ere I forget

Short Message Service

2011-05-31T16:03:00.000+02:00

Manon was a late addition. Not in loving memory of some ancestor I never got to meet nor as backdoor option for a name fancy enough to be given, but not fancy enough to be proclaimed at every piano recital and graduation from that point on - but just so that the rest could no longer be shortened to a nazi officer rank. And because it worked well with Sabine. And because Sabine had to stay. Sabine had to stay because Sabine was the result of 7 straight months of bargaining. It had survived 2 theological shifts on my father's part, causing biblical name's to be out, then in, then out of the question again (4 years later Rebecca Naomi would take them all of 2 minutes); a 3 month of truce during which I was called Elin Sunna (an equally meaningfull referece to my dad's Norwegian intern at the time), and some 20 rounds of dubble blind list writing from a library babyname book that was due to be returned several weeks ago, until one name popped up twice.

I regularly tell them they should have stayed with Elin. Elin would have been spontaneous. Elin would have made friend easy just for the sound of her name and Elin would certainly not have spend most of her highschool career roaming forests or cuddling up on the couch with a book.
They're still very fond of their choice. Ms. SM, who is not a nazi officer, just a simple SMS.

currently enrolled in a writing course so I'll be posting little snippits of that here

On Advent and Gratitweets

2010-12-26T16:17:00.010+01:00

I'm grateful for enough food, even though I'm still hungry all the time.

I'm grateful for a soft bed, even though I spend all my days tired despite of it.

I'm grateful I was born into and amazing family. I really miss them all.

On December 18th (a rather random date due to the sponteneity of the idea), my favorite actress suggested on Twitter we'd all tweet her one thing we are grateful for, every day until December 31st. I figured that would be a nice end of year tradition. Giving thanks under all circumstances and all that. We're halfway through now, and I'm running out of ideas. Running out of ideas as in today I was grateful for tea. Turns out I suck at being grateful at the moment. I've spend most of the past four weeks in bed and I'm no longer very succesful at the whole pious suffering thing. I'm glass half empty. Or to be quite hounest, I can only make out about half an inch of fluids in there. I sat up in bed yesterday evening deciding that's pathetic and tried real hard to come up with the numerous blessings I have in my life. I then spent 30 minutes watching all of them being followed by a whiny 'even though...' of some sorts.

I'm grateful for friends that haven't forgotten about me after all these years, and sad for the ones I've lost contact with cos I can't find energy for them.

I'm grateful for the internet and detest the amount of time I spend on it. Or maybe I'm just gonna be grateful for the internet for a bit.

I'm grateful to live in a country with a well functioning healthcare system, even if the best diagnosis they've managed to come up with in over 5 years is still 'you're fine'.

I'm grateful for my parents being in good enough health to take care of me, even though it scares me sometimes where I'll end up when they will no longer be able to do so.

I look up at the prayernote for the 6 year old girl batteling brain cancer above my bed and tell myself to be grateful I'm not dying - a sarcastic 'I can just keep feeling miserable till I'm 78' slips out and I bite my lip. I try again to be grateful for another birthday celebrated, another New Year hailed and I'm grateful for hers. But I can't help remembering 2010 as the year I cancelled both my birthday and Christmas, and spent the two New Year's Eves at home alone.

I am grateful for the upright way the girl's mum blogs about their struggles and their faith and how they clash all the time. There's a real one. Even if I wish she didn't have to.

I'm grateful that I have a roof over my head and walls to keep it up there, even if I'd love to spend some more time outside of it.

I'm grateful I still like the taste of scrambled eggs after 4 years of eating them daily cos they're on the short (very short) list of fuel my tummy will except. I hesitate to write it down or even think it though, cos instead of grateful I start feeling very pathetic.

I'm grateful for enough money to give away from and I yearn to give myself.

I remember Joni Eareckson, a girl paralised from her neck down since she was eighteen. She writes about our tendency to only look at people better off than us, allowing ourselves to wallow in selfpity while we only need to look the other way to turn the scales. I try to look there for a bit. I am glad I'm not worse off, but to call it gratitude would be a bit of a stretch. You don't just feel pain when you made it to the top of the list.

I'm grateful for pretty snow and am dying to play in it.

I'm grateful for Christmas lights even though I wish I'd had more than 3 afternoons of high enough energy levels to enjoy them with a candle and a Christmas cd.

I'm grateful for new neighbors with kids but really wish they'd stop sanding now.

I'm grateful reading other people's gratitweets cos mine annoy me to no end.

I blame Advent.

I love the four weeks leading up to Christmas. I'm a candle burner, a crib builder, a calendar opener. And a Christmas meditator. My head didn't pull off much meditating this year (did I mention I've spent the past four weeks in bed?) but the upside of that is your mind only hangs on to those things that really spoke to you and mulls over them during long boring bed hours. To me this year, it was a sentence from the back flap of the booklet:

Advent is an exercise in longing.

It’s hard to be grateful while letting in the full blow of what you ache for.

I took me a few years to get there, but when I finally accepted I had little hopes of regaining the life I used to live anytime soon, I learned quite quickly that you can't wake up every day wishing you were in college. It's also a bad idea to keep track of all the activities you're missing out on, and if you can't escape them cos, well, your friends are still living your life, you endure them till it stops hurting. Till summer holidays and snow are the only situations in which you still spontaneously feel like hiking, cos they don’t happen often enough to get used to their new reality. You take what you have, and instead of constantly reaching for a place you can't get to, you make yourself at home in a new one. You live a small life instead of the former big one, but at least you're living – you’re not stuck in an ongoing attempt at it that keeps failing. You kill the longing cos it's just easier that way.

