A certain number of days have elapsed since I last wrote in this weblog. I am not sure how many of them, exactly, since it was sooo early when I left and I am so useless when it comes to time zones. A year has died. I`ve made no resolutions, because all of the things that would be worth resolving are impossible.
The youth subcultures here are bizarre, in that they are so pervasive they seem to be the norm. The young people here are universally edgy and alternative. The noise is incredible.
I would write a good many other things,?@but I`ve got only ten minutes left (of the hour I paid for), and I don`t know how to work this keyboard. It uses standard "qwerty" formatting, but mixes things up by making the space bar impossibly small, the punctuation elusive, and my foreigner`s brain all confused.
It`s lovely here. The company is superb.
posted by Alexandra
I've been up since 4:40 a.m. This is surely a sign of the apocalypse. Or, a sign that I must be out of the house by 6:00 in order to make my plane, and I still have not figured out which books I'm bringing.
4:40 a.m. looks no different from 8:00 p.m. or 2:00 a.m., but it feels entirely more unpleasant.
Last night, I tried to make instant soup, a food product with preparation instructions so simple a donkey could follow them. Somehow, I managed to ruin it. After adding the water, the soup stratified into what seemed to be a layer of parsley/oregano and a layer of hard, crunchy pasta and vegetables. I've never made a decent cup of instant soup in my life--in my inept hands, even cup o' noodles is fuck-up-able. (I am never able to get the dehydrated vegetables to re-hydrate, and there is always a part of the ramen-block which remains dry and crunchy.)
I can't even make instant soup, how am I ever going to marry myself off to a rich husband?
I feel like inflicting this slapdash goodbye post was an injustice to you, the reader. I've committed a crime against my reputation as a good-ish weblogger...and I'm fleeing the country now, so I guess the analogy is appropriate.
I will rendezvous wth him in a matter of (several cramped, plane-ridden) hours. The anticipation threatens my structural integrity as it is, when I see him I may just explode with joy.
posted by Alexandra
Maybe it is the temporal distance more than the physical distance that makes him seem far away. Normally, I can go to sleep knowing that he is at roughly the same location in the day that I am, already asleep or at least heading inexorably towards it. When he is displaced across so many miles of ocean, though, I have to do time zone conversions, and the addition and subtraction and long-division muddle up my English/Biology-major mind, and I get confused and go to the kitchen for something to eat instead.
posted by Alexandra
I woke up at 6:30 this morning, read in bed for two hours, and then proceeded to (successfully) make myself waffles, coffee, and pear-slices using foreign kitchen appliances and, of course, my sharp instinct for survival. My newfound self-sufficiency is extremely heartening--I am confident, now, that if I were stuck on a desert island with only bisquick, milk, eggs, a waffle iron, coffee, coffee filters, a coffeemaker, a pear, a knife, and a source of electricity accessible via an electrical outlet, I could still make myself a decent breakfast. Until the isolation began to drive me mad, that is!
I like my coffee so black that it could be mistaken for a black hole, with a gravity so immense that it ccollects and traps surrounding light.
posted by Alexandra
I've decided that Christmas isn't really so bad, the concept just needs a little work. More costumes, for example. And free candy. In short, it needs to be Halloween.
Two Halloweens! How crazily great would that be?
posted by Alexandra
Maybe I am just feeling cynical because I have been reading about diseases for the past several hours. There is nothing uplifting about scrofula.
posted by Alexandra
I know I am by no means the first person to come up with being dissatisfied with Christmas (the concept was actually invented by the Roman physician Galen in 130 AD), but humor me--your patience would be an ideal Christmas present.
Until I was about twelve, I sincerely believed that each Christmas was the very pinnacle of my existence, the height of human ecstasy--and the only thing that made its disappearance bearable was the knowledge that it would be back in a year, saving me from the tinsel-less, unornamented, gift-less routines of everyday life. I never dabbled with advent calendars or drew thick black "X"s on the calendar as I dispatched each frustrating day preceding The Day, but I didn't need to. The countdown kept itself, and was constantly in mind, a sort of halo of anticipation hovering about my head at all times.
