Alone!

Next year I’m making a costume whether I go somewhere or not. That much I promise.

And for any Americans who are baffled by the title of this post, I suggest you Google “Stars in Their Eyes”. You will see the worst tributes to Elton John you have ever seen.

I’m just about to start doing my I-751, or my ‘petition to remove the conditions of residence’ on my green card. It’s tricky business to say the least. My case has a bit of a red flag, what with all the drama that went on in 2007 so I’m a bit stressed about the correct presentation of proofs to substantiate my marriage to Andy. With this hurdle approaching, and Bardhi’s frustrating news about having to return to Kosovo prematurely, simply because he was unable to synchronise jumping through a paperwork-hoop with the USCIS, I’ve been feeling annoyed about immigration more and more. It really does my head in that the American Government can talk about giving amnesty to illegal immigrants when they can’t even grant a length of stay to perfectly legal ones without getting things confused and chucking people out of the country. It angers me that people like Bardhi, who are paying taxes, contributing to society, enriching America’s culture and not breaking laws are getting turfed out over mere paperwork glitches, while the government’s half toying with the idea of letting people who aren’t paying taxes receive a coveted US passport without so much as a slap on the wrist for jumping a fence and dodging the thousand-dollar paperwork the rest of us immigrants had to plough through.

Bardhi and i were gchatting about our various immigration problems when he showed me this, no doubt in defence of America the Beautiful:

I especially love the woman in red giving her chair-pants the game-show-girl Hand of Glamour.
God bless America, and may inventions like this be real.

One Summertime in Provo I needed petrol and fast, so I stopped at 7-11. The car windows were rolled down because it was super toasty. There were a hundred Cougies milling around the forecourt clutching various flavours of Slurpee. While I waited patiently in my car for a petrol pump to free up, I realised that the song flooding my speakers was a split-second away from shouting an expletive I doubted the Cougies wanted to hear. I scrambled in an attempt to turn the volume down on the expletive (and then return the volume to normal), but I somehow managed to turn the volume down on the word “MOTHER” and max the volume out on an unsavoury word which can be obscenely con-joined with the word “MOTHER”. I have no idea how I managed this, and if you happen to be one of the sensitive Cougies I offended, I am sorry. I’m sure that Xhibit is sorry too. Yes I was listening to Xhibit, and no I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I was nineteen at the time and I only have like two of his songs anyway. I have no idea why I’m getting defensive over this. A prerequisite to even viewing this blog probably has something to do with owning at least one contrived-rap album.

Speaking of which, and I can’t believe I forgot this: while I was up at my mums the other weekend I turned on the TV and they were showing some of the UK’s worst music videos. This video was featured and I feel like if I had to wreck my day seeing it, it would only be fair to share the wreckage.

Steps, and Heartbeat. It’s more obscene than anything Xhibit could ever say. It’s like the Lion ate the witch, and the wardrobe was burned down by a couple pyro “little people”.

I’ve had this insufferable sense of not being able to get away from myself recently. Being alone, sick, and cooped up in London without any toys has made me realise that I can get sick of myself. There’s no meaningful outlet for anything in my flat. I can’t go out at night because I don’t exactly live in the South Downs, my pens are missing, I don’t have a violin or piano here, I can’t get my hands on too many books because I have no £ to buy them and the library for my catchment address is mainly stocked with “best-seller” rubbish, there’s no internet in my house right now, and no TV – so I can’t even mollify myself with mindless reprieve of IRON CHEF. I told Andy that I was feeling a bit cagey and sick of myself. He told me a thought he’d had while he trying to relate. He said maybe it was that sense of ’scraping the barrel’ that I was experiencing, when you want to produce something good and satisfying, but you just can’t and you’re left with yourself in that knowledge. I think that’s what the problem is. I want to produce something I am satisfied with – anything, a picture, cross-stitch, a BLOG POST even, but I can’t and I’m left with the reality that there is nothing in my mind worth scraping out, and like a Roomba programmed to vacuum beyond a room’s corner, I end up smacking my face against a wall instead of being useful in the room behind me.

What a horrible analogy.

