Flashback- 26 October 2006

I am firmly of the opinion that girls are silly and somewhat boring. There's no explaining how their brains work. The obsession with boys is unfathomable to me, which might explain my total inability to flirt. I didn't even know I wasn't allowed to date until I was 16 until I was 16 and a half. Not that it matters. I'm not bitter about my eternal singleness, but I'm definitely bewildered by the concept. I don't know. I'd always kind of assumed one day something would happen in that area of my life, but it resoundingly hasn't. It's still better to be single forever than do something stupid, which I think is blindingly obvious, but apparently, most girls don't know that. I don't get it. Girls are silly. Oh wait...

Cliche

My most recent deep thought: Sometimes, being fearless doesn't mean being willing to be different. Sometimes, it means rushing headlong into the face of cliche and embracing the fact that you, like so many before you, have found something alive and wonderful beneath the worn-out surface. While this is all amazing and true when applied to God and Christianity and all that awesome stuff, on a more personal note, sitting on the couch watching Star Wars with JT's arm around my shoulder and my hand in his was more real and more fantastic than Hollywood would have ever lead me to believe. Let's see if I'm brave enough to put that sentance up on my blog for the world to see.


I think I am.

The Breakup

Dear Jim,

I'm sorry, but I've fallen for someone else. Someone less imaginary. We've had some great times, and I hope we can still be friends.

Sincerely,
Aubrianne

For Kerry

On 13th and University

Thick black Bible in hand, he stood in the middle of the crowd and shouted. Students bustled by, some on skateboards, some on bicycles, others weaving between their wheeled fellows in an intricate dance that always seemed to border on a collision. No one looked at the man with the Bible, even as he thundered about the remission of sins that Christ had provided for all of their sorry souls in words painfully familiar, words that had lost their unearthly glow from overuse. Never mind that no one was listening, never mind that not even those who agreed with his theology would stop to talk shop, he would stay and shout (or, as he likely thought of it, proclaim) the truth unto the sinful masses until his lungs gave out or Christ returned, whichever came first. This man was ministering.

The sign read "Free Hugs". Scrawled in thick black marker, it leaned against the hug-giver's leg, as his arms were too busy following up on his offer. As students rushed by on their way to class, they took a moment to receive a quick squeeze from the easy-smiling stranger. Never mind that he didn't claim to represent anything save a simple affirmation and a grin, never mind that he likely had little in common with those he hugged save a momentary intersection in place and a time, this man was sharing love unconditionally, one sinful soul at a time. This man was ministering.

That's so sketch

My frumjuous sister. I guess I should have waited for her birthday or something before l put this up, huh?

Adventures in College

"Hey, Jude," I sang. I wasn't singing for anyone's benefit, really. As a matter of fact, I rather hoped no one came into the bathroom for the next 20 minutes or so, as I had turned the Beatles up really, really loud to compensate for the sound of the shower in which I was immersed. It occurred to me mid-soak that most people for whom the shaving of shins is an issue do not, I'd imagine, bring the shin in question up so near their face as I, even when the narrowness of the shower does not allow any other obvious means of keeping the carefully cultivated suds out of the spray's reach. How the other 40 or so girls manage to keep their shins smooth is beyond me.

To recap: me = very flexible.

"Bože môj," I muttered, further obscuring my vision in the process. "Nič nevidím." Stopped at a red light, I opened the clear plastic front of my helmet to let some of the cold night air lap away at the fog my breath had formed on the surface. Added to the light sprinkle of raindrops, visibility was poor, to say the least. The light turned green and I twisted the throttle. Better to take the risk of something flying into my eye than risk flying blind.

To recap: Vera = freaking awesome anyway.

"Ch," I said to myself. "Ch. Tsh. Tshill. Chill." Poring over my linguistics textbook, I was taking a valiant stab at internalizing a chart of consonant sounds, my tongue (in close cooperation with my alveo-palatal ridge, apparantly) playing a vital roll in the struggle between me and the densely insightful page 81, as peppered, to switch metaphors, with indecipherable symbols as (switching again) a fruitcake is with not-terribly-fruitlike fruit, like raisins or something.

To recap: IPA = raisins.

A Sequence of Unrelated Thoughts

This is the fifth opening sentence with which I have attempted to prime the pump of words. As I have nothing better with which to begin, I will allow it to stand.

Work is fine. I finished reading an excellent book (Language in Thought and Action by S.I. Hayakawa, in case any of you want to look it up). My room is unbearably disorderly. My new students, all 15 of them, promise to be a great group. I went out and bought an exfoliater for my face skin the other day. I move in to Trinity House in roughly a week. I don't have any idea what I'm going to do for my recital piece. Office Max finally got me two girl-sized polos so I don't have to wear that mens' medium one pinned in at the back anymore. Mom took me shopping for my new room and spent an absurd amount of money on me. I seem to have snuffed my closest friendship into embers. I lost Jim's pen somewhere in my room. I have to clean the whole house tomorrow. I have three social emails to which I have yet to respond. I worked for ten hours today. Some people apparantly consider me to be a good writer, but then I put out a post like this every so often just to prove them wrong. I want cake. I am going to listen to Chopin and eat some chocolate stare at the ceiling until I fall asleep now.

