And then I came back to Berkeley, Oakland, El Cerrito, my Honda Civic, and the assorted chaos I once knew.
Good to be home. Adventure has just begun. Will write soon.
Lauren
25 August 2009
27 July 2009
The Big Goodbye
There have been so many goodbyes already!
First there was my last official day as the boys' au pair, crying into their hair before leaving for a monastic week of silence and song at Taizè...
...but we said hello again a week later, when I dropped my immense backpack on the floor, and they came running to offer up Legos, drawings, and dinner.
And then there I went to Morocco, and came back. They had their first overnight summer camp experience, their first nature arts'n'crafts cabin experience, while I tasted sweet mint tea (which fellow traveler Ollie deemed "a hug for my throat"), looked at camels and avoided snakes. Talked philosophy and love with Lindsay on three different beaches, and sprawled beneath the air conditioner. Slept in. Listened to strange music, shrank away from the market barter and haggle, and wondered once a day what was happening back home in Turin.
We had danced all weekend in a marriage celebration, and I watched the wedding with all the family secrets subtitling the traditional ceremonies. I caught the bouquet. I danced with my host parents, and clinked mojitos. I worked for them? Awesome.
And there was the penultimate goodbye this morning, our last time at home together. They drove away to the seaside while I wept and waved from the stoop, departing tomorrow. When I took the elevator upstairs alone I thought about how opposite this was from the airport goodbye I had pictured. (But I'm the one leaving!, I said to me.)
Now I look around my room at all the little things that don't really belong anywhere. I have weighed and reweighed my bags, and despite my inability to lift them they are miraculously below the weight limit for both Aer Lingus and United Airlines. Tomorrow at dawn I will leave this home and never live in it again, to go back to another home that I have never seen before. What if it was here?, I ask myself when the goodbye gets teary. What about that College Home, and the Childhood Home, and that future Married Home? I guess we're always coming from one and going to another. It's useless to keep track anymore as I feel like I now belong so much to myself and so little to places.
Look at my pictures on Facebook! If you haven't a profile, you can email me and I'll send you a way in.
I will be back in the Bay Area on August 3rd or 4th, somewhat impoverished and somewhat more luminous. Unreachable and without a valid California ID. You will recognise me from the new short haircut, the North African tan, and the suitcasing wrinkles in all my clothes. And the politely distracted I-think-my-life-just-changed-again gaze.
First there was my last official day as the boys' au pair, crying into their hair before leaving for a monastic week of silence and song at Taizè...
...but we said hello again a week later, when I dropped my immense backpack on the floor, and they came running to offer up Legos, drawings, and dinner.
And then there I went to Morocco, and came back. They had their first overnight summer camp experience, their first nature arts'n'crafts cabin experience, while I tasted sweet mint tea (which fellow traveler Ollie deemed "a hug for my throat"), looked at camels and avoided snakes. Talked philosophy and love with Lindsay on three different beaches, and sprawled beneath the air conditioner. Slept in. Listened to strange music, shrank away from the market barter and haggle, and wondered once a day what was happening back home in Turin.
We had danced all weekend in a marriage celebration, and I watched the wedding with all the family secrets subtitling the traditional ceremonies. I caught the bouquet. I danced with my host parents, and clinked mojitos. I worked for them? Awesome.
And there was the penultimate goodbye this morning, our last time at home together. They drove away to the seaside while I wept and waved from the stoop, departing tomorrow. When I took the elevator upstairs alone I thought about how opposite this was from the airport goodbye I had pictured. (But I'm the one leaving!, I said to me.)
Now I look around my room at all the little things that don't really belong anywhere. I have weighed and reweighed my bags, and despite my inability to lift them they are miraculously below the weight limit for both Aer Lingus and United Airlines. Tomorrow at dawn I will leave this home and never live in it again, to go back to another home that I have never seen before. What if it was here?, I ask myself when the goodbye gets teary. What about that College Home, and the Childhood Home, and that future Married Home? I guess we're always coming from one and going to another. It's useless to keep track anymore as I feel like I now belong so much to myself and so little to places.
Look at my pictures on Facebook! If you haven't a profile, you can email me and I'll send you a way in.
I will be back in the Bay Area on August 3rd or 4th, somewhat impoverished and somewhat more luminous. Unreachable and without a valid California ID. You will recognise me from the new short haircut, the North African tan, and the suitcasing wrinkles in all my clothes. And the politely distracted I-think-my-life-just-changed-again gaze.
25 June 2009
Return to Venice (San Servolo)
Remember when I almost died in Venice one year ago? I mean, when I melodramatised that I was going to die in Venice from the naturally heinous consequences of unforseen humidity, recent emotional turbulence, and rapid national/geographical transitions? That had been my first weekend in Italy, the first venture out of Turin with my new Italian family, and I had been too busy with keeping food inside my body to enjoy the setting. This time I slowly paced the island and tried to appreciate, without too much fore- or afterthought, the unusual chance to walk the same paths in the same clothes on the same summer days, that I walked exactly one year ago. To look at exactly where I was, and where I am. Talk about closure.
Same weekend in June. Low humidity, thank the skies. Same five hour train ride from Turin to Milan to Venice. Same ferry from the train station to our island, same dormitory, same nannies, most of the same kids. Same aloof Italian parents - khaki and pearls, Blackberries, spritzes - disappearing to a different part of the island for their mysterious conferences. In place of Henry James' "Washington Square," I read Zora Neal Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God." The holiday in August - I'm still referring directly to my original "Death in Venice" blog entry - turned out to be one week in Paris and one week alone in Turin; I did indeed visit Christa in July; and I didn't come home for Christmas, making this the longest I period I have ever passed away from my hometown and immediate family. 375 days since my plane took off, and I'm so much bigger for it.
Irene, the Filipino nanny, remembered me from last year. We have both shortened our hair. "So you are leabing soon to go back to California," she said, smiling. "You are lucky." She has a son and husband in the Philippines to whom she sends the money she earns in Italy from ironing and doing laundry and raising Federico, a vivacious 4-year-old. Irene always smiles.
Our trip coincided with the first strains of the Art Biennale, a biennial international art exhibition that takes over the whole city. I managed to visit the Arsenale exhibition space, the Ireland and North Ireland pavilions, the Morocco pavilion, and a few of the public exhibits. My main aim, however, after doing the Student Thing with my study abroad group in 2007, and the Tourist Thing with the family last year, was to find the real Venice: where do actual Venetians live? What do they do? Do they actually exist, or is everyone here part of the tourist culture? I snatched the few opportune hours to wander Venice alone, stuffed them into my shoulder bag with an umbrella and my journal, and took to the streets. Here's what I found:
Venice is even pretty in post-rain Monday evening.
Someone wore this tiger suit so much that it had to be washed.
Rainbow laundry dries on the line between house and tree.
Australian couple swinging barefoot to the jazz band playing in front of this historic cafe, to the delight of white blazered waiters and various passersby.
There are, in fact, some corners yet untouched by tourist culture...
... such as the wine bar (above) that I entered to escape the rain, only to find Eric Clapton's "San Francisco Bay Blues" playing on the flatscreen. I ordered a big glass of red wine and picked a corner table to attempt to journal, and instead struck up a conversation with a fellow American traveler that lasted all afternoon. Takei, a 28-year-old architect from New York, and I drank our way to the end of the passing rainshower and shouldered our respective loads to wander Venice together. He said he was losing focus in New York, unsure of his next steps, and I assured him that he was headed in the right direction if only by asking himself about it. We tossed coins into the case of a group of lean, hatted, teenaged gypsy guitar players improvising under a portico; I photographed his flannel shirt and bearded grin on a narrow gondola dock; he told me about the girl he lived with and now no longer lives with, and the siblings he barely knows. I wrote to myself
venice is as pretty as usual, and i got a straw hat like i wanted.
i feel like i've run out of things to write. all this time has gone by, and i'm no longer 1. in crisis from graduation, nor 2. alone.
16 June 2009
Open Your Ears
I have met so many people here and around who assure me that a change is coming, that the current course of the modern western world is bound for ruin and the only way to redirect that course is with informed, intentional action. Lindsay said the other day that what we need now is brave people, courageous people. The most recent issue of the Re-evaluation Counseling publication “Current Times” opened with a quote: Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength. Loving someone deeply gives you courage.” It seems that a lot of important historical action has come from like-minded individuals bringing talent and skills to a community*, and inviting other enlightened individuals into a pulsing group of activists via late night conversations, substance experimentation, the wholehearted execution of bad and great ideas – and the more I read about the literary groups and artists’ circles that came before, the more I consider the potential of the community my friend Kelsey mentioned in a recent email:
And there’s no way that venture could fail, simply because we would be together.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been soaking up a ton of new information about the past and current states of the world. The first was a film called Terra Madre about the SlowFood movement – a documentary based upon the urgent call to renew the once-sacred bond between Man and the Earth – after which I had a chance to talk with the director and filmmaker Ermanno Olmi about what effects the film may have on viewers, and on the larger population. As the end of the film was a 30-minute wordless chronicle of one farmer’s seasonal process (tilling, sowing, smelling, cutting) I told them during the Q&A that I thought the film fostered attentive listening. Active, deliberate listening: something often forgotten in today’s age of output. Blogs allow people to publish mindless grievances and ravings; text-message capabilities allow lovers and friends to say things over the mobile phone that they cannot take back, let alone defend or explain; and email correspondence has contributed, in my opinion, to the rapid breakdown of the written English language as a means for articulating one’s ideas in an intelligent way. In another part of the Q&A, Ermanno Olmi mentioned President Obama and his story-telling campaign, and I agreed that he has indeed opened the door to individuals of each life path to come together in love. The next step, however, is to listen. Really slow down and listen. Absorb. To give ourselves the time to do that, then take that new information with us into the action.
* Torino's Promotrice delle Belle Arti (an elegant exhibit space in the big riverside park, my favorite museum here) is currently hosting collected works of husband and wife Camilla and Valerio Adami. They had a circle, too, in the 1980s, which included literary theorist Jacques Derrida. Cool.
Clare and I have been fantasizing a lot about the post-Ecuador San Francisco life [they are currently in Ecuador on a Colorado College post-graduate grant to film a documentary] and, I have to inform you that you are intimately involved in our future fantasy. So, here is the deal. We want to move into a big house in the Mission in the fall with other like minded artistic, into the healthy lifestyle/going out on cultural ventures type people.... know anyone who fits this profile? (hint: try looking in the mirror)
And there’s no way that venture could fail, simply because we would be together.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been soaking up a ton of new information about the past and current states of the world. The first was a film called Terra Madre about the SlowFood movement – a documentary based upon the urgent call to renew the once-sacred bond between Man and the Earth – after which I had a chance to talk with the director and filmmaker Ermanno Olmi about what effects the film may have on viewers, and on the larger population. As the end of the film was a 30-minute wordless chronicle of one farmer’s seasonal process (tilling, sowing, smelling, cutting) I told them during the Q&A that I thought the film fostered attentive listening. Active, deliberate listening: something often forgotten in today’s age of output. Blogs allow people to publish mindless grievances and ravings; text-message capabilities allow lovers and friends to say things over the mobile phone that they cannot take back, let alone defend or explain; and email correspondence has contributed, in my opinion, to the rapid breakdown of the written English language as a means for articulating one’s ideas in an intelligent way. In another part of the Q&A, Ermanno Olmi mentioned President Obama and his story-telling campaign, and I agreed that he has indeed opened the door to individuals of each life path to come together in love. The next step, however, is to listen. Really slow down and listen. Absorb. To give ourselves the time to do that, then take that new information with us into the action.
