in prague right now, having an okay time - kind of been in a
frustrated funk though, feeling a bit exhausted and a bit adrift. i
have hatched a mad plan to redirect myself though - check this out:
tomorrow i get up insanely early and catch a 7:17 train from Prague to
a town called Cesty Kremlov, with some weird diacritical marks that i
can't type here, getting in at 11:36. I'm going there to see an old
castle with battlements and a well-reputed weapons & armour gallery,
and also an Egon Shiele museum; i catch a 15:19 train back to prague,
getting me in at 18:58. This is so that i can take a 20:45 overnight
train to Frankfurt, arriving at 6:02, where i will change to a 6:44
train .... to Paris!!! Yes, back to paris. I'm very excited. I feel
like there were things that i regret not doing there, and while it is
silly on the one hand to revisit a place when i'm only traveling for a
short amount of time, it seems even sillier to leave with regrets when
i can so easily put them to right. so, back to paris! the louvre, my
emperor Napoleon's tomb & the accompanying military museum, the rodin
museum, good coffee, cheap wine, a friend or two, and a good time.
I'm very excited - and on this trip, that should be my only
requirement for going somewhere, i think. from there i think
Amsterdam, then Copenhagen and then Stockholm, and London to finish.
I have been in a funk since wednesday or so, when i realized (i think
shortly after talking to you) that i wasn't using my time well in the
excursion to Germany - i did neat things, but they took too much time
because of otehr peoples' reasons, and that sucks. Prague is fun, but
the appeal of the cheap beer is not as strong when there's no one
really to drink with - it seems like a great place to have gone with
people, but on my own - and not in a hostel - it is a bit tiresome, or
bleak. i had a great morning though: i went to shul in the city's
famous Old-New Synagogue, the focal center of Jewish life in Prague
since the 1200s. it was quite an experience. i'd never been to an
orthodox service, and didn't know what to do with myself for a bit.
everyone is in their own little cycles of prayer and thought -
speaking at different times and speeds, moving and dobbening, walking
around, standing and sitting, greeting each other - it all seems very
erratic and disorganized when you first get there. but there's some
kind of pattern to it. each of them are connected to the others by
some kind of weave that i could not perceive, and didn't know how to
interact with. but it was wonderful to behold. i followed dad's old
advice and found some commentary to read in one of the books, and in
doing so i discovered a space for thought and reflection inside of the
spiritual cacaphony of the service. i also said a koddish (the best i
could) for uncle herbie, and sang the shammah along with everyone when
they brought out the torah. the one thing i remember most clearly
about the whole thing was the way that all of the men's voices rose to
the vaulted stone ceilings at their own paces, but returning down they
fell into a pattern, and it sounded just like laughter. that was very
beautiful indeed.

reading Kipling's "Jungle Books." they are wonderful.

a cop-out post, because this is taken from an email i sent my robin:

so did you know that i'm awesome? you know why?? because when i got to the protestant cemetary to see keats's and severn's graves, on my last day in rome, and saw that it was closed, i did not admit defeat but instead CLIMBED THE WALL (with the help of a parked car's front fender and a big jump) and SNUCK ILLEGALLY INTO THE CEMETARY in order to pay my respects. AND snuck out again, which was way harder (involving one of those spiked gates in an archway - a tall one with a sheer inside face [god bless you, upper body strength] - painful pointiness and scraping, and contusions on my shins from getting my leg stuck between two of the big spikes). but now, i'm officially awesome, because i did it.
off to vienna!!!

In Paris with Ellie and her friend Seth, and having an awesome time. Speaking snippets of phrase-book French (I got stamps today ... in FRENCH!), eating lots of bread and fruit, seeing beautiful buildings, passing gorgeous women whom I mostly wish were Robin instead of whoever they are because I miss her, drinking exotic coctails, having a great time.

And listen to this:

I am getting to stay at Shakespeare & Company, an English-language bookstore that was started by American expatriots, ALL WEEK ... FOR FREE. Apparently, traveling writers and artists and people can stay there for periods of time at no cost, as long as you do two hours of work for the store during the day. The only other criterion you have to fulfill in order to stay there is that George, the owner, like you. I went upstairs about an hour and a half ago and found George in his study-bedroom. George is fully 90 years old, tall with a withered face and hair in big cottony wisps around the sides of his head, like clouds that hang around mountainsides, and his eyes have that wide wide old-people eyes look that I always find bewildering at first. But he is full of life. As soon as he saw me, he smiled and shook his head and said "Ohhh, we're gonna have trouble with you." I laughed, and then he asked how long I was going to stay for. I told him sunday or monday was what I'm looking at, and he said that that was fine, as long as I would be there for the Pancake breakfast on sunday morning.

I love this. This is adventure.

8:05 PM

Here is my biography and picture:

Josh Bisker
For George

I’m in Paris. I don’t know what this city tastes like yet, I am not used to it. I just got here from London a few days ago; they are very different, it feels like. It’s strange – when I got to London in January, New York was the city in my head, my point of reference for appraising other places’ values and colors. Not that I know New York that well. We moved out of the City when I was only 5 or so, up to a horrible suburb called New Rochelle. It’s the kind of place that I guiltily excuse my connection to – “it’s not my fault,” I’ll say, half jokingly, when someone asks where I live. Obsessively materialistic, subtley anti-intellectual, big cars and middle-school cheerleaders dating high school security guards; an icky place. It’s not too far from the City though; only forty minutes on the train, a half hour or so since I’ve been driving (though yes, parking’s a bitch). So I’m in the City for things, still not often, but enough so I can say I know how its currents of money, traffic and art all flow, and know how to swim in them. But I don’t really. I’ve never really lived there, drank there, been on my own there – it’s all been a kind of limbo between being a local and being a tourist. Then London.

I got to London a week after the New Year began, nervous and excited and young. It was a semester abroad from school back home, the second half of my junior year at Oberlin. Oberlin is a small liberal arts school to the south-west of Cleveland, OH; in ways a fantastic place, but it drives you crazy to be there too long at a stretch (you know, like two, three weeks…). Part of it is the violently counter-culture attitude that pervades the campus; protest has become the new institution, and it can drive a man nuts. I’m studying English there, I think in a much more old-school institutional way than most of the other English Majors – can you believe that someone could matriculate from Oberlin with a degree in English and have never read Shakespeare in a class? Sure, just sticking to the old academic rubric would be both dull and reductive, but there are some strengths in the old way. If you’re going to be a writer – or a reader for that matter – you’ve got to read and try to see the forces at work in our literary tradition; Keats knew his Chaucer, Dylan knew his delta blues, Stan Lee knew his Shakespeare. So I took a break from Oberlin to try to fill in my foundations, hoping to flesh out my sympathy for writing, and that brought me to England. But laced through with that lust for a different readerly mindset was a thirst for London; a City, a new city, a city to be my own; to learn and taste on my own without parents or sister or other models of experience or advice; to see through fresh eyes without already being thickly invested in someone else’s feeling of what the city ‘really’ feels like. New York is a place with such a grim and grinding mythos about it, the City that never sleeps or lets you do so either – but London, London was new, and just for me. I could discover all its history and magic and myth and truth on my own. It was wonderful. It became mine.

I was not there for the longest time ever. Five months, almost six? I left three days ago, but already it feels like ages. It is strange to have left after such a short while; for a bit it felt like home, and homes can be hard to come by. Maybe I’ll end up there again? I don’t know if I’ll call it home again. It has been difficult being away from family; the older generation is getting older and its numbers thin, and that is very hard to be away for. I missed my Great Uncle Herbie’s funeral, and am not sure how to begin mourning for him. It’s also bizarre being Jewish in Europe, confusing on how to keep it as part of my identity (good jokes?). So I’m un-uniquely uncertain about the future. I got one more year left of school, and then I guess I have a lot of doors open. Back to England? NY? I have family and a girlfriend down in DC, but a year is a long time for thinking about either. Japan is another door, to continue and intensify my study of Aikido, a Japanese martial art. My goal is to open a door into the American comic book industry, as an editor and eventually a writer. I care a great deal about comic books; they tell great stories, important stories, and as much as any other literature they help make the world a bit more sane and lively for their influence. I understand them, why they work and why they often don’t, and they excite me – it’s what I want to do. Lots of doors. I feel like I’m in a good place though right now; I’m opening more of them, and when I have to choose one it will almost definitely lead me somewhere great. For now I don’t have to worry about it. I’m at the beginning of six weeks travel, arrived in a new city from a new home, bound for glory. Right now, I’m in Paris.

Holy shit, I'm off.

Okay, so it's 1 in the morning and i just went outside to post the postcards i wrote today, and feeling the calming ease of the cool night air I decided to linger a bit on my stoop, soaking in the sounds of this my fleeting city. Sitting on the ledge of my building's doorway, I see a white, unmarked van making very mysterious movements around the neighborhood. The driver is pulling up at random points along the streets and hopping out to do something, but I can't tell what. It looks like he's making deliveries of some kind, but I can't see what he's dropping off, and he doesn't seem to be going to the doors of buildings; and who ever heard deliveries at 1 AM? So I go to get a closer look when he pulls over to the mailbox on the corner, where i had just dropped my cards off. I see him pull over and jump out, leaving the engine running. He races to the side door, slides it open and comes out with a big brush on a stick, and a sheet of paper. Now I get it, and I watch with some delight as he paints the glue onto the mailbox and sticks the poster on, jumps back in the car, pulls out and cuts a turn to race down the next block. I know that there's not much over where he's headed, so I gamble that he's going to lap around and come out a block south. I start to run down, holding on to my flip-flops with my toes and trying to button my shirt. I know that there's a few circuit boxes that always have posters on them, and if I'm right about his destination, then I can beat him there. He pulls in just like I'd thought, and I'm only a few steps behind - but he jinks back out again and keeps going down the block. Right by the circuit boxes are three orange-vested civil servants! Are they waiting for him? Will they bust him? Oh no!

