Tuesday, April 22, 2008

As of ten hours ago, I was pretty decided I was going to
William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia next fall. It's a great school, amazingly strong IR/Global Studies/Public Policy programs, and a good price. Hell, I was planning on becoming a resident of Virginia so my senior year I could just pay $16K.

Providence College accepted me too.
I just found out this morning
Rutgers admitted me. I have to email them to find out what the aid offer is.

I feel very befuddled. Probably because even though I thought I would get into every school I applied to, I didn't actually think it would happen. And it did.

I wonder if that means I should have devoted more time to my applications as a senior in high school, instead of trying to get everything done at once while balancing a breakdown and way too many responsibilities.

This grown up shit is weird.


Mad Girl’s Love Song

Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
 
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
 
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
 
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
 
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
 
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)



Howth, Ireland

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posted by Courtney at 1:39 AM | 0 comments
Tuesday, April 15, 2008

It seems strange that in a few weeks I'll be back in the United States. I can't tell if it's because I think my time Not There has gone so quickly, or so long. Part of it ties into spending four months identifying, defending myself as an American, and now I face returning to my ancestral home. When in Barcelona, walking up to Park Guell, we passed what looked like a punk house. Written on the roof was 'Why do they call it tourist season if we can't shoot them?'. I was sympathetic; I remember the same sentiment from living on the Shore, waiting and wanting for all the Bennys to leave so the stop signs could be covered again and the beaches empty. But then right after, was a bit of graffiti that said simply enough 'Yankees go home.'

I was angry. I may be an American, but I am no fucking Yankee. A Yankee is the kid in our group who went to Spain with a cowboy hat; a Yankee is someone who doesn't bother to learn the language (not even a please, or a thank you); a Yankee wears socks with sandals.

And since then I've been rethinking
how I feel about being an American. Reading 'Into the Wild' only encouraged the questioning, and instilled a desire to road trip across the Pacific Northwest, to boot. And now knowing that I am leaning towards relocating down to Virginia, Williamsburg no less, where I will face tourists, and Yankees and inevitably be North--- the meaning of American hasn't settled down much.

Still, it seems unusual that soon enough my hands will be close to my mother's hands, that I will be able to have lunch with my father and coffee with my friends; that I will see Boston and New York and the same old town I have lived in for much too long. I worry about slipping back into my old ways, and yet not being able to shed the worst habits I picked up here. I must resolve to hold onto the good things- the sense of freedom, and better baking especially- while returning to better habits- running, not eating at all hours simply because I am in the mood to cook- and holding onto integrity. Such a little town, and I am half-afraid of it, convinced it is loaded with weights and claws, everything joined together in a grand attempt to impose stasis.


I'm not really worried about the summer. It sucks that I haven't heard back from internships, but even if nothing turns up, I'm sure I'll find some sort of gainful employment, be it Starbucks or doing some sort of transcribing. Things will come through; they always do.



Music: Broken Social Scene 'Swimmers'

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posted by Courtney at 3:54 PM | 0 comments
Monday, April 14, 2008
'She worries over the way her love comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn't as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows, it is sad. the human voice conspires to desecrate everything on Earth.'

"Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters"
J. D. Salinger

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posted by Courtney at 3:20 PM | 0 comments
Sunday, April 13, 2008

I’ve been listening to podcasts lately teaching me rudimentary French. I’m not sure why this trip to Paris has brought on the urge to go with some language skills. Maybe it’s the perception that my background in English and German will not exactly win me friends in France. Maybe it’s because I will be alone for at least part of the trip, and I hate appearing to be a tourist. Whatever it is, I’m preparing more now than I did for traveling to Eastern Europe, or even to Spain.

I think part of it was that I took French, and I liked it, more or less. Granted, it was middle school, and not that difficult, and Stephen B. kept throwing our textbooks out the window and the teacher had no control over the class, but it wasn’t bad. I could never get the r right, but I managed to retain the ability to count to four and your basic manners- please, thank you, hello and goodbye, the toilets please?, very bad, tough shit.

Listening to these podcasts, it doesn’t seem to be sticking like it ought to, like I feel like it did for German (I’m pretty sure I’m glamorizing that). I keep mixing s’il vous plaît with prosim, and thank you with köszönöm (like kissidem), the few words I picked up in Poland, Prague and Hungary. Prague makes sense- I liked the language, and I’d like to learn more of it. 

I wonder sometimes if we overfill our neurons. I have this vision in my head of nerves like diving boards, everything, all the information crowded on edges and then flipping from one to the next, springing on and on and then splashing down on our tongues and fingers and telling us what to do- making our muscles move. And then sometimes, the diving boards are full up, information crowding down to the backs, so nothing can get a decent jump going and instead it all just belly-flops into primordial mush and grey matter.

