belgrade girl

I've had a puppy-rescuing experience a month or so ago. I ran across a 900 gram bundle of fur which the vet told me couldn't be more than a month old... she was a complete mongrel left all alone in a park, with some horrid bird pecking at her. Tiny fluffy filthy dog, all quiet, in complete shock, color of 'I wanted some brown highlights but it all went horribly wrong'. So what to do - I took her to a vet, then home, spent a day or two loving her and agonizing over her future (it's hard to find a home for a mongrel, people who want dogs tend to already have dogs, and most people want a breed......) I'm not really a dog person, and neither is Husband - but I tells ya, we were on the verge. I couldn't bear to just toss her out again, and serbia has no asylums or shelters for abandoned animals... so handing her over to an institution would mean she would be put to sleep. I just wasn't ready to let something so fluffy die.

anywho the story ends happily (as all good stories do :) - friends talked to other friends and a friend of a friend took her, and loved her at first sight. she's currently in a town an hour or so away from Belgrade, in a nice house with a yard, and I hear her best friend is a cat. Open minded little dog.

well the dog story worked out ok, except that I found it sensitised me greatly to the plight of abandoned animals (strays bring tears to my eyes sometimes, and they never used to), and gave me a deep-seated and undeniable need for something furry, fuzzy and fluffy scurrying around the house. So Husband and I looked around and came up with two gray kittens (which breed, you ask? Thoroughbred Belgrade Dumpster Cat). You can imagine how entertaining life has just become :)

in other news, I took the MENSA test the other day. Felt horribly embarrassed standing there with thirty or so people all reckoning they've got genius potential... I even made Husband participate ('C'mon, it'll be fuuuun....!!) though he fought me long and hard. Anyhow it's a month-long wait till the results come in..... Honestly, if someone asked me why I did it I couldn't say. This nice man was talking about it in the morning TV programme.....

they say you can do the test three times in total, and must wait a full year between sittings. But honestly, I think I'll stick with the one time, whatever the result. I've got nothing to hang a complaint on - I had enough time (though the man was right - it was the fastest 20 minutes of my life), I was rested and happy and relaxed, and if the score comes back low it can only mean I'm objectively daft :) At any rate I'm not really aiming for the MENSA entrance level. (that's an IQ of 148) I'm reckoning somewhere around 130.............................

Heh heh it will be fun when the results arrive though, seeing as Husband and I both took the test. Whoever comes out on top, I can see trouble brewing.... Our one salvation would be a tie! Incidentally, among the people taking the test with us were three girls sharing the same last name - sisters, presumably. Wonder how the results affect their lives.......... Wonder why they decided to all go together. Funny thing intelligence. None of us feel we're lacking in it, yet it's a frightening thing to let someone give you  a scientific estimate of you IQ.... Makes one feel curiously vulnerable. Most of us would rather just secretly suspect we're a lot smarter than anyone would guess.............

I'm thinking too many things simultaneously, and none of them gel with any of the others. So I'll hold on to the whole tangled ball of yarn until some sort of pattern emerges. Until then I'll share some poetry.

Maybe a word on poetry before that - I realise that for most people, the invocation of this term requires mention of sunsets, flowers and tragic romance as obligatory items. Which always makes me recall what Daniil Kharms once wrote (wonderful Russian writer, anyone who looks him up is sure to be amused. Especially his 'Incidences') anyhow where was I.... yes, he wrote 'One should write poetry so that if you threw a poem at a window, the pane would shatter'.

Oh one could pontificate all day. Here goes.

Running lightly over spongy ground,
Past the pasture of flat stones,
The three elms,
The sheep strewn on a field,
Over a rickety bridge
Toward the quick-water, wrinkling and rippling.

Hunting along the river,
Down among the rubbish, the bug-riddled foliage,
By the muddy pond-edge, by the bog-holes,
By the shrunken lake, hunting, in the heat of summer.

The shape of a rat?
It’s bigger than that.
It’s less than a leg
And more than a nose,
Just under the water
It usually goes.

Is it soft like a mouse?
Can it wrinkle its nose?
Could it come in the house
On the tips of its toes?

Take the skin of a cat
And the back of an eel,
Then roll them in grease,–
That’s the way it would feel.

It’s sleek as an otter
With wide webby toes
Just under the water
It usually goes.

(Theodore Roethke. I remember something else written by him, about the sadness of pencils..... ah anyhow. This is actually part of a larger poem, called The Lost Son)

I'll share another - and this, quite irrationally, moves me beyond all expectation. Maybe simply because it is very dear to someone who is very dear to me, and very far. But also it seems somehow to say something about life that I cannot quite sum up but rings stealthily true:

Louis MacNeice - Bagpipe Music

It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with overproduction'.

