traveling swallowing dramamine

praha haha ha.

hey kiddos.

for those of you who want to follow along.

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 1, 2004 / 6:17pm / Houston International Airport, Terminal D5

the flight from lafayette was brief and uneventful, except that the flight attendant was a total bitch. she informed us very abruptly to stow our carry-on items--we thought she just meant our bookbags--but then when we were about to take off she came around and fussed at us and put our purses up too--rikki was like "jesus christ"--and i wanted to write in here but i couldn't--i was sad.

sign in Continental Airplanes terminal: BusinessFirst: It's a trip--for your ego.

ha. hahaha.

fell asleep on the one-hour flight from lafayette--i hope i sleep on the eight-hour flight to amsterdam. i brought Benadryl.

there are these little hispanic kids playing in the airport--"Mira! Vamanos!"--very cute--except they occasionally utter ear-piercing shrieks--which is annoying.

there was a baby squalling on the lafayette flight--the scary flight attendant was speaking over the intercom, giving the usual spiel--in that sort of smooth sedated inflectionless airplane voice--but when she was demonstrating how to use the oxygen masks (which, mind you, may not inflate--but don't worry, there will still be a steady stream of oxygen...) she leaned over and drawled, "lawd a mercy, that baby's got some lungs." and sorta half-grinned.

lots of spanish at the houston airport. i wish i could speak it fluently.

rikki is next to me, journalling. we are the ultimate english major nerds.

our flight to amsterdam just got bumped back an hour ten. we only have an hour layover from amsterdam to prague.

ben has a picture of me tacked up on the wall next to his bed. it startled me when i saw it. we're sitting on the sofa at his house, he's looking at the camera and laughing and i'm reading the kama sutra. it's a cute picture. but when i saw it--i don't know. it wasn't a bad thing--just sort of an abrupt and unexpected realization that we're really in a "relationship."

he has a picture of me. in his room.

ok, that's it for now. gonna teach rikki how to play rummy.

as far as you know i've never touched the ground

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 1, 2004 / Continental Flight 46 - Boeing 767 / 9:11pm

we were supposed to leave at 7:20--got bumped to 8:32--now it's 9:15ish and we're taxiing. which doesn't bug me except i'm a little worried about the connecting flight to prague.

there's that funny feeling when the landing gear finally leaves the ground--the wheels disconnect from the earth and there's this little bounce when the air takes you up--it's that scary/exhilerating thing.

we just watched a video--narrated by "flight attendants" named "Michelle" and "Crystal."

it's 4 in the morning in amsterdam. the plane is taking off. which still terrifies me on some deep-rooted level of survival instinct.

swallow hard as the momentum pushes you back into your seat.

we were not meant to fly, i don't think.

"Crystal" pointed out that our seatbelts should be fastened "low and tight" across our laps. which is hot. hott.

the landing gear, as it folds back up into the belly of the plane, sounds like a keening whale.

ate dinner in the houston terminal--we got a "veggie fresh" pizza from Pizza Inn to split--personal pan--and while we were in line this young yuppie-ish business man ordered a pizza--the "incredible monster"--and tried to pay with a credit card--there was a red sign at the counter declining to accept cards--and the guy pitched a fit--"how can you be in business--that's the most ridiculous thing i've ever--boy that really pisses me off." storms off to an ATM, returns with cash, continues to berate the cashier, accepts his pizza and leaves.

what i want to know is: how can this guy take himself seriously when he's eating a personal pan pizza for dinner?

in kind of a pissy mood. need sleep and to not feel so claustrophobic. maybe ben's introversion is rubbing off on me. any alone time i get at this point feels like a relief.

stuck in the center seat of the center section...

how many flights have i taken at this point? at least twelve. how many times have i heard the safety spiel? but i pay attention every single time. note to self: don't use the exit just aft of the wing. that slide may only be used as a flotation device--whereas the other slides are straight-up rafts.

i've just been informed by my video monitor that it has a remote that's removable from the armrest--and the monitor also comes programmed with video games--to use the remote as a game controller, you just turn that bitch horizontal--it's got a control pad, four action button, select, start, even L and R on top. kickass. think i'll watch The Parent Trap and then play some poker.

rock.

gekoeld bewaren!

TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 2, 2004 / Flight 1335 KLM / 2:34pm Amsterdam

which means it's--8:34am new orleans?

uuuuuuuugh. took Benadryl (2), eyes were closing halfway through The Parent Trap--which really does, as my father pointed out about eight years ago, send a terrible message about divorce--and womanhood--as if we're all in this to land a man--and if you're not married you must be frigid. i hate when dad is right.

well, amsterdam was lovely, i'm sure, but all i saw was its huge fucking airport--huge. fucking. we got off at the end of terminal G and had about forty-five minutes till our flight to prague left--people with flights five minutes earlier than us got rebooked. we ran for about twenty minutes--the monitor said our flight had been moved to gate D10--then the guy at D10 told us it was still at D27--no one was at D27 but a guy at D29 told us it was at D51. sprint/jogging after eight hours straight of cramped sitting does not equal fun.

rikki laughed when she woke me up this morning to tell me breakfast had been served--i fell back asleep without touching it--she ate my croissant--when i got up again she was like, man, you were out--i was like, i was drugged. and she said she wanted some for the way home--although honestly it was sort of fitful drunken sleep--i kept thrashing--i know i kicked rikki like twice--and probably the poor dude in the business suit next to me.

got a copy of The Guardian--front page shit about the saddam trial--just in time for the fucking election. end quote of article--"It's going to be the trial of the century." what a zoo. what a circus.

can't keep ears popped enough. ow.

guy at D10 stared at us as we ran up panting to the [empty] gate--we weren't sure if he spoke english--rikki paused and then said, "prague?" and he said "no." then he said (in perfect british english) that the plane was going to london-heathrow. i told him that the monitor had said the gate was changed, and he checked for us--while he was checking, i said, laughing, "prague? ...no." and he said, somewhat snidely (but also sort of laughing) "well, if you'd spoken in complete sentences..." which made rikki feel like an ass, but it was still sort of funny.

chicken sandwich for lunch--"Corn Chicken and Cocktail--GEKOELD BEWAREN--T.H.T./Exp. date: 04-07-04."

deep breath. they invert month and day here.

i hope.

-------

(still in the air--ben would appreciate this--there's a churchgroup from the US on this flight--very whitebread--wearing matching light brown long-sleeved cotton shirts--which have the outline of the czech republic and a star to indicate prague--and then a caption: CZECH, PLEASE!

haha. ha.)

-------

searching with a foot for a space to stretch your leg

-------

dobre den or something like that anyway

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 3, 2004 / 10:34am Prague - 3:34am NOLA

i would kill for a glass of water. not carbonated, this time.

slept so hard that i'm sort of exhausted. feel puffy. want water and to get my transit pass from Goddess Hana Z (who booked our room a day early for us) and find Bohemia Bagel to email everyone i've ever met.

must. take. shower.

had these totally bizarre and really aggressive dreams. one about mom--i don't remember why i was mad--but we were screaming, she had done something illegal--something with breast implants--the police had "vaporized" my car--she had not had implants, though--she was wearing a wig but had the same hair underneath--

i remember at some point getting a long, gangly, stuffed toy monkey and it was covered in blood and i thrust it under her skirt and then pulled it out and shook it at her face, as if saying, "remember, you gave birth to me"--or something, i'm not really sure what point i was trying to make. there was a lot of anger and bitter screaming. and i felt sort of orphaned.

ADVANCE was tied up in this too. oh holy shit i dreamt about dr. b___. i need to email her. she was so scary in my dream. she had legs made almost of metal--she was so skinny from being sick that she was literally skin and bone--her legs were skeleton legs but with skin. and then somehow i discovered that she had been walking around with platform shoes on--but, like, a foot high--because she was even shorter than she seemed--i was so scared of her, and she kept turning up.

the talent show--i was doing an act--a reading--with shan and wu--"sure thing," the scene i read with breton--and i was going to wear the tie again--but i couldn't find it--then i remembered i had borrowed it from maria--so i was gonna borrow one from brian s__ (my roommate in the dream)--then i got to the talent show and realized i didn't want to read the scene anyway because shan wasn't a good reader--had to run off copies of the scene--but they had copies already--but all the copies were different--finally watched the act before us go, and they were doing our scene, but not the way you're supposed to do it it--they had set it to music, like a show tune, and it was really bad.

ok. jeez. anyway. shower.