By the way, Andy didn’t say that Roomba junk, I just wrote that for some reason. For an even stranger reason I am hesitant to delete it. Maybe because I love Roomba’s so much. Anyway. I’m trying to turn myself around. I ordered some new inks for my pens, and I’m going to create some sort of advent for Andy’s return to keep me cheerful. I’m off to a good start.

I made a derogatory comment about Bridals ages ago and I think I offended some people.
I just heard about “Groomals” today and am wondering if they are more open to mockage.

When I was a kid I watched this cartoon on Saturday mornings called “Once Upon A Time… Life”, which google told me was actually a dubbed French cartoon called “Il était une fois … la vie”.

It showed all the cells and bits and bobs inside the body as animate creatures. I used to imagine what it would be like to be so small and how I’d have to use dental floss to climb onto the kitchen counter to retrieve food, and how I would make a house inside a tissue box. About half a year ago while at work, it crossed my mind how Liliputians would have a field day on my desk, littered with bits and bobs of office supplies.
Then this morning when I picked up a Metro to read on the bus, I found an article about a photo stream from a French guy called Vincent Bousserez featuring mini-people!

I really enjoyed his photostream. You can find it here, on Flickr.

There are only seven other people on my degree course besides myself. One of them is a short Italian man called Gian de Franco who is probably about fifty years old, has a Law degree, an up-and-running psychoanalysis practice, and is somehow doing the same course I am. Most of the time I am intimidated by his knowledge of the subjects we study, but some of the time I am just transfixed by his hair. For all intents and purposes I believe he went bald, and then glued a toupée to the nape of his neck. He combs most of the hair up towards his scalp, but it does little to assuage my suspicions.

This week saw me hit the ‘fourteen weeks pregnant’ mark. This post is boring and just getting written for the record, so in short: I’m getting fatter and slightly less ill, school is kicking my trash but I figure that even if I just stay in the game I can get this Masters.

I got really worn out dealing with the all-day all-night all-singing all-dancing sickness I’ve been ailing with for the past seven weeks. It started subsiding (i.e. throwing up 3 times a day rather than 5) but it’s still rough. To make matters worse, I caught some sort of flu bug and developed a sinus infection which aggravated the nausea and somehow paved the way for something called a ‘throat spasm’. I felt like I’d swallowed a golf ball, was constantly choking on it AND I was forever blowing my nose, dealing with catarrh, and still throwing up. I basically turned into a barfing, tissue-ridden, mouth-breather for a few weeks there. I rode the throat spasm out, and the cold diminished but the nausea got worse again, so I gave up on gingersnaps/peppermint teas and went to the doctors.

I don’t really like going to the doctors. With basic health complaints, Doctors can only really diagnose from the symptoms you’re presenting, so if you present 2 + 2, obviously the doctor is going to come up with 4, even if you’re really suffering from 5.
I just reduced the fine art of diagnoses to elementary arithmetic. Bah!
Long story short, I got a prescription for Avomine, generic name: promethozine teoclate. I couldn’t help but fixate slightly around the ‘meth’ part of the name until I remembered it had more to do with nomenclature than getting me high. I’ve been taking it for almost a week now and I’m seeing some improvement. I have episodes of nausea, but the episodes actually pass, and I’m left feeling almost-normal for periods of almost an hour sometimes. Christmas Miracle! I’m reluctant to take drugs, but the throwing-up was getting so frequent that my throat was bleeding slightly. I can’t even imagine being bulimic – if it’s anything like my past two months it must be overwhelmingly exhausting. I know you all come here to read about bleeding throats, so I’ll be sure to mention that horror again.

I’ve only had two other sides effects of pregnancy: weight gain and rubbish skin. The weight gain is not too foreign to me; I’ve had my fair share of yo-yo weights depending on how many Wendy’s fries/Rice Kings/Pizzas/Oversized Desserts I’d eaten en masse that week. The bad skin is annoying though. Aside from the occasional Donny-Osmond spot, I never really had too troublesome of a complexion. Pregnancy has thrown my hormones and skin into undesirable territory however, and I’ve developed so many spots that I share an uncanny resemblance with a dot-to-dot puzzle of the Eiffel tower. In short, anyone who pretends I have the so-called “pregnancy glow” is asking for a smack.

