Moving Day

 Well, it's my last night here.  I spent the entire day with Yohann, helping him move to his new place.  Jason joined us around 5pm and we moved my stuff to my interim place.  We went back to Yohann's and drank French champagne to celebrate.  Then we watched Wall-E.  :-D

Funny how quickly you can become attached to a place.  Even a room like this one which was never really ideal.  It's a good room, warm and spacious, so there's no need to complain.  But with only one window, albeit big, that faces onto the building itself and not the sky, well, it was often dark.  No direct sunlight, only one corner I could stand in and see the trees.  The building wasn't great either, and I often went a week or so without seeing another human being in the hallways or entrances.  A somewhat dark and lonely place.  And I am leaving it.  :-)

Again, I have nothing to complain about, but I do feel like I'm starting over here.  It helped, I think that it wasn't so cold today, and the sun was shining, and Yohann's apartment is big and open and awesome.  He has a huge patio, and there's a TRAP DOOR that leads to his bedroom!  A trap door, people!  Sigh.  I know I'll find a similarly awesome place, but man, trap door bedrooms are a dream...

After tonight I won't have internet at night.  There are various cafes around where I can do some day time surfing, but when things close at 5pm, I'm cut off.  My interim location has no internet.  This is not a comfortable thing, but I bet you I can survive unplugged!  ;-P

Maybe I'll update during the day, or maybe I never will.  Who knows.  So, until we meet agiain.

Almost There

Finding pictures online to put in my blog is too hard.  Takes forever to find what I'm looking for, and then it's always entirely too big.  Too much effort.  So I'll probably go back to boring pictures of myself.  Or nothing at all.

I had a pretty great dream that I went into a café in Leiden and found that my entire family was eating there AND Neil Gaiman was in the corner talking to his agent or publicist or something.  I played it cool, but soon my whole family was talking loudly and laughing and joking with everyone else in the tiny café, so Gaiman finally noticed us.  I managed to stick my elbow in my apple pie, and he gave me a $10 bill to buy a new piece.  I hugged him and thanked him for writing my favorite novel.  Haha, not much of a mysterious dream this time!  :-P

I woke up this morning early to get the key from Janos, who will be my interim flat mate.  I then spent the day, doing stuff.  I guess I got my stuff all packed and ready to go.  And I also almost got my paper finished.  I wrote about 500 words and was really struggling to write any more, so I thought, "I'll finish this sentence and then go to the library to write something fictional for a while."  And then I wrote 600 words, and just need to double check some footnotes and write a conclusion and I'm golden.  Funny how that works.

I sold my tv, and felt entirely too much pain at separating from it.  It's back to a tv-less existence for me.  It's funny how I survived for 5 years without watching more than a Discovery special on Egypt or a football game during the World Cup (ok, LOTS of football games) and suddenly I'm missing my Law and Order.  Oh well, I can write my own episodes if I need to!

So now, it's 9pm and I'm going to bed.  I'm going to read a little (The Graveyard Book, again), and I might just write a little bit.  I'm hoping to start up a re-telling of the story of Selene and Endymion from the perspective of an annoyed moon goddess who just wishes the stupid boy would wake up from his dreams of her and realize she was there.  :-P  (Ok, I admit that in most tellings of the story it was Selene who begged Zeus to bespell the kid so he wouldn't grow old.  But my version makes for more interesting emotion.)

The Lady of Milk and Honey

Neil Gaiman is my favorite author.  A friend of mine read a bit of my fiction and insisted I read everything Gaiman had ever or would ever write.  I listened, and read American Gods, which immediately became my favorite book.  (I've been attempting to Nook it for a while now, but I just never feel up to the task.)

Neil won the Newbery award this week for his newest piece The Graveyard Book.  This morning I listened to an interview on NPR and I was super charged with the NEED to write.  So I tossed on my coat and rushed to the library.  Discovered a new spot with sunlight and a beautiful view of the mini-Romanesque courtyard and the HUGE church.  And I wrote.  And I finished Milk and Honey.

It's 11 pages, and though I'm still in the polishing process, I'm pleased with it.  It's a somewhat dark story, though the telling covers up some of the darkness.  It's a strange thing to write, to know the things my character tries to hide, and to have their memories.  It's harder than I thought to get these thoughts on paper.  Not the effort of choosing the right words, it's the pain of these memories.  

I've been moving my stuff to my new interim location.  I'm homeless, but I have a warm place to sleep, so I'm happy.  I have amazingly good luck with apartments, and I'm sure I'll have an amazing place for pretty cheap before too long.  It's one of my super powers.  :-)

Jason stopped by for dinner and to get his stuff, and Janos is coming over soon to pick up his key.  My room is starting to look empty, and I like it.  I'm going to send home a bunch of my stuff.   I packed for two years, and will only be staying 4 more months.  I want to fit my life into one suitcase again.  :-)

Help Me, Jan!

