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...