These past few days I and the family have been in the north. When you leave a city whose name means strength for a the wide expanse of a wetland 300 kilometers away, you gain more than in the wheel rotation count of your automobile.
When viewed from space, the Ebro Delta looks like the geological capture of a primordial whale’s breaching. Driving up, the terrain I see only confirms this statement: neat squares of rice stalks separated by thin canals could easily be the interlocking vertebrae.
As we travel, the mountains that define my field of vision recede along a spectrum of color from charcoal to indigo to warm gray, with no apparent logical order in between. These chains of rock, I think, could be substituted for fins in my imaginary cetacean. Already I am imagining Oparin’s abiogenesis, and my huge aquatic mammal swimming in the soup, though this makes little sense from an evolutionary standpoint. When my brother asks who I named him after, when I am in a good mood I answer, typically, “Alexander the Great”. Maybe next time I shall say “Alexander Oparin” and instruct him to purchase spectacles and grow a goatee.
We emerge from the hotel every morning and drive around the coast. Our oldies station works, miraculously, even amid the teeming mass of mountain. One-hit wonders until the car strikes sand and we unload, bringing Pikachu towels and cheese sandwiches from the trunk and to the shore.
On the first day we visit a curious strip of land that cuts the Mediterranean so that there is visible water on both sides. “You can have your pick,” my father says, as though this lovely dual beach were the product of his own efforts.
After a swim it is decided that we simply must visit a bird viewing tower, and so when she is through with salt water my mother rises and the rest of us follow like a string of ducklings. The depressions her feet make on the sand give me a path and a pattern, staying much after she herself has disappeared from view.
on
30 August 2010 with no comments
Day before yesterday we returned to an aforementioned river. This time the trail was significantly less strenuous, traversing hills of rosemary and lavender, an occasional spruce of thyme. It’s green mountains folded clean as origami, and my shoes are brimming with water, squirming as I make my way around crags and gullies. I’m carrying lunch bags. Couscous and orange soft drinks perched on one shoulder, getting a better view of the countryside than I.
An hour and a half of walking: peacock blue bathing suit slick with sweat, hair down, knees up, one, two, I am called a city girl one too many times, lover of the chock-a-block, unappreciative of clay deposits. Oh, how harsh, how very harsh indeed.
But it soon becomes clear that suffering is not in vain. We strike gold, a veritable paradise. To the right of the trodden path, upstream, a little star that strayed from the confines of universe. Pool, blue, waterfall, butterflies, as close to a shiny Bahamas postcard as you’ve ever seen. It’s so great I pull off anything not water-proof, Superhero-style, and cannonball.
It seems impossible to me that engineers have found ways to blast holes through hundreds of feet of rock face. I don’t mean it in a sad environmentalist way, but in a does not compute way. How can you bulldoze through green slices of water, their cascading brethren so tough they throw me out when I try to climb up, the skinny cliffs overlooking houses and trees hundreds of years old? I can’t make it five minutes along these woods without feeling thorns. This mountain is greater than any of us.
on
24 August 2010 with 1 comment
I spent yesterday afternoon eating udon in my mother’s office. Afterwards my brother and I lie on the floor, surrounded by mannequins and furniture catalogs. Though my mother works in the design department, she is not involved in design; she does the innovative business shebang. Still, whatever an innovative business room looks like, it can’t be as nice as working under the observation of articulated statues and books in pastel shades and canvases covered in curly lettering.
When my mother finishes, she goes to the window, pulling open the curtain as though ripping open a candy bar. We’d had overcast weather that morning, and so I see it fit to ask “is it raining?” to which my mother answers “more than that, it’s hailing”. Her tone is so high and so sharp she might as well have been swearing. My mother is terrified of storms.
We go down and find the doorman behind the glass door, keeping an eye on the silvery plaza. My mother says she’s never seen a storm this bad, though I can clearly recall us driving through a much worse one not a full year beforehand. She leaves for a moment, and reappears with a white umbrella. She says she’s been lent it, although there is no one left in the building who could have lent her such a thing.
The sidewalk is empty. Once in a while a couple will emerge, wet arms swinging. At one point we see an entire family, dressed in bright soaked shorts and carrying tote bags made of dark straw. The daughter, walking down the asphalt with the air of a martyr, is barefoot.
