At one with the moment

We watched the Simon Amstell standup, and it was actually... well, it certainly was well-crafted. You could see how much work went into breaking it down into small segments that flowed into each other pretty seamlessly, and how aptly placed the callbacks to earlier bits were. A lot of it struck so close to home though, that I found myself drifting away from the humor towards some sort of internal scoreboard, checking off whether I was more, equally, or less fucked up in the currently discussed capacity. The whole thing's on the Internet by the way:

We're running, and everyone else I think is one with the moment, one with joy, one with the universe, and I'm there, as we're running, thinking 'Well, this will probably make a good memory...' Which is living in the future, discussing the past with someone who if they asked you 'Oh what did it feel like?' [you'd go] 'I don't know, I was thinking of what I'd say to you.'

That one gave me the longest pause, because it's pretty all-encompassing, and therefore related to all my other... peculiarities. I think I'm still a bit ahead of Amstell on that front. It's not a crippling mechanism - usually - but it felt very weird when I realized that I had had the exact same thought literally three hours before.

I was at my parents' house, and as I was about to leave, my mother asked if she could show me and dad something she'd been practicing. We sat down in her room, she put on a Russian folk song on YouTube, and sang the second voice to it. It was the first time I've ever heard her do anything like that. She was visibly nervous, and off key at times. At first I had no idea how to react. And then I heard this voice in my head: stay in this, take in as much as you can. When they're gone, you will want to remember it.

So I tried, vacillating between sitting in that room in Winter and listening to my mother sing, and some vague point in the future when this memory would need to be as vivid as I could make it. Unsure whether what I felt in the moment was a direct response to the now, or a bizarre reflection of this projected, inevitable loss.

Maybe I'm not ahead after all.

The Horse

Nosze to zdjecie w komorce od 2 lat. Sciana pokoju matki:


Detal:


Pointy nie bedzie.

Overflow

I had a bunch of stuff to write about, but it's more and more difficult for me to actually post here. Or rather: it's more and more out of the way. I dump all the trivia into my Facebook feed, and the other stuff just dissolves after a day or two anyway, so why bother.

I'd like to have some kind of record* though, especially about the good stuff.

My birthday was last week. I threw a huge party for way too many people (It got freaky, I figured at least half of them wouldn't be able to make it, so I overshot with the invites, but then most of them actually showed up.) I don't remember any single conversation I had, which is weird, since I'm told I wouldn't shut up for the entire evening, and my throat was sore the next day, but that always seems to be the case for the host. Anyway, people claim to have had fun, and I got some awesome gifts, including the first volume of Absolute Sandman (incidentally, it took my mother about 6 minutes today before she spilled wine all over it, so that was fun) and a very cool boardgame, and a new toilet seat (that's right, you heard me), and a Polish, personalized rendition of this song. Because my friends are awesome.

As I was cleaning up on the next day, I kept remembering funny stuff from the evening before. I had it listed in my head for that entry that never materialized, but now I just remember Waste doing a short presentation of nerdcore, completely out of the blue.

It felt really nice to know that people came. As base as that sounds.

Then I went to lunch with a friend who came over from Krakow. It was a very long ride, and the tram broke down two stops before my destination, so I had to leg it. The sun was shining, I had this playing...


Life felt very good.

On the next day I got a full-blown sinus infection.

Took me a week to get better, but I finally did (sort of), so today my parents came over, and took me out to lunch at a bar mleczny in Praga, and a coffee (also in Praga, at a surprisingly hip cafe that they claim is their favorite - apparently they really get around). Life was really, really good again. I hope it keeps doing that, as often as possible.

* and now Famous Blue Raincoat is playing in my head. Brains are silly.

Dents

I found myself craving a hug today, as stupid as that sounds. And not even in the metaphorical sense. I sat there, as whole vats of shit were dumped upon me, and the only thing I could think of was that I really wanted something warm, very close, right now.

That's all over now though, thankfully. At least for a time.

For over a week I've had this Word document open and sitting on my taskbar, so that I remember to actually work on it when I have the time. Unfortunatley I don't, but by virtue of my slow hard drive, insufficient RAM, or what have you, whenever i click the "show desktop" button or open a new document, all the minimized windows peel away until that bottom-most one - the script of a documentary on Bruce LaBruce - is revealed for just long enough to deliver its subliminal message:

By the way, you do suck a good cock.

Always gives me pause.

Mother dear

I visited my folks today, to check in on them, and to give my mom The Sputnik Film Festival catalogue & assorted merchandise, which Marta benevolently gave me last night hoping she'd get another welcome package today, with her press credentials. Which she didn't. Sucks to be Jesus.

Anyway, it was the regular stuff - a tote bag with the catalogue, a screening schedule and assorted promo trash. I was sitting with mom at the kitchen table, waiting for the soup, and idly rifling through the stuff, when suddenly two condoms fall out from between some cosmetics brochures. My brain went AAAAAAAAAAAA! and I instantly palmed them and slipped them into my back pocket, which was no easy feat. Half a minute later another condom-looking packet appeared, and was also spirited away (I had become a pro by then, apparently). All the while I was trying to avoid thinking that I just almost re-gifted my mother condoms.

