Filed under: Uncategorized
Twelve hours later and it occurred to me that I might have issues.
Frankly– and I know I tend to say this sometimes– I am amazed that I didn’t die last night. And I don’t know why I push the boundaries. What am I, stupid?
I missed an hour of my favorite class in the world, the last class of my favorite class with my very favorite professor, who called my cell phone to leave a voicemail which I can’t even bring myself to listen to because I’m so positively distraught and upset with myself.
I was supposed to wake up at 730am and bake the cookie dough that’s now just sitting in my fridge. I was supposed to appear composed and lucid in the last class of the world. I was supposed to come home with my shoes on.
I made promises last night I can’t keep. There is no feeling like shame. I am not a real person. In this regard, I’ll be glad to come home. Being here is a terrible weakness.
Veddy serious pain in me gulliver.
Filed under: ANIMALS
Shiba/buhund, anyway.
Okay, I have to go to Abbey Road and take my shoes off now.
Filed under: ANIMALS
I’m writing a 2500 word essay on the Malthusian trap in India/China.
I would rather take some Paracetamol and curl up into a ball,
EXCEPT FOR THIS FURBALL OF MOTIVATION:
Today’s motivational Shiba.
That’s what I should do as a countdown until I leave next Wednesday.
Filed under: MUSIC
In the spirit of the previous post, I reviewed my Thanksgiving entries on LiveJournal. From the past SIX YEARS.
One Thanksgiving and a hot tub and burning Furby(?)
One Thanksgiving we didn’t have a working stove.
One Thanksgiving shadowed by a funeral.
Pre-Thanksgiving parties elsewhere.
MORE people I’ve fallen out of touch with.
(“HELLO CAN I HAVE THE SOPA DE JUAN?
DO YOU HAVE THAT AT SPOTSWOOD DINER?”)
[Budding relationships opened with this comment:
"you're such a fuck! who cares."]
So stupid and refreshingly hilarious.
I am breathless with laughter and banging my fists/head on my desk.
ALSO, LiveJournal reminded me of “Tokyo” by Cap’n Jazz, who I’ve not listened to in ages.
Thanksgiving day: tossing eating wearing pigskin worn thin.
Torn teethly like the scaredy-cat sacred custom goes.
Sweet chicken little eating lollipox treats for turkey day [...]
Matching a patched-up pair like us,
apparently it’s a given, given culture and all.
We will break things just to call them broken,
stained by this compulsion to ruin and name it art. [...]
Architects ache so they build.
Some subdivisions no matter how much pain or planning–
no matter how much it matters–
some ugly houses sprout up in rows,
look like structures of sad accidents and broken happy plans.
We named the clever chimp that picked up the first tool Adam.
We discovered we are really mostly just water.
We pretend about a past to justify right now.
We tell countless lies to make it through each day.
I loved this shit.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING, AMERICA!
To give you an idea of how important this is, I just stopped making hand turkeys in order to devote my attention to blogging. I think I’m having a revelation, but I don’t know what it is yet.
Out upon your guarded lips…
and say to-morrow what to-morrow thinks in hard words again.
I was reading my favorite flatmate’s Facebook note on being thankful. (With 7 flatmates, of course I have favorites.) Normally stuff like that doesn’t phase me, and I’d typically find it borderline contemptible. HOWEVER, I cried. Maybe it was her verbally coming to terms with the terrible things that have happened to her in the past, the fact that I’m 5000 miles away from my entire world, I just got off of a Skype date with Liz who is living just fine without me, or that I was listening to Iron and Wine. A combination. Something in me has either broken or been fixed, if I can cry like a normal female in this hemisphere.
I guess misery and despair are also important parts– important enough to document as a move toward containment. (Get out of my head!) There are pressing theological things I’d say about this, but they don’t quite have a place here yet.
I’m thankful for being here, but at the same time, I don’t mean it like everyone else will say once we have our “family” dinner tomorrow night. Naturally, I have to make it far more complex.
It’s great to sit in a bedroom I claimed as “mine” in a foreign country, but I worked all year until I felt that I deserved this. I’m completely thankful for my mom’s help with paperwork and financial aid, and that my parents’ credits are good enough for me to snag a loan. This should be said, definitely.
Primarily, I’m thankful for what’s been happening in my little head. Even if it scares me nearly half the time. I feel that I can come back to the United States as a better person. (What does that even mean?) Just like you’d want in your government, I think I can conduct my life with a little more transparency. Less shiftiness, more honesty. Saying no and meaning “no.” Saying yes and meaning “absolutely!” Saying “thanks” and meaning just that.
Basically, I’ve been a shit friend and a shit lover.
As Devendra Banhart says,
Years away finds me here today,
On my own and knowless of my way now.
So I send my friends gifts from where I’ve been,
something for the hand I’m never there to lend.Being in a new location has allowed me to backtrack to years of errors and shine a light on the tangling of strings. (Insert sordid ball of yarn.) I’m untangling now. I want to flush everything out, perform an OCD bleach cleaning on my soul and return a minimalist.