But this year is different. This year, the holiday is advancing towards me with all the gentleness of a freight train, not a halo, and I just wish I could sleep through it, or read through it, or maybe hunker down in a bomb shelter until the danger has passed. I've gotten the strangest sense of vertigo shopping for people, no doubt because I made the mistake of going to the gargantuan shopping center outside of town--the one that is more like a town than a commercial center, sprawled out over acres and acres of land, and probably containing enough apparel to attire the entire nation of Luxembourg. (It is really terribly intimidating in there. Everything is designed to compete for the shopper's attention, so upon entering I always feel like my head is being invaded by barbarian raiders disguised as neon signs and advertisements for sales and jackets and lingerie and golf clubs and toys. And at night, the people stream out of the building like rats leaving a sinking ship.) Last Monday, my mother and I got lost within the bewildering network of roads connecting the Leviathan central shopping mall to the exiled stores on the fringes of the shopping area. It took us half an hour to get out, our irritation and snappiness multiplying like rabbits with every wrong turn. (And that's a lot of irritation/rabbits, believe you me.)
I am no longer able to deify toys and gadgets as I did when I was young. I know that I will not be lastingly, noticeably happier with a ____ than I would be without one, and that takes a great amount of the anticipation and the fun out of gift-receiving. (To a child, making a Christmas list is almost a religious experience--only, instead of dreaming of the afterlife or god's glory, the child dreams of the mystical properties of their desired gift. I suppose I've lost my faith.) As far as I can tell, nobody else I know wants anything in particular either. Since I was never raised with any religion, the holiday has always been a consumer holiday, and consumption has come to feel like a rather negative thing. (Is it just coincidence that "consumption" is also a term for tuberculosis?)
Also, I hate jazzy renditions of Christmas songs where the singers wail (with jazzy inflections) one ridiculous word for a very long time. How can anybody sing "ding-dong" or "reindeer" for a minute straight and still expect to be taken seriouisly?
Bah, humbug. At least Christmas cookies and Christmas lights and fireplaces remain incorruptibly great.
posted by Alexandra
Updates have become less and less frequent on the weblogs I visit, of late. They've gotten sparse on my own, too. I believe this is evidence of a sharp decline in the interestingness of the world, a decline that threatens the existence of culture, art, and literature--though its effect upon weblogs is by far the most serious and worrisome symptom.
Either that or the aliens are fiddling with our brain waves.
In any case, let's all make it our mission to do something interesting, inspiring, or startling for our local neighborhood weblogger this season--key their car, dye their pet gaudy colors, profess your undying romantic love and sincere devotion (in perfectly rhymed iambic pentameter), bake them a wedding cake. Something, anything, to cure us of our collective doldrums.
posted by Alexandra
As you probably do not know, I am leaving for Japan on Monday the 29th. I will fly alone (for the first time in my 17 years of livinghood), borne by the swift metallic wings of a Boeing aircraft, and will meet my paramour amidst the high-wattage blocks of concrete that comprise Tokyo. I have unrealistic plans for the trip--I want to write fifteen pages of travel journal a day, I want to converse naturally and charmingly in fluent Japanese, I want to meet Godzilla and defeat him in hand-to-hand combat with the last ragged remnants of my brown-belt karate skills.
Mark Twain wrote spectacular travel journals, and I would dearly love to be able to stumble around in the general vicinity of his footsteps. (We've got lots of things sort-of in common, Samuel Clemens and I--he has written shelves of plays, novels, essays, and nonfiction, I have a bookshelf-and-a-half full of books written by others. He wrote eloquently about issues of race and religion, I think about race and religion--on occasion. He was a genius, and I am not.) Therefore, I will be taking along a brand new notebook, and will write in it daily whether I have anything to say or not. If any of it is worth salvaging, I will post it during the trip, or when I return.
(I believe I have been domesticated. He leaves tomorrow morning for Thailand, and I feel strangely like a dog waiting for its master to return from school.)
posted by Alexandra
Nine out of ten historians agree: I am the worst decision-maker in the history of history. My philosophy is that the best way to avoid making a bad decision is to make no decision at all, or at least spend enough time considering the options that the issue becomes obsolete and irrelevant. Consequently, I am a very bad Christmas shopper. This morning, I entered a shop to find a ##### (classified information) for my mother. By the time I left, I was a whole two hours closer to death, and I had still not chosen an object to give her.
