Last night was the first night that I’m willing to qualify as proper Miami winter (yes, yes, the 21st is still a few days off), which is to say that driving home late at night with the windows down, in t-shirt and jeans, I felt a shiver or two from the breeze.

I hate not having real seasons, even though I also do appreciate some things about the temperate climate. But, well, I’ll enjoy what I get. Wear a sweater or two.

I’ve found myself really busy over the last few months, which makes things go more smoothly for me, I think. I have less to say on this forum because I’m saying it in others. I’m working, and exercising, and spending time with friends and family and romantic partner, and all of this together conspires to bleed me of the meagre stories I have, until I’m not sure what to write down here when I try to journal.

My life’s grown very comfortable, such that the excitement is minute and perhaps uninteresting. I haven’t been in the mood, I guess, to write about the wonderful meal I made, or ate; the adventure I went on this weekend. I suppose I’ve been unable to write fiction, or poetry even, as well. I think I’ve written six poems in the past six months, which in fact is an improvement upon the preceding year, but is by far a decrease from years before.

I don’t think I feel the drive less, exactly. It’s more of a motivation issue. Always in the past, there’s been some element of conclusion—a poem to submit to the review, or send to a friend; a story to submit to my workshop. Without any driving force, the ideas well up and then die down. That was what was so brilliant about LiveJournal and the other journalling platforms that were abounded in the early/mid 2000s: your friends provided support, encouragement. Just having twenty “friends” on xanga or LiveJournal meant that you could imagine that there were twenty people awaiting your next update.

Tumblr provides that as well, but I think in an age where facebook already records the minutiae of your life, tumblr and the blogging platforms that remain have veered away from self-observation and towards more specific blogs. (The primary exception to this seems to be travelogs.) How many people still write blogs about their lives? Facebook is already recording your life as you live it. (And now, with the new timeline feature, you can go back and browse through the past. It’s a strange concept that I’m sure better essayists than I will cover.)

When I was perhaps a senior in high school, I set about writing a mini-autobiography, chronicling the stories of myself. When I first heard about the timeline idea, I thought of it as an opportunity for everyone to do that, to write an autobiography. I’m curious to see what people will do with it, to see who will create a false identity, who invent a past. Who will be the first artist to publish a character on facebook, whose story we can read? When we can detail our lives with images and video and interactions, map our paths and locate each moment in time, is a personal journal of interest?

As it is, I’ve veered very much towards anecdote-tinged essay on this forum in recent time, coupled with travelog and interjections of films. My earliest journal posts on the web are almost postmodern in style, spastic and jumbled. These days, I use paragraphs.

I don’t know where we’re going, this space and I. I’m sure I’ll keep writing. I hope the subjects continue to blossom.

I would post photographs; there are so many good ones but none that particularly lend to a blog post. No group pictures, yeah? It’s my own fault for forgetting to pull out the camera at opportune moments.

I’ve been obsessing with two songs for the past few days.

1. The Hidden Words – “Temple”. (Ref. this bog post for a description and to download; facebook.) Really haunting good.
2. Flight Facilities – “Crave You” (featuring Giselle). (youtube video.) Jesse, one of my friends in Philadelphia, mentioned this song while we were all dancing at the flat he shares with three other guys I really like. I looked it up later that night; it’s pretty wonderful. The video’s interesting.

See?, that was relevant.

In any case, interlude aside, I miss Philadelphia. I miss the city; I miss the feeling of connection to the city itself that I lack in Miami. I miss my friends a lot — that sense of having lots of people who I want to see every moment of every day if possible. I wonder if I will spend a lot of time in my life missing that feeling, which was very much a college thing. I always am interested by the way I feel about things like this; in many ways I’m introverted, and I like spending time by myself — but I really feel like I need a balance between self-time and good, happy, pleasant other-time. I don’t enjoy meeting random people, or talking with strangers, not unless they’re really cool. Some people who are particularly extraverted just love to go out and talk about whatever; that doesn’t work for me, although I can do it sometimes. Yeah?

In any case, I don’t think I really Did all too much in Philadelphia. Ate some good food; made some good food; ate the good food we made. Watched a movie; played a board game; played a light game of Exquisite Corpse and a rousing game of telephone pictionary (aka writey/draw-y), which Jacob or Jesse probably won. (No, fine, you can’t really win.) Walked around. Saw people. Went out to Haverford and hung out with some awesome past professors.

Really a lovely time.

