the preface, of course
greetings from the future!
this is the post from 2006 that floats magically atop the others so that i can be a controlling blogger and greet you all upon entry.
hello.
background: i'm living in amsterdam for six months. i was actually given money to do this. isn't academia marvellous?
below is my blog. i hate blogs. i would tell you why but some of you have blogs and i don't want you to think i hate your blogs. i just hate the idea of blogs. and it's really not the vehicle i would choose. but until i figure out how to make my own minimalist website, which has been sitting at the bottom of the to-do list for about five years now, this is just easier.
oh, and unlike the burning log, this one follows blog chronology. so it starts in the archives for december 2004, listed in the right hand column just below here. --->
isn't that annoying?
cheers
p.s. the future is fantastic. flying cars, t.v. phones, everything they promised.
p.p.s. photo links are now in the december archives
1 july 2005
Regina has an expression for me. She doesn’t know if it’s a legitimate Spanish expression or one that she made up with her mother, because Regina and her mother have the kind of relationship where they make up language and it seems so natural and intuitive that they forget it is their own. Regina is tall and warm and has long brown hair that falls over her face; she wears hippie shirts and refers to special conversations as “pretty.” She is a lot younger than me and a lot softer, and often the things I do make her cover her mouth. But she was one of the few people that knew early on how fast this time would go, so we agreed to be sponges together, espongas, to soak up Amsterdam every day. In between soaking we sat together in the Crea Café sifting out our experiences over light coffees, hers sweet. So she knows a bit about me by now. Regina’s expression for me is that I have flowers on my ass.
It means, more or less, that I am really fucking lucky. Which I already knew.
This week has been my last official week in Amsterdam. I’ll be here again before flying out, but by then my international friends will be back in their respective countries and my Dutch friends will be on holiday. So for all intents and purposes this was the week for the tying up of loose ends. I hate loose ends.
First there was the part where all the logistics fell into place. The discount / student fare / two-seats-per-plane-at-this-rate ticket back to New York that I had purchased for the wrong date was easily changed to busy mid-August as the STA affiliate travel agent shook her head in disbelief.
An email arrived in my inbox advertising a room for the fall in a sun-filled dog-friendly vegetable-growing Eugene house near both the railyards and the riverside bike path.
A friend from another residence randomly relocated to my building and offered to store my extra bags while I am traveling.
Let’s not even go near the notice I got about an unavoidable seven-hour layover in Chicago on my way west. Notice that arrived approximately one week after a friend I haven’t heard from in ten years randomly emailed. Guess where he lives. Guess how many people I knew in Chicago before that.
As these details fell into place I eased out of my Amsterdam life. I had one last night at the Doos with the full cast of characters. Maria and I ate huge amounts of fruit in Vondelpark, then met up with Peter and Kasha for red pepper soup. Natalie and I hopped between the Rozengracht shops to find her shoes for her sister’s graduation. Gianluca and I traded favorite books.
Then there was my night out with the Dutchies, Madeleine, Renske, Casper, and Cynthia. I met them all months ago when I was doing my lab work. At the time they seemed busy and I assumed that I was too temporary and English-speaking to have much to offer. But then we were all on the Urban Ecology course together, and somewhere between the speedy guided tours and the leisurely late-night drinking we talked a lot about government and marriage and language and plans. And Wednesday night they had pizza and wine with me to say goodbye, and that was huge for me.
Today I went to the post office to mail my last round of Dutch postcards, and I found a new journal and some traveling shoes to swap for my flip-flops. Regina came to help me clean and we drank honey rum and listened to Ryan Adams, and Moritz came by to reclaim the Walt Whitman anthology I borrowed in March.
I skipped out on all the big parties; I didn’t go to a single one. Last night I just sat on my sofa and read Isabelle Allende. It was perfect. I really love this city, and I didn’t want to celebrate or mourn the end of my time here. I just wanted to have one more night of being in Amsterdam as if that wasn’t about to change.
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.
