Between the lines

He asks me whether I was born in France or in Iran. “Iran”, I reply dreading what is coming afterwards. Then, he adds: “In Tehran?”. I confirm. He smiles, proud to have guessed correctly, not knowing that he had  a chance of 1 in 7 to be correct. I wonder what kind of a city he pictures when he thinks about Tehran.

He is my banker. I look at him while he is typing stuff on his computer. He is barely 25, dressed formally with a tie and a suit. Well groomed with a bizarre moustache, ugly but carefully trimmed. He has probably grown this moustache to make him look more mature. I am not a big fan of facial hair, on guys, with some exceptions. I am not a big fan of facial (or non-facial) hair on women, with no exceptions.

Once he finishes printing out about 30 pages for me to sign, and once I sign them while complaining about the number of pages, he tells me to cover myself up well “not to get cold” before leaving. It’s nice that my banker thinks about my health.  We shake hands very formally, telling to each other “how nice” it was to have known each other, without really meaning it,  and then I leave.

In the street, the smell of the roasted chickens from my butcher has filled the whole neighborhood. Automatically I think of my mom, she loves these chickens. I can understand her, the smell of the melting fat is irresistible. The view of rotating chickens appetizing, of course if you decide to ignore about how these chickens have ended up in that oven.

I forget about the chickens and run to catch the bus to work. I say hello to the bus driver, who has become a familiar face after all these years. I am extremely late. I pull out my ipod and shut myself off of  everything around me. Another work day is to begin and I can already feel my headache bothering me. I will take a pill when I get to work.

Once at destination, I speed up to get to our weekly seminar. On my way to the talk, I start to ask myself what is the point of going to these talks if in few months I am gonna leave everything? Then as I have been training myself lately, I try to shut down discouraging voices in my head and keep walking. I arrive late, even according to French standards. I open the door and find everyone carefully listening, or pretending to listen to the speaker. He is quite badly dressed, as physicists do, thinking that they are cool that way. He gives me a sharp look as to say “who are you and why are you late?!”. I don’t care. In that room, strangely I feel at home among those mostly borderline autistic scientists. No one with a tie, no one with a suit. Some plain dirty, scratching their head constantly.

At lunch in our cafeteria, I witness snapshots of a scientist’s life. A masters student who dreams of doing a thesis. The smile on her face when she tells me about her research plans is so innocent and naive that I envy her. Then there is the PhD student who worries about her future choices and her thesis. Postdocs like me, trying to be encouraging of more junior fellows, but well knowing that they are there to struggle for a while. Some will be more successful than others, as is the rule of life. Then there are more senior members of our “household”. Some who are well grounded and have found their place. Watching them is a real pleasure. And then there are those who have turned bitter and make others lives bitter. I wonder how does this happen. As I often wonder, how does an innocent child turn to be a mean person? I guess you can never prevent that from happening. People do make wrong choices that affect them and others. You just need to be quick enough to fix the damage as early as possible.

The day comes to its end as any other day. I pack my bags and leave the institute. It is late, it  is raining outside. Awkwardly I am in love with the fine drizzles. I walk for a while and replay my music. It’s too late to get a roasted chicken. I go home and file the 30 pages that my moustached banker gave me. One more folder to take care of.

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It’s around midnight. I get into the metro and take a seat. I am so tired that I lean my head on the wall and close my eyes. I have about ten minutes to go. I can feel my veins pulsing in my boots. My feet are tired, I can’t wait to be in my warm bed.

After a couple of minutes I open my eyes and notice that the half-drunk seemingly homeless guy in front of me is staring at me without blinking. When he sees that I am looking at him, he starts to smile. I smile back and look at the bottle in his hand. He takes a sip of the strange pink-colored liquid and says: “Oh, these eyes … You must be Portuguese”. At first I say nothing. I just continue looking at him. He looks kind, not too drunk and not aggressive. Then he continues telling me that now is not the time to sleep, no reason to be tired, that I should be more lively. He makes gestures with his arms as if he wanted to run, to show me that I should be more energetic. “When you die, there will be plenty of time for sleeping, now is time to live”, he concludes.

