What Do You Do On Mondays?

grumpy loose threads

My big ambition is to write a book that is optioned into a screenplay and I’ll have a premiere at the Tuschinski Theater. Christian Siriano will design my outfit — velvets and satins in jewel tones. It will co-star Guy Pearce (who IRL is married to a Dutch woman and lives in Amsterdam), as a founding member of the VOC. It’s about two women, one modern (me) and one from the golden age of Amsterdam, who are contending with evil men bent on their destruction, connected through time via a magical, haunted mirror in the house where they both reside, one still a ghost, one on the way unless things change. I’ve never written fiction, but I lose hours, days, weeks, months dreaming up this story. Will anything come of it? No because I don’t have any discipline. I get bored easily, and I’m not as ambitious about making things happen as I used to be. (Oh, it’s hard and requires sustained effort? Nevermind, then.) Still, dreaming about it feeds me.

The Tuschinski Theater in Amsterdam is fabulous. You should go see a movie there if you are ever in town. It’s the perfect rainy afternoon activity.

“Werewolves of London” comes on my playlist, and I’m reminded that anytime it came on the radio in high school my friend Emily would drive over to my house like a red-headed demon regardless of what time it was — we were both night owls, and leave a note in my mailbox or stuck under the windshield wiper of my car. She’d draw a werewolf smoking a cigarette with a drink in his hand and write the lyrics above his head in her wonderful scrawl. She was a talented artist so it was a little work of art. The ‘80s ruled and I’m lucky I lived that experience.

I spend lazy mornings drinking coffee and talking to James about music. My favorite topic remains Led Zeppelin. I tell James that the reason Jimmy Page’s eyes are so black is because of his black soul and I immediately think this is a genius observation and I ask James if anyone else has made that connection, or did I just invent it? James assures me it’s my original idea.

I like sitting around feeling clever. It amuses me.

I tell James that Jackson Browne and James Taylor both annoy me in the same way. I don’t think they are worthy of the success they enjoyed and are entirely too pleased with themselves. A couple of self-satisfied piano tinkering guitar strumming dorks, if you ask me. (No one has.) James agrees, and then he has to go to work.

I have decided I require a porcelain basin suitable for laundering my french delicates but I settle for the metal bowl we use for big salads. It works fine.

I am sick and tired of the Kennedys. Every single one of them. Their self importance long ago outlived any usefulness it may have served, and I wish they’d all fade away to the quiet corners. Enough, already.

I stopped watching or caring about Real Housewives when we moved to Amsterdam eight years ago, but I still want Kyle Richards to pick me up in one of her fancy convertibles and drive me around Hollywood while I’m on edibles. I think we’d get along and I could help her heal post Mauricio.

Since returning from California, I’ve been ruminating on something vexing and I fear an explosion is coming. I wrote a go-straight-to-hell missive to the offending party, composed in the format of a politely snarky Victorian letter. It remains unsent, but seems to have quelled the fire. For now.

I met a fellow writer in a brown café for a co-writing session, but I spent the time catching up with her (she’s fascinating, we were destined to meet as we have so much in common) and then I spent the rest of the time petting the oldest stinkiest dog who ever lived and doing absolutely no writing. Co-writing sessions don’t really work for me, but I’m glad to have tried.

It’s too nice outside for writing. The canals sparkle and beckon. I’m heading out to sail on Shrimpy. I’ll stare at the clouds and think about my historical fiction ghost novel. It pleases me.

My BFF Winnie wants us to start a podcast. It’s called Winnie and Jen Start a Podcast with the subtitle: What Do You Do On Mondays? There’s a back story about a person who pissed Winnie off by asking her impertinent and judgmental questions about how she spends her time since moving to Amsterdam, and I absolutely love how salty Winnie gets when she explains the encounter that culminated with the obnoxious lady pressing Winnie, leaning in close to her and demanding to know, “Well, what do you do on Mondays?” A thing I love about Winnie is she does not tell a story in a straight line. Winnie once told this story while we were on a canal boat tour with a bunch of her friends who were visiting, and it took her an entire 2-hour boat tour to get to the punchline. One person listening to the story got to the punch line about five minutes into the story (even though that lady was on mushrooms), but Winnie still told the whole story over the course of two hours and it made me laugh so much listening to her tell it. Winnie’s a ruminator and a grudge holder, and a noticer of details, just like me. Our podcast would consist of us sitting around on sunny terraces overlooking the canals, or walking through the Rijksmuseum talking and laughing and telling spiky stories that take forever. Winnie wants us to have those tiny little microphones to talk into, and we’ve been planning to go to MediaMarkt to see how much they cost.

Our podcast would also consist of us discussing all our mid-life money-making schemes. We keep talking about the jobs we want to get. We want to get part-time jobs together, but only if we can work the same shifts, for no more than 4 hours that don’t get in the way of any of our plans, that don’t require us to speak Dutch at work or learn any new skills, and don’t have any major responsibilities. We think we’d be good at stocking the shelves at Albert Heijn, but I don’t want to use a box cutter or lift anything heavy. The only thing we’ve come up with that ticks all our boxes is getting a window in the fetish section of the Red Light District and giving old-lady hand jobs. Work is work. Our husbands are not enthusiastic about this plan though.

I want the job I had at Hallmark with my BFF Owen when we were 15 where we spent all our time making prank calls. We’d fill birthday balloons with helium and suck the helium out and randomly dial numbers and talk nonsense in our squeaky Minnie Mouse voices and fall on the floor laughing and pay absolutely no attention to the customers. We were allowed to eat the broken Russell Stover candy, and consequently many boxes of Russell Stover candies sustained mysterious damage. We ate our fill in between prank calls. We both got fired from that job, so we got jobs at Shopper’s Food Warehouse, but Owen called me from a payphone 10 minutes into her first shift because they’d assigned her to the deli and made her wear a paper hat and she wasn’t standing for that bologna, so she quit. Later that sticky summer night she stood on the roof of my Chevette with a bent cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Boone’s Farm in the other, and mimicked working the meat slicer while I rolled around in the street yelling “Slice it lightly!”

I feel like mid-life is like being a teenager again. It’s fun and fraught in a lot of the same ways.

If anyone is looking to hire two middle aged ladies with this type of work ethic, please be in touch. Or subscribe to our podcast. If we ever get around to launching it. Right now we’re very busy planning a trip to Scotland in July so we appreciate your patience.

Xoxo

My dad (pictured here with baby me) and his older brother (who was as tall as a giant) used to do this thing where they’d lift babies with one hand to “make them go up high.” All my cousins have photos like this. 😂