Retail Therapy

A Conversation. February.


Haley from Florida: Hey, how are you doing?
Depressed Aubrianne: Well, um... I guess I'm alright.

...

Haley: This is the part where you are supposed to ask me how I'm doing.
Aubrianne: Oh. Um... so... how are you doing?
Haley: Fine.


Another Conversation. Still in February.


Haley from Florida: Hi! What's up?
Aubrianne: Not a lot.
Haley from Florida: How are you doing?
Aubrianne: I'm fine.
(a beat. Haley gestures in such a manner as to indicate that I should continue)
Aubrianne: How are you?


A Third, More Recent Conversation


Aubrianne wearing a nametag: Hello.
Random OfficeMax Customer: Hi.
Aubrianne wearing a nametag: How are you doing today?

Look what I drew!

Ok, so I sorta traced, with Jim's help, one of Tanner and my baby pictures, circa 1995. (Tanner's and mine? Little grammatical help?) Whatever. It looks cool and styley and artsome; Junoesque, l'd like to think, but that is praise too high to give oneself. Shoutouts to Jeff and his fellow Harris family peeps for the sweet softwares! Let me know what you think, but only if what you think is that it's good.

What's what

Just a quickly quickly update on my life for anyone who might be interested. First off, this week will see me teaching a more advanced class that ever I've taught before. I'm maybe a little worried, mostly because my students for the week have been my classmates in the past. More excitingly, I just got a call from Office Supply Store saying that they want me to work for them, so as soon as I come in and pass the criminal background check and the drug screening, I will be a bona fide member of the work force. Technically, I've been employed since I was 14, but it was all dance teaching, which, despite paying $15 an hour now that I'm all experienced and grown up, was a) too much fun to feel like work and b) only a couple hours a week. So this is my first for real job. I figure I've spent enough money on pencils and notebooks over the years that I might as well start getting some of that back. School starts at the end of September, at which time I move in to Trinity house and start sharing a room half the size of my current room with a stranger from Corvallis. That's about all I can think of just now.

Jim

Jim and l are very happy together.

Whether he is named after my imaginary boyfriend Jim or else is said boyfriend, I leave for you to decide for yourself, dear readers. Take into consideration, however, that Jim is my new tablet-style laptop.

Also, this is my hundred and first post. I've been at this for a while now.

l am currently getting ready for fall, applying for a job at Office Max hawking notepads and pencils and the like to pay for Jim and my expensive (despite the scholarship) education and trying to get my schedule in order in time to register for classes in the morning. Adultish-hood is not all fun and games, it seems.

l am very much looking forward to fall. lt's strange, but Jim, via his handwriting recognition software, made it known that he feels the previous sentence could be better phrased," l am very much looking forward total!"

Oh, Jim. You crack me up.

These days

For those of you hasslin' me about this nigh-on-a-month-long hiatus, I offer you a) my sincerest appologies and b) the following excuses: I am crazy busy just now. I have been taking this Tchaikovsky dance camp with good ol' JKD, so that fills up my life from 9:30 to 1:00, after which I take a bus or otherwise get myself to the U of O for this amazing Linguistics class about different varieties of English. So that takes us up through about 5 pm, after which I have to get all the homeworks in order and fit in all the screwing around and goofing off I couldn't do earlier. Besides, now we have a pool and a hot tub, so that takes time, too. Oh, and these days I have friends with whom I actually hang out, which is new and exciting for little old homebody me. In case that's not enough reason, consider that now I'm back, I can't rely on being exotic and foreign to buy me readers. These days, I actually have to come up with some content.

To some slight degree, I feel bad about being so happy with my life back home. After all, the long gray winter can never compare to the living green of summer, and foreign lands can never hold the same place in my heart as home. Home! How I dwelt on the word until it seemed to have a meaning beyond what any dictionary would tell you.

All that is to say, Rotary, you were totally wrong about "reentry" being a challenge. How much of this is my fault for not making Slovakia a kind of home? If I'd been a better exchange student, might I miss Slovakia? I do miss some of my friends (not Slovaks so much as Americans and moja mila Australcanka), but frankly, I'm having too good a time being back here to devote much thought to it. Sorry, guys. As good an experience this year was, I didn't engage and, as a result, I didn't really get much out of it. I am glad it's over, but simultaneously guilty for being glad, if that makes any sense. I spent all year whining about it, which probably didn't help me get past it.

