Name:Lauren Country:United States State:California Birthday:10/28/1984 Gender:Female
Interests:dancing with CADC, hanging out with my thetas, hanging out with my friends, complaining, listening to others complain(i actually like to do that) Expertise:losing things when I really need them, tripping in public, getting lost while driving, having a horrible sense of time, direction and location Occupation:Education/training Industry:Other
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Berlin
May
2008
I was standing on the top step of the altar at the Pergamon in Berlin. I was pretty high so I was pretending that I was actually in ancient Greece and I was a princess standing at the base of my palace, brooding over the miseries that can only be found in a Greek Tragedy. I was, of course, steeped in tragedy over a forbidden love, or a lost love, or any kind of love.I surveyed my kingdom, looked down to where all the villagers lived, tilled the land, herded the sheep, and I marveled at the beauty of it all. I fluttered along the exhibition, still very much in my own world. My eyes glazed with fantasy, my head filled with stories that never really existed. Eventually I floated back from Athens and found myself walking around the largest 3-D puzzle that I have ever seen, with my head plugged into an audio tour guide that whispered the secrets of the plaster reconstruction in my ears. What was I really looking at? I was looking at pieces. Pieces of an ancient world, put back together in the way that we imagine it should look. Where was I? I was in Pergamon in Ancient Greece, but no, I was actually in Berlin, modern day Germany… I struggled to make sense of this. Through the haze I realized what that museum was all about. That museum was about our desire, as humans, to feel connected to the past, to try to stand on the top of an altar that has the memory of thousands of years brushed on its surface, and try to imagine… that we actually have a place in it all.
We got the weed from Ben our tour guide. Ben who was living illegally in Berlin.We sat in a dank bar with him while he counted his measly tips and audibly cursed the stingy Canadians who skipped out on properly compensating him for his performance. He walked us to the bank of the river where we parked ourselves in the grass and talked while he rolled our joint. To Ben, Berlin was just, well, better than the U.S. People there weren’t in such a hurry to live their lives. They woke up late, went to bed late, drank a lot, smoked a lot, and worried less about moving so quickly through life.
.... The rest is on my new blogspot, I'm not really sure why I switched over, just time for a change I guess...
I am very opinionated when it comes to the subject of
certain types of people who ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ drive. I don’t believe, for
example, that women ‘cannot’ drive. I, personally, am not that great of a
driver. I mean I’m ok, I haven’t had any near fatal accidents or any real
accidents to speak of (knock on wood) but I have had some close calls. So if
you see me on the road and I do something stupid, like cut you off, you are
going to look at me and think ‘Oh, she’s a woman, she can’t drive.’ No. I just
can’t drive in general, the fact that I am a woman is a completely independent
variable and you are incorrectly making the conclusion that one variable
(gender) caused the other (inability to safely maneuver vehicles). Correlation,
not causation.I tend to believe that
human beings in general cannot drive. I would constantly find myself being
irritated beyond belief when I lived in Irvine because people would always drop
ignorant comments about someone who had made an idiotic driving decision
because they were Asian.Think about it,
there is a very high percentage of Asians in Irvine. Therefore statistically
you are more likely to get into a driving altercation with an Asian driver because there are more of them. It’s not because they are Asian that they
can’t drive, it’s because they are part of the human race.
With that said, and I know I am going to border on hypocrisy
here but bear with me. There is one population that I do believe cannot drive
worth a shit. And that population is: old people. I’m sorry, I know it’s bad, and
probably disrespectful, but seriously there comes a point when it’s just
ridiculous. You know that feeling when you wake up after a long night of drinking
and your brain is all fuzzy and your motor skills are slowed significantly and
you can barely understand what your friends are saying to you let alone
comprehend such difficult things as red, yellow, green lights, stop signs and
turn signals? Well that is what I imagine it is like to be old: half hung over
and half still drunk.
I had a dream last night that I was crossing the street in a
big intersection and this car came around making an unprotected left hand turn
into the crosswalk where I was. The damn car almost hit me and I had to jump to
get out of the way. Lo and behold, when I looked behind the driver seat there
was an old batty lady driving. Without thinking I took the blueberry muffin I
was eating and threw it at her. Her car window was open and it hit her in the
face. She immediately stopped her gigantic boat of a car in the middle of the
intersection and started yelling at me. “What are you doing throwing your
muffin at an old lady like me?!!!!” she yelled. Her ancient Sunday church hat
had fallen down over her powdered wig and was covering most of her eyesight.
“You almost hit me lady!” I yelled back as I continued to cross the crosswalk.