----------------

from an email to ben:

holy shit.

that is what i said when i just got off the metro with rikki.

last night we wandered around the dorm neighborhood to find a place to eat. the buildings look sort of old-school communism but with cuter roofs. we saw a coke sign on this building while we were on the bus back from the airport and rikki and i turned to each other and she said "goodbye lenin" and i was like "yeah." you should tell robbie that. and you should see Goodbye Lenin so you know what i'm talking about.

anyway, so the neighborhood by the dorm is pretty quiet--i mean, it looks like london or paris or any big european city but not very...i don't know, distinctive. big streets but not very crowded, couldn't find a whole lot of restaurants (but this was just a little walk)--anyway we ended up finding a pizza place, more on that later, but today i decided we would go on an adventure to find an internet cafe--it involved taking the metro three stops and walking through the old town square and possibly getting really lost. i wanted us to get out into the sunlight, because it's supposed to help jet-lag, and i wanted to get on the metro and walk around and just, you know, jump right in or whatever. i was feeling pretty confident (cocky, actually) about taking the metro since after nyc, london, and paris it's pretty old-hat by now. but i speak english, and i took six years of french, so subway signs in the other cities were not that hard to figure out. but i don't speak a fucking word of czech. and it's not like, you know, a romance language or anything, so it's not like i can find a familiar rootword. so we had a panicky moment, and then we weren't sure if we had to get our transit passes punched--and if so, how--once we got on the metro we were so golden.

we got off at the right stop, and we came out of the station, and i said "oh, holy shit" because ben. it's fucking incredible. we were right at the old town square--it's like you come up out of the street and there are these old fucking churches that look like castles and the buildings, just the storefronts, it's like--all i can think is it doesn't look real. it looks like a movie. or disney world, but all the shops don't sell the same mickey mouse keychain over and over and over again. i had written down the directions to the internet cafe (bohemia bagel) and we found it on the first try, because we're fucking ninjas. and we had a meal, a nice meal, i had sun-dried tomato and melted mozarella with pesto on a sunflower bagel--100 crowns (a little under four dollars). and now i'm on the internet. which is costing me more than i anticipated, i hope i can find a cheaper place to do this, because in the guide book it said it would be 1 crown per minute but it's actually 1.80. and yeah. god there's so much to tell you but it's like i don't know where to start...

...we took the bus from the airport--rikki's idea--i wanted to take a cab so we wouldn't have to deal with the luggage--but the cab fare would have been about 500 crowns (20 bucks), assuming we got an honest cab driver with whom we could communicate well enough to figure all that shit out--and the bus fare was 12 crowns (like, fifty cents)--and then a "five-minute" walk to the dorm--so we're debating, and i'm like, alright, let's do the bus, i'll feel like less of a pussy. so we manage to get bus tickets, and get on the bus with our shit--i was standing on the bus, staring desperately down at my suitcase, trying to figure out how the hell to get it on the bus, and this nice guy at the bus stop grabs the suitcase, sets it on the bus, and then hops off right as the doors close. my fucking hero. so then i'm remembering that you have to do something to the bus ticket, punch it or show it to the driver or something, as soon as you get on the bus, or they yell at you or fine you or something. and i'm like "rikki, what do we do?" and she's like "i don't know" so we're trying to figure it out, and the bus is going, and i'm feeling like an idiot, and finally this czech woman comes up to me and takes my ticket and pantomimes putting it in the yellow timestamper thingy. sort of rolling her eyes. i might be paranoid, but the people who have helped us out so far--the random locals who've dealt with our incompetence and inability to speak anything other than english--they've been really helpful but i keep feeling like they're rolling their eyes at me. it's either my usual paranoia or we really are stupid americans. i feel like a stupid american, anyway. they offer a "survival czech" language course as part of the program here, and i'm totally signing up. it's really frustrating not being able to say a damn thing. and people talk at you and all you can do is shake your head because it's totally unrecognizable.

anyway we get to our stop--which i figured out on my own, but the woman who helped us stamp our ticket told us as much, which was nice of her. and we manage to get off the bus with all of our shit--i somehow managed to throw my gigantic suitcase off of the bus. and then we walked to the dorm. which was really not far at all. it was a much shorter walk than i expected. and checked in, and our rooms are adorable, and we have a great fucking view. well, it's the fourth floor anyway, and we can see the street and the buildings across the way, and there are trees. the day is warmish and sunnyish and i'm wearing a cardigan. it was damn chilly last night. i figured out how to open the window--harder than it looks. the dorm is about five hundred times nicer than caddo. no top sheet on the bed--which made me think of you, isn't that silly--just a down comforter with a really ugly pink and purple pastel eighties-fied cover. it's three rooms to a suite, with a suite bathroom and a "kitchenette"--stove top and small fridge and cabinets and a table i think. after much fussing i got the adapter to work--and it works--we have music, which is fucking awesome.

i don't know. it's going really well. i took a shower. and brushed my teeth. and i've eaten twice. i feel like a human. after all that airplane bullshit. airplanes are so uncivilized. it's like you regress into childhood. they feed you prepackaged food and offer you "sweets" and you're strapped into a big chair and you can't move around. you sleep fitfully. i slept so hard last night in my bed that i'm sort of worn out. i had really aggressive dreams about my parents. one about my mom and one about my dad, which i'll tell you later if you're interested and i remember. i wrote them down. this email is getting ridiculously long and it's totally fragmented, i'm sorry, i'm sort of rushing.

is that it? no, but that's all for now i guess.

hradčanská

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 4, 2004 / 11pm

fuck me i'm tired.

woke up inadvertently at 6, couldn't fall asleep for three hours, finally fell asleep and had weird dream about matt and jake electrocuting themselves with musical instruments in the rain and dropping dead.

woke up exactly at 12:45pm, just in time for the orientation.

probably 4:1 female/male ratio. maybe more. maybe 10:1.

--------------------

July 5, 2004 / from an email to ben:

hradčanská --

which is the only thing i can pronounce in čeština. it happens to be the first metro stop (we're right at the end of the line). and i can say it. woohooooo.

language class starts tomorrow. i'm psyched.

it's about nine AM at home, i think. maybe it's 8. i'm not sure. it's about three here. i just ate thai for lunch with rikki, this girl danielle, and these three other girls from my class--lana, mandy, and julia. danielle is from tallahassee and is looking to move to new orleans--i was trying to think of something to tell her about new orleans, and said "well i don't live in the city proper, i live in metairie" and she said "oh, that's actually where i was going to move" and i was like, oh, well then. she was trying to get an editing job at a local magazine, and it didn't work out, but she teaches at a private high school in FL and i was like, you know, there are a ton of private catholic schools in new orleans and i think they're pretty much always looking for teachers, there's a real high turnover rate, and she was like "--did i mention i worked at a catholic school?"--and she hadn't--then she told me it was funny, because she was jewish, and the kids at her school have sort of a morbid curiosity about it--she'll be like "so let's look at this poem by langston hughes" and they're like "so do you speak hebrew?"

i also met this girl shannon, who's from...i don't remember where...but anyway, we all went out to dinner saturday and we were walking along downtown and she asked me about school and i was telling her about how i wanted to get an MFA but i was freaked out and pretty sure i wouldn't get in, blah blah blah, and she was like, "well, to tell you the truth--i applied to a bunch of programs and didn't get in." but what she did instead was what you want to do--she went to france and taught english--got a job through the french government--that's what she did last year, and she's doing it again this year, and she's going to get her masters over there, straight MA, in, like, english/french/arabic or something crazy like that. i told her that she should talk to you about it. anyway, she's really sweet.

there's this other woman named caroline who's from manhattan, she went out with us too, she's teaching at one of the CUNYs--hunter college--comp and creative writing--and she's never written a play in her life--but we workshopped her one-act today and it was really good--i mean, pretty obviously she doesn't have a lot of theatre background but her dialogue was fucking great. anyway i asked her at that dinner if she was in an MFA program, or what, and she told me she'd gotten hers at columbia--i was like "oh, fuck me, what'd you think" and she said that she only waited a couple of years to get it, but she wishes she had waited longer. and that it was really cutthroat competitive and she wasn't too crazy about it. and that's what i've heard from people who've gone to big-name schools. the yalies have said as much--femi and kristin sosnowszky (the managing director at swine palace, my former boss). so what the fuck. disregarding the whole will-i-even-ever-get-in part of the MFA bullshit, it sounds like the big-name programs are miserable experiences, but it's like, to get a decent job i'm afraid you have to worry about the reputation of your program. and what if quietly respected doesn't cut it? although it seems like it's getting more and more irrelevant at this point because--i don't know. i'm pretty much not going to get in. and even if i do get in, it's doubtful whether or not i'd be wasting my time going at this point. but what the hell else am i going to do.

anyway. my workshop teacher is cool--he works off-broadway, writing and directing, and he has his own theatre company, with a bunch of writers and actors and directors, and they do a lot of stuff sort of self-contained. and he's taught similar workshops at nyu and brown and wesleyan and somewhere else cool. he's shortish and slim and wears a lot of black and has dark hair that he wears long and in a ponytail. he looks more like a techie than a writer/director. he's goofy. his wife is sort of a bitch. but maybe it was jet-lag. anyway.

last night we had our "opening party"--they catered some crazy-ass food--i was most excited about the deviled eggs--this was no potato-salad-and-tony's affair--it was like, boiled egg cut in half, with the yolk in the middle, covered in this cream cheese that looked like whipped cream, and there was black caviar and a little tiny lemon wedge on top. it was crazy shit. free wine and beer. i had a glass and a half of red wine, which was lovely. wes kungel, who was in crone's class with me and rikki, is here, and we talked to him for a long time.

and then lana and this other girl tessa said they got a flyer that afternoon for this spanish guitar concert--flamenco or some shit--so a bunch of us semi-drunkenly wandered through the old town square looking for the place--and then by the time we found it it was sort of over--but there was "live jazz" at this hoity-toity touristy restaurant across the alley. white linen tableclothes on the patio. it was the kind of jazz you pretentiously snap your fingers to. very cool. patrick c___ would have called it "jass." it was crap. rikki and i were like, "this is crap." we cut out and wandered across the charles bridge. we stopped every five feet to peer over the edge. the view is fucking ridiculous. this whole place is ridiculous. it's so old. it's unbelievably old. and has this crazy history. but there you are, standing on these fucking cobblestones. it's insane. i was standing on that bridge, wine-drunkish, the kind of drunk that induces those open-mouthed kisses, aggressive with a lot of tongue, and i turned back to look at the old town square--i wanted you to be there. for many reasons. the wine and the view and yeah.

