What made you smile today?

Great story, nimh. It exemplifies why I love to read this thread - it's fun to see what makes others smile.

getting this email at work today





I can 'hear' him grinning.

Do you suppose he'll post a pic of them in their formal gear? This landlubber would love to see that.

Good to hear the hanburgers are having a fun time!

I returned home from vacation with daughter M to discover an email from Mr B, who is touring with daughter K and her high school orchestra. It's the first contact I've had since we went in separate directions last Thursday. They're doing well, the concerts the kids are giving have been well attended and well received in Budapest and Vienna. They play in Salzburg tonight and then on to Prague for a concert on Saturday before returning home on Sunday.

I can't wait for all of us to be safe and sound at home, but it made me smile to hear that they are having a good time in Europe.

I got a call today (April Fool's Day) at my store asking if I knew what the melting point of nails was. He wasn't joking; he thought I might know.

Az irodalom, a zene és véletlenek, barátságosok magyarok megmentnek engem (nem az először..).

(Benéztem E-ba, nem sokaig. Ha nem menték be, most örült lettek volna - és nem ok nélkül. De pont most - rendben vagyok - többé-kevésbé.)

That's nice, Nimh

Mr B and daughter K arrived home today a day late, tired and happy after a long trip. I'm glad everyone is home safe and sound.

I found 250 dollars in this women's purse. Now I'm 250 dollar richer. And no one suspects it was me who took it. Todays a wondeful day.

Let's hope that's more than less...

Oh Francis, you dont wanna know ... what a f*cking weekend. After all that **** with my ex, now I've lost my on-and-off lover of fifteen years too... all those years of gentle promise, now thats all gone too. But I didnt wanna go on about it, hence making my note (about something that made me avoid, last night, feeling the way I would have) in Hungarian instead.

Seeing precisely this today:



(The photo was taken this time last year, same blue sky and same blooms today.)

nimh, sorry things have been rough. For all I know that could've been cut and pasted, but seems like at least you're approaching fluency in Hungarian..?

I'm sorry you had such an awful weekend, nimh. I hope something happens very soon that makes you smile again.

Hey, thanks. Yes, weekend was rough: I'd been looking forward to it for weeks, months, like a wanderer in the desert brightens at thinking of the water that awaits him. Peace, quiet, comfort and charm; closeness, intimicacy, desire - all that, always there when we meet - not now. Or with several crucial chunks gone missing, anyhow. Decision-making time, it'd been, and decisions didnt fall in my favour.

Woulda been nice if I'd known in advance, tho.

Anyway.

Yes, though, Eva, there always remain things to smile about - in fact, I got a couple right now! I'll post those next. Soz, yes, that post was all mine, for sure - but fluency? Not in years yet, I'm afraid..

Oh, and the "irodalom" was Budapest by Chico Buarque, a brilliant, clever little book I bought yesterday and immediately sank away in, read half of it in one stretch, beautiful!; the "zene" would be cafe E's unbeatable mix of raw flamenco, old Hungarian show music, Manu Chao, edgy latin pop, etc, that goes so perfectly with its tipsy patrons, and the "barátságosok magyarok" were an old acquaintance I came across there for the first time in half a year, and a random girl and boy who each started some random spontaneous chat.

At the risk of turning this into the nimh dear diary thread, tonight was really nice ...

I was grumpy all day, and sad too, for obvious reasons, and then had to go to the dentist as well to have a big filling replaced, which was highly unpleasant, plus I have to go back on thursday for a cavity, again in the morning too - everything sucks. So until late afternoon there was just no let-up, or it would have to have been that the dental hygienist (this was a new place I went to) turned out to be a lovely, charming, kind and flirty dream of a considerate girl, so who knows perhaps i'll even stop dreading going to the dentist with such unparallelled intensity (which is exactly why she was like that of course, sensing I was as tense as a bow - which makes her a genius at her job.)

Anyway, so the daytime was sucking but at least the weather was bright and sunny and warm, even as along with a hundred other curious Budapesters and tourists I walked down the seriously flooding Danube, which has swallowed up the entire shore road and is now reaching up all the way to the tramways by its side, despite impotent sandbags - just half a meter more and the fancy hotels will be in trouble. Restaurant boats with gangways that end up in the water, traffic signs sticking barely out and taking on an entire new meaning ("pedestrian crossing is dangerous and forbidden!"), plenty of cool photos to make while it was day. It was the evening I was dreading, fearing the panic of desperate loneliness, the heavy realisation of dreams crunching into dust one by f*cking one.

But, this time, I was in luck. Esther sent me an email asking if I was coming along to some short docus being shown in the Archives at 6, two further friends were there too. The docus (from Tadzhikistan, Iran) were very amateuristic but also - the Iranian one - charming and optimistic - in fact, that one deserves a WMYST post of its own, will add something right below. We all went to have a drink and then Esther and I went to have another one in another place, I got to tell my story of the weekend with all its complications, but we also joked and chatted, and she reacted with exactly the combination of light-heartedness and relativation and understanding, and just talking about it, and then her reaction, really helped to get some perspective, of which I tend to quickly lose all when left to brooding by myself. So that was really wonderful, I was really lucky, the perfect distraction.