But he just parks on the corner and goes with his brush and papers to the wall by the phonebooths where the drunk people pee on their way to the tube. I catch up with him just as he gets back to the van.

"Hey, can I gank one of your posters," I ask him.

He answers with a big smile, and says "sure mate, which one do you want?"
He slides back the van door to reveal a whole matrix of cardboard boxes, each with a different kind of poster. I ask if he had put up the Morrissey one I had seen around the corner, and he gave me one of my very own. And here it is!


So awesome, right!? I love this city sometimes.

From the book I'm being more and more wrapped up in, "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino:

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
"But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks.
"The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form."
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."
Polo answers: "Without the stones there is no arch."

A book? I'm reading a book? YES! That's right - I have time to read now, because I'M DONE!!!!!!!! DONE DONE DONE! No more schoolin' for four months! Holy hell, it feels wonderful. Wrote some good papers, wrote some crap papers, it's all in and I'm all done. Got Calvino's "Invisible Cities" and Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" to entertain my brain, and Blur's "Parklife" and a Blondie collection to entertain my ears (I thought it was an album when I bought it). Some anonymous stranger has been telling me to get "Parklife" for weeks, and now I've done my mystery friend honor by following his fairy-godmother advice, and I love the album. Any other suggestions, mystery friend? Also listening to the Smiths and the Cure courtesy of my darling Robin and the fine chaps at the Royal Mail, and Dylan '64 and St. Louis Jimmy Oden from Mom&Dad. I'm planning on enjoying them and freedom and London to the fullest in the next week and a half - because that's all I've got. Hooooooooooly crap. I only realized it on Thursday while I was changing for aikido (and I'm going to aikido again - yay free time!!!!!!!), that I only have two weeks left here. It is exciting to think that I'm going to be traveling and everything, but it's sad also; I've been having a really amazing time here, I have a great best friend who I've bonded with to the degree of being almost symbiotic, I have a dojo that I'm making more friends in and learning a lot, and I have THIS CITY that I'm living in and not a tourist in and love and enjoy, and it's crazy man. That said, I'm still enormously excited. Gotta get off my keister and make some solid travel plans this week though, and that will probably be both terrifying and exciting.

I saw "All's Well That Ends Well" on stage this Thursday with John; it was fan-goddamn-tastic. Dame Judi Dench was the Countess, and she was magnificent - everything was! I forget how watchable Shakespeare is. You know? It's so brilliant and complex and emotional and intellectual and layered, and sometimes I forget how it's also captivating and fun to watch. But it was, and was wonderful. This week will hopefully see me continuing my cultural education at many a museum; the Imperial War museum and Wallace collection are high on my list. And can one ever spend enough time in the British Museum? No. One simply cannot.

So all my coursework is due on Tuesday, and I've been frantically busy and mad stressin. Every day since early april has seen me in a library (except for the two i spent hungover and horrible from a night of accepting too many free drinks at the blues bar ... eeeugh), and I've been pretty consistently productive, if not speedy. But now it's crunch time and i've still got a whole heap of work to pump out - but there's good news!
The good news IS that I just got back two of my papers, with an A and a B++ in red ink on the tops of them! This is not only good news because good grades = good news, but more to the point, BECAUSE since I only have to pass my classes here (the grades don't transfer), having those good grades in the bank takes the pressure off what i'm producing for my current work. I just have to produce, I don't have to burst the seams of academia with my insights. Oh thank God, this may be a less horrible weekend than I'd thought.
The two papers, incidentally, were the Dylan and the Chaucer respectively, which I'd proper slaved over, so I'm happy to have done well.

Room, vacuumed.
Colors, washed.
Whites, in the wash.
Sheets/towels/redsocks/blanket in laundry bag.

Plan of action: put whites+colors in the dryer together. Go to sainsburys with John, procure dinner. Return, fold dryed laundry. Initiate paper workage. Prepare, eat dinner. Continue paper workage. Wash final load of laundry. Continue workage. Dry, fold laundry; return sheets to bed. Don magical red socks. Continue to work on paper, imbued with the power of the magical red socks, triumphing over the perils set before me. Insert self into bed; sleep, victorious.

London is beautiful today, sunny and warm and friendly and alive. The pub ono the corner, the Crown & Anchor, has had a crowd outside of it for the last few hours, a nearby office that let out early to enjoy the nice weather. You notice all kinds of things on days like this, and wonder if they're new or if you simply didn't see them before; people playing football, kids riding on fathers' shoulders, girls wearing low necked shirts and high cut skirts, cars with their tops down. What a wonderful city. I'm going to drink some juice, write a few postcards, and then go meet people at the Blues Bar, and I'm going to leave my jacket in my closet (well, on my floor ... but it's the same idea).

What could be funnier than Pirate Jokes, you ask???

Pirate Pickup Lines!!!!!!!! There was a list of fifteen that I clipped from somewhere, but I'm amending it in the name of decency and humor. Well, okay, just humor.

"I must be huntin' treasure, 'cause I'm diggin' yer chest."
"You're just the lusty wench I've been keeping me eye out for!"
"WOW! I bet we could fit SIXteen men on that chest!"
"So you're the new cabin boy, eh?"
"Do you have the latest copy of Windows XP with cracked product activation?" (software pirates only)
"Yo, ho! Bottle of rum?"
"Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre you free on Saturday?"
and the Number 1 Pirate Pick-Up Line...

"Is there an 'X' on the seat of your pants? Because it appears that there's wond'rous booty buried underneath!"

You know what's horrible?
I am developing callouses and bruises on my elbows, painful ones, from doing nothing but writing at my laptop every moment of the day. Lord a mercy would I like to be done with these goddamn papers.

John has been talking recently about this thing called the Watson Fellowship, which both his school and mine are eligible for, and it has gotten into my brain a bit. It's a $22,000 grant to go do something interesting in the world at large. They mean 'something interesting' as in interesting to you, not purely an interesting for the world thing, which all in all sounds amazing, and improbable, and amazing. They seem to take all kinds of projects - I wonder if I could get a grant to go study the differences in Japanese and Manchurian and Russian aikido, or to trace the trail of Osensei's travels, or something like that. I rather think that a project like that would have a pretty good chance. Or perhaps to walk pilgrimage trails in Europe or Asia: La Camina del Santiago, Canterbury, etc. Huh.

Would this screw up all kinds of other things, like a life with Robin or a job with David? I hate having to think about this future stuff. Good thing I have so much work to focus on in the present.

Earlier today, my Winamp mp3 player played this arrangement of songs, while on shuffle mode:

Canned Heat, "It Hurts Me Too"
Savoy Brown, "It Hurts Me Too"
Barenaked Ladies, "Psycho Killer"
Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer"
Paul Butterfield, "It Hurts Me Too"

It's coming: the Rise of the Machines. Maybe all those computer viruses that we think are so terrible are actually just nobly combatting the ascendance of Skynet. Ever think o that?

Don't worry, I don't actually like the Barenaked Ladies; it's just an interesting cover. And yes, "It Hurts Me Too" (or "When Things Go Wrong") is a good enough song to have the 9 versions of it that I do. Looking for more too. Each band has a very different approach to the song - my favorite might be Canned Heat live, with Eric Burdon on the vocals, but it really depends on my mood. Plus, it's like 9 minutes long. Right now I can't get the Jack Johnson song "Bubble Toes" out of my head. It's really infectious and great, although I have no idea what "her eyes are as big as her bubbley toes" means" Honestly, what?

Ooo! I hear the ice-cream truck!!!!

God I love thunder. We just got to Senate House and are set up in our usual study room on the fourth floor, a double-story room with a balcony of books and huge windows on all sides to let in light from every direction. It’s a nice place to focus and a really interesting room (heraldic devices at intervals on the balcony railing, a huge coat of arms at the head of the chamber), and this is where we tend to work best. Just now, there was a burst of lightening so bright it looked as if we’d all been electrified, a crash of thunder so loud and long that it rattled the books from their shelves, and a gust of wind so fierce that the windows rattled in their panes. Then, silence. No rain, no hail, no wind or booming thunder; no flashing from the clouds, and the sky is gone white as a ghost. I think it was my long-time friends the Storm Gods giving me encouragement for the day’s battle. It will be a day for triumph. Oh, my brothers.

3:10

John just discovered the Autocorrect addition I put onto his word-processor program. He is writing a paper on the Roman playwright Plautus, but while he was in the bathroom last night I changed his settings so that whenever he typed that name, the computer would change it to “I am a bad person.” I had completely forgotten about it till just now, when John reared up from his work with a “you ass!” He has vowed to change my settings so that Chaucer will become “smelly assface,” and now I’m scared to leave him alone with my machine. What price mischief?

Sir Winston says: "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
Why wasn't he ever made a lord? Laurence Olivier was made a lord before he died. Did you know that Lord Olivier shaved his legs? It was a habit picked up from his early days in the theatre, when the practically peniless troops couldn't afford the tights for their productions of Shakespeare, and the players had to shave their legs and paint them in bright colors. Apparently Sir Larry never wanted to kick the habit. Also, he would never talk to anyone unless they called him "Larry." I wonder what people called Churchill? Sir, I guess.