I was actually upset that I wasted the rest of my blueberry muffin. She
continued to sob out her window about being treated in such a manner for an old
woman.Other cars started piling up in
the intersection and honking at her because she was blocking traffic in all
directions with her ridiculously large car. And thus, she proved my point.
The four of us were curled up in big comfy chairs in Starbucks. Each of us with an overpriced-calorie-filled-super-sweet mug of coffee in our hands. If you sit in at a Starbucks in Scotland you get a mug instead of a paper cup. Al Gore must be the only American who actually cares about the environment (I'm super super serial).
"Edinburgh is just too small to do that," Rachel said, in response to the conversation circulating regarding awkward run-ins we've had with boys we've pulled in the city. Everyone agreed. It struck me, that I have had the exact same conversation in my past but it went something like "Irvine is just too small to do that." Funny how the world works, isn't it?
Let's say I took an overhead transparency and drew a picture on it and that picture represented my life in Irvine. Let's say it was a picture of, oh I don't know, Darth Vader. So now I look at my life here in Edinburgh, on a different transparency, and it's still a picture of Darth Vader (of course). So you put one transparency on top of the other, place it on the overhead projector, flick the switch and say "Aha! See?! They are the same!" But then you realize, they are not the same. You see, his light saber sticks out at a different angle on the top transparency. Oh for fucks sake... So you shift the top transparency. Now it lines up. Ok, but now his helmet isn't lined up at the top right corner. So you shift again to line that up. Perfect. But now his cape on the top transparency is all kinds of different than the cape on the bottom transparency, so you shift again.
References. Tiny shifts in one life compared to another. Yes, I still compare my life here to my one back home. But only because that is how we comprehend our world and how we adjust our perceptions. In many ways my life here is similar to the one I have back home, I mean, hell, it's still a picture of Darth Vader, but it's different too. In a good way. I find myself constantly shifting around my transparencies to try to nestle down into my life here and what that means about who I am. When I left Irvine I felt a bit lost. It's hard when you find yourself so submerged in the pieces of your own life that you don't really know who you are anymore. That might sound strange because you might think that the pieces of your life make you who you are. But wouldn't it be great if you could live as two co-existing entities? You and your life. So that you could pluck yourself out of a time and place, like a peg on a Lite-Brite, and place yourself somewhere else, and still exist, as you. It's hard to imagine at first. It takes a lot of shifting, a bit of frustration, and constant comparison. But after a while the shifts make sense. An unconscious response to the way you live your life. The ability to shift, paradigms even, if you consider your life in that grand of schemes. In California I know that 101 is Northpark Maintenance Association, 106 is Serrano Heights Community Association, 113 is Turtle Ridge Homeowners Association full of certifiably insane people. In Edinburgh 23 is a peardrop shot, 17 is a bubblegum shot, and 3 is a disgusting chili shot that loads of people order just for the novelty of it all. The same, but different.
I passed out on Sue's couch because we had been up drinking all night. I woke up and she made me French Toast and asked "What do you want to do today?" Absolutely nothing, I told her. We watched Flight of the Conchords and ate greasy take-away food. The same, but different.
There are ghosts in my room. Well, I shouldn't say there are ghosts in my room. They are not here now. They come and go as they please. Always when I am tucked away into my bed, somewhere between sleep and awake. Always different. Always leaving me with a foggy view of their presence and memory. They are all unique. And I don't know why they choose to bother me. Mostly I like them though. They interest me... The second one came on Christmas Morning. He was not pleasant. A strong male presence by my bedside and he frightened me and I wanted desperately to tell him to leave my room but I felt a ghost press upon my chest and I was paralyzed. I wanted to reach out to tell him to leave but I couldn't move. I couldn't talk either which was the worst part. I felt the words at the bottom of my throat... "get out".... but they were stuck. I didn't like him much. The first one was feisty. Very sexual. I liked him. He left too quickly. The third one, or 'ones' actually was a group of girls. They were bothering me while I was trying to nap. I think they were trying to steal my keys. At this point I got over trying to fight these apparitions. I was still paralyzed by a ghost press but I refused to fight it this time. I let them giggle and play around in my room until their silly presence faded into a silly dream that I can't remember now.
I know what you are thinking. "Lauren, don't be a moron. Those are not ghosts, you are just dreaming."
