Fog is Pretty

I'll probably delete this later, but I just had to proclaim that my brain is exploding. Or melting. I can't really decide. I had this tremendous intellectual revelation breakthrough, and now all I want to do is sit in the library and write my theses so I can go to grad school. Like. Right now.

God damn it I hate it when you're interest has been piqued, but yet, there is no where to go with it, nothing to do and no resources to back up your brilliance?!?!?!

:-<

Longer post ruminating, percolating, and maybe even rotting. I think I'll sit and write tonight, perhaps post the results tommorow if they're particularly useful. Pow wow tommorow around 3 if anyone can make sense of me.

"...We agreed that a young person's years of indecision were not wasted if they provided thinking space fortified by relevant data, even though some of the latter might not be understood at the moment, so that when the lucky moment of inspiration struck, it found tinder to ignite, but Joe asked, 'What if you just keep on drifting, not knowing what tinder to collect because you don't know what's going to ignite you?'

'You go on long enough,' Holt growled, 'you become a bum."

Now there was extended discussion of what the term 'long enough' meant, and someone asked me what I thought, and I said, 'I don't know much about girls, but for a man it's almost impossible to waste a year before the age of thirty-five...no year can be wasted. Knocking around Europe may be the very best thing a young man can do if he wants to become a great lawyer. Working in a lumber camp may be the real road to a vocation for the ministry. Suppose you want to be a fine dramatist. Maybe the route lies through Marrakech..."

I've found my song, my subject. Oh lordy, what now?

"...One of the most exciting things...is to see a young person of talent and character stumble upon a concept big enough to occupy him in his first absorbing test of strength. Such moments are the building blocks of meaning. Now I watched as Gretchen reacted to the sudden explosion of an idea whose ramifications were extensive enough to encompass all that she had been inchoately dreaming of;...she saw ahead of her the long years of work and their fulfillment."

For now, Mitchner. Tommorow, palabras de mi cabeza, en mis propias palabras.

Can someone please turn me off?

Mir v vsjo Mirja

Let me just say that I just had my first Russian dream, and it kicked ass. I have no recollection as to why, or what it was, but I woke up and was just extatic with myself. Take that Donna.

Let me also just say that perfective present tenses are the bane of my existance. I mean really now, why the hell would anyone EVER invent something is CONVOLUTED as that. Only the Russians.

And the Czechs.

And the Poles, and the Slovaks, and the Bulgarians...i tak dale.

Sakra.

Woot for my new phrase book though, if anyone every needs to know how to tell their copious Russian lovers to put on a condom damn it, I can totally hook you up =).

Thanks to all of you for my MSN date, totally was the pick me up I needed. That and my 2 hour conversation marathon with the TA. But yea, I'd love to do it again, if you're out there in webland and have MSN, give me a shout out a good day in advance, and I'll haul my computer down to campus and we can chat.

Eeee for good moods.

Wow. And my sandwhich was that good.

The Unrecognizable Chord Progression

Bless the gifts of adolescence for making such cavernous emotions fleeting, bless the strength and stupidity for making them linger. Faced with, *gasp*, nothing to do and nothing to read this Friday evening, I return to my print seduction. Rereading my rants of this past year, I'm chuckling, a little bit sad, but mostly, curiously nostalgic.

Where did all those tumultous feelings go? Am I getting better at churning through the mourning process, better forgiving, quicker forgetting? When I stop and think about it, asides from the absurdity of reflection, I'm torn. Half of me craves the storms of sadness, craves the excitement of loss -- no, more of the perpetual re-creation and reinvention of such inert hell. The other side, ever the pragmatist, marvels at my progress, remembering the pain and longing and sad hope in rejection. I look back at how I was, and can't piece together how it is that I am, existing in joy and challenge and ambition, today. What particularly struck me was the dates of entries, how half told reminisces tumbled forth, never really admitting anything, awash and tangled in my eloquance. (Chris you are totally right). I spit out half sentences, curious and trying to convince myself to not let it be happening, as if not believing could've saved me from giving a piece of my heart to Jon.

And then finally semi-OK, standing on my own feet, and Noah hit me like a ton of bricks. There. I said his name. See? I really did. It was more of a thunderstorm, really, quick, angry, brilliant, terrifying, quenching, and making the dry nights all the more heart wrenching. I still belive that he, and his absence, hit me so hard because it illuminated my loss of control. Yes, I lost control when I got drunk that night. I was not in control when I let my grades slide all semester, mourning something I never had, and believing my immortality. I still believe thats what positive I take from my experience with Noah -- the reminder of the problems of guarding my emotions so tightly, that feeling to the extend that my head is mostly above water, is OK. I lost control this spring because I was too far gone to notice, too deluded to realize. The catastrophe of that night woke me. So Noah Hallet, where every you are, hear this. What you allowed me to do to myself was horrible. But you have forced me to reevaluate myself, and for this, I'm greatful. The risk is always worth it. Always.

