TMZ.com soap opera update!

  So do you need to break in words the way you break in a new pair of shoes?  Maybe.  

I feel like I need to provide a TMZ.com soap opera update!  I started a new project on Monday and I’ve been kinda stressed out and remiss. 

So the Oslo deal is sealed!  Fabio took the job in Norway and will start March 15 or April 1.  He’s been hashing out negotiations for weeks now and signed the contract last week.

Typically, I don’t worry about things until they happen.  And despite a couple edgy rants, I really haven’t fretted about his move.  I’m not bragging.  This is NOT an innate skill.  In fact, it’s totally the opposite.  In my previous life as a loving but under-sexed and slightly neurotic Chicago wife, I LIVED, worried, and breathed in the future.  I was constantly plotting and planning for things days, weeks, and years in advance. 

Obviously this has something to do with me and what I’m made of, but I was also a monster created by my circumstances.  My ex-husband, wonderful in many ways though he was, was in Dante’s version of grad school… ultimately 13 years of perpetual agony (my interpretation not his, I’m sure).  In the last years of our marriage, my mantras were: “I wish I could fast forward to X years from now”… or worse: “I wish that I could go away for X years and come back when it’s over.”  Careful what you wish for.

My fanatical vacation planning habit nicely exemplifies my former obsession with the future.  I’d create elaborately-researched, multi-columned spreadsheets itemizing where we’d stay each day in New Zealand or Costa Rica, where we’d eat, how much we’d spend, contact addresses and phone numbers, ferry times, bungi jumping operators, what time we’d wake up… (okay, everything but that!)  The trips were amazing, but it was my need to escape that drove me to plan them as much as my love of travelling the world. 

When I started my unpredictable, road-warrior consulting job, my attempts to apply this planning were out the window.  If I thought I was going to Prince Edward Island or Buffalo, New York next week…I ended up going to Flagstaff, Arizona instead!  I wasted incalculable hours of time and energy planning for things that never happened.  I was forcibly retrained to live in the moment and um…it was a gift.  Velveeta cheesy but true.

Anyway, so back to the present!  When Fab told me he sent the acceptance back to Norway,  I suddenly realized that things were going to get really hard…  I just started this new project and can’t sneak away unnoticed for hour-long chats in empty conference rooms anymore.  And he’ll actually be working and probably like a dog at the new job.  No more lazy days in the office or ‘working from home’, calling me on the company phone for a chat.  Dating long-distance over 6 time zones isn’t easy to begin with, but it’s going to get harder times A LOT.

Can you picture this wonderful thing slowly dying?  Fuck it.  That is not an option.  We’re smart enough to see it.  And that’s what we talked about, at 3am Italy time.  Better to end it, than watch it die.  We decided we’d sort it out soon, but not at 3am.

Then after we hung up… a text message from my honey  -  Amore, I don’t want to lose you now…  and lots of I love yous to follow.  

 Love, I don’t want to lose you either… 

Big, old, hand-eating mouth

   The big, old, hand-eating mouth is another way of describing one of the most famous artifacts in Rome – La Bocca della Verita.  I just registered for a new Italian class based on one thing and one thing only.  The school’s logo is – you guessed it – La Bocca!  Visiting La Bocca is one of my favorite memories in all of Italy and therefore, molto logically, a good omen for the quality of my new class.  I am hopeful that the teacher will be better than my last professore, Giuseppe, who had a tendency to digress into long-winded stories in class in English about his Sicilian mamma.  Oh yeah, and sometimes he would show up to class drunk.

La bocca della verita means ‘the mouth of truth’.  This ancient statue is the earliest form of lie detecting technology.  Legend has it that if you put your hand in the mouth and are asked a question, if you dare to lie in response, the mouth with chomp off your hand.  If you tell the truth, it will let you keep all your body parts.  La Bocca has a cameo role in the film, Roman Holiday, which I stumbled across before my trip to Rome last summer.  After watching the genuine fear on Audrey Hepburn’s face when toying with a lie around the mouth, it became one of the top places I wanted to visit in Roma. 

This trip last summer was a lot of firsts…  my first visit to Rome, my first vacation with Fabio, and also, I may as well be honest here – essentially our first real date.  We didn’t know each other very well before we planned the 10-day vacation.  And we had no plans to see each other again afterwards.  Anyway, the visit to The Mouth became a running joke between the two of us.  Fabio spent a lot of time teasing me about my apparent inability to tell the truth, forshadowing my inevitable hand amputation, and attempting to predict when it would be most convenient to occur.  For example, it would be difficult for me to carry my luggage to the airport with only one hand… etc….so we had to get the timing just right.

We planned to visit La Bocca on our last evening in Rome, but we were too late and the mouth was closed!   (I mean the gate to the mouth was closed – the mouth was still open, of course…waiting for its next victim…)  Since my flight left the next morning, it looked like I would get to keep both my hands afterall.  However, as he was loading me into the cab the next day, Fab had a brilliant idea.  We could have the cabbie stop at the mouth on my way to the airport!  He’d come with me and then just walk back to the hotel.

