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The Abridged Journals [entries|archive|friends|userinfo]
[friends only]

[ i | about the author ]
[ will | the library ]
[ write | an attempted plot ]
[ you | characters I know ]

Maria in English [Aug. 29th, 2007|07:58 am]
[Tags|, , ]
[I feel | sleepy.]
[listening to |a bee caught in the curtains.]

Maria in English | May 28

 

“Knob” says a white slip of paper in blue pen above the handle on the door. When she asked me last night what it was we use to open the door I had to think a moment once or twice, because it just comes natural to me. All over our room there are papers in the same form with English terms on them – sink, shelf, desk, drawer.

 

So this is Maria in English. There are quite possibly many errors in this description due to misunderstandings in translation and a tarnished American perspective. Maria is originally from Venezuela, but she moved to Spain four years ago because her mother was getting a degree. She has a younger sister who is about fifteen, and the beautiful daughter it seems from pictures and stories told by Maria of her sisters boyfriends. She came to Newbold with help from her cousin, Daniel, in order to learn English. Daniel is twenty-six and this will be his fourth year here. He’s tall, built, has dark hair and blue eyes, like a softened Greek god and wears a childish looking blue watch on his wrist. Every night he calls Maria to tell her goodnight. The way he winks at me makes me feel like a little girl more than someone you can’t seem to look at with both eyes because she’s so gorgeous, instead you have to wink. Which is what I’d rather his reason be.


Maria is younger than me. “I have secret to tell,” she says, with her eyes big and her shoulders slouched, “I am alen.” “Huh?” I said, “Oh, alien!” And I laugh. I laugh a lot, mostly because it shows an understanding that isn’t always there. I took two years of Spanish, but all I can remember is John 3:16, and how to ask for the bathroom. I can still read it a little, but nothing much. She does far better in English than I do Spanish.

 

I am an adaptable person, but no one is like Maria. When I first met her, I thought she was shy and quiet, but after a few nights together, I’ve discovered she’s quite the opposite. She never stops talking, as though she thinks you may forget her existence if she does. “I don’t know you,” she says to some girl from Japan and then continues to introduce herself. I’ve met a lot of people this way. In so many ways she reminds me of a six year old – so many questions, goofy jokes, teasing. It’s a little exhausting. She like science, and I prefer English. She doesn’t understand why I write, but don’t write a book. We get along all right, but I need space from time to time. And here, I feel like I’m being watched, like some animal in a zoo. I go to read a book and she asks me about it and then goes into a long ramble of a book she read when she was twelve. “If I annoy, just tell me,” she says in a broken English. But I just smile and laugh. I feel like putting a label on her mouth that says, “Quiet.”

 

Even still, I’m glad to have a roommate who talks and isn’t a girl from Finland who spends all her time with her fiancé. She’s already invited me to Spain. So I may get to see it a little after all. Then she can put labels all over the house in Spanish, so that I may learn to be a Heather en español.  

A Place Without a Restroom | May 29

Maria has nominated me her translator, so I stood in line with her for registration and then I went through myself.

 

Everyone here is well traveled, they speak more languages, and know more about what they are doing, and it’s so intimidating. I feel like a postage stamp on a package that has no real destination, so it wanders from place to place.

 

It’s so much easier to meet people here; you stand in a queue and you leave it with four new friends from Spain, Brazil, England, and Mexico. I don’t know if it’s because I am different here, or people are different here. I do feel more brave and confident, because there are few expectations of who I am and should be.

 

I love the diversity. Here, your heritage is not just a history lesson from your grandparents; if you’re Japanese, you’re from Japan. I’ve met a few boys from Brazil with their light eyes and dark everything else, who are very nice. I hate that I have trouble remembering names, especially when they’re said with thick accents – Abigail sounding ling Abgi.

 

After standing in queue’s all day, and meeting more people whose names I forget a moment after I hear them, I finally had my classes. I’m not accustomed to the semester system and am not sure how I’ll handle two periods of one class, but it’s nice to be able to spread things out a little more. I didn’t really get to take all I wanted, and had to convince my tutor that I had enough English to take an upper division course. I only hope that I’m here for the second semester as well, it may be a bit hard to finish up a history course I started here. Anyway, my schedule:

 

Time

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

9:00-9:50

Daniel  &

 Modern

 

 

 

10:00-10:50

Revelation

 Literature

 

 

 

11:00-11:50

 

 

 

 

Civilization

12:00-12:50

 

 

 

Modern Lit.

