Trams and festivals and irons!

After a long day's journey into night (hehe), I have finally reached my desired destination, as they say - ie, Prague, my birthplace and perennial hometown, despite the fact that I now live in a suburb thousands of miles away. It has been an eventful day - I secured a tramcard, that symbol of the true local (foreigners can't have one and must buy their passes by the day) and proceeded to try to remember not to get run over by the behemoths as they thundered their way down the streets of the Old Town. Due to unpredictable traffic patterns caused by bike messengers, Pegeuots, trams and various other debris that litter the streets in these parts, I also participated in a game of "catch the twentytwo tram" (read: fullon 200 metre sprint across the Moldau that left me gasping for air) and retained the flush of victory for quite some time afterwards.

I have also secured employment at a boutique in Old Town that sells handmade clothes. The minimal pay is more than made up for by the amazing location and great premise of the shop. I start on Monday and I'm very excited. In the afternoon-evening I went to a free folk concert in a park on the other side of town and listened to bluegrass-folk on the hill, Gambrinus in hand. Ah summer.

In an effort to make myself useful, I did some ironing in the evening. Why anyone would invent a steampress iron, or clothes that would require a steampress iron, is beyond me. I am relatively self-sufficient usually and so my laundry often gets done by me, but usually it involves washing, drying, and if I'm feeling ambitious folding and putting away. Irons do not have any stake in the game. They're pointy and hot and make wrinkles while obliterating the original wrinkles and meanwhile I'm standing there going how many freaking panels does this simple buttondown have?! And why are they all different shapes?! Forget Yves Sant Laurent - props to anyone who can put together something as complicated as a buttondown collared shirt.


The 22 tram, about to get in a fight with me. You are going down my dear.

embark on the adventure home

In a few hours, I'm off to the Old Continent. I am surrounded by half-packed suitcases and my thoughts are trivial - where is my battery charger? are suspenders superfluous? why didn't I do my laundry? As blase as my attitude seems, I'm certain that at least subconsciously I am rather excited. Journeys mean new epochs, and I've always assigned them symbolic meaning, whether that's right or not.

I used to be a very goal-oriented person. I'd write out schedules and plans to no end, and while I've mellowed out considerably over the past year, I still take a change in pace as an opportunity to resolve to accomplish something. Hence my plans for this summer:
-read Ulysses
-read the Desolation Angels
-write something useful
-take pictures
-run every morning
-live simply

Hopefully I'll be able to report back from my travels with wild tales of half-crazed gypsy boys.

Well, we'll just have to improvise.

There's a lot to be said for literature - in fact, usually literature speaks for itself, so others don't actually have to say anything for it. There's a lot to be said for plays, and speeches, and dramatic readings, and all that happens when people take it into their minds to organize their thoughts and present it to others in a coherent fashion.

That said, there's also a lot to be said for spontaneity, which is the opposite of organization. What happens when you take spontaneity and present it to others in a coherent fashion? You get improv.

I recently saw my first live improv - at a tiny theatre in New York, for five dollars a show, and I was utterly blown away by the brilliance and wit. The other option was to see a Broadway play for about sixteen times the amount, and I'm certain that I enjoyed myself more this way.

An improv show goes somewhat like this:
-the audience shuffles in.
-the performers shuffle on stage, which is usually bare.
-the performers ask for a word from the audience (in our case, it was "marshmallow" "Rhode Island" and "Prohibition")
-the people on stage start making up random crap, weaving in and out of situations and assuming dozens of roles in the space of an hour, acting out skits, ranting, cracking jokes, and making fools of themselves, without having ever rehearsed any of it before.

I think that if the performers aren't very good, an improv show could get boring rather fast, but we were lucky enough to stumble onto sheer brilliance. Frankly my writing skills do not do any of this justice.

If you're ever in Manhattan, be sure to check out the Magnet Theater at 254 W. 29th Street. It'll be worth it. I promise.

draw conclusions on the wall

The wonderful thing about cities is the raw vitality they exude. Every city is full of people who are collectively full of ideas, views, positions, manifestoes, agendas. Of course, this means conflict, and crime, and lots of opportunities to get screwed over by your fellow humans. But it also means street art! Street art from New York.


Scrawled, probably in Sharpie or the like, on a construction site. Trite, say some. Poignant, say I.

I have no idea what this means, but it's graffiti that has the word serf in it. Serf's up! (I know many, many bad serf puns.)

Advertise your store using spray paint. Heck yes.

What? It's so orange! It makes no sense! I like it.

Ok, so the imagery is overused. But still good. Better than what I could do with a can of spraypaint, which would look pretty much like the symbol once used by the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince...

In the surroundings (decrepit old lot) somewhat fitting. I also like the little vampire figure under him that says "Reality Bites", even though I dunno if you can see it. Also fitting, but I'm not sure precisely in what way.

Elvis plus Uzi equals Kinda Cool. Actually, I hate Elvis, despite all he did for music.

All pictures taken by yours truly. I feel inordinately proud.

The Drawer's Condition on November 38, 1961

Is there anything emptier
than the drawer where
you used to store your opium?
How like a black-eyed susan
blinded into ordinary daisy
is my pretty kitchen drawer!
How like a nose sans nostrils
is my bare wooden drawer!
How like an eggless basket!
How like a pool sans tortoise!
My hand has explored
my drawer like a rat
in an experiment of mazes.
Reader, I may safely say
there's not an emptier drawer
in all of Christendom!

