Oh, my stars and garters!

-ing about -ing.

After a month of neglect, I just spent four hours catching up on all 42 blogs on my list. Damn, you guys write a lot.

I can't tell you exactly why, but this post was my favorite.

I'd like to find more blogs to link to now that I'm caught up. Just not tonight.

Welcome to my nightmare. (Rar!)

Roo posted about his recurring nightmare, in which he stops attending one of his college classes and forgets all about it until it's time for midterms. Then fear, despair, waste, failure, all completely avoidable. It's apparently a pretty common dream. I used to have a variation of it all the time too, until it actually happened.

It was a media law class, an interesting enough topic, taught by a nice enough guy. But he taught word-for-word from the text, class after class, which drove me nuts. Fuck this, I thought after a few weeks, I know how to read. I was working full time and had plenty of other, more difficult classes to work on, so I hit on a brilliant solution: I would read the book and skip all the classes except for the test-review and test days. 

You can see where this is going. I did well on every test up until the final and was confident of an easy A. There were about three weeks of classes between the last test and the final, so I busied myself with other projects, grateful for the extra time. I did a little reading for the last unit here and there but figured I'd save the real studying for after the review session. I was so proud to be gaming the system that whole semester. After all, wasn't that what college was really about?

Yeah, I'm smart. So goddamned smart that I showed up for the final review, ready to take copious notes, ace the final the next week, and proclaim my experiment an unqualified success. But something wasn't right. Why was everyone frantically consulting flashcards? Why were they sharpening their No. 2 pencils? Oh. My. Fuuuuuck.

At some point in the previous three weeks, the class had voted to throw out the syllabus, move the final up a week, and finish the class early. Of course I didn't know about it. I wasn't there.

I'd had this exact thing happen to me so many times in a dream that it took me several seconds to realize that it really was happening. But it was true, I had to take the final cold. I sat there blankly for several minutes while a terrible chill traveled up and down from my neck to my asshole, coming to rest somewhere in my large intestine long enough for me to randomly pick some multiple-choice answers and scribble a few vague replies. It was even worse than I'd dreamed; in a nightmare you don't actually have to take the damn test.

I got a 30-something on the exam. Fortunately, that was enough for me to pass the class. My grade point average suffered a little, but really, it wasn't that big a deal, except for that nasty chill and the sting of having my tremendous smugness punctured and ground into a sad little paste. At the very least, I haven't had that awful dream since.

Now I believe if I could just win the lottery, have all my teeth fall out at once, and witness a plane crashing into the side of a mountain, my recurring dream problem would be completely taken care of.

Thanksgiving weekend photos

Hruska's. I don't know how good their deer corn is, but their kolaches are delicious. Ellinger, Texas.

A boy and his backhoe. Eric's nephew is seriously great. Pensacola Beach.

Eric's new favorite game is "Traumatize the Three-Year-Old." Sublevels of this game: "I'm afraid you're going to have to sleep in your high chair tonight," "I think we should strap the car seat to the hood, don't you?" and "No, seriously. I've got your nose."

 

Cool tunnel under the Mobile River, Alabama. Eric took this one.

Hurricane Rita damage, Southwest Louisiana. We saw hundreds of miles of stuff like this. Mississippi was the worst: tent cities in parking lots off the interstate, furniture and debris scattered in the ditches, miles and miles of toppled billboards and road signs. It's been three months and people are still living in fucking tents on the side of the highway. It was bad, and we were several miles inland. 

Parts of the Gulf Coast make me really sad. The refineries make the air beige. I think this is outside of Sulphur, Louisiana.

Boy, this photo essay has kind of taken a depressing turn. Here, have a picture of Elmo that Eric's nephew took:

Also, I'd like you to know that there is a building concern in Louisiana called Cretin Homes. No lie.

Oh, also?

I came home after a 12-hour drive to a tube of beer-scented lip balm. Holy fucking fuck, I love my pen pal.

Highway ratings

I-10 between Pensacola, Florida, and Columbus, Texas, I think you've just beaten out I-35 between Austin and Oklahoma City as my least favorite stretch of interstate. You certainly smell worse, and your air is much murkier. Although Henderson Swamp is cool, your drivers aren't as aggro and twitchy as they are on 35, and you finally got most of the construction cleared up. Plus I feel guilty for being depressed by how ugly you are after all you've been through, hurricane-wise. (Not too guilty; god knows you were really ugly before.) So we'll call it a draw.

Texas Highway 71 between Columbus and Austin, you are very fine. Your hills and curves are fun to drive, I love your smiley face water tower, and the sausage kolaches at Hruska's Chevron in Ellinger make me squeal like the pigs they're made of.

Pictures 'n' shit tomorrow.

Bye again

Tomorrow morning we drive to Pensacola to visit Eric's family. I anticipate this trip may take a while and will therefore require that we bring a good deal of beef jerky, Red Bull, and nicotine. As far as I'm concerned, that's all the nutrition you will ever need on a road trip. It makes the car smell like a fruity meat hell, true, but you get farther faster. Trust me on this. I'll be back Sunday; meantime, I hope everyone gets to eat lots of good food and hang out in their pajamas with people they like a lot.

