Checkn' it out in Granada

Sometimes you go to sleep feeling frustrated, useless and meaningless and you wake up to an invitation from one of the more beautiful men in Granada.

First kiss in Granada (tongue ring, street lamp, etc.).

[I feel like I'm on the Truman Show....]

Jazz, Magic

Hello Saturday night/Sunday morning on November 21/22^nd in Spain. Hello first, real, intimate time with a writing machine. I’m seriously sighing with all of my body.

Guys, I’ve been in Spain for over two weeks now and I haven’t had a real chance to communicate with most of you (and with myself, in the way that one spits a bunch of stuff out, expulses it, and then can step back and look at it from afar. There is something weird about the layout of my current notebook that disables me from long-writing. I need to get a new one). Here we are, again. And I am oh so lost. Welcome to my madness!!!

Let the games begin.

So this is actually my first, real time that I’ve ever had being a real adult. You, know, “real life” and all that. I’m taking care of EVERYTHING myself, I’m figuring out EVERYTHING from scratch, and I’m taking on all these new things that I’ve never had to take on before. It’s overwhelming and fucking frightening and so amazing all at the same time, maybe somewhat like what Richard Yates writes in his Revolutionary Road—which I am reading right(/write..ha I accidentally wrote ‘write’, initially) now because someone lent it to me/it is good and I wanted to read it—writes: “It was like walking through a sandstorm; it was like walking on the ocean; it was like walking on air” (141. P.S. I am obsessed with semicolons… That’s all.). And thus has been my past 2-3 weeks here (I put 2-3 because I really, seriously don’t know how long it’s been. Surprise!), a grand mixture of so many things, so many ways of looking at things, life plans, lifestyles, changes in monstrous logistical things, learning how to react to all kinds of info and situations, learning about a new culture, understanding purpose and intention, working, calculating, trying to enjoy while calculating, making friends, peace and reason, breaths of fresh air, siestas, culinary morphis, meaningandmeaninglessness, something out of nothing and knowing when there is sometimes nothing in something, eyes wide open and world somewhere else, coffee and shawarmas, communicating and communicating and communicating and messing up and not being able to say what I want and not really knowing what I want to say, and missing people and realizing that I maybe should and shouldn’t and actually did or didn’t miss people, and NOT missing people, and not remembering things and then remembering things really hard, really intensely, really unexpectedly, and then crying and having no one there to comfort, and then when seeking comfort feeling lost and even more discomforted because comfort isn’t comfort anymore, and feeling so far away from everyone, starting to feel closer to myself. Stuff like that.

I’ve been crashing here on Elizabeth’s couch (upon which I sit at this very moment) for over 2 weeks (once again, -ish). Elizabeth is a friend of Vanessa’s (girl who went to Oxy, is living and working in Granada, and did the same the year before) who is teaching English here through CIEE. She is also coincidentally from St. Louis, which is totally the weirdest thing. I love this, because I LOVE St. Louis. Yes, for all of you that don’t know, I absolutely love that city. It is a ridiculously special place (and if you have never been there before, I will show you sometime). Elizabeth has been incredibly giving and I am endlessly in gratitude of her and her roommates warm and open house, their empathetic understanding of my situation, and the loving way in which they incorporated and invited me into their home. (A home really is a thing, really is a force) I am even probably “moving out” this week and her flatmate, Katarina from Prague, invited me to dinner on Thursday night. I plan on having them all over for an excellent and indulgent dinner when I finally get a place figured out. I owe them so so much; way more beyond the ‘things’ I could ever give back to them.

And yeah, then about my living situation. I mean I don’t want to go into that too much, since I already basically wrote a whole ‘blog’ (which was more just a thing of my being like omg I need to tell ppl about this bc it is eating up my days and life here, I need to write a blog/ and I need advice!!) about this, but I am yes still in the process of figuring this out. I have a new idea which is a happy medium, which involves paying a lady to crash in an empty bedroom every tues and wed night in huelma and then living in Granada the rest of the time, therefore only paying for 4 full days of carpool the whole month and 8 days of rent in huelma. It seems to be the best happy medium for a lot of reasons.

There’s something special about Granada, in its jazz and magic, I have yet to find it and I think it will be a long, sinking in, thorough process.

So, far, since being here, I’ve finished The Best American Non-Required Reading 2005, am half-way done with Revolutionary Road, and have experimented with Bolano’s “The Romantic Dogs” in both Spanish and English, depending in time, place, internal season, etc.

