Rosslyn Chapel
Posted by: lucie
Family Vacation
Posted by: lucie
Okay, so families are all different. In some families, brothers and sisters are physically affectionate with each other to a degree that I find creepy. My boyfriend is in one of those families. We obviously have vastly differing ideas of what is normal brother/sister behaviour. So... that is all there is to it. I will get to watch him put his hand on her knee and stick his face a centimeter away from her face and touch her a lot, which seems totally weird, and I will try not to be too freaked out, and in two weeks she and her husband will go home and life will go on.
We did talk about it, awkward conversation though it was. He said maybe they were a bit different from other brothers and sisters because of their situation growing up. Their dad was never around and their mom was an alcoholic who used to leave them in the car when she went into the bar to drink, so they kind of fended for themselves and took care of each other. That's how it was from the time he was eight and she was five, he says, and you have a lot of physical contact with kids that age. It still seems like you'd outgrow that physical relationship, but I guess it's not my place to judge.
Never think you have already seen all of the general categories of relationship weirdness, because there are always more that you haven't thought of.
The two week family vacation was probably not the brightest idea. It was not particularly carefully considered, but there wasn't much to evaluate - they were only going to be here once, and we couldn't afford to take a separate trip by ourselves, so there you go. In or out.
Here's the worrying thing, besides the snuggly sibling component: the sister and brother in law are from a small town in the most sparsely populated state in the US. This is their first time out of the country. They seldom leave their own small town. They don't know why he left, and are probably not particularly happy that he felt he needed more than their part of the world had to offer. The three of them are close, but seem to stick with small talk, which is alien to me. "Simple stuff," the boyfriend replies when I ask him what he usually speaks with them about. "Is that because that's all they want to talk about, or because you've never tried to talk about anything else?" I ask him. He doesn't know but supposes he hasn't tried particularly hard. "They're kind of rednecks, honey," he reminds me, which seems rude, but hard to deny when they make comments about someone "Jewing" someone on a business deal, or talk about hanging out at strip clubs, which is apparently one of their main forms of entertainment. I sound like a city-girl snob, I guess. But you should hear the way the boyfriend talks, and he loves them.
The boyfriend says he feels between two worlds and is a bit self conscious about them seeing him as having changed. Yesterday this tension resulted in him being incredibly bad at acknowledging my existence at all. I have no idea how I'm going to fit in. And you know how it is meeting family. Even if you're an independent, standalone kind of girl, you don't want to feel like people would prefer that you weren't around.
I kind of suck at small talk. It feels false and starts to drive me crazy if it goes on for too long. And even some stuff that I would consider smalltalky can end up in awkwardness. For example, yesterday the brother in law noticed the Scottish flag and asked if there was another flag that looked like it. I said yes, I think the the Finnish flag has a blue cross instead of the blue "x," then wondered aloud if it was actually white on blue, not blue on white. The brother in law said he thought maybe it was white on blue, at which point the sister asked him pointedly, "When did you get so full of knowledge?" (His response: "Playing the in-flight trivia on the way over.")
The boyfriend, who actually left the small town six years ago to move to the closest significant-sized city one state over, talked a lot at the beginning of the year about how his background affected the way he approached people - namely that in a small town like his, it was not a good idea to act like you were smarter than anyone else. Or smart at all. My background is totally different. The people I grew up with, went to school with, and have surrounded myself with ever since, like to enjoy their brains, think, reflect. We like to talk about new things, learn stuff, speculate, look up words in the dictionary and look up flags on Google image search. We like to solve problems and riddles and figure stuff out. We correct each other when we get confused, because that is how we learn things, and no one takes it the wrong way if you say "My brother went to Spain and Barcelona," and you said "Oh, actually Barcelona is a city in Spain," because then they know, and it's nice to know things. With this group, someone says someone went to Spain and Barcelona and then there are a couple beats of uncomfortable silence before the conversation moves on. It's just weird to be in a social situation where your whole way of approaching discussion in general is... rude, I guess. Where showing that you know anything someone else doesn't know makes you a know-it-all.
Well, I guess "know-it-all" is relative. Maybe this will be a good opportunity to improve by diplomacy and learn to make small talk a bit better. It's sunny out today. My toes are a little cold, though. This Coca Cola Zero seems to taste the same as Diet Coke. Music is cool. I like things that are blue.
