I promise

So I find that I have joined this thing called National Blog Posting Month, which means posting every day for the month of November. It scares me a little for several reasons.

1. I have never posted every day for a whole month.
2. It means that maybe somebody besides my grandpa and my parents and my three friends might read this blog. (Since I had to join this networky thing to make it official and keep myself honest.)
3. The abbreviation of the challenge is called NaBloPoMo, which, well, scares me a little. Therefore it is the last time I will use said abbreviation.

But one of the good ideas that I got from the networky part was to post every day about something I am thankful for. So, since I'm starting on November 2, I will write two things:

1. I'm thankful that the Mister is coming home tomorrow.
2. I'm thankful for the nice feeling of putting on a clean pair of socks.

See the world, don't move an inch

Yesterday I discovered one of those fascinating yet time-wasting internet thingamabobs. Maybe you've heard of it already and are all, that's totally old news, and I've known about it forever, and get with the program, yawn.

But to me, this is pretty cool. It's flickrvision, and it shows a big map of the world with all the images people are uploading to flickr, the online picture gallery, in real time. It feels like you're watching snapshots taken of the whole world at once.

You get to see Lara in Brisbane's photo, and then a picture by Luciano in Milan, and shots of Stephanie in Seattle's party, and Renata in Rio's travels and Yulianus in Indonesia and Fundera in Germany...and on and on.

While the pictures of groups of smiling people and/or pets are legion, there are some wonderful landscape and travel shots. One fun part is noticing that a given picture, while uploaded in Germany or China, is actually of Barcelona or Monument Valley or whatever. It makes you imagine people moving across the map, seemingly at the speed of a few flickers (flickrs?!) of the computer's pixels. Or, click on "3D view" and the world spins as though you're the one flying.

When familiar things pop out of the map it's especially exciting: someone had taken a picture of a croissant from the best bakery in Barcelona! And that statue in Boston! It happens more than you might think, too, that the photos are truly stunning, worth waiting for while the boring blurry ones drift by.

Yesterday as I watched, some distinct trends started to emerge. The Americans, they were uploading pictures of zombies and witches and bumble bees and dragon (to clarify, people costumed as these things). The Europeans were uploading scenes of either parties (blurry pictures of bands and groups of people around beer-littered tables) or travel (cobblestone streets, mountaintops, monuments). The southeast Asians were uploading pictures of street scenes and school events.

After watching for a while I finally saw a picture from Belgium. And what, you are dying to know, was it of? A plate of food, unrecognizable beneath the pile of cheese melted all over the top. You gotta love the Belgians.

But that was just yesterday, during one little slice of the afternoon. What does the world look like today?

Sleeping like a marmot

Yesterday's evening was a success on both social and culinary levels. I was introduced to the joys of the little round almond cookies called panellets and I introduced my guests to the joys of pumpkin pie. None of them had ever tried it before--imagine the tragedy of a pumpkin pieless life!

I wore my Cleopatra wig and eye makeup and managed to astonish everyone who came through the door. I even managed to frighten myself a few times, especially after I had ditched the wig at around dessert-time but caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror still wearing half-smeared crooked black eyeliner all over my face. But, sadly, I was the only one in costume. I understand that on what to them was just a regular worknight, it was hard to get hyped up enough to se deguiser. So I played the role of the loony American hostess in her wacked-out wig and kooky color schemes (I served an all-orange menu: carrots and orange peppers, bright orange butternut squash soup, pumpkin pie).

Everyone stayed until 2 am, and although I lost some of the thread of the conversation by the end of the night, due to sugar overload, wine, and the fact that it was 2 am, I did pick up on a rather handy Catalan phrase. "Dormir com una marmota," to sleep like a marmot, is the equivalent of sleeping like a rock or log. I like it because I'd much rather sleep like a marmot than a log, the former being a whole lot softer and snugglier.

And sleeping like a marmot what I proceeded to do as soon as I had popped the leftovers in the fridge and crawled into my jammies. (And yes, OK, I'll admit it. I ate pumpkin pie for breakfast today.)

In costume

Happy halloween!

I was going to scour my photo archives for pictures of me and/or me and the Mister in costume from Halloweens past, but I think they're all either in hard copy only or on my backup hard drive, which would require labor--you know, plugging the thing in--to find, so instead I have found a mini gallery of what I think are infinitely better pictures. Sort of a catalogue of all the costumes that I found in my iPhoto library.

Cutest first. Last year I was in Vermont for Halloween, and got to witness our nephew's discovery of what Halloween is all about. At the start he was a little confused by the whole thing, but by the time my dad had taken him around to a few houses, he was all about Halloween. It doesn't take long to get a kid to appreciate the glories of people giving you lots of candy.


