Toronto (An Interlude)

I'm back in North America. On my flight here from Dublin, I sat next to a painter named John MacGregor who told me that I "need to find something practical to do with my life" and that he really loves to work while listening to classical music. Here is one of his paintings:

"Cubism Reborn"

Anyhow, when our eight-hour flight from Dublin got in last night at like 4:00 p.m., my body felt like it was 10:00 p.m. There's something weirdly exhilarating about traveling like that. After a certain point, I think the human body just adapts. Certainly my brain is not working at full-capacity, but perhaps part of the excitement of traveling this way is getting outside of your head and considering only what is in front of you.

I'm going to stop switching between the first- and second-person now and instead share a few of the buildings I saw.

Some library, University of Toronto

Rising moon over the Royal Ontario Museum

The closest I came to the CN Tower

The sunrise this morning, with some glare that my makeshift towel-fort couldn't eliminate

 

When I get home in eight or so hours, I will give my parents big fat hugs and drink a lot of coffee and have the world's best shower. I might even get really wild and take a nap. I slept in Terminal 1 last night, and it was more comfortable than I was expecting. The benches didn't even have those annoying armrest dividers, so I got to sleep on a surface that was not the floor. I was probably disproportionately excited about that.

And tonight, because I have the dearest and most thoughtful mother in the world, I have tickets for a Chuck Palahniuk (like "Pall-uh-nick") lecture with my sister. Not a bad way to spend my first night back in the States.

Later, Europe

I'm sitting in the Dublin airport, preparing to go back to North America for the first time in four months.

I'm also very sleep-deprived, as in I've slept for maybe sixteen hours in the last five days. Full disclosure.

Anyhow, though I'm sad to be leaving and nervous about returning and not being able to speak Spanish all the time or go out for a beer with my incredible host moms, it's going to be superbien to see the midwest landscape and my friends and family and pets and all that. There was a lot I wanted to do and a lot of people whom I wanted to see here, and I'm sad I didn't have time for it all, but it's a good reason to come back again.

To conclude, somewhat stiltedly, Dublin has been great. I saw Francis Bacon's studio and, though photography was not allowed, I made this very realistic and detailed and slightly-blurry drawing of it.

Almost as messy as my childhood bedroom

But I should probably go find a corner and sleep.

Te Dejo Madrid

Greetings from a cell phone at the Barajas Airport in Madrid! I'm substantially short on sleep, because yesterday we left Córdoba and today we're mostly all leaving Spain. I'm headed to Dublin for a few days, and super-excited about that, but I'm also sad to be leaving a place and people that have meant so much to me. My fatigued heart is filled with lots of sappy love and admiration right now. And though I'm a bit bummed to be leaving (just when my Spanish was getting okay!), I'm also very excited to start a new travel adventure, to come home for a bit, and to begin this summer at Wellesley.

Writing this on a phone is hard, so I'll conclude with another mundane cell-phone photo of the surprisingly-fast ferris wheel at the Córdoba feria.

La Feria (A Goodbye, of Sorts)

I haven't written anything in a few days, and for once it's because I'm truly, completely busy. This is my last week in Córdoba, and as such, I'm trying to live up this time as much as possible. Getting to do a bit more traveling and finally going home are both such exciting prospects, but I've realized how much I'm really going to miss this place. Before this post turns into one of those insipid and hackneyed essays about "how study abroad totally changed my life forever," I'll just say this:

My worldview three years ago was essentially only Platte County, Missouri. It's a beautiful place, but it's only one place in a very big world. Since I graduated high school and began college in Boston, I feel like I've only grown in the most exciting and fulfilling ways. I learned to make a new home for myself away from home. Coming to Spain--my first time in Europe--has been the biggest and brightest mix of emotions and experiences. I've only gotten the tiniest taste of the world that awaits us all, if only we have the luck to make good on an opportunity to seize some of it.

So basically, this post has just become what it was trying to avoid.

But anyhow, so yesterday at midnight was the start of feria, which is a huge fair in Córdoba. There are rides, games, casetas (these giant tents where you can drink and dance), lights, and loads of horses. I went on a few of the rides today with my good friend Jo, and we had a grand ol' time looking out at the city from the top of a swirly-spinny thing that went really high up. We also went on the most rickety, sad little roller coaster I think I've ever been on. It's moments like that I'm going to miss a lot.

