Unedited Notebook excerpts- 28 Feb-9 Mar

28 Feb 2008
Yesterday was the best day ever. And I was thinking that before my package came. So I want to write it down so I don’t forget. After the third class, Ellie and I went upstairs for Art, but mysteriously, none of our classmates ever showed up, so we sat around and talked for two hours, after which I started wandering townward. Before I’d even made it out of sight of the school, Ellie called to say her Slovak lesson was canceled, so we went to town together and got some ice cream with hot raspberries and tiramisu, then went off to the čajovňa for tea and a vodna fajka. Around 2:45, Ellie went home and I went to see Ratatatouille dubbed into Slovak. I understood 90% of it—well, actually, I understood all of it, but of what I heard rather than remembered, I got 90%. I was amazed. Anyway, a couple more things about the dubbing—it was funny how the headlines and book titles and were all in French, which I guess makes more sense. Second, at the part where Linguini says, (in English), “If you’re going to name a food, you should name it something that sounds delicious. Ratatouille doesn’t sound delicious. It sounds like ‘rat’ and ‘patootie’. Rat patootie. Which does not sound delicious.” They translated it something like “If you’re going to name a food, you should name it something that sounds delicious. Ratatouille doesn’t sound delicious. It sounds like ‘rat’. ‘Rat,’ which means ‘rat’ in English.” Except the second “rat” in that last sentence was in Slovak, but you probably figured that out. Well, I guess that’s the best way to make it work. But I understood enough to figure it out!
The moral of the story: If you want to have a good day, go out and spend money.
Anyway, when I got home (walking), Ana told me Lukaš had gone to pick up a package for me. Michael sent me a pink pony! He definitely wins a t-shirt. Mommy sent me the jewelry I requested and the best Valentines’ Day card ever, not to mention two boxes of tea nad one of emergen-c! Daddy, though, sent me a zune! So now I’m listening to a new David Crowder Band album. Oh, and a dvd of Narnia, and three of Firefly. I’m so happy! I love the Juno soundtrack. I could gush on and on. I’ll save that for a blog post or a thankful email.

Walking ‘round in February
Pretending like it’s June
Sitting down in the park
Trying to write a simple tune

Not wearing my winter coat
Since in my mind it’s June
Walking in the chilly air
The weather’ll catch up soon

I close my eyes and I’m back
In a park at home in June
Sitting talking with a friend
‘til the sun turns to the moon

Eating ice cream in the rain...

29 February 2008
Day 199
I don’t want to be here today. Don’t really know why. I just don’t. Don’t know where I want to be instead, just not here. Actually, I want to be home, but I’m not really homesick. Listless, more like. I feel listless. Which is weird considering how much I hate making lists (har har). Really, though, the lack of pressure is driving me nuts. Yesterday I left school an hour early for no reason whatsoever and just walked home. I’m finding myself looking for reasons to stay at school, rather than justifying skipping, and for the most part, I can’t find any except, “well, what else is there to do?” I’m probably the worst exchange student ever. I don’t do anything. Not that I did at home either, but I just feel like I’m doing even less since I’m not even doing anything productive. At least I accomplished stuff back home, even if I didn’t have a social life. I feel dead. I don’t do anything, I don’t feel anything but non-feelings like apathy and listnessness and boredom. I’m not even learning anything much anymore. The bright spot in all this depression is having my new fauxPod. I love it to pieces. The only thing is the battery doesn’t last forever. I about ran it out yesterday. That’s the last time I’m watching videos in school. New rule for me. I really believe my dead old fauxPod is sorta a God thing, since I wouldn’t have ever learned Slovak if I constantly listened to it, plus I would have seemed even more unapproachable. And it’s a little conveniently inconvenient that the other one only worked while I was walking or cross country skiing. No music in school, let alone movies or other distractions. Distractions?! From what? The maybe-dozen time’s I’ve been addressed in class? Anyway, I’m going to be in Rome in less’n two weeks, so I guess I’ll just wait it out. Ugh. I have PE today, but I don’t want to.

Včera bola veľmi lahký den. V pondelok, chodim do školz o 9:45, tak spala som do 8:00 a išla pešo. Bola som na hodine dejepis v 3B a potom na hodine fyzike v septima A dva krat. O 12:20, išla som domov pešo. Doma, poyerala som film na mojom nokebooku a hačkovala rukavice, ale niečo sa zdalo a nie su dobre, tak musim skusiť znova. Škoda. Minúly tyžden, prišel balik od mojej rodiny, tak temaz mam novú mptrojkú, ktorá funguje. Ja sa tešim! Teraz, ked čakam na autobus, môžem pozerať filmy alebo americkz serialy ktoré poslal môj otec. Nebojťe sa, pani učitelka, nebudem pozerať v škole. O 5:00, išla som do Rotary klub, ako musim každý tyžden. Rozpravala som sa s Ellie a Haley po anglickz, ale klub bol strašný nudný. Nevadi. Buduci vikend, budeme variť pie (ako sa povie pie? Neviem.) Lebo Ellie nepozná, a čo je americkejšie ako jabulkový pie?

Day 204 Wed 5 Mar 2008
Leaving for Rome in a little less’n a week. Wednesday is among the more bearable school days, despite starting earlier than I feel’s strictly necessary. Tomorrow’s my Daddy’s birthday. I’ll have to call him. In any event, I’m looking forward to making pie with Haley and Ellie. We’ll see how it goes down. I’m working on a hat for Ellie’s birthday present. She picked out this crazy rainbow yarn, and I was working with half double crochet stitches, but that way, each color only gets you one stitch, which makes it looks like some gnarly rag rug, so I think I’ll start over with singles, or even slip stitches. Should look much better. Watched the first twenty minutes of O Brother Where Art Thou before class this morning. That’s a good movie.

An apt analogy:
The lack of pressure in my life at the moment is to my mind as the lack of pressure in outer space would be to my body.
Day 205. Dad’s Birthday. Pie day. Leaving for Rome in 1 week. Only 16 pages left in this notebook. (Editor’s note: I know there are only 10 pages accounted for here- the other six had no text, only drawings.) Then I’ll have to get a new one. Maybe with quadrille lines. I also need to call Dad at some point. Well, not just any point. Between 4 pm and 5 am. I slept hard last night. I crashed on my little couch listening to my daddy talk about the bible, but then I got up maybe 45 minutes to an hour later, washed my face, and read 10 chapters of psalms. That one psalm was crazy long. Anyway, the weather still continues charming. I grabbed my coat on the way out the door, but have since regretted it. Now I’ll have to carry it around all day. Not that it’s not a tad chilly. It’s probably good that I changed out of the skirt, but still.
I want Burrito Boy. Maybe the Chicken Boy. I don’t care. I want Café Yumm. The Baby Yumm, or maybe the edamame one with nori (editor’s note: I wrote nori in Japanese). That’s the first Japanese word I’ve thrown in in… 59 pages. It breaks my heart to think I’m forgetting it. I no longer feel the need to go home so urgently, but by no stretch of the imagination would I say that I don’t want to. It occurs to me that they don’t have the kids who don’t find the year to be the best of their lives come and tell us to come—we only ever heard from the few weirdos who have no life back home to miss. If I were to time travel back to a year ago November, I would tell myself not to go on this exchange. That’s an interesting revelation. That I wish I’d never embarked on this madness in the first place. The cool parts—which are basically just Haley and Ellie, learning the language, and starting to wash my face and read my bible consistently—are far outweighed by the things I’m missing out on back home. Family, friends, (which I was just starting to have,) studio, Narnia, and later recital, Tanner’s first year of high school, playing cello with Adam, having Ryan teach me to drive a stick shift, starting college, hot tub, college-level modern, and who knows else. Hanging out with Ashley, playing sausage with Tanner and friends…
When I listen to the recordings of Institute, I pretend I’m curling up in my daddy’s lap and saying, “Daddy, tell me about the Bible”.

