HELPHELP I'M DROWNING IN TUBE SOCKS CAPRIS AND SOCIALISM

I feel like I'm rapidly becoming more European, but I don't know if this is my body and mind just naturally adapting to the flow of life here, or if it's the result of deliberately manipulative conditioning on the part of my many different hosts and caretakers I've had while visiting here (Are you offering me a pastry? Or a thinly disguised different set of moral values?) ; all I know is that I will need to undergo some sort of intense repatriation detox quarantine upon my return to America.

First of all, I'm starting to enjoy watching soccer, which is a huge warning sign, and I'm pretty sure I felt some kind of vestigial unexplainable national pride whenever I watched Spain play. (Germany as well, to a lesser extent) (Vestigial? Like a tonsil or a useless wing-like appendage? I guess that's what nationalism is in Spain now: an extra mostly useless organ or limb that might give you a bit of a functional advantage in athletics but in general just makes people look at you like an uncouth fascist hunchback mutant. [There's a *little* truth in there but mostly just mixed metaphor.])

Not only did I enjoy watching the "technique" or "skill" or whatever they call that nonsense used in the actual playing, but I felt myself automatically liking and feeling an affinity for the Spanish team. I also discovered that I immediately hated every player from non-German/Spanish teams on a personal level, even before they scored any goals or pretended to get hurt a lot or took their shirts off in the field and let their crazy come out like the arrogant untalented jerks they are.

(By this I mean the Italians. [which beat Germany by being obnoxious.] No one ever scored enough points on Spain for me to really have time to articulate my dislike for them this clearly.)

(This natural dislike of people based entirely on their nationality seems pretty American actually, but the fact that it involves soccer teams is a pretty huge no-no.) (Maybe when the American Repatriation Police interrogate me I'll just call it Football! Is it especially American to deviously overthink things like this? I'm not sure, but I know it's American to stubbornly stick to my guns and refuse to change my terminology just because I know that the other culture will fundamentally misunderstand my nominalization.)

It's kind of like going to England and asking for fries, and when they say, "do you mean crisps?" you just throw your tea into the nearest available sink or body of water and say, "FRIES. I MEANT WHAT I SAID AND I SAID WHAT I MEANT."

(An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent?)

(haHA! Dr. Seuss is American.)

(butttt his family was all German immigrants... Plus Americans tend to avoid poetry unless they're children or Maya Angelou. Thus my internal national/cultural identity is still in question. Crap.)

(Also there are no elephants in North America. But being ignorant of a fact is about the same as that fact not existing, right? AMURICA.)

What makes this scarier is that I went through the entire Fourth of July without shouting "AMERICA," eating processed meat trimmings, OR burning myself with vaguely illegal fireworks. Not even once. (I did manage, however, to be that obnoxious American who doesn't speak the native language and just insists that if he speaks English slowly and clearly enough, everyone will understand. [Even after the German lady behind the counter has already admitted in German that she doesn't speak English]).
 
Worst of all, I'm pretty sure I actually bought some clothes at H&M at one point. Should I come forward about this in customs on the way back and just apologize? Or should I try to sneak through, (with my H&M clothes in my carry-on, of course, hidden inconspicuously beneath Sperries and sweatpants.) and then try to do my own self-imposed repatriation later on?  That sounds lazy and procrastinatory, so in the spirit of Americanism, I'm gonna go with that one.

A few more things:

•  I seem to no longer have a problem with wearing dark blue jeans on a 30 degree day. (Er I mean. um... 85 degree day. Conversions are hard to do.) Luckily I still have less than a clue about how much a meter is.
• I'm developing an affinity for public transportation. When I first arrived it was like "SCREW THIS BUSES ARE CONFUSING, SOMEONE DRIVE ME," but for some reason or another subway maps are starting to make sense to me. Also I just walk everywhere. When I'm carrying my suitcase though, public transportation is still my arch-nemesis, hellbent on humiliating me and bringing me teasingly close to the brink of a breakdown, but somehow knowing exactly when to stop. (At the beginning of my trip, all public transportation was somehow capable of this.) Finding the right train car and carrying my bag (the size of a small couch and twice the weight) through the train without accidentally mauling someone and then somehow getting the bag into a safe spot to store it--(breath)--is literally a nightmare. Literally in that once I'm done with it, I sit down and pretend I'm asleep and convince myself that it is no longer a thing that happened. (Trying to disconnect myself from reality is becoming part of my routine.) (It can be fun once I'm pretending to be asleep to exaggerate the previous nightmare; I start putting famous people and friends in the place of other passengers and I inevitably add a sword-fight on the roof, because no dream train ride is complete without one of those.)
• I can stand sparkling water now? Also I'm completely accustomed to just eating bread with various toppings for 2 out of the 3 meals in the day half the time. (I'm still not accustomed to *not* having huge cups of coffee though, so I just kind of overdo it on the caffeine, which, in addition to being a general college thing, seems to also be a European thing.)
• Sometimes I notice the way I speak English changing according to whatever other languages I've been speaking. (THE COMMIES BE CORRUPTIN ME WITH THEIR BROKEN ENGLISH) (For some reason I think America doesn't need any help corrupting my English) Spanish, when directly translated, sounds a lot like really archaic British English, so here's a hypothetical example dialogue of some of my Spanish-influenced English:
• Someone else: "Hey Michael, by the way,  the clean laundry's already on the bed. You still need to put the sheets back on though; sorry about that."
• Me: "I see. That appears well to me, do not preoccupy yourself. I had not been given account of that the dirty clothes yet had been collected. What convenience! All of it that I had wanted to wear tomorrow is yet clean!" 
• Speaking of which, I've grown accustomed to stiff and crusty clothes that have never been in contact with the substance known in America as fabric softener. I'm exaggerating the crustiness, but drying in Europe is done with clotheslines because they're less lazy and a little more environmentally conscious. 

