When I was a little girl of about 7 or 8 one of my favourite passtimes was this: I closed my eyes really tight, waited for a couple of minutes clenching my fists in concentration thinking that when I open my eyes I just might realize that all my life to that day had been a dream and I am, in reality, living a completely different, unknown life. Naturally, every time I opened my eyes I still found myself in our flat, surrounded by the familiar objects and the familiar mess and yet, the possibility of a different outcome filled me with a mix of excitement and apprehension over and over again. Later, once I have given up on finding a new life by closing my eyes, I became more creative: as a pre-teen, I would invent different looks and personalities for myself. I would mentally pick for myself whole (mostly pink) outfits from the shopwindows of the tacky 1980s Hungarian "boutiques" ("butik" was the generic name used to describe the couple of privately owned clothing stores in central Budapest; with the extinction of communism most of them have thankfully become defunct). I would have long conversations with my imaginary friends, parents, siblings; sometimes I would forget myself and talk aloud on the way to French class and would only realize that I got a little carried away through the look of the others. Conventional wisdom is that kids do this because they are unhappy with their lives as it is, or they are strange little outcasts. Perhaps I was, indeed a little strange, but I was not unhappy with my life and I certainly was not lacking in friends or family. Quite the contrary. Our family and social life was so intense and excitingly unconventional in comparison to most kids' at school that my motivation for inventing the other lives was for me to have an ordered and understandable private world that I alone controlled.

Since I have reached adulthood I reduced the number of imaginary conversations significantly. The ones I am still having are internal and (mostly) with actual people in my life, only in imaginary settings, situations or circumstances. For example, if during my morning walk down Rue St. Lazare towards the Alcatel offices the sun is shining, I turn my face towards the sun and imagine that I am in Rio. I then launch into a very vivid internal description of my parallel, imaginary life, a kind of "Sliding Doors" analysis of what it would have been like, had I chosen to go and work at Robin's business in Rio. I can see the people I used to hang out with lying on the beach on a Sunday afternoon; I can almost smell that strange mix: black beans, sewage water and baby poop at the creche in the favela; I can taste the ice cream from the exquisite little cafe I used to go to in Ipanema. All is familiar and real except for my physical presence. While I daydream, the external world becomes the opposite: unfamiliar and unreal except for my physical presence.

As it turns out, imagining things is not such a solitary occupation after all. Thanks to a charmingly intelligent, but very pretentious and slightly exalted Italian and modern technology (email and my all time favourite, the SMS) I have had a virtual "relationship". It started, peaked and ended within a 48-hour time period without any verbal, let alone personal exchange. After meeting him at a dinner party, the well-spoken Italian initiated email contact, which he then transformed into an sms exchange. It took perhaps 7-8 emails and 15-18 text messages and I somehow found myself refusing a romantic offer of meaningless s*x (on account of a girlfriend), followed by the receipt of a "let's just be friends then" message (odd, considering our brief history). I am not really sure how we reached that stage. The exchange was entertaining: he was articulate and challenging, and I enjoyed practising my "biting irony", as my new flirt put it. And yet, the whole situation is absurd and not so different from my childhood fantasizing and dreamed up stories, except that I happened to be involved in another person's fantasy world.

This incident made me think about the effect of text messaging and emailing on (romantic)relationships. That two people interpret the same situation completely differently happens quite often anyway. B. Easton Ellis is not my favourite writer, but the narrative structure in Rules of Attraction captures this problem very well. Texting however, adds a whole new level. On the one hand, frequency and the buttons act as some kind of a shield: it lowers the stakes and renders communication more daring, as it were. On the other, the exchange becomes more restricted: there is only so much you can convey in 160 characters per message. End result: this feeling of absurd, dream-like alienation, which is very comfortable and unthreatening, but also depressingly shallow and vacuous.

My job description could be something like: "acting self-important and busy while calling lots of people on the phone"- thereby making them and everyone else in the department/group feel important, consequently creating the impression towards the bosses that they are important because they are managing such important people, which in turn gives the comfortable feeling that, as a group, we are involved in something important. They have a problem with having me as a first link in this chain - but I think they don't know that yet.

The grass is always greener on the other side, of course. I was invited to a dinner party last Wednesday by Mathieu, who works at the Paris office of the World Bank. Those at the dinner were mostly his colleagues and the way they were describing their jobs confirmed the suspicion that helping the poor is not necessarily the main motivation of most at the WB. This should not have been a particularly shocking piece of information (although the extent to which some of their "important people" do not even bother to keep up appearances is quite shocking). It is more that I have to think over my well rehearsed answer to the "where do you see yourself ten years from now" question. In the corporate world I have met many a pompous, status obsessed a**hole with money to burn on the symbols of their acquired (and aspired) status, but they at least were spending either their own money, or that of the company they worked for and these companies' mission was certainly not "to fight poverty and improve the living standards of people in the developing world". Evidently, this latter sentence - and the first in the World Bank's mission statement does not prevent some of its senior (and less senior) employees from behaving exactly like my corporate buffoons. Depressing.

I am regressing, I think. Yesterday, I had to spend the entire day at a training session (on a business process modelling tool: yes, it is as boring as it sounds) and, as an act of rebellion, I spent most of the time ICQ-ing with my best friend Marta, and the rest of the time - instead of using the collaborative computer tool as instructed - I hid funny little comments that would occasionally pop up on the projection screen. In addition to utter boredom, the other source of this childish behaviour was the need to distance myself from my colleagues - the aforementioned cockfighters. It amazes me how arrogantly embrace themselves as the "settled, late thirties males with a business school degree and a big ego (and a small???). I don't mind being "the junior" (in fact, I have no experience in this field) or even doing some admin crap, but I refuse to be treated as an inferior and subjected to their unjustified arrogance. Especially when I went to better schools and speak more languages better. But I won't let that be felt because, unlike them, I am not one to brag about my degrees (anyone ever heard of HEC, a business school in Paris?). Instead, I pretend that I am back in primary school and behave like a naughty pre-adolescent. Great.