-Leonard Cohen

Following my school's prom (a marvelous, if quintessentially high-school, experience), I traveled to New York with a dear friend. It was needless to say a marvelous time, as we had a knack for finding ridiculously cool cheap thing after ridiculously cool cheap thing, from street fairs with edible flowers to five-dollar underground improv. As a result my head is exploding with impressions, so fodder for blog posts is secured for a bit. This poem is from the Selected Poems of Leonard Cohen from 1956-1968, which I found outside the Strand selling for a dollar. This was the first page I opened to, and I must say I found the poet's plight rather funny, which only goes to show what a callous and unfeeling person I am.


Leonard Cohen, yet another man I would totally go for if only he lived in my era...

Is this art?

I went to an art museum with a friend, and some of the exhibitions made me wonder.

For instance, this spiral. It looks sort of cool, but is it art? In case it's illegible, the sign reads "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths". Is the artist being ironic, talking about mystic truths by way of the neon of strip malls and 711s? Is he serious, with the whole "life is art, art is life" mentality? Does he consider himself an artist? Is he being pretentious? I don't understand, which is why it's probably good that I'm not an art critic.

The lights in this photograph can represent either isolated surges of hope surrounded by the bleak loneliness of existence or the short clarity that is human life as compared to the vast stretches of infinite time that surround each lifespan.

Or maybe I accidentally took a picture while watering my plants at night. You pick.

This is my last Monday

of compulsory schooling. From now on, when I go to school on Mondays, it will be because I want to, and because I'm paying for it.

This realization makes me painfully aware of how far I have to go to become self-sufficient, and it's making me feel ridiculously inadequate.


Incidentally, the word Monday gets its name from the moon, because calendars were set by lunar cycles at one point. In Indian languages, Monday is Somvar. Soma is the moon. Soma is also the drug in Huxley's Brave New World. This fact makes me chuckle with its strange interconnectivity. Monday, drugs. Drugs, Monday. Yes?

The Russians, meanwhile, named Monday понедельник (transliterated as poniediélnik), or "the day after the day we don't do anything, that day being Sunday, which is the day of rest, which is the day of no doing". Most of the Slavs followed suit, I guess, since in Czech it's pondělí, which also translates as "the day after Sunday".

Linguistic lesson courtesy of Wikipedia.

ho hum. life.

I should be thrilled about life right now, and to an extent I am, but I can't help feeling a sort of lethargy. To an extent it's a switch in schedules - I'm no longer beating myself up two hours a day, which in turn means my endorphin levels aren't at their normal through-the-roof status. I keep having epic plans, like writing down my life dreams, trying to do fifteen pullups or going for Buddhist meditation at six in the morning, and then deciding that laying in bed and reading Terry Pratchett is a viable alternative. So it happens that my greatest accomplishment in life has been outsmarting iTunes and burning my music. Fight the man, people.

Thus it came to be that I found old Donovan. Donovan is fairly awesome. Unabashedly poetic without wearing tight pants, clearly not exactly cutting-edge at this point, but why would that matter? Our culture judges people rather harshly by what they listen to, and I'm not exactly innocent of this- mention Rihanna or Panic at the disco (I absolutely refuse to put the little punctuation mark there) to me and I will scoff at you like the conceited snob that I am, but essentially I guess it comes down to music that you like and want to listen to, and I like and want to listen to Donovan right now. That said, I couldn't find To try for the sun on the interwebs, save this youtube version that some couple in calgary made for the birth of their grandson, but it's really not bad, and sunsets are kitschy because they're beautiful. Unabashed poetic, yes?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeqEnbxc3XM

why won't hyperlinks work for me?

And now I'm going to go lay in bed reading for pleasure again. Why? Because I can.

Candide and Huck Finn

Read Candide. Do it. You will laugh more than you thought possible and will subsequently be appalled at the things you are capable of laughing at. The story involves red sheep, syphillis, philosophy, biglugs, and unruly pirates. I am not going to pretend to be a literary critic or even literate, but as a complete plebian I had obscene amounts of fun reading it.

After I finished reading Candide, I went fishing for the first time yesterday. Illegally, with a stick and some line, kickin it old school Huck Finn style. I can understand the merits of sitting outside, contemplating the ripples and joking with one's compatriots about the utter pointlessness of it all. This is pretty much what life is supposed to be like, I feel. I'm grateful to have snatched a few halcyon moments to grin about when I'm a crotchety old lady sitting on the front porch knitting dishrags for the neighbourhood annual alfa-alfa pickling competition. Actually, that doesn't sound all too bad, and thus I venture forward into life with perennial optimism.

All is for the best.

Dear Random French Girl,

You are way cool. Be my friend?

Putting effort into writing things down is rather difficult of late, as I have these things called AP tests which require me to write copious amounts about subjects that I don't really care that much about. The fact that I don't really study means I'm not exactly stressed about them, but it doesn't mean I'm going to write anything here. And so, to conclude:

"The secret of eternal youth is arrested development."
-Elanor Roosevelt