How could I forget a blog? The outlet where I can say what's on my mind, a place to channel those random, rounded thoughts. Maybe it's the silent audience that I can never be sure of, if it exists, if it's judging me, laughing, smiling. Why do I have to care? And why do the faces that I cannot see haunt me?

It's not that late but somehow I'm incredibly tired. There is no energy left in my body to even hold my face together. It sags; I can feel it drooping. Where did this day go? It's piled up somewhere with all the other days that disappear.

Six months without turning on my brain - that's what it feels like. 180 days of silence. The car battery only tells you it's flat when you go to turn the key. It reminds me of missing a step at the bottom of a staircase. "What?" Now that I'm reading friend's blogs again, I realize my most recent mental hiatus has been a long one. Where does the mind go, 1,440 minutes a day?

Tonight's adventure was had here in my room. Just me and my suitcases. I didn't do so bad, expanding over eight months. Frivolous purchases were kept to a minimum. As expected, I only gained in books, which weigh unfortunately quite a bit. The rest is a combination of gifts and new clothes. "Slave of fashion", that I am. It's good to see, though, what I need to have in order to survive in a foreign land. I've learned quite a bit. No more books. And travel to a tropical climate were clothes are an option.

It's time to try again and go to bed. Exhaustion should be illegal. Then maybe people would enjoy it.

Meanderings

I don't understand a lot of things. Philosophers are reputedly people who admit to knowing nothing. But that doesn't make me feel smart or enlightened. Rather, I feel like a piece of cheese left to dry up and turn crusty in the fridge.

The question is, if I really know nothing (or admitted to knowing nothing), then how would I comport myself? Would I take the red pill or the green pill? Why do I have to take a pill? At the least, I know how to form random thoughts and badly structured sentences.

But I digress.

There are crows outside the window. Big black beasties with small pearl eyes. They fly in and out of the trees. This is Sweden - rather, the 6th floor view from a student high-rise in Flogsta, a suburb of Uppsala. It's overcast and from up here a loogey would probably would strike the blacktop below silently and invisibly. And I don't know why I am here. But I DO know why. I do. But I don't.

Teenage Angst - yum

A little bit of lyric because I gotta post something or my brain will revolt.

"When a new day reaches dawn
I feel it's worth the wait
But I tumble and I fall
I'm up against my fate

When the barricades come down
I'll build them up again
When I'm just about to drown
I still don't know the end

Sometimes I tremble
Like a little child
Their faces mourning
With a broken smile

Sometimes I crumble
When they're chasing through
Sometimes I feel that
I could rule the world

When the morning comes alive
Release your love brigade
At the end of day it's night
To suck it up with hate..."
Rule the World - Kamelot

Carwash, yes

I dreamed last night that I went to a boat wash. Seriously, a boat wash. Even though a boat sits in the water all the time (unless on dry dock - I do know my boating jargon) the irony of a boat wash wasn't lost on my unconscious self. After the boat wash, which was run by very large, naked, and hairy men, I went to a computer wash. They washed my computer but I remember being dissatisfied with the quality of their service. I couldn't watch (because they were naked) and when I did try to peek, it was all fuzzed over or that gag from Home Improvement - something always popped up to block the view. ANYWAY, they didn't clean my computer screen. Jerks.

Moral: never trust a naked man to clean your computer. Computer wash, no.

459 Edit

I slid into the water just as the sun rose and illuminated the frothy peaks of the waves around me. For a moment, I held on to the metal railing and dangled freely on the side of the boat. The waves were strong and sea spray blew persistently in my face as I watched the water turn pink in the dawn.

The line from the boat’s ocean anchor stretched behind my head and plunged taunt into waves. The boat rotated slowly, held securely to the ocean floor by a stainless steel anchor shaped like a stingray and weighted with lead. I fitted my goggles over my eyes, took a deep, salty breath and plunged beneath the waves.

My friends always recount the silence underneath the waves – the impenetrable peace of the deep ocean. I can never hear the silence. The ocean roars inside me constantly, dull and thunderous. True, I can no longer hear the waves, the boat’s hull slapping against the water, or the soft chime of the lines on the mast. But every sound within my body is magnified ten fold. This is the sound of the ocean. Breath, blood, and thoughts stream through my veins and it nearly drives me mad.

The next thing fellow divers passionately describe is the light that fades the deeper you swim, the farther you dare to go. This is absolutely true for me. As I lingered there, just beneath the surface of the waves, cold darkness reached out closer than ever. Many people prefer to dive at mid day but I consider that denial. The darkness is there and the best way to face it is to forget the light. I am afraid every time I descend but terrified every time I ascend.

But the worst thing is not the silence, the light, or the threat of insufficient oxygen. No, it’s the temperature, the godless cold that seeps out of the darkness and invades your body to the very center of your bones. Beyond your wet suit, there’s very little you can do to protect yourself. You can’t jog in place or rub your arms. You can only swim slowly and gracefully deeper. All divers are unwillingly ballet dancers. The water gives you grace but at cost. Even the air in your lungs chills, freezes.

I surveyed the darkness below me for a brief moment before I followed the vanishing length of the anchor line into the ocean. Whenever the fear became too great, I could reach out and feel the anchor line – my line to life, light, and warmth. I swam until the silence, cold, and fading memory of oxygen screamed inside my body. Then I slowly rotated in space, felt for the line, and returned to the surface.

Early morning laugh!

Get Your Sexy Name

John Irving

I'm reading some John Irving and I really like it. He's very straight forward and when he uses description, he slides it on like a pair of nylons. What he writes seems very clear and the clarity makes me want to believe it to be true. Although everyone knows that artists are liars. What is there to believe? I try to find things that apply to my own life. One character in the book I'm reading is a reader. She is asked if she will become a writer and she responds 'no'. Readers preferably marry writers. Is this true, I wonder, what will define happiness in my own life?

I picked up the book because I was tired of reading the manual for my teaching job in Austria. The text is dry and very formal, heartless, and unimaginative - very discouraging. Reality is discouraging sometimes. The manual causes a familiar stir in me, something I like to call "premeditative sorrow." I'm afraid that I will be graceless and awkward in front of the kids - students being so much more receptive than I ever was to insecurity (being so insecure myself, probably). I'm afraid to be alone, bored, ill. I'm going to miss my family. I'm going to have to settle into a new place again. I'm going to miss my new found heart. It's going to be hard. But that's life.

Now I've found that it's much easier writing to someone (even if that someone is an imaginary ear on the internet) than writing from my imagination. Jenny Fields, a character from my book, says that no one is born to be anything, that success comes from hard work. I guess we will soon see.