To Heaven and Beyond

Well, it's been Hallowe'en: my second Hallowe'en here. In fact, my second Hallowe'en here was remarkably like my first Hallowe'en here, in that I wore my nurse's uniform and went to the college disco (this year rather unfortunately named "The Hallowe'en Bop." Blech). The big difference, though was that I went with a group of friends (also, the nurse's outfit was a bit too tight, as I've gained some weight). And I got to talk to Mr. Cielo!

"But who is Mr. Cielo?" I hear you ask. Fair enough! Mr. Cielo (this is actually his name. Well, sort of) is a friend of a friend of mine, but even before I knew he was her friend he was, as he remains, a very cute guy who's at my college.

There are many kinds of good looks, reader. There are "Who's THAT guy?" good looks (I've met one of those here, as well). There are the good looks discussed quite recently on this very blog. And then there are the kind of good looks that make you go "oo!" when you see them, and make your day a little brighter for a few seconds. Mr. Cielo has this kind of good looks.

"But what does he look like?" I hear you cry. Yes, this is a bit of an odd one, because although I myself find Mr. Cielo lush, my friends are mystified. So perhaps what he looks like will not be attractive to you. I would say, he looks like some sort of toughened-up Slavic aristocracy - perhaps the heir of a family that had some peasant blood brought in to revivify the stock. A simpler way to approach this question would be to say, Waddya think he looks like? I'm the least imaginative person in my physical taste ever, so naturally he's reasonably tall (although the accessible side of tall, so perhaps about 6 ft. at the most), very slim, with blue eyes, a large nose, high cheekbones, and pale skin. But the sad truth is, reader, that the best way to describe Mr. Cielo is to say that he looks like, well, an ideal SS recruit. I'm sorry, but this is really true, because I found a recruiting poster for the SS online when I went to look for a photo for this very post, and the man pictured looks remarkably like Mr. Cielo:

This is quite ironic, really, because Mr. C. is Silesian, which means he's Polish, which means he would have been second in line for the chop, after me.

(Incidentally, when I went looking for pictures on the internet, I found a site that specialises in selling SS memorabilia. How gross is that? I've done my best to remove all Waffen indicators from the picture above, but I'm still of two minds about including it.)

Anyway, it turns out Mr. Cielo is quite the flirt, so we stood around and flirted for a bit. Twice. Yes, but the difficulty with flirting is that eventually it runs out - light banter can only be sustained for so long - and then you either have to move it along (not something I particularly wish to do after 15 minutes) or part. I opted for parting both times, but the second time not before I stood outside chatting to him, and discovered that he is one of those men (this type seems to be limited to men) who is constantly checking people out over your shoulder. I wouldn't swear that he was checking out women, because I couldn't see behind me (although I checked out of the corner of my eye a couple of times, and they did seem to be women), but he certainly flicked and flicked his eyes behind me pretty much the whole time we were talking. Oooooo, I hate that! Hey, and newsflash, men: all women hate that. To be fair, it seems to be the province of the scuzzy and the young, which suggests that after a certain level of maturity men at least learn to hide it better (women of course do this checking, too, but they seem to be much better at hiding it right from the start), but until they do learn to hide it, it's very, very rude. Dance with the girl that brung you, as they say down Otherhome way.

So, so much for Mr. Cielo. Which is to say, he's not in the running for long-term partner. But then, he hardly was before. Mr. Cielo has a roguish twinkle, and some truly sexy MLW (mature laugh wrinkles), but as the word "roguish" suggests he is also one for the ladies, and knows he is one for the ladies, and is fractionally too practised at being one for the ladies for my taste. Obscure as this prejudice may be, I feel that if you are a smooth lothario you should at least have the decency to mask your smoothness and lothariocity as sheer linguistic serendipity: "What, this banter? Oh, it just comes to me. Just lucky, I guess." (but then I, of all people, should be aware of how much effort it takes to disguise a practised silver tongue as a spontaneous one.)

Even leaving Mr. C (who was dressed an eighteenth-century nobleman, by the way, only without the knee breeches, and thus contrived to look even better than usual) aside, this has been a week of surprising developments - indeed, some of them have been downright astonishing. In fact, it has been one of those weeks in which there are numerous developments all at once, WHOOSH. Unfortunately, it's unclear how those developments will continue to...er...develop, and of course since I can't name names I can't say who is experiencing which development. So I thought the best thing to do was to present these developments and their possible future outcomes in the manner of a film preview:

Sometime in the very near future....ONE MAN will betray the beliefs he thought he held....ANOTHER MAN will make unexpected changes in his life. ONE WOMAN will move defiantly forward....ANOTHER WOMAN will experience disappointment. ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN may know bliss....ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN may know sorrow. At the very least, NEW CONNECTIONS will be formed, and OLD CONNECTIONS will be loosened. For some...long-hoped events will occur. For others...possibilities will be abandoned.

And the best thing is, it's all as open-ended as that, and it's all completely true.