Prague Arrival: 24

Yosef and I ended up dividing our responsibilities as follows: he was in charge of getting us transit from city to city, and I was in charge of getting us lodging. He got us bus tickets from Dresden to Prague, which was originally a tentative point on our trip. We never had a formal discussion adding it to our itinerary, it just happened on its own. 

Before leaving Dresden, I met up with Marija, whom I had met at the wedding, and who teaches political science in London. We talked about forks in the path of the heart, and experiences with roommates. I finally figured out what was wrong with my frothy milk order. She reminded me of my friend Hannah, the general academic nature with an apparent care for her friends, or maybe just the similarity in coloration. 

And then a chunk of the day was spent on the bus. I wrote a few postcards to friends and napped. Finally we arrived in Prague and lugged our bags up. 

At that point my impression of Prague is that it is all uphill, all windy cobblestone which gets in the way of carrying a suitcase. We were too early to check in to the airbnb, and hungry as well, so we found a Greek called Olympos and celebrated our arrival. I finally got a very little cup of dark bitter liquid and tiny carafe of milk. We were both so tired at this point though, so when we made it back to the airbnb (which required some thinking because the keys were locked in a lock-box on the bars of a convenience store a block away and around the corner) we took a nap. 

Actually let's circle back to the convenience store: it was one of many bodega-like markets sprinkled throughout the city. After dinner we stopped in and picked up some more kefir and fruit, as well as some laundry detergent. They are open late, and as far as I could tell, primarily run by Vietnamese people. There's a kind of charm to these smaller shops: the neighborhood corner store that's open late and were you can buy a pack any number of things: cigarettes, liquor, peaches, or shampoo. These peaches were squatter than the ones I'm used to. There's a family-run feel to them: the one next to me in the Ukrainian village I know the owner, and I think his teen son or nephew works there too. There, sometimes fresh tamales are on sale, but there is also whole-bean coffee and a porter I like. Compared to the ones in Washington Heights in NY, the ones in Prague had more fresh produce and fewer dried and canned goods, and there were no cats. I think with these kinds of places it is easy to start fantasizing about what it would look like to live in a place: strolling the streets, nipping into the corner shop for some milk and dish soap. I saw the guy who manned the cashier a day later in the street, and we recognized each other. If I lived there, maybe we would know each others names, I would learn which fruit are in season when, and develop a sense for the local currency. 

After the nap we got dinner. My friend Mark recommended a Czech place called U Sadu, which he had described as "simply a pubby bar, with simple but carefully (would one say lovingly?) prepared food." The waitress was patient with us, and there were fewer tourists there. Afterwards we went for a walk - we saw some great views of the sun setting over a castle, and the Jewish cemetery, which was closed.  

And that was a full day of Dresden, transit, and Prague. 

Lisbeth & Dresden: 22 & 23

The wedding took place in a rural town outside of Dresden called Lisbeth. The weather smiled on us, and I grabbed some sad bitter water at the train station, on the way to the old-timey bus. A green and white bus that had a massive stick-shift system specially chartered for the occasion. Cows passed us as we rode into the countryside 

The wedding was sweet. I am finding it a bit hard to write about it though: I think weddings are so thoroughly planned, both meticulously orchestrated and intimate affairs, that it's hard to know what to write. There were multiple parts. First we mingled. Instead of alcohol to smooth over the fact that most of us are strangers, were given bingo cards with facts like "has hiked a glacier" (my brother) or "has run a marathon" as a kind of get-to-know each other icebreaker. Then the ceremony itself, 49 people in attendance including the bride and groom, all of us sitting near a grove of birches. Bianca's sister officiated the wedding, and the groom's vows were blown away by the wind so we couldn't hear them. Afterward, he said it's because he spoke from the heart rather than doing a performance. More mingling, this time with sushi, and photos with the hired photographer. Then cakes! About 9 cakes. Yosef and I took half slices and then split those to maximize the experience. 

I slipped away at some point and Bianca's aunt made me a cup of tea while we chatted. She is a live wire that left an impression on a lot of the younger crowd, thinking about what it means to keep up that kind of vitality into later years. This was the first moment I went off script: unplanned tea with the aunt, with allusions to history and politics. Then we funneled back to the dinner buffet (honestly maybe the best meal we had while traveling?) - food, wine, more chatter, a photobooth and dancing. When we rode back on the train back to Dresden, very tired, and me and two other women discussed predicaments of the heart. The second off-script conversation, after all the planned events, and a more intimate moment there too. 

