365 days ago, I was here.

 

That “here” is Salerno, Italy. That morning I had said goodbye to Heather in Rome – she headed back to Scotland to finish off her semester at Aberdeen and I had a day before I took the 8 hour train ride, just across the French/Italian border to Nice.

It’s more than a little weird to me that four months of my life existed almost entirely outside the realm of context of anyone who has been walking through life with me. Not to say that there are any regrets or that I have concluded solo-travel does not interest me (rather the opposite, in fact). But there is something to be said for the sharing of life with friends and family.

As I’m sure everyone experiences, there are moments when the mind wanders. When you can’t quite anchor your train of thought to the tangible reality in front of you. For me, these moments are constituted of any number of things. Thinking about what tasks I should be accomplishing. Contemplating some of life’s great mysteries (why does chicken turn white and beef turn brown? – ok, I do think deeper thoughts than that). And remembering.

Moreso than in previous years, I have noticed my thoughts not so much wandering back to my trip to Europe, but more arriving as the ghost of your favorite pet stepping out in front of your car as you speed down the freeway.

It’s rarely the monumental, that rush to a precision focus. It’s not the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum or Westminster Abbey that I see. It’s Monoprix, the containers of shredded carrots, the aisle in the grocery store where I bought canned green beans. It’s waiting for the metro, climbing un-ending stairs to emerge finally into daylight. It’s the man who sold me sunglasses and the ricotta with shrimp that I had to de-shell. It’s gelato and walking down the street being a part of the world of Paris. It’s trying to find my host family’s house for the first time. It’s eating a sandwich at la plage (the beach).

It’s any number of mundane events that I know better than to bore you with. Or worse, make you think that I am somehow trying to flaunt that I went to Europe.

Since I shared this part of my life with so few people, it’s not like remembering a childhood toy or occasion that I can text my sister and say, “Oh! Remember when…” It’s an inside joke with myself.

I think – or maybe even know – that some people might have wanted me to share more of my experiences when I returned. But I think even now it’s not something I can go through chronologically and say I did this then this then this. Sure, with a trip to Disneyland, that works. But you can’t really summarize life that way.

I don’t think there’s any sort of neat conclusion for me to come to at the end of this. This isn’t a suggestion for you to ask into the mundane details or a closure of anything really. It’s just an observation that has been floating around, waiting to be made.

As you’ll know if you’ve read my blog for any length of time (or just browse the archives), I’m not one for posting memes (or rather, I do it elsewhere). But in light of the fact that I should be writing a novel or vacuuming or doing any number of other things on my to-do list. I thought I would snag this nifty, consolidated list of 100 books. If you follow blogs or just like lists, you’ve probably seen the 100 best novels of all time or whatever. Apparently this list consolidates all those different ones. I have no idea (or care really) as to its accuracy, but it’s different than some of the others I’ve seen, so why not

Read/Want to Read/Don’t Care/Never Heard of It

41/29/9/21

1. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
2. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Grapes Of Wrath John Steinbeck
4. The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
5. Catch-22 Joseph Heller
6. One Hundred Years Of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez
7. Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell
8. Ulysses James Joyce
9. On The Road Jack Kerouac
10. The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien
11. To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
12. Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
13. Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë
14. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe C.S. Lewis
15. Great Expectations Charles Dickens
16. War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
17. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
18. Animal Farm George Orwell
19. Crime And Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
21. Lord Of The Flies William Golding
22. Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh
23. Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie
24. Love In The Time Of Cholera Gabriel García Márquez
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams
26. Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë
27. The Hobbit J.R.R. Tolkien
28. To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
29. Middlemarch George Eliot
30. Rebecca Daphne du Maurier
31. Dune Frank Herbert
32. Brave New World Aldous Huxley
33. A Prayer For Owen Meany John Irving
34. Watership Down Richard Adams
35. The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
36. Little Women Louisa May Alcott
37. Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
38. Anne Of Green Gables LM Montgomery
39. Emma Jane Austen
40. Memoirs Of A Geisha Arthur Golden
41. Beloved Toni Morrison
42. Of Mice And Men John Steinbeck
43. The Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
44. Les Miserables Victor Hugo
45. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
46. The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown
47. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
48. Winnie the Pooh A.A. Milne
49. Birdsong Sebastian Faulks
50. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Louis de Bernieres
51. Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut
52. Life of Pi Yann Martel
53. A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess
54. The Count Of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
55. A Passage to India E.M. Forster
56. Moby Dick Herman Melville
57. A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth
58. The Stand Stephen King
59. Possession A.S. Byatt
60. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
61. A Tale Of Two Cities Charles Dickens
62. The Trial Franz Kafka
63. I, Claudius Robert Graves
64. The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood
65. The Secret History Donna Tartt
66. His Dark Materials Philip Pullman
67. The Harry Potter Series J.K. Rowling
68. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky
69. Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
70. Sons and Lovers D.H. Lawrence
71. The Pillars Of The Earth Ken Follett
72. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
73. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
74. The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini
75. An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
76. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
77. Bleak House Charles Dickens
78. The Time Traveller’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger
79. A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry
80. The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemmingway
81. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
82. Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry
83. The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing
84. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers
85. The Stranger Albert Camus
86. Native Son Richard Wright
87. Gravity’s Rainbow Thomas Pynchon
88. The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver
89. Perfume Patrick Süskind
90. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
91. David Copperfield Charles Dickens
92. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl
93. Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov
94. Persuasion Jane Austen
95. Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand
96. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
97. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
98. Atonement Ian McEwan
99. Light in August William Faulkner
100. The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett

Three days and 5,739 words later, I’m no closer to a plot than I was last week. Okay, maybe a few inches closer, but inches hardly matter when there are miles to be considered. I can’t decide whether 10% feels like a lot or not. Those 5700 words are almost entirely character development. (Sidenote, don’t ask if you can read it yet. The answer is no. Perhaps a few people will be privileged to hear excerpts if they happen to catch me while I’m writing, but if I’m not allowed to read over what I’ve written until it’s finished, neither are you.)