I hate volleyball. My playing basically consists of trying not to give the impression that I’m going to go for the ball, since then no one who actually has a chance of being helpful with get it. I figure the best thing I can do for the team is stay out of the way and look apologetic that they got stuck with me. I hate volleyball, I hate volleyball, I HATE VOLLEYBALL!!!
I realize that lots of people enjoy volleyball for God only knows what reason, but I don’t have to. Likewise, just because I loathe it so doesn’t mean I expect all you freaks to hate it too. Why can’t you just return the favor?

I only have a few more pages in this notebook, so today I went out and bought another one. I’m kinda trying to finish this one out as soon as possible so I can use the next one. I’ll have to copy my calendar and school schedule into the new one. Today started out really crappy, but since I got out in the sunshine, I’ve felt way better. Of course, this can also be attributed to the nice men handing out flowers in the square, listening to the Hosanna recital 2006 soundtrack and spending money on office supplies. I’m supposed to meet Ellie here by the fountain, but she’s not here, so I’m just sitting here in the sun. Today is day 206. Forgot to mention that. Oh, I need to remember to have Dad tell me how to fix my virus software. Er, anti-virus. Apparently it expired or somesuch. Anywho. I wish I had a departure date so I could count down rather than counting up. I think it’d be more encouraging. I said back at the beginning of the year that I didn’t think I’d much care about percentages by the time it got close enough for my approximations to start showing their inaccuracy. That is not probing true. I thought I was already past 2/3, but in reality that’s not until the 18th. (Editor’s note: that’s not right either. The actual 2/3 date is around the 14th.) Dang, my foot’s asleep. Oh, I went out and bought a black permanent marker for CDs and the cover of my notebook. The new one, that is. It’s a good thing I’m not buying anything clothing-related now. I’d be more broke than I am. Some homeless dude just asked me for 2 crowns for a rožok. I figured, how much drugs or alcohol could he buy with 2 crowns? So I gave him his 2 sk, and he asked me for2 more so he could have 2 rožok. I don’t know how long this’d have gone on, so I told him I needed everything else I had and he wandered off muttering.

To summarize the day: crappy, awesome, crappy, tipsy and thus awesome.
The rest of day 206:
I’m mostly writing this to see if I remember it in the morning. After I met Ellie, we went and had ice cream, then I walked her to her bus stop. From there I went to dance, where I had a nervous breakdown during developes since I felt like such a big fat slug. My arabesque hardly reaches 90. Not even that, really. It’s pathetic. Anyway, Terka was amazingly nice. I like her. She might be my best Slovak friend. After that, I met up with the other exchange students who were in town and we went to this dark underground bar place where I drank 2½ glasses of crappy wine. “So I’ve never been drunk,“ I remember saying, “but I feel sorta dizzy when I turn my head. What does that mean?” I was told that I was “tipsy”. That’s cool, I guess . I can work with tipsy. Anyway, then I followed the remaining students who didn’t have to catch a train back home at like 7:30 to the café where Haley always gets mojitos and had a cup of coffee. It was funny. Everything seemed really quiet, and they told me I was talking really loud, so I don’t know if that came from the tipsy or what. Anyway, Haley told me right at the beginning that I absolutely couldn’t get drunk, since we have no idea what would happen, and she didn’t want to have to take care of me—but she would if it came to that. I thought that mighty nice of her to have my back that way. Anyway, I had a long discussion with Tomaš over my wine. I somehow developed strong political opinions over the course of the conversation. Weird. That’s not normal for me. Once I made it home on the 35, I told Jan that I’d drank some wine and was feeling a little woo-ooh. He just laughed and said I didn’t have practice. Which is true. This is the most drunk I’ve ever, ever been, and it can stay that way as far as I care. Not that I won’t drink as much ever again, but definitely no more. I’m good. This whole experience is very odd. It’s like being in a dream. You know, all sorta floaty… like nothing’s really real. It’s weird. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and realize I was a total idiot.

Day 207
So I still remember everything I wrote down. I’m not sure how it looked from everyone else’s perspective, but I was probably really weird and giggle. I felt weird and giigly. Anyways. I went out skiing this morning. I made friends with a five-year-old named Katka—cutest little thing. She was a better skier than I. Came home three hours later—okay, I was going to skip this part and pretend it never happened, but it’ll be funny in retrospect. I tried to go down the not-bunny slope. No sooner had I gone over the brink than I a) realized this was a big mistake, and b)fell and slid literally halfway down the mountain before the guy wearing a first aid kit stepped out and stopped me. I stood up, thanked him, pulled myself together, and set off again. Ten seconds later I lost control and wobbled for a ways, then fell and tumbled and slid. This time I lost both skis and a pole. Some nice man uphill of me brought them to me, with the advice “go slower”. Gee, thanks. Good tip. Pity the gravity’s so strong here that I slide down on my butt at 9.82 meters per second. Anyway, I got to the bottom, shaking like mad, only to discover that my kiddy-lift ticket wouldn’t let me on the grown-up lift to get back out of the pit of hell. The nice guy running it let me on anyway, though. So that was a disaster. After that I stuck to the kiddy run and hung out with five-year-olds. Back home, Iounged about and copied the calendars to the new notebook. Around 6, Terka sms’d me and asked if I wanted to go to a movie. Jumper. Good concept, but poor plot construction. Not to mention that Hayden Christianson’s uglier than a raccoon with a butter knife stuck up its nose. Anyway, I’m home now. Not really much to do now but sleep after I read bible and wash my face. Starting Proverbs tonight. Not such a fan of psalms or proverbs. Not such fun reading for me. But hey. Whatever.