& Ideas

2:00-2:50

Daniel &

 

 

Civ. & Ideas

 

3:00-3:50

Revelation

 

 

 

 

4:00-4:50

 

Enjoyment      o    of

 

World Music

 

5:00-5:50

 

World Music

 

 

 

7:00-7:50

 

 

 

 

 

 

My tutor said Daniel and Revelation might be more intense, but should be easier than if I were to take two religion courses. Modern Literature is an upper division course intended for third and fourth year students, but after we talked a bit he said he was willing to let me attempt it. Civilization and Ideas is like world history, I was rather sad that I didn’t get to take American History, but it’s not offered this semester, the same with Creative Writing and Fine Arts. So instead, I’m taking Enjoyment of World Music. It’s a fun class where you get to listen to all kinds of music and travel a bit to see plays and operas. It was either that or Drama. My tutor was the drama director I believe, because he tried convincing me to do Drama. Apparently they’re doing Hamlet and I told him I’d read the book quite in depth, but drama is so much work.


I still feel completely unprepared and unfamiliar with how things work. I have no books, no idea where my classes are located, and I’m not even sure how many credits I have. I suppose I should ask someone. But right now, it's time for a nap. I never knew standing could be so exhausting.

 

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Roses I Don't Deserve [Aug. 28th, 2007|02:43 pm]
[I feel | sleepy.]
[listening to |Maria sounding out English words.]



He gave me a red rose that I placed in a Volvic bottle on my desk. All we wanted was something to eat, but it was 9:30 and everyone we asked told us that most the kitchens would all have been shut up for the night. “There’s Chinese take out across the way there,” said a man more a boy with just a small trace of a mustache. “Little Indian place around the corner too,” he added skipping the “t’s” and moving right to the end of the word little and never pronouncing the “d’ in around. After trying dry white rice and chow mein at a Chinese restaurant in Bracknell a few days before we decided to attempt the Indian food instead.


 


We spent most the day in Windsor, looking through the castle and the shops. The queen was not there, but she does normally stay there on the weekends. It was bank holiday, so the entire bit of southern England was there too, along with all the tourists. Japanese dressed in bright colors and socks in sandals, Americans with their loud voices and questions, and others I couldn’t place.


 


We saw miniature versions of palaces in the Doll House exhibit, and dolls who wore dresses that cost more than my own clothes. We walked through an exhibit that contained pictures drawn by Michelangelo and DiVinci, as well as old photographs of past royals, jewelry, and silk gloves that still look brand new. “When do we get to see the queen mummy?” A little boy with blonde hair said with his nose pressed to the glass. “She’s right there,” his mother replied just to answer, as though she’d heard the question all day. “In that little glass box?” He retorted unconvinced. “No it’s a picture,” she said and he scrunched up his nose and wrinkled his brows confused.


 


We had tea at a café in the a sort of outlet outside the castle, and mostly window shopped because most of the stores close right at 5:30, not 5:29, not 5:31. Eventually, we finished looking at paintings, going through shops, and reading about history I’m sure I’ll forget in a week – there’s just way too much – and decided to go on a drive through the country.


 


The thing about England is on a map it seems to look so much bigger. The distance between one place and another look daunting there, just dots with wide spaces in between, like paint splattered sloppily on a page. Instead of big cities, there are towns dropped all over the countryside, each one a bit different, with pubs called The White Horse or Roebucks full of people laughing and watching football.


 


Eventually we saw brown signs for The Vail of the White Horse and decided to take a look, it was nothing much but a chalk trace on a hillside that you can’t really take a proper picture of unless you’re up in the air. After walking around a bit taking pictures before the sun went down, we decided to drive into the town of Uffington to find food. We stopped at a bar called The Fox and Hound and asked about supper, but were told by a woman with curly hair and red cheeks that it was Bank Holiday and most kitchen’s would be closed. Before we could get back in the car, an echo of voices came from the bar. “Come in, come in,” they all said. So we stayed and talked a bit about the French, Wales, Scotland and history. “What are you studyin’?” Asked a bloke named James. “Nursing,” I said. “Ah, I’ve got a bit of a bad leg here that needs checkin’ out,” he said and the entire bar laughed while the man in the corner said in a bit of a slurry speech. “I’be got big feets.” “To keep him from falling over,” said Dave. Laughter again, while big foot squinted his eyes. Dave bought us all a round of drinks and we stayed awhile. Mom went outside and talk with a fellow more capable of conversation, while Nana went on a history rant with a white haired man at the bar. I sat there laughing at jokes told by drunk Englishmen who repeat one another’s jokes, but it only makes it more funny. Eventually they said goodbye, James kissed my hand as they left and I knew I was blushing and wished I wasn’t.