still not over the jet-lag. it's not that i'm so tired, it's that i can't fucking sleep. the first two nights we were here--rikki and i both woke up at 6AM, exactly, and couldn't fall back asleep for hours. i don't know what it is about 6 in the morning. it happened to wes too. part of it might be that the sun rises pretty early--i know in london it rose around 4:30. it doesn't set till 10ish. i was so pissed the first night in london, i was so tired but i told myself i had to wait until the sun went down to go to bed--figuring it would be at some normal time, 7 or 8, but it was 8 and the sun was shining bright and then it was 9 and then it was 10--it took till 10:30 for it to get really dark--i was irate. anyway, so last night we got in from the charles bridge adventure and i was going to write in my journal and read some more but i flopped down on my bed, fully dressed, and passed out. like, drooling snoring passed out. i woke up half an hour later and wrote and read and went to bed at 12:15ish and didn't fall asleep till probably 3:30. i was so pissed.

cream and dream

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 6, 2004 / 10:24pm

my god it's only tuesday. we've had a very full two days so far. monday was the first day of class--9:30 to 12:30 playwriting workshop. am friends with 2.5 girls in my group.

i don't know when we're workshopping my play. i'm nervous. i have homework tonight--a short writing assignment--about which i am excited. glad to be writing and not just workshopping old shit that i don't even really like.

it was mandy's 30th birthday yesterday, and me, rikki, lana, tessa, and this girl who's maybe named she-ra went to a pub called Chateau Rouge. got two slices of pizza around the corner for 25 crowns each--which is about a dollar a slice. i've had pizza every day so far. it's cheap and filling and tasty and not greasy. and then we went to see The Shop on Main Street, which was being screened by some teacher in the program for us for free. czech movie, 1966 oscar for best foreign film, holocaust, an old lady dies. rikki cried at the end. it was pretty good.

today we had a full day of lecture--first rikki and i had our "czech language survival course" from 9 to 10, then lectures from 10 to 11:30 and 11:30 to 1. lunch, computer lab to check email--finally an email from ben. he's had to work all weekend--i knew he couldn't get to the library to email me until monday--so it's been five days since i'd heard from him--which is the longest since we've been dating.

anyway, 2:30 to 4 another lecture, then rikki and i went on a hunt for stosh, who'd emailed to let me know he was in town. had a hard time finding his hostel, and then fully expected him not to be there, but there he was, in bed asleep, and we (cruelly, perhaps) woke him up, all excited--he's been gone for over a month (LSU in Greece).

so we took him to Chateau Rouge and talked for a while--pizza for dinner again--and then tried to find this ice cream shop called "Cream and Dream" for dessert--no luck. so we headed to the Ypsilon Theatre for our semi-mandatory reading series--7:30 to 9:30. three poets, and stosh was hestitant to go, but it ended up being pretty entertaining--and the theatre was fucking cool--when it was over, stosh told me (unprompted) that he had enjoyed it.

home again and about to start my work. tomorrow me, rikki, stosh, and danielle are headed to a modern art musuem after class. free admission first wednesday of every month. i'm psyched.

-------

also. why can't i fucking sleep?

i go to bed at 12:30, exhausted, wanting nothing more than to drop off into unconsciousness--

but it's three hours of lying there, pinned down by my thoughts, flat on my back and hot under the covers. i'm a stomach sleeper. and maybe it's the nature of the thought stream. because the stages of sleep are dictated by the slow cooling and settling of body and pulse. and i'm always thinking of ben.

needle in the hay

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 7, 2004 / 9:42pm

ah elliot smith in the evening.

i'm so fucking tired. oh my god.

class went well today--i like the shit i ended up writing for homework, and we did an in-class writing assignment that got me pretty juiced. i'll end up continuing it for homework on monday. and i gotta print out what i typed up this morning. i sent it to ben--he said he wanted to read whatever i've been working on.

workshop went well--they read it well and made really good, constructive suggestions--not condescending at all. jeremy said i had done a good job with the edith's character, and that i had a good eye for detail. most of the time we talked about stakes, which consistently troubles me the most.

went to modern art musuem--barely made a dent in it--cool shit--i loved the czech artists--the part on socialist realism was creepy ("The More We Produce, The Better Life We Lead!"--with the rosy-cheeked toothily-smiling Aryan family)--crazy seeing it after reading about it in those Kundera novels.

at dinner i was sitting across from rikki at our little 2-person table--she was picking at a scab on her right shoulder--and i thought--what was it like before i knew her? when i first met her? it was in ronlyn's 2005 class--rikki and i were each other's great defenders in workshop--kindred writing spirits--that's what our friendship was based on. we agreed to be writing buddies. it was only after ballet, our first class at Dancers' Workshop, when we sat at Wendy's for two hours and talked--that we realized we both knew stosh and jacques and groh--

anyway. i'm thinking all this, and she's picking at a scab, and then she announces that after dinner she wants to sleep--but potty first--and i tell her that i've been thinking nostalgically, as if we were some old couple, about the beginning--and she bursts out laughing--i'm like, "who could have known that, a year later, we'd be sitting here, prague, you and me together, eating dinner, you picking at your scab and talking about how you need to potty--"

anyway. i'm gonna eat trail mix.

kde je tady zahrada?

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 8, 2004 / 10:19pm

one of the things i like about my alarm clock is that when it hasn't been set, it shows -:-- instead of blinking 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, 12:00...

eating green seeded grapes. three seeds to a grape. the holy triumverate.

we went to a grocery today, which was an experience--buying groceries when you can't figure out what the labels are--the cashier was ringing me up, and she got to the grapes, and she was like, "oh, something something something" and i didn't understand, i thought maybe i had to weigh them or something, but it turned out she didn't know the price--and i was like "oh, i'm sorry" and she said, in english, "i'm sorry, i'm new" and i was like, "oh, it's cool," so she asks the girl next to her, the next cashier, who shrugs and says something into a microphone--in czech--but basically it was like "price check on aisle three" and for some reason i thought that was really great. some things are apparently universal. anyway while we were waiting the cashier--young girl--was like, grinning at me, "so where do you live" and i tried to explain about the dormitory down the street and she's like "no, where do you come from" and i was like "ohh. the states. um, louisiana? new orleans?" and she was like "yeah, yeah, i know that." she was really nice. then rikki came up behind me, also with grapes, and the girl was like "oh nooo." she was so cool.

it rained on the way back from the reading tonight. we caught the tram--first time on the tram and it went off without a hitch--number 18 to Staromětská and it was raining hard--the lightning silhouetting the spires of the castle and the churches--prague looks decidedly like Transylvania in the rain. rikki said, "it looks almost sorta Gothic" and i said, "well actually--it is Gothic" and she was like, "yeah, well. yeah."

so we caught the metro back to Dejvická and i'm sitting there with the wet slowly creeping up my calves from where my jeans drag--holding my collapsed umbrella awkwardly aloft like a dripping purple nylon bouquet. there's an asian couple sitting across from me wearing sheer yellow ponchos that look like they're made out of that crinkly grocery bag plastic--puffed up around them like lifevests. the haggard woman directly across, it's rained through her white shirt and i can see the seams of her sagging bra--the girl standing by the door has carelessly cuffed up her blue jeans--the word "RUSSSIA" has been spray-painted in black on the seat, so that it looks like it's been seared into the vinyl--

on the walk back to the dorm, rikki and i practiced our pronunciation.

ulice. oo-lits-eh. street.
kde je. gdeh yeh. where is.
kde je tady ulice--where is the nearest street--
kde je tady ulice karlová?
kde je tady ulice thakurová?

"--i thought it was karlová?" she said.
"thakurová is the street our dorm is on."
"oh. i've just been calling it the 'th' one."

kde je tady pošta?
post office.
"posta."
"no, no, poSHta."

kde je tady hospoda?
pub.

kde je tady kavárna?
"what is that, garden?"
"no, it's coffee shop--i don't remember garden, it was a hard one."
"yeah, but really," she said, "when are you ever going to need that--"
"--excuse me, where's the nearest garden--"
"--i really need to plant something--right away--"

we could write a poem, she said. The Garden. she started in on flowering shrubbery, carefully over-enunciating to imitate the, uh, extremely articulate poets from the reading tonight.

earlier while we were waiting for the metro, i looked at her and said, "thank god you're not a poet--because i honestly don't think i could stand you."

on fear

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 10, 2004 / The Globe bookstore / 4pm

-- went to Kafka's grave today--at least, we tried to--but apparently he's buried in a Jewish cemetery--and it's the Sabbath--so it was closed. gates locked.

we took the tram all the way across town to get there--mostly kids from rikki's fiction workshop--there's this older woman named joyce, probably in her 50s--apparently she's afraid of everything--travelling and cities and foreign lands--god only knows why she came on this trip--she was complaining on the tram that she'd forgotten to take her Dramamine and it became this crisis--is joyce gonna make it--"only five more stops, joyce"--and all i can think is that i'm so glad i'm here and young and getting over it now--because i am afraid of everything--and if i don't push myself now--i'll end up crazy and neurotic and panic-stricken--paralyzed at fifty, and that would be sad.

