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Me
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| From the Pretentious Annals of my Subconscious |
[Apr. 24th, 2008|12:20 am] |
Last night, I dreamt that I was searching fervently for copies of Nabokov books. I queued for hours at the front of what looked like a record shop until I got to ask the clerk, in French, not if he knew where I could find any Nabokov, but if he knew where I could find a copy of the Neutral Milk Hotel's first album (perhaps because it looked like a record store?). Somehow, he knew what I was really after anyway, and he sent me on a covert mission to the secret basement of the shop where there was a whole dusty English book warehouse. The books were arranged alphabetically by colour; don't ask what this means; I don't know. I had to evade capture on my way there, through a dusty labyrinth of stairs and dead-end doorways marked by emergency exit signs. I got there, and it looked like a fallout shelter-cum-mouldy library: the leftover set from a 1950s cold war movie. But, I was much distressed because when I found the 'N' section of this secret book fair, there wasn't any Nabokov at all. There was a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the 'N' section, but it was by marked as having been written by someone called Carter, which I found even more distressing than the lack of Nabokov. I mean, where I am in life if I can't even identify which titles were or were not actually written by Nietzsche? Obviously, I had to Wikipedia it upon waking to placate myself.
Analysis, in short: I really need to get out more.
Extended Analysis (including actual things that happen outside the realm of my dreams): to follow. |
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| The Long-Haul |
[Feb. 27th, 2008|03:49 pm] |
I'm going back to France tomorrow. Once in a while, I slip and say that I'm going 'home' which implies good things I guess, but immediately, it always sounds wrong to me. My mushy little single bed (into which I stopped sinking only after I unpacked and shoved my too-big suitcases underneath, creating accidental support in my search for storage space) in my lonely little tower room will never quite be any genuine kind of 'home' to me. I'll be glad once I'm there (I can't really justify hiding out here for any longer), but the prospect of nearly ten more hours of travel time does not excite me, especially since I always find leaving Edinburgh impossibly hard. Is it even physically possible for a week to pass this quickly? Didn't I just arrive last night?
Tonight should be good (pub quiz in the gay bar!), and I shall fill in the events of the week (not that there were many events to speak of) once I recover from the combined effects of early morning travel and whatever state I drink myself into ce soir. (Oh, hungover plane journeys, will I never learn from you?) I think that beginning tomorrow, I shall be in France for the long haul. Since I arrived in September, I have never spent an entire calendar month there, but unforeseeable events aside, I don't think I'll have much cause to leave France in the next three. I'm ready for that though; these next three months will be the crisis point - a kind of do or die style approach to my French education - in regard to my French language skills; most of what I don't learn in the coming months, I probably never will. I no longer expect to attain absolute fluency, but I'm ready to immerse myself both literally and figuratively in the Franceness, and do the best I can; there will be no more coming up to breathe; next time I taste Anglo air, I will no longer be an ERASMUS. That's a bit of a daunting prospect, so I'm glad that I was allowed the indulgence of this week. |
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| F R E E D O M ! |
[May. 18th, 2007|04:09 pm] |
So, second year is now officially over, which means that I am half done Uni. I would probably have quite a bit to say about the significance of this if I weren't slightly tipsy from Pimm's pitchers, espresso martinis, and a church book sale. And yes, I do mean to imply that the discovery of 50p paperbacks made me a little bit drunk. |
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| Longest Week EVAR. |
[May. 17th, 2007|10:38 pm] |
This week has been impossibly long; it has been possibly the LONGEST week I've had to endure since coming to Edinburgh; this last week leading up to my last exam has actually been TORTURE. I know that, basically, I'm just being a bit of a whiny wretch, but I feel like I've been living in the library for the past month and a half (and for the most part, I have been); I have literally never done so much studying in my life (which, albeit, still isn't THAT much), and this last week it has just been bordering on too tedious to handle. Every night this week I have had to make a conscious effort not to scream, throw my English translation of Madame Bovary across the room, give in, and go out.
