personal

Big Apple, Small Room

It took me a while to convince my mother that our apartment wasn’t twenty-five square feet. I needed to remind her that if it was, that would mean it was the size of my aunts’ terrace.

Nevertheless, the space is small, the bed slopes, the internet is having issues, the shower-curtain smells suspiciously of new plastic (was there blood on the previous one? Is that why it was changed so recently) and the air-conditioning not so much hums as grunts and complains loudly that its back is hurting. We shut the poor thing off and slept with the windows open.

Does it sound like I’m complaining? Oh, dear me, no! Part of life in the big city is the itty-bitty one room apartments that make up those jigsaw puzzles of lights-in-windows that can be seen anywhere, always, because it never goes completely dark here. I heard something about some legendary blackout that happened sometime, but I can’t imagine it. How would people so addicted to their machines function?

Friends, good food, and fun awaits. Oh, yeah, and then school starts in a couple days. But until then, I’m going to make the most of this place.*

*By that, of course, I mean I’m going to go with my mom to read at the Highline park. But hey, that’s pretty dang adventurous for me!

In Vancouver

The flight to Vancouver was long, long, long, but there were some interesting characters that my mom and I got to experience on the way. I’ll be writing about them eventually – unless I decide to hoard them in order to use them in some piece of fiction eventually.

Our first day was yesterday, and (incredibly) we dragged ourselves out for a full day of walking around and exploring the city.

Today my mom, my aunt, my brother and I walked around Vancouver some more. We went to Granville Island, this really cool inlet that has an arts university as well as an arts high school and is full of awesome young people. There’s a market there that looks like it came straight out of Disneyland – it’s too perfect and adorable. I loved it. There are also a couple dangerous stationary stores that I had a hard time tearing myself out of. I love that stuff way too much.

My hands are strangely slow and heavy as I write this, so I think that it’s time for me to fall back into bed. I got out of it a mere twelve hours ago, but a second day of walking around and a healthy dose of jet-lag is affecting me, clearly. Good night, people.

A Pause, An Apology

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve not been here quite as regularly during the past few days – and that includes not reading and commenting on all your wonderful blogs as often as I’d like.

The reason is pretty much the usual one when it comes to me: I’m stressed and getting ready to pack up my essentials and move back to New York for a semester. In addition to the logistics of wrapping up my summer vacation and getting ready to go back into study-mode, I’ve also been going through on emotional roller-coaster. One of the ways I contend with it is to remind myself that everything I experience, however painful and difficult, can always be used later as material. It might be a cold way of dealing with things, but it works.

On Tuesday night, my mother and I fly to Canada to visit my aunts for a week. From there, we go to New York for a couple days vacation before I go back to university, where I get to move into my shiny, new (well, newly painted, at least) single dorm room. Once it’s all set up, I might actually take pictures and post them here. Then again, I might be too lazy. In two weeks, I’ll be part of the team of students welcoming the freshpeople into the college by helping them move their things into their rooms.

So the next two weeks are going to be hectic, full of flights, family and friends. I’m going to do my utmost to continue updating regularly and reading your blogs, but if I miss a couple days, I’m extending my apology preemptively, and hope you’ll forgive me.

Renewing My Passport

The government offices were located in an old building that radiated history rather than bureaucracy. The door was up a flight of worn stone steps, and a plaque beside it read “The Ministry of the Interior” in tired bronze letters. It wasn’t until people passed through the door that the present caught up with them.

Inside, beside a metal detector, a fashionably bald guard checked purses cursorily while scrutinizing every male who walked by, checking if they were rivals to his role as alpha in this place. Rows of metal seats were filled with couples with strollers; the solitary elderly staring straight ahead, watching replays of memories in their heads; teenagers nervously fondling their phones to mask their discomfort at being alone; and nondescript adults in whatever uniforms they wore to work every day, hoping to get business done during their lunch breaks.

Everybody who entered became less of a human being than they’d been outside. They were all reduced to ghosts of themselves, pale representations whose most important features were their date of birth, address and payment method. The clerks behind the counters slumped in their chairs, back problems manifesting around their torsos like poisonous vines, and repeated facts in dull, empty voices. They reached for forms mechanically, part of an assembly line that originated in a sub-clause, part b-one-point-two of some document written by some drone of something called the government.

If there is a hell, I imagine it would look something like this. I walked into the office armored with a book and a magazine, and prayed that it would be enough to keep me from becoming another zombie in this space of paper-shuffling monotony. An hour and a half later, I emerged, blinking, into the blistering heat of the August sun, prodding carefully at my soul to see if it was still intact.

Thoughts on Journals

Another one of my disclaimers: it’s 1:40AM right now, and I’m pretty out of it. Not sure if much of what is below makes sense. Forgive me for not editing it, but I’m exhausted.

I’ve been thinking about journaling lately. I’ve been keeping a journal pretty steadily for a while now – I don’t write often, but I keep the same notebook instead of jumping from one to the other, and whenever I write I feel very relieved. I love it. I wonder if I should start doing it regularly, as part of my routine – doing it first thing in the morning or right before I go to bed or else find some better time during the day. It’ll be hard to keep it up during school-time, though, so I need to consider this.