 


Not long after them we left, our stomachs still rumbling. We stopped in a small town called Wantage that looks like every other small town in England – town square, brick buildings with plants growing in between the bricks, inn’s and bars lit up. And then there we all were in The House of Spice where a Bengali man with a name I’ll never be able to pronounce took our menu’s and chose all our dinner’s like we were queens. There was naan bread, rice, curry with chicken, curry with lamb, and a popular curry in Britain.


 


At the end of the meal, he gave me a rose because that’s what they do for all the lady customers. “But we only have one rose left, so I give it to you,” he said and wished me luck in my studies and to call him if I ever eat at The House of Spice again.


 


So on my desk is a red rose that I feel like I don’t even deserve, but still it reminds me of how in England I am like a queen in comparison to life at home.



 


 

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Wanting In a Juvenile Way [Jul. 10th, 2007|04:01 pm]
[I feel | crushed by an elephant.]
[listening to |dogs snoring.]

   Moors

I may not be getting a Mac. But more importantly, this may be the only view of England that I ever get to see - me sitting in my bed looking at pictures of last year, wearing just a t-shirt, smelling of toothpaste and covered in tears and doggy kisses. I wanted it to work out. People continued to tell me, "Dont worry, it'll sort itself out in the end." But it's the end and it isn't sorted, it's just over. I know I'm being dramatic, that I could do it in a few years if I wanted. I'm just terribly frustrated and disappointed that things aren't going like I wanted. I wanted to get on a plane for England in the fall. I wanted to study abroad for a year - not a summer, not 4 months. I wanted to go to museums and take pictures of purple fields and sheep I have to sneak up on. I wanted to sketch odd trees and fall in love with boys who speak Italian or French. I wanted the impossible.

But my life isn't like the movies where the cripple gets up and walks, or everyone is happy, or two people fall in love and grow old together. It's a mess. I feel like someone just took me apart, stomped all over me and said with a wicked grin, "Fix that."

The thing is, I'm too poor to pay for a trip abroad, and too childish to remember to call the right people before it's too late. I haven't had the right math and it's required for the program I tried to get into. And it may be too  late to take a placement test that I'm probably too stupid to pass anyway. I need at least $15,000. I need it fast. The college I tried to get into isn't accredited by any of the banks I've called, or the loan programs I've emailed. I'm just ready to give up.

I guess, I was just wanting in that juvenile way for everything to sort itself out. So now, it may be over before it started.

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An Out of Money Experience [May. 29th, 2007|04:39 pm]
[Tags|, ]
[I feel | very poor]
[listening to |While My Guitar Gently Weeps | Beatles]


Money Matters | Loan Letter


Dear Sallie Mae International,


I apologise for the uncouth nature of this email, but I am about to have a midlife crisis a little early. You see, I am nearly through with my first year of college and I thought it would be nice to get away from the sunshine and travel a bit in England while studying.. What I mean is that I have been planning to study abroad at a college in England , located in a town not far out of London. However, I am facing a few difficulties. I’m attempting to support myself through school, which inherently means a lot of loans and holes in my pockets. But it’s a lot more complicated than that, because I’m dumb as a doornail when it comes to money and it seems the only way you can get anywhere in life these days is with it. Bob Hope said, “A bank is a place that will lend you money if you prove that you don’t need it.” I’ve been trying vigorously to get an acceptance letter from the college I plan to attend, because they’ve claimed I’m accepted but keep telling me that I need to make payments for half years tuition as well as the equivalent of a 300 pound down payment (which is something like $600 in American money). It all equals up to about $5,400 that I have to get in soon or else I will be unable to get my VISA. But I’m not like their queens and ladies; I don’t have $5,400 lying around in some ornate coffee table drawer. But it gets worse. In order to get my student VISA so that I can reside legally in Britain for almost a year I need an acceptance letter for the school I plan to attend, but in order to get that acceptance letter I need money, but in order to get money I need a loan, but to get a loan I need an acceptance letter from the college. Life is just a long run-on right now. I’m sure you can see, I am in a bit of a pickle. And it seems that whenever I ask anyone for help they just send me off to another person, like an ongoing game of tag and I’m always It. I’m beginning to think I should give up and move to the streets of San Francisco where I’ll dress in all I own and hold up a sign all day that says, “Call Sallie Mae before it’s too late, or you may end up like me – a student without a college.” I’m starting to learn that you should never get so poor that you procrastinate and don’t pay attention to money matters. Thank you for your patience and for helping keep a student off the cold, terrible streets of San Francisco.