•  Naked people on beaches and in saunas and at pools and occasionally in parks no longer really faze me. (The list of things people do in parks in Europe would boggle your mind and rattle your senses while leaving your children with lots of inappropriately detailed questions.)
• I now expect every church I see to be at least a little impressive and medieval looking, and every town should have at least one cathedral. (there's actually a very sophisticated scale for measuring how medieval looking a city or church is; I require a 3.5 for a city and a 6.2 minimum for any church that I'm going to look at for an extended period of time.) It is also a little unorthodox for a town to NOT have *at least* a few huge random stone walls or gates scattered haphazardly in random places around the city, as if the original builders were creating more of a hedge maze than a fortress.

Europe has spoiled protestant churches for me. More on that next time when I actually start discussing specific places I've been.

 Probably the weirdest Europeanization I'm dealing with is the fact that I'm no longer bothered or enraged or even really notice when I hear up to 4 different languages spoken around me at once as I walk down the street, only one of which I really understand. It's when I hear English that I do a double take or get upset or worry that they're talking about me behind my back, which is a weird reaction now that I think about it.

In conclusion: I love America, but I'm not *in love* with it.


 

In Hopes of Retaining my Ability to Communicate and Express Myself Effectively in Written English: Deez Wacky European "Languages" be All Crowdin' Ma' Normal Syntactical Patterns 'n' Such

"What am I doing in Europe?" is a question you might currently be feeling inspired to ask, and you would not be without good reason for asking this question, unless you failed to reword it in order to ask me about my activities, rather than interrogating yourself about your own goings-on in Europe. Of course you might have good reason to ask yourself that question as well--I might not be up-to-date on your illicit overseas goings-on, being as I have been in Europe, far away from where you might be squandering your life away in a Portuguese back-alley opium den. I have to ask you, however, to please do all your self-confrontation and careful existential reflection on your self-destructive Indo-European habits outside of this blog and the time-slot that you have awarded to it in your ever-ticking forward-moving countdown calendar that is the rest of your life. Thank you; Please don't make me ask again.

(Is "goings-on" a real term that real people use? Or is it just another word I've learned in a dream? [like mumphin. and turble.] [also I'm pretty sure kaleidoscope didn't become a word until after I dreamed it.] [given, my definition was a *teeeny* bit different])
(Does Portugal have opium dens?)
(Isn't Portugal in Europe?)
(SHUSH)

Incidentally, I have discovered why English is such a difficult nonsensical language that is so challenging for people to learn. (while we delight so much in tormenting them and refusing to listen or understand a word they say until they learn it)

It is not, as is widely believed, that English pronunciation rules are merely piles of half-baked vaguely worded ambiguous *norms* that each apply to only a few of the many possible syllabic combinations in the English language, and still fail to hold true more than 50% of the time. (Although that is accurate.)

What makes English so difficult and frustrating to master is, in fact, the existence of a certain insignificant something that we do in weird ways that barely anyone else does: helping verbs. HELPING VERBS. Don't nobody do them like we do. (except of course for speakers of a few Celtic languages like Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh.) (now you know!)

So what have am I been doing in Europe? We'll I'm was glad you asked!

•  Going places. Seeing things. Meeting people. Eating food. Walking. Sitting on trains. Taking pictures of random small animals like hedgehogs and snails. Looking at cathedrals. And a basilica. And a weird cathedral/mosque hybrid pitiful yet fearsome man-made mutant beast of a communal gathering place. (more on that later.)  Infinitives.

RELEVANT. Also cool because it looks like the snail is going so fast that the fabric of time and space around it is being bent and twisted and melted. Either that or it's so slow that the snail stays in one spot while centuries of change go on around it. THE SNAIL TRANSCENDS TIME. (is the only possible conclusion. moving on.)

• Observing cultural things which are different and/or unusual, both on a large and overly generalized scale and on a very specific obnoxiously esoteric and detailed one. One thing you probably didn't know about Europe: There's a lot of tourism! They also speak a lot of different languages! (English is spoken in Europe too, [waaaaatt????] but the only place it's natively spoken is in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which are actually on ISLANDS SEPARATED FROM THE REST OF EUROPE! [weiiiiiiiiird.])

Forreal though, Western Europe is basically one big Disney World/Graceland/Biltmore Estate/Hard Rock Cafe. Tourists EVERYWHERE. It's OBNOXIOUS. (especially to all the *non* tourists like myself, *scoff*) Eastern Europe is like the employees-only buildings in Disney World where all the people in Mickey Mouse and Pluto outfits take off their masks to smoke and curse and complain about children. Also that's where they take the lost children to do whatever disgruntled Disney World employees/Eastern Europeans do with them.

 (I'm pretty sure that was potentially seriously offensive and degrading to a large quantity of people (i.e. Eastern Europe(eans). Disney's hands are tied for reasons I'm not at liberty to discuss.); luckily I (ordinarily) live in AMURICA, where I can say whatever I want about large quantities of people without fear of repercussion. (save for the occasional riot or boycott or bombing))


Another thing: everything is so much more musical over here. Now by that I don't mean that Europe is like Disney World or Glee or High School Musical and that people in lederhosen regularly burst into choreographed and well-rehearsed performances of popular pop songs or campy less popular songs about summertime or bratwurst. (That's only on festival days.) What I mean is that instead of just mindlessly hurling random music all over the place like America, Europe is musical in that it uses musicality. In very (usually) subtle ways.

For example: car horns. In America, every car horn plays a single note, or just a mass of sound. It works; it's obnoxious. In Europe, however, a lot of car horns, completely individually, will play a specific dissonant interval--often the infamous tritone. That means that they play two notes at once, which, instead of merely being obnoxious like the American horns, immediately grabs your attention and usually makes you want to rip your ears off and bathe your head in salt so the pain will drown out the vaguely nails-on-a-chalkboardish wail which is assaulting your senses. Now that is an effective car horn. ("That" is super intense but for some reason "That's" doesn't feel or look very emphatic. Contractions are wimpy? Maybe that's the conclusion to be drawn from this.)

(Real men do not take shortcuts, even linguistic ones.)
(ESPECIALLY NOT LINGUISTIC ONES.)