On Tuesday, the flat mates and I tried to distract ourselves from the temptations of going out with a bottle of wine and some cheesy TV. We thought that watching something about someone infinitely more pathetic than us might make us feel better, but honestly, it just made us want to throw up. I've always been rather against television censorship, feeling that, especially in America, the things that aren't allowed to be shown verge on ridiculous. I mean, those people whose delicate sensibilities can't handle a bit of language or nudity, should probably put down the pickets and just stick to watching episodes of Murder She Wrote on the Pax channel, right? Well, I still feel that way, and I still feel that, especially where documentaries and news stories are concerned, any inclinations toward censorship should be trumped by an effort to portray things in as realistic and objective a light as possible. This show, however, certainly made me rethink those views at the very least. The three of us were actually just sitting there, appalled, wondering how in hell any of it was allowed on TV. The premise of the show was that this asexual loser of a 26-year-old was to go to a school in Amsterdam to learn how to have sex. It may sound quite harsh to automatically label him a loser based upon only that criteria, but this man's sole source of income was delivering newspapers; he lived in his dad's basement; his grandmother had to take him shopping for clothes. Call me judgmental, but this man had absolutely NOTHING going for him (no wonder he wasn't getting any). We were drawn to the show by the hilarity of the premise (and often, it WAS hilarious), but I don't think any of us were prepared for how mind-numbingly PAINFUL it would be to watch. I saw this man awkwardly grope the naked breasts of an ancient, motherly Dutch woman until he was compelled to stop because it was "too sexual". It was like the real-life version of that old SNL sketch in which Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch(?) are professors / "lovahs" in a hot tub. At the end of the documentary, we literally SAW this man losing his virginity to a dutch prostitute, which, to be honest, just felt to personal a thing to be witnessing, and you know, they were ugly and it was kind of gross; much like a bad accident however, it was impossible to look away. While part of me is awed and glad this sort of thing is allowed on television, part of me wishes she hadn't been subject to it.
By Wednesday night, I was going MAD. I was missing a Pirate Party at the club down the street from us, and I was missing Snow Patrol's semi-secret DJ set at one of my favourite clubs. And, as I believe I've made clear in the past, I HATE missing things that are GOING ON. Furthermore, as I expressed above, I am generally bored, fed up, and would be very happy never to read anything ever again (or at least for the duration of the week).
Tonight, however, I feel lighter, like I'm on the cusp of sweet freedom. It feels good to know that there will be no more long days in the library, no more guilt about not having read enough; my last exams ends at 11:30am tomorrow!
I may have done a lot of whining about the whole thing, but at least I made it through this exam season without leaving in the middle of my exam to have gay sex with my best friend Hollyoaks style. Well, maybe I speak too soon. I still do have one exam to go... |
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| Rockin' the Suburbs. |
[May. 12th, 2007|09:55 pm] |
I've been meaning to write this post for about a week, but as has been discussed previously, I am very bad at blogging things in a timely fashion; in fact I'm not particularly gifted at doing anything in a timely fashion. I have, however, been spending an inordinate amount of time in the library reading French novels I should have read months ago, so I shall exploit that as my excuse and ask you all to indulge me in my tardiness as I return to the heady days of the weeks just past:
I think that, in my world, at least, it is officially summer. Sure, I have two [now one] weeks of exams and revision left, and today, at least it's overcast and chilly [still true], but it FEELS like summer. I may have a million things I should be doing, and lots more things I should be learning, but everything just feels so light and spontaneous that I find it difficult to care. This is going to be my first British summer. As such, I'm sure I'm over-romanticizing everything - indeed, Charlotte wonders why I've elected to stay in rainy, muggy Edinburgh when I could be in sunny America - but, I have this irrational belief that the sun's magical rays will candy-coat each summer day in red and white stripes; everyone will be attired in a Barbour jacket to combat the crisp breeze that rolls across the lush green grass as he sips a refreshing glass of Pimm's, idly watching the pages of his book rustle in the wind, or maybe watching some of his friends playing croquet. There will probably also be some lighthearted polo playing and fox hunting (the fact that fox hunting is now illegal is obviously irrelevant). This may be a rather Catherine Morland-esque attitude for me to adopt, but I think that life as a character in a Jane Austen novel would only augment my ridiculous fantasies.
( Beginnings of the British Summer ) |
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| " I'm gonna knock you down like a patient etherised upon a table" |
[Apr. 25th, 2007|11:25 pm] |
I have just reached that point in the evening at which I have been procrastinating so long that the object of my procrastination has become the same as that which I had been avoiding revising. Behold:
I had been avoiding reading Eliot only to hear him quoted. And then I laughed so hard I knocked a bottle of water into my macbook.
This can only mean one of two things: (1) My geeky streak runs so deep that even in my mindless internet leisure time, I cannot escape my literary aspirations, or (2) the Universe at large thinks I need to study a bit more before my English exam in the morning.
