...a certain shade of [green] what are _you_ waiting for?
25.6.03
ahoy! i'm still alive - i promise! living out of a suitcase at a friend's flat right now, will be back in the states on 1 july, more updates after that. apologies to everyone who's visited only to find stale, crusty blog crumbs - there should be more soon!
blatant post-jacking. so i've decided to steal this brilliant idea from kat and make some lists of my own [i can hear her now - "why ya gotta waste my flava? damn!!"]. i thought one of my last hurrahs should be a survey of what i will and won't miss about living here in edinburgh, or scotland generally, or the uk even more generally. and like kat says, i don't want to go home yet...
i don't mind leaving behind:
combination washer/dryers [the clothing "steamer"] ** rain as the dominant weather phenomenon ** £2.00 beer that fakes you out and really costs $3.00 or thereabouts [come to think of it, pricing in general - it's damn expensive here!]
** tourists on princes street and the royal mile ** stella artois and tennants ** chicken that costs more than a year's worth of tuition ** neighbours, east enders, hollyoaks ** celebrity obsessions and perpetual socioeconomic distinctions [exhibit a: the royal family; exhibit b: posh and becks] ** fake shawerma [damn russian shaverma! so good, and even spelled differently!] ** texting ** untrusting blockbuster - have a little faith, guys! ** resnet ** the bathroom sink taps in my flat - not only are they separated into hot and cold, but they push down instead of twist, and thus our water stops flowing after only a few seconds! ** scaffolding everywhere
reasons enough to stay:
scottish accents ** the book group and cutting it ** stella artois and tennants [masochism, i think] ** the metric system ** flapjacks, naan, and hummus ** trains! ** the crags right outside my bedroom window ** highland cows and sheep ** broken dialtones ** roundabouts [they're very efficient!] ** chippies at 2am ** easyjet, ryanair, etc. ** compact cars and the prevalence of stickshifts ** texting [annoying but still fun] ** being within a timezone or two of europe ** h&m ** british chocolate ** taking public transportation ** the generally more social welfare-oriented atmosphere [moreso in scotland than the rest of the uk] ** multiparty politics and an effective green party ** nile valley and jordan valley ** pubs and pub lunches ** walking everywhere ** double decker buses ** £1 and £2 coins ** wee green men ** mmehsg-pilf ** anna, devota, lauren and louise, not to mention laura, ellie, and everyone else i've met
i'm sure i've missed out some really good ones, and if i think of them i'll add them in.
whoops! no one told me that it's been 6 days since i last posted! i suppose an update is in order then...
this is a time of many closings. the flat lease. the schoolyear. the year in edinburgh. 4 years of college generally. life in the holodeck [geek reference!]. i'll be moving out on monday morning and i've been packing for days now. i've thrown out most of my old, unworn or shunned clothing and suddenly my belongings seem lighter despite the accumulation throughout the year. maybe it's a ritual cleansing thing, a sort of defining purification. i don't know - my goal was to lighten my luggage. but it feels like it could be the start of something new, or at least looks that way in hindsight, which is proof enough to convince me that my life is run like a contrived novella, an episode of "full house" where the moral lessons always come on dad's knee. but it's nothing unique, hindsight is always useful for convincing ourselves of that anyway.
i'll be at a friend's flat for a week before i come back to the states on 1 july, so posting should be sparse for a while [a change indeed, you say]. after that i'm hoping for big changes but i'll settle for new shoes.
the weather. or, what lies ahead. the weather is oftentimes not my best friend. on my list of Things Of Which I Am Truly Scared, populated by at most 4 or 5 entries, lies the force that is the tornado, a weather phenomenon with which i've been obsessed since elementary school. i used to watch the weather channel obsessively, scan the skies every few minutes for signs of peculiarities, go into a virtual shutdown during the windy run-up to a storm. i was 16 and driving home from school when, while listening to the radion, i learned that a funnel cloud appeared to touch down about 5 miles from where i was driving at the time - i drove to a friend's house instead and had a panic attack. a similar thing happened last summer at uva, but i was inside a computer lab at the time and didn't know until after the fact.
i guess i've gotten over my extreme fear of tornados and settled on the less adrenaline-filled awed fascination of them, but the weather still has the power to chill me. i was driving outside of charlottesville one night, right after midnight, in a fog that had settled below the clouds and was starting to reach towards the street lights. in the glow of the red and yellow sulfur lamps the fog looked like flames bearing down on the earth from above, hiding from sight in the distance between the lights. sometimes a fog will drift in here in edinburgh, or the clouds will hang low out of the sky and blanket the top of the crags, and i'll feel somewhat suffocated. a few nights ago, at around 11 or so, when the sky is still light enough to contrast with the clouds, a cloud moved through the sky as rain fell from its tail-end - i could see the rain falling against the sky, and it looked like the cloud was trying to grab the ground. it's times like these that i feel the weather is replete with personalities that make themselves known primarily to disquiet me.
but lately i've also noticed a kind of benevolence in the weather around me. in the week between my arrival to edinburgh and the beginning of the first term, the weather was gorgeous, warm, sunny and bright blue. that warmth ended on the first week of school, and has not returned. has not, that is, until last week, the last week of term and, incidentally, the last week of my career as an undergraduate. exams brought the warm and sunny skies back to edinburgh and with it some of the optimism that went with the anticipation of a year of school abroad. the weather speaks to me, i'm sure, and tells me not to be afraid of moving on.