At the feria, there is also an enormous botellón, which is basically a congregation of people drinking in the streets. All the young people go and get drunk together and it smells really badly. I went last night to explore with a few friends and was severely overwhelmed by the number of people. There had to have been at least a thousand of them, just in this huge fenced-in area. The police were standing there, containing it and completely cool with it. The whole thing was very strange to me, just because it's so out-of-step with U.S. drinking culture and legal customs.

Though I still have a lot to do before I leave, the top of the list is to ride the ferris wheel and eat churros with my friends under some pretty lights.

If you've gotten this far, thanks for plodding through my somewhat disjointed and sentimental writing. I'm leaving for Madrid on Monday, for Dublin on Tuesday, for Toronto on Thursday, and home on Friday. I'll share more vignettes when I have the opportunity!

A cell-phone photo of some of the said lights

London, pt. II

Some more photos from the second half of the trip (because we took a lot of them):

I was disproportionately shaken when this busker stopped playing and looked at me while I tried to photograph him next to the
"No busking" sign. Sorry, dude.

The Shard

Brick Lane

Some street art by C215, about whom I knew nothing until Diksha pointed this out

London (finally), pt. I

A month or so ago, I took a lovely little jaunt over to the U.K. to visit my friend Diksha in London. She took me around to lots of parks and museums (The Tate Modern, The National Gallery, The Courtauld), and good times were had by all. Being the swell friend she is, Deeks also humored me by taking me to the tourist sites like Buckingham Palace and The Globe Theatre, both of which were surprisingly underwhelming.

To summarize the weekend, we looked at lots of art, walked through lots of different neighborhoods, ate lots of good food, and along the way we took a few photos.

Somerset House, right by where my friend goes to school at The Courthauld because she is impressive like that

Trafalgar Square

Basic; Water Lilies

Hyde Park

Dude really loved birds, I guess

He was putting birdseed on himself to get them flockin'

The Tate Modern

The Thames (if you click this it will get bigger)

Songs That Were Ripped Off, pt. II

More procrastination, more stolen songs.

The song: "I'm Writing A Novel" by Father John Misty (2012)
    What it ripped off: "The Ballad of John and Yoko" by The Beatles (1969)

Before I write anything else, I want to clarify that I'm an unabashed fan of Father John Misty. My pal Patrick showed me his music a few months ago, and I've been listening to it regularly since. The album Fear Fun is clever, sarcastic, and catchy as all get-out. Plus, Father John Misty got Aubrey Plaza to act in the music video for the song "Hollywood Cemetery Forever Sings," so obviously the guy's doing something right.

But for all the catchy turns and clever lyrics, I noticed that the song "I'm Writing A Novel" sounds unmistakably similar to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" by The Beatles, specifically in the chorus. I'm willing to give the guy a bit of a break, because the lyrics to this song are wonderfully snide and self-deprecating, but he could've changed the melody at least a few notes.

The original:

- "The Ballad of John and Yoko" by The Beatles, released as a single in May 1969

The rip-off:

- "I'm Writing A Novel" by Father John Misty, from Fear Fun (April 2012)

Songs That Were Ripped Off, pt. I

You might have noticed that I tend to make sense of the world by trying to find tenuous connections between anything and everything, especially with regards to pop culture. I've decided to put this tendency to some use by gradually sharing some songs that, to me, sound a lot like previously-released works. I don't want to use the word plagiarism or anything, but the similarities are uncanny.

Full disclosure: I'm trying to write a twenty-page paper on the cemeteries of Al-Andalusia in Spanish, and it's becoming increasingly difficult. As such, this post is the product of tedious procrastination and wasted time.

The song: "Then The Morning Comes" by Smash Mouth (1999)
    What it ripped off: "La La Love You" by the Pixies (1989)

This one's been bothering me for a long, long time. I first heard "Then The Morning Comes" as a tender-eared child of five or six, and didn't discover the Pixies until five or six years later. The first time I heard "La La Love You," I felt like the whole world opened up. What was, to my six-year-old ears, the talent and creativity of Smash Mouth, was revealed to be lazy and unmotivated stealing from a group who actually had talent, once upon a time. Listen to these and tell me the guitar riff is not exactly the same (except way less impressive when stolen).