The next day Yosef and I, again, struggled to wake up. We had our breakfast at home, got Vietnamese food at Codo - Yosef got beer, I got dark liquid poured over ice and sweetened condensed milk. Then we met the rest of the wedding attendees for a historic scavenger hunt arrange by Bianca's sister. I managed to eek in a few exchanges with Bianca - the bride and groom are always so busy on their wedding day, all of us vying for their attention.

We reconvened at Eiscafe Venezia for dessert, then some of us broke off. Beer, Little India (food was good here, the owner seemed very committed to making us happy, too) in an artsier part of Dresden. And thus concluded our final full day in Dresden. 

Sundowner 07/21

Jetlag into Europe from the US is always so much harder than on the way back. Yosef and I struggled to get up before noon, and then went to the Aldi across the street to grab yogurt, as well as the bag of muesli and box of tea mentioned in a previous post. I also accidentally bought fresh yeast thinking it was butter with honey in it. In my defense, it was yeast that was made with honey, so, I had read part of it correctly. And it was in the butter section. Misdirection via context clues.

We then made our way to the Old Masters Picture Gallery which frankly is a great museum. I noted many artists with whom I was not familiar to look up later and got postcards, which is my standard museum procedure while traveling. We then doubled back to a touristy stretch of restaurants and ate a decent meal at Wilma Wunder, though again with disappointing frothy milky drink. 

So I haven’t mentioned yet my impetus for traveling to Europe. It is this: my friend from college Bianca, with whom I have maintained a connection across the Atlantic for nine years, was getting married. Or having a ceremony: logistically they had to get married for her husband to enter Ireland where she had found a job. I actually have a post which gives me the last time I saw her before she went to get her Masters in London. Nine years! Crazy. This was later followed by a PhD in Cape Town, South Africa, where she met her now-husband. She has family in Germany ergo the German destination. I offered Yosef to make a sibling trip of it, since he was musing about travel already, and so he became my plus-one.

To start off the celebratory festivities they arranged for a Sundowner gathering by the river. Sundowner is the South African tradition of having drinks at sunset. It was also an opportunity to meet her husband for the first time before the actual wedding ceremony. I was the only person from our college to attend the wedding, and so everyone else there was a stranger to me. Yosef struck it up with an urban designer from Amsterdam, I chatted with an art teacher at a high-needs school in NYC. Then, just around the planned end time, it started to pour rain: one of the grooms’ friends from Cape Town lent me his sweater and Yosef and I trotted away to the Sbahn.

My mother told me the last post was too long but perhaps reflected the first day of long travel. Lucky for her I had already written this one out before she told me this and it turned out shorter! Hurrah! 

Plane, Ubahn, and Rail 07/20

One of my supervisors had mentioned a phenomenology exercise she was assigned while completing her degree: to describe coffee for a week without using the word coffee. The dark liquid on the flight from Chicago to Paris felt well captured by this quote for 1984: “It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.” 

On the flight, the woman next to me had some sort of therapy-level psychology degree, but was on her way to see her long-distance husband in...Algeria, maybe? I can't remember, a North African country? They had met through his brother who worked as a lawyer in the U.S., she had initially tried law school but dropped it. Her husband had a large farm and so she only did a bit of consulting now as he could support her fully, but I still struggled to understand what it would mean to study to be a therapist and then not want to be a therapist. For the better though, if that's not what she wants to do, that she doesn't do it. If I remembered her name I would look her up, but a month on and her name escapes me. 

I was pleased that though Yosef arrived earlier than me, he needed to go through customs, resulting in him only waiting for me for only half an hour before we met. I had already gone through customs at my layover in Paris, then gone to brush my teeth and reapply deodorant - a travel tip from my mother (our? does mentioning my brother necessitate using our mother here?) After that, in desperation, I had eaten sushi at the counter while I waited for the second flight. Sushi that came with sweet soy sauce packets, much to my dismay and bewilderment. When I did land in Berlin, I was glad to see my brother’s face, even though he snipped at me before we had even made it to the Ubahn, likely in response to me telling him what to do. Older-sister habit I am trying to kick. Yosef pointed out the cloth-towels at the airport restrooms, a seemingly endless single roll of reusable towel.