He is not completely wrong. I should try to be more lively, there is no reason not to be. I can not explain to this guy that I feel out of steam because I don’t see a clear prospect for my professional life. Compared to him I have what is needed to be happy, and yet he is the one cheering me up.

I laugh. I wish that dying was like a long sleep filled with good dreams. One of my recurring dreams is me flying like a giant bird. I love the sensation of flapping my wings and finally taking off after the third or the forth try. Once in the air I cruise where I can never go otherwise. I fly above the oceans or in the mountains. I admire the view in the horizon. In my dreams, I do things that are impossible in our earthy life. I cultivate giant sunflowers few meters high.

Maybe dying is indeed like an endless sleep. Heaven is when you are stuck in good dreams and Hell is filled with nightmares.

The guy doesn’t give up and asks me again whether I am Portugish. He tells me that he is familiar with the expression in my eyes. I feel sorry to disappoint him but I finally tell him that I am actually from the middle east. He raises his eyebrows. “Oh!”, he exclaims. Then to add to the disappointment I add that I am from Iran. At this point, a big smile forms on his lips. “I love Iranians, they are very kind”, he says. I wonder if I should add to the drama and precise that I am actually an Armenian from Iran?! I decide to cut it short. Maybe he doesn’t have such a good opinion about Armenians.

I am already at my destination. I wish him a good night and leave. I know that the best part of the night for him was just then, when he was sitting in a warm metro car. Soon, he will spread his sleeping bag on a cold cement floor and wait for the morning to come. With the force of his pink drink, he will probably manage to fall asleep defying the cold weather. He will probably dream of his Portuguese muse and hope to see her someday.

As for me, I go to bed wishing to experience another flight over the mountains.

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Each year there is one Christmas card that stands out from the other cards on my desk. It is the one sent by my English friend. Every year along with her greeting card, she includes a one-page summary of the highlights of her life during the past year: “I got married, our baby is now walking, my husband changed his job, we took a one-month trip to the north pole, etc.”. All of this garnished with the famous British humour.

This year, I decided to do something like that, just for myself, as an exercise. The result was not so pretty. Last year was rubbish to put it mildly. Half of the year passed by my miserable attempts to get a permanent position, the other half was spent trying to recover from my defeats and go forward. Quite charming! My friends should feel very lucky that I didn’t send them my “report”.

Ok, I don’t have any Roman blood, and yet I tend to dramatizing any situation. The big lines that marked me last year are dark. In between, there were lots of light and cheerful moments, which are probably what really count. As our dear John Lennon said: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”. So my Life according to John Lennon, despite few low notes has been positively animated during last year. It has been filled with laughter, love, warmth, unforgettable moments spent with adorable people, tears of joy, new encounters and discoveries of beautiful music and art that make life so worthwhile to live.

Maybe I should have sent my annual report after all.

Today, 31st of December 2011, I woke up to a grey, rainy but romantic Paris. The last day of the year is a special day. As a kid, I remember the effervescence that existed in our household during this day. My parents always threw big parties for the occasion. So the day used to pass with organizing the dinner. For me, all that mattered though was to plan strategies to catch the Santa, “Dzmer Babi” as we call him. I used to ask my dad millions of questions: “Where is he coming from?, how will he enter the house?, how can he fit in the chimney?, etc.”. By the way, the Armenian Santa comes on the New Year eve and not on Christmas night. Probably there is delay issue due to his European trip.

As we grew up, the excitement diminished and the Santa visited less and less. There were years that I wished there was no 31st on the calendar. Sometimes, as much as we might want to ignore it and convince ourselves that it doesn’t mean anything, that its a day like any other and it will pass, and try to rationalize by asking: “What does it really mean to change the year?”, still some little voice tells us that it is the time to do some mental cleaning and welcome new beginnings. To believe that the Santa will come, and maybe he will bring what we have been dreaming for a while.