Everyone seems to have crowded into the phone store across the road. They’re all the English tourists, riding out the rain. It doesn’t take long, and soon enough I have convinced my mother to brave the trip to the metro stop.
“Afraid of a little thunder and lightning?” I say, or something to that effect. “What the heck?”
But as we wade through the dips and tucks in the street I see a girl on a street corner who is clearly terrified of that little thunder, little lightning. She’s of at least partial Oriental descent, though now, in retrospect, I cannot pluck out her features from the muck of memory. All I can remember is her black hair, and her arms, which were wrapped around a boy, who should be more properly termed a young man, though I think of him only as a boy. He had a buzz cut and broad shoulders, and one of his hands was patting her head while the other held firm to the puzzle piece of the small of her back.
We soon leave them be, and as we are making through the narrow streets so isolated one could be the paradise of monsoon and another a stark churning desert, the water slows and the clouds clear, as we are passing paralyzed stray dogs and marble store fronts, I think, in passing, a thought that is perhaps number 450 of the 700 I think per minute, stuck between one triviality and the next: THAT WAS BEAUTIFUL.
(title is never mine, but only Theodore Roethke’s, a line from his “The Storm”)
on
21 August 2010 with 1 comment
Someone needs to do for Emma what Nabokov did for Lolita. I am sorry, but I am no Janeite, and I hanker only for old Russian magic, Baba Yaga in a glade of silver birch, Count Leo in chalk blue and boots.
Actually I am not sorry at all. Why is every Emma a Venetian blond, eternally young heiress of industry or at the very least beauty, the authentic Woodhouse?
I want an Emma with uncut nails and a long neck. The curve of her back is warm, a mid-ocean ridge swimming with neon monkfish, and the skin behind her ear is like that of a white nectarine, or dark yellow Mirabelle plum. She can be as dirty as dishwater or as pure as the driven snow, femme fatale or Galatea. Hair gelled, ridden with lice, bronze glasses, bombastic. I want a gutsy Emma, a gutted Emma, salty, sour, housefly, dragonfly Emma.
She can be a spongy Swiss mademoiselle, hardboiled American lass, delicate Buddhist princess, mooney extraterrestrial damsel. My Emma is a prostitute, a seller of exotic curios, a British matchmaker as dear Jane Austen intended her to be. She gets to go home happy or up in smoke.
The whole time I was reading “Lolita” I was waiting for Nabokov to allude to the literal meaning of the name Dolores. Dolores, in Spanish, meaning sorrow, pains. He took that name apart and put it back together again, put little Lolita in every kind of metaphor, simile, allusion, elevated her to a special plane of literary beauty. But never does he once mention what the dictionary has to say about Dolores. Not once does he say, “and this is Dolores, and her future is sadness, as her name so indicates.”
Maybe that’s what I really want for my pen and paper Emma.
on
13 August 2010 with 2 comments
There are three bookstores here in Valencia that I like. The first is our local Fnac (though only the lefthand corner of the upper echelon of any Fnac is dedicated to literary pursuits), the second a Mom & Pop place called KandA and the third the quaintly, if somewhat mundanely, named Casa del Llibre in the city center. One of my favorite things about this third option is its baffling ability to stock up on new English titles I went out of my way to purchase elsewhere not two weeks beforehand. While Fnac has offered the same twelve books and their succesive sequels for the past four years (”The God Delusion”, “Eragon”, “The Lieutenant’s Lover”, etc. etc.) and KandA is essentially a fluctuating flea market (the owners have set up an enchanting exchange system), Casa del Llibre’s selection comprises all of four waist-high shelves, all labeled alphabetically (though none of the books or their keepers seem to have gotten with the cataloguing program) and probably the most diverse collection I’ve ever seen. Nabokov’s novella “The Enchanter” rubs elbows with four copies of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, while, in a separate aisle, Shakespeare communes with Danielle Steel, Camilla Läckberg and several dozen South Asian American authors (I have read of Indian immigrants wearing Bata sandals, struggling to make Kolkata street food with Sam’s Club alternatives and making derisive comments about the quality of US mangoes more times than I’ve seen any actual Indians, excluding my lovely Rajasthani father.)
