New Space, Read On.*
*Addendum - Thus Dutch will be preserved in its entirety here, and I'll warn ya over at Thought Flesh if I'm going to post something new here (possible, if I go back to Europa).
08 July 2008
21 June 2008
A Note On Re-Entry
It's less strange than I expected to be, or perhaps it would be better to say that I could not and did not predict the ways in which it is strange. That said, I have so much more re-entering to do. I've only spent one full day in Buffalo since I've been back, what with jetting off to the Cape and the Big Apple and whatnot. And St. Paul is a whole new kettle of fish to tackle. I do think I want to keep blogging, although doing it in this space seems weird to me. I'm going to keep Thus Dutch as a travel blog, and I'm going to make a new one for anything that happens in America. I have to organize myself first though, and decompress a little. Stay tuned. Much love to all.
08 June 2008
Last Daze
Today is my last day, and I still have 5000 words to write. Can't focus. I'm wandering around my room reading highlighting pacing eating putting things in garbage bags trying to decide how best to get to the airport compulsively checking my email making a bibliography turning the fan on and off cleaning crying. I can't finish anything I start, it seems. What wreckage.
I couldn't have asked for a better last few days here, with everyone. Wednesday made a last round through Kitsch Kitchen, La Tertulia. Thursday night the Bitterzoet for the very very last time, everyone ecstatic, burning through joy liquor sorrow confusion and the building set of tensions within each of us as we prepare emotionally for departure (or fail to). A snapshot of the amazing : Hallie broke out her moves! Hipsters passing their hipster hats all around for everyone to wear, a case full of perfect cigs rolled en avance and on the dancefloor, a round robin of badass she-js, boyz in backpackz, a new height to our collective euphoria. Moshing with strangers, first ODB then Bodyrox then Dead Prez then don't push me...i don't wannaaaaa! then Bloc Party then A-ha. So many jams. Everyone happy pushing each other spilling beer on each other hugging kissing each other, friends and strangers alike, hands over shoulders, boys in pinstripe shirts with beautiful fros, girls with open shirts and black bras and Euro mullets, the requisite Rastas chillin' with their blunts in the corners, nodding. Four hours later we spill wet with beer and sweat and happiness into the street and lie down on the curb to reflect/pick glass out of our shoe-bottoms, trudge home elated. The best last night at the Bitterzoet that anyone could ask for. I danced so HARD with all of my being and screamed and stood next to the amp and I don't know when I'll next get to do that, certainly don't know when I'll next get to do that without a slew of worries attached. Texaco for ijsjes and water on the way home, up early Friday for one last lunch with Letje and Christy at our favorite cafe where we went faithfully every Wednesday, sat on a canal for an hour or two dangling feet watching birds getting viciously sunburned, wandered the Jordaan and Museumplein, yesterday Waterloo and the Resistance Museum and Alex's fake birthday (her real one is tomorrow) and a songs-of-our-youth singalong that lasted long into the night.
In the immortal words of our beloved Aaron Carter, circa House of Carters, my heart is so big right now. I feel like I'm straining so hard to preserve everything in every variety of sensory memory.
love is like tryin' to drink with no glass, cuppin' water in your hands tryin' to make it hold fast,
but be careful, sometimes the harder you grasp the quicker you lose your grip,
sip slow, make it last, everybody's gotta follow their path, and sometimes those of others intermingle with ours...
My cup runneth over. Everything about this place, these people, moments where I catch the eyes of others on the street or the bus or the tram, moments where I stop and look around me, the way my belly felt as I tried to rest in the sand on our last beach day, the way my arm felt when I woke up this morning having slept on it, crisscrossed with lines from my sheets, the way my headphones rest snugly in my ears, the way the air felt loose with storm-memory as I shuffled to school for the last time eating rasberries on Thursday, the particular combination of Christy and I jumping and shrieking trying not to burn our fingers lighting 21 candles on a cake from Albert Heijn, the particular combination of the six of us sitting in one room talking singing observing laughing. I had to stop in the middle of the party and clean the kitchen (not mine) until I calmed down, scrub, pour and consolidate. All of these things hit me BAM in the heart. I'm nothin' but a ball of nerve endings, hurtling through stimulus absorbing and feeling. A hyperconnection to my physical body in this sense of it transporting/creating memory and reacting to its surroundings, a huge disconnect in the sense of moderation, normalcy, what I put into it.
