Pillar of Salt

"Let us run away," Hamlet said wistfully.
"Hmmm," I agreed lazily.
"To Santorini." He continued.
I laughed, and then grimaced when I saw, in the little Skype screen before me, what laughing did to the contours of my face. But I allowed myself a few languorous moments to languish in Hamlet's fantasy of beatific, blue-roof'd Santorini, away from snow, stress and sordidness. What a life it would be, spent in the pursuit of beauty.

I can't do it.

Okay, maybe I could for a month or two.

There has been a lot of talk of running away recently. Not just me, but others too. And, for some reason, it's always on Skype! Charles and I were talking recently, and once I was done updating him on my Awakening a la Kate Chopin, he sang a dirge of his own:
"There was a time when I thought I was the city, but now, I know that I am just someone living in the city!"

I have reason to believe that T.S. Eliot felt the potency of mutability of city life, captured it in little vials, and distilled it to form his languid, loquacious, yet luxuriant city poems. There are many who say that cities, and the life they afford are uniform. Macroscopically speaking, this makes sense, for, macroscopically speaking, what do you see in a city but people accoutered in the clothes of their occupation rushing past one another, billboards of ostentation, vehicles of quality and kind? Yet, a microscopic glance (and just a glance, I promise you!) is necessary. For only microscopically will you see how the city is a state of mind. How the small-town student has his own way of seeing the city in the vibrant colours of freedom, how the executive sees all in a blur, his vision only fine-focusing on what is the order of the day, how, for the urban brat, the illumined picturesque has now become a grainy, repetitious picaresque. That is how I was in the Eternal City when I decided to seek my fortune elsewhere. The urgency to 'run away' is what I heard in Charles's voice. I heard the same rawness in Hamlet's drawn-out plea. Could it be, then, that the Spitsbergen, despite me snobbishly insisting otherwise, is actually a city?

I will begrudgingly answer in the affirmative, but a conditional affirmative. The Spitsbergen has a long way to go, trust me, in terms of infrastructure, but in terms of drama and attitudes, it is rather urban. Within reason, of course. Yet there is this constant theme these days: the theme of running away, an escape. Why? I have the fragments of an answer for me: my courses (with the exception of two) aren't doing anything for me this semester, I feel like I am just going through the motions. The drama, as defined by the frisson that accompanies romance(s) + my occupational drama (passive-aggressive fights and agreements to disagree with co-workers), is draining. At times such as these, Hamlet's whisper, Charles's unsaid supplication, they all become a heady siren song, serving up the idea of running away as tantalizingly as possible.

Last week, I threw a bit of a tantrum whilst speaking with daddy on the phone. I have decided to stay on in my foreign homestead over the summer and intern at a firm or a lab. My parents, judicious, prudent people as they are, are heartbroken but are saying the right things: "We are proud of you.", "We so want you to come home, but the benefits of this are so far-reaching.", "We wish you could come home, but we understand." My emotional entropy is a bit messy, so I ended blurting out a complicated sentence, the meaning of which my father distilled perfectly: "So you WANT to come home, but want US to say it? Beta, this isn't an approval thing, you can totally come home if you want to. We won't think any less of you." Oh dilemma! I did what I do best: "Daddy, I have to go..." Running away, again!

I feel like my time with the Spitsbergen is at an end. I cannot see myself for more than a year. There are those who seem to have gotten used to its two climatic seasons, and the bare seasons of the heart. I worry every time I feel something stirring in my heart, I fear falling headfirst into that ingenue's pattern of, "Do you know I am alive? Do you feel what I feel? Alas! You are gone, and I am ruined!" As Verlaine put it, "After all, we do not want another Eponine fiasco, do we?" No, we most certainly do not. This Eponine shall do what should have been done to begin with: leave the barricade, and get a PhD. Is that running away too? Is there really that much dynamism in stoicism? I can feel it throb beneath my skin, this beating of something wanderlust. I can feel it shuffling its feet impatiently during 09:00 am biochemistry, asking, in a very VERY out-of-character twist, what the point of it all is? It knows its own impermanence, it knows the perils of being sessile, and so it wants to move! For once, I feel like I am one with this Wanderlust Pulse, but all I want to do is go home. Just for a while, and have all the sordidness and drama fade into a faraway foreground. I do not want to answer these questions about me, and I do not want to stand witness to those of others; I just want to go home.

The Wanderlust Pulse tells me to forge ahead, however. It tells me to think of Lot's Wife who was sinful enough to look back, and became a part of the landscape. Forge ahead! Let the past burn, let it provide us some warmth, for what else is it good? Think. Of. Lot's. Wife. I am, actually. And I don't think that she was full of sin; I think she just missed her home, no matter how debauch a place it was.

Until the next time,
GossipGuy.