Enough of this. Last weekend was cool, as planned I managed to capitalize on my pseudo-friendships: Sammy took me to a really beautiful flamenco performance and Mathieu took me to a very special cinema, called the Pagode (a highly ornate, very authentic looking Chinese pagoda) to see (fittingly) 2046, a Chinese movie. (Ode to the motorcycle part 3: he picked me up with his Vespa. No need to repeat, but I will: motorcycling around Paris is a priceless experience.)

Another interesting one for people on the lookout for strange scenes:

"Saturday night, 2 a.m., fancy apartment in Paris, two girls and a guy, a little drunk are discussing the American elections. The doorbell rings and a slightly embarrassed young man of about 25, dressed in a suprisingly nerdy looking beige suit (in sharp contrast to the funky just-out-of-bed hairdo) asks:
- Where is the girl?
- What girl? - responds the woman who opened the door (the only one of the three in the flat who can speak French)
- The girl who is supposed to be my cavaliere, I need to take her to this party next door.
- I am clearly not that girl...not sure what to tell you, maybe you should try the next floor.
- Hmm, um, well...it does not matter. Perhaps you would like to come with me? And your friend maybe? - pointing to the blonde woman who was, by now, standing right behind the brown haired francophile one.
The blonde woman does not understand what is going on and retreats in her boyfriend's direction to the back of the room . Ms. Francophile contemplates accompanying the boy with a smile on her face, but then looks back at the questioning faces of her friends and decides to decline the invitation. As she shuts the door, laughing, she knows that she will regret her decision. END"

It is cold and I have given up pretending that I have something to say about "project planning". I am in my office with three guys discussing some boring proposal: one of them knows what he is talking about, the other two have engaged in a cock-fight of sorts - a "who is the smarter and more important contest" for which my presence and involvment is not necessary. Men can be so tiring. AND they now collectively can't get our (the girls') names right.

This weekend I don't have any visitors so I will try to work on my few existing pseudo-friendships and my thigh muscles. Which is just as well because last weekend in Lille we kept going from one resto to the next (parma ham, oysters, profiteroles, you name it) and I bullied Zazi into buying yummy chocolates at this divine chocolate shop called Le Chat Bleu - twice. It was a wonderfully lazy weekend, although we did socialize with Zazi's various friends: we went clubbing with a well-to-do doctor, his goofy young Finnish girlfriend and some other friends of his; the next day we did a video night a friendly lesbian couple where we - perhaps appropriately - watched Qu'est ce que sexe? a one-man show, the French version of Talking Cock, which is a pretty funny fake-academic analysis of the male sexual organ.

Zazi's friends were nice and entertaining and she was her usual self: openly discussing her sexual escapades with everybody we met, who are all very well versed in the most intimate details of her recently ended long-term relationship. I always tell her that she shouldn't talk to everyone about how horribly mean her ex was to her - my approach to these things is a little different though. I also always tell her that she is very beautiful and interesting and does not need to be too impressed by short, semi-attractive, womanizers wanting to sleep with her...not to say that she shouldn't do it: just with a different attitude.

The American election results are depressing, but I won't share my opinion on the topic because it is not original at all. Since I don't actually know anyone who voted for Bush I am assuming that anyone who reads this shares my feelings. It would be interesting to chat to someone who does not - I had high hopes for a friendly Texan Alcatel employee we took out to dinner a couple of weeks ago, but it turned out that I was being prejudiced. She hated Bush because of his "no child left behind" program, which may be praised by the Economist (and even the New York Times) as the only bi-partisan, positive initiative that Bush came up with in the past few years, but according to her is counterproductive, unfair and disadvantages those who are disadvantaged to begin with. That same night I confirmed to myself that in addition to being prejudiced, I am also culturally insenstive: I asked the Chinese man, who was unhappily pushing around a a huge pile of cheese covered tortellini on his plate, how many children he had. ONE - was the polite answer. What an idiot. Me, that is. Absolute cultural sensitivity and true liberalism and tolerance is hopeless. Anyone who claims otherwise is a hypocrite. Important is to be conscious of this.

As to my management consulting carreer - it has not exactly taken off yet. Every project they put me on seems to die an instant and painful death. T is just as well, I am happy sitting around here with the useless people and just be one of them. Need to root out those communist sentiments I voiced in my previous post, repeat to self: "real work is not only physical labour".

Last weekend Suri (my sister) was here, she was lucky enough to get the last glimpses of warm Parisian sunshine - we had a sweet time. She thought, and I agree, that my neighbourhood is like the quintessential movie-Paris hood. When you switch on the TV and flip through the channels "THE FRENCH MOVIE" is identifiable after about three minutes: cute girl, big-nosed skinny guy, pretentious and unrealistic conversations, you know it. I think all these writers/directors must get their material in the cafes near Montmartre. Scene: fourty-ish, bald man in leather jacket shows up with two artsy-looking heavily pregnant women in their late thirties. They sit down, order a beer each and begin to smoke. Bald man says to cute little black waitress: "I am both kids' father, you know. You don't see that very often, do you?". END - because I left. But I am sure that there was more material to be found.