-- which is why i came to Prague in the first place--it's been baby steps for me. NYC: big city, public transportation, total freedom/total responsibility, all alone. then London: abroad but not really, same basic cultural background, same language. France for three days: a culture that jealously guards its own. in London, there was literally a Starbucks on every corner. in Paris, there was none.

and i know my culture. i want someone else's. after London i wanted to spend time in a place that was completely foreign to me. the idea of it both attracts and repels me. i want to go to Budapest. but i'm afraid. i don't know the language, i won't know my way around--i know nothing about Hungary--but then, those are the very reasons i came here, to Prague--

but even here in Prague--it's a newly popular European tourist destination--and deservedly so--but i've been getting by with English and every place i've found in my Lonely Planet travel guide is decidedly Westernized--even "Americanized"--like right now. the Globe is a bookshop/bar/cafe. for ex-pats. it's an English language bookshop, and ok, what use would i have for a Czech bookstore--

but i've been on the hunt for a nice local coffee shop hang-out--a cozy one--which is proving hard to find. they're all new-looking and brightly lit, hard wooden chairs. this place is ideal: little round tables to write at in the bookshop section, a small loft space for used books, a smattering of cushy chairs covered in some plush maroon fabric--there's the cafe in back, noisier, music playing, more tables. but the cashier takes pounds and dollars along with crowns, and all the newspapers are in English. which is not what i was going for.

-- in our language class, the teacher--young, vibrant, enthusiastic--frequently has us close our workbooks and simply repeat after her. i find myself panicking in these moments, as she utters an unfamiliar word and we as a class are left to imitate the sounds--i know it's not exactly right, what i'm saying--maybe it's a "v," not a "b"--and what does it mean--and how is it spelled--what does it look like--i surreptitiously crack open my book and she scolds us for peeking. my heart has seized up in my chest. my stomach is in knots. i must look. i have to see.

i remember hearing when i was in grammar school about "visual learners," and it's only now occurring to me that i fall into that category. i've never considered myself a particularly "visual" person. but i have hazy memories of hating the listening sections on those standardized tests; my recall when i took exams was always related to the way my notes looked on the page. now, when people give me driving directions, i have to write it down. it's not that i necessarily have to refer to my notes when i'm driving. it's because, unless i write it, and see it written, it doesn't stick in my head. i worry that i don't deal well with "abstract" concepts--i hated biology on the cellular level--unless i can relate it to something concrete--

i don't know, maybe it has nothing to do with being a visual learner. i can remember conversations almost verbatim. and maybe i'm not part of some special category; maybe everyone is like me. but rikki laughed at me when i had that meltdown moment in the language class. and she tried to read her latest story to me last night, and i immediately groaned and grabbed it from her to read it for myself, thinking "i'm way too tired to try to listen to it"--it really takes a lot of effort for me.

-- so i was talking to this guy kelly while we were waiting for the tram to the graveyard--about MFA programs and whether or not to wait, life experience, etc--

and i'm starting to realize that i can go one of two ways. i can go straight to grad school, straight to teaching, teach and write for the rest of my life--

or i can graduate from LSU, try to find a job doing something--maybe an internship with a video production company since i have editing experience--or a theatre company--hell, like laura said, i could join the fucking circus--i'd probably have to wait tables or bartend to pay the bills--take odd jobs--get experience--

because what else do i have to write about? it's not that i "don't think i have anything interesting to say" or that "nothing ever happens to me"--the writer's gift is that she takes the common experience and elevates it with her unique style of wordplay--her own voice, her own take on things. so to write i have to live. in the world. to be a part of the "common experience."

and if i go straight through school, and straight into academia, i won't be living in the world. i'll be cloistered. i'll be hiding. i've been having this sense that i want to go straight into grad school because i don't know what else i'd do. and for that to be my immediate reason--that's chickenshit.

so we're back to fear, again. which is how i live my life. out of fear. where did this come from? my mother's pragmatic paranoia, my father's racism--they cultivated it carefully in me: the oldest, the only girl, over-disciplined, over-sensitive, over-achiever. my directors in high school--dance and theatre--told me that i was playing it too safe--that i had to "find the fire within"--i hated it, and hated realizing that they were right--how strictly i operate within my comfort zone--where i feel safe--it's hard for me to give up control, my careful plans. it frightens me.

but i'm starting to think that it may be the only way.

(assorted)

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 10, 2004 / The Globe bookshop

Headline, front page, The Daily Telegraph: 100-year-old cuts his ailing wife's throat in 'act of love.'

at the reading last night, a woman told us that she graduated from high school with an albino boy born into a black family. shortly after they graduated, he lost his mind, thought his family had been inhabited by aliens, and shot them all.

---------------------

let's be honest, michael moore's books are basically pulp.

why does he always have to be on the cover? looking so damn smug. does he think he's oprah?

the hot chocolate here is unbelievable. darkly bittersweet and served at the perfect temperature.

----------------------

i have encountered more varieties on toilet flushing mechanisms in the past week than ever before in my entire life.

----------------------

10:30pm / and home again

the other day i was sitting on the front steps of Charles University, eating a tuna fish sandwich, and a tour group in one of those little motored train-like things passed by--right by me, within ten feet--they all gaped at me, eating my lunch--i felt like a landmark, or an animal at the zoo. it was weird.

i've been playing this game with myself, particularly on the public transportation: the "do i pass for local" game--most likely not--if not for the fact that i exude touristy vibes, then for my physical features--dark hair, dark eyes--the czechs seem to have a pretty distinctive look about them--a lot of it is very Aryan--

and of course there's also the whole socks-with-sandals thing.

gloomy weather today--overcast and a bite to the air that's almost autumnal--accordingly i felt pretty down all day--like the dogs, leashed and muzzled, that i pass in the streets--i feel both like i need time alone and also that if i succumb to that desire, i'll hide away in a book and get even more depressed. that's what i did that summer in new york, and i didn't snap out of it until the end of the trip, when i started interacting with humans.

to that end, i ate dinner tonight with rikki, kelly, and ian at this restaurant on the corner--kickass food for cheap. this place could aptly be called a titty bar, as it is a bar decorated exclusively with artsy black-and-white photos of women's breasts. (there are shots that include pubic hair, too, for those of you who choose to make your art/porn distinction that way.)

----------------

oh, and i found out today that jeremy, my teacher, just directed an off-broadway musical starring anthony rapp. be still my heart.

----------------

strictly metro

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 11, 2004 / 12:16pm

stosh just called--he and ian are down in the lobby and they want to get lunch--they're leaving on the midnight train. (to Budapest, not to Georgia.) (sorry.)

had a ton of weird dreams--i don't ever remember my dreams back home but here they've been so vivid--there was something about how i had a loose tooth--really loose--hanging by a thread, the way i'd let it get when i was a kid--and i kept pushing it with my tongue--i was freaked out by it, though--ben reassured me that he still lost his baby teeth--but i didn't have a permanent tooth behind this one--just a big gaping hole.

i dreamt a lot about ben--scary sad dreams--if he doesn't email me soon, man--this sucks. it's bad enough i can't afford to call him--

also dreamt about mom and dad--mom was mad at me because she felt like i was ignoring her--which i thought was unfair--someone had been driving a car through my house, through my bedroom, to get to the fridge, drinks in the fridge--they drove up on my bed and out the door--michael said they'd been doing it for ten years--dad offered to take me to Bud's and i told him i wasn't hungry but tomorrow? and he hesitated, we were in a parking lot, night, and there were other people pulling up, his friends, and he was like "i gotta go" and he thrust the contents of his wallet at me--credit cards, membership cards, coffee shop credits, gift certificates--and told me to buy some for myself and bring him back a napkin--and i wondered if he wanted the napkin as proof i'd gone to Bud's instead of using the money for something else.