We made our way to Zimt and Zucker, a café recommended by my friend Bianca’s sister. I asked if we could sit outside since otherwise our suitcases would be in the way, but the hostess responded there are no more spaces outdoors, and that our suitcases will be in the way regardless. She seated us at the same table as a couple who arrived shortly before us and had ordered what seemed like chocolate with milk poured over it. They stirred it and it broke up the chocolate a bit but never really transformed into chocolate milk and they left without quite finishing it. Yosef got a Berliner Weisse, a drink I had almost forgotten existed: beer with sweet, flavored syrup mixed in. I drank a cappuccino and we both got crepes. The cappuccino was the first in a series of disappointing drinking experiences. It turns out the American way of defaulting to a double shot for a larger quantity of milk is not the standard elsewhere. A few frothy milky mistakes finally caused me to reconsider my drink order.

We sat around awhile after figuring out how to get to Dresden, using the 1euro bathrooms that take place of the free public restrooms we have in the US. We had meant to use Deutsche Bahn, which includes regional rail, but we were far too tired to navigate another transfer and ended up opting for a more expensive direct train. A Muslim woman asked me how to use one of the other ticketing machines and I gestured at our suitcases to explain that I don’t know my head to tail here. A large Russian-speaking family sat on the bench next to us. Finally, we got on the train and found seats, and Yosef and I took turns sleeping on the train as the countryside pulled past us. Our Airbnb was a short walk from the train stop and thus concluded a full day of travel.

Kefir and Muesli

I will later perhaps try and make sense of my abrupt return here.

Later, too, I will outline in greater detail the actual details of my trip, which spanned Dresden, Prague, and Berlin. 

But right now I am trying to grasp the things that I gained from my vacation: long walks, kefir in the morning, good meals out, art museums, my traveling companion (my brother, a month shy of 25, who requested we spend most of the time speaking Russian, which we did until we got to Berlin), writing, photography, seeing friends I hadn't seen in a decade or so, meeting strangers, coffee, beer, taking in the streets...hoping to hold onto these things and bring them home. 

Kefir was easy to arrange, the muesli slightly less easy but I was able to create an approximation of my own. The American cereal aisle is dessert for breakfast: from unabashedly candy-flavored, to sugar-coated raisins feigning a balanced start to the day. I was able to find something with flakes and granola to mix in with oats, flax, and hemp. Blackberries were more affordable this grocery trip than they usually are, and the nectarines were on sale. I don't think about the cost of fruit when traveling. Red and Black currant was in season and readily available in Europe. It is such a rarity in the US, especially since black current was illegal for almost a century and continues to be highly regulated as a crop. And so, I can recreate the breakfast Yosef and I had every day in Europe. We had carried a bag of muesli we got in Dresden to Prague and then back up to Berlin, eating exactly one bag between the two of us during the whole trip, and drinking through a box of English Breakfast tea. It is hotter in Chicago than it was in Europe, so here I have been brewing a large amount of chai and sticking it in the fridge for iced chai in the morning.

I realize, dear reader, this is a very literal way to try and capture a vacation to extend it into “regular” life. I do believe though, that some of our life is informed by the ways in which we follow day-to-day actions. And there may be something to be learned from observing what one does when plucked from those rhythms which we neglect to otherwise examine. Some of the ways in which we are in life will not be shaken when we travel, no matter what we hope, sure, but I found more affirmations than disappointments.

Many of the things I did differently were less ... self-indulgent? hedonistic? in nature, than one might expect. These terms have baggage – Protestant ethic morality versus Pagan debauchery comes to mind. But here in 2023: when tired at the end of a long week, I am more likely to fall into watching a show or YouTube endlessly, and sometimes believe that if given the opportunity to exist without responsibilities, this is the sad place I would find myself. And perhaps, sometimes, that is true. But not always. What I am thinking of is Pleasure Paradox/Hedonistic Treadmill. (My father texted me on the trip asking if these terms were mainstream – I said I don’t know, and that I am not a good measure of what is mainstream knowledge in psychology.) I was surprised how much I wanted to do things, even the things that are not the most direct path the pleasure. 

