Weeds

Despite the fact that I just returned from an absolutely incredible time in Greece and that tonight is Halloween and I should be out partying, I find myself in bed on the brink of tears. Amidst all the donkey riding, baked feta, sunsets and smiles this past week a garden of unpleasantness had begun to take root. Pushed back into dark neglected places and watered with a few stolen tears and fearful whispers before sleep, ugly twisted things began to grow. Sadness sprouted first as it usually does, followed quickly by pain, loss and homesickness. Guilt lagged behind but as always soon grew to be the largest, spreading it's roots and slowly starting to strangle everything else. Intertwined so closely with the others it cannot be uprooted without taking all grief up with it and so I let it be. I tried to ignore the vines snaking their way up my spine and around my heart and have now found as grief tightens with each beat that it's too late.

A tragedy in the family has caused the flowering of all kinds of emotional seeds many obliviously sown years ago, dormant until now when age and slightly increased maturity has brought about an entire new set of weeds in addition to the loathed familiar ones.

I have never been very good at gardening and the people who are usually so adept at pulling the weeds in my soul (often without an awareness they are doing so) are miles and oceans away, just as I am from my family. So instead of haphazardly and whole-heartedly, if mostly ineffectually, trying to comfort and help my family and watching guilt begin to shrivel and die from the warmth of kinds words from beloved and trusted kindered spirits I am just sitting here in Italy growing weeds and raining on my pillow.


*Photo from Stumble

Zen Revenge & Other Things

I've probably never mentioned that the family that lives above us is extremely loud and annoying. Since we are just worthless American students and the ceiling is 12 feet high, poking at it with a broom like Erin and I used to do in the Vistas last year is not an option. Incased in a thick cloud of midterm studying, over the past couple days I have found myself stewing more and more each second, about to lose my mind over every marble dropped upstaris. So I decided to get revenge the only way I could: by imprisioning the father of said family in a hateful miserable life, literarily speaking. I don't know much about Italian families so I had to use an American family dynamic but I assure you irresponsible parents and demon children upstairs this is about you.

If you need a distraction/laugh enjoy my very shittily written catharsis.


There had been a time when Bill and his wife had been in love. When they were young and new to each other there had been smiles from across the room, and witty debates over paint color and sex on the kitchen floor. Delving into each other’s pasts and wielding hopes with which they begun melding a future, they had shared secrets and dreams. Now it seemed all they shared were children. Three of them. Sticky, screaming little demons who dropped things on the floor and ran around in circles shrieking. Bill resented the fact that since their introduction he was not allowed to talk about himself anymore, only about the children. He was not allowed to eat at a restaurant without a kids menu, or take a little stroll on his way back from work instead of rushing straight home with more diapers. It’s true they were HIS children but still, it certainly had not been his idea to have them. To turn his cozy well furnished little apartment into the monkey exhibit at a zoo and his wife into a dumpy baby factory who talked of little else.
Bill tried to ignore the children as much as possible. He trudged up the stairs to his first floor apartment and dropping the diapers by the door, settled into his chair with the morning’s paper. Only to find that his daughter Jamie had apparently needed to make a ransom note as her preschool homework and the days headlines could only be read after a game of hangman to fill in the blocks left by her safety scissors. Halfway through an article he found an blue eye staring at him and he lifted the paper to find three year old Tommy giggling in front of him with a green mouth most likely from the magic marker in his pudgy left hand. “
“Do you mind sport? Daddy’s trying to read the paper here.” He went back to his article.
“Daaaadddyyyy”
“What Tommy?” asked Bill gruffly
“Will you play with me?”
“Not right now son. Why don’t you go play with the baby. And keep that damn marker away from your mouth. You’d think there’s nothing to eat in this house with you always chewing on makers…..Weeendyyyy….. Tommy’s got a green mouth again. You want to do something about that?”
“I’m a little busy Bill.” Came a terse response from the steaming kitchen. Angela started crying from her bedroom. “Billl….”
“What Wendy?”
“You want to get her so I can take the meatloaf out of the oven?”
“Meatloaf again?” muttered Bill with disdain “You’d think we were some damn poor people. No wonder the kid is eating crayons.”
Somewhere in the apartment Tommy turned his tin of marbles upside down and they spilled out onto the tile like shattering glass. Angela cried louder and started shaking the crib to get out causing it to bump against the wall. Waaaaaaa thunk, waaaaa thunk waaaaa thunk
Bill stared at the front door and listened to the beeping of the timer in the kitchen, the marbles being dropped back into their tin one by one, the pounding of the crib against the wall. He stared long and hard at the front door and then he threw the paper down and went to take care of Angela.