For me, this year will forcibly have new beginnings. They might be welcomed and desired, or imposed. In anyways, I somehow can’t wait to see what they will be. In making my “list”, I realized that for the past couple of years I have been pedaling on an apartment bicycle. Even though I have built some muscles, I haven’t advanced much. Time to get on a real bike and move.

I like this picture. I wish Santa will bring me a bike and a helmet; you never know, better be prudent. I will chose a destination and go. No other choices left.

In the mean time I wish everyone a Happy New Year and hope that 2012 will be a less aggressive and turmoiled year on global level and more generous and harmonious for all of us. Will keep you posted where my bicycle takes me during the new year.

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It’s hopeless. Once again there is no way I can fall asleep. I turn in my bed and look at the clock. It is 2:00 am. I decide to get up and do something. There is no use in staying in bed.

I make myself a camomile tea. Camomile is supposed to sooth and help sleeping. Maybe real camomile has some virtues, but I have a hard time believing that this processed herb in a bag that I put in boiling water will do anything but make me pee. Nonetheless, I will give it a try.

The box of my beloved cigarillos catches my eye. Maybe I should not smoke, not at this time of the day specially not with the cough that I have. But then again, I am very restless. I need to calm down. I give in to my temptation and light one up. The smell of the cigar and the dancing smoke take me away for few seconds. I am not a regular smoker, but once in a while I like to treat myself. Why not at 2 am?!

I think about strategies to combat my insomnia. Probably I should restart doing some sport. My jogging plans are on hold due to the stupid tendinitis I’ve got. The other option is to go back to the swimming pool. Near my workplace there is a nice swimming pool with a very affordable price. The problem though is that for no apparent reason, the personel of this center are on strike every other day. After trying few times and facing the closed door, it is hard to motivate oneself to put on the swimming suit in the winter cold. Specially now that I dread to look at my extra kilos.

I will think about it later. There are many nights still ahead!

I wonder if I could do something more useful with my time awake than writing nonsense in my blog. I could wash the dishes, arrange the mess in my apartment, read my book about siberian forests, or even continue to think about things that prevent me from sleeping. Maybe I will finally find a solution for them. But then again, writing these lines helps me put some order in my thoughts, and it is truly relaxing. Much more that the camomile tea!

The days are long, full of events, emotions, conversations and lack of conversations. In the end of the day, we are left with the thoughts of those moments that we would have loved to cease and cherish but somehow they slipped through our fingers. When we go to bed, we finally find time to dissect the day and realize that we have been too busy doing nothing.

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Time looses its meaning when you repeat the exact same things in a one year interval, and it seems like yesterday.

It’s again mid-December and I have to go to the east of France to meet the “big boss”, the same person as last year. It seems that he only has time for me once a year. I have to give a talk, almost the same as last year, and to discuss about a potential position. Looks like a terrible deja vu. I wonder why am I doing it again.

I find myself in the same train station, the same Christmas decoration, the same shops, and the same questions buzzing in my head. What will be the outcome of the day?

It’s going to be a long day. I had to wake up at 5 am and I will be back home around 10 pm. I am happy that I can take the high-speed train instead of an airplane. I hate going to the airports.

I drink a coffee at the train station to keep me awake, refresh my makeup, and head to the Institute.

I meet the guy who wanted to hire me last year. I call him the “small” boss. He is all cheery and encouraging, as he was last year. He coaches me a bit for my evening meeting. Somehow though, the one thing that has changed during the past year is my attitude towards people. I don’t trust anybody anymore.

My talk goes well, I meet a lot of interesting people in the Institute and in the end of the day, I meet the big boss. The meeting, started well and ended with me suffocating. Literally. Out of nowhere, I started to cough for about 1 minute nonstop, had a hard time breathing and lost my voice! The boss said: “I don’t want to kill you in my office, so take your Parisian germs and leave”. I didn’t shake his hand on my way out, not to contaminate him.

The conclusion of this meeting was that I am still hanging in the air. Things that seemed more settled a month ago, are again undecided. This reconfirm my lack of trust in people. I come back, disappointed and more hesitant about my career.

