I ache to be the way we were.

Often, the past stings me. When I don’t finish something, I tend to get a bad conscience. I have my dad to thank for that wonderful quality, seeing as he did such a great job at being a yiddish mama all these years.
The things that I have left behind me were things that I had to leave behind, for my own sake. It may sound stupid, but I had to get out of school. Repeating a year was what I dreaded the most during all my years at the ESM. I was never in danger of having to repeat a year, but it was a great fear of mine nonetheless. It wasn’t the shame that scared me, it was having to go to that school one more year than absolutely necessary. I feel like the day I turned 18, which incidentally and symbolically was the actual day I got handed my diploma, I took it and ran. On the rare occasions where I was forced to look back, I hated it. It cost me superhuman strength of will, at first, to go to Entity Theatre, because the rehearsals were at my old school. I have cut off ties with almost everyone from that period of time. There are exactly five people I am still in contact with and they are close friends, the kind that will never go away. At least I hope so. Hi Miriam, Carol, Thomas, Sophia, Ollie! I love you.

When Egyptology, studies that I rushed into a little, started smothering me, I had to cut it out of my life. The trouble there is: I got to love most of it. I loved the subject matter and there were a bunch of people there that I shocked and maybe even disappointed when I packed my bags late one night and disappeared into the darkness. Since then, I have actually apologised and thanked them for what they did for me when I was falling, but every now and then, Egypt sneaks back into my life and it’s a bitter-sweet reunion. I didn’t even notice before I started studying it, that Egypt is everywhere. It seems we are uncommonly fascinated with that ancient culture, with its air of mystique, its great deities, its monuments that have lasted throughout the ages. And so sometimes, I turn a corner and there it is again. And each time, I can’t help but ask myself whether it was wrong to quit it. Deep down, I know the answer. It was right to quit it. I am happier here than I ever was in my life. But I still ask myself what my former colleagues are doing right now, what is going on over there, what has become of the rooms I unearthed while I was working in Misr. But like my mum’s history professor used to say “on ne fait pas de l’histoire avec des ’si’” – in history, you don’t deal in “what if’s”.

It’s hard sometimes to tell the difference between our roots and our wings. Between the winds that will carry us forth to new heights and the tornadoes that will crush us. It’s difficult to give up the past, especially when it has become deeply rooted within us, and welcome the future. It’s even more difficult to live in the now. It’s scary sometimes to cut something out of our lives, because couldn’t it be that we’ll miss it somewhere down the line? It’s scary sometimes to keep something going, because couldn’t it be that it is leading us nowhere at all? It’s hard, when you’re in your twenties, because, to sound sappy: we’re too young to die and too old to know better. The only thing that really should count is something I heard Kara Saun, a finalist on the last Project Runway season, say: don’t lose your soul, ’cause you will need it someday. And yes, I watch Project Runway on youtube, I’m not ashamed to admit it.

I like where my life is going at the moment. I like how it is at the moment. There is plenty of room for improvement (namely on my hips), but in general, it could be a lot worse. It could be raining (name that classic movie). It’s no wonder that my favourite song of the week is “Jump” by Madonna, the only song worth listening to on her entire Confessions on a Dancefloor album. Which is kinda sad.

Here it is for you to listen to:

I wish you a great start into the week, live long and prosper, peace,

Anna

Look at you. You don’t even have a name tag. You’ve got no chance. Why don’t you just fall down?

TAG, I’m it!

A few weeks ago, I was tagged by the lovely TJ from Humble Origins and now I’ve finally gotten around to playing. So now I have to tell you about six non-important habits/quirks that I have and then tag some more people. So here goes nothing.

1) I’m telekinetic. At least, I pretend to be. Whenever I’m at doors with motion sensors, I make a little gesture with my fingers and voilà! they open up before me. I always do that. Adds a little magic to my days.

2) I’m a messy but I’m completely anal about my DVD collection (just goes to show what my priorities in life are: films over dirty dishes). I have my DVDs ordered by genre and within the genre, by year of release.

3) I like reading out loud from my favourite books. I don’t do it generally, but every so often, I whip out Dune or an Isabel Allende book and read out loud of it. When it’s not fiction, like with “The Art of Alfred Hitchcock”, I sometimes like to take on a newscaster voice.