It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.

It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.

It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

it has come!!! it has struck me, yesterday at half past five. it came flying in through the window with the radiant dying rays of afternoon sun.

this was my second. my first epiphany happened during the bombing in 2000 - I think it was 2000 at least, march maybe. a tomahawk missile had struck the building of one of the ministries - a building of gigantic stone pillars and marble halls and ornate double doors you can barely push open, like banks used to be built - to inspire confidence and give an air of unflappable quiet strength, and never let any warmth in through all that stone. always cool and quiet on the inside, with echoing halls and wide staircases. anyhow the tomahawk came down right through the roof, leaving the building looking entirely intact from the street, but giving it a whole new level of ventilation from above. two days later I'm walking down the street and the soft spring sunshine is streaming into this building through the crater in its ceiling, flowing and spilling out the huge double doors and into the street, bathing the inside of the building - and all the rubble and scattered papers - in what can only be described as a physical emanation of heavenly grace.

that was epiphany no. 1.

it said never try to guess what can or cannot be beautiful, or positive, or good. Because you haven't got enough imagination to cover all the possibilities.

yesterday was the day of the second epiphany, and this one was internal rather than physically manifested. I've been bitching for days, for months now, to myself and to others, complaining of this and that in my life. My boss hates me, my job sucks, there's no inspiration or creativity, he treats my work like rubbish, i've got seven times more school than him - not to mention pure common sense - i have to keep cleaning up his messes, think for him AND make him coffee, simultaneously. he's an aggressive, insensitive, sexist racist pompous prick. this goes on and on you know. I could keep going all day.

anyhow then it hit me. all these things, though without doubt quite true - and utterly annoying - are thoroughly, completely, painfully beside the point. Unbelievably!!! what the fuck difference does it make what I think of my boss, his qualifications or his social skills? what is my job? to do whatever he needs done. am I doing it? not even with a tenth of my capacity. it's an easy job and I'm a bright girl so the tenth is still enough to keep things running - but it's a lot less than what I could be accomplishing. and why? because subconsciously I'd made a decision that he's not worth the effort. And this decision was completely WRONG. it's not about him. it's not about what he deserves, what he appreciates, or how much he's worth. this is my job. I should do it as best I can. and cut the bitching. or walk. he hasn't got me chained to the friggin' desk. I can always tell him to take this high-paying, mindless position and shove it. and he can write his own reports, letters and guest lists. as long as I choose not to do this - i.e. not to tell him to go fuck himself - I am duty-bound to actually work there. Not spend every minute feeling sorry for myself and figuring out how to cut corners.

some of the inspiration for this came from that most mediocre of motion pictures, 'The Devil Wears Prada'. similar scenario - frumpy, intellectual-type girl works for ice-cold, freakishly over-demanding high class fashion magazine editor, thinks she's better than the job, looks down on the entire fashion industry, and keeps feeling sorry for herself because people are not being nice to her. and a friendly gay designer type tells her - what do you want?? a pat on the back, a vote of sympathy? poor girl, look how badly you're being treated, no one understands you?? you've got a job a million girls would kill for. you don't want it - move over. otherwise just shut your mouth and actually do it!

so that was part of it, definitely. another part was something I kept trying to say to myself and stick by for a long time, but had recently quite forgotten - YOU'VE NO CONTROL OVER WHAT OTHER PEOPLE DO. ALL YOU CONTROL ARE YOUR OWN ACTIONS. Deal with this. People often get in trouble - work themselves into feeling miserable - through shifting responsibility for their own happiness onto the backs of supposedly uncaring Others. my life sucks because my boss doesn't appreciate me, my colleagues get away with doing nothing but gossip all day, my professor keeps not being available when I want to meet and talk about my thesis. I hate them all - friends and acquaintances, lovers and pets, the public, the government, the planet and the galaxy. And me such a little morsel of perfection. blameless and without a blemish, floating within this tainted, cracked, corrupted existence. It's not that I'm doing a job I've long since outgrown but I'm too chicken to quit and surrender the unreasonably high salary, it's not that I'm not willing to sacrifice comfort for psychological fulfillment, it's not that I'm envious of people who get away with dumping their obligations on others even though I'd never want to trade places with them - no sirree, ain't nothing wrong with me. it's all Them!!!!!! hahahhahahahaha......................................................

come on girl, you're older than that, you're smarter than that.

so you work for a prick. not the first, not the last. if it don't kill you it'll make you stronger. at least the money's good. and you can still always tell him to take a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut. if and when you choose. until then................

like it.

this was epiphany no. 2.

let's see how long it holds.................