Up where they walk, up where they run, up where they stay all day in the sun – wish I were free, wish I could be, part of their world!

Wow, so, I’m breaking the silence that has hung over the Golden Lasso for a few weeks now. I got back on my feet last weekend (literally) after having the Martian Stomach Flu from Hell. It’s kinda nice that my body has finally stopped rejecting everything I tried to feed it.

 

Last Saturday I met up with someone I met over my youtube account. He’s an American currently living in Naples, Italy and he was in Munich to celebrate his birthday with a trip to the Oktoberfest (man, I haven’t been in years!), so he decided that Munich and Zurich weren’t that far apart and he’d swing by on his way back to Naples.

He was really a pleasure to get to know. He’s not one of those ultra-shallow Americans (sorry, but I have met my fair share of those in my time), which was surprisingly refreshing. We had so much to talk about, it was awesome. And boy oh boy, he talks more ‘n I do! Yeah, I know, hard to conceive, even for me. Anyway, we had a lovely time on Saturday, so after that (which means after we both ascertained we weren’t serial killers trying to off the other person, you never know with the net) we decided to have a late breakfast on Sunday. Which was equally lovely. I am proud to announce that I now understand what they mean by freshman, sophomore, junior and senior in the movies. Seriously, wikipedia was no help in that respect.

But there was something else about my encounter with The American that struck me and that was way more profound than anything we talked about. The way he looked at me. Or rather, the way he didn’t look at me. What am I on about? I’ll tell you what I’m on about!

Let’s face it, I’m one fugly broad. One fugly, overweight broad. And in a country like Switzerland, where the health ministry puts out discriminating, offensive anti-obesity posters up twice a year, being a fugly overweight broad is not always a piece of cake. No pun intended. Coming from Munich, I come from a rather posh, well-dressed city. But Zurich is a whole other level of posh and well-dressed. No matter how much I dress up when I’m out and about in the world, I feel like I’m underdressed. Actually, I feel like someone who wears a garbage bag, found, rank sandals and uses poo as face cream. In a nutshell: Zurich is the city of the beautiful people. Sure, you occasionally see someone who’s chubbier or even obese, but they are usually identifiably lower class inhabitants of this town.

All this amounts to people who interact with me giving me certain looks. There’s two main looks in people’s eyes. First, there’s compassionate pity, with a hint of how-can-I-look-at-her-without-making-it-seem-like-I-notice-she’s-fat. That’s the friendly fire, if you will. I get that look by many people who like me (and whom I like too) and who are simply too nice and don’t want me to feel bad about myself. So they try to pretend I don’t look the way I look. Not perfect, but a hell of a lot better than constant harping on my looks, I guess.

Second, there’s the suspicious, incomprehensive, bordering on hostile looks. Awarded by strangers in trams, in restaurants, in the street. These people look at me a little like they would look at a convicted child murderess. Why is she here? How dare she walk the streets with such impunity? Is there no place to hold people as disgusting as her? Police! POLICE!! When I’m out late at night on weekends and am near crowded places with the drunk teen cliques hopping from club to club, they will, when pissed enough, look and then…  comment on my fat ass or how I shouldn’t be out but locked at home where nobody can see me. Oh no boys and girls, I am not making any of this up. It happens regularly.

People who get to know me a bit better usually lose either the pity looks or the hostile looks rather quickly. Silver lining, I suppose.

But the thing that really stunned me about The American (because yes, I have a point)? He didn’t look at me at all. Not at my physical appearance anyway. There was no judgement, no question-mark on why I am like this, nothing. He just talked to me, the person, the human being. From the moment we met, there was not one second in which I felt his eyes wandering somewhere to a roll of fat, or some fabric maybe sitting a bit in the wrong place. Not once did I feel the need to suck my gut in and I didn’t get shifty or try to adjust my clothes or anything. Because what he was giving me did not make any of it necessary. The only time he actually seemed to notice my appearance in any way was when I reapplied some lipbalm. He seemed to watch my lips intently. And then the moment was gone and we moved on to talk about his interesting work schedule.

It may be that, being American (and just ever so slightly pudgy around the edges), he is more used to women looking similar to me. That he just doesn’t see them anymore as different but simply as, well, there. Alive, in the world. I don’t really know. I can’t really know. This is pure speculation.