4) When I have trouble falling asleep, I play seven corners in my mind, with celebrities. This works especially well since I have a few friends and acquaintances in the movie business. It makes me feel closer to the stars I like and would like to interview someday. I have strict rules for the game though: it only counts if the stars really know each other (i.e they have starred in the same scene of a movie or been on stage together etc). I “know” Angelina Jolie this way: my friend H. —> Valeria Golino —> Benicio Del Toro —> Angelina Jolie.

5) My room plants always get names. My last one was called Makoto and the current one is called Gail. Yes, because of Sin City.

6) I love to sing and often, I sing in the streets, when there’s no one around. And before you ask, yes, this has lead to many embarassing moments, when I wasn’t as alone as I thought I was. I can sing, so that’s not the embarassing part, but people do tend to look at you like you’re a complete nutcase when they notice you singing outside, alone.

So now I tag:

Sophia: Uber Uschi

Usually, you have to tag six people, but all the blogs I read have either already participated in this or won’t do it, because they are too big, with thousands of readers each day.
But here are the rules anyway, in case you want to be implicitly tagged by me and feel like playing:

1. Link to the person that tagged you.

2. Post the rules on your blog.

3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.

4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.

5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

I hope you all have a great weekend, I’m going to visit poor sick Carola now and bring her some goodies.

Live long and prosper, peace,

Anna

They call me the cautionary whale.

Hello everyone, I hope you all had a good Easter. Sorry I didn’t post on either of my blogs in a little while, but I was caught up with work and uni and then I just needed the 5 days over Easter to do (next to) nothing and I really didn’t feel like blogging much. But now I’m back with a vengeance and a truckload of batshit crazy stuff that I bet neither of you thought I was going to discuss any time soon. Well, that’s really building it up too much, but hey, I’ll be discussing pregnancy, so at least it’s partly true.

I went to see “Juno” today and when I got home, I finally got around to watching the final episodes of Gilmore Girls. Needless to say, I cried my eyeballs out when Rory chose not to marry Logan and Luke and Lorelai got back together again. And then I got thinking.

I’m thinking, maybe having a child is not such a bad thing after all. Maybe it is worth procreating and, if you get it halfways right, making the world a better place by putting a child into it that will be better than you are. Because really, if it’s not going to be better than you in at least some respects, what’s the point? I don’t know if that’s what parents think about or if it’s ever been discussed in a forum or a book or a documentary. But I’m kinda thinking, my parents are better than their parents. So much better. They are better people, all around. They don’t drink, they don’t hit, they don’t consciously mess with their kids’ minds, they don’t trample on their offspring’s feelings (for the most part, heh), they have better jobs, more interesting lives, better education and an overall much more empowering approach to life. They have never tried to keep me or my brother small and they have never bribed us or done something for us that we can do for ourselves.
And whether I want to or not, there are things that I am trying to do better than my parents, maybe because to some extent and as much as we love them, we do always feel compelled to go against how they live their lives. What I mean is, I know my parents’ strengths and I admire them for them. But I simply have no wish to do things exactly the way they did them. For instance, I always knew that I was never going to be a teacher. My French grandparents were both teachers, my mum and her little sister are too. I think it has to end somewhere and I am the end of that line. There’s nothing wrong with being a teacher, but it feels like enough already for my family (says the girl who has been tutoring kids older than her since she was 14 and will be giving conversation classes next term). My father has passed down his love for cinema to me. However, he rarely went past a certain level of consumption and commitment for it. I am trying to cross that boundary so very, very hard. I strive to be active about it. Not just consume, but get involved. My father may never have had these opportunities, but I am lucky enough to have them and I’m seizing them as best as I can. As for my little brother, it’s too soon to tell what he will do better than our parents. But I’m sure there will be some things.

