Monday was our deadline day. I woke up before the alarm, despite going to bed later than usual around 1:30am the previous night. Perhaps I’d gained some energy from our dangerously relaxing weekend, spent mostly lying on various grassy surfaces in the sun. We need to make up for the gray winter.
Had my usual breakfast of cheeses and toast and headed to work hopeful that we would finish today and not push our deadline back another day, which happens more often than I care to admit – and I’m not even the editor-in-chief. Spent the day finishing up what needed to be done- some events here, a PR article there, a lifestyle piece in the middle, some phonetically spelled Hungarian sentences and (another) sappy editorial to edit as bookends. Did I mention that once my boss asked me to write his editorial, then (to my great horror) put my name on it? I mean, he thought he was doing me a favor, as if you could just draw straws for who gets to be editor that week and I could add it to my resume. I’ve since written them twice more. The irony of it all, of course, is that when he writes them himself, he uses a pseudonym, and a pathetic one at that: Justin Case.
Had lunch with my lovely American co-worker M at a pizza place for yuppies and tourists on Ráday utca called Pink Cadillac. It seemed like everyone around us was speaking English, though our young waiter, crew-cut glistening and acne stains only beginning to fade, spoke to us only in Hungarian. I couldn’t decide if it was because he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak English, or because he was tactfully playing along at our rudimentary language skills, or he was just becoming a sad victim of the Italian tourism pox. The pizza was good.
Ostensibly I think we should be finishing each issue on a Friday, then proofing it thoroughly on Monday with fresher eyes. The fact is, we haven’t been in the habit of proofing at all, and it was painfully obvious in our last issue. Granted, it was rushed- three days ahead of schedule to beat a four-day weekend -but we really aren’t building any support by publishing a shoddy rag. So I made it my mission to stay late and proof the thing no matter what.
That meant I got home around 9:30 p.m. E was at her sister’s place, checking out their new garden, which she reports is very cute. I sat on our fifth-floor balcony in my boxer shorts, hidden by darkness and the ugly frosted-glass barriers and sparing the neighbors any embarrassment as I watched the few stars, listened to the distant tinkling of a rock-club across the river, and ate a small plate of strawberries. Oh yes, the magical season (yes, my American brethren, there IS a season for strawberries, and most fruit for that matter, which you are NOT supposed to get in the winter) of strawberries-by-the-kilogram will soon be upon us, prized for it’s competitive price ($2.50/kg for the expensive ones) and incomparable taste. These are no fist-sized, apple-red, plasticine monuments to genetic “enhancement” that have little taste and even less nutritional value, but knuckle size, gnarled berries of Jacques-ian lore that melt on your tongue with just the right balance of sugary temptation and sour fulfillment. I look forward to a summer of fresh strawberry shakes and vegetarian barbecues, the latter unfortunately only by our own design.
The warm summer air a reassuring temperature, though probably early for this time of year, I watched the fifteen or twenty stars that made it through the light pollution and regular pollution to bring ancient light to my eyes. They all seemed to be twinkling rapidly between white and red, and yes, I’m sure they weren’t planes, which were easy to spot as they looked like massive fireballs ascending and descending at Ferihegy 1 and 2 about 20 km to the east. One star was much brighter that the rest; at least 2-3 times so. I briefly attempted to search for it on the ‘net (what would one Google? “brightest star tonight”?), then gave up. It’s probably a planet anyway.
In the late afternoon I had a meeting with my other boss, that of Sales and Marketing. This meeting was important because we were finally discussing the terms of my contractual employment request. I will get it, with the caveat that I commit to another year, which would probably only begin in August, as the bureaucratic process actually takes months to slog through, with considerable expense. I have to tell them my intent in the next few days.
Big decision time.