It makes me laugh, to come into Casa del Llibre and spot the exact four books I doled out more money to buy more than six thousand miles away, in a New York Barnes & Noble. There’s even a Murakami I could not find on Fifth Avenue, and it’s somehow reasonably priced, even though this is Europe and nothing in Europe is reasonable. That I could have purchased my beloved novels here at home, ending my year long literary starvation period, if I had just thought to check at Casa del Llibre and see if they had renewed their usually mediocre stock!
Clearly this is turn of events can only be explained by my terrible luck, which I shall hereby personify as a hateful, or at the very least excessively mischeivous Book Lord. In artistic depictions of this Book Lord, one should never forget to include the Rasputin beard, skull-topped sceptre and the burning pile of wonderful literature in the foreground (scenery should evoke Holy Inquisition period Spain, or, alternatively, the planet Hoth.)
Perhaps it is high time I purchase myself a Kindle.
on
11 August 2010 with 1 comment
We went on one of those river hiking thingamabobs today, five hours of trekking through glorious waters and golden views and continually falling on my face.
O grace, how you elude me!
By the end of it I had stripped to a turquoise bathing suit, sopping shirt slung over one shoulder, warbling the “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” song from Mulan in an effort to rally the family forces. BE A MAN YOU MUST BE SWIFT AS THE COURSING RIVER [cue fall in river - o grace!]
We crawled up the crags to the road, I on my hands and knees, no longer caring about the state of my abused attire. O a change of clothes, o hunks of bread fetched from the trunk, praise be!
At home I go out to the terrace and pirouette with dusty feet as my mother hollers “Emma! Eat your mushrooms!” My mediocre ballet distracts her, leaving me to prance around, legs covered in antibiotic ointment and still stinking of river. On the street in front of our building, someone has written “Felices 18 Amor 31-7-10″ which, for those of you without rudimentary knowledge of Romance languages, translates to “Happy 18th Love”. It’s the work of the enamored hooligan, the combined victory for the beloved and against the authorities, the triumphant defacing of public property. I tell my mother and she laughs, suggesting that we go down and wash the birthday wishes off with a hose.
on
7 August 2010 with 1 comment
And so I am home and camp was a million different kinds of brilliant, and star-gazing in a waterless lake and falling hard and fast and mad in love with writing, all over again. But I am home again, and I’ve to work.
In fact, today was the first day of my summer internship, and on the way to the tram stop I pause at a reflective store window to admire the color of my polo shirt. It’s sea foam green, and it has the power to do away instantly with this particular time and space and take me off to some remote era of childhood, some land of memory contained in an unobtrusive part of my body (my feet, for example, or left kidney).
I remember spotting this shirt in a store in New York. I didn’t even try it on, just took it straight to the cashier. Sea foam green, one of eight tropical Crayola markers, a color I’m sure I’ve seen all members of my immediate family wear.
Few other special details like sea foam green exist in this world, or at least the world I am used to living. There’s a particular bird here in Valencia, for example, a species I’ve never been able to pinpoint, whose call inhabits one of my earliest memories. I can clearly recall hearing it throughout my childhood, though the many instances I must have heard it have melted into one singular episode in my head: I, as a four-year-old, and a bridge that would be later torn down, and turning around, and spectacular sunlight, and that bird’s cry.
It’s difficult for me to retain memories in neat, concrete blocks. I need a specific stimulus to burst through the stratified walls of the untidy cave that is my mind. Watermelon with salt, or the stench of chlorine, or my brother’s haircut, they swing and bring back distant, although never alienated, thoughts.
Take sea foam green, reflected in glass, resurrecting mother, father and brother, though in younger incarnations. Sea foam green, and softly lit streets and boxes of cereal and drawings pinned to the refrigerator like exotic butterflies.
Sea foam green, and the incorporeal ghost of my mother in the glass winking at me, glowing in two planes of being, memory and reality, smiling, not moving, watching me go.
on
3 August 2010 with 2 comments
As I am exiting the Museum of Natural History, I pass a woman talking on the phone. She asks, “Is it wonderful?” and I think, “It is.”
I am in New York, buying English books (at the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue, thoughts of Kelly prompt me to purchase “The Cave” to replace “Death at Intervals”) and eating cheesecake at Junior’s in Grand Central Station. I have rediscovered Milano cookies, Starburst and English muffins, which I eat in the mornings when jet lag forces me awake. English muffins, I have decided, are the pinnacle of good eating.
on
10 July 2010 with 3 comments
VALENCIA
I say g’bye, yes, Mother, I will not forget my sombrero aboard the ship. It’s a big boat, this cruise in question, a nice reprieve after the academic year, armed with even a library against the threat of boredom. I don’t expect great things of the library (it probably consists of Dan Brown and Danielle Steel), but I am determined to have at least the barest semblance of a good time.
