#36 Many meetings

I met someone new at one of London's central stations on Monday. As usual, I'd remembered parts of the directions but forgotten others. Careless. I hadn't even met her yet and she was already angry with me. That's what carelessness does. We had a chat, some back story, some context and then headed to her flat. 

The place was a bit of a mess. I started by assembling one of the cleaning devices and got to work on the windows. It seemed to take an hour or so. I felt a bit like Daniel Larusso. I can't remember the order of the other tasks. Fitting lampshades, changing light bulbs, hanging curtains, setting up the radio, the DVD player, the fitness watch, the vacuum cleaner, the blender, replacing batteries, cleaning and tidying in general, rearranging the wardrobe and fetching meals. It was kinda good to do something useful for a change. A good way of earning some respect too. 

She warmed to me, once she saw beyond the quiet, unenthusiastic person that she first met. Indeed one of work's greatest powers is to engage a person, so that they can then remain engaged outside of work too. She taught me some philosophy, gave me some perspective and pointed me towards more. I had only really been looking for company at the time. When you look hard for something, you often find more things along the way. I stayed until Wednesday and came home much happier in myself.

This blog is still at least weekly but I'm off work at the moment so I'm writing more.

#35 A couple of minor changes

Sometimes at weekends I'll head over to NY Financial Press TV and listen to the market updates. This is largely because I love the flow and fluctuations in the way that Remy Blaire and James Sweeney read the reports. They seem to have started taking clips from the financial news network featuring someone called Donna Sawyer recently but her tone of voice is much more boring.

TGI Friday's is currently undergoing a major rebrand. After successfully removing the apostrophe from its logo in the US, we can only hope that the UK follows suit. Or can we? My personal view on this is that the restaurant should be called 'TGI Friday', or even just 'TGI' because all we're doing then is naming a restaurant after a well known phrase. To pleuralise the phrase doesn't make any sense so far as I can see and to switch it to possessive would highlight the fact that the restaurants or menu items belong to a company named after a phrase, which seems unnecessarily complicated.

Espero que possamos falar novamente no tempo.

#34 Healing up

"How much is it?" I asked. "You want to go now?". "Sure". Ahmed asked me some questions. I told him I was twenty nine, traveling alone and what I did for work. He asked if I was scared. "No", I replied, calmly. He sized me up, puzzled. "You're scared of something" he said. "You're uncertain". "We all have a duty, a reason to be here and you need to figure out what yours is". I knew one thing and that was that I wasn't about to start becoming a Muslim. Ahmed was right though, in fact I was scared of practically everything. Losing my job, being in the wrong job, heart palpitations, getting sick, never finding someone, finding someone but it being the wrong person, not being good enough and that even if I stopped thinking about all these things and really enjoyed life, it might go so fast that at the end, I'd just look back and wonder where the time went. 

I started to feel better after the conversation though and noted with satisfaction that I'd actually met someone on holiday, which was cool. The fear and the guilt vanished for a bit. In fact, it had turned into a puppy. It's strange because I'm really more of a cat person. This takes some explaining. I'd been carrying this guilt around with me for a few days now, thinking it might be useful. All emotions do serve a purpose. I took it on holiday, expecting to feel bad for like a week or two. It seemed like reasonable behavior. I hadn't exactly been the most caring person in the world lately. By the end of the first night, I'd given it a name and an imaginary persona. It was this big grey rock, about eight feet tall that I dragged around on a chain. It wasn't aloud to talk, but it growled and roared. It did this a lot. When I went to the supermarket, it followed, lumbering along and snarling, dragging its feet. It was a bit of a pain in the ass.

I found Ahmed back at the paragliding shack, talking to a family with young kids, who were eating at a next door restaurant. He played with the kids, asked the family questions about them and just made general chit chat. As we waited for the minibus to arrive, I told him what had been bothering me lately. He told me that I should stop thinking about it. I  told him "look, I'm always thinking about something". He said "you should be thinking about yourself, here, now, not about someone else and not about the past, because you can only help someone else if you help yourself". "You're losing yourself and your liver isn't working". "Excuse me?". "That's why you feel so numb. You need to eat three times at the same time every day, eat lots. Eat lots of protein, go to sleep at the same time every day and sleep well." 

This guy had good advice. Ahmed wasn't right about everything. I had no intention of seeking out the bearded guru from the pictures on his camera phone, nor were the couple sitting opposite us father and daughter as he had guessed. Still I took a few pieces of wisdom from him and thanked him. As I ran off the cliff at 2000m with a scruffy, student instructor strapped to my back, I did manage to feel something approaching nervousness. Good, I thought. Focussing on something more fundamental for a change, like how far away the ground was. "You need to move" he said. I shuffled around a bit. "Move" he yelled. I squirmed a bit more. "Is this ok?". "No" he replied. I wondered what the hell he meant by that and if he had any idea where we were. I tried leaning backwards, then forwards and pushing myself up a bit in the harness and finally found a position he was happy with. Phew. We'd be in the air for another 25 minutes. The instructor managed to startle me by doing some G-turns and eventually we landed. I walked back to the shack and thanked Ahmed. Maybe she'll speak to me again one day, maybe she won't. "What's meant to happen will happen" he said. 

I walked back to the hotel, paused and looked around. I think I'm in Turkey.