Gym, textbooks and cigarettes.

When I wear my glasses, I feel like I should be working in an office in the 30's or 40's and smoking a cigarette, like the whole cast of Goodnight and Good Luck. I don't know if this is true, but my film teacher said that Clooney chose only actors who could smoke. Which makes sense, because everyone in the movie smokes the whole time. But then, my teacher also said that the Ian McKellen version of Richard III was set in the Elizabethan Era - then he corrected himself and said that it was during the George V/Edward/what-is-going-on-in-England crisis, which (according to him) took place before WWI. I know the man is intelligent, but sometimes he gets his facts a little crossed.

... I suppose the smoking-actor thing isn't too much of a stretch, though.

I'm so tired. I kind of failed at today - at least, the part of today that I had set aside for going to the gym. See, I spent all day in class, and then had to go to an audition for a play that I can't be in (probably for moral reasons as much as scheduling ones). It's just required for my acting class that we go through the audition process. I'd planned to go to the gym after that, but by then it was after 3 and I was tired and hadn't eaten all day... which keeps happening, by the way. I need to learn to REMEMBER to eat. Food is good. Anyway - so instead of going to the gym, I took the long way home and intended on doing homework once I got there. Well, I've been here for an hour, and all that I've managed to do is drink a coke (actually not even - I'm halfway through that process) and eat a bowl of pasta. Not exactly good brainfood. I've got to read philosophy for tomorrow, and then read books for English (that I don't have yet) and write two pages in answer to some questions for that reading. I'm kinda screwed. I'm so tired of being a step behind! Which is pretty much the story in most of my classes... because most of my books haven't come yet, so I haven't been able to do my homework. Sounds nice, I know - but that just means that once my books DO come, I'll have a whole mountain of homework to do. Doesn't sound really fun to me.

And I need to job hunt on Friday. Ew.

All I want now is to finish my homework and eat a lot of unhealthy food. Or maybe just the second part of that. Dad left two packs of sour-straws on my desk (my favorites) and I finished one whole pack in like five minutes. So now I've got a headache. Aaaaaaaaaand I'm drinking coke? Nothing I do makes SENSE!!! Agh!

... I need to go to the gym.

Shoot.

I had a dream last night that I was getting married to some 30-something year old square named Chris. He was incredibly well-meaning, but incredibly dull, and halfway through the dream I realized that I couldn't even remember his name. My family kept telling me how happy they were for me, and all of the boys I knew were standing outside, kicking trees and glaring at me.

I'm not even kidding.

My dream-self ego is rather large.

The butterfly in the cathedral

One day during the hiking week in the northern Czech Republic, I was walking with one of the boys behind our group. We were going through these big hills on the way back to our cabin, on a nonexistent trail far above the little town in the valley. Further up on the hill we were on, we saw a little chapel that looked about 100 years old, so we ran up to investigate. (Well, he ran. I followed at a more normal-person pace.) He called down to me that it was "a Catholic place for Mary", and as I was nearing the chapel, he turned away from it and walked down the hill a few yards, stopping there to wait for me. He had his back to the chapel.

"There's a butterfly," he said when I came back down. "It's trapped inside."
I told him that the butterfly would probably be alright - if it could get in, it could get out.
"No," he said, "The opening is too far away and small. It will not find it. It will die."

I'm not sure why this affected him so much, but it did. The way he said "it will die" was just so... sad. Like he felt that he had killed the butterfly himself, just by saying the words. I guess it's just that butterflies are so fragile, and we hate to see fragile things get broken. I can relate - last semester after a really hard day, I was walking up to Amelia's from school, and I saw a dead hummingbird on the sidewalk. For some reason it was one of the most depressing things I've ever seen.

Anyway. After that episode with the butterfly I realized that I should write a story called "The Butterfly in the Chapel" - except change 'chapel' to 'cathedral', because it sounds better and gives the butterfly a smaller, more delicate, more trapped feel. I just need to come up with an organized story for it. Fragile things make for good stories.