I never thought it’d be this way, but coming back to the US will be even more difficult because of the English mindset and the differences in taboos. Not because I love EVERYTHING here or that I’ve found the ideal British mate to stay with forever and ever. (Former being true regardless, the latter would be a baldfaced lie.)
Yes, the British are uptight . . . when it comes to public comportment. Thank God. However, I dare to say that America is a terrible place to raise your children in, physically, mentally and/or sexually. Terrified of death AND being sorted into one of three Puritanical categories: mother, child, or whore? No small wonder that girls/people in America perpetuate their own stereotypes.
This is Europe. Be who you are.
I can say “I love you” to someone because it can be about who they are, rather than what they can do for me on a scale of 1-10.
(If this all means that I ought to take out my nose ring and tongue ring to be able to deal honestly with my parents, then I can do that too. Tattoos are a different story.)
This will all become more clear to me once I’m done with the hand turkeys. You have a lot of time to think about nothing when you’re cutting out the fingers.
I’m just somebody that you used to knowww.
I still hope this whole shebang doesn’t sound idiotic. I feel like, despite my best efforts, everything ends up sounding like it was written by someone who looks like this:
. . . I’ll be thankful if it doesn’t.
It totally throws your life in relief when people visit; DeLillo’s right yet again. Small tics, foot shuffling, unnecessary explanations, a slip into dialect, compulsive cleaning, one random wet towel. Whatever.
Our 48 hours together were a crash course in London’s great sights.
Yesterday was her only whole day in London, so: we had English breakfast; caught the end of a mass in St Paul’s Cathedral (I lit a candle for my family and cried, like I did in Sacre Coeur); walked the Millenium Bridge to the Tate Modern; made fun of their modern art; ate a pasty in Waterloo; South Bank for the Cologne Christmas festival; drank mulled wine and took pictures of the Eye/Big Ben/Parliament; Parliament to Trafalgar; Covent Garden; British dinner at one of my favorite pubs and introduced her to Strongbow-with-black; “scenic” bus ride back to New Cross; drank at Amersham Arms with Chris; finished with a box of Square Pizza.
She explored by herself today when I was busy nodding off in classes.
I hope she enjoyed herself, despite my need to spit out every historical tidbit I’ve learned about places here.
And I’ll be spinning in my skirts
and knitting tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little hats.
And when my breath becomes an island,
I won’t be dancing on that roof anymore or wearing these crazy boots.
I just saw Emily off at the railway station on Liverpool Street and made the 40-minute trip home at my leisure. I made a conscious effort to walk as slow as possible. People looked at me funny.
Felt tears prickle when I got back in my room. I felt this way in the days following our return from the 11-day trip abroad: GREAT and then slightly wretched. I spend so much time with people in intimate situations and close quarters for days. You can comfortably lapse into silence and forget where you end and they begin. And then I’m alone.
I’m lonely, not homesick.
I am so lucky to be here.
And we was running, running, running.
We was climbing, we was fighting.
We was breathing fast, praying please.
Funnily enough, despite all the musical experiences I have here (another time), I’ve been playing Alela Diane over and over. Like I need an American folk singer to remind me what it’s like to drive down Summerhill Road in the summer heat.
Chris and I are organising Thanksgiving for this Thursday to honour our heritage. We hope we’ll do it up right, but it’ll be a lot of effort and money.
Four of us are going to Liverpool this weekend. It’s costing me more money than it’ll be worth, I guarantee, from the round-trip train, hostel, Beatles tour, and food combined. I NEED to go to Wales. I need to make that pilgrimage within the next 24 days.
Instead of going to see Zac Efron and Claire Danes standing around Leicester Square today, I figured a good pick-me-up would be to scan my YouTube Favorites list.
145 videos of “quality entertainment” for me to occupy my time with.
(Normally, Wednesdays are spent coping with a hangover from the New Cross Inn and trudging to the library.) An androgynous British musician playing the harp can change someone’s life.
http://www.youtube.com/user/sszreter
As soon as I figure out how to rip audio from YouTube videos, I will do it. And I guarantee I will just lay in bed for hours and listen to it. (I miss my record player.)
The cover of the QEH version of “Only Skin” is also gorgeous, if “yar interes-ted” in those sorts of things. Maybe it’s just me.
If it were possible to screen friends, I would surround myself (part of the time) with (talented) musicians. I walked out of my Public Administration lecture yesterday, past the open window for the lecture room two doors down and was struck dead by this massive orchestral jam session going on. Their class is sitting in a circle, playing without sheet music. They even had someone on a harp. Which is why I bring this all up.
. . .And I stand by what I’ve said at least a dozen times: one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me was to transcribe Joanna Newsom’s “Sadie” onto a guitar. Life changing in small moments. (I wish I could’ve recorded it.)
After a little thought and self-review, I think I’d be incapable of actually seeing Joanna Newsom perform live. (I’d never turn down a chance for tickets.) But I think it’d be such an important moment to me that I’d black out. It’s unfair to hang so much on one person (although it is fair, because they have no clue who you are.) I would faint. Like little girls watching The Beatles live, I would scream and cry and then be incapable of relating the experience to anyone. Thus, a downward spiral of gorgeousness.
Those are my thoughts on that, anyway.
