Kind Of Not

R. is doing a project for his Brazilian cinema class where he’s going to film people saying three things about themselves. It’s based off a scene in a film they watched, A Hora da Estrela, wherein the heroine describes herself saying “I’m a typist, I’m a virgin and I like to drink Coca-Cola.”

I’ve been thinking about how to respond to this (which might defeat the purpose) and have come up with some variations:

- “I’m a TCK, I’m biracial, and I’m a student.” (Judge a book by its cover edition)

-”I’m a knitter, I’m a doodler, and I like old books.” (Introvert version)

-”I’m a reader, I’m a cook, I’m a mass of old scars.” (slightly creepy version)

-”I’m a sister, I’m a daughter, I’m a woman.” (Grrrrl power version. And interesting to note that sister feels most natural first here. Not sistA, though. Sister. My two brothers are some of the most precious things to happen to me. )

-”I’m tough, I’m curious, I’m delicate.” (contradictory version– but at least I’ve figured out what adjectives to use to describe myself should the need every arise)

-”I study people. I’m an artist. I like to eat noodles.”

And so on.

R. is still stuck on thinking about his. He has the obvious ones (”I’m Serbian. I’m an engineer.”) but the perfect third one is eluding him. I think what attracts him so much to this movie is how it depicts the heroine’s struggles with maintaining the things that make her herself in the face of moving to a new environment. The list she makes are apparently some of the things that separate her from those around her. Being foreign here, I think he really identifies with this sense of separation from his surroundings and so on.

Anyway, I could go on writing about this for a while, as well as psychoanalysing my boyfriend, but as it is 2 am, I really feel I ought to go work on my paper some more and then to bed. I am a procrastinator, I am in my pyjamas, and I am sleepy.

What would yours be?

Two occurences that brought me joy and great amusement today:

Firstly, walking back from buying my lunch, I spot a man walking down the street towards me. He has slicked back black hair, a white button-down shirt, tight red pants, carefully cultivated facial hair and a self-satisfied look on his face. Not my usual run of male companions, but there’s something about him that is remarkably familiar. I rack my brain, trying to place him.

As he draws near, he shouts to an acquaintance across the street, “Ciao, Dani!”

I don’t know him at all. He’s just stereotypically Italian.

————

The second one doesn’t have a story behind it, but this person was just so remarkable that I had to pay attention. I was getting a spoon for my yoghurt (ah… what remarkable encounters I am brought to because of my lunch…) when I found myself confronted with the sort of individual that you only find around universities– similar to the weird guy with muttonchops who sits in Lamont all day reading newspapers and looking at girls while breathing heavily. Anyway, this guy was a treat, mainly because of the complete normalcy of his face. Ordinarily the more eccentric members of the population have at least something to distinguish them, but… no. Anyway, he was a completely non-descript man. In his late forties, graying brown hair, vaguely paunchy. He looked vaguely stressed, as though he were doing some work in this fine library. Ordinary. Except for the stereo headphones, on his head, the three strands of Mardi Gras beads– complete with peace signs!– around his neck, the Hawaiian shirt, the safari vest, and the pants tucked into his socks.

I’m going to miss these characters so much.

It is raining today. I brilliantly went out wearing jeans and ballerina slippers, no tights or anything to shield that delicate little patch of skin on top of my foot from the evils of early Spring in Boston. My bus was 20 minutes late, and I was at a stop without a shelter, so I stood there, clutching my umbrella and watching my fingernails take on a bluish tinge (I’m not good with cold. More thyroid fun.) stupidly convinced that if I just… waited… a second… more it would come and I would get to class on time.

So anyway, I ended up missing about half my class (always a great way to make a nice impression, I say) but the main thing was that the damp cold had worked its way in and I just couldn’t get warm, and the worst of it was in my poor, cold cold feet, all naked and exposed to the ravages of the outside world.

A-ha! Gym bag. Gym socks! I pulled them on, and… bliss.

Problem is, I have a weakness for cheesy novelty socks, since noone will ever see them. Particularly ones from Asia or other countries with funny motifs and writing on them. The uglier the better. Sometimes, though, you absentmindedly wander about for a couple hours, and then look down and see yourself confronted with… a large watermelon motif, split green and pink across the foot, going down into the shoe, with the words “FRUIT AND JUICE” plastered across them, edged in yellow flowers. Beautiful.

Maybe I’ll start a trend? I’m not taking them off, and I refuse to wear my gym shoes. I can be the Agyness Deyn of socks. (In the sense that she wears hideous clothing and is hailed as a style icon, not in the sense that I will be the current supermodel of socks. Though that would work quite nicely as well.)

