So What If I Like Castles?
November 27, 2022
Sometimes your new job isn’t the Nancy Meyers fever dream you preordained it to be, it’s just a job and kind of annoying sometimes, but that’s okay. For now.
Sometimes it’s fun to dream your way out of said annoyances by imagining winning the lottery, but not a really big one, just a small one like in the Time Traveler’s Wife where you can keep your job as a part-time librarian or artist who creates giant wing sculptures but you can buy your own house with space for your artist studio and you don’t have to worry about paying for food, medical bills, tuition. Sometimes you throw in a vintage Porsche that you can drive to France for the weekend, but you don’t want to veer too far in that direction as it leads to dissatisfaction.
Those are the daydreams I get lost in for untold periods.
It’s hard not to have daydreams of grandeur when you live in a land festooned with castles. I love the castles in Europe, they fill me with delight and I don’t want to hear any grief about it. I like witches and castles and pretending to be Celine Dion in the It’s All Coming Back to Me Now video, and that’s the way it is. We went to Kasteel De Haar on Friday for the Country and Christmas Fair, one of my top happy places since we moved to Amsterdam. It’s been canceled the past two years because of the pandemic and we missed it. We ate poffertjes and frites with mayo and everything else we could find and listened to Dickens-costumed carolers and watched the castle fountain light shows and there were twinkling lights and trees with leafy curtain branches over wooden bridges and little fires burning everywhere, and it wasn’t manufactured Disneyesque it was hundreds of years old and haunted as shit.
I love the pictures from the 60s which seems to have been the heyday of their modern entertaining era. By all accounts, Gregory Peck’s attendance was a highlight. I’d like to get invited to a party there. Maybe after I write my Lady Witch Detectives of Amsterdam novel and it gets optioned and I make my non-TERF tainted JKR money I’ll get invited. Or I can rent it out myself and throw my own party, to which you will all be invited.
Sometimes it’s okay to be disappointed life isn’t a fairy castle daydream, and your new job is just a job and kind of annoying sometimes, like you think you knocked it out of the park writing an introduction for a guest speaker but you didn’t clean the toilet and it’s an hour til closing and you didn’t know you were supposed to clean the toilet, you’d done it on other shifts but you weren’t scheduled to close this time and you assumed someone else was handling it but apparently not and you got yelled at and now you feel bad. But then you snap out of it, it’s not a fairy castle daydream, it’s just a job but that’s okay. For now. Cinderella.