To up the cuteness factor even further, here is a photo of our niece and her little pal at carnival season last year. Do I not have the cutest nieces and nephews ever?


I rest my case.

Let's continue our perusal of the photographic archives. Here I am with my mom at my old abode, the House of Love. For the annual department Halloween parties, it was the Haunted House of Love. But the decor stayed up pretty much year round. Witness this photo, taken in May of 2006:


Hijinx at the House of Love were many. The following photo is me and my housemates in "costume," sort of. It's a brilliant card made by my housemate for my farewell party. It features me as Nancy Drew, and the two of them as other characters on the cover of The Secret at the House of Love. This is exceptionally fantastic for many reasons, including our love of Nancy Drew covers and the fact that the House of Love holds many mysterious secrets, one of which was that--I kid not--a wheelchair was one of our permanent furnishings. Nobody knows when it took residence at the house, but it was uncovered by some of our earlier housemates in a closet full of rubbish. It was a favorite seat for parties and in actuality proved terribly practical, because it could be driven from one room to the other. And also used for pop-a-wheelie tricks.


Now, switching gears (do wheelchairs have gears?), imagine my surprise when I discovered that I have more than one photo in my archives of random European men dressed in bunny costumes. Honest.

Cologne:


Brussels:


May your intake of candy be excessive, and may your dreams never be haunted by manic bunnies.

Live, from the bus

This morning I was buoyed by the sight of blue sky and sun--it has been so many days since I have seen either. As I got dressed, full of energy to face this day, one that came with a long list of to-dos clenched in its fist, I looked forward to getting my sunglasses out of the backpack where they had languished since my surprisingly summery trip to the US at the beginning of this month.

But as I pulled on my jacket and gathered up my things, the house darkened precipitously. "Oh no," I muttered, "Can't you just wait?" Hurrying my pace, scrambling for the papers I needed for my visit to the parking reservation office (yet again), I glanced at the windows. Sure enough, the familiar sinister pelting of rain. Sighing, I grabbed my umbrella and put my sunglasses on the table.

I should be glad, at least, that I had warning in time to get the umbrella, because when I stepped outside the rain was coming down SO hard--I think the technical term is "cats and dogs." The kind of rain that had my pants drenched up to the knee in a minute, even with the umbrella.

I made my way through the downpour toward the office of "Administration Communale de Saint-Gilles Urbanisme et Travaux Publics." Fortunately, once there, the man understood my tortured French enough to grasp the problem, and a discussion ensued among him and several other jumpsuited public works men as to where the panneaux should have been placed, requiring specialized knowledge of the locale in front of our house. I even drew a picture, pointing to where--BOTH times--the signs had been placed and a big X where our window is located. Clearly, the two did not align. Someone brought up the friterie across the street as an orienting landmark. Yes, that's it! I say. In the end, I left with yet another "clear off the street-side parking" reservation, one that I hope will, this time, do the trick.

I caught the bus to head downtown--oh, did I forget to mention that that's where I am right now? I'm on the bus! writing longhand--for a visit to the costume store. Yes, that's on today's to-do list, given priority even over that conference proposal I have to write, because that I can do after 5:30 pm, whereas the stores, they close good and early in this wet, dark land called Belgium.

Why a costume store? I am hosting a petite soirée at my house tomorrow night that will be a mixture of Catalan All Saints (making panellets, little almond cookies, with a friend), Thanksgiving (making pumpkin pie), and of course, Halloween. That's where the costume store comes in. Normally, I endorse entirely homemade costumes, but this year I've taken it into my head to be Cleopatra à la Elizabeth Taylor, and I just can't get around the wig--everything else I can make, but the wig sort of has to happen.

And besides, it will be for more than one party. In Barcelona in a few weekends we're holding a similar party for all of our family and friends at our new apartment, sort of a housewarming event and, we hope, a way to institute a holiday celebration at our place. All Saints/Halloween is a good one, because people have the day off but don't usually have family commitments already, it's kid friendly and fun for all ages, and can easily combine American and Catalan traditions. Although, obviously, this year we'll be having it a little after the fact...

M. can go as Antony to match my Cleopatra for a good couples costume. Now that I write this, I can't remember if I've mentioned this to him or not. Hmmm... He'll be a good sport about it. We've been known to put together some successful costumes in th past, Bonnie and Clyde and Vermeer and the Girl with the Pearl Earring among them.

Oops, must go. Bus has arrived.

Hello again. Back on the bus, heading home. Mission(s) accomplished! I got a witch's wig that will do the trick, with long straight black hair and straight bangs. Several other stops produced some accessories. At Brico, Belgium's answer to Home Depot, I bought several meters of shiny gold chain that I can make into necklaces and hair adornment. Cost? 1-2 euros a meter. Cost for the stupid and fake-looking plastic Cleopatra jewelry at the costume store? 10-20 euros.

