City II City

I don't have a sweet little story for you, just tidbits of windy towns and winding roads. We left Marrakech for Essaouira, Essaouira for Casablanca, and Casablanca for Fes. Essaouira is a beautiful seaside town, all crashing waves and rocks and ramparts.  The fish market was in full swing every morning, as troupes of boys hauled the big blue fishing boats in and out of the water and the fishermen displayed their catch at little tables.

We spent the (theoretically) 6 hour bus-ride from Essaouira to Casablanca chatting with an Australian couple, our new favourite people.  The view out the windows was often pretty spectacular as well, as the landscape varied from desert to lush fields.

Our new friends Robin and Michael tipped us off to the existence of a giant mosque in Casablanca that non-Muslims are allowed into.  Casablanca is otherwise a sprawling industrial city, an economic engine baring little resemblance to Hollywood movies of yore.

The Mosque was as impressive as promised.  It was built just recently in a direct effort to give Casablanca a jewel - something to anchor the city on the tourist circuit.  It was unbelievably enormous and ornate, with plush rugs covering the floors and exquisite tiling and carving at every turn.

We spent just one night in Casablanca and then hopped on a train for Fes. My mom adores trains so I think that maybe made up for the lack of alcohol in this country? (I doubt it - girl likes her wine.)

Fes is nice, so far.  My mom and I have agreed that it's definitely her feminine charms attracting the 20 or so propositions directed our way every day. "Hey, where you from? Holland? You're beautiful. Ca va? You speak English?"  It would be flattering if their intentions weren't written all over their faces. As it stands, mostly creepy.  I've taken to telling them (on my mom's behalf, obviously) that I'm from Kazakhstan and I don't speak a word of French (the common tourist language here.) Sadly I also don't speak English. Or Kazakh. 

Brave Dispatches II: So Fresh and So Clean

Ahhhh, hammam. Hammams (pronounced as two syllables - ham-mam) are Moroccan bathhouses. Locals do most of their bathing at these public steamrooms, heading to them twice a week to scrub themselves with black soap made from olive oil and charcoal and rinse themselves clean with scoops of water.

The hammams are heated by pipes running under the tiled floors. Everyone brings a bucket or two to fill with water from the pipes. Get your bucket, sit your (naked) butt down, and get scrubbing. It's also a super social experience - kids play together while their moms chatter and wash.  There are, obviously, seperate hammams for men and women (or divided hours).  

As you've probably guessed by now, I'm telling you all this because we visited one today. Our riad offers a visit (scrubbing included) and we couldn't resist. It took about an hour in all - we were scrubbed briskly, pulled around the place by the hand, lain on the ground to enjoy the heat coming through the tiles and rinsed clean via buckets of water over our heads.  It really does feel like we have new skin after all the scrubbing - getting rid of a couple of days worth of Marrakechi grime sticking to your body is a great feeling, let me tell you.

All in all, a good experience. I think my mom is starting to itch for some home comforts (she needs a GIANT cup of coffee, not a teacup of coffee, people!) but I'm just getting the adventure ball rolling. She'll be sipping tiny, super sweet mint teas with the rest of us in no time.  Until next time, bon voyage on all your own journeys (be they to the Casablanca or Casa Ritchie).

To Essaouira tomorrow! (Unless we change our minds...)

Brave Dispatches

Two nights in London, not a single funny story to be had. It was altogether nice, though.

I have this idea in my head, a mental catalogue called Things I Have Seen. I expanded it these last few days with a trip to the British Library and wanders around neighbourhoods I'd never bothered to visit before. I also ironed in a few old favourites - the Tate Modern, particularly, but a general rewandering around the grandly historic areas of London. For a history nerd like me, there's a distinct thrill to even just seeing objects or places once owned and inhabited by famous historic personages. Things I Have Seen, then, got a few highlights and underlines as I thrilled at Wordsworth's scribbles at the British Library and gaped at the statues in Trafalgar Square.

