Nonsense, Drivel, and Balderdash

The past week has been a fairly idle one. After training with my job I was told to wait until they called me with my hours and classes. That was over a week ago. The rest of the teachers in training have not received any hours yet either. It seems that the companies that use our English teaching services do not start their language programs until around the 2nd of October. I really don't care though, I am fine the way I am because I am still getting paid regardless of whether I work or not. It has actually been really nice to have a week off after the stressful weeks of training. It was especially nice since it was the week that everyone really moved into the apartment and we got everything in order. In fact, by the time I do start work I will probably be in the mood to do so, so this break is excellent. I went to the mountains on Saturday with the two apartment-mates that were around, Kenny and Dan (pictured left). It was quite cold this weekend and especially so up on the top of ...

Our new house is pretty cool. Check it out: (please feel free to click the pics for a larger version, it is usually worth it or at least it is in the last one) Here we see two of my apartment mates sitting in our commodious living room area. Brian is on the couch facing us, speaking to one of his many lovers. Dan is on the other seat, most likely contemplating a way to kill you using nothing but his uvula and half a stick of butter. And here is the missing apartment mate, Kenny, playing a little (ok, a lot) of Prince of Persia on the playstation. It just wouldn't be a guy's apartment without some sort of computer gaming going on. This is my room. Humble and Spartan, but bigger than the past 3 rooms I have had during the past couple of years. The nice thing about my room is that it overlooks the city and has a lot of light. And here is a panoramic view of what I see when I step out onto my balcony in the morning. Rooftops, windows, antennas, and the silesian monastery in the di...

College is done. This much I am certain of. Now I have joined the masses of "suits." I am one of many zombie faced humans that shuffles through the subway halls in the early morning. I am one of the white earphone wearing, wool clad, briefcase bearing denizens of the corporate world. I have become what I always swore I would never be. I get up before the sun is up and get back after it has set, like some sort of daytime vampire who evades the sun's rays in the safety of a cubicle or behind an office wall. At least pawning your soul pays well when you sell it to the almighty dollar. But life is not all terrible. Since I last wrote on my little piece of cyberspace, I have found an apartment and I have completed my job training. As to the first order of business, my new home is quite nice. It has 5 rooms for 4 people, which means we have room for guests if the need arises. The living room is also really large, which is a rarity in Spain. My other apartment mates have moved i...

Its nearly midnight and I am restless. I have spent most of the day taking it easy. I have just been hanging around the house. 'Bumming' around the house is probably more accurate. I have watched copious amounts of television and played hours of football on the playstation that Paco lent me while he was in Nepal. Actually, I have spent most of the week inside these four walls, though not all of it was spent piddling away the hours in the glow of a tv screen. No, most of my week has consisted of hours of scouring the internet for an apartment to rent (that is, 'flat to rent', for you british readers...). Once I found one that I considered to be a possibility I would have to look up the exact address of the residence to make sure it would be close to a subway stop and other such things. Many times, that step in the process would end with me realizing that the particular house was way too far from anything to be of value to me. After this long process, I would end up with ...

Ahh... the summer is finishing. Long days dwindle away as the sun gets tired of staying out late. The continued heat is only a ruse to lead us to believe that autumn is not on the way. But the daylight tells a different story, it is slowly changing colour from the deep yellow of summertime to the paler, more sterile, tones of winter sunlight. The change is slow, but it is inevitable. Fall is coming. However, I feel like I have already been in an extreme post summer environment. I have been cold at night, buffeted by rain and wind during the day, and thanked the lord for every sweet glimpse of sunlight I could get my hands on. Yes my friends, I have been to Scotland. I went there with the Jazz a cappella group, "The Oxford Gargoyles ," that I joined during my time in England this past year. After a year of performing concerts at everything from weddings to graduate parties, we decided to do what all struggling artists do in Britain: we went to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh...

Are you worried that not enough people will show up at your funeral? Have you been a jerk your whole life and are afraid of not having any mourners? Well then why not try the Chinese method of attracting a funeral crowd? It will get a big crowd and make those who DO care a lot happier . Nothing like having naked people dancing on your grave to liven up a funeral.

OK OK, I lied. I may indeed put a couple posts up here this summer. This one isnt really a huge bit of writing, it is more of a suggestion, the recommendation of a bit of excellent critical writing. I love a good bit of media criticism, a good review, all that sort of stuff. Here is a critic saying that Sufjan Stevens isnt any good. Th reason I like this is because: 1) most critics kiss the ground Stevens walks on. 2) It´s a well written argument 3) The writer has some very good points. He was also able to verbalize some of my frustration with both indie music and its avid (and some times rabid) fans. "indie, has become a bunch of self-serving, self-congratulatory niches" How right he is. It has been that way for years now, ever since the term "indie" came to be a genre instead of a method distribution and production. This isnt to say that I dont like a lot of indie music, I do. There are some great artists out there. But I hate the genre, and I have a severe dislik...