Yesterday, was one of those days. My tears were on the corner of my eyes and dropped on few occasions. I hate to be at work in this state, but there is no choice. So, I force myself to joke, to laugh, to dance at the work party and try to forget for few hours that for some of us finding a job is much more like rock climbing than strolling in a Scottish green lanscape.

While I am dancing a salsa, or something that was supposed to be a salsa, the guy leading me reminds me cruelly that doing five years of postdoc is a little too much and I am in a critical situation. If I had high heels, I would have definitely pierced his feet. Instead, I just smiled and left his arms willingly.

The only highlight of yesterday was a cheesy, common flirt line that I received during another dancing round. “I am lost in your eyes”, he said. Well … “too bad”, I thought. I myself have been lost for some time in someone else’s eyes, and have not yet found my way out. I have never asked for directions though!

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I knew something was wrong when I started to go to sleep around midnight with no effort. It was too good to be true.

Since my teenage years, I have been struggling with insomnia. It is as if every night I need to sort my whole problems, and the problems of others, once I go to bed and turn off the lights. It is then that my mind starts to function in ten times its capacity and turns nonstop as a vinyl disk.

But strangely since about six months ago I started to be sleepy even before midnight. My eyes would get heavy in front of the TV and I had a hard time dragging myself to bed. I can confess that it was a very pleasant feeling. I knew that once in bed it was a matter of few minutes and I would soon go where my dear friend calls “the chocolate island”. I never knew sleeping could be such a sweet experience.

My sleepiness didn’t stop there though. The whole day I would feel like I had been hit by a truck. I had a crazy desire to take a nap on my desk, in the lab, in the bus, everywhere! When at home, I would take a nap in the afternoon and enjoy every minute of it.

This new euphoria was accompanied by an undesired steady weight gain. It seemed that every week I was getting larger, like a balloon. This part was much less fun. I kept buying new cloths while sleeping on the way to the boutiques, hoping that they would be the last ones before I loose the extra kilos.

At first I blamed it on stress. You can blame everything on stress, work, and fatigue. But fortunately I know myself better, and I knew that I have never felt like this even in my worst stressful years. So I went to see a doctor. I thought it must be a vitamin deficiency or something like that.

Tests were done and the verdict fell. I have a low functioning thyroid, called hypothyroidism. But like everything else in my life, it was a borderline condition. Not really clear how to deal with it.

My doctor recommended that we do an echography. The echographer, who turned out to also be an author of medical trillers, put the cold jelly thing on my throat and rolled the scanner up and down before announcing his finding. “There it is, you have an isolated nodule”, he said proudly. I thought for few seconds that seemed much longer, then with a voice that only I could hear, I asked: “What does that mean?”. He replied in a reassuring tone: “It means that the nodule is all alone”! “It has been there probably for ten years”, he continued. What a romance!

I suddenly felt a deep nostalgia for my lonely nodule who has been hiding in my thyroid gland for about ten years. It’s crazy, but since that announcement I rewind in my head all the events that have happened to me over the past ten years and try to include my nodule in them. How could I miss her existence?!

I came back to my doctor and told her that I have a “lonely” nodule. She laughed and said that we should check it out, but a priori it seems not to be a problem. The first couple of days I was very worried. The thought of having something being poked in my throat was not so pleasant. But it is surprising how quickly we adapt to every news. Now, I can’t wait to get over with the test and move one.

My ex-boss seems to belong to the Hypothyroid fan club. “Oh! That is nothing”, she said once I told her about the diagnosis. “All my family are hypos. I am hypo, my mother was hypo and my daughter is hypo. You just need to take a little pill every day”, she said with a huge smile.

So here I am, hooked on this new pill Levothyrox, since ten days. I am still fat and bloated, but the sweet sleeping nights are already gone. I am not very trilled to have to take a pill every morning until the end of my life, but I am happy that for six months I savored the luxury of sleeping at a decent time without having to review past, present and future problems before entering the chocolate islands.

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Is there a coincidence between Halloween and my past coming back to haunt me? Probably.

Few days back I received a message on facebook, from a person I knew in another life: “I am in Paris, would like to meet you … if you feel like it”, it read.