It should also be mentioned, however, that Spanish people appear to have negated the helpfully jarring effect of this car horn by HONKING ALL THE FRICKIN' TIME. They honk when someone else is going slow; they honk when someone else is going fast; they honk when someone is in their way; they honk when someone else gets out of their way; they honk when the light is red; they honk when the light is yellow; they sometimes inexplicably honk when the light is green; they honk when their fútbol team wins; they honk when their fútbol team loses; they honk before, during, and after a fútbol game occurs in which they have any sort of remotely vested interest; they honk to say hi to friends; they honk to harass attractive women; they honk to make fun of ridiculously dressed people on the streets; I'm pretty sure a lot of Spaniards just honk because they can--I'm definitely working too hard at trying to come up with rationalizations for them. (They honk just for the heck of it now because just over 35 years ago the ultra-catholic fascist regime being in power meant that honking was forbidden? I SAID STOP IT MICHAEL)


Also instead of making similarly monotone ringtones or using random catchy dancy music clips as ringtones, some phones in Europe also use music to be more effective and efficient with their ringing. When I was visiting my German rock-star friend and his family outside of Dusseldorf, I was convinced that their house was haunted for my entire first day there, partly because of the ghost that kept taking my socks, but mainly because I kept hearing an eerie ringing, like the music that usually precedes a grotesque fanged creature jumping off of a roof into a dark graveyard, interrupting an ordinary funeral or a misguided attempt at black magic by a silly British secret society; it also reminded me of the X-Files.

It took me until half-way through my second day there to realize that the hauntingly simple and tremendously spooky three-note melody that I kept hearing was just their telephone ringing. Then everything suddenly made sense; up until that point I just thought it was witchcraft that made someone leave the room every time I heard the noise.

So hypothetically that spookiness can help people answer the phone well? I'll have to think that one through.


And I haven't even mentioned church bells yet, which in southern Spain are as loud and obnoxious and dissonant and intrusive as possible. (A singular church bell would do just fine on its own--butNOOOOO--we need a symphony of randomly timed random notes to chime and inform the city that another hour has passed or that it's time for mass or whatever.) It's unclear why exactly this is but it's hilarious because that's kind of what the role of the Catholic Church has been reduced to in Spain; an extremely loud and pervasively intrusive in its influence yet almost entirely passive government-supported venture.

• Was I trying to make a list out of this? That's unclear, but another bullet point seemed necessary.

Another factoid that you should glean from all this is that Europe is large--enormous even. One does not simply "travel across all of Europe by bus or train or car" unless they have a great deal of time and money on their hands.

(I will also accept "Being chased across the globe by international spies/an organized crime syndicate/Slovakian human traffickers that want to take my life/freedom/9-year-old daughter" as a reasonable rationale.)

Spain, for instance, the first country I spent a large amount of time in, is nearly the size of four North Carolinas. Let's get a better idea of what that means. Hypothetically, if you were to drop Spain on the United States so that North Carolina roughly lined up with the southeast region of Spain, all of North Carolina would be crushed by the mass of sweat and Arab palaces that is Andalucía. Madrid, due to the mountainous terrain of Virginia and Central Spain, would probably end up suspended above Richmond or the general area outside of Richmond, so that, not only would the good people of Richmond be able to say that it was raining cats and dogs, they would also be able to say in all good conscience that it was raining the capital city of the Kingdom of Spain. (the precipitation would mostly consist of people, beer, and the occasional art museum or royal palace.)

West Virginia would be mercilessly smashed into the mountains of la Sierra de Guadalupe in western Spain, while Portugal would end up stretched across two-thirds of Ohio and just enough of northern Kentucky to crush Frankfort with its beautiful mountainous beaches. (did anyone else know that Frankfort was the capital of Kentucky? I didn't even know that was a city. Wow.)) Northwestern Spain would cover nearly all of Pennsylvania and still leave a little bit of Galicia hanging over Lake Eerie, while all of Cataluña and Aragon and the Pyrenees in northeastern Spain, a region a little smaller than the state of New York, would be untouched--not that that would help all of Barcelona from falling into the Atlantic Ocean.

You'll notice that I didn't mention Washington, D.C., Maryland or Delaware. This is not because they would somehow remain safe from falling European countries; this is because they would never stand a chance and their effect on Spain would be negligible at best. New Jersey, however, can take solace in the fact that it would be quite efficient at absorbing a large portion of the weight of the Basque Country and its neighbor regions, while the northern-most portion of New Jersey would remain untouched.


 If we extended this hypothetical scenario, of course, then the beaches of Normandy would end up in Maine and all of South America would be ultimately squashed by Africa, but those consequences are unimportant for the purposes of this mental exercise. If we were to delve that deeply into it we would obviously need to inquire as to how the eastern hemisphere somehow managed to flip itself over before being dropped on its western counterpart.

Once Upon an Arrival in Spain Last Week (Mine)

So there I was, in an airport in Madrid, SPAIN, having just gotten off an airplane filled with people that all spoke different languages. I was excited, but also intimidated. My initial plans to immediately dive into the Spanish language failed when the extremely friendly grandmotherly monolingual lady from Aragon who was going to sit next to me on the plane and teach me all about Spanish and the culture and later introduce me to her large family that lives across Spain failed to exist.

(I blame the amiable french couple for not giving up their seats to go meet their previously forsaken American grandchildren who they ignore because they're still angry at the children's parents for abandoning them to go America. Either they were too stubborn to admit they were wrong for letting an old childish grudge get in the way of supporting their grandchildren in their time of need or they just couldn't read the dramatic and plot twist-filled letter they received from their grandson Peter in a Texan prison. [If it goes that way then I can blame them for being too proud to ask for help.] Typical.)

 (Maybe I'm projecting a little bit. [Or mayhaps I'm reading too much into their beverage orders.] Nevertheless, there was definitely some wistful regret mixed with bitter resentment in the way the man requested apple juice after his wife *explicitly* ordered tea for the both of them.) But either way, my matronly Spanish fairy godmother never appeared because of French people.