I saw Into the Void tonight, Gaspar Noé’s newest film. Here, read about it. I found it: fascinating, brutal, graphic, direct, beautiful, haunting, upsetting, boring, stupid, interesting, worrisome. Ostensibly, it’s about a young man and his sister, living in Tokyo. The young man is dealing drugs. But there’s a lot more going on. I hesitate to recommend a film by Gaspar Noé—his Irreversible is one of the most-walked-out-of films I know of. But there was something really interesting at least in the way this movie was made. I loved the way the camera worked; I really liked watching Oscar (the protagonist) stand silently in so many scenes, [like] a ghost. And yet.

I’m not going to get into a discussion of the pornography of violence, or talk about New French Extremism, which is the “genre” Noé is often grouped into. I’ll just say that if you’re interested, you should talk to me about this. (And I liked the review from the Miami Herald.)

In any case, my life is moving along its own course. As I keep on telling people, I’m gaining a lot by living at home, but also losing something about my 23rd year that I may or may not regret losing. I keep on changing my mind about whether or not I want to move out.

I’d like to start updating more regularly. Perhaps I shall.

I got my stitches out of my lip today, which is good. I’m looking forward to my lip healing entirely.

You know, I rarely post on here like I used to — like I used to five years ago, I mean. This sort of thing — each paragraph treating a different topic, loosely connected perhaps but perhaps not at all. Also there were entries that were numbered because they were so completely unrelated. Sometimes I like looking back and reading something I wrote, say, five years ago. Things have changed a lot; they also have changed very little. (It should be noted that these old posts aren’t here on this website.)

I’ve been following the World Cup, which means that for the first time since the last World Cup (when I rooted for France), I’m watching entire association football matches. It’s fun; it also means that I’ve had more conversations with my roommates than ever, since we can talk about sports for once. It’s kind of fun, although I still don’t know most of the players. I’m rooting for the US, and for Spain. If it comes to it, I’ll transfer allegiances to Argentina, or perhaps Brazil. But we’ll see what happens. I’m watching Argentina play Greece right now.

Now to break some rules, and follow some others;

Sometimes he receives notes from the past,
short in their wording and direct in their import;
they break out of the seas like bubbles
and hold him to a forgotten wall.
When they come to him,
they are like fireflies below a waning moon
and he closes his eyes before them
in a movement of shame.
The words are always written in a heavy hand,
script more indentation than outline,
the black ink sometimes faded.
They are always unavoidable.
When he dines with his girlfriend
or transfers lines in the depths of the subway,
he has been known to see reflections,
or embossed words
in the wrinkles on her face,
in the plastic boxes that house advertisements.
Once, in frustration, she called him late at night
and asked him to explain his distractions.
“I can’t,” he said into the receiver,
“and I don’t know if I want to.”
The present is not inescapable
any more than the past is incapable of forgetting;
his dreams will not leave him alone,
because he has not yet given them up.

I think this is a good example of why I haven’t written a poem in quite some time. But that doesn’t [necessarily] mean that it’s bad.

I made Madeleine’s pumpkin pasta last night, and am eating its leftovers with some bacon to give it a different flavor. I made the dish in the first place because I found a can of pumpkin I bought last November, and then forgot about; it’s a great recipe.

When I first started living here, in October, I disliked cooking for just myself, since I was so used to always cooking for three or four. But I’m not averse to leftovers, so I’ve been enjoying the idea of cooking for myself one night and eating it for three or four. As I’ve mentioned before, I try generally to spruce up leftovers — it’s a lot more fun to eat the same thing when it’s not quite the same thing. Roasted chicken turns into roasted chicken tacos. Spicy peanut sauce and pasta turns into pasta with pan-seared chicken and a creamy spicy peanut sauce. Pumpkin pasta becomes pumpkin-bacon pasta. The other day, I made a vegetable dal, with a gigantic cauliflower and some pepper and other veggies. Without meaning to, I made a huge amount, and literally ate it for five meals (lunches included); it was good since I couldn’t chew as well as normal. By the last day, I was tired of it, though; I turned it into more of a soup than it usually is by adding water and small pasta, and a bouillon cube. The flavor transformed — it was the same, but varied.

I’m going to miss living in Spain. But I don’t think I’ll miss it that much, somehow.

Embarrassed is unfair, really. There were points where I really liked it; I like the way I look here, for example. But nowadays I use “I used to have long hair” as an “imagine that!” I liked it a lot my freshman year. But post-then… I dunno. I guess it’s a good thing, to think of it this way. Better than missing the long hair.