Well my friends, the skies are clear and the swimming pool holds a fine chill. And that means it is time to relax. Over the course of the next couple of months I will be away from the kind of screens which aren't meant to keep out bugs. This is a good time to take a hiatus from this newsletter and rantletter. I will begin to write again when the air carries hints of autumn.

I'm done with college. That is crazy. Until this week, I had been studying continuously since I was 5. That is 18 years of a single activity, 18 years of singlemindedness, 18 years of focusing on filling my brain with information and filling my report card with something that will save me from the proverbial slap on the wrist. And now I am finished with all of that. I have my degree in English Literature, my concentration in creative writing, and my minor in communications. What does this all add up to? Well, for now it adds up to me sitting at my desk in my boxers, basking in the morning summer sun and itching slightly from a sunburn I received yesterday at the swimming pool. Creedence Clearwater Revival is playing from my high school boombox and it seems fairly appropriate for its summery, upbeat, antiestablisment sounds. Plus it has a sort of hillbilly twang to it which seems to fit the scene of sitting in the sun in your underpants. So I am theoretically supposed to have my lif...

Yesterday I escaped from Oxford and made my way into London (finally). I had not left this town at all this term until yesterday, so I was ready for a change of scenery. I went into the city to meet up with Kenny, who had come down from Durham as part of his end of the year mini-tour of England before he leaves the country. When we met up in the morning we didn't really have anything planned so we ended up heading over to the natural science museum. I love science museums, but I think it had been a while since I had been to one. So we spent a while walking around looking at lunar modules and steam engines, eventually ending up in the 'hands-on' part of the museum that was usually geared towards kids, but whatever, we are young at heart and spent a good while playing around with pressure machines, shadow capture booths and mini feats of engineering. We were about to leave but I wanted to see the dinosaurs, because, well... Who doesn't wanna see dinosaurs? We had a little...

Then there are the 'networking websites' like Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5... the list goes on for a while. These vary in what they do and who they are aimed at. I must admit that I am quite a fan of facebook, and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't a myspace member. Of course, with the exception of Facebook that actually targets people who go or have gone to school together and therefore know each other, most of these sites are just ways for people to spend countless hours browsing profiles of people they will never meet or looking at pictures that look nothing like the people they are meant to represent. Alternately, people spend hours trying to take pictures of themselves in bad lighting and from angles that hide all their bad features (acne, small boobs, large boobs, unibrow, webbed toes, antlers...) and highlight their good ones (right eyelid, small boobs, large boobs, flexing muscles, cheap tattoo done in a drunken stupor over spring break that says "i...

The internet has had huge social repercussions. In fact, the social repercussions are arguably larger than the economic or informative ones. Think what a huge difference that email has made on the way we keep in touch. We now have cheap and instant access to sending and receiving information across the globe. We can now make sure that our family members know how life is going, or send pictures to our friends, or contemplate if the amount of spam advertising penis enlargements is proportionate to the number of men that need them (lets hope not), and lets not even mention all the death threats we have all received implied in the content of those chain letters ("...if you liked this joke please resend it to 45 friends if you don't, then tomorrow both you and your loved ones will be hit by a bus full of rabid monkeys, flogged by the ghosts of the spanish inquisition, raped and pillaged by giant amoebas and consumed in the fire of the almighty. thanx! have a gr8 day!"). But be...

Life is finally starting to loosen up a bit. Last week was a stressful as trying to find a needle in a haystack, in the dark, during a blizzard, with polar bears chasing you around the haystack, and a sneaky Eskimo midget setting the whole thing on fire. Figuratively speaking, of course. I have never tried to find needles in haystacks and have nothing against the denizens of the artic. But yeah, it was a busy week. I spent massive amounts of time in the libary or at my computer or rushing to and fro, trying to get things done, and preferably on time. And it rained. Non-stop. Cats and Dogs and various other domestic mammals fell from the sky and left a mess all over the sidewalks. On top of that, as my previous posts probably gave away, I was hit with a post-graduation downer and was wondering what the heck I was doing with my life. So yeah. A flaming haystack. But it was all good, it reinforced my suspicions that we all really lack any sense of perspective in this world and that we are...

