Sometimes, ordinary boring days baffle me completely.
Like today: cold rain lashing down, lunch in a little Vietnamese restaurant, and long office hours writing emails in three languages to customers, suppliers and colleagues.
And in the midst of my bored yawns, I marvel over this life.
The unexpected cold after a warm summer - shivering in my too thin layers of cotton, wool and leather wakes me up to the surprising reality of autumn. Diving into the restaurant, greeted by the warmth and my friend's smile and the smell of spices. The lunch hour rush around us - strangers and someone I recognise vaguely and the annoying familiarity of everything and yet, there are a million new things to see and learn here. And in the office - I'm in an office, for heaven's sake, moving on to new adventures after years of hotel receptions and shops and lonely rooms, and who would have thought that I would be writing emails in three languages?
Knowing my cautious, anxious nature, it sometimes strikes me as incredible that I have managed to learn things like drive a car or use a computer. Or make friends.
My default settings for what life should look like are apparently stuck in my '80s childhood. When only people much older and smarter than I drove cars, when only the nerdiest of nerds owned a computer, when friends were something that came upon you if you were very, very lucky and Vietnamese food was only found on the other side of the earth. When I was a pitiable creature who needed to be taken care of.
Having survived until 2013, if only to be ordinary, is a marvellous accomplishment.
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