I also recharged my cell phone and went grocery shopping for the stuff I'll need for tomorrow. I had never shopped at the grocery in the center of town before, but I will do so again, because it was awesome! Large, well-lit, interesting food, great wine selection, and even good music (Jamie Cullum)! Although, as in every Belgian grocery store, there is one whole cooler section devoted to gross-looking mayonnaisey salads in every pastel shade of the rainbow, each one a mixture of some kind of meat and some kind of sauce. Ah, Belgians and their sauces [insert shaking head motion here].

Oh, and another thing about the grocery store: although our French teacher says they celebrate Halloween here--and judging by the costume store, they do--there was a noticeable lack of brown and orange M&Ms, or any orange and brown candy. I'm just saying.

Digression: Isn't that an odd phrase, "I'm just saying"? It really means the opposite of what it says; it means you're implying something that you're not saying. I had never noticed it until writing it down right now. Because usually it's something you're saying out loud, so I guess in that sense you are "saying." You're both saying and not saying. Isn't language wonderful?

Digression #2 [written in margin earlier]: This morning I read in the NYTimes that mice who are placed on vibrating pads for 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week, lose a significant amount of fat and gain considerable bone mass. They're going to start testing that on the elderly, but it makes me wonder (as I write this with shaking script and teeth clattering to the vibration of the bus) if regular bus riders (especially in Europe, where the cobblestones make for superduper vibrations) also have relatively less fat and better bone mass? Hey you scientists, you should get on that.

Anyway, we're nearing home and I feel happy to have completed my errands. There's even a little sun peeking out of the low clouds. I'll type this as soon as I arrive [editor's note: NOT].

Yellowlegs and purple figs

The market today was full of beautifully autumnal foods, and even though the Mister is gone all week and I'll mostly be eating alone, I couldn't help but buy piles of mushrooms, figs, and other produce.

I even took some pictures (with the videocam, because our camera is broken!):



I'm a tad confused about which kind of mushrooms these are (they were two different purchases from two different vendors; in the picture they're mixed together). Are girolles the same as chanterelles? From a brief look on the web, I think what I bought may be two varieties of chanterelles, the ones with the brown stems being chanterelles jaunes. Not sure though, because at one stand the sign said girolles and the other had no sign.

I think in catalan they're camagrocs (yellowlegs) and rossinyols (nightingales). Translations of food names are so difficult, but oh so fun!

I know these come straight from the forest because while cleaning them I found all sorts of little surprises, included pine needles and moss and more than one little crawlie. I don't terribly mind (although I tend to drop what I'm holding like a hot potato if I see something move) because it means they are fresh and will taste the way the crunch of fall leaves sounds.



Now the question is what to do with the mushrooms? I think for lunch, in a few minutes, I'll sauté some of them and put them inside the buckwheat crepes I made yesterday, since I have leftover batter. If there are enough left after that, maybe a fall risotto...

Also, the figs, oh the figs! I've been buying them lately to put in salads with goat cheese, but since I have a whole little basket of them, I think I should try to make a tart or something warm.



The cookies I made yesterday are hiding in the background.

And what would Sunday be without the Herald Trib (featuring the Sunday crossword, of course) and a grainy baguette?

Home pianoless home

Talking to my brother--with the miracle of video chat! saw his most adorablest dog for the first time!--I realized I had left the story hanging in the middle of the Mister's traveling travails.

He arrived safely, albeit five hours late, and with enough time to relax, talk, eat dinner (I made crepes for the first time in my life--why didn't anybody tell me they were so easy?) and to re-pack his suitcase, which he is doing as I write.

Also, the piano, it is not here. That which was likely yesterday was confirmed today with full cancellations of all of the people involved. I called the police so they could file some sort of document, and talked to them when they came, explaining the situation, although they refused to file any sort of document. (But I talked to them, in French, and they understood me!)

So the Mister is home, and the piano isn't. I'm just thankful it's not the other way around. Although it would be nice to have them both.

Mister in Roma

He got stuck there this morning--after waking up at an early hour to catch a taxi and a plane from Sardinia to Rome, discovering that a small light or something had malfunctioned on his plane and there was no promise of leaving for another five hours, at least.

This is bad news for a couple of reasons. One, it means less time at home between his arrival and his departure again in the early hours of tomorrow morning, when he leaves for El Salvador and Costa Rica. (Yes, this is a travelling month, indeed.) Two, if the delay continues for too long, he'll miss that departure, and that will put him in a pickle.

So I am praying that he can get on a different flight, or that they manage to get a new light for the plane lickety split. Sometimes it's the smallest things that cause a snag...

The Lord does not want us to have a piano, it seems

I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it.