I never really thought (not in this much detail anyway) about how other people’s looks affect me until this guy came along and I felt great being around him. I felt, for lack of a better word, light. Unburdened for a few precious hours. A first grade human being in the city of Zurich. And these hours were gone much too quickly. I do appreciate meeting him though because it got me thinking about all of this.

Also because I have been having weird dreams lately (two nights ago, I had three consecutive, rather long dreams in which I was ready-to-pop pregnant, for instance) and wondering about them. Today, I read the penultimate post on Maria’s just eat your cupcake blog in which she mentioned a weird dream. Then I went to the comments section and somebody mentioned a site called dreammoods.com with some quotes pulled from there. Out of sheer curiosity, I went to check it out. As a kid I was very interested in dream analysis, dream symbols and all that stuff but I haven’t really kept up with it. Going on dreammoods was a bit of a shock. I looked up the most recurring, vivid dream symbols that have been with me for a good two years now. Zombies attacking me, teeth falling out, flying (both easy and difficult) and also pregnancy, because of two nights ago.

Turns out that all these dreams point towards me feeling overwhelmed, inadequate, burdened, defensive of my sense of self, under constant stress and a whole lot more that I won’t discuss right now, because frankly, it’s a bit painful at the moment. I seem to have a knack for not knowing what is good for me, not being able to make things work the way I’d really want them to and for bearing pain, both physical and emotional, for mind-bogglingly long periods of time, without really knowing I am hurting.

This of course is no major revelation, as I have previously expressed these patterns at important points in my life. I am just a bit dumbstruck that once again, I seem to be headed down that road and now it’s my subconscious, my dreams, trying to tell me to stop, FUCKING STOP and look at yourself, you fugly moron broad. My dreams have always been important to me, to my psyche, but I didn’t know how categorical and straightforward all these symbols, that I found strange, rare and unusual actually are. It’s so simple. So horribly, complexically simple.

I’m not sure how I’m going to handle this, now that it’s out in broad daylight. But my back was hurting today so I decided to get a massage when I get to my hotel on Thursday (that’s right, it’s Karlsruhe, 70mm Festival time again). Probably a worthless, empty gesture but it’s the best I could think of right now.

 

Live long and prosper, all ye who dream of strawberries, cream and butterflies, peace,

 

Anna

 

ps: to all those on whose blogs I usually comment (Jen, Roman, for instance) I apologise for not having done so in a long time. But I’m kinda backed up at the moment, in more than one way. I’ll be back eventually, so please don’t be mad.

Charma loves Greb.

And I’m so, so ill.

 

I’ll be back once I can stand up for more than 3 minutes at a time.

 

Peace,

 

Anna

I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.

No, seriously. I think I might cry.

Why?

Because today, today is the beginning of the end. The end… of washing dishes!

Having to do dishes by hand has been the bane of my existence ever since I moved out of my parents’. Nothing has poisoned my life in the kitchen as much as having to bloody do the dishes. In fact, I recently discovered (while at my parents’) that I don’t cook and bake as much as I’d actually like to because all I can think about during the cooking/baking process is the MONSTER amount of yucky dirty dishes it will generate. I actually like cooking by now (trust me, I didn’t use to) but the looming mountain of dirty crockery ahead of me always puts me off. I do cook for myself, but more out of necessity and not with any pleasure. At my parents’ in August, I actually made gnocchi from scratch. And it was glorious. Here? I would never dream of it.

Until now.

I was on the phone with my mum yesterday, telling her I was tidying up around my flat but hated that the kitchen was still such a mess. My kitchen is teeny-tiny, with absolutely no space for a dishwasher anywhere. So I always dreamt of one day having a dishwasher but never thought I could maybe have one in here. And then my mum, cool as Shaft, said: “If this is what’s keeping you back, if this is really what poisons your life – and I think it is – then you have to do something about it. Put it in the shower if you have to, but find a solution to make a dishwasher happen. Now.”