I’d given thought to my question, but can’t even remember what it was anymore, because I never asked it.   When I put my hand in the mouth first, I didn’t expect a serious query.  Fab asked me… “Do you think we were so good together just because we were on holiday?”  I gasped and said “No, definitely not!”  And when he put his hand in the mouth next, I asked him the same.  A resounding ‘No!’ from him as well.  Am I getting across the the heart-thumping romance and warm fuzzy feelings??  The Mouth of Truth let us both keep our hands.  We proceeded to make out in front of all the tourists. 

I have a real fondness for the Bocca and consider it to be a good sign.   I had my first Italian class at the new school tonight.  My teacher, Patrizia, conducted the entire class in Italiano and only once referred to her mamma, and then only to explain the meaning of the word ‘nonna’…grandma.

The passion of the software?

  I made a list of all my goals for 2008 on the subway ride to work this week and not a single one of them involved my current job.  I think this is a sign.  Actually, I don’t think it’s a sign, I think it’s a blatantly obvious billboard stating that I do not have a burning passion for implementing software.

 

 Here is the list.  In 2008, I hope to have…

• the ability to have a conversation with a small child or very patient adult in Italian
• become a semi-competent swimmer and have competed in a sprint distance triathlon  (this is shorter than it sounds and if I don’t do this I am lame)
• be an expert braiser using my new, red Le Creuset braising pot and braising cookbook
• be in a relationship with potential for lasting love and future family fun  (preferably with current awesome boyfriend)
• write/blog 4 times a week using a more creative/cohesive theme other than current dumping of thoughts onto keyboard 
• Find new job that provides some level of inspiration and motivation…  I am hesitant to type this because I want it so badly but am afraid it won’t happen, so typed it quietly in italics and purpley font.  

The truth about lawn art

   So you get it right?  that the gnomo gift was a inside joke…?  a sentimental reference to one of the first Italian words Fab taught me, as well as a quick and dirty way to ensure that I get to use one of the few words I know in Italian more frequently. 

Additionally, planting the gnomo in the garden was to a fun sneaky activity to do outside in my socks while my boyfriend was fetching some cheese from the car.   (Plenty of time while he trekked down the garden path…and the cobblestone road…and back up again…)

Our first night in Blevio, Fab had nightmares about some cheese we left in the car…. which was weird because we actually did leave some cheese in the car.  I had nightmares about being attacked by family of lions.  And the next night it was wild boar attack while I was trapped on top of an SUV. 

Significance?

Assassin cats, gnomes & salamanders… oh my!

Let me preface this entry with the fact that I’m in love… not just with Fabio, but also with Italy.  So if that sort of tone is going to make you barf then you’d better stop reading now before the cheesy onslaught begins.   

Last night I got back from my 10 day trip to visit Fabio’s home in Blevio on Lake Como. For those who knew me when I was married and a spazoid-hyper-planning-maniac, it’s probably astounding that I didn’t really think too much or research Como in a travel book before I left. 

 

The awesome part about not doing any research is two-fold: 1) not having a lot of expectations and 2) the wonder of being surprised. 

I like to think I’m maturing, but maybe I’m reverting.   Anyway, this isn’t really about me.  It’s about the magical country of Italy!!   Note:  I am aware that what is magical for 10 days could be annoying on day 11 and maddening on day 30, but again, I’m in love, and I flew home on day 11.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So…  Fabio’s house is off the narrow road that circles Lake Como.  Much of the road is rimmed with tall stone walls, no shoulders, and various pastel-colored pizzerias, polenterias, and other various -ias.  Driving on it feels a lot like an arcade video racing game…especially with Fabio’s crazy Italian driving skills.  There’s tunnel after curving tunnel opening out into views of tall mountains, blue Lake Como, and peachy, pinky, yellowy villas. 

 

 

Specifically, Fabio lives on an old Roman street that is off this narrow road around the lake. His street is narrower still and typically used as a footpath between the villages if that gives you a better idea of the practicality of its width.  Most of the time we hiked the 5 minute walk up the steep cobblestone street to his gate.  But a couple times we drove “the little car” – one of two types of 4WD cars can squeeze between the tall stone walls and stay attached to the ground on the tight curves. Once up the hill, his house is set back  in a terraced garden, full of pear, fig, cherry, and every other kind of decadent juicy fruit you can think of…best of all a PERSIMMON tree.  It’s dropped leaves for the winter but is still covered in persimmons and looks like it’s been decorated for Christmas with big orange holiday baubles. 

 

Further magical inhabitants of the garden… a regulation-size bocce court WITH full-court lighting for night games.  (This came with the house; Fab doesn’t have an obscure bocce fettish.)  Regardless, I don’t think that even the courts in Central Park are lit for night games.  There are also some transient residents: i gati assasseni (the assassin cats) that required us to form a CSI Blevio unit to investigate their nightly wrongdoings.  But my favorite is a bright orange and black spotted salamander that makes nightly appearances slowly crossing the snow-covered walkway to his house.  I can’t tell you how shocking it is to see this rainforest-colored amphibian lumbering around in the Italian snow. 

As part of his Christmas gift, I planted a surprise gnomo (gnome) off the garden path to guard over Fab’s fairytale giardino (garden) and make friends with the enchanted salamander.  The gnomo has a nice spot next to a trunk not far from the persimmon tree.