So I’m at the British Museum again to try to keep getting work done. You’ll love this: tonight, apparently, is Viking night! There’s a program called “Young Friends of the Museum” or something, which consists of a bunch of kids from like 4-12, who come in once a month or so and sleep over in the museum, and each time has a different theme where the kids get to do all kinds of things involving the collections and projects and things like that. Tonight is Viking night; they are in the other side of the Great Court building longships, and I’m told that they had a battle earlier, with swords and shields and helmets that they made. Later they will sleep in their Viking-tents. I wish I were 12 again.

...

New info: they will sleep in sleeping bags in tents set up in the Egyptian and Greek galleries, and they witnessed a battle by reinactors with real weapons and armour, and then got to explore the Viking camp that was set up on the museum lawn, where they could try on armour, hear stories, eat food, and all kinds of things. God Dammit, I wish I were 12. That sounds like the coolest thing ever. Oh, and those longships they were building? We're not talking pipe cleaners, we're talking huge wire frames and cardboard slats and big dragon prows and things. God. Dammit. What lucky lucky kids!

Finally making headway on my Dylan paper, thanks largely to advise that Dad gave me last night on the phone. The urge to procrastinate is overwhelming, like a black beast riding my back. Or a monkey. There’s a monkey riding on my back … what does that expression mean? Obviously, it’s a bad sort of monkey. Not like a macaque. Did you know that macaques make snowballs to play with, but the DON’T throw them? It’s truly heart warming. And they’re really cute too. My completely insane freshman-year roommate had a big poster of a baby macaque that he put up on our door. It was one of his better features, having that poster. Holy hell am I ADD like a madman today. I feel like my mind works just like that visual thesaurus program. I think of one thing, and there’s a million balloons that immediately spring off of it, all relevant and interesting and exciting ideas that draw me away from what I was originally thinking about. In a way it’s wonderful; I think of all kinds of neat ideas all the time, and a lot are artistic or useful or innovative. But when I’m trying to get something done, jeeeezus can it be a difficult thing to deal with. Like this post – I was talking about writing, and then made a joke, and then a question about that monkey expression, and then five sentences about monkeys and my freshman-year roommate (who was seriously crazy, like arms-tied-around-the-back crazy. A nice kid though, I hope he gets better. He might, who knows? It wasn’t his fault really - diplomat parents. That’ll do it to anyone.) SPEAKING of ADD. God, I gotta get me some testing done when I get home.

Did you know that Little Eva, who does the song Locomotion, was just the record company exec’s babysitter, and that she made up the song and the dance while she was playing with his kids? He saw it and then, BAM, stardom. It’s one of those inspiring stories.

Back to work.

Things that are great include my sister's subway diary. You should all read it.

Diary, incidentally, is a word I will always check over once I write or type it, as it almost always looks like "dairy" but only occaisionally is.

A poll for my readers and friends: which sounds better to take at Oberlin next semester, Japanese language 1, or Introduction to Silkscreen? I can't tell which will be stupider to miss out on doing. I think that if I can get into the silkscreen course, I should take it. It will make for a more rigerous semester because of the other things I'll have to take around it, but I think it's worth it - I mean, how cool? Anyways, comment and advize me por favor.

"Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room." -Sir Winston
I like monkeys. Particularly Japanese macaques (they and titi monkeys were me and my ex-girlfriend's favorite animals), but most of them do just fine in my book. I think I need to get a dog. Not right now, but once I'm living somewhere on my own.

Otay, bed.

OY, didn't get almost anything good done today. Time is getting tighter, and I'm not getting more productive. I am really stressed about this Bob Dylan paper, partly because I'm utterly intimidated by the material, partly because I'm not sure how to structure my approach to it; ayyyyyy, this will be very difficult I fear, and I think that my product may not be very good. Oh well, plenty of fish in the sea, and plenty of them that I'm supposed to catch before the month is up; I will have to just grin and bear it if this one's undersized.

The most fun thing ever in the world today was after dinner (which was a tremendous and sumptous feast of pasta and meat, with new ingenious ideas from me. simmered some cut up zucchini in olive oil, garlic, and ground pepper, and took them out to put to the side; kneaded paprika, parsley, salt, pepper, and lots of cut up chili peppers into a lot of ground beef; onions and more pepper into the olive oil to change color, adding more chilis at intervals (so the strong flavor gets into each stage of the cooking, and gets refreshed instead of steaming off); added meat, stirred in onions and chilis; added more spices, some Thyme (but not too much - I mean, who has any Thyme to spare these days?), oregano, pinch of basil, more parsley; brown meat with onions and chilis, add zucchini again, pour on base sauce from a jar (I know, lame, but it's cost effective for us); and voila! Pasta Sauce! It was splendid and filling, and all the right kinds of gentle spicy, and we ate like kings.). So after our kingly feast, during cleanup, i had packed all the leftover sauce and pasta into our tupperware, and still had handfulls of pasta leftover that wouldn't fit. So I started throwing them at John. We didn't get into a pasta war, instead, he stood there washing dishes with his head turned to the side and facing me, as I threw piece after piece of curly fuculli at his open mouth, and missed every single time. We must have been at it for a half an hour, first chuckling, then giggling, and finally laughing so hard I damn near had an athsma attack. It must have been sixty pieces of pasta, all missed. I hit him in the eye enough times that he thought I was aiming for it. Pasta got stuck to his neck and the back, the BACK mind you, of his shirt. Pasta on the forehead, in the dishes he was washing, in his collar, in his nose, on the wall behind him, and all all over the floor. And the whole time, John, implacable and unperterbed, letting me have try after failed laughing try, with his mouth gaping wide open. Highsterical.

Advising our pigheaded political leaders, those men dragging us heavily towards doom as surely as a weighted chain will haul a drowning man to the Locker, Sir Winston says: "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."

After a decently productive day in the library, we decided to blow off the evening's work and go see Master & Commander at the Prince Charles. Holy hell, what an amazing movie. I hope they make ten sequels.

Of course, Churchill would remind us that all that fine naval tradition is nothing more than "rum, sodomy, and the lash." Well, it was an R rated movie with plenty of rum and the lash - maybe the NC-17 sequel will fulfill the Bulldog's idea more fully.

I'm finally FINALLY done with our good Mr. Chaucer, but am not completely satisfied with my final product. I think that I may try to turn what I did here into the basis of an Honors project at Oberlin, but I'll have to talk to a few profs about it, see if i can get both approval and support. Nice to be finally god damn done though. So now onto my paper on Dylan, which I had thought was going to be the more intense of these two projects, but I gave more time to Chaucer than I was intending to and now my work on Dylan is going to have to suffer for it to keep me on schedule. Sacrifices, sacrifices. Hopefully by Sunday I will have Dylan and Sci-Fi out of the way, and i'l only be a day behind. Senate House opens up again tomorrow, and John and I expect to get there at 10:30 in the morning and work till 9:00 at night, with a lunchbreak. Hopefully I'll be able to step up my productivity once I'm there; it will be a better working environment, and the hours will be long. I've been finding it almost impossible to get anything done once I get home. I can have the best of intentions but there's always some other way I end up using my time; it's become so psychologically defeating that I've given it up altogether and just decided to work when it's worktime and relax when it's not. The long library hours give us a good amount of worktime though, so I think I'll be in good shape.

Getting that work done is HARD though. Even when I can stay good and focused, it's really god damn hard to produce good and thorough writing. I can't imagine how in god's name we do it back at Oberlin. Here I will apply myself for a full day's worth of worktime, and get out enough material that I can look at it the next day and see where it doesn't make sense, and correct or edit it. But this takes TIME! And I'm only working on ONE paper! At Oberlin I'll have seven hours of classes and meals and extracurriculars in a day, and I'm still supposed to be reading five hundred pages a week and writing a paper for every hundred of them. Our work, I am beginning to think, must really rather suck. Why do they want us to turn in work that sucks? It's beyond me.

Johnny Toz sent me a brilliant NYTimes article by Michael Chabon, who, if you have not heard of him, I will introduce to you as the most sensetive and gifted American writer since John Steinbeck (Steinbeck who if you don't like him, it's because you were forced to read Of Mice and Men when you were in High School and never read East of Eden, which you should not let wild horses stop you from reading, immediately). It's a wonderful article, please do yourself the favor of reading it.

Apparently it's not 4000 miles to Oberlin, but 3776 (or 3281 nautical miles), according to this "How Far Is It?" site. The confusing thing is that it gives both headings as "north" - is the direction that it's following over the North Pole?

Churchill says: "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."

Holy figs, I'm sitting here typing just now (by which I mean, procrastinating on the internet), and when a car revs it's engine outside I am totally baffled and alarmed by the noise: "what's that noise? where AM I?"

I thought I was in Oberlin. It took me a minute to get my bearings, and then I realized, no I'm 4000 miles away from Oberlin. And I haven't lived in that room for a year.

I had totally mentally relocated myself without even noticing. Blimey.

Oh, how weird. I'm really god damn far away from Oberlin. boo.

I think I really miss it.

Churchill: "We shall not fail or falter, we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job"

Churchill: "It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time."

And, lest I forget, our Churchillism for the day:
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."

These are posts I wrote during the day while working on my Chaucer paper. Still.

1:54 PM

We got out a bit late, but not too badly today. Senate House is closed for the Easter Holiday so we’ve been forced to relocate our studies. That’s the name of the UCL library which we normally study at, and incidentally, the building which George Orwell modeled his structures on for 1984, while he wrote the book inside of it. We study in the home of Big Brother, and yes, there are CCTVs everywhere. I feel like they should call them Orwelloviews or something ironic, but they don’t – and they say we don’t understand irony. P’shaw.