It wouldn't have been that bad but my contingency plan fell through too. I was going to master Spanish in my 7 hours on the plane by watching a few dubbed movies  (Alvin and the Chipmunks or something with Gerard Butler would have done quite nicely) but then American Airlines had to go and remove all the television screens from the back of the seats!  I was frustrated. (Now that I think about, what does "dubbed" really mean? Why is it such a silly word? Where does it come from? Does it like its current definition, or is the unusual use exhausting?)

Deprived of my preliminary Spanish mastery, I walked timidly through the airport, seeking out targets with which to bravely conquer and thus prove/create my linguistic mastery. My first target was customs.  The line was relatively short because it was a Tuesday, but I still had time before I stepped up to draft a short speech about how long I was planning to stay in Spain and what my purposes for visiting were; I'd even written up in my head a few brief explanations for my planned visits to other European countries and some strongly worded assurances about my scheduled departure from Europe in two and a half months' time.

Again I was tragically stripped of an opportunity to prove myself; I marched forward and handed my passport to the customs agent, brimming with expectant energy and prepared to stutter, when the seemingly hungover and visibly impatient Spaniard simply stamped my passport and handed it back, without so much as a second look at me. (Sometimes I think I'd get more attention in the airport if I were still on the no-fly list.)

I was then briefly sidetracked by an American from the same flight who was nervous about his baggage, but my focus returned to Spanish as I spied a money-changing booth. I muttered something unintelligible to the American and then turned to the booth while digging in my wallet for my money.  Here I wouldn't have quite the same opportunity to be verbose and loquacious and tediously talkative and long-winded and vocabulirific and obnoxious, but it would have to do. I sidled semi-casually up to the window, prepared to explain the cash I was changing and why and from where and for how much. I didn't know how long this kind of thing took either, so I considered small talk options and settled on a few paragraphs of questions about the money changing business and certain exchange rates. (best to stay professional at first; I could always improvise from there)

Trembling, with cash in hand, I carefully said to the lady on the other side of the counter: "Yo tengo...ciento...y cuarenta do..dolares..ay! dólares." (I have...a hundred...and forty.. do...dollurs..erm ohuh..dollars.)

She smiled and spit out a quick string of nonsense. I stood quietly as she changed the money. Then she handed me my euros and said "have a nice day" in perfect English.



My confidence was definitely shaken, but it was only a minor setback, and I determinedly continued on my way, set on making the day a successful Spanish adventure filled with efficient travel and enlightening conversations with natives who only later realize that I'm not from around these parts.


After spending an hour on the wrong bus and inadvertently learning my way around the entire Madrid airport, I stumbled and tripped my way on to the correct bus headed for the train station, nearly killed myself as I nobly decided to lift my 50-pound suitcase onto the second row up of luggage racks instead of the starkly empty bottom row, and then sat for 20 minutes vainly trying to eavesdrop and comprehend the conversation between two natives a few meters ahead of me before I realized they weren't speaking Spanish and that I was in the handicapped section. Confidence lightly battered, I retreated to the back of the bus and surrendered, turning on my ipod and listening to American house music.

Only a few stops later, however, my confidence was boosted when a Dutch couple assumed I was Spanish and slowly asked me how to pronounce a few words on a sign before I let them know I was American, and thus could speak a language that they could understand fairly well. (Of course I still talked to them in half Spanish, partly because I needed the practice, and partly because I didn't want to abandon the idea that I was one of those American-Spanish multi-cultural hybrid citizens you hear so much about. [the illusion that was in my head of course])

Then I got to the train station, Atocha, (Which I'd been tragically mispronouncing until this point) and was again shamed into submission.  I wandered for half and hour around the train station looking for a ticket booth and awkwardly walking into the wrong lines for surprisingly unoccupied areas mumbling half-formed questions about the station layout until a security guard or station staff member would spit out some directions that I would slow down and decipher as I turned around and walked on.

Once I realized that I'd fundamentally misunderstood both the station layout and the organizational structure of the entire train system in Spain, I figured out what seemed most correct and then sat down to wait in line for an hour and a half in what appeared to be a Spanish DMV for buying train tickets, which is both a fascinating notion and a horrifying reality.

Despite the best bureaucratic efforts of the train station employees, however, I eventually got a ticket and boarded the last train that would still get me to Sevilla in time for my rendezvous with the other students. As soon as the train started moving I commandeered the bathroom so I could change and put in contacts and wash myself in the tiny sink with an unintuitive motion sensor. (I'd been operating as an unwashed, half-blind, coffee-stained mess until that point in the day; this probably should've been mentioned at an earlier point in the story.)



Once I arrived in Sevilla, I managed to successfully, albeit painfully, explain to a taxi driver where I needed to go and how much money I needed it to cost for me to still afford it.  I ended up a euro or two short, but the driver took pity on me (I think he could tell I'd had a rough day) and decided not to drop me off a mile before reaching my destination.

Pulling my huge suitcase, unwieldy backpack, and slightly fragile mandolin out of the taxi, I sluggishly dragged myself and my belongings into the hotel that I didn't have a room reserved in yet. It was three in the afternoon.

spainspainspainspainspainspainspain is where I be at.

I'm sleepy, but Spain is wonderful, thanks for asking. My body is currently stuck in some weird mental quasi-psychological backwards time warp, but not. Let me explain: it's currently midnight but my body thinks it's six but at the same time my body is exhausted and it doesn't know why and it gets angry and lashes out at loved ones (figurative loved ones) when it's hurt and confused so it's in this inevitably cantankerous downward spiral where it keeps getting pissed off at itself for how tired it is and refuses to listen to reason or read a clock. However, the rest of me is doing fairly well and has learned to ignore the body when it goes off one of its vaguely passive aggressive, semi-hallucinatory pathetic sleep rampages.