Until this month. Now I shamelessly long to get dressed in the morning and shower every day. Because my book said so. I long to step out my front door and then go somewhere. Somewhere that's not a doctor’s office, and without being taken there by someone else. I long to take a 2 hour hike in the snow, and to go ice-skating in the woods. I long to join the Christmas gourmet. While we're on the topic of food: I also long for pizzas and brownies and oven potatoes with Italian herbs and coffee with rum and Chinese take-out. I long to shop for old people when the roads ice up, and to not be the lonely person prayer object on the Christmas calendar. I long to make up for 5 years of cancelled tea parties and dinner dates. I long to go to colllege and to live on my own. I would also like to have a cat.

Okay, maybe this isn't the kind of longing for kingdom come my book was talking about. But then maybe you never long for kingdom come when you've succesfully banned out all need for it.

So maybe this is a first step. Maybe, a few weeks from now, I'll be grateful again for hope and dreams. I may have given up on trying to make life meaningful and instead be waiting for meaning to be given. I may have gotten to the second half of my book's remark: in the expectance that God will fulfill that longing: He comes close. A few weeks from here I may be longing for something always within my reach, even if I still miss friends and brownies. In fact it might be the very thing that gives a brownie including life it's meaning. I may believe again all things work together for good and that it's still the case when I can't see it. A few weeks from now I may be grateful for the Baby.

Try me again mid January. I'm behind a bit, that’s all. I spent the past 4 weeks in bed.

Bathroom talk

2010-12-05T13:45:00.020+01:00

or: the shocking moment when I first realised how close I came to never existing

My gran never lifted her feet properly. She said she did, but she had way more than her share of broken wrists to prove her wrong to the rest of the world. She'd trip over the temporal boardwalk in front of our house, or the last step of the staircase, or her slippers. Or just air. And so one day, when I'd gotten old enough for chores duty and she had her newest cast on, I drove my bike over to their place and let my gran introduce me to one of the wonderous details of her household: bed making.

When you reach your seventies, you have a specific way you like to have things done around the house. I should know; I'm 25, but had my share of experience with other people making my bed for me. The blanket should go all the way into the sheets (no loose ends up at my chin, that feels like the bed hasn't been made in weeks) and the busy print side goes down, only showing when I open the bed.

My grandparents had their own routine: sleeping bags.
Or, something of the sorts. After 50 years of sharing a bed together, they still had their seperate sheets. And in order to make those fit on their not-specifically-wide-bed (so grandma told me while directing my every move), the ends had to be neatly curled inwards. Making sure you could never touch the other person in the bed other than by accidentally slapping you arm across their face, I remember thinking. I asked her how she even got in there at night. She replied they had perfectioned the art of sliding in from the top.

We had some tea afterwards, me cuddled up against the heater, grandpa dosing on the couch, and I asked her how she was getting by. 'Oh, it goes, it goes,' she assured me in her own good fashioned way. 'And it makes for some pretty funny situations too!'

I smiled.

'For example, this morning...'

- from the corner of my eye I notice grandpa waking up -

'.. I wanted to take a shower...'

- grandpa nods and grins, grandma chuckles -

'.. we can do that, you know, we wrap my arm into a plastic bag, and then I sit in the plastic chair and your grandpa washes me, that's a little hard to do with one arm only..'

I nod, grandpa remains the naughty grin on his face.

'But then afterwards, I got into the other chair to get dry, and I thought, well, this I can do by myself! You know, it's less slipery, and the places you can't get to - well, they dry up by themselves anyway.'

Another slightly awkward nod from me.

'But then your grandpa says, he wanted to take a shower too..'

'I felt like taking a shower,' my grandpa contributed.

'So then I said,' - grins and chuckles all around - 'well why don't you take one now!'

'It takes your grandma a while to dry herself,' grandpa explained, still smiling.

'So then there we were!, in the bathroom together, me drying myself while your grandpa was showering..!'

They sent some additional smirks and raised eyebrows back and forward. I threw in another nod.

I swear, how those two every made babies is beyond me.

The last two weeks of life

2010-11-11T11:52:00.009+01:00

Maybe it was bound to happen at some point. Maybe I'm just the kind of person that feels obliged to not let others down and doesn't like to show it when she can't handle things. The kind of person that was't used to, or even very familiar with, not being able to handle something. Maybe this is how I was gonna learn. That I was born with a mind that needs empty evenings on a more regular basis than midnight meetings. That even though I could be a good organiser, maybe a good chair woman even - the other half of me needs her quiet.

Just too bad I had to meet with my cooking skills.

Today, 5 years ago, my life changed. I woke up with an odd feeling stomach. I emptied myself from uphigh and below, and most of what came out was water. I texted my best friend to check if I had made her sick too with last night's dinner. She said no, but had thought I'd been a little liberal brushing hair out of my mouth with fingers that had just been cutting chicken. I had thought the same.

