3 is the loneliest number

Three.

Three often means two plus one.

I have two friends I met my first year of "junior high" for lack of a better word, when I was ten. We remained in the same class until I was 15, and then they both went towards economics and then prepared the entrance exam for business school, and I went towards literature.

French school system.

I was not a very gregarious child, and had very few friends. My dream, from the age of 10 onwards, was to be someone's best friend. In that internet-less age, best friends called each other every evening on the house phone, and annoyed their parents expecting calls. Best friends had sleep-overs. Best friends could bond against the world.

This never really happened for me. Like the booty call who hopes against all odds that he/she will become the official partner, I spend a lot of time daydreaming about my potential best friend-making moves. Should I be funnier? Should I have cuter clothes?

When I finally got close friends, it never felt that I was the one. My two closest friends and I formed a trio, an uncomfortable one at times. I will never forget a trip to Vienna where I felt completely left out and cried myself to sleep every night. I was a very immature 17.

I don't know why the moniker best friend was so important to me. Now I have many friends, all important for me, all wonderful, and I laugh at my past self for having set so much store on a label. How insecure. How silly. No one can be everything to someone.

Now my two oldest friends are going back to school together. Like when we were 15, they will be laughing about teachers, sharing in-jokes about fellow students, spending hours in the same classroom. I suddenly realised this a few days ago and thought "How nice for them."
Then I thought "Damn it. 2+ 1 AGAIN?"

And I call myself an adult.

The Perv leaves

My pervy co-worker is leaving today, after a small office party. This is the man who 1° always makes terribly lewd jokes I don't understand in my general direction.
2° squeezes, strokes and squishels his female collegues as a jest.
3°once cornered me in an elevator and playfully grabbed my bottom.

Now he is going away for good.

"Slap him", says my boyfriend. "Let him get drunk at his own party, make bad jokes, and when he tries to touch you or anyone else, slap him."

"Throw a drink on him."

"Tell him his behaviour is unacceptable."

I think I will talk to him. Tell him it's not funny when you don't understand the language perfectly. That it's awkward when you're an intern and he works there. And more than that, that touching people without their consent is appalling behaviour.

My French colleague told me with a Gallic shrug: "Let's hope for him he never works in America."

Yes indeed.

raining all the time

Don't know why
There's no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather
Since my man and I ain't together
Keeps raining all the time...

I love that song, especially sung by Lena Horne.

RAIN RAIN RAIN.

Random news and bits and pieces:

Only 5 weeks left in Berlin then I'm going back home...It went by really fast. Now I have guests every weekend, will try to keep up with my friendships here and a lot of lobbying work to do. We shall see.

Planning to spend NYE in Venice. I never celebrate NYE, being so stuffed at Christmas I need a week to recover from indigestion. My grandmother was always the soul of Christmas for me, so this year should be very different, and quite sad. Maybe I should start celebrating NYE!

My grandfather is not doing well at all. My mother is not sure he will still be with us in November, but if he is, I will probably go to London to help take care of him or do daily visits at the hospital. I hope I will see him. I have great affection for him.

I'm looking for good American fiction to read, can anyone recommend something contemporary?

And with this, I go forth through the rain.

Changes

I'm not an adventurous person. My idea of the perfect evening is a good book, some lapsang souchang tea, and maybe a cat purring somewhere in the house. But I have some adventurous sides. I like travelling, I like meeting new people in strange circumstances, and discovering new things.

This clumsy introduction to say: I sometimes surprise myself by doing out of character things.

Almost ten months ago, still shaky from my breakup, I asked a man for his number at a party and called him the next day. Subtle! None of the usual rules we are taught to apply in the seduction game counted then, because I was not after a relationship, just what we call in French an "aventure", a fling. I went for it with careless energy, not wondering if he thought I was crazy or weird, or investing huge amounts of emotion in our dealings. In retrospect, this probably explains why we got along so well from the start. Neither of us was pretending to be someone we were not. It saves time down the line.

Now of course we are going towards...something else. We have plans. He is cautious and commitment-phobish, and to a certain extent so am I. I don't want to move in with him, I am certainly not planning my life around him, but still. We have plans. Plans to spend New Year together. Plans when I come back from Berlin in November. Little plans, like making reservations in a nice restaurant to celebrate my academic success, and bigger plans, like vacations.

