Amanda Blog and Kiss

Ahem.
So uuuhhhh. It’s been awhile.

I couldn’t even begin to tell you where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing or what is preoccupying my mind of late. Mostly because 3 and a half months is a long time to cover, and the distance feels vast.

But where to pick up then?

It is 3 am on the morning of Christmas Eve, and things are quiet. Now is as good a time as any I suppose.

I’ve fallen out of love a bit with blogs lately. With my blog(s), with other blogs, with blogging in general. I was considering shutting up shop, when I got a lovely comment from Julia.

“perhaps you have found an exciting new life following your holiday, but in case you have just not felt motivated to write…. you should know people out there are reading”

Julia, if you are still reading this, a full month (almost to the day) after you commented, then thank you. Your comment came at the right time, right when I was thinking “What’s the point?”. And then I realized that there is no point to blogging except blogging itself, and that never stopped me before. So I decided not to give up on blogging just yet.  An eight year hobby deserves a better chance than that.

But it’s not just blogging that is falling to the wayside: I am not returning phone calls, not even picking up the phone most times. I don’t email back. I forget to text. It all just feels so….so…..not what I need right now.

What I do need is anyone’s guess. If you find it, can you let me know: a) what it is; b) where to find it; and c) if it costs much (because times are tight right now).

In the meantime, I will tell you what I have been busying myself with while I’ve been avoiding phone calls, emails, texts and this blog:

• Yoga. (Specifically hot yoga.)
• Swimming.
• Running.
• Gymming.
• Work.
• Taking my dog to the park.
• Sleep.

So, as for an “exciting new life”,  Julia?  Not so much.

A quiet, serene, maybe too-boring-to-blog life?  Yes, maybe that.  Maybe just that.

I’ll be back before the end of the year with the year’s alphabet roundup, my own little blog’s traditional nod back to the year that just passed.  In the meantime, if you need to brush up: 2006, 2007,2009, 2010, 2011.

Merry Christmas everyone!

*

Normally after a night spent awake, I look back in bleary-eyed wonder about what could have kept me up for those extra 8 hours.

This time, I know.

It’s the people who walk down my street at all hours of the night, talking to the person three inches to their left as if they were three miles away.

It is the heat of the city, which makes me sleep with the windows open, which makes it that much easier to hear all of them shouting to their friends.

It was the douchey douchebags who were sitting on the tram stop in front of my apartment blasting horribly repetitive tap-on-my-brain-with-a-hammer techno music.

It was me furiously dialing the police non-emergency line, scrambling in my brain to come up with the proper way to say in Dutch, “There are two douchebags on the tram stop in front of my house CAN YOU PLEASE ARREST THEM I HAVE TO BE IN WORK SOON.” (Luckily their tram came before the police picked up the phone; I didn’t quite have the sentence fully formed and it would have just been me yelling down the line “EIKELS!  EIKELS OP DE TRAMHALTE! VOOR MIJN DEUR! DOE IETS!”.)

It is this pain in my shoulder returning after a three year absence.  Can’t say I missed it much, or the havoc that it wrecked on my life at the time.

It is shin splints.

And it’s this song, the chorus of which keeps repeating ad nauseum in my head.

So, if knowing is half the battle, what then have I won?