sun 02 jul 2006 22:18:00 — raamgracht
what's going on
[from an email to a friend]
crisis in the dutch government, the cabinet has "fallen" because of controversy surrounding a woman called rita verdonk, minister of immigration, whom everybody on the left hates and the rightwingers seem to love. but the current cabinet will limp along until early elections, probably in november. i was tuned into the whole thing like a soap opera.
a bit slow-moving, distracted, having trouble getting motivated to do my work. a bit lonely too.
and i'm a little depressed about money and taxes. this past wednesday i had to go through an audit by the tax service, six hours talking about my financial records *in dutch* mind you. at the end of it my brain was toast.
otherwise fine i guess.
friday night i had dinner with three beautiful women, and they wouldn't even let me pay. that was nice. thai food on the haarlemmer straat. that afternoon i had thought of my friend dvr, whom i don't see very often. i wondered how he was doing and if i should give him a call sometime. just after dinner he phoned me out of the blue. so i met him and some other friends at mulligan's. we all sat upstairs and had a nice time. a woman named dh gave me two coffee cups that she'd made herself -- i guess she's a potter -- as a thank-you for letting her use my computer to edit her video for a video class. talk about trouble communicating, i think dh is someone who likes people but keeps accidentally insulting them. or maybe subconsciously. she got up from the table and said "well gentlemen, your conversation has been soporific ..." i think she meant it as a joke, but i wouldn't wanna get into how soporific she can be.
anyway they're nice coffee cups. now i have four all together, including the floddertje cup i stole from lgf and m, and the monaki-nekko cup jenny gave me back in allston (monaki-nekko is that cat that waves his hand at you to wish you good fortune).
given my current paralysis to do real work, instead i've started writing another short story. not sure where it will lead. it's about a very courteous bright young woman -- a "good girl" type, let's say -- who one day finds out she's dying, and decides to fuck off across the world and try everything she's ever wanted to do. but she hasn't got a penny on her, cuz in fact she was in a swimsuit floating in a truck tire tube on a lake when she fell asleep and woke up somewhere else, and just decided to keep going. i've got as far as when she falls in love with the tattoo artist next to a strawberry farm in waterloo iowa. but in the next few pages a tornado will devastate the town and she'll have to move on. i'm wondering what happens to strawberries during a tornado. i have a feeling they'll fly through the air like a hail of red bullets.
a lot of boats went by here today, some of them had musicians on them. accordion from the canal is nice. it's twilight now, maybe i should go for a walk, go to the pub maybe and have a pint.