Improper hauntings

This is  a story that was never meant to be published on my blog for a couple of reasons: a) I do believe that the story is much better told in person (as in the tradition of the genre) and b) the subject is of  an intimate sort (those of delicate minds consider yourself warned). But as my tale has recently gained unforeseen popularity by others telling it and circulating it forward (without naming any names, Jackson and Morales, you know what I am talking about), I want to claim authorship and give you, my dear reader, the original tale.

What you are about to read is a true story.  It happened to yours truly, truly. For the record, at the time the events took place I was not intoxicated nor by alcohol or drugs of any sort. Also, as a background information, let it be known, that in general I consider myself to be an atheist and I do not believe in any supernatural or paranormal things.  (I need evidence.) Having gotten all that out of my system it´s time to tell the story of how I was haunted by a self-pleasuring ghost.

This  happened a couple of years ago. The day must have been just an ordinary day as I have no recollection of it, what I do remember is what happened during the night.

I was sleeping on my belly, arms under pillow, other leg stretched, the other bended.  Suddenly I woke up to a feeling that somebody was sitting on my lower back and pressing me hard from the shoulder blades to the mattress. And I mean hard, I could hardly breathe. Needless to say, I was quite scared. I mean, how could anybody have broken into my apartment, gotten past the shoe traps in the vestibule without me hearing a thing and waking up.  I tried to turn my head and see who it was that was the cause of this distress, but I could not see anybody.

So there I was lying on the bed, afraid, not being able to move a muscle, feeling a weight of an invisible person on me, thinking frantically what the heck was going on, when suddenly I heard a sound. (The sound could perhaps be best described as a very soft and lazy “clacking” sound.)  A sound that sounded like a happy union of a man, his hand and his erm..overhang having a jolly good time.

At that point I started to get angry. It´s bad enough to have a ghost in one´s house, but to have a masturbating one is just insufferable.

I mustered  all the strength I could find, pushed my upper body from the mattress and told the unidentified male spirit with a stern voice and firm words that I did not approve of his doings and that I wanted him gone. (This is something that I had picked up from Sex and the City, apparently one has to acknowledge the ghost and then tell them to change scenery if one wants to get rid of them.) As soon as I had done that the sound stopped, the pressure eased and I could stand up.

I was quite shaken by all that. I turned on the lights and checked my apartment but I could not find anybody there. I went to the kitchen and started rummaging through my spices in hopes of finding some sage. (Another bit of “information” that I have learned from some TV-series, burning sage is supposed to cleanse the atmosphere.) I had run fresh out of it, so I had to settle for some pizza seasoning potpourri that I springled around my apartment. (Even the non-believers get scared and resort to extreme measures.)

For the rest of the night I kept the lights on (actually I slept with the lights on for a good couple of months, for some reason I though electric light to be a good spirit person repellent), but could not really sleep, not even dream. (The adrenalin rush took care of that.)

If that visit would have been the only instance I was harrassed by an unseen person, I could have written it off with a shrug, but the ghost game back. And the second time we “met” was even worse.

It happened not long after I had started to sleep with lights off again. This time I was laying on my back, arm over my eys, when I woke to a very moviesque sound. It was like there was a big book open on my floor with wind going through the pages. (Quiet flap flap flap flap flap.)

I opened my eyes, and then I felt it: a big hairy arm coming from under my bed. It went through my mouth into my throat and lungs and I got a distinctive feeling that it wanted to take my voice, maybe even my life.  It hurt, I was paralyzed,  it felt like I was being sucked inside the mattress. Also, once again I had to will myself to an upright position and told the the ghost very, very firmly to go away and leave me alone.  And as soon as I had done that, the pain eased.  Again I checked every possible nook and corner to see if somebody was indeed hiding in my tiny flat, but to no avail. I was alone.

After the last incident, the house has not been haunted again (to my knowledge at least, and I should know as I continue living there.) But I have been perplexed ever since: what happened? In both instances I was awake,  my consciousness was not altered by any chemical means etc. and the physical and auditive experiences were very real.

So the chances are that there might be some supernatural things after all and I actually was molested by a meat-beating phantom. It´s either that or a case of  really bad heartburn.

