The last verse.

Quelle romance...

Figure A: Pure magic.

Okay, I'm packed and ready to go, but also a shambles.  Do you get the pit of your stomach feeling when you travel?  Like you're about to climb aboard the Millennium Falcon, and you feel obligated to say "I have a bad feeling about this," even though you everybody knows you're going to blow up the Death Star???

That's me right now.  But it's okay.  Manchester awaits!!

How I love you, Werner.

"There's something profoundly wrong—as wrong as the Spanish Inquisition was. The Spanish Inquisition had one goal, to eradicate all traces of Muslim faith on the soil of Spain, and hence you had to confess and proclaim the innermost deepest nature of your faith to the commission. And almost as a parallel event, explaining and scrutinizing the human soul, into all its niches and crooks and abysses and dark corners, is not doing good to humans. We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore. And you cannot live with a person anymore—let's say in a marriage or a deep friendship—if everything is illuminated, explained, and put out on the table. There is something profoundly wrong. It's a mistake. It's a fundamentally wrong approach toward human beings." 

Rest of the interview here.

Thrown for a loop.

I've been feeling a bit off lately.  I think it's because I've been technically happy, which is so completely at odds with my instinctive cynical demeanor, that I've been questioning every reaction I have to every thing.  

And when I say technically happy, it's not because I feel like I have to qualify the emotion.  It's just that there are so many LEVELS OF HAPPY.  Some of them operate only a few notches up from despair, where you actively seek out glimmers of positivity to make day-to-day living bearable...then there's the operational mode of happiness, where you settle into a happiness routine--hanging out with friends, having good times, making memories, what-have-you.

THEN

There's stratospherically happy--a feeling that (see despair happy) only comes in glimmers, and is SO good...is SO enjoyable, that you're pretty sure it can't possibly be real.  Or if it is real, it must come with a caveat.  Like Brigadoon or a corpse plant.  

But fuck it.  I'm going to throw my lot in with the beautiful stinky flower and the disappearing hamlet.  

I don't do tuesdays.

Pop music=the great dorkenator

When I'm going through customs this Sunday, and the guy asks me the purpose of my visit, I don't think I can answer, "a song by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros,"
but I sort of want to say it anyway!

Things I have typed today:

C: I will happily accompany you to wythenshawe hall if you like (tudor and jacobean manor house in south manchester)

Emily: oh! I've always wanted to go there!

They have a historically important collection of silver.

I exist, and I find it nauseating....

sizzler!

President Bush Reacts to Osama Bin Laden's Death with Will Ferrell from Will Ferrell

tablescape.

The more you know...

Emily in 2005:

"Shit, I have to write my bibliography.  How do I use MLA style again?  Where the hell is my handbook?  Oh wait, I threw it out.
(Googles MLA, putters around for hours copying, pasting, reformatting, and cursing.)


Emily in 2011: 
Oh, I have to write my bibliography!  (Goes to Worldcat, makes list of books, hits export to MLA, is finished in 5 minutes.)


What have we learned today?
1. The march of progress isn't always scary.
2. Worldcat is best thing since sliced bread or the TI-82 calculator.

The constellations

At least we know we're free?

Um, I need to learn German just so I can see this movie!!

In the midst of watching and re-watching the royal wedding coverage (seriously, there is nothing on TV!), Laura's fella Olaf (my favorite German theoretical physicist who totally got to meet Stephen Hawking and hangs out at the LHC all the time) told me about this movie, which is apparently the German version of King Ralph!
I only have a vague conception of what's happening, but it's still pretty funny!

Post-royal wedding soundtrack

Meh, let's rise and follow Charlie!

The best chapel speaker ever.

CHALLENGE!!!

I have a paper due next Wednesday about Hollywood remakes and theories of simulacra, and I've been slacking off MAJOR for it.  I don't know why, exactly--a combination of finding far superior ways to spend time, and being generally distracted by wonderful things.

Anyway, to get myself back on track, I am going to challenge myself to find ways to put the following bits of text into my paper:

Temporal trompe l'oeil

Unseasonably warm 

Subsequent disturbances

Zone of liminality

Uncomfortably close

The sad thing I've realized about papers is that they're essentially giant crossword puzzles or haikus.  All you have to do is plug in the bits of information in a pleasing way, and then BAM it's a good paper! 
Occasionally you have to throw in a few "fortune cookies" in to keep it interesting, or else you fall asleep on the keyboard and wake up looking like a craterface.

I really need to spend more time on Elektro, and less on this biz.  Papers are too damn easy.

Out of the frying pan and across the pond.

A few minutes ago I was on a blog which linked to the Abbey Road webcam, a cctv hooked up in that iconic spot of London street, site of innumerable dopey tourist photos.  I clicked through out of curiosity, expecting choppy footage of a dark road, and instead found some warm amber streetlamps, and the oddly sweet sounds of double-decker bus traffic and birdsong.

I can't and never could account for the relaxed feeling that England, particularly London, gives me.  I wish I could chalk it up to Anglophilia, and perhaps in earlier days I could, but that's not the whole story.  Simply put, I've never felt so comfortable with my solitary self anywhere else.  I don't need other people in London.  I can just be.  

In my lowest moments, I have over the past few years, made it a habit of spitting out random sets of search parameters: arbitrary dates and times to return to England.  Some people smoke when they feel stress, some turn to the bottle, I cling fast to the idea of getting on a plane and landing in another country with next to no luggage, if only to crash on a park bench while eating 99p egg&cress sandwiches from Spar.  

Unsurprisingly, I've never gotten out my credit card, and punched "buy."  The shackles of workaday life don't allow for such quixotic behavior, and what's more, there's no reason to spend a lot of money to go someplace to be completely alone and homeless.  

But about an hour ago, as a person who is at a perfectly nice point in her life, who is not any more stressed than usual, and who is confident of her reception at the other end, I clicked "buy."  All of the sudden, I have turned into Indiana Jones walking over the invisible bridge,  supremely confident about what awaits at the other end.

And now all I have to do is lie back and close my eyes, as the sounds of 5:30 am in Abbey Road lull me to sleep.