Wednesday, March 21, 2007
So I forgot to mention this because I was distracted or something, but, people: I was in Boulder, Colorado a couple weeks ago. And it was awesome.
I'd never been that far west before, so this was the first time I ever saw the Rocky Mountains. They were pretty incredible. I loved the way they dominated half of the landscape, the way you could always tell which way was north just by looking at the way the mountains ran, the way you could drive up and find snow when temperatures down in the city were balmy. It was a little unreal having them right there.
(I met a missionary on the bus today who was from southern California, and she told me that this was her first winter in Massachusetts. She was describing how autumn here had been so exciting to her that she had been constantly collecting leaves, and how having actual snow and shoveling seemed so unbelievable that she felt like she was in a movie. When she said that I realized that that's how I felt about the Rocky Mountains -- it's not that I didn't know what they looked like from pictures and things, but it was so strange to be right next to them that it was like being in a movie or a book or something.)
While I spend a fair amount of time whining about how I miss my scattered friends, the fact is that I am lucky to have friends who move to interesting places, because it gives me an excuse to travel to places I wouldn't have thought to visit. I am not much into travel for its own sake, or running around being touristy, but I like going places if I have a specific reason to be there, like visiting a friend or studying ruins. And once I'm there I enjoy falling in love with new towns and cities. As we drove around Boulder, visited the Immense Hardware Store of Awesome, barhopped around Pearl Street, and the next day, drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park, I began to think I could get used to a place like this, loving the way the city suddenly stopped and the great open spaces and mountains began, right there, and having wild fantasies about how easy it would be to live in solitude and keep a cow and a pony and hike and ski all the time and still have an easy drive to the city. I am an Easterner at heart, but after that I think I totally understand what there is to love about the West.
It was comfortable in another way too, getting to see my former roommate and her husband and their wide variety of pets (including Bella the cat, who used to share our apartment and who is now the star of my youtube channel.) All my friends seem to be getting married these days, and for ages I was afraid that when everyone got married, they would leave me behind, as though my singleness was some mark of unworthiness, as though there was nothing we would share anymore. But I have been relieved to find that that's not true at all. Rabi wrote something recently about how when you're grown-up, you get to make your own family. I haven't been lucky enough to do that yet, but I have been lucky enough to have lots of friends who have, and who welcome me into their families and their Sunday mornings, who share with me their dinners and cats and babies, who tell me to come visit anytime -- people I am lucky enough to know well enough to miss, in the solitude of airports and trains, on my way home.
I'd never been that far west before, so this was the first time I ever saw the Rocky Mountains. They were pretty incredible. I loved the way they dominated half of the landscape, the way you could always tell which way was north just by looking at the way the mountains ran, the way you could drive up and find snow when temperatures down in the city were balmy. It was a little unreal having them right there.
(I met a missionary on the bus today who was from southern California, and she told me that this was her first winter in Massachusetts. She was describing how autumn here had been so exciting to her that she had been constantly collecting leaves, and how having actual snow and shoveling seemed so unbelievable that she felt like she was in a movie. When she said that I realized that that's how I felt about the Rocky Mountains -- it's not that I didn't know what they looked like from pictures and things, but it was so strange to be right next to them that it was like being in a movie or a book or something.)
While I spend a fair amount of time whining about how I miss my scattered friends, the fact is that I am lucky to have friends who move to interesting places, because it gives me an excuse to travel to places I wouldn't have thought to visit. I am not much into travel for its own sake, or running around being touristy, but I like going places if I have a specific reason to be there, like visiting a friend or studying ruins. And once I'm there I enjoy falling in love with new towns and cities. As we drove around Boulder, visited the Immense Hardware Store of Awesome, barhopped around Pearl Street, and the next day, drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park, I began to think I could get used to a place like this, loving the way the city suddenly stopped and the great open spaces and mountains began, right there, and having wild fantasies about how easy it would be to live in solitude and keep a cow and a pony and hike and ski all the time and still have an easy drive to the city. I am an Easterner at heart, but after that I think I totally understand what there is to love about the West.
It was comfortable in another way too, getting to see my former roommate and her husband and their wide variety of pets (including Bella the cat, who used to share our apartment and who is now the star of my youtube channel.) All my friends seem to be getting married these days, and for ages I was afraid that when everyone got married, they would leave me behind, as though my singleness was some mark of unworthiness, as though there was nothing we would share anymore. But I have been relieved to find that that's not true at all. Rabi wrote something recently about how when you're grown-up, you get to make your own family. I haven't been lucky enough to do that yet, but I have been lucky enough to have lots of friends who have, and who welcome me into their families and their Sunday mornings, who share with me their dinners and cats and babies, who tell me to come visit anytime -- people I am lucky enough to know well enough to miss, in the solitude of airports and trains, on my way home.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
I was pretty obsessed with this music video ("Leaving New York" by REM) back in the fall of 2004, but at the time I probably couldn't have told you quite why, just that I was. The other day I was fooling around on YouTube trying to get my favorites to save properly (which, incidentally, reminded me of trying to get a stubborn, hard-mouthed school pony to not pull over abruptly to chow down on some grass after every circuit around the ring) and I rediscovered it and I knew exactly why I loved it.