Brothers & Sisters
Posted by: lucie
So maybe my life likes to badly imitate sitcoms lately, because on top of the baking, do you remember that one episode of friends where I can't remember which one of them is dating a guy who is a little bit too affectionate with his sister? Okay, it's not that bad, but my boyfriend's sister got to town today, and... who puts his hand on his sister's knee when they're in a taxi together (especially when his girlfriend is sitting on the other side of him)? I am creeped out. Being affectionate is sweet, but that just seems weird. We're going on a two week vacation together - me, him, the sister and her husband, and now I'm just slightly bugged out.
I guess that's all.
Compulsive baking
Posted by: lucie
Recently, anxiety about the uncertainty of my future "career" (if there is one in store for me) has been manifesting itself in an embarrassingly derivative-of-Izzy-from-Grey's-Anatomy compulsion to bake. Bake? I don't really know what's going on. Not that I haven't been known to whip something up on occasion when the mood strikes, but in the last three days I have made two loaves of banana bread, a cake and two batches of granola. I sit down at my computer, start to research consumer behaviour and advertising literacy, and the next moment I'm at the kitchen counter mashing bananas, sifting flour and melting butter. It just happens that way. Since this is already underway I figure I may as well take Izzy as a role model and start working on my muffin recipes. Maybe I can bribe my dissertation adviser with a basket of muffins when I turn in a crappy paper at the end of August.
When I logged in to write this entry, I discovered that someone had called me whiny, self absorbed, vain and a slutty dirtbag on my "low key tribulations" entry. I find this pretty cool because a) It's the first time I've had a truly bitchy comment on any entry aside from the painted cats shenanigans! and b) I actually used to write far more "slutty dirtbag" type entries on here, but this time all I was mentioning was the recent drawn-out process of diagnosing an allergy to latex condoms, which I've been using with a grand total of one person for the last year. Sheesh, this Phobos character should have been around back in the drunken, just-broke-up-with-my-last-boyfriend days. It's a wonder no one called me a slutty dirtbag back then. And for the record, if I'm a slutbag, at least can point to a battery of tests certifying that I am a slutbag of the very cleanest variety.
So speaking of that latex allergy, I am the proud new owner of a matchstick-sized piece of plastic that lives in my cervix (aka the Mirena). A little piece of plastic with a tiny amount of hormone in it that will be released over the next five years, resulting in me not having to worry about birth control again for five! freaking! years?! Times like these you can't help but be overcome with the full wonder of living in modern times. This makes birth control pills look primitive, and those kicked off a whole sexual revolution in the 70s! It's exactly like getting laser eye surgery. A little bit of pain, a few days uncomfortable recovery, and then a burden (contact lenses / birth control) is lifted from your life forevermore and you quickly forget it ever existed. That said, it's a little weird to think that I have a piece of plastic inside of me. It's the first piece of plastic to make a home in my body, as far as I'm aware. I guess some people have pieces of plastic that make them more attractive, but I don't have any of those. I feel very high tech now.
Jobhunting is still hard, and making some of us over here a little bit depressed. No one expected it to be this difficult. It's never been this difficult for any of us before, and here we are feeling like total losers. I got a rejection letter the other day from one of my top-two-most-desired-over-the-last-few-months jobs and actually felt good just to have the closure. It has reached the point where rejection feels good merely because it supersedes the anticipation of rejection. The boyfriend and I have reached an informal deal where we take turns whining about our low self esteem. If you get a rejection letter, it is automatically your day. You get to feel sorry for yourself and the other person is obliged to humour and coddle you and tell you everything will be okay. It's a good system.
Sorry for spelling everything British. You get into the habit.
Here is a picture of a rather small castle from a distance. It's on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a little bitty island off the Northeast coast of England that you can drive to only at certain parts of the day. The locals keep little "tide table" books so they'll know when they can get on and off the island. A taxi driver we met there said that every single week, some tourist tries to drive out at the wrong time, despite warnings, floods his or her car, and gets stranded in a very shallow sea. The rescue operations cost the locals hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.