“There was always drama on her footsteps”

Sometime ago I stumbled across a quotation by Jane Austen: “Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings” (or actually the form of the quotation was “her life became a succession of busy nothings”). The picture that Jane Austen paints of her heroines life with that little sentence is somewhat chilling in the emptiness it reveals but at the same time it is also wonderfully dramatic and strangely elating.

The line prompted me to a quest of making up a one-liner that would somehow describe me or my life as poetically as hers did. That is how I came up with “there was always drama on her footsteps”.

For sometime I reveled in the sentence, repeating it over and over like the name of a new lover. All in all, I was quite pleased with myself. I felt a new, more lyrical aura around myself had risen.

But as I am a person with some sort of  lite commitment issues (I could never make an all top something lists as I feel if you do those you need to stick by them  for ever and ever, and I need to be able to maintain my freedom to change my mind on stuff), and appetite for diversion so when I was faced (in these uncertain times I may add) with the choice of making the sensible decision or the not-so-sensible decision, I naturally opted for the latter.  And that is how I discovered (or rather came into realization of one aspect of my personality)  “she was never one to shy away from an adventure”.  (She being me.)

With a sense for drama and a taste for adventure on my side, I think am pretty well set on the tag line front. And life.

ps.

I do not I deliberately seek to create drama around me, and I  certainly  like my relationships with friends and family to be even-tempered and mellow (and for the most part and most of the time they really are) but perhaps I do tend to respond to things and situations (life) with somewhat of a poetic approach or an excessive zest.

I would also like to add, that am not about making irresponsible or poor choices. It is just that if an opportunity to see the world or live life knocks on my door am apt to say yes.

When dishes need washing, the washer goes blogging

Or so I  thought a few days ago when the number of clean coffee mugs was going down at a rate that suggested a  instant merge of water, detergent, a dish brush and some elbow grease was needed . (I even advertised my upcoming post as my status in a well-known online community as I was convinced that building pressure from more fronts than one would surely result in a text (the other front being myself) as I usually thrive under pressure.)

As I sat down with the intention to write (or rather finish yet another batch of beginnings) about recent events that have occupied my mind, I noticed that the subjects that really got me going were once again, yes you guessed it, cleaning and blogging.

“Is that it? Is that all I can write about? Blogging and cleaning! Cleaning and blogging?” I was shouting at myself when I came to a halt with the realization of the most chilling kind  anyone can experience: I have become  my father.

My father, like me apparently, has two genres of stories he tells. The first genre usually takes place in a factory where he worked as a “process designer / engineer” of sorts (the title does not translate really) and usually those stories beside being full of eccentric personae, that I have never met but have heard of so many times that I feel like they are almost family, are also full of technical details and minute process descriptions. These stories, given the right mindset of the receiving end, can sometimes be somewhat entertaining, whereas the second genre stories seldom are and indeed are not meant to be such. I call these narrations “the dangerous situations in traffic”-stories.

“The dangerous situations in traffic” – stories are a specific breed of stories that are very much place, time and situation bound. Obviously, the plot is simple, and always the same: my father has witnessed a dangerous situation in traffic or has almost been part one due to negligence or foolhardiness of a fellow driver (or pedestrian etc).

Place and the situation where these stories are told are always the same: upon collecting me from the railway station when I have come to visit my parents. The forte of these stories is in the repetition.

The first time I hear of “the dangerous situation in traffic” is when we are sitting in the car at the railway station parking lot waiting our turn to get out. The second time the story is summarized, is when there is a situation that bears some resemblance to the original. (Really, there does not have to be much in common to trigger the words from my fathers´ lips.) The third time the tale is told is when we actually pass the place where the situation took place, this time explained very thoroughly and in detail. And finally, the fourth round of the story begins when we get home and my father repeats it to my mother. (But this does not happen before my mother has asked me (while am taking my jacket off) “how was the trip” and “was the train full? Did you get a seat?”)

(I have been hearing these traffic stories, well basically the one story for a good fourteen years. On average I visit my parents once a month. Fourteen times twelve times four is..what…six hundred seventy two. That´s how many times at least I´ve heard of dangerous situations in traffic. You´d think that make me terrified of driving a car! You are right, it absolutely does, am terrified every time I´m in the same car with my father when he´s driving. Wouldn´t you be, with that track record of almosts. The funny thing is, he taught me how to drive, but that´s another story.)