Evenings in are the best, which I suppose is good because there are so many of them. Recipe for happiness on a night that’s uneventful, but where we are simultaneously so twitchy and unfocused that friendly sniping grows dangerously close to reality and computers have to be abandoned? 15 minutes for pasta with spinach and ricotta (mmm), 45 minutes spent researching horses, Clydesdales in particular for their enormous feet (the size of dinner plates!) and general hilarity, for the imaginary house we will buy or build once a winning lottery ticket is found. 30 minutes of manic work, then 2 hours watching Castle in the Sky, which is yet another environment-touting Miyazaki animation that I loved with a childlike abandon. He wasn’t so sold on it, as he’s a little less able to abandon basic rationality and not question things, such as: Why does the bad technological part of the castle have to be destroyed? My answer: because the baddie is there, of course. And because technology and weapons are EVIL. Duhhhh. He: not convinced. Anyway, we sat there, me knitting on the sock I bring out for our movie sessions, and him vaguely simultaneously reading a poker book. He was actually watching the movie, but his eyes instantly shot back to it whenever I caught him dedicating masses of attention to the screen.

So yes, a humdrum day, but a good one. Before the evening, my main joy for the day was wearing a pretty blue dress and finding my pearl earrings. The punctuations alternated good/bad, but the overall effect was good. Now there are drums playing somewhere along Mass Ave. It would be tremendously annoying, but it’s somehow adding to my general state of pleasure. Hurray for pocket-sized happiness.

And on a side note, my favourite word for the day is  humdrum. I enjoy the fact that it rhymes, and I just really like writing it. I think it would also be delightful to see a man with a large walrus moustache and a pince-nez repeating it to himself under his breath.

 When I was little, my dad possessed the largest record collection known to mankind, as far as I saw it. A whole long role of titles, spanning one of the walls of our Milan apartment, later sectioned into five boxes and carried around the world with him on his travels. Alone at home, I ran my chubby fingers over the spines and marvelled at the names and colours. I had many favourites among the titles, mainly in his collection of sixeties psychedelia, but for some reason I keptfinding myself drawn to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I believe it was the platform boots he wore on the cover. Apparently, aged six, my aim was to be a drag queen. Regardless, I insisted that my dad play this for me and would dance along, howling “you know I read it in a maga-ZAY-ee-ee-een…”.  Between the howl, and the naughty thrill I got out of thinking that she had electric boobs (tee hee), rather than boots, this song was the apex of my young musical loves, only to rivalled by the joy of yodelling “Bee-el-ze-bub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for meeeeeeee!”, whenever I convinced him to put on Queen.

I have many other fond memories of this record collection*  but this is the particular one that comes to mind tonight, as for some reason I have been humming “buh-buh-buh-Benny and the Jets” to myself all night. Not to mention doing little sidesteppy dance moves in the street, much to the amusement of the panhandlers in Central Square and the cool kids hanging out outside of the Middle East. That’s what Elton John’s tinkly little piano does to me. Public bopping. Lordy.

*one of which is of myself, again aged VERY young, absolutely stark raving furious, because I was utterly, unshakably convinced that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the same band, and so it was simply selfish of them to put out records under two names. I believe the logic there was Rolling Stones–> Rolling stones gather no moss (god knows where I heard that expression, aged that young)–> Cover of Rubber Soul contained greenery, and was thus considered mossy–> My insane six year old self concludes that these so-called “Beatles” were obviously the Rolling Stones in disguise, meant to confuse astute young listeners like myself! An obvious conclusion!

Enough randomness for now. I’m heading to bed. Hopefully, my telepathic communications will rouse my father and convince him to send the entirety of said record collection to his loving daughter. It really is amazing.

I love this page from a romance comic that I found on Mike Sterling’s webpage (via Neil Gaiman’s blog… wow i’m big on citing correctly today.) The conversation between the mouths is wonderful, and I’m a sucker for anything over the top and cheesy like this.

On a semi-tangential, semi-related note: Did I ever tell you about the glorious summer my cousin and I spent lying around eating popsicles and plowing through an immense stack of trashy romance novels we got at a used bookstore for a pittance? Pure bliss, I tell you. With lots of ripped bodices and heaving bosoms. I think we had to resort to shamefully taking more books out of the library once we made it through the stack. I would always get out one real book at the same time, and put it on top of my pile, so it didn’t immediately look to the librarian as though my brains had been replaced by fluff.