Yes of course some combination of vacation-magic and necessity meant eating out for most of our meals, and this is not something I want to or can do otherwise, though about half of these meals were very enjoyable. At the same time, it seems I found more energy to do the work of finding slower burning contentment, which has been evading me lately. I remember last time I was in Berlin I felt inspired to stop eating meat again - I had started eating it again at the end of my first year of college, feeling unable to push back on the chaotic selection at the college dining hall. But I felt inspired again in Berlin - found the energy to pursue this small bit of idealism after a year break. I continue this way still, eating meat about once a year, the rest of the time automatically defaulting to the way I have eaten since I was 14. Two of the most recent carnivorous instances in the past two years were on this vacation, in Prague, when I found myself sprung out of rhythms. I see a lot online about motivation versus discipline, but personally, life would be easier if I had a better practiced thoughtlessness. Good habits have always felt like the slipperiest of eels thrashing out of my grip.

My tomato plants which had started to carry green berries when I flew out are now holding ripe tomatoes. I made my first harvest on Friday, drizzled with balsamic vinegar and mixed in with burrata cheese which I shared with a studio friend before we went to a small gallery near me. Two small rooms, a stream of people going in and out, it was free. Art museums are harder to arrange at home. They are certainly one of the planned indulgences of travel. We bought three-day art tickets in Berlin, and saw art in every city. But at home, as large as the Art Institute in Chicago is - and it is, it is massive - I have many of the rooms memorized by now. Perhaps next time I will return with a sketchbook. Do a better job of tracking down smaller galleries – and so on.  

I read half of Erwin Mortiers Shutterspeed on my flight back, and finished it my first day home, with a slow realization that I must have already read it, possibly all the way through, when I purchased it - I think in 2015 on a trip to NYC. The graphics on the cover are perhaps, then, more memorable than the text itself. Regardless of my enjoyment of the novel, the act of reading was less laborious than it has been of late. 

I have walked at least four miles every day since returning to Chicago but want to learn to run - time saving relative to walking for a couple hours, some flexibility to do it in the morning before it gets too hot after the effects of my jetlag run out. Yesterday it was raining but I still went, after an apartment viewing fell through, to watch the waves of Lake Michigan crash into the rocks and cement steps that make up the lakeshore. I thought: if I take in Chicago as if it is a new city to me, or a city I love, perhaps living here will be easier. I am good at appreciating the alleyways, the graffiti, the light, but sometimes Chicago feels gray and desolate, its industrial roots mean occasional vacant stretches within the city itself, breaking up life. My experience here, too, is broken up by the plague, the often fleeting or superficial social connections of grad school, and my own personal upheavals. I am trying - started to before I left - to have a true Chicago summer. Everybody here says summer is the best time but I dread the sticky heat. It melts my brain and makes me sick. But I still endeavor to steal some of its spirit for myself; swimming in the lake, attending some of the dozens of farmers markets and festivals that spring up, and eating ice cream. Perhaps these are avenues to fall into conversations with strangers and see the city with new eyes. Bring a camera with me, write about it here. 

 Wish me luck.

oh hi

OH HI!
no  one will see this now that Google+ is dead.

Here's my update:
I AM MOVING TO CHICAGO
I will be attending The Chicago School of Professional Psychology for a PsyD
I went to Chicago three times and Philly twice since I started these interviews at the end of January. Last one was on April Fools day. I put down my deposit on the fifteenth of that same month.

my job is going through the end of JUNE - I am helping in looking for someone to fill my spot - I wounder if that means I can add hiring manager to my resume

I am taking online classes because I didn't have a prereq done for my grad program.
I have been having migraines and think cutting my hair will help.

I am going to Israel in July and then somewhere else. After some back and forth I should be getting my Israeli passport in the mail soon. The second leg of the trip will be with Matt but we haven't planned it yet.

I am coordinating with three girls regarding flatmate living in Chicago. They will all be attending a different psych graduate school which I decided was a worse fit for me, but I met one of the girls through the interview.

My youngest brother is a teenager. My grandmother here for her annual visit.

I will flesh out most of this later.

this is all for now

life as film

Yesterday I got a text from Max, who travels a lot for his new job.
it said:
I am officially a regular at JFK Laguardia airport, gate official recognized me and said, "Hello again Mr Mendelssohn" before he even saw my ticket.

and I thought: this is so great! It's like a scene from a movie. Those small-town feel in a large city scenes the establish a character at the start of a film. It also reminded me of a long conversation Leonid and I had (via letters) about being a 'regular' somewhere; how so many shows are set up around this idea that people meet up at a bar or a coffee shop or comic book store a lot and there's this community there. How little either of us know of establishments that have that. I was edging on that at some point at the 1369 cafe in Central Sq: the people who work there seem cool and there's a lot less turnover than at most places (I even named the blond girl with the dreads in my head, don't know when that happened) . And they recognized me and one even came over to chat one time. I would come three days a week in the morning before work and get the same thing almost every time. And then I moved. But that experience felt like I was filming in a movie, in a really artsy movie that I would maybe like to watch. What other good moments are there like that, where life imitates fiction?