They put the parking signs--to reserve our space for the piano lift--in the wrong place, again. We TOLD them and well that it had to be on the OTHER SIDE. We are in the same boat as yesterday morning.

Can I pick up the signs and move them? When it says police property all over them? And some poor guy finds his car in the no-park zone? What if I keep my eyes out and scuttle down and move them when there's no car? And if the car doesn't move?

I called the office but of course there is no answer and it's now almost seven pm. M is calling the police from Italy because he has the official papers with him (since he organized things on his way to the airport).

If there is no other remedy, we will have to cancel the lift to avoid paying YET AGAIN for their time. And the piano, meanwhile, is sitting in the entryway and annoying the neighbors.

I can't believe it.

Also, I short-circuited our electricity today.

The little earth we live in

While I was staying with my friends in Bloomington, we watched some episodes of a most marvelous BBC series called Planet Earth.

Actually, "we" is only true in part. I watched a couple of episodes with one of them, and then a couple on my own after they were both gone on conferences, feeling a little like an interloper but grateful for their in absentia hospitality. I watched them while eating crema catalana (Catalan crème brûlée--the Catalans invented it first, I do believe), the sugar topping caramelized to a perfect glassy burnt-sugariness with my friend's industrial-sized blowtorch.

I bring this up, full disclosure, because I think it's possible that the sugar high and vanilla euphoria of a perfect little pot of cream may have impaired my judgement on just how totally awesome these documentaries are. But I stand by my review, nevertheless, and am confident that they will prove to be just as awesome even when viewed while not under the influence of a creamy sugary dessert.

Sorry. I got sidetracked. Forward, ho! This series of nature documentaries is definitely the most impressive I have ever seen, in terms of outrageous fiming techniques (you keep yelling "HOW did they get that SHOT??!") and in terms of outrageous animal behaviors and creatures that you never knew existed (you keep yelling "This is CRAZY!" at whatever little baby squid or paradise bird or guano beetle they are focused on at the moment).

And it's not just the animals; as the title indicates, the focus is just as much on habitats and environments. Each episode is named after a habitat such as Jungles, Caves, or Deserts, and the processes of wind and water currents, volcanic eruptions, or plant life are equally as central as the animals.

The filmmakers went out of their way to film behaviors and events that have never before been captured on film: think snow leopards frolicking by their den, strange and rare mating dances, manta rays as big as a room. But the "normal" things become just as fascinating as the exotic, and the intricacies of life on this planet bowl you over in every shot.

Predictably, there's an ecological message in all of this. But you are never preached at. It's enough for the narrator, with his impeccable British accent, to note that the only nesting place of this flock of millions of birds is just one rocky outcropping in the middle of nowhere in the Atlantic ocean. And then to show you how the birds feed the sea lions, or whatever, and the birds feed on the fish, or whatever. So you know, without preachiness, that if the waters rise, and this little outcrop is covered up, a whole lot of trouble is going to happen in the world. And that's just one small example.

So, all I'm saying is, stop global warming. And also: this baby is going on my Christmas list.

PS: there's a little preview video on the Amazon site. Go watch it. And also, if you have HD television, this might be the thing that's most worth watching in high definition, ever. There's a different version you can buy online to watch it that way.

Please accept our apologies

I realize, and I feel terribly sorry for, the fact that I haven't written in this blog for nearly a month. I was gone a lot of that time, and I made the mistake of storing up all the things in my head that I was going to write about, until the point came where it all seemed so daunting to make a dent in it and I just sort of put it off.

Which makes a good case for regular blogging, in the first place.

Among the things I want to write about are: the family reunion in Michigan, the week in Bloomington with good friends and the old IU haunts and profs, fall food, especially pumpkin pie, our new (hand-me-down) videocam, and other terribly important things I can't remember right now.

For the moment, I offer up the rambly post below, written about today's rambly day, which should give you a snapshot of what's going on with us at the moment, and bring you up to date on the piano situation. Spoiler: it's still not in our apartment.

Love and kisses and hugs and all of those sorts of things.

From aliens to fish eggs

Oh, dear readers. It has been quite a day, a day whose tale must begin by gathering the threads of the piano saga. It is nearly two months since we purchased the piano, and it is still not in our apartment. As of today, it is forlornly sitting in the building hallway, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Only this week did we receive the money back from the first moving company. Meanwhile, upon my return from the US I discovered there were several calls from the store where we bought the monster. We called them, only to find that they had gotten so fed up with us not appearing to claim our purchase that they put it back up for sale.

This, needless to say, was perturbing news, and we insisted that they remove the for sale sign. They (justifiably) wanted us to pick up the darn thing, already. So we went a new route (the Mister had already found other potential carriers-up-the-stairs but we gave up on that plan) and decided to get parking reservation from the town government to park a lift, and coordinate the delivery from the store with the arrival of the lift and some extra hands, all designed to just get it up here.

