Doesn't Anyone Understand?

We toured Toledo today. The city is very beautiful, very old but very very beautiful. We saw the oldest synogogue in Western Europe. It's no longer a working synogogue, but now more of a museum. For a long time in Toledo there were three groups, Jews, Christians and Muslims. The three groups lived in relative peace and harmony, as far as any records can tell.

Then Queen Isabella came and ruined it all and had all the synogogues torn down and all the jews basically converted or killed. Very unpleasant times indeed.

The Spanish didn't take part in WWII (from what I recall from high school history lessons), because they were dealing with their own civil war at the time. Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain from the 30's until relatively recently, being a facist, let Hitler use his country and his people for target practice for testing out bombs and weapons of destruction. That's where Picasso's famous "Guernica" comes in (I'm seeing it tomorrow, I hope I don't weep). Joan Miro, my most favourite artist, has some very insightful pieces reflecting on the civil war and the years of tumolt for Spain. We went to the Miro museum in Barcelona, which was such an astonishing experience for me. The first time I saw a Miro first hand was in Hartford in 2004, I believe, at the Athenium (if you're from Connecticut you've probably been at one time or another, it's very small but it's a cute museum and I believe it's the oldest public art museum in the United States, but I could be mistaken). He is a contemporary artist, and most of his works seem very primitive and unrealistic, but what you really must do is look beyond the figures, the paint, the frame, the palet, and make the painting something for you. I like art that becomes whatever you want it to become.

But this wasn't meant to be a rant about Miro.

In Toledo today, I noticed there to be a lot of graffiti of swastikas. I don't understand how anyone, particularly someone in Europe, particularly someone whose country suffered under a fascist dictator for decades, could possibly promote the fascist way. Don't they know how their parents and grandparents suffered? Don't they know how all the people of Europe suffered? Fleeing from bombs falling here and there, shrapnal everywhere, air raids, no food, never knowing if you'd live to see tomorrow or if your children would live to see the end of the war. Or worse, if you were one of the direct victims of the fascists, if they stuck you in a ghetto and then huddled you into a cramped box car and sent you off to never be seen or heard from again. Spain is a Catholic nation, don't they know what the Nazis did to the Catholics? Don't they know, don't they understand? How can anyone draw the swastika without silently killing their soul?

Sadly those aren't the first swastikas I've seen in Europe. There is a little shrine, with candles and swastikas in chalk on a stoop near my school in London (in one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in London, might I add). I got so angry and sad when I saw it, that I blew both the candles out, and I don't even care if CCTV saw me do it. They're English, the Nazis tried to wipe London off the map of the world, don't they understand?

On a MUCH happier note, I just got word that Obama signed the Hate Crimes Bill into LAW! How awesome is that?

Perhaps there is hope after all. Yes, I'd say there is a lot of hope. Things are getting better all the time :)

http://www.hrc.org/13699.htm


Miro, 1973, "The Smile of a Tear" very appropriate for today

Eleven Months

We are in Madrid this lovely warm evening. It's been a very long day of traveling and touring and eventually eating, so now we are resting for the night.

Today is my eleven month anniversary with Hillary, and it is sad that we have to spend our anniversary apart.

However, we'll be together next month for our one year anniversary. We'll be in Paris then, it will be que romantico.

I can't believe it's been eleven months, it feels like just yesterday we were driving home from Ani, got hungry for Wendy's and spent the better part of an hour sitting in a dark parking lot eating and talking about life, silently telling each other that we couldn't put on this facade anymore.

Love happens and it knocks you right off your feet. It's the best, most stupifying feeling in the world, to be sure. Perhaps numbing is a better word for it. I don't know if I like the feeling of numbness, or fluttering about, but I do love being in love with a wonderful person and I am very glad that we found each other in this big scary world.

There is no one out there who would climb mountains with me on a whim, who would stand by my side from 3,000 miles away, who would so thoroughly entertain me while simultaneously captivating me. I fall in love with every pretty face I see, but I have never been so completely in love with not only a pretty face, but a wonderful mind and a beautiful soul.

Here's to Madrid and eleven months with Mogli.

Barcelona

Welcome to Barcelona!

This city is AMAZING! I wish I had come here to study abroad instead of crumby old London. There is so much here, and the weather is beautiful and there are palm trees everywhere.

And the food... magnificent.

