Blogworld

It would appear that I am not a particularly successful blogger considering that I hardly ever get any comments to my posts. I get the occasional feedback from my friends (and some of their friends) who read this every now and then and that satisfied perfectly my desire for recognition. Until now. Now that I have read the top ten tips for better blogging, the "how-to-s" and "when-to-s", I feel a little inadequate, and somehow undeserving of the "people of the year" title collectively awarded to all bloggers by themselves and affirmed by various media outlets. So please, if anyone feels like posting just a tiny little word of encouragement that might boost the business value of my blog...(see: google adsense feature).

If not, then that's just as well. I never particularly like to be considered a fashion follower. I managed to survive the winds of Antwerp and came back to Paris with a great desire to be active and focused. So I was. I found a swimming pool just minutes from my flat, I went to a birthday party on Saturday night where I two girls asked for my number (I might eventually get myself a real social life here!) which I didn't take as a blow to my ego, considering that apart from me there was only one woman who was not one part of a couple.

The obvious self-comparison to Bridget vaguely crossed my mind, except that despite knowing better and defying my brother's sensible advice I went to see the second instalment of Bridget Jones in Holland and had no choice but to come out convinced that she is the most irritating, self-involved and pathetic character (up there with Carrie Bradshaw in her later period) and an insult to all single women. No, to all women, really. My problem with them is not that they are no more sophisticated than Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty in their approach to men and love, but that they pretend otherwise and, while waiting for them get to their f*ckin fairy tale ending, you, as the innocent spectator, have to listen to them moaning and whining (and only that!) along the way. So they distort and misappropriate the role of the "single woman" and in their unjustified smugness they make the "marrying kind" look stupid and uninteresing. Ok, perhaps I am sensitive to the topic because I am single an 30. It does unfortunately make a difference - your sensibilities are in a different place. When my new colleague, Sarah, who is 25 and very sweet said of a friend of hers that "she is almost 30 and quite worried about finding a boyfriend" it stung like a bee. Even a year ago it would not even have registered. Objectively all is not lost yet, of course and I still look good for my age, or so they say. But I am afraid of what my perception of how I am perceived does to me - I don't want to turn into a lame moaner who (like BJ et al.) scares all semi-sane people away...

The activity craze stems partly from this fear. I think that I am making a point to myself that exactly because I am 30, (temporarily) single (and relatively rich) I can afford to do lots of interesing things that I couldn't if I wasn't any of these things. I can spontaneously go to beautiful classical concerts; start some insane, new-age yoga where you have to force your body into the strangest of positions in a room heated to 40 degrees celsius (that hurt, but apparently you can loose a lot of weight and keep looking younger for longer - ha-ha, I still have a little Bridge in me after all, I guess); run around the dodgy parts of the city on a Sunday morning, etc. All of this makes me feel (a) more interesting than the fiction based on "us" would have it and (b) like I should actually just try to nail a rich husband and live a life of leasure because really, I don't understand where I should find the time to work...

In yet another Benelux State - this time in Antwerp, Belgium - fighting the consultant's fight. I don't know how much this job suits me. The first hurdle you have to jump through when you show up at an "operational entity" (code language for "people who do things") is to simultaneously deflate the obvious feelings of hostility and disdain all self-respecting operational employee feel towards the outside consultant showing up to "ask lots of questions and get them into trouble with their distant lazyass (non-operational) superiors without knowing anything", and to avoid being taken for a complete fool in the process. I am on my own this time, which means that I cannot play the good cop all the time. I want people to think I am nice so I act like a girl who just happens to be here by accident, doesn't want to be here any more than them, and is very sympathetic to their concerns. At the same time, I can tell that they are feeding me some fairytales and I can sense that they are told to close the ranks and pretend that everything is perfect for fear of being questioned or bullied in the future by the unknown higher powers. It is quite a delicate ground to tread on: I have to ask pretty personal questions (inasmuch as your daily work activities are a personal matter) from people who have been stuck in unbelievably tedious jobs for years, even decades. The fifty-ish, chainsmoking lady I just spoke to this morning has been here for two years longer than I have been alive! She has witnessed and participated in the evolution of the "supply chain" (simply put: sale and delivery of products you manufacture) from the time of the (then modern) punchcard systems to the super complicated SAP softwares of our day. This of course I find depressing. Even so, I prefer speaking to people like her than hanging out with our clients in Paris.

(Antwerp by the way is quite pretty and it is full of trendy bars and restaurants. I had dinner at a cafe last night on my own and was happy to get confirmation from the friendly waiter that I can still pass for a twentysomething student. It is silly but true. The 30th birthday does change your perspective on things even if I know full well that I had no reason to feel any differently three weeks ago. My analysis on that will be for a later post.)

I have not written in ages. And I turned 30 in the meantime, too. That is not why I don't write as enthusiastically though...I just don't know if there still is a point other than self-therapy. A couple of weeks ago I started a draft with this:

"Last week I spent a few days in London and my good friend Bence - the author of my first ever post - asked me what the point of my blog was now that nothing interesting was happening to me. I can refute that claim.  Spending a few days at the Hague offices of Alcatel was interesting, if not necessarily my idea of fun. I had the opportunity to attend the local Christmas party last night, held at the canteen of the office building in the outskirts of the Hague. "Party" is not exactly an accurate description of what went on yesterday, or rather what I understood to be going on. Basically, due to the neverdending cost saving initiatives they stopped taking employees out to nice restaurants and made them believe that somehow it is more sociable and fun to hang out at work, munch on inedible canteen food and drink cheap wine on pretext that it is Christmas. We, the consultants, got invited out of a false sense of obligation and we attended out of misguided courtesy. Result: nobody wanted us to be there and we certainly didn't want to be there. After suffering through a couple of self-congratulatory speeches in Dutch - including the awarding of the "salesman of the year" title - we survived the crappy food and drinks unscathed and even got a ride back to our hotel. This experience was in stark contrast to our own end-of-year party hosted by the senior boss at a fancy-ish Italian restaurant for the consultants and our clients. If anything, the man has style and went for the full package: six-course meal, exquisite wine and entertainment in the form of an attractive, young(ish), wanna-be actress-cum-writer with big boobs and an affinity for Apollinaire and mushrooms (yes, her very own oeuvre was some sort of morality tale using mushroom-men as an allegory). Just to be malicious: the source of real entertainment for most of us was not so much the quality of her writing or her performance; the fun was more in the initially clumsily concealed but progressively more and more freely expressed desire of our boss to bed her right then and there."

This is where I stopped my account of the Dutchmen and the various Christmas parties. Subsequently I attended a couple more of those (including that of my former employer's Amsterdam office - ouch!). They were not that memorable though and it's a new year and a new life, so no more on that. And no more on anything else for now either because I have to go. Back to the gym.