Sunday Reds

I know I haven't been good.

It mostly has to do with the absence of the internet in my hotel.  I could get a connection in my room, but then I would have to fork over the second home, a couple Harry Winstons and the private jet to be able to afford it.  Or I could go down to the hotel's business centre.  And by business centre I mean that one computer that sits in the hallway next to the lobby, the one with the funky Swiss German keyboard (not Qwerty, not Azerty, but Qwertz).

Which is where I'm sitting now, mostly out of guilt and because the cleaning lady is in my room.  Where I should be packing.  Where I want to be curled up in a ball crying.  But never mind.  Instead I'm here, talking to you.

I am so fed up.  Fed up with spending every night alone in a hotel room.  Fed up with scanning the same eight items on the room service menu wondering what I'm in the mood for (and after five weeks, the answer is 'nothing').  Fed up with having no one to talk to who's known me for ore than five minutes.  Fed up with the cold.  With the fog.  With my expanding waistline.  With those dozen extra wrinkles that have cropped up ahead of my 33rd birthday.  With not having anyone to go to the movies with.  With being single and friendless in a city where I don't understand the language or the culture or the obsession with brightly painted hard-boiled eggs.

The highlight of horridness: last night.  I receive a pity invite to a party from a friend of a friend whom I'd never met.  I'm a little nervous about it but desperate to talk to somebody, anybody, espsecially after a day spent surrounded by couples and babies at IKEA, trying to lift my body weight in flat packs.  So I get all dressed up.  Makeup on.  Take two trams across town in below-freezing temperatures.  Find the building.  Ring the buzzer.  Wait.  Ring again.  Third time's not a charm.  Neither is fourth.  After ten minutes, a lady walks into the building.  I try to explain that I'm attempting to go to a party but the buzzer isn't working.  She refuses to let me in.  I give it another five rings.  Nothing happens.  I take the two trams back home.  I spend Saturday night the same way I have spent all nights.  In my pajamas, with room service, watching TV.

Which I guess means things can only go up from here, right?

First stop, a new appartment.  Tomorrow.

Still no internet, though.

Comments

I know I don't do it often enough, but I want to take a moment now to thank everyone who takes the time to comment on this blog and cheer me on when the going gets tough.

So thank you.

You Belong to Me

People often ask me how I come up with ideas for my blog, how long it takes me to write a post, whether there's any kind of hidden message (there isn't), is there a method in the madness (nope), etc.

While occasionally I do actually have an "idea" - usually dreamt up in the middle of the night, while sitting on a metro (or now, a tram), or when I'm actually supposed to be working - most often I just sit down because it's time to write and whatever comes out, comes out.

This is one of those.

I'm in Paris this weekend.  Back home.  Curled up on the sofa while the deluge does its thing outside.  God, I missed home.  My apartment.  My furniture.  My books.  My painting of Alina.  My little Nescafé and Kellog's muesli ritual in front of the TV (so much better than the real stuff I get in the hotel back in der Schweiz).  My loud, crazy, dirty street.  My friends.  My family.

All the things that are mine.  In Switzerland, nothing belongs to me yet.

Except the job.  The job is definitely My Job.  It helps that no one else has ever had this job before.  That no one knows exactly what the job is.  The job is whatever I decide it will be.  And so it is very much Mine.  And I love it.  Not just because of the hours, or the colleagues, or the overlapping of languages, or the man-magnet effect of saying I work for CoolCo Sub.

Mostly, I love it because I can create my own little world.  And my boss trusts me.  If I say I need something to happen, it happens.  I never realized how empowering it is just to be trusted.  I feel like I can do anything, achieve anything, go anywhere.  It's an incredible feeling and one that, in my experience, is all too rare in the workplace.  Don't worry, I'm not going to go all Leadership Seminar on you, but still, think about it.

So I have My Job.  Finally.  Although I still wonder how exactly I got here.  Litigation, consulting, novel-writing and now...  Strangely, it all feels rather fated somehow.  Dr B thinks it all has something to do with The Boy, who apparently wasn't simply put on this earth to break my heart over and over again, but also to edge me a little closer to this new life at CoolCo Sub, this new life where I feel confident and capable and ready to conquer the world.

If that's true, I suppose thanks are in order.

Still, couldn't My Job have been in Paris instead?