---

The long weekend was taken at it's fullest: on Saturday Matt and I went to Walden pond. He read Walden at Walden Pond. I finished Be Here Now by Ram Dass. We walked around and took a dip in the lake. We talked a bit about Skinner's Walden Two and the like. The kind of day I like. He's spent the whole summer pretending shorts are swim-trunks. I've spent the whole summer without any shorts. Somehow we got by; it is now September.

On Monday Sima and I finished a project we had started the weekend before; that is, we finished bleaching his hair. He just got braces and glasses (Harry Potter style, his choice) and wanted to complete a trio of changes by doing his hair as well. Mama tried at first with a pharmacy kit, but those never work well so I took over after purchasing some more heavy-duty materials at a beauty supply store. He was so excited throughout the process, even biked over to the train station to meet me.

It was also Yosef's birthday, the day before he left to go back to his second year at university. I made him coconut cupcakes; he made everyone Uzbek plov.  I told him "We are both in our 20's!" and he said "you are closer to being 80 that I am!" -- how dastardly! I miss him already.

aquasleep

In case you were thinking; oh wow, T--- did not write for a year, why the sudden post yesterday?
you are misled by my absence here; I wrote letters and even tried to write something for here, but was never satisfied somehow. here is one attempt (from my favorite place - my e-mail draft box):

11/16-17-2017 I woke up early this morning from restless sleep, for the third day in a row and I’m not sure why. I’ve been better about letting things go before bed and falling asleep, sleep through the night. I tell myself “Worrying about tomorrow is not going to help me now or tomorrow. Let it go. Sleep” and this works on some nights. But the last few nights I’m not sure what I’m hanging onto into my slumber which reaches up at four am to say “get up, now is the time. No, you are not rested. Your body wants to stay in bed, your mind wants to return to sleep, but wake up. Wake up” and I do. I spend the next two hours restlessly in bed, dipping my toes into the well of sleep but not being dropped down into the depths to fill up with energy like a bucket fills with water. Yanked up to the surface almost empty to thirsty lips.
after eating some of my pickled tomatoes I remembered: I do not like pickled tomatoes. As a child, I did not like mushrooms, but I told my parents (probably around age six) that I thought I would like them one day. I knew I had the capacity for change, and that is something I am trying to remind myself of now. I made pickled tomatoes, I still do not like them, but other things may change.
I wonder if it startles my mother when I respond to emails she sent me years ago. 48 emails in my inbox not yet responded to, mostly from her and her brother, with only five exceptions. At the crux of it it is because they send me information to review: long stories to read in Russian that I haven't gotten around to, authors to look into but I haven't checked out any books from the library by them, or even glanced at the Wikipedia link - sometimes, that is all the e-mail consists of. A heading and a link to Wikipedia. Sometimes I do get to them - the oldest ones are from 2014. Matt's inbox is the antithesis of this: only two e-mails that are ongoing, everything else archived in as far as I can tell, invisible.
____
I don't have a photo from when I wrote that, so here is some mint that I got to grow from the grocery store

persimmon pudding

Four shots of gin on a Tuesday night. Later he said he doesn’t like it when people act drunk. Too bad.  We parked at a spot and needed three quarters before it became free at eight and I asked people on the street as they passed. The guy who parked behind us had enough for himself and for us too; so simple, tipsy and able to ask strangers time and time again “do you have a quarter? I have two dimes and a nickel”. Walk until we find sushi and tempura and miso soup.

The night before and the night after we go see apartments but I have yet to tell my parents. My mother called and I told my family “I am in Waltham but I can’t come by”. The laundry was too far away in one, the walls too slanted in the other. No rush, we were looking for November, looking for December now. Rain-wet streets and wind and girls not ready to let go of their summer-dress-and-warm-tights combination. 
until next time 


Me and three of my roommates completing a crossword puzzle: we go all out on a Friday night. Alex made persimmon pudding and I helped Raj turn his phone into a walkman for his Halloween costume. Curtis pleased with himself for having gotten: someone who works a lot - a car salesman. Long discussion about housing prices with Adrian. 

