Whistling sound

We went to Cambridge and ate huge baked potatoes stuffed with butter and cheese and beans and oh my God my left ventricle just collapsed. Wanted to go to Hitlerton upon Ruhr too, but never made it - we did glimpse Lolworth though. Had awesome balti, played some Civ4 hotseat, swapped spit (by way of inflatable mattress) with our host, saw Tamara Drewe (so British), bought a bunch of pretty awesome books (like this one, and this one). In other words, had quite a lot of lazy fun.

It's strange to think this was the last one of these trips (in this format, at least). Maybe that's where that need for instant gratification came from - knowing that I'm working on a deadline.

I always feel sad leaving, even if I really want to be back home already. It's a funny sort of sadness though, completely divorced from reality. Like a shot of nostalgia for something that never fully materialized. Could be a byproduct of partial idealization. Could be that they don't play movies on intracontinental flights and getting out of my own head was never my strong suit.

I love inorganic emotion.

Undelivered

It's tricky when an ongoing thread becomes part of your personal narrative. Once you've used that shorthand enough times, you start expecting reality to follow suit and wait for it to provide you with the encoded experience. As opposed to experiencing it in real time and expanding that code. That's about as close as I was able to get to what I wanted to say.

My narrative is that these little trips to the UK are what's been keeping me sane for the rest of the year, since - short as they are - they constitute my only holidays. The pattern has been established, the mental shortcut made, so I expected heavenly bliss to blast a hole clear through my head upon arrival. Instead two really nice, relaxing days happened.

So yeah, ongoing threads are tricky. But when you drift off for a moment on evening #3 and upon return notice you're looking at the people at your table through a vaguely bliss-shaped hole, you realize that sometimes they become part of your narrative for a reason.

Roses, condensed

Sometimes I really love my job. Probably never more so than over the past week. I was contracted by three different people to translate three different movies, and... well, let's just say Banksy's hilarious mockumentary turned out to be the least engaging of the crop.

Unfortunately, the trailer for the only feature offering of the bunch is a bit lackluster and all over the place thematically, so I'll showcase the last one:



The scripts I translate movies from often aren't 100% compatibile with the finished product - they contain scenes that were later cut, present the dialogue in a different sequence, or in some severe cases are only superficially related to the actual movie. It's a pain in the ass, but there's nothing I can do about it. This time it led to me translating a story that as it turns out never made the final cut. For once, though, I'm really glad it did:

There was this kid I grew up with, sweetest person you’ll ever meet, and could sing just like James Taylor, had a beautiful voice. His daddy was a Pentecostal preacher and he grew up in the church and ended up marrying a girl whose daddy was a preacher. And he was just surrounded by Jesus and he was a sensitive soul and he didn’t fit in the church. Didn’t fit there, but kept trying and trying until one day he just went to the hardware store and bought him a can of paint. He went to the church, he painted love on one side, he painted hate on the other. And then he sat down on the front steps crying. He just couldn’t find the middle.

Ok, back to work.

Side road

I've been going to sleep around 4-4:30 a.m. and waking up at almost 2 p.m. for the past few days, but today I have a breakfast appointment and had to drag myself out of bed at 10. I was totally zombiefied and had very little control over my thought patterns, so my brain was going off on all sorts of tangents. I got out of the shower somewhat more conscious, but with a very specific, and unshakeable soundtrack in mind.

I popped it on, and as I was pulling on my socks, and the ruckus in my head subsided, I had the oddest bout of nostalgia for that fleeting pocket of quiet before the shitstorm I associate with my school/university days. That stretching of of every second in your rapidly collapsing bubble, when you've already resigned yourself to your fate, but decide it's perfectly within your rights to ride out those last moments of escapism.

I never thought I'd miss that. And actually, I don't think I do. But the wistfulness stands.