I've met my mother - she successfully navigated her way from Heathrow to Gatwick despite crutches and two different shoes. We're on a flight now to Marrakech - a city I doubt I'll be describing in words so soothing as "altogether nice."

As the title of this post (and obviously my future book) alludes, I'm clearly not the first person to ever go to London. I know I sometimes find other traveller's breathless reports of Mexican beaches or NYC cityscapes irritating - however, it's my belief that you're reading this because you'd like to be and therefore appreciate my posts on the day-to-days of travelling.  As such, I will proceed to blog, confident in the knowledge that I am indeed the first person ever to travel to London.  My brave dispatches will continue in this vein. 

PS. We're in Morocco now!

my life in songs

Looking back at what songs define where I was or how – the xx still makes me feel lonely and quiet and drinking cider on the bus and maybe a little bit of softly-lit surface-level multi-heartbroken, too.  There’a a Butch Cassidy remix of a Band of Horses song that I listened to on repeat then – straightening my hair and spending my Saturday nights with an apple by myself in a rose-themed bath.

There’s a song I’m sure was only played to J. and I in Australia – it’s a dance song and you all know it but I’m perfectly sure – just perfectly, perfectly sure – that she and I are the only ones that have ever heard it, too.  It lit up nights out and days in and bus rides.  Those days were filled with Ben Howard’s Old Pine, too, a song that could make anyone feel little bigger and a little smaller inside at the same time.

There was a summer of Nicki Minaj – she makes me think of a boy I thought of then.  I spent that (distant, now) summer on my bike (like always, I guess) with Nicki or else spinning around secretly with someone I’d bounced right into, right off of meaning and into a pair of open arms.

The next summer was driven entirely by that song by Of Monsters and Men.  You know the one I’m talking about – your summer was driven by it too.  I lived that summer inside my skull and forgot to turn on the lights the entire time.  This song made me cry.  What didn’t?

Last year’s cold days in the library I floated on a foggy sea of Alt-J.  How could I listen to anything else?  I was alone again but it was okay this time – drifting from a summer of jagged unexpectancies and a sort of choking sadness into a year of ambivalent okayness. 

I’m kind of still there and it’s a little bit astonishing to me, sometimes, to realize that I’m as steady as a prairie road.  I’m surprised to see my body is ok with how I’m treating it in all but the most superficial manner.  Obviously, I listened to nothing but Major Lazer for months.  How could someone so oddly floatitioned listen to anything else, you know?

tell me (let me)

I tell myself a lot of stories, usually just a line or two of my life.

We size our successes against those of others, we forget how enormous they are in the face of someone else's showy and colossal successes. Our problems, though, we measure only against ourselves. Our problems are enormous; we forget how lucky we are to have the problems we do. It's an incredible blessing that the worst thing I have to fear is mediocrity.

I think a lot about this mythological happiness that we're all chasing, some dream state where all things and feelings are warm and your mind is always well-lit and flushed with roses. That dream state is all that keeps us going, but I at least really have to accept that it's okay to just be okay. There's no failure in not having a bliss to follow. It might show up one day or it might not. In the meantime, stasis is a few worries that refuse to heal over and a few small pleasures, tumbling about my every day. 

It's so much more convenient not to believe in love.

I would like to evacuate all the feelings from my body now

and instead of having feelings I will exclusively fall in love with mountains and go on dates with them and I will sit on the hillsides and the sun will be kind of warm on my skin but also not quite warm enough?  And the mountain will be like "I am a mountain, I do not have a jacket to give you" and I will be like "that's okay mountain, I am pretty self sufficient anyways" and then I'll go back to my cabin and wear a big sparkly dress and drink champagne by myself.  It's nice to date a mountain because you don't have to share your champagne.

all photos by miss j. sebeer.

