My friend Balduino has just left my house after coming over to do some work on his website. He’s from Caracas, Venezuala and naturally he has this overwhelming spanish accent when he speaks english. He works as a theatre peformer and is quite a talented artist so I am helping get a site up where he can advertise his performances and display a gallery of his artistic peices. (I’ll put the link up here when it’s ready for display). The funny thing about Balduino is, whenever he speaks to women, they hear his spanish accent and become putty in his hand. It’s like he has this powerful ability to control their minds and make them hand over phone numbers without them realising they are even doing it. Now I have an Australian accent, and there is a bit of a myth that Aussie accents have some sort of seductive power like Spanish ones, but I’ve never seen any evidence of it. At best an Australian accent is a conversation starter; something that gets people interested and chatting about where I’m from and how I ended up in Amsterdam. Balduino on the other hand, when he starts talking you can see girls go wet between the legs and they become mesmerised at the sound of his voice. God it’s enough to make you want to throw up really. I tried to fake a Spanish accent once (I was pretty drunk at the time) – allo… mine namee iz Andaroo, I am phrom Brizbain! Somehow it just didn’t come out Spanish sounding but instead like I had a speech impediment possibly caused by a stroke or mental retardation. The girl I tried it on looked at me like I was dribbling down the front of my shirt and left rather quickly. I was annoyed that when Balduino used the exact same line – except for using his real name and not mine – 7 seconds later he had a phone number from a hot looking French chick.

So I’m really trying to work out just what the hell it is about Spanish accents that rob a woman of 90 percent of her common sense and turn her into a goey mess!? Someone in Nasa should take a few million dollars and conduct some sort of scientific experiment to get some answers because I’ve seen this happen so many times with Balduino that I just have to know what the trick is so I can do it for myself. I wonder if a course in Spanish and some self tanning cream might do the trick?

Padwanna

So it’s sometime late afternoon right now. My head is still feeling fuzzy as fuck from Saturday night out socialising over a friends place! I had plans to go for a run sometime, but it’s a bit touch and go really. I don’t know if I’ll even have the energy to put my shoes on, let alone run a 7km circuit. So for the moment I think it’s going to be more couch therapy.

Speaking of which, I’ve just been horizontal for the last 2 hours watching my favourite movie (of the moment), Layer Cake. It’s a Brit gangster film done much in the same style of Ritchie’s Lock Stock, and Snatch. Actually the guy that directed this movie was a producer of Ritchies films so I guess it kinda makes sense that he’s inherited some of Ritchie’s cinematic flair. This movie is just brilliant though; witty script, fab actors, and a music score that is amazing in how it plays on your emotions throughout the scenes as they unfold. Daniel Craig – the lead actor – is about the coolest guy on the planet. When I grow up, I want to be just like him. That’s what’s cool about cool films; they show you how to be cool! I think I’m going to do a wardrobe upgrade soon and go buy some things like Daniel wears in the movie. If he caught Sienna Miller, then something had to be working for him, and it’s my bet it was his clothes… and also that he’s the coolest guy on the planet!

So what’s next in this lazy Sunday afternoon, I hear you ask. Well, I figure it might be pizza time soon. I really couldn’t be arsed to cook anything. Or to clean up the couple of days worth of dishes that is currently occupying the space next to the sink. Normally I’m pretty tidy (these days but I just don’t have the motivation in me to do any housework right now. What I wouldn’t give to have a maid. Doesn’t have to be a french one, as long as she looks equally as sexy in that apron outfit, and would like to clean up after me I don’t mind where she comes from! Oh to be rich and be able to afford a maid when the Sunday afternoon lazy attack hits and you don’t want to move a finger except to press play on the dvd player.

So it’s Monday rolling round again! Scarey stuff! Two days seems to just pass by in the blink of an eye on the weekends. I have to find out how to do that trick where you can slow time down. See if I can’t make these two days feel like four. Now that would be something cool. Ah, I have to say though, I don’t really mind that it’s Monday again tomorrow. Life is kinda cool for me right now, and I don’t mind going to work. I only wish our office had more women working in it. As a tech worker in an IT company, I am surrounded by geeks mostly. Just once I’d love to work in a marketing department and be surrounded by girls that talk about stuff other than linux developer tools. Maybe I should see if I can get a desk change organised. Say it’s for the long term health of my eyes. I wonder if I can get anyone in the office to believe that one? Well I guess you don’t know till you try really!

