"Your blog is malnourished." -R

So, what's been going on since my last post? I'd like to answer this with a tag cloud. "visa. flight. wedding. find apartment. move. job search. manifest new life where I am very crafty creative industrious and bloggy." Well the last one might not really work as a tag, but you get the idea.

So we moved to New York! We love it. And now, after two years in London and one month in New York, I'd like to give some initial thoughts:

This country is litigation mad! I guess I knew this but I never experienced it before. I mean official bureaucracy, yes. I have had my share of that- (see my previous post). But you need a credit check to get an apartment here. You need to sign non-disclosure forms and tax forms and authorize background checks on your "character" when you go to a job interview! It's madness.

Free stuff everywhere! New York is like a living garage sale. There's free stuff on the street, curb alerts on Craigslist, all kinds of impromptu street sales, stoop sales, and community swaps. Now mind you when we held a sidewalk sale on our street in Hoxton and advertised up and down Kingsland Road, to get rid of some stuff before we left London, we were met with everything from a lack of enthusiasm to total fear. English people don't really seem to get the concept of self-organized sales; they're more comfortable with a car boot or a jumble in a designated area. I do find it something of a paradox that the land of free market capital is also the land where commerce can easily get back in the hands of the people. But they probably just look at it as trying to make a buck. I'm the one who walks down the street past a lady selling some old baby clothes on the front stoop of her brownstone, eyes shining, and murmuring about anarcho-syndicalism.

People talk to each other here! Strangers! The other day I was in Williamsburg, which is pretty much like Shoreditch only a bit scruffier, waiting for my friend to meet me for brunch. Meeting for brunch at the weekend, with a Mimosa (Buck's fizz) or Bloody Mary, seems to be very New York. It's not much different from meeting for brekkie in London, except there's no beans or tomatoes or decent tea, and you're allowed to get a bit tipsy. So as I was standing on the corner in front of a diner, I saw a lady with a dog pass a man. He asked her if that was a beagle. She said... I'm gonna go to quotes here:

LADY: "Yep. He's a beagle. Pet a beagle and you'll have good luck all day!"
MAN: "I won't get bit, will I?"
LADY: "No, no. He won't bite."

Then they get into a conversation, which goes on for about 10 minutes. This lady tells the whole story of how she found this dog. The vet says he's about 8. She thinks he's a retired hunting dog. Sometimes he just sits on the sofa a looks at her and she wonders if he's happy. The man suggests she takes him to a park or wood, and gives him something to smell. Then she should hide the item and he can hunt it.

MAN: "You see, there's a big difference between what makes us happy and what makes them happy."

Turns out this guy is like a dog whisperer. I love how people in New York just start talking to anyone randomly, and this story also leads me to another observation:

People in New York are CRAZY about their pets. First of all EVERYONE has a pet. Everyone has a cat or two and a dog. When we were apartment hunting, we started out looking at sub-lets, but it was soon clear that that wouldn't work out because everyone had a pet, and I'm allergic. The people across from us have two cats who eye us through the kitchen window whenever we get something out of the refrigerator. The neighborhood is full of pet salons, doggy day cares, and professional dog walkers. Yes, that's a job here. People give their pets birthday presents and christmas presents. People send their pets to pet resorts. It's like a child substitute for people who are too busy or selfish to have children. I don't mean to sound judgemental. It's just weird that so many people treat some animals like their own children and don't afford the same sense of kindness to the animals on their plates. But hey, I guess it's better than living in a country where ALL the animals are treated cruelly. Here it's just most of them.

Food! The food here is so freakin good. I mean there is good food in London, and in our neighborhood we were especially spoiled with great Turkish food and Vietnamese. But that was it. Decent pizza and more recently Mexican can be had in London, but you have to seek it out. Here, it's everywhere. There are so many good places everywhere. There are thousands of pizza places all over this city where you can get a slice for $2.50 and it's unbelievably good. Tacos. Deli sandwiches. Eggplant parmigiana. Any time I eat something here I pretty much reaffirm that we made the right decision.

One thing I miss about London, among many, is the free museums. Museum entry costs a fortune here! There's a real class divide; high culture is a luxury. Luckily you can get free tickets to fringe theater and off-broadway shows on Craigslist. The other area where New York clearly falls short is parks. There are two big parks we can access here, Central and Prospect. But neither really live up to London parks from what I've seen. So what's the conclusion of my research so far? Strangely, or maybe not strangely, I am dazzled by New York, but I don't feel it's my city yet. I'm presently still loyal to London, but a few more slices of pizza and a free blender off the street might turn me into to a true New Yorker.

Lost youths

I'm feeling depressed with the world lately. I'm working myself up day by day into one of those funks which are hard to shake off, because they are so easily fed with so many examples which demonstrate that the world is in many ways a terrible place. It wouldn't be so bad if the world were inherently terrible; I could accept that more easily. It's that the world is beautiful, and that I love life, and it feels like all of its potential goodness is being squandered- not only squandered but distorted into unrecognizable forms. There are so many wrongs that need to be righted and it's hard to hope that they ever will be. At times like this I question why I even want to have children. Life is hard, we don't know what it's for, we don't know what to do with it. The world is a fucked up place full of mostly fucked-up lives. Do I want to inflict existence on my progeny just because I don't know what else to do? I am afraid to imagine sometimes what kinds of lives my children and grandchildren will have, what kind of world they will live in. The signs are bad.