Seattlite

Pigeon toes, wandering by myself on tiles with a million names. I embraced optimistical possible possibilities. I'm speaking mostly to my subconscious, your sleeping self is speaking too. I'm curious, as I certainly was.

Living in these bones is impossibly boring. I looked up a map to living a sparkling lemonade life but my city pushed me here and i'm marking myself return-to-sender. I'm completely fine and well, but no one's just fine and well with a sparkling lemonade of a life.

Ugh, this confusion. Know that you'll find me, mind pulled back into my core and secure to my spine, back where I was, marked fire on the map. Picture, for one second, a satellite moving around the earth. 

worrisome things in my google search history

"i'm alive and I"

"craig"

"how many pages is a 92,000 word book?"

"I just want some goddamn salad rolls"

"outfits for old ladies"

"the girl with the best hair in the entire world, ever"

"khloe kardashian height"

"my roommate loves spring what do i do"

no for real though

better than an ostrich

this is how I feel about exams right now

hi world

come date me now pls

I will also accept:

invitations to rap battle

frozen mango chunks

any yoga challenges you care to make available

your offer to call all my exes and see if they maybe think about me sometimes, too

your first-born puppy 

time on time on time to sit in the sun and think about trees

jewelery that is either very delicate or aggressively dazzling

compliments

 

ecosystemic

I'm super interior; all I can do is keep track of my own forest

hardly saffron

All I can do is express myself in drawings in my mind, nothing I can realize on the page.  I can't help but be exactly who I am, which is goddamned shame a mathematical majority of the time.

I'm imprinted in ink, a close and frenetic scribble.  Press your pen to the page and clench your fist, try to resist. 

A close and frenetic scribble, pen marks straying to the edge of the page.  I'm trying to pull

(try to resist hurting anyone, and by anyone you mostly mean you)
I'm trying to pull myself together.

I am I am

I've been quiet lately, I know.  I don't know if my time is too full to leave spaces for poetry or my brain is too full or what.  Sometimes it's just that other people write so sickening well and I know that's a fever I'll never sweat.

I'm trying to melt individualism out of everyone around me; hack out chips of humanity from that beautiful or unbeautiful mass.  I'm getting to a point with my new friends, peeling back smiles and style and trying to chisel away to some sort of core.  All I know I know outside out.

I'm trying to take a couple of steps back from myself for a day or two.  I know this blog is a constant paean to every emotion I've ever felt and I don't mind it that way, but maybe both it and I need a break.  I've been taking one, anyways.

I'm endlessly internal.

sizing

I play with ideas of myself and the world, I stack them up and knock them over again and again.  I'm frustrated with utility, I write puzzles and dreams, I see myself reflected in a thousand panes of glass scattered around the map like pins.  I'm built to shine quietly and ferociously and I'm built with the gleam of a million or two others.

I can't pretend at uniqueness, I'm no artist, I know.  I blank out blank canvases and paint twelve pictures in sync.  The work I produce hangs in galleries around the full-text version of my mind, downloadable and accessible from very few ports.

I'm an exclusive carbon-copy, both beaming and dull.  I'm my own ivory tower and I'm surrounded by giants.  I could seal myself into my mind forever, echo beats off my bones and know a glittering chronological luxury.  Dress up my intellect in furs and spin it around, present a dizzy bow to the opera house.

But I'm an automaton.  Marching forwards forever and climbing up laws like a staircase, looking onwards at due dates and grasping at straws.  I can't pretend at uniqueness, I'm no artist, I know, but I'm doing a wonderful job at pretending to like this.

courtesy of jessi

bearing/teeth

I'm sorry, it's been a while.  Let me tell you about a few things I want to accomplish this year.

one

Talk less shit.  Everyone benefits.

two

Work harder.  I'm pairing this carefully with nos. four, five, and six.

three

South America.  Sorry, mom, I don't think I can bear to stay in one place for more than six months at a time.

four

Be better to myself.  I'm alright, I'm okay.

five

Be better to myself.  I'machine, you'rengine.

six

Be better to myself.  There's only so much.

seven

Tell me who you run with and I'll tell you who you are.

twenty-one.