I still remember the date because Friday November 11th 2005 was the morning of the national student conference I'd helped organize over the past year. I was part of a 5 member board and with a small team responsible for providing some 300 christian students with food for thought in the form of workshops and speakers. It had been fun and new and exhilarating, and by November, I was kinda done with it. I had enough issues with the new college challenge of balancing out highschool friends and bridgeyear promo and schoolwork and student union and college friends and church duties and family visits and workouts and the need for money and doing nothing every now then. I got fed up with 2 days and nights a week taken by something I couldn't get out of.

But by the end of October, it was just two more weeks. Skip through m and then go on living. No biggie.

My friend had looked over my dayplanning during class and jokingly added one minute of spare time. I hounestly didn't think it was that bad. Examperiod was only a few days ago. I hadn't cared for the subject matter, and therefore hadn't cared for the grade; couldn't even learn for it as it was a take home essay. I had finally cut out two of the Back Home Obligations - no more Saturday work or Sunday morning kiddy club for me - and had spend my first weekend in Maastricht for no reason other then the heck of it. We had planned our breaks two weeks in advance - lunch at 12:30, coffee at four, and a few extra ones every time someone made your phone buzz. Our first dinner at a student pub ended in a detour through half the inner city to find the best place for dessert icecream. The following nights we took turns cooking. I remember how we fried up all of Judith's freezer contents and how we passed around an 'examweek is' list through the UL. I remember the giggly churchservice that provided 'strenght for today and bright hope for tomorrow' with a whole new meaning the day before the exams. How we vowed to study till 10 PM; how I gave up by 8:30 and how I got a call 20 minutes later, if I was in for The Matrix. It had arguably been two of the most relaxed college weeks to date. So really, how much harm could two weeks of utter stressfullness do?

Cos yeah, stressed out I was. The Monday after exams saw the first lecture of a course on multiculturalism. It was basicly why I went to college there in the first place. School had been slopping a bit. I was told that's what you do as a student and I still get B's while slopping. But this I wanted to do and I wanted to do it right. The teacher announced the course needed some extra input from us, to stay up to date with a few established newspapers and get a feel for the public discussion. She also added the first 3 weeks where gonna take the most of us. If that wasn't gonna work for us, we could approach her.

It hit me that I should probably do that. Cos I was gonna be pretty much non-available for the two weeks leading up to the conference, and might be kinda drained the week after. I didn't. Cos she didn't look like the kinda person that thought much of extra-curricular activities. Cos comparing the course and the conference work, at that point I didn't either. And cos even though in that instant the realization there was no way to stuff all I needed to do in the time I had for it completely overwhelmed me, I couldn't bring myself to give up in the one thing I actually wanted to be doing.

And so, I stuffed in the 700 things I needed to do in my already pakced scedule and for the next 10 days felt like I was drowning. I think I felt that was normal. That and the fact that I was too ashamed to admitt I couldn't handle it. But that's what you do. You score less than B's. You do a ton of things besides studying, not curl up with tea or take a solitary walk in the woods. It was the first time I explored that side of me, that I wasn't the girl on the side watching, that I got asked to take the lead and that I could pull that off and have fun doing it. So this was what normal people feel. When it's too much, you stress out. When you bump into a limit, you push a little harder. When you're exhausted you keep going. When you feel lousy, you ignore that for a bit. You just keep doing what needs to be done, and then you can enjoy the weekend you worked so hard for and rest up afterwards. It'll blow over. You will have lived.

Except it didn't blow over. I made chicken for my bestie and her boyfriend who were in town and who, like everyone else, I hadn'd seen for too long. And then it all fell apart. I dragged myself out of the bathroom and off to the conference that morning, hoping I had just got rid of whatever it was that made me feel funny. But ofcourse I got as sick as I'd ever been. I spend two weeks at home walking into walls I thought should have been gone by then. I caught on to another 2 weeks of autumn flue. And when I finally felt better again, something else had introduced itself. Something that made biking hard and shops move and wouldn't go away.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I know. That's something's really off when in the following year you loose 18 pounds while eating twice as much as you used to. Something's off when the mechanism that makes you feel satisfied after eating seems broken, cos even when you stuff yourself to the point of gagging you still feel like you're about to faint from hunger. And those were the good moments. Something's messed up when leaving out thyme and rosemary and about a dozen other ingredients from your sauce suddenly dóes make it fill you up. Kinda. Something's not right when unpacking a hedgehog home makes you heart skyrocket to the 130's, when every tepid shower on a plastic seat with the windows wide open puts you in bed for half a week, when going somewhere makes the world shake and look fuzzy and actually registering what someone says to you takes all the energy you've got. People stress out and push themselves over limits and get sick on wrong moments and fall down hard. And give or take a few months of hitting into walls, they bounce back up again. They don't feel like they went running 5 miles in the rain with a bad case of the flue 5 years later every time they have to take a step out of their house. And I know it doesn't help when no one can tell you why and you and your dazed head have to find these things out by years of trial and error and attempting to focus on the newest googled guidelines where 9 different camps of medics tell you to exercise more or do less or see a shrink or change your diet or take supplements or hold vibrating balls or do the stuff you like, without telling you hów exactly. Kindly adding that the worst thing you could do is listen to any of their colleagues' advice. I know all that.

But sometimes my thoughts wonder back to those two weeks, and I want a little more. Something more solid. I want someone to tell me what's wrong and that I didn't do all of this myself, that I didn't screw up in such a gigantic way that it not only cost me my life, but also the right to feel any for form of bad about it, the right to expect any form of sympathy. I wanna visit the girl I was 5 years ago and steal her agenda. Undo the parts I did. Turn away the threat of impending doom I can still feel when I think back on those weeks. Scratch out the Saturday bridgeyear reünion and the Sunday family circus visit, somehow inprint on her that the classes I had been looking forward to for a year and what not could be postponed by two weeks. To make some choices and not commit a part of myself to 20 different causes. I want a second chance and I want to do it right this time.

Mostly, I wanna tell her to stick with what was orginally in my shopping basket - pasta sauce. A bunch of veggies, mashed tomatoes and minced beef. To not put all the ingredients back cos I remembered boyfriend Willem was too good a cook for something student fashion like that.

Not sure why I thought instant sauce with chicken would be more impressive.

Writers blog

2010-09-15T14:51:00.026+02:00

As a kid, I had pretty simple wishes. I was the smart one and therefore usually ended somewhere at the top of whatever quiz adults organized to get us more interesting in what they were trying to teach. And so I had first choice in the prizes department. Much to the joy of my friends, I imagine. If the girl scout leaders had arranged a full table of dolls and bears and cups and survival kits, I chose the compass. It was small and round and they probably got it for free buying beer cos it has a Heineken label at the bottom of it. I know this cos it is still on my desk. They thought I was being modest and tried to talk me into taking the bidon. I had been pretty relieved the 3 kids before me had overlooked the prime subject on the table and desperately held onto it while shaking my head, unable to understand why they'd think a waterbottle would be more interesting than a needle that always points north.

In school, the stakes were even higher. In school, my teacher would usually throw in a few notebooks.

For as long as I can remember, I've gotten a high out of blank, lined paper, and a pen. And that weren't just your everyday notebooks on the table, mind you. Though I still have one of those too, with a chicken on the front. The ones we used for geography and Dutch. All for me to give purpose to. But the next time, there would be an A4 sized notebook with a perfect shade of blue cover, and a white field on the front to give it a title. Or the summum of all notebooks: one with lines on the one page, and nothing on the opposite one. For an image of some sorts, I imagine. I don't quite recall what I was planning to do with that one. Drawing frustrated me cos no matter how hard I tried, what ended up in my notebook never by a longshot resembled the beauty or peacefullness or feeling of what I had been trying to capture. It's probably why I turned to words instead. Maybe I got it in my photography fase, after a great-aunt gave me a camera for Saint Nicolas Eve when I was 9. That seemed sheer perfection for a while. Although I locked myelf in the bathroom and cried when I got it; not a simple gift by far.

I remember those notebooks because those too I still have. They sit in my cupboard, still blank lined, still getting me high when I come across them. I've never actually used one. What ended up in there, in the summum of all jackets, had to be one, and brilliant, and neat - and even at that young age I knew that the proces of writing is neither.

I pulled the blue one out this morning. Because I'm going to write a book. After years of keeping diaries in 1 dollar college blocks, after years of keeping an online weblog and after the world has seen the rise of Microsoft Word, I layed in bed last night thinking my book notes beter be organized in a separate booklet, instead of being shattered all over the pages of my moleskine (moleskine!, now those are made for me! simple, ánd ultimately writer fancy). And then wondering about where I'd get myself a simple notebook, I realised I still have some.

So the blue A4 notebook I won when I was 8 years old now lies at my desk beside me. It will be filled with messy scriblings, frantic summeries, ugly scedules (I still can't draw) and a bunch of arrows trying to make sense of it all. After which all of that will end up in a neat Word document I'll be able to change untill it's perfect without messing the whole thing up.

I'm gonna write the title in the white window now.

Really, I will in a bit.

Roots

2010-09-07T19:01:00.039+02:00

I first thought my grandparents just didn’t like to talk much about the war. I know heaps of details from the moment they met – how they lived next door to each other; grandma being a tomboy with one brother 6 years older than her and one 6 years younger was very excited about the 11 children that moved in next door. Especially as 8 of them where boys . How she used to play outside with uncle Henkie, who was her age and liked to roam the streets of Amsterdam as much as she did. She never laid eyes on my grandpa. He was three years older than her and way too serious a dude in her opinion. Plus she wanted to marry a tall guy with blond hair and blue eyes that loved sailing. And my grandpa couldn’t swim. He did notice her. Even asked her parents for her hand, but they politely told him to come back when she was eighteen. And so he did. By that time ‘serieus’ had turned ‘intriguing’, much as his dark hair and eyes. After that there’s a lot of stories featuring a shared balcony and a poorly constructed dividing wall.

I know these things, but I know little from before. Come to think about it, that’s probably cos my grandpa didn’t like to talk, period. It’s my gran who told me the stories above and he’d just sit there grinning as she went on about their early love life and I’d cuddle up to the heater behind me and do the same. It’s my gran’s side of the war that I know best too, even if it’s from a kid’s perspective. She was 10 when the war started. Living in Amsterdam meant living in the exact place where food ran out first and so she was send up north to a farm out in the country quite early on. She always remembered her first night out, scared as a little chicken, spending an overnight with a family that had not spoken one word to her the entire time she was there. But after that the biggest trauma I’ve heard of was losing her flat Amsterdam accent and returning to the city with a country one =) Which her youngest brother Henk never let us forget. He was send out to the far south farms years later, and having learned the lessons of his teased older sister well, he decided he would not pick up on a single sound that wasn’t city like. He succeeded quite well till someone caught him yelling at a dog that was trying to bite its own tail, ‘fat je steertje, fat je steertje!’ Grab your tail. Except the orginal dutch is ‘pak je staartje’. You do the math. Everyone remembers that incident. No one remember my gran’s complete idiom change. And so Henk took it upon himself to regularly remind us of it.

Another story of hers I remember is one that actually made me tear up a little, even though it’s by far the least dramatic one I’ve heard. She told me when I dropped by one time, still finishing the last bit of nougat I picked up on the way there - the square shaped, ultra flat kind, covered in a thin layer of chocolate. It was my newest candy obsessions and it had been hers for a long time as well. But when she was growing up, there was little of anything and that included candy. Food was distributed by monthly coupons. As my gran’s mum was a single mother to 5 children during war time, she had a hard enough time figuring out how to get enough food on the table and so she’d usually forget about the candy. Even though my gran made sure to remind her twice daily. So at the verge of desperation, my great-grandmother gave her a coupon.

My 10yearold mind could still very well fathom the enormity of that gift. The strange power when you were handed 10 cents and could pick out your own kind of licorice. Being exposed to this huge amount of candy and having to make your own choise there. The need for coupons on top of that was something straight out of a children’s book.

She dropped by at the candy shelf in the grocery store every day, and after a few days had narrowed it down to two options: a string of wine gum, and the chocolate covered nougat square. She continued to drop by every day, weighing her options, cautious to spend her one coupon on the best kind of candy there was. Till one day she noticed the date on the coupon had already passed. I think what makes me sad is that she still remembered it 60 years later.

What I remember about grandpa mainly comes in bits and pieces from the rest of the family. I know his older brother was in the resistance, so deep that he spend a great part of the war in hiding. I vaguely remember a story about him being chased down on a train, escaping only by jumping off of it while it was riding. But that was indeed filed under ‘stuff we don't talk about’.

Grandpa being a few years younger was kept away from that stuff and lined up to bring around the resistance’s illegal info bullitins. He once told me about the time when the door swung open as he tried to deliver one and an NSB’er, at dutch guy who had switched to Nazi side, stood in the doorway. He turned around and ran as fast as he could. Spend weeks waiting to be picked up, or shot, or something. And never heard from it again. He spend the rest of the war wondering if the guy was just under cover, or if maybe NSB’ers had a heart.

And maybe even Germans had one. He spend most of the war working at the railway station, that saw a lot of German soldiers being transported. He didn’t particularly like German soldiers. Till one of them gave him a good pair of shoes, that were kinda hard to come by in a family of eleven. Maybe even Germans had a heart. And maybe you didn’t want to know where he got a spare set of boots.

Inspired by Tash and her Pop =) Would love to hear everyone else's stories about their roots!

Had I mentioned the view yet?

2010-06-20T18:57:00.003+02:00

ow yeah, that's right. I did.

Switzerland recap

2010-06-20T15:06:00.021+02:00

- Arrival after a 13 hour trip was the kind of moment when your average PP character would declare with a delighted smile how this was all so worth it, while concerned doctors are still looking for a polse. Arrival was the kind of moment I promised myself I was never gonna get futher than a 100 feet away from my bed again when I'm sick, let alone drive my sorry ass to Switzerland, no matter how much money and inconvenience I'm costing. Cos it is só nót worth it. Even if the recovery by some miracle only took me a day or two. And taking the insane view into account, that is saying something

- Note to self: audiobooks are a great way to survive 13 hour car rides. However, do not listen to one about a homicidal maniac going after your main character at a secluded house in the woods, when you yourself are staying at such a secluded house and your bedroom has 6 by 8 ft. doors facing a dark forest. It will seriously damage your ability to sleep.

- The ants outside my bedroom doors brought out the inner boy in my dad. He attempted to 'freeze them' with a can of toilet refresher, main effect being a bunch of good smelling ants that collectively took a moment to wash themselves.

- Dad also saw a fox. In an attempt to rise above my childhood's complete lack of imagination, I named him Mulder.

- Week overview: 1 day journey, 1 miserable day in bed, 1 day up and about doing too much, 4 days of being a good girl and getting rid of a cold in bed, 1 day shower, 1 day post-shower-recovery, 1 day trying out if I can take sun heat and discovering that I can’t, 1 day recovering from that, 3 days in a cloud, trip back.

I suppose it was always gonna be a fuss. The fuss I subconsciously anticipated the moment doc #5 suggested I'd go to Switzerland and killed my sleep. You don't send a chronically ill patient on a trip. Would love to do this again now though. Without the hot summer sun, start off cold, 5 AM wake up calls cos I could not for the life of me obscure the huge glass doors that were my bedroom window, and all the getting used to stuff. I know how to do it now. I'd sleep and be prepared and see sun and even be able to enjoy it.

I always had this idea I'd either feel better there and be cured, or at least have been on holidays. I feel like I should tell either one of those stories to everyone keeping their fingers crossed for me - that it was good, one way or the other. Not sure how to report two miserable weeks that not seem to have helped me, while I can't even tell that for sure. Will ask doc somewhere this week if my few hours outside with overcast weather were enough to really prove anything. I feel some misplaced sense of guilt over it, along with the disappointment cos even though I had strictly forbidden it to hope, my subconscious used the sleepless hours to plan an academic carreer at UCLA in detail. If I had just... I suppose if I had been able to just..., I wouldn't have had to go there in the first place.

And hey, I did see mountains :)

Almost happy

2010-06-02T22:16:00.016+02:00

There's a strange dynamic about being ill. Being ill on top of being ill, I mean. Garden variety cold meets CFS. I hate it when I feel it coming. I resist with all my might the feeling of extented exhaustion I fear my body can't take. I feel like I've already crossed my yearly quotum of feeling miserable and it's unfair of the universe to rub in some more. To have my heart pound out of chest and feel like I'm out of breath the minute I utter a sentence or eat a sandwich. The heavy head and the stinging eyes. The way my entire body feels the way your legs feel after a 15 mile hike. A fatigue so extreme it has me laying flat in bed feeling it is too much of an effort to even turn over or reach for a water bottle. To feel that exact same level of tired after three straight days of bed and every night's sleep.The feverish feeling that takes over every time I dare get out of bed and eat something. Having to let go of even those very few things I can still pull off in a day.

But then there's this moment.
When the fighting doesn't work and I have no choice but to give in to the extended missery - something happens. Acception takes over, and with it comes a downright cheerfullness. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but I know it's there with every new cold, sure as the runny nose and the spaghetti legs. I'm happy. I guess that now that I really can't do anything, I'm no longer obliged to try. I'm finally excused to do absolutely nothing. I can stop the fight. And I can take up one I know the rules to, one I know how to win. Lie still for three days. Eat vitamines. And asperines. Wipe nose. Rub Vicks. When I do that, it takes of week of misery and another one of recovery, and then I'll be fine again. Till then, I get to taste the long forgotten experience of feeling a little better every day and knowing how to gard that. Maybe it's cos the little I usually can pull off suddenly feels like being fit, and I know I'll have that again a few weeks from now. Maybe it's being forced back to life cos I'm too out for even most forms of procrastination. Maybe it's being forced to tackle chronique misery again, and retrieve some of the answers that usually get lost in an ongoing battle to try and live a little. Whatever it is, it makes me relax and give in and lay back for a bit. And be as happy as I'll ever be.

Untill it stops again. I push through a little longer, more bed, more vitamins - I still feel lousy. And then I realise that this is normal lousy again. From here on, I can pop and rubb and sleap and get up whatever I want, but nothing's gonna change. This is as fine as I'll get. From the weeks behind me I take with me a hint of peace, not being obliged to take up the world anymore, simply because I can't. And a renewed addiction to wanting a little more.

Beasty go?

2010-05-11T18:34:00.012+02:00

I was seventeen and had just graduated highschool; my mum had a collegue with two young daughters and a babysitter with a hernia. And so I babysat. I'm a fun babysitter, let's have that clear before we get to the more embarasing parts of this story. I passionately read stories to the diapered sweethearts when they hop on my pillow at 6:45 AM to hear about Noah's ark. I have snowballfights with half the kindergarten when I drop them off at school in the morning and arrive at my first class mildly soaked. And the following story is before and above all an account of my most heroic babysitting act to date.

Just to have that clear in advance.

The youngest was two year old Kelsey, and Kelsey had a little sheep for a stuffed animal. Named Beasty. Yes, we tried to turn that into Whity, Wooly, Lammy and Patrick-Henry. It failed. Now I'm not really in a position to judge. My stuffed banana was called Banana. My popple was called Popple. I had a bird named Bird, a panda named Panda, another panda that was convienently also called Panda, and the undefinable creature with the nose you could suck on, I named Sucklenose. My alltime favorite was a ladybug kinda thing I named Beast. Like I said, no comments here. And Beasty sounds kinda sweet coming from a lisping two year old. Beasy.

The fase of dragging Beast behind me everywhere I went I did skip. Or at least I don't recall my mum telling me stories about searches on hands and feet, or the every ten minutes recurring question 'Oh! Beasy go..?' That could very well be because my mum's answer to that would probably have been something along the lines of 'where you last dropped 'm outa yer hands'. But I'm a sucker for blond pigtails and chunky hands raised in despair. And so, several times an hour, I undertook the journey through the livingroom, from behind the couch and under the diner table, along long forgotten plants and the backside of the DVD collection - Beasty was never anywhere in sight - untill I found a dusty sheep between the freezer and the fridge where - ah, right - she had been playing with magnets five minutes ago. 'Ah!, Beasy..!' she'd say with a pointing little finger. Sounding like she had just personally discovered America.

Because I'm a fun babysitter, I don't spend my days making money reading when I have 2 little girls appointed to me for 3 whole days a week. Nope. I make baths in the backyard. I build glorious sandcastles at the playgrounds. And when I was in a really good mood, we'd undertake the somewhat longer journey to the park. I'm fun, and I'm very responsable. When in buggy, Beasty was to be all but strangled while driving, and Beasty stayed in that buggy when we made our way to the aviary and the slides. Blond pigtales and sad pouts in vain. Fun yet inexorable I was. Fun yet inexorable, untill 4 year old Alana ran up an exceptionally high bridge, crossing an exceptionally wide canal. And I grabbed Kelsey out of the buggy without further thinking and also made my way up there. High up on my arm you can then point to the pretty duck behind me, and when I turned, I saw something white fly from the corner of my eye.

Oh! Beasy go?

'Beasy fell in 'he canal..!' In that exceptionally broad canal, with that exceptionally high bridge over it. Way out of reach of all the sticks in the world, but we weren't quite ready to embrace that conclusion yet. That took 15 more minutes of roaming the bushes with Alana while Kels was stuck in her buggy, looking at an exceptionally high bridge, chanting 'Beasy go...?' Till Beasty started floating towards the Wide Open Pond, and the floating slowly turned sinking.

And so, I swam. Or, refrase: I made my way through 5 inches of water and an infinite amount of swampy dirt. And then walked a straight line home. Alana staring at the wet cirkels appearing on my jeans, me ditching up all kinds of algae from my bra, Kelsey hanging out of the buggy trying to catch a glimps of the smelly heap of wet sheap in the net underneath her.

I haven't even seen them too often after that summer. Every now and then, on birthdays. Every time the question's the same: 'Still remember who that is?' The name takes them awhile. They've long forgotten about me showering myself in the backyard bath with momma's handsoap. But the question is usually answered long before it's even asked, by a look of pure awe. 'You got my Beasty out of the water.'

Damn right I did.

Whistle class

2010-04-04T22:02:00.043+02:00

In our windowsill sits a small, round box, made out of soft chinese paper. In it rest some 99 leaflets with sayings on them, carefully rolled up to little tubes, all snuggeled in there with their heads looking up. It's my mum's box of wisdom. You're meant to randomly pick a saying each day and carry it with you throughout it. It's also my niece's favourite object in our entire house.

She first discovered it when she was a year old, caressing the soft box that seemed to be made out of velvet leaves and flowers. At 2 she spend endless hours frantickly trying to get her little fingers to work the tweezers after all other ways of getting the paper to leave the box had failed. At 3 she finally figured it out, and then spend every birthday at our house carefully taking out the paper rolls, doing some rolling and unrolling and training her little fingers to tuck them back in. By the time she was 4 we were first asked to read them out loud. She didn't understand a word of it, didn't really try to either - it had just come to her attention that those weird little signs carried a meaning, or just a sound even, and it had thereby become part of her game to get them deceivered. Sounded. She was 5 when she first started listening. Carefully chewing on the words, turning them around in her mind till she was ready to pass a verdict.

'Love thy neighbor as thyself.'

'Yup. True.'

'It's not over till it's over.'

'Duh....'

'The ink of the wise outlasts the blood of martyrs.'

'Hmmm... that's odd...yuk.'

'Giving up is the surrest way to loose.'

'Yeah that's true cos if you give up you never get to the finish line, so how are you supposed to win?'

I don't think any conversation with a 5 year old has amused me as much as her giving the heads up to Jesus.

She's 6 now and came to my sister's birthday yesterday. The box didn't get lot of attention. We did a brief contest on who pulled out the greatest quote and earned an extra one - me, by far; 'the biggest failure is to never try at all', earning me a slightly disappointing 'new brooms sweep clean' - but she quickly turned to giving me whistle lessons. Some of the more fruitfull out of my 182 attempts so far I might add, though still well into the realms of pathetic. I produced some weird noises to compensate and she laughed and told me about a girl in her class who did the same thing. Only this Nicole girl kept insisting she cóuld whistle. Which, my niece emphasised, the girl could as much I did.

'It's understandable though,' she added. 'She has two older brothers and she wants to be better than them. But she can't, and so she wants to be the goodest of us.' I nodded. She then put a notebook on my lap because kindergarden is boring her and she wants to practice her writing. 'Maybe we can make it a game!' she went on, all excited. 'We can make numbers and words and stuff, and then we can see who draws the prettiest 8, or the best horse!' And as I set out to draw the most miserable 8 I could think off: 'So we can learn that it's okay when someone else is better at stuff than we are.'

She trew me her most radiant smile and I put the wisdom box back into the windowsill. I swear, by the time she's 7 she will outwise the lot of them.

Pffffft

Doctors visit

2010-03-13T13:27:00.029+01:00

I had polished my nails for him. I doubt that he noticed, but I did. The way I noticed my also polished toenails and the clean socks and heeled boots that held them. I came prepared this time. Usually I don't notice how straight-out-of-bed I look until 15 minutes before leaving the house. When the unfamiliar feeling of denim touches my hips and I try to remember how make-up works again. When I realise legs need shaving more often and that I should add some decent wintershoes to my collection of ancient sneakers. But not today. I can't help the pale face or the unwashed hair, but at least my nails are polished. I get to feel somewhat dignified while being shoved into the role of helpless patient again.

His mind is still with his last case when I walk in, and I let him ponder. 'Complicated, complicated.' I smile. 'You guys are pretty much experts at everything that looks like CFS but isn't, huh?' He looks up. 'We're experts in tired. I suppose that covers... all of medicine..?' He doesn’t seem too pleased with it.

It's been four years since I first sat across from a quite doctor. I felt misarable beyond what I'd ever felt and he told me I was fine and I knew then. My agenda for that week said 'essay due date' and to call back Judith to inform her whether or not I was up for the chairman function next year. Instead, I was gonna be one of those people. The ones that just remain ill for no apparent reason.

By now I'm used to quiet. But after some more pondering, this one actually starts talking. Something about rheumatism - '...that isn't rheumatism' 'no, it's not' - and auto-immune reactions. About illness and cells breaking down and bacterias clustering and triggering it - '..?..' 'yeah, like I said, it's complicated'. And whether I felt better in Spain? 'Never been to Spain. It's hot there.' 'Switzerland then?' 'My dad's scared of heights.' 'Wanna go there?' 'Sure.'