We thought about it some more and eventually came up with the plan of moving my fridge into a, mainly unused, alcove by my bed. And putting a dishwasher where the fridge had been (because that’s next to the sink). And I starting thinking “Yeah… that could work. It’d be a little weird having a fridge right next to the bed, but at this point I’m frickin’ desperate!” So I used my Google Fu to find out about models and prices. Everything cost 2000 CHF and upwards. Yay. I was having a semi-meltdown after seeing these exorbitant prices but my dad talked me down off of that ledge and said that’s probably not exactly what they’ll cost in the actual store. Unwilling to give up, I headed straight to the electronics store after classes today.

Ten minutes of perusing the models they had yielded nothing. The dishwashers’ sizes were okay and even the prizes weren’t quite as shocking as they’d been on the internet, but I couldn’t make a decision alone. Then came a sales guy from heaven. He listened to me and after going through a number of alternatives, he said: “Well, what about a table dishwasher?” A what? Have you ever heard of that? I certainly hadn’t. Turns out it’s a mini-dishwasher that fits, you got it, on a table. Well, any surface really. It’s not like it refuses to work if it’s not on a table. I hope.

Sales-guy-from-heaven showed me a cute little model. I inspected it thoroughly, asked him a zillion questions and… bought it. It was the last one they had, so instead of paying 399 CHF for it, I only had to shell out 239 CHF (well, plus some installation costs, but even so, we are nowhere near the original, insane and whopping 2000 CHF price range). Basically, it’s a baby dishwasher. It looks a little like a small oven (which is why I ran straight past it at first), with it’s glass-plated front. It’s perfect for a one-person household (I wish I didn’t have to write that, but oh well) and it’ll fit snugly next to my sink, on the counter where the dishes (ptooey!) are supposed to dry.

It. Is. Perfection.

The delivery guy comes Friday.

I don’t have to outsource my kitchen by moving the fridge.

I am in heaven. Heaven! I’m in heaven and my heart beats so that I can hardly speaaak and I seem to find the happiness I seek…

I swear, I wanna buy this thing dinner. No, actually, I wanna buy it a ring.

No more dirty dishes. No more aching back. Yes, aching back. My sink was apparently built for a Hobbit and when I do my dishes, I get back pains after half an hour. Not being a Hobbit and all. No more waste of water and cleaning liquid (I told you I try to live green and dishwashers are so much more environmentally friendly).

No. More.

 

Who knew I could fill an entire post gushing about a dishwasher, eh?

 

Live long and prosper, peace,

 

Anna

 

ps: I bought the DVD of Juno today and just watched it. You can clean me off the floor with a sponge. I was in tears half the time. I love that movie.

pps: songs that I can sing (physically) but can’t sing because they make me cry and my throat closes up: Let The River Run by Carly Simon. One of my all-time favourite songs. I hope that once my Hashimoto crazed hormones are back in balance, the crying about everything will subside and I will be able to sing that song again.

ppps: [does the Futurama Hypnotoad thing] You. Buy. Dishwasher.

pppps: how random am I?

Listen, while you’re grabbing the Rambaldi manuscript, if you happen to see a sandwich…

Ridiculessness abounds in this world of ours. 

For example, the most stupid job description ever: sandwich assistant. I just heard that today. Sandwich assistant. I was seriously befuddled for a moment. What does that imply? Assisting a sandwich in its hard tasks? Like being eaten? Hey, I may be a part-time sandwich assistant! No, that’s not it? Assist a sandwich emotionally maybe? Telling it it’s okay, this is just the circle of life? No, not either? A sandwich assistant, ladies and gents, is a person who makes sandwiches for a living. You know, those people at Subway for instance.

Why do people feel the need to elevate themselves through ridiculously euphemistic job titles? No, you’re not an environment improvement technician, you’re a cleaning-lady. No, you’re not a waste removal engineer, you’re a garbage-man. No, you’re not a vision clearance executive, you fucking clean windows for a living. And no, bloody no, no, no, you are not a media distribution officer, you are a paperboy. Nobody’s an engineer if they haven’t actually studied engineering. You’re not an officer of anything if you haven’t gone through some kind of military (or, at the very least, military inspired) training in your life. I say, if you want to have a fancy-pants job title, you have to earn it.

This is truly euphemism overload.