Matthew DiVito makes gifs.

you have eighteen, I've got

I'm worn out, I can feel the bones in my lower back creaking against one another and under the library bathroom's fluorescent light, I just look tired.  I've written five exams and I have another tomorrow.

Last night I sat on my bed and I stared at the wall for thirty minutes.  I just wanted space to think and not think, drifting through daydreams and hazy half-lit ideas.  I stared at the wall for thirty minutes, and then I keeled over and fell asleep at 7.15.

My mind has completely retired, it's absenting itself from my body and abstaining from the vote.  I can't seem to corral my intellect into any kind of shape, it's drifting lazily on mental tides and washing against shores far distant from the contracts exam I have tomorrow.

fifteen thousand

Here are fifteen tiny stories or platitudes or ideas for you for the fifteenth.

The Strange and the Sweaty

First dates are a fascinating thing.  He sweat so much he soaked his shirt and had to put his sweater on.  He sopped his napkin and shook with nerves.  I did not see him again.

Chillaxin' and Maxin' All Cool

 Last night I learned that it is apparently not universal knowledge not to tell the girl you're dating that you think she's carrying a few extra pounds.  Luckily, though, you probably shouldn't worry too hard about that extra weight because I bet you five dollars you will never see her again.  Also, excuse me?

No, For Real

That's a real thing that happened.  To me.  Last night.

It Ain't Easy Feeling Feelings

And it is perfectly acceptable to not think about them until you have to.  Right?

Chemistry Set

Number six and I are still talking and I am still utterly charmed, a year later.

Pillows Like Lips

I'm obsessed with pillows, of all things.  Imagine how they could brighten the our apartment, whose walls are a dreamy and smoky cloud grey.  I want all manner of patterns and shapes.

I'm an Excruciating Embarrassment

"Visa?  Oh... Um.  No, I actually can't pay with my debit.  Well, I only have seven dollars, so maybe I don't need this... or this..."


You Just Want Me For My Intellect

When I leave the house sometimes I dress in my invisible outfit and I sneak through the streets like Harry Potter.  Try curly hair, glasses, harem pants, and a big sweater.  Your life will be free from voyeurs for one precious day.


I'm Straight (But It Might Just Be A Phase)

I wear a pin that says this on my housecoat.  We loudly denounce heterosexual scenes in movies in our house:  "Just disgusting, I mean do what you want, but don't flaunt it, okay!"

 At The Altar of Her Incompetence

My property law professor somehow managed to hand out the same exam for the final that she had posted online with answers a month earlier.  Should I feel bad that she might lose her job as this last-straws the formal complaint process already going forward?  Probably not, no.  She's bright, she'll find something else.  It shouldn't be on our shoulders to sacrifice our understanding of property law.

SFF: Supreme Friends Forever

I know all the supreme court justices' names, I pick favourites like a sports team.  McLachlin is of course my all time ace, you hear me?  And La Forest? That rogue!  Ritchie's a distant relative, which means heck we're practically siblings.  And you gotta be able to get behind L'Heureux-Dube, the prolific dissenter.  What a woman, she does what she wants.  When I do what I want it usually involves just involves eggnog.

To Be Lit Up

I think it would benefit all of us to spend more time thinking up album titles for our hypothetical band's second album.


Saying Hello to Strangers Gets Tiresome

I have a pair of pants that have a great deal to say to the world.  When I wear them, everyone smiles at them.  For some reason when people smile at your pants, they feel the need to smile at you, too.


Insufficient Sweetness

I skip sugar in both my coffee and my personality.

Can We Just Talk About Me For A Second?

As soon as any quote is ripped from its original resting place, it becomes awful and trite.  I'm sorry.

are you smiling?