I wonder if other people break their bodies down this way, into images and similes instead of accepting that each of my fingers has millions and billions of smaller parts too many to think about and that each piece is straining and pulling away from me, that I’m losing parts of myself everywhere and leaving myself behind on everyone and everything. That makes me think of crime scene TV and how if there was only a swab small enough, advanced enough to be able to collect those chunks, to remold them back into images of ourselves- two sides and translucent, newly born and shaking legs, ready to hear our advice and heed none of it, to start living and breaking apart again.

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posted by Courtney at 7:58 AM | 0 comments
Monday, April 07, 2008

I've been obsessing with the M. Ward song 'Chinese Translation' recently. I know bloggers everywhere are shaking their heads in horror- '
but that song has been out for so long? How could you not have fallen in and out of love with it already? Don't you know that These United States are the new M. Ward? Don't you listen to WOXY?'.
Fuck that. I had it on the iPod, listened to it once or twice and was finally grabbed.

Then again, I'm sitting here in zombie make up in the dark blogging. I really have no leg to stand on. At all.

I went to the Smithfield horse fair on Sunday. It was surreal and voyeuristic. Basically, it's a horse market held the first Sunday of every month in Smithfield, an industrial area of Dublin, right next to the Jameson factory. On this pavilion next to these new apartment buildings you have kids showing off the horses they keep in their back gardens and Pavee and horse traders, all showing off and selling and buying. And then you have people like me, stumbling around with their cameras a snapping and then going home and screwing around on Picasa and posting them on their blogs to tell other people to go and stumble around with their cameras and then post their pictures.




















Right after snapping this last one, I made eye contact with the boy. It was one thing to take a photo of those eyes on someone else taking a photograph of him, and another to have them turned on you. It's my fault for making eye contact with too many people, trying to see into too much. All I could do was make apologetic eyes and put away my camera.




Implicit Associations
I read this in the NY Times today. Immediately I went and took the University of Chicago test mentioned. What frustrated me was that for the first 30 odd images or so, I mixed up the Z and / functions, so I was shooting when I meant to holster. Plus I started over-thinking towards the end and figured out the pattern with the background imagery. Then I started debating my own narcissism while trying to test my racism and probably confused the hell out of my neurons and latent impulses. No wonder my average score was a .615 for an armed black man vs. .665 for an armed white man. I wish the test explained at the end what the averages was, so I could compare myself to the rest of the US/worldish intelligencia out there who saw a test for racism and went 'I'll test that!'. Judging by the results of Mr. Kristoff, I'm not alone in hesitating in shooting white men and holstering for black men.

Nice to know that the researchers interviewed tend to feel that gender is more of a discriminatory factor than race. I am clearly set as a white, American, bleeding-heart, Christian- socialist woman. So set for the nonprofit sector it's not even funny. I'm just like Madonna!

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posted by Courtney at 4:41 PM | 0 comments
Friday, April 04, 2008



iTunes has free language podcasts?! Why has no one told me about this? There is one devoted to GERMAN GRAMMAR. I could have made a world of a better impression on countless (ok, 4) German professors with that information.

I think that might be the future of my education. I took the bit step today and canceled my tourfilterBoston account, and opened up a tourfilterNYC. I think I'm leaning towards taking the fall off and working up money, and by leaning towards that, I mean I'm anywhere near financially stable and will have to.

I'm fine with it. I've gotten sick of higher education- the sheer bureaucracy of all of it. Maybe I came into university with too high expectations, imagining some place where suddenly all the quirks of my mind and my tangential interests would find a place to be nurtured and encouraged, and getting required maths and program lines just failed to compare.

I suppose I can chalk it up to growing up. While it's not quite " 'One day you will do things for me you will not want to do. That is called being a family.' What she does not understand is that I already do things for her I do not want to do. I listen to her when she talks to me. I resist complaining about my pygmy allowance. And did I mention I do not spleen her nearly so much as I desire to? But I do not do those things because we are a family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom the hero taught me." (if I got the quote wrong, sorry. It was all memory). And it's not quite the old guy putting down his beer and saying, "son. I am going to tell you something the like of which has never been told" either.

What it is getting a better feel for Grace, and grace. Understanding Rose better. It's not freedom. It's nothing like freedom, or even security. It's just sort of an understanding, and it only sounds trite when I explain it.



Budapest photos.

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posted by Courtney at 3:49 AM | 1 comments