* Torino's Promotrice delle Belle Arti (an elegant exhibit space in the big riverside park, my favorite museum here) is currently hosting collected works of husband and wife Camilla and Valerio Adami. They had a circle, too, in the 1980s, which included literary theorist Jacques Derrida. Cool.
02 June 2009
In Which She Finds the Dream Position
I went with the family to the mountains near Monte Bianco, Valvaraita, for a few days' repose in a hostelly cabin. We happened to share the weekend with a first place European outdoor someoneorother (Olympic mountain climber?), a young couple of fresh 
polenta-cooking newlyweds, and some scruffy sweatered locals who spoke not Italian but a fascinating language called Occitan. They apologised to me, in Italian, when they would lapse into their own language in front of me, but I waved it off because I like trying to guess what they're saying. I will miss Italians' hand gestures, as they make eavesdropping so much easier.
In the early morning of each of the three days we stayed there, I awoke with the final words of a dream on my lips. I've found in recent weeks that sleeping on my back with hands crossed over my stomach, aside from making me feel like an old man, encourages fast and furious dreaming, often of movement and contentment.
The mountains were moody when we arrived, all crags and fog, driving us indoors to play cards and Forza Quattro (Connect Four). I read aloud from "The Indian in the Cupboard," and to their parents' amazement the stircrazy boys stayed quiet for a solid half hour! They love it. I'm pretty good at imitating the different voices. They especially love the cowboy Boone's Texan accent, though I'm sure they only understand 29% of what he says.
On our last day the blue sky won out over pouting clouds, and set the background for a long wander up into the painted scenery. The boys complained of thirst and boredom, until we started to spot marmots and their outlooks changed from whiny to alert. How spoiled I've become that I don't think twice about how cool it is to read about Obama in the Italian newspaper with a focaccia sandwich in one hand, sprawled upon the grassy lawn beside a ruined stone cabin, nestled between snowy hills! One of the boys contented himself to build a dam in the snow runoff creek; the other fought unseen enemies with his walking stick. Dad walked off for a good half hour with his binoculars to birdwatch/moosewatch/marmotwatch, and came back unsatisfied. Mom stretched out in the sunshine, tanktop straps pulled down for maximum sun and minimum proof. These photos haven't been retouched.
On other fronts, I've run into that funny Hawaiian au pair a few more times in and around the neighborhood park, and each time I envy anew her carpe diem attitude, her freckles, and her sweet leather shoulder bag. She's one of those people of whom other girls always say, "Oh, no one could pull that [obscure fashion item e.g. sailor hat, buttoned gloves, leiderhosen] off except whatsername." Her regular videoblog updates reminded me that I should strive for diligence in documenting these last four weeks at Corso Galileo Ferraris, 67.
My dad asks, "Doing OK?" I reply, "Yeah. Racing time." He says, "Believe me - you lose every time." Listen to this with the lights out and you will see the saddest, brightest bits of your life montage before your eyes.
polenta-cooking newlyweds, and some scruffy sweatered locals who spoke not Italian but a fascinating language called Occitan. They apologised to me, in Italian, when they would lapse into their own language in front of me, but I waved it off because I like trying to guess what they're saying. I will miss Italians' hand gestures, as they make eavesdropping so much easier.In the early morning of each of the three days we stayed there, I awoke with the final words of a dream on my lips. I've found in recent weeks that sleeping on my back with hands crossed over my stomach, aside from making me feel like an old man, encourages fast and furious dreaming, often of movement and contentment.
The mountains were moody when we arrived, all crags and fog, driving us indoors to play cards and Forza Quattro (Connect Four). I read aloud from "The Indian in the Cupboard," and to their parents' amazement the stircrazy boys stayed quiet for a solid half hour! They love it. I'm pretty good at imitating the different voices. They especially love the cowboy Boone's Texan accent, though I'm sure they only understand 29% of what he says.
On our last day the blue sky won out over pouting clouds, and set the background for a long wander up into the painted scenery. The boys complained of thirst and boredom, until we started to spot marmots and their outlooks changed from whiny to alert. How spoiled I've become that I don't think twice about how cool it is to read about Obama in the Italian newspaper with a focaccia sandwich in one hand, sprawled upon the grassy lawn beside a ruined stone cabin, nestled between snowy hills! One of the boys contented himself to build a dam in the snow runoff creek; the other fought unseen enemies with his walking stick. Dad walked off for a good half hour with his binoculars to birdwatch/moosewatch/marmotwatch, and came back unsatisfied. Mom stretched out in the sunshine, tanktop straps pulled down for maximum sun and minimum proof. These photos haven't been retouched.
On other fronts, I've run into that funny Hawaiian au pair a few more times in and around the neighborhood park, and each time I envy anew her carpe diem attitude, her freckles, and her sweet leather shoulder bag. She's one of those people of whom other girls always say, "Oh, no one could pull that [obscure fashion item e.g. sailor hat, buttoned gloves, leiderhosen] off except whatsername." Her regular videoblog updates reminded me that I should strive for diligence in documenting these last four weeks at Corso Galileo Ferraris, 67.
My dad asks, "Doing OK?" I reply, "Yeah. Racing time." He says, "Believe me - you lose every time." Listen to this with the lights out and you will see the saddest, brightest bits of your life montage before your eyes.
21 May 2009
In Which The Heat Begins
Springtime is fast melting into summertime in the city, and high noon birdsong from rooftops makes me sweat. Everything is too bright and too dry. I'm drinking water straight from the plastic liter bottle, a rude habit we try to discourage in the boys, and trying to justify my lethargic immobility with my previous sleepless night.
Last Wednesday night, two friends and I went out to a french chanson concert in a distant bar, taking a combination of bus and metro to reach what turned out to be dim humid locale without available seating. Nonetheless we enjoyed the complimentary drinks included in the cover fee, enjoyed some live music. Upon exiting the venue, we just missed our bus home. Drat! Poor Balbina had just had a cast taken off her ankle earlier that afternoon, after several long weeks of surgery recovery, but limped along like a real trooper. We talked of the awkward beauty of adolescent female bodies - lithe, sensuous, misunderstood - and about our dream vacations.
A strange young Italian guy happened upon our midnight ramble when we neared a hot taxi spot at Porta Susa train station, and hovered near us as we walked past a busy pub. We three girls, all mascara and sandals, moved instinctively closer to one another against this uninvited escort, unsure of whether to increase or decrease our speed. I didn't even realise he'd snatched her purse until he was halfway down the block and turning the corner, and I suddenly understood the word "crestfallen" when I knew neither of us could catch him. Muscular blurs raced past on both sides; some men from the bar had seen the whole thing and chased the youth for blocks. They returned, panting and triunphant, gold and white clutch in hand! Cell phone, check. Apartment keys, check. Ten euros, check. Chapstick, check. They'd found him crouched in a dumpster, they said, and Balbina's nostrils flared indignantly when she they reported that no, no one had punched him. If I didn't have this bum ankle, I woulda chased him down and kicked his ass! Carabinieri, or civil police officers, arrived around 1,30am, and took her info. The druggie youth was soon caught by another pair of police officers when he tried to snatch another woman's purse just a couple of blocks away, and huddled dazedly some yards away from us in the cop car as the first two officers took witness reports in the most ridiculous, roundabout (read: typically Italian) manner. "Can you describe what he looked like? What he was wearing," the young cop asked while the old cop ogled me and Lindsay lecherously. "He's right over there!," I wanted to yell, wanted to use both hands to indicate the culprit in the dark car. "WTF are we still doing here??" Minutes passed as they questioned the "witnesses" one by one. The muscular witnesses bought the pretty witnesses a round of beers. The pretty ones bought everyone a plate of french fries. We didn't get home until almost 4 in the morning. Hence the aforementioned sleepless night.
On a completely different note, someone recently turned me onto an interview with author and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot in which she addresses the search for meaning and fulfillment in what she calls "the third chapter," the years between 50 and 75 that, in this day and age, no longer mean retirement or slowing down but rather another kind of identity crisis.
Move past the boredom and compose... your life!
Last Wednesday night, two friends and I went out to a french chanson concert in a distant bar, taking a combination of bus and metro to reach what turned out to be dim humid locale without available seating. Nonetheless we enjoyed the complimentary drinks included in the cover fee, enjoyed some live music. Upon exiting the venue, we just missed our bus home. Drat! Poor Balbina had just had a cast taken off her ankle earlier that afternoon, after several long weeks of surgery recovery, but limped along like a real trooper. We talked of the awkward beauty of adolescent female bodies - lithe, sensuous, misunderstood - and about our dream vacations.
A strange young Italian guy happened upon our midnight ramble when we neared a hot taxi spot at Porta Susa train station, and hovered near us as we walked past a busy pub. We three girls, all mascara and sandals, moved instinctively closer to one another against this uninvited escort, unsure of whether to increase or decrease our speed. I didn't even realise he'd snatched her purse until he was halfway down the block and turning the corner, and I suddenly understood the word "crestfallen" when I knew neither of us could catch him. Muscular blurs raced past on both sides; some men from the bar had seen the whole thing and chased the youth for blocks. They returned, panting and triunphant, gold and white clutch in hand! Cell phone, check. Apartment keys, check. Ten euros, check. Chapstick, check. They'd found him crouched in a dumpster, they said, and Balbina's nostrils flared indignantly when she they reported that no, no one had punched him. If I didn't have this bum ankle, I woulda chased him down and kicked his ass! Carabinieri, or civil police officers, arrived around 1,30am, and took her info. The druggie youth was soon caught by another pair of police officers when he tried to snatch another woman's purse just a couple of blocks away, and huddled dazedly some yards away from us in the cop car as the first two officers took witness reports in the most ridiculous, roundabout (read: typically Italian) manner. "Can you describe what he looked like? What he was wearing," the young cop asked while the old cop ogled me and Lindsay lecherously. "He's right over there!," I wanted to yell, wanted to use both hands to indicate the culprit in the dark car. "WTF are we still doing here??" Minutes passed as they questioned the "witnesses" one by one. The muscular witnesses bought the pretty witnesses a round of beers. The pretty ones bought everyone a plate of french fries. We didn't get home until almost 4 in the morning. Hence the aforementioned sleepless night.
On a completely different note, someone recently turned me onto an interview with author and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot in which she addresses the search for meaning and fulfillment in what she calls "the third chapter," the years between 50 and 75 that, in this day and age, no longer mean retirement or slowing down but rather another kind of identity crisis.
All of us [individuals in the third chapter] at this point, to some degree, are on a search for meaningfulness, for purposefulness. And we want to find what this next 25 years, this penultimate chapter of our life, is going to be about. And we're ready for something new. For a new experience. For a new adventure. And I think all of us, to some degree, experience some burnout. Burnout is not about working too hard. Or working too diligently or being over committed. Burnout is about boredom. And so, I think in some ways this is about sort of moving beyond the boredom to compose, to invent and reinvent the path that we're on.Check it out at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05082009/watch2.html
Move past the boredom and compose... your life!
19 May 2009
Cartolina
Hey, y'all!
I know, it's been awhile. Just wanted to write a brief postcard to let you know that no news is good news: there's too much to do, too much to see, for me to sit down to report it all, much less reflect. I have seven more weeks here with the family in Turin before I take off for my month of travel in July. First week I'll fly to Paris to meet up with a good college friend and we'll go together to Taize. After that I'm coming back to Turin just long enough to meet another friend for a two-day long voyage to Marrakech, Morocco, via Milan and Madrid. (The recurring Ms are completely unintentional, an amusing coincidence.) We'll stay in Morocco for seven days and six nights, then fly back to Milan together on July 20th. I'll bum around Italy some more until a good friend gets married on July 26th, then on the 28th I leave Italy for Denver. Denver, Colorado Springs, and a road trip back to the Bay Area. I'll probably be in my own bed sometime around August 4th.