BTW, educational issues from last night are now resolved, thanks to a little luck, a nice lady, and an exceptionally snippy email on my part. More apologies owed.
Here, cheer up with this photo.
Filed under: RANT
Cabin fevah and bronchitis.
Everyone’s out seeing Billy Elliot for a class and I’m sitting in my room, reading Othello. It’s totally a man play, written by a man. Measure for Measure might always be my favorite, if I had to pick, but I guess it’s unfair to not pick a tragedy as well as a comedy.
Just to get out, I took the tube to Camden today and got my tongue ring changed FUH FREE. The people who own the shop barely speak English. I forget where they said they were from– they told me after I had four gin & cranberries to dull the burn last time– but it’s either a remote South American country or some country that doesn’t contribute much, like Estonia. It could go either way with them, and I guess the way people look ethnically is always misleading in a country like England.
Anyway, having this striking-yet-unfortunate-looking woman speak to me about life while she’s swishing around in my mouth and pulling my tongue was unreal.
My blog has descended into the shameful underworld of LiveJournal-ness, whether from a lack of patience and pruning or an increased desire for containment.
Othello brought up a thought. Cassio said that if Othello ignored him for more than three days, he’d forget his lieutenant’s previous love and service and replace him.
Last night, I had a conversation with Daria that was unusual– I think– for our relationship, even though we’ve known the in’s and out’s of each other’s lives for the past 15 years. I don’t know what it is I’m trying to say, other than we leapt our conversation boundaries and talked about things I keep reserved. Like the square block goes in the square hole, but the round peg can also fit in the square hole. I don’t need one person for each aspect of my life, but then I worry that I’ll be forgetting or replacing, but over the span of three months.
In one night, I’ve been robbed of $6000 that is rightfully mine. (A grand total of $18,000.) I am beating my head on the keyboard over my college education right now and sometimes I’m actually a bit mad. Professor That Guy said we keep our shit together through dialogue (because even the solemnest soliloquy is a dialogue) but people talking to themselves IRL is a whole other story.
To reclaim aforementioned $18,000 I have to prove I remember maths from four years ago, locate the exact paperwork, convince advisement that I know these things and have documents, find classes that are remotely useful and convince people to let me take classes concurrently, overall driving through a mound of red tape from 3,000 miles away.
This does not include everything else, like being forced to overstep my comfort in verbal concision. So I’m a little daft right now. Homesick, too.
My last cigarette was in Paris.
For the past 15 minutes, I’ve been watching this man sit on his roof on the other side of the tracks, in the offchance that he jumps or is blown off by the 35 mph winds.
I live in New Cross. Things like this could happen: an unfortunate man and a more or less helpless bystander. Things like that could happen to me if they happen to someone else in the world, yes?
And I am nothing of a builder, but here I dreamt I was an architect.
Then someone else came out to help him and my little life-saving fantasy was a lie. I don’t know what this says, but here are some voyeuristic pictures to accompany my little anecdote:
This is only the 2nd witnessed instance of life on the other side of the tracks.
Perfect weather for the wails of Mike Kinsella or Andrew Bird’s Black Session . . . And not really thinking about all the things we talked about yesterday. (Synchronicity and containment and oscillating between love/hate [false,] love/sadness [also false,] love/control [quite possible,] or love/contempt [accepted truth.] My life.) As if Kyd had any clue about a doofus philosopher who would be born almost 300 years later.
“For love resisted grows impatient.”
Yeah, we get it.
Now my tea is cold.
So it’s November, and full nostalgia kicks in.
Thanksgiving kills me, thinking about high school, certain albums, my old car. People I no longer associate with, who are all visibly happy now. It’s probably just as well we have no Thanksgiving here to celebrate. No Native Americans or dried corn or smallpox.
No way to miss people properly!
remembering something I heard it
hurts when actions speak louder than
do you have some time for me?
I guess I’m excited to come home in 34-ish days. I know it doesn’t have much to do with it, but I’ve been apt to burst into tears this week: Notre Dame, lighting a candle for my family in Sacre Coeur, singing to the graves of Edith Piaf and Yves Montand in Pere Lachaise, the West End play last night, just now.
I flew over French countryside, listening to songs written for me. “Interior of a Dutch House” came on through Belgium and there I was– stuck on a bus with my sleeping friends and people I didn’t know, sabuh-da.
There are 33 full days left to convince someone that they can love me enough.
(And so I can gain citizenship in 3 years’ time.) I’ve been going about things all wrong and I need to stop looking up when I walk by people in the street. It’s silly. Errrbody has their own problems. I stand by what I said last year: waking up next to someone is a lot different when you’re not in love.
The inevitable agenda:
November-December: nostalgia
January-March: depression
How ’bout I only think about you when there’s leaves on the path
as I’m on my way to class?
Would that make it less apparent? Is this really happening?
In good news:
1) My friend’s band just had a walloping good show, opening for Mae. They stole the crowd, he said. Wish I could’ve seen it with my own eyes, but I was stuck in Luton airport at the time.
2) I smuggled a bottle of Grande Absente back from Paris
3) I’m seeing The Spanish Tragedy at the Arcola Theatre tonight for free
