KITTIES!
I’ve noticed a weird trend in the sassiness/bluntness of many of the emails I’ve received from Lancaster University personnel. Perhaps it’s simply because Puget Sound works as hard as it possibly can to offend absolutely no one with anything, EVER, but I feel like it’s not just me when I read over the following:
In regards to the upcoming (and patriotism-affirming) Diamond Jubliee party: I apologise to the few of you (very few) who do not want to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of The Queen of England…
In regards to needing (select) students for a press release: Articulate, photogenic, college minded, literate and free at 13.30 Wed 29th Feb - if so: read on…
In regards to the (non-existent) interview skills of undergrads: If you are coming up to your interviews for the Lancaster Award (or any other interviews for that matter) and you have any questions about it, please feel free to contact me. If you want to borrow my DVD on Interview skills – all you need to do is ask.
Salutations from Matera once more! To my infinite relief, the sun has decided to take a break for a few days and left us with overcast, drizzly weather. Although my Northwestern/English temperament is glad, it does mean my pictures are a bit on the gray side, but oh well. At least I can sit on the veranda without instantly feeling like all my skin is burning off.
Not much to report, as most of my time in Italy tends to be spent a. sleeping and b. eating. But we did go visit a nearby town the other night with a lovely castle and a wonderful pizzeria/bakery, where I got both my favorite pizza (agosto) and my favorite baked good (coda di rospo), so that was quite spectacular.
Every time I come to Matera, I am reminded of the striking difference between living in a city/suburbia and living in a small town like this one. More than anything, you have to be eternally prepared to bump into someone you know, as it will almost certainly happen. Yesterday I went shopping for postcards and earrings and ended up having lengthy chats with various shop owners, all of whom still remember me from four years ago. In fact, the owner of the office supply store where I always bought my pens and postcards asked me if I still draw - and still has a doodle taped to her cash register from when I was testing out pens on some scratch paper. This is not, I think, something that happens too often in American suburbia.
Of course, the flipside of this is that you also end up with family vendettas against certain stores - like the one purse/jewelry store I’m not allowed to enter because my aunt is in a fight with the owner, or the jewelry store we can’t go into because it’s right next door to some family friends’ jewelry store and they would be insulted. My aunt spent half an hour at lunch today explaining why she no longer shops at Diva Supermercato, largely due to reasons of personal insult over bagging procedures. It is, needless to say, another world.
In less Italian but still exciting news, I found out yesterday that the Sherlock book is not coming out August 31st, as Amazon has been promising, but rather already came out last Saturday. I find it somewhat amusing that even my editors were completely unaware that this was happening until boxes full of the actual books arrived on their doorsteps.
Needless to say, ever since receiving their rather surprised email yesterday afternoon, my mental state has best been described by the following:
Being able to search my own name in my university’s library and HAVE SOMETHING POP UP is just REALLY EXCITING, OKAY? GOSH.
At last, I am in Matera! As you can see from the photos up above (most of which I shamelessly stole from Google image search), it’s a pretty awesome place to be. As I will tell anyone who starts talking to me about Italy, southern Italy is real Italy, and it doesn’t get much realer than a town continuously inhabited since the Paleolithic Era.
For those of you who don’t know (or who would like a refresher), Matera is where I spent my gap year abroad, living with my host parents Sylvia and Remo. Sylvia is actually Austrian-American and cooks the best food you have ever tasted. Remo, on the other hand, is Italian and is perhaps best described as a human teddy bear who also really likes The Beatles. Living with us are Sylvia’s mom, Remo’s sister, and now also Sylvia’s sister, who moved to Matera three months ago and brought her three cats with her. (So far my favorite is Kyoto, because he is both fat AND fluffy and absolutely loves being pet.)
As always, I am somewhat surprised at how much Italian I’ve retained, even if the gaps are clearly evident. Hopefully things will only have improved by the end of my three week stay. I am, at any rate, looking forward to seeing The Avengers with its Italian dub. (5 Euro says Tony Stark’s voice is curiously high pitched.)
I am, as ever, very glad to be back in my Italian home - even more so after eating the best lunch I’ve had in ages. As much as I love my frozen pizzas and microwave peas, it was a nice change to have pasta with lentils, fresh mozarella with sun-dried tomatoes and salad, and fresh-made strawberry tarts (just like you would buy for 4 Euro in a fancy French patisserie). Amazing as always.