That was all supposed to happen at 8 am, today. But what we discovered at about 7:30 am was that a car was parked in the essential space, and that the city had placed the no-parking-special-reservation placards on the wrong side of the building (for which we had paid 55 euros, of course). We called the number they had given us to get the police to come and move the offending car, several times, but we received brusque insinuations that our plight was unimportant to them and they were shorthanded anyway.

Meanwhile, the lift guys, who had arrived on time, are sitting there and eating our money. With their coffee and cigarettes. For breakfast.

The piano arrived at around 8:30, and everybody drank more coffee and argued and looked up at the windows and gesticulated. (This from what I could see by leaning out of the window where the piano was supposed to enter. The Mister was down in the thick of things.)

Eventually they decided to bring the piano into the building, and so they did. It is now sitting in the entryway, blocking everyone's passage and just inviting people to scrawl graffiti on it, I'm sure.

We paid the lift guys their 100 euroroos, which they had totally earned by sitting there and drinking coffee and gesticulating. So now we have paid some 150 euros to get our piano about half a foot further upwards towards our fourth-floor window. I had to leave for French, the Mister had to catch a plane to Italy, and I just wanted to cry. I had to say goodbye to him, arrive late to French, and find out I had done terribly on my last exam.

But: the Mister to the rescuuuuuuuue! After class I talked to him on the phone. It transpires that before going down to the aiport, he had returned to the parking-reservation place and insisted that it was their mistake (I made the reservation in the first place--in French!--and I can say with confidence that I indicated the CORRECT side/street numbers) and they should give us another free reservation. At the same time, he called the lift company and coordinated a time with them and with the parking reservation guy for this Saturday. And the lift guy said something about not charging us as much the second time, or something, so that's good news. Then, because without the original piano delivery guys who came with the truck this morning, we needed more lifters, he called our ex-neighbor, who agreed to come with some buddies. So he had it all set up before I even got back home.

Which was a relief. Because I was more upset this morning about the daunting thought of renegotiating and coordinating all these people, in French, while the Mister was on his trip, than I was about not having the piano. At this point the piano itself is a chimera, an illusion whose physical reality even now is masked by the hallucinatory fact that it is loitering in my building entryway.

So that was the morning. The afternoon didn't get much better. I took a nap, in part because I hadn't slept well last night. I had woken up this morning with specific, novel-length dream memories of watching a city-sized meteor land on Chicago, and the all-too-real aftermath of a major disaster. It included aliens who landed in various shapes and their alien animal species, and taking care of an alien who I wasn't sure but thought was an alien child. I even remember thinking about the theological implications of discovering that aliens were real, and feeling the old 9-11 kind of fear and chaos, even while I felt surprise that I felt resolute and maybe even brave. (PS: Did you see the series of NY Times articles on sleep and dreams? They were fascinating. Go read them.)

I didn't dream during my nap.

But I did wake up unaware of what time or day it was. Which is why, when the Mister called at around 8:30 pm, probably a few hours after I had woken up, and I looked at the clock, I started shouting. Because I was supposed to have been at choir rehearsal at 7:30. My one regular evening commitment, and I had missed it. Tonight was important, too: the orchestra conductor, the one who will be conducting us during the concert, was there to rehearse us. So I rushed out the door, grabbing my Messiah score, and caught the next bus. And of course it took me longer than usual to get there. I caught the last 50 minutes of rehearsal, though, at least that.

After a day like today, an upside-down and topsy-turvy day, one that started with disaster-dreams and ended with frenetic catching up to my regular schedule, I decided I needed a treat. So I stopped at the french-fry stand that's across the street from us. People have told me that this humble little trailer is actually well-known for delicious frites, but we had never tried them, probably because the last thing you're thinking about as you step outside your front door is "Where can I get some good snacks?" And also because, returning home, my mind is usually occupied with what we have in the refrigerator and what I can make with it, instead of the fried food across the street.

So tonight I tried them, and they were indeed tasty. Oily and hot and salty, freshly cooked, sliced from potatoes today.

And then I got another treat, only a couple of moments ago: the Mister called from Sassari, on the island of Sardinia, and he explained his utterly delicious meal to me. I was both glad I wasn't there (a bunch of older Italian professors speaking in heavy dialect) and sad to have missed the trip (I was planning to go, but it was two days of travel for one day of being there), but happy to eat vicariously through my husband's description of his glorious sampling of Italian regional foods. Including a wine that "tasted like flowers," a special myrtle grappa, and bottarga, which I've heard of but never tried--it's fish eggs that are salted, cured for several months, and pressed. It's used sort of like parmesan, grated over pasta, or served on bread or sliced as hors d'oeuvres.

