Recently in Other People's Blogs Category

I started reading Charlotte's Web about two years ago I suppose and was immediately captivated. Charlotte is writting a book, a book which, when it's published, I'll be first in the queue to buy. Then after I've bought it I'll be driving to the Burg to get it signed (all this despite the fact that I am terrified of driving and the idea of the autobahn fills me with dread).

Charlotte reads and reads and has grown up travel adventures.  When I discovered her blog I think I spent a day and a night just reading and reading and reading. 

It's funny, you know, (apparently that's my catch phrase for when I'm about to deliver something I've been thinking about for a while), but almost everyone I know who I really really like are people that have been transplanted in some way from what's familiar to them into a situation where they've had to re-learn everything they know.

I hope, one day, to visit Charlotte in The Burg and drink a few very very large glasses of something bubbly in her garden, while barbecuing, preferably making lots of smoke to annoy the neighbours.

Charlotte's Web

Chloe is a new blog friend of mine from this year.

She lives in Greece and takes fantastic photos. She writes about interesting things like how to be irresponsible while appearing to be responsible, the stuff people say on buses, admits to buying things she shouldn't buy, has a category on her blog called My Malevolent Disposition, (I have one too  - disposition not category - funny thing that ...), and a thing for James McAvoy.

I like her. Hope you like her too.

Oh, and Coldplay's new album was out yesterday... got it yet?

The Froth

Jeanne is South African. She's also an accomplished cook and runs a fascinating blog called Cooksister in addition to a busy day job. I 'met' Jeanne about two years ago when I stumbled upon her blog and we started chatting via email on and off and commenting here and there on each other's blogs.

We share so much cultural background and our tastes in food are uncannily the same. Her love for fun, barbecues, the great outdoors, anything edible, the joy she so clearly takes in cooking, photographing and writing about what she makes in a really great, really accessible style is contagious. The recipes really work and the food Jeanne makes is clean, non-fussy, with really clear flavours on the palate.

Then there's the expat angle where she shares some of the reasons she started blogging, which are much the same as the reasons I originally started to write - the isolation of being away from everything you know and the desire to keep up, somehow or another with your family.

She's a media darling too!

Cooksister.com

'Girl, aint no kindness in the face of strangers' - Bruce Springsteen, Human Touch

Charlotte did this a while ago and I was thinking that I have a lot of things left unsaid. Classic passive aggressive with assorted neuroses over here. Anyone notice?

So now I'm saying them:

1. I wish you wouldn't be so very hard on your kids. They're beautiful children and they do their best and they love you. It breaks my heart.
   
   
2. I'm sorry I wasn't there for you when you needed me to pick up your boy from school that day. I regret that our friendship ended over something so stupid, especially when both of us needed (and still need) a best friend so badly.
   
   
3. I really do appreciate everything you do for me. I'm just not very good at showing it.
   
   
4. It's just all terribly sad. I feel so stilted and I have nothing to say, but I am sad too.
   
   
5. Being a big girl is difficult. I understand how alone you feel, but if no-one had ever told me how to get my head around it I would still be a big girl too. My acupuncturist is Gerrit Bijlsma. His phone number is 020-6438686. Please phone him and tell him Ash sent you. He will make space for you.
   
   
6. Even if we both just walk along the same path for a little while, it's still a good experience right? I'm starting to understand the value of not mapping out one's future in advance.
   
   
7. Yes, I speak Dutch better than you speak English.
   
   
8. Thank you for telling me not to be insecure, but really, it's not something I can change overnight. If I could don't you think I might have done it already?
   
   
9. I value your opinion but I'd prefer you to keep it to yourself. It is your opinion after all.
   
   
10. No, I don't want to come to church with you and I certainly don't wish to be born-again. I'm quite happy with the once, thank you.
    
    
11. Darlings, I feel like I'm failing you every day. I wish I could be perfect, for you. More how I think you would want me to be and less how I am.
    