Answer me one thing, though; I made it through the whole year, thus qualifying my time as a "successful" exchange. How can it be successful if I personally failed so miserably?

Anyway, to bring it back around, my life is friggin' sweet these days, with kind of the vibe of a mellow acoustic guitar accompanied melody in D major being played under a tree in the park while passing around a jar of lemonade on a pleasantly warm day in mid-July. Close your eyes and picture it. There. Just thought I'd bring that back up here at the end and end this puppy on an "up" kind of note.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgment #1: It has been a long time since my last blog post
Acknowledgment #2: I ought to have posted something here at least saying I made it home.


...

I'm home!

Holy Carp

One week from now, I'll be on an airplane.

Slovanglish

All the exchange students, including myself, developed a strange little jazyk all our own. Dubbed "Slovanglish" or "slovangičtina", depending on who you're talking to, it's basically angličtina, but about half the slovos come out po slovensky, which could be a maly communication problem when I get back home. The nouns are the worst, besides those funky little words that you just toss out into the sentence. I'm going to be saying "No" a lot, but what I'll mean by "no" is generally "yes". I read that it takes at least two weeks to stop saying "yes" and "no" in your adopted language, but that seems a little kratky to me. You should have heard us all spolu. It was a little scary. If you'd stranded us all on a desert island somewhere, it would only have taken about a rok and we would have had ourselves a full-fledged jazyk all our own. I have here appended a maly glossary for you in case any of you want to študovať up a bit before I get there in case you find me yelling for you to "podˇkaj a second" or asking you to pomôc with my počitač. I'm sure it doesn’t even begin to cover the immense confusion we'll have, but sometimes a little confusion is fun too. Add to the mix the fact that I've been chilling with my Australčanka with all her fun australsky words, and my vocabulary becomes a very very zauimave place.

Bez	Without
Podˇkaj	Wait
Trošku	A little bit
Spolu	together
Dˇakujem	Thank you
Diki	Thanks
Australčanka	Australian chick, more specifically, Ellie.
Autobus	Bus
Pozor	Watch out, pay attention
Angličtina	English
Australsky	Australian
Americky	American (adjective)
Laska	Love
No	Yes
Hej	Yeah
Daj mi	Give me
Však	Something along the lines of "eh?"
Viem	I know
Zauimave	interesting
Čaj	Tea
Muž	Man
Počitač	computer
Mobil	Cell phone
Pomôc	help
Maly	Little
Vlasy	Hair
Domov/doma	Home
Nie	No
Notebook	laptop
Strašne	Horrible, horribly
kratky	Short
stači	enough
Kufor	Suitcase
Potraviny	Convenience store
Pivo	Beer
Pes	Dog
Po Slovensky	In Slovak
Po Anglicky	In English
Jesť	Eat
študovať	study
Jazyk	Language, tongue
Slovo	Word
Môže byť	May be
Rok	year

Journal Entry May 12 2008

35 days to go. It's such a strange thought-- that I will be home in 5 weeks. 5 more Mondays will see me on an airplane leaving for home, where my family will be waiting at the airport to take me back to my house. I smelled a campfire two nights ago and my mind jumped to Blair Lake in August. "It will be so good to be home," I thought. I have spent the whole year, or very nearly, elsewhere. Not physically, obviously, but as this flesh and blood and bone and skin sat in class, my mind was wandering the strange paths of dreams, either losing itself in someone else's preprinted fiction or constructing its own reality on, or perhaps in, which it could dwell. This construction sometimes bore the label of HOME, but whether the reality of home will compare to these idealized versions is one of my chief worries at the moment. I have changed. I can't quantify it, hem my differences into a tidy little box, a list of updates for the perusal of any interested party. They said tat the start of this that "reentry", as they termed it, presented a very real challenge, rivaling that of the year itself. On the other hand, it wouldn't be the first time they'd been totally wrong. Still, I'm anxious. Over the course of the year, I have forgotten somewhat how to engage people. I have been floating along in my bubble, watching myself fall into the old familiar trap of ME. I have a long, hard struggle ahead of me to get out, but I don't want to use my acquaintances here as the social lifelines on which I lean to pull myself out of the comfortable pit I have fallen into, as I do not want to form attachments to these people whom, in all probability, I will never see again. Why start making "goodbye" harder to say now? It's too late. The monkey wrench in my logic is that I said the same thing in September. A year, it seems, is not sufficient return on my investment to warrant the risk inherent in putting myself forward. I recognize this thought for what it is-- a horrid, unhealthy view of my fellow humans and a pathetic excuse to justify my insecurities. However it's taken such a deep hold on my heart… a creeping, insidious vine slowly choking the life out of me, a fungus on my soul, a deadly cancer growing in my thoughts, it's hard to see how deep we'll need to cut to get it all. My greatest fears are human interaction and loneliness, others and myself. I know what I need to do, but it's so hard to kill that needy beast in my chest that wants nothing but to sit in a corner and gnaw at bones, whispering the lie, "I am enough." There is so much more. I have tasted it.