I've been up to the usual shenanigans of late, with some old characters and some new. There are two newbie au pairs on the scene, the first being a tall bearded creative writing major from Ohio who drinks wine like water and speaks English to his Italian family with a curious accent, as though they are more likely to understand an English that sounds somewhat like their native tongue. Seeing how unusual a male nanny is, he coined a new term for himself in celebration: a Manny. The second newcomer is a hip hapa Hawaiian who wears flat sneakers with black tights and thick eyeliner under thick glasses. After a year of odd jobbing in Korea, she nannied in Germany for several months before coming to Turin. Restless, easily distracted. "I'm running away," she says matter-of-factly, lifting the tiny espresso cup from its tiny saucer. "From just, you know, everything."
I just started to read Jack Kerouac's "On The Road," whose rugged, ragged prose eggs me to stay up later, write more furiously, and generally care a lot less about anything than I usually do. Can someone please explain to me the difference between careless and carefree?
Am feeling self-conscious about writing a blog, feel that to spit out so much unedited reflection is somewhat pompous of me. I hope someone out there (besides you, Mom, because I know) is getting something from this.
Anyway, will be back in the Bay soon enough, with thirteen months of European living behind me. Forward all mail to Oakland.
I know, it's been awhile. Just wanted to write a brief postcard to let you know that no news is good news: there's too much to do, too much to see, for me to sit down to report it all, much less reflect. I have seven more weeks here with the family in Turin before I take off for my month of travel in July. First week I'll fly to Paris to meet up with a good college friend and we'll go together to Taize. After that I'm coming back to Turin just long enough to meet another friend for a two-day long voyage to Marrakech, Morocco, via Milan and Madrid. (The recurring Ms are completely unintentional, an amusing coincidence.) We'll stay in Morocco for seven days and six nights, then fly back to Milan together on July 20th. I'll bum around Italy some more until a good friend gets married on July 26th, then on the 28th I leave Italy for Denver. Denver, Colorado Springs, and a road trip back to the Bay Area. I'll probably be in my own bed sometime around August 4th.
I've been up to the usual shenanigans of late, with some old characters and some new. There are two newbie au pairs on the scene, the first being a tall bearded creative writing major from Ohio who drinks wine like water and speaks English to his Italian family with a curious accent, as though they are more likely to understand an English that sounds somewhat like their native tongue. Seeing how unusual a male nanny is, he coined a new term for himself in celebration: a Manny. The second newcomer is a hip hapa Hawaiian who wears flat sneakers with black tights and thick eyeliner under thick glasses. After a year of odd jobbing in Korea, she nannied in Germany for several months before coming to Turin. Restless, easily distracted. "I'm running away," she says matter-of-factly, lifting the tiny espresso cup from its tiny saucer. "From just, you know, everything."
I just started to read Jack Kerouac's "On The Road," whose rugged, ragged prose eggs me to stay up later, write more furiously, and generally care a lot less about anything than I usually do. Can someone please explain to me the difference between careless and carefree?
Am feeling self-conscious about writing a blog, feel that to spit out so much unedited reflection is somewhat pompous of me. I hope someone out there (besides you, Mom, because I know) is getting something from this.
Anyway, will be back in the Bay soon enough, with thirteen months of European living behind me. Forward all mail to Oakland.
08 May 2009
Riding Home At 3 a.m.
After working as an au pair for one week short of eleven months, I was reprimanded for the first time yesterday evening after my youngest charge wiggled out of sight and crossed a busy six-lane street by himself. His parents, home early from work, watched the whole thing from the balcony and called my mobile, demanding to know where I was. It was all resolved in the end, but the best way to finish this particularly traumatic Wednesday was to go out for wine with three other au pairs at a nearby jazz bar. Each had a nanny tale worse than the one before, and one glass of red wine gradually became four bottles. For the better part of four hours we bitched and moaned about our jobs as one only can when surrounded by people who completely, absolutely sympathise, saying all the things we can't say to people back in the States because they always trump us with the smug "But you're in Italy!" card; and all the things we can't say to people we've met here because they're either friends or co-workers of our employers, or held at emotional arm's length by the language barrier.
The more we drank, the more American (loud) we became, and the creepers at the counter absolutely loved it! Corner table. Saucy redhead from Virginia, blue-eyed brunette from Indiana, a quirky southern California blonde, and yours truly. The bartenders closed the doors and pulled down the exterior storefront. "Are you closed?," I ask in Italian. "For you, no. For everyone else, yes," they smile. I go behind the bar to choose the next song. My friend is getting Arabic lessons from an older Moroccan guy for our upcoming trip in July. Another girl is dancing with a flaming homosexual in silver tank top, wine glasses in hand; the last is sketching on a paper placemat and talking with the computer programmer from Milan who claims to have lived in Miami for some months and that's why he knows to speak English so much well. I rode my bicycle home at 3 a.m., and managed to carry it downstairs into the cellar without falling on my face. Almost a year in Europe, and you think my alcohol tolerance would have risen. It hasn't.
Slept four hours before waking to ready the children for school (no longer Bad Nanny, previous day's transgression had been forgotten), and went back to bed until 11 a.m. No hangover! But no appetite, either. Found a pretty sweet matchbox in my pocket, which I vaguely remember having admired when me and old Moroccan guy shared a cigarette. The cute short bartender with the fauxhawk drew a picture in my journal - he calls me San Francisco Girl - next to which the tall one with a cousin named Caesar, wrote, Anticamente ricordo di avere pensato che il mondo potesse comprendersi tutto in un solo momento e vivevo contento di averlo compreso. Ultimamente piuttosto considero tutta la vita un gelato che viene leccato da tutte le lingue di un mondo schifato ma ancora goloso. A long time ago I remember having thought that the world could be understood all in one moment, and I lived content with having understood that. Lately, though, I consider this life to be an ice cream being licked by all the tongues in a disgusted, yet gluttonous, world.
Eight more weeks. Lick the gelato.
The more we drank, the more American (loud) we became, and the creepers at the counter absolutely loved it! Corner table. Saucy redhead from Virginia, blue-eyed brunette from Indiana, a quirky southern California blonde, and yours truly. The bartenders closed the doors and pulled down the exterior storefront. "Are you closed?," I ask in Italian. "For you, no. For everyone else, yes," they smile. I go behind the bar to choose the next song. My friend is getting Arabic lessons from an older Moroccan guy for our upcoming trip in July. Another girl is dancing with a flaming homosexual in silver tank top, wine glasses in hand; the last is sketching on a paper placemat and talking with the computer programmer from Milan who claims to have lived in Miami for some months and that's why he knows to speak English so much well. I rode my bicycle home at 3 a.m., and managed to carry it downstairs into the cellar without falling on my face. Almost a year in Europe, and you think my alcohol tolerance would have risen. It hasn't.
Slept four hours before waking to ready the children for school (no longer Bad Nanny, previous day's transgression had been forgotten), and went back to bed until 11 a.m. No hangover! But no appetite, either. Found a pretty sweet matchbox in my pocket, which I vaguely remember having admired when me and old Moroccan guy shared a cigarette. The cute short bartender with the fauxhawk drew a picture in my journal - he calls me San Francisco Girl - next to which the tall one with a cousin named Caesar, wrote, Anticamente ricordo di avere pensato che il mondo potesse comprendersi tutto in un solo momento e vivevo contento di averlo compreso. Ultimamente piuttosto considero tutta la vita un gelato che viene leccato da tutte le lingue di un mondo schifato ma ancora goloso. A long time ago I remember having thought that the world could be understood all in one moment, and I lived content with having understood that. Lately, though, I consider this life to be an ice cream being licked by all the tongues in a disgusted, yet gluttonous, world.
Eight more weeks. Lick the gelato.
24 April 2009
Men
Drinking yerba mate in my CC running shorts and an old t-shirt, listening to Madeleine Peyroux while I translate an Italian magazine article into English. The best part is that existing, for this moment, needn't be more difficult than this.
I sat on a bench yesterday afternoon to read while one of my charges finished up his gymnastics lesson, and an Italian man in sunglasses and linen pants walked by... twice... and came back. Inward groan. The following exchange prompted me to write the conversation in my margins so I could laugh about it later:
[dude] Mi scusi, magari ci siamo visti prima? Sorry, but I think we've met?
[me] No, credo di no. I don't think so.
[dude] Aah, ma non sei italiana. Di dove sei? Ah, you're not Italian. Where are you from?
[me] California. Lavoro qua a Torino. I work here.
[dude] Oh! I speak English some.
Great, I thought, Just great. Now we have to be awkward in two languages.
[dude] If it - possibility - drink?
He accompanies this... statement? request?... with a hand gesture of tossing back a rather large bottle of something invisible and likely alcoholic. I smile but shake my head, hopefully in a gently discouraging way. No, thanks.
[dude] Okay! Thanks to you, very much! Ciao, ciao!
And he is off again on his merry way, undeterred by my rejection. This is not the first time that has happened. What a funny breed.
I sat on a bench yesterday afternoon to read while one of my charges finished up his gymnastics lesson, and an Italian man in sunglasses and linen pants walked by... twice... and came back. Inward groan. The following exchange prompted me to write the conversation in my margins so I could laugh about it later:
[dude] Mi scusi, magari ci siamo visti prima? Sorry, but I think we've met?
[me] No, credo di no. I don't think so.
[dude] Aah, ma non sei italiana. Di dove sei? Ah, you're not Italian. Where are you from?
[me] California. Lavoro qua a Torino. I work here.
[dude] Oh! I speak English some.
Great, I thought, Just great. Now we have to be awkward in two languages.
[dude] If it - possibility - drink?
He accompanies this... statement? request?... with a hand gesture of tossing back a rather large bottle of something invisible and likely alcoholic. I smile but shake my head, hopefully in a gently discouraging way. No, thanks.
[dude] Okay! Thanks to you, very much! Ciao, ciao!
And he is off again on his merry way, undeterred by my rejection. This is not the first time that has happened. What a funny breed.
22 April 2009
Stars Aligning
Look at the date of this Learn English podcast titled Lauren's Eyes.
Weeeeeeiiiiiiiiirrrrrrdddd.
What, exactly, is the world telling me? To wear more makeup? Start a video podcast? Drive taxis? Keep on speaking English?
Weeeeeeiiiiiiiiirrrrrrdddd.
What, exactly, is the world telling me? To wear more makeup? Start a video podcast? Drive taxis? Keep on speaking English?
21 April 2009
Resurfacing
Hey, everyone. Sorry for getting too into my head and soul these past several entries instead of actually telling you something of my life.
Lately I've been staying up too late and waking up too early, the extended springtime sunlight pushing me to get up and out of the house to accomplish as many things as possible while it's light. "Things" are art projects, books, errands, half-hearted attempts at exercise-- but I have a hard time concentrating on any one thing long enough to actually finish it. My shelves and bedstand are littered with partially written letters, partially read books, and scraps of paper or bus tickets with notes and quotes to put in some upcoming journal entry. I credit the restlessness to the change of season, and the panic that comes with knowing just how quickly the next ten weeks will go by.
My sweet Italian family brought home a psychadelic patterned dress for me from their Easter vacation in Berlin, and despite fears that it's not really "me" I wore it to my 10am haircut on Tuesday. (Turns out it is me.) While Fabio trimmed my bangs the conversation turned to the economic crisis, and I asked him if he felt it at Studio Pepe. "No," he told me, "And I'll tell you why: because I have regular clients with whom I have built real, good relationships. It's like a therapy when they come to my studio, and the more they feel the crisis in their lives, the more they come to me. Sometimes they come just to talk, not even for a cut, while others do things they've never done before, like add color, to cheer themselves up. We don't suffer from the crisis because we know we all have to take care of each other."