Also, she's just cool - I mean, apart from the furiously unreliable part. Just nice, and kind - but also totally wacky, we are funny. Like, she was earnestly telling me how this was perhaps all a sign that I needed to make decisions, a turning point in life you know, where I have to define what I really want (I know that one: a family, and settling down - either that, or non-committal pleasure) - and just go for it. So I laughed, earnestly summarised the lesson like that and then put on my most dramatic face and asked her to marry me - and when she said yes, does that mean I get a kiss now - and sure enough, here she leans toward me and we're kissing for a minute in that cafe. Ha - good thing she's beamingly happy about her new boyfriend, or else ;-).

--------

This Iranian doc, by the way, was about a woman in a small village who had already defied tradition and religious dogma by casting aside the weird kind of half-mask women wear there and starting work as a nurse - and now (this was in 2000 or so) did the unimaginable and stood as a candidate for the village council. Unheard of, and we see a friendly elder sitting down with her and talking in pleading, lecturing, arguing circles to try to dissuade her. But she is a bubbling, no-nonsense fountain of ideas and ambitions: to set up a school for girls, foremost, and the village road should be paved, there should be sport facilities for the kids so they dont turn to drugs and also outside sport facilities for girls so they dont need to hide inside to play, and this, and that, and why hasnt the village council done anything in fifteen years?

She's a short, young, enthusiastic thing, a loving woman who as nurse runs around the surrounding villages non-stop to take care of the villagers, calls them her 600 children; she's visibly elated by the camera and all the attention, and bursting with excitement about it all, sending boys out to the voting station to find out more news, and more news. The coolest thing though is how she and her husband interact: because he is also standing for the same elections (!), yet never says a word to stop her. He's all smiling gentleness and endearment, and the edge of competitiveness between 'em that also visibly shows up is more cute than anything else.

The conversation with the elder is hilarious, he is using everything from flattery (but you have found your mission, and you are brilliant for it - be a nurse, you wont have time to travel here and there!) to pleading to loyalty (but why not trust your husband, he's on the list too, why not let him take this one on him?), to bizarre back-to-front folk wisdom (women have more sins than men! Why? Well, why are they buried three meter down, and me two meter? Because they have more sins!). But she matches him every step of the way (and what did you say when I first wanted to be a nurse? The same things, all the same things! And where does God say that..), and both woman and husband break into friendly laughter when the elder pleads with the nurse that, why do women have to cover up when they go out alone? Well, because women - every look at them or from them is like a shot at the man's heart!

Basically, they're just having this lively, eager debate like any of us, which all the while remains comradely and friendly. Is the glass half full or half empty? Some of the stuff the elder says are mindbogglingly superstitious stuff, yet there they are, the old man and the young woman, having this open, frank and good-natured fierce discussion in the first place - aint a thing he gets past her!

Plus, of course ... yes, she did get elected! ;-). She and some 500 other women in villages and districts around the country, apparently, back then. And according to the closing titles, within a year there was a paved road - and a school for girls.. who could have wondered, with her on the council?

Of course, God knows what's happened to her now, five years on, considering the changes in Iran since Khatami's heyday. But thats no longer WMYST.

Now I'm smiling.

It's nice to know my wish for you came true...several times in one day at that!

Wishing you more days like this one....the afternoon and evening, that is.

You write with such insight.

Aww, thats nice <smiles>

Thank you

I can't find a place to stick this story, so it is going to be put here, in a thread where Nimh has related experiences that were not exactly
"smilely."
Down below my house is a cul-de-sac. And there are three office buildings down there. One of them is the headquarters for a construction company; another is an insurance agent; and the third is the local office of a large regional real estate agency.
Yesterday, in the parking lot of the real estate office, a large tent was put up. And today, chairs and tables and tablecloths and then the live band arrived and set up, and I saw a van pull up with a logo on the side that advertised "Ice Scuptures." A table was set up with perhaps a hundred or more gift bags. I have no idea what was in them, but there were a lot of them.
Curiosity got the better of me, so my yardboy and I walked down there and approached two stocky guys in ill-fitting suits with earphones and dark suglasses. They were not happy to see us. My yardboy has lots of tatoos and piercings. And I, for working in the garden, was attired very casually. We did learn that the real estate office was hosting some big party.
Sure enough, caterers came and then two very long limosines, each carrying two passengers (go figure).

It was a nice day today in Virginia. Sunny most of the day and mild. But only about 25 or 30 people came to the party and I could see some of the catering staff sneaking around behind the building to smoke cigarettes.
After a couple of hours the limos came back and the many, many gift bags containing I know not what were carried inside the office.

I reckon the lesson here is that things don't always turn out like they should, or like you hope they should. But you never know. Perhaps next time could be different, and everything clicks like magic and falls into place.

A web-thing: these concise, funny reviews of the degree of "dangerous content" in each African national anthem. Chuckle. This one on the anthems of Latin-America is funny too.

There's follow-up pages on the other continents as well (the Asian ones are very well-behaved), all under the title Deutschland Uber What Now? :wink:

Oh, I only just now 'got' rjb's post...