Cool Sunday

Allow me to take you back a few days to January 8th…

I had had a long, long week of work, including the start of the hand-over with my replacement – yeeess!!! :) (Well, it was just on Saturday but one day is better than nothing, right?)

Went to bed on Saturday decided to go against my usual and deeply buried habits of sleeping until late and roaming around the house in my pyjamas most of the day without doing anything very productive. As I didn’t hear the alarm (what’s new?...), I only woke up around 12pm but feeling a new woman :)
Determined to be ‘dynamic’ for once, I put my book on my brand new bag (gift from Marivic on the staff Xmas dinner), and went out for a brunch at the mall garden. Had a tonic and some lovely “Spinakpita” (sort of small rolled crepes with cheese and spinaches, pretty good) and watched the Filipino families on their Sunday favourite promenade – window-shopping and strolling around the mall: father, mother, 2-3 children or more and, most of the time, the maid (or maids). You can’t miss them, they’re dressed like nurses and carry a small towel on the shoulder to wipe the kids’ faces, noses, hands, whatever needs to be wiped, as soon as it does.
I do try not to be prejudiced, nothing against having a maid, but it does amaze me to see them working on Sunday, ‘part’ of the family. Some families even have 2 maids… I suppose it’s essential if you have more than 2 kids, as one maid only has 2 hands. Right?

When the mosquitoes kept on biting me in spite of the mosquito lotion – what is it about my blood anyway?? -, I was forced to abandon my garden viewpoint on the Global Café and go to Max Brenner’s.
Now, Max Brenner is the place you don’t want to go if you’re trying to get fit, its Chocolate by the bald man, a total perdition place. I try not to go there very often…
‘Résultat des courses’ (NT. in short, result): some 1400 calories, under the disguise of a DELICIOUS layered-chocolate-cake topped with raspberry sauce, with nuts and custard on the side, accompanied by a Mexican Mocha Chocolate served on a hug-mug (as you would imagine that’s a mug that you hug). Halfway through the chocolate ‘mug’, I decided it was just too much chocolate to have in just one hour and finished the cake with a big glass of water :) And suddenly remembered I didn’t even use to like chocolate when I was a kid, I was always a tea and coffee person. The fault of R & R who, though they don’t know each other, have made me addicted to chocolate cakes!

The book was, of course, Oryx and Crake. I know I can be quite imposing with my readings… well, at least I only speak of the books I do like. Or mostly. Anyway... Oryx and Crake is a great book that got me thinking about quite a few important things. Plus it’s very well written and makes you addicted. Yes, ok, I’m also an easily addicted-to person. (Will you stop interrupting me, please? I’m trying to write here.)
I’ll leave you with one of my favourite ‘concepts’ on the book: are you a word person or numbers person? Which one are you?
Most of you tortured souls… you’re a words person, stranded on a Universe ‘that changes all the time’, just because of the tone a word was pronounced or the punctuation used on an e-mail, permanently haunted with “what did he really meant by that?”. Numbers people think they have it all figured out, but don't really get what’s going on, though they’re convinced they do. Nevertheless, they do produce useful things. And a number of dangerous stuff too.
I can easily place some of you.
Then… you have the erratic ones – which one am I? What is really important after all? “What is really?” Crake would say… The lost ‘sheep’, who oscillate between words and numbers, torn between one world and another, repeating to themselves that they should belong to one of the sides, if they want to fit in. If only they could... Right?
Artists? They’re words person. There are many ways of ‘wording things’.