I’ve also been thinking about how so many bloggers manage to write about their personal, everyday lives in an interesting way. I’ve always had a problem with this, partly because I put such low significance to anything that happens to me. Let me clarify – I find whatever happens to me important, but that’s natural and expected; the problem is that I seem to think that nobody else could possibly find anything that happens to me engaging and worth hearing about. Only through therapy have I succeeded in forcing myself to share more of my everyday life with my friends. I used to expect them to yawn – inwardly, if not outwardly – and find me incredibly dull. I’m slowly learning to accept the fact that my friends love me for who I am and want to know what’s going on with me. They shouldn’t need to ply me with endless questions just to get me to tell them about the internships I’m applying to or how my current work-in-progress is going.

But then there’s the issue of the internet. Sure, my friends are interested in me. But why should random readers who stumble on my blog care about what I’m going through? I realize that I read many blogs where people share their personal, daily lives in a way that I find entertaining and I keep coming back to read more. How do they do it, though?

I’ve been thinking of experimenting with adding a new page on my blog, another one that I’ll post to every day, that will be more of a journal. Then this, the main page, would hold my fiction and thoughts on writing.

How about you guys? What are your thoughts on journaling? If you’re a regular, would you be interested in seeing me add a more journal-like page to my blog?

Things I Saw Today

-Three kittens playing with their mother’s tail.
-A man wearing a back-brace that looked kind of like a corset.
-Youtube videos of one of my heroes.
-Blog posts that have been open in the tab-bar at the top of my browser for days.
-The park outside my house, absolutely deserted because it was so freaking hot.
-“Bridesmaids,” the new Judd Apatow film.

Once in a while, I like making an actual effort to remember the day I’ve had. It’s refreshing.

The Swamp Monster

A swamp monster has taken over my life. It breathes loudly in my ear while I try to sleep and drips menacingly over my shoulder when I eat my meals. Strangely enough, I seem to be the only one able to see it.
Sometimes I tell people about it. Some of them, like my mother, seem to take it for granted that the monster exists, and sometimes I think that they almost see it themselves. No doubt they’re haunted by their own ghouls and demons, the kind that I can’t see.
Others seem to be truly oblivious to the existence of such beasts, and when I try to tell them about my monster, they sympathize politely while all the while their eyes flash with disbelief. I can see them exchanging looks over my head, wondering whether or not I should be committed, pitied, or simply humored.

My swamp monster isn’t malicious; that much is clear to me. It’s full of good intention, so much so that I invite him to come with me sometimes. Today, for instance, it’s been with me all day, every moment, and I even invited it to come along with me to see a movie with some girlfriends and stay the night with me. The swamp monster was shocked and flattered, and, to be honest, I think it was worried that I wasn’t sincere in my invitation. But I was. Because I know it means well and is lonely sometimes. So I tolerate it as often as I can.

My therapist thinks that I indulge it too much, though. Maybe he’s right. Still, I think that my swamp monster is pretty much here to stay, so getting used to it is probably a good thing. Maybe during the coming week I’ll be able to snatch some moments to myself, without it hovering over me like an oozing, pulsating, muddy puppy.

Feeling the Years

Ever since coming home from school, I’ve returned to taking voice lessons. My teacher wanted me to be in the music-school’s end-of-year concert, which is how I found myself roped into singing the lead in Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” as well as doing backing vocals for half a dozen other songs.

The other girls singing with me are of various ages between eleven and eighteen. I’m the oldest by three years, having recently turned twenty-one. Let me tell you, nothing makes a twenty-one year old feel her years like spending hours with girls six years her junior and realizing that they’re actually not as interesting to her as the eleven-year old. What is it about the middle teenage years that seems to erase half their brain-cells? One of the other singers, an incredibly talented girl who’s also very sweet, polite and bubbly, actually takes Justin Bieber seriously and thinks that he’s the bee’s knees.

Then there’s the issue of the guy who used to be my guitar teacher when I was a freshman and sophomore in high school. I hadn’t seen him for ages, until tonight when I found out that he was leading the rehearsal we were having. Since seeing each other he’s become more clean-cut and I’ve had time to go wild and come back down a little again. It was strange seeing him and realizing that six years had passed since spending weekly hours together with our guitars. Knowing that I’m now at an age where he looks at me like an equal, an adult, is frightening in some ways, exhilarating in others.

Growing older is strange, but so far it’s not actually displeasing.

Finished?

I think I might have finished the first draft of my current work-in-progress. I know that it could go on forever in some ways, but I feel like my characters are saying that this is it, it’s enough, it’s the slice of life they wanted told and they don’t need me anymore to keep on living their lives.

This is extremely scary, because I’m going to be embarking on my first second draft now. I don’t even know where to begin. If anyone has any tips for me, I’d be grateful.

I’m feeling overwhelmed. I finished yesterday, but today I’m beginning to really understand the meaning of having finished the first draft. I feel a little bereft, a little lonely, but also gratified and fulfilled. The human capacity for emotion is a strange thing indeed.

Weird

The past two-three weeks have been odd. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but things are being turned topsy-turvy in my mind, in my gut, in my heart. I don’t understand it, and although I’ve been trying to, I’ve also realized that I might not be able to really fathom what it is I’m going through.
Because of this, everything I’ve seen, done and experienced during the past couple of weeks has seemed dreamlike, as if it hasn’t been taking place in reality.
Have any of you experienced this? Do you have any tips on how to deal with it?