as you turn while wandering...

This is my last full day at Mary Chapman Court, and, in the larger sense, Norwich. I'm packing and going to some of my favorite places in the town, buying chocolate, trying to enjoy it.

But I'm really sad. I just said goodbye to Abbey, and Kaitlyn. More goodbyes to come.

I'm going to do a much more fulfilling post tomorrow, complete with pictures of me in a Santa beard, and me with a moustache. Lots of strange facial hair to look forward to.

I have not actually packed anything yet. It's all in the planning stages.

Why do I do this?

radio heart.

I have been doing nothing all day. Lethargy has used its limp, clammy grip and managed to wrap my brain in its disgusting, effortless grasp. I am not sick. I am just nothing.

Last night was fantastic and epic, cathartic and just plain ol' good fun. I was a paper boat floating in the atlantic ocean, or, in less poetic terms, a tall skinny kid in the middle of a Futureheads mosh pit. I think most of the time I just yelled what parts of the chorus I knew and danced and tried not to let anyone fall around me. Joseph and I emerged with our shirts a darker, sweat-stained color, smiling and pleased with the amount of pushing, pulling, and yelling we had accomplished.

I noticed that the parents of one of the opening bands was there. It was refreshing to see a 50 year old, bald man singing along, and then the singer giving his dad (this is all assumption by the way. for some reason, I just think that people of a more advanced age at concerts simply must be there because they are the parents of either the band or a fan) a smile.

I should get back to the nothing. I'm proud I blogged at all.

Is your bed made? Is your sweater on?

I have had a pretty wonderful past couple of days. They have been laid back but festive, settled mostly but a bit frantic as well. I've written a story that I am proud of, first of all. That always puts me in a good mood. It needs a better ending, but overall I think it is a good one. Wanna read it? Let me know.

Secondarily, I have been going out again. I realize my last post was a bit doom and gloom. I am fully aware that I will keep in touch with everyone via e-mail, facebook, and in some cases, letters. I'm excited about that as well. It's just... I don't know. I know ties aren't severed, the rope is just getting a bit longer. Which is fine. I just know I'm going to miss here, just like I miss there. My goodness though, I'm back in less than two weeks! My heart pitter patters at the thought! Familiarity! Family! Friends! Festivity!

One of the nights out I've had recently was an indie dance night. I flailed and shook and all of the things that are (sort of) accepted as dance these days... I even got up to sing with one group called "the Little Ones." I learned a new dance as well. It's called "The New Jumper." I will show it to interested parties... the dance should be an international sensation, sweeping the world by 2009. Jack and Joe provided some music, and I must say, throwing my hands up and shouting to "Shout" along with Kaitlyn, Rachael, Sam, and Grace is one of my favorite memories. I have lots from Norwich.


The attire on the invitation said "Christmas Jumpers." Do you like mine? It's from Gap!

Last night, Hannah and I took a walk down to one of my new favorite places - the Fat Cat. Over 80 different choices of beer, all of them described in loving detail. I don't really know what "full-bodied" means for a beer. I also don't know what a "nice, hop-filled finish" means, exactly. I just know that Hannah had one that tasted of chocoalte, and I had one that tasted of a fruit bowl at first, ending in a nice, beer-y flavor.

Also, I had an absolutely miserable snack, called Pork Scratchings. Basically, it's pork grisle (grisel? griscle? grizel?) that has been fried up in salt and oil, and then put into a sealed bag and kept behind a bar for any number of years. There is no expiration date on the bag. That is suspect. I ate an entire bag. During this snacking, my sense of self worth took a nose dive. I was lucky to have a full-bodied, hop-filled finishing beer with hints of fruit and pine, really. Quite refreshing.

And somewhere in there was a cider with flatmates Harry, Sam and Alex. They wasted their pocket change on this horribly addicting trivia machine that will ask you which continent the United States are on at first, and then ends by asking you obscure bits of Malaysian political history. Sometimes, it lets you win a couple pounds, sending you into a frenzy of hope. But alas, the hope is for naught. Your sense of self-worth takes a nose dive. You walk home and the only thing to lift your spirits is a box of Mark and Spencer's chocolate cereal. I want to bring a box of this home.

And finally, it's glove weather in Norwich. Biting, bitter cold. I rode my bike to school in what I believe was sleet. But I only have to manage it for a week, so I'm grinning through the whole thing. Oh, Winter. I have never experienced you to this degree before.

I hope it snows.

I got time to hold my own.