In recent weeks, I've seen a few things which have upset me. One, I saw a perhaps thirteen year old boy eat a chocolate bar first thing in the morning at the bus stop and then deliberately drop the wrapper on the ground. Meaning, this kid lacks even the most basic concepts of ecology, pride in one's home town, and cleaning up after oneself, not to mention of a healthy breakfast. Basically, I interpret the whole thing, the eating and the littering, as this kid screaming out "I feel like a garbage can, people treat me like garbage, I treat them like garbage. I therefore see no point in trying to avoid wading through a sea of garbage." Though, of course, as a Brit, he was probably using the word rubbish as opposed to garbage. My thoughts filled me with despair, as did the feeling that nothing I could say could get through his wall of ignorance. Not even if I quoted to him from "The World Without Us," a depressing and compelling book which details how the sea has literally become a sea of garbage, millions of tiny pieces of plastic to be precise.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting on the upper deck of the bus. Across the aisle, two teenage girls were talking and laughing, one of them playing music on her phone. At times it seemed so loud, I wasn't even sure if it was coming from her phone, or from something more powerful. I had my headphones on, and I could still hear the music plain as day. I took a headphone out of one ear, and said to the girl "Is that your music?" with a little smile. She looked at me, immediately quizzical and confrontational. "What?" "Is that your music?" I said. "But you got your earphones on, isn't it?" she asked. "Yeah," I said. "But I can still hear it." "How can you hear it if you got your earphones on?" she asked, pushing up her face. "Because it's really loud," I said. "Do you think you could turn it down a bit?" "It's not even loud!" she said aggressively. Then looked at her friend and laughed. "I asked you politely," I said. "You could respond politely." She didn't answer.

The last and most disturbing event was also on the bus. Three twelve or thirteen year old boys piled onto the back of the bus on the upper deck. They were laughing and joking and shouting, as kids do, but literally everything they were saying was an obscenity. High pitched voices, horseplay, and "you cunt! oh, you cunt!" "stop it you twat!" "Oy, your mom's a bitch!" "Fuck you! Your mom's a dog. She takes it doggy-style." Not yet full grown-men, already fully trained woman haters.

The thing that is the saddest is these kids, the litterer and the swearers, the rude girl, are not entirely to blame. They are, in a sense, victims. They are sponges who soak up the culture we immerse them in. A culture that values above all style, surface, sexiness, and possessions. A culture which places little value on being smart or spiritual or basically caring about other people. These youths are mirrors we look into and recoil from because we don't recognize what we see. There is sickness and corruption here, in our culture, in our world, and we ought to take responsibility for that. We ought to stop wondering what wrong with these kids and start wondering what's wrong with all of us.

The Return of the Blog

Ok, I admitted in my last post that I was a bad blogger, but this is getting ridiculous. I haven't written anything since September, and I decided it's either recommit or delete. And well, here I am.

The trouble with me is I don't do what I really want to do. I want to do lots of things: be a great writer, have my own farm, blog regularly, take pictures, bake my own bread, actually bake my own everything (maybe have my own little line of cute cupcakes and cookies - I would love that). Or... you know be an academic, learn Slovak, start painting again, or pick up the banjo. Today I was thinking that instead of continuing to agonize over the decision to start or not to start a PhD (this has been going on for years), I should just become like a serial Master's student. I did one in comparative lit., but what if I do one next in history, then sociology, then philosophy. Or maybe I should do the philosophy first... I have trouble making decisions. Actually my main trouble is I make a decision, tell everyone, and then change my mind. It's just the way I am. As my friends and family have learned. Thus, they take every decision I make with a full tablespoon of salt. And really, it's not that I don't do what I really want to do, because if I really wanted to, I would do it, right? So I must not actually want to do it. What I actually want to do must be this- spending most of my free time reading in bed, listening to music, and cooking. It's not a bad life really.

My sister is mainly responsible for The Return of the Blog. She gave me a wicked pep talk and apparently likes my blog entries- and doesn't think they're just some self-reflective crap. Anyway, I'm going to continue- at least once a week, to launch my observations and neuroses here. And I'm going to try not to worry about if I sound too British or too American. I do feel that I'm getting a little more American the closer we get to moving to New York. Then I'll no doubt be writing lots of posts about New York and London, how they're similar, how their different. I can't wait to be able to do that properly. I reckon I'm sounding rather British at this point. But what if I say hell yeah, moving to the city is going to rock!

Who am I?

Ok, this is definitely self-reflective crap. So I'll go now. Gotta heat up the kale curry I made and prepare to defend the existence of kale curry to meat-eating boyfriend.

I'm back in London

Not quite two weeks back in the big smoke and Trabzon already feels like a distant memory. It's amazing how quickly I reverted back to London life. The five minute stroll to my office in Turkey has been usurped by running for the bus, my glasses of tea are now paper cups with plastic lids, my hours of leisure time are now reduced to the weekend, my olives and cheese have become eggs and beans. I am teaching more for less money, and summertime ended the day I left Trabzon. Through the drizzly film of the 243's windows each morning, cinematically soundtracked by my I-Pod; (I'm currently on a bluegrass binge), I observe rowdy youths, showcase crazies, armies of workers, and battered-looking hipsters who have clearly not been to bed. I am back in a land where construction sites are carefully sealed off from the public and traffic rules are obeyed. In Turkey I got used to navigating moving bulldozers in the middle of pedestrianized streets, and habitually checking for scooters on the sidewalk. Now I find myself back in the banal safety of England. Grey church steeples are matched by a gloomy sky and pub signs swing and creak in gusts of wind. There's a lot of things they don't have in Turkey: chavs for example, or decent graffiti. You wouldn't think I would have missed such things, or laugh when my umbrella gets pulled inside out by the wind. But I did, and I do; it's nice to be back.