The last two pages. The end of an era.
I’ve wanted to cobble together something with all the quotes I’ve related to lately—quotes about home, thing out of them—but that’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Holy crap, though, I’ll be in Rome Thursday. I’m surprisingly unexcited for it. I mean, I’m consciously excited but not relaly emotionally. I must be really emoationally disengaged right now. I don’t feel a lot—when I’m not crying my eyes out. Not just plakam, rozplakam. Literally crying all over the place.
In a lot of placed my handwriting looks a lot like my dad’s. The phrase at the top “of an era”, for instance, and the word “dad” right above here. Plus must of this here paragraph. I still bite my nails. I’m sorta giving up for now. I figure I need the emotional release this year.
I had a very strange dream last night. Very vivid, but I only remember bits and pieces. It seemed very sad. I mostly saw it in third person, but realized different characters to be “myself” throughout. The whole thing mostly took place in a hotel with a giant pool, both of which were, as I put it in my dream, an oasis in the middle of a dark sea. Overall atmosphere was dark, but brightly lit inside as if to compensate, but the darkness outside was impenetrable.
There was a baby crocodile we (some strange man through whom I perceived much of the dream and me, a wealthy society chick—quite skinny) adopted. He grew up into a boy, who didn’t want to swim. He was in swim lessons and all the kids had to race to knock this baseball off a pole. Somehow the man won, and the boy was all smiles and impressed. For some reason this made the man angry that he wasn’t trying hard enough and they got into a fight. The boy hit the man with a plank and turned back into a crocodile and swam away.
I remember I sat on a swing outside with the man sitting on the balcony. I swung higher and higher, until the hotel looked small and distant. It was at this point I commented on it being an oasis in an ocean of darkness. “I wish I could jump off and dive into the sea, down to the very bottom,” I continued, “and not die.”
“And not die”, repeated the man pensively.
Later a Chinese guy came for some reason, and since it was my crazy brain making the dream up, I could pick up Slovak and Japanese words in the “Chinese”. This isn’t uncommon in my dreams. Later still I found myself in a museum with Haley, who had recently been somehow bereaved, so I was comforting her as we walked through an exhibit on the history of England.

Som Raketa!

Eeyup, it's been a while. Just thought I'd acknowledge that. This past week (well, I call it a week, but it was really more like five days), I was at some mountain-type place for the church's ski trip. Sunday was mostly taken up with arriving and introductions and the like, and today, being the last day, was mostly taken up with packing up and leaving, so that makes three days of substance. On the first day, I skiied so much, and so badly, that my knees, which have always been weak, were not only black and blue from the incredible number of times I fell, but also felt as though someone had taken my shin in one hand and my thigh in the other and just twisted away at the knee in between. For those of you unfamiliar with human anatomy, just know that your knees are not meant to twist, just bend. Thus, I sat the second day out and mostly spent the time playing through Monkey Island 1 and 2, the first two Pajama Sam games, and a prodigious amount of solitaire. Also prodigious was the 3-hour nap I took. Good times. Anyway, that means that the increasingly inaccurately titled "ski week" actually consisted of a mere two days of skiing. (Aside: See that there? I stole the phrase "increasingly inaccurately titled" from the back of the copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where it states that it is the "first in the increasingly inaccurately titled Hitchhiker's Trilogy" or somesuch nonsense. This is why I could never write a book. I would get the pants sued off me for plaigerism. And there again, where I stole "Get the pants sued off of" from Sam and Max. Max responds, "but you don't wear any pants." The cycle never ends. Well, that grew unusually tangential unreasonably quickly. End Aside.) Furthermore, I was one of maybe two of the 14 there who were actually skiing. All the others were far too cool to ski and thus, snowboarded. In case you are one of the few people who haven't heard me expostulate on the topic yet, my two most spectacular falls both involved me getting to the end of the run with too much momentum and not enough skill to stop in time. In the first instance, I sailed off the ski run, was airborne for a moment, and faceplanted in the dirt, as the only snow there was manmade. In the second instance, I skiied through (and partially over) the line of people waiting for the lift. The other funny, I honestly can't be bothered to relate again, so I'll just copy it out from where I told my mama about it. Yes, I am lazy. Som leniva.

Aubrianne hovorí:
i somehow got a new nickname this week
La Chel Carson hovorí:
yes
Aubrianne hovorí:
apparantly i go really fast skiing, and some czech tourists commented
Aubrianne hovorí:
and called me "raketa"
Aubrianne hovorí:
which means rocket
Aubrianne hovorí:
and some of the guys heard that and were so taken with the word that they just said it all the time
Aubrianne hovorí:
so now i'm raketa.
Aubrianne hovorí:
i guess
La Chel Carson hovorí:
that is so funny!!!!!
Aubrianne hovorí:
i thought so
La Chel Carson hovorí:
it suits you to a T
Aubrianne hovorí:
hee hee
Aubrianne hovorí:
it's weird, since they kept saying "raketa! raketa!" in that way that people say a word when they just like the sound of it
Aubrianne hovorí:
and i didn't know what it meant or what they meant by it
Aubrianne hovorí:
until kelly told me
Aubrianne hovorí:
i only go fast since it's harder to slow down
La Chel Carson hovorí:
that actually makes it a little funnier!
Aubrianne hovorí:
i know!
La Chel Carson hovorí:
you have always only had one speed!
Aubrianne hovorí:
well, by the last day i was good enough at least to stop
Aubrianne hovorí:
if not slow down much

So yeah. That's about how that went down. Oh, and "hovorí" means "says". The messenger here is all in slovak. The last fun bit that I can think of concerning the trip is that there were two American girls there who somehow spoke less Slovak than me, despite having lived here at least as long (in one case) and considerably longer (in the other). Oh, and the Slovak girl to whom I did most of my talking said that I "don't have any accent". She went on to ask if it was correct to say "don't have any", and whether it constituted a double negative. We told her it was fine. When she later went on to ask about phrasal verbs or somesuch hoo-ha, however, we told her we didn't have a clue what the heck she was talking about.

Journal Excerpt

Day 182. 58%. A little over 4 months to go.

The weather's been fantastic lately. Cold, but sunny. Yesterday I explained to Ellie (the new Australian girl) that the lack of cloud cover, in fact, contributes to the cold because there is nothing to hold the heat in. Wit hthe weather has come a coorosponding warming of mood. It seems unlikely that, at this point, it's going to be cold and rainy and snowy again before summer. In the words of the acanonically named Stumpy, "This is no thaw. This is spring!" Four months doesn't seem so long, especially considering I've already made it six. Well, almost. The official six month anniversary is on the 15th. Doubt not that it will be met with much rejoicing. As of today, I am optimistic. Next week I will be off skiing with church people, and in one month tomorrow I will be headed off to rome! While I'm not nearly so anxious to leave when the sun is shining, i'm still not in love with this place. Seriously, I can think of maybe a day or two worth of fun to be had here. Anyway, I do not want to live here or even stay longer than I am planning. Really ,as soon as the farewell weekend is over, I am out of here. I think I'll wear my black pants and ballet flats on the plane, probably with my switchfoot shirt. Confy and easy to get shoes on and off, and probably would look halfway decent after beingslept in. I'm worried about the packing- fitting everything in the suitcases will be a challenge. I might give Ellie my big coat, as she has another winter to get through here. I don't really want it, and it definently won't fit in my suitcase. We'll see. I'll probablky have to give away lots of my stuff. I don't really know what, exactly, though. Probably my crappy jeans that I bought here. Actually, nobody would really want those, they're so beat up. Dang, though, I have a lot of books. that might be a problem. I don't know. W'll find out when I move to my last host family.

