Compliments

Compliments are rare and hard to come by these days. For some reason - or no particular reason at all - the compliments so generously offered by my husband don't seem to do the trick just now. Perhaps I'm taking them for granted or perhaps I don't quite believe when someone calls me beautiful after a sleepless night spent on my bachelor's paper and work, work, work, there's always too much work and too few hours to do it. But yesterday I got a compliment that made me turn around and say thank you to a person I would most probably not even muster a smile for. Some neighbourhood bum told another of his kind - "there goes the woman I've always liked very much". And the simplicity of these words really got to me. It was like a bucket of water in a very long drought. Because these days I feel anything but pretty. I was flabberghasted, truly, to hear that somebody likes me very much. It made me change the way I've been looking at people lately. Someone that I smile at just to be polite might actually lift my mood at the most unlikely moments.

This night I have to work again after having spent the whole day on that blasted paper. But that's alright, it's finished now, printed out and awaiting the binding and handing in tomorrow morning.
In my despair to get everything done on time I've overachieved on heating the house and it's really hot here.
I've got a whole night's amount of work before I go to the city early in the morning, and I don't quite feel up to it. But here I am, and change is gonna come. And then some. That bachelor's paper, fondly referred to as "the Batch" around here, is about the weight-loss motivators and demotivators (it's not really a word, I checked) for adult women. It has made me think so hard at times it felt my head would explode. The whole 129 pages of pure emotions, obsessions, control-freakiness or helplessness, and still there is hope. Not for weight loss per se, but for peace of mind and for loving your body.
This staying up all night and translating movies and some pretty worthless stuff is not loving my body. I might say it's survival, but now I'm 129 pages smarter, and I know it's punishing myself.
So, good night, I'm off to do some work and then slide blissfully between the sheets, oh, I do enjoy sleep!