A few things I liked from my book (Yates):

“..became the stock supporting actors in a confectionary romance of bachelor-girls in Manhattan” (and I thought about the way my life could have been/he worded that so fucking beautifully and so spot on, like all of his language)

“never in talking to his wife had he triumphed more completely over time and space”

and the quote I put earlier, that is really amazing both IN and out of context. The page #s there, so if you are of ever will be or ever have read it, look for it in context..Bad Ass.

Then something that both my brother reminded me of (via a quote from his 1^st grade teacher), and that April Wheeler puts to plainly and obviously in the novel, “‘certainly it’s not going to be easy. Do you know anything worth doing that is?’” I would love to keep this in mind. Frank and April never made it to their great and big and fabulously fabulous plans. Here I am. It may not be perfectly what I had in mind, but man, it’s something, and it’s pushing me, and I’m growing and I’m frustrated, and I’m empowerd and squashed all at the same time, but it’s in experiences like these, where I have the incredibly good and the incredibly bad all mixed together, when I can feel elation and energy and empowerment as well as fright and worthlessness and defeat, that I feel pushed and moved in the most meaningful of ways, in the big ways that aren’t fleeting.

I punched this into my cell phone as I walked from an internet café to Elizabeth’s apartment, after Skyping with Alex Black tonight:

I find myself floundering in a vat of my own confusion, that I can’t find the clairvoyance to make sense of anything, to pick anything out, to push through it, like honey, pushing into a wave. --It’s worth taking note of what I wrote in that moment.

Kiiitos. 3 o’clock climbs into me (sexual? It wasn’t meant to be, but think walking in Brooklyn at night, Naguine!! Oooops..?) and I feel I should be ‘responsible’/I’m tired. Here’s my thing right now: I’m still at that phase/point in my life where I write things like “responsibility”, in quotes, and feel like maybe I should just fucking take the quotes off because it’s real. That’s where I am. That’s how things are changing. Fucking weird. Warped. Unreal. Real.

Ciao, bellas! mush mush

p.s. looking very forward to brother visit in January and the semester arrival of The Bear (Sarah Buyers from Oxy).

What’s more: bathroom stall, coffee shop, Helsinki, Finland: “Te quiero Heidie, no se porque pero te quiero mucho mas que me quieres. Ahora no importa, despues no se”

Andalucian Life...: Pueblo Life? The house hunt begins. (and never ends)

Hola, Todos.

LIVING:

Yes, I am definately in Spain and have definately been here for over a week (was a week on Monday). I've spent most of my time honestly searching for an apartment, and I've gone through many phases of this. First, I was looking at apartments circa 200 euros/month, because that was around the price that my friend was paying. I found two fabulous apartments (mom, nag, and cat, those are the ones I emailed you about) that were 230euros/month and they are really really lovely. prob the coolest apartments I've ever had the option of living in. In my next phase, I was trying to find apartments that weren't SO perfectly central, that weren't like riDIculously cool, still nice enough, and that costed less. This is a much harder process than the one before because it requires factoring in so many little things. And it requires being super vigilant during my brief visits to visit the apartments (like, mental checklist and all).

Anyway, Huelma?

Ever since I've started my job, which is yesterday, I have been thinking about the possibility of living in Huelma, the town where my school is. Although I've figured out a commute and have a few options on places to live in Granada, here are my thoughts:
-The commute is tough. I mean, it's roughly 3 hours out of my day, 3 days a week, which is definately something. I have to fight really hard in the morning to not get car sick. I drive through the mountains on small windy roads and the driver drives maniacly and the car is controlled via stick shift, which makes it even jerkier and more nauseating than it needs to be.
-With these new financial issues (loans), I can actually pay quite less for rent and therefore would be more likely to afford paying back my student loans. Also, my boss is encouraging me to subscribe to a private health care company in addition to the public healthcare that I already have. He says it's better and faster. I told him about my knee injury and he said it would be better for me to do private insurance so I can get to it quickly. He said with public healthcare I might have to wait over a month to get started and my knee hurts a lot right now.
-Slower, I can focus more, think more. I felt flooded, unnecessarily (not in a stimulating way, like the way that New York floods my being. Just in a busycitystuffgoingon way) in Granada. And the smoke is suffocating me (cig and traffic). bleh.
-The town is nice and not too small. There are bookstores, cafes and restaurants, a pet shop, florists, I think even an theater. I think I could actually find some things to do outside of work. Some things to be involved with.
-One of my main goals of being here was/is to write a lot. Write short stories, online journal articles, start a novel. I think this would be the perfect place to do it. Away from distractions.