Wow. That came from somewhere far, a dream totally unexplainable, so totally removed from the day at hand. Isn't it funny, to be surprised with one's emotional stability? Like, where the hell did that come from? Huh. To be content with the drudgery of my days --that is what I gain from new beginnings. I'm strangely and unfamiliarly satisfied. Monterey is a transfixingly beautiful spot. Home for the summer is perched on the top of Prescott Avenue, a good 18 blocks straight up from the city. No joke, this hill is quite San Francisco-esqe at places, raucuously 45 degrees and taunting. I've made it up 4-5 blocks so far, but even the trudge the rest of the way leaves me invigorated, and all endorphin high. I figure the hill is quite a fitting metaphor for my studies, if I can make it to the top by the end of the summer, I take absolutely no fears of linguistic incompetance with me to St. Petersburg. Classes are going strangely well. For the moment I think I'll cast that off to first week strangeness, and do my damndest not to get complacent. I did, in fact, keep my placement in the Intermediate group, to much suprise and relief. For the moment I'm holding my own suprisingly well. My class of 10 is mostly graduate students, all 5-10 years older than me on their best days. Me being me, I'm trying hard not to disclose my age, but failing miserably. I'm kind of glad that I'm not living in the Institute Housing, for a lot of reasons. Only one being not having to deal with being young and underage on a nightly basis. I feel no pressure to be social, which is almost charming. I came home tonight after an abrievated stop at happy hour to mooch free food, and and studied for about 2 hours before giving up. This summer is like, the fulfillment of all my secret Nerd fantasies.

Masha is coming tommorow!

Lord. Must find Monterey Library. Must must must. Before I wither away all Emily Dickinson like.

It's leaving time again

How can there never be any conclusion, any larger summation, tying of loose ends? Why must everything always be so...disjointed, and bizarrly clear and vibrant? I'm stuck in this strange continuation, between just being and doing and making...qu'est que je fais? Chto bydy delat? Proc? The sky is the color of my jeans and my hair is bleaching blonder. This whole California dream may just teach me the neccesity of sunblock. I guess I don't believe that I can be there then here so quickly, so harmlessly, so nonchalantly. Like I jumped through a hole in the sky, and landed here. Flat. Oouch. Like I've fallen back into a life I used to live, yet could never have known. Where is my blank page, blunder, barrier, boundary between what was, and Part Eighty of what is coming?

Procession

I felt like an adult tonight. It was perversely fleeting, five hours of incredibly enriching interchanges, of which I actually took part and held my own in surrounded by several PhDs. My dinner with my high school Russian teacher somehow blossomed into so much more of an affair than I'd expected. In the end it was him and I, his Belgian wife, my friend Joy, another kid I remotely knew from school years back, this boy's sister, the sister's Italian boyfriend, the sister's Dutch housemate, and my teacher's nieces visiting from Belgium. For me the petulant introvert, the crowd introduced so much more stress than I was expecting, though I was flattered to be included in such a group. Its funny, it very definitely takes me a while to get comfortable in a setting like that. For the first hour or so I mostly listened, interjected with sober polite comments if questioned, but yea, for the most part, passive. My first adult dinner party...aww. I got kinda confused etiquette wise, but fell back on the old Pretty Woman technique, just copy the people next to you. Was very careful to sit up straight (posture my ass...that shit is painful on a stool) and do nice things like put a napkin in my lap. And then I realized, like most times I'm completely over my head, that I can actually handle it. I can deal. So I starting listening, and chatting, and thinking, and smiling, and genuinely enjoyed myself. I was sitting next to the Dutch boy. He is a PhD student in Philosophy, just here in the States to finish his thesis. At one point he turned to me, and asked whether I actually knew the people everyone was talking about. I laughed, and admitted that I didn't, but just really liked watching people's expressions and body language. This launched a half hour long discussion about people watching, sitting in cafes and sketching, etc. Maybe this whole adult thing isn't such a croc after all. I think that's a big part of me, I really like being over my head, and having to deal. Everything really meaningful I've ever been involved in has been the hardest possible route to the destination, the most outlandish activity, the most farfetched schemes. Basically, hard leaves it mark. At times I just sat back and listened to conversations going on in three and four languages around me, remembering how much I love to just listen, to let words flow over me, even if I can't understand a single word. But then I realized I was picking up quite a bizarre amount of Dutch, bizarre if only for the fact that I have absolutely no background in Germanic languages, but intriguing none the less. Weird. But very very cool. And then as I got up to head home from College Park, of course I failed to find Route One, so ended up a good half hour out of my way the opposite direction. I really do have a fairly decent sense of direction, just not when I'm driving around suburbia. So much for semi-perceived wisdom. Oh well.

In other less philosophical ramblings, I must figure out a way to stop being so heinously bitchy to good friend's new girlfriend. Being so does definitely help me maintain any sort of non-jealous existential relationship. Note to self: Stop it. Now. Damn it.

Four more days to freedom in the West. Oh how I'm looking forward to this next adventure, even with the anticipated ass kicking it entails. May there be many more intriguing graduate students, thought provoking evenings, and not having to refuse wine when I'm offered.