Begging for food money already,


Heather L



The Response | Loan Letter


Loved your email, but, unfortunately, the [college you plan to attend] does not participate in the Federal Education Loan Program (Stafford and PLUS Loans). Sallie Mae does not have a loan relationship with the school. We will be unable to assist you with a loan. I would encourage you to contact the school for financial aid options they may have available to American students attending there. Good luck!

Regards,
Sallie Mae International



      _______________________________________________

So, I may end up a bum on the streets of San Francisco but at least I write amusing emails. Maybe I could start a job writing letters. Yes, I’ll call myself Post for Procrastinators.



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Remember Everything [Apr. 4th, 2007|07:12 pm]
[Tags|, ]
[I feel | blah (that is a word).]
[listening to |Patrick Watson |]





I Am | John Clare


I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live - like vapors tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I loved the best,
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.
_______________________________________________________________

Remember everything I once wrote sloppily across my Anatomy notebook. Not because the names of bones and muscles intimidated me or because I wanted to remember how my professors eyes seemed to bulge from his head like he had Grave’s Disease. No, I want to remember everything, because I am so afraid of forgetting everything. Because if I forget, who will remember? So, I write to remember.

Yet, in order to be remembered you must first be known, and I am hardly known. So perhaps I write to exist. Yet, my biggest flaw is my inability to express myself, because of this I will never be really known, and because of this I will never truly exist. The truth is, I cannot write about where my story began, where I am now, or where I am going, because I feel that I am a ghost. Even still, I selfishly long to become immortal like the gods, to freeze myself in time with words, like all the great writers do. Like Shakespeare did Hamlet and Melville did Moby Dick. I want to be critiqued, stripped apart and given labels that mean something, like muscles, bones, and microorganisms. Instead, I am a volume of thought that some love and others hate, but no one really understands. I hate to be misunderstood. It is that which makes me feel most lonely, knowing that even in a room full of friends not one of them could tell me who I am when my memory fails me, when words fail me.


I may worry over what will become of me when I am gone, but even more so, I worry of who I am here and now. I call myself a writer, an artist, a philosopher, when I don’t even really know who I am. There are times when I think that the reason our existence is so fleeting is that we never really seemed to exist at all. Alain de Botton said, "Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing; that we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying; that, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved." With all my hiding, all my secrets, all my solitude and loneliness, I have never been so loved by another that my existence has been legitimized. So, 'Will I be remembered?' becomes replaced with 'Who was I to ever be remembered?' Perhaps it is ridiculous of me to think that I have yet to exist in the way a renowned philosopher or writer does. Right now, I am like a hypothesis. The start of an idea yet to be tested, a theory yet to be agreed upon, or a law yet to be established. My fear is not that I may never be proven, remembered, or talked about in years to come, but that I may not even be spoken of during the time that I am here in this world. I may never be known. For, how can we expect to exist when we leave the world, if we did not exist while we were alive in it?

 

I am envious of those who wake up in the morning and skip a class to go the beach or hop on a plane to travel to islands that are so small, that on a map their names dwarf them. I want to smoke a cigarette and not wonder if it will kill me in the future. I want to tell people how I really feel and not have to worry how it will make them feel. I want to write all day and night from a balcony in Italy or France. I want to become – to exist in the ways that threaten my very existence.

 

If I was really existing, I woudn’t be questioning if I was.

 




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Becoming a Story [Feb. 23rd, 2007|08:11 pm]
[Tags|]
[I feel | like writing]
[listening to |Anyone Else But You | Moldy Peaches]



Dear Somebody,

Always I am writing letters, but I rarely send them. Mostly because I write letters to people I don’t even know. For example when I was eight, I ripped out a page from my mother’s daybook and scrawled in red pencil:

Dear Postman,

Happy Valentines Day!

I watch you drive to my house every day and I always wave but you never see me. I think you’re very punctual. I know what that word means because today my mother said I wasn’t when I woke up late for school and made her late for her meeting at work. And I guess that’s why this letter is late. I know Valentines was last week, but my teacher said over and over again that we get Valentines for everyone so that no one feels left out and last night while I was sleeping I realized I’d written one for Mr. Stanson across the street but I forgot about you. I’m sorry and hope you will forgive me. Maybe you can write me back and tell me how to be more punctual.

Love,

Heather

I carefully folded the letter and drew a lopsided heart on the other side. I waited all the next day until he came and I waved from the window. After he left, I went to see if he wrote me back, but the only thing left was a folded paper with a lopsided heart. In disappointment, I ripped it apart. That was the first time my heart was broken.

