pot.

Stop asking me if I smoked pot. You can all quit emailing me about it, or emailing me about something else and casually bringing it up. You are like a big fucking junior high peer pressure video.

“Yeah, but you’re in Amsterdam” my ass. I’ve been in plenty of perfect places to smoke. I’ve sat in, on and around enough smoked filled rooms / fields / beaches / barns / campfires /etc to incriminate half the population of three universities and the backpacker circuits of several countries. I’m not going to do it.

It’s not like I have a fanatical personality. I’m a Jew that goes to Quaker Meeting and a vegetarian that eats bacon. This is not about defining myself, or taking a stand, or judging you. I’m just not interested, in the way I wasn’t interested in seeing Pulp Fiction. I don’t care if everyone else has.

I don’t agree with the insinuation that by not smoking pot I am denying myself something precious that I don’t even know I’m missing. As my mom will tell you at length if you get anywhere near her, I make shortsighted impulsive occasionally self-destructive decisions all the time, solely for the purpose of feeling something new. And although smoking pot would be something new, so would getting branded or running a marathon or becoming a Born Again Christian. Some new things we choose to try, and some we don’t. Quit your job and fly to Serbia and then you can give me shit about being closed to new experiences.

After spending countless hours over the past ten years in every possible context with pot smokers, I find pot smoking categorically boring. I hate the lethargy and the emotional distance of high people. I hate the way smoking up replaces the actually fun activities that were originally on the agenda. I hate the pseudointellectual, agonizingly repetitive conversations of an evening sitting around smoking pot.

And if the real impetus to smoke is internal rather than external, I’m not interested in that either. People think I’m high all the fucking time. People have been asking me if I was high since eleventh grade. I don’t know why I was lucky enough to receive it, but I have the most marvelous top shelf brain chemistry available. I walk down the street and the buildings sing. I can enjoy a piece of cake for an hour. Cordoroy fills me with rapture. These are not illustrative exaggerations. When I say the buildings sing, I don’t mean I like architecture; I mean, I hear the buildings sing. I have to keep myself in check constantly just so everyone around me doesn’t think I’m absolutely out of my mind.

So I’m just not going to fuck with that. It would be downright ungrateful. And smoking pot sure as hell isn’t the most adventurous or intense or social or mood-enhancing or soul-searching or mind-opening thing I could find to do in Amsterdam.

It’s not that interesting that you smoke pot, and it’s not that interesting that I don’t.
Let’s move on then, shall we?

26 june 2005

I woke up warm and content this morning on my top bunk and I realized I was dreaming that I was leaning on Ian, tall Ian the geologist with the ponytail and beard and affinity for heavy metal. And then I was sad to have woken up. And the wholeness of the comfort of this dream was that I felt protected. My dreams are not so subtle in times like these. I am standing here at the edge of Amsterdam, where after six months I have finally gotten my geographic and linguistic and social bearings, and I am diving off into some great Balkan chaos where I will have to deal with erratic buses and messy history and not being able to ask for a spoon.

Once I jumped out of an airplane and the part in the plane gaining altitude was the worst part, the part full of anxiety, and the falling was euphoric. This is travel to me. It’s not something I look forward to; it’s something I dread, but the pull of the fall is enough to make me scheme and scrimp my life around it.

I am blessed with a non-addictive physiology, I can drink a coffee or smoke a cigarette once a week or once a month and it’s all the same to me, no headaches or crankiness or achy need, so beyond sex and chocolate and the company of certain people the only craving that feels more like reality than a whim to me is travel, and it’s ruined my resume and my credit rating and the majority of my romantic relationships, but I’m pretty sure it’s still better than heroin.

berlin

Berlin! Insanity.

It sprawls in every direction. You walk for blocks through anonymous gritty urban blight only to emerge in front of Rem Koolhaus or a former SS bunker-turned-memorial or a park full of beautiful mohawked punk kids sitting in the sun with beer and dogs.

Sixty years ago Berlin was rubble and twenty years ago it was prison and today it is a construction site, and I can’t help feeling that the Germans ought to scrap the idea of Berlin altogether and try again somewhere else, somewhere without the legacy of violence and inhumanity and destruction that keeps reinventing itself on the spot.

Some places are sacred and some are haunted and neither should be built upon, and just because we don’t understand the mechanisms of this invisible geography doesn’t mean we shouldn’t respect its rules.

I don’t like being on trains in Germany. I don’t like the German language and I don’t like bratwurst, and the beer is good but I drink too much of it whenever I think too hard about this city.