I would like to wish you all a happy December. I thought I would miss the suburban lights almost immediately - one thing I love about USA Christmas (TM) is the "Gotta Beat the Johnsons" mentality of Christmas lights. But insead of that good ol' American display of I-care-less-about-my-electricity-bills-than-you-do, we have this:


This too (that color being projected actually changes. Not unlike the Disneyland castle.):


And this lovely string of lights as well:


Yessir, Christmas is coming. I miss my family and I have been spending the last couple of days doing little to nothing. I'm chipping away my play but it is nowhere near as fast a writing as when I wrote my play about superheroes. I wrote that play with super-speed. Ha! Honestly though, every year since I can remember... at least since I have been away at school... I have had a bit of winter ennui. I thought, perhaps, being in the United Kingdom would change that, but alas, no. I have to fight it to make myself get out of the house, to participate in things that I used to welcome with open arms. I don't know why, or how this happened, this particular form of seasonal social disorder, but it's happened and I'm fighting it. I'm going out when I can and I'm hanging out with folks. Poker is big right now, with cookies taking the place of money. Joseph is still ill, so sometimes we just converse in my room about things like television, musicals, and (as usual) the difference between the US and the UK.

I'm still happy, though. Happy with a bit of sadness on the edges. It's kind of like present-wrapping, actually, to make a seasonal metaphor. Packages look absolutely incredible - they have appeared as if by magic, wrapped in boxes, with magic inside. A lovely seasonal guessing game. But there is a bit of sadness because eventually, that package will be ruined, the gift inside revealed, the glitzy paper off to the trash can. That's how I feel. I feel like every day is one of those packages. Happy but a bit futile.

The futility is from the fact that these people that I am with, who I have come to care about quite a bit, who I live with and share hot cocoa with, whose papers I help edit and distract from, who I walk to university with and get pints with in the evening... I will probably never see a large fraction of them ever again. Our futures all lie elsewhere. New Zealand, Germany, Serbia, Scotland, Canada. So while I love doing all these things, it feels impermanent and sad at the same time. Like the wrapped package.

Sigh. It's a complext emotion. Have I described it adequately enough? I think so.

Let's talk about Harry Potter! Tomorrow, the Harry Potter collection of fables comes out. I am incredibly excited! As far as I know, there is absolutely no plans for midnight parties or anything (as far as I know. I'm going to the bookstores today to find out.) But that's fine. I'm just excited to read something new from this universe. When I can't get to sleep in my little dorm room, I put on Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter 6 and eventually get lifted into a fantasy dreamworld and then sleep.

And, I'm sorry, but the UK version has a much better cover. Observe:

Totally vintage, as though it was on the shelf of a wizard. Compared to this thing:

I can't wait!

they made a wreck of you.

Happy December! Joseph and I are going to go buy an advent calendar. Chocolate helps count down days, were you aware of it?


Ready for this? Thanksgiving, England style. Patrick and I managed to have 18-20 people over, which was more than we bargained for. Both apartments contributed chairs from rooms and dining rooms, their dining room tables, and our tiny ovens, to concoct wonderful Thanksgiving staples like sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, cauliflower smothered in cheese, roasted vegetables, fried parsnip, and two giant roast chickens. It was cheaper than Turkey.


It was incredibly heartwarming to be surrounded by so many loving, wonderful people, brought together to stuff themselves silly. Our table was fantastically multi-cultural, with only four people out of the 20 or so ever having experienced a Thanksgiving before. Sam insisted it was much more British because 53 pint cans of Strongbow Hard Cider were consumed. For some reason, Sam measures British-ness in drunkenness. This is not a universal measurement.


My favorite bit was saying what we were thankful for. So many people thanked us for their first thanksgiving, others thanked families that could probably hear them with heartstring connections, (I partook in that. Did you, family, hear it?) I also tthanked everyone for coming together and being like family - Patrick and Joseph like brothers of mine. Alice like a mom. That's about where the family metaphor ends, but the family connection is a lot stronger. We are a fantastic group.

Oh yes. My contribution was coconut tea cake, which was like pound cake. I don't understand why, in these autumn/winter months, you can buy coconuts in every single market, but pumpkin is completely scarce. Still though. It was delicious. I took this picture in the middle of dessert, remembering I didn't take a picture before this.


I called the family on Thanksgiving. It was a lovely conversation, and bittersweetly, it was the last time that I talked to Bill Foster. Bill Foster passed away on Sunday, and he will be missed. Losing family is one of the most surreal and terribly sad things that can happen when you are away - or at any time, really. He was a wonderful man and my best wishes and thoughts are with Aunt Annette and my cousins. My thoughts are always with my family at any given time, but even more so now.

You'll be one of us when the night comes.

So, Barcelona.

There's a song... hold on, I'll post it at the end of this post. I don't know why I told you to hold on... I guess this is what they call "live blogging". The blogosphere is totally lame. Do you realize how many cute cat blogs there are out there? Have you any clue?

What was I talking about?

Oh right, Barcelona.

I think Barcelona, as a city, singlehandedly caused the unraveling of what I call reality. Ever since my trip to this warm Spanish city, I have had trouble connecting the already disparate events of my life. Now I'm on ice floes, jumping from island to island, curious about where I'm going, where I came from and if the ice will hold.

If I look angry in that picture in Barcelona, I wasn't. Not at all. In fact, even though I think the unsewing of the quilted patches of my life is a direct result of the eight hours I spent getting to the country, I found Barcelona to be a gorgeous, if confusing, city.