For those curious: my lip is curing. It’s itchy now more than anything.

I’ve been in an odd place for the past couple of weeks. On the one hand, my life’s going quite well; I’ve been really enjoying myself here in Madrid and I’ve done some really exciting things (we’ll get to one of them in a moment). On the other hand, my life has become more unsure than I was hoping it would be, in the sense that my plans for next year fell through and I don’t know where I’ll be three months from now, nor what I’ll be doing.

This is by no means the worst that could be, but it’s harder when this sort of feeling follows a state of expectation. In any event, I’ve been having some very mixed feelings — really happy a lot of the time, but kind of disenchanted with the things that aren’t as pleasant. (I’ve become somewhat more frustrated with teaching when my students aren’t trying; I’m less into the work I’m doing at the university.) It’s frustrating to feel disconnected, yes? It’s not pleasant to transition between highs and lows. In many ways I’m much less stressed than I have been in past years, what with the whole not-being-in-school, so it’s a lot easier to deal with this. And yet.

Be that as it may.

Tonight, after talking about it for a while, I went and saw a circus group perform at the Price Theatre (well, El Teatro Circo Price), called Les 7 Doigts de la Main. You may’ve noticed something — that’s not Spanish. It’s French, which makes sense, seeing as how they’re a French Canadian group, affiliated with other French Canadian circus groups like Cirque du Soleil only in the sense that they were founded by people who had worked in that circus and in similar companies before. (You can read about them on French wikipedia, or at their very outdated website.) The act was called “Psy,” and was loosely themed about mental problems, in the sense that each actor (performer, I guess, is better) espoused a certain mental problem that was portrayed to a greater or lesser degree during the show. Here’s the website advertising the show, although it’ll probably disappear shortly. I encourage you to watch the video. The song is called “Frontier Psychiatrist.” I like it a lot. (And here’s a good review. It also has pictures.)

The show was really fun — somehow I keep end up seeing great French Canadian stuff here in Madrid. (Ref: the last time I talked about such a thing.) I went with Mateo and Ashley, who both seemed to enjoy it, and ran into Pier, Alexis, and Alexis’ friend Raquel. All of them liked it, too — Pier gave it five stars. It’s sort of a cross between the more traditional circus — juggling, tumbling, trapeze, handstands; the more ridiculous things of Cirque du Soleil (disclaimer: I saw a CdS show once, but I must’ve been like 11) — crazy leaps, a wheel-thing, a climb-able house set-piece, a set of stairs that flipped over, a see-saw catapult (apparently called a teeterboard); and a more acting, clowning sort of atmosphere. The show had been translated into Spanish, primarily, but there was also some in English, and some in French. (The only bad translation I could see was the fact that for whatever reason they had translated “sleep disorder” or “narcolepsy” as “insomnia.” Which it just wasn’t.) It also helped that almost all of the performers were young (really young), it just made it feel like, “Oh man, I could be doing this!” And boy would I love to give some of it a try — that’s part of the enjoyment for me with circuses and gymnastics. Not to say that I would want to try all of these things (I’ll pass on the swinging trapeze, I think), but some of them I’ve always wanted to try.

For example, I think corde lisse is really cool — it’s essentially a hanging rope from which you do acrobatics. (Here’s a video of someone doing something similar, but with silk.) Similarly, the [German] wheel (google tells me it’s sometimes known as Rhoenrad — it seems like the sort of thing Germans would invent) is amazing. Here’s a video from this production, although it was slightly different when I saw it. (I guess it’s always slightly different.) Some of the stuff I like is primarily based in strength and agility, but there’s an acrobatic grace to it also, when it’s done well, as it was here.

I guess my overall feeling about this circus was that the performers were good, but not mind-blowing in and of themselves. They weren’t doing anything shocking. But the show itself was really well-choreographed, and the scenes were fit together to tell a sort of story about mental illness, even if it never had any plot.

A description of the performers (in Spanish) is here. Some of them have websites, although it only seems to be the men, that I could find — the trapezist, the tumbler, the guy who did hand-stands on chinese poles, and the juggler. (I recommend checking out the first and the last of those websites, if you’re curious — they’re better websites, and have more to offer. Actually, all of them but the tumbler guy’s are good; his needs a bit of work. The trapeze one has his video from this show, which is really great. (Although Mateo didn’t like it.)

But yes, I think this makes me want to do something exciting, and new. Or just meet some acrobats.