I let a day pass by about a week ago that would have marked the one-year anniversary of my having moved into dorm at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, where I studied for three months before returning to California and UCI. Others of my friends who went abroad with me posted Facebook statuses that caused me pause, and wonder if so few words and such simple sentiments could really package up and present any kind of respect to or memory of their trips abroad. I like to write...obviously..., and it seemed a good occasion to try to write of some of the experiences I had whilst abroad, but I second-guessed myself and ended up forgetting about it until I was awake at 1:45 AM and realized that it was the next morning, and the day had slipped by unnoticeably. I felt a sort of relief, a release from the pressure of performing to an expected, regular, standard ritual. A year ago today I moved into a place and that was the first day of like ninety days that I spent away from home and I met some good people and had some good times....etc.
I thought to myself later--well, it’s good you didn’t write about it on that day. It meant something to me in a way that pulled at me insistently when I realized that it was 19 September that day. And as is an annoying habit of writers, I began to retreat into the lucid imaginings that are located, for me, abroad....walking through autumn air so cold that I ceased to be able to locate my nose on my face without reaching up and wrapping gloved fingers around it and having that be a nice thing, the crowded streets of Paris near Christmas scented like hot wine and chestnuts. I thought to myself, well, it’s a good thing you didn’t go all the way in. It’s good to distance yourself. This is your life now. This hot, dry, Southern California, hot and dry well into autumn. You live here. You live here.
I’ve written before that I’m not sure I do live here, but acceptance of that idea has, frankly, gotten me into a lot of trouble. So I’ve been working on it--getting better at living here. Going out with friends, wearing shorts more, not putting sunscreen on my face every day. I haven’t been to the beach in ages, though. I’m sure my re-immersion into my Southern California won’t be complete until I’ve put my feet in the sand of the coast where I spent so many of my childhood summers. I’m trying to get better at remembering that these memories--of watching the rip tide float half-way into the horizon, of finding sand in my underpants and hair for days after a beach visit, of jogging to the coast for P.E. a few days a week in junior high, of invading tide pools and catching sand crabs and bodyboarding ferociously--these are real. And they count for a lot. My mom’s old mini-van, in which we took trips to the ocean frequently, should be as real to me and as important to me in memory as the double-decker busses that I took six of seven times a week for three months while I was in Norwich--it should be more important. Or--I don’t know.
A big trouble about living so much inside my head is that I forget that what’s not in my head is important. Some people tell me that what’s not inside my head is actually more important. I’m poison to myself; I’ve known that for a long time, now. But people like me who are poison to ourselves are also poison to ourselves because we’re okay with that. Me--I’m so afraid to lose any of the things that I feel like I have sometimes, and I use this occasionally to justify my frequent trips into non-reality. Except it’s real for me. So there probably needs to be another term for that. My dad always taught us and still insists that there’s only one actual reality. This makes perfect sense to me, but still, there’s something I’m living in a lot, whether or not this is harmful to myself and difficult for others, that’s on some sort of parallel plane, and I’d like a name for it. Maybe I’ll work on that. I don’t much like “delusions” or “la la land,” etc. Let’s think of something that notes at its devastation and doesn’t sound like an errant sound escaping from a three-year-old’s mouth.
I meant to write a really different blog. I’ve just had the first two days of classes of my last year at UCI. Right now, I’m just going through the motions--gathering school supplies, battling lines at the bookstore--you would not BELIEVE how long they are, it’s astounding--sitting in class, struggling to raise my voice to speak from the back of crowded lecture halls.
One thing I will say before working on another post to describe some things about classes in detail, is that, with the beginning of each new school year or quarter or whatever, I incur a fresh, acute fear of being run over by a bicyclist. I have been walking around looking over my shoulder so often that people are probably going to think that I’ve developed a compulsion. But, it’s like, bicyclists have some sort of record to set on the first few days of classes or something and have to hit a certain number of students before their crazy-bicyclist-on-the-way-to-class reputation is thoroughly installed.
I’ve actually only seen two people toppled before, but that’s two more than I should have seen. I used to find it just crazy, but let’s think about it--who needs to ride a bike to class? What kind of person is that? When 90% of us can make it there on time fine on our own two feet, why are bicyclists in such a hurry that they need to run people over? After careful consideration, I’ve found that I think they’re probably people with a different set of priorities. Actually--that’s obvious, right? Most people probably have “not running people over on my bike” pretty high up on their unspoken list of things that are important to them.
*title taken from George Borrow's Lavengro, in reference to Norwich