*****
it's 3 o'clock in the morning and the birds are chirping again. every morning at 3am they do this. are they talking about the day just passed, or the one ahead?
a simple reminder. to all those who argue that palestinian militant groups must cease violent activities for the peace process to begin again, remember that
"For radical groups such as Hamas, any peaceful resolution that recognizes Israel's existence is anathema..." [quote taken from this wapo story, which is interesting but not required reading.]
radical palestinian groups will not agree to a cease-fire for the road map's sake because they do not agree with the road map's conclusions - palestine, for them, cannot exist as part of a two-state solution. israel's existence is illegitimate, palestine is wrongly occupied, and any solution compromising these claims goes against the very pillars of their beliefs. any attempts by abu mazen to call for a cease-fire on the part of radical groups is futile because [a] radical groups do not recognize his authority as speaker for them or the palestinian people and [b] abu mazen is not the policy director of the radical groups. just a reminder.
rapid modernization of britain's legal system. britain's barristers are forced to get with the times and conquer the latest in hip hop slang:
"This led to the faintly surreal experience of three gentlemen in horsehair wigs examining the meaning of such phrases as "mish mish man" and "shizzle my nizzle," the judge said.
i'm also pleased that the judge went searching on the internet for the meaning of the mysterious phrases. onward with the e-revolution!
aarrrgggghhhhhh!!! the man gets me down again! so i post a rant about why i hate the phrase "in these uncertain times", and i look up today and see an ad above my blog for the british red cross, asking for donations in "uncertain times". i give up!
back to scottish political thought. 24 hours from now and i'll be done with undergraduate studies forever!
**update: the man keeps getting me down. apparently haloscan goes down completely, and now it appears to have eaten some of my comments. one day i'll move to moveable type, as soon as i can afford it.
intermission substance. so i'm off in a few minutes to go and study for my last final ever as an undergraduate, but i thought i'd leave you with these little bits in the meantime, just to let you know i'm still alive and functioning.
i used to think of myself as a language purist - i realized that this wouldn't work when i started writing philosophy papers and had to make up words to get across what i wanted to describe. i think this type of language innovation is perfectly ok. i'm also quite happy to allow mainstream slang into the accepted lexicon, especially if it's gone global. that being said, there's one particularly irking area of language innovation that gets me every time - i cannot stand it when people forget that a perfectly usable verb exists, and instead takes the noun form of the verb and creates another verb out of it. two examples: 'to orientate' [from 'orientation', original verb 'to orient'] and 'to conversate' [from 'conversation', original verb 'to converse']. in the case of 'to orientate', the oxford english dictionary lists the definition as 'to orient'. utter redundancy. and 'to conversate' doesn't even exist!!! [by the way, i also have issues with the oxford english dictionary's hegemony over lexicology - as well as lexicography - but that's another post entirely.]
*****
i had this extremely strange dream the other night. i was with both of my parents [which, incidentally, doesn't really happen anymore - divorce and all] and we were in this strange little town on a hill with wooden houses on stilts. the hill wasn't huge, but the ground was raised enough such that i could see quite far in the distance. we were standing around doing god-know's-what when i saw a huge fireball in the distance coming toward us. it didn't actually look like a fireball - it looked instead like an avalanche of fire, or maybe like the dust cloud that flew down the streets of manhattan when the towers collapsed on 09/11. anyway, it was evident that this huge fireball/wave/thing was lava flow from a volcano that was coming for us, and fast, and so we all ran ran ran away from it as fast as we could. eventually we stopped running, not because we had outrun it, but because we realized that lava was coming for us in all directions and we couldn't run anywhere else. the lava behind us stopped flowing for some reason, and we found ourselves encircled by fresh lava. our plot of untouched ground was maybe 10 meters in diameter, not much room, but enough to pace. at this point i realized that we were all going to die in this little circle of ground - the lava would be too hot to walk on for days [don't know if that's true, but it was in the dream], the town around us was destroyed, and for some reason it appeared - and at least i felt intensely - that we were the last people on earth. it was strange, knowing i was going to die in that little circle, and that i couldn't stop this death through any particular actions of my own. i was extremely scared when i woke up.
grinding nemo.this is brilliant [incidentally, if you haven't seen the trailers for disney's new movie finding nemo, you should go see them right now]:
COSTA MESA, Calif. - Kids be warned: Flushing your pet fish down the drain will not send it safely into the ocean as depicted in the new computer-animated movie "Finding Nemo."
A company that manufactures equipment used to process sewage issued a news release Thursday warning that drain pipes do lead to the ocean - eventually - but first the fluid goes through powerful machines that "shred solids into tiny particles."
"In truth, no one would ever find Nemo and the movie would be called 'Grinding Nemo,'" wrote the JWC Environmental company, which makes the trademarked "Muffin Monster" shredding pumps.
In the unlikely event Nemo survived the deadly machines, the company added, he would probably be killed by the chlorine disinfection.
oh, and a shredding machine named "muffin monster"? are these people smoking crack? brilliant.
toilet literature. i'm still cramming for exams, so not much substance, but i thought i'd give you this nice work of poetry i saw on the bathroom wall in the hostel in amsterdam:
i'm sitting
and shitting
with nothing to do
so i'm writing
this poem
for me and my poo.
oy. i am officially back from amsterdam, covered with the requisite sunburn and mosquito bites. blogging will be light for the next week or so as i am trying to study for my last set of finals ever, but i might put something up now and then.
six amsterdam observations:
1. old rusty bikes are cool. really really cool.
2. once you've been on double-decker trains, you'll never go back to single decks again.
3. english is everywhere. everywhere. i mean, half of the ads and tv spots are in english, for god's sake. un-subtitled, even!
4. do not pretend to 'understand' celsius temperatures, even if you have lived with the metric system for a year, if you are born and bred on the farenheit scale. you will end up with sweaty clothes and a sunburn.
5. there are certain birds, not ducks apparently [but waterbirds nonetheless], that can walk - er, run - on water. they do this most often to scare the ducks around them shitless.
6. amsterdam actually does not smell like weed unless you are standing directly in front of a coffeeshop.
