Common Fire

Oh also I watched Psycho with Hannah, there was a screening at Preston for some class. It really made an impression on her (as much as The Seventh Seal, now that's a big deal). She buried her face in my shoulder at some point, I held her until I figured it was safe for her to watch.
"you're cute" I told her.

And Clea visited Bard. She's supposed to be in India because she got a job there (she visited Shivalika and fell in love) but she's having visa problems so she dropped by Bard since she's still in the US.
It's been two weeks since and she's still having visa issues, so she's been working over Skype and doing very strange hours (working on India time).

Jack has been fairly absorbed by his political life, he even did a project over the summer which he wrote about . I visited him at the co-op he lives at, called Common Fire. It's mostly Bard students living there right now, but not exclusively, and the couple that started that specific one has moved on to another bigger project. One of the older guys, Tripp, said that there used to be more diversity in terms of age, and that two children have been born in the house. They've gotten a decent amount of recognition (especially for being green), but from my stand point: a lot of the stuff there is donated, so it's a nice mishmash of odd chairs, three refrigerators (they order food in bulk), and nonuniform kitchen ware (like at my house). The floors are wooden and the ceilings are high, the light is warm and the kitchen is very large. There's a wild cat they call Stealth who hang's out on their porch a lot, even though he fends for himself, and lives outdoors during the winter as well. They are out of the way, so they have a fair bit of land, and no neighbors and the parking is far from the house as well. They switch of on dinner duty, though for the day I came no one had signed up (a fluke). It was nice, though the location requires one to rely on a car for transportation.

Really, I'm here.

I am back at Bard, the land of chain smokers, sprinkled in anorexic girls and boys with bouncy walks. 

Social Stuff: This Friday I went to Smog with Amanda and Sumedah. There were a ton of people, but I left after an hour, a little after 12. Seriously though, so many people, many freshmen, it doesn’t matter.

Thursday I came over to Hannah’s dorm and we had dinner, after I had gone to the club fair and danced with Lila to help recruit for the Bard Science Journal (which I just signed up for) (this is where I got my face painted last post-by the art collective). At some other points in time various other similar things have happened; nail-painting and looking at peoples rooms before and after they were decorated.  

The weekend before that I went back to suburban Boston to photograph a family friend’s bar mitzvah party. I talked to a freshman on the train there, stayed a night in NYC with another family that was going to the bar mitzvah and then stayed a night at home after the party, bringing back to Bard a small suitcase full of stuff I forgot the first time around (travel mug, my neuroscience textbook…) The same family drove me back to NYC, we had lunch and then I took the subway->rail->bus back to Bard. 

The weekend before that I went to Amanda/Lila/Hallie's house in Tivoli for dinner, and then we went to Liz’s birthday party in Redhook, and some other party after that which had already died by the time we got there, we stayed for one song, which happened to be one I like (Crystallized by the XX).

I also went to the budget defense forum where clubs vied for more funds. I hadn’t gone to one before. This is how it works; first there are the friendly amendments. Clubs come up on stage (this was set up outdoors) and ask for money, saying what their purpose is and how much they are hoping to get. Other clubs will donate: “5 dollars from the boffing club” “20 dollars from the Bard belly-dancers collective”  “5 pounds from the half-naked lunch club” (yes, these are all real).  My favorite one of these came for the Bard Moderator (a semi-annual sexuality and body politics magazine that has writing, art, and photographs): “Two years ago the Bike Co-op donated 200$ to the Moderator in exchange for an alley-cat naked bike photo shoot. This photo shoot never happened. We now donate 15$ to uphold that contract” After that go the hostile amendments where club heads attack other clubs, saying they have too much money, and that that money should go to them (this actually didn’t last very long). 

Oh! also at the very start of the year I went to the Amanda Palmer and Grand Theft Orchestra show. It was fun, they even sang a song I know from when she was the Dresden Dolls.

trying to get used to being around people so much. even when I'm alone at Kline, it's still filled with faces I recognize from just being at such a secluded school.

Wet Socks

I'm not bruised, I just had my face painted.

I am tired but I feel like I have neglected writing. Here is what I wrote on Tuesday:

The electricity is out (this isn’t surprising at this point, it’s expected). My shoes are wet and so are my socks and feet. I should do something about that.