I'm in the wi-fi lounge (pronounced zona de wee-fee) of a hotel in Sevilla, and I should probably be sleeping, but that's a precondition for efficient and high-quality blogging, or so I have concluded from extensive laboratory test-blogging. (The entire last year and 9 months of blogging(or not-blogging, as the case may be) have been an experiment.[chew on that.] If that makes you feel emotionally manipulated or used or metaphorically filthy and in need of a shower, then just imagine how it makes *me* feel.{And then let me know because I don't quite know where I stand on the issue yet.}) (But don't even get me started on feeling in need of a shower; I have very strong convictions) (and odors)

The journey to get to this point (the wee-fee lounge), however, is more interesting and/or eventful. Any inherent connection between those two adjectives, however, is insubstantial. (I've done the tests; I've spent long hours blogging in the laboratory to create the evidence. [Take this however you want to. Think deeply about it, or don't.]) But this story *should* be at least one of those two disconnected things: interesting and eventful. (Keep in mind that we've already discussed how logically confusing and inadvertently instrumental but undemanding the *should* imperative can be.) (I don't know what I'm talking about.)

These last 48(?), 72(¿) hours?¿ have been quite ridiculous, marking this summer as a time for great adventure and new experience. s.

The new experiences and adventures haven't been confined to just Spain either; one of the first few began on my flight to New York. Seated beside my genially hasidic acquaintance (kind of like being acidic, but friendlier and more snappily dressed and generally not harmful in any way), I bit the bullet, said goodbye to my childhood, prepared to forge a new pathway of experience in my life, and requested tomato juice when the stewardess offered us beverages, eager to try something new.



*spit out bile and clear  out phlegm*



Despite this grievous misstep, I was able to recover and get back on the right path. (It took me years to remember how to spell flem, I mean phlgim, I mean snot. [I know years sounds like an exaggeration but I'm in a different time zone; so keep that in mind])


Then the rest of my travels went fairly well, at least until I arrived in Madrid after an overnight flight in which I sat next to an adorable old french couple who didn't know a single word of any language that I am familiar with. (except french; I was able to share a moment with them whenever they said fromage. Thanks to a childhood filled with Dexter's Laboratory, I managed to find a common ground in a shared experience with the phenomenon that is cheese. [also in laughing about airline food, which they ate zero of; they just picked up our packaged breakfast foods individually and then dropped them again, like they were gorillas slowly learning how to use sticks, or like aliens discovering plastic backscratchers: trying to decipher their intended function, and then laughing at what must appear to be a pitiful attempt at something greater, or a thoroughly valid, thoughtfully worked-out solution to an insignificant and impossibly inconsequential idle non-problem.

Now, because it is late and my body is beginning to furiously beg and plead with itself in hopes that it will cease the relentless and miserably pointless passive self-injury, I will go to sleep.  I will continue this blog later. I will post this portion now, so that I don't leave the beginning hopelessly anachronistic and temporally ambiguous. (Porque editing is a certain activity, up with which I shall not put.) (Also present tense is funner and I prefer not to choose between watering down my blogtastic drama or telling obvious (and therefore ineffective) untruths.) (funner is too a word.)

(Welcome back to my blog by the way. I'm in Spain at the moment but I left cookies.)

(What?)

(I pray to Jesus, Brahman, the Holy Spirit, Buddha(who is not a god), Shiva, KamaSutra, and the ever-loving L. Ron Hubbard that my room has been left unlocked.)

I apologize for the inconsistency of my capitalization.

Ohmygosh I’ve done so much reading recently. But I don’t really feel like talking ironically pretentiously and sillilly (meaning: in a manner quite silly) about old stuffy Russians and their stubborn ridiculous ways of looking at literature or a stuffy old American anthropologist and his stubborn ridiculous way of looking at “systems” of religion or Frankenstein.

(I didn’t expect you to laugh at that last sentence [I *don’t* expect you? Maybe huh Woah I just got a tense migraine (lol.)] I didn’t expect you to laugh at that last sentence about Frankenstein and Russians, but I just want you to admire the jarring, seemingly sudden way it ended because of the lack of parallel structure. You would have been more likely to laugh and feel good about the sentence (hehe) if the third item had been longer like the first two. (It being funny would also have helped) As it was you were (probably) all set to speed through the first part of the third item to get to the expected joke at the end of it, but it both ended early and wasn’t very funny. Yay for parallel structure!)

I’d like to apologize for that.

But instead of that I will talk about something else.   Erm… (‘erm’ makes me think of Foxtrot. Think about it. It’s usually accompanied by Paige or Roger or ‘whatever the mom’s name is’ making the weird face where they’re concerned or torn or undecided about something and you can see their teeth and it looks like they’re eating their mouth in some kind of weird mutant monster manner.)

I had a dream about my teeth falling out a couple of nights ago. Popular superstitious opinion says that I’m either desperately trying to hold onto some deep dark secrets that are inevitably going to spill out like bloody teeth, or I’m just deathly afraid of dental surgery.

Have you ever thought about what Beyoncé would be like if she were a cat?  I’ve been meaning to shoot a parody of “If I Were a Boy” and call it “If I Were a Cat.” Ideally it’ll feature some Beyoncé look-alike in a fuzzy cat suit rubbing herself on furniture and talking about fish.

I went deep sea fishing once during my junior year of high school. What started out as a day of fun and fishing ended up as an eternity of nausea cold and vomit. (So I didn’t put any commas in here just to see what would happen, and it kinda looks fine to me which is interesting, but now this word processor program is suggesting I put a question mark at the end. Weird.) All our food got soaked, my hoodie was very much stained with vomit, and we ended up huddling together for warmth on a bench for hours as the cold waves crashed over the sides of the small fishing boat. Our first stop after returning to land was Walmart where we bought fresh boxers and vomit-free t-shirts.

Hm.

So I’ve been writing for a comedy magazine named BoUNCe this year. I go to these brain storm meetings they have, but it seems weird to me because they’re all just coming up with funny ideas and they assume people are going to take the initiative to write funny things with those ideas.  For some reason the concept of a trashy dirty collective idea bin that we all dip into before writing anything disgusts me, so I just listen to the ideas that they’re coming up with and spin off my own stuff, desperately trying to avoid copying what they come up with. So I go to their brain storm sessions to come up with my own separate ideas.

Here’s an article that I wrote that didn’t appear in an actual magazine!

Kyra Sedgwick Takes Break From Acting to Spend Time With Family, Eat Babies.

Kyra Sedgwick, star of television drama “The Closer”, announced Tuesday that she would be putting her acting career on hold in order to slow down, reexamine her priorities, and eat some babies.