------------------------

10:40pm

we went to that pizza place for lunch--came back, balanced checkbook, made out budget. have determined that for time reasons (and, to a lesser degree, money concerns) a trip to Budapest is impractical--it's a seven- or eight-hour train ride and we only have weekends. and next saturday we have a day trip to the bone cathedral.

so then we left stosh and ian on the metro--tried to tram it to this coffee shop rikki picked out of my Lonely Planet guide--tried to take the green line one stop to Hradčanská, then #18 to Národní Divadlo, but when we got off the metro it was pouring rain--crazy wind and freezing nastiness--i discovered that #18 no longer stopped at Hradčanská--that's been the difficulty with the tram system--first off, it's hard to tell on the map where the hell the stops are--and then, when you think you've got it figured out, you discover that the routes have all changed. so basically you wait and hop on and pray. it's very hit-or-miss.

so we took the metro two more stops, to Staromětská, and took #18 to Národní Divadlo, and walked in the nastiness down cobblestone alleys--found the address for the coffee shop--but the doors were locked, and there was no sign for a coffee shop--finally we just turned the corner, kept walking--found another coffee shop within the block, which fit the description, minus the name and address, of the shop we originally sought. the guy behind the counter was really funny and nice. and we stayed for a good four or five hours, reading, writing, talking--the place got pretty busy, although when we first got there we were the only ones--

anyway, it was exactly what i'd wanted in a coffee shop--cozy, funky, friendly guy behind the counter, and frequented by not-just-Americans-and-other-tourists. i was happy. it's pretty close to the school building, too.

so we were gonna try to catch the tram back to Hradčanská, thinking maybe we were at the wrong spot the first time. we got as far as Malostranská, and then the driver got up, briefly adjusted something in the back--i thought maybe we'd gotten to the end of the line, but no one got off--then, sure enough, the fucking tram turned around. we got off at Staromětská and took the metro back to Malostranská, hoping to eat dinner at this mediterranean cafe called Posha--but the prices were insane (seventeen bucks for an entrée--a pricey entrée here is about seven dollars). so we ended up going back to the dorm (strictly metro this time) and eating at the restaurant by the dorm--the titty bar--which is great but the service is even slower there than usual in Czech-land--like, it takes at least a half-hour to get your food--closer to forty-five minutes, sometimes--and rikki and i hadn't eaten since 1:30ish--it was 10 before we got our dinner--

we went to the convenience store next door afterwards, for a bottle of wine, which we purchased amid much hysterical laughter, because we couldn't read the labels--our purchase was based upon our mutual agreement that, as far as prices go, 60 crowns was a nice round number. but the store didn't sell cups or a corkscrew--we have a mug here, and i figured we could at least pass the bottle--and that the front desk of the dorm would have a corkscrew--which they did. the guy handed it to us, and we sort of tried to open the bottle and gave up, laughing, and the guy, also laughing, came out from the office and tried to open it, but it turns out the corkscrew was missing the, uh, screw part. so. no wine tonight. tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

got back to the room and put on PJs and dry socks. i'd had wet feet for eight hours. they went sorta numb at some point. it was really cold and blustery today.

while we were waiting for the tram (the one that would ultimately turn around on us), an elderly couple approached our bench. i stood up to let them sit, because that's a big deal here. the woman scooted over and patted the seat on her right and told the man to sit down--and then patted the seat to her left and gestured for me to smush in. so i sat, and their dog came sniffing up to me, and rikki and i started petting it and telling it how cute it was--which it was--and the woman pointed to the dog, and told me something in Czech--finally i figured out that she wanted me to shake hands with the dog--it raised a paw and we shook. it was the best thing ever.

sports and wine, yeah yeah

THE TRAVEL LOG
(straight up, baby)

i ordered baked trout for lunch at this oldskool Czech restaurant the other day. it came whole. i didn't realize. but the server set it down, and there it was: a trout: baked. the whole thing. skin, tail, head, eyeballs. split up the belly and minus the guts. i tried not to look as panicky as i felt when i saw it. rikki and lana were there. lana told me to cut off the head and the tail--"with what?" i asked--i had to use the butter knife. and then pull out the spine, which felt a little bit Mortal Kombat. but the fish was pretty tasty.

last night eloise and anna, two MFAs from LSU, had a potluck in their suite. i showed up at 8:30 and there were crackers with cheesy spread, lunch meat, olives--fish and rice and a rockin' fruit salad--and more wine than you could shake a stick at. (everyone who couldn't cook, myself and rikki included, brought wine.) we all huddled in the suite hallway and drank and ate and talked, and it felt as good as it feels at home whenever we have an impromptu dinner party. there's something about people coming together over food and wine and conversation that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. like i really am part of some community. and that's what communities do. eat a lot. and talk bad about whoever's not there. no, i'm kidding. sort of.

i ate a hot dog from a stand on monday night. the playwriting class went to see a production of marlowe's "Faustus" and afterwards we went out for drinks and after that we went out for more drinks. i drank about four glasses of wine. three of them at a bar that has wine--really cheap red wine--on tap. i was pretty sloshy. anyway, between the two bar excursions we stopped at this stand in the middle of the square and i had a hot dog, Czech-style, which means sausage on a slab of bread with mustard on the side. i took one bite and then the sausage rolled away and hit the ground. the ground was wet from rain. rikki picked up the sausage and wiped it down with a napkin and handed it to me. "c'mon," she said. so i ate it. which makes me either a disgusting person, or hardcore.

it was damn good.

so it's been wet and windy and cold for the past week, and i've been going out of my fucking mind. i don't know if it's New Orleans or what, but i am so much happier in the humid hot. today it finally warmed up, although there's a lot of cloud cover, and i'm wearing a tank top and a skirt for the first time in forever. sun-starved and desperate.

i've been outlining this new idea for a play--about a nun and a woman in a bus station. and yesterday i was trying to come up with character names--i wanted good catholic names. so i went to this website, which noted:

The moment has arrived to choose a Christian name for the baptism of a baby boys or girl. What should the child be called? Must he/she receive the name of a saint? According to the revised Catholic Church Canon Law, it is no longer mandatory that the child receive the name of a saint. The Canon Law states:

"Parents, sponsors and parish priests are to take care that a name is not given which is foreign to Christian sentiment." [Canon # 855]

In other words, the chosen name must appeal to the Christian community. While the names of Jesus and Judas are Biblical in nature, the choice of such names would result in controversy. To many, the Name Jesus is Sacred and the Most Holy of all names. Because Judas is the disciple who betrayed Jesus, many feel this would be a poor choice.

Equally, names such as 'cadillac' or 'buick' are not suitable because they represent the individual person's personal interest in certain cars.

god i love catholics.

this is not a love poem.

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and unabridged)

Friday / July 16, 2004

I went home by myself
tonight drunk it was
past eleven when I left
the bar I didn't even
know where the metro
was you should have been
worried you should have
been very concerned I
had a shot of something it
tasted like nailpolish remover
smells I drank it in one
sip and three gulps and
then I had a vodka and grape-
fruit juice the difference
between vodka and water in
Czech is the "k" I had to
get out I had to get home
I was drunk past the point
of poetry but I wanted to
write you before this
buzzing in my bloodstream
fled

I navigated the interminable
escalators of the metro
reckless on these unsteady
legs I was wearing that
skirt the short gray one
with the pleats you
know and this hard-
faced man with a hairy
chest and tight blue jeans
he checked me out you
should have been worried
you should have been very
concerned

I went home tonight drunk
alone it was past eleven-
thirty when I got off
the metro and now I'm
here to let you know
that I'm leaving you I've
left you and I'm never
coming back I like it
here the weather's fair
to middling and the
architecture is really
stunning moreover I've
seen some good-looking
Czech men they all have
blue eyes I'm crazy about blue-
eyed men it's like running an
ice cube over your bare
skin and so I'm gonna
find me a nice Czech guy
with Aryan features they
all have Aryan features which
get kinda craggy when they
get a little older and
he will speak Czech to
me he will mock my attempts
to roll the ř he will
talk trash about Kundera
the way I gossip about Al
Copeland and he will feed me
ghoulash bread dumplings potato
pancakes it will be very
erotic it may even involve
a sausage so this is just
to let you know I will not miss
your eyes the way they crinkle
at the corners when you're on
the verge of laughter and I
will not miss your plate-
stacking compulsion I will
not miss your skin especially
not your back or the warmth
of you in bed or how you
scoot over so close to me
thereby taking up my side
of the mattress so I'm
practically falling off I
won't miss spooning you or
being spooned the winters here
will be very cold but I think
I'll just buy a nice down
comforter and hope for the
best

I will admit
the men here wear
socks with sandals
which is decidedly un-
sexy whereas you on
the other hand wear
flip-flops and you
do have very nice
feet.

that and the impending apocalypse.

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

8:09pm / July 17, 2004 / Globe bookstore

i'm in such a crabby mood. went on a field trip today (bone cathedral, several castles, czech countryside, etc) but i didn't realize how intrusive the tour guide would be. i was screaming things in my head and it was getting to the point where i wondered what would happen if i just let it all out.

it's funny, last summer in London i stuck really close to the group--there were only about 35 of us--and we did a lot of stuff all together--this summer i've been sticking mostly with rikki, and we've been figuring out the city on our own. so now i find that i grow impatient with large groups--and furious with the tour guide--i'd much rather wander alone.

all my pictures are of buildings.

last summer i was frustrated because i felt like i knew the program group better than the city; this summer i'm frustrated because i know the city better than the group. although, honestly, which will last longer? the friendships formed at programs like this tend only to make sense in that specific context, whereas Prague will be around till, you know, the end of time. or whatever.