First of all, I don't speak Spanish, which everyone in Barcelona speaks. I also don't speak (much) French, which was the principal language that Ariane, Caroline and Fabien spoke. So the first night there, we drank these lovely drinks to get the whole situation a bit more lubricated:
It is called a Guarapita (I believe) and it is made from freshly squeezed passionfruit, rum, vodka, and another type of Spanish rum that I never think I heard properly. We drank those and we went from mildly talking and eating snails and calamari and squid and mussels to this:


Ha! See the good times? It was just odd, because they all spoke in French. So a lot of the time I spent in my head, describing the techno music mixing with the old architecture, and the seemingly endless amount of lovely squares hidden in the side streets there. The strange and interesting cultural difference of Barcelona to London is that London insists on planting grass and lovely plants and putting statues in the center, and Barcelona is content to put large slabs of concrete and let people skateboard. Also, there were many dog drinking fountains.

Here is the other interesting thing about Barcelona: Gaudi. The further segmenting of my reality can be blamed totally on the architecture of this man. Randomly strewn throughout the city are his works, like buildings amongst other buildings and park benches with his style of mosaic and then this monstrosity:

The Segrada Familia. Absolutely terrifying and amazing, and it was started in 1884. And it will be under construction forever, I think. It's just... never wanting to be finished. It's better that way, actually, if you ask me, because it's this strange and beautiful work and it stands as a testament to this man who was basically a little bit or a lot insane. That first picture, where I look perturbed (I'm not, by the way) I was in the park that he designed, and it's similarly deranged and beautiful. Let me see if I have a picture to illustrate that.


See that? Bizarre.

The other thing about Barcelona is they put all of their food in lots of butter, or chocolate. This is something I can get behind. Here are churros and chocolate, which was fantastic and went together quite well, if you ask me.



And then here is the best paella I think I will ever have. It's certainly the best paella I have ever had in my young life. There were crayfish, and mussels, and every bite of saffron rice had tiny shrimp. I had two helpings. This was gotten from the restaurant below Fabien's place, and we sat around the table talking (they talked a bit more than I did) and drank delicious red wine and I just wondered if suddenly, like a movie, I would understand french implicitly and then I could join in. I also wondered about other things, and I came to the conclusion that Barcelona is the way it is because it is basically a very international city, a concentration of lost souls, trying to party away their problems, eating collage foods in a city of mad construction projects and chasing pleasure and fruit.



Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just... strange. My last night and day there I spent by myself because Ariane and Caroline got a plane for the day before. I don't really know how that happened, but Fabien and I went out to a couple different bars drinking pretty bad beer that night, and we tried to communicate why we both felt a little bit at a loss for words. Have you ever tried to communicate a loss for words? It doesn't work.

And on that Monday, I just sort of wandered around with my clothes on my back and tried to figure out how to best amuse myself before I spent another day on planes, trains and automobiles. I ate fruit and drank a mango coconut smoothie in an incredible market where people shouted fast Spanish about their various fresh wares. And I went to that park where I took the lizard picture and I just felt completely lost in the world, too small and too insignificant and I tried to find people who were speaking English and failed, so I just sat and looked out at the whole city and wished for companionship. I felt oddly free and happy though, at the same time. So it was a happy loneliness, which is bittersweet. Popsicles were appropriate though, so I bought one of those and a cheese sandwich and eventually made my way home, via a taxi, a train, a subway, an airport van, a plane, another three connecting metros, and one final train. And my feet. You can't forget your feet.

Quite the winding path.

Barcelona is basically just a product of collages - putting things together and hoping it all works. That's why the band below works - they are 26 people and they are called I'm From Barcelona even though they are from Sweden. After a couple of those Guarapitas, me and Fabien sang this song as we walked the avenues and side streets.



I'm glad Ariane invited me. I hope I get to see her one more time before I head back to the states.

down to the ground.

Tomorrow: off to Barcelona.

Today: wrote some of my play, watched Wall-e. Twice, maybe. I absolutely love this movie. Maybe I can relate... the traveler, in a new place, trying to tie himself to something he knows.

Wall-E had Eve on the Axiom. I guess I have... well. I used to have an iPod, which was a lot like Eve. Oh iPod! I miss you so! You were a lovely, lovely iPod, and now I have nothing to listen to.


That's like me, dreaming of my iPod.

Now all I have to listen to is the dreary, cold world.

I feel loads better. Today was what I needed. Wall-e, water, excedrin, soup, and salami sandwiches are great healers. But my mouth is all burnt from all the hot soup. I need some sort of spoon that has a heat senser that tells me if my mouth will be happy with the heat. Does such a spoon exist?

Christmas is coming. They finally turned on the lights around town. I'll take pictures when I get back and wow you all. It's like a Christmas card, but real life!

(oh, and no comments on the last post? have I lost you all with my long vacation betwen posts?)