Back home I took a closer look at them and it turned out they weren't actually condoms, but hand cream samples, and there's actually some red-headed girl weirdly almost-kissing a middle-aged woman on them (which would make for a somewhat confusing condom wrapper), but trust me, they look the part. And now for some choice quotes (in Polish):

(przegladajac katalog mama natrafia na sekcje dziecieca i wlacza jej sie nostalgia, z pelnym zaangazowaniem i wzruszeniem) ... ale moja ulubiona bajka to byla taka szwedzka, Carsson (sp?), o panu z broda ktory mial smiglo w tylku i odwiedzal male dzieci...

(o kompocie, ale znienacka, nowa mysl) Wiesz, bo ja to po prostu robie do dzbanka.

It was a nice interlude.

And the weather was great. Very windy, but warm, with heavy, rolling clouds racing across the sky. Perfect for walking, though it did remind me a bit of a cartoon someone told me about: a gray cityscape filled with downtrodden, gray people, and a gray strip across the sky, with the caption "A Rainbow Over Warsaw".

I promised myself I wouldn't harp on about weather so much, because at one point it seemed all I did was weather, music and obfuspeak, but I can't help it, I get such a kick out of just watching the city skyline. Also, tried a little experiment and it's amazing how many different shades you can pull out of those clouds depending on whether you're listening to this, this or this.

Things that are black

I think the thing I miss most about my old room is the sound of rain on the street outside my window, and of the odd car driving in the night over the wet asphalt. There's something about nighttime storms that I find incredibly comforting. The more tempestuous the better. Here, none of my windows face the street (thought that's actually a blessing, JP2 is far too noisy), and something's off with the angles - the raindrops never seem to hit them. And when they do, the sound is abrupt and unpleasant.

When my dad was 20, he decided that he would spend his 40th birthday in Vienna, his 50th in New Orleans, and his 60th in Reykjavik. He went to Vienna alone - it was a big deal back in 1989. Mom tells me that she took me to meet him in Budapest, and then the three of us came back home. The only thing I remember about that journey is that I got a Hungarian Tom & Jerry comic book. We didn't have those in Poland yet. Ten years later, he took me to New Orleans - that trip I recall much better, though for me the entire thing was still mainly about seeing Tori Amos live for the first time in my life. But I do remember walking with him down Bourbon Street on his birthday night.

On Tuesday, I bought him tickets to Reykjavik, trying very hard not to think about the whole thing in terms of a "proper sendoff". I could tell he didn't expect it, but we're both titans of emotional display, so the whole exchange took maybe 10 seconds, and then we were off to the next topic. Mom was incredibly happy, and later told me he actually teared up. Of course I never even noticed.

We'll know on Aug 8th when he starts chemo.

The sky is really uncanny tonight, Pitch black. You can almost feel the void beyond. No moon, no stars, not even any of that reflected city glow. And certainly no rain.

Christmas '08

We managed to get Christmas food shopping done in under an hour. Could be because mom got sick and I went to the supermarket with dad alone - less time spent on arguing, as it's kinda hard to argue when you don't have much to say to each other. I think we both took some pleasure in our efficiency though.

I saw a packet of dried beets, which gave me pause. I also learned that my mind is immune to the concept of buying prunes. It just shut down and I grabbed whatever caught my eye with nary a conscious thought. And so, on the first attempt I came back to my preplexed father with some dried apples, then I presented him with a jar of French toffee, and finally I came back empty-handed after performing a totally cartoonish halt-and-head-swivel after some random guy my autopilot glimpsed peripherally and decided he warranted further inspection. It was so obviously earnest I could have safely made an "oh I thought you were someone else" face, or performed some other evasive manouver. Except I was - as I've already mentioned - in a prune-induced coma, so I just stared blankly for a moment and went on my way.

I managed to get my mother the perfume she wanted, but the book I had planned on giving my father was nowhere to be found. Finally, before embarking on another hunting mission, I asked him if there was something in particular he wanted to get this Christmas, in case I failed, to which my family replied that they'll just package something from my dad's bookshelf in festive wrapping paper for the sake of appearances (i.e. - the uncle), and I can get the book after the shopping frenzy subsides. I think it's a good estimate of how vibrant the holiday spirit is in our household.

But maybe that's the secret to a calm and pleasant Christmas, cause I definitely enjoyed ours this year. I ate my weight in smoked salmon, watched a lot of Undeclared (which is HILARIOUS), and played entirely too much WoW. I also neglected to get any work done, and find that fact simply awesome.

Apart from that, I feel a bit like the last stand of a drainpipe clog - almost completely flushed, but still hanging on by a tampon thread. Monika came back home for the holidays and I'd hoped to be unclogged, one way or the other, by the time we got to talk, but I guess it was not meant to be. A fan of international postal service I am not.

It's kind of funny that I had about 2 weeks' worth of candidness in me, after switching to this blog, and then instantly reverted to unwieldly obfuscation. I guess it's not the venue, but the audience that counts.

My name's not Anne, and I got no plan, but you still need to listen to this: