The Bad Lift

Every morning, I take Bus 92 from Place de Marechal Juin to Charles de Gaulle Etoile. From there I take the RER A to La Defense. Every morning, I buy a couple of freshly baked pain au chocolat for breakfast.Every morning, I rely on probability to give me a sign of what the day holds for me.

I am not superstitious, merely bored. You see, we have three lifts in our building. Two perfectly fine ones and one that looks like it has been gutted and was a scene in some Terminator movie. With its wires hanging out, and its the flourescent lights (that were supposed to illuminate softly, hidden behind a steel panel),  open to the world and starkly visible on one side of the elevator thereby making everyone look older and even more tired than usual. The walls were covered hastily in a sickly green carpet, as if that would make it look any better. I wonder what they were hiding. A printed out sign, in Times New Roman, tells the story of the elevator, ‘Attention…’ it says. Since the rest is in French, the story is lost to me.

Every morning, if the first thing I get is The Bad Lift, it’s a sign that the day will be interesting.

This morning, I took the Bus 92 from Place de Marechal Juin to Charles de Gaulle Etoile. From there I took the RER A to La Defense. This morning, I bought a couple of Pain au chocolat for breakfast. Freshly baked.  This morning, I relied on probability, and the odds were against me. I got the bad lift.

I said I wasn’t superstitious, so I ignored that little signal of doom. I don’t believe in bad luck anyway. It was a busy day workwise, but that was normal. There were guests so I had my usual awkward social situations with them. Normal. I had a web conference, and that went fine, except that it was generally a waste of time. But that’s normal too.

It was almost the end of the day, so I decided to go to the toilet first to pay homage to the throne. I had to get out of the office, since the toilets were just outside, in front of the Lifts of Fate.

I do my thing (number 1 ok =P), and flush. As I turned to get out the door, my security ID flew off it’s loose case and landed straight into the flushing toilet. It circled a bit and disappeared. That was the longest flush I’ve seen in my life. My horrified eyes could do nothing but watch it go down. Drowned, gone forever, to the sewers of Paris.

Outside the toilet doors, the Lifts of Fate watched on. Tomorrow is another morning.

Rainy days

The rainy days of late brought me back to being 12 again. May was always notorious for bad weather. Some people have a knack of keeping sparkling clean despite the mucky streets. Not me. I always used get muddy streaks at the back of my trousers when I walk and even my habitual biking would give me the splashes of sludge down the back of my shirt.

I recall the big, blue plastic container we have at the back of our old house, the one that we use to trap rainwater from the eaves. There was a lack of running water back then, and we would try to collect water whenever we can.

I remember the hot, sticky humidity that clings to the silence before the storm.

It can sometimes come like a curtain of water. It starts out as an April’s Fools day of sunshine – the complacent belief you can leave your umbrella at home.  When it starts, there’s that smells that brings all the memories back, of the earth and the air being cleansed. I would look out from the dry comfort of our door and reach out my hand, hesitating slightly as if the raindrops could hurt. It has to be a certain intensity to be perfect for bathing. Not too light, cause that’s just boring and not too heavy to be scary. It had to be just enough to completely drench a twelve year old in shorts and a cotton tank top in about 5 seconds of exposure.

When it felt right, I would rush in, and the sound of rain would overpower everything else.

Today

I feel like shit today. To make it a happy day, I headed over to Mango to get a pair of jeans. I have only one pair of jeans with me here (my other pairs of jeans are in the UK and the Philippines). My current one, clearly overused, is slowly unraveling and revealing (in tiny, distressed windows) the color of my underwear. 

Skinny jeans are here again, but I didn’t want anything to do with that 1980’s remake. I made that mistake once and never again! Skinny jeans are for skinny people and with MY hips…no way, it’s just a disaster on me. I opted instead for a nice dark blue pair of boyfriend trousers. Still sexy and chic, but balances my hips with a straight, slightly flared cut. It was my lucky day cause it only took an hour for them to alter the length. It can sometimes take days.

So I thought shopping would make my slump go away. Well, it didn’t. It was a shame cause it was such a sunny day, and I could have done something incredibly interesting and bloggable.

But I didn’t want to. I just wanted to go back to my apartment, clean my junk and have a sense of control over something – like the washing machine. 

It used to be that my ‘cure’ for my homesickness is to travel. Curiousity distracts me from Longing. But I can’t travel just yet…

I don’t want to think I’m losing my wanderlust. I just think that the sheer effort of getting up, smiling and appearing normal (instead of burning the phone lines at home and my brain with the wifi) is just exhausting me and I don’t want to be like this. I really don’t.

It’s a choice to make each day, to get out and not feel sorry for yourself. I go through these phases, several times a day: Step 1, count your blessings. Step 2 Accept that this is your choice and Step 3 Look around you. Discover little things that make that particular day different from the rest. Well I did just that.

Today is special because I talked to him for as long as I could this morning.

Today I noticed how people act totally different when they think you’re not looking (when I was really watching their reflections on the dark windows of the Metro).

Today I wished I bathed in the stormy rain of yesterday. Those rainy days in the Philippines, when the raindrops feel like tiny hands massaging you, the smell of earth and just being surrounded by it.

Today I can’t figure out where the hell the adaptor for my epilator is and how to quiet all the untamed hair that calls out for it. 

Today I bought neon post-its to stick to my small map of the city, with names and directions to restaurants and interesting places.

Today I will try and start documenting my ordinary days here.  My future self will thank me for it.