In case you haven’t noticed, I love music. I LOVE MUSIC. So does Pnut. Between the two of us, we own four bookcases full of CD’s. At 180+ CD’s per case, we’re close to opening our own shop. That said, our taste in music is pretty damned different. His heavy metal shelves (all twenty of them) sit side by side with my folk/country section. Yes, we organize by genre. He tends to prefer male singers, and I have a definite love for women’s voices. We tease each other a fair amount about the various artists we obsess over intermittently, but usually respect for each others differences.
Over the last few years, I’ve developed a somewhat unhealthy obsession with Maria Callas. Carmen is my favorite opera, and Callas’ development of the role both musically and theatrically is, for me, simply unquestionably perfectly untouchable. Which is why Pnut knew exactly what he would do to my mind when he came home from work yesterday and pithily questioned “Did you know that Celine Dion has the same vocal range as Maria Callas?”. Has anybody seen my mind? I miss it.
It MAY be true. I can’t really imagine it being true. Please, tell me it’s NOT TRUE! This is the difference between using your powers for good versus using your powers for picking the pocketbooks of a massive following of teary-eyed Canadian women.
Canadians (try not to throw up):
(The indomitable) Callas (try not to explode with wonder):
Do you have a favorite female voice? I’d love to hear it (unless it’s Celine Dion, in which case you should probably seek the help you need elsewhere). Leave me a link in the comments.
Did I mention? I’m in a great mood! As a matter of fact, I’m… HOOKED ON A FEELING!
Is it real, you wonder? Why, yes. It’s The Hasselhoff. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. And be sure to attend Oktoberfest in Germany next year (he’s always performing there) if you wanna hear the follow-up.
It has been hard to start writing again. To revisit these pages so full of the sordid anguish and heartache of the past year and a half. It’s not something I ever want to see again, or think about. My friend Kye once told me that people have these “star-crossed” years in their lives where everything falls apart. Like an acid coccoon that eats away at your self so that you must emerge a different creature. I’ve clung to that bit of hope for a long time, but I’ve been hesitant to call the year “over”. Yesterday I talked to Kye for the first time in over five yeras. Is it a sign? It feels so good to have real, true friends in my life again. So let me declare now the Shitty Year of All Fucking Shit, as it will hereafter be referred to, as OVER. Or rather, that I am over it. Whichever.
The important thing is, I am here and Pnut is here. My mom, dad, my brother and his wife are all doing well.
Jersey?? You ask? Happily, one of the most under-rated places I have ever been. Most people think of the Interstate from here to NY. Truly, I am in agreement. It is disgusting. Dirty, full of gutted dead deer and other indistinguishable animal (I hope) remains, traffic backed up for miles and miles, overrun by shopping plazas and strip malls, and thoroughly depressing in that solely Amerikana fashion. But take an exit, my friend, and you are in small lakeside villages, rolling hills, farmlands and provincial areas where the “townies” hang out in their local pubs, and everybody will tell you exactly what they’re thinking without hesitation.
We didn’t get the house in Dover-Rico, but we are almost finished with the purchase of a beautiful log cabin in the borough of Hopatcong. It’s one of those cabins that used to be a vacation home, built in the early 1900’s. Knotty pine walls and a loft space with a bathroom that forces your knees into your ears as you seat yourself upon the throne. But Pnut and I are used to living small, and we like a space with little privacy so that when our friends are in our home, we can enjoy them as much as possible. The previous owner fed deer from the deck in back, so there are four-legged visitors a few times per week. The largest lake in NJ is just a few houses away. And we’re close to the Gunks… even closer than we were to Fontainebleau from Brussels!
As for school… I am applying. I am gathering immunization records, SAT and ACT scores from almost a score years ago, transcripts and other odds and ends of paperwork that trail you for the whole of your life though you can never locate them without serious excavation work. And I hope to start for this spring semester, though it seems unlikely given the timing. Pnut and I are already planning our visit back to Europe, and our belated honeymoon to either Argentina or Chile later this year.
So it is with some trepidation, but not much, that we start this new life in America. Once again with just a few suitcases of posessions, but books in transit. With each other. And like most people moving to this country - with many hopes and dreams for the coming years.
Spider sang this song (E ti Vengo a Cercare) for us at our wedding in VDM. It is one of my favorites. The Battiato version is the original, but this CSI version that holds sticky in my throat and breast.