For reasons of personal vanity, the general safety of my macbook, and the sake of my exam results, I am going to go with option two. |
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| On Edge. |
[Feb. 7th, 2007|03:08 am] |
I'm not quite sure what it is, but tonight, I am one jumpy motherfucker. Jumpy to a point at which I literally shudder when I catch a light reflection or two of my own hairs in periphery; my heart is racing at the sight of shadows, the echoes of wind, and the scratching of my own feet, one against the other. It could be an effect of this strange, melancholy day, or irrational fear of our resident mouse, or a manifestation of my reluctance to write this essay whose subject matter I barely grasp (and is it the combined influence of weighty Modernist literature and the 25-year-old in whom I'm not entirely sure I'm interested, or does the whining about essays actually make me sound like nothing more than a stroppy school girl? Because in spite of the fact that what I'm doing here is whining about writing essays, I'm feeling increasingly ridiculous complaining about them when there are so many more pressing things in life -- like cultural apocalypse as a result of Modern depravity, or, you know, actual responsibilities and/or problems). Actually, it's probably just due to the mania of sleep deprivation. Or a skittish attempt to escape general ennui?
Aside from marginal insanity and reluctance to think, however, life is going fairly well. At times, I'd like nothing more than to get on a plane and fuck off to anywhere, but life here certainly has more than it's fair share of wonderful moments. And even though it's all too easy to forget the good things when the wind bites and the work load multiplies, I'm lucky enough to live in a city that provides constant reminders.
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| "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." |
[Jan. 20th, 2007|12:20 am] |
Last night, over bottles of wine at a favourite bar, I recounted to some British friends tales of my "glory days" as a pretentious, idealistic wannabe-rebel of an early teenager. While I tend to discuss that period quite a lot in this space (though I don't really need to -- all you'd have to do is hit the 2001 button in my archives and you'd be drowning in my self-righteousness), it's really not something I like to brandish about with any regularity in conversation. This is mainly because I like to keep a pretense of sanity for the sake of my social life, and things like this don't say "mentally stable" to me so much as they say "too much time alone to obsess over musical theatre." While that is only one example of the numerous reasons I am glad that I am now not quite so extreme (read: vile) as the person I was then, tonight, I discovered one way in which that incarnation was superior to the current: poetry.
I don't know how or when it happened, but some time during the past five years, I grew frightened of poetry. I know for a fact that I used to enjoy poetry; I used to write it; my haughty little 14-year-old sod of a self used to read a Shakespearean sonnet every night before she went to sleep under her Ikea-produced mosquito net. Yet (most noticeably in this past school year during which I've been forced by curriculum to read an uncomfortable amount of poetry) I've come to the realization that now, the very thought of approaching a poem is inordinately daunting. I have a mental block where it comes to verse, and amongst other things, that makes me a very bad student of literature indeed. I've been easing back into it, but the word "poem" still makes me a bit queasy. Tonight, however, that changes. Tonight, my brash, self-satisfied, fearless inner-geek returns to me, and in the early hours of the morning, as we wade through The Waste Land, with every ounce of unabashed pretension we can muster, we proclaim 2007 our year of poetry. It very well may be cringeworthy, but it will definitely be more rhythmic than last year. |
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| Romantic Irony: Not Quite So Bad As A Medical Student Chasing Me With A Brain-Transplant Device |
[Dec. 6th, 2006|02:39 am] |
When I was five years old, I attended Catholic Kindergarten in a trailer on the campus of what was then Holy Family Community College (now, Holy Family University). I hated it for a whole host of reasons.
One day in the spring, the nuns who taught us took us on a "field trip" to the college cafeteria. As we walked there, two by two, we saw dozens of college students lying about languidly on every available chair, bench, and windowsill, reading voraciously and looking generally nervous. "They have exams," the nuns said in vague explanation, and like so many things to which they referred (Jesus, the concept of prayer, President Bush I, leprechauns, the song "Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus), I had no idea what they were really talking about. So, immediately, I imagined that the students were about to be physically examined on cold steel operating tables, as involuntary subjects to inhumane medical experiments. For several subsequent years, I was consumed with fears of what would be done to me during these horrible exams when I finally got to college.
Well, fourteen years later, here I am, crashed out in the library for hours on end, reading frantically, and I think, finally, I get what they meant when they grimaced and said "exams." And while it isn't what I was dreading, it certainly isn't pleasant. |
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| Why Am I In The Library? A list |
[Dec. 5th, 2006|12:54 pm] |
I am in the library because:
1. The saxophone player at the top of my street has learned two new songs: Wind Beneath My Wings and Celene Dion's My Heart Will Go On.
2. There are too many distractions in my flat for me to force myself to concentrate: Internet, tea kettle, television shows in which antiques are sold.
3. With Terrance at home, Steph in England, and Charlie at the library, being in the flat feels too much like solitary confinement.