This is a photo of Jan Assman, one of the most interesting Egyptologists around.  He wrote three or four of the books I'm using right now on my paper about mourning scenes, and will almost certainly be involved in whatever thesis I come to.  Mostly, he writes about death.

This paper is just not getting itself written.  Writer's block, big time.  Thanks to Herr Assman here I know what I want to say, but my thoughts aren't forming themselves into words.  It's like my words are rebelling and just want to party in some fiction somewhere.  Gah.

Oh well, the prof decided he didn't want to wag the papers to Egypt, so we have a little more time.

And speaking of time.  It looks like I'm going to be staying here another semester.  The department won't be able to tell me until March whether another year will be added to my program, and classes start next week.  So, I'm going to sit tight another semester, and if the program here is just one more year, I'll stick around.  If it's another two years, I'll head back to the states.  Then I have a lot of options.  I can't start a masters until the Fall anyway, regardless of what continent I'm on.  So, doesn't that feel better?

February 1st is when Mercury is direct again, and this wacky time of retrograde will be over.  If we can all hold out until Sunday, we'll be fine.

Everything is getting shaken up.  Things are changing big time.  I can feel it in the air, even.  Today it looked like early morning in spring, all day.  All day.  This is going to be quite an interesting spring.

Jubilee

I was looking for a song yesterday that shows off how beautiful Alison Krauss' voice is.  And the one I found is called Jubilee, and is breathtaking.  Here's a YouTube video that has the song as a background.  Ignore the video itself, because it's dumb.  Just listen. 

The sun came up on Monday morn

The world was all in flame

It's all a mortal man can do 

To make it right again

Swing and turn, Jubilee.

Live and learn, Jubilee.

The moon came up, I stood my ground

And swore to not give in

To never rest and do my best

To rid this world of sin

Swing and turn, Jubilee.

Live and learn, Jubilee.

The one who spoke cried tears of hope

That we might change in time

And when I looked into her eyes

The fear I saw was mine

Swing and turn, Jubilee.

Live and learn, Jubilee.

The time had come to travel on

I made my way alone

My soul will mend at journey's end

This road will take me home.

Swing and turn, Jubilee.

Live and learn, Jubilee.

Austin City Limits

So, no I don't have a decision made about where I'm going.  However, I've been doing a touch of research and it looks like Austin Texas has slipped onto my list of options.  

Here's the deal.  They have a dual language major in Germanic Studies.  This means I would take comparative linguistics, or literature, or pedagogy of German and another Germanic language, like, oh, say, Dutch!  

How perfect would that be?  And I've heard only good things about Austin!  Interesting things are happening!

I spent the evening over at Jennifer's and Sören's, enjoying homemade chai tea and some awesome conversation about the problem.  Opportunity.  :-)

I also chatted with Robert today about it, and I realized, I have some amazing options!  Can't complain too much!

The Pen and The Paper are Calling

I've been kidnapped, it would seem, by words.  I woke up late today (was out all night playing with Jan, Walter, Kia, Fike, Cindy, Dessy, and others) and I spent the day in the library reading.  John Connelly short stories (Nocturnes, is the book, I'll Nook it soon.) and a book Jan gave me as a present, Martha Peake.  I came home and read poetry.  By everyone, just poetry.  I'm starving for it.  I need it.  Happy, and sad, and nonsense, I just need it.  I wrote a little too, but mostly I've been riding this wave of words.  

Jan and I had coffee in the library, and we talked about music.  I now have A LOT of new bands to enjoy, and I'm really looking forward to them.  Most of Jan's music seems to have a narrative involved.  The albums tend to be based on stories, or on lost cities that were found, or old haunted houses, or something.  Truthfully, it sets me on fire to think about.  I'm not sure why, but more and more, stories are becoming a flame inside me.  

I've always been a writer, but it's come in flashes and bursts.  When I was a child, I would often have to beg a pen from my father and write words and phrases on whatever I could find around me; napkins, receipts, my own hands.  Sometimes a story would follow me for a while, and I would dash some notes down, but I finished little.  I wrote a lot of poetry, not all of it bad, but the stories weren't the important part. It was just the words, and they way they sounded and felt.

But now there's more.  The idea of a story takes me up and shakes me around.  Maybe I've just lived more life, more complex joys and darker pains, but it's about more than the words now.  And I want to read, ingest, learn learn learn.  I want to have a poem for every situation, I want to read the words of great men long dead.  I don't know why, but I hunger for this more now than I ever have.  And I have long been a lover of literature, of poetry, of paper and ink.