Valentine's, Ballantine's, great music, great movies and hard negotiations

To be completely honest, there was no Ballantine's in our Valentine's celebrations, but I liked the pun too much not to put it in the title. And anyway, if you do not have a Valentine, at least you can have a Ballantine.

The menu

We did have wine though and a meal that included mushroom soup with shiitake and white mushrooms, roasted sweet potatoes and red skin potatoes, sugar snap peas with an olive oil sauce, rocket salad with cherry tomatoes and my greatest pride of all, the fruit tart pictured above. As I have mentioned before, it is not that easy to stay original when cooking vegan and I did not want to make chocolate truffles, chocolate brownies, chocolate tart or chocolate muffins yet one more time. So what I did was a tart with soy vanilla cream, blueberries, raspberries and almonds, topped with a blueberry syrup caramel. We ate 7 bowls of soup the two of us and more than half of the tart, so I consider the cooking a success.

The music

Yesterday AFP (stands for Amanda F*cking Palmer), released the video for her "Bed Song". I was really excited and full of anticipation until I saw it. Well, I have to admit that I preferred the song without the video. It's not that it is a bad video. It is great and it visualizes the lyrics well. A bit too accurately for my taste though. I prefer my imaginary video. When I first listened to the song I cried because of the deep truth of what it describes. You can read the lyrics here. Luckily, I have examples of love that turned from passion to deep care and tenderness and it just lasted forever. My parents. My grandparents. Friends of my parents. But I also have so many examples of people just drifting apart due to bad communication. And it is yet more cruel when you do love the other person but the wall of silence has become so high that you cannot jump over it anymore.

Anyway, great song. Go listen to it and make sure that it does not end up describing your life.

The second song that we came across was Two of Us, by The Beatles. I am a John fan, my partner is a Paul fan, for the record. Did Paul write it for John? Did he right it for Linda? Well, nobody knows but it is a great song about love and friendship (and a couple more things) anyway. A cover was also in the soundtrack of "I am Sam". Watch this movie. It does have a happy ending but until it gets there, oh man...

The movies

After dinner we chain-watched two movies. The one was Before Sunset. We have watched Before Sunrise a few weeks ago and were amazed, so we thought we should go for this one as well. The Boy has written a great album inspired by Before Sunrise, by the way, so if you are into his music, go listen to it. Do not let the cover scare you away. In these two movies Richard Linklater makes you re-visit your life and gives you a preview of what your future could look like -at least if you are around 30. I watched these two movies for the first time when I was 18 and I found them absolutely uninteresting. Its basically two people walking through beautiful European cities. Whatever.

And then, I watched them almost 10 years later and -bam!- I got it all. It was as if Linklater has been stalking me and my brainwaves and spit out all my thoughts and emotions in one movie in Before Sunrise. And in before Sunset, he summed up all my fears, hopes, thoughts, hesitations and reflections of my life as it is now. Now we are just counting days until 2013.

The second movie we watched was Morvern Callar. I first watched it also when I was 18, but this one really shook my world. I remember going to a video club back in 2003 and not knowing what to pick. And I liked the cover, so I got this one, with the ridiculously translated title "Life, a journey". There is a writer, there is friendship, there is death, there is Velvet Underground. This is the movie that introduced me to Velvet Underground and also this crazy song. Amazing soundtrack and characters and Samantha Morton as Morvern Callar, making all the crazy stuff that I did as a freshman in University seem totally reasonable and justified. 

I remembered this movie because of a post in the website of some friends, were it was discussed how so many great movies have rating under 7 in imdb. No one mentioned Morvern there, but I remembered being shocked when I saw its rating after I had watched the film. People, please do not pay attention to imdb ratings. Watch this movie. Watch whatever movie looks like it could resonate with you somehow.

Also, Samantha Morton and Tilda Swinton = Major girl crushes.

The day after (negotiations)

Unfortunately, the day after Valentine's did not start that pleasantly as I had to talk with a real estate agent that owes us money as well as the person who kicked us out of an apartment because of our pets. You can read the story here (A rabbit, a hedgehog and a slight change of plans). 
Briefly, we rented a house and the day that we were supposed to sleep there for the first time and the agent came to give us the key, we realized that pets are not allowed, not even non-barking/meowing pets. This led to us giving back the keys and finding a new house a day before New Year's Eve. Still, they did not give us our money back. They said we would get it once they would find a new tenant. 1.5 months later, this has not happened.

Thankfully, we have friends that are informed about the Dutch legislation and pointed us towards legal services and tenant protection committees. So I informed the agent that now "guess what, we know what you do is illegal" and somehow her attitude changed a bit. We really hope that the owner will conform with our suggestions and we won't have to take further steps. 

As crazy as that sounds, I feel that those challenges make us stronger and more capable of dealing with injustices. And with immigration waves becoming more and more apparent in The Netherlands and Germany, I do expect things to become less easy for foreigners, especially considering the fact that unemployment is rising even within the native population. I have seen it happen in my own country and it does not look pretty, I have to say. 

The work

Work-wise, I feel really lucky to be busy with quite a few projects. Small ones, definitely not that well-payed, but some of them quite fulfilling. I designed Mia Simon's new book cover these last days and it turned out pretty neat. I also did a layout where I was allowed -and encouraged, to be honest- to use some Dada typography style bits and that was a lot of fun. Of course the usual content writing that pays the rent took place as well and that might not be so fulfilling, but it is still a pleasant challenge to try and come up with 10 different articles for the same keyword. 

Also, within the next two weeks, a book that I am ghost-writing will finish and after that I am thinking on sticking to smaller projects so that at least during the weekend I can focus on my own writing. We will see if that works out...