4. Secretly, I love it. |
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| My Struggles with Time |
[Dec. 2nd, 2006|07:24 pm] |
So much revision to do; so many books to read; so tempted to go to the pub tonight so as not to break the going-out-every-other-night drinking pattern I seem to have revived from First Year.
I'm loving Scotland more than ever, but I'm missing the homeland more than ever too. I can't believe another semester is over already, and I just wish that everything would stop for a second, or at least that my brain would start functioning properly again. I'm home two weeks from today, and and I'll be back in Edinburgh for New Years two weeks thence. And while I'm listing my whereabouts, I suppose it's time I announce that I'll be spending the 2007/2008 school year in Montpellier because I've decided not to be a pussy and drop the French like I had thought I might. I am so excited about everything, but a little bit frightened too. Afraid, perhaps, that it will all collapse. But I suppose that's the price I pay for living a life I love so very much.
I'd apologize and explain it's an Emo time of year, but it feels like EVERY time of year is an Emo time of year. Argh. Back to Sartor Resartus, I guess. |
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| Where's the intervening voice of Carwin NOW? |
[Nov. 12th, 2006|11:25 pm] |
Dear Concentration:
What the fuck? You've been seriously slacking this week. To be honest, you're almost solely responsible for letting down Team Graduating From University with your consummate inability to think about anything marginally academic for longer than five minutes. Get with it, please; we have essays to write.
Remonstratively Yours,
The Rest of Melissa |
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| But all I have is gin (and I rather think I need it!) |
[Oct. 15th, 2006|04:05 am] |
So, it's four-thirty in the morning the day before the day before my first English essay of the year is due, and in efforts to be more responsible this year, I've decided to pull my all-nighter one night early so that editing is possible. Plus, all of my flat mates are at home for the night for various reasons, and having the flat to myself means I can read the horribly boring feminist literary theory aloud to myself, and if I'm talking, I'm far less likely to fall asleep. Or scream. So, I'm sitting in the living room, playing music, drinking tea, typing/babbling on about the virtues I don't even believe Mary Wollstonecraft possesses, and everything is going fairly well considering I'm spending my Saturday night writing about something I'm not entirely sure I understand. But then, I hear noises. Living on a main road, however, there are always lots of noises. Especially at night when the drunks are out, but this isn't bagpiping, and it isn't a slurred selection from the Timberlake canon. And, living in an old building, there is always lots of creaking; besides, the walls are thin. Whatever. Feminism. Enlightenment. Reason. MOUSE! Right out from under the couch, near my naked feet. 3% cute, 97% scary. Besides, that mangy little creature of the forrest could be carrying the Bubonic plague; historically, this city has had its issues with the plague.
So now, I've locked myself in my room, towel shoved under the door like a 14-year-old pot head just so I don't start hallucinating whiskers on my floorboards. I'm actually much less freaked out about this than I'd have expected I would be. I am still, however, jumping at the movement of my own shadow.
My dad's advice on this? Accidentally spill a pint of Guinness and then move in for the kill. |
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| A History of Sex |
[Jan. 27th, 2006|04:16 pm] |
My English Lit lecture today had the same title as this post. At one point, the lecturer announced in his English accent, "I'm going to show you a video now. I couldn't find the original; this is the 1993 remake or something." He then proceeded to play us the music video for the YMCA by the Village People. Afterwords, he said, "In case you didn't notice it, there was a homosexual subtext there." And then he did a Derridian literary analysis of Village People using such exciting literary terms as Signifier (leather pants and handcuffs) and Signified (homosexuality). |
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| Time with my essays |
[Dec. 9th, 2005|03:45 am] |
I almost enjoy nights like this. Long, slow, intimate nights, entered with apprehension and the anxiety that I'll never finish, that when I do finish, I'll have produced shit. But, here I am right in the middle of the silent darkness, finally settled into my keys, and I know that within hours I'll be finished, before I blink, it'll be printed and handed it, for good or ill, that all worries, concerns, perhaps that I should have started days ago, will finally be abetted. It feels nice to be sitting here, literally IN THE MIDDLE of my essay, drinking tea. I know it's awful, I know I should have started yesterday, at least, but this is the only way I can get things done. It almost feels like treadmilling -- checking the word count like I would the time, convincing myself I'm nearly there. And perhaps I am, for all the good it will do. Here I am practically writhing in analogies and descriptive prose, when I should be going on about Derrida or feminists or something important that will up my word count. So, I continue. Approximately 1000 words to go! Did I say this was nice? I meant it was TORTURE. |
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