All I want for Christmas is.

And so that's the end of that. I'll be leaving in just about a day. And it always tears me apart, having so many "homes" like this. Because home has really become about the people who are in a certain place and I have too many people in too many certain places. And leaving each of them is equally hard, no matter how much I love the place I am going to next. So I've found that the best way to leave is to cry my eyes out, get through security at whatever God-forsaken airport I'm at (unless it's Amsterdam, that's a freaking nice airport), and then call someone. Call up the next person I'll be seeing and hear from them so that I can get all excited about that and forget about leaving. Because once I actually get through the "leaving" part, everything is fine. It's just actually getting my ass out of this country that is extremely, extremely painful.

I won't think about all that home has been just yet. I'll do that once I get back to college and have a chance to breathe and figure out what has happened to me in the past month.

I miss everyone and everything that is not here, and I feel like I already miss everyone and everything here as well. Merry Christmas, even to Jewish people like Maria and semi-Wiccan hippies like Raine. I hope it was bliss for everyone.

Oh, and I'm not filling in that blank. You can.

Almost Famous

"Yeah, great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing.

And love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love"

I had the absolute best meal of my life tonight. Literally. The best feeling in the world, and I mean better than anything else. I wish someone would come all the way over here and see me so we could dress up, go out in my city, eat ridiculously expensive food and split a bottle of wine and laugh the entire night. That's all I could think about doing tonight.


"Somos nuestra memoria, somos ese quimérico museo de formas inconstantes, ese montón de espejos rotos." -Jorge Luis Borges

Simple Math

Valerie + a bottle of rose wine + great English literature + anything to do with you = ...

Fill in the blank.

A glass of wine at midnight always leads to philosophy

It's strange... to walk into a regular, busy, crowded coffee shop and see your first -well, your first everything- sitting there, all nonchalantly at a table. These reunions, these moments, are things you think about for so long, things you spend your time wondering about while you're away. And then when they happen, they are just entirely surreal. Climactic simply because they are so anti-climactic. All you do is walk into a coffee shop and see that person. No billowing music, no surprises, no kind lighting. Just walking in and sitting down across from them.

It's stranger... to sit across from that person and look at a face that is still the same, but isn't. A face that is two years older and about ten years wiser. A face that has changed while you weren't around to see it. But a face that you still know as well as your own, even though you haven't traced it in years.

It's stranger still... to realize how much everything has changed. To wonder aloud together what things would have been like "if only". If only one had stayed, if only the bad things hadn't happened, if only we had been older, if only. You sit together, recounting everything that has happened, justifying why you both have changed. You both have made bad decisions. You've both made a couple good ones too. You both judge each other, even though neither of you is in any position to do so. You've both grown up, just in different ways and into different people. It is simply different, and that is simply just the way it is.

But maybe the most strange of all... is to know that with all the differences and similarities, all the changes and all the continuous things....you're still two people that are important to each other. That it doesn't really matter what you have done or what has happened or what could have happened. It doesn't really matter how things "should" be now, or how they "could" be now, and in truth, it doesn't really matter how things are now. It is still the two of you.

So maybe that is strange... to think about that. But it's also comforting. To know that there are relationships that are not dependent on a specific time or place. To know that some things will always matter. To know that things don't have to be the same, that feelings don't have to be the same, but that it can still be alright. To know that through all of it, you can still sit down and have a cup of coffee together. You can still talk. You can still care. And you can still make sense to each other, you can still make sense in that cafe, you can still make sense in life.

The important people will always be the important people, no matter how long it has been and no matter how far we have gone in between. Because anything that involved real emotion, anything that involved a momentary entwining of paths or whatever other less poetic way you describe it, is not temporal. It lasts, and it matters.


"If we overcome space, then all we have left is here. If we overcome time, then all we have left is now. And in the middle of here and now, don't you think we'll see each other once or twice?"
-from "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull"

List-making

1. I need a fucking cigarette. I made it this far, but now I feel like I'm going to rip my hair out or chew through another glass of ice or something. It's turning me into a crazy person.

2. Eres un mentiroso. Pero hace esto todo más fácil, porque recuerdo que me tratabas como mierda y me tratas como mierda todavia. Gracias.

3. It got cold. It's like, 20 out tonight (Fahrenheit, of course, loves). And that's cold. And all I have are pretty sundresses and I refuse to wear the same kind of clothes I would wear in Norway here back home.

4. The dentist asked me where I worked. And then I told her I was still in school. And that I was not really, in fact, even at university yet. Apparently, I must look like I'm about 30 and working as a secretary in a lawyer's office or something. Great.