So anyway, we’ve had to relocate our studies – and right now I am in the King’s Reading Room of the British Museum, and I feel like a God. The room is a gigantic dome with inside curves of blue and white and gold, huge vaulted windows and a glass disk at the pinnacle. It’s 200 feet high if it’s an inch, and filled with light and space and history. Apparently most of Karl Marx’s important work was written in here, as well as many others’. Place is completely amazing. The desks are padded with blue leather, and equipped with pull-out shelves and book rests, and they’re large enough to actually let you do work. And all around us are books! Thousands upon thousands of books in three tiers, encircling us with the knowledge of an age. The structure was built and donated by George IV (I think it was the IV), and suits a King’s pleasures. And now, surrounded by inspiration and wisdom, I go to write.

9:33 PM

I’m back in the British Museum after going out for dinner and a movie with John and Aikido Mike. This time I’m in the Great Court, which stays open till 11 even though everything else has closed down. The Great Court is, visually, what Rome would have looked like if they had added some steel, glass, and electricity to their architecture. It is an enormous expanse of marble with great pillared doors on each of the four walls, and the Reading Room is in the center, a massive irregular hub made of more marble. An opaque glass ceiling covers everything, a thousand triangular sections of aqua and steel. In each far flung corner sits some large piece of ancient statuary, a Colossal Marble Lion from the Assyrian Empire, a jet black obelisk with Egyptian hieroglyphics down each side, a figure of Tiberius on horseback. It’s amazing in here. You’re at once relaxed by the clean polished stone, cool air and calm lighting, and still totally awed by the scale and weight of the space around you.

It overjoyed me to spot a mouse scurry out of a walkway vent and sneak around under one of the open tables before disappearing with a newly won scrap of bread. If I’m blown away by the size of this place, something as small as that mouse must be positively flummoxed. How does he cope with it? Maybe he just hasn’t seen the Colossal Lion yet.

10:12 PM

Ooh, another one! God, it’s smaller than a tooth from one of the granite Egyptian Pharaoh heads. I couldn’t manage living like that. Still, it’s very clean here, and there are no cats. In fact, I’m sure the Museum staff have no idea that they have mice in here. Well I’m not gonna tell them.

Dear Lord was today useless and unproductive. John and I got up MUCH later than we wanted to (not at 9 like we'd planned ... but at 2), and got almost nothing done. It's funny, he and I have developed an essentially siamese-twin existence; I don't think either of us has done anything without the other in days. It's nice now, but might become worrisome. We're becoming symbiotic - but who's the bull rhinoceros and who's the cranes that eat off his back? Who's Spider-Man and who's the evil black costume that enhances his powers; who's the alligator and who's the swamp bird that cleans his teeth!?!?

The agonizing questions of existence.

We've been doing really well though, it's neat having such a good feeling best friend that I am actually spending time with, as opposed to having a best friend who I am millions of miles away from. I don't understand why some folks think that 'best friend' means you can only have 1; that's just dumb. I have a small collection, but I'm usually far removed from them. Some from New Ro, some from Oberlin, some from Becket, some from the dojo, 1 from Philly - but I don't get to spend much time with any of them. Here and now, I got someone who is rocktastic and whom I feel real close with, and we get to see each other all the damn time and do everything together. Pretty damn cool.

I was supposed to be done with my Chaucer paper yesterday, and now it won't happen until tomorrow, and then I start in on the Dylan paper (then Sci-Fi, then Romanticism, Shakespeare, and Chaucer again - wheeeeeeeeeee). It's funny, I'm putting a whole lot into this Chaucer paper. But I think it's really good, too, and I'm realizing that writing convincingly on this particular subject is actually very important to me. I'm seeing now that the topic has been mulling in my mind for the two years since my last Chaucer course - in fact, not being able to solidly form or express my ideas about the Pardoner's Tale back then was one of the major reasons why I became an English major in the first place. It is an aMAZingly complex and personal and post-modern piece of writing, and seeing the perplexing beauty and gravity and sadness of it made me want to read and think about eveything I could, while not being able to peg down the things that were so amazing about it made me want to learn how to write and think critically. So yeah, I guess it's become a pretty important paper for me. But I really need to finish it, and to care less about making it perfect. I can keep revising it next year with Jen's help (she's one of my wonderful Oberlin profs, the one who taught that Chaucer class), but for now I just need to get down what I have to say and get it done. Done is good. Perfected is better, but good will do the trick for me now.

To bed. I have concocted a plan whereby John and I alternate mornings waking the other up with a cup of tea and a knock on the door; we'll sit together and coalesce over our tea, and thereby avoid going back to sleep. We try it out tomorrow, and I lost the coin toss so it's my responsibility to get it done. And that requires sleeping, now.

Before I go, a new addition to my blog: a regular quotation by Winston Churchill. Today's is about language:

"From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put."

Brilliance. Leave me comments.

PS: Do you find it odd that blogger's spellchecker does not recognize the word "blog?" I do. I sense foul play.

I'm cheating, I posted this on HaikuQueen as well, but it's late and I need my brain sleep.

Haiku Triptych - "Sainsbury's Puzzlebox"

Item: Whole Chicken.
Sale Price: 99p.
Hot damn, I'll take two.

Its rare price too good
to pass up, I am left stuck.
How will I cook it?

A difficult block,
But the gods must be with me:
Spices on sale too!

My friend Laura from Oberlin asked me to write a piece for a fledgling campus mag which she staffs for, called Sheer Mag. I have some issues with the publication itself (sorry L!), but hey, a writing opportunity is a writing opportunity. The theme of this issue is "Mischief," and I think she wanted me to write something racy, but I just wasn't inspired in that direction. All the same, I was still inspired to create and I've posted my product below. It is entitled: "Clawing Your Way to the Top of the Food Chain," but if anyone has any better titles in mind after reading it, then comment to your heart's content. It was the best (I'm not saying good) pun I could think of. Here we go -


I’m sure that there are plenty of good ways to get kicked out of the Giant Eagle in North Olmsted. To be precise, in my three years at Oberlin I have discovered no less than thirty-seven separate activities which will elicit an immediate expulsion from that fine establishment. Now, many a sordid foot has walked many a noble path toward the goal of supermarket turmoil, and these heels of mine have worn their own deep groove in the linoleum corridors of suburban disruption. And yet in all my heists and experiences one prize sits out of reach. From the beige metal shelves of an A&P in Blairstown, NJ, to the endless rows of canned soup, a Warhol streak of wrapped bouillion and aluminum, in a Stop&Shop in Duluth, MN, one goal has ever remained beyond my fingertips. It represents the Holy Grail of supermarket discord; we rioters, merely its hopeful knights errant, ever striving and failing to find a means to attain it.

There it sits, calling to you from the back of the store. Always watched, always monitored by the mustached men behind the fish counter, their white coats spattered with pink from the day’s filleting. Your eyes find it easily, a murky brick of a dark and uneasy color, foreboding and incongruous amongst the shining sterile surfaces surrounding it. Blue-black and massive, with a slash of rocky orange at its heart. There, in the bottom of the tank, can you see them moving? They’re still alive you know. They’ve probably been in there for months – maybe years. Press your nose up to the glass, get a good long look. For there they sit, those jewels in the fluorescent crown of supermarkana, those armored warriors of the long-ago ocean bed: lobsters.

You see, lobsters have never made it as a successful part of anyone’s supermarket schemes. For one thing, a successful crustaceous operation is one which requires obvious planning, and most good shenanigans spring from spontaneity. For another, it just seems like a great deal of work, and frankly this can be some easy business. There is plenty of mayhem for a gifted fiend to create without resorting to drastic measures. I once got kicked out of a Bread&Circus in Northampton, MA for having nothing more than a simple Renaissance-style duel with a friend and a small selection of display lipsticks (which I won, five long stripes to his three). There’s shopping cart races for the unimaginative, shopping cart and french-bread jousting for the more bold, and blindfolded shopping cart Tank Commander with kiwi fruit for the truly daring. A small-size George Foreman grill, the Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine (mine is named The Duke), can plug in and provide a handy means of sampling wares from the meat aisle, but do remember to bring your own spices. Many a vegetable-aisle vandal will experiment with eating different food in different quantities – I find that an assortment of olives, grapes, string beans and carrots will be both yummy and unmistakably incriminating, both of which are good qualities in that sort of endeavor. Apples or pears, while obvious, are bland and a waste of valuable time. Pizzazz is important, remember! And of course, there are condiment wars.
But lobsters – oh the possibilities!

There are, of course, several terrible things one could do to them. Two words: Immersion. Boiler. Cruel in a way, but also potentially amazing – think of all those lobsters cooking at once in that tank, and the bewilderment of the fishmongers behind the counter! And hey, maybe they’d start giving out the cooked lobster for free since they couldn’t sell them anymore. For the psychologically optimistic, and malicious, there’s the idea of continuously melting butter in a pan in front of the tank, right where all the lobsters can see it. Then of course there’s the lobsters’ natural environment to keep in mind – what happens when we introduce one of their natural predators to the tank? Like this eel!!!

Of course, that wouldn’t be a fair fight – the lobsters all have their claws bound with rubber bands. If there were only a way to get those bands off, what an arena of fun we could dive (figuratively) into. Imagine pouring a bucket of live crabs in with the lobsters. Boy what a fight! Or giving them some fish to attack. Big ones, or scary ones like blowfish. Oh, the possibilities. Bread&Circuses indeed.

Yet there’s another angle to consider – revenge. Here you are in the supermarket, a decadent palace of frozen dinners and second-rate children’s toys, and marked for death in the tank before you are the once-proud warriors of a noble species. Woe, the loss of pride and glory! Woe, the humiliation! Yet you can help these lobsters reclaim their honor! These rubber manacled kings of the underwater deep, brought low from their former grandeur – you can right the ancient wrongs! We, friends, can deliver the lobsters unto their long-awaited revenge!