Putting the "Erf" in Performance

I realize that I haven't blogged recently, but that's only because it seems that nothing much has happened. Life in Slovakia goes on much as it has this past age, full of its own comings and goings. Worth mentioning, though apparantly not worth going out of my way to post about, are my two performances. The first: playing that Vivaldi cello duet thingie which was, I guess, close on two weeks ago, and which, unbeknownst to me, was some sort of concert for the Italian Embassy folks. That's right, the folks who brought you Vivaldi. The other cellist messed up in that one part that goes "doo, da da da da dum dum doo, dum da da da da da doo, da da dum di da da doo, da di dum dum da da doo doo doo doo da da da da dum da da da dum da da da doo", which doesn't matter so much, since, admittedly, it is a hard part, and it just made me look better in comparison. Better still, when they announced us, they said something along the lines of "And we'd like to thank the Conservatory for the use of their talented solist". Then, this last week I had this other dance thingie for študio tanca's modern class. I didn't much care for the choreography or the music, but that's okay. The younger students were sort of fun to watch- kids, the youngest of whom were perhaps five, who had clearly had no training other than modern, albeit their funky not-so-technique-based brand of modern, but still, interesting to see. The music that my class danced to was, I swear, about pedophilia. Not that I blame the teacher, since there's no reason she should know what this English song was about. Still, it was rather odd. In any event, in neither event did I fall down and make more of a fool of myself than you, dear readers, already know me to be.

Good day.

Today is shaping up to be an awesome day. I'm sitting at the cajovna at the moment, which is enough to qualify any day as good, sipping tea and paying 15 SK for half an hour's wifi use. Yesterday saw the dawn of a new reason to be extraordinarily happy, as I now have access to a non-crap cello! Granted, I can't take it home, and it lives at a music school a few minutes' walk from town, which is, in turn, maybe 15 minutes' walk from school, which is, in turn, about 50 minutes from my house. Town is only about 40 minutes away. Think of it as a less-than-perfect iscosoles triangle. Technically scaline, I suppose. Anyway, I went there straight from school and worked on getting that one Vivaldi cello duet thingie back into shape in anticipation of the performance I'll be playing in rather than giving a speech in Art History class, a gig which got me the cello in the first place. On the way, I stopped at a bookstore and picked up a copy of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe from the shelf marked "English Books", since I'd been craving some Douglas Adams and, shortsightedly, I didn't bring any with me. I'm typing with one hand, as I'm holding a sweet tea cup in the other. I'll be headed off to dance in about twenty minutes, so I'm going to stop typing now and go and squeeze every bit of internet I can from the remaining time. The end.

Happy Post

I have had a lot of people tell me that my depressing posts are depressing them, and, what's more, that they all are convinced that I'm miserable all the time. The truth-- I only blog when I'm miserable, really. When I'm happy, I'm out catching rainbows and playing with puppy dogs and bunnies and stuff. So. Without further ado, here are some happy things for all y'alls. With bullet points! Gotta love bullet points.

• It snowed about a foot yesterday. We shoveled snow from the driveway and then strapped on skis and tramped out a flat spot where Lukas and Jan will build an ice rink.
• I have a giant bruise on my knee and another one on my arm. From cross-country skiing. When I fell down. Well, one of the times I fell down. Not sure which one. Why exactly bruises are a good thing is one of the many unsolved mysteries my psyche holds.
• I finally made it to a rank of 100 in Psychonauts and got to see the bonus scene. Ok, so I googled "Psychonauts Figment Help" to find the last three, but still. I'm awesome.
• Oh, and I had a birthday! So now I'm old.
• I love my hankie. I got it in Japan, and whenever I cry on it, it makes me feel better. Way better than tissues. This particular hankie is not for boogers.
• My birthday package came the day after my birthday, full of much awesome and spiffiness.
• My host parents got me glasses with clear lenses for my birthday. I told them that, since I can't really speak intelligently, I might as well look šikovna, or even mudra.
• Tanner's Narnia greetings DVD was the best thing I've ever seen. I thought it'd make me cry, so I got my hankie all ready, but I laughed and laughed.
• On New Year's Eve, Lukas and his girlfriend had some friends over and we walked up on a nearby hilltop and watched the fireworks over the city while we passed around a bottle of champagne, which was, after midnight, legal for me to imbibe.
• I decided some time ago, but don't think I mentioned to many of you, that my favorite word is "cataclysmic". I don't know why, but all the 'k' sounds appeal to me.
• School and dance start up again tomorrow, so I won't feel bad about skulking about the house anymore.
• This morning, I wasn't sure if school started today or tomorrow, so rather than call one of my acquaintances from school, I walked all the way there and back, reasoning that it's not like I had much else to do, and the exercise would do me good. So I took a two-hour walk in the snow this morning.
• Shoveling snow, to return to a previous point, reminds me something little imaginary people living on a cake would do when you shake powdered sugar over them.
• I got an amazon gift certificate from Kyler for Christmas, so that's pretty sweet.
• My old headphones broke, but now I have new ones! Blue ones! Shine your shoe ones! (Sorry, doctor seuss moment)
• I'm trying to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in Slovak, since I got it for Christmas. I don't know about half the words, but it doesn't really matter since I basically have the English version memorized, it turns out.
• I'm not out of Burts' Bees yet!
• I haven't shaved my legs in almost a month, but it's not like anyone will see, considering that they'll shoot you if you don't wear socks and boots.
• I've got a sweet new type of over-the-shoulder roll to teach to all my dancing friendlets back home. It goes side to side. Did I already mention that at some point?
• I'm not wearing socks or slippers at the moment. Ha ha ha ha.
• My new year's resolution this year: To spend the whole of 2008 without buying any clothing for myself. It's good to walk through a store and say "No, you know what, I have everything I need." Which, in turn, reminds me that I could be living under a bridge and still have everything I need, since God loves me and all. Sorry to be Captain Preachy Good Christian Girl, but it's true.
• While I'm on the topic of being Captain Preachy Good Christian Girl, I finished reading through the bible the week before Christmas, and now, on the second time through, I'm about halfway through Deuteronomy.
• I got a sweet switchfoot tshirt in my birthday box. Which is sweet.
• I found the one truly disgusting Slovak... dare I call it food? It's sort of a beverage, but basically it tastes like you're drinking slightly runny expired sour cream with a tinge of bile. And you all know that I'll eat anything, so if I say it's disgusting, it must be completely unfit for human consumption. "Gnarly" is perhaps the most apt term here.
• A day of two before the new year, I went out and filled the biggest gaps in my wardrobe in anticipation of my no-more-buying-new-clothes resolution. So now I have a black zippy uppy hoody sweatery thing and some black ballet flats, both of which I can wear with my skinny black pants and pretend I'm Audrey Hepburn. Not that they'll let me wear ballet flats out of the house in January, but still.
• Speaking of Audrey Hepburn, I'll be going to Rome in just a few months. Yay!
• I saw Heros for the first time, albeit in Czech, but I still understood the Japanese dude. Plus, little miss stick-her-hand-in-the-garbage-disposal didn't really need a whole lot of translation.
• Look at all these happy things! That's a lot of happy. This makes 28. Let's see if I can come up with two more and make it a nice round 30, 'cause I'm just OCD like that.
• My face stopped being a breaky-outy spaz just in time for me to reenter society, which is always good.
• I wear perfume now. The ol' host parents got me some for Christmas. Not sure if they're trying to tell me something.

Are you happy now?

The Christmas Non-Post

I should write about Christmas, but I don't feel like it.