Pre-made Vietnamese spring rolls from a supermarket are a horrible thing to buy on the way to the library if what you are craving are actually fresh ones, with nice soft rice wrappings. Plus, there is really no way to eat them publicly without looking vaguely obscene. I always thought it was genius that Broadway Market had them, and wondered why nobody bought them. Now I know. Ah well– this is apparently going to set the tone for the day. Back to paper!

This article about the “King of Fountain Pens” makes me rather happy. It combines many of my favourite things: Cute old men, adorable Japanese men, pictures of a workman’s hands, fine craftsmanship and fountain pens. I really do miss writing with fountain pens. I’ve been having a love affair with the simple Bic ballpoints over the past few years, as I enjoy their drag on the page, but I think I might revert to fountain pens, like I used to have to use back at school in Italy.

My mother and I have noticed a worrisome trend emerging over the past few years. Books with names of famous authors, musicians, or just plain thinkers prominently displayed in their titles, as though some of the magic would rub off through contact with great thought. Flaubert’s Parrot and Foucault’s Pendulum are early examples of this, permissible because Julian Barnes and Umberto Eco are pretty great in their own right. Also, apparently, because F’s P. is a fun way to abbreviate things. Recently, though, this phenomenon has reached critical levels. Even The Da Vinci Code fits into this category, which should be reason enough to understand why this trend is… troublesome, to say the least. The current offender is Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story. In it, as far as I can tell from the back cover, our dashing heroine strives to disprove Tolstoy’s saying about happy families. Does that make anyone else’s stomach turn just the tiniest bit?

The worst offenders, though, have all been found in the group of books published by people who have read Jane Austen (wish I could find a way to pronounce her name with the proper reverence) and are so very inspired by her genius and her understanding of the human SOUL and her true, compelling descriptions of the TRIALS and TRIBULATIONS of finding ONE’S TRUE LOVE (aiiiiiiiiii… beat chest, tear hair) that they simply feel compelled to either continue the stories, or reinterpret them, or just blatantly write Darcy-p0rn. It wasn’t so bad when it was just modern re-imaginings, or people who plagiarised endlessly from her storylines. The storylines were charming, and lent themselves easily to the reinterpretation. Also, don’t get me wrong– I spent countless hours curled up in various fat armchairs clutching tattered copies of Persuasion and Mansfield Park. I forced the books on my little cousin, and had endless dreamy thoughts about what it would be like to grow up in England at the time, with such a succession of unsuitable bachelors, and such monetary considerations to make, and so many sisters to contend with. And, being a red-blooded heterosexual female, I have also swooned many times over all six hours of the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice (although, I must confess that the fountain scene never really did much for me), and wished my hair would curl as charmingly as Lizzie’s. Many hours were devoted to pondering why it was that Jane reminded me of a horse. I think it’s the neck, combined with the nose. It gives her a distressingly equine appearance.

My irritation is more with the scores of people who have felt the need to try to sell their books on the merit of the inclusion of relevant words in the title. To wit: The Jane Austen Book Club. Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. Me and Mr. Darcy. Austenland. Drive and Determination. Pemberly by the Sea. I would go on, but I’m afraid to know just how many of these books there are. The number of straight-up sequels are also terrifying.

The point is, people, invent your own love stories! Or if you must have a “Darcy-like” character in your writing, have the grace to disguise him, instead of splashing the fact all over the blurb! Have the decency to have the lead female character NOT be reading Jane Austen at the same time that this aloof, despicable, but oh-so-alluring character is around. Helen Fielding had Bridget Jones obsess over the aforementioned Pride and Prejudice BBC version, but she didn’t call the book “Bridget Jones’s Diary: Dreaming of Darcy” or anything like that. Or… just start reading OTHER books! Other writers wrote things too! Why haven’t I seen any “Heathcliffe’s Hoydens” or things along those lines?

Ach. I’ve run out of steam. Or rather, I’ve been distracted by the fact that my little brother is now on facebook, and has joined a number of groups that I judge to he HIGHLY INAPPROPRIATE for his tender age. Harrumph. Something else to shake my stick at.

Incunabulum– a book that was printed, not handwritten, before 1501.  The word has a glorious weight to it, reminiscent of the painful process (though significantly less painful than that of copying these tomes out by hand.) of printing at the very beginning of the Gutenberg era. I love the thought that, though these bookmakers (mainly monks, I presume) considered themselves innovators of the time, the word is so wonderfully antiquated. Plural: incunabula. Hurray for words that are just blatantly unchanged from Latin!

And yes, I am a dork.