    
12. Don't fucking tell me how I should feel! You have no idea.
    
    
13. I really didn't mean for your hamster to die in my desk back in 3rd grade. I've felt eternally guilty around small furry animals ever since.
    
    
14. When I pushed you away it didn't mean I didn't care. It's just a reflex I have.
    
    
15. I love you. Really. I do.
    

'Wise men say only fools rush in.' - UB40, Can't Help Falling in Love with You

Time Out's guide to London's most erotic writers is interesting.

Anyone else have metafilter in their feed reader?

It's fun to browse, and full of obscure yet riveting topics. Just look in March 10. Corsets and an etch-a-sketch clock! What's not to like?

'But to you, I give my affection, right from the start.' -  Joan Armatrading, The Weakness in Me

The other day, when I was looking for Small World online, I found Underwater Amsterdam. Fab website, look at all these restaurants I can visit. Been to four on the list, de Bakkerswinkel, Bazar, 11 and of course Small World. Didn't like 11 at all! The food was overpriced and horrible. I was there for lunch when I went to the Andy Warhol exhibition and I wasn't impressed.

I liked Bazar, but I really need to go again to write a real review and of course, there are so many many others. Week before last I went to Vinomio. That was nice. An excuse to drink (and eat) because food goes with wine, or so they say. It's one of those 'be there to be seen' places, which kind of alarm me, and I didn't taste the food so I can't comment. Guess I might just have to go back and see if food really does go with wine. What do you think?

This weekend I went to Casa di David in Utrecht with a friend. Lovely lovely food, wonderful company. I had an amazing ravioli, can't remember what my friend had, but I know I wasn't sharing mine at all! It's in a beautiful location, just along the Oudegracht. To enter the restaurant you walk through thick velvet curtains which somehow makes you feel like you're entering some kind of medieval chamber. Very romantic. There's even a house cat who purred and wound herself around my legs when I went to the bathroom and then refused, haughtily, to come any closer to me after that.

I start work tomorrow. Expect abbreviation.

'I'll be there as soon as I can, but I'm busy mending broken pieces of the life I had before' - Muse, Unintended

Margaret Atwood writes poetry. Why did I not know this before? Actually, I did know because I know this poem, but my goldfish attention span and incredibly poor memory let me down. What caused this memory loss? Prozac? Or was I a crack addict somewhere in my previous life?

Anyway, this is one of my new favourites:

Is/Not

Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise

sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities

you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,

nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveller

Give up this medical concern,
buttoned, attentive,

permit yourself anger
and permit me mine

which needs neither
your approval nor your surprise

which does not need to be made legal
which is not against a disease

but against you,
which does not need to be understood

or washed or cauterized,
which needs instead

to be said and said.
Permit me the present tense.

--- Margaret Atwood, Is/Not

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Other, less ethereal activities than reading poetry yesterday included job interviews and playing dress-up..

I am moderately excited about one of the interviews, maybe even going so far as to say 'hopetimistic'! It's working as a PA for a director, one on one in a great environment. Pretty much everything I want in a job, except the hours, but everyone has to work, right?

The playing dress-up? The Biba boutique inside the V&D dept store has the best saleslady I think I've ever met. She's Bosnian and probably a little bit older than me. I first visited the store in December sometime and we got talking and had an immediate connection. She thought I was Eastern European at first. I don't look Dutch, just different really. Plus when I speak there's my accented Dutch. So we talked a whole lot about how we came to Holland etc, about how it feels to be a foreigner. There was a sale on then so I just stood in the change room and she brought armfuls of clothes for me to try on.

Yesterday I went in for a new coat, and tried pretty much the entire spring collection. Favourites were a white PVC-ish tight-waisted jacket with a tied waist, and layered underneath a sort of frilly orange printed blouse and a gorgeous gold-beige beaded blouse that falls from just under the breasts. Slinky! Alas, I need an income in line with my Biba addiction.