This morning is another dreary one, Saturday before Halloween become Halloween, Mama is coming by. I finally picked up a roll of film I shot in the beginning of the summer, so maybe I'll have photos again soon, dear reader.

sticky mango

my mother told me my last post was like this:
"my. mother. says. I. am. not. writing. enough. I am typing. I am not dead"
I burst out laughing.

Humidity had shackled me to my bed, wrapped its heavy arms around me and murmured into my ear until my brain became a homogeneous goop. Heat so close to body temperature my insides merged with the outside. Molasses spilled onto the crevasses: slow thoughts and sticky fingers.

But I try and persevere! Today I met Sar'ka at Haymarket. I bought: blackberries, lemons, radishes, broccoli.
She bought: a box of mangoes, ten count, for four dollars. We went to the water and ate them, slicing the skin with our nails, devouring them with greedy lips, juice running down our arms right to the elbow. Seven mangoes gone as she told me about her semester in India, decadence making our heads spin and bellies yearn in summer heat.

Last weekend on the way to the park I thought about how my past is not my destiny, and by the time I met up with Matt I was almost crying. Kelsey said: yes, those are good thoughts! but also terrifying. He watched as I picked purple wild flowers.

A thunderstorm is coming.

white border

My mother asked me why I haven't been writing lately.
And here's why:
Every attempt in my head of cobbling together words and thoughts about my everyday existence cascades out like a white boarder around an honest black square. The white mundanity simply a frame for everything that needs to be said but I am not yet ready to say; all of my time at the hospital, year and a half, the river that I keep dammed up. Black square white frame, one simply a complement to the other how funny that things can be so simple when there are so many complex horrors in the world. 

But I will try, I will try to take that white border and make it it's own gray world. For no day-to-day is truly banal when taken on its own terms.

This weekend was a long one, fourth of july, fireworks and patriotism. My family usually goes up to the north of Maine to escape it, camping with leeches and moose, mosquitoes and gnats. This time we left too, but not quite so barbarically far away - up to a friends vacation house in Vermont, just us five (both my parents wrote to me: K's house! But they won't be there. Join us?) We walked paths in the woods and I noticed how we always pair up: two people talking and one person wandering in their own thoughts, but switching off. In the morning, my brother - startlingly - in my mother's hat - dutifully washing the dishes. Bickering and wine and hopping on rocks along a river. On the ride back: the sky - a pink so delicate, like sooted paper after a bonfire, print legible, it falls apart at the touch of a finger.

Truth and Beauty

At the very end of my shift on the 31st, a code was called that resulted in three restraints. That was how I exited 2015.

They say your year will go the way you entered it. I entered it with warmth. I was surrounded by people I've known since I was ten. I called my family in Arizona. I messaged those who I wanted to carry with me from 2015 into 2016.

My first conversation of the year was
Eloosha, with a smug look: Huh, doesn't feel very different.
Me, insistent on magic: almost like New Years is an artificial time construct, you jerk.

traditions carried for generations: Oranges or clementines. Champagne. A table laden with food. Ирония судьбы (The Irony of Fate) playing in the background. Saying goodbye to the Old Year before saying hello to the New. Family. A New Years tree. Sparklers and fireworks. Snegurochka and Ded Moroz. Gifts. Love.

First Day of the Year, discussing bunnies as secret illigal pets during college
"I only ever saw two bunnies at Yale, one was named Truth and the other Beauty, and one of them almost certainly overdosed on cocaine" (which one though, is unknown)

I woke up the next morning and knit for a little bit before falling asleep and waking up with everyone else: all of us soon transitioned to one bed, a lump and warmth and promises to try to stay horizontal for as long as possible. Liza said "my new years resolution is to keep my heart over my head for as long as possible". Eloosha said "I think with my hands". I tucked those away.
Wasting time to the fullest with cuddling and music and late brunch. 
The next morning I woke not in my own bed yet again, and read Autobiography of a Corpse (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky translated by Joanne Turnbull, 1920's) while surrounded by sleeping beauties.