Project pick-me-up
Posted by: lucie
Low-key tribulations
Posted by: lucie
Disclaimer: Men are being gunned down on their doorsteps in countries oppressed by corrupt governments. Kindly little old ladies with dementia are moving into assisted living facilities and confusedly asking for their long-dead husbands and long-grown young children. People are finding out they have HIV. Hearts are being broken. Species are becoming extinct. Alienated, hopeless young people are planning senseless attacks on their fellow humans. George W Bush is still president. People are enduring all kinds of deep struggles at this very moment. My "problems," if indeed they can be called problems, are miniscule by comparison. I just want to acknowledge that before going any further. Hands up, meaninglessness acknowledged.
All that having been said, I had a new experience this week: The Humiliating Job Interview. While the details are still vague to me, I believe this to be a category of interview wherein the interviewer has already decided you are not really up to the job. Perhaps he/she was simply looking to pad the shortlist with a couple more respondents, or - and this is my theory - perhaps his or her lackey did the shortlisting for him or her, resulting in you getting the interview simply because you're clever enough to mimic the vocabulary of the job description in your cover letter and CV, and said lackey held said JD and said CV side by side like those DNA data printouts you see on TV sometimes and said "looks like a relative." This is how you end up wasting an entire day commuting back and forth to a job interview for a position you know very little about, because who are you, really, to put further conditions on your time when you are, albeit still a student, unemployed?
Long story short, after a 4.5 hour train journey I found myself answering questions about deep career-related skills-based queries such as, "What made you decide to move to Prague?" I was asked very few questions about skills or experience that may relate to the job, for which I was apparently blindingly obviously unqualified, despite beginning to think during the interview that it actually sounded rather boring and unchallenging.
A friend commiserated with me at the pub upon my return from the-motion-sick-day-on-the-train-I-will-never-be-able-to-get-back
and recounted his tale of a recent lost cause interview along the same lines. "The guy chose to bust my balls about a job I had taken when I was twenty one, he said incredulously. 'Why did you decide to go into publishing? What was the logic behind that?' " Said friend is now 35 and has been in high tech for the last 11 years or so, having moved on from publishing at 24. To be fair, at least my ladies were kind enough to ask me chit chatty questions about a city I love... but if I wanted to talk about Prague, I'd rather just pop over to the coffee shop and show strangers pictures until one of them showed an interest. Dressing up in a suit and heels and dragging myself around the country is hardly necessary.
The saddest thing, however, is not the waste of time. The saddest thing is how demoralizing such an experience can be. The incredibly pathetic feeling of looking into the eyes of your interviewer and seeing some version of your mewling, silly, optimistic yet woefully unqualified self through their perception - this obvious mistake across the desk. Such a thing happened to the boyfriend recently. I was entirely convinced it was due to his appearance (he looks about 23), but then it happened to me. Not saying I look like an old hag or anything, but I don't look "Oh my god, this position is way too senior for you" either, I don't think.
Anyway, that sucked. And I arrived home to another rejection letter. Woe is me. It's so hard being a rich westerner about to finish her MBA.
In other news, for anyone who has read this far through my whining, which I now mercifully conclude, a public service announcement: it is possible to become allergic to latex. Let me tell you what it has taken me to figure this out: many many flucuonazole pills, a visit to the family planning clinic, a colorful visit to the "drop -n session" at the genito-urinary medicine clinic (filled with amusingly guilty faces and dodgy overheard conversations including such gems as "she looked safe!"), screenings for chlamydia, gonnhoreah, HIV, syphillus and a few other things I'd never heard of, months of nights filled with fever and pain, and finally... some latex free condoms that I had never bothered trying because it seemed all too bizarre that someone could just suddenly become allergic to latex. Well, ladies, gents, you can.
Caveat: if you are a teenager who has googled "latex allergy" because you have some kind of nasty symptom and landed at this page, please do not take this as evidence that you are just allergic to latex. You have to rule everything else out first. I'm just saying it's possible.
Next public service announcement: those polyurethane condoms are a lot more prone to slipping than the good old stretchy ones, hence you may increase your chances of having to dose up on half a month's worth of birth control pills, aka the morning-after pill, which as you can imagine is not the healthiest thing a woman can do to her body, and makes me, for one, more than a little bit testy. At which point you may throw in the towel and just opt to have a piece of hormone-releasing plastic stuck up into your you-know-what which, if successful, will mean you don't have to think about any more of these tribulations for at least five years. Maybe I'll let you guys know how that goes (I hear it hurts).
And that has been the career / vagina update for June. Thank you very much.
ps. I make these offerings of happiness:
Lindisfarne Priory
Posted by: lucie