A lobster sits on the checkout counter, humiliated and doomed, and watches his executioner reach into her purse for her credit card. Yet what’s this? She screams and stumbles back, tearing her hand out of the bag and shrieking in pain. A lobster was in the bag, and now digs into her fleshy paw with all the strength of his great ocean-toughened claws. Children wail from their inescapable safety-seats in carts, where they find lobsters suddenly dropped in beside them. Unable to get out, their castles have become their crypts! Men from the butchers’ counter tear their faces in terror as the armored monsters skitter towards them across countertops and cutting boards, pinching like demons. A boy in the cereal aisle takes a box down from the shelf; but it explodes in his hands as a massive, pinching lobster leaps out from his hiding place to gorge his warrior’s fury.

The supermarkets will be in upheaval. Chaos: women screaming, clerks fainting, lettuce heads rolling across the aisles like tumbleweed. And across all of it, the lobsters. Glorious in their vengeful savagery, still they are caught in an inexorable chain of defeat. See them struggle on the slippery linoleum now that their passion has abated; some lie still, pulped by fallen canned-goods or crushed under stiff heels of heavy shoes. Yet their brief moment of glory is your moment of triumph. Supermarket bedlam, with lobsters. It’ll be beautiful.

Man, if I were starting a list of things that are itchy, I'd put wool sweaters just right at the top.

That last post was, in brief, the result of a discussion on Quantum Physics that was forced upon me under the delightful conditions of not enough sleep and soaring overcaffeination, and a healthy (by which I of course mean decidedly unhealthy) amount of stress. But of course if we look at caffeine as preserving ideas of locality, in opposition with the Copenhagen interpretation, then our assumptions about the nature of sleep as a positive quantity can only be accounted for by the creation of a hidden variable theory. All we have to do is fire particles through a tube AT MY BRAIN AND END THE PAIN OF QUANTUM THEORY!!!!! Or, uhm, something like that.

My room is cold. I think they shut off the heaters late at night when they think we'll be asleep. Bastards.

Righto, anyway, back to work.

Have you ever had a dream where you can't understand how to speak anymore? Your brain works fine and you're having a nice normal chat with someone, and then when you open your mouth the sounds that come out are in some other language, some dead and ancient tongue that no one can understands? Even you can't understand what your words mean, and you don't know where you learned those sounds from. You are hearing yourself speak but your ears can't translate what your mouth has said aloud. And the people around you go white and wide-eyed with shock; you feel frightened by your unreadable babbling but they are aghast at it, your gibberish sounding to them like archane, screaming obscenities. And you flee before they can stone you for your words, your horrible sharp words that are rake like shards of broken glass upon their minds; you flee.

Laundry money, return to me!! Blast! Where have you gone? I had you here, I know it. Damn. Khaaaaaan!

Dear Friends,
I find myself come upon honestly-not-too-desperate times, and must inform you of something that has not had any real tragic significance in my life, but still, from a certain (albeit quite skewed) point of view, represents a loss. I come to tell you the story of my first houseplant, now deceased, one Greenstem P. Alvarez. Alvarez’s life in this house was neither a particularly smooth nor joyful existence, I will admit. From the very first there were signs that he would not long remain a healthy resident, for instance the fact that he was not a flowering or hanging plant, or really even any kind of houseplant at all, but was in fact, parsley. This tragic and immutable aspect of his character bespoke a sad and early doom for poor Alvarez. He was also marked “parsley to eat” and not “parsley to grow” which, a friend informed me, meant that I was supposed to use and replace him speedily before he had a chance to die on me. That heartless monster.

Things had started off very well for me and Alvarez – I had found him on sale at Sainsbury’s for a scant 45p, marked down because he was to ‘expire’ the next morning. At the time I thought that was ludicrous: do plants expire, I asked myself? Well now I know.

After joyfully bringing him home and furnishing him with his own luxurious and honorable place on the far corner of my desk, things were looking great for us. But then disaster struck: hunger. It struck, and struck again. I believe in retrospect that my periodic grazing upon Alvarez had only bad effects upon our relationship. Each time I nibbled of his lush, herby leaves or tore into the watery lower stalks, I could feel him growing a bit colder inside, retreating from the life we had built up together; but I could not stop myself. Things were getting critical between us, and I knew that pretty soon our relationship would probably draw to an end. Still, optimistic, as I prepared for a holiday away in Bath last weekend I hoped that the time apart might do us some good. Tragically I had forgotten to provide any water for Alvarez during my absence (or in fact at any single point during his stay here), and when I returned he was no longer alive.

I think that it was a combination of factors; mainly his being cooking parsley, my eating him, and my never watering him, ever. Alvarez, you will be missed, and hopefully your replacement, sorry, “successor” will be something less immediately edible. Here are some pictures:


Also, Bath was really great and I took snazzy pictures and had good adventures and ate homecooked meals, and will tell all about it soon.

Some people seem invested with the idea that Time is a very smoothly flowing thing. The way you hear some folks talk, you’d think Time just scooped you up in its hands and carried you along from one day to the next, step by easy step. I’m starting to think that this is just nonsense. There’s not supposed to be any consistency in how you move through your days, that would be a boring trip indeed; really, time rides about as smoothly as a bike with a bent-up front tire. I don't say this to worry you though, quite the opposite: this has not been the screaming and perilous part of the trip where the pavement rushes forward and you and see your entire dental history flash before your eyes, but the quick downhill exciting part where everything whirrs by and you think you're flying. I’ve been in London for a while now and I swear that the last week has been more full and vital than maybe any of the time leading up to it.

“We’re at Now now.”

I will tell you about where it all started a week or so ago, at a Blues Bar, a great, totally fucking great little place with a cheesy catchy name down around Oxford Circus. It’s trapped in the midst of all these horrific boutiquey places, window after window and store after store of bald mannequins with tight cheeks staring at you expensively in short skirts and lingerie, and by the time you find the door to the place you feel like your whole body’s covered with dirt. You can feel it all over your skin, it’s greasy and polished and impossible to rub off; it’s in your hair and in your jacket like cigarette smoke that stays sank into you after a party. By the time you get to that door you’ve almost had it, I’d almost had it, the city was just too much there for too long without a break, and even if it’s cold and not New York you can still feel the air lick you when walk the streets. Don’t get me wrong, I love it here, but you can get to needing a break. I needed one, and I found that door.

You walk in and it all comes off a you, it’s like they’ve got some magic machine by the door that just wipes you clean from top to bottom and blows something cool on your face. God what a great feeling! It was like plunging into cold water. The door closes and smoke and beer and sawdust swim up to hit your nose, and the light on your skin is clean and just bright enough to let you see who you are again, and then you look down and you say “that’s me!” and you keep on walking in. There’s music too, it’s perched up in a black box on the ceiling and when it notices you it spreads its wings and takes off. It ducks around a cloud of smoke swerves past the big men’s shoulders’ and skinny ladies’ necks and finds you clean but nervous in the thicket of bodies and clinking glasses, and it hovers there in front of your face and you stare up into its strange glass eyes and it’s just the most beautiful thing you thought you’d ever see, and here it flew all that way just to say hello to you. Then all real suddenly it comes in close and gives you a little kiss on the inside of your ear and you shiver all happy like the first time you ever got touched by a girl in the dark; now have a drink, or have two, it’s happy hour and they might have named it just for you!

And there are your friends, happy and clean like you are, and glad to see you. Really glad, what a thing! You drink and you joke with them, you meet new friends, friends of friends, friends of strangers, there’s a girl from Minnesota with her shoulders showing and a guy from Brussels with a cowboy hat and a leather zipper jacket, there’s nowhere to sit and nowhere to stand and everywhere to be and you’re smiling from your belly the way old men tell you to do for your health. And then the band finally makes it from the bar to the stage, an hour later than advertised but you couldn’t think to care or complain because the second they’re up they start making love to you and everyone else all at once. Magic. They’re good, man; even without the harmonica who won’t make it up from his bottle for another good hour, they are really good. The drummer’s sat up on a milk crate with his back leaning on the wall, his whole body looks relaxed but boy, you just try to follow his hands moving. A Hammond organ blesses us with the sweet sounds of a human soul made electric melody, and above a lanky dark electric bass, guitar licks fill it all in. There’s a big man singing whose voice sounds like it’s a hundred years older than you’ll ever be in your life. The music ripples through you, it touches everything in the room and bounces off again and it touched you too but it stays there. It bounces off the postered ceiling and off the stained sheet-music on the walls and off the racks of colored glass bottles behind the bar, but when it touches you it stays and just hits you again and again and again as it comes back off everything else, it hits you harder and softer and you feel like you’re standing under a waterfall and you can see those glass eyes hovering in front of your face and you can feel the bird kiss you on the insides of your ears.

Hello true believers -

Tonight has elapsed and I have not made good my goal of finishing my story by Tuesday. Alas, apologies. I will give a small post anyway to make up for it, and regale you with tales untold tomorrow.

Today was good; my recent Hamlet paper got encouraging approval from my appallingly intelligent tutor person (he's absolutely brilliant in a very slow-paced and exquisite way that makes you want to scream), and that felt quite good; aikido was good and Dirk bought the drinks afterwards, and I chatted up two british girls in my Romantics seminar (appropriately?). I only know one of their names, Polly (short for another name that's absolutely nothing like "Polly"), and of course it's the other who is more friendly and easy to talk to. Both are really nice though, and Polly is a knock-out. I have two tickets for an art thing on Thursday, the opening of a Lichtenstein exhibit, and am still searching for a date so I may ask her. I really don't know her very well though and don't give myself great odds on it; hopefully I'll get a good word tomorrow from Juliet or Elana and can avoid the whole thing. Silly, I know, but honest.