This is the last week of interim driving, so it’s the last week that I have three shifts (Tuesday am and pm, Friday am). Weirdly enough, Tuesday am has proved to be by far the most active of any I have had, I swear I’ve gotten more calls in that shift alone just in these three weeks than in the previous semesters combined. The first set of calls were worse: I hadn’t yet realized that the ac in the car doesn’t work (and therefore doesn’t work for defogging windows,) it was dark, and my ability to small talk with passengers was at zilch after the summer, which made me too eager to get back to campus- I even turned a stoplight early, which was embarrassing. Tonight, as Adrienne nicely put it “the weather is WACK.” It’s been raining all day and there is a ton of debris on the road. To top it off, three of the stop lights don’t work, at all. They aren’t even flashing to signal their brokenness, so I at first I just missed one and felt that something was wrong. Bard was reasonable about it though, they made sure I was okay driving in this weather, and gave me a TLS van, which is much nicer (and safer) than the Jeep we use for ED. It has a working AC and the headlights aren’t dim. Starting next week I will have the Saturday PM shift.

--

Tomorrow morning I will be rested. If not, I can always take a nap! I have no classes on Friday, and maybe I'll go out tomorrow night.

Matt

I welcome the rain. The humidity and heat have been steadily edging into my brain, with only one brief reprise for a few hours one night this entire week. I welcome the rain, though of course it’s not just rain, we got an e-mail with a tornado warning, and the light just flickered and the thunder was a crack right by my ear.

The semester is off to a good start, but I will write about that later.

The Sunday before I left home, I went to climb Mt. Washington with Папа, Yosef, and his best friend. The peak is at 6,288 ft (1,917 m) and the highest wind recorded there was 231 mph (372 km/h), which was the world record until a few years ago. For me these numbers only make sense when Папа told me that the air is thinner at the top, though unlike many of the mountains he's climbed, I can actually manage this one. The day we went wasn’t too hot or too cold, and there was hardly any wind. Папа  says he has never seen such perfect conditions there, ever. Granted, he has a tendency to climb it when there’s snow. The mountain does tend to attract clouds though, that’s true. 

I hadn’t climbed the mountain since I was nine, and then we had arrived at the top soaking wet from the rain and took the last train down. Last time I remember Папа bought me hot cocoa at the top, which burnt my tongue as I too-eagerly tried to drink it. It was strange arriving at the top this time, because many of the people up there had driven, and we still had ways to go before the end of our journey.This time I bought a banana and stole sips of cocoa from my brother.

On the way down, when there was only about twenty minutes left to go (we had started around eleven in the morning, and it was near eight, the sun was setting) we bumped into two other hikers, an old man and a young man. My dad started talking to the older guy, probably in his 60’s, and we soon left them behind, catching up to the two 13-year-olds that had decided to run off ahead. 

The guy I ended up talking to was twenty-something, from Oxford, MA. Shorter than me, with braces and a beard and he introduced himself as Matt at the end of our conversation. He has a job painting lines on the road. His father and grandfather had done the same, and he likes it, says it pays well. In the winter, he gets laid off and gets unemployment until the weather clears up and he can paint lines again. He was planning on staying in his jeep for night and hiking another peak in the morning. He turned out not to be the adopted Russian son of the 60-year-old man, and in fact had just met the man half an hour ago. The old man had looked slightly confused so he was walking down with him and was going to give him a ride to his car, since it wasn’t on the main lot. We were talking about New England* and skiing came up and he said something about being a loser for not knowing how to ski, which was absurd, and he was looking forward to moving to Maine (his job moves him around, you can’t paint road lines in the same place all the time) because of the solitude and mountains, and how photography allows you to remove yourself from a social scene without actually leaving it. We talked about psychology and orphans and the fact that he likes to go to the Middle East café in Cambridge for music concerts, though he generally shies away from the city (and, it seems, people in general.) 

Eventually my dad came down carrying the old man, whose legs had given way from exhaustion.

Matt went to get his jeep and drove the old man to his car. And that was that, and it left me thinking, yet again, about how narrow a world I live in, and how few people I meet.

*fun fact: when I was little I thought New England was just another name for the USA. The fact that my dad’s map of New England was different from what other maps of the USA did cause a moment of pause for me, even then.

Quitting Self-Sustained Propaganda

I made a list of things I haven’t packed yet (letter writing materials, nail scissors, German dictionary, tripod, cloths in the laundry machine...).  

Tonight is my last night home. I just kissed Shimon’s soft cheek goodnight but he’s still talking to me through the bookshelf which helps to mentally separate the room into two. He’s asking me why Yosef and I speak in English to each other so often, reprimanding us – это вообще то неправильно, and he’s right, but I care more about what Yosef has to say, and in Russian I just end up correcting his grammar every two seconds and we both get frustrated with me. 

The rest of this post is pre-start-of-academic-year ranting.

Last year I wrote “I feel like I'm freaking out more about college this year than I did last year. Which makes about as much sense as a balding monkey.” I know that I will not flunk any classes, I know that if I forget to pack something there is a post office both here and there. I am not freaking out.

In Berlin I was happy because I went to museums, which was both something I really enjoy and makes me feel accomplished, but also something not incredibly hard to do. After I had my dose of organized culture, I would go on with the rest of my day. 

