Ptaszynka goes downtown pt. 1

  The Botox Lady had a very singular surname: if you googled her, you’d only meet some slightly unsettling results. Money laundering, blackmailing, getaways at night, fake passports, you name it. All in her lineage.
Was I blackmailed myself into associating with these darkness operators? Actually, that was part of my atonement trip. I was in debt with myself for a substantial amount.

  I had a friend who worked for this woman. My friend has 2 names, one starts with a G so I’ll call her G.; she deserves her own chapter but right now I’ll just say that she changed a lot of jobs in a relatively short time, which led her to meet Botox Lady and her associate twice on her path, and the second time she offered her a job. These two baddies, aged 40-50 (uncertain) ran a vintage store in one of the chicest historical neighborhoods in Rome, plus B.L. was on her way to open a second one, a concept store, in another equally insufferable overpriced gentrified neighborhood not far from there.
Given the nature of my trade, temporary in itself, I was currently jobless and waiting for another project to start in September; in April, G. said that she mentioned my name to maybe serve as a runner for a day or two, because Botox Lady needed someone to carry her junk around and up to her soon-to-be-opened store. I love driving so I agreed, but I was reluctant to be called again...

  I got up early in the morning and off I went, the day wasn’t exactly a breeze but definitely an interesting experience. I got to sneak into a lot of labs and little craft shops you cannot simply visit or wouldn’t regularly notice with the unaided eye, all these young people busy creating horrible artifacts sold as “naïve” and baby Jesus knows how else they get called; I remember picking up a horrible black and white cylindrical glass beads necklace (they looked like rigatoni pasta) to be tied together with a gros grain ribbon that this lovely girl was renting a whole studio to make, I remember a sort of capsule collection including two "reworked" (read "stained with vinyl dye in random colors") suit pants, some slip dress with poor little fabric scraps sewn on, a fast fashion y2k little purple purse covered in a drizzle of metallic paint which resembled my cheap nail polish from when I was a little girl that these two gay fashion students were proudly selling in their little studio-lab, I remember collecting a lot of cardboard boxes that this guy kept saying were "empty" (but to be fair he seemed freshly burnt out, like he had just broken up with his girl), turns out they contained the ugliest ceramics you could ever imagine and, last but not the least, I collected plastic ampoules. Boxes and boxes of plastic ampoules from this shop in a remote industrial area, literally named "PLASTIC".
It was unclear whether these objects would be put on display as rentals or they’d go on sale and, as I came to know, not only it wasn’t unclear to me, but also to the artisans themselves. Everything was very blurry and uncertain. That’s how rich people with a little hobby organize their business by the way: they don’t.
At the end of the day, the Botox Lady was sooooo enthusiastic with my job, so she immediately started showering me in compliments, love bombing, you know the drill. But I wasn't buying into that: I’m not a spring chicken. I have a narcissistic dad, I know all the tricks in the book, they don’t work with me. They only work if I make them work, that is, I need something in return. Which was the case: I looked at my bank account and it needed a major fix.

(To be continued)

Are we reading allat?

  For almost a decade, it felt as though as blogging was on the edge of dying.
Maybe it died, maybe not, I choose not to care; but we can all agree that it's not the favorite medium at this time.
Reading a text longer than a 3 lines caption feels like a quest, the time to sit and process your thoughts is a luxury good. I see fearmongering tiktoks about "European people sending 6 hours voice messages instead of typing" (I'm European and I do all of the above, I regret NOTHING), not to mention the staple "NOT READING ALLAT", the supreme move.
Which is true: most of the times, we ain't reading allat.

   Too many words are being said, too many messages are being spread, too many alarms beeping, too many small happenings trying to catch our attention: we're at once fed up, intoxicated and numb to informations.
There's a fire that moves me, though, the core of it all - that’s the reason why I learn new languages and own social media accounts, watch vlogs and interviews, retrieve some nieche biographies and, in fact, enjoy blogs: to mind other people’s business. My insatiable compulsion is to look into the others' lives and the motive is not even that deep: reality is more sapid than fiction. Maybe, just for the mere fact that it's real. And what about the opportunity to turn your own thoughts into a novel, only truer than truth? So seductive.

  As I type today, I'm sitting at my desk. I'm on the clock, there's clearly nothing much to do lately but I'm pretending to be painstakingly filling in a wire transfer request anyway (how much does it take to fix just 3 vendors?) ... see how many things have changed in 10 years? Got a job, got the money, my dream to work in an office wearing vintage Prada sandals and midi skirts slowly came to life; what also came to life, is a white strand of hair. I tried plucking it, she's 6 or 7 years old now, still there, still white and looking like nylon fishing line.
Full disclosure, my current job and the white strand are not directly connected; they have a common denominator, though, which you'll maybe find out one day reading these pages...
Keep minding my business!

- Ptaszynka 

"Evil doesn't die: it reinvents itself"

  Opening a blog was in my new year's resolutions.
In doing so, I stumbled into a real time capsule: all the blogs I've owned in the past - or, more precisely, the ones that have survived the various blogging platforms going out of business. I was sure that I had lost my credentials forever; truth was, they were simply connected to the email accounts I use to this day... which made me feel like a buzzard, a little bit.

  What changed? Everything that could change over 10 years, and maybe even more.
But I'm not, by any means, new here...
("Evil doesn't die: it reinvents itself")