Nine-year party!

Hey, Eric and I started going out for real nine years ago today. To mark the occasion, we had a deeply sensual, romantic evening that started with a trip to a crowded-with-insane-Thanksgiving-overachievers HEB. Then we ran by Roo's to drop off his Amazon order and borrow his soup tureen. We drove home and unloaded the groceries, and I donned my slinkiest fleece hoodie and made a huge pot of tortilla soup. Meanwhile, Wain worked around us, cooking the pork tenderloin he bought on sale yesterday. Finally, the three of us settled in on the couch to eat our food and watch the last half of Comedians of Comedy and a Daily Show rerun. Then I divvied up the rest of the soup into Tupperware containers to freeze for later. It was magic. Really. Happy anniversary, Mr. B.

200 words

Back to work for two days tomorrow, then into the car and off to Pensacola to see Eric's family for another five. Wain asked me if I weren't dreading going back to work, and I was honestly able to say no. Especially just for two days.

Eric, Dan, and I hit some stops on the East Austin Studio Tour today. Saw some really good stuff, saw some so-so stuff.  Both kinds of stuff are instructive, I think. My favorite stop was Obsolete because they had corny dogs. I haven't had a corny dog in forever. I'm totally serving them at my next mass-feeding function.

I liked some stuff I saw at Iron Gate, too, but I'm fucked if I can remember the artists' names. I couldn't find them on their website. Also, I really liked Bonnie Gammill's carscapes; plus she lives in my neighborhood and served cocoa bonbons. So that's my art report for the day. In conclusion, art is fun to look at and corny dogs are really, really, really, really, really, really, really,  really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really good.

More pretty Italy

I finished putting up the pictures from our trip if you want to see them. Part two: Siena, Rome, and London, starts here.

Some things about the trip:

It's refreshing to have to be alert all the time: to what things look like, how they work, where you're going,  how you'll get there, what you're saying, and what's being said to you. I guess I don't realize how much of my life I spend on autopilot until I go where I have to work for every little thing.

Italian is a lot like Spanish, but different enough that a little Spanish can be kind of a liability. My pronunciation was wretched. Fortunately, everyone spoke at least some English and didn't seem to mind our bungled attempts at anything beyond the pleasantries.

It's very, very strange to be illiterate.

Pretty Italy

 
I posted about half the pictures from the trip tonight. I considered throwing up all 540 of them just to be an asshole, but I narrowed it down considerably because, really, how many pictures of the same cathedral do you need to see? Not very many, I reckon.

Anyway, if you want chronology and some commentary, like the droning vacation slideshows of yore, start here and keep clicking on the "next" thumbnails. Otherwise, just go here and start bashing away randomly.

I'm tired. I'm trying to ignore the jetlag, but my body is still secretly convinced that it's about nine in the morning right now. Stupid body.

I have 540 vacation photos to sort.

And those are just the ones I didn't delete along the way. It's going to take a while to go through and resize them all and then get a representative sample up.

For now, have a picture of Galileo's middle finger. It's from the science museum in Florence.

Science!

I just wish my ears would pop.

Train to Gatwick Airport, 6:30 a.m. GMT

Plane on Austin airport tarmac, 5:30 p.m. CST

It took us approximately 18 hours and 20 minutes to get from my friend Cricket's front porch in East London to ours in East Austin.

I just made a big pot of coffee and am dying to start making phone calls, but I can't hear a thing. Wain redid the bathroom while we were gone. The cats hate us. We had a great trip. It's good to be home.

Rome do's and don't's (Hey, I found the apostrophe key!)

Do:

Eat lots of pizza with anchovies. It's super good here, and I don't even like anchovies.

Rent a pedicab in the park and take it out on the scenic overlook to do donuts with it.

Drink cheap beer in the afternoons and wine with dinner. They open the beer for you in the store so you can slurp away on the way out to the street, and that is so gratifying to me that it's almost pathetic.

Take public transport as much as possible. This place will kick your ass if you don't conserve your energy a little. It's an asskicking you can respect, though.

Don't:

Eat at a restaurant that has a menu in eight different languages. It was so bad that Eric unleashed a stream of profanity all the way back to the hotel. He felt personally insulted. I was just confused: When I was 19, broke, and didn't know how to cook, I often made a dish that was just spaghetti noodles, margarine, garlic salt, and parmesan cheese from a can. But how on earth could a restaurant in Rome reproduce that recipe so faithfully? Bleah.

Visit the Dario Argento museum. Actually, do, but be warned you're paying three euros to walk down a short corridor lit with party bulbs and exhibits such as a room with Darth Vader, Freddy Kreuger, and a rubber rhino head grouped together. What...the...fuck? It was totally worth it. It was so bad and so ludicrous that I laughed the hardest I've laughed in a while. I had to bite my cheeks to keep it in until we got down the street so as not to offend our very bored hostess, though, and that part was sort of painful.