One of my favorite Christmas activities is going from store to store and laughing at the products they have on sale. Some are just incredulity-inspiring. I've seen all manner of shiny silver boxes too small to put anything in, several dozen kitchen utensils designed to do things a knife does perfectly well, magnifying glasses and knives and nail files attached to things that you would never have thought needed a nail file. I get a strange pleasure out of looking at them and tihnking, "wow, somebody's going to buy that."
My other favorite Christmas activity is looking at christmas lights on trees. They never get old--though, by all rights, they probably should. I'd love to be cynical about the holiday, but I just can't manage it when the decorations are so sparkly.
posted by Alexandra
Language is a great idea poorly executed.
As a species, we no doubt felt very bright and very smart and very proud of ourselves when we first began inventing names for the nouns around us--stones and fire and sticks and large prehistoric mammals. Things were simple: "eat mammoth," "use stick," and so on. But then we got overconfident, and began to think that we could express precisely the mess of thoughts and multitude of emotions that lie jumbled about in our skulls. (This was a ridiculous notion, as consciousness is very big, and words are very small. The larger will not fit inside the smaller, just as a bathtub will not fit inside a teacup, no matter how you struggle and debate with them the issue.) Then came abstract nouns and grammar and an English vocabulary large enough to choke a horse, and still I cannot express myself. Trying to translate feelings into words is like trying to translate a painting into music, while retaining exactly the colors, shapes, forms, textures, and images of the former.
Consequently, I am forever getting tongue-tied and confused when I try to say what I mean to say, or try to salvage an intact and accurate thought from my mind. I fumble around in the dark, sometimes coming up with phrases which say what I mean to say, and sometimes dredging up ridiculously inaccurate impostors. I feel like an armless, legless blind man attempting spear-fishing for the first time.
This being the case, I will experiment with a return to noun-and-verb-only speech for the day.
(I do not know if this entry is sound as far as evolutionary linguistics go, but I do not know if I really care, either. Finals are over, and I'm going to go and read until my brain turns to dust....I mean, "finals done, read book, brain become dust.")
posted by Alexandra
I've been nominated for "Best Essayist" for the Asia Weblog Awards 2003, so if you'd like to vote for technicolor.org (or one of its tremendously worthy competitors), you should do so. It is important to vote--otherwise the world would be overrun by dictatorships and cats.
posted by Alexandra
I've noticed a disturbing trend among our nation's (Boulder-Denver area) concertgoers: upon entering concert venues, they seem to undergo a temporary paralysis which renders them completely unable to move, even when surrounded by extremely danceable music. I do not know if they were born tragically jointless, or if they simply dislike all the music they listen to, but it really impedes my dancing style to have to worry constantly about knocking over the stiff, boardlike people surrounding me.
I do not at all mind the people who stand around nodding their heads: at the very least, they look like they are interested in the music (even if they look like they're interested in it in more of an anthropological, intellectual sense, in an NPR-news-report way). The ones that annoy are the hipsters who just stare dully at the stage, like middle-schoolers dragged to a natural history museum exhibit on Tamil basketweaving.
It's not really so terrible as all that, but I have a week-long license to complain (as it is finals week), and I don't really feel like spending my complaints on the topic of finals, which are not really that bad.
Finally, though I know that acoustic guitars are the official instrument of the Romantic Seranade, there are three musical instruments which are much more likely to win my heart. The first is the electronic, synthesized hand clap (as in the song "funkytown" or the ladytron cover of "open your heart"). If someone were to show up beneath my window with a tape of synthesized hand clapping sounds (they sound so enthusiastic!) and do a little improvised song, I would swoon instantaneously. The second is the tin drum, circa the 1770s, played in the traditional Revolutionary War style. Revolutionary War-style drumming never fails to arouse intense feelings of patriotism in me--and as I have no huge capacity for nationalism or love of country, all the overflow is sure to flow to the man or woman who is drumming. The third is the cello. All three at once, somehow, and I would probably go so lovestruck that I would marry the entire state of New Hampshire.
posted by Alexandra
Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there is a good version of me and a bad version of me. The good one is bright and pleasant, a caricture of a nice person. The bad one is sulky and petulant, sometimes irrationally depressed. If they were ever in the same place at the same time, I could get the good me to throttle the bad me and just be done with the whole cursed duality. But, come to think of it, the good one is probably too nice to murder anything.
And that, in short, is the problem.
posted by Alexandra
I like that I do not have to analyze the joy out of my relationship with him (as I have done to so many novels in English classes past.) I do believe that agreeable relationships need to have naturalness and a certain degree of easy, courageous automation.
