all the way until Thursday? Gosh... Um... Good question, I guess?

That being said, I'm having a wonderful time, basking in Karolina's golden glow and taking full advantage of Bohdan's plug-and-play personality. Already had a couple Smell the Roses moments (you know, when you actually take a step back and go Oh, wow... Happiness) and I'm counting on grabbing a few more for the scrapbook before my time is up.

Ok, finally sleepy. Over and out.

Thrall

Had a rather gloomy day today. Nothing major, just a slightly chillier current making its way to the foreground.

For the life of me I can't figure out what triggered it, so I guess it's random. Unless my ebb and flow is actually affected by the movement of celestial bodies. Which would be weird. And fascinating.

Immersion

I was always tickled by how seamlessly Bollywood actors switch back and forth between English and their native language, even in the middle of very intense exchanges. It just seems so natural, like they're instinctively drawing upon whatever tools best express their emotions at that particular moment. Fascinating as it is, I still had mixed feelings about it, what with the residual stigma of collonialism, and all.

But now I was just flicking through some Swedish film, and noticed the exact same thing. It's not yet as pronounced - the English bits are sparse, and sometimes delivered with such a thick accent that even their own subtitlers seem to treat them as an integral part of the source message, and parse rather than transcribe them (for example, at one point a girl finishes her sentence with You can go now and the English subtitle states Go away). Then again, there's also a scene where a highly agitated guy yells at his cheating girlfriend and halfway through, without missing a beat, chucks in an almost textbook, pronounciation-wise, IN YOUR FUCKING DREAMS.

The stigma? Not so much residual this time, but for some reason I find this sort of hegemony far less objectionable. Some part of me rails against the encroachment, but at the same time it's so... exciting. Another tantalizing whiff of Cyberpunk Now.

Not there

I went to visit Kaska and Piotr yesterday. Piotr made pizza (or rather: two pizzas), we had a few good laughs and more than a few moments of extremely non-PC behavior. Kuba - their son - was adorable, as always. I'm still tickled by how matter-of-fact Kaska is about him. No doting whatsoever. It's such a welcome change from borderline hysterical mothers. Piotr, on the other hand, is very affectionate, which I find equally entrancing. Just not used to seeing that side of him, I guess. A moment in time:

Wiska is playing with Kuba, dangling a plastic bag in front of him, and then hiding it behind her back
Kuba: Not there!
Wiska, extremely excited: He just said "Not there!"
Kaska, barely looking up: Yeah, he does that.
Wiska: But he actually said it a propos, I took away the bag and he went: "Not there"!
Kaska: Well, he says it about a 100 times a day, so chances are he'll sometimes get it right.
Kuba, smiling proudly: Not there!

Friendly fire

Go out to dinner with friends and have your private life inadvertently summed up in 2 sentences.

Alternatively: eat a bagel and stab yourself with a fork.

The choice is yours.

Give

Sorry, haters - TVAB is my favorite, so I was unable to resist this one.

Burn

I came home on one of the new subway cars last night, the ones with a red LED time/date display. Mine read:

So 09.05.09 23:11

And I thought to myself: Wow, subway car. You're incredibly specific in your condescension.

Lokomotywa

Wpadlem na chwile do domu rodzicow wydrukowac umowe. Tym razem wzialem klucze. Matki nie ma, ojciec spi. Nie obudzilem go.

Gdy zasiadlem do komputera znalazlem oparta o monitor pocztowke z parowozem jadacym przez jakies sciernisko (rodzina byla w weekend w Wolsztynie na jakims zlocie starych parowozow z calej Europy).

Pocztowka zaadresowana do nich samych, zgodnie z ojcowska tradycja.

Tak jechalismy.

Wagonow bylo wiecej.

I lato w pelni.

Wyniki w poniedzialek.

Pooh

Turns out the last.fm radio thing isn't broken - it's just that my trial has ended, and now they want me to pay 3 bucks a month for it to continue streaming. I'll have to meditate on it.

If I ran away

On a day like this, there are worse things you could be doing with your time than playing Frozen Charlotte and taking a few minutes to stare at the lilac outside your window.

Just saying.

Grooves

If some alien lifeform were studying my daily routines, they'd probably notice a particular pattern I have followed since my 2nd day here: Take a lemon out of the fridge, slice off a small chunk and squeeze its juice into tea, place the remaining part of the lemon under a small glass dome, doubtlessly designed just for that purpose, proceed to ignore it until it's rife with mold, toss it out, wash the dome, take a lemon out of the fridge...

I went to two recordings today, and was reminded just how much I hate them. For me they're always a game of "spot all your failures". I loathe listening to the lame jokes, and my even lamer attempts at translating them. It turns out some good has come out of the absurd anal retentiveness of the new contract guy - I might have spent an entire week on something I'd usually do in a day's work, but my text was so polished, had been thoroughly checked by so many people, that the recording session was virtually painless. Plus, it was a documentary. That always helps.

Met a cute translator at the studio, I think we even got introduced, but of course the name bounced right off my brain. Also had a bit of a laugh with the nexus girl. Recession is so funny. Ha ha.

My parents went to Cracow for the weekend (and Wroclaw, and Wolsztyn, and Kalisz, and Lodz, all in all, they covered 1500km), so I stopped by today to learn how their trip went, and tell them about Berlin. Halfway through one of mom's stories I caught myself feeling this little spike of misty-eyed exuberance, the sort you sometimes get when you're kind of drunk and having a really good time talking to someone you like. Which was pretty awesome. Dad's going in for tests on Thursday, but they seemed in really good spirits, so... Well, we'll see.

I've been watching the new season of In Treatment and was a bit disapointed at first,that none of the patients' stories drew me in, and some of them even annoyed me. I'm on week five now though, and find myself really looking forward to the Mia sessions, even though I used to find her completely unpalatable. April's ok too, and Gina - the one constant - never fails, because I find Dianne Wiest just too damn engaging. So that makes 3 out of 5. Not bad, I guess. I still liked the first season better, but I also admire how they actually moved shit forward. Paradoxically, I almost like seeing Paul, the main character, reveal in the Gina sessions what an asshole he is, or use these kind of low, transparrent gambits during his own sessions with his patients. It makes him feel so real. And it's quite a progression - it wasn't so pronounced in the first season. The signs were there, but you didn't see him openly struggle with his life.

Aaand that's that.