5. I have too many high heels laying around on my bedroom floor and no one to appreciate me wearing them here.

6. My family cannot get through a meal without criticizing each other. "Valerie, why the hell are you driving like that?". "Mom, you have horrible taste". "Mike, grow up". "Arie, don't talk again until you have something intelligent to say". "Oh my God, Valerie, why do you eat so much?". That would be a sampling of my family at their most stressed out trying to go out to dinner together earlier.

7. And in spite of the rest of this list, I'm feeling very...hm. What's the right word? I'm feeling like I just want to cuddle up under lots of covers and make cute eyes at someone. Or drive around in the sun and just stick my head out the window and scream because I'm so happy. Or splash around in the ocean. -Oh that's right. I only have to wait 10 more days for all of that-

8. And if you haven't figured out what the title of my blog means, use your Latin/Greek skills to figure it out. I mean, come on.

Apologies for the previous novel-post.

I've just come back from The Shins and Modest Mouse. Perhaps needless to say, it was generally an acoustic orgasm.

Didn't play "Fighting in a Sack" though. Disappointing.

I'm sufficiently fed up with all the drama my family brings at this point. Which in a way is good. I'm ready to move on again. It will still be hard to leave, but at least it will be time to leave.

We got our asses kicked in the football game last night, which is really too bad. I almost wish I was back at my old high school, the guys seem much cuter now than they were when I was there. Maybe that's just because they were playing in a state championship football game, but still.

My mother just called me an imp. What the hell does that even mean right now? You see what I mean about it being time to move on?

It's a city day tomorrow. Lots of rambling around in my car with loud music on to get to cafes with good coffee and sidewalk tables. I just want to sit and enjoy thinking about whatever the hell I want to think about and not having to talk to anybody and not having to fake anything. Just enjoy being.

And what the hell kind of life do I live? One of my best friends is trying to evade a military draft, another is lost somewhere in Spain, another is probably drunkenly passed out in some field full of sheep, and another has apparently jumped into a canal or something out of insanity. And that's not even counting all the people here at home, what with all the cocaine and fake IDs and arrests and fucking around.

So don't even get me started on why I'm losing my mind.

So this is the less articulate, less philosophical, less pulled together version of myself. The linguistically devolved blog. The one you can't search for. The one you can only find and read if I want you to read it.

Generally, this blog will be worse than the other one. Unprofessional at best, harsh at worst.

So now that that is established...

How could I explain home? It will probably drive me crazy, but that is because bad things have happened that I don't have any control over. I guess it's always made me crazy, really, because if I came from somewhere normal, I wouldn't have turned out like this. But it is still home.

It's been hot, I've spent a lot of time out on the river with my sister, a surreal thing to be doing in December, even in Atlanta. It seems impossible that I'm sleeping in the Bergen airport one night and laying around on rocks on the Chattahoochee River a few nights later. And I'm getting tan, which is always a plus.

I've finished three college applications and I'm working on a fourth as I write this. I absolutely loathe answering those same questions over and over and over again. This whole process is torture and the worst part is, I'm paying them 70 bucks an application for torturing me.

The gap year cannot come soon enough. I've been looking at apartments in Paris and even though we'll be staying in the smallest place ever, it will still be in Paris, and it will still be ours. I absolutely cannot wait. Busy streets and fine wine and good shopping and cheese on baguettes for dinner and cafes and French everything...mm. And only having to be around people that I truly enjoy. Why is it all still so far away?

I don't feel like I should be here. I'm not sure what it is, exactly, because I'm not unhappy. I'm enjoying the people and the country and everything fully. But it just doesn't feel like where I am supposed to be right now. And I'm not supposed to be at college, either. Just...I don't know. Life is lacking certain people at the moment. And it's lacking excitement. Everything is the same as it was when I left here a year and a half ago. And that's comforting in a way, but I want to be somewhere difficult again. Somewhere that's not so comfortable but is a hell of a lot more exciting.

Uruguay very soon, which means 2nd years very soon. And for fuck's sake, it's about time for me to go be somewhere that makes me crazy happy again. I'm sick of swinging between being extremely bad and just mediocre. I want to be ridiculously content again. Not just okay, but intensely good. The kind of good that can only come when you allow fate to just act upon you instead of trying to control everything. The kind of good that you don't expect but that turns out to be exactly right. Two weeks.

It's hard to look around and realize that nothing is the way you thought it would be. That no one turned out the way you thought they would. That you apparently have no idea where your life is going because you thought you had it all figured out up until now, but you obviously didn't, so how could you know a single thing about your future? I don't know, is "hard" the right word for that? Maybe strange. Or funny, in a cynical way. And when nothing is the way you thought it would be, it's still hard to let go of what you thought life was supposed to be at this point. It's hard to stop trying and forcing and fitting and forgiving, just to make it all work out like it all "should have".

Who knows what I need. I think the real answer is

I just need life to move.