I should write about the quaint Christmas meal with its quaint little traditions. Throwing walnuts over the shoulder for luck, eating little wafery things with honey for some antiquated, superstitious reason, that sort of thing.

But I'm not in the mood.

I ought to thank all y'alls for your brown paper packages tied up with string, and maybe skip over the part where 1:30 in the AM saw me sitting on the bathroom floor sobbing.

While you might be interested in the family visits that took up all the 25th and 26th, I'm sure you don't want to hear about how the constant peopleness of those days left me all aspburgersy, so much so that I've spent the past week crocheting until my fingers bled.

Were I were to write about that, I would probably brag about the matching hat, scarf, and gloves that I've made without a pattern since then.

But I'm not in the mood for blogging.


So I won't.



But one thing I would do

If I were going to blog--

I would make every sentence a new paragraph.



'Cause it makes every

Indented

Isolated

Statement

seem more significant than it actually is.

Clever like a radio.

Wow, it's been a while. Sorry about that. I guess I'll pick up from last weekend-the Rotary Bratislava trip. A very bare-bones summary would be that all of the events were pretty pathetic and poorly organized, but we exchange students had a fantastic time anyway just being together and speaking lots and lots of English. To make a short story long, the whole thing started when Jan (host dad) drove Haley and I to Bratislava, where we stopped at Ikea to get some Swedish Meatballs for lunch. We ran through Ikea real quick like, stopping to get my secret santa gift, which I, in typical me fashion, had completely spaced about until that morning. One awesome stuffed rat later, we were back in the car headed for the bus station, where we met up with everyone else and left for the hotel. We went up to our assigned rooms, crammed into itty-bitty elevators, and dumped our stuff on the beds before putting on our silly rotary blazers and going to some bank place, which apparantly is one of the tallest buildings in the whole, entire country, which would have been a more impressive boast if they hadn't been simultaneously boasting that, on a clear day, you could see two other countries from the top. Before they let us head up to the top, though, they had us sit and listen to some bank guy talking about the euro in slovakia- or at least that's what we think he was talking about. I felt sort of bad for wasting his time. Anyway, we went up and took pictures, then went back down again. We then loaded back on the bus and went to the old city, which was all decked out for christmas. Chelsea and I made it our aim to get lost early enough that we had enough time to find our way back. We succeeded, then hung out at this bar place which was gorgeously decorated with glowy colorful lighted walls and giant black and white pictures of beautiful people on the remaining walls. I could be confusing this with another day, but I think we then went to this pub place which we totally took over to give our secret santa presents and play pool, at which I lost magnificently, which is how I do everything. It was Whitney's birthday, too, so we had cake and sang "happy birthday," first in English, then Slovak, then the Mexicans sang in Spanish, and the Brazilians sang in Portugese. It took a while. Anyway, afterward, we went back to the hotel and hung out. I taught a roomful of exchange students how to play Ruckus in Slovak, since View is Thai and doesn't really speak much English. So that was sweet. It should also be noted that every three rooms shared a bathroom and toilet, and that my roommates and I were unyieldingly sarcastic to one another, making up for nearly four months of a) being polite and b) speaking Slovak. It was awesome. The next morning, we all got up and breakfasted on tea, rolls and hot dogs, which is, unfortunately, pretty typical Slovak breakfast fare, then set off on a whirlwind sightseeing adventure. The bus dropped us at Bratislava castle, where we were left to wander around and take pictures of ourselves for maybe three hours, before the bus failed to make its rendezvous, so we walked around by some church for about another hour waiting for the bus to come. When it finally did, it took us to the tv broadcasting tower for another view of the city and adjacent countries and lunch in the fancy restaurant at the top. Afterward, another bus ride brought us to a little red tourist train. Those of us lucky enough to sit in the back car with no adult supervision had a grand old time not seeing the sights of Bratislava. We eventually started randomly waving at strangers and pretending to take their picture and generally pretending to be stupid tourists. How fitting, then, when our little red tourist train was ambushed by a crowd of randomly waving and picture taking Japanese tourists. The little red tourist train drove all through the old city, ("hey, we were lost here!" said Chelsea) and took us- why not?- back to Bratislava Castle. The intercom voice lady then pointed out several bridges over the Danube, mentioning that the smallest one was damaged by Americans in the second world war. We all looked at our shoes. I muttered, "sorry". When we loaded back on the little red tourist train, we in the back car were joined, surprisingly, by some random Irish tourists. "We haven't paid- we're just hopping a ride," they said as the train pulled away, "Where are we going?". When we explained that we were with an organization and had no idea where they'd take us next, they jumped. Off the little red tourist train. Yeah, it was nuts. Anyway, we then walked across the bridge to the biggest mall in Slovakia, for what it's worth. I bought a pair of skinny black pants, then spent the rest of the night in a state of nervous breakdown over them. Never did I think I would own a pair of skinny black pants. Anyway, after a mere three hours shopping, we all gathered and went back to the hotel, where we got ready for the club that night. I spend most of the getting ready time wandering around, panicked, in my new skinny black pants trying to borrow a shirt that would make me feel less like I was wearing tight black pants. The disco itself, despite being "the biggest club in Slovakia" was sort of a letdown. Basically just a smoke-filled room full of people who thought they were cooler than they probably were. There were two slutty dancers (and I use the term "dancer" loosely) on the stage, even. Eventually, the girl who was kicked off of Slovak Superstar the previous week came out on the stage and sang, and that was kind of it. We went back to the hotel around midnight. The next morning was the dreaded test, which I still maintain was poorly designed. I don't really want to talk about it, then after breakfast, we went home. Jan came and picked us up, and I slept most of the way back to Banska Bystrica. And that's about all.

Living with Strangers- Again.

Thursday night saw me trying to cram all my worldly possessions into the two suitcases they all came here in. Strangely, they seemed to have multiplied to the point that they barely fit. How can it be that I have so much crap and still I feel like I have nothing to wear? After that escapade, I resolved to stop buying clothes for the rest of the year (I use the word "resolved" loosely, meaning that I probably will anyway), and use the money for vodna fajkas. Gotta love the hookah. I just wish I knew exactly it is I'm smoking, but I have been assured that it's neither tobacco nor drugs, nor indeed anything harmful to my health. Anyway, yesterday my stuffed-to-the-gills-or-would-have-been-if-they-were-fish suitcases and I moved to the Rapcan residence, which is a gorgeous old house perhaps 45 minutes' walk from town, which is a significant improvement over the hour and a half it took took to walk from the Velky's house in Kremnička. My new host family consists of a mom, Anna, a dad, Jan, and a 20-year-old hockey playing older brother type, Lukaš. They are all extraordinarily nice, and Lukaš speaks flawless English. He said he liked the way I spoke English, with my "wery nice accent", which is something a west-coast girl like me doesn't hear all that often. Anna has been studying English for the past three years, and is eager to pick up more words, but they all speak Slovak to me, since I asked them to. I've learned that, however much the other party wants to speak English, if you consistantly respond in Slovak, they'll eventually give up and speak Slovak to you. The house is fantastically old-style, even by Slovak standards, so think pre-communist era. The upstairs, where the three bedrooms are, has doors only on the bathrooms, making the whole place really open. My room is just sort of... there, once you pass the bathrooms. The bed is in a little alcove, and the closet is plenty big enough to get dressed in, so no worries on the count of privacy. Oh, and they have a sauna in the bathroom. Which is awesome. In the parts where they've updated the house somewhat, they have heated floors, which is also awesome. The internet, though, is like than molasses going uphill in January- with crutches (bonus points for you if you caught the reference before you read the next sentence). Speaking of which, I said a sad little farewell to my carefully accumulated savegames when I uninstalled Psychonauts from the Velkys' desktop. Anyway, that's about everything I have to say at the moment. I'll leave you with my address so that when the Christmas and birthday presents start pouring in, they'll end up at the right house. Just don't send too much stuff that I'll have to fit into my suitcases! What I really want- ok, this sounds silly, but go with it- is a pair of spiffy glasses with clear lenses, so I can feel like I look smart even when I don't actually feel smart. I still have to get the stuff I've bought for my family home, and finish my Christmas shopping. Oh, well. Ok, so that address:

