Graceful Me

I am one of those boring people who seldom gets drunk beyond the ability to control my own action or motorfunction. Usually that is.

Once when I was around 16 years old I drank a whole bottle of wine with a straw in the park and my friend had to drag me in to a taxi. This isn’t even my own memory but a story told by others which scared the living daylight out of me. So I spent the rest of my teenage partying days drinking myself pretty and holding my friend’s hair when they were throwing up in the bathroom in the back of a club. These were friend’s who drank tequila straight from the bottle and who apparently did not understand the sentiment of the word enough.

Sure, once in a while I would stumble and fall but as my boyfriend pointed out to me the other day, it had little to do with the alcohol and more to do with my ability to fall over and run my toes in to dead objects.

“You’re always cursing the furniture,” my boyfriend explained one morning very matter of factly. “It’s always ‘damn that chair’ or ‘stupid idiot table’. What you should be saying is ‘stupid idiot feet’” he snickered, recieving a well deserved pillow in his face.

It’s because of my mother you see. My mother always falls, trips or turn things over. I inherented that gene. The clumsy gene. On every vaction we ever took my mother would fall. She would tell me and my sister that we should be careful and then the next second she would slide down the slippery slope on her behind. In New York she got it out of her system right from the start as she flew out of the taxi, falling flat on her stomach right in front of the hotel, just inches from the doorman, a tall African American who was looking down at her. I was so embaressed.

Maybe that is why I stay so much in control when we’re out. Becuase for once I am the person standing up straight. The person who can look at others acting clumsy, falling over, and for once feel like a graceful being.

Dare to Dream

Today came the verdict. At least it felt like a vertict since the outcome wasn’t what I had hoped for. “They decided to go with another candidate....” If I got payed every time I heard that, I’d be rich. But at least they called this time. Usually they don’t, you have to call them up yourself, which you know is a bad sign right from the start.

I am dissapointed. Naturally. This was not just any job. It was not Customer Support, which I have been told from one agency is my only option because of my limited experience and which I can’t get either way since I have too much education. It was not a Marketing Assistent job which another agency called me in for a couple of weeks ago, but that I didn’t get because they wanted someone with education in economics. It wasn’t even a job as an Informant or Communicator which I have been told I can forget about right from the start even though I have the education for it. It was Head of Information at on of Sweden’s most successful companies. Like being Chief. Boss. In charge.

Madness!

“Don’t look at this as a defeat,” the recruiter said. “Try to focus on the fact that you got this far on almost no experience. They felt you had a lot of potential and ambition but they wanted someone with experience.”

He said it almost as if he disagreed with their decision. As if he thought that they’d missed the point. “I’m really sorry.” He added.

It didn’t feel like he was feeding me a line, it felt as if he really meant it. At our first meeting I found him completely intimidating in the way that he kept throwing difficult questions at me, as if he was testing my ability to cope. I walked out of that room never expecting to hear from him again.

Then he calls, out of nowhere, and he wants to see me again. We meet again and he is no longer intimidating. After that meeting he calls and tells me he wants to send me to the interview. For the job as Head of Information! He tells me that he is sending two other candidates with experience and then me. He tells me I am his favorite candidate, the most ambitious one in the bunch and also the one most likely to pull this off. These are almost his exact words. He sees something no one else have dared to discover. He sees potential. And he tells me that potential is more important than experience.

I can’t believe it is happening. I can’t believe that I am going on this interview and that someone believes in me as much as he does. And even though I know that this is too good to be true, I dare to dream. I know I don’t have the same chance as the rest but I am toying with the posibility of getting the job and I can’t stop myself from thinking: what if?

So of course I am dissapointed. And I panic over the fact that I now have to deal with the people of little faith. The unbelievers.

Dead Ficus

My ficus is officially dead. I can't tell if it is caused by too much or too little water because all the other plants are still alive. But the ficus is sagging like a tired old man sitting outside a dressing room, waiting for his wife to try on the tenth shirt which looks like all the other shirts in which she just posed for him.

"It's been a good couple of months," my boyfriend proclaims and rather congratulates me on the success of the plants that are still alive. He knows as well as I do that I am hopeless with plants, maybe even more so than he is. And I am proud of this minor achievement, a step in the right direction, but at the same time I can not let go of the failure, the stains in my success. That's just the kind of animal that I am.


Meanwhile I am three out of over two hundered. I am one of three for the position of a life time. The kind of job that no one gets, not in my position anyway. I am the candidate least qualified for the position, of this I'm sure. Not sure like in "I pity myself" but sure because the man sending me to the interview told me so. He said I had spirit and ambition but not sufficient experience. He said he believed I was the best candidate but that chances are that they don't. People stare themselves blind on experience, he said. And contacts, I added in silence.

He told me I am his favorite candidate. That out of over two hundered, cut to ten, then to five and three, I am his favorite. I don't care that he probably tells all three candidates this, I really needed to hear it. After all the dissapointments, the deceits and unfairness that comes from the position I am in, it felt like coming up for air when you are suffocating.

Even if I don't get the job I am very content. I am proud that I got this far. I never thought it possible after what I've learned these past couple of months. And I take solace in the fact that you can get far with honesty and hard work. It feels comforting.

But I am very much like my ficus. Usually I drown in the water, having too much experience. Otherwise I dry out, having too little experience. This interview felt very dry. I'm fairly sure I'm not getting this job, it all adds up to that. Never the less I have had a good experience and I've regained faith in something I thought I'd lost.

Misunderstanding

In Sweden most kids come to the realization some time during pre teen period that the rockband Kiss does not mean urine, which it translates in to in Swedish. I am embaressed to say that I was very late to discover this myself which is strange since I was always advanced in English in relation to my peers. Justified humiliation though since I was always very arrogant about it.

My best friend once told the story about her boyfriend's brother who misunderstood the song lyrics for the theme song in the cartoon version of Robin Hood. Instead of singing "Oo-de-lally, Oo-de-lally Golly, what a day", he sang "Woody Allen, Woody Allen Golly, what a day" (in Swedisn of course).

I just love such stories, because I know how stupid we feel when we realize the mistake. And usually we've always felt that our misunderstandings sounded weird and didn't make much sense even when we were unaware that we were wrong. I mean, why would any band want to be named Urine?

This is why I was delighted to find this site about the song lyrics we thought we heard and what they really meant. Some of these are hilarious.


http://kissthisguy.com/

Point, what Point?

I was sitting on the bus on my way downtown when I noticed a man looking straight at me. I met his eyes and he didn't look away like people ususally do when caught staring at someone. Intense glaring makes me uncomfortable however so I broke contact but noticed that the man kept staring at me.

Had I been 16, thinking that the world evolved around me, I would probably have thought that he couldn't help himself, seeing how pretty I was. Now, eleven years later, it's more leaning towards: "I must have smut somewhere on my face...." So I dove into my bag for my hand mirror and tried to see just how bad it was.

Turns out I didn't have smut on my face. It also turns out that the man is holding a white cane, indicating he was blind. I felt really bad for thinking he was creepy.


Then, two hours later, over a cup of Vanilla Nut Latte, my friend starts pondering whether or not blind people dream. According to a number of not so reliable websites I find out that they don't. At least not in images.

You're now probably thinking that if there is a point I should be getting to it shortly. Sorry to say that I have no point to make. Just making an observation.