the duck-laugh evening

Recipe for a good evening:

Eat chicken & blue cheese pie with your best friend.
Add a few glasses of red wine.
Watch Pretty Woman for old times' sake and for the sake of that quote that you couldn't quite remember ("A name, a name, the pressure of a name... Cinde-fucking-rella!").
Ask "Do I have to prostitute myself to find a prince?"
Ask "Why are so many of the great chick flicks Cinderella-stories and why can't even a cynic resist them?"
Go to a "Night at the Museum"-event and get frightened half to death by a bunch of wooden ducks in a dark room who suddenly start laughing at you.
Walk in the balmy May night with your friend and laugh until you cry.

a poet's homeland

That stream which could be the real Fountain of Eternal Youth. That mountainside half in ominous shadow, half in enchanting sunlight. Those crooked trees where trolls may be hiding. That wild, hidden lake with secrets lurking in its depths. Those magnificent ruins of a thousand years. That enigmatic wishing-well that bends space.

I look through my pictures from my last visit to the enchanted valley and realise that I take the same pictures every time I go there.

I am always faintly surprised that the pictures do not come out blank, or all dark, or with unidentifiable smudges - the way pictures look when people try to photograph supernatural things. Apparently the valley does exist outside my own imagination.

That forceful gravity it exerts on my soul is very, very real. The mysterious black hole of my life.

how to learn a language and link to Hubble

Today's little challenge for bored shop assistants:

* Find a mobile phone (one of the more advanced and complicated ones) that someone has left behind by mistake in the second-hand shop where you work (in the bargain bin).

* Draw on your compassion and human decency and decide that you want to try to return the phone to its owner.

* Realise that the phone's language setting, hence all the menus and functions, is Arabic.

* First of all, try to unlock the keypad.

* Mess around with all the buttons for a while.

* Press the cancel button to turn off the camera function that you involuntarily activated while doing the above.

* Admire the picture that you involuntarily took of your navel.

* Press the cancel button a few times to turn off all the other functions (web browser, MP3 player, picture gallery, Tetris, universal translator, intergalactic communicator, direct link to Hubble telescope) that you involuntarily activated while doing the above.

* Try to figure out what "Contacts/Phone Book" may look like in Arabic script.

* Try to decide which one of the little squiggles looks like it may be the phone number to next of kin (what is "Mum" in Arabic?).

* Press green to call a random number.

* Press red to end the call when someone says some very angry words in Arabic at the other end.

* Admire the live feed from the Hubble telescope for a while while you ponder what to do next (discover an unknown galaxy while you are at it).

* Press green to answer a call from a caller identified by more squiggles.

* Press red to hastily end the call after being informed by the unknown caller that you will not get away with this and that the CIA and Interpol and NASA are on the case and will be knocking down your door any minute now.

* Listen to some soothing Arabic music for a while on the phone's MP3 to calm your nerves.

* Activate the universal translator function (accidentally) and call the number marked "Mum".

* Return the phone to its owner after being promised all the Prophet's blessings and a lifetime's supply of halva cakes (or something to that effect, but you are not sure the universal translator actually works as well as it seems to do in Star Trek).

* Inform NASA that you want the galaxy you discovered named after you.

This almost happened to me today.

how to manipulate me

The highest art form: the latest music with cutting-edge hipness, combined with original, poetic and unexpected lyrics.

Use this formula and you have me at your mercy.

where old revolutionaries come to die

Guevara is not dead. He is hiding out on the top floor of a run-down apartment building in Vaasa, Finland. His name is on the door so maybe he secretly wishes that somebody will come and look him up.

Maybe I will ring the doorbell tomorrow. I would like to know if he still wears that beret with the little red star. I always liked the star.

my dictionary

My diary contains a list of words I like:

dance storm enigma snow wine
laughter spark coffee world joy
spirit saga WOLF strength Dixieland
stranger forest God fire
whiskey music castle sea

mountain kitchen wisdom
bookshop SPICE irony ice
piano labyrinth father library
vagabond harbour cello adventure ink
soulmate Vienna peace woman

silk melody beauty
guardian dusk wonder star whisper chronicle
poet moon smoke inn midsummer echo-maker
theatre pulsar voyager monastery
thousand church midnight tale hunter

kiss life exuberance garden
wildness silver diesel fisherman
mercury strawberry dizzy Cambridge
ocean wool Orion honeysuckle
time resonance embers city

monsoon Isfahan cheese mosaic
lullaby lover rooftop fiddle
bard vortex hike twilight road trilogy
infinity eternity Oklahoma serenity
sage CIRCUS university

chocolate academy seven

lemonade olive punt hazelnut Celt
autumn tea vanilla Milky Way
journal Cumberland oak
Kahlua buttercup gypsy home end.

And tea tree oil and the name of every spice. And those specialized names of colours, like ochre, cerulean, sienna.

I should write a novel and use all of these words in it. Can't wait to read it myself.

unexpected view from a car window

I sat in the back seat of a car travelling north and could easily imagine everything I saw from the perspective of a foreigner from central Europe or North America.

Small towns, even smaller towns - nondescript, unassuming, roadsigns in two incomprehensible languagues. Endless forests, tiny fields, flat landscape, cute little villages with houses far apart.

Myself: one who has travelled the world but now is content with her job in a small shop, speaks both of the incomprehensible languages, lives, works, gets around on a bicycle, is one of them.

The foreigner him/herself: when homesickness and loneliness weigh heavily on the mind, the joy of seeing something familiar. A sign in English, the yellow M of a MacDonald's, another tourist like yourself, a familiar type of tree - but these things are so far apart. Or something that has been put there for the benefit of you as a stranger (a welcoming) - something written in English, an international traffic symbol, a hotel, a tourist site.

These quiet people who lack grand gestures and dramatic manners, who usually turn out to speak at least some English but who are careful and reserved. This country, so far away, so sparsely populated, often so cold.

I saw all this, as if from a great distance, through the grimy car window.

another link in my anchor chain

I met him in a lift, a middle-aged, fairly ordinary man with thinning hair.

Many, many years ago, when I was a shy teenager with an innocent mind and dreams that stretched towards all horizons, he was a youth group leader and trying to channel the exuberant energy of a large group of youngsters. I was one of the quiet ones in this group, the wide-eyed observer who blushed whenever someone spoke to me.

The youth leader wasn't really the central person of this group - he sort of faded by comparison to some of the older teenagers who enchanted everyone with their joy of life and inspiring energy. But when I geared up to go out in the big, wide world - scared to death - and applied to a school abroad, he was the one who helped me get going.

I have hardly given him a thought during the many years since then, busy exploring the wonders of the world. Until I came back to my home town and we happened to get into the same lift. Suddenly, I felt like that tongue-tied teenager again, not sure if he recognised me. But he smiled at me and asked me what I had been doing for the last ten years.

I have been lost so many times, and lonely. Never a very important or memorable person. But every now and then one of these people from my past show up and smile at me to prove that I am still anchored to the bedrock.