Alex wrote a beautiful post that expresses so much of what I'm feeling, the wants and not wants and, I think, most of all, the sense of community that we have here. It is us, the group of us who have bundled together and braved and enjoyed everything in concert with each other, but it is also more than us. Know, my lovely Amsterdam fambly, that I will be thinking of you always. I will be thinking of you when I leave my room finally in its barren state, I will be thinking of you hearing Dutch around me for the last time on the train to Schiphol, I will be thinking of you sitting exhausted in planes and airports, I will be thinking of you when I am home and it doesn't quite feel like home, in Minnesota when I am making sandwiches and sweating through the unbearable heat and dancing and laughing and taking walks with people who are not you.
I carry your hearts, I carry them with me in my heart.
04 June 2008
03 June 2008
I'm cracking down on my field experience paper, which is stressing me out to no end - I made an experiment out of it, in the hopes that I would discover some sort of new and exciting medium between academic research and narrative/creative/highly descriptive writing. I'm starting to despair a bit. I think I can yank myself out of it, it's just that I need to stop setting these grandiose change-the-world-in-one-semester goals and start just seeing what happens when I try hard.
Yesterday we went to the beach, for what is sposed to be the last beautiful day we have here. Tim and Christy and Alex fell asleep and I took creepy pictures of them napping in the sand. There was a really cute baby in a pink bandana running away from his mama, and a realistic seagull kite. A coke cost 3 euros, but I got one anyway. M+Ms were eaten, water was waded in. I have a strange sunburn on 1/2 of my right arm. Came home, ate falafel, wrote.
Yesterday we went to the beach, for what is sposed to be the last beautiful day we have here. Tim and Christy and Alex fell asleep and I took creepy pictures of them napping in the sand. There was a really cute baby in a pink bandana running away from his mama, and a realistic seagull kite. A coke cost 3 euros, but I got one anyway. M+Ms were eaten, water was waded in. I have a strange sunburn on 1/2 of my right arm. Came home, ate falafel, wrote.
30 May 2008
Wind-Down
My memory is a funny thing - highly sensory - sort of photographic, but more like cinematic. I can usually tell ahead of time when a moment is going to become a memory - a certain combination of senses hitting me at once in the head, the heart, the gut. These days my brain is working overtime to capture and store indefinitely, and I can do nothing but stand, rooted, when it hits me - watching C. buy flowers in the Dappermarkt, strolling along the Leidsestraat in the light rain, making lists of the last things I have to buy, see, photograph, walk through, do; the last benches I have to sit and write on, the last times (for a while, anyway), that I will laugh and dance, talk, drink, eat, listen, observe, with this constellation of people who I have entwined myself with in Nederland.
I think that leaving Amsterdam is going to be harder for me than leaving anywhere else has been, although it always rips at my heart a little to be transplanted. I've grown up here in a sense - navigated a language barrier, a bicycle, new neighborhoods, new ways of teaching and learning, making friends of my own accord,pursued curiosity rather than fear, taken care of myself, begun to integrate myself, and chosen things to love wholly without the influence of people I knew, emulated, adored, or needed before I came here. Even in Saint Paul, in the beginning, I had the comfort of a small campus and people who lived in the rooms directly surrounding me, moreover, I had the examples of cousins and bookstore friends and parents and people I had known my whole life to build upon and follow, a set of ideas about what college and liberal arts college and the Midwest could do for me. Here, I did not have that - I was ready, after years of fear and self-examination and worry and slow, steady rehabilitation from these things, to stumble into the world on my own shakey toddler legs, and I did, and I could not predict or regulate what would be difficult or easy, and I loved being thrown into that maelstrom fiercely, with all my heart. I'm concerned that I have/will become addicted to change of environment, reinvention, and the constant set of challenges and rewards spit at me from living in an unfamilier culture. Despite the fact that I am emotionally preparing to leave, wrapping things up, buying and taking pictures of last things, grappling with what it will be like to leave the life I have begun to build here, despite the fact that pieces of my heart are firmly grounded in Buffalo, Eagle, Saint Paul, North Truro, Many Glacier, Trumansburg, despite the fact that I love so many people who are not here, despite the fact that I am young still and far from full-grown, or even mature, I think in some ways I will always think of Amsterdam, of Nederland, as my first adult home.