First of all, that video evokes exactly what it feels like every time I get on a plane again to come home after visiting faraway friends. The solitude of the airport, the flickering memories of vibrant sights and happy people, the sense of being pulled apart by having a home in one place and people you love somewhere completely different. That sense of longing and regret, and a need to travel back in time by about a day. I didn't know that that's how it would feel back when I first loved this video, but maybe I guessed it would.
(It is easier to leave than to be left behind, though.)
Second, I love the way the signs in the video keep changing to go along with the lyrics. It goes along with my desire to plaster buildings and subway cars and walls with the words in my mind. So every time I see "it's pulling me apart" scroll by on a sign in this video, I think yes, you understand, this is what it's like inside my head. (Plus, I'm just generally fond of those flippy signs like the ones they have at South Station.)
First of all, that video evokes exactly what it feels like every time I get on a plane again to come home after visiting faraway friends. The solitude of the airport, the flickering memories of vibrant sights and happy people, the sense of being pulled apart by having a home in one place and people you love somewhere completely different. That sense of longing and regret, and a need to travel back in time by about a day. I didn't know that that's how it would feel back when I first loved this video, but maybe I guessed it would.
(It is easier to leave than to be left behind, though.)
Second, I love the way the signs in the video keep changing to go along with the lyrics. It goes along with my desire to plaster buildings and subway cars and walls with the words in my mind. So every time I see "it's pulling me apart" scroll by on a sign in this video, I think yes, you understand, this is what it's like inside my head. (Plus, I'm just generally fond of those flippy signs like the ones they have at South Station.)
Monday, March 12, 2007
I have developed, it seems, something of a strange habit. Some days I leave the house to run errands, buying this and that, getting to the bank or the post office, and I feel a Clarissa-Dalloway-esque sort of busyness, attempts at domestic perfection, as though I am that movie character whose grocery bags always have the baguette and fresh flowers sticking out the top. Some days I complete these errands successfully, and I am pleased at the efficiency and normality of my efforts.
But then some days I leave the house -- often on those days when a lingering discontent drives me to get outside -- and I cannot get anything done or make any little decisions. On those days I poke my head in and out of a dozen restaurants I could have lunch in, vetoing them after I'd already entered for stupid reasons: too crowded. no homefries. too fast-foody. not what i'm in the mood for. I keep walking, too frustrated to wait for or sit on a bus. Eventually I have walked across to Boston or Cambridge and my mind feels numbed by my pacing. I break down and stop for a coffee and pastry, and the coffee takes my mind to new places entirely.
(When I have walked like this to another place I often feel like a completely different person. My apartment is like baggage, full of messy piles, unwelcome roommates, decorations from long-gone friends, unfinished projects. Once I have walked for long enough I feel like I have left behind everything I am not physically carrying. I am Amanda who owns these few objects: some books, an mp3 player, pens, notebook, hairbrush. I am not Amanda of all these human entanglements past and present. I can minimize myself to the homework in my bag. I can focus.)
I can sit in a coffeeshop and do this reading, this new me released from my normal life. But the chitchat in my head gets louder as the silent day goes on, as the caffeine begins to take effect. My mind wanders to different places, creates its own worlds, imagines monologues and dialogues with real and fictional characters. Sometimes I will grab my notebook in the middle of reading or even while walking and write down lines. The whirring of my mind is almost manic, it goes so many places in a minute that I think I have the beginning to a thousand poems, none of which I have the attention span to work on just now. I try to write down what I can as it engulfs me. I still can't make simple decisions, and I wander stores without buying things, I patrol vaguely in search of dinner as though the decision really were life-changing, as though the holy grail of dinner might be around some corner in Somerville if I just keep walking. People I know walk in and out of my brain having fictional, unlikely conversations with me and I let them, completely immersed. If I have to say "Excuse me" to someone in the street, my voice sounds husky and unpracticed, as though I hadn't spoken for weeks. Eventually I wind down, or I go somewhere where I must talk to people, and the effect wears off. But later there are still these scrawlings in my notebook, of which I might make something someday.
It was only today that I realized I've done this several times, this ridiculous adventure where I am sidetracked from my errands, where I am too stubborn and frustrated to eat at any but the ideal location, where I have coffee on an empty stomach even though I know better, where I walk and walk and walk while my brain airs out everything that's rumbling along inside it.