So tomorrow I invest in seeing the sights. Mr. Browne sent an email scolding me for not my idleness in investigating the varied spots of ancient blood that colour this city like the spilt wine, and he is dead right in his tisking. He is really great at telling me the right things when I need to hear them; he sent me a really kind and wonderful note after he read about Uncle Herb, with a passage from the Fellowship. He’s very peculiarly perfect in his expressions of intimacy and guidance for me, he always seems to know exactly what I need from him without my knowing it first. This is a good example too, and so Westminster, here I come! Depending on when the day gets itself started I will storm either Westminster Abbey or the British Museum. There will be photos. I think I may simply cry on stepping foot in Westminster; I mean, God, think of it all. We will see.

Also on the agenda para mañana: getting a cheap haircut, training at lunchtime, seeing a Becket friend Dan Wright yay!!!!, and MAYBE more experimentatin, if I get a lucky email. If it happens and I survive yet again, I will simply have to catch up in my storytelling. Expect to hear blood-chilling stories of a man's struggle against science, soon.

***

Winamp plays me Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" and follows it with "Wild Wild West," which samples the main line from, you guessed it, "I Wish." I think it's taunting me; I can see it rising to horrible consciousness but am powerless to act. I'm just days away from it saying "I can't do that Josh" when I want it to shut down. Oh dear. Getians, by the way, are a type of flower (thanks Cheyenne!!). The OED has not heard of them, yet Blogger spellcheck has; and somehow "sentience" runs the other way around. The writing on the wall is in back-lit courier.

My web-radio has selected a Bobby Darin cover of "What'd I Say" for my listening pleasure. Ray Charles, you ask? No no, Bobby Darin. What was he thinking, you ask? I have no idea. Interestingly, the computer followed it up with Ray himself doing "Georgia (joja) on my Mind," further evidencing my claim that the machine is slowly gaining fearful sentience. If I ever discover that it's renamed its network location "Skynet" I'm taking the hammer to it, so help me.

So I recently found myself introduced to something called Science. As far as I can make out, it's just a new bastard version of religion, with all the old rites and sacrifices and priests with long robes and unintelligible mumbo-jumbo. Our acquaintance started off in about the worst way that something can start out, but as we all know: tragedy plus time equals comedy! I will tell all.

John and I are eating dinner, our usual fabulous stir-fry concoction that I decided this time to base in lime juice (very fun since we didn't have a juicer so I got to just pulverize a lime in my fist over the pan. and very tasty; lime and soy make an unexpectedly delightful flavor combo, try it out). We somehow always manage to make an unreasonably large amount of food for just the two of us, and this night was no exception. As we are lingering in the kitchen, slowly harrying the last packs of veggies and rice off our plates, Bhav comes in. Bhav is a girl who lives at the end of the hall and emerges more rarely than the still-nameless Korean girl two doors down (whom I run into every two weeks and have to hide from - we use her pots and knives, and feel guilty). She's friendly enough - Bhav I mean, obviously not the "I'll never bother to say hello" girl - and we all start talking. She tells us that she's a Physiology student and that she's spent all week in the lab, and I make a joke about messing with lab rats. She says "no, I only experiment on human subjects" and John and I laugh. I say that if she's looking for any new bodies, maybe we could dig her up some lucky stiff, har har, and she says "really?"

No, not really. What do you mean, really? Of course not really. Explain yourself. She's running an experiment this week she says, and they're paying volunteers, 10 pounds for fifty minutes worth of experimenting. Now that's not bad for an hour's work, and we say "what do you, just spend an hour hurting some guy and give him ten quid?" And her face just plumb lights up: "yes," she says, "yes, that's exactly right." Again: What? Wait what do you work on, pain? "Yes. I experiment with pain."

Now, I'm standing there thinking I know you, I've seen people like you in James Bond movies. John on the other hand is all ears (we are making no conjecture about John's personal tastes or hobbies, friends, only choosing to understand that times are tight and money is money). He enlists himself right away for god knows whatever horrors are to come, and takes a slot on the next day at 2:15. And then the two of them start in on me. Bhav suggests 3:15, right after John's 'appointment' but I tell her that won't give me hardly enough time to learn from him what the extent of her torture is, or give me enough of a chance to make fun of him for signing up before going myself. But Bhav starts telling me how easy the tests are, that they want to see your sensitivity to heat- and cold-pain and you get to 'tap-out,' as it were, as soon as you feel any pain at all. Now that didn't seem so bad really and that 10 spot looked pretty good for an hour's easy work, and hell, if it's good enough for my gullible friend then it's good enough for me, pardner. So, like that, I'm in.

Since it will be hard for us to find the torture room on our own, it being appropriately hidden in some secret science buildings, Bhav will meet John somewhere more locatable at 2 and take him to his doom therein. He says that I should just come with but I'm sure I can find the place, and besides, that would give me a whole hour with nothing to do but listen to him crying. So we're all set, and Bhav thanks us and is gone. We are in surprisingly good spirits as we finish our meal and start dishes, laughing a lot and reprising our jokes from the last while, chuckling at Bhav's different ideas of humor and sincerity. Levity always on the doorstep of terror. Bhav comes back with a street map to show me where I need to go. She gives directions, she makes sure we're all set, and there it is. It all seems simple and straightforward at that point, no worries, no fear, no turning back; we're over the top now. Then: "I forgot to tell you before," she says, "but after those other tests, there's another one. We call it a Burn Test." Eyebrows crinkle, resolve dimishes. Burn test? "See you tomorrow!"

***
I will have to finish the story on my next post I'm afraid, for tonight it is 2am and I need some sleepy if I'm gonna be able to kick Hamlet's indecisive ass in a paper tomorrow. Sorry to leave you hanging, but I have a long line of literary predecessors who have strongly established a tradition of same, so thbbbbbt. The full story will come out soon.

A last word: In an effort to cover it's traces, my computer's spellchecker has feigned an ignorance of the word "sentience," suggesting "gentians" instead, and offering "scanty" in place of "Skynet." One - what the hell are gentians? What? Anyone? Anyone??? Two - ha! Foolish computer, your bluff only bolsters my growing suspicions. We will have a reckoning soon...

Tomorrow I give my body to Science, and in exchange Science rewards my body with money, for use pending recovery. We will inform you all how it goes and how it all came about, once Science returns my body for further use.

I don’t know what to write really. My Uncle Herbie is passing away. What a marvelous man he is. I don’t know what to say, I don’t feel like telling you how amazing he was in words on a screen; instead we will listen to jazz together and tell warm, funny jokes to make each other laugh; we will invest our lives in the bonds of tight friendship and close family; we will tell the stories that make young boys grow into young men; we will love a life of honesty and loyalty humor and music; and we will stay friends for the rest of our lives, and then we’ll have some small idea of the beautiful life that my Uncle Herb lived in this world. I see life more clearly when I am with Uncle Herb, I hear the sounds of a good life echoed more clearly through the air, music and laughter and wisdom fill up the space around him in my life and in mind.

When I was fifteen I snuck two Playboy magazines out of his house for the dirty pictures. It was later that I realized he had kept these ones for the articles; each had an installment of a four-part piece on Jazz. Once I knew this I felt terrible for robbing him of half of his jazz story, but I never figured out how to give them back. What a stupid thing to do.

Over the last year or so I have been becoming much closer with Uncle Herb and Aunt Quillie, since that trip for Nanny’s 80th birthday, visiting them once in DC and speaking on the phone. I bought a postcard in a store for them a few weeks ago, with a photo of Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie, but I hadn’t written it yet, only their names. I can only imagine what Quillie is feeling, or Steve and Tana, or Nanny, to whom I haven’t mailed anything since I’ve been here, i can't believe that's true but it is. I wish I were home to be with everyone. I wish I were there for Jason and Brandon to help them feel … I don’t know, I don’t know how I’d help them feel, I just remember when I lost my grandfather and I’m the closest boy to their age in the whole family, so maybe I would be helpful somehow. Steve was the closest man to my age when Bepop died, and I remember him at the Funeral and how it helped to see him there. And the boys are younger than I was, and spent much more time with Herb. I can’t believe that my Uncle Herbie is passing away and I’m so far away from him and from my family, for them and for me. What a strange time to be so far away from everything I know.

What a strange time. I guess I know that my family will be alright without me, but they shouldn’t have to be. They are losing someone and will be coming together, and everyone should be there to help everyone else, there is such a huge rift in our hearts that it takes everyone’s help to sound its depths and know its feeling. They will already be without Herb, they shouldn’t have to be without anyone else.

What a sad thing, what a sad thing. I don’t know what to write to help me or help you, a great light is sinking below the horizon and we all must bow our heads.

Everyone with a spare second and a thirst for good reading should check out Ellie's Subway Diary. The link is below, and it will be one of the fixed ones in the right hand column too. It's pretty freakin great and I'd tell you all about how, but go find out for yourself. Sis has a real gift for installment-writing that I think she'll really get to flesh out here, so the Diary will definitely be worthwhile to keep up with. My only complaint is that I often write "dairy" instead of "diary" and later have no idea what the hell I was talking about. Other than that though, awesome.

The Subway Diaries

Uch, does anyone else share my utter weakness to good candy bars? I swear, I just have no ability to resist the things. Had such a big and filling dinner tonight, but was unable to restrain myself from chowing down a Mars bar just now, and feel a bit ill from overstuffing. Blast you, Mars bars!