The main problem with disappearing for well over a month is that you then feel the need to come back with a BANG! To rehash all the exciting things that happened over the last few weeks. To excite your loyal audience (hi Chelsea!) with titillating observations and snarky commentary. You get all hyper about how to do it. You construct run-on sentences in your mind. You edit them. You delete them completely and come up with a new subject. You do this pretty much every day until you realize that everything you’ve been wanting to write about is utterly meaningless in comparison with the bag of tortilla chips on the coffee table and the cushy couch growing out of your ass. You compose tender and reassuring poems to your growing ass. Finally, your ass gets so big it doesn’t fit on the couch anymore and you have to get up and go to work. Dammit.
So as you can see, I have returned to work now have nothing better to do than post.
I’ll just give you the overview of the last eight-ish or so weeks. First, I got depressed. Well, actually I got depressed sometime in October. Instead of waiting for Total Meltdown this time, P found some cheap tickets and shuttled us both off to Chicago for Thanksgiving. I saw the whole family, which was really fun except my mother’s version of “hello”, which was as usual a lyrical exercise in criticism. This time it covered (primarily) my knack for losing things and my lack of common sense. Always a good time. After the US, I had one week of pretty happy. Then I crashed into Total Meltdown mode for all of December (in case Ian Curtis below didn’t clue you in). TM mode means I walk around the house bleary-eyed and crying a lot for no specific or apparent reason. P looks at me and I cry. I put my shoes on and find it incredibly sad. I comb my hair - waterworks. I come home and go straight for the couch. P hugs me, I cry. P makes me dinner, I cry. I go to bed and bawl all night. And this whole time sad-me is being watched by psycho-me. Psycho-me turns everything I do into a potential act of suicide. Drive to work- why? when it would be so much easier to drive into a tree. That would quiet things down. Then I feel this incredible bourgeois guilt: “What the fuck is wrong with me? This isn’t the 1800’s that I can inherit my uncle’s money and check myself into a sanitarium for le malaise. I’ve got this thoroughly rich life and I am being a big fucking baby about it. People are suffering all over the world and I’m blubbering about jet-setting around Europe.” Unfortunately, depression is a disease, people. And you can’t really apply logic to a brain that isn’t functioning properly. Unless that logic happens to involve ways to kill yourself.
I feel absolutely horrid writing about this. Because I find it embarrassing to be a weak, whiney baby. Because I have no less than three friends who have lost their parents or other people close to them to this disease. But I don’t want my life or what I write to be bullshit. I want to have real friends who know and love me for who I am. Who love me when I’m fucked up and depressed, and not just when I’m running around making up fun magical adventures. And if you decide you still love me, well - thank you, please leave me a comment so that I know who you are, and I love you too.
Moving on… this TM depression state lasted pretty much through New Years, which was a total effing disaster this year. Pretty much everybody we knew left the country. We didn’t really have the money to go anywhere because P’s divorce got finalized suddenly and he had to fly to Italy to sign the paperwork in front of a judge. The few friends that we do have here were doing their own traditional things (Belgians, like St. Louis people, have this annoying tendency to keep hanging out with the same people they went to highschool with… not that I’m bitter about being left out!). I was so depressed and couch-ridden for the week P really did everything he could to get me out of the house. A colleague of his was nice enough to scrounge us up tickets to a VIP erotic party. Let me say here - not something we do. But we went to a club earlier this year out of curiosity and thought the people and the ambiance were really relaxed and interesting. Besides, it was P’s only option apart from a) staying home listening to me cry or b) knocking me on the head with an ice axe. The party was not relaxing and the people were not interesting. It was a meat festival and at some point I just gave up and started downing Vodka/redbulls. After I was altogether too drunk I had a massive freak-out and P drove me home. The end.
I guess the freakout I had at the party was cathartic, because I came back to life sometime last week and started feeling human for the first time in months. I finally managed to detach the tumor - I mean the couch - from my ass and found that I had gained 6 kilos. That’s a lot when you’re five foot two and started out at 50 kilos. So I started climbing again, took up Pilates (which is a real workout, unlike the “breathe, use your mind” yoga crap I hate), have done a few woodcarvings already, and …well, voilà… poorly written stream-of consciousness, but at least it’s a post, eh?