So maybe having a child is not such a bad thing after all, if it means helping someone to outgrow you as a parent and therefore helping shape this world, hopefully for the better.
Selfishly, I’m also thinking that having a kid probably makes one happy and proud. At least sometimes.
And because of all this Juno and Gilmore Girls stuff I watched today, I’ve started to reflect about how I would want to raise my child, if I ever have one.
I would want to be close to my child, even if things get tough. I would want it to know that it can count on my love, because no matter what my parents say, a part of me does believe in unconditional love. I hope that should I ever have a child, I will love it simply for being there and giving me the opportunity to grow, to learn and to help it become a wonderful human being. I would want to give it a special name, something meaningful but not something it will get teased about mercilessly at school, even though children can turn the most common of names into a cruel joke. I would want to give it all that it needs. I would want to never have secrets that I would need to keep from it. I would never want to lie to it. I would want to want it truly, if not, I would not go through with the pregnancy. I would want to be able to tell it how I feel and I would want to be sad and excited at the same time when it leaves home. I would want it to be as happy as possible and yet still know that life is usually not all peaches and cream. I would want to want to watch it sleep at night. And I would want to pass on the good things that have been passed on to me by my parents.

So all in all, maybe me watching Juno and Gilmore Girls has brought my dad one little step closer to having the grandchild he’s been clamoring for for years. That alone is one more feather in Diablo Cody and Amy Sherman-Palladino’s caps and something he should be grateful for. Then again, I still don’t know how I’m gonna get through childbirth. It positively makes me cringe and eeewww and squirm to see it in a movie, so I have no idea how I’ll do it. Maybe I’ll have to pull an Angelina.

Anyways, live long and prosper, peace,

Anna

ps: check out my newest piece of prose on my poetry blog (yeah, I’m a walking contradiction like that)

For years, I was smart. I recommend pleasant.

Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be” – she always called me Elwood – “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.

So today concludes my first week back at uni. And I loved it! I’ve got some great, great classes and I’m totally thrilled with both content and deliverance.
I especially love my “leadership of employees” class. I like the man who teaches it and I’m grateful I can do it. It was important to me to attend it, because for 6 years now, I have been finding myself, willingly and also by sheer hazard, in leadership positions. I want to learn more about how I can be a better leader still and I want to identify mistakes I make leading and get rid of them as best as I can. Personally, I also want to explore why it happens to me all the time that I find myself in leading positions. I’m not power hungry at all, actually, I like to share achievements and I like to see people work independently and with passion, as I strive to do. I think part of the answer is that I’m creative, in lots of ways. And when confronted with something that is important to me, I want to improve it or do the best possible job executing it and that only comes when you assume responsibility and by extension, leadership. Following the other lemmings off the cliff won’t build the bridge from one cliff to the other, know what I mean?

I also got myself my first cell phone contract ever. Up until now, I’ve always had a prepaid card. But I realised that I was actually spending more money this way than I would with a contract, so I switched. That also got me a new cell phone (my old one was used when I got it and it was clearly agonising). I now have a nifty, super flat, superbad Motorola Razr. I love it a lot in many ways, but in others, it has turned out to be a little testy and secretive. For instance, it seems to reboot after I charge it, which completely messes up the settings inside. Not all settings, mind you, just one of those I need the most: the alarm clock. For some odd reason, it refuses to switch it on, although it actually lies to me and tells me it has switched it on. Then, hours later, the “on” symbol appears and the alarm seems activated. When I don’t need it anymore.
This little gem (“you might have told me that little gem before”) made me an hour late for work on Thursday. It was the first time ever since I started working there that I was late but I was embarassed beyond words nonetheless. My bottom line on this so far? Cell phones aren’t pocket computers just yet and the more you try to turn them into one, the more they will mess with your head. What I hate most about all computerised things these days is that you can never tell where an error came from or why it occured. It most cases, you don’t even know what it means either. I could deal with occuring errors a lot better if I understood them, couldn’t I? Yes, thank you. At least I didn’t get an iPhone or some such nutcase of a cell phone.

Otherwise, not too much has happened. I’m very proud of myself for getting my papers and my other stuff in order. I just have two more folders to go! I’m not so proud of my still messy kitchen. This week, it seems the more effort I put in tidying it, the more messed up it is. I don’t know how that is even possible in such a small kitchen (I mean, it’s not even a room, it’s a niche in my room) but it looks like a nuclear wasteland. I don’t know how I do it… *sigh*
On the bright side, I finally got those super-cute, flowery (but in a non-kitsch way) boxes to store stuff in and that did a world of good to my previously messy workplace. I now have a sewing box, an arts and crafts box and a computer CD-ROMs box. I also want to get a hat box for the memorabilia of my oh-so-fascinating life, but I don’t know where one gets hat boxes. And I’m am dead bent on a hat box. I need a hat box because they are beautiful and old school and Sydney Bristow had one too. Do you guys think Ikea has some? I’m going there at the end of the month, to buy linens, a kitchen scale, a night light and measuring glasses.