“I’ve been working so much lately,” the actress said. “I just haven’t had any time for my family or any of my hobbies, like woodwork and hungry infanticide.”

Sedgwick, who played the insignificant female costar in The Game Plan with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, looks forward to spending more time with husband Kevin Bacon, running in the park with dog Minnie, and devouring small children.

“I really miss that fresh air, and you can’t really take it in when you’ve got all these commitments on your head,” Sedgwick explained. “And there’s no better feeling than snapping a dead infant’s soft neck open for some fresh marrow and knowing you don’t have to be anywhere in the morning.”

Sedgwick couldn’t say how long the hiatus would last, but she would definitely be back.

“I’m excited to come back to work, but I want to be a part of my children’s lives before their childhoods are over all. I’m just going to focus on Travis and Suzie,” Sedgwick said. “And dead babies.”

And now back to me. I hope you enjoyed that brief article-ish thing.

And here’s the application I sent in to a literary magazine last semester!

(blahs edited in once more)

 Well, my name is Michael Dickson.  I like writing, and I’m an indecisive sophomore from Raleigh.  So far I’m not telling you anything you haven’t picked up on from the first 1/4th of this page.  My apologies.

(shifting gears)   (*onomatopoeia*) 

I’m interested in “The Door” because I love writing, I love looking at writing, I love reading writing, and I love editing writing.  (I like gerunds too.)  I like analyzing stuff and overanalyzing stuff and talking to authors about stuff so I can argue with them about the stuff they wrote about.  

 Except I don’t think I’m actually very argumentative.  I’d say I’m pretty easygoing.  

I don’t know blah blah blah blah "work experience" blah blah blah blah "non-existent" blah blah blah "good work ethic?" blah blah blah.

I’m very organized – not in the sense that I obsessively sort my socks and make my roommate vacuum his mattress – but in that if I have something that needs to be done, I know exactly where it is and when I will do it and how.  (That might be the same thing as responsible – I’ll look it up.)  

As for specific writing experience, I’ve been editing my own writing for years – not to mention my friends’ blogs and my brothers’ creepy science fiction stories and my brothers’ friends’ college application essays.  I like writing (I feel like I’ve said that already) and I like making it sound good (More important than just *looking* good). 

blah blah blah blah "blog blog" blah blah blah "shameless plug" blah blah blah "link" blah blah blah "beg" blah.

Please excuse my liberal use of sentence fragments; I promise I am at least moderately conscious of and familiar with all standard grammar conventions and their uses.  

I hope this post has been at least moderately entertaining.

The Season of Lists! (I've been slacking a lot with the whole "proper punctuation" thing recently; sorry about that)

I have returned from my long Christmas break. I have come back to my compact, pleasant, and gnat-infested home after spending several weeks at my more expansive, comfortable, family-and-food-filled home. Thus begins the next season of academia, abstract education, and filling my mind with only semi-practical but simultaneously extremely interesting and thought-provoking nonsense. This marks the end of this rather short season of lights, family time, gift time, Jesus time, lots of food time, and lists. Time.

Now I’m going to delve more deeply into this last thought: the season of lists. Time.

This is because I have a very unpredictable attention span and I often venture off on long tangents in my thought processes without explaining or watching to make sure that my companion observers are close behind as I jump between trains of thought mid-journey on a whim, as if the Native American outlaw train-robber savages had me cornered, diving onto the roof of the train to Pasalacqua in a desperate attempt to escape peril. Ten-gallon Stetson hat in one hand and my six-shooter in the other, I try to provide some cover fire for them/you/the companions as I roll across the top of the neighboring train and deftly hang off the side in order to give the Indian criminal steam-engine burglar vermin less surface area to fire their blow-dart rifle knives at. I mourn the loss of any followers of mine who may’ve been blown gunned stabbed down by the Iroquois bandit railroad hijacker thief barbarians or their superfluously gratuitous nonsensical analogy about train robberies.

I should hyphenate more. That sounds like hydrate. I will do one of those two things.

So with that botched segue behind us, I will now smoothly return to what is presumably the main topic of this weirdly and overly narrated blog post.

So we just ended what is essentially the season of lists. Christmas lists, Naughty lists; the list goes on and on ( I assume). If you have not yet guessed, this is simply a poorly conceived and even more poorly executed narrative device set up to allow me to make some lists. I will now do that.

Lists about my Christmas break!

List of cool nifty things I got for or around Christmas (That was some confusing preposition action right thur.)

• Pickpunch (IT LITERALLY PUNCHES GUITAR PICKS OUT OF WHATEVER I PUT IN IT. SURPRISINGLY ENOUGH, THERE HAVE YET TO BE ANY [SERIOUS] INJURIES)
• A scarf (yay! Also an awesome jacket but only “scarf” sounds exotic enough to make it on the list.) (Maybe I don’t use “exotic” the same way other people do…)
• Snuggie! (I don’t… I can’t… um… yeah.)
• Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee mugs.
• A zombie survival kit! (pressing concern)
• A lot of other things that I don’t have comments about but were nonetheless amazing gifts that I appreciated very much. I promise

List of things I forgot to do

• A lot of things, including sanding a guitar in preparation for painting, a project that I’ve been putting off for literally probably quite possibly three years.

List of things I said I wouldn’t do but did!

• Play video games/watch tv for more than an hour a day. (Ohhhhhhhh man I said I’d do that?)

List of movies I saw!

• The Adventures of Tintin (awesome and nostalgia! Adjectival suffix!)
• Source Code (yay inter-dimensional theory!)
• Cowboys and Aliens (YAY DANIEL CRAIG YAY HARRISON FORD YAY OLIVIA WILDE YAY YAY YAY)

List of movies I didn’t see

• Probs lots.

List of videogames I played

• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (I played an Italian assassin who kept speaking in Spanish and had English subtitles [I may’ve messed with the language settings a little])
• Civilization V (I created a grammar-themed civilization and proceeded to impose stern totalitarian and theocratic rule over the entire world. This is only a little bit of a big exaggeration.)