 

On another note: only in Switzerland will the gardener, or should I say the technical horticultural maintenance officer, feel compelled to bring you back your garbage that wasn’t properly disposed off. That’s right, a few nights ago, my doorbell rings and there is a sour-looking garden gnome of a man standing there with a wet, sloppy paper bag full of paper. My old paper. Which I had put out for the paper garbage crews to remove and for some reason wasn’t. They had it let standing there (unbeknownst to me) and the next night, it rained, turning all that paper into a wet, gruesome mess. The gardener noticed, ruffled through that pile of trash, apparently found an old envelope addressed to me and brought me back my garbage. I asked him what I was supposed to do with it, since I had actually done everything right by sorting the paper and putting it out on the day the garbage men came and he pointedly informed me that I had put it out without adhering to the rules. Yes, there are rules. Boy, are there rules. While in the past, the garbage men have always taken my paper waste in its paper bag (it’s convenient to collect it that way at home! sheesh…), apparently now they only take neatly folded, stacked and tied with the specific, regulation twine bundles of paper with them. If you don’t do it like that, they will leave it out in the rain to rot.

I swear, this garbage nonsense is really getting on my nerves. One of the reasons why I know I will not stay in Switzerland forever is that this country has turned me into an eco-criminal. I try to live as green as is practical for me. I don’t have a bathtub, so I only take a few baths a year when I’m not here. I try to conserve water as much as I can. I buy fair trade, organic, seasonal products whenever I can. I don’t eat a lot of meat. If I can help it, I don’t buy stuff made in China. I shut off my computer completely and never leave it on stand-by, as I do with other electronics. You know, stuff like that. In Germany, they recycle and require you to separate your garbage. But they make it easy for you. Sure, you pay quite a hefty garbage tax. But you get at least three different containers and in them, you can just put what belongs in them, without regards as to what garbage bags your waste is in or whether or not your old paper is bundled up neatly. You don’t have to worry about missing the date your paper garbage men will come (and your carton garbage men – yes, in Switzerland, they make a difference between the two, nobody has ever told them it’s the same thing) or about the decorum with which you dispose of your waste. In Switzerland, you have to buy a special sort of bin liners and you can only throw those in the containers, or they will leave them out, say it with me, to rot. These bin liners cost over 20 CHF (that’s about 15€) and they store them with the cashier because people used to steal them when they weren’t supervised. That’s right, in Switzerland, the bin liners are more valuable than hard alcohol, which is allowed to stand, unsupervised, in the aisles. However, Swiss supermarkets do sell a variety of normal-looking, non city-brand bin liners, though I have yet to find someone who can tell me why, since these liners aren’t accepted by the municipal garbage men. Everybody who thinks there is something intrinsically wrong with this whole picture, please raise your hand!

All that is to say: I have become an eco-criminal. I am all for sorting garbage and recycling but you have to make it practical. And I am over all this. I won’t separate my garbage anymore. From now on, tt all goes into those luxurious white bin liners the city of Zurich sells and that, as they say, will be that. If you can’t find a simple way to help me recycle, fuck it. There are a million ways to make all this a breeze. I know because I’ve lived it most of my life. I’m sorry, but I am done playing by the rules of snotty city councils, snotty garbage men and snotty, know-it-all gardeners. I have tried, really tried, to stick to your rules but that’s as far as I will go. From now on, you may sort through my garbage yourself.

 

Live long and prosper, peace,

 

Anna

Now how’s that for a slice of fried gold?!

Is it wrong that I experience a true high and intense feelings of victory after spending only 50min on my homework last night and getting it all 100% right? I was so excited once I was done, I could barely go to sleep because I couldn’t wait for it to be morning, so I’d get to see the answers sheet (hey, I never said I was logical, mmkay)?

My prof told us it had taken him hours to solve the Ewe and Aztek exercises the first time he had to do them and that he thought that it would therefore take us even longer. Of course I would never dream of telling him it took me 50 minutes but it does give me a real good feeling, you know, down in my tummy and up there on my smiley cheeks.

Surely it must be wrong to feel so good about a few linguistics exercises. But in this case, I may not want to be right.

 

Live long and prosper, peace,

 

Anna

 

Random sidenote of the day: I finally installed my wireless mouse on my big laptop and the internet on my netbook – I am now fully satisfied with the utter computerisation in my home. It rocks!