He tells me about people who just need three days there, and then fully function again. Something with short waved light and the human immune system. It's gone when they enter the train back home - 'that doesn't really help then, does it?' - but at least they can take holidays from their illness. 'I'm not gonna help you ignore the signals your body sends you so you can cross your limits. I do have a fun light cabinet here though, I would love to try out on you. So do me a favour. Go to Switzerland for me.'

I shake his hand and click my heels and tell my mum we're gonna see the mountains. I also think he just acknowledged that I'm sick, and even threw a theory at me as to what it might be. I then exchange my jeans for trackpants again. Look up chalets and post polls comparing Switzerland and Gran Canaria and forget to inform anyone about the news. I suppose I don't really believe him. I expect to be tired in Switzerland and loose my one shot at a valid excuse for it, just to be stuck with 'you're fine' again. I guess at least I will have seen mountains.

Quarter life crisis

2010-03-09T13:02:00.015+01:00

Jude was here. She came on a Saturday because the commute around Amsterdam would have been unbearable on a weekday. Last time we met, we didn't think about that. We would have used public transport, transferring times for anything south of Amsterdam, north of Maastricht rolling smoothly from our memory, having used it on a more than weekly basis for years. Cars were an unknown luxury sometimes borrowed from our parents, when we had decided to concur the Alps over the weekend. I suppose they still are. Parents borrowed luxury. Except we don't concur Alps anymore. And living with your parents again makes the luxury a little less 'unknown'. After all, we are adults now. Driving cars is what we do. On lost Saturday afternoons, we drive them over to eachother and remember when we didn't.

Pictures of that time are now neatly ordered in albums, the result of some carefully conducted grieving proces. We take them in with greed and an appropriate amount of 'oh yeah..!'s The old citywalls where we spend our coffee breaks. The riverbanks where we played soccer till it was too dark to see the ball anymore. Where we jammed torches into the earth and drank cheap whine from plastic cups and watched the stars rotate above us. A sheet of paper that was passed around the library, scribbled on till there was no white left, entitled 'Examweek is...' Too much coffee. Walking half the city to find the best icecream place in your break. Coming in the UL so often that after a week you cannot for the life of you remember where you put your coat this time. There's the pictures of initiation rituals, first years standing in 'our' creek at 1 AM to sing the union song, and the one's from when we baked 1284 waffles in Ben's backyard.

It's the names we like best. Saying them outloud again, to someone who knows them too. Hannah, Joris, Rik, Christine, Andrea, Rob, Willeke, Wubbo. Some twenty more. To be a part of that group again. Just for a moment. Ignore the weddingcards we got sent, even today, and be us for a bit. Until the albums disappear in bags and on shelfs again. She goes on applying for 7 more traineeships. Maybe somewhere next year someone will take her. I sit some more couches. We are now waiting for the rest of our lives to happen.

Introducing...

2010-03-08T20:44:00.009+01:00

Yes, I caved =) I have no idea yet how this will go, but, for starters, here's a little introducing me & my family.

There's the 20 yr old sister who works the cashregister at our local supermaket and knows everyone. She has a soft spot for elderly women with dogs, who, in turn, will shuffle half an extra block to be served by her. She also seems to have charmed Horny Guy From Upstairs, who is said to be God’s finest male creation to date and usually picks up his coke, chips and sigarettes in three separate rounds.

My mum is solely responsable for keeping the local swimmingpool organised, one ignorant female collegue snuggled up with a dude named Dave who patiently shows her how to work Paint, her boss wishing mum had her social skills. When she's not there, odds are she's visiting my grandpa who lives in the elderly home down the road. He has a bladder infection every other week and tells great stories about the walking houses in the street and his frequent trips to Spain where he meets up with the national soccer team. On his brighter days, his eyes glisten below his silvery white hair as the nurses complement him on his looks, and he informs us that he’s ready now to go and be with this wife again. I think he pretty much lives on the candy and liquor my dad brings him.

Dad runs the educational programm of a hospital. He’s a proud dutchman who daily bikes the 10 k’s to work through whatever horrors Dutch wheather throws at him. The 5 days a year when he’s forced to take a bus and is ‘crammed in with a lot of smelly wet people’ are among his crankiest. On drizzly Sunday afternoons, him and I like to watch rugby together. Someone has yet to inform us about the rules, but we have good times giving points for best tackle and prettiest Irish accent. Or Welsh. Or Scottish. Or whatever it is we’re listening to.

And then there’s me. I liked to think that at 24, I'd be blogging about something other than the weirdness that is my family - say, the subrented appartment in some far away town; the writing of in-depth philosophical articles on the background of our multicultural society; anecdotes that flow out of giving integration courses, or the social mapping I had done for some political research agency. In a more realistic universe, the joys of one final streched year of college life.

Instead, I sit couches.

I have pre-breakfasts at 4 o’clock in the morning and feel hungry for most of the other 23. I occasionally shower and spend the two next days of extended exhaustion feeling very proud of myself. I visit doctors who tell me there’s nothing wrong with me, or, on good days, that I’m weird. I get angry at people telling me I should just get over myself, and at the part of me that believes them. I watch tv shows to see something else and start blogs to grasp some everyday reality. I spend long afternoons with a pen in my hand thinking of what that might be.

Mostly I’d do anything for a project and even more for a sense of me.

Today, I succeeded at both.