Skubínska
Cesta 96, 974 01
Banska Bystrica, Slovakia

Skiing and the Spazzy Internets

Ok, so the internet is being a spaz and whisked away this beautifully composed post to never-never land, never to be seen again, so I'll do a quick recap for those of you who weren't...um... me, sitting here writing it.

Skiing is cool. I fell down a lot, as predicted. The Velkys have a little apartment place, where we spent the night. I fell down less the second day. I went real fast, since it's hard to slow down and stop once you get a certain amount of momentum going, so they all think I'm this crazy speed demon. A good time was had by all.

I wrote out for your enjoyment the little chart I made of dates and their cooresponding percentages through the year, but frankly I can't be bothered to re-write the whole thing. Suffice it to say that I reach the 1/3 mark on the 23rd, and plan to celebrate with some zmrzlina or a trip to my favorite little čajovňa for some tea and a vodna fajčie, despite the controversy it stirred up among my readers. A good time will probably be had by all.

Posts still to come:
•Excerpts from my journals- wacky stuff I wrote while bored in school
•Crappy poetry that I've written over the years
•More mundane details than you or your grandmother can handle
•Whatever other random flotsam I dredge up from my murky mudpuddle of a mind of to regale you, dear readers.

Anyways, please take a minute to comment with questions or stuff that you want me to write about. Comments=Love, to a blogger.

Weather and Other Mundanities

Warning: stream of consciousness ahead. Strap on your life jackets and keep your hands and feet inside the raft.

It seems that, despite my frequent protestations to the contrary, folks seem to think that, merely because of my current location, my life couldn't possibly become routine, boring, or anything other than exciting and exotic. I repeat: this is not the case. My phone is now relentlessly and absurdly throughly programmed to beep when I reach significant percentages through the year, in addition to the weekly update and the monthly update. For those of you keeping score at home, I arrived on August 15, almost three months ago, and my calculations are based on spending 300 days here, which puts my departure somewhere in June. Makes the math easier, anyways. It's started to snow in earnest, I think. On Monday, it snowed more than we ever get in a year back home in Eugene, then it all melted and rained on Tuesday. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday... more rain. Rain depresses me here. It's too much like home. Today, though, the snow started again. Every time I look out the window at the couple of inches of snow covering everything, I get all giddy and gleeful and start to dance around like a crazier person than I am. We're going skiing next weekend. That is to say, my host family will ski and I'll probably fall on my face a lot. I'm friggin' excited. The Christmas-themed commercials have started... but despite the snow, it simply doesn't feel like the "holiday season". They don't celebrate Halloween here... or Thanksgiving... so that might have something to do with it. My host mom's constant, slightly passive-aggressive worrying about me being cold are beginning to look more legitimate, what with the snowing and freezing of mudpuddles and all. Therefore, I succumbed and meekly accepted her offer of a proper winter coat today, for which I need to pay her back. Note to self. Anyways, my current to-do list has, maybe, two things on the horizon: the Rotary slovak test in December and a presentation for Fyzika (physics) on the sources of energy in my area shortly thereafter. Mostly hydroelectric, as far as I know. I'll have to do some googling for that. I went to an Irish pub with Haley on Friday. Tried my first sip of beer ever, and didn't like it. Also tried a sip of some bright blue drink that, I swear, tasted exactly like mouthwash, and a sip of some mysterious clear substance that tasted exactly like rubbing alchohol. Not that I've ever drank rubbing alchohol. Some girls in school asked me what an adverb was, and I sat there for five minutes humming through all the school house rock songs I could think of before I could answer them. It was pathetic. All these questions about tenses and parts of speech leave me wondering what 12 years of education taught me after all. The other day, some emo kid asked me to look over some crappy song lyrics he'd written in English and make corrections, which I did. They were mostly nonsensical, with a bunch of disjointed, rhyming lines that made just enough sense that I couldn't really correct them for anything in particular, but just little enough that it was obvious that the kid didn't really speak English. I suppose, since I have nothing more to say, I should stop typing now. 3/10 of the way done with the year! See you all in 7 months!

So, yeah.

Just letting everyone know I'm still alive. This week was some sort of Autumn holiday thing, so we had no school Wednesday on through the rest of the week. Which was nice. There is no such thing as Halloween here, though. I never would have thought I'd miss it so much. On the plus side, though, my host family and I went to this waterpark/spa place three times, with three different groups of other friend-type families. On the minus side, Psychonauts doesn't work on my lappy. Back on the plus side, though, it does work on my host family's desktop computer, so I get to play it there. Honestly, that's a lot of why I haven't been so much in communication with all y'alls this past week or so. Two Fridays ago, I went to this fantastic čajovna (that's teahouse) with some girls from school and some friends of theirs, and last Friday, I went again with one of Barbora's friends who I sort of inherited, and some of her friends. I had Japanese tea, which for some reason I always think I like, but then it turns out that I don't really. Tastes like fish. That doesn't stop me from drinking it, though. Anyways, they also had these spiffy voda fajčie things (literally, 'water smoking'). Basically, you inhale flavored smoke from a hookah (which is the thing the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland smokes. Don't know why I know that word.) They assured me that it was not bad for you, just sweet flavor. I sure hope so, 'cause I sure liked it. Three or so of us shared an apple-flavored one on my second trip, and it complimented my Japanese tea quite nicely, making it much more palatable. Yesterday, I went and spent all my money for the month, including the cash from a card in my package, my rotary allowance, and then some extra from my debit account to make up the difference, on a pair of warm boots for winter. About 3200 crowns. I have intentionally not done the math on how much real money that is, since I'm afraid of cringing so badly that I'll cause permanent damage to myself. It's supposed to snow Monday, and my host mom keeps on worryin' at me about whether I'm cold. For the ridiculous amount they cost, I intend to wear the silly boots until they are so worn out that they no longer qualify as viable footwear.

I have now exhausted everything I can think of to say. I'll probably be online next weekend for an undetermined length of time at an undetermined hour for when I have something more to say. I do, however, want to give a quick shout-out to my hype/hope buddies. Miss you all buckets, and don't forget to send me a copy of Narnia this year. Not a DVD, either, all of you have to come here, 'kay?

