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”