The similarities do not end here. We are alike in the way we tell stories:  we fill our stories with unessential (albeit interesting?) bits and pieces of information and embellishment, we rarely go straight to the point (they call it the storytelling for a reason!) and our stories generally are relatively lengthy to say the least. Oh, we also stray from the topic easily as the story we are telling usually has its´roots or is connected to another story and in order for the listener to be fully able to appreciate (or understand) the story, those must be incorporated in the thread (hence the length). We  can come up with quite concise and clever one-liners (or two), but that´s not the same.

When it comes to storytelling, there is no middle ground. It´s nothing or all. Like father, like daughter, I guess.

post scriptum

I would like to add that I have only the utmost love and respect for both my parents that truly are good and funny people that have lot of interesting stories of their own). Even though they do drive me crazy regularly (father especially, mother not that much). I would also like to say, that my father is a good driver even though he sometimes confuses his build with that of an owl (rotating head, you see where I´m going with this? Head, traffic, situations etc).

Where is Victor when you need him?

It seems that I have a knack of getting myself into awkward situations. (Situations that  perhaps would not be awkward to most people, except me.)

A while ago  I was lucky enough to be sent on a work trip to lovely city of Lisbon. (My work duties were over in a couple of days so I decided to take couple of days for myself and see the city as I had not been there before. ) While enjoying my days of freedom I had to participate in a work related teleconference call as I was to be headed to another work assignment to Damascus quite soon after I would come home from Lisbon, and some details of the project needed to be checked and decided on.

(Ah, Damascus, an intriguing city, full of history, with friendly inhabitants who treat lanes as mere suggestions, who have understood that horns on cars are not for decorative purposes only, who enjoy cheese on everything (the cheese is just delicious) and… the list could go on and on. Damascus and it´s people were a very pleasant surprise indeed.)

As the teleconference had been scheduled to take place during mid morning, I had already left my hotel and was happily traipsing around the neighborhood of Belem, famous for it´s cream pasties, in a pouring rain. When the time drew nearer for the aforementioned meeting I decided to find a cafe where I would enjoy a well deserved cup of coffee and a sweet delicacy, also well deserved.  Of course, my chosen cafe (the most famous cafe of the area thanks to their flans) was full of clattering of dishes and happily chatting tourists and locals. I managed to secure a table though and a steaming cup of coffee in front of me I dialed the number. (I was feeling slightly important with my pen and notebook and fancy telephone.)

After a while, our international team was on-line. My colleague called in from Rome, some called in from Finland and of course our customers from Middle East joined in.

Everything went as well as could be expected with somewhat bad connections, a bunch of non native English speakers and a noisy cafe in the background. Until I needed to check a very small detail concerning an abbreviation.

Our customer asked us to deliver the products (in this case videos) in two formats: MP4 and something else. It was only a question of one letter really, but it had to be solved. I could not quite make out was the format in question VLV, SLV or FLV. (The lines were really bad, the cafe was noisy and the pronunciation of all the parties involved was not perhaps quite up to par.) So after repeating all the options over several times I decided to resort to spelling using the phonetic alphabets.

I started:  “Is it V as in…” Then it hit me. Complete and utter blankness, it was as if all the words had left me.  I could not remember a single word in English that begun with a V. Appropriate words that is. All that came to mind was: Is it V as in…Venus? V as in…Vixen? Vulva? Vagina?

All very proper words in their own rights, but let´s face it, it was not a booty call or a call to my gynecologist that I was making.

As I was continuing to stutter V as in…V as in.. etc I felt like I was the only (and lonely) participant in a naughty Wheel of Fortune.

While I was mentally kicking myself for not bothering with properly learning the phonetic alphabets I was trying to will my colleague to read my mind to jump to my aide from other side of the southern Europe. Sadly telepathy seldom works, and as I was left to my own devices I finally managed to mutter a mumbled (and humbled) V as in the letter, followed by a slightly hysterical giggle.

Lessons learned (again): pride comes before a fall and V is for Victor.

Impossible missions: adventures in apothecaries abroad

Here I was thinking that having to mime constipation in a small Brazilian pharmacy up in the northeast a few years ago in order to make the apothecary understand that my friend was in pain and indeed in need of medical assistance to help her to pass her … product, would presumably be one of those “once in a lifetime” type of moments when I found myself in a similar situation in Jakarta.