List of videogames I didn’t play

• Anything Lego-themed (except for 15 minutes of Lego Harry Potter at a friend’s house but that doesn’t count.)

List of snuggies I got!

• I may have covered this already.

List of nostalgic old tv show dvds that I gave to a sibling

• Sheep in the Big City!  A very ridiculous old show about a sheep named sheep. Sadly no real dvds exist so I had to buy a homemade Chinese dvd version. Is this illegal? If so, then it was 10 years ago that I bought it. Statute of Limitations! (That’s probably not how that works.) (Either way, whatever punishment I would receive for such a crime would be more than worth it for the laughter and tears I brought to a child’s face. [Actually he just chuckled and pointed out that they’re recorded really badly and inconveniently.])

List of Lego-themed video games I didn’t play

• Did I cover this?

List of Lego-themed video games (created by Traveler’s Tales) that exist

• Lego Harry Potter
• Lego Star Wars
• Lego Pirates of the Carribean
• Lego Indiana Jones
• Lego Batman

List of Lego-themed video games created that I wish existed

• Lego Lord of the Rings =(

Yay lists!

Wait, what’s this, you get one more surprise??? You get a bonus analogy-allegory! I’d call it an “analogegory,” but that sounds gross.

So we’re talking about the Nuremberg Trials in my philosophy class, and it looks like what was really going on in World War II was that America and Europe were trying to get their house under control. They had a new roof and had spent a long time trying to make it strong and stable. (At first the roof was really more of a thatch weave, but Germany kept climbing on top and mussing it up.) Then the roof was more tile-y or whatever roofs are.  So Europe and America thought the roof was fine, and they didn’t worry much either because Germany was in bed with a lot of broken bones and a really bad toothache and he had lost his wallet and his phone so he couldn’t call or get a ride to his friend Austria’s house. 

(Austria had helped mess up the thatch roof earlier but then England called his angry authoritarian Austrian mama and he had to go home.)

So England and France are out eating lemonade in their sunroom when they hear a noise above them. They look out the window and they see Germany running all over the roof! He’s cackling and hopping around and ripping up the tile-y roof pieces and throwing them off at people like Poland, but they don’t know how he got up there because his new room had been in the basement and they’d thought all his bones were broken anyway. Then they saw Italy and Japan climb up on the roof too. 

(They were mean neighborhood friends of Germany. Italy was at that weird age where he was cool when he hung out with England and France, but as soon as he was with Germany he was an awkward and anti-semitic hooligan.)

Germany was throwing tiles at all kinds of people and England and France didn’t know what to do. They waffled around for a while and eventually started throwing stuff at him from the window. Then Japan threw a rock at America who was just walking by, so America joined up with Europe and France and their group of friends who’d gathered to get Germany and *his* friends off the roof.  Well they went to all the windows and threw everything they could at Germany.  The roof was getting weaker and Germany was sore, so eventually he stopped throwing stuff, but he still refused to get off the roof.

They had no idea how to get him off, so America, England, France, and 21 other neutral or allied nations (including Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Australia, Haiti, Honduras, Panama, New Zealand, Venezuela, and India) sat down to think and come up with a way to get Germany off the roof.

(At some point in the struggle Italy had fallen off the roof and Japan had exploded, so Germany was the only one left to deal with.)

After months of deliberation, America tentatively made a suggestion: “What if…” he began, “what if we went out on the roof too? Then we could take him back inside!”

A lot of other countries got pissed. What the crap was America talking about? If we went out on the roof then we’d be no better than Germany.

But America was all like “No way, we’re going on the roof for totally different reasons; the way we’re doing it, it’s not even really going on the roof.”

The other nations all said, “wat?”

“Yeah man,” America said, “Germany is already on the roof, so any going onto the roof we do to get them isn't actually going out onto the roof anymore, we’re just going out onto the roof to bring Germany back in.”

The other nations were still confused, but they went with it anyway. They went out onto the roof, grabbed Germany, pulled him back in, and then created a new roof. They called it the United Nations.

If You Ever See Me In A Coffeeshop Obnoxiously Tapping Out Rhythms On My Computer, It's Because Otherwise I'd Be Shaking Uncontrollably From The Egregious Caffeine Intake. Now You Know.

So here I am, sitting in a Starbucks in North Raleigh. (This is about as clear and specific as saying “I’m in a building that sells waffles somewhere in Johnston County.” Probably less so actually.) It is near the end of Christmas Break, which means that the parents are back at work, the little brother is back at school, and I only see most of the other brothers when they come by for a free meal. The rest of the extended family has returned to their home streets and states, and the cousin has left for Belize. You know how it goes.

I’ve realized that while at home, I am incapable of doing anything besides watching entire seasons of 30 Rock, wasting hours playing my little brother’s computer games, and checking the fridge every 15 minutes, assuming that I’m going to find something interesting wedged in there that was not there before. Thus I am at Starbucks. And now that this huge mug of liquid caffeine is causing me to literally buzz a little bit, I will write.

(The drug culture in this country is fascinating. You can buy machines for filtering your drugs at every big store or mart worth its beans, some people carefully grind their own personal blend of drugs every morning, and there are cafes in literally every shopping center where people can sit on smarmy couches and think smarmy thoughts while a smarmy liberal arts major in an embarrassing apron prepares their drugs for them, complete with hazelnut syrup and room for cream.) 

[I’ve begun to use parenthesis as an indicator that a particular thought is an offshoot from the central topic and an acknowledgment that I am comfortable and conscious of this fact. The brackets {or whatever they’re called} are indicative of a further tangent away from the original offshoot.]