At times like this I wish I were living rather in Dijon or Clermont-Ferrand, somewhere unreachable. Or in another century when there was no internet.

I hesitated for a while what to answer. How to be polite and refuse? I honestly didn’t feel like plunging in the past and relive uneasy moments. I thought that maybe he has moved on and just wanted to see me, but I could not take the risk. I consulted my officemates, as I do for every little thing. “Say that you are out of town for a conference”, one said. “Or, reply to him later and pretend that you didn’t read your facebook message on time”, the other suggested. “Or, we could meet him together and tell him that I am your husband”, the last one proposed with a big smile. I am uneasy with lying, so I decided to coldheartedly ignore the message.

I rewind my mind to seven years ago. This was one of the most bizarre relationships that I have encountered in my life. Quite intense in some ways and quite repelling in others. By the end I was quite unenthusiastic but nonetheless he was willing to move cross Atlantic with me. “I will do anything to make us work”, he once said. I would have given my life to hear these words from someone else. But after he told me this, I stopped returning his phone calls. Everything ended there. It was quite cruel, but I didn’t know what else to do. Our feelings were not reciprocal.

image from http://www.intemporal.org

I came to Paris and never thought about this episode of my life. From time to time I saw him in some friends’ photos and tried to figure out if he finally got married. He wanted so much to have kids and a family.

I don’t regret my choices. I am a lion person and don’t believe in learning to love someone with time. I don’t like to settle for second-bests, unless I am really forced to. They say when you visit a house to buy, you make up your mind in the first 45 seconds. I guess it’s almost the same with people. Maybe not 45 seconds, but definitely not much more. It’s just a gut feeling.

Sometimes in only 45 seconds, a smile, a long stare, or a warm hug can transfer feelings and get us hooked for a long long time. And sometimes, in years we try to create something that cannot exist because the elements are not correct.

I am aware that a lot of people are against this line of thought. That they say that I am a dreamer. That life is much more complicated than a “love at first sight” cliché. Maybe … maybe I am a naive romantic who has watched a lot of Hollywood movies. The proof is here, I fell in love with  the movie Beginnersand dream to find a guy like Oliver (E. McGregor).

From the movie

Hal (Oliver’s father): Well, let’s say that since you were little, you always dreamed of getting a lion. And you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and you wait but the lion doesn’t come. And along comes a giraffe. You can be alone, or you can be with the giraffe.
Oliver: I’d wait for the lion.
Hal: That’s why I worry about you.

But what do you do once you find your lion? What happens if you are the giraffe to your lion? Or even worse, if your are an annoying fly buzzing around the head of your beloved lion? He will probably ignore you and stop answering your phone calls!

Life is cruel in the animal land.

—————–
P.S. If you guys didn’t know how crazy I can be, I have found these two old posts about the adventure in question:
part I
part II

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It’s curious how silent I was for three months and now suddenly I can not stop writing. There must be a name for such a behavior. Perhaps maniac-depressive?

I wish in parallel to this obsession, I could play music and evacuate some of my suffocating emotions. They say Virgos need such things, since they are big introverts. To be more precise, once upon a time I could play music. I took piano lessons for ten years. Playing piano was not my idea, it was my mom’s. She wanted her little girl to play piano and dance ballet, and marry the prince of the universe. So I tried. I still have nightmares about my piano lessons sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, my piano teacher was a sweet person, it was me who didn’t like to practice and I was always late with my daily routines. I have similar nightmares about chemistry exams. I didn’t like neither the piano nor the ballet, and not even the chemistry for that matter. So the day I was off the hook, I formatted my brain and forgot all about these activities.

Since few years, there is this tickling feeling inside me that wants me to restart play the piano. I promised to myself that the day I have a job and I get my own place, I will buy a piano and take lessons. That day seems to be at the retirement house. There, I am sure that I can find a piano. As for the ballet, I never had any tickling feelings. I just love watching it and I am proud to know the name of some of the moves: the arabesque, the pirouette, the developpé, the battement tendu, etc.