I only have one tutorial a week now for the next couple of weeks, which means that I will be able to enjoy them fully. And they are meant to be enjoyed, for they are all related to children's literature. This week I am doing one of my personal favourites, The Wind in the Willows. If you haven’t read it and are looking for a wonderful bit of summer reading, it is a delightfully whimsical piece of post-romantic literature. And it has a badger in it. Anyone who knows anything realizes that putting a badger in your story automatically grants it entry in to the halls of literary immortality. Oh, I went to Kenneth Grahame's (the author) gravesite today and paid my respects. It was a bit sad. In the same cemetery I also found the grave of poet and inkling Charles Williams, as well as one of the fathers of Aestheticism, Walter Pater. Oxford is cool like that.

Eva had this in her blog in honor of the honorable profession of the housewife (which she aims to be) and to teach all those feminists a lesson. It was all in good fun of course. But to prove that I am just as much a modern man as she is a woman, I reply with a similar quiz (translated into the native language of this blog): 1. Favorite domestic chore/duty: She said that her least favorite was shopping for food. I didnt even know that was a chore. That is one of my favorite parts of the week for sure. 2. Most hated domestic chore/duty: Cleaning out the fridge. Anything that can put me in contact with mold or other things that might decide to migrate to my skin and set up shop. 3. Favorite laundry detergent: dude, that one that smells like lavender. I love that crap. 4. Favorite kind of apron: I am going to have to be a guy on this one and go with those that have some stupid slogan on it like "master of the flame" or "boss of the sauce". If it includes pirates in any...

well, all in all, the graduation day didnt turn out as bad as could have been expected. Around 7 o'clock, my friend kate found me sitting at my computer listening to cathartic angry metal whilst dressed in a graduation robe I found in a broom closet. She insisted that I needed to get out and stop mourning my passing college years, which was probably true. So we went to a pub, had a couple pints and chatted. I needed that I think. We spent several hours out chattin about complete innane things which made me feel much better. Then I hung out in on of th other gordon houses watching "green wing" (a british comedy series) which made me laugh a bit. One of the nicest gestures was when I got home and I found a couple nice british beers on my desk, courtesy of my housemate Miriam. While that was nice in itself, there was a sticky note on top which said that I had a present in the fridge. In the refrigerator I found a nice half leg of lamb. Miriam is clearly an amazing human bein...

I am so depressed. Today is graduation day at gordon. Not only does that mean that I should be done by now, but it means that I am missing something that most of my american friends are all doing. The end of my studies will be a "non-event". But even worse is this pit at the bottom of my stomach that misses the hell out of all my gordon friends and the knowledge that it will never be the same between them and myself. I suppose this should have hit me when I left for oxford, but it has sunk in in a different way now. I really wish I were spending the summer living on campus and working grounds crew again. It is at moments like these that I dont give a crap about going back to spain and just want to go back to the good friends I made in Boston. It is only worse that in a week I will feel the opposite and then back again. If I could settle on one place it would be easier. Having my friends separated by a vast stretch ocean, and having to choose between the two groups, kills me. ...

A funny thing happened to me this evening. As I walked towards the library, I was filled with something I can only describe as 'rapturous joy'. This all may sound cheesy, but it is only because I have no way of putting it into words . It was so unexpected, and welcome, and strange. Anyone who knows me know that I am not prone to feel anything of that sort, which is why it was so strange. As I walked down the street, I was suddenly overpowered by a deep sense of happiness surging up inside of me in such a way that I could not help smiling and had to keep myself from skipping. I do not know what it was that brought it on. Perhaps it was that I had been profoundly moved by the end of George Macdonald's book Phantastes a couple of hours before. Or it may have been the effect of dusk on the ancient architecture. Or it may have been that the air was filled with the intoxicating smell of springtime. Or the way that the warm sun combined with the brisk air on my skin. Perhaps a bit...

I cannot figure out what is "good." I'm talking in terms of productivity and creative output. It is interesting that quality is so limited by the fashions of the day. Take Oscar Wilde for example, in his day he was considered a poet. In fact he was a poet long before he became the famous playwright he is known as today. And yet, if you are to read his poetry today you will realize that, generally, it is pretty terrible. It is an emphasis on all the most annoying and dated poetic figures found in Romantic poetry without any of the free flowing soul found in the better poems of the time. It is exceedingly cheesy and over the top and relies on seemingly formulaic compositional elements. All in all, most critics agree that it is terrible poetry (the one exception, for those who like to read poetry, is the Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he wrote regarding his time in prison). Now, my problem is not that Oscar Wilde could not write lasting poetry. Many good authors have tried th...