I don't feel secure with him. He keeps the distance, always, and I do too, in other ways. It's not safe and nurturing. It's something else. And I trust him more and more, with my feelings and with myself.

I never thought I would be happy in a relationship like this.

Maybe I am less needy, less insecure and less annoying.

But as my sister would laughingly point out, still a serial monogamist!

A diamond as big as the Ritz

An old picture of me which is the closest I can get to the EAT PRAY LOVE look. The "I look so natural and free-spirited! When in fact I took hours to find this flattering angle!"



Last night I was tired after work and decided to go see a shitty movie. That movie turned out to be Eat Pray Love. I had listened to the book while running and not really gotten into the whole guru-following, yoga-practicing balooney idea that spirituality was something you could wilfully acquire. Anyway, I just wanted to see Javier Bardem and James Franco.
It turned out to be the film première, and to celebrate it, some German magazine called HAPPY had organised for glasses of sparkly wine to be distributed around. All the women in the theatre were rather tipsy then, and giggled extremely loudly. I struck up a conversation with my two neighbours, who were speaking bad French to each other, and we quickly decided that we liked each other. Funny how that works.

So the movie was very depressing. BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPES...JULIA ROBERTS AND HER GIGANTIC MOUTH...Finally some Javier Bardem.

The story of Liz Gilbert is supremely relatable. I suffer from depression, I know almost no one who hasn't felt trapped in their lives at least once, this is good material. I may hate the mumbo jumbo of the ashram episode, but I could certainly respond to her other themes. Food is my antidepressant of choice...

When I left the movie house, I felt very unhappy. Vividly unhappy for the first time in months. I simply did not want to go home. Going home meant going to sleep, and that meant coming closer to waking up and going to work. I decided to drink a cocktail at the Ritz.

The Ritz Hotel in Berlin is right behind the Sony Centre and Potsdamer Platz, formerly known as No Man's Land. It's now a land of hotels and office space. I swept inside and ordered a Virgin Berlin. My bike was waiting outside and I don't drink and drive...

It was a perfectly soothing experience. Lavish, extravagant, dumb. Sipping my 11 Euro cocktail, I sank into the thick leather bar stool. I think I waited for an hour for my melancholy to go away.

Years ago my sister and I would sometimes dine with our grandfather at the Ritz for Christmas. We would wear our nicest clothes and people watch: older men with ravishing young women, plastically enhanced bimbos, and the occasional family treat scene, like us.

I miss my sister so much. Sipping my Virgin Berlin, trying not to go home, feeling low, I thought of her in America, and felt strangely comforted.

I rode home gently, feeling at peace.

A wonderful spiritual experience A nice drink in a nice bar is sometimes all it takes.

Where I am

Some days I wake up and I can't remember where I am. Last weekend I was in Munich, this week I'm flying to France, to do my presentation on my thesis in Lyon, then going back to Paris for a couple of days. It's going fast. I'm sorry I've been in limbo these past weeks, but I was never quite sure where I was. I wanted to write about the funny things that happen to me all the time here in Germany, but I felt sad and withdrawn; I didn't want to write about this sadness because it will pass, and it hurt to think about it too much. Many people in my family are not well, many things worry me, and I like this blog to be not only doom and gloom, although it often is melodramatic, as befits a Frenchwoman who talks with her hands.

Crossroads. I am deciding my professional future/ do I want to be an academic, with all the freedom that entails? Do I prefer working for a private company and make money, or at least, more? Do I want a quiet life or a busy one?

Where am I?

I wish I could say answers are coming in fast and steady, but it all feels confusing and hard to me. I like permanency, and everybody is changing. Things are moving without me. I want to be able to hold on to a sense of self, of place. I want to wake up and know where I am.

Overdramatic...as usual.

The easiest thing in the world sometimes is just to feel. The warm yield of an apple crumble, the sweetness of grass under my back as I fall asleep, drinking in the last days of summer, the soft skin inside my boyfriend's wrists when we hold hands. These things are easy. These things are now, and gone as soon as they are felt, and no questions needed.

Why isn't it enough, I wonder.