So when I say that last night was an interesting experience, I don't want anyone to be confused and think that I mean it was a good experience. Not funny "ha ha" if you know what I mean, just funny. Right, well that said, last night was sure an Interesting experience. Umm, apologies to those with sensetive eyes. This post might not be the one to show the kids or Great Aunts (Hi Aunt Quillie). In fact, this post is certainly not the one to show to those kids etc. I just scanned down to reread before posting, and, well, a weeeeeee bit of agression finds its way onto the page. Aunt Quillie, you just go ahead and scroll down to the next post, and everything will be better.

Selena, a hallmate, and her best friend Stephanie invited John and I to a birthday party at Stephanie's flat. It was, in a word, horrificallyterribleandembarrassingnottomentioncompletelydemeaning. So we were told a few days ago that it was probably going to be like fifty of Steph's girlfriends and the two of us, which we figured was an odd but possibly good setup, but we didn't really put enough thought into why a setup like that could come about.

God, you know what - i'm still so completely pissed off about it all that I don't really have the wherewithal to even desribe the whole night and the myriad facets of its utter sucking, so here's a tidy breakdown of it all. Don't worry, you'll never know the fun you weren't at all missing.

We were brought to this place as objects of malicious entertainment for the birthday girl and her friends, to be mocked and made fun of for the entire effing night. It was completely fucking embarrassing and demeaning, competely crushing and aweful for the entire time we were there. It seems that the whole focus of our inclusion in the evening was to provide an imported item of exotic and savage origin that the locals could jeer at and feel better than. It was fucking bizzare, like depraved and twisted and bizzare. It was like something out of ancient Rome. The whole time was this progression of people just laughing at us in these mean and subtle ways, talking to us in order to make fun of our Americanness, of my Jewishness at one deLIGHTful moment that mysteriously preceded our immediate getting the fuck out of there, our speech and the words we said, our bearing and manner; they made fun of how we felt out of place in a new country around new people, they got a kick out of our newness to their more civilized world. It was embarassing and meanspirited all. We were only there to be mocked as exotic outsiders by this group of in-friends, like people take out a bad horror movie to laugh at or assholes TV jocks taking a nerd along with them for a night just to laugh at him cruelly. It was like the Romans finding sport in pitting unarmed slaves against, you know, LIONS, because it's entertaining to watch something get torn the fuck apart in place that feels alien to it. It. Was. Terrible. MY absolute highlight of the night, and this is just a gem of an experience, came with Stephanie. She was extraordinarily drunk and horrible to be around, and coming onto me strongly. She walked over to talk to me and didn't make it, half collapsing on a bad and almost sliding off it onto the floor. I try at first to coax and then to heave her fully onto the bed so that she doesn't end up falling down and hurting herself, and ending up passed out on the floor of her own party. And into the middle of this enobling and exciting process steps Nina, one of Steph's horribly condescending and deriding and aweful friends. She pulls herself right in front of me as I'm struggling to look out for her woefully drunken friend, levels eyes like coal bricks at mine, and says in a voice that she's made loud enough to get the attention of everyone in the apartment: "I think it's just disgusting when someone takes advantage of a drunk girl." And remains there in front of me as heads turn from every direction, smiling her venomous pointed little teeth at me, until my face goes red like a strawberry and i mumble something like "yes, I concur" as coolly as I can. In my head, I finish the statement with something like "you whorish, fathomless pit of poxied utter bitchiness," but i thought it not perhaps prudent to voice that particular opinion at that time. I, by the way in case you couldn't tell, Can Not FUCKING Believe That. Snake Nina spends the rest of her night wandering around the party repeating her scandalized summation of the event to everyone she can find, pointing at me from across rooms, and always making sure I'm just in earshot when she says it, and often engaged in conversation with someone else who turn to look at me askance when they realize that i'm the disgusting creep in question. To make the experience so much the sweeter, Selena (who is SO high up on my favorite people list) explained to me that indeed Snake Nina is not to be blamed for her reaction; since when a girl is "out with her mates, right" and some "sketchy fuck" is trying to "take advantage of" a friend who has drank themselves past the point of self control, then "of course a girl's going to stick up for her, it's just the right thing to do, you know?" So, thank God, it actually turns out that Nina's not a gigantic bitch, but in fact handled the situation with an astutely perceptive grace and responsive genius. And here, silly me, I had not even considered myself to be the "sketchy fuck" in question, nor had I fully taken into account my deplorable attempt to take advantage of the poor birthday girl. Thank the fucking sweet lord jesus that they set me straight on that score. Un be fucking lievable. So, a night spent getting stabbed by the speared tongues of a legion of british bitches, TONS of fun and an evening well bloody spent.
Jolly Good.

I recall thinking that I need to be meeting more British kids; i think perhaps i need to qualify my future desires with little phrases like "that don't totally suck" or "that aren't wretched and horrible." Live and learn, liiiiiiive and learn.

PS: Matty commented to me in email about this, reminding me that I know martial arts and could have taken half that party apart if i'd wanted to, but am such a better person for playing it cool. Ice cold, ice cold.

Wow, I have been getting the best emails ever from people. Homefront, you rock my world. Everyone seems to have a little bit of very valuable insight to share, all things which I am glad to receive. Some highlights include:

"My advice is to stay away from whiskey porridge and tipsy laird. And hamburger, since it will inevitably be cooked into charred shoe leather. Also the things known as "margaritas." Extremely nasty."

"london = so exciting!"

"I for one am not delighted about the pub age there"

"Don't walk where ice is about to fall on you."

"The English certainly aren't the warmest folks you'll find. Go to Ireland and its a whole other kettle of fish."

"I think, Josh, that you need to find someone with a blender."

"Shopping tips: Americans go to Costco and buy enough food for the End Of Days: Europeans buy and eat."

"I'd say it's not flag house without you, but that would be lying, because we still have all the flags."

"If you see the queen, tell her I said hi and we should meet for tea."

“Whether she's just hanging out to be friendly or if she wants to make sweet love to you highlands-style, there's no telling.”

"I know we don't really have accents, but the Brits think we do, and sometimes think the accents are cute, so just roll with it and play it for what it's worth, aye?"

"Read early Samuel Beckett & listen to early Shane MacGowan while you're there"

"DON'T fall for anyone over there .... Just be a horn-dog and have a little fun."

"Did you buy limes to combat scurvy? good thinking. effin limey”

“take care in the land of the funny talking people.”

So I had a date on Friday. That’s right, three weeks in and I get my first date on foreign shores. Not too bad for an ol’ country boy (or, you know, me). It was a pretty crazy experience, very exciting but very odd at the same time, but who knows, maybe that’s what dating is supposed to be like. This is pretty much the first date I’ve ever really been on. Usually it’s worked from the other way around, where I’d developed a personal intimacy with someone and then we saw if we wanted to share something deeper; this was kind of the opposite way, where two people are essentially supposed to pretend at having intimacy until they discover that reality will either adhere to their idea it or won’t. Two days gone though, I’m still not sure which direction reality decided to go in. I will tell of.

Juliet, from Glasgow, dynamite to look at, sweet voice, friendly to talk to, works at the fitness center. I’ve been chatty with her since I started going there for aikido on like my third day in the country, and we have gotten nice and friendly like. So last Wednesday I go in for lunch-hour class and we start talking; it seems that she lives right close by to me, and both of us to campus, and she bemoaned the fact that she never gets to go home and feel like she’s really getting away from school. Kinda before I can rethink it, I ask her if she wants to come over to my place for dinner some night, since me and my buddy are top-notch Iron Chefs, and she'd thereby get to escape campus a bit more. So she says that would be great, and why doesn’t she give me her number when I come out from the gym. Pa-fucking-ching! I couldn’t really believe it. The second we bowed out from aikido I searched like mad for a breathmint or some gum (one of the girls on the mat had some) and went back down to see Juliet; she already had her number written down for me. Colossal, right? I was skyin’ all the way home, and put on Ludacris and sang along and danced around my room for like ten minutes as soon as I came home. I’m totally like fourteen years old. Whatever yo, at the time I’m just really freakin happy with myself for ignoring the instinct to flee and cower from cute Scottish women, and that I have instead beaten out reason and might be on my way to making a new friend. Rock. The. Party.

So this was Wednesday, and it took me till Friday to realize that what we had agreed on was, in fact, a date. Thank the good lord I hadn’t really figured that out on Wednesday, I might have had an aneurysm before she even gave me her digits. By the way, Thank GOD for voicemail. That’s what I got when I called her to actually set a time, and LORD was it a mercy. It's a much less anxiety-ridden thing than an actual conversation would have been. Not that I'm saying I would have necessarily screwed up the actual conversation, necessarily, but it's much easier to be cute and rambley on a message, and one’s nervousness and long-windedness are infinitely more allowable since everyone is like that on voicemail. Anyway, she got back to me and set the day for Friday, which, when I woke up that morning, means that it’s actually a date. Dinner on Friday night, with open plans for afterwards, and mention of possible clubbing? Date.

So my plan, and I did plan, was to try and walk the thin line between an intimate date and a more relaxed general-social atmosphere. I mean we don’t really know each other, so I thought maybe we could do with a nice non-threatening balance, like not coming on too strong and getting to interact somewhat naturally in a relaxed environment (and I was confident that I could pull off charming and funny in the kitchen with my impressive cheffery and jokey dynamic with John). This plan fell to pieces within the first few minutes of the date. So I show up to her place right on time to pick her up (right on time after loitering in the across-the-street bookstore for half an hour). She looks fantastic, and has put too much effort into how she’s looking to appreciate having dinner with my buddy in our pubic kitchen. She has also picked us up two bottles of wine, and her words when I tell her that I’d got us one too are, “great, let’s go to your place and get drunk.” Them straightforward Scottish lasses, right? Well, not really, as it turns out.

