On Things

I finally have a bit of freedom to read and write things. By things I mean blogs, of course.

My laptop was taken for a fix and for the week and three days it was away from me I anxiously called the fixing centre to enquire about my electronic child and ensure its safety. It’s back safe and sound, thankfully, and I am sitting here in a cafe using it to type these sentences.

In A CAFE?! On a FRIDAY? At 1:23pm?! How is that possible!? Well I booked a couple of days off work you see. I really needed to, I was beginning to go crazy, and growl at people on the street, and froth at the mouth if somebody dared to ask me how my weekend was.

My weekend was the same as every bloody other weekend, Janet, how was yours?

And when I say it, it comes out in a mocking tone, as though I am my brother’s older sister again making fun of what he is saying by adding emphasis to it and jutting my teeth out and crossing my eyeballs.

Anyway so I had two glorious days off and what did I do with them? Did I go hiking? Did I go to the gym, and greedily devour all the books waiting for me on my bedside table? Did I do all the things I daydreamed I would do when I was too busy to do them?

No, of course not. I cleaned my house and watched Harry Potter and had a very long nap.

And those things felt just as good as all the other grand things.

What things do you want to do when you’re too busy to do them?

 

Painting by SheerJoy, Australia. You can buy personalised paintings here!

Oh, hello, stranger.

There is a woman next to me eating a tuna sandwich. Well, I think it is tuna. I can’t be too sure. You never can, with the wide variety of sandwich fillings these days. What happened to good old cheese and tomato? That washes down well with coffee.

This lady is sad, folks. Her face is flushed, and she pulls a tissue out of her coat pocket to wipe her eyes and nose. She also stares vacantly out the window for a while, and her shoulders slump as though the weight of the world is settled on them. She holds herself close to her heart, her knees inwards, her chest bent in on herself, as though she is curling up like a desert leaf to hold herself in and protect herself. Her posture suggests she might be nervous or uncomfortable.

She has a slim notebook in front of her. The cover is black, with green drawings all over it. She is left handed, and writes with her hand bent over her sentences. It is not a way I could envision writing. Her bag is purple, like space, dotted with stars. Her hair is shoulder length and curly, and she wears glasses.

Her eyes are sad, and I want to go and sit next to her and sprinkle some joy upon her day. But I don’t know how to. What would I say?

Hello, I noticed you look sad. Wanna talk about it?

Hi! I’m Lenora. I love your diary.

Oh, hello. Look at these pictures of cute squirrels I found on the internet.

Good afternoon. Do you think you could take a few moments to talk about our Literary Lord and Linguistic saviour John Ronald Reuel Tolkien?

Hi, I really like your hair.

Hello, ….

The possibilities are endless. But none sound remotely right.

Oh. She has put her coat on, and off she goes. Mayhaps she wrote all her sad thoughts in her diary, and now feels relieved to carry on with her day.

Perhaps she wasn’t sad at all, but had hay fever.

I wish I talked to her. I want to know what she has to say.

I don’t know how to talk to strangers though, without seeming like a creep, or uncommonly odd.

Well. Maybe next time.

Meeting in a Cafe

John Singer Sargent (1880)

Today I met a woman in the library cafe.

She came up to me and asked if she could sit at my table, as the library cafe was bustling with people.

I said, of course!

I noticed she looked Arabian so asked if she was Arab.

She was!

We got to talking in Arabic. She was a very intelligent woman. I would put her in her mid-thirties. Very pretty. What struck me the most about her was her thought process. Her thoughts seemed to run a mile a minute. She was explaining something about having a phD and it not really being much of anything unless one chooses to use it for good interaction. I felt as though I was focusing on the fact that she was saying something, rather than what she was actually saying! This made me feel perturbed, because zoning out while someone is telling you something you are dying to hear is not normal, is it? my father is guilty of this habit.

After she left, I thought in horror: I am my father!

Not that my father is a bad person to be. In fact I would be quite chuffed if someone said I took after him. He is a very intellectual man, with oceans of knowledge. It’s just this habit that he has of not really knowing what people are saying to him from time to time. He zones out when people are taking to him. My mum reckons his head is in the clouds. It’s not a bad trait to have. But it does mean you miss out on what many people have to say.

Like me, today.

I think she said that having a qualification means nothing if you can’t apply it in social interactions. Like, for example, it’s well enough for a doctor in medicine to have all the qualifications necessary for practise, but if said doctor doesn’t possess the social skills to be able to interact effectively with patients then there really is no point in that doctor being a doctor at all. I think that was what she was saying. I wish I’d managed to focus on what she was saying.

I just nodded dumbly and agreed with her, rather than contributed to the discussion, so it just trailed off, and I think she probably thought I was an idiot. Or that I was rude for not really saying anything properly back.

She paid me a lovely compliment, though. She said my Arabic was excellent.

Why thank you, kind lady.