Not my best writing but now when I hear what must be elephant sized people parading around upstairs I just think of poor unhappy Wendy and Bill and I feel better :)

I finally got over the strange and inconvient illness that ruined my weekend. Now I'm spending my time cramming and paper writing over coffee and smoothies in the loft of a nearby bar where in my first weeks in Florence, I took the strangest and most repulisve shots ever. The lady asks sometimes if I want rum in my smoothie and while I think that really alcohol can only help when reviewing ethics, I have so far refrained.

Two midterms down, three to go. and then a wonderful week on the beaches of Santorini. Excited for a break from creepy Italian men, pee smelling streets, exasperating neighbors and (hopefully) the rain!

The aftershock felt across the world

Besides being a life altering and tragic thing, death is very complicated. We expect that when it happens we will know what to feel. We have been told there are stages that we should hop across like stepping-stones on the path to being whole again. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. But the Kübler-Ross model leaves out the emotion that for me has always been the most prevalent when death lays a fingerprint on my life: guilt. Guilt eats away at the denial, the anger, the depression and fills the spaces left by reason and perspective, which always seem to disappear in the face of loss. I feel guilty that the last thing I said wasn’t I love you, that it had been so long since we had spoken, that I’m alive and well while they have breathed their last. Guilt pervades every crevice of my existence. It disagreeably seasons my food, glues my shoes to the floor like bubble gum and turns mirrors into artistic likenesses of Medusa so that the only sanctioned activity seems to be grieving or attending church. It seems somehow disrespectful to laugh, go out with friends, and even take out the garbage as if nothing had happened. How rude to go on as if things were the same. How rude to live when someone has died.

But the way in which guilt gets me the most is when it hisses in a whisper over and over again: this isn’t your tragedy. I’ve been fortunate enough in life to so far not experience the kind of earth shattering loss that makes the planet go black. The kind that snuffs out the sun and feels very much like something out of Revelation, the apocalypse, the termination of all future existence. Both of my parents are alive, my friends scattered and strained but still breathing. I have lost people but never someone whose presence I demanded for my own existence or who had in their possession a piece of my soul. I have never known this tragedy and I am grateful. So in my past, when death stilled the spinning of the world on it’s axis for just a second and left behind the shadow of a loved one he had stolen I found that it was not my world he had stopped.

It’s true that I cried for days this summer lamenting the loss of an uncle I had truly loved, whose removal from my life left a large hole (and not just because he was a large man). I felt grief that has since subsided but is prone to flare-ups especially when I think about returning to Arizona for a Christmas without him. This grief had to fight being suffocated however, by the guilt of feeling that my loss could never compare with my fathers. My Uncle’s death was tragic, but it was not my tragedy. We had all lost someone we loved but the loss belonged to my Father. Four months later it still follows him around like an imaginary friend that only he can see. My grief was not that strong and so it allowed guilt to rope around it, intertwining the two as it had always been in the past. It was not my grandfather who died as much as it was my mother’s father. Not my Aunt as much as my Uncle’s wife. My parent’s neighbor who was like a father to me was in fact someone’s father and it was the loss of this father that brought his son home. These tragedy’s were not my own. I had no right to their sadness.

Today I found out that my favorite teacher has passed away. Passing at only 35 her story is a devastating one of cancer, two-year-old twins and a five-year-old boy left behind. Although it has been years since I have spoken to her I am still affected almost daily by the life lessons she instilled in me. She was my Psych Professor and a school favorite at Xavier; constantly dispensing advice, inspiration, and encouragement to hundreds of plaid skirted teenage girls over the years. It is a tragedy that the scope of lives affected by a single person is never realized until they are gone and now we are banded together in our memories and mourning, lamenting that we were among the last to be addressed as “future mother’s of America.” Although shocking the loss of our teacher, GP as she was affectionately known around Xavier, is almost insignificant when compared to the immeasurable grief that must be felt by her husband, or the devastation to her children, losing a mother at such a young age they might not even remember her. When I think of this, I cannot help but feel guilty for even experiencing a sense of loss. I try to remember however that in death grief is not rationed out. You do not have to be the most devastated to feel remorse that a life has been lost, that a person has been taken from you forever. There is no shortage of sadness in death and we can always make more. Regardless the relationship or history, in some ways the loss to the world of a great person is everyone’s tragedy.
RIP GP.