Anyways, I wish you all a wonderful Sunday and a good start into the week.

Live long and prosper, peace,

Anna

Each land, each boundary I cross lets drip away another illusion.

So, I promised to write a little something about my neighbour. First of all, you must know that I live in a house where there are only female tenants. I didn’t plan this, it was sheer coincidence that I happened upon this flat while I was flat hunting a year ago. The reason for this is that the flats in the building are owned and rented out by an organisation that helps women with small salaries. Which I more than qualify for, trust me.

Even before moving in, I knew I would have a lot of crazy neighbours. I just didn’t know there’d be so many. How did I know? As I was visiting the appartment for the last time before moving in, my predecessor and I were talking things over and suddenly, in walks a forty something dirty blonde, says hi, asks a stupid question and leaves. I was stunned. The girl whose flat I was taking over told me “you’ve gotta be careful with that one, I was sleeping one night and she just walked in and she did it during the day too”! To this day, I haven’t been able to figure out why anyone would do that, but no good reason comes to mind, does it? I just knew there was a reason I hated the way door handles are made in Switzerland. You see, in Germany, front doors have a handle you can pull down inside and a knob outside. That way, even if the door is actually unlocked, one can’t easily come in, you need a key for it (which incidentally is probably how 99% of all lockouts happen). Here, there are handles on both sides, meaning that if you haven’t locked the door with your key, anyone could just walk in. And in this building, they apparently do.

So I made it a habit from the start to always lock my door and leave the keys in the lock. So far, no walk-ins from Ms Dirty Blonde. The minute I moved in however (and I mean that literally), the woman living in the flat across from mine came over, walked right in and started snooping about. I was still getting the boxes from the van! I tried to keep her out as best as I could, but I swear, she has a telescopic neck for peeping around corners. ET style. Except he was cute, she’s just fugly and annoying. And seriously, what is it with people wanting to come into this flat? Is there a treasure buried somewhere that I don’t know about?
Anyway, Ms Fugly ET has been a pain in the arse ever since. She spies on me and monitors when I come and go as often as she can. She monitors the amount of times I do laundry. Yes, you read right. And everytime I go down to do my laundry or dry my laundry or fold my laundry, she’s there and she tries to get into a conversation, though I still don’t know why, since apparently she hates me and I more than dislike her too. Though, it must be said, I think she starts conversations with me for the sole purpose of making herself feel better and get me to admit she’s supreme. She always talks about her studies (psychology, they’re the worst kind) and how great she is for getting into the programme because the numerus clausus is so high. One day, she inquired about my studies, just so she could say it and when I said “journalism” she went “oh” condescendingly and then proceeded to ask if it was because my bac grades hadn’t been that great. I shut her up by telling her I had had an A in my bac and so could have chosen any studies I wanted, unlike her who was wait-listed for her major for years.
Otherwise, she’s gone into cold war mode with me over a door in the hall that I keep leaving open because otherwise it gets stuffy and I drives me crazy to have yet another door to open when I get home with arms full of groceries and the inevitable inopportune urge to pee since an hour. So she’s put a sign up saying “please keep closed when it’s cold outside” and she’s told me off about leaving it open (I told you she spies on me). At first I kept it open because of the aforementioned practical reasons. Now I also keep it open just to piss her off. Petty, I know, but I can’t help it. One night, I had ordered pizza and when the guy showed up, he did what he always does, which is hit on me and try to get me to pull him inside, undo his trousers and do unmentionable things to him. So I did what I always do, which is keep him at bay, out of my flat (I’m telling you, there must be a treasure in the walls) and try to make him leave as quickly as possible. But that particular night, he was determined and he kept talking to me about god knows what. Sure enough, Fugly ET’s door opens, her disshevelled head peeks out and she starts complaining, in a really venemous tone, about how we’re making so much noise and she was already asleep and what kind of manners is that? It was 9pm and we were talking in a normal volume. Sheesh…