(Why (and how to) mime constipation you may ask. Apparently our pronounciation of the portuguese word for it was not convincing enough. 15 minutes of performing a la Marcel Marceau did the trick to entertain the crowd (yes, there was a crowd ) and to get my friend the medicine. Which, by the way, is probably the most efficient drug I´ve ever encountered. The moment she touched the package, she had to go. To my knowledge it is still unopened.)

But back to Jakarta. A couple of weeks ago I had to leave for Jakarta quite unexpectedly on a business trip. The departure was so sudden that I did not have to time to check my calendar for my next expected visit from Aunt Flow. As luck would have it, of course I got my period (not to talk about the cramps) while in there. And of course I was not sufficiently equipped in the feminine hygiene products front. That is to say, I had not packed my mooncup with me.

(I have been using mooncup for a good three years now and I absolutely love it. It is hygienic, enviromentally friendly (as it is reusable) and in the long run it saves you a lot of money. Ladies reading, if you have not heard of mooncup before google it now and try. Or if you have heard of it but are hesitant, google it and try. I warmly recommend.)

Even though I suspected that mooncup might be hard to come by in Jakarta I decided to try. After all, they have Dior, Chanel, Vuitton et al. in every selfrespecting mall (obviously not a backwater joint then), so I thought there might be a small chance of acquiring one. (Mooncup that is. Although I did come across such a beatiful red leather bag by Dior that my heart skipped a beat. For a second or two I toyed with the idea of submitting myself into a imprisonment by a debt and buying the bag, but I came to my senses quite quickly.)

So I there I was, trying to explain a) what a mooncup is b) what it looks like and c) what are it´s benefits to a fascinated (or perhaps i was mixing politeness and slight embarrassement with interest?) crowd (yes, there was a crowd, again) of pharmacy workers dressed in pink uniforms while my colleague & friend (male) was laughing his arse off behind the shelves. (His moment of miming would come later when we tried to find a place that would cater for male waxage as well.)

After having to explain the principals of mooncupping for the umpteenth time both verbally & with sign language I decided to surrender to the circumstances and buy “regular” sanitary towels. But either they have not heard of the size zero pads that fill the stores in Europe or my choice of pharmacy in Jakarta was poor but the selection of the sanitary towels was slim whereas the towels themselves were not. (The thinnest things I could find were more reminiscent of a cushion that anything else. Why, tape one of those pads to  your neck and you´ll have a handy neck pillow that supports your head and doesn´t slip on long flights!)

Lessons learned: when travelling always, always pack for all kinds of leakage (or lack of it as was shown in the case of Porto de Galinhas) or be prepared to mime for your, or for your friends medication.

Blogging emptiness

Isn´t is strange that when you are supposed to be doing something, there is always something else more interesting or rewarding to be done. And you know that if you only could be doing the thing you are not suppose to be doing, the results would be magical. But as soon as you could be doing the other thing, instead of the first thing: numbness hits you. I am of course talking about blogging.

I have not posted anything for a while as I have been busy with (can you guess with what) writing yet another essay for the seminar. (Truth to be told I have not been writing as much as contemplating writing and the ever impeding deadline. In the end 9 weeks of “writing” culminated in 2 days of frantic grinding out words but little content.)

When I was supposed to be writing the essay, many many posts were started, not finished though. That would happen in a mere moment when the essay would be finished. Or so I thought.

Now I have been staring at my little embryos of a blogs for couple of weeks and nothing is happening. Instead I am drawn to cleaning (again?!), reading detective stories, playing scrabble in french, dreaming of distant lands & new blogs (can you imagine!) and thinking of starting my own business.

Oh well, what is a mademoiselle to do, except publish this one and continue staring. And maybe, just maybe a new post will be born.

On the relations of Greek tragedies and cleaning

The ancient Greeks had a concept hamartia. Hamartia is a fatal flaw or error in the judgment of a person. Sometimes it could also be seen as a fatal flaw in the character of a person. Usually in the plays, for obvious dramatic reasons, it is of the hero´s. Hamartia is something that can not be avoided, it is so deeply linked in one´s personality and fate. Bear in mind though, that the flaw is not usually nor necessarily outright negative. It can be for example pride or love that leads to the hero´s downfall.