London Calling

It took less than 48 hours for me to fall hopelessly and irrevocably in love with the city of London. All of the years I had wasted ruminating on my hatred of Arizona, my failure to obtain a sense of permanence in San Diego, and my apprehension at carving out a life for myself in Boston had culminated in a single moment with the realization that America isn’t where I belong at all. London is.

Our seemingly endless passage to London somewhat resembled a Kerouac novel, excluding of course all the hitch hiking. Although a flight from Florence to the central London airport is only about a two and a half hour journey the fact that we are unemployed college students on quickly depleting checking accounts and maxed out credit cards makes it necessary to opt for cheaper flights and long bus rides over expensive cab rides. So it is only after two hour long bus rides, a two hour flight delay and one brief international flight that we arrive at our hostel at almost eight pm, nearly ten hours after I left my apartment. Remember what I said about travel being work? The party girl in me is more than a little ashamed to admit it, but worn out and wearied from traveling all I want to do is eat and finally enjoy some sleep with my legs stretched out. So while we walk around the area near our hostel a little bit and I have one of the most delicious and fattening meals of my life in the form of a gigantic bag of fish and chips followed by peanut M&M’s, we save adventures on the underground for the next morning. Despite the fact that my bunk at the hostel has one sheet fitted to the bed on one side and folded over on the other side turning me into a human taco, I drop off to sleep quickly and soundly thanks to the fatigue of traveling and the heaviness of the London Ale I had with dinner.

Saturday we rise early and after a hostel breakfast, which is actually better than any pitiful Italian breakfast, we launch headfirst into a whirlwind of London must-sees. Kierra and Lisa quickly figure out the tube and Platform 9 and ¾, Abbey Road, Big Ben, House of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, St. Margaret’s Church, Eye of London, Buckingham Palace, and The Tower Bridge all make appearances on my camera. With the exception of a surprising amount of traffic, both by foot and car, that must be held for photographs at Abbey Road, the absence of guards at Buckingham Palace and the momentary devastation of a blockade in front of Platform and ¾ that took some resourcefulness to get around, all is as expected. Nothing disappoints or shocks except that it takes almost four hours for me to finally stumble upon a Starbucks and get my long awaited Venti Carmel Macchiato. The day is fast paced but not stressful as we easily make it through all the things on our list even after several hours spent drooling over the food courts at Harrods (If there is not a huge room devoted entirely to every kind of dessert in heaven just like the one in Harrods than I’m not going) and shopping in the Camden Markets where despite the vendors inclination to haggle I spent an excessive amount of money.

Although we spent much of the day doing hopelessly touristy things residents here would no doubt roll their eyes at, I often found myself picturing a future in the city. I don’t know how to explain the feeling but it is the same one I had when I toured USD and quite unexpectedly found that I could see myself there. It’s a kind of sense of belonging, like when you return to a familiar place that you suddenly realize feels like home. Something about London feels like home. I don’t know if it’s the city itself, the way the urban sprawl that boasts boutiques and Mom and Pop coffee shops as well as Top Shop and Starbucks all on the street is so large but yet not dirty or suffocating like New York. London boasts the atmosphere that I have always loved so much about Boston but in a somehow less threatening and hostile way. It is a beautiful city of huge trees, exquisite architecture and a kind of wide-open feeling to it that gives one the sense that the city is full of infinite possibilities. These possibilities, like the people of London, seem more friendly and approachable then they often are in prodigious cities. If dreams lay broken on the boulevards in LA, in London they soar through the skies like birds glittering even more brightly from the romantic gray skies.

Just as wonderful as the city itself, are the people of London. Maybe it’s just the way they talk that I love so much; the “God bless” and “dear”, ever so polite in beautiful accents for which I have always had a soft spot with slang that creates a delightful new dialect from the only language that I have ever known. The children are the best. Bundled up in puffy jackets and stained play clothes they look just like Americans until they open their mouths and I have to resist the urge to kidnap them because absolutely nothing is cuter than a three year old with an English accent. In the Underground and on the streets people stride purposefully from place to place but do not snarl and shove at you if you are in the way. I heard “excuse me” more times in one day in London then I have my entire month and a half in Florence. In London I saw stylish, spirited girls with un brushed hair and patterned tight, boots and blazers. Kindred spirits of mine in the fashion department, I immediately want to befriend them even if they do not in fact blog and listen to Vampire Weekend as much as they look like they would. While the tan, aggressive, Italian men illicit more disgust then attraction for me I swoon a little bit at each beautiful blonde haired blue eyed boy and wonder if he has an accent he could pass on to our children.