Those are all the don't's I can think of right now. Our little trip is almost over; we fly to London tomorrow and back to Austin on Wednesday. I would gladly keep going, but we're getting a little tired, and anyway, it'll be nice to be somewhere where I'm literate again. Even the most innocuous street signs seem a little ominous when you can't tell what they say. (No right on red? Certain death for pedestrians? Free ice cream for everyone?)

Ok, time's up. Much, much more, plus many, many pictures when we get back.

Best walk ever

First off, I"ll tell you I can"t find the apostrophe key. I"m in Siena. I left Eric guarding our laundry in a laundromat across the street from what looks like and is most probably a medieval castle. Hell, everything here is in a medieval castle. We"re even staying in one tonight, although from the inside it looks remarkably like a bare-bones 21st century hotel.

We just came from Cinque Terre, which oh my god. We spent the whole day hiking along the coast. It was so picturesque it bordered on the ridiculous. How rugged do mountains need to be? How lush the farmland? How blue the sky/sparkly the sea/golden the light/quaint the villages?  I mean, give me a break. And then, right when everything was so pretty and picturesque we couldn"t believe it, the sun would drop lower in the sky or the clouds would diffuse it, the quality of the light would change, and everything looked even better. We drank beer on the beach. We saw meteors. We ate mussels. I took about 250 pictures. If it had been warm enough to swim in that water, I think I would have had a stroke and drowned when the multiple protracted orgasms diverted all the blood from my brain. But it was a little too chilly,  so I live.

So, yeah, we"re having a pretty good time. Tomorrow"s Rome. Which intimidates me. But in a fun/scary sort of way.

Ok, bye!

So, am I missing anything?

It's our last day in Florence, which is lovely and hectic. Today's been good because the rain and the Sundayness have driven a lot of people inside so we can navigate the sidewalks pretty easily. A lot of the shops are closed and the museums shut down kind of early, but that's not really a problem since our favorite thing to do is walk around looking at the weird little details (ornate lizard door knockers, grammatically incorrect graffiti, alcoves with 600-year-old statues wedged between trashy stores selling nothing but socks) and crack ourselves up saying the names of European cars over and over again (Citroen Jumpy! Panda! Pahn-da! PanDA!). There's a freestanding ancient Roman column a block from our hotel, we have a view of the Duomo from our hotel's optimistically named rooftop terrace, and yesterday I leaned up against a building to adjust my shoe while I was waiting to cross the street and realized I was propped up against a Medici palace. It's been like that.

We did most of the major museum stuff yesterday and Friday, and, frankly, we're a little Jesused out already. We've seen rosy, cherubic Jesuses, tubercular Jesuses, Progeria Jesuses, hydroencephalic Jesuses...so many Jesuses. Michelangelo's David was great, though, as was the supremely creepy zoological museum, where all the animals had been shot, stuffed, and catalogued in the 1850s. They were all molting and had been positioned to look fierce, no matter what they were, so the poor little lemmings and the gentle aye-aye looked like they were about burst through the glass and rip your throat out at any second, or at least they would if they weren't in the early stages of decay. This place was benign neglect at its finest.

Tomorrow: Cinque Terre, then Siena, then Rome. Florence is gorgeous, but it's hard to really get a feel for a place that's basically a touristic playground. Don't get me wrong, I'm a tourist, and I love playgrounds, but I think I'm ready to see some other stuff.

Bye forever!

We leave tomorrow afternoon. I'm packing light, so light that when I lift my bag to marvel at its lightness I get paranoid that I forgot everything essential. There can't possibly be shampoo, an extra pair of shoes and a hoodie in a bag that light. But they're in there, all right, and anyway I remembered my passport, my debit card, nicotine gum for the plane, and my camera. There's not too much else I absolutely couldn't do without.

So we're as ready as we're going to be. I do this every trip, but I keep thinking I should have done more research, ferreted out more little shops on the internet, made more--and more obsessive--lists, run off more copies of guidebook pages.

I think we've got enough. I don't think we're going to run out of things to do just because I didn't bother to write down every obscure art gallery in town, cross-referenced by bus stop, subject matter, and opening hours.

The only thing I really, really wish is that I bothered to learn some Italian that wasn't penis related.

My penis hurts.
Ho male al pene.

His penis is swollen.
Ha il pene gonfia.

I have lost my penis.
Ho perso il pene.

How ugly-American is that? Yeah, hi, I'm here to soak up a little bit of your complex and timeless culture. Oh, and make dick jokes. Um, hello? Speakee zee English? God, honey, it's pretty here and all, but I wish they talked like real people here, I can't understand a word except for "penis."

Stupid. I forsee no need for any of those phrases in any language, ever. They're useless. But they're funny, dammit! They're really fun to say, especially if you gesture grandly as you say them. Pene! (Wave hands excitedly.) Ho male al pene! (Sweep arms skyward.) Give it a try; you'll see.

So that's it. I'll try to post at least intermittently while we're gone. For fun, I was going to prewrite some posts to autopublish throughout the trip, but I was too busy cracking myself up learning how to describe my nonexistent penis in Italian. Let no one say I don't use my time on this earth wisely.