Now, one hobby that I really like is to look for potential diseases online. Thanks to the internet I have become a hypochondriac. Well, I am not quite a hypochondriac in the sense that I do not panic about my well being. I just think that every time I have a small pain, it must be due to a cancer or some auto-immune disease. In such cases, the internet is a blessing. You can tailor your illness to the symptoms your are having. Everything is possible.

On the internet you can even buy the drugs you need to cure yourself. I once did. I diagnosed myself with some liver disease and then ordered some medication that I guess was going to be shipped from India. I received the package which consisted of about ten pills with no notice, nothing. The sight of these abandoned pills made me feel better instantaneously. I threw the pills away and never thought about doing it again.

Why do I do self-diagnosis? Because I don’t like to go to the doctor. I am scared of them. It takes me a lot of energy to call the doctor, then go on with their capricious availability. “We can see you in three months”, the secretary says. By then, I can already be in Père Lachaise if I have a serious sickness. The only doctor that I would eagerly go to visit was my Rheumatologist while I was in the states. He was a handsome young man with a British accent to die for. He had visited Iran and talked to me about Shiraz. That changed a bit from the ever present topic of Ahmadinejad. Of course I made a fool of myself the first day I saw him. He gave me that famous paper blouse which you wear with the knot in the back and told me: “When you are ready knock on the door and I come in”. I did, but since it was my first time wearing the blouse, I put it on the wrong way, the knot in the front. It seemed like I were wearing a robe, except that the knot was around my neck and everything else was open. To me, it was more logical and easy to wear this way. He came in and burst in laughter. He told me how I should wear it! and left the room again. After the examination, it turned out that nothing was wrong and I just needed few physical therapy sessions. Not with him though.

After five years in Paris, I finally went to see a doctor. I have some leg pain since few months ago. I tried to explain the type of the pain to the doctor with not much success. She started to examine my leg; bend it, lift it, squeeze it. Murphy’s law exists; while I was under examination the pain had vanished completely. She thought I was making it up, but nonetheless she refereed me for a doppler echography in case there was a varicose vein problem. On my way out, I asked her for some blood tests, just out of curiosity. I received the results and of course, according to Doctor Internet, many things are not in the “normal” range. I already have a list of diseases that I might be suffering from. Maybe I’ll go and consult her about my discoveries!

In the end of the day, as it has happened few times already, she will tell me that I am suffering from stress. Stress is this mysterious thing that when there is no other reason for the illness, it can be used as one. She will say that I should keep calm and take care of myself. Maybe it’s time to start the piano lessons?

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At my workplace I have a two by one area which belongs to me. Since I am the most senior citizen in this shared office, I allow myself to spread a bit more. My desk and a large periphery around it has become my camping area. I have accumulated so much junk in my office that once one of my friends said that it was as if I had moved my wardrobe to the office! When I don’t work on my computer, I either chit-chat with my office mates, or I eat some sugary stuff or I look to the wall facing me which I have covered with various pictures. This wall has become a memory lane. Many postcards, photographs and cartoons present my five years that I have passed in this office. An office shared with four colleagues, that have become my buddies.

Today, I saw a curious new addition on the wall that I didn’t recognize. It looked like an almost naked man! Not so attractive. I climbed on my desk to see it better. Yes, it was young Sean Connery in some sort of prehistoric cloth. I looked at my colleagues and detected forcefully hidden smiles. They like to tease me with such surprises now and then. One day, I found Rafael Nadal’s gorgeous ad for Calvin Klein displaying his perfect abs, on my desk, “With love”, it said. I wished! If I weren’t ashamed of serious visitors in my office, I would have kept it on the wall. Another time, I found my whole computer decorated with microfluidic channels (some sort of rubbery translucide things similar to gummy bears). I have still kept them even though my computer now looks like an extraterrestrial object. Once, I even found a photo-montage of myself on an ad for a flower fertilizer, that referred to my planting in the cafeteria.