Each passing minute in London reaffirmed my belief that I had figured out where my life was going. Or at least where I was going, once I graduated. By nightfall we had headed to meet a friend of Lisa’s whom Kierra and I had met at Oktoberfest. She is studying there for the semester from LMU and took us to an adorable pub near her flat and then to a Tai restaurant that was a welcome reprisal from our constant influx of pasta and pizza. A cozy night of bathroom talks, laughter and hard cider is a likewise sweet departure from sweaty Italian boys, cheap boxed wine and Americanized music. I add English Pubs to the list of reasons I’m moving to London.

On our length journey back to Firenze I set my iPod to my Heart Songs playlist and cozy up to the bus window to watch Tuscany fly by as I consider my fast and hard fall for London and the impulsiveness with which I had decided to make it my destiny. Although I am well adept at making my own decisions I often find myself tentatively requesting the perspectives of others to sway me from a prison of indecision. Black or gray boots? Buy that scarf or wait? Respond to his text message or don’t? Someone once told me that my life seems to be a constant struggle between a willful determination to get what I want at all costs and a crippling yearning for approval and therefore solidarity in my choices. The strange deviation in this phenomenon appears when I have to make huge life choices. A last minute switch from Boston University to University of San Diego, the spontaneous selection of a city I knew nothing about in a country with a native language I do not speak, the termination of a friendship I had once considered necessary to my soul’s very existence. These decisions were made with conviction, few tears and little strife or uncertainty. In each case I headed into the next phase of life without hesitation, confident in the fact that rather than made a choice I had instead simply KNOWN what course my life was to take. So it is with London. I left on Sunday with regret but also the self-assurance that my life was to lead me back there someday. Like that person who already KNOWS who they are going to end up with eventually, mine is not a desperate lustful need for immediate gratification. It may be years before I am back again, decades until I have the means to live there but I know that someday when I’m waking up in London again it won’t just be for the weekend.


*Second image found on stumble

Portrait of a Stranger

One of the weirdest things about sitting next to a stranger on an airplane, train or bus is that the entire time that you are squirming around in fevered discomfort trying to get some sleep and counting down the minutes till your arrival what you both really want to do is stare at each other. After several frutive glances over reading material or feigned stretches and back cracks you become aware that while not at all subtle in your attempt to take in your forced travel companion, you are not alone in these attempts. We should really just alocatt a stretch of time at the beginning of the trip to get this out of the way. When the dreaded questions "Is this seat free?" arrives it should be followed by fifteen seconds of socially acceptable staring at each other. Yes, you may have this seat but let me first take a moment to get a good look at you so that I know what I am sitting next to for the next six hours without having to employ whatever creeping abilites I posses. This would certainly aleviate a lot of stress and uncertainty for me personally when I am sitting alone.

Unfortunately, this practice is obviously not condoned and so after I ask the four worded question nobody wants to hear while traveling and steal a quick glance without eye contact, I find myself next to an individual whose physical appearnce I have absolutely no idea of. Out of the corner of my eye I can see that he is wearing faded blue jeans, white sneakers and a black zip up windbreaker over a white t-shirt. Basically the most nondescript single white male you can imagine, the kind where it's almost impossible to tell if they are 22 or 35. Perhaps somewhere inbetween. We are forced to breathe the same air, to exist for 97 minutes in a three by one foot bubble of awkward awareness of each other. I can not help but wonder about him and create my own imagined stories of his life. What's your story? I want to ask him. Why are you coming from the London airport with no bag and nothing in your pockets but an iPod and a phone? Are you listening to your iPod so that we don't have to talk or because it's awkward NOT to talk and NOT listen to it? I think about this person next to me and who he might be. A collection of cells that is loved, hated, desired and worried about by someone in the world. Like me he has lived a life of choices that have brought him to this moment. A moment where as complete strangers we are brought together and in silence share an experience both meaningless and profound. I pause my own ipod and strain to hear what he is listening to. The silence glues us together like static electricity. Suddenly the track changes and I recognize the overplayed vocalization of Rihanna's Rude Boy. Not exactly the soundtrack for an intriguing encounter between two strangers brought together by fate. I return to staring out the window, having lost all interest in the stranger taking up space to the right of me.