Tonight at dinner we shared our meal with a little black cat who was walking amongst the tables. She was a skinny little cat so I dropped her some of my salmon. But she wouldn't eat any of my salmon, which was curious because she looked hungry. Then she disappeared. A little while later she returned, followed closely by a kitten, who proceeded to consume all of the salmon I had dropped for his mother. I stroked the cat while she watched her kitten eat, and I swear she was smiling at me. I fed her some salmon so I was certain she had eaten, and she ate every last drop. Then another kitten came, and it all got too crazy and we were leaving the restaurant but it broke my heart to part with the cat, she was such a sweet cat, and she knew exactly how to make me fall in love with her (it's probably because I miss my Kitty).

Earlier this evening, we were walking down to the beach so my mother could put her feet in the Mediterranean Sea, when we came across a man on a bike. Not just any man on a bike, though, a man on a bike wearing... only a bike. He was completely nude!

I got pictures. It'll take me a while to figure out whether Americans are sexually repressed (in that we giggle at nudity and think it's obscene) or if Europeans are too sexually liberal.

Barcelona is amazing, we've walked all over the city so far. This morning we went to Monserrat, which is this really interesting old Monastery in the mountains outside of Barcelona, but it's more like Disneyland in the mountains, with music and dancing and food and liquor. It was awesome.

My internet isn't working (I'm writing this on my friend's laptop right now) so I will upload pictures when I get back to Londontown or if the internet in Madrid works after Tuesday :)

How Do You Cope?

No one has ever asked me that question before, until last night.

Basically my story starts out with a bunch of twenty-year olds drinking and having nothing to do. But the drinking and nothing to do part is unimportant. The debauchery was only the bridge from polite conversation to indepth conversation.

We started the night out with five of us, sitting in our dorm room, drinking and talking. By the time we left the room we were all feeling good. We went to a bar and I had a few drinks, and by the time we left the bar I was almost too drunk to walk, but I did all right. I can still remember everything clearly, and that's all that matters.

We went back to our room, five of us had become six by this point (we ran into one of our friends in the dorm lounge). We all went back to the room and listened to music and talked (loudly) into the wee hours of the morning. I was trying to stay awake to talk to Hillary at 2:30 am my time this morning anyway (9:30 pm her time), so it was nice to have some company while I waited. We never got to talk anyway, but staying up late was worth it.

Eventually the numbers dwindled and six became four. We were all sitting around in true college fashion, drunk and wrapped in blankets to keep warm in these chilly London nights. We were also playing truth or dare, and since we are all too lazy to accept any dares we all chose truth. The main topic was, naturally, sex, because what else is there to talk about after all?

So it is understandable that I was very taken aback when my friend (a new friend, might I add, who I only just met a month ago) asked me how I cope with my father's death. Thankfully I was sober enough to not cry in emotional drunken sadness, but too drunk to give her a concise answer.

So I rambled on for the better part of fifteen minutes about how people who didn't watch their parent literally waste away and die before their eight year old eyes are clueless as to how I feel, and that it is an incredibly lonely place to be. I have so much pressure on me to be the best, to never cry, to never show weakness because I'm my mother's rock, I'm her one constant. And she's my one constant, so she feels compelled to be strong for me. We have to be srong for each other and neither of us can ever cry or ever grieve or ever shout out in fear and sorrow and anger.

But I mess up, I'm human, and sometimes I'm not constant and sometimes I'm weak. All the time I'm messing up and I am disappointing someone because I can't be what everyone wants me to be.

The hardest part of having to cope with my father's death is that my father was my best friend. The strongest love I've ever felt for another living thing in this life I felt for him. He was amazing, one of the greatest people God ever put on this Earth, and I'm not just saying that because I'm sprung from his loins. He was truly amazing, and a definite blessing to everyone he met. No one on this Earth can compare to my father, my love for other people can't compare to the love I still have for my twelve-year dead dad.

The saddest part of his dying is that his grandchildren never got the chance to meet this man. This man who would have loved them so much.

I don't really cope with it. I don't cry about it and I don't talk about it (unless someone directly brings it up, ordinarly). I still feel like a trapped eight year old, lost and alone searching for her daddy everywhere and never finding him because he is long gone. I guess I'll always feel like an eight year old, lonely and heartbroken and wishing God would have taken me instead of smashing my heart into tiny pieces of jagged glass that can never be repaired.

And that's what I told them, in a long drawn out soliloquy of no tears and no other noise besides the hum of my soul coming out of my mouth.

I don't know if they heard me, or if they know how sad I am and how fragile I am. But I do know it felt so so so good to be asked how I feel about my father's death. No one has ever asked me that in twelve years. No one has ever wanted to know how I feel before. And finally someone asked, and it was the most relieving experience I've ever had. Finally someone cared about me and my ability to handle something no eight year old should ever have to handle. I just felt so good.