This is what I will miss about Italy! The smallness of their community, the familiarity and special personal touch in so many family businesses. I'm convinced that it exists in the Bay Area, too, though, and I'm out to find it.
I did the New Haircut Strut into the center of town to buy Simon and Garfunkel's "Bookends" album for the house. I stopped by the flowershop where my good friend vehemently advised me never to marry. Have children, yes, but settle down with a man, no. "It's not for people like us," she said with a shake of her head as she wound green wire around the tulip stems for a funeral arrangement. "People who need to move and change. Trust me - I've seen a few [men], tall and short, rich and poor, bald and with long hair - and it's not worth it. Don't marry." Information saved under mental file titled "Open After 27th Birthday."
I came home and put on the new CD while for lunch I reheated some leftover inky black rice, made with Venetian octopus ink, and sauteed asparagus. (Brief digression: our maid usually prepares a vegetable dish in the morning for us to eat at dinner, and when my host mom came home she was surprised to find the best part of the asparagus missing. The next morning she asked Giovanna what had happened to the heads of the asparagus, and Giovanna said she had cut them off. "But haven't you ever cooked asparagus before? Don't they have asparagus in Peru?," asked the petite Italian mother, in her business suit and pantyhose. "No," replied the Peruvian, good-naturedly. "Next time we get asparagus we'll cook them together, and I'll show you," was the solution.) After lunch I played guitar on the terrace until I broke a string. I worked on an article translation. I napped in the sunshine ten minutes before putting on my shoes to go get the boys from school.
This is how I pass my time these days, dabbling in many projects and hobbies. Two or three times a week I meet with four regular clients for 60- or 90-minute English lessons, for which I receive either 15 or 20 euro. This extra money generally goes towards espresso, gelato, or an after-dinner alcoholic beverage at one of my two favorite places. The rest of my weekly allowance is being prudently set aside for my travels in July, which remain unfixed as yet. (Stay tuned for more on that.) The changeable spring weather, shifting daily from beastly heat to lightning showers, has us all feeling a bit unsettled, but we've emerged grateful and strong from the darkness of winter, and now put one foot in front of the other in a dogged march towards summer...
Lately I've been staying up too late and waking up too early, the extended springtime sunlight pushing me to get up and out of the house to accomplish as many things as possible while it's light. "Things" are art projects, books, errands, half-hearted attempts at exercise-- but I have a hard time concentrating on any one thing long enough to actually finish it. My shelves and bedstand are littered with partially written letters, partially read books, and scraps of paper or bus tickets with notes and quotes to put in some upcoming journal entry. I credit the restlessness to the change of season, and the panic that comes with knowing just how quickly the next ten weeks will go by.
My sweet Italian family brought home a psychadelic patterned dress for me from their Easter vacation in Berlin, and despite fears that it's not really "me" I wore it to my 10am haircut on Tuesday. (Turns out it is me.) While Fabio trimmed my bangs the conversation turned to the economic crisis, and I asked him if he felt it at Studio Pepe. "No," he told me, "And I'll tell you why: because I have regular clients with whom I have built real, good relationships. It's like a therapy when they come to my studio, and the more they feel the crisis in their lives, the more they come to me. Sometimes they come just to talk, not even for a cut, while others do things they've never done before, like add color, to cheer themselves up. We don't suffer from the crisis because we know we all have to take care of each other."
This is what I will miss about Italy! The smallness of their community, the familiarity and special personal touch in so many family businesses. I'm convinced that it exists in the Bay Area, too, though, and I'm out to find it.
I did the New Haircut Strut into the center of town to buy Simon and Garfunkel's "Bookends" album for the house. I stopped by the flowershop where my good friend vehemently advised me never to marry. Have children, yes, but settle down with a man, no. "It's not for people like us," she said with a shake of her head as she wound green wire around the tulip stems for a funeral arrangement. "People who need to move and change. Trust me - I've seen a few [men], tall and short, rich and poor, bald and with long hair - and it's not worth it. Don't marry." Information saved under mental file titled "Open After 27th Birthday."
I came home and put on the new CD while for lunch I reheated some leftover inky black rice, made with Venetian octopus ink, and sauteed asparagus. (Brief digression: our maid usually prepares a vegetable dish in the morning for us to eat at dinner, and when my host mom came home she was surprised to find the best part of the asparagus missing. The next morning she asked Giovanna what had happened to the heads of the asparagus, and Giovanna said she had cut them off. "But haven't you ever cooked asparagus before? Don't they have asparagus in Peru?," asked the petite Italian mother, in her business suit and pantyhose. "No," replied the Peruvian, good-naturedly. "Next time we get asparagus we'll cook them together, and I'll show you," was the solution.) After lunch I played guitar on the terrace until I broke a string. I worked on an article translation. I napped in the sunshine ten minutes before putting on my shoes to go get the boys from school.
This is how I pass my time these days, dabbling in many projects and hobbies. Two or three times a week I meet with four regular clients for 60- or 90-minute English lessons, for which I receive either 15 or 20 euro. This extra money generally goes towards espresso, gelato, or an after-dinner alcoholic beverage at one of my two favorite places. The rest of my weekly allowance is being prudently set aside for my travels in July, which remain unfixed as yet. (Stay tuned for more on that.) The changeable spring weather, shifting daily from beastly heat to lightning showers, has us all feeling a bit unsettled, but we've emerged grateful and strong from the darkness of winter, and now put one foot in front of the other in a dogged march towards summer...
In Which The Very Sky Breathes His Story
I am overcome with the fact that we only get one chance - just one! - to live this life. Each decision we make eliminates hundreds of other options, which means that each moment has infinite potential to lead us to a different destiny.
My heart hurts from loving.
I had a crazy adventure this Sunday when four of us took a train into a tiny village outside of Turin to help my friend pursue a great beer from the restaurant where she drank it to the brewery where it was produced, and somehow our clumsy grope into this obscure corner of Italy got us into a private and exclusive pre-Grand Opening party for a new branch of what was already a flourishing establishment. I wish I knew more about beer so I could appreciate more deeply the once-in-a-lifetime-ness of it! We rubbed shoulders and clinked beer glasses with Italy's most notable brewers; toured the handpainted and entirely custom-crafted Casa Baladin, the nearby hotel; met the professional cartoonist who does all their graphics, the photographer who does all the pinhole imaging, the bartender who designed their website and the manager who will debut their men's fashion line in November. Outside the the rain fell ceaselessly while inside we drank our way to merry, flushed and uninhibited in a funky pub that likely none of you will ever visit. I was struck by the feeling of community I found there, among a group of old friends who happen to be perfectly suited for each of the niches of the business - financial management, dècor, advertising, brewing - and have thus been able to make money doing what they adore, together. Everything about the place emits a kind of light (yes, even the vegetarian pasta), for it has all been and continues to be produced out of love: the love of beer, love of travel, love of beautiful things and good company.
Driving me back to the train station, one of the co-owners told me he never graduated from college. And here he is at 45, wearing a navy designer leather jacket and driving a brand new BMW, holding third row season tickets at Turin's Teatro Reggio (home to one of the best symphonic operas in the country) for the 25th year in a row, working alongside his best friends to follow in the footsteps of America's fine brewers to bring artistry to the local beer industry -- and without a college degree. Everything I've learned, he tells me, I learned from the right people. They taught me how to be who I am at an early age, and I'm different from anyone else I know. These people continue to teach him, I'm sure, and he, them. I'm beginning to see the sense in forming artists' communities like the Bloomsbury group and other famous literary societies, because when surrounded by a group of people with the same information, moving in the same direction, you not only find yourself but tap into a stronger and swifter current; a current that has moved the great thinkers behind you and will surely move those who come later. Fifty years ago, Simon and Garfunkel produced a chart-topping album retrospectively described as "a meditation on the passage of life and the psychological impact of life's irreversible, ever-accumulating losses"; around 2am today, a good friend of mine emailed me,
[It’s] this precise love of the mysterious that draws me to the wise. . . . I don’t think that wisdom the answers [sic], but rather the sustained curiosity to investigate. And the full-understanding that there are things one will never know. And the learning and growth is thus endless. One day bleeds into the next and one journey turns the corner onto the following; time passes, and because one can never know when death will come, life has an enigmatic infinite discreetness.Whoa. Time - art - love - loss. The resonance of these themes over the passing months tells me that something must be done with, must be produced from, their repetition. I once worried that the great thinkers, authors, musicians, artists, were long gone, but I begin see that we are indeed in a continuum. There is a legacy here that moves across time and space and, without presuming to be omniscient or egotistical, I feel that I'm nearing one of the aforementioned currents. A society is beginning to form... I can feel distant pieces slowly orienting towards a common place, as the points of so many widespread compasses all trembling northward.
We are all telling each other's stories.
17 April 2009
In Which Her Mother Comes To Call
My friend just skype-asked me,
how is your friday?
To which I replied,
good
started it with my mom
feels like a hundred years ago
she woke up early and dressed,
and lied down beside me until i had to get up
and i cried
She came to Italy last Friday to stay with me in and around Torino for one week, and it was glorious! From start to finish with no itinerary, just to be mom and daughter and catch up on the past ten months apart. I introduced her to the people who have been taking care of me here, like the florist, Monica (who gave her freesia, tulips, and a present for her new house); one of the boys' friends' moms, Silvia, (one of the few neighborhood mothers who doesn't work full time and thus mothers everyone else's kids... and au pairs...) over whose kitchen table I poured out many a wintertime woe; family members nonna Mariucia (who doesn't speak a word of English), zio Enrico and nipote Marta; and the Carpaneto family themselves. She and I weathered one lightning and thundering rainshower, some overcastness, some days of warm sunshine, and one intensely long country lunch on Easter Monday. We saw a castle-turned-museum, some horses, a lot of La Crocetta (my neighborhoos), and one important episode of "House" in our pajamas in my bed when we couldn't fall asleep.
On Thursday morning, on the way to Parco Valentino, she rubbed my back in that unconscious circular mothery way and tears sprang to my eyes so fast that I had to cover my mouth. I buried my face in her shoulder and, smack in the middle of the sidewalk, with cars driving past and old men hobbling by, my mommy held in her arms the sum of my homesickness for Berkeley and my family, my homesickness for Colorado and college, my guilt for having moved away again, my frustrations and doubts. Maybe she cried, too, for all the heartbreaks in between. When we resumed our walk she asked me if I needed a Kleenex, and instead of my customary grateful acceptance of the rumpled tissue from the bottom of her purse, I refused; for, since I've started working with these kids and never leave home without a pack, I had my own!
06 April 2009
05 April 2009
What Am I?
P.S.
Speaking of rootlessness, I should add that it isn't a bad thing. For all my lamenting for California and home, I have come to like carrying my wallet, journal and apple around these cities, satisfied. It suits me. Celebrated American short story author Kevin Brockmeier, comfortable in Arkansas, says, "One of the advantages of working as a writer… is that you don’t have to live anywhere in particular to participate in the strongest currents of your art form. As long as you can sit down with a pen and a sheet of paper one minute and with a copy of War and Peace or One Hundred Years of Solitude the next, you’re basically living right at the center of literary culture. When it comes to literature, there’s no such thing as the provinces.”
Maybe I'm a writer.