It is dangerous to be too self-conscious where these things are concerned. It's like riding a bike: if you pay too much attention to the process of riding a bike, all the complex physics equations stuffed full of variables and parentheses, your balance will falter.
(I know I'm the 50 millionth person to use that analogy, and probably the 300 millionth to use the "50 millionth" phrase. And maybe the 20 millionth to comment upon how cliched it is to describe oneself as the 50 millionth person to do something, and maybe the millionth to say what I just said--and from here on the numbers just get smaller and smaller, because people start getting bored or irritated with themselves, or the have lives and families and contentment and therefore do not have the time to be as irritatingly self-aware as I am being right now. This is all irrelevant, because I do not even know how to ride a bike in the first place.)
posted by Alexandra
I feel like I have a specific, limited amount of mental activity meted out to me each day, or week, or maybe month. It is a system more like wartime rationing in its strictness and simplicity, and less like the system that governs credit cards, which seems to me like a confusing jungle of interest rates, charges, and debt. So, the point is, I cannot beg or borrow or steal productivity-units (though, believe me, I would if I could), I have only what I have. And, of late, I've been using the entirety of my allowance on writing. Most of this writing is invisible to you, the weblog reader, for it comes in the form of academic papers (which are read by 1.6 people, on average) and hideous Quasimodo/half-made short stories (which are read by nobody, including myself). Unless you want to read drivel that does great injustice to Mark Twain's genius or boring things about Shakespeare plays, unless I thumb my nose at assigned papers and spend my time posting on here, unless you can find some way to slip me black-market inspiration and productivity, this weblog is in a bind, and will probably have a hard time getting updated as much as it should.
posted by Alexandra
The real world was never made to correspond with the fast pacing and surfeit of plot that exists in movies. I accept that my story was one of subtle, tedious character development—like a Scandinavian arthouse film—and not one of swordplay or dragon-taming.
posted by Alexandra
I am getting worse at solitaire daily. (oh no!)
posted by Alexandra
It's too bad love is quantitative and not qualitative, like pregnancy. Because if it were qualitative, they could make a simple, safe, and accurate test for it. Simply urinate on it, then wait however many minutes to see what color shows up. (Don't give me any of those you-can't-quantify-love arguments, you know as well as I do that you can love somebody a little, a lot, or somewhere in-between. I am open to the theory that there is a threshold or gradient above which victims of that extra-severe upper-region love all look, think, and behave as foolishly as one another.) Just think of how many divorces this could prevent, or cause.
I have been feeling intermittently out of sorts for the past few days, so I thought maybe I needed a good heartfelt crying session. That is, a nice bawl, weep, whatever, as long as it is done with reckless abandon. It's a bodily function just like any other, it's just that some people need it more often, or longer, than others. So, I sat myself down, put on some appropriate music (East River Pipe, Belle and Sebastian, Hefner all do nicely), and gave it a go. It soon became apparent that all I was doing was making huffing sounds, and forcing it never really works. So, I traveled back, mentally, through the past week and (having found nothing there) through some old, embarassing memories. Then, I got a little frustrated and tried to work myself up into sobs over tragic historical events (like the Trojan War, Hitler's rise to power, the Treaty of Versailles), and still failed--I was never much interested in history. As a last resort, I tried to think of movie endings that had made me cry in the past, or at least choked me up, but then I got to "Lost in Translation," which was wholly detrimental to my cause because the ending wasn't sad to begin with, and then I just started giggling at miscellaneous other parts. It appears I have nothing to cry about, and plenty that does not warrant tears--a very bad thing as far as achieving tonight's goal goes.
Ah, well. Guess I'll just have to resign myself to being okay.
posted by Alexandra
If I did not feel like my mind was analogous in sharpness, speed, and firmness to a bowl of maple syrup, I would write about a good many things.
posted by Alexandra
In case you give a damn: a genetics paper.
posted by Alexandra
It feels like I've been alone with my own thoughts for quite a few days, writing and reading, and not really saying very much. My mind and I have gotten past that initial period of awkwardness, and are now rather companionly and friend-y (comfortable with each other and all that), but I sense that we are about to get very sick of each other. Seeing other people would probably do us both a bit of good.
posted by Alexandra