----------------------------

i've decided.

people get in the way of relationships.

think about it.

you make a connection--the connection doesn't change--it's the person, or what you know about the person--what you learn to hate about the person--that becomes the deciding factor. the connection is still there. it's just clouded over by the people stuff. insecurities and vices and emotional baggage.

i suppose it's a paradox. because, on the other hand, you can't have relationships without people.

maybe this is the motivation for one-night stands.

red plastic souvenir

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

June 19, 2004 / the hazards of living abroad:

i sent off postcards last week. (becca, elizabeth, meghan, jake: if you ever read this, i either didn't have your address, didn't know your email, or you didn't respond to my email for your address. i still love you. do you love me?) i tried to leave room for the stamp when i was writing out the postcards. but when i went to the post office i discovered that the stamps were the size of Godzilla. so i had to mail these cryptic postcards with words and phrases stamp-obscured.

i sent another batch of mail today: a letter to ben and a postcard to my dad. i left a lot of room this time on the postcard, because i learn from experience. alas, the post office would not be outwitted. a postcard to the U.S. requires a 12-crown stamp. the post office was apparently out of said stamps today. i received a 10-crown stamp that was even bigger than the 12-crown stamp, and two supplementary 1-crown stamps. and a sticker for "priority mail." i swear, they've got a vendetta against me.

from an email to ben:

rikki and i went to the grocery. i tried to buy peanut butter and jelly. i ended up buying some kind of "marmalade," which will suffice, and "nugetta" which is, mind you, not nutella. it is brown, comes in a jar, and has a picture of peanuts on the label. so, you know, i figured...but i was wrong. it's some kind of chocolate peanut butter. like nutella but with more peanut buttery flavor and texture. it's not peanut butter. (snot peanut butter??) but it's damn good. we eat it with our fingers, very quickly. also sometimes on bread.

we also tried to buy butter. that didn't work either. rikki found something in a tub that was next to something that came in sticks. so she figured....but she was wrong. it's cream cheese spread. ah, well.

so lana asked us if we wanted to go see a puppet show on some street corner at 7, and then a black light theatre show at 9:30, and we said yes. but then we didn't have time for dinner, so we cancelled on lana, and got dinner, and then we were going to go to the movie thing at 8--the program screens classic czech movies for free on monday nights--but the theatre is hard to find, and i found the street but not the theatre, and we were already fifteen minutes late, and i hate missing the beginnings of movies. so rikki was like, "fuck it, let's go read at the coffee shop" and i was down. while we were looking for the theatre, we had passed this group of british guys, one of whom looked me square in the eye and exclaimed, "hallo!" and i gave him this tight-lipped smile and we walked on. we doubled back on our way to the cafe, and the guys had slowed down--one of them turned to us and asked us if we knew where some club was, roxy's caesar cafe club, i don't know, i told him i didn't know where it was, and then another one said, "are you american?" but you know, britishy, so the inflection is down at the end.

and so it began. yes, american, from new orleans--
"isn't that where they have the mardi gras?"
yes, we have 'the' mardi gras.
"and the girls all show their tits?"
yeah, the tourists do.
"so how many beers would we have to give you--"

and this is the tricky part, trying to decide if you're going to be mock-offended or actually offended. rikki, flustered, answered "none" and they laughed, and i thought about telling them how over the line they were, but instead said "there isn't enough beer in the world." and one of them asked us if we wanted to stop in at the pub about five feet away and he would buy us a drink. and i looked at rikki and she shrugged, and i shrugged, and so we went. i had a jack and coke, surprise, and rikki had a beer.

there were five of them, from manchester, it was a stag party excursion, in prague for three days. justin was the youngest, 23, the bridegroom, kind of dopey and very earnest. the oldest was his brother, ben, 27, who was shy and had a great laugh, this sort of nerdy chuckle. their cousin "donny" whose name was actually danny but in prague for some reason they started calling him donny--he was really fucking drunk, he'd been doing shots of absinthe all night, and so mostly he was asleep. occasionally he'd wake up and ask questions that had already been answered. and then there was gaz, who had a pierced tongue, and the bar in his tongue had a white tip that said "cunt," which he claimed was his girlfriend's idea. and he also had pierced nipples. and he told me i should read The Alchemist. he was the philosopher of the group. and nick was 25 and sex-obsessed and told me the last book he read was The BFG. which is a great book. roald dahl is, as lana would say, "the shit."

so yeah, five guys, and me and rikki are sitting on this bench against the window of this pub, and the guys are all standing around us, except for donny who was asleep. and they're asking us all these questions, about the states and the south and new orleans and cajuns etc. and we imitated each other's accents. and they're making fun of each other and being very fast and dry and perverse and stereotypically british, except that occasionally justin would look at us and smile dopily and say "we're just kidding, we're kidding" and i'd tell him that we knew they were kidding, and that part of the game was that they would say dirty things and we'd pretend to be offended. there were lots of really good "your mom" jokes. and they informed us that donny rented out his ass--at which point donny woke up and said, "good money, it's good money!" and then fell back asleep. (later, donny tried to auction his ass off--5 pounds? pound-fifty? alright, seventy five p? no takers.) they were so fluent in their insults; it made me homesick for my retarded guy friends.

rikki and i held our own. every time we said something sarcastic back, ben--who didn't participate in the tomfoolery--would do his little chuckle, and rikki and i would burst out laughing. ben was, as rikki said, the brains of the operation. he was the most sober, too. so we had our drink, and they got rikki another beer, and i might have had another jack--yeah, i did, but i didn't finish it, because they got us shots of absinthe, which we managed quite successfully, flaming sugar spoons and all. they were handing off drinks and taking our empty glasses and one of them laughed and said "my, you're being waited on hand and foot" and another one said "where are the grapes, we should be feeding you grapes" and yeah, it was fun. after that they asked us if we wanted to go to roxy, some club, and we said sure, i was somehow still pretty sober, ben told us it was on dhoula, which is the street bohemia bagel and stosh's hostel are on. so we got on the tram and got off the tram and walked through the square, and the boys were losing their buzzes and gaz started bitching about how we were doing too much walking and not enough drinking, so we stopped at some pub, mexican theme, someone bought me a beer which i only half-drank, rikki had another beer, at this point justin was really drunk and getting kinda pouty, i don't know why, we ended up walking some more and stopping yet again, another pub, i had a grapefruit juice and vodka and that made me drunkish.

rikki had another beer and informed me that she was fucked up, which was funny, because i don't think i'd seen her really drunk before. she was really cute, she would get up to use the bathroom and leave her bag with me and ask me not to leave her. i was like, um, don't worry. it was nice to be out with someone that i knew wouldn't abandon me. i don't know if guys worry about that stuff. but in london, i skipped out on some nights because i didn't know the girls of the group well enough, and some people will just leave you. anyway, the guys were all pretty fucked (except for ben) by the time we hit the third pub, and they were getting kind of rowdy--and then one of them would say, "okay guys, we're getting rowdy, we should keep it down" which was really funny--you know, they kept talking about "titties" and "cunts," purely for shock value, and then they're pulling this well-mannered stuff. they were pretty loud, though. when we left that pub, we saw a sign at the door that said, all caps, NO STAG PARTIES, and ben started laughing.

by the end of it, they were walking arm in arm through the streets singing--i shit you not--british drinking songs. about the slums of liverpool and all this stuff. it was fucking hilarious. gaz got drunk hiccups and i made fun of him and he said he didn't have hiccups, and then he hiccupped, and then he laughed for like ten minutes. we didn't find the club (only because they couldn't stand still long enough for me to read the map) and they kept talking about "titty bars" which rikki was not keen on--i'd probably go to one, but not with them--rikki told them if they were hitting a strip joint she was ditching them--but it was justin's stag party, you know, so i figured it would be unfair of us to give them a hard time about it. especially since they'd bought us five rounds of drinks and been generally good-natured and enjoyable. so we were walking down this street, and there was a strip club, and donny, like, ran in, and that was pretty much the end of that. we hugged them and bid them adieu. ben was sort of reluctant; he told us he was glad they'd found us.

it was only 1am (we started drinking at 8:30) and rikki was like "that was fucking awesome. and i'm drunk. and i don't how how to get home. and i hope you do." and i was, shockingly, not that drunk--i mean, i wouldn't have tried to drive a car or anything, but i was functional enough to walk in a semi-straight line and read a map. and so she took my hand and we started walking. i got us to wenceslaus square, to the all-night tram stop (drunk bus equivalent), and we made it home safely. and we ate bread and cheese and turkey and green olives. and went to sleep.

stoner haiku

THE TRAVEL LOG
(on the rocks)

July 21, 2004:

we did this revision exercise in class today, where we all wrote down the name of one person we knew, then traded names. with the name you got, you had to a) imagine what the person is like, b) write a sample of that person's work, c) ghost-write / revise a scene from your own work using that person's style.

for example, i got the name Dora Barzcus, and i imagined her as a little old lady who wrote trashy thriller romance novels. so i wrote an excerpt from one of her novels:

He paused. Thrillingly she waited. The eager, panting anticipation. He put his hand on her thigh. It was a warm hand, with a moist, fleshy palm. She waited.

"Hilda," he croaked.
"Yes, Ernest," she trilled.
"Hilda, I just wanted to tell you."
"You don't have to tell me anything, Ernest."
"I didn't mean to, I tell you. I want you to--"
"I understand, Ernest. I understand everything. More than you know."
"I love you, Hilda," he said. His head fell back on the white hospital pillow.

She sighed. Relief flooded through her. It was finally over. Finally at peace. A flush spread over her cheeks. The poison had worked quicker than she'd imagined. And no one was the wiser. [D.B.]

then i wrote the opening scene from this play i'm starting--trying to start--but as if Dora Barzcus were writing it: two women in a new orleans bus station. carrie is in her thirties and she's due back in vermont, where her husband and kids are, but she doesn't want to go. sister sheila is a nun headed for the retirement community of destin, FL, to visit an old flame.