Speaking of rootlessness, I should add that it isn't a bad thing. For all my lamenting for California and home, I have come to like carrying my wallet, journal and apple around these cities, satisfied. It suits me. Celebrated American short story author Kevin Brockmeier, comfortable in Arkansas, says, "One of the advantages of working as a writer… is that you don’t have to live anywhere in particular to participate in the strongest currents of your art form. As long as you can sit down with a pen and a sheet of paper one minute and with a copy of War and Peace or One Hundred Years of Solitude the next, you’re basically living right at the center of literary culture. When it comes to literature, there’s no such thing as the provinces.”
Maybe I'm a writer.
03 April 2009
In Which She Finds This Journey Has Already Been Named
On Wednesday I had my regular English lesson with Giorgia, an educational anthropology student who hopes to improve her pronunciation for an international education conference in Vienna next October. As we read aloud together the introduction to Paul Rabinow's book Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, a nonfictional account of his time in Morocco in the 1960s, I came across a ringing bell: dépaysement. This French word was similar to an Italian word I'd discovered with delight some days before, spaesato, in a magazine article about the plight of Italy's current youth generation. I noted paese, or country, and the prefix s, which usually indicates an opposite like un- or dis- in English. Un-countried. The electronic dictionary told me it meant 'out of one's element; uncomfortable.' A state of unease for lack of being in one's own homeland. Rabinow, describing the various personal and historical reasons for setting off for North Africa, was compelled by Lévi-Strauss's obscure concept of dépaysement, a "paradoxical call for a distancing that would allow one to return more profoundly home." Whoa, whoa-- I had to shake my head to clear it, and take a break from the lesson to explain to Giorgia with wild gestures that this was exactly what I was doing! That, without knowing there was a name for this particular journey, this had been my intention all along, not only of my post-graduate year in Italy but of my initial departure from Northern California for Colorado Springs. Remember the end of high school when all directions pointed away from California, not because I didn't like it but precisely because I adored it? I couldn't explain it then. I didn't know how to tell my friends, my teachers, my family, that I needed to leave in order to come back. All that lost and sad and restless I used to feel in El Cerrito was not in vain, but in fact has brought me right here the glass of chilled white wine, the paperback book about Jews in Palestine, a sparkling blue Colorado College ring, a haircut that looks best after 3 days without shampoo.
"Every man," wrote Françoise-Renè Chateaubriand, "carries within him a world which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns, even when he is travelling through, and seems to be living in, some different world." (This same French philosopher once wrote, "One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world." Too bad he lived in the 1800s, or else I'd try to get him to meet me for a glass of wine at the jazz club on Via Gioberti.) "Henceforth," said Lèvi-Strauss of Chateaubriand, "it will be possible to bridge the gap between the two worlds." All these quotes of quotes... maybe we do it in order to validate our own histories, taking comfort in the words of those who have already gone this way. Italians use the same word for "story" and "history." I feel like I've traveled so many different worlds over the past four years - Colorado, Mexico, Florence, London, Petaluma - each one leaving traces within me like so many dusty pebbles, to carry around in my pocket in hopes of one day having the time and audience to explain the handfuls. At the end of June, 2008, I drew a picture of Torino so I might remember what I have seen and loved: There are so many little idiosyncracies about life in Italy that I forget to write down each day, like seeing a woman ride her Vespa (which means "bee") in stilettos, seeing a young couple on a park bench popping each other's zits, going to the supermarket and marveling at the smaller sizes of things. My favorite is the sleek 3-pack of beer. It's so silly! But wonderful, too, the way we had to re-organize the entire car to fit 5 bags of groceries into the trunk. That's how compact and economical they are with their space. And so with their waster, their home organisation, kitchen-- everything (except Ruggi's room of toys) is useful, and has a place to live. There is little waste, and the luxury lies more in richness and value than in size or stature. This is true of the apartments, stacked one atop another all throughout the city; the small cars, even their park/garden across the street, not exactly the sprawling lawns of London but a mini-concrete pedestrian area with along, narrow strip of play equipment. The trees are big, the buildings are tall, but lives are lived on an altogether more personal scale.
Speaking of space and luxury, another gem from one of my French philosophers: "Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between an individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal." I have learned that this family, part of Northern Italy's upper crust, for all their wealth and Europeanness and domestic picture-perfection, have their tribulations just as I do or anyone else does. Freedom boils down to a matter of one's relationship to one's space; and self-identity, to the sum of one's previous choices and experiences.
With just eleven more weeks here in Torino, I can feel the end of the Distancing start to curl up at the edges to reveal the pink, painful beginning of the Coming Fully Home.
The atmosphere thickens, everywhere.
"Every man," wrote Françoise-Renè Chateaubriand, "carries within him a world which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns, even when he is travelling through, and seems to be living in, some different world." (This same French philosopher once wrote, "One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world." Too bad he lived in the 1800s, or else I'd try to get him to meet me for a glass of wine at the jazz club on Via Gioberti.) "Henceforth," said Lèvi-Strauss of Chateaubriand, "it will be possible to bridge the gap between the two worlds." All these quotes of quotes... maybe we do it in order to validate our own histories, taking comfort in the words of those who have already gone this way. Italians use the same word for "story" and "history." I feel like I've traveled so many different worlds over the past four years - Colorado, Mexico, Florence, London, Petaluma - each one leaving traces within me like so many dusty pebbles, to carry around in my pocket in hopes of one day having the time and audience to explain the handfuls. At the end of June, 2008, I drew a picture of Torino so I might remember what I have seen and loved: There are so many little idiosyncracies about life in Italy that I forget to write down each day, like seeing a woman ride her Vespa (which means "bee") in stilettos, seeing a young couple on a park bench popping each other's zits, going to the supermarket and marveling at the smaller sizes of things. My favorite is the sleek 3-pack of beer. It's so silly! But wonderful, too, the way we had to re-organize the entire car to fit 5 bags of groceries into the trunk. That's how compact and economical they are with their space. And so with their waster, their home organisation, kitchen-- everything (except Ruggi's room of toys) is useful, and has a place to live. There is little waste, and the luxury lies more in richness and value than in size or stature. This is true of the apartments, stacked one atop another all throughout the city; the small cars, even their park/garden across the street, not exactly the sprawling lawns of London but a mini-concrete pedestrian area with along, narrow strip of play equipment. The trees are big, the buildings are tall, but lives are lived on an altogether more personal scale.
Speaking of space and luxury, another gem from one of my French philosophers: "Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between an individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal." I have learned that this family, part of Northern Italy's upper crust, for all their wealth and Europeanness and domestic picture-perfection, have their tribulations just as I do or anyone else does. Freedom boils down to a matter of one's relationship to one's space; and self-identity, to the sum of one's previous choices and experiences.
With just eleven more weeks here in Torino, I can feel the end of the Distancing start to curl up at the edges to reveal the pink, painful beginning of the Coming Fully Home.
The atmosphere thickens, everywhere.
30 March 2009
In Which She Develops An Unusual Fondness for Velvet
That's right, velvet, that heavy fuzzy material largely reserved for overdressed little girls, tacky vintage prom gowns, or ancient theatre-goers in costume jewelry and musty violet perfume. It started when I dropped into Palazzo Madama for coffee last week. One of the perks of having an all-access museum pass Abbonamento Musei 2009 is that I can enter Torino's museums just to visit the cafes, waltz smugly through the miniature model room and Renaissance altarpiece room and ceramics room without once looking around to get my money's worth of passive art appreciation out of an overpriced ticket. Upon deciding to enjoy said privilege on one lazy Tuesday afternoon, I flashed my card at the front desk, picked up a couple of attractive leaflets, and breezed up two flights of spiral stone steps to the high-ceilinged cafe to read them over a 5 euro (waaaay expensive) caffe shakerato, cold shaken coffee. Vaniglia o Bailey's, signorina? So tempting... but I have to pick up the kids from school in an hour... vaniglia, per favore, grazie. I settled into a cushy robin's egg blue chair and opened the "upcoming museum events" brochure to find a 10-hour weekend workshop structured around velvet and its role as a luxury material from medieval times to the 18th century. Make your own red velvet bag, just like the one in the museum's collection case!, it announced. And I read between the lines: Chat with old Italian grandmas and housewives while learning something about a weird history and craft!
Never mind that velvet has long been associated in my mind with tasteless department store girls' dresses, oversized Christmas bows, and general ugly.
I convinced a friend to sign up with me, and headed into the museum on a rainy Saturday afternoon with no idea what to expect. We found the chunky key that opened the glass case in the textile room; we found a nineteen-year-old fashion student and her boyfriend's mom who had signed up for the class together; we found a trio of spunky grandmothers who cheered us on for being gutsy young American girls, unafraid to try this foreign language and old-fashioned handiwork; we found a spacious corner room on the third floor of the palace, whose skylights and paned windows let in enough grey drizzle light to illuminate our chilled, busy fingers. Around 4,30pm a pair of babelicious tuxedoed waiters from the museum's cafe brought in green tea and biscuits on silver trays and white china. I leaned over to whisper conspiratorally to Carmen, a stern but twinkly lipsticked older woman well into her 60s and maybe even 70s, that I thought the cute waiter's deep bronze tan was fake, and she looked up slyly in his direction. Gave a knowing nod. Lampade, she says. Tanning bed.
The twelve of us beaded, stitched, chatted, asked each other about kids and recipes and grandkids and what American universities were like. Three hours on Saturday and seven on Sunday. Every now and then Aubrey or I would say something in English that one of the ladies would ask us to repeat more slowly so she could try it on later for her daughter, who studies English now. All the while it continued to rain, and one of the coordinators put on a Baroque cd in the background, and I had to finish sewing my velvet bag at home today because I spent more time lipreading Italian and beaming dopily at all the new life information being exchanged around me, than down at my work.
Never mind that velvet has long been associated in my mind with tasteless department store girls' dresses, oversized Christmas bows, and general ugly.
I convinced a friend to sign up with me, and headed into the museum on a rainy Saturday afternoon with no idea what to expect. We found the chunky key that opened the glass case in the textile room; we found a nineteen-year-old fashion student and her boyfriend's mom who had signed up for the class together; we found a trio of spunky grandmothers who cheered us on for being gutsy young American girls, unafraid to try this foreign language and old-fashioned handiwork; we found a spacious corner room on the third floor of the palace, whose skylights and paned windows let in enough grey drizzle light to illuminate our chilled, busy fingers. Around 4,30pm a pair of babelicious tuxedoed waiters from the museum's cafe brought in green tea and biscuits on silver trays and white china. I leaned over to whisper conspiratorally to Carmen, a stern but twinkly lipsticked older woman well into her 60s and maybe even 70s, that I thought the cute waiter's deep bronze tan was fake, and she looked up slyly in his direction. Gave a knowing nod. Lampade, she says. Tanning bed.
The twelve of us beaded, stitched, chatted, asked each other about kids and recipes and grandkids and what American universities were like. Three hours on Saturday and seven on Sunday. Every now and then Aubrey or I would say something in English that one of the ladies would ask us to repeat more slowly so she could try it on later for her daughter, who studies English now. All the while it continued to rain, and one of the coordinators put on a Baroque cd in the background, and I had to finish sewing my velvet bag at home today because I spent more time lipreading Italian and beaming dopily at all the new life information being exchanged around me, than down at my work.
25 March 2009
Annie Lennox Reiterates a Good Point
Yesterday afternoon I went to one of the four or five cafès around my neighborhood in which I passed many a snowy afternoon this past winter, and I realised while sitting inside and looking out (with an inward laugh at my own indulgence) that I'll have to find a new set of cafès in which to pass the springtime afternoons. Ones with great iced coffee, and plenty of outdoor seating in the sunshine. Walking out of this cafè, I mentally noted that I would come back to this winter cafe next time it snowed... and then I remembered that I won't have another winter in Turin. Only one of each month, one chance to live each Italian season. An uncomfortable realisation.