21 june 2005

I spent the longest day of the year in Berlin. Berlin is crazy. It defies everything I know about cities: how they are structured, how they look, where it is safe to walk. Berlin is like a random assemblage of patches torn from every other city on the planet: ultramodern architecture, communist bloc apartment buildings, monuments, memorials, highrises, and empty lots all strung together by the erratic rusty tendrils of subways and surface trains.

I am here for the second half of a two-week course in urban ecology. The first week in Amsterdam was a slightly disorganized quasi-success with good fieldtrips and bad powerpoints. Now we – about twenty of us from Oregon, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Spain and the Netherlands – are here doing a ridiculously quick redesign exercise for a former glass factory site. We are working in small multi-disciplinary, multi-national, not-so-multi-lingual groups, figuring out how soil scientists and landscape architects and geologists and physical geographers approach the same problem. The conversations are awkward and fascinating and full of misunderstandings and poor word choice.

We are staying and working in a small conference center accommodation in the east part of the city, in the former East Berlin. We have dorm rooms and a meeting space and a yard that ends on the Spree River. When the work grows too frustrating we lie on the deck smoking cigarettes and deciding what outings we can guiltlessly squeeze into our schedule.

Last night the Jewish Museum was open until 10 pm, so I headed there when we adjourned. Oh, Daniel Liebskind! You have restored my faith in architecture. I could describe the spaces but it would be unjust, it wouldn’t be anything like being in them, because he makes you experience all the ideas of the museum. The building itself makes you feel lost, and confused, and alone, and all the other emotions that one gently builds a tolerance to after a few days amidst the artifacts of what this city used to be.

Now it is Tuesday, 3:30 in the morning, and I have just come in from a few late-nite hours on the Spree with Talley, Michelle, Ian, Aaron, Madeleine and Casper. We drank seven bottles of wine. We laughed and talked shit and enjoyed the easy friendships of mutual relocation. We sang a lot of songs, and it made me glad for all the good people in the world with big vague dreams.

11 june 2005

It’s four a.m. and I just got home. I have no interest in going to bed. This is what happens when the sunlight fades at ten and reappears at five: one feels that the daytime is winning, that being awake is the only possibility.

Today it was gray and there was both too little and too much to do; nothing was required of me but time is running out. So I wasted the day. I hate it and I hated it when it was happening, but this is how I am. When the todo list is long it all gets done, and when there’s no todo list I sit on the sofa by the window and read.

At eight I finally went out to get some groceries. At nine I had dinner while instant messaging Joshua, who is graduating today with several of my UO friends. I wish I could be there.

At midnight Miriam and Marie Carmen and Han picked me up and we went to Frankrijk, a nearby squat. In order to preserve the housing density that makes the Netherlands possible, it is required that property in the city be inhabited. Property owners who leave their buildings empty – derelict warehouses awaiting condominiumisation, for example – risk being squatted, and the squatters have rights. Not robust rights, but rights. In some cases they eventually win court battles to take over their squats, but more often they exist in a sort of limbo, occupying space that for whatever reason is being ignored. Many of the squatters are foreign, and they are often students, artists, musicians, activists, and so on. Squats are independent communities that often open their doors to the larger community for events and performance. Some of the squats run popular dinner nights, movie screenings, bars and clubs. Frankrijk is one.

There is a word in Dutch gedoogde (said sort of like hehdoktah) that does not have a perfect English translation because it is such a Dutch concept, but a close stab would be tolerated. Lots of things in the Netherlands are gedoogde: they are not technically legal, but they are not illegal either. Squat bars are gedoogde. The police know that they exist, and that they don’t have licenses and don’t close when other bars have to close. But there is an implicit agreement that the squats will not be called on this unless there is some sort of change in circumstances – neighbors start complaining, damage is done – because they are not doing harm to anyone. The Dutch are big on letting each other be. And the idea of gedoogde allows them to let each other be without seeming hypocritical and arbitrary in law enforcement, the way, for example, marijuana is treated in the States.

Frankrijk is a typical squat: prime real estate in the center of the city on the busy Spuistraat. It is easy to pick out because in the row of historic facades, it is the one completely covered in graffiti. Really fabulous graffiti, actually. At the door are three guys in black with about a dozen visible piercings between them. They move aside to let us in.

Inside the space is cavernous, unfinished, basement-like. The walls are covered in graffiti, political posters (anti-Bush, anti-fascism, anti-G8), and announcements for concerts and rallies. A crowd that includes a fair number of teenagers clusters around the makeshift bar and the dancefloor. A girl with overdyed hair and black-and-white striped tights sits alone in a corner with her notebook. There are a lot of mohawks.