On that culinary note, I need to escape to bed. I hope I will not have novelesque dreams that I remember in the morning. If I dream, I hope it will be of Italian food and the music I will play on my piano....one of these days.

I am about to gush

...about being in Chicago, where it is WARM and full of sun and sidewalks and sweatpants. (Er, I don't mean Chicago is full of them so much as Americans are full of them, or fill them fully, if you know what I mean.) And did I mention the SUN? and the WARM?

I strolled around downtown today, blissfully happy, unconcerned even by the el breaking down and bums on the street. I bought overly expensive makeup that I am convinced is going to be worth it because it's one of those fancy things that is blush! and eyeshadow! and lipgloss! in one. And I bought that highly recommended Philosophy facial cleanser.

Plus: the nice people at Sephora gave me lots of free samples. Plus: behold, my buying power is great, for I come from the land of the euro. Although: sales tax? Whoa! All of the sudden at the register everything seems so much more expensive!

I also should mention how charmed I am by the green street signs that have their own little posts, and green highway signs.

And I ate Mexican food, one of those big burritos with black beans, and lo, I was content. And I drank Starbucks, unguiltily (I am opposed to the American invasion of it in Europe, but here, well, I just have two words for you: pumpkin spice).

Speaking of pumpkin, I bought two big cans of it to bring back to Brussels so I can make pumpkin pie. My longsuffering husband has promised me that he will carry them in his suitcase for me. (I don't know if he realizes how heavy those cans are.)

Speaking of the husband, he will arrive tomorrow, and then all will be right with the world. Then we will drive to Grand Rapids to experience the full impact of the gathered descendents of my great grandparents, who arrived in America 100 years ago. Given the family genes, it will be sort of like a blonde giant convention.

Homesickness

Although the title of this post might suggest otherwise, I'm not exactly homesick (besides, in two days I fly to the US!). But it's a gray, spitting, Brussels Monday, and this poem I just found (in a book of German Expressionist poetry that I picked up for two bucks in Harvard Square) perfectly captures that gray feeling of exile and distance.

Homesickness

I cannot speak the language
of this chilly land,
nor walk in its pace.

The clouds that drift past
I also cannot read.

Night is a stepqueen.

I always have the Pharaoh's forests on my mind
and kiss the constellations of my stars.

Already my lips are glowing
and speak distant things,

and I am a colourful picture book
in your lap.

But your face weaves
a veil of weeping.

My shimmering birds'
corals have been gouged out,

on the hedgerows of the gardens
their soft nests are turning to stone.

Who will anoint my dead palaces--
they bore the crowns of my fathers,
their prayers sank into the sacred river.

~Else Lasker-Schüler (tr. Esther Kinsky)

What weekends are for

Friday night birthday parties. (Try to avoid the part where you get inexplicably dizzy all of the sudden in the middle of talking to that nice American girl--yay! another American! a rare sighting, indeed--and have to run to your hosts' bathroom where you can't find the lights to save your life and meanwhile you have to puke.) (No. I'm not pregnant.)

Sleeping until noon. (Preferably wearing your favorite pajamas.)

Reading aloud in bed. (The best way is taking turns. Helps if the chapters are short.)

Talking about European history, with a focus on Lenin and the Russian revolution, in bed. (Yeah, I know! Whatever floats your boat!)

Doing other things in bed. (No comment.)

Frying eggs and refried beans. (And eating them.)

Talking to far-flung family in Spain and the US. (Or, you know, wherever yours happen to be. Go Skype!)

Meeting friends for a Belgian beer. (Recommended: a bar where old men are playing chess.)

Going to see a movie on a cold and wet Saturday afternoon. (Preferably something kind of Hollywoody, in English, but that has gotten at least some decent reviews, bonus points if from the NYTimes. If that doesn't work out, a Romanian art-house film.)

Meeting other friends for a city-wide music fest, trying out a few venues and listening to French pop, jazz, and blues. (And maybe some reggae.)

Going to church. (Wear thickest possible tights. See aforementioned "cold and wet" weather.)

Buying fresh vegetables at the market. (To make soup. See aforementioned "cold and wet" weather.)

Making soup. (See aforementioned "fresh vegetables.")

Playing cards with your husband. (Try to win at least once.)

Denying that it will ever be Monday again.

Chum Frink

I've been doing some work for my brother, who has a super cool graphic design company. They do everything from branding to product displays to websites to photo shoots. He asked me to write copy for a catalogue of high-end sport sunglasses (think Oakleys, but they're not Oakleys).

My job was to write a spiffy history/mission statement, descriptions of all the different styles of glasses, descriptions of the super duper fancy schmancy "tech features" that make these glasses the thing you absolutely have to get if you're at all serious about your sunglasses, and mini-bios of the four famous people who are wearing the sunglasses in the photo shoots (this last one I ended up editing, not writing from scratch).