The original:

 

- "La La Love You" by Pixies, from Doolittle (April 1989)

The rip-off:

- "Then The Morning Comes" by Smash Mouth, from Astro Lounge (June 1999)

The Art of Humor, with Calvin Trillin

I recently found this 1995 interview between George Plimpton and Kansas City native Calvin Trillin. It made me really happy, because I just like the idea of these two smart and able dudes sitting together and talking about things like their childhood and their favorite restaurants and all that.

Calvin Trillin, just a regular guy at the deli

In the piece, Trillin covers everything from the office atmosphere at The New Yorker to afternoon rendezvouses (is that the right plural?) in safe deposit rooms. It may be found here in its entirety, on the Paris Review website. The interview is in no way my personal property and I do not claim it as such, but I recommend it. Especially if you like humor or journalism or good things.

Here are a few highlights for the short-on-time:

INTERVIEWER

When did you realize that you were funny?

TRILLIN

At Sunday school when I was about eleven. We came to the part in the Bible or the Talmud, whichever it is, with the famous phrase, “If I forget thee, oh Yerushalayem, may my right hand lose its cunning and my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.” I stood up with my right hand gradually becoming noticeably weird and said: If I forget thee, O Yerushalayem, may my right hand lose its cunning and my tongue cleave to duh woof of my mout. Everybody laughed except the teacher, who ejected me from the classroom and accused me of self-hatred. A very weird epiphany. I guess I already knew I wasn’t a solemn little boy—shy, but not exactly solemn.
I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can’t get rid of. It’s odd: one of the questions that people ask me constantly is, Is it hard having to be funny all the time? The difficult thing for me is being serious. It’s a genetic thing—being funny—like being able to wiggle your ears. I don’t have any trouble being funny, that’s my turn of mind. Or at least attempting to be funny. Whether it really is funny is for the audience to judge. But I actually do think that some people are and some people aren’t. We all know, say, a lot of lawyers who aren’t funny and some who are. A lot of dentists who aren’t funny. The dentist who just took a fractured root out of my tooth—we refer to him as the butcher of Fifty-fourth Street—is a pleasant, friendly man, but he’s not funny.

INTERVIEWER

I would have thought most people who find themselves very funny early on think of themselves as potential stand-up comics or actors.

TRILLIN

If I had been raised in a different house, I might have done something like that. As it was, I was raised to be a kind of champion, sent out to make something of myself. My father, who was technically an immigrant—he came when he was an infant—wanted me to be an American, preferably an American president. He didn’t go to college. Before I was born he wanted me to go specifically to Yale, which he thought would help. It was easy for him to think I could be president: he didn’t have to worry about being president himself, being ineligible because he wasn’t born in the United States.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any explanations as to why there are so few women writers one thinks of as funny?

TRILLIN

Well, funny is obviously not one of the things women in this country have traditionally been expected to be. In the bad old days there was certainly a feeling that being funny was not feminine. I suppose the number of female stand-up comedians these days is an indication that this is changing. But if a girl in my Sunday school class had thought about pretending to take that passage about forgetting Jerusalem literally, I don’t think she would have stood up and put on the little performance. The female class cutup has not been a staple of American folklore. I don’t know whether or not that has meant that fewer women have felt encouraged about writing humor. There are, of course, some very funny women writers. Molly Ivins, for instance, writes about the characters in Texas politics better than anyone. She once mentioned a Texas gubernatorial candidate—this was a real candidate—who visited San Francisco and was so afraid of getting AIDS that when he took a shower in the hotel he wore shower hats on his feet.

...I really want to know who that gubernatorial candidate was.

Coming Home (An Ode to My Pets)

I leave Spain in twelve days, and I get back home to Kansas City two weeks from tomorrow. In the interim, I'll be spending a few days in Dublin and Toronto, which is way exciting. Though I will miss Córdoba dearly, and feel as though four months wasn't nearly enough time here, I'm eager to be home for a few short days before starting a summer job in Boston. There's nothing quite like spending an early June day in the sunshine surrounded by red juniper trees with planes flying over.

But more than that, I miss my dog, Annie.

We've had her since she was abandoned on our road when I was six or seven years old. She has to be at least fifteen or sixteen years old now, and considering this, I get extremely emotional every time I leave home.