Fall

It has become apparent that fall has, at long last, arrived in London.

Much to my dismay, might I add, since I enjoy wearing short pants all year for the most part. The air is getting damp, the leaves are sweeping to the ground in little orange and red puddles. The evenings are chilly, and the bottoms of my jeans are often wet and grainy from being dragged all over the city.

It's almost not fair to have to sit in rooms and read about people who are very much alive in the pages of hundred year old texts, people who did things and loved and lived and lived, and we are cooped up and confined to a classroom and a white board, or a power point slide show or a visit to a museum where the professor will butcher a piece that otherwise would have brought a tear to your eye.

Fall always reminds me of walking to my house after school. The bus dropped me off a block away from my house, and I always remember the sudden surge of excitement at the end of the day when the last bell would ring and then that feeling of disappointment, sitting on the bus and bouncing up and down up and down and knowing it would all have to be done again tomorrow.

Walking home in the fall is particularly vibrant in my memory, probably because there are so many smells in the fall. I think there are far more fall smells than spring smells even. There's the smell of leaves, leaves that you couldn't smell all spring and summer and now that they have made their way to the ground you finally get a good wiff. And then there is rain. It rains a lot in the fall, at least in the Northeast (and in London, it is very very damp), and the smell of the rain falling from the sky, clinging desparately to the bare tree branches and the few remaining leaves. It's all very romantic.

I remember walking home and having nothing better to do than to have conversations with myself (this was before I had a car and I would just turn the stereo on high to drown out the thoughts in my head). Inner conversations of course, I'm not the crazy lady who talks out loud to herself (not yet anyway). I'd think about everything from algebra to charlemagne to why life was so hard to how I didn't think I could do it all over again tomorrow. High school was such a drag.

Sometimes while I was walking, I would look around and notice that I was all alone. I live in a bedroom community, my friends and my teachers and my mother know me, but none of my neighbours even know my name. I would feel so utterly alone. And then there would be a gentle breeze, and the leaves would all start to rustle. The leaves would be swept up with the wind, and they would kind of march alongside me, the breeze pushing them along.

The leaves walking alongside me in the gentle fall breeze always made me feel like I wasn't alone, like it was worth it to get up and do it all again tomorrow. I would cut through my backyard, which opens out onto a side-street, and slosh through the muddy grass. The leaves wouldn't roll alongside me in the grass, but it was okay because the gentle breeze remained and, not unlike the warm hugs of summer, the cool breezes of fall are also friendly and gentle in their own way.

It's strange to look back on times like those and think of how insignificant they felt then, and what lasting memories they have become.

I never feel alone in the fall. I feel like someone is watching me, a lot of the time, specifically in the fall, and I can't help but wonder if it isn't my daddy watching me, knowing that these months are the hardest for mom and I to get through. This year will be twelve years since he died. I always say I wouldn't give anything to see him again, to hear his voice, to touch his scratchy face, to play one round of basketball with him, but secretly I would. I know he's in the leaves, he's in the trees, he's in every raindrop and every muddied blade of grass. He's everywhere I am, everywhere I've been and everywhere I'm going. But it doesn't make me miss him any less.

I know it's just me being wishful and hoping that my daddy is watching over me, but I know it's just my heart and my mind playing tricks on me, hoping to see him walking up the path, open the door and catch my eight year old self flying into his waiting arms.

But it's just the breeze, and just the leaves rustling in the gentle changing of the weather. The sky is getting grey and the days are getting shorter. Soon it will be winter, and there will be frost on the bare tree limbs and the flowers will all be long dead.

I do miss being alone and introspective, I hope that there are still lonely and introspective teenagers out there, and that they don't feel so alone when they feel gentle breezes or rain drops that fall on bare cheeks. I hope no one feels so lonely when they hear the leaves rustling in the wind, and that everyone has a marvelously beautiful fall, wherever you are.

A Week and Five Days!!

Finally some good weather! It took freakin long enough for it to get here, but it's here and it is glorious, but it is going away on Sunday so I'm hanging on to it with every fiber of my being.

We're going to... you guessed it... PTOWN! this weekend! I'm so excited. I love nowhere else on this Earth the way that I love Provincetown. I'm sure there will be pictures after the weekend.

Two weeks from today I'll be in London, and I will have been there for two days! It's so surreal... I can hardly believe that just a few months ago studying abroad was a fleeting thought and now all of a sudden it's here and it's real and my suitcases are empty and glaring at me from across the room (they're saying "Rachel, you really can't put off packing us much longer..."). I'm going to miss everyone from home so much, and all of my college friends. A lot of my friends are seniors this year and I'm missing one whole half of their senior year. I'm missing four months of my little kitten's young life. I'm missing my one year anniversary with Hillary, apartment hunting and quality time.