My Loins, The Bitch, and An Overpriced Wardrobe

Sex is scary. The kind of scary that induces stream-of-consciousness in one's pen, or fingers. The last time that happened to me was during an immunology exam when I found that I had 15 minutes to write a 25-mark essay. It turns out that while the theory of sex is all biology (my turf), the practicum tests all your knowledge of biology, physics and chemistry (my turf, hell no, and a friend I hang out with sometimes). The challenge that the practicum presents entails that one strike a balance between the three. But what if the coupling of your textbook-based knowledge of biology, and the few random assortments of statics-dynamics equations that you know, lead to a few sloppy errors in your coupling? A few slips, over-lubrication, the Skinny Jeans Impediment, the sheer ergonomics...easily remedied, but not really desirable. You would think that one can gloss over this with some well-timed chemistry, but what if the test has more questions about physical chemistry than organic chemistry? What if you're diving headfirst into the practicum on the basis of superficial attraction? The Hydrogen-bond type? The kind that water molecules use as they flit from partner to partner? You've studied hard, and you've studied the hard, my friend, but somehow the test didn't get you. So you find yourself half-answering some questions, bull-shitting your way on others, and leaving the frightening blank spaces for yet others. So yes, sex is scary, and the instruction manual is a haphazardly compiled check-list that ensures a decent culmination to the practicum. What most alumni fail to mention is the milieu: the testing centre is as important as the test itself! Don't take the test at a trashy, community college-esque testing centre. Seriously. You'll end up feeling like a whore.

I want to high-five the Man in the Sky (to the strains of indie-music, no less!) for the script that he has written, the script where cliché serves as an anchors to a kind of meta-theatricality that is, quite literally, out of this world, his world. As a sampler:

Cliché #1: Boy meets Commitophobe-in-Disguise.

Cliché #2: Boy loses Commitophobe-in-Disguise.

Cliché #3: Boy fills out Exit Survey, and finds dark, repressed things about self.

Cliché #4: Boy makes bad decisions, and does the whole Fantine bit.

Cliché #5: Boy becomes venomous bitch.

Cliché #6: Boy-turned-Fornicator has to deal with religion. Totally out of the blue.

Cliché #7: Boy, Interrupted: remains freakishly calm, files things away in "I'll Deal With It Tomorrow" box, saves neuroticism for therapist and self.

Cliché #8: Boy nearly becomes one of those people who cry at therapy sessions.

Well written, Man in the Sky, I, for one, laud your theatrical devices. Two thumbs up! The musical score, however, is a little overdone, but I am sure you're trying to make a point. Something on the lines Man-is-as-subtle-as-a-sledgehammer? Maybe.

These past two weeks have wrung me dry: of imagination, of emotion, and of conversation. As I glided from crisis to crisis, from coffee-shop to restaurant to dorm-room, to a gathering, to a truck, I found myself wishing I had someone to hold my hand through all of this. When did this become so important? I used to be fairly self-sufficient. Hamlet and I have rallied around each other through dire times. Namely, the dissolution of both our romances. His altruism kept me sane through mine, and I hope I was of some help at least. Now imagine this, Hamlet and I, sitting at a fairly plush eatery by the name of 'The Drunken Noodle', there is a light drizzle outside, the sky is at a point where it is trying to decide between the rising of the sun and the moon, and steaming plates of Asian cuisine sit before us. We talked about various things: the tear-tempered cup of coffee I had with Mary Wollstonecraft (his ex) as I attempted to thaw the gelid bridge that had formed between us, we talked about fools, we talked about Kings, we talked about the fools of Kings...so you would think that I had someone to go to when drama turned against me. But Hamlet is not the jigsaw piece I am looking for, he fills a different void, an important one, for I may as well be dead were he not around, but this pretty little picture needs something else before it can be called complete. My sagacious friend agrees. Upon my return to my hall of residence, Butters gave me some of the worst news of my life. News that confirmed to me that changes, large changes were at hand. But, I can't deal with this now. This wound is too fresh. I think I shall file this away for now.

The only bright spots include a journey (to Hornbacher's!) with the incisive trio comprising of The Hipster, The Skater and the 4Chaner! That was the best taste of aerial fun I have had in a long time! I also did coffee with the ever-delighting Novel-Duchess, we updated one another on our respective drama, judged people's sartorial choices, and came to realise that we our friendship has the potential of becoming something more permanent. Christine de Pizan gave me conversation, albeit of a more literary bend, but this was also food that I had been starved of for so long that I had even forgotten the taste of it. The interim periods of vituperative bitchiness were uncalled for, but necessary. There is something very satisfying about biting someone's head off, as much as I blush to admit it!

I have come to realise that the Intelligent Metrosexual is really not all that intelligent after all. He mixes his lessons up, like some foppish, pedantic amateur. As far as the love practicum goes, [Strangers-at-Night= Dreamers-at-Night], yet that is not always the case with the Sex Practicum. He is exactly the kind of fool who knows what he has bargained for, but slowly hums "Deux anges qui se décrouvent, n'ont rien à expliquer" because he has seen a portent in the moon that tells him that this may be something else. Being a bitch is not fun, not in the long run. Not to someone who is only trying to make you comfortable, who understands that your nervousness is making you snappish, and especially not after that heady venom has worn off, and the guilt begins to set in. Being a whore unleashes the Absolute Alcohol of Guilt into one's bloodstream. When each passing day bears the promise of 'Tragedy Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight!', perhaps the only constant thing you have is an overpriced wardrobe. Because, really, if you're not pure, at least your shirts are! They're such beautiful shirts! They make me sad!

So much has happened, and so quickly, that, in my own way, when I turn to God-on-high, my Man in the Sky, I beseech him to bring me home. This town is too small, it is too tinged with the iridescent trail of my mistakes. Maybe that is the only saving I need. My Eternal City! Let there be no talk of loins (mine or anyone else's!), the bitch I shall be shall be more satire than sulphur, and the luxury of that overpriced wardrobe shall make the flowers grow.

If and when tomorrow comes,
GossipGuy.