It was fun to try everything on, see what works, what doesn't. In comparison the Benetton top and shirts I tried were just... blah. I guess I really do like Biba.

I have to admit to really liking the saleslady though. Do you have a store that you go to just because you like the staff? Every single thing I do in terms of shopping is based on whether or not I like the staff in the shop. My car, flowers, bakery, butchery, clothing, hairdresser, gym, even the supermarket I go to is chosen because I like the staff.

In Amsterdam I popped into Cora Kemperman and Noon on the Leidsestraat. I found a new label in Noon that I really like, called Tiger, except I can't find it on the Internet? Anyone know it?

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Oh, I was happy, neutral, slightly sad (4%) and angry, according to Glad or Sad. Thanks for voting for my picture. Just wondering where the angry came from? I mean, I am, but jesus - it shows that much?

This week I am actually happy. Not too obsessive, not freaked out, not gnashing my teeth about my future. Even a little bit contented. Yes, really! That means I haven't written anything because when I'm not in a deep pit of despair I don't write.

In 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' Lionel Shriver said something about how we dig ourselves into a hole a teaspoon at a time. So maybe I've been digging myself out a teaspoon at a time.

And then I read that maybe all that Prozac really did nothing for me after all?

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Christine Kane is writing this week about the Law of Attraction and I finally get it. I get it I get it I get it.

Let's take an example. I am a good person to know because there is always a parking space free for me, (ok, so that's just one reason it's good to know me). But there is always a parking spot for me. Always.

So I'm all 'yeah, the universe loves me because it gives me a parking space right in front of where I need to be, every single time.' Then I congratulate myself on attracting good things (like parking spaces) but I sort of forgot that I'm also attracting bad shit (like when I broke the bumper on my car).

No more part time belief in the law of attraction for me.

I am the centre of my own universe.

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Going to Zandvoort later with S and her kids and will break the no-kids-pics-on-the-blog rule tomorrow. Just this once.
 

'I loved them 'til they loved me.' - Carla Bruni, after Dorothy Parker, Ballade at Thirty Five

Serendipitous, again.

On Wednesday I heard Carla Bruni for the first time, singing in French, her first album. Not in person, obviously.

I was captivated by her voice. Not a clue what she was singing, no French spoken here, but it sounded beautiful.

I bought No Promises when I got home. Love love love it. Poems read in that breathy voice to music. Dorothy Parker's Ballade at 35. Ok, I'm 34, but give me a year. 

Today, relaxing, I opened my Esta and there, in the back was an article written tongue in cheek about how if your man walked past Carla Bruni, sat with a coffee at a cafe, poetry book in hand, he'd be quoting Auden and thinking 'Carla Carla Carla' for the rest of his life. The shorts and the sneakers, and the hair and the poems, oh the poems.

Auden's The Secret is Out.  Christina Rosetti's Promises Like Pie Crust:

Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?

The Observer and Cool Hunting had something to say about this album too, and it's all good.

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Glad or sad. Emotion analysis of photos as part of a University of Amsterdam study. I submitted a photo, please go vote on mine so I can get the analysis. I want to see if I'm really happy! Just in case I need reminding in the future.

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New shoes really make you go faster. 5 km in 35 minutes today. This was serendipitous too. Last week three different people told me my shoes needed replacing. Then Wednesday I ran with them and hurt my shins. Yesterday I bought some new shoes, and these are them. And only 49 euros.

Last week I was running 4 km in 31 minutes. It's all the shoes, I tell you.

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Son #1 told me today 'Mama, you put on weight.'

Hah. How to tell the boy that mama has pre-menstrual bloat and combined with PMS saying things like that might not be the best way to win favours?

Then he compounded the pain by saying 'Ja echt, mama, you look fatter around the middle'. Careful boy!

He turns 8 soon. We're going disco bowling, yeah babay! Mama gets to bowl too. For Amstelveen.