I'm not too concerned about missing our one year because Hill knows that I love her and that every moment we have together is a gift, months and years don't matter, rather the most important aspect is the amount of love and happiness that fills those months and years. I'll miss her sleep breathing and setting the alarm clock fifteen minutes later and pulling her in to my arms for just a little bit longer. I'll miss playing with her hair on car rides while she drives. I'll miss climbing mountains with her and visiting my nieces and nephew with her and going out to dinner and holding hands under the table and going to the movies and putting my arm around her and letting her head rest on my shoulder. I'll probably even miss arguing with her over trivial things, things I only pick fights about because I know in the end she will still love me, if I thought for a minute she would stop loving me I would never argue about anything. She's a one of a kind kinda girl, and this is a one of a kind kinda love.

I'll miss all my friends from home, but I always miss them anyways. Kate and Natasha are so wrapped up in school and their new lives that I hardly ever see them anyway. I feel kind of like they don't appreciate the fact that I'm going to be 3,000 miles away for nearly four months and that they won't see me or likely talk to me for that amount of time. But I supposed, at this stage in our lives, I'm really only of use to them when they're home from school (if I'm home from school at the same time). I'll send them a postcard or two, but they won't understand that I miss them and that I love them, because they don't miss me and I'd venture to say that they don't love me anymore. It's all growing up though, I s'pose.

Molly and Rob and Jaime are all different stories. Rob and Jaime work all the time, and it's difficult to coordinate hanging out with them. I do feel, though, that they miss me when I'm not around and that they love me and that they appreciate the distance and length of time I will be away. Molly is the one person out of all of my friends from home who I am sure will miss me and appreciates that I will be gone for a long time and that I will be virtually unreachable a great deal of the time. If I retain a relationship with any of these people, I believe Molly will be the one with whom I still have a strong relationship in the coming years, even when I move to MA.

I'll miss my family, even though I don't see them as often as I would like, at least I know that if I need anything they are a phone call away for the most part. I visited my grandmother on Nantucket last Friday, and even though my grandmother remembers me as a 13 year old, she does recognize me (although she is shocked that I am as tall as I am, since the last time she remembers seeing me I was in rollerblades and overalls, speeding around the parking lot in her retirement community), but it's incredibly depressing to have a member of your family with Alzheimers. I needed to see her, though, because the last time I saw her was Thanksgiving two years ago, and if she were to die while I was in London I would never forgive myself for not seeing her in two years.

My mother will be the one who misses me the most, I am sure. She likes to pretend that she is okay without me, and she is, but I know she misses me and my crazy antics and she will find it strange that I don't call her in the afternoons when I know she is headed home just so we can shoot the breeze for a few minutes. She'll have difficulty not driving to my school on Saturday afternoons to pick me up and take me out to dinner or to take the T in the Boston with me to go to a museum. She'll worry about me constantly until my feet are planted safely on the ground on December 20th at Logan. It makes me feel good to know that she cares, but at the same time I worry that I am the cause of her suddenly more grey hair.

I'll try to blog often while I'm in Europe, and I'll try to have significantly more pictures than I usually do. This is the chance of a lifetime, I'm so glad to have this wonderful opportunity and I can't wait to share my experiences with everyone!

The Great Pumpkin

I feel like the last time I carved a pumpkin was probably when I lived in Hartford, just nearing on a million years ago now. I have lots of great Hartford stories, but no great pumpkin stories.

That was a great pumpkin reference for Peanuts fans. I never understood why Marcy always called Peppermint Patty "Sir." It sends me into a fit of giggles every time I think about it.

Anywho, so I carved a pumpkin tonight. The reason I haven't carved a pumpkin in so long probably has something to do with the fact that you end up with pumpkin seeds and pumpkin mush all up to your armpits. It's wicked gross, I basically ran back and forth between the bathroom and the pumpkin carving area every single time I picked a handful of mush out of the pumpkin. I can't stand that sticky gross feeling, gives me the heeby jeebies just thinking about it. I'll be smelling like pumpkins for weeks, yum. My pumpkin started out as a cat that evolved into several other things as the evening progressed and my mind wandered further and further into the gutter. I would put up a picture but I am quite ashamed as to how it turned out, and some things are better left in the gutter.

Happy pumpkin carving and apple cider drinking and corn maze wandering season!!!