I've just come back from holiday in the Czech Republic and felt the urgent need to communicate with the world. I missed a week from the virtual world and it seems I didn't miss anything. Nobody facebooked with me and most of my dozens of emails were newsletters, so no need to panic. On the otherhand, no employer of the year contacted me. I didn't even miss payment day, as it tends to be late each month.
I'm sort of tired, plus I had a completely different daily routine while on holiday, so I don't intend to stay up late. Besides, I don't have the patience to write a proper post just now. I don't even have pictures, as it was my boyfriend who took all the pics, which was a bit embarrassing because I always pointed out things that I wanted him to take a photo of. I made like five pics altogether, but these are also on his camera, so you have to wait a couple of days if you're interested in the Bohemian-Bavarian region of the Alps, which you should be because it's indeed a beautiful region.
Right now all I can provide is some emotional-reflective account of the week. As you may remember, I play the oboe in a wind orchestra, and for the last three (now four) summer holidays I have travelled with them, as it is an opportunity for cheap travelling and accomodation with varied programmes and people who I enjoy being with (in most cases). This year's journey turned out as a real challenge for me, mainly because I started to dislike more and more people as the days went by.
There's a certain section in the orchestra (covering mostly the flutists) that I don't really get on with, or I should say I don't even communicate with them. Actually, there are only a few people I regularly talk to in the orchestra, and most of them are boys. For one reason, most of the people joined the orchestra ten plus years ago, and especially the flutist girls have a close-knit group whose main concern is the four of them and their boyfriends. Of course there are more than four flutitsts but even the other flutists cannot belong as closely as these four belong to each other, one of them actually being my future sister-in-law. In addition to maintaining their secret circle their second annoying habit is what I call bitching, when for example two of them buy a long piece of jelly bean shaped like a giant spaghetti, and start eating it from the two ends, obviously parading for the boys. And to mention just a third reason for my ambiguous relation towards them, I just cannot tolerate it when people constantly giggle and smile, with or without a cause. Maybe it's my different socialization, but I'm not at all like that, and this stupid teenage-like habit can drive me mad.
I have to admit that I was disappointed to see the boys sticking to these girls, and by sticking I refer to the fact that whenever we arrived at a place, the instant they got out of the car, a certain group started running through the place, zigzagging between the sights like madmen, and finally finishing by sitting in a cafe, drinking beer. Meanwhile, the rest of us spent the hours walking through the place, trying to see the important sights, observing them, taking photos, all in our calm pace. I have to laugh out loud whenever it comes to my mind how the organizers of the journey insisted that this journey is meant to enhance team spirit. Actually this very same future sister-in-law of mine that I've already mentioned had arranged the seating in the cars, and in the first version she put my sister, my boyfriend, and me in three different cars, whereas she put herself, her boyfriend, her two favourite friends, and the two cousins of one of them all in the same car. Ironically, the three of us ended up in their car by the end of the fourth day as the girl with the two young cousins couldn't tolerate the swearing of the driver and asked us to change.
If you don't already know me I have to tell you that I'm an awful enemy, so I spent the time before going to bed scolding the people who annoyed me that day to my boyfriend, commenting on every tiny thing that annoyed me, and I can tell you there were lots. In addition to those already mentioned, I don't like it when a girl drinks doubles and plays table football, and all these things that count as wow in their dicitionary and that have to do with following the boys' ways. You can call it jealosy if you want, for though I was there with my boyfriend, I was indeed disappointed to see that the other boys thought it all cool. The problem, as usual, was that I always think of what others think of me, and there's a strong urge in me to belong.
Even my own sister started to drive me crazy as the days went by. She's the type who is always worried about something, typically about other people's opinion, and in relation to this, she always wants to play by the rules, always arriving on time, behaving properly, and so on. It wouldn't be a problem if she maintained these manias on her own, but she usually shares them with me. If she is afraid of being late, she cannot just leave on time on her own, she stays and keeps fussing about me until I also leave. Or, another thing that drives me crazy is when she starts playing back events, like "Do you think when X said this and this she meant this and this?" And she keeps on doing this until I'm quite irritated, then she says things like "I just don't like doing anything wrong," or something like that. Because she did this quite often during the week, and because I know that she does it at her workplace as well, I started to worry that she didn't relax at all, so I asked her about twelve times a day if she was feeling good. And of course, she became annoyed after a while.
There were moments when I thought bringing my sister along was not a good idea after all. Moreover, there were moments when I questioned that I would ever again feel good with the people in this orchestra. Despite the invisible line of demarcation, one of the flutist quartet (who had also become an outcast) joined us playing card games and board games in the evenings, and also the young flutist cousins (for whom it was their first journey with this group) played a lot with us, which showed me that we are not freaks after all. And yesterday evening, while my sister and the two young cousins were folding paper roses, I was astonished to find myself playing cards with three of the flutist quartet (including my often-mentioned future sister-in-law).
For some reason I didn't fall asleep easily yesterday night, and while I was thus thinking of the day, I arrived at the conclusion that these people are not evil after all, and they even let me enter their precious circle, if only for two rounds of playing cards. When we stopped in Passau today, we even stack together for most of the time. And I know we will always remain different, and we won't be close, but I should accept them (and my sister) the way they are (and probably even like them after a while).
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