Which makes me want to continue setting realistic, satisfying expectations, but I’m afraid I’ll fall back into the habit of setting ten goals as high as the moon. Quitting the habit might be hard, like it’s hard for a smoker to quit smoking at the place where he has smoked for the past eleven years. Bard is then on of the many places where I have "smoked". I’ve had the idea ingrained in me for a long time; that I should be in some pursuit of intellectuality and everything else too, and that this equates to happiness. I may now understand that that is not the case, but understanding and to act on that understanding, to make sure my entire being is on the same page with that concept…that sometimes seems almost as hard as reaching ten goals set as high as the moon.  

I will be enrolled in Painting I, Drawing II, Abnormal Child Developmental Psych, A Haunted Union; Germany and the Reunifications of Europe, Chamber Singing, a Photography Tutorial, and a Neuroscience Lab. I will continue doing Emergency Driving, I signed up to volunteer to mentor freshman, and I convinced Eames to do Argentinian Tango with me.  I also want to write and go to the clay club room and read for myself and try to at least not forget German and have a social life.  

This can go two ways, or more, but here are two. One is that I freak out from all the stress and everything I am not obligated to do goes by the wayside, and I unhappily start equating myself with school work, unhappily because I am unlikely to get straight A’s and so numerically, on paper, I will not be ‘fulfilled’. The other option is that I will structure my time well, and, in having time to myself, but not so the type of time where I just sit around hopelessly ruminating, and not doing what I want to do, just sitting there, and that when I don’t do absolutely everything perfectly I don’t let the cockroaches inside me grow by eating me, guts first.  

Note that I described both options using the negative. It is hard to separate out 'happy' as being something other than 'not unhappy'

There is this hope that I will somehow be able to ‘realize’ myself but of course that is simply the continuation of the same self-sustained propaganda. I cannot wait to become who I am. My life is now.

Wish me luck remembering that. 

breathe

Art Supplies

Yesterday I went to Central Sq and met up with Sara. We went to Weirdo Records and bought 6 cd's for a grand total of $6.50. And then I dragged her to do my art supply shopping. We had tea at her place.

 

I accidentally bought 84inch canvas instead of 48inch, so I have to exchange that. I still need: containers for mineral spirits and paint (tin-cans and such), palette paper, 2-inch masking tape, size 11 xacto knife with blades, 4 sheets of 140lb cold-press watercolor paper 22*30inch. 

 

After meeting up with Max M. and making very dense bread, I went to "Mediterranean Grill" in Newton with Nastya. I had a good time convincing people who are steeped in worry and adulthood to dance to live Thursday-night music.
Friday morning  Max and I had a brunch picnic:  I made blini and he brought honeydew melon and coffee, we sat in the shade until the ants found us.

Tuesday consisted of a walk around the Copley area with Karen, talking about our brothers and outlooks on life. I switched cities and met up with Eloosha at Harvard Sq. We sipped our teas at Tealux, me reading his copy of Invisible Cities, him continuing his Hopscotch project.
We then met with Kostya and a his friend that was visiting from Moscow, and then back to Eloosha's place, where Ben joined us to watch Melancholia.

I'm finally waiting for college to start again, I feel a bit dumb not studying. 

movies before Berlin:
A Serious Man with Max T and Yulka
A Single Man with Yulka and Valya, after which we went to IHOP and slept at Valya's
Promethues with Max M

fuzzy white caterpillars

The first day we pitched tents and raised tarps as it started to rain. I listened to the rain come down, lashing against the blue plastic so that it was hard to hear people raising their voices to speak.

The last night there were eighteen people sleeping in a ten-person-tent, like sprats. We smelled like smoke from the campfire, staying up until five with our voices and an acoustic guitar. Russian bard songs rose from everyone’s lips, and songs written after the 70’s only from the lips of those who don’t consider themselves adults. The port and boxed wine went quickly at night. By day we listened to lectures on ageing, social & neural networking, and the history of China. The younger kids rehearsed their plays: the Odyssey, Winnie-the-Poo, and Ciao by Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon. Thousands of photographs throughout the week resulted in a mystical stop motion video.

Before arriving we had gone to watch a theater production of “A Month in the Country” and in the middle of the week we went to Mass MoCa to see the exhibits there. For the first time I felt like the adults where taking us more seriously in conversation, and I spoke more to the younger generation as well.

Eloosha was jetlagged from Paris and I woke up early, so we did yoga in the grass and swam in the lake. I spoke about writing to Valya and Sasha, and about change, Liza recounted her drama for the year, and Kirill some of his. Esther surprised us by appearing on her birthday, a gift. We played zoo and drank tea and ate oatmeal. I only looked at the stars one night, and not for long; I only saw two shooting stars. The campground was full of fuzzy white caterpillars and bright orange salamanders.