In Greek tragedies hamartia does not exist without peripeteia. A turn of events that is caused by the hero´s fatal flaw. And as we are talking about tragedies, this turn of events is never for the better. Just think of poor Oedipus.

In the light of recent events I have come into conclusion that my hamartia (or one of them, but this is the one that I can publicly write about) is quite clearly displayed in connection to cleaning or other household chores.

So, a few days ago a friend came over with a bottle, or two, of red wine. As he was obviously distressed, I decided to oblige him and enjoy a glass of ripe syrah with him whilst he and I poured our hearts out on various personal topics. It is not necessary to go deeper in details, let´s just say that the wine was consumed. (Also, it seems, am better at saying yes than am saying no.) Anyhow, sometime during the evening I noticed that there was some mysterious clear liquid on the shelf of my fridge. But as there was an interesting story going on, I decided to look into matter only the next morning. (After all, there is no time like tomorrow!)

Came next morning and I woke up early, about 6:30. I went to the refrigerator, opened the door and the floor of the fridge was filled with clear liquid that now I indentified as water. Apparently I had accidentally hit the unfreeze button previous night. The next 3 hours were spent frantically mopping, drying, breaking up the last pieces of ice stuck to the bottom of the freezer part of my fridge. (Some freezer, a teeny tiny box that freezes over.)

As I was scraping the railings and whatnot´s of the fridge I came across some mementos of the last time I unfroze it.

It was a last June and I was leaving city for six weeks the next morning. At about 07:00 pm I decided that now was the time to unfreeze fridge. After boiling and changing at least 30 litres of hot water in the dishes that I had placed inside the fridge, in hopes of that hot steam would accelerate the melting process, I called in the big guns: blow dryer, screwdriver that acted as a small scale chisel and wooden spatula that was used for leverage to try to remove the stubborn ice. Time must´ve been nearer to midnight.

Well, inspite the obvious obstacles and the excess time spent in the process, I decided to clean the fridge thoroughly. (After all, why go through so much trouble with only mediocre results.) I remembered seeing an episode of “How clean is your house?”, where a paste made out of baking soda was used to clean a fridge and give it a nice, fresh odour.

Happily I attacked the fridge with my paste. I do not know if I had gotten the ratio of water and soda wrong or what but the paste dispersed all over the fridge. It looked like a bag of cocaine had burst inside my fridge.

I wiped and I wiped and I wiped, but it seemed that the amount of the bloody paste did not diminish at all. Clock was nearing 04:00 am and I was nearing insanity and I was still wiping. (And of course there was still most of the packing to be done before leaving round noon.) At some point I had managed to get most of the stuff out. I decided to throw in the dish cloth and just try to be satisfied with the results which were not exactly the shiny, sparkly and fresh- as- mountain-air experience that I had imagined it would be. (Goes to show, do not believe everything that you see on TV. I can tell you right now, coca-cola is not as good a substance for cleaning your toilet seat as other detergents, specially meant for it, are.)

As I was still finding traces of dried baking soda a year later I came to the part in the plot what the aforementioned greeks called anagnorisis: recognition or realization about who I am and what my choices are really about.

My hamartia is my wish to avoid the mundane at all costs. (That and my curiosity and my passion for cleaning devices, tricks and detergents despite the fact that cleaning is propably the last thing on my list of things to do.)

I have a need to glitter (or pimp if you will) everyday chores to make them interesting or engaging enough. More often than once these little plans or spices backfire and I end up spending much more time and energy than a “normal” approach to things would require. In a way it is a terrible burden, this surrender to whims and “decoration”.

But on the other hand, isn´t it amazing how a small whirlpool fridge can contain not only food but also food for thought and ancient greek tragedies.

? (or on the relations of studying and cleaning)

Deadline is looming for an essay for the seminar am attending. So in theory I should spend all my free time glued to the computer, composing wonderfully wild theories and theses about my subject (related to aesthetics, hence the freedom of thought (?)).