Okay, well it’s pizza time. Must dash to the phone and all that. I hope that if you’re reading this and it’s Monday, that you had a nice weekend and a lazy fuzzy Sunday on the couch like I did. It’s great therapy for those of us living modern lives in the fast lane!

Padwanna!

It’s a saturday afternoon and I was just about to go outside, but as is usual for Amsterdam at this time of year (which is to say all of the year) it’s raining. Since I ride a push bike as transport, and I really don’t look good wearing that just-got-out-of-the-shower look, I’ve had a bit of time to sit around and browse blogs, which is a new favourite pastime of mine just recently. Normally when I’m looking at blogs, I just look at things I find at random. I don’t really search by topic or popularity on weblists, or anything like that. No, much like a party where you don’t know anyone, I just wander from blog to blog reading people and their take on life. One of these – the last one – really caught my interest. It’s a blog by a woman called Ann who writes like I do; about her life and her thoughts about life, and what’s on her mind that day. I read one she wrote called 100 Things About Me, which was – strangely enough – 100 things about her that she thinks about herself. As I was reading the list (this was after I had read a couple of other posts) I began to get a warm feeling for this person because I started to know things about her, personal things, like you do when you spend some time with somebody talking intimately. I also saw that there were similarities between the two of us, and at time I had to laugh when things on her list that were personal quirks that I had as well. By the end of her 100 Things post I had a very good personal feeling about Ann, and I really hope that she finds the happiness she is looking for.

The thing about blogs that I see now, is that even though these people are strangers who write them, through their own particular and peculiar way of thinking and sharing with us their thoughts, we begin to understand ourselves better. All of us share a common emotional bond through just being alive and living in the world. And the fabulous thing about blogs is, it allows us as individuals to share our individual emotional experiences. In this very act of sharing we show others, and come to understand for ourselves, that we are not alone, but that others out there feel and think like we do. Strangers show us that we are not so strange after all, and that if others feel the way we do, then maybe we aren’t so alone at all.

It’s a beautiful thing in this world to be able to feel like someone else understands us, but I think it’s an even more beautiful thing when someone else gives us the opportunity to understand ourselves better and make us feel good about who we are!

Thanks Ann.

Padwanna.

So it’s been a couple of weeks since the last post, mainly because I was getting the new domain sorted out. Now mentalechoes.org is finally up and hosting my blog. I’m really happy with the new domain name and having my blog reside in it, because it is much more meaningful than my old domain name, and more aptly describes what my blog is essentially about.

It’s funny though, coming up with this new domain name was the first time I have done something in recent life that I didn’t rush (I have a bit of a habit of being a rusher). My first domain name I spent probably 10 minutes max thinking about it whilst I was sitting in front of a domain registrars registration form. Hence the more or less meaningless – and totally made up – word that was to become my domain name. The second time around though, I think I must have been working on it for near on 3 weeks if I add up all the time I spent writing down names in a little pad on the metro ride to and from work. I always had this rolling shortlist of cool names that I was going to use, but somehow none of them seemed perfect. And what I was aiming for was perfection, if there was such a thing you could attribute to a domain name. No matter how hard I tried though, I could never find that perfect name.

It was through this little exercise that I started to see wider patterns in my own life; namely always chasing perfection but never being able to acheive it. For some people, it is okay for them to be less than perfect, they’re comfortable with who they are and they don’t aspire to be better tomorrow than what they are today. In many ways I envy people like this because they are happy, and they never suffer from the frustration of staying the same. I know too that I am not alone in being a perfectionist, there are a lot of people out there – I know many – who constantly strive in themselves to be not just better, but perfect. Here in lies the cruelist of jokes, because the universe has made it so that we can’t be perfect, we can only ever be less than perfect, and that means we can never live up to our own goals. For me, I find this a source of frustration in my life at times, and one that can be hard to accept.

I’m starting to see as I get older though, that life isn’t about being perfect, but about learning to be happy with your limitations, and accepting what you are, so as to not be constantly struggling to fit an ideal that can’t be attained. That’s not to say that I think we should stop trying to be better tomorrow than what we are today, but we should be happy with trying our best regardless of the actual outcome. Because in the end, it is the effort of betterment which is really meaningful, rather than being perfect in itself.

And so, after realising I would never have a perfect domain name, I choose the name at the top of my favourites list and registered it on the internet. It may not be the perfect domain name, but it’s perfect enough for what I wanted, and I’m happy with it. In life too, we should try to be satisfied with our day to day acheivements no matter how small, and be happy with ourselves, rather than be dissapointed when we see how far we have fallen short of our own perfect ideal.

Padwanna.