I made it back to my apartment eventually, only to go back to the same company for a conversation that lasted hours, a midnight visitation and trying to breathe and be brave.

affections

Let me start in small strokes. I am feeling better than the last time I wrote. The boy who would evaporate on me has evaporated altogether, and the only thing that's keeping me from writing 'gone forever' is that I don't like ultimatums and certainties; believe in eventuality and chance. He lives fifteen minutes away but he has evaporated as he was, as people sometimes do. I've always kept this out of here but here it is anyways, I have changed and so has how and what I write. And so on Friday Paras came from NYC, because he is not one of those people who just goes away. Amy showed up and Adrian and his brother, and we all went to play pool and were so cool, so cool.

Yosef showed up the next day and we drank tea and drank words and eventually realized that we ought to take a walk so we did, circling around Inman Sq. I'd given him a haircut so he looked more civilized and in the evening Mama picked him up and dropped off another wild-haired brother, also seeking a haircut. I'd said to Sima that he could sleep over as a birthday present and that's what we did. I'm glad that I'm fourteen years older than him because if we had shared a womb the way we shared a bed I certainly would have been the smaller twin. I woke up a few times to find myself taking up a third of the bed to a child half my size. In the morning I made him oatmeal and then he read for half an hour for his school homework, reading excerpts he thought particularly funny aloud. I gave him a haircut and we walked to Harvard Sq where he got frozen yogurt - he left content.

perfume

My mother keeps telling me to be kinder to myself. I called her on the phone, after what I thought were tentative plans turned to vapor and left no trace, as if they had not even been tentative. I called her, telling her that it took me two hours to get up out of bed after work and move myself to change and shower, and that the entire time I felt gross because I hate staying in my work clothes, the stink of the hospital still on me, the smell of my least-favorite perfume (necessary to wear if I'm to survive a day filled with the smell of psychotic depression stagnation, or geriatric decrepitude, or withdrawal shakes - but still my least favorite because why would I ruin a nice perfume by wearing it there, putting that complicated misery on a smell I like? One patient kept telling me that I smell like the perfume his mother was buried in, he seemed angry that I kept wearing it and kept refusing zyprexa and anything else). T---, tell yourself that it's okay that you were in bed in those clothes for two hours. You are good. She didn't ask why I didn't love myself more, and she knew that when I said that perhaps I am good because I don't love myself, that it was pointless to carry on that conversation further. This is all to say that my mother is very smart and very loving and that I'm so happy I have her.

Paras moved out last weekend, while I was in NYC (more on that later.) Curtis moved in once I was back already, I was grateful that he had so few boxes (so, I'm sure, were both he and Adrian, as we carried what few things he had up four flights of stairs).

I'm thinking about the things that people take and leave behind. Paras has taken with him a lot: the coffee maker, the sound of him practicing sitar, himself. He has left a few things scattered around the apartment, including two voluptuous plants on the balcony (he knew I would like that), and Amy for a friend. I'm meeting up with her now.

below: I'm trying to draw again. Max and I meet up - in theory every Tuesday, in practice less frequently. We assign homework, we try to hold eachother accountable to keep drawing outside of college. It's hard, but we are trying.

what next?

The first restraint I had to do I didn't feel bad about -- angry males that are just trying to set each other off, even if they are schizophrenic drug addicts, don't make me feel as sad because that behavior, in this case, had little to do with the diagnosis. I think I bruised my rib because about a month later it still hurts, but that night I was running on adrenaline. I joined Paras and Amy after my evening shift had ended, meeting them at Charlie's Kitchen around midnight, and then the three of us went to the The Field. It was a Friday night and for once it felt like it, still wearing work clothes, watching people watching people.

This Friday there was a large goodbye party for a co-worker who left for nursing school, and it feels like everyone who is working here now has either been here forever and is old, or is about to leave, or has already left. We have a new CEO and DON that don't understand that everything they are doing is hurting them (but us first) like trying to increase census without increasing staff first. It means people get mandated (like I did for the overnight last weekend) and are less likely to help patients and more likely to get hurt. Everyone I could learn from is leaving, and that's a problem for me.

I went to the Hakusai exhibit with my family and it was great. It's a totally different type of printmaking than what I've done, and it's strange to realize that this one wave is the face of all East Asian art.

(which is to say, outside the hospital, it is spring and I am happy.)

yellow balloons

Mama and I went to Newbury St with one goal in mind: to get me a hat. The Goorin Brothers shop was filled with people listening to the Kentucky Derby crackling on the radio, drinking bourbon and wearing outfits alluding to some old-Kentucky time. The hat is brown and felt and with a very large wavy brim. My hair does not look silly sticking out from underneath - this was a very lovely birthday gift.