The weight gain is sure and steady. Skinny Whippets like Sister-in-Law Liz and old co-worker Lauren are so foreign to fat that their only weight gain seems to show up around five months in the form of a shapely bump. I however have fallen on the more…. well insulated side of pregnancy, and have been retaining a nice blubbery coat of chub since about twelve weeks pregnant. I can’t really “watch what I eat” because I’ve had to become an impulse eater since feeling so sick. The nausea was/is accompanied by a shockingly strong sense of smell that usually prevents me from preparing healthy foods. Earlier this month I couldn’t so much as open the fridge without gagging and barfing up the last snack, nevermind prepare food from it’s raw components which probably smelled funny. Because of that, I just ate whatever appealed to me for the sake of getting something down and I’m sure that had adverse effect on my weight. Shame I’m not going to fall into the Liz & Lauren category of materno-morph, but so long as the baby is happy and healthy in there, I don’t mind.

In other news, I’ve been doing alright at school. The course is harder than I expected, the reading more tricky, and the professors grade hard. I’m already wondering if my chances of getting a Distinction flew out of the window with my last paper. This degree is less intuitive-psychobabble and more complicated, formula ridden theories that get my knickers in a twist. My main professor sounds like he’s speaking a different language sometimes. He’s friends with Zizek, who I guess is a hot button this pop culture season. I subscribe to a number of things Zizek purports, but he still sounds kind of self-absorbed to me. According to my professor, Zizek shot out a pompous email analysing the psychodynamics of 9/11 in less than 24 hours after the towers crumbled… I mean if that’s his coping mechanism then whatever, but it strikes me as more than a little callous to brag a hypothesis reducing people’s terror and loss into a paragraph of Lacanian junk, especially so immediate to the tragedy. That aside, things are good at school. I enjoy my professors weekly fashion show (this week it was a white, silky shirt with a wide collar eclipsing his suit lapel and open to his sternum, a waistcoat, dangly earring, and cowboy boots) and the campus is decent.

The title of this post is usually what I think when I think about speaking German.

I technically learned German for five years during High School (from age 11-16), but in reality, I only had one year of Germanic Education and four years experience giving substitute Frau’s nervous breakdowns. Well, not me personally, but my class in general. I was in Set 1 for German, which meant we were meant to be fairly smart, but what I really think it meant was that we all had short attention spans and no manner of Frau was going to steel us to learn our verbs, tenses and conjugations without putting up a fight. All the Frau’s we had, had surnames that rhymed with derogatory words, and I think that was somehow linked to the teachers always quitting after a few months.  I felt like I learned nothing more than how to get a room in a hotel, and tell people my favourite colours.

Andy and I are going to Berlin in December. I can not wait. Germany is an optimal location for Christmastime and Berlin is reputably a historical/cultural centre of sorts. Obviously, living in London and going to grad school has wiped the floor with our bank balance, so there won’t be any more of this European frolicking after Christmas; we’re going to make the most of Berlin. I suppose this means that I will need to remember more German than “I would like piece of cake WITHOUT cream, please” and “I like to learn Chemistry”.

If you live in Provo you should keep an eye on the board posted outside of the Chevron situated on the East side of State Street as you ascend the hill to Orem. Andy and I did, and were once rewarded by spotting a sign that proclaimed “GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY!”

I’m intoning Great Googly Moogly! today because inspite of the essay deadlines I have looming over my face, I have some exciting news to cling on to:

Andy is coming home in six weeks. SIX WEEKS, I tell ye!

It sounds like an eternity until I remember I’ve made it eight weeks without him so far,  and that I’m now well and truly over the half-way mark of loneliness. I am also infinitely grateful my loneliness has an end in sight, and tip my hat to those who are still fully capable of dealing with life solo. Around the time I started losing lunches in public bins, I realised that my ability to deal with life happily, and on my own, had diminished into something so small it could be eclipsed by a doughnut. I can not wait until Andy gets here. We are going to see every exhibit in town, eat every morsel of deliciousness we can find, and maybe even go and see one of them west-end musicals people keep squawking about. The word “squawking” looks really weird, more like Squaw-King, but google:define tells me it is correctly spelled.