There were other letters filled with explanations to Santa Claus for when I was bad, to Tooth Fairy who seemed too busy to leave a dollar under my pillow, and the Easter Bunny asking why my bunnies never laid chocolate eggs. I wrote letters to my mother asking her if she missed my dad and to my dad asking him why he didn’t love my mother the way she wanted him to. I still sit on coffee shop corners or on rusty benches in parks writing letters to old men walking by, or fathers with their phones in one hand and kids in the other.

I'm beginning to find that every letter I write is a letter written to him. It makes me think of how I am like one of those characters in a book who is aged, alone and misunderstood. Their past sculpting their future, making large chips in a block of clay until it is almost nothing, instead of their hands forming eyes and ears and mending a heart. Somehow, they gave up on life and living. When I’m eighty instead of talking to him at the dinner table at breakfast while eating eggs and toast I’ll be writing to strangers about love and loss and how they are the same, because sometimes I am the girl who gave up, or maybe just the girl who gave into the past, or maybe just the past.

I write letters to soldiers who are alone not to comfort them but to seek solace and understanding in having to fight without support of others. I write letters to people in Egypt, Europe and unknown countries like Ghana and Niue not to find what is unfamiliar and different between my world and theirs but to see that sorrow is part of every country. I write letters to prisoners that committed murder and robbery and drug dealing to say that I’ve committed crimes too. I want to say to them, “I’m in a prison too. I am my own prisoner.”

Sometimes I get a reply asking me what my life is like, what I like to do, if I have a dog, how I am. I reply with more questions and stories about pets I’ve owned and my five-year-old goldfish that used to be gold but now he is white with old age. Somehow I slip in a few words of I’m fine or I’m okay, but there are no stories to show what I mean. To be honest I don’t really know. It just seems as though I can be whatever I want to be. I can be happy. I can be sad. I can be angry. I can be glad. It’s just that no matter the angle you look at it, you can always make it right. I have reasons to be everything and reasons to be nothing. I hardly understand how anyone can say with certainty I’m happy without saying I’m sad.

Maybe I write letters because I have something to say and no one to say them to, or I just like to listen to the sound of my own voice - to see the words I am saying. So I write and write and write. I want someone to write me back and say, “I know you. This is who you are.” Perhaps I write letters so that I can become the heroine and not just a flat character with no purpose other than to show how plain I am compared to others in this world. So, I fill every letter with stories, but not just stories, my stories. I want to be the story, so I can put myself in the palm of your hand and you can say to me “Yes. No. I understand.”

There is order, safety, and certainty in this. The page can keep me from going in every direction at once. And I can say, “I’m happy.” Without saying, “I’m sad.”

Some letters are addressed to friends telling them of my adventures and how there is so much I want to say but don’t, because my mother always used to shout at me, “Actions speak louder than words.” I told her I loved her by clearing the table after dinner, making my bed and hers in the morning, and dusting everything on Friday’s so she could relax on the weekend. I would hug her before I went to bed and again before she went to work.

When I took an advanced English course the year I was 17 the teacher always shouted from the front of the class, “Show don’t tell!” This is why I smile when people ask how I am, and the reason I frown while tears amble like old wise men down my cheeks when I remember something sad. It’s also the reason why I failed the writing class after turning in blank pages instead of should be stories about us, our first kiss, or embarrassing stories. I knew that any story I was to write of myself would be fictional because I’d exaggerate my good parts and I’d omit the bad. In the end, I’d be Heather from a story and not the Heather who sometimes thinks bad thoughts, draws circles around words she doesn’t know, or uses post-it’s to remember.

Once, I tried to stop writing letters, but I’d see a boy with black hair and orange sneakers singing the Eagles in the bookstore and I’d want to write him to ask if he knew that the song “Hotel California” was about an insane asylum. There are some things you can’t say with a smile or a frown, but they only complicate things. Because, maybe he’d say that he knew that already and I would feel stupid or maybe he’d say “No way” and ask for my number but I don’t really like to give out my number so he might feel stupid. Its best that I just smile and read Aldous Huxley.

I may not ever write a novel or a short story about my first kiss but I’ll never stop writing letters, even if they sit at home in notebooks and napkins and on receipts that no one gets to see. It may be immoral, for despite what they say, these words say more than I ever could with a smile, a frown, or the wave of my hand. A wave of my hand could mean “hello” or “goodbye” or “how are you?” or “I’m so happy to see you.” Though for now, if I were to wave my hand it would mean the same as if I were to say, “Goodbye.” Both speak pretty loudly, but humans were never very good at listening.

Simply,

Heather 


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