March 16th marked nine whole months since I boarded the international plane out of Denver, longer than I have ever been away from home. The first time I stayed away from home for a long period was the summer of 1998, sixth grade, two whole weeks at CYO summer camp. Six years later I moved to Colorado to live away from home for five months at a time. In 2007 I tested the boundaries of distance to study in for five months in Italy, Spain and England, but came home at the end of it. Then I graduated and came here. Talk about rootless. It's all a series of loops, really, that continue to bring me back to Berkeley with a deeper appreciation for the life that waits for me there.
On another note, I read an interview with Annie Lennox in Turin's low-quality daily newspaper, City. Here's my attempt to translate a bit of the piece entitled "Finally Free to Really Communicate":
(AL) I have a lot of ideas in mind. Of course I won't abandon music, but I'm searching other ways as well, especially now that there are all of these new technologies that let you get in direct contact with other people. Like blogs, for example. Internet is a liberation: it has rendered communication both global and instantaneous. ... I would like to tell people the things that I know, that I've learned thanks to experience, about my existential evolution. And maybe use this celebrity, which is disgusting and which I hate, to do something good. To talk about ecological sustainability or women's rights, themes that interest me a lot right now. But without become an oracle.
(city) What do you think about musical talent show programs on TV?
(AL) There are reality shows on TV. Like the one where they filled that poor kid with fake green slime. [???] I ask myself why they do it, and who watches it. The talent shows are better, even I watch them, but the judges annoy me. They're often not musicians themselves, and sometimes they're sadistic, humiliating the contestants. I think of the mothers of these kids sent to Berlin. The way the show works reminds me of ancient Rome, when the emperor could simply turn his thumb and condemn you to death.
Sigh. If only every celebrity could speak out against the dumb things, in favor of great things. Every person, actually, famous or not. Can we all be more awar, more tuned in to one another and the needs of the world? Please? Plant vegetable gardens like Michelle Obama at the White House (hell, yeah!), request that scads of British pounds' worth of condolences be instead donated to needy, worthy causes (Natasha Richardson)? I think the scary thing isn't how difficult it could be, but how simple.
March 16th marked nine whole months since I boarded the international plane out of Denver, longer than I have ever been away from home. The first time I stayed away from home for a long period was the summer of 1998, sixth grade, two whole weeks at CYO summer camp. Six years later I moved to Colorado to live away from home for five months at a time. In 2007 I tested the boundaries of distance to study in for five months in Italy, Spain and England, but came home at the end of it. Then I graduated and came here. Talk about rootless. It's all a series of loops, really, that continue to bring me back to Berkeley with a deeper appreciation for the life that waits for me there.
On another note, I read an interview with Annie Lennox in Turin's low-quality daily newspaper, City. Here's my attempt to translate a bit of the piece entitled "Finally Free to Really Communicate":
(AL) I have a lot of ideas in mind. Of course I won't abandon music, but I'm searching other ways as well, especially now that there are all of these new technologies that let you get in direct contact with other people. Like blogs, for example. Internet is a liberation: it has rendered communication both global and instantaneous. ... I would like to tell people the things that I know, that I've learned thanks to experience, about my existential evolution. And maybe use this celebrity, which is disgusting and which I hate, to do something good. To talk about ecological sustainability or women's rights, themes that interest me a lot right now. But without become an oracle.
(city) What do you think about musical talent show programs on TV?
(AL) There are reality shows on TV. Like the one where they filled that poor kid with fake green slime. [???] I ask myself why they do it, and who watches it. The talent shows are better, even I watch them, but the judges annoy me. They're often not musicians themselves, and sometimes they're sadistic, humiliating the contestants. I think of the mothers of these kids sent to Berlin. The way the show works reminds me of ancient Rome, when the emperor could simply turn his thumb and condemn you to death.
Sigh. If only every celebrity could speak out against the dumb things, in favor of great things. Every person, actually, famous or not. Can we all be more awar, more tuned in to one another and the needs of the world? Please? Plant vegetable gardens like Michelle Obama at the White House (hell, yeah!), request that scads of British pounds' worth of condolences be instead donated to needy, worthy causes (Natasha Richardson)? I think the scary thing isn't how difficult it could be, but how simple.
24 March 2009
I find the following line from Donald Oliver's book "Education and Community: A Radical Critique of Innovative Schooling" somewhat disturbing--
Yikes. The more I learn about the systems, the less I want to have anything to do with them. My host dad told me yesterday morning, as we walked his sons and their enormous backpacks to elementary school, that I should seriously consider going to graduate school for another degree because in his opinion I am not only able to but well-disposed to continue a higher education. Too bad I'm not in any way eager to do it. I replied after a quick, wry laugh that I'm not interested in going back to school unless it becomes part of a longer plan, unless I find a craft that requires specialised education before I can actively practice. Sigh. PhD, Schmee H. D.
I just finished watching "Rebel Without A Cause" for the first time (well, second, since I watched it in Italian last night, and again in English this morning), and still find it hard to believe that the teenager didn't really exist before the middle of the 1900s. That's just weird. Childhood, it seems, is disappearing; the ten-year-old with whom I live and work knows things that I didn't know when I was fifteen, and his thirteen-year-old girl cousin, even more. Each day I see the long and continuous battle between being a bambino (boy) and a ragazzo (young man) being waged in and around his small head of fine, varicoloured hair, and I want to reach out to stroke a sense of calm into his heart, to tell him that the coolest thing he can possibly be is himself.
This photograph is my personal tribute to whoever wrote those mid-nineties' pop female songwriter lyrics "Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box / religion is the smile on a dog."
She knew.
In sociological terms, an underlying central goal of schooling is to preselect and stratify children to make success and failure within the system seem reasonable, justified, and personally earned.
Yikes. The more I learn about the systems, the less I want to have anything to do with them. My host dad told me yesterday morning, as we walked his sons and their enormous backpacks to elementary school, that I should seriously consider going to graduate school for another degree because in his opinion I am not only able to but well-disposed to continue a higher education. Too bad I'm not in any way eager to do it. I replied after a quick, wry laugh that I'm not interested in going back to school unless it becomes part of a longer plan, unless I find a craft that requires specialised education before I can actively practice. Sigh. PhD, Schmee H. D.
I just finished watching "Rebel Without A Cause" for the first time (well, second, since I watched it in Italian last night, and again in English this morning), and still find it hard to believe that the teenager didn't really exist before the middle of the 1900s. That's just weird. Childhood, it seems, is disappearing; the ten-year-old with whom I live and work knows things that I didn't know when I was fifteen, and his thirteen-year-old girl cousin, even more. Each day I see the long and continuous battle between being a bambino (boy) and a ragazzo (young man) being waged in and around his small head of fine, varicoloured hair, and I want to reach out to stroke a sense of calm into his heart, to tell him that the coolest thing he can possibly be is himself.
This photograph is my personal tribute to whoever wrote those mid-nineties' pop female songwriter lyrics "Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box / religion is the smile on a dog."
She knew.
23 March 2009
In Which Recycling Comes Back
I spent the past weekend with my Italian family, on a road trip for the first time since September. September! Since I've stayed in Torino on the weekends they went away, or I took off on my own weekend trips while they stayed in the city, the five of us were delighted to hit the open road all together again. This time it was to check out five prospective houses/properties in the Tuscan countryside and around the Ligurian coastline, as they hope to purchase a place to spend their summers. We stayed in a bed and breakfast with tiled floors and a view of the Mediterranean; where brown kiwis grew on shady, leafless vines. We ate fresh seafood, I drank too much wine, and we dumped sand out of our shoes at the end of the day.
If my age status were to be determined by the hour at which I got out of bed, with 7am being Kid and 9am being Adult, this weekend I was 100% Kid. The other two dozed off on my shoulders in the backseat of the car, and I chose gelato over coffee.
19 March 2009
In Which A Tower Leans Over the Couchsurfers
But in a protective, not menacing, way.
Last weekend I took a train down to Pisa to meet up with a good college friend, Greer, near the end of her month-long senior project in Rome. We agreed on Pisa as our midpoint so neither of us had to go über out of her way to reach the other, and so she could test out this CouchSurfing thing. (CS is a free online network that allows travelers to stay in peoples' homes rather than hostels or hotels, "surfing" the "couches" offered by willing hosts, and has gained popularity in the past couple of years.) We found two beds in the apartment of five male graduate students located just five walking minutes from the Leaning Tower, and according to former guests' testimonies they had been fantastic hosts, so she and I had high hopes for the weekend. After ten months apart we were glad to simply spend some time together in Italy, checking out the small town with its Big Sight-- and it turned out to be everything we'd dreamed!
The boys were so kind and laid-back for the entirety of the weekend, beginning by meeting each of us at the train station. I arrived first, got acquainted with the apartment and its inhabitants, went out for wine and cold cuts at a great place called In Vino Veritas*, chitchatted in Italian about why I was in Italy, what they were all studying (biology, sociology, engineering), the clay models of mythical creatures that they make and paint and joked about someday trying to sell. Charming, good-natured people. Then we went back to the station to pick up Greer, and she and I defaulted into American Girl Mode, laughing, hugging, talking at top speed in twin excited tones. Clicking arm-in-arm down the cobbled stone streets while Pisan university students began to assemble for the usual nocturnal weekend piazza festivities. Met some people, drank different things, coquetted with young people from all over the world, all the while catching up on the past year of her life and mine -- all that we had accomplished and realised and missed.
* Check out these adorable directions from the "English version" of the In Vino Veritas website: If you arrive to Pisa from the A1 highway, you can turn into the A11 highway direction Pisa, way out Pisa center and then you can find. Oh, the clarity. I give it an A for Effort.
We went to bed late and woke fairly early, went out to take coffee and croissants on a sunny cafe patio and talk at length about deeper matters, about doubts and fears and disappointments. Just one year ago, in March 2008, I was exactly where she is now. Study abroad in Italy still freshly impressed on her brain and heart, outstretched fingertips brushing the tip of an undergraduate degree in literature, teetering at an ambiguous edge. Unsure not only of what lies on the other side of College Graduation, but of where and when and how to jump. Can we, in fact, jump without falling? From behind my oversized Holly Golightly sunglasses I made some lame attempts at wise advice, offering my two centessimi on how unnecessary it is to be certain about anything right now, how this is the perfect time to sit and think and absorb. Doing comes later, when we are sure of ourselves. She nodded, sipped her coffee. Wore her customary pearl studs and Banana Republic cardigan. No makeup. A woman.
We talked also of the small things, of the a cappella group in which we initially met, of a class we had taken together some years ago. The sun moved in the sky, warming the air, and we changed into dresses before visiting the Baptistry (famous for its extraordinary interior acoustics) and eating a picnic lunch beside the Leaning Tower itself. Our hosts showed up at the end of lunch with a five-string guitar, which we played in turns, heedless of the other picnickers around us.
The sun moved again and we moved out of the tower's cool shadow. In the late afternoon we went shopping, walking. I won a game of Scarabeo (Italian Scrabble), to my - and everyone's - surprise. Extravagant homecooked dinner, birthday party at a friend's house, karaoke, 1am scooter rides around the city. I lightly held the ribs of a handsome blue-eyed Croatian boy whose name I never did manage to pronounce and looked over at Greer, passenger on another scooter. We both smiles like idiots, giggling at the absurdity and beauty of our situation. Crossing a stone bridge that's probably older than my own country! Moonlight shimmering on the river! Is that the wind whipping past my ears, or the sound of the motor? Or the beating of four young hearts?