All these are reasons for which I dread the day I have to leave this place. I actually have developed a love and hate relationship with my workplace. I love it because of all the people that I have come to know and love and spent time with. I love it because I have been able to learn so many new things that once seemed exciting to me. I hate it because it has seen me in my worst times. This same desk that has witnessed me laughing with my friends over stupid movies online, has also absorbed many many of my tears. Its hard to stay at a place when you feel people judge you the way you judge yourself.

I wonder how I will remember my current workplace in ten years or so. For this, Nadal, Sean Connery and the extraterrestrial objects will be with me to remind me that once I worked at a place with (some) wonderful people who cared for each other and who tried to lift each other’s moral when things were not going well.

Even thinking about leaving gives me shivers, but we all have to move on and go on with our lives. We have to change work places to advance and not stagnate. We should feel lucky if we leave with a baggage of good memories and experiences.

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Exactly three weeks ago, I woke up with a phone call at 7 am. I didn’t dare to pick up the phone. At that hour it could only be a bad news; someone has broken a leg, or had a stroke, or my aunt can not operate her new phone. This time I was wrong. It was my friend calling me from the United Stated to wish me a happy birthday. My thirty-eight birthday!

It seems as if it was yesterday that she and I, and many others, celebrated our 18th birthday. For us, 18 was the age that we were officially considered adults. I still don’t know what that really means. Numbers don’t really mean anything, it is all a smooth transition, and specific to each person.

Usually, I like to spend this day with my friends around food and fun. This year however, I had no specific celebration plans. I was doing my “French” and I was on strike. As if by not celebrating it, it could not intrude my life. I however made an effort to put on nice cloths and make-up to convince myself that I can defy my age. I went to the lab, did my work and came home. I opened a bottle of my favorite red wine, cooked myself a nice dinner and watched a movie. Et voila! that was how the day passed. Nothing special and yet it added a number to my life. A number that for some means that I am no longer fit to apply for the job I want to do and for others it means that I have screwed-up my chances of building a family. In both cases I think of it as a pre-menopause, professional and personal. Ionically, I enjoy myself since I have turned thirty and I don’t feel any special worrying signs. Well, except that I start to have trouble reading, and I have joint pain when I run, I quickly get exhausted when I play tennis, and I am getting a fat belly and a double chin, and …. STOP.

Not surprisingly very few people remembered my “special” day. Blame it on facebook. Nowadays no one bothers to remember such dates, they just wait to get a notice on their homepage and then send almost identical lines to wish ” Happy birthday”, or “Have a wonderful day”, or “Have fun”, etc. I hate this, so I have removed my birth date from my profile.

But more surprisingly, my parents didn’t remember it neither. I wonder how does the transition happen from parents who suffocate you with the exact count of months and weeks and days and hours of their baby’s birth to those who say: “She must be thirty thirty-five”!. And then when I say” No no, I am much more than that”, the panic appears in their eyes … “When will you find a nice guy and have babies???”. When? Maybe in 2 months and 1 week and 3 days and 14 hours. And don’t even think about “babies”!

Few years back I was going out with a guy who broke up with me with the pretext that he is not in the position to build a family with me and hence I have to go on and find a “better” guy. He said: “You are running out of ‘time’, find yourself someone who suits you and have babies”. I had two choices; either hate him for being a typical guy who knows what is “best” for me without asking me, or considering that he was probably gay and he didn’t know it yet. I chose the second.

So in two hours I will be exactly 38 years and 3 weeks old. Before I know, I will blow-up my 40 candles and received an extra-powerful wrinkle-fighting cream from Yves Rocher as a recognition for being a fateful customer. I will probably be sitting behind my computer with my new presbyopia eye-glasses and I will think about the four decades that have gone by in a blink of an eye.

Life is short and long at the same time. When we were kids, asked about our age we would reply: “4 years and 3 months old”. When we passed the holy age of adultness, we would waited until the last day before our birthday to add a new year. Being thirty or thirty-five seems almost the same. Soon, in forty years or so, we will go back to the original counting mechanism and be very precise about our age. “He is much older than me, I am eighty, he is eighty-two”, we’ll say proudly.

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