Instead I find that some sort of domestic goddess (in the loosest possible meaning of the word) is trying to surface my personality. During last couple of weeks I have engaged in an insane amount of cleaning activities and usually anything is always more alluring than cleaning: even writing an essay. So: I have dusted almost all of my bookshelves. I have vacuumed, not once, but twice. (I can almost hear some of you draw in a deep breath. I know what you´re thinking: 2 times is excessive!) The dishes have been washed almost immediately after use, I have started to organize my cd´s into alphabetical order (now on letter M) and I have washed clothes and folded almost all of them. I have also started to organize a myriad of sheet music and other papers weighing my piano down… Oh, and nearly forgot: I have boiled a microfibrecloth (is that a word?) in a carefully monitored temperature of approx 95 degrees celcius to rejuvinate it´s cleaning powers. And, a n d, I have chosen to do these things rather than play online scrabble (which I´m totally hooked on and that has recently & until now been the number one distraction from my studies. When I should be studying that is. One can not study all the time. One must also schedule time for unwinding from the gruelling academic toil.).

What is happening to me? Am I under some evil spell? Or could it be that I am… domesticating? After all my academic mrs degree is coming together slowly but surely (and finally I may add). Could this be some kind of a terrible symptom of it?

Ok, enough with this madness. I must get back to my essay. I need to return it in a couple of days and many, many, many pages need to be written. I will do it as soon as I have posted this. And taken a restorative nap. No, wait, I see some dishes that need to be washed and my home could benefit from a touch of slight vacuuming…

Things that make an independent woman tick, and not in a good way.

I consider myself to be an able,stable, independent woman, who can tackle almost every curveball , big or small, that life throws on my path without greater difficulties. But why, oh why I sometimes find myself wanting to surrender to the role of “weaker vessel” and thinking that I really should not have to have certain skills. This will be a treatise on the subject that will be updated from time to time, namely when need to weep becomes irresistible & talking to yourself does not bring relief, I would think. Also, I will also most likely list things that irritate me, period. Given the right circumstances. In order to give perspective I have categorized levels of irritation as follows: mild, moderate, high, higher, ultrasonic.

I ask you, dear reader, to keep in mind that this is purely therapeutical and not judge me based on this alone. (Also I would like to point out that I actually never weep about such things. Weep just rhymes better with need. Nowadays I mainly weep = bawl my eyes out when watching Extreme Make-Over, the home edition. It is so overwhelmingly emotional! Also, I am not an easily irritable person on the whole. Just ask my friends, they´ll tell you I am as mild as a nice piece of brie on a plate.) Ok, without further ado, here it begins:

• When your computer crashes for the umpteenth time (mid blogging of course) and you´ve done every trick imaginable, there are only the dust balls & maddening queue tone to keep you company whilst waiting (hours, sometimes, I may add) to be connected to some anonymous support person. Irritation level: high to ultrasonic. There is no ground for moderate when it comes to computers & stuff. On the other hand when it is just you there is no one to nag about the dust. And if you´re lucky a friend comes over with a bottle of red and you can get annoyed together.
• You have to polish your own shoes. (Army, besides making boys into men (?) also teaches them to excel in shoe polishing, I have been led to believe.) Then again, while waiting for the polishing frenzy to take over you can buy new, mire-free shoes! Irritation level: mild to moderate & can quite easily be totally polished off with a new pair of shoes.
• revolving doors. a) they are scary (there is always the possibility that you somehow get caught from a scarf and strangle to death or somehow get squashed in the process) and pointless. Why is is thought that a door that revolves is a good or practical thing? b) “modern” semi-automatic revolving doors are so slow it makes you want to pull out your hairs one by one. Irritation level: high to higher. Irritation over almost as soon as you get pass the doors. But boy, while it lasts…

Blogging anxiety

I´ve only started to blog recently & one of my main reasons to start it was to avoid doing other things that needed to be done. I thought this would be nice diversion.Ha! Never have I been so wrong.

Even though I have written only one proper thing (just posted it) I think I am already suffering from blogging anxiety syndrome. You think you should write often (as obviously people are waiting with bated breath what is to come), and you have the ideas, but, nothing seems to be good, interesting, smart, funny or whatever enough to be actually posted. Then comes the late night calls to friends: listen to this, can I say this, what should I do, can I post it already and at the same time you realize the err of your ways: you never should have told anybody about the blog…

So, dear reader, despite all this, I hope to that you´ll find your way again to Mademoiselle Clouseau. Mademoiselle is waiting & promises to try to post more often.