Maybe. I live in a city that is hundreds of years old. There is a castle next door that is built into the bulky earth of an extinct volcano. Under my feet as I walk down South Bridge I know that there are empty caverns that used to house a seedy underworld full of illegal whiskey making, prostitution, body snatching, mushroom growing and the devil knows what else... There have been plagues and wars. Things have been knocked down. Things have been rebuilt. New things have been built right on top of old things. If you can't go out, you can always go up. My room is old. I went to pull the door open yesterday and the handle came right off the damn door. (This is more likely due to ineffective maintenance and upkeep of the shitty building I live in and not a valid indication of the ancient-nature of my surroundings, but nonetheless an amusing situation as I stood there in amazement as the door swung away from me and I stood there with the handle in my hand, not really sure what just happened...) If there aren't ghosts here then I'm not really sure where else in the world you might find them. It seems like a valid place for souls to get trapped. Sweeping around the surface of our world as we do our best to ignore their existence. I might just be imagining it though. I might be letting my imagination get the best of me. Maybe.
I walked down the middle of the street, hand in hand with Lauren. The street was closed for Hogmanay. It was cold but we weren't cold and we took pictures in our minds. This was the first New Years Eve that as I counted down I wasn't feeling dread. For as long as I can remember I have hated the countdown because there is a split second, a millisecond after the word "ONE" is shouted into the air, that I feel the most gut-wrenchingly horrible sense of disappointment. It happens in that tiny breath that you take between the words "ONE" and "HAPPY NEW YEAR!" Just for that one second. I am incredibly depressed. But not this year. I said 'one' and she said 'one' and all the people around us said 'one' and immediately the most beautiful show of fireworks imaginable shot up from the castle. Reminiscent of its turbulent past perhaps? Was there a time when explosions of the kind that erupted over the city were a sign of panic and fear? Yes. Most likely so. But on that night each explosion made me progressively happier. A final culmination of the night, of the month, of my first semester in Scotland, of a year that held so much I cannot express it in words. Lauren asked me "What are you saying goodbye to?" and I told her. And it felt good. For the first time in forever I had a fantastic New Years Eve.
I think I know why I can deal with the ghosts. I think it is a trade-off for what this city has given me. Lauren and I discussed it. I told her in an e-mail earlier this year: "Dear Catface: So I've been feeling something lately. A strange feeling in my stomach area somewhere. And it bothered me because I didn't know what it was. I don't like it when my own feelings are foreign to me so I pushed it aside. I ignored it for a while. But it kept coming back, at random times. Sometimes when i am just walking down the street. Sometimes when I walk out of class. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning and the Edinburgh wind blows the sound of a bagpipe playing right up to my fifth story window. And one day I realized what it was. This foreign feeling inside me. Lauren, I realized that I am happy."
So if I have to deal with a few spirits drifting through my room every now and then with the trade-off of living the life I am right now, I can deal with that. I wish they wouldn't bother me right now though because I have a lot of work to do. Although I think I would do that if I was a ghost, bother people when they think they are 'busy'. If only to remind them that life is too short, and we shouldn't take ourselves all to seriously.
It has been suggested that your own personal outlook on the events in your life can shape the way in which you truly perceive things and the way the world functions in your own paradigm. For example, if you think positively, things will be positive. I agree. To an extent. Because some days you have the ability to take control and say "ok well something bad happened today but look on the bright side, many good things happened today too." I do think positivity is contagious. But... sometimes I think we, as humans, have the right to look at all the shitty things that happened in a day and say "GODDAMMIT today has been a bad day!!!!" Yes, I believe we are all entitled to have bad days once and a while. I think we deserve at least a few opportunities to curse some all powerful deity for throwing garbage in our faces for the day. It makes us feel human.
Today was not one of those days. Today was the day that I was forced to act like a moron. All day. With no real explanation as to where my moronic motivation came from, what possessed me to unintentionally do the things I did and why why WHY in God's name was I such an imbecile today??? You see, I don't really feel like blaming today on some unforseen being. I don't really feel like today was a 'bad day'. I just feel like I woke up and today was "Be A Moron Day" but I forgot to mark it on my calendar...
Where do I begin? I went to class today and just spilled the most unintelligible garbage all over my poor stuttering professor I just feel so bad for him. I was trying to do a comparison of the English and French education systems and how their concepts of national identity both influence and are integrated into the structures of their education system and I somehow ended up spewing some sort of nonsense about the United States having a poor sense of national identity because it is not integrated into the education system. He said he thinks the United States does have a strong sense of national identity and some more garbage started coming out of my mouth because I was trying to cover up the already ridiculous things that had come out of my mouth but I think I was just making things worse. I was clearly misconstruing a disconnected feeling I had as liberal in a conservatively run country in the midst of an unpopular war and an uncertainty about where my loyalties lie, which is in no way connected with the US national identity and so totally out of context with the comparison I was supposed to be drawing between educational systems, but you see today was moron day and I just left the room feeling totally embarrassed at the things I said in there. I want to send flowers to my professor as an apology. "Dear Professor Raffe, I am sorry you got caught in my word vomit today. Please accept these daisies as my sincerest apologies and next time I will remove my head from my ass before I come to class."