Qualms?:
-I'd like a gym. I don't know if they have one here.
-Can I do physical therapy here?
-there's noone here that's my age. For some reason at the moment that doesn't seem to bother me.
-possible lack of stimulation and boredom.
-less stuff availible that I'm used to
-It's colder because i'm in the mountains (and not particularly beautiful. Just kind of like hills in our vicinity, but we def get the temp of the mtns)

If I don't like it, I can always move into the city later.

Thoughts?

P.S.
-Spanish-speaking everyday: awesome. learning a lot. especially at my school where I spend a lot of time with the teachers in long and sometimes intense conversations about pedagogy and all.
-uh my comp charger is broken, so I've only been able to utilize the computer really infrequently. my apoligies for lack of communication, but, i mean, yeah.

Loves youuuu. u. u. u!

I don't have any pictures, yet, because I don't feel like a tourist. Sorry, duduzeses.

Notes from New Yo-ak, Second Toe

8 Octubre, 2009

New York was a blur. I mean, not like a million things happened, but my mind was somewhere else..completely preoccupied. I've appreciated that on all of these beginning legs of this trip(/life. "It's not a trip!"), things have been rather chill-er than they could have been. I arrived into New York mid-day on Saturday and took the bus to Max Abram's place in Queens (Max is a friend from Oxy for those of you who don't know) and hauled my crazy mess of bagS around Astoria. On the bus ride there I met this Canadian doll who "is a Flamenco dancer" and loves the flamenco because "you don't have to have a partner!!" After regrouping for a few in Max's apartment, Naguine, Max and I hunted for a particular Brazilian place for lunch that turned out to actually be closed. We walked around Astoria for a little, searching for an intriguing and not outrageously expensive place to eat. We decided on an Indian place that had good lunch specials. The food was satisfying and they used a lot of garlic, which you don't typically taste in Indian food. I liked it. Think about it. After they started playing what I would say is AMAZING keyboard ballads (others might call it pre-programmed back-up sounds on your Casio), Max ultimatum-ed that we HAD to leave. We ducked into a coffee shop (it was greek?) for summa tha goods, hit up a free wine -tasting at a seller next door, and then went back to Max's. At Max's we again regrouped and planned the evening, deciding to take it a little easier and skip the dance party at the Brooklyn museum and instead chill in Queens at Max's roommate's friend's, where we smoked hookah, drank tea, laughed. After late night babaganoush and falafal sandwiches, Naguine and I had to lug my baggage all the way from Queens to Brooklyn and ended up getting to bed around 4.

In the morning, Naguine had some errands to run on the Upper West Side and I met my friend Courtney for coffee, met back up with Naguine, shopped a little in Brooklyn and had lunch at a cafe where Max joined us. Time was ticking rather fiercely at this point and here is where I began to get a little crazy. I just really didnt want my last day or last few hours left in the U.S. to be stressful and hectic. They very much were, which I find really unfortunate. I think I definately am a person that likes to sink in. I like to process what I'm doing and in this case, what I am about to do. The haphazard throwtogether, the only-tending-to-the-physical and the logistical needs really was not okay. If I had really known this about myself, I would have designed my day differently and made it very well known that I needed a good amount of time in that day to just chill and be and think, maybe write, and call Sophie (!). I only realize this in retrospect. Look!..I learned something about myself already! I also learned that you should ALWAYS take the option to bring the most convenient suitcase, even if it is not the largest one (IF you are moving, and especially especially if you are making some stops along the way). Carrying around an inconvenient suitcase..I will never do THAT again. I ended up swapping my suitcase for a rolly one that Naguine had (props to N's ingenuitive mind) and this saved me loads on my very last trek from her place to the JFK airport. Oh myyyyyyyyyyy..! And trek to the airport was insane because I took a cab to the subway station but the subway station was closed so I had to board a shuttle bus to the next station and had to transfer onto 3 different things. A lot of really really awesome people helped me along the way with bag carrying and directions. Who ever ever says NYC is filled with cold, isolated people disinterested in their fellow new yorkers is so freakin wrong. I feel that EVERY TIME I am in New York. People reaching out and connecting, people caring about each other. Maybe that is just me and what I happen see (as in come across) in the place, or maybe I just see it differently. Perhaps people just tend to treat ME differently, but I really don't think so because I see it with other people, too..it's not just me.