I know what must be done.

No School

I'm not exactly sure why, but there was no school today. Thus, seeing as I'd been up 'til 2 last night teaching myself to sew, I slept until noon, rolled out of bed (literally), ate spaghetti for lunch, and went into town for a dance class. I was almost ten minutes late, but it proved moot as the doors were locked and no one seemed to be there. Thinking maybe it was supposed to be at 2:30 rather than 1:30, I wandered into town, where some sort of a cycling race seemed to be going on. Two scoops of ice cream and an hour later (green tea and strawberry, incidentally), I wandered back to the still-locked-up building, then went back to the house. (I don't call it home because it's not. I haven't done that all year, so no disrespect to this family.) I ate some yogurt and pretzels, then plugged in my lappy, cracked my knuckles, and started typing. Later, I'll probably meet Ellie for some vodna fajka, since we all got our allowances Monday and all that money's just sitting in my wallet.

Further Pointless Pontifications

So I got back from Barcelona last night around 1 am, and thus, slept until about 10:30 this morning. Having made toast with tomatoes and eaten it along with a thingie of yogurt, I wandered into the office-area place to maybe do some wandering about the internet only to see a giant blank space on the desk where the host parents' laptop wasn't. Undaunted, I used the opportunity to try out a little experiment I'd been wondering about. I fetched hither yon lappy and plugged yon lappy into their internet and lo and behold, the internets came flowing into yon lappy like sweet summer rain. Having visited some, but not all, of my regularly frequented corners of the boundless ocean of internet that I have so often of late found closed to me, I decided that it had been too too long since I had contributed an extensive, eloquent, and ultimately pointless tributary stream of consciousness to the digital waters I imbibe like it's going out of style. Take this paragraph, now. Without even trying, I just created an extended metaphor! See what happens when I have my own keyboard under my fingers and sweet digeridoo music I bought from some street musician guys in Barcelona? Given the right circumstances, I'm a friggin' fount of eloquence.

So. Now that I've established what exactly I'm doing, it's time for me to actually do it.

Okay, so I lied. I went and took a shower (stinging my sunburn, it should be mentioned), turned my ripped-up jeans into ripped-up shorts, put them on along with a shirt, sat down and pondered topics on which this post could continue. So now, here we goes!

I am wicked excited for the summer. Already, the weather and blooming of trees and the like are having an inexplicably significant impact on my mood. This summer, upon my return home, I have planned and been promised any number of amusing diversions which, for the sake of the heck of it, I will list here in the old standby, bullet-point format:

• Learning to drive a stick-shift
• Learning to solve a Rubiks' cube
• Epic midnight pancake parties
• Berry-picking and subsequent cobbler-making
• Tree-climbing
• Bicycle-riding
• Music-making
• Out-hanging in the park
  
• Dancing!
• Dance-teaching (maybe)
• Slovak-speaking with Livia and Lea & Alesh (maybe)
• Staying up all night with my electric-kettle and wifi access
  
• Breaking up with Jim, my imaginary boyfriend
• Toast-eating
• Movie-watching
• Ikea-going
• Room-furnishing
• Car-driving with windows down and music blaring
• Hot tub sitting
• Game buying
  
• Game playing (both at home and with friends)

Them's all I can think of at the moment. In any event, this promises to be an awesome summer. I'm going to get some more food, then maybe continue this jaunty little post afterward.

Or maybe not. I'm out of things to say at the moment. Have a good week, everypeoples!

Barcelona, man!

Okay, so Barcelona is the most amazing place ever. While Rome and Athens were also cool, but overall, the impression I was left with was "Well, now I can say I´ve been here." This town, though... I´m already thinking about when I´ll get to come back. Athens and Rome both had this old thing going for them, but they didn´t feel so much like anything was going on now except for the tourism for the old stuff. Granted, I was pretty much only in the touristy parts, but Barcelona has this whole modern art thing going for it too, which I dig. It´s also fun to be hanging out with my fellow exchange students, on which subject, I will here patch in an anectdote which I forgot to put in the entry on Athens.

Four of us were wandering down this road looking at all the little touristy shops, and, figuring that it may be more advantageous to be Slovak tourists than American, we took turns not being able to speak English, with the others speaking in heavy accents with the vendors and translating to eachother. It was friggin' hilarious.

Much as I´d like to elaborate, I have to go now. Darn. I got peoples waiting on me to go to some park or something.

Oh, and so far, I´ve made it on roughly 5 euros per meal. No small feat. I´m pretty proud.