Her train left at 7am the next morning, mine at 3. We shared a bench on her platform, talked about Colorado. Hugged. There is a small fruit tree in Pisa, growing from a squat square pot to about hip height, that is about seven or eight kumquats lighter than it was before my arrival. The Croatian boy invited me to join him for his end-of-the-summer journey home to his island, four hours to cross Italy by scooter and ten to cross the sea by ferry. Every time I come back to Torino, I am different.
And when I come back to California...?
Last weekend I took a train down to Pisa to meet up with a good college friend, Greer, near the end of her month-long senior project in Rome. We agreed on Pisa as our midpoint so neither of us had to go über out of her way to reach the other, and so she could test out this CouchSurfing thing. (CS is a free online network that allows travelers to stay in peoples' homes rather than hostels or hotels, "surfing" the "couches" offered by willing hosts, and has gained popularity in the past couple of years.) We found two beds in the apartment of five male graduate students located just five walking minutes from the Leaning Tower, and according to former guests' testimonies they had been fantastic hosts, so she and I had high hopes for the weekend. After ten months apart we were glad to simply spend some time together in Italy, checking out the small town with its Big Sight-- and it turned out to be everything we'd dreamed!
The boys were so kind and laid-back for the entirety of the weekend, beginning by meeting each of us at the train station. I arrived first, got acquainted with the apartment and its inhabitants, went out for wine and cold cuts at a great place called In Vino Veritas*, chitchatted in Italian about why I was in Italy, what they were all studying (biology, sociology, engineering), the clay models of mythical creatures that they make and paint and joked about someday trying to sell. Charming, good-natured people. Then we went back to the station to pick up Greer, and she and I defaulted into American Girl Mode, laughing, hugging, talking at top speed in twin excited tones. Clicking arm-in-arm down the cobbled stone streets while Pisan university students began to assemble for the usual nocturnal weekend piazza festivities. Met some people, drank different things, coquetted with young people from all over the world, all the while catching up on the past year of her life and mine -- all that we had accomplished and realised and missed.
* Check out these adorable directions from the "English version" of the In Vino Veritas website: If you arrive to Pisa from the A1 highway, you can turn into the A11 highway direction Pisa, way out Pisa center and then you can find. Oh, the clarity. I give it an A for Effort.
We went to bed late and woke fairly early, went out to take coffee and croissants on a sunny cafe patio and talk at length about deeper matters, about doubts and fears and disappointments. Just one year ago, in March 2008, I was exactly where she is now. Study abroad in Italy still freshly impressed on her brain and heart, outstretched fingertips brushing the tip of an undergraduate degree in literature, teetering at an ambiguous edge. Unsure not only of what lies on the other side of College Graduation, but of where and when and how to jump. Can we, in fact, jump without falling? From behind my oversized Holly Golightly sunglasses I made some lame attempts at wise advice, offering my two centessimi on how unnecessary it is to be certain about anything right now, how this is the perfect time to sit and think and absorb. Doing comes later, when we are sure of ourselves. She nodded, sipped her coffee. Wore her customary pearl studs and Banana Republic cardigan. No makeup. A woman.
We talked also of the small things, of the a cappella group in which we initially met, of a class we had taken together some years ago. The sun moved in the sky, warming the air, and we changed into dresses before visiting the Baptistry (famous for its extraordinary interior acoustics) and eating a picnic lunch beside the Leaning Tower itself. Our hosts showed up at the end of lunch with a five-string guitar, which we played in turns, heedless of the other picnickers around us.
The sun moved again and we moved out of the tower's cool shadow. In the late afternoon we went shopping, walking. I won a game of Scarabeo (Italian Scrabble), to my - and everyone's - surprise. Extravagant homecooked dinner, birthday party at a friend's house, karaoke, 1am scooter rides around the city. I lightly held the ribs of a handsome blue-eyed Croatian boy whose name I never did manage to pronounce and looked over at Greer, passenger on another scooter. We both smiles like idiots, giggling at the absurdity and beauty of our situation. Crossing a stone bridge that's probably older than my own country! Moonlight shimmering on the river! Is that the wind whipping past my ears, or the sound of the motor? Or the beating of four young hearts?
Her train left at 7am the next morning, mine at 3. We shared a bench on her platform, talked about Colorado. Hugged. There is a small fruit tree in Pisa, growing from a squat square pot to about hip height, that is about seven or eight kumquats lighter than it was before my arrival. The Croatian boy invited me to join him for his end-of-the-summer journey home to his island, four hours to cross Italy by scooter and ten to cross the sea by ferry. Every time I come back to Torino, I am different.
And when I come back to California...?
06 March 2009
In Which She Notices the Alarming Correlation Between Monopoly and Real Life
Someone stole my wallet from my purse on a busy tram yesterday afternoon, whilst I tried to keep my umbrella out of the nostrils of the woman in front of me, one blonde boy from falling out of the bus every time the doors opened, and the other from shoving his tennis racket into the crotch of an elderly signore seated behind him. Danged pickpocketers. It of course contained my ATM card and credit card and driver's license, two of which cannot be replaced internationally. So annoying! Not much cash, however, just a brand new 20 euro bill. In the post-thievery flurry of collect phone calls to monetary institutions (and simultaneous instant message chats with both of my parents), I realised that in just a few days this would become just another item in my ongoing column of expenses. Chance card: Wallet Stolen, Lose 20 euro. Pass Go next Monday, collect 100 euro. So weird how sometimes the things that were supposed to teach us lessons about Real Life, actually do prepare us for Real Life.
Today I bought slime from the joke shop/school supply store across the street from the boys' school, one "barrel" of "petroleum" (the slime is black) for each boy. When we were walking home with them the younger one said to me, "Mi sembra acqua ciccione!" Literally, "it seems to be like chubby water." That's adorable.
Today I bought slime from the joke shop/school supply store across the street from the boys' school, one "barrel" of "petroleum" (the slime is black) for each boy. When we were walking home with them the younger one said to me, "Mi sembra acqua ciccione!" Literally, "it seems to be like chubby water." That's adorable.
01 March 2009
In Which She Contemplates Other Birthdays
Excerpt from a letter to a friend.
How did you know that I, too, was just dreaming about another such camping trip [...] ? I would really love that. One option for evading the economic crisis = retreating into the woods to wait it out with cheap beer and good friends. Sounds like heaven.
Lately I've been marveling at the freedom of our age. It sounds like it's hard for you to feel it while at the mercy, so to speak, of your parents' generosity/charity (it is hard to differentiate, isn't it sometimes, when it comes to Them) but to be 23, unmarried, unburdened by children or elderly parents, not yet tied to a steady job yet in fresh and deserving possession of a bachelor's degree. You, whether or not you are fully aware of it, are your biggest priority right now, and that is, for all its daunting terror, delicious. May we find the courage to take full advantage of these sweet years! I know I sure did today, a sunny Saturday in Torino, and here's how:
stayed up until 2,30am on skype with --- to hash out the existential puzzles of this world, then woke up at 8,30am to ready my two little charges for their weekly swim lessons;
[once they had gone] ate yogurt and granola on the balcony in my pajamas, with Henry James' Turn of the Screw in one hand;
gave my host dad some professional English mother-tongue advice about his potential project titles, as he hopes to soon get a couple of grants to form an international research foundation;
met a good friend on the corner between our houses for a long stroll around town to run errands (visit this shoe store, that books store, all the things we postpone until Saturday), and ended up going into a stationary store with so many beautiful delicate handprinted things in the window, and getting a tour of the printing studio; drinking Corona straight from the bottle in a "piazza" (strip of greenish dog-poopy lawn in the midst of a parking lot), eating apples, and choosing songs for her sister's upcoming wedding reception; gawking at sexy men, even if they were with their girlfriends or, in some cases, boyfriends, and laughing in that really exclusive teenage-girlish was about something we both remembered that wasn't even actually that funny; parted ways so she could meet someone for a running date, and I went on alone--
ate lunch alone at an outside cafe, always accompanied by Henry James;
saw a marching band march by, followed by a rather sheepish-looking flag squad;
heard a classical street guitarist named Matteo play to an indifferent crowd, stopped to listen to and sketch him, then offered him a coffee which we took at a nearby cafe with his girlfriend, Francesca;
bought an incredibly cool burgundy long-sleeved shirt that converts into a sleeveless vest via zippers, and a Calvin & Hobbes book for my boys, who are just beginning to enjoy listening to English books read aloud;
walked and walked, and looked and looked, and thought, and thought: This is luxury. This is freedom."
Along with lofty concepts like Freedom and Youth, I have also been lately ruminating on Education, Identity, and Purpose. You know, in my spare time. Coincidentally, just yesterday someone whom I hold in high regard sent me a scholarly reading titled “The Disadvantages of An Elite Education” from which I proceeded to remove a few especially savory bits with all the attentive delicacy of taking a sleeping infant from the arms of another, and set them apart in a clean, dry corner of my brain to ripen, and deepen. To resonate. Yummy bits like "being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas” and, next of all, “thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them." The author gives his two cents on today's university system and how far it takes the individual from her true intellectual purpose, which should be to question the universe around her, to find and cultivate a vision that allows her to best give something back. This message isn't unlike that of the UC Berkeley article about which I recently posted, the one about the plight of the young girl in modern society. Both writings speak directly to me, it seems, supporting this itch I felt one year ago to take the road less traveled (thanks, Margo Watson, for Robert Frost) and go abroad to see some things, to think some things. Nine months after graduating from Colorado College and eight months after leaving the United States, I'm beginning to see that despite all my misgivings, it was the right thing to do.
"The ability to engage in introspection . . . is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude." Speaking of which I spent a hefty chunk of my birthday alone, this past Wednesday. Ash Wednesday, my brother reminded me, adding that it's my fault that Catholics have to feel so guilty this year. Thought about how different this birthday was from the one before it - 22, when I wore a pink tutu around campus just to wring the absolute most public attention from my special day. Before that came 21, when I shared strawberry wine with other study abroad students in a small pub in Florence, and before that was 20, the Day of Twenty Alcoholic Beverages... yeah... ahem. Even before that came 19, when three friends and I set off the smoke alarm in the freshman dorm making quesadillas, and 18, the 40 person scavenger hunt that so unfortunately ended in a minor car crash. Oh, birthdays.
I'm 23.
How did you know that I, too, was just dreaming about another such camping trip [...] ? I would really love that. One option for evading the economic crisis = retreating into the woods to wait it out with cheap beer and good friends. Sounds like heaven.
Lately I've been marveling at the freedom of our age. It sounds like it's hard for you to feel it while at the mercy, so to speak, of your parents' generosity/charity (it is hard to differentiate, isn't it sometimes, when it comes to Them) but to be 23, unmarried, unburdened by children or elderly parents, not yet tied to a steady job yet in fresh and deserving possession of a bachelor's degree. You, whether or not you are fully aware of it, are your biggest priority right now, and that is, for all its daunting terror, delicious. May we find the courage to take full advantage of these sweet years! I know I sure did today, a sunny Saturday in Torino, and here's how:
stayed up until 2,30am on skype with --- to hash out the existential puzzles of this world, then woke up at 8,30am to ready my two little charges for their weekly swim lessons;
[once they had gone] ate yogurt and granola on the balcony in my pajamas, with Henry James' Turn of the Screw in one hand;
gave my host dad some professional English mother-tongue advice about his potential project titles, as he hopes to soon get a couple of grants to form an international research foundation;
met a good friend on the corner between our houses for a long stroll around town to run errands (visit this shoe store, that books store, all the things we postpone until Saturday), and ended up going into a stationary store with so many beautiful delicate handprinted things in the window, and getting a tour of the printing studio; drinking Corona straight from the bottle in a "piazza" (strip of greenish dog-poopy lawn in the midst of a parking lot), eating apples, and choosing songs for her sister's upcoming wedding reception; gawking at sexy men, even if they were with their girlfriends or, in some cases, boyfriends, and laughing in that really exclusive teenage-girlish was about something we both remembered that wasn't even actually that funny; parted ways so she could meet someone for a running date, and I went on alone--
ate lunch alone at an outside cafe, always accompanied by Henry James;
saw a marching band march by, followed by a rather sheepish-looking flag squad;
heard a classical street guitarist named Matteo play to an indifferent crowd, stopped to listen to and sketch him, then offered him a coffee which we took at a nearby cafe with his girlfriend, Francesca;
bought an incredibly cool burgundy long-sleeved shirt that converts into a sleeveless vest via zippers, and a Calvin & Hobbes book for my boys, who are just beginning to enjoy listening to English books read aloud;
walked and walked, and looked and looked, and thought, and thought: This is luxury. This is freedom."