What took me by surprise was how much I enjoyed doing this work, mostly because of how creative and--dare I say it?--poetic it was.

I was drawn to the challenge of saying normally boring or cliché phrases in a way that was fresh and invigorating. I loved thinking about how to describe a sunglasses feature with style and panache. Ultimately, I found myself using creative language that approximated the poetic process much more closely than I expected.

Of course, I didn't have any illusions that this was poetry, and knowing that my name wasn't going to be on it was pretty nice--kind of lifts the pressure of greatness. (It is only product copy, after all.)

The question of poetry in advertising made me think of the character in Sinclair Lewis' book Babbitt called Chum Frink (his full name is T. Cholmondeley Frink, and that alone is worth the price of the book). Chum Frink is George Babbitt's next door neighbor, and his is "a Famous Poet and a distinguished advertising-agent." He is the author of both "Poemulations" and "Ads that Add."

At a party, Frink gets going about which of his callings is more difficult:

"I’m doing a series of ads for the Zeeco Car and I want to make each of ’em a real little gem—reg’lar stylistic stuff. I’m all for this theory that perfection is the stunt, or nothing at all, and these are as tough things as I ever tackled. You might think it’d be harder to do my poems—all these Heart Topics: home and fireside and happiness—but they’re cinches. You can’t go wrong on ’em; you know what sentiments any decent go-ahead fellow must have if he plays the game, and you stick right to ’em. But the poetry of industrialism, now there’s a literary line where you got to open up new territory."

The poems--not advertising--are the "cinches" if you just "play the game." On the other hand, advertising has true style and panache. So in Frink's world, the poems are the manipulative clichés and the language of advertising is where true artistry happens.

(Of course all of this is Lewis' commentary on the way poetry in the 1920s was changing to include language of popular culture and advertising, as well as the rise of mass culture in general.)

But that leads me to the part about writing catalogue copy that I didn't like as much: the creative language and metaphorical imagery was being used to--basically--manipulate someone into thinking that they should buy these sunglasses (or a store into thinking they should sell them). Where Chum Frink sees poetry as manipulative (and perhaps it is, in its own way), the language of advertising is overtly designed to cause consumer behavior (and even more, create a consumer identity).

In other words, even though the exercise of language for this job was sometimes just as fun as writing poetry, I am more comfortable with poetic language being used to provoke thought rather than the urge to buy. A more cynical view might insist, like Frink, that poetry is "selling" something, even if that something is a sentiment or a thought or a political/aesthetic perspective. But I'd like to think that there's still a difference there, even if it's a question of degrees (and I don't mean that PhD that's hanging over my head).

I should add that my brother's company is run with integrity, skill, and artistry. And (psst, bro) I would totally work for them again. But the whole process made me think about what creative writing means, what advertising does, and the aesthetic philosophies of T. Cholmondeley Frink.

Piano saga, part trois

After yet another week with no piano in sight (despite promises to the contrary), we fired the piano moving company. They better give us our money back. M. went to collect this morning.

But now we're stuck with our original problem, which is how to get a big honking piece of wood and metal and ivory and stuff up to our apartment. I realize it's just not that easy to do this sort of job, which is probably why the "professionals" get away with all that craziness they pulled.

Does anyone know exactly how many people it takes to carry a piano? And how brawny those people have to be? We're wondering if it would work to just individually hire people, starting with our former Polish neighbor (I mean not formerly Polish, formerly our neighbor) and going from there.

I'm getting a sinking feeling that I won't even have the piano by the time I leave for the US, next week. And since I'll be there for almost two weeks, it will have been A MONTH AND A HALF between the day we bought the piano and I finally lay eyes on it again.

Discord

Still no piano. After several hours, and several phone calls unanswered to the delivery man who called me in the first place, I spoke with the piano company man, who told me that the delivery men had attempted to pick up the piano "three or four times" over the last week but they hadn't ever let them take it because they didn't have "the ticket" (i.e., the sales receipt). It was absolutely necessary, it transpires, that I go down to the store in person and bring them the receipt.

What I want to know, is why I only found this out after THREE attempts at pick-up, over the course of TWO weeks, and why they never CALLED us to get the receipt instead of banging their heads repeatedly against the same difficulty? Why, during ANY of the several times M. e-mailed or called in an attempt to move things along, did they not mention this detail? (At one point they even told us--patently untrue--that they had already picked the piano up from the secondhand place and was being stored at their piano shop.) It all boggles the mind.

It's tempting to blame such blatant demonstrations of ineffeciency and incompetence (repeated over and over again in our day to day life in Brussels) on the government. Or, I should say, the non-government. Belgium just celebrated (with a big sparkly cake) the 100th day of having no elected government.

