Mystery

 

This was an unexpected visitor to our mail room last year, and he has nothing to do with this post really.

I was looking in my folders, for a photo of the lobby here in our apartment building. Couldn’t find it, but I found this instead.

In the actual lobby, we used to have a big couch, made of fake leather … burgundy coloured … and a little table. Now we don’t.

I don’t know if somebody stole the couch … I’ll probably find out tomorrow, when there will be people around to ask. Can’t see any other reason why the couch would be gone. Unbelievable. This building is pretty secure — they couldn’t risk taking it during daytime. It’s amazing how Seinfeld episodes pops up in real life almost every day 🙂

It was a good day. Went for a swim. Saw yellow birds and I even managed to get a shot of one. It’s a Yellow Warbler.

After that we went out for supper and that was great … to sit down in a cool restaurant and eat food that somebody else had cooked.

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MacArthur Park and Seinfeld

Blogging can be more fun than usual somtimes. Yesterday, I was reminded of an old song that I remember so well from my youth, but had not thought about for quite some time. When I was in my early teenage years, my brother gave me an album with Waylon Jennings for my birthday. One of the songs there stuck with me forever … MacArthur Park. For some reason I’ve found, throughout life … none of the people I’ve met have known about this song … even the ones that I’d have expected to know [not sure whether Angharod and I talked about it, though]. Yesterday, as I was reading through the day’s posts by the ones here that I’m subscribed to … what do I see, if not MacArthur Park.

Long before I moved to North America, the show Seinfeld was airing in Sweden … it was very popular and most people watched it. Except ME! I heard them talk about it, I didn’t know what it was — I thought it was some kind of talk show like Larry King. The main reason I never bothered to watch it, was because it was on very late at night, and I got up 5AM every week day.

SO…the very first Seinfeld episode I happened to sit down and really watch, was the one when they’re in the laundromat and Kramer pours concrete into the washer. That was when I’d just moved to Quebec. I laughed myself silly and was hooked forever. Now I’ve watched every episode several times and almost know the lines by heart. If Jerry Seinfeld knew how much I’ve learnt from that show … not only laughed … but learnt expressions, and about North American life … I think he’d be pleased.

Now … to the point of all this: In one episode, called The Statue, I was really surprised to hear George Costanza say: «When I was 10 years old, my parents had the very same statue on the mantle, in our apartment exactly and one day I grabbed it, as a microphone. I was singing MacArthur Park, and I got to the part about “They’ll never have that recipe again” and it slipped out of my hand and broke»

I could hardly believe my ears … like I  said; nobody I knew, knew the song and secondly — at that time, I had not thought about it for maybe twenty years! Now that we have Internet in our lives, I know much more about the song than I ever did before.

when sleep won’t come

Last night, I just couldn’t fall asleep. Somehow, I sensed it almost right away, that this would be one of those nights. The humidity is pretty high so that didn’t help.

For the longest time, I remained in bed and my thoughts kept wandering. I even thought about blogging, and what if I’d come up with a topic that everyone is interested in … I mean, really interested — so that they’d flock to my blog, waiting for the next post LOL ! In one way, it would be kind of cool — I’d get lots of comments to reply to. My next thought was ‘what would people really be interested in??’ If I knew the answer to that one, I’d really have it made.

When you live in a big place, you easily get the impression that they’re only interested in themselves and if you’re in a small village they seem to be interested in other people … their neighbours. The smaller the place, the higher the level of gossip. I remember a couple I used to know … each Saturday, they went to have supper with his mother, a few kilometres away from where they lived. She suggested to him that they should start taking a walk there instead of taking the car … so that perhaps the heavy supper would settle on their walk back. He thought about this, and said ‘no’, he couldn’t do that … not because he didn’t want to but because they’d had to walk past the farmer’s house and then the farmer would think they had been drinking and couldn’t take the car.

That little story goes to show how people care about other people’s thoughts in really small places … whereas in a big city nobody would care at all! Both concepts of living have their advantages I guess — the freedom of doing whatever you feel like in the big city, compared to the sense of security you get in the small place, where everybody knows one another. The loneliness that the anonymity could bring … you’re never as lonely as in a big crowd … the annoyance of constantly being judged in the little ‘fish bowl’, where people never forget.

I’ve tried them both. Well … not a really big city, of course but still … fairly big. My home-town is small … the mentality there used to be like the little village, almost. With the job I had, I knew a tremendous amount of people. Being away for a few years causes you to lose the grip and of course, as time goes by you age too. Once I moved back there after four years, and it took quite some time to get back into the swing of things … but I did, eventually.

It sort of tickles my mind to think about what it’s like to live in an immense city like New York City. I would think that when it’s such a huge place and so many people, it must be broken down to smaller units … blocks, perhaps. When you watch TV-shows like Seinfeld or DOC [the one with Billy Ray Cyrus] you easily get the impression that it’s all so friendly and they all know one another 🙂

Accept what you cannot change ~ Pet Peeves

Over the years, I’ve become pretty good at accepting that I can’t change certain things. Instead of wasting energy on trying to change, and thinking about how much I want to change it, I try to settle in both my mind and in my heart that things are the way they are. There have been times when that has felt like a big relief.

Other times, things are bugging me and I realise that it’s possible to rid myself of them — that’s a relief too.

Then there are TV-commercials.  TV-commercials in general, I won’t even go into, but the fact that the volume automatically goes up when the commercials come on … that bugs me to no end, and I have a really hard time accepting that.

I have tinnitus, and when the TV is too loud, the tinnitus gets worse … it’s like it’s trying to compensate for all the noise around me.  Just the fact that I’m not really in control of my own TV … BIG pet peeve!

There must be lots of people that are angry about this, one would think. It’s like telemarketing … who likes telemarketing? Why are  they allowed to call me … most often around supper time?! I wouldn’t say a word if the telephone was a FREE service, but I pay for the damned thing … just for  the pleasure of having a telephone.

Jerry Seinfeld handled it very well. In one episode, he was called up by a telemarketer. Jerry asked for their home phone number, so that he could call them back. They wouldn’t give that to him, of course. «You don’t want people to call you at home, huh?!», Jerry said …. «now you know how I feel!»

Those are two issues that I, so far, haven’t been able to accept. Guess I should be out on a ledge somewhere, instead of just sitting here with a lot of opinions.