It's strange how caffeine does this to me. I think the mythology is supposed to be about alcoholic writers, but I can count on all the fingers of my elbow the amount of decent writing I've done while drinking. But the combination of caffeine and walking seems to bring voices, stories, lines floating out of my brain that I would normally suppress and set aside, in the normal course of cooking dinner and buying baguettes, those usual things that I try to nestle picturesquely into my day.
But then some days I leave the house -- often on those days when a lingering discontent drives me to get outside -- and I cannot get anything done or make any little decisions. On those days I poke my head in and out of a dozen restaurants I could have lunch in, vetoing them after I'd already entered for stupid reasons: too crowded. no homefries. too fast-foody. not what i'm in the mood for. I keep walking, too frustrated to wait for or sit on a bus. Eventually I have walked across to Boston or Cambridge and my mind feels numbed by my pacing. I break down and stop for a coffee and pastry, and the coffee takes my mind to new places entirely.
(When I have walked like this to another place I often feel like a completely different person. My apartment is like baggage, full of messy piles, unwelcome roommates, decorations from long-gone friends, unfinished projects. Once I have walked for long enough I feel like I have left behind everything I am not physically carrying. I am Amanda who owns these few objects: some books, an mp3 player, pens, notebook, hairbrush. I am not Amanda of all these human entanglements past and present. I can minimize myself to the homework in my bag. I can focus.)
I can sit in a coffeeshop and do this reading, this new me released from my normal life. But the chitchat in my head gets louder as the silent day goes on, as the caffeine begins to take effect. My mind wanders to different places, creates its own worlds, imagines monologues and dialogues with real and fictional characters. Sometimes I will grab my notebook in the middle of reading or even while walking and write down lines. The whirring of my mind is almost manic, it goes so many places in a minute that I think I have the beginning to a thousand poems, none of which I have the attention span to work on just now. I try to write down what I can as it engulfs me. I still can't make simple decisions, and I wander stores without buying things, I patrol vaguely in search of dinner as though the decision really were life-changing, as though the holy grail of dinner might be around some corner in Somerville if I just keep walking. People I know walk in and out of my brain having fictional, unlikely conversations with me and I let them, completely immersed. If I have to say "Excuse me" to someone in the street, my voice sounds husky and unpracticed, as though I hadn't spoken for weeks. Eventually I wind down, or I go somewhere where I must talk to people, and the effect wears off. But later there are still these scrawlings in my notebook, of which I might make something someday.
It was only today that I realized I've done this several times, this ridiculous adventure where I am sidetracked from my errands, where I am too stubborn and frustrated to eat at any but the ideal location, where I have coffee on an empty stomach even though I know better, where I walk and walk and walk while my brain airs out everything that's rumbling along inside it.
It's strange how caffeine does this to me. I think the mythology is supposed to be about alcoholic writers, but I can count on all the fingers of my elbow the amount of decent writing I've done while drinking. But the combination of caffeine and walking seems to bring voices, stories, lines floating out of my brain that I would normally suppress and set aside, in the normal course of cooking dinner and buying baguettes, those usual things that I try to nestle picturesquely into my day.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
I've been taking the Mental Floss Geography Challenge fairly obsessively. When a friend first pointed it out to me and I started quizzing myself, I was disappointed to discover that I could locate hardly anything in Africa, that I never did get those former Soviet republics straight (the USSR broke up when I was in elementary school, and I don't think my school system ever got new maps), and that even parts of Europe were going a little hazy. When I bombed it a few times, mostly thanks to good old Africa, little voices in my head started to whisper those statistics about how less than half of Americans could identify Iraq on an unlabelled map, and I felt very guilty. (For the record, I could identify Iraq. But I couldn't identify lots of other things.)
So I was like, what the hell? Rote memorization is supposed to be one of those natural skills of mine, right? So I resolved to study my atlas and kick that geography challenge's ass by the end of spring break. I'm already doing way better, much to my self-satisfaction. I'm not entirely sure what I'll get out of this besides some vague sense of accomplishment and superiority. Perhaps someday I'll be at a party and someone will mention Myanmar in conversation, and I'll be able to nod sagely and say "Yes, hand me an unlabelled map, I'll show you right where that is."
Who knows.
So I was like, what the hell? Rote memorization is supposed to be one of those natural skills of mine, right? So I resolved to study my atlas and kick that geography challenge's ass by the end of spring break. I'm already doing way better, much to my self-satisfaction. I'm not entirely sure what I'll get out of this besides some vague sense of accomplishment and superiority. Perhaps someday I'll be at a party and someone will mention Myanmar in conversation, and I'll be able to nod sagely and say "Yes, hand me an unlabelled map, I'll show you right where that is."
Who knows.