Dear Girl-with-the-shades-half-open

I must admit, after being here for a little more than a month, today was the first day that I saw you. Your curtain, which is normally closed, is half open, revealing half of your room and I happened to look out my window today when you were in there. You had your hair in a ponytail and you wore a black and white polka dotted shirt. Your hair was dark brown or black and the pony ended at the nape of your neck. Your neck was thin and pale, matching your forearms which I saw when you reached for something on your desk or perhaps on the windowsill. I will never know. Even now, a few hours later, the sky all dark, your room is lit but I cannot see a sign of your person. I lied. Just as I glanced out again you appeared in the window with a black blazer on and shut the curtain. I saw that you had glasses on. Maybe I confused you for another girl, but I don’t think so. Your window was open when the sky was still cloudy and gray and the drizzle beat down on the bird poo, smearing it onto my window. Now it is dark and no one is around and it has stopped raining.

I hope I get to see you in person next time, stranger.

Love,
Me

Sometimes you kind of have to wonder

all those quiet people who stay in their rooms all the time or who keep to themselves, are they having fun? are they enjoying their college life, supposedly the best years of their lives? or do they wish to have done things differently, to be a little more than themselves? or is it just better to be silent and hang in the back?

who came up with mushrooms and cheese?

about those things that lurk in the back of your mind, all those things you wanted to say, all the thoughts you ever had about that boy or that girl or that teacher, what happens to it all? does it go forgotten in the recesses of your mind that is the pit of our existence, or do you someday dredge it up?

could you be that person wearing the loud clothes or that person smiling and laughing with everyone or maybe that quiet one sitting on the bench reading by themself?could you be any of these people that aren’t you? and what would it be like?

should I eat this with my hands and look like a slob or eat this using a fork and knife and fail miserably at it?

milk or cream?

if it is more acceptable to yell out the answer or to raise your hand and wait to be called on?

do people live this messily in their own homes or are they just doing this because no one is nagging at them to clean up after themselves? or are they just being lazy?

On Fish

While carving into a dinner of bacon and cheese chicken kiev and penne pasta with tomato and herb sauce I looked at the fish swimming before me and pondered their thoughts. What do fish think about as they swim, all day, in lazy loops around their six by four by four inch watered life. Do they think of hunger and swim, mouths gaping, to the surface and find no food before them? Perhaps they wonder at the human cutting her chicken kiev with a knife and fork and clumsily adopting the British food eating ways of piling all of ones food upon the fork.

It is a strange custom. The British cut everything they eat and spoon their serving onto the back of the fork and lift it to their mouth. They cut their chips [fries] and their salads. It is quite an elegant method, and requires quite a deft hand-eye coordination. It is something I would like to master in my time here, although I probably will not have the chance to practice this as often as I wish I could. My diet consists of cereal, oatmeal, peanut butter on bread, pasta, spaghetti, chicken kievs, fish cakes, and chocolate. So much chocolate. And tea.

I sit there wondering about the boy who kissed me in a tender way and held my hand as we walked home, who understood my wish of wanting to sleep and left the club with me at four in the morning. I wonder what the other boy was saying in his British accent, yelling words that didn’t mean anything into my ears so that all I heard was noise and deafness. I want to watch a movie but I think about the homework I should be doing, the books I should be reading, the story[ies] I should be writing. And I wonder who took my shampoo.

Indulging in the Drollums

Mary Marie Moriarty cannot marry
Her face is too wide and her hips are too much thigh
She spends her money on beauty
And her beauty on boys
Who only care about her money
The vicious cycle continues

Still the Same, and Yet Incredibly Different

It snowed in Norwich last night. There would have been an expanse of three inch deep white snow on the pavement when I woke up except last night we had a two minute running around snowball fight and this morning there were two people making a snowman. Pretty much the snow was trampled to death by the time I woke up. I’m glad I had the first romp in it last night though. That was pretty awesome.

The snow, though, brings me to a very important point. I’m glad there are still many things I can relate to even though I’m in a different country and time zone. It’s not like I’ve fallen to a different universe. I’m still on earth. The sky is still white when it snows and there’s still that eery peaceful silence during a snowfall, as if people are afraid of stirring so they talk in quiet subdued voices. And there they are still boys who want to make snow penises and then take it apart and throw snowballs at your window. Yup, some things are still the same everywhere.

Although, I have to say, the peanut butter here is really good. Maybe it’s because I’ve stayed away from peanut butter for the better part of a year and a half after a certain strange incident, but it is creamy and peanutty and absolutely delicious. I can’t stay away from it.

Another thing I’ve noticed, though people have pointed it out to me before I suppose they haven’t really realized it until now, but I’ve had at least three people already say to me “Wow, you must read really fast.” It’s interesting, what people consider fast and slow because who do they compare it to? The norm? Wouldn’t the norm be themselves? In that case, if it is faster than them, then yes it is fast. If it isn’t then it’s slow. If it is about the same then they’re the same, even if the rest of the world thinks they might be faster, to them they are the same.

Did that make any sense?

Anyway, recently [today] I looked up this book supposedly called “Wreck This Journal” or perhaps it’s a journal. I am not entirely sure about which one it is. Pretty much it is a journal that someone has created and on each page there are instructions and you [the buyer] need to follow the instructions, such as ‘poke holes in this page’. At first it struck me as a really interesting thing to do, but now that I’ve allowed the idea to sink in a little, it’s become more of a ‘what?’ Perhaps it’s because I read it on a post about creativity. Regardless, I feel like if you are buying a journal, you should whatever the fuck you want with it anyway [pardon my French]. You shouldn’t need a journal to make it okay to hammer berries into the pages or to write down all your feelings or color the pages all purple! If you have the urge to be creative, and feel you should do it more often, then do it. Don’t wait for a journal/book to tell you it is okay. If it’s a jumping stone, fine, but you should be making that step. The journal shouldn’t do it for you.

It seems like a pretty cool idea though. You could get some ideas from it, and then just toss the journal aside. But that’s all we really want from a journal, isn’t it? To wreck it. Why else did you buy it? To wreck it with your thoughts and emotions and anything you have lying around. Who cares?

In a sense, it is like snow. When you first get it, it is a blank sheet, but then you walk onto it and you mess it up and it gets brown and muddy and frankly, quite disgusting, but when you step back and look then it is a masterpiece, of sorts.

I’d like to end this post by saying thank you to the people who have been reading and to those who have just popped in to check it out. Happy reading!