Beaten up

This has been a very rough week, what with my purse getting stolen and a terrible cold and a demanding visiting artist in town. I'm not at all satisfied that I made enough of a priority of myself and my life. I let the artist get her way over and over again, compromising several of my own principles, for the sake of being polite I guess? Norwegians are known for being blunt, and she was comfortable with utilizing that national trait. Thankfully, I had a chat with a guy I know in Iceland, I like to think of him as my Icelandic body guard or bouncer, this morning. He's always been good at showing me, without telling me, that I need to stand up for myself more.

Now Icelanders are generally known as risk-takers, and a bit naive, and those are qualities I have to some degree and which I generally assign to my Icelndic identity. But there are those rare, very critical and absolutely essential Icelanders who counter-balance that, individuals who have found a way to harness that iconoclastic, entrepreneurial spirit in highly appropriate and productive ways, to be strategic. This is a skill I am still working on.

So I love it when my Icelandic bouncer takes time to check in with me, usually along the lines of "why in the world are you doing x?", to which I rarely have a good answer. But this time he caught me in time, before I made another arrangement I was unhappy with but which fulfilled someone else's expectations.

Sometimes, less really is more. 


Comments

Jón Páll said…
Some guys just have no idea how to take it to the next level, how to make their move. Nothing frustrates a woman, and makes her loose respect for a man, when all he's got is endless foreplay.
Lissy said…
Jæja, eg fa mer alveg nog af svona folk, sem vantar of mikid tholinmæli. En Jón Páll, thu fer oft langt fyrir ofan væntingar, og er tha mikid uphalds hja mer. Halda afram ad vera sanngjort sjalfum thig, ekki lata öfund stjorna ther í leidindi. Thu ert dæmalaust, eg hef sér thad oft.

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