Before class I had made some coffee in my new coffee maker and I made some really horrible weak hazelnut coffee and I spilled burning hot coffee all over my chin/face when I tried to take a sip and it really hurt. I continuously spilled that gross-tasting coffee all over myself for the rest of the day.
Then I wasted a lot of time on facebook when I should have been working on my assignment that is due on friday. Come on now Lauren, this is graduate school. Stop it. Stop it right now.
Then I read a chapter in this book I bought for £30 that I thought was going to be really useful for my assignment and came to the conclusion it is not really relevant. Now it is going to be a really useful doorstop. Then I ate my weight in hummus because I have a serious problem when it comes to hummus, I can't stop eating it. I look at it and I want to stop eating it, I really do but my hand is acting of its own will and I can see the carrot stick floating through the air and dunking itself into the chickpea deliciousness and the next thing I know it is on my tongue and I am having a hummus orgasm in my mouth and it just tastes so good when it hits your lips. Next thing I know I'll be at Sainsbury's again because I'm a moron who ate all my hummus.
So then I'm supposed to go to the library to read and put more money in my account so I can print out the millions of pages of articles that I need to read for my assignment that is due on Friday. So I go to the library and realize I don't have any more change to top up my account. Great. So I do a little research but the only area with computers that I know of is what I like to call the "Undergraduate Happy Hour Room" This is in no way intended to offend undergraduates. You are all very beautiful, wonderful, intelligent, and tolerable people. But the air in this room must be injected with some sort of 'annoying' medicine that is only potent upon contact with the lungs of undergraduates because I swear the second they step into that room they turn into LOUD OBNIXIOUS SCOTTISH KIDS who don't seem to realize that they are in a LIBRARY. And the flirting and mouth-open-throat-relaxed laughing and the yelling and the shouting across the room ensues and I just can't take it anymore.
Then I go down three flights of stairs and the machine won't convert my £5 into coins. Then Tyrone comes through the doors (The one shining light in my day of stupidity!!!!! Tyrone!!!!) and asks me if I have ever heard of someone named "Freud", oh Tyrone, he is just so adorable. Then I walk up three flights of stairs, and the credit machine doesn't work. Then I walk down three flights of stairs and the librarian says that is the only machine in the building and I will have to go to the Main Library which is a good 20 minute walk and it is already dark outside and I can see my breath. Then I go up four flights of stairs to talk to Tyrone because he is my shining light for the day. Then I muster up the strength to go to the Main Library and I walk down four flights of stairs and then realize I left all the research I had just done on the table where Tyrone was so I walk up four flights of stairs and then down four flights of stairs. Idiot.
Then I start walking to the Main Library and I get lost. Here's the thing that kills me: I KNOW HOW TO GET TO THE MAIN LIBRARY. I know it! I can see the path in my head! But on one corner I think, "Well maybe If I go down one more street instead of turning right here it will be quicker." No. No, that is not how it works in Edinburgh, if you go down one more street it is NEVER a quicker path to your destination. Instead of ending up on high street to the right of Hogwarts I end up on the LEFT side ALL THE WAY BELOW Hogwarts and I turned my 20 minute walk into a 35 minute walk in the completely wrong direction and I said "F- you Main Library, I will see you tomorrow".
Then I tripped like an idiot walking up the stairs into Mylne's court right in front of this guy who was walking into the same courtyard as me. "Are you ok?" he asked. I wanted to tell him that it wasn't my fault, that the day was designed to happen that way and I just couldn't help acting like a complete idiot. But I just wasn't sure he would understand.
Then when I was trying to spray my curling spray into my hair after I took a shower I held the bottle up to my head and pushed down the compressor and sprayed curling spray directly onto my mirror and not on my head whatsoever. I stood there with my arms and my sides, my curling spray in hand, staring at the sticky thick mess that was sliding down my mirror distorting my reflection in part. I just looked at it. Yup, just stood there and looked at it because I couldn't really figure out what to do. I wiped the mirror and that just made it worse
Now my flatmate's high pitched earsplitting alarm is going off at 11pm and I know she went out for the evening and her door is locked.
Time for bed. That is all I have to say. I'm going to bed.