Ifactifice.

I must be a frustrating person to communicate with. I get annoyed over the stupidest things and decide not to write back, just because. Or I don't write back because I feel like it's too important to deal with. (weird, I know.) OR I mean to write back, and I think about what to say so much that I begin to assume I've already written back. The second scenario is the most frustrating. For me, anyway. I want so badly to say the right thing, and I'm so afraid of being uninteresting or unimportant or just.... average. So I find myself disregarding the whole matter entirely, and leaving the people I want to impress hanging. I don't make sense. agh.

There's this passage in Everything is Illuminated (which I finished on the plane to Prague, and which broke my heart into a million pieces, and which changed how I view pretty much everything about writing and storytelling, and which I can't in good conscience recommend but I hypocritically LOVED [and hated, because it was true])... and it talks about words that have been made up for various things. I loved this one.

IFACTIFICE:
Music is beautiful. Since the beginning of time, we (the Jews) have been looking for a new way of speaking. We often blame our treatment throughout history on terrible misunderstandings. (Words never mean what we want them to mean.) If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand. This was the origin of Torah chanting and, in all likelihood, Yiddish - the most onomatopoeic of all languages. It is also the reason that the elderly among us, particularly those who survived a pogrom, hum so often, indeed seem unable to stop humming, seem dead set on preventing any silence or linguistic meaning in. But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.

I wish we could communicate that way.

And I need you more than want you.

Soooo.... hi. I am a sheepish person for not writing sooner. I should have, because I've had a lot of time to do a post of good length... but summing up a month is just too daunting. I've been back for a week exactly (well, almost exactly... our plane didn't land until a bit after 8:00.), which is so, so strange. In a way it seems like it's been an eternity since we all ate our last meal together in LA at In-n-Out, watching Delta's and Southwest's swoop over us to land or fly away as they pleased. But in another way, I can't believe it's been that long. I still find myself thinking about what time it is in Prague, and what the people that I came to love there are doing. The worst is when I do that and realize that it's 2 or 3 in the morning there, and they're all sleeping. Somehow that fills me with an incredibly lonely feeling. Apparently the 307 million people who live in this country aren't enough to keep me company.

sigh. As I said, daunting. So I'm not really going to try. Besides, right now I'm tired and could use a cup of coffee and something mindless, like a Rookie Blue episode. Today was my first day back at school, and it was a good day, all things considered. I only had one class and I got to hang out with friends the rest of the time. Tomorrow will be a longer day, but that's mostly with friends too, so it's all good. VC just isn't intimidating anymore. I used to worry every morning before going to school; I even hated walking across campus. The situations there haven't changed - people are still high, still creeps, and everything from bagels to textbooks is overpriced - but my tolerance for discomfort seems to have risen considerably, so I survive. I hope that spirit carries over with me in the next few weeks while I'm looking for a job. Yikes.

Anyway. In short, the trip was very good. It was really different than last year - some things were definitely better, and some things were definitely worse. Other things were eerily similar, so dealing with them for a second round was a good challenge. Last year I had an impossible time adjusting back to life here; I really came into my own over there, and I got the whole independent/I'm-my-own-person-and-hey-it's-cool/I-can-conquer-the-world! travel bug. This year was a bit different with my parents there... it worked out well, but it wasn't quite the same independent feeling as last year. So this year was more about the relationships. I feel like our team made a lot of strong friendships with each other and the Czechs (I know I did, anyway). So, for me, that was the hard thing about leaving. But Facebook is doing an alright job of keeping us in touch. I really do want to go back, though - I don't know if I can do Team Praha again, because they're not doing it for two years and I don't know where I'll be in two years. But maybe I can get over there on my own, like Jon did. Because that would be really cool.

Oy, I could go to sleep right now. I think I'm going to drink some coffee and watch some tv and fall asleep like the old woman that I am.

Seriously, I feel so old today. How atrocious.