That, however, is just petty neighbourly bullshit, compared to the Queen of Weird. The Queen of Weird only manifested herself two weeks ago, when I had the locks on my shutters and windows done. She left me a note on my door, asking me to come over so she could tell me something. When I did, she practically pulled me inside her flat, saying in a hushed, frantic voice “because who knows who is listening out here”. I just thought “here we go… I wonder what she’s gonna tell me”. The appartment ticked me off right away. No lights were on, still the windows were shut and the blinds were down, opened just enough so that narrow slits of light could come through. The appartment was cramped, full of…things, with a huge computer on a desk in one corner. Conspiracy theorist, straight out of the movies. But she isn’t only a conspiracy theorist, no, she’s schizophrenic. Which means that every conspiracy revolves around her in her head. She told me (and showed me) how the two flats across the streets were just decoy flats, where people had set up camp to spy on her. She told me many neighbours in our building were after her, trying to set her up and call the cops on her to get rid of her. She said she shared a birthday with Claude Debussy. She convinced the colours black and white are stalking and threatening her. She said a big black spider in the laundry room told her of the coming of the guy who did my window locks. Which only worried me insofar that I’m now wondering where that big black spider is in the basement and that I really don’t want to cross its path, thankyouverymuch. She believes the man I had lurking at my window was an attempt to frighten her, through me, because she “used to be very politically active when she was young”. She thinks it’s no coincidence that some Swiss radio station suddenly switched its music programme from classic (evil) to church music (good).
A day later, I was going to work when I saw an the cops and an ambulance parked outside our house. They walked in and I really would have liked to stay and watch (I know, I’m horrible) but I really had to go to work and it would have been really awful to actually do it. I haven’t seen Queen of Weird since though… I wonder what has become of her. As much as I am making fun of her and found her annoying (she made me late for an appointment with her gibberish), I hope she’s ok and getting treatment of some kind.

So that’s the 411 on my batshit crazy neighbours. I like that expression “batshit crazy”. Hehe.

In other less entertaining news, my semester starts back up tomorrow and I’m really excited! I can’t wait to study again. I took a little less courses last term, because I needed a breather, but I actually missed having more. So now I’m back to full power and it should be awesome. I think that this term, I could cross a lot of compulsory courses, exams and assignments of my list.
I’ve got a “new term resolution” too, which I’m going to work on this week, which is get all my stuff here at home in order. Mainly my papers (which I got a good headstart on a few weeks ago, but who now need to be organised within their folders) and things like CD-ROMS and other stuff you need for efficient studying. I saw some totally cute boxes in town the other day and I’m going to buy some to put all that stuff in. At the moment it’s all over the place and that messes with my head. I’m too much of a messy and quirky and excited about cool accessories to be the orderly type, but I always aspire to it anyways. It’s like the overall look of my flat: it’s colourful, cozy, warm and fun but the original aspiration was to make it zen. One day, when I have lots of money, I will have a flat so big that all my stuff will look like it’s not that much and I will finally have that zen look.

Well, I am going to go to bed now. I wish you all a great start into the week!

Live long and prosper, peace,

Anna

You are ignorant… but I don’t have time to enlighten you.

In a galaxy, far, far away called highschool:

Mr Peryer: Agnes, will you please enlighten the room?
(Agnes gets up and leaves the science lab)

Ahem. Ok, let me tell you where all this comes from.
In a nutshell: I blew Mr Bugs off.

