That got me thinking.

Maybe the little girl who made the cards liked the other one better. Logically it would make sense, as the person whose desk the card was on has met the girl way more times than I have, having been with the company for eight or nine years. It would not be unreasonable to assume that the little girl likes her best, and gave her what she thought was the nicest card. This is what children do.

Then I remembered when I was in primary school. Everyone used to give out Christmas cards, and there was this brand of cards that must have been fairly cheap because most kids gave out the same ones. I remember that there were a couple of cards in the packet with really nice pictures of fireplaces and Santa Claus and presents, and I used to give those to my favourite people. But there were also one or two cards that had these pictures that I thought were really ugly � a single, bare-looking tree in the snow, illustrated in dull shades of blue and grey. I used to give those ones to the people I liked least, or the people I didn�t really know that well. I wanted to give all the nicest cards to my friends, and then whatever was left got doled out to everyone else.

I know that I was not the only child in my class who thought like this; and so, in a subtle way, there formed an unspoken Christmas Card Hierarchy.

Come December, you knew exactly where you stood with your classmates. I was on the receiving end of the Ugly Card once or twice, and both times I was not surprised or hurt because the person who gave it to me was someone I barely knew. A few times I was pleasantly surprised to receive one of the Nice Cards from someone who I thought didn�t like me very much, and found myself wondering whether that person�s parents had simply bought extra packets of blank Christmas cards so their kids wouldn�t have to use the ugly ones at all.

I think that little unspoken hierarchies and messages like that can be found all over the place if you look. My grandparents � that is, my tiny Italian grandmother and my big German grandfather � both send and receive messages in this bizarre code. They even get messages that aren�t really there. I don�t know whether it�s just some European thing or whether everyone is like that and I just never noticed, but if you slip up, goodness only knows what �message� they are going to invent from it.

There was a somewhat explosive occasion a couple of months back between myself and my grandfather after he interpreted some �message� that I had apparently sent by (a) not being at his birthday �party� (this consisting of my mum, my sister and one uncle) even though I had told him I was going to be out of Sydney that weekend, and despite the fact that I was present on his real birthday, (b) consequently giving him his present late, and (c) making the fatal error of forgetting to sign Daniel�s name on the card.

Apparently the �message� was that Daniel didn�t like my grandfather, and that I didn�t go to the �party� because Daniel wouldn�t let me go. This made me very angry on two counts: one, the accusation that Daniel would forbid me to visit my family, like some wife-bashing ogre, and two, the idea that I would let ANYONE control me that way, like some helpless maid.

On top of that, by not putting his name on the card, I was supposedly saying that Daniel himself wanted nothing to do with my grandfather. My mouth dropped open when my grandfather said all of this. I was furious. It ended up with him screaming in German and me leaving the house. He actually (almost) apologised to me afterwards. My grandfather never (almost) apologises to anyone. Score one for the stubborn granddaughter.

Am I the only one who makes these tiny but apparently significant social blunders?

Anyway, I was talking to Kurt today. He�s a seventy-something Austrian bloke at work, who does various things involving a sandblaster and other big boys� toys. He always talks with such fondness about his youth � the adventures, the skiing, the fun they used to have. He still loves to travel and you can tell by the way he talks that he just loves to meet people, no matter what their backgrounds. My own grandfather has some incredible stories of wartime Germany, of the children�s home he was sent to in Slovakia while the war was on so that if anything happened to Berlin at least the children would be safe. He hated it at the home and used to go for walks on his own, and soon learned that the food in the hospital was much nicer than the food he was being served at the home. So he decided to fake Scarlet Fever by scrubbing himself all over with a steel brush, and managed to fool the doctor. In the end, they sent him to the hospital� where he really DID contract Scarlet Fever.

I can�t remember how the next bit of the story goes, but he ended up running away with a group of gypsies who lived up in the mountains. He speaks so fondly of the gypsies, and talks of how well they looked after him even though he barely spoke a word of their language. He ended up finding his way back to Berlin by train a few months later � I have no idea how the reunion with his mother went, because all she knew was that her son was �missing�. He has other stories too, of travelling across Europe without a passport, hiding from guards at stations, working for a French family on a farm somewhere in southern France, before eventually making it across to Italy on New Year�s Eve.

I don�t think I could ever be as resourceful as that. I play too closely by the rules to know when I can get away with breaking them. And yet stories like that really inspire me. On the one hand, of course I want security: marriage, children, real estate, a job. But on the other hand I want adventure: I want to travel, I want to see and do things. I want to have stories to pass down to my own children one day. Career means so little to me, because no matter what the job, I find the idea of spending a set number of hours working in the same place each week totally uninspiring. I do it because it pays � it means I can afford to buy a home, to feed myself, to snowboard, to go overseas. Maybe I need a more interesting job than the one I�m in now. But I�m not interested in fancy titles or business suits at all, and I don�t think I could dedicate myself to an artistic role that requires outrageous overtime � especially now that I am living with Daniel. Most people I knew from Uni went off to work for various law firms or departments of the Government, in jobs whose mere titles bore me to tears. But they are �respectable� jobs, the sort of positions they feel are expected of intelligent people.

Just� ugh. Why can�t we all just eat rainbows for a living?

Still, I�m really enjoying my editing/proofreading course. It�s like a constant little challenge, trying to pick up all the mistakes and mark them in the correct notation. The techniques and practices of the field can be taught, but you need to have a very good working knowledge of English spelling and grammar, as well as colloquial speech, to be able to put it into practice. I think this is why I enjoy it. It�s like wearing a little cloth badge on your undies that says, �I�m special�. Nobody can see it but I know it�s there. And now so do you!

I still need to find a book on teaching yourself German, because it turns out that most Swiss people speak German (or a rough dialect thereof) rather than French, making my French mostly useless. I continue to be surprised at how difficult it is to find a decent book that actually explains the construction of the German language, with conjugations and so on, rather than just phrasebooks. Kurt suggested that I try to find German newspapers when I start learning. I hadn�t even thought of newspapers, and yet they would be the most obvious way to see how my German is coming along. Now it�s just a matter of finding out where in Sydney I can get my filthy little paws on a German newspaper.

Oh, and Daniel has decided that he is a Greek God called Impervius.