-------------------

CARRIE: I can't go back, I tell you. I can't, I can't. (She flings herself down on the dirty floor of the bus station.)
SR. SHEILA: My child! Get up! What in heaven's name is the matter? (She kneels beside Carrie, struggles to bring her to her feet.) Now, now. Tell me what ails you.
CARRIE: It's...my husband.
SR. SHEILA: Are you having difficulties with him?
CARRIE: Difficulties...well, yes.
SR. SHEILA: Is it another woman?
CARRIE: No.
SR. SHEILA: (hushed) Another man?
CARRIE: No, no.
SR. SHEILA: Is he bad with the children?
CARRIE: No. It's--well, he doesn't satisfy me.
SR. SHEILA: Emotionally? Psychologically?
CARRIE: Sexually.
SR. SHEILA: Oh.
CARRIE: His thingy is so small!
SR. SHEILA: Oh. I see.
CARRIE: It's hopeless, hopeless! (Flings self.)
SR. SHEILA: My child! (Kneels beside Carrie) Nothing is hopeless. Remember that despair is the only unforgivable sin.
CARRIE: What should I do?
SR. SHEILA: Well, I'll tell you. It involves a cantaloupe and a can of arsenic.
CARRIE: Oh, I just love a good murder mystery. I think I'm going to need a sandwich. [D.B.]

---------------------------------

it was a useful exercise, because i'd originally started the play with the two characters harrumphing a lot and being awkward strangers with each other. obviously i won't use this new dialogue, or the murder plot (although...hmmmm...), but i did find a starting point with higher energy, which was nice.

but the best thing about the assignment was that we read them aloud to each other, and i had written down adam's name, which this girl carey used for her scene. and she said she envisioned adam as a stoner guy who wrote exclusively in haikus. and this was her sample:

I said "Dude" to him
and he said, "What's up, homeslice?"
Not much, man. Not much. [A.R.]

---

Blam! Pow! Bang! Kaboom!
What is up in the Batcave?
Batman is angry. [A.R]

and that made me very happy. adam, this gives a whole new meaning to the [incredibly irritating] expression "you're a poet and you didn't even know it."

sproing!

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 22, 2004 / Globe bookstore / 3:27pm

just had yummy Globe pasta for lunch. was so hungry. am now tired all the way through to my feet and bones.

found a studio on Narodní that offered open "klasický balet" classes for 150 crowns. went with rikki to the 10:45am class. i hadn't brought my dance stuff to prague; i packed it, thinking that since Prague is a big city i could find a studio that offered open classes--the czech equivalent of BDC in new york. at the last minute i unpacked all the dance stuff, thinking that i wouldn't have time or motivation or money to take dance classes.

then at the student reading last week, a girl from the non-fiction class read a piece about how she boxes back home, and how she was all excited about coming to Prague because she'd found a czech gym on the internet and so she's been training here with a hot czech guy. and i thought: goddammit, i want to take a ballet class in prague. lack of cute (or straight) czech guys notwithstanding, it would be interesting to take a dance class in another language.

so i googled "ballet school in prague" and found an ex-pat forum for the czech republic, and a bunch of postings for this studio called Dance Perfect. i found the school, got the schedule, asked about the dress code. rikki guilt-tripped herself into accompanying me to class. i wore: lana's sports bra, a tank top, black tights--i brought them to wear under skirts, but they're dance tights--they have what are known to dancers as "convertible feet"--which means that the feet have holes in the bottoms; you can wear them so that they cover your feet, or you can pull the tights up over your feet and roll them up around your shins. so i rolled up my black tights. and over the tights i wore--and this is the part i'm proudest of--a pair of black boyshort underwear. as if they were bloomers. which they actually sort of are. they're made of the same knit fabric as leotards. they're cute, they have a pink girl sitting in a cocktail glass on the hip. anyway. i didn't have my ballet slippers with me either, so i wore socks folded down over my heels. rikki improvised likewise, in a pair of borrowed exercise-y pants, a tank top, and folded-down socks as well.

so we take the metro and the tram to Narodní Třida, all paranoid, because we don't know what to expect. there are schools of dance and there are dancin' schools, and i didn't know if this studio was going to be cheesy. (besides "klasický balet," Dance Perfect offers classes with names like "Power Yoga" and "Fit Ballet" and "Street Funk.") we figured it could go one of two ways: either the class will suck and we'll have wasted our time and money; or the class will be hard, the dancers will be awesome, and we'll look like assholes. especially in our makeshift dance clothes.

we pessimistically hadn't considered a third option: the class will be good, the dancers will be mediocre at best, and we'll look like we pretty well know our shit. this turned out to be the case. there was one girl who looked like she'd had a lot of ballet training, but otherwise the class looked like mostly jazz and modern dancers who could sort of keep up, but were far from intimidating. and everyone was wearing tank tops, pants, and socks. ah, dancer fashion. it's hard to explain to the uninitiated, but dancers have this apparently universal tendency to very carefully and deliberately layer on their most raggedy-ass clothes--working hard to achieve the i-couldn't-care-less look. it's ridiculous, but we all do it. apparently even in Prague.

the teacher was a tall, stringy czech man with flamboyant arms; i googled him afterwards and found out that he's one of the ballet masters at the national theatre in Brno. he knew his shit, and he gave a good class. well-paced, but i never felt lost. he was patient and not at all condescending. it was weird hearing the class given in czech, but the whole thing felt very familiar. the teacher referred to the steps by their french names--his accent was kinda funny--and he demonstrated most of the steps, so that was easy enough. i couldn't understand his criticisms or his compliments unless he did some kind of physical gesture along with it, and i couldn't understand his counts, because i don't know how to count in czech. the hardest part was, ironically, the exercises that were most familiar: there are some exercises so basic and so universal that they don't really require explanation or demonstration--the teacher will just say something like "ok, real quick, come to the center, thirty-two changements, just to warm up the feet." and in english i know what that means, but in czech i have no idea. so rikki and i would stare at him blankly, and then he'd kindly demonstrate--but without making us feel like we'd been singled out or were particularly idiotic.

anyway, the class was fun, and the girls were nice enough--no one tried to run me over. some dancers will do that. it can be very cutthroat. i want to go back again next week. hopefully by then i'll be able to walk normally, because i'm sore as fuck today. it had been about two months since i'd taken class regularly. my hamstrings are killing me.

went to a jazz club last night with danielle. the music was alright--jazz fusion--i could've used a glass of wine. the atmosphere was so chill. but i was broke. on the way back we saw this couple get on the metro. the guy was carrying a large box containing an espresso machine, which he had apparently just purchased as a surprise for the girl. she had met him in the station and hadn't seen the box till she got on the train. when she saw it she squealed and started kissing him, asking happy rapidfire questions, and he'd respond all bashfully. it was cute. except at first i didn't know that they had just met up in the station, so i didn't understand how she hadn't noticed the box. i thought maybe he had just stolen the box from Tesco, and that she was surprised, like, "oh, honey! you stole me an espresso machine!"

also, the metro stations are plastered in posters for this art exhibit called "heroes," by ivan pinkava. on the poster is a black-and-white photo of a bald, pasty, bare-chested, weird-looking man. the exhibit information is printed over his chest. every time i take the metro, i have to go up and down the long-ass escalators and see ten of these posters, all in a row, that weird man over and over and over. so when i was coming back from the jazz club with danielle, i said "god, i'm so sick of seeing that man" and she said "it's not a man, it's a woman." and i almost fell down the escalator. i seriously had to re-evaluate my entire world view. she'd shattered my perspective. what is truth? but more importantly, why does that bald man have breasts?

saw a guy working construction in a building near the Staromětská tram stop. he was slim and muscular and shirtless. i made a note of his shirtlessness to rikki, and she pointed out that he had a mullet. he did indeed, but i argued that it was a minor mullet and instructed her to ignore his head and focus on the shirtlessness. then i sighed wistfully and said, "he looks kinda like ben," and she burst out laughing. "you just miss ben," she said, and i told her to shut up. crazy bitch. but yeah. i do.

because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 24, 2004 / Saturday / from an email to Ben:

my class performed at the student reading on friday night. you're supposed to do five minutes of reading your own shit, but as playwrights that's a little awkward, so we did this in-class exercise called "prohibition" where we picked a prohibited object (a dictionary) and we each wrote a scene with a designated theme:

1) parents find child with object
2) congress debates prohibition
3) Public Service Announcement about prohibition
4) prohibited object sold on the black market
5) talk show debate about prohibition
6) performance art protest of prohibition
7) the ban is lifted

i had the black market one. we wrote our scenes separately and came together to read them, realized two scenes took place at a dinner table with a '50s sitcom family, and kind of worked it all the way through. so my scene was in the metro, with a Shady Man and the Mother. it was very dirty.

anyway, i got all cuted up for the reading--i was reading the Mother parts--and i ended up being about 20 minutes late for the reading because i forgot the scripts--typical.

on the walk to the metro station, this guy in the back of a parked car leaned out the car window and applauded at me. i cocked an eyebrow and walked on. then on the metro, i was sitting down--it was kinda crowded, and there was a little room next to me, but not much--anyway, this weird guy got on and said something in czech to the guy next to me--like "scoot over"--then he plopped down--he was practically sitting on me--and he started making slurping noises at me--which was really, really not funny. i bolted upright at the next stop and stood by the door.

when i finally got to the Ypsilon i discovered, to my relief, that our class hadn't gone yet. and everyone told me i looked cute, and then the reading went really fucking well, everyone laughed a ton--and people kept coming up to me afterwards and saying a) the scenes were great b) i was great c) i looked really cute. so that was fun.

