not falling down

My interaction with the world has always been, and remains, mostly text-based; maybe this is why not being able to read holds a particular terror for me. Seeing the shapes of a familiar alphabet in configurations I can’t parse is a constant reinforcement. That would explain why I’ve handled London better than I did Rio, and why (cognitocultural dissonance ahead) I am now, in Innsbruck, missing London.

I like Battersea, man! I like the little library and the big park and fresh bread every day for lunch. I like living too far away from the bookstore or the electronics shop to spend money easily. I like my housemates most of all, and I’ve only got forty days left there, and it will be very hard to leave.

I just found out on Friday what continent Surinam is on. Hint: it’s one I’ve been to.

I was going to write this into something else, but hell, it’s a vaguely embarrassing anecdote, let’s put it in the blog.

The summer after I graduated high school, my sister declared her intention to move into my slightly larger room while I was gone, in Brazil. I was pretty much hapless in this, since I was going to be moving out soon anyway, and so was made a part of the collective clean-and-pack-both-rooms initiative. There was a lot of stuff, because while I’m mildly materialistic, my sister is a voracious packrat.

While getting down to the bottom of her closet, as Caitlan and Mom temporarily went to get something downstairs, I came upon what appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. Magic Eyes are (were) stereograms hidden in computer-generated texture patterns; if you stare at them while unfocusing your eyes just right, a 3-d image pops into view.

This one was a mostly purple square, not part of a puzzle book or anything, just lying around. I didn’t feel like working very much, so I started trying to get the image.

I’m normally very good with Magic Eyes, but this one took forever. I’d think I’d caught something, then lose it, then I’d have to start over with the pull-back-from-your-nose strategy. Finally, I siezed something indistinct–a diagonal bar in the left third of the sheet, and some kind of amorphous shape…

“Brendan? What are you doing?” said Caitlan from the doorway.

“I’m trying to get this Magic Eye to come out,” I replied, a little annoyed. “This one’s really tough.”

She said “Brendan. That’s wrapping paper.“

I went running this evening and got completely lost, somehow ending up in the suburbs near some kind of park. I think I could have found my way back, but, with an oxygen-starved brain, I decided it would be easier to loop around and try to find Bardstown again. My route ended up really convoluted, and my copy of One by One had started over by the time I got home; I actually had fun, except for where it was hot and I wanted to die.

(I was going to rip a map from Yahoo and PSP it to comically illustrate my path, until it occurred to me that I had a stalker once, and I’d rather not give out directions to my apartment.)

While we’re on transportation, this evening I was fixin’ me up some brownies when I remembered that the package of mix recommended making a double batch in a 9×13 pan, and that was all I had. So I hopped on my bike and went to the store for another one. I hopped on my bike. And went to the store. I can do that now, because after four years of allowing my (mom’s) old Peugeot to rust in storage sheds, I went and took it to the shop and got it resuscitated and learned about gel-pad saddles.

I’m still very much getting used to it. I know, right, it’s just a bicycle, but the last time I rode one was exactly one trip to Shoe Sensation on Flora’s bike last fall, and the last time before that was in Brazil. (Don’t think it. If anyone could forget, I could.)

I lived, though–I didn’t even work up a sweat, which is astounding to me. I’ve been walking everywhere for long enough that going anywhere in the summer automatically means changing shirts, but this time I just… went. With almost no effort, and only a few death scares. Apparently this “mechanical advantage” thing is more than just jibber-jabber.

It’s still sinking in that I can go places now, do things, make plans. Bake. The brownies finished cooking while I sat here writing this, and they’re all mine, two different kinds of mix and fudge ribbon and chocolate chunks as inspired by the Chicago trip. There’s a lot of chocolate in those monsters. The kind of chocolate you wouldn’t want to trifle with. (Truffle with. Urk!)

Today is the day I plug Mindy in the blog. Mindy Mindy Mindy! Mindy is a frosher, only she’s not because the year is over, only she still IS because that’s who she is in my head. And yes, Mindy reads this and wanted to be name-checked like Emily and Strother and whoever else. Congratulations, Mindy: approximately five more people have now read your name.

What I really (still) want is for all my friends to get blogs, or Livejournals, or their own sites, or something. The presence of my crew on the interweb is disappointingly low. I want to check in on them and read about their love lives and be fascinated by the way they think, especially when I’m exiled to Richmond, but they stubbornly persist in their absence. Get blogs, all of you! I promise to link you if you do!

Oh, that means I should talk about Sara. Sara is a (former) frosher with a blog! You could all take a page from her cyber-book, other friends.

I’m still going through the sum of all my belongings, sorting and repacking things for the great exodus to Louisville, and yesterday I found three items of interest. The first is a piece of paper from last summer, on which is scrawled the following:

If I die, and somebody goes to a vanity press or something and has a posthumous collection of my work published, and it’s not called Destroy the Evidence, I shall be very angry and want an explanation.

And you know, it’s still true.

The second was the package of pictures I took in Brazil, all twelve of them. It’s very strange to me that it’s been four years since I was there. I slept on a mattress one inch thick in the same room as Tiago, the world’s biggest Goons and Hoses fan, and ate a lot of beans and rice and lost probably thirty pounds. I started watching Dawson’s Creek for the first time, and was surprised to find that I liked it, and pined for home and Erika too much.

I had an incredibly sweet host sister named Joana, who tried to reach out to me any way she could: we played Quake II together, and she introduced me to cocoa in condensed milk. I saw a giant Jesus and many, many streetside orange vendors. I went to Mass with my host grandmother, who spoke no English at all but who smiled and patted my hand the way my own grandmother would have. I took showers that froze me, burned me and gave me some nasty electric shocks.

Along with the blue acrylic painting I bought at an art fair (still one of my favorite possessions), those pictures are the only souvenirs I still have from Brazil. The Rio pin I used to have was lost with my first bucket hat, fall term of my first year at Centre; I think the futbol calendar Tiago gave me is packed away somewhere in the attic, probably for a long time. It was a very self-centered time for me, and I wish now that it had been otherwise. I should have learned some Portuguese, I should have thrown myself into life there instead of trying to live here in my head, and I should definitely have played less Pokemon.

No regrets, though. I Went There, and I Came Back.

The third thing will have to wait, probably for quite a while, as I want to make it a part of this site and I’m going to have to write some code to do it. Right now I have to lug bags of potato chips over to Emily R’s house for a pre-Chicago Trip meeting. My life is filled with travel.

I’m going to be on a plane very soon. This hasn’t quite settled in my brain yet. I love flying, probably because I getto do it so rarely–the last time I was in a plane was on my way back from Brazil, summer after senior year, when I wasexhausted and homesick and weighing 120 pounds. That wasn’t the best flight, actually. But the way down, six weeksearlier, well… of the roughly fourteen hours we spent over ocean and rainforest and cloud, I’d say I spent at leastthirteen just looking out the window.

I’m going to be crazy far behind in my classes when we get back late Sunday night, and I’m probably going to be boredonce the sound and fury have settled down, andmost everyone but Ian and I are going to be drinking heavily at night, and I’mgoing to miss the chance to copy edit for the paper this week (for which transgression someone has already beaten me severely). Evenso, I’m looking forward to this. I keep getting asked if it’s a competition, but if it were I doubt I’d be going. We’regoing to be half-killing ourselves just because it’s never been done before, and that gives me kind of shivers Iimagine mountain climbers must get.

I need to figure out what books to bring, and also how the hell I’m going to get to the airport. Wish me luck.

they saythe more you fly the more you risk
your life