IBIZA
The limits of teenage extravagance have the flabbergasting ability to expand before my very eyes, like some kind of starry, utterly drunk universe. How the adolescent bladder withstands such amounts of alcohol I do not know, but by my calculations, that girl in the salmon pink dress should have passed out a quarter of an hour ago. I can’t decide whether that couple over there is doing the nasty or having a simultaneous reaction to a some kind of neurotoxin. While it’s hardly as if I am ignorant to the goings-on of teen life, I am in a white knee-length tunic and flats, I could be a priestess surrounded by infidels. The suggestion we go to bed is met with violent booing, as if it’s entirely impossible for anyone to sleep before three in the morning. The madcap dancing, the strobe lights, the blend of cigarette smoke, patcholi, vomiYARRRRRGH WHATEVER I’M GOING TO BED YOU GUYS.
TUNISIA
I make a game out of spotting tourist scams: wood flakes in the saffron, chipped paint on tin teacups, plastic handbags of supposed camel hide. Nearly all the windows and doors are blue, and the houses themselves are white, and my classmates are so red their skin is peeling off at their shoulders. A Coca-Cola is nearly four euros, and so I pretend not to be thirsty. Through meditation, Buddhist monks can sweat during the harshest of Nepalese winters. When we return to the cruise ship, I confirm my initial suspicions concerning the library. Nevertheless, while the rest are at the pool, I sit next to the stacks with my copy of “Death at Intervals”, close my eyes, and make believe that I can deal with people my own age and that I am not a raving introvert. Unfortunately, it seems that meditation cannot fix everything.
CATANIA
The power of make-up amazes, and apparently not just me. I allow a cabinmate to slap some kohl underneath my eyes and bam, an attractive Austrian boy takes sudden and immediate interest in me. Flashing a set of pearly whites from across the table, he reminds me of the figure of the wolf in classic fairy tales. He is blond, blue-eyed and buff, a pale Zac Efron with nicer hair. He asks me where my boyfriend is, and, when I am forced to answer in the negative, more out of lack of a better response than a desire to flirt, he makes an indirect offer to swap saliva in the bathroom. In retrospect, he used rather lovely phrasing, appropriate perhaps, of a Viennese child, although the implications of this phrasing were not quite so elegant. One never knows though, what elegance means in different parts of Europe. Austrian bourgeouis culture could very well include, in addition to opera, fine arts, and classical music, making out in public facilities. Difficult to say, really.
NAPLES
The bus rides during excursions are from half an hour to three hours long, and I sit alone. On the way back, like a torrent of silver fish or a burst of light in a far-off corner, a boy plops into the seat next to mine. More specifically, it is the boy who was kind to my presentation, who some of you will perhaps recall. Today’s trip was to Pompeii, and I am still envisioning clouds of black ash and curled up canines. He asks me if he can sit there after he is already seated, as if to unsubstantiate any refusal of mine. The precaution is hardly neccesary, but I do not care to explain such things. After a few minutes, he, a little puzzled by the unhurried way I look out the window, without averting my gaze from the scenery for a second, asks if perhaps I am playing Eye-Spy with myself. I answer that yes, more or less, smiling a little. Moments later, the landscape changes briefly, from industrial factories to a bright field, filling my field of vision with yellow sunflowers.
FLORENCE
Florence’s cathedral is mostly green and white, a combination I have not been particularly fond of until now. Brunelleschi sounds like a tragic hero, and I now want to spend twenty-seven years of my life constructing a golden door, or a golden thing of sorts, for people to admire. The gold part will have to be figurative however, as I am not creative enough with my hands to justify the expense of such quantities of precious metal. Crazy dreams, that’s what Florence has given to me, but not the means to make them true. I’ll never be able to go to dinner with you, I think later, in reference to dreams, because all I’d be able to do is watch you eat.