The airport was absolutely insane. I guess that's what you get with international departures. All sorts of people doing all the little things differently and also lot's of crazy long and intense sorts of goodbyes and people going for longer times, bigger-deal journies. Craziness comes with that. The Indians, though...they were the craziest (flight to Hyderabad leaving like 30 mins before me, and then Mumbai 20 mins after that). I felt like I was back in India, suddenly, with all of the tiny little culture clash, like lines (as in forming/not forming them or knowing that they are things that people do) and organization, personal space, family etc. If you went to India, think about like 100 Indians (maybe half of the people in line) and then like a ton of other intl ppl (mostly euro/us) who are tame and obedient and form lines and stay quiet and are professional about the security process. It was just so good. So India and so strange that I experienced it RIGHT before my Spain flight, right? What a weird coincidence. Like moving twice at the same time. Like the Universe recognized that I was leaving and just wanted to let me know that it was paying attention to this one. Let's see what that means in the coming days..

Now, I am actually sitting in my seat on the flight from NYC to Madrid. I took a sleeping pill, but what the heeeck. It really isn't kicking in very well. I think that I will take the other one after I eat this dinner that they are aparrantly bringing to me? Go vegetarians in Spain...? Let me get back to you with goo (emotional, intellectual) when I am done with this meal thing. 2 secs.

Psych. This blog is over. Stay tuned for notes from ESPAÑA!!

First Toe

The first toe (left, second) of my trip comes to an end that is the begining of a begining. Tonight I will fall asleep, head full of thoughts of past and future (I feel like I have no present at present)--Chicago will string these together for me (Abbey and Oxy girls, high school and college, mid-way between places, old and new memories strewn all over this city)--and wake up plunging towards New York. My time here has been very nice, my Uncle Chris and Chumel as very accomodating and comfortable hosts (its rare that I stay with family and its very nice) and it was a fantastic way to begin my journey: slow, easy, but filled with good things. I also got to see my dear Abbey from high school who I really haven't seen much of in the past 1.5 years (whom I absolutely adore right down into the core of my being), had short but really good visits with Celeste and Nia from college, and then spent my last evening with my most favorite girl in the entire world, Catherine Petru. Catherine was in Chicago for a PIRG-related conference (super perfect coincidence). I got to meet some of the PIRG people in her life and we made our way to a fanTAStic cafe on Clark in Andersenville(o?), then ended the evening breifly at my uncle's. I love that girl so so damn much. She really feels like my family. Like my other family.

It seems that I am one of those people where it is imperative that I stay up very late on the night before I am about to do something big because I must remain to process and sink into everything and what I am doing, what is about to happen, to squeeze a little bit more out of being in the now before the future becomes the now. It's nearly 3 a.m. here. I'm planning on waking up at 7:15. I will save this to my flash drive, post it tomorrow from Naguine's, and read a short story (maybe 3/5s) before I fall asleep. What will I dream about? Maybe Catherine and I will be underwater or my mother will be sowing a garden of children's toys and candy canes.

Train towards Chicago

Cute couple asleep (upon each other) on train, behind me. Only exacerbates my feeling of sinking into loneliness and wanting to feel the intimacy and love of this type of relationship. Yes, true that I have been feeling like I want a relationship lately. I've never felt that before (because typically, I am already in one), but I think it is probably a symptom of me slowly detaching myself from things, places, people, in order to advance forth into this new stage of my life, this independent waif stage--this has left me feeling particularly lonely, emotionally and connectively isolated (redundant? whatever its working for me) [because i have to be so in order to ever really enjoy my time abroad and scurry about like a psycho bunny that i have become] and maybe therefore craving this intimacy/something or someone to go through it all with, and to have to fall back on and into in every sense of falling on and into. This pushing away so as to move somewhere else, I really don't like. I wish I could take all the people and places and things I care about with me. Obviously this is unrealistic, but then it gets me to thinkin about what Sophie and I have been talkin about lately, which is if people really are a huge part of my/our life/ves then why not and how come I don't keep these things central in my decisions, then? Perhaps I will..when roam around the world adventure stage is done, because let's just face it: it is completely impossible to drag 8 places and 20 people with me everywhere I go (I mean literally, I can't check that much luggage on a plane..would cost me a fortune!) so when I ask for this lifestyle and these adventures, I am asking for something that I must and can only do alone. So here I go.

Two things, which are actually words of advice from Sophie's mother:
love and purpose seem to work together
and "life is only figured out for an hour at a time"

Sophie's mother is so wise.