Two nights ago, at the Bitterzoet, we listened to a Dutch funk family band blow the roof off for two solid hours. They were sweating, they were smoking, they were belting. The drummer sang a la Levon Helm, the bassist stuck his tongue out when he was concentrating, the sax player moved every part of his body except his arms, the lead singer was the one of the teeniest tiniest frailest looking waifs of a white girl I have ever seen, but she could have given Aretha a run for her money. They came back for an encore, the DJs began to spin - Sister Nancy, People Get Ready, A Tribe Called Quest for good measure. I was dehydrated, I had not been home for twelve hours, I was carrying my school bag on my right arm, I had just said goodbye to Letje, I was dancing with a familiar fever, a familiar smile. I looked around at my beautiful friends all concentrating, all happy, all busting moves that I have come to feel so much at home in the middle of. At the hipsters and go-go Dutch girls and slow rastas with beautiful dreads and scruffly young men with backpacks and headphones around their necks wagging their knees. And I teared up a little, realizing that I have only nine more nights of the potential to be surrounded by these particular characters and motions and sounds, to be in the midst of this particular mental film.
I'm not even entirely sure who my readership is, though I do know some. But whoever you are, I'd like you to think about whether you want me to continue this blog or not when I return, and let me know. I'm torn.
I think that leaving Amsterdam is going to be harder for me than leaving anywhere else has been, although it always rips at my heart a little to be transplanted. I've grown up here in a sense - navigated a language barrier, a bicycle, new neighborhoods, new ways of teaching and learning, making friends of my own accord,pursued curiosity rather than fear, taken care of myself, begun to integrate myself, and chosen things to love wholly without the influence of people I knew, emulated, adored, or needed before I came here. Even in Saint Paul, in the beginning, I had the comfort of a small campus and people who lived in the rooms directly surrounding me, moreover, I had the examples of cousins and bookstore friends and parents and people I had known my whole life to build upon and follow, a set of ideas about what college and liberal arts college and the Midwest could do for me. Here, I did not have that - I was ready, after years of fear and self-examination and worry and slow, steady rehabilitation from these things, to stumble into the world on my own shakey toddler legs, and I did, and I could not predict or regulate what would be difficult or easy, and I loved being thrown into that maelstrom fiercely, with all my heart. I'm concerned that I have/will become addicted to change of environment, reinvention, and the constant set of challenges and rewards spit at me from living in an unfamilier culture. Despite the fact that I am emotionally preparing to leave, wrapping things up, buying and taking pictures of last things, grappling with what it will be like to leave the life I have begun to build here, despite the fact that pieces of my heart are firmly grounded in Buffalo, Eagle, Saint Paul, North Truro, Many Glacier, Trumansburg, despite the fact that I love so many people who are not here, despite the fact that I am young still and far from full-grown, or even mature, I think in some ways I will always think of Amsterdam, of Nederland, as my first adult home.
Two nights ago, at the Bitterzoet, we listened to a Dutch funk family band blow the roof off for two solid hours. They were sweating, they were smoking, they were belting. The drummer sang a la Levon Helm, the bassist stuck his tongue out when he was concentrating, the sax player moved every part of his body except his arms, the lead singer was the one of the teeniest tiniest frailest looking waifs of a white girl I have ever seen, but she could have given Aretha a run for her money. They came back for an encore, the DJs began to spin - Sister Nancy, People Get Ready, A Tribe Called Quest for good measure. I was dehydrated, I had not been home for twelve hours, I was carrying my school bag on my right arm, I had just said goodbye to Letje, I was dancing with a familiar fever, a familiar smile. I looked around at my beautiful friends all concentrating, all happy, all busting moves that I have come to feel so much at home in the middle of. At the hipsters and go-go Dutch girls and slow rastas with beautiful dreads and scruffly young men with backpacks and headphones around their necks wagging their knees. And I teared up a little, realizing that I have only nine more nights of the potential to be surrounded by these particular characters and motions and sounds, to be in the midst of this particular mental film.
I'm not even entirely sure who my readership is, though I do know some. But whoever you are, I'd like you to think about whether you want me to continue this blog or not when I return, and let me know. I'm torn.
25 May 2008
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