Dance-o-rama

Last week was frigging amazing. Forget every bit of whining about a lack of modern dance in this town. My two-monthish absense from my primary means of self-expression was certainly made up for, if only by sheer quantity. There was this four days of dance festival thing, with roughly six hours of workshops in the morning and afternoon, followed by some sort of performance in the evening. Every day, mind you. The workshops varied from "cool" to "amazing" to "oh my, I seem to dislocated my shoulder". Over the shoulder rolls, it turns out, are only one of the many ways you can roll around and injure yourself using your shoulders. I had no idea. As for the performances, they varied rather more in quality. Most of the teachers for the workshop were there to perform, and we often learned sections of their choreography. The best piece was by a group of dancers from Poland, who took the workshop with us, asking questions and recieving answers in English, since they didn't speak Slovak. My least favorite piece was very, very strange indeed. I have no idea what it was about, but there were a couple of girls wearing these knee-length sort of Quaker-looking dress things with hoods, and they ran around making sheep noises while some other guy wearing white tails without a shirt read some Slovak about the Tatras, pausing to strangle one of the quaker-sheep-girls, much to her amusement and prolongued bleating. The first night, there was a piece with many other strange things, including a girl eating a lemon, peel and all, while announcing "I do not need to eat chocolate to be happy", blowing up balloons while singing, tuning a guitar, a girl dancing around in her undies, only to put on pantyhose, a dress, and high heels, sit down, and eat a sausage that she pulled out of her purse. Quite surreal, but very entertaining. There was even a dance where the lady wore nothing at all. Not so much as a pair of shorts or a loincloth or anything. Bupkis. The lighting was low, so you could mostly just make out her sillouette, but you could see enough to know that you could see too much, if you catch my drift. So, yeah. I have many bruises, marley burns, gouges, scrapes, bumps, and scars, both mental and physical, to show for last week. All my arts school friends, the ones with whom I take ballet and folk dance, think I'm this amazing modern dancer, and I just let them keep thinking that.

By the way, this is my seventy-fifth post. Woo hoo. If I had one of those little party horn thingies that unroll when you blow them, I'd be blowing it now. Since I don't, I'll just have to sit here going "toot, toot".

Toot.

Details, details...

I have not had a huge amount of culture shock since I've been here, but there are things that, every time I see them, make me think about how they are different than at home. None of them really have much significance, but all of them together ensure that I feel that I'm in a foreign country now. And now, ladies and gentlemen, let's have a big hand for your favorite format and mine: the bullet points!

• Doorknobs. There are no round doorknobs anywhere in this country. They're all the kind that are shaped like the letter L, with the short end in the door and the long end parallel to the floor.
• Lightswitches. Rather than the neat white rectangles of my youth, these are all square.
• Chalkboards. There's nary a whiteboard to be found anywhere, but the chalkboards slice, dice, make julienne fries, and even sort your socks. The board is comprised of a rectangular piece with two folding wings, which open or close to allow the teacher to write on both sides of them, provinding a surface area three times that of the original rectangle. They slide up and down about six inches, too, the better to write at both the tippy top and way down at the bottom.
• Notebooks and other school supplies. Rather than aisled upon aisles of notebooks, binders, and the like, students here have only about three rather hideous styles of little staple-bound booklets of lined, plain, or quadrille paper, in addition to the three styles of more expensive spiral bound notebooks.
• Radiators. The big old-timey ones. There's one in every room. No central heating here!
• Very, very narrow streets. Coupled with the ridiculous speed at which these people drive, their utter disregard of seatbelts, and pedestrians' habit of jaywalking, it's a wonder I'm still alive.
• Yellow lights. They come on both sides of the red light. The cycle goes green, yellow, red, red and yellow, and back to green. Pretty good idea, actually.
• One last rant about socks, and then I promise I'll shut up about it. What the crap is wrong with not wearing socks? Seriously, these people are obsessed. And it's not just socks. If you're going to wear a skirt or even a pair of capris or something, you'd better be wearing nylons or tights (unless you're a guy. But if you're wearing shorts in the winter, apparantly that means you're on drugs). Otherwise you will be accosted by everyone you meet, even total strangers on the bus, with the thrice-accursed phrase: "Nie si zima?" ("Aren't you cold?")
• Shoes. There's some sort of rule about "inside" shoes and "outside" shoes, less strict than in Japan, but I still haven't figured this out. I think you're supposed to change shoes when you get to school, and we wear old, worn-out birkenstock knock-offs around the house. But some kids wear similar shoes around school (with socks, naturally), so I have no idea what that's about.
• Lunch. The school lunch system is complicated. The day before, one must register their choice of meal by stamping bot hhalves of a perforated ticket and depositing one of them in a little box. Then, the next day, you hand the lunchlady the remaining half, in exchange for which they provide you with a steaming plate of... food. The problem: 1. I can't read the menu, and therefore, my choice of meal is utterly random, and 2. I didn't get any more tickets for October. I'm working on that.
• Dubbing. Roughly half the TV shows one sees here are dubbed into Slovak from some other language- usually, but not always, English. I've seen episodes of Friends, CSI, Monk, NCIS, some random German show about a crime fighting dog, and any number of Spanish soap operas, in addition to the local programming- sitcoms, reality shows, soap operas, and the like, all in Slovak.
• It's funny to read the back of the shampoo bottle and see four languages, none of which are English. Often, you get Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and sometimes German.
• Public buildings, including my school, are all in such bad condition that, were they in America, they would long since have been condemned and torn down. Cracked linoleum, broken windows, graffiti all over the desks- there's even a mural of the Simpsons on the back wall of one classroom. That and the bars on many windows and doors gives the place a very strange vibe, like a converted prison or insane asylum or something
• The oldest building in Eugene is on campus and dates back to the 1870s. The oldest buildings in Slovakia date back to the 12th or 13th centuries. Note, for instance, this conversation that took place when the language camp kids went to see a castle:

"There was a fire here recently, and this ceiling was the only wooden thing to survive." "So all the other wood is a reproduction?"

"Oh yes. We replaced it shortly after the fire."

"When was this fire?"

"Oh, 1800."

• Every name has a special day, which the bearers of that name celebrate much like a birthday. The upshot of this is that there are only a couple hundred names for the entire population. I know two Martins, about four Barboras, four Ivetas, two Dominikas, and countless Sashas.
• The bathtubs here have a little seat built into them and a showerhead. Lots of families don't have a shower, so they shower in the tub. They never fill it up and take a bath, they just shower sitting down. Which is actually kind of nice, especially for leg-shaving.
• Everyone uses umbrellas in the rain. If you don't have one, then friendly strangers walking your way will often offfer to share, which is kind of nice.
• Gym class is wild. There are usually about three classes having PE at once, in the same little gym. Seventh graders duch under the volleyball net as they run laps, a crowd of 11th grade girls ignore their male counterparts' football game as it weaves through their volleyball game, and against the far wall, sixth graders do situps- the kind that were condemned as "bad for the back" years ago in America. It's beautiful and dynamic to watch, if loud.