Along with lofty concepts like Freedom and Youth, I have also been lately ruminating on Education, Identity, and Purpose. You know, in my spare time. Coincidentally, just yesterday someone whom I hold in high regard sent me a scholarly reading titled “The Disadvantages of An Elite Education” from which I proceeded to remove a few especially savory bits with all the attentive delicacy of taking a sleeping infant from the arms of another, and set them apart in a clean, dry corner of my brain to ripen, and deepen. To resonate. Yummy bits like "being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas” and, next of all, “thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them." The author gives his two cents on today's university system and how far it takes the individual from her true intellectual purpose, which should be to question the universe around her, to find and cultivate a vision that allows her to best give something back. This message isn't unlike that of the UC Berkeley article about which I recently posted, the one about the plight of the young girl in modern society. Both writings speak directly to me, it seems, supporting this itch I felt one year ago to take the road less traveled (thanks, Margo Watson, for Robert Frost) and go abroad to see some things, to think some things. Nine months after graduating from Colorado College and eight months after leaving the United States, I'm beginning to see that despite all my misgivings, it was the right thing to do.
"The ability to engage in introspection . . . is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude." Speaking of which I spent a hefty chunk of my birthday alone, this past Wednesday. Ash Wednesday, my brother reminded me, adding that it's my fault that Catholics have to feel so guilty this year. Thought about how different this birthday was from the one before it - 22, when I wore a pink tutu around campus just to wring the absolute most public attention from my special day. Before that came 21, when I shared strawberry wine with other study abroad students in a small pub in Florence, and before that was 20, the Day of Twenty Alcoholic Beverages... yeah... ahem. Even before that came 19, when three friends and I set off the smoke alarm in the freshman dorm making quesadillas, and 18, the 40 person scavenger hunt that so unfortunately ended in a minor car crash. Oh, birthdays.
I'm 23.
23 February 2009
Orange you going to say Banana?
Along came February, and in some corner of my mind I dusted off the memory of a mystical, almost mythical, annual orange battle in some small Italian village about which I had previously heard bits and pieces whispered between young world travelers in hostel bunks or boasted over beer steins in some international pub. I hear that hundreds of people - no, thousands - gather from all over the world to throw oranges at each other, from atop buildings and from trees. They camp out for days waiting for it to start. Every year someone dies. In reality it occurs in part to celebrate Mardi Gras, and in part to honor the historical uprising of the common people against tyrannical nobles around the time of the French Revolution. Among other symbolic events that take place throughout the five days of Carnevale, the throwing of the oranges is supposedly intended to remember the Ivreans' "fight for liberty." The event even has a website, which explained the existence and history of the nine teams who actually compete for first place. When I realised that this event was in fact real, and safe, and extremely close to Torino, I decided to enlist the merry company of four friends to investigate.
Here we are, pre-battle.
We took a train up from Torino on Saturday night to check into our hostel and mosey around town before the evening's parade and ceremonies. Along the way we ran into a red-headed and freckled Italian youth named Boris who attempted to direct us toward a pizzeria but succeeded only in creeping us out of being hungry. Our hostel had once been Salesian monestary, and we shared it with a large group of elderly Scottish bagpipers who practiced on the sprawling outdoor lawn the pieces they would play in tomorrow morning's parade. We put our backpacks down in the room, chose bunks, and ran outside to listen to bagpipes in the dying afternoon sun. What a start to the weekend.
The orange battle was just part of a series of intensely awesome events, including a bean lunch that apparently originates from the Middle Ages when some noblewoman gave a handful of beans to some peasants. Over the years, that act of benificience evolved into ten or fifteen humongous vats of beans simmering overnight in an empty piazza that fills to the brim the next morning with people lining up for a deep bowl of bean stew, hunks of hearty bread, and tiny plastic cups of cold red wine. Yes, we ate beans and drank wine at 11am on a cold Sunday. Only in Italy, right?
There were parades, opening ceremonies involving the Miller's Daughter and her Entourage (better explained on the website), cotton candy, riverside fireworks, and more mulled wine than was good for me! And then, of course, the battle itself, which took place from 14,00-16,30 on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Horses pulled carts of helmeted team members into other teams' piazzas, where participants hurled oranges at each other with alarming ferocity while judges and spectators watched. The five of us had prime spots in the centralmost piazza for the start of the Battle and, aside from being thoroughly and continuously astonished at the overall event, I think the most memorable thing about it was that from the physical and botanical carnage rose the sharp yet delicate odor of oranges that - so one Ivrea resident tells me - stays in the city for nearly one month after the festivities have finished. Over the course of the Carnevale pedestrian traffic would mix the orange rinds and pulp into a disgusting paste with horse manure and other garbage, hence the boots you see in our group photo, but we didn't see the worst of it as we stayed only for the first day.
It was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. On one hand, ridiculous; but on the other, somewhat poignant as it's the singular reason for which this tiny village is known in Italy. The deep pride behind these labors was evident in the teams' posture, the musicians' step, the clipped prancing of the ponies, and the long complete silence in which thousands of Italians, young and old, and at least five Americans, turned their eyes heavenward to watch almost half an hours' worth of fireworks explode overhead.
21 February 2009
In Which She Marvels at Circularity of Things
Things like the Universe. Sometimes it seems that there really is a plan, somewhere out there.
My host mom turned in shortly after dinner to rest up before tomorrow morning's drive to Tuscany for the long weekend; dad stayed up another hour to do some business stuff on the computer; R-- breathed deeply next to his yellow nightlight - covered in assorted stickers - probably dreaming about wild animals and the new Star Wars lego spaceship for whose assembly he abandoned tonight's dinner; and F-- clutched a brand new iPod, slim and black and already containing hundreds of American songs. I, however, stayed up way past my bedtime to watch Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino from the corner of our big red sofa, with a crafty art project on my lap and mug of tea at my feet, while the rest of the household slept. I really liked the song playing in the background of one of the final and most emotional scenes, and thought the piano sounded oddly familiar. And the voice... sounded like... Jamie Cullum? Then I remembered my last night at Midem conference in Cannes in mid-January, defying sleep and high heel blisters to walk into the center to see one of my favorite musicians play a measly five song set in a small standing-only venue. He introduced the penultimate song with an anecdote about Clint Eastwood, claiming that he'd never performed the song live before, this song requested by Mr Eastwood for his upcoming film. I mentally waved off the introduction and assumed I'd never see the movie; and even if I did, I wouldn't remember to connect this song to that film.
Yet almost exactly one month later, I realised that the song pulling my focus away from the drawing in my lap and even from the actors on the screen, was that very song! The song that Jamie Cullum debuted to me and my dad and a roomful of strangers in some upstairs room on the French coast. Is there such thing as chance? Through my mind raced a bit of a book I'd finished earlier this week, Jeannette Wall's memoir The Glass Castle: If every action in the universe that we thought was random actually conformed to a rational pattern, Dad said, that implied the existence of a divine creator. I have run into corroborating evidence for this pattern so many times now that I'm no longer surprised, only deeply pleased and slightly amused. Like how all those years of Catholic mass made it possible for me to attend an all-Tagalog Sunday mass and follow the entire service; like how the Peggy Guggenhaim exhibit I stumbled into months ago came up in a conversation with someone I've never met before, rendering me more widely cultured than I would have appeared. Like how learning the etymology of the word assassin from a seemingly mundane Ital-Eng language exchange sparked a new conversation with a different person from which I learned about an ancient Persian population that came and went leaving almost no trace. Like how taking a wrong turn not only kept me from getting lost the second time, but made it possible to give someone else directions. Like buying those ill-fitting boots in November gave me something to bring to Ivrea tomorrow, with which to wade through the orange muck in one of the weirdest small town events I've ever heard about.
Nothing is ever, ever random. Kepp your eyes open at all times - it is all useful.
My host mom turned in shortly after dinner to rest up before tomorrow morning's drive to Tuscany for the long weekend; dad stayed up another hour to do some business stuff on the computer; R-- breathed deeply next to his yellow nightlight - covered in assorted stickers - probably dreaming about wild animals and the new Star Wars lego spaceship for whose assembly he abandoned tonight's dinner; and F-- clutched a brand new iPod, slim and black and already containing hundreds of American songs. I, however, stayed up way past my bedtime to watch Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino from the corner of our big red sofa, with a crafty art project on my lap and mug of tea at my feet, while the rest of the household slept. I really liked the song playing in the background of one of the final and most emotional scenes, and thought the piano sounded oddly familiar. And the voice... sounded like... Jamie Cullum? Then I remembered my last night at Midem conference in Cannes in mid-January, defying sleep and high heel blisters to walk into the center to see one of my favorite musicians play a measly five song set in a small standing-only venue. He introduced the penultimate song with an anecdote about Clint Eastwood, claiming that he'd never performed the song live before, this song requested by Mr Eastwood for his upcoming film. I mentally waved off the introduction and assumed I'd never see the movie; and even if I did, I wouldn't remember to connect this song to that film.
Yet almost exactly one month later, I realised that the song pulling my focus away from the drawing in my lap and even from the actors on the screen, was that very song! The song that Jamie Cullum debuted to me and my dad and a roomful of strangers in some upstairs room on the French coast. Is there such thing as chance? Through my mind raced a bit of a book I'd finished earlier this week, Jeannette Wall's memoir The Glass Castle: If every action in the universe that we thought was random actually conformed to a rational pattern, Dad said, that implied the existence of a divine creator. I have run into corroborating evidence for this pattern so many times now that I'm no longer surprised, only deeply pleased and slightly amused. Like how all those years of Catholic mass made it possible for me to attend an all-Tagalog Sunday mass and follow the entire service; like how the Peggy Guggenhaim exhibit I stumbled into months ago came up in a conversation with someone I've never met before, rendering me more widely cultured than I would have appeared. Like how learning the etymology of the word assassin from a seemingly mundane Ital-Eng language exchange sparked a new conversation with a different person from which I learned about an ancient Persian population that came and went leaving almost no trace. Like how taking a wrong turn not only kept me from getting lost the second time, but made it possible to give someone else directions. Like buying those ill-fitting boots in November gave me something to bring to Ivrea tomorrow, with which to wade through the orange muck in one of the weirdest small town events I've ever heard about.
Nothing is ever, ever random. Kepp your eyes open at all times - it is all useful.
17 February 2009
Valentine's Day isn't so big here.
But on this particular lover's day,
I
woke up early
delivered a ton of flowers
ate chocolate
gossiped in the back of the flowershop
about the locals.
made some money
spent some money
got buzzed with a good friend
drank wine and ate delicious bread
talked about our Biggest Loves and Biggest Heartbreaks
and realised that, in both cases, they were the same person.
started the evening at the theatre to hear Torino's symphony
ended it walking home at 4am
from Peruvian Night at an Italian disco.
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