For the long version, read on.
Mr Bugs was like a true bunny rabbit: fluffy, cutesy, gullible and not the sharpest tool in the animal kingdom’s shed. Neither of these qualities really manage to thrill me. Or as my friend Jeanne would put it: c’est pas la kermesse dans ma culotte.
I guess the only thing that would speak in favour of Mr Bugs is that he looked at the pics of me that I have linked to here (I gave him the link of the blog in an attempt to clear up what I had meant by saying “you will most likely be disappointed in me”). So he looked at the pics and said “I don’t know what is wrong with you, you are totally cute”. Thumbs up for not being shallow. Thumbs down for being desperate, unfortunately.
After looking at my pictures, he proceeded to text me and call me. Lots. And he picked the wrong time to call too. I was in the last stretch of my ghoswriting assignment and had tunnel vision, I just wanted to get finished. Then he texted me about wanting to call so many times that, unnerved, I said “ok, but only 5 minutes” to get it to stop. We spent about 10 minutes on the phone and one sentence after another made me cringe. There’s this awesome word in German: Fremdschämen. It means feeling embarrassed for someone else. That is what I felt the most while going “uh huh, yeah” and trying hard not to share too much of my own self. Yes, you might say that in that sense, giving him this link wasn’t exactly working towards that goal, but he doesn’t really speak English anyway. Anyhoo: he kept telling me that God had gifted me with a wonderful (sic) voice, that I had a great soul and that we were destined to meet and get to know each other. Then he said “can I ask you a personal question?” and part of me hoped he would say “have you ever retired a human by mistake?” and I would get to turn into Harrison Ford. Instead, he said “what sign are you?”. Are you kidding me? WTF? Yes, I admit, I actually, literally, went double-u tee eff in my mind. I said “cancer” because I figured that was information I could volunteer without it harming me. Mr Bugs sighed a sigh of relief and with a grin so wide I could hear it through the phone, he told me “wonderful, because I usually don’t get along so well with capricorn women”. Uh huh, ok. Whatever. I asked him if he really believed in that stuff and he said yes.
After some more chitchat I ended the call, citing work. He asked, in the most annoyingly submissive way, if he could text me next week and then call me and if I would consider giving him my address then, so he could write me real letters. In my mind, I went “riiight…” in an Austin Powers tone. To him, I said: “yeah, you can text me”. Then I thought about this whole mess and felt that really bad feeling, when someone wooing me like that gives me the creeps and just plain stresses me. That feeling really quickly builds up to a situation in which I become cold and distant, with a hint of guilt and then I get mean with the person even though that was never my intention.

On a quick tangent: the situation with The Spaniard actually is interesting. I am getting very sick and tired of this not-being-able-to-work-out-a-second-date thing, although he continually claims he wants one. Nevertheless, I feel completely happy and comfortable anytime we do have contact and that is also only via texts and phone calls so far. He can also be a little insistent or focus on… vacuii… but I never take it badly.

Ok, tangent over: I talked about it with my father and he laughed, cringed and then advised me: “tell him you’re a child of the Enlightenment”. I laughed out loud because my father, as usual, was spot on. And for once, I felt elated at knowing that I had a great catchphrase ahead of time and it wasn’t going to be as it usually is: you say what you have to say and later, you have a million better things you would have wanted to say, but it’s too late. I’d better let you know right away my glee fell completely flat. But hey, I got to say it anyway.
So yesterday, I got the ominous text message from Mr Bugs. I had my mind completely made up. No point in getting his hopes up any more than they were. He texted me, twice. Then he tried to call and I let it go to voicemail. He texted me again. I texted back that I was sorry, that I was a child of the Enlightenment, that all that esoteric stuff was not my cup of tea and that I hoped he would find someone more on the same wavelength and who shared his beliefs. He didn’t get it. He doubly didn’t get it. He didn’t get this was the blow-off and he didn’t get the Enlightenment thing. I had to explain it to him (Voltaire, Diderot, Kant!) and explain to him that I did not wish further contact. He told me he was heart-broken over my decision (“and I just want to add , yes, I believe in God and I have been given the opportunity to witness His miracles and what faith can do”), but that he respected it and hoped we would speak to each other again at some other point in time, because we were really destined to be. I said I was glad he accepted it, but that God and His miracles were not my game.

I want to specify something here: I completely respect people having faith. I’m not an atheist, I’m an agnostic. It’s just that religion plays no part in my life and I find it difficult to deal with people who try to convert me or make me see the truth. In my life’s experience, I’ve only come to one conclusion so far: the truth is within ourselves and we make our own destiny. I often wish I could believe in something as soothing as God, but I can’t. It would make things easier sometimes, but to be honest, I think we grow out of adversity.

That being said, I do realise that I might have been a bit of an asshole with Mr Bugs. But the sucking up, the utter submissiveness, the destiny talk and just plain the ignorance about certain basic concepts like the Age of Enlightenment made me want to run for the door and not look back. So I may have been an asshole, but frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

So that concludes today’s episodes, ladies and gents. In the next gripping installment of my life saga, I will tell you all about my schizophrenic neighbour who talks with big black spiders. And yes, they answer her.

Peace, live long and prosper (hey, is Star Trek a religion? like Jedi?),

Anna

ps: because you are going to ask anyway: it’s French and it means “it’s not a fairground in my panties” *g*