The jaded part of me laughs a little at the squat scene: the predictable scripted angst, the disconnect from actual mechanisms of change, the obvious hook-up potential that is clearly boosting attendance. But I also recognize the squats as productive and alternative spaces for a group of people that is usually marginalized. Society doesn’t generally consider the young, the restless, or the tattooed when allocating public resources, and they are often made unwelcome in allegedly public spaces. But everyone is welcome at the squats, and they show up, and they are smiling. And I’m not sure I agree that everyone is entitled to rent-free living in the heart of the city, but I’m not sure I disagree either. And I admire anyone with the guts to raise the question.

9 june 2005

So it’s 3:30 in the morning at the end of a good day. A good day that comprised a few hours sketching and reading by the canal, two conversations with random strangers, a beer with a near-stranger, a sandwich on a picnic blanket in Oosterpark, a coffee on the patio of the Kriterion, a tasty soup-and-stirfry dinner prepared by Maria, an Austrian murder mystery screened in the closed-except-to-friends-of-the-bar-staff Doos, and a short round of kicky dancing at a punk club. Not bad considering it started at noon after six hours of sleep.

And despite all that I am feeling reflective and anxious with so few days left in Amsterdam: did I do this the best way I could have? I know that I didn’t. I didn’t stick with the Dutch the way I wanted to, and I didn’t call as many people as I might have for interviews about Dutch design, and I didn’t get to quite as many Dutch cities as I had hoped, and I didn’t sketch and paint as much as I might have. And most of all I regret the hours I spent fucking around online. Not the hours of blogging or i.m.ing friends, but the random hours of surfing, which is no better than sitting in a foreign country watching television… the random hours when it was too cold out to hold a pencil and my brain felt too full for language or literature.

But I didn’t do THAT bad. I got to just about every museum on my list, I got to know some fantastic people, I got to Utrecht and den Bosch and Schiermonnikoog and Leiden and Haarlem and Arnhem. I played on the Amsterdam Women’s Lacrosse Team and spent Queen’s Day on a boat and took at least five landscape architecture PowerPoint presentations of photos. I got to Spain and Belgium and Paris.

Mostly I wish my project hadn’t been such a wash, which I consider to be about 25% my fault. Though (early on) I made some good progress with my thesis research, the side project I was actually here to do was almost wholly disappointing: it changed at the last minute to a less interesting and relevant problem, I had little supervision and no collaborators, and it was impossible to produce meaningful results in the allotted time. That said I could have taken more initiative. When the choice was between roadside management technique lit searches and an afternoon of Van Gogh, Van Gogh won every time. Which I feel ok about. The times when fiction at the café won out are a bit more ambiguous.

In any case, I have about one more week. I am going to try to end this with grace instead of with sleep-deprived over-emotional heel dragging, but I’m not making any promises.

excursion

Last nite I took the redeye from Philly to Atlanta to Amsterdam (oh airline geography) after five days in the States for Erin’s wedding. The wedding was beautiful and shit! Erin got married!

Personally I think the whole affair was an elaborate ruse to get me into the pink dress that I was required to wear as a bride’s maid. My Amsterdam friends really laughed their asses off about that one, since they’ve really only seen me in knee high black Docs.

Being back in the northeast for five days was exceedingly strange. First there was the sudden return of familiar yet distant artifacts: highway driving, Dairy Queen, green money. Then there was the whole shift in self-awareness. This happens during every trip to Philly because when I visit my parents, my mom inevitably needs to make helpful suggestions about which new clothing, hairstyles, and lipsticks might greatly improve my life. But on this trip in particular I was surrounded by a bride and her wedding party, all beautiful fashionable people who have a lot to say about handbag designers, makeup colors, bodyhair removal, and hemlines. And although I am a self-confident person, it still takes a certain amount of energy to hear someone say, “I can’t go out until I put on some cream for my eye puffiness!” and not think, I’m not wearing cream for eye puffiness and last night I slept in an airplane. And I know that this is just not something I care about and that that is ok, but it’s easier to remember in Oregon where dressing up means wearing the black fleece.

In any case, as I said, the wedding was beautiful and so was the bride. But to be honest I didn’t care about that either. I cared that she married a great guy, and they love each other, and also the wedding was FUN. Dancing, cupcakes, old friends.

And then I got back in a plane, flew back to Atlanta, back to Amsterdam. I made collages from the inflight magazine and listened to country music on my complimentary headphones. The program was hosted by Big & Rich (of Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy fame, as I’m sure you’re aware).

And they lived Happily Ever After.