Sima's birthday was on Thursday, so they all came to me. We inflated nine yellow balloons (his favorite color) and we went to Baraka Cafe, which has good food and a chatty Tunisian lady. I told Sima that, since he has so many things, I'm not going to give him a physical gift. Instead, my gift to him is that he will come visit me for a day and sleep over. When Mama asked him what I had given him he said "She gave me love".

blue tape white snow

I got paint at Pills Hardware store and somehow ended up with a VIP card, 10% off with a signature of the owner (I'm much friendlier when I'm tired.) I got Yosef to come and help me evacuate all my belongings, blue tape the floor, paint the walls. I took him out for pad-thai, so I don't think he regretted coming.

I also went with my family to New Hampshire. We went snowshoeing. Sima struggled to get up the mountain but then we slide down most of it on our butts, the longest snow-slide and excruciatingly fun.

Black Cat White Cat (1998, Yugoslavia, Emir Kusturica)

dream --
We had crash landed on another planet, our jar of human stem cells cracking in the process, the culture spilling all over, infecting the air. The creatures that lived in took on the form of what they touched, and so they looked human. But if they touched you, you turned into one of them: empty, imitative, reflectory. And so we were terrified: who is human and who is not? They moved and were watching us, slowly pretending not to hunt.

free chocolate

That same day I met up with Karen in the evening. It was my Monday off (I'd worked the weekend of the play) so I wanted to make the most of it, and for once everyone else had a Monday off too. Full weekends become a very exciting event when you only get every other one - a marked switch from the three-day weekends typical of my college experience.

Tuesday, Wednesday were normal work days: up before the sunrise, done by 3:30. Thursday I got mandated to do a double shift for the first time. I still had work Friday morning and had woken up at 4am for no reason. I was so loopy (and also it was my fourth unit in three days, which meant yet another set of names and rapport to establish) but it went well, though I'm sure the other MHW, who had never worked with me before, thought I was crazy. I told him that during my break my eyes welled up with tears after watching a Cheerios commercial.

I met with Cat and Alana after work that day, and watched The Wolf of Wallstreet once I got back to the apartment (2013, USA, Scorsese, not worth your time). Beer and a movie; classic American way to end the day. Totaling being up for 22 hours for no reason at all.

Saturday morning I got up and Therese (roommate) and I joined her friends at Harvard Sq. where a chocolate festival was going on. Lots of free samples, also lots of people lined up, patiently. We were not patient. We ate the samples we got before a couple hundred people swarmed the square, at which point we left to get afternoon margaritas. This is what classy ladies do - drink margaritas in the middle of the day. And the cherry on top was my parents coming to drop my bike off, and then falling asleep, finally, after they left. (There ain't no rest for the wicked.)

after my parents left and I fell napped, I woke up in time for wine & sparklers

bubble gum

I taught Sima how to blow bubbles with bubble gum. He was so gleeful with his first one, and then right away decided he wanted to blow a bigger one. Are we never satisfied?

Thanksgiving was the usual blur of people and food, different topics spiraling out of control, music in excess, bad poetry with better people. I was told to shut up, and listened as the entire American Black population of the US be called "those fuckers". Watched tiny girls made into superstars while their mothers glowed close by.

Spent a day doing nothing over coffee with Max M. and had margaritas at Sunset grill&tap with Yulka to celebrate my new job, followed by tea and Settlers of Catan, the sleepy settler loosing but I was sober for the ride home and how I wonder about those two girls who died this year at Bard in the hit-and-run. Faces of the past will meld into faces of the future, I want to find an apartment and hope I'll like my new job and arrange my life so that I read and sing and dance and paint and all those other things I consider to be living.
I make it beckon, and then I come.

ice swan feathers

a few weeks ago Mama and I went to see the show Bad Jews. The four actors were pretty good, and though the characters could be misread as caricaturish, I have met people exactly like each of those characters.
There is a Sabbath blessing that fathers do for their children; placing a hand on the head and saying a prayer. I've always liked that moment.
Mt. Washington with my father and his friend ended in a satisfied fatigue. We drove to New Hampshire and stayed the night in a motel, got up at 5, started climbing at 7. Near the top, the wind blew so hard I was afraid I would get blown off, and we couldn't see from one cairn to the next because of the fog. But it was beautiful; the wind had swept the moist air into ice formations, like frozen swan feathers.