Last Sunday, on Mother's Day, she got lost on our neighbor's property and somehow got stuck behind a barbed-wire fence. My parents found her, and apparently she's alright, but I'm still prepared to give her an extra big kiss on the head as soon as I get home.

I could write all day about how much I love my pets (my cat Summer means more to me than most people), but I realize that that's a little weird. Most people on the Internet really don't care about how cool I think animals are. Consider this post an extrication of long-term, distance-enhanced feelings of adoration.

June 2013

Just because
January 2014

Malta

Following the general trend I've established of posting photos a month after I've taken them, here are photos from Malta.

Before I go too far, here's a history/geography lesson in case you need it (I know I did):

Malta is a group of itty-bitty islands in the Mediterranean. It's approximately fifty miles south of Sicily and has a storied history of attempted Ottoman sieges, colonisation by about every big European world power that's existed from the French to the British to the Spanish, and yet more sieges in World War II. In case it wasn't obvious already, Malta is fairly hot property not because it's beautiful, but because it's right in the center of the Mediterranean and therefore very well-situated with regards to military strategy. Malta finally got its independence from the British in 1964, and has been a neutral member of the European Union for a good minute (since 2004). It was also where good ol' George H.W. and Gorbachev first met in 1989, effectively ending the Cold War.

I would also be remiss if I didn't mention that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a public secretary in Malta for a few years in the early nineteenth-century while he was trying to kick an opium addiction. Here is a rather interesting exploration of his role within the government (which seems like it was fairly minimal), as well as a letter he wrote about Malta to his wife Sara. My favorite part is when he writes of the Maltese people:

Of the women five tenths are ugly; of the remainder, four fifths would be ordinary but that they look so quaint, and one tenth, perhaps, may be called quaint-pretty. The prettiest resemble pretty Jewesses in England. They are the noisiest race under heaven, and Valetta the noisiest place.

Yeah.

But to summarize, there's a lot of history here, and though the islands are small, it was still incredibly difficult to see everything in the weekend we were there. We used the time well, though, taking a day to trek to the island of Comino and swim in the Mediterranean, which was rather cold but mostly clean and very clear. We also explored Valetta, the capital, and bummed around Sliema for a day. We failed, however, to see any Maltese falcons. Apparently birds-of-prey have been so heavily hunted on the island that many species have become either endangered or extinct. Sorry to disappoint.

The people we met there were alternately extremely friendly or standoffish, though I'm hesitant to draw any conclusions on the culture and customs of the island based on a three-day trip. There was a woman named Sonia who let us play with her cat and told us all of the best local spots to explore and avoid, but there were also busdrivers who refused to stop for passengers. We met a couple, one of whom grew up in Malta, who were moving away to the U.K. When prompted, the woman explained that she disliked the brash nature of the people she'd met there and that she felt very isolated there. We also experienced more catcalling in Malta than anywhere else in Europe. Unfortunately, it's not too terribly abnormal in many places that a group of young women might receive some street harassment. Therefore, though it wasn't terribly pleasant to be objectified and approached so often, I'm not going to try and infer any grand generalizations about Malta from that. At the end of everything, it seemed like a dynamic, varied, and idiosyncratic country, one which I'd recommend visiting, should you ever find yourself in the mid-Mediterranean.

And now for some (full-disclosure) mostly auto-corrected photos!

Valetta

Friday

Comino

 

Later, Malta.

I Don't Know Why

- "(I Don't Know Why) But I Do by Clarence "Frogman" Henry (1961)

The Andalusian Countryside, pt. III

As previously promised, I'm finally sharing some six-week-old photos from a hike my host mother took us on in a public park in the countryside. It was full of smallish mountains and slightly-arid terrain and eucalyptus trees.

More interesting than the landscape was the hike itself, though. At one point, my host mom took us up to this house on a hill, because she thought there would be a nice vista, and we ended up finding a dog and some kittens hanging out there. I gave the dog water and tried to pet it, but it seemed very scared and poorly cared-for, so we left after a while. As we were leaving, however, a pickup truck pulled up and the guy inside started asking us why we'd been snooping around this private residence (there are certain instances in which it is legal for people to maintain private homes in public parks here, similar to the U.S.). My host mom and he got in a bit of a yelling match, with her telling him that "the countryside is for everyone!" and him telling us to get lost. It was absurdly funny.

Little Córdoba