The Literary City: Praha

You don't take your story with you; You spread your story around.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I believe you deserve some sort of explanation, here. Right? Well, I would like to just (belatedly) relay to you some of my experiences in a land called Prague, then Berlin, and lastly, Finland. I will do these in chronological order (at least at the start. You never can tell what will happen when you get the ball a'rollin and you get the things flustering, you know?). Check this:

Praha!--
Hey. So Alison and I arrive in Prague late at night, and at the very very very last minute my friend Tom (who I met in Hyderabad) helped us out with a place to stay. Brieana has a really lovely apartment in Vinohrady and Alison and I stayed in a really luscious spare bedroom.
Our first day in Prague was unexpectedly and accidentally tourist-effed. We were just trying to see the old city and check out some stuff, but we accidentally were swallowed whole by the maddness and the mobs of tourism that are Prague. Oh, poor little Prague. Completely overtaken. It was so hard to see where the city even was underneath all of the tourism icing. Un. It was nasty. That might have been the most annoying and unpleasant tourist infestation that I've encountered yet. That night we went to dinner with Bri and a friend, drank fabulous Czech beer, and ended up at a club called Techtele Mechtele where we met Peter and Peter and had interesting chats about India and writing professions, respectively. We got back to the apartment, realized we'd left our keys upstairs, so knocked on her neighbors window (the light was on) at like 2 am and he actually came out and hooked us up!! Turns out he was ridiculously good-looking so Alison and I appropriately wrote him a secretive secret meeting note, slid it under his door, and then failed to make out secret meeting the next day.
In Prague, because Bri had wireless internet, we spent a fair amount of time doing "work": Alison her Marshall scholarship, and I planning the next phase of my trip, post-Alison. The next morning we "worked", bought tickets to see the symphony later that evening, spend the afternoon at the Mucha Museum, made dinner, dressed and saw the symphony, hit up a cafe where I illegally over-indulged in chocolate (should've been a crime) and we begin writing "Dear Stranger" notes furiously on Cafe Louvre stationary. We left one for our waiter with our bill, and the rest we poked around in little secret places around Prague during out walk home in the (light) rain. Dear Stranger notes are special notes to strangers. We started writing questions to these strangers and then decided to make a website where these strangers could answer the questions. We put the website on the note, but when we got home and tried to create the site, it domain was already taken, so I made a site with a similar name to what we wanted, but that didn't help our cause. [I distributed a bunch of these notes around Helsinki on my last day there and I put the appropriate website address but no one has yet responded. I know that in order to do this seriously I have to mass produce these letters, but I didn't really have the means to do that at the time. Perhaps I will do that in the future].

The next day Alison departs, I take care of some odds and ends, meet up with my friend Saarah's friend Drake (Saarah I also met in India) and people at a Beer Garden near Bri's, we migrate to a place with an excellent dj where I befriend a hilarious Irishman and then crash at Bri's. The next morning Bri and I do breakfast, I depart to move to Drake's (because Bri is leaving for China in the evening) where we enjoy a charming lunch in his big open window, head out on a search for a particular bar, come upon an old, breath-taking random church, drink fantastic beerS at a bar with the largest beer menu in the CR (here i had Budvar, the orig budweiser maybe..?), I lose my sunglasses, we tour an offbeat part of the city sufficiently buzzed, end up at Bukowski's (where D has been wanting to go because he, like myself, it a huge and awesome literature nerd). Here I have a great chat with an Indian-American girl about India and about South America (and they sort of crossed over). We go back to D's for dinner and then I opt to stay in while he goes back out, because the room is lit so well. I do yoga and finish the epic Ashbery work (the perfect place to finish it if Prague was good for nothing else).

Next morning Mallory goes on an excursion solo, crossin the Charles and over to Petrin Hill to finish Praha with an Unbearable tribute. I make my way to the top of the Hill, experience what I suddenly sense to be the beginning of fall (it hits me). There is this lady kneeling and praying on this precipice that overlooks all of the orange city. It’s an overcast day and she’s crying. I spot, from SO far away, an orange bag flying in the air (like in American Beauty) and it’s weird because the city is orange—so it matches—and this lady is crying and weeping over the beauty or her life or some sudden catastrophe, whatever it is, I can’t believe how poetic and cinematic a scene it was. I felt like I was let in on some cinematic secret. Like I wasn’t supposed to catch all those things at the same time and have them line up like they did, but I did, and that doesn’t happen very often.

Then I found a strangey field with all of these fruit trees and chatted with some local about how he does and I can actually pick any of the fruit (“and eat it!”). I promptly pluck two pears (one ripe and one rare), take some photos for an Indian couple in a rose garden (sophie…), and head out to meet drake at this sick bookstore/coffeeshop called The Globe (check it out if you’re in Prague!) I secure my ferry trip from Stockholm to Helsinki whilst at this shop, chat with a dawg from Ar-hay (in Spanish, por su puesto), and Drake and I buy matching books (written by a Polish lady, published by a Prague-based press) soas to begin our adorable 2-person book club. We hurry back to his apartment and I shoot like lightening (I’m getting good at it) to catch my overnight bus from Prague to Berlin.