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Job interview on Monday. 2 days a week in Schiphol-Rijk. I could do that, right? 2 days a week and not go crazy?

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If you don't read Neil Gaiman's blog, you should. But, if you don't, you wouldn't know that there is a free download of Harlequin Valentine on Last.fm.

So now you do.

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Books bought yesterday:

India Knight's The Dirty Bits for Girls. I hesitate (and blush) to share that I read most of the books that have excerpts in this book. Notable though, in the Dirty Bits reading was Lace, which my mom caught me reading lying down by the side of her bed. Ooh la la. I was 11 and already naughty.

The New Granta Book of the American Short Story. I have a weakness for short stories. They're so cut and dried. A beginning, a middle and an end. Swift and succinct, short as a love affair, there is no time for disillusionment. My shelves are full of them.

Books I want:

Four Letter Word, New Love Letters and Francine Oomen's Gek van Liefde. Ben je gek van de liefde? Or is it all a matter of choice? Crazy not crazy crazy not crazy... Love is a conscious choice. Chemistry, ah, that's different.

A bit like this:

sitting across from him in the cafe
I thought for a minute that I could see
that brief moment of truth
of how it could be
the ins and outs, the shine
then just as quickly it went again.

Book club I joined:

One in Amsterdam, on Wednesday nights. Book being read right now, Andrea Levy's Small Island.

Book club I started, linked with the Dutch Word of the Day:

First book. Boudewijn Buch's de kleine, blonde dood. Grab a copy and come join us on facebook. We start in March.

Go read the Dutch Word of the Day too. Those guys do a fantastic job of making Dutch accessible.

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I just realised I could have spun this blog post out into a whole week, but today I have so much to say. Funny how that happens sometimes.

'And on the jukebox is your, is your only song & I, I have never remembered the words.' - Martha Wainwright, When the Day is Short

I have been reading Anais Nin's Henry and June. My initial impression was undecided, I suppose. I had to remind myself that these extracts were written in diary format, that these are her thoughts, that self-absorption is the basis of a diary, not written or intended for anyone else except the diarist.

Now that I'm finished the book I have more of a sense of who she was and what she was searching for. The search for self, for actualisation, for meaning. The desire to feel and feel anything. In the last entry that was included in this book she writes:

'Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become a woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. ...  I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.'

I can't pretend to be able to take apart the book and analyse it for its literary impact, but I can see the advantage that Nin had of being first, being the first one to write about these things, being the first one with an openly bohemian lifestyle. Now, in 2008, if the same work were published it would be old, no longer fresh, boring.

Which brings me to my own diary. This diary. I thought it might metamorphose into something else but no, it's a record of my thoughts and actions from day to day. So it's a diary. There are some stories, some recipes, some other stuff, but it's a collection, a collecting place for everything I don't know where to put, including my thoughts.

I am almost tempted to make it private, but something stops me, I can't say what. The thrill of writing a diary lies perhaps in the surreptitious reader, the opening of the window into another life, the questions that each answered question raises in reply.

Anonymity is such a double edged sword. You think it protects you, but it's nebulous really.

Yesterday I went to read the scent of water and found a year of ordinary. 

Beautiful writing about life, less ordinary.

 'Hey, I put some new shoes on and suddenly everything is right' - Paulo Nutini, New Shoes

Aha! I feel like a girl with new shoes. Or just a little bit famous.

For Neil's Great Interview Experiment I was interviewed by Not Fainthearted.

Who, true to her pseudonym, is far from faint hearted.

She asked me all kinds of cool questions. I feel like one of the cool kids now. Way hey!

But (and why is there always a but with me?) re-reading my answers makes me think I spend too much time in my head.

Oh, and she asked me about the sexy stuff that I write here. Have a look at how skillfully I changed the subject. Way hey (again).

After you've read what I have to say go read the rest of the interviews here.