At a certain point, however, I decide that the subject of discussion has become skewed enough that it is no longer clear or worthwhile to categorize things in reference to what the supposedly “central” topic is or was. (Think of it this way:  Your train is going to New York. From somewhere. If it stops off in Philadelphia, that could be considered an offshoot. The stop makes it take longer to get to New York, but it could still be considered a point on the way to New York.  Then the train goes to Massachusetts. This delays your arrival in New York even more. (Particularly because you just briefly passed through New York, and despite your shouts at the conductor, the train didn’t stop or change course. You think he might’ve been on the toilet.) This stopover in Massachusetts delays your arrival in New York, but it is still nothing more than a brief tangent, an offshoot from your original course. Maybe not a very efficient one, but you can still see the main route you’ve been pursuing. But then the train leaves Massachusetts and before you know it you’re in Ontario and there’s a lot of mounties asking for your passport and an obscure train analogy messing with your head and you’re not even sure where you were headed originally or who you were visiting; You’re left in a Canadian jail (imagine your average Holiday Inn but with better room service) with nothing to your name but righteous indignation and a vague disconcerting feeling that you’re supposed to be somewhere else. 

At that point parentheses are no longer useful, sensical or effective.

(This says “sensical” is not a word but I’m going to keep saying it is until it shuts up, not because I know it is a word but because I know it should be.)

I am ashamed to admit that I had to find and study a map of the United States for that train analogy. Hooray Geography!

Never again will I try to blog without a huge mug of coffee by my side.

I saw The Adventures of Tintin last week! Another reason I like being at home, besides the delicious home-cooked meals and the coffee that is magically already in the coffeemaker every morning as soon as I wake up (Where does that come from???) is the ability to go out to eat and watch movies with family, AND NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!

I enjoyed Tintin immensely.  I don’t know if it’s an orthodox, expected part of remembered childhood for people of my generation, but I definitely hold some kind of nostalgia for it. The father Dickson has a huge collection of Tintin comics and I attempted to read every comic I found lying around the house as a kid, be they on the kitchen table, in the basket in the bathroom, or in the cardboard box discreetly tucked under my dad’s bed. (The box is where I found especially good ones like Catwoman and Bone. [*pause* for comprehension and analysis {Bone: an independently organized series of graphical novels about three bald white cartoon brothers: Phoney Bone, Fone Bone, and Smiley Bone.} Do as you wish with this information.])

So yeah, Tintin brings back a lot of memories. On a related note I kind of like the CGI animation used more and more in movies now. It makes everything look as similar to real life as possible without making it as boring as real life. (So the people look real but they don’t actually have to follow any natural laws of gravity, physics or thermodynamics.)

Before the movie I saw a preview for The Lorax, which made me squeal and squirm in excitement for the rest of the previews and at least the first 8 minutes of the movie. (much to the chagrin of my neighbors, but it serves them right for invading my arm space. [I SAID “CHAGRIN” I DID IT THEY SAID IT'D NEVER HAPPEN BUT I DID IT! THAT CRAZY WORD SOUNDS LIKE THE NAME OF AN ALOOF AND MYSTERIOUS FRENCH ADMIRAL RESPONSIBLE FOR A LOT OF COVERT ATTACKS ON BRITISH PORTS, NOT THAT THERE WAS REALLY SUCH AN ADMIRAL WITH A NAME SIMILAR TO "CHAGRIN" BUT THE NAME "CHAGRIN" MAKES IT SEEM AS IF THERE WOULD BE SUCH A STORY BEHIND IT]… *ahem*) Despite my tendency to get extraordinarily excited about ordinary things, however, I would like to emphasize how amazing and awesome and incredible and cool and fantastic it is that there is a legitimate feature film being produced based on Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. It will be released on March 2^nd. Thus I will celebrate my impending transition out of teenager-hood (March 5^th=20^th birthday) with a resounding return to my childhood.

Now that my caffeinated buzz is beginning to fade, I will provide you with some extracurricular reading material.

Near the beginning of this last fall semester, I applied for a position as a staff writer at Bounce magazine, which is the satire magazine at UNC-Chapel Hill. Here’s part of the application I filled out: (I’ve edited my answers to the first two questions in order to remove the boring informative material; everything besides the "blah"s were in the actual application I turned in.)

Describe your ideal position at BoUNCe. What kind of work would you enjoy doing?

My ideal position at BoUNCe would include reading, writing, editing and free meals at Noodles and Company.  Ideally.  Parties with fresh fruit would also be ideal.  Blah blah blah blah “ideal job” blah blah blah blah “interests” blah blah blah blah “ideological compatibility.” Blah.

What relevant experience, if any, do you have with magazine publication or your position of interest?

I have no real relevant experience with actual magazine publication, but blah blah blah “I have a billion majors” blah blah. I’ve been editing my own work for years, and in recent years I’ve been the go-to-guy to proofread and edit my friends’ blog posts, my brothers’ wonky Lord of the Rings fan-fiction, and my brothers’ friends’ college essays.  I read the Onion religiously, and blah blah blah blah “journalism” blah blah blah “blogblogblog” blah blah blah; “socio-political expertise” blah blah. 

You wake up in a bathtub full of ice and your kidney is missing. What do you do next?

I jump out of the tub and take off any wet clothes I might still be wearing.  Then I start limping, squinting, clutching my side, and mumbling loudly about dinosaurs.  I need to reach maximum crazy before I run out of the bathroom and subsequently through whatever humble household I happen to be entrenched in.

Aside/Explanation: Think about it – if a mildly crazy-looking injured guy in his boxers starts wandering through your house and/or neighborhood and/or local elementary school playground, then you’re going to beat the peat(synonym for crud) out of him.  But if you see a half-dead, naked, soaking wet teenager yelling about a brachiosaurus trying to make yogurt out of his head while a diplodocus looks on, then you are much more likely to just sit in your easy chair, hunker down behind your newspaper, and tremble.

Approaching maximum insanity, I swing open the door and begin to run through an oddly clean living room.  It looks and smells like my grandma’s house. I get a momentary glance at a middle-aged man playing chess who stares at me and freezes, and then I sprint-limp-shuffle out of the room.  I then run through a kitchen pretending I’m being chased by iguanodons.  The three college-aged guys cooking breakfast look very much caught off guard, and one of them spits out some curses as I dive-tumble-crawl my way to the back door. 

Once in the backyard, I take a moment to get my bearings.  Then I abandon the limp and begin to run faster.  I compensate for the loss of the limp by yelling louder and adding nautical terms and random exotic fruits into my frenzied exclamations.  After a few minutes of running I realize I have no idea where I am.  It’s going to be a long road home.