– Thanks Ed Sheeran for the title 😉 –

This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for a week*. I can’t say I didn’t have time, because I had as much time as in any other week, I just used it for other things…  😉 I think it’s going to be a long one… 😉 Admit you wanted one, and don’t tell me I didn’t warn you..

I haven’t been in bed before midnight since I can’t remember when, maybe last week sometime.. And men are strange. I’m going to provide some examples, but they probably won’t begin to cover the strangeness of men in general 😉

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I changed the workshop round on Monday. Most of the move had to do with the atmosphere in the workshop and my inability to work when distracted as well as wanting to create distance between myself and the ‘unhappy’ person (man) with whom I share my workshop..

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I went dancing on Tuesday. I think I wrote about how I have a whole group of new people to get to know. As a woman, I tend to dance with men, which makes getting to know the women a little more difficult. Naja, at the end of the dance class, all the women vanished, leaving me and 3 of the guys to decide what we were going to do with the rest of the evening. There was the offer of meeting the intermediate danceclass for waffles, but they’d been there for an hour or so already and were on the verge of going home. The dance teacher had mentioned a bar/club/restaurant which has a Brazilian evening every Tuesday. We dance Forro, a Brazilian dance, so that sounded pretty cool. When we got there we were greeted by a rather underdressed lady who presented me with a coupon for a free cocktail; ladies only. I was a little disturbed by the idea, but maybe my imagination is too active. The others tried to get her to give them coupons too, but she wasn’t covinced by their feminine sides. The dancefloor was entirely empty as we finally made our way down the stair into the underlit bar. An even scantilier clad lady sat on a stool singing while a couple of guys accompanied her on a DJ mixing deck (???). A this point I wanted to bail out. I didn’t because.. actually I don’t really know why because.. I just told the barkeeper-bloke who appeared out of the gloom that we wanted to sit somewhere, and that there were 4 of us. It’s probably not fair to assume the others were too busy oggling to answer. It was pretty loud, maybe they didn’t hear him ask….

*grins* A short while later things started looking up. The others ordered burgers (Tuesday special) and one of them offered to buy me a non-alchoholic cocktail in exchange for my ‘surprise’ cocktail which the waiter kindly explained was premixed and therefore couldn’t be made without. I ended up with 2 half-burgers (the special involved buy one get one free and all 3 of them ordered them. Only one managed to eat both of his) in addition to my non-alcoholic contail. In return, I let myself be persuaded onto the dancefloor by one of them, where we were the only dancers. A couple of songs later, one of the others demanded it was his turn, and a couple of songs after that we all decided it was late and we should probably go home. And that was the end of another interesting day.

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I spent a lot of time between Thursday and yesterday with a man with metre long dreadlocks who has been staying at my house for the duration of the film festival in the city. He’s a pretty awesome guy. Runs a film school for people who aren’t interested in making Hollywood style films. He knows EVERYTHING there is to know about films, and shared a minute fraction of that knowledge with me. I am now a million times more knowledgeable about films than I was before… He got me a film festival pass, and helped me decide which films would probably be worth watching.

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I walked home last night and was asked, “Can I know you, please?” by a random stranger on a bench. I’m not really sure what that means. I know the Bible occasionally refers to sex as ‘knowing” someone, but I’d never heard anyone use it in normal conversation (as far as yelling at passing strangers counts as normal conversation) so I assume he was foreign (though I couldn’t say where from) and just wanted someone to talk to… I don’t particularly need more strange men in my life at the moment, so I smiled, pretended not to understand his broken English, and carried on home. He went back to his beer. Which is probably a good thing, considering.

* I’d almost finished it too, but left it in Drafts. I’ve finished it off (wasn’t much needed) and posted it today, 29.7.16, 3 1/2 years later, but it the ‘rightful place’….