Reincarnation

Recently I've been spending some time thinking about my past lives. Being in Europe has not cured me of my sentimental heart or tendency to wander, and often get lost, down memory lane. So earlier today when a stray photo of me in my high school uniform led me into a fit of nostalgia for the days of plaid skirts, ballet flats, and daily QT fixes, I found myself untangling details of my past balled up like yarn in the back of my brain. While I lack a belief in the kind of reincarnation presumed by many religions (coming back as a cow? Not a possibility I'm interested in entertaining) I consider myself a prime example of reincarnation as a basic principle. Mainly because I am not the same person that I once was at all. It's probably safe to say that a majority of people live their lives in stages. Like acts in a play the scenery, costuming and even much of the cast changes as we move through the plot of our lives. It's impossible not to evolve as this happens, to grow out of our surroundings and hopefully grow up a little. Maybe it's common to feel as though along the way you are leaving who you used to be behind, shedding it like a snake sheds it's skin. But I can't help but feel that my scene changes have been more dramatic then some. I often find that I have not only grown out of a life, I barely recognize the skin I left behind as my own.

I remember the sullen, brooding, preteen with a grudge against the world only in flashes of deja vu as if I get the sense that I was her once but I can't find a memory with enough clarity to be sure. I know the facts but can't remember the feelings, the only kind of currency I've ever banked on. I long ago outgrew the Abercrombie and Fitch jeans and braces along with my self appointed occupation of being a miserable pain in my parents ass and sometimes it feels like they never really fit me at all.

In high school I had a rebirth prompted by a new cast of bubbly and outgoing characters with a penchant for having a good time. I abandoned my days of social obscurity and adopted a predisposition to skinny jeans, ballet flats and a left side part, when I wasn't testing the elasticity of Xavier's uniform regulations. My vocation was entertainment: and making up for years wasted living vicariously through TV shows. I found my calling as the innocent one my friends wanted to corrupt, but only to the point where I was still occasionally a reliable DD. By the summer after junior year I was well settled into "the best day of my life" and trying to make the most of what I thought high school was supposed to be about. These years were characterized by practically living out of my car, believing that my first hangover was as bad as it was going to get, and an immeasurable amount of laughs, sunsets, inside jokes, and ridiculous adventures. It was a beautiful well lived life but it was one in which I had no idea who i was except young, crazy and stupid.

Then there came the move to San Diego, my first two years of USD. A time of being just as young and crazy and only slightly less stupid. Come to think of it maybe more stupid, but at least I was finally aware of my own recklessness. This life is one that I can not really reflect on because it is the one to which I will return in four month's time. In San Diego I am a student. Although I am sometimes a poor one, being a student pervades every part of this life. Where I live, who I know, what I do everyday all ties back to the fact that I am supposed to be studying and getting a degree.

In Italy I am still a student but that is not my true line of work. I'm a stranger here, a hopeless foreigner and so in every location and every day I am a traveler. The word "travel" stems from the french word Travailer, to work. This is fitting in many senses because while a grand adventure full of delicious food, scenic views and lots of play, traveling is also work. The dictionary interprets work as an "activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result". The physical effort of packing, planning, booking flights and wandering around a strange city with bags and a phrase book in hand are all facets of gallivanting around a place you do not call home. Travel requires the mental effort of quick thinking, adapting with flexibility to your situation, and navigating places without familiar landmarks and people without familiar language. This is the work that I am doing these days as I find myself reincarnated once again in a setting and as a character I could never have envisioned four years ago.

While I know that this life is only temporary and that I will someday take leave of my job as a traveler and return to the life I knew, I can't help wonder if I will then find that I no longer recognize it. A favorite quote of mine by Peter Hulme says "Travel broadens the mind, the knowledge of distant places and people often confers status, but travelers sometimes return as different people or do not come back at all." After my stint in Italy has come to a close will I return to America and find that my old life has held my shape like memory foam? Will I crawl back into the mold of my former self and return to a life that has been ready and waiting for my reappearance? Or will I find as I do when I return to my parent's house or my past life in Arizona that I am a different person, that I have outgrown my life and San Diego and once again been reincarnated unable to recognize the shell of another person I used to be.