Everyone's talking about whether the country will split in two or not; certainly we've been astounded by the palpable sense that there is greater division between the two parts of Belgium than any two neighboring countries. But evidently Belgians are fond of their monarchs, and besides, Brussels would be an unsolvable mess: a mostly francophone city in the midst of Dutch-speaking Flanders.

The complexity of regional, city, and town governments are astounding; nothing gets done because there's just too much governance. Especially because it's just a little sliver of a country not much bigger than my home state, Vermont, it's hard to imagine why it is so difficult to smoothly run a bilingual and multicultural country.

Anyway. I just want my piano.

PS: for a nice recent review of the Belgian-split problem, see this NYTimes article.

In which I promise to have some thoughts

I just realized that the iTunes thingamabob that I tried to put up a while ago actually IS there. I thought, mistakenly, that the Blogger template stuff hadn't accepted the coding and anyway...shrug. But there it is. And I don't like it! I can't figure out why some of my favorite music shows up but others are random albums that I don't really like that much at all. And while the scrolling words are nice for about a minute, they're all grey and boring and repeat over and over. You can click on the artist to see the album, but even that is only interesting maybe the first couple of times you do it. Am I right? So, I will be deleting the iTunes thingamabob.

Also, apologies for not blogging in, like, forever. I promised my grandparents I'd keep it up, and then I slacked off for almost the whole month of September. So here I am, grandpa and grandma! I'll try to blog more so you know what I'm up to!

What I'm up to lately is more of the same, which means: trying to work diligently, studying French, singing in choir, trying to swim more regularly so I don't turn into a couch-shaped blob, and traveling to places like Barcelona (two weekends ago) and Liege (yesterday, to see the opera there--Nabucco--and do a bit of sightseeing). Ooh, and my good friend Amanda is coming to visit tomorrow! Also, I'm doing some work for my brother, which I think I'll have to save for another post because I have some, you know, thoughts on that.

Do, re, mi oh my

So, we bought a piano. It's not, shall we say, something one typically expects to do on a regular old Friday afternoon.

But the Victor Horta House Museum, which we thought would occupy our time until our dinner reservation, actually only took about an hour (being rather more "house" than "museum").

Whiling away the rest of the afternoon meant strolling through the Chatelain neighborhood, and in the Chatelain neighborhood, on the same street as the museum, there is a huge secondhand shop called Les Petits Riens (The Little Nothings).

We had our eyes peeled for a sofa or a coffee table, and didn't see anything. However, we saw a piano. Two, actually.

I should mention here that my mother was with us, and I should mention that my mother is a pianist by trade. We started playing the pianos, and noticing that they were only 200 euros. We also noticed that one was both decidedly more antique than the other AND decidedly of richer sound, tuning, and all around beauty. This is where my mom came in: she knows what to look for (uncracked sounding board? good. a cracked key? replacable. tight tuning pins? good. a couple stuck keys? no problem.) and she helped us realize that yes, we could buy a piano in a random thrift shop on a regular old Friday afternoon.

Then the friendly people at the store started to realize that we might actually take one of these pianos off their hands, and they reduced the price by another 25 euros, while pointing out that they had originally priced it at 500, and had no idea what it was really worth (hinting that maybe it was worth a lot more than that).

Nervously (can one really buy a piano, just like that?), we handed them the credit card and were the proud owners of a beautiful antique piano.

Now, here's the rub: one can't exactly take a piano home in one's back pocket. After a few phone calls the following morning, we discovered that transporting the piano up to our fourth-floor apartment was going to cost us more money than we paid for the piano in the first place. Most companies wanted us to rent a furniture lift, which is very expensive and involves reserving the street in front of our house from the town government etc. etc. We did find some professional piano movers who were willling to CARRY the thing up our stairs (heaven help their backs), and so we paid them to do so.

And then waited. All of this happened, let's see, over THREE weeks ago. And we're still waiting for our piano. After numerous phone calls and e-mails and consternation-ful conversations with the piano people, it appears that at long last, TODAY is the day. The piano was due to arrive twenty minutes ago (the dudes called me earlier this morning), so I am holding my breath and crossing my fingers (you know, to limber them up for the scales I'm going to be practicing shortly).

Our neighbors are probably going to hate us, but I am hopping-up-and-down to have a piano. Last time I was home and played a bit, I could tell I had lost so much of what I had (which wasn't a whole lot to begin with, to be honest), after years of having nowhere to play. I'm looking forward to sharpening up some piano chops, and also to being able to practice my choir music without having to resort to a. awkward solo pitch-guessing, b. singing along with recorded versions of the pieces, or c. attempting to use an "internet piano" by which you click on keys in sequence to get a computery approximation of the melody. (Believe me, it's not worth the trouble.)

So here's to secondhand shops, and piano chops. May the piano be light on their backs, and may it come within the hour.