We come to my place and start in on the wine and start talking about this and that and every other thing, and we’re really kinda hitting it off. The best example of this is (and you’ll love this if you know me): who’s her favorite musician? None other than Johnny Cash I’ll have you know, that Man-in-Black hero of my America (I rejoiced, but inwardly cursed that I hadn’t worn my Johnny Cash black cowboy shirt). Yeah man, we are just hitting it off great. We go on like this for some hours, lots of really good talking and stories and things, and then at some point her phone rings. And it’s, drumroll, her boyfriend. Boyfriend, you ask? Boyfriend, I ask too. Boyfriend? Boyfriend. So we keep at it as we have been going, drinking and sharing, for a few hours more, but from that point on (and he text-messages her TWICE later on) I am pretty much baffled by what may or may not be going on. I mean, it’s great to be sharing a fun time and good stories and things in common with a new person from a new place, all that is great. But, I still feel like what the fucking fuck was going on? I mean, am I mixing up my signals here? So on her Friday night she wants to come out with me, she gets dolled up looking damn good and damn sexy for it, she brings TWO bottles of wine over to my place, has no interest in doing anything but being in my room with me drinking it and having a good time, and has a boyfriend? Yo, I KNOW that can all be nothing more than friendly, but come the fuck fuckin on, could you maybe be a bit more freakin direct about some part of it? Any part of it! Eeeeeeyyyyyya.

So I think, based on things that she said and the general climate (and the paranoid way that her dude kept messaging her) that she is not really certain about the relationship she’s in right now, and maybe her coming out with me was an experiment or something, and that’s all great, but it sucks being guinea-pigged on something like that. Because also it leaves me wondering all, “did I just turn her off somewhere, or did she have a relapse of love for her dude, or was it all not supposed to be a date, or whaaaaaaat the fuck?” So I have been moody about it since, and confused. I will probably see her again on Wednesday and hopefully she will be friendly and will say she had a great time, and maybe it will turn out that we get to be great friends, and that would be scoretastic. To tell the truth, I like the idea of being able to date and everything in this new environment in these new situations, but I’m mad not ready for anything more than just casual dating or friendliness; Robin and I are still hugely in love and hugely loving each other, and even where we’re not trying to carry through a strict long-distance relationship it still sure feels strange to be meddling in new intimacies that don’t involve her and I. Oy, the complications of love, and having it. Maybe though, this "date" went all for the best.

I mean, it's pretty great all by itself that I got a date. Feels ballsy and brave and good, and you know what, it was a very fun time. Really neat discovering that I can do that, I can get a hot girl’s number and bring her out and have a great time with her, make her laugh and feel pretty. I’d never been in that position so spontaneously before, and for all that I can be cocky about stuff like that it was still new and scary and exciting and fun, and weird. Boyfriend. That bastard, what the hell is he thinking? Well, anyway I got (probably) a new friend, a Glaswegian to boot, and had a fun time and drank like a gallon of wine in my room, legally and happily (and resourcefully figured out how corkscrews work; thank you spatial aptitude tests in 7th grade for making me not look like an idiot). Chris gave me great advice and peace of mind in an email, saying among other things, “dude, you're freaking out over one date.” And he’s right, it was just a date and a fun time, and probably I didn’t just scare her off like I’m thinking in my head, she probably had a good time too. So word. And things are still close and wonderful with Robin, and not as grey as they might be otherwise. And I love her, and that’s scorefreakintastic. And I had my first date ever, and it was with a Scottish lass. So for all that I’ve been bitching, hell, a fun night and good date. And I went out with a Scottish girl.

So Thursday night turned suddenly awesome at a late and unexpected hour. At about midnight I got a call from this girl Selena, a brit friend who lives down the hall. She has this mad hushed voice and is very anxious, and asks if i would be brave enough to come down the hall and check out her area, because she has been hearing this steady heavy breathing right outside her door and is freaked out; she can't see anything through the peephole, but there is unmistakably some kind of heavy breathing noise that is coming through and scaring her. So I come out thinking that it's probably nothing, some kind of plumbing or heating thing or something, but i go and look down the hallway and there's this body lying down on the floor with its face right up against her door. I'm thinking "oh shit" and suddenly expecting some kind of trouble with a creepy guy who's mysteriously in the building, bracing myself as i keep going down the hall. And then i get closer and see that it's John, passed the hell out on the floor of the hallway, having not made it to his room before abandonding the consious world. I start laughing and tell Selena to come out, and she screams when she sees the body on the floor but quickly relaxes when i explain that it's just her drunk neighbor, and we both are laughing at him for a while. I try to puzzle out how to find his keys and get him into his bed when we see that his keys are in fact in his hand, held out pointing at his door. The poor guy was so close, so close and just couldn't make it that extra few feet.
I am getting ready to fireman's hoist him into the room (wouldn't be easy since he's much taller and heavier than I am) but he shoots awake the second I touch him, and is somehow instantly energized and still drunk and hilarious. We laugh at him a lot and laugh with him a lot more, and he's really embarrassed about it all and REALLY sorry for freaking out Selena, and kind of all around hilarious as he is frenetically apologizing and telling his night's story and discovering that he's still drunk. The best part happened after Selena went to bed. I was still with John making him drink water, and he realized that he hadn't eaten in a long time and was really hungry, but didn't trust himself to cook anything safely and pleaded with me to help. I was happy to, i was actually really enjoying myself. John is a very boistrous kind of guy, even if he thinks he's somewhat shy, and very loudly fun to be with. Together we are undoubtedly the loudest people in the building, and it's a good thing that my room is the only one closest enough to the kitchen to be bothered (at some point that night though, i told him to quiet down because we might wake me up, and it really confused him). So we go in the kitchen and start frying some eggs up and heating up bagels, all John's, and we eat a bunch of eggs and decide to make a bunch more. I barred John from doing anything related to the cooking process, for fear that he'd somehow kill us both, but this had only limited success. See, i kept breaking the yolks when i cracked the eggs, and we started yelling at each other about it. He wondered why i cracked the eggs into a bowl and not on teh edge of the pan, i said it's because i didn't want egg juice getting onto the burner, he said that if i cracked them on the pan then i wouldn't break the yolks. We went on like this for a while until he says "I'lllllll do it!" and proceeds in one deft motion to shatter an egg all over the stove, pan, burner, and floor. It was epic, homeric. We were laughing so hard and so long that the eggs in the pan burnt. It was hysterical and great. Good stupid male bonding. Here are some pictures of it, John being drunk with cheese, eggs on the stove, me with eggs, me like a cheffing ninja with pan and spatula (although i didn't use the spatula, having great success with the pan-flip).

tonight just turned awesome, but the awesomeness itself took long enough that now i need to go to bed, not take the time to recount it. I will give a report tomorrow. For now, here's some pictures of my newly decorated room. I've got photos up of friends from oberlin and new ro, some training shots, me and sensei at the holloween party, me and robin and reba from the same, and the family. also posters of captain marvel, the bindlestiffs, the outlaw josey whales, and some others; more to come. there's also a take out menu from Gig's, our chippy, and of course the good old Jolly Roger to oversee things. I am thinking about investing in a lamp or christmas lights. either would add to the hominess of the place and honestly, i could use the light. the urge to decorate came from reading Raymond Chandler. In an early bit in "The Long Goodbye," Marlowe describes this guy's room like so:

His apartment was small and stuffy and impersonal. He might have moved in that afternoon .... There wasn't a photograph or a personal article of any kind in the place. It might have been a hotel room rented for a meeting or a farewell, for a few drinks and a talk, for a roll in the hay. It didn't look like a place where anyone lived."

After I read that, i thought that it could be a description of my own room, and it damn well shouldn't be. I want to feel like i live here, not like i'm just passing through the place. I was a bit frustrated at the decorating - i kind of didn't want to make it into another college room, with a mass of posters and cards on the walls, but i don't really have any fine art or anything, and it all suits me well enough, and reminds me of me. So now i have a room on its way to comfortably decorated. Tomorrow, laundry and cleaning (i vaccuumed today - mad points).

HOOOOOOLY fucking hell.
It's snowing in London.
Snowing heavy. You know how it started out? With thunder. Lightening, Two HUGE thunder claps, and now it's snowing in London. It's biblical. You know what's next? Locusts! Gosh, it's really coming down. I will have to take some pictures. Oh my lord, it's really gorgeous and chilly and madnificent. I think that it only snows like once per historical era here, this is really amazing. I'm sure that there have been English monarchs that didn't see snow for their entire reigns. Oooo, it's really pretty and magic feeling. I heard the thunder a few minutes ago and thought it must be raining (rather logically, really), and just now went to check and see how wet it was before i went out. I pulled back my cutains and just stood there, dumbstruck, not really understanding what looked so different about the outside but knowing it wasn't the same. It took me a moment of solid concentration to realize that the ground in the alley outside my window hasn't always been white, and that white means snow, and that the snow was still in fact bursting from the sky in handfulls, like angels pelting snowballs at the workingmen in their bowler hats. It is really something.

(Later) Some pictures. I went to the main UCL building, very neoclassical, huge and beautiful, and took some shots of things inside the main gaits. These are them. You will notice two pictures from the same angle and vantage point, but very different. One is with flash, the other without, and you can see it both snowing and snown because of the difference. My favorite is the one of the statue. It's extraordinarily cold and slippery out, and the city is very shit-down from the snow. Tubes stopped, cars in confusion, pedestrians sliding around; it's like - guys, it's two inches of snow. relax. still, pretty and fun. i am going to stay in a cook a hot meal and read shakespeare and coleridge, and read some fiction with a glass of wine before bed. a good night in store for me!