Saturday, February 16, 2008

Saturday musings with a smile

Being in love is a bit distracting...I don't mean the lack of attention to detail, thinking about the loved one etc....It distracts one from one’s own happiness. I’ve just realised as soon as I so much as have a faint romantic interest in someone, I start thinking how terrible / lonely / incomplete / failing my life is without him...in fact worse, it’s not ‘without him’ but just on my own…I stop smiling, laughing, feeling, hoping…When I don’t have such an interest, my life is GREAT….which is what it indeed is.

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I got a free coffee on Wednesday morning from a guy working in Pret. He was betting against another Pret guy as to what I was going to order. When I noticed this and he lost (his cappuccino to my latte), he gave me the coffee for free. When I said this made me happy and smiled, he said my smile made him happy….and I should continue to smile to others and make their day too…and then the next day was Valentine’s and I would still be smiling then…All that smiling for £1.79 and decaf!

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My Valentine’s was spent mostly on trains…went to Brussels for the day…I usually work on the train but this time slept all the way there and back…No way for my somewhat forced dream of meeting a romantic Euro-commuter who would offer me champagne at the train bar to be realised…Back at St Pancras I stopped by at M&S to get some dinner. Unbeknown to me one of the Valentine cards (for a WIFE) hanging by the tills must have fallen into my basket…I only realised this when the cashier asked me whether I wanted the card in the plastic bag too…I laughed and said “Why would I buy myself a Valentine’s card?”

The cashiers all laughed too. They didn’t question my implied status as a ‘WIFE’ and I didn’t correct them. I smiled all the way back, feeling a little fake but happy to find out how easy it was to become a wife.

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Had a party here last night….apparently I am a beautiful woman…‘a woman of/to be loved’…whatever that means…alcohol is a funny thing…

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Went to the Trafalgar Freeze today….about 1000 people turned up and froze in motion between 3.30 and 3.35 pm. Good fun…perhaps too many people for the freeze effect to work on the passers by but still good fun. Should I have grandchildren one day, this will be one of the stories that will make me a ‘cool granny’…I’ll add the video link when it’s up.

On the way back, two men offered me their seats one after the other…it felt rude to refuse the second time. I am sure they thought I was pregnant…am terribly bloated after last night’s excesses. My acceptance with a smile confirmed their implication of my pregnancy. I did my best impression of a pregnant woman until I got off.

The guy who gave up his seat got off at my station. I went to get some food and he was still at the bus stop when I got there….we smiled at each other…My bus came before his. As it pulled away I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t pregnant but still grateful for his gesture and that he was the best looking Far Eastern man I had ever seen…but I just smiled instead.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

The Law of Attraction

Attraction is something that can’t be explained…nonetheless it follows a logical order.

You see someone from a distance.

As soon as you see them, you notice they are different.

Yet, you don’t make contact immediately…

Sometimes your eyes will meet, sometimes they won’t…

But when you finally start talking, there’ll be no stopping you.

There may be others at shorter distances, with easier conversations…these conveniences don’t matter…

Somehow you end up talking to each other for a long time, not minding getting notebooks and pens out and drawing plans of where you live and how it turns out you used to live five minutes from each other and never knew…

You would take out your heart and place it on the table next to their pint glass if that were possible but get your pencil case out instead to show your colourful pens…they show a particular reaction to red…

Then you walk along the South Bank…after midnight with nothing but rain drops to accompany you…Just because after another night, you walked along the South Bank with another whom you ended up kissing by the Tate doesn’t mean the same will happen again…

The same doesn’t happen again…

You cross the wobbly bridge, get them on No 25 and go home alone.

Back at home, you update your facebook status “…has fallen in love but doubts the feeling will last the night”…after a few minutes and through your boozy stupor, you go back online and change it to “…is questioning the purpose of status updates, having written something very personal and deleted it”.

One friend - one who is still working at 2 in the morning – gets a glimpse of the highly personal nature of your status update before it is deleted and, a little envious, wonders what you were up to at that late hour and hopes the feeling does last the night.

The next day you learn that they have a partner already which explains why it was so easy not to kiss and get on the bus and go home.

Again the next day, you write back to your friend “I fall in love with every men I do a late-night South Bank walk with even if nothing really happens...it's just the peace and lights of the night along this, my favourite, part of London”.