MONACO, CANNES & NICE
For reasons unknown to man, I, who have been so frugal as to deny myself refreshment at costly bars, who have sat myself upon a lofty perch and frowned upon the lavish spending of classmates, have given up exactly thirty-eight euros to an unknown woman in Nice. Supposedly the money is destined for a non-profit organization for handicaps, but it takes less than thirty seconds of clear thinking after I have left the lady to come to the conclusion that I have been conned. My social group, or, as my father terms it, my posse (of which I am of but lowly social rank, the little constable in a sheriff’s gang), ridicules me, albeit under the cover of opinionated guidance. I feel first like an idiot, then like a good person, then like an idiot once more. Maybe that’s enlightenment, who knows.
VALENCIA
I am not sure how well I’ve fulfilled my initial goal of enjoying myself, but I know for sure that I’ve come home poorer (by sixty euros, thirty-eight of which are now circulating God knows where) and not that much more tan. The dastardly plan I’d been concocting has failed as well, proving once again that my mettle is the equivalent of a plankton’s, despite Cherokee war dances and robot moves. Fortunately, to counteract this failure, I’ve gained a little more social repute, and a little more experience in dealing with teenagers, though not enough for me to be promoted from constable. Most importantly, I have discovered that my initial Buddhist meditation was successful, though not in the ways I’d hoped. I’m not magically an extrovert now, but I am on better terms with myself. This is a plus, I think. I really don’t know when this voyage around the Mediterranean became a voyage into self. In any case, I am still in possession of the sombrero my mother was sure I’d lose and so the trip cannot be called a disappointment.
on
8 July 2010 with 2 comments
Today I attempted to look tough. I donned my most no-nonsense outfit (which actual no-nonsense people would say is not very no-nonsense, especially considering it was purchased in a chic shopping mall, but how’s about we let that one go) and stood in a strategically dimmed corridor in front of the most robust mirror in the apartment (the one in the bathroom has gold scalloped edges which is just not the effect I was looking for, though it does go along nicely with the salmon toilet cozies and – OKAY NEVERMIND BACK TO THE TOUGHNESS).
I puckered my lips (made me look like a hotel chain cabaret dancer), furrowed my brow (made me look like a disgruntled and exceptionally tan Oxford scholar), exposed my arm muscles (made me quickly realize that I possess none). I even practiced the most steely, hard-as-nails adolescent gesture I know: the callous digitus impudicus, commonly known in Western culture as “the finger”. Almost immediately I felt terrible for committing such a grave injustice against my innocent reflection, and attempted to patch things up with a benevolent smile, but then that felt obnoxiously self-serving and then I kinda went “GRAAAH” and gave up and went to fetch myself a Popsicle from the freezer (great for comforting the soul, not great for my figure or Operation: Look Decent in Bikini, but then again I’ve decided not to shave my legs this summer so it’s not like I’m going to look good in a swimsuit anyway).
I’ve always been a little on the short side and this, coupled with my elementary school haircut, gives people the impression that I’m younger than I actually am. Hair dressers pin my hair back with the multi-colored barrettes reserved for children, waiters bring me crayons, next door-neighbors pat me fondly on the head. I am used to this treatment, and am usually quite fond of it, despite the General Rule of Teenagerdom #15: Thou shall throw a tantrum when treated as a kid.
However, next week I will be going on a tenth grade graduation cruise, and on aforementioned cruise I shall attempt to pull off a dastardly maneuver. This maneuver requires of me a certain level of toughness. A HERCULEAN LEVEL OF TOUGHNESS.
Needless to say, my current toughness level is nowhere near A HERCULEAN LEVEL OF TOUGHNESS. It ranks somewhere between A CAREBEAR LEVEL OF TOUGHNESS and A PLANKTON LEVEL OF TOUGHNESS.
My practice sessions in the mirror have not improved that measly toughness level but I fancy myself a little better prepared now. Whether this is foolishness, spurred on by that cocky wink I flashed at my reflective counterpart, or some kind of previously unknown bravery blossoming from deep within my endocrine system I do not know, but I’ll accept anything I can get (as a substitute for the halberd I cannot bring aboard)!
I shall let you know how this maneuver of mine fares. PRAY/RAIN DANCE FOR ME, INTERNET. KYLIE, IF YOU ARE READING THIS, PLEASE DO YOUR CHEROKEE WAR CHIEF DANCE. IT’S TOTALLY FOR A GOOD CAUSE.
on
22 June 2010 with 2 comments