My mother apparently joined the club of people who think I’m dead because I haven’t checked in for a few days, so I thought I would share this gif of Jeremy Brett disregarding the constabulary.
(via pieceofgold)
We had our last CREW303 class today and I was immensely sad, seeing as how CREW303 has been the only thoroughly brilliant writing class I’ve ever had. I will definitely miss all the wonderful people whose writing I actually enjoyed reading, as well as my excellent and genius professor (even if I had to spend a fair bit of time today convincing him that fantasy should not be considered a “ghettoization” genre). All good things must end, I suppose. I just wish I wasn’t faced with the bitter reality that I will go back to my home university’s creative writing classes in the fall, where half the people don’t seem to understand what basic punctuation is.
Aside from procrastinating a truly horrifying amount and going to see the mind-blowing wonder that is The Avengers, I’ve mostly just been gathering quotes for my Islam paper and working on revising my creative writing stuff. EXCITING, I know. So I guess to fill space I will just go ahead and share one of my super short pieces. It’s the last in a set of five prose-poems about Western Washington. Hopefully it is not terrible.
I-5 (Centralia)
The stars and signatures traced into the windows have fogged over again. The windshield shows a steady wash of mirrored water, bending and rippling the glow of red brake lights in between steady strokes of the wipers. No one out there is moving, but every couple minutes comes more thunder. The water level is rising, washing over the freeway’s painted lines.
As Mom and Dad say things like, “It can’t be long now,” you pick up a wrinkled map from the car floor and unfold your state across the backseat. In the afternoon thunderstorm light, you trace red highways across dashed county lines and give each town and city your attention, reaffirming your own citizenry with their pronunciation: Sequim, Puyallup, Chehalis, Duwamish, Issaquah, Skagit, Mukilteo, Enumclaw.
They sound like winter’s flooded highways, like dripping hemlocks and ponderosas, or gushing water spouts by your front door, or stepping around puddles on the pavement without thinking—like mountains on both sides and water everywhere in between.
Summer is when sunburnt relatives come, their pinched Midwestern vowels and country music filling up the car. Every year, they try to read the highway signs as they fly past, resulting in charitable laughter on your own family’s part, all of you amused but perhaps somewhat disturbed at this sharpest reminder of the 1,888 miles between your two Americas.
So, lots of people yelling at me to update my blog has made me realize that I should probably update my blog.
I am now back in the drizzly hills of northern England, with two weeks to go before I am done with all my classes and final papers and can jet off to Italy to chill with my host parents. Unfortunately, before I can go enjoy delicious meals made by my four-star chef host mom and play piano for the first time since December (I’m sure that’ll go well), I have to complete the following tasks:
However, since coming back to Lancaster on Monday, I have done the following:
But now I seem to be improving somewhat healthwise, which makes me hope that I can actually get things done in the next few days.
The last part of our trip in Scotland was, much like the rest of it, quite fabulous. After doing a two-day trip around the Highlands (resulting in half of the pictures up above), we drove down to spend a night in Edinburgh, where we visited the castle, hiked up Arthur’s Seat, and ate dinner at an amazing vegetarian restaurant. On our way down south to Lancaster, we swung by Hadrian’s Wall for a rather damp (if historical) stroll. And then, after spending a night in Lancaster and getting a tour of the castle, my parents and I hugged goodbye and parted ways. I was, it must be said, not altogether cheerful about it, but I’m feeling better now that a few days have passed. I was also somewhat helped by receiving a package from Andrea, which came dressed as a Rubix cube and filled with confetti and streamers, which in turn contained bushels of American candy (RED VIIIIIIIIIIINES. NERRRRRRRRRRRRRDS.), her recital CD (which I have not listened to yet because I was horribly ill and wanted to actually enjoy the experience), a My Little Pony calendar (which my house back home is very excited to have decorating our kitchen next fall), and a beautiful used copy of Poems of Stephen Crane, which also happens to contain hilariously nonsensical drawings and comments from its previous owners, and is all the more amazing for it.
Anyway, I’d better go revise some short stories or something. Hope you’re all doing well! (I get to go see the Avengers tomorrow, so, obviously, I myself am doing fabulously.)
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Another brief update from yesterday’s adventures. The pictures are from our stop at Dunnottar Castle, which was quite reminiscent of Pyke (if you don’t understand, go read Game of Thrones) - even more so when it started pouring down rain and hail, all of it being blown sideways, of course. But! We ended up getting a perfect double rainbow out of it, so I guess it was worth it, yes?
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