----

Bohemia Bagel / 1:17pm

so hungry. chicken and leaf spinach sandwich. Bon Aqua--voda perlivá--

accidentally walked into some guy's room the other day, thinking it was mine--i'd taken a wrong turn at the elevator--the dorm is a goddamn rat maze. then last night at the reading, met greg from Tulane. told him he looked really familiar. he told me it was probably because i had accidentally walked into his room the day before. oops.

----

dear god.

(Shakespeare bookstore / 5pm)

am buying two books at this kickass fucking bookstore.

i miss ben. bookstores make me miss him.

these idiotic canadians next to me are having a very, very touristy conversation, about

("I yearn for decorated style!")

how to pronounce the letters of the czech alphabet, public transport,

("it looks like it's been iced, like an iced cake!")

how cool and not touristy they are, the difference between absinthe and absente--it's a guy and a girl, but they're not flirting--it's more like a pissing contest.

the guy was saying how he couldn't light the sugar in the absinthe spoon. i wonder if he soaked it in the alcohol first. jackass.

----

i thought i would feel isolated, being constantly surrounded by people speaking a foreign language, but in fact, it's convenient--they're so easy to tune out. whereas these two jerks, speaking american english--i somehow can't ignore them.

----

from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson:

'Don't you ever think about going back?'

Silly question. There are threads that help you find your way back, and there are threads that intend to bring you back. Mind turns to the pull, it's hard to pull away. I'm always thinking of going back. When Lot's wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

working on my sunburn.

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and unabridged)

Monday / July 26, 2004 / an email to Ben:

so what's funny about this is

i went to vyšehrad yesterday with rikki. after the laundry. we had to lug our laundry many blocks. rikki didn't have a bag to lug so she took her suitcase. the big one. many blocks we lugged. and did our laundry. and lugged home. and then we went to vyšehrad. it's a castle thing. according to my guidebook, vyšehrad is considered the birthplace of prague:

"According to legend, the wise chieftain Krok built a castle here in the 7th century. Libuše, the cleverest of his three daughters, prophesied that a great city would rise here. Taking as her king a ploughman named Přemysl, she founded Praha and the Přemyslid dynasty."

i love that. the wise chieftain Krok.

anyway, it's got a castle thing and a church thing and a rotunda chapel thing and a cemetery thing and a fort thing. and i was in a pissy mood when we got back from doing laundry, and all i wanted to do was lie down and read forever. but rikki's been wanting to go to vyšehrad so we went. and we had to walk a lot. it's kind of like central park in nyc except cobblestoney and with really really old buildings. but similar in that if you're looking for one particular section of the park, you have to follow signs that don't really help you find what you're looking for, and you walk and wander for ages, and it's tiring. anyway so i'm tired and we're walking and we find the church, the rotunda, the cemetery, not the castle, but the fort, and we go up to the fort wall--of course this is all built on a hill, they always build them on hills, you know--and holy fuck, i said. and put down my bookbag.

see, i haven't taken that many pictures since i've been here. it's because of the buildings. the buildings are amazing. i want to take pictures of the buildings. all of them. so i start snapping away at the buildings, but then i get self-conscious about it--because all my pictures are of buildings, and who wants to see that--but the thing is, that's prague to me. on the other hand, it's overwhelming, because all of the buildings are incredible, and the experience of being here and being surrounded by it--you can't capture that in a picture. because you're limited by the borders of the shot. it can't recreate the experience of standing in the middle of the square and spinning 360 on your heel and seeing it all around you.

at the same time i'm getting a little bit numb to it, because i've seen these buildings every day, every day i see some ridiculous amazing red-tile-roofed view of the city from some hill or another--

but we got up to the fort at vyšehrad, and i dropped my bookbag and said holy fuck and took out my camera. because jesus christ. the view from the hill was amazing. we went out on this fort ledge thing, it had a little balcony rail around it so that you didn't do anything silly like walk out any further to the edge of the hill. so rikki and i climbed over the railing and walked a little ways around--we were past the fort wall, there was this concrete block thing on the very edge of the hill and we sat down on it. if i moved a foot and a half forward i would have fallen about 150-200 feet onto the road below, or if i were lucky, into the vltava river. we sat up there and read and wrote for about an hour, i guess.

then we went home, to the grocery, made dinner. grilled ham and cheese, grapefruit, tea. it was only the third meal i've had in my room since i've been here. i'm so sick of eating out. so dinner was nice. our suitemates hung out with us in the little kitchenette thing, and liz had bought a hunk of watermelon at the grocery--so we all went downstairs to the courtyard in front of the dorm and ate watermelon and drank tea. someone bought cookies and we ate those too. it was the first time the entire suite had ever been all together. rikki and i have been sort of antisocial. danielle came and sat with us for a while. i told her to come hang out in new orleans sometime, gave her my email and number. unlikely.

anyway what's funny about this is that i had a really nice day. vyšehrad and dinner and tea and watermelon at twilight on a park bench. and it was then i think i missed you most. because i was so content. and i wish you could have been there. after tea and watermelon we went up to the room and i put away my laundry and we listened to music--i put on the mix CD you made before you left for new york--i haven't listened to it since i've been here because i didn't want to be sad--but i guess i wanted to miss you last night. and so. i did.

103°

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed, unabridged, apologetic)

Prague / July 27, 2004

I.
I watched two women walk the cobblestones of Old Town: eyes rolled back, clinging to each other, girlish laughing, white canes extended and tapping forward.

There's that saying about the blind leading the blind, but the reality of it is more optimistic than you'd think.

II.
(Close your eyes.)
There is an ache pressing up
from underneath my skin.
Maybe it's fever.
Maybe it's you.
There is a mouthful
of metal taste my own
chewed and bloody lip.
Petulant.
Petulant.
Restless and uncomfortable in my clothes
(Take it off.) my skin
(Take it off.) I
Lay bare, gutted,
glistening fishbelly white,
vulnerable as the bald woman
haunting the walls of the metro station.
I've lost my stomach.
This is delirium setting in.
Petulant.
Petulant.
Roll it around on your tongue
because that's what I love about you.

III.
Some you keep and carry inside.
Some you tear out and fling away.
Some you meet in passing,
gentle and unexpected as the first
brush of lip against lip.

thou art god, that which grogs.

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 28, 2004 / random kavárna / 4:42pm

went to two thrift stores today--got a dress, which i'll have to take in. took a few pictures. was feeling pretty shitty, but am feeling better now.

while we were looking for the 2nd thrift store, we encountered difficulties in navigation: ie, the street on the map that would take us directly to the Vyšehrad metro stop did not seem to exist in reality. we walked up and down Jaromírova looking for the cross street, which was called Nuselský Most. the cross street was not where it was supposed to be. finally i looked up, and above us was this giant overpass. i said, "you know, i bet that's Nuselký." and rikki said, "you're probably right. especially since 'most' means 'bridge.'"

definitely one of our stupider travelling moments.

yesterday during the lecture break i was buying a kitkat bar from the machine, and this girl came up to me and said, "hello. you don't know me. but i really like your shoes, the ones you wore at the reading--" (the silver ones) "--and i wanted to know where you got them." and i told her, happily because i love those shoes, that i got them at payless, they were red, and i spray-painted them silver. and she looked to her friend, who was standing behind her, and looked back at me, and said, "i think we have a crush on you." and i got all bashful.

may be going to see some performance of Hamlet tonight. am hungry. feeling adventurous, just ordered "grog"--touted in the Lonely Planet guide as a "popular year-round beverage"--which, as it turns out, is a beverage of equal proportions hot tea and rum. oops.

i chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning with the taste of something true in my mouth.

THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)

July 29, 2004 / another random kavárna / 3:07pm

with rikki and lana, at some coffee shop on the other side of the Charles Bridge--taking pictures like mad and trying to buy souvenirs--elated, sunshiney, sunburning.

woke up feeling like shit. went out last night with lana, tessa, and alex--saw a performance art interpretation of Hamlet. it was sort of hilarious, lots of writhing. but it helped me determine that i definitely want to be a mime for Halloween. a renegade mime. afterwards we went to some club--a bar in another one of those "subterranean vaults"--offering (according to alex, and he would know) the only "indie night" in prague. such a motley crew: buddy holly glasses galore. the music was alright, but it was really smoky and my grapefruit-juice-and-vodka cost 95 crowns, which is bullshit.

cut out at 2am with lana and tessa, and wandered around for an hour trying to find the #51 tram stop--got chased by some young italian guys shouting "ciao, bella!" which i thought only happened in movies.

it's weird: all of a sudden i must look old enough to ogle--because now, when i'm at a bar, i catch guys staring. it's really disconcerting. at this point i'm getting self-conscious just taking my cardigan off. because they're watching.

i remember being seventeen in new york with my friend drew, who was hot and blonde, and it was always happening to her. and i pretended to be disgusted but secretly, of course, i was jealous. it seemed like it was always me and my cute blonde friend. and now--it's a tiny bit secretly satisfying, but mostly it's sort of embarrassing. it doesn't make me feel particularly attractive, just dirty. and like i shouldn't wear tank tops, ever.

anyway.

prague is beautiful today. i have my days of being homesick and tired of it all--but not today.

today i am in love.