sunny outside...

Here I am, a busy little drone at my desk. Outside the window I can see its gorgeous weather, but there are only so many cigarette breaks you can have in one day before your boss gets on your ass about it. Besides, being outside for those 5 quick, smoky minutes just makes me less motivated to get back to work.
I hope the weekend will be nice, but right now the weather forecast says it will rain. Damn Dutch weather: The few good days of the year always seem to be during office hours, while the weekends are seriously crappy all through the summer... If there is a God, this is proof that (s)he's an evil & sarcastic bitch/bastard (cross out the option which least suits your level of feminism / traditionalism).

It reminds me of situation a while ago, when I was still a student. I was living in a student house with lots of people from all over the world. Amongst the varied assortment of people living there, there were two French girls; Anne and Stephanie.
Anne was the pretty one, in the way that only French girls can be. You know, French girls can have that "je ne sais qua", that always perfect look. The kitchen could look like a trafic accident, the garbage could be piled up to the ceiling (god, the smell haunts me to this very day...) the walls covered with lude comments, posters of half-naked babes and most of yesterdays dinner (the Russian guy had cooked, which turned out to be a good reason for a food fight :P ) but she would still look as if she'd just walked in from a highclass fashion shoot. I had a few seriously embarrassing moments here and there, when my male anatomy decided it was going to enthusiastically cheer her arrival by pitching a tent in front of all my housemates. (Sausage!!)
Stephanie was the opposite. She was the Hobo-type. She was the cool, different, dreadlocked, passionate and lots of laughs type. The kind of style girls generally adopt when they are a bit insecure & want to be attractive in a non-standard way (which by now has become the standard way of trying to cover up insecurity. Talk about irony, eh?!). She never gave me “tent-pitching-problems”, but I had alot of nice evenings with her, laughing & chatting. I really liked having them both around in their very own and different ways.

Anyway, the moment I was thinking about was one afternoon when I arrived home from a lecture (yes, I did attend a few, not too many though ;-) ), on one of those typical grey & dreary afternoons, of a typical grey and dreary week of a grey and dreary Dutch summer. It had started drizzling a few days before and so far it wasn’t showing any signs of stopping any time soon. Having lived in Holland all my life, I hardly noticed it anymore. Just shake your head whenever you enter a dry place (ignoring the shouts of everyone around you as stoically as you had earlier ignored the rain itself) and make sure you have your telephone in a dry place. Stick to these simple rules & you'll live. Anne and Stephanie weren’t so well versed in the subtle art of surviving a Dutch summer, and by now I think it was getting to them...
I entered the kitchen at my usual energetic pace, noticed the two French belles standing looking out of the window, called a cheerful "Hey, Hello!!" in their direction, whilst reminding myself not to shake myself dry too close to them. Wondering what was attracting their attention outside, and curious as I am, I quickly joined them at the window.
A few minutes passed without a word... (I’m really bad at that btw, I get this Urge to say something in silences, this nervous, jittery feeling that I simply must say something. Which usually ends up in me loudly pronouncing something totally inappropriate, and imediately wishing Id stuck my foot in my mouth the moment I opened it)
“Eehhmm… what are you looking at?” I asked carefully after a few minutes of the silence which had fallen after my slightly-too-enthusiastic greeting.

“For Gods sake, Does it ever stop raining in this damn country?” Anne and Stephanie asked in one voice.

They didnt even look at me. They kept staring into the rainy, grey outside, their gazes as cold as the misty rain covering all we could see.

And I just didn’t know what to answer to that...