The Moment Before Reason

For a moment, I thought I saw you yesterday. But it was just a particular shade in a stranger's hair, a tilt of the head or the angle of a smile on an unknown face. It seems you are refracted-my images of you, fractured, playing across a million foreign faces like glimmering rainbows cast by the prism of distance, intangible, insubstantial. I would not have thought I knew you well enough to see you where you are not, in the glint of a man's glasses on the bus or even the feet of a fellow dancer. The way a nose wrinkles in a smile, the shape of a slender finger, a neck's particular slope as it becomes shoulder- you are all around me, silent strangers reminding me of your absence. In the moment before reason, there is just time enough for an inhalation and the flash of your name across my mind like lightning across the sky and then you are gone, swallowed alive by harsh reality, and I realize, having had to say goodbye again, how very much I miss you. We are separated by thick walls of time and space, penetrated only by a feverish imagination starved of you. I did not think I missed you until my heart leapt at the sight of you, only to be cut down by reason, shouting its truel truths- that you aren't here, that you can't be here- and i realized just how much I wished you were.

I write this to you, my friends, so you will know, as I now do, that I miss you more than words can say, more than reason can explain or even describe. This is my love letter and my lament, for though neither of us is irrevocably removed from this fallen earth, the distance winding between us, literally oceans away, feels as impassable as the gap 'twixt life and death. We stand on the edges of the chasm and shout, scream until we have no breath, and ultimately, we turn away and live our lives apart. Living, simply being, causes our characters to change, grow, evolve, When I return, dear friend, who will you be? Will I recognize you in the flesh? Perhaps more frightening still- who will I be?

When such thoughts cloud my mind and precipitate into tears, your wise words, spoken in a quiet, tearful moment, decend about my shoulders like a warm arm-

"It's only for a year."


Note to readers: I wrote this in a very blue moment. Rereading it now, it seems extraordinarily overdramatic, but that's what makes it fun to write. It's not always this bad. Some of the occurances of the word "you" in this post are plural, some are not. You're smart. You can figure it out. But hey- it's got imagery, analogies, metaphores out the wazzoo, just a dash of alliteration, heck, even death. By gum, It's a bona fide piece of literature!

New comic! Fun times!

And for those die-hard fans out there, here's the very fancy, digitally remastered version of the first comic thingie!

I miss my Xbox

I wrote this in class and then put "Blog this" at the top of the page. So I guess I will.

I'm such a long way from home, yet the distance bothers me less than the simple fact that I'm not there, if that makes any sense. It doesn't feel as if I'm a couple thousand miles away, it only feels like I have paused my life there and time and space have conspired to change my surroundings. As if, in the middle of a game, I saved, quit, and played something else. The problem is that the game's still going on without me. But you sit in the same chair. You use the same controller and watch the same screen. Sure, the buttons have different effects and so must be used differently, but you still, at least, push buttons. I'm living a different life here, analougous to playing a new game, but I see it through the same set of eyes. The new world has the same sky, the same sun and clouds and rain. The pavement under my feet may be different, but I stand on the same two feet, in the same pare of cream leather converse that I got at Buffalo Exchange for $16.00.

I think I'm almost through the tutorial. It's taking for-freaking-ever.

Fruits of Idleness

See what happens when I don't have internet access in the wee hours of the night? For some reason, blogger won't let me make this nice and legibly big for all y'alls, so you'll just have to figure it out. Sorry.

*note* Emo's quote is some of a poem I wrote one day some months ago when I was feeling particularly down, so it's not to be taken as a reflection on my current state of mind. *ahem* Dad.

Miss you!

Jarmok

So this weekend is Jarmok, a nation-wide festival sort of thing, complete with booths and people running around in native costume doing traditional things and selling traditional, hand crafted wares. The most bizarre element of the whole thing is that, according to tradition, the boys give girls smart whacks to the bum with traditional wooden spoons. Not even kidding you. (Michael Eckerdt, this is your chance.) There's also a bunch of the obligatory festival-type portable rides of questionable safety and/or legality. So that's what I did this weekend.

This was my first week at school. I'm taking a bunch of classes, presented here in handy-dandy list format:

• French. This seems like a good idea, but they are all way better than me, and half the time, I don't even know what language the teacher is speaking.
• PE. I suck at Volajbol. And at basketbol. And futbol. Oh well. At least I don't have to talk much.
• Chemistry. This class is probably the one where I understand the most, as far as Slovak goes. I mean, it's not hard to tell that "etán" means "ethane". Unfortunately, I don't remember much of the content.
• Remedial Slovak. Private lessons. Yay!
• Math. Same deal as Chemistry.
• A bunch of other classes. It's horrible, I know, but I don't understand them at all, so I sit quietly and draw pictures. The other day, and I know my readers will be either appalled or proud of me, I wrote out every bit of diologue from the first ten minutes of Serenity. I checked later, and I only made 27 mistakes. Not bad, I think. Try it some time. We'll compare scores.

So, that's about all for now. I've been quite busy. I've been learning to ride šelda, sasha's horse, and I start dance classes on Thursday. Dance will be three days a week, ballet once, (I think) modern once, and folk dance once. I'm excited!

I miss you all incredibly much.

First day

So today was my first day at school. After being shuffled from office to office, following my host father around, I went to my first class, which seemed to be sort of a homeroom sort of thing, where the teacher announced their schedule, pausing to tell me that mine would be different and that I'd get it tomorrow. After class, some girls nervously approached me and asked in broken English if I wanted to go into town with them. I said yes, not knowing if they meant after school, sometime next week, or skipping the rest of the day and going now. In any event, I then followed the teacher to an office, where I met the headmistress/principal/director of the school, who welcomed me graciously (via the best efforts at interpretation my teacher's limited English could furnish), and shuffled me off to yet another teacher, this one with a more functional knowledge of English. She informed me that she is basically in charge of exchange students, and that I would be taking various subjects with various other classes while my class took English, which makes sense. When she finished, the girls who had approached me earlier came in, and I followed them, much to my bewilderment, out of the school and a couple of miles away, through the mall, through the old city center, to a sort of outdoor bar kind of place, where we drank kofola (one girl smoked) and played fooseball, at which I continue to suck. Seeing as it was about nine or ten in the morning, and we were gone for more than a good hour, I was understandably confused and freaked out. However, my fears were allayed when we met up with my host mom at a cafe in the mall on the way back, after several phone calls. Turns out that we weren't delinquent hoodlums sneaking out of school to smoke and drink (only kofola, but still). The best I can tell is that today was just an orientation sort of day and that's all there was to it. Oh well.

Oh, and I had my first rotary meeting today. I was asked to introduce my self (in Slovak, of course), which I did. "Your Slovak is perfect," said one high-up looking sort of guy. Then I sat, legs crossed at the ankles and back straight as could be, for about an hour, pretending to understand. I perfected the art of looking from one face to another, following the conversation without understanding a word. Well, I understood words. About halfway through, I started a drinking game with my mineral water- every time I understood a word, I'd take a sip. I made it through the whole bottle, even. Yay for me! Afterward, I met my counselor's girlfriend, who plays the violin and teaches English to little kiddies. She offered to take me to concerts and the like, and asked me if I would come to her class every so often so they could hear a native speaker.

I don't have a snappy way to sum up this blog, so I'll just have to let it die here. Sorry, folks.