Lessons learned so far?

- This really is about writing just for the sake of writing. But I’m okay with that.
- Going in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness route was a great idea. I can write a lot more prolifically that way (evidenced by the 700 words I am ahead of the word count goal for today. I’m trying to maintain this lead so that when friends come to visit or other extenuating circumstances come up that prevent me from writing, I won’t get too far behind).
- I really don’t seem to find the balancing colon in the ratio of business to boredom. It’s like there is nothing going on, or I’m constantly busy. Honestly, not sure which is “worse” or preferred.
- The world does not stop for x, y, or z. And sometimes you just have to put things off – not procrastinate, but legitimately set it on the sideline – until there’s more time. Like my iTunes library, half of which managed to get duplicated in the transfer? There are still about 500 songs I need to delete, but let’s be honest, that probably won’t happen until at least next week if not later.
- I am not convinced one way or another whether fiction is (one of) my genre(s). It used to be the primary, but that notion fell away years ago.
- Sleep is still important. If you’re erasing time to sleep to provide time to write or do what you should have been doing when you were writing, you are not optimizing the situation. In the long run it will likely just take you longer to write, thus perpetuating the cycle in giving you less time to sleep etc etc etc.

Mmmm sleep.
Getting up at 6am really does put a damper on the midnight bedtime.

Oh. My main, 30 year old, male character is still unnamed. He’s something of a quirky individual, but not weird. So his name is not going to be John Smith, but neither will Hezekiah Goldenfarb fit the bill. Any ideas?

-  My ring was found!! When cleaning out his car trunk, my friend found it!! And in light of the fact that an entire post was dedicated to it, you can imagine how excited I am to be reunited with it.

- I am 3807 words into my novel (which, if you’re keeping track, is more than 400 words ahead of the daily goal – go me!). Expect more on this at a later date. Perhaps tomorrow, depending how speedy my muse is at sending me owls. Today she sent me the daily blurb in just about an hour. I was quite pleased.

- It’s November. Two months away from 2010. Does that weird anyone else out?

- My new computer arrived! Still haven’t gotten it completely to where I want it – what with writing demanding a fair bit of my time and all. But getting there!

- On Saturday went with a friend to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre, which is breathtaking, btw. And the show was pretty dang awesome – featured Anthony Federov (American Idol finalist a while ago – I don’t follow it but maybe you do). I wasn’t familiar with it at all, but thoroughly enjoyed it. Definitely on the crazy side, but pretty fantastic. The soundtrack is now on my list of must-get. Somehow, I think it was Les Miserables that started it all, I have become quite enamored with musicals.

- I have discovered that making multi-portion meals benefits me in the long run because then I have leftovers for a while! And if I cook two legit meals each week, I’m set with a bit of variety.

My new computer should be arriving in a week.

You may or may not hear from me very much next month – what with the whole novel-writing business afoot. Or you’ll hear of nothing but finicky characters and a non-existent plot.

Life kind of happens, you know? I can’t fill you in on all the details (believe me, you’d be bored). But just posting the highlights doesn’t quite do things justice either.

Seeing as it is the current season, I suppose it’s appropriate that I can’t get fall out of my head. The sun shone for a moment as I was waiting for the bus this afternoon, and I revelled at the magnificent leaves. It’s been rainy (and I expect it to be for a great many months to come – thanks Seattle), and the light was a welcome change – albeit brief. I’ve been wondering at the beauty in fall – perhaps it is to compensate for the sadness of transience. It is, I imagine, the poet in me that searches for a glimmer of the beautiful and/or noteworthy in everything, even tragedy.

Thusly I will hold onto hope for my rather prosaic life of the moment. Work, come home and do stuff to pass the time until I work again? Umm, great… It should be work, have adventures and be awesome, work again to fund the adventures, etc etc.

I miss direction, most in all this desperation.

subject: The Two Towers (film), Samwise
quote: “The Blues”, Switchfoot

Today is my last day of work for the present. With any bit of luck and wind in the winged boots of the USPS, the several checks I am waiting for will arrive soon and I just might feel financially stable enough to buy a computer.

Setting aside the frustration over a hard-drive the size of a peanut and processing capacity to rival an abacus, part of the reason my need desire  for a new computer has ratched up to something nearing (but only nearing) an obsession is the impending arrival of NaNoWriMo. I suppose Word processing hardly takes the most processing effort from my machine – but it would be nice if, upon lighting-bolt of inspiration, the computer would yield to my instantaneous desire to transcribe said genius. Instead, I suppose, I will return to the tried-and-true pen and paper, because let’s face it…that will get the job done faster than waiting for the beast to wake up and come to some semblance of a functional state.

I really just wish November would hurry up and arrive so I could start writing. In the interest of maintaining interest in the work of craptastic brilliance I am going to create, I haven’t allowed myself the pleasure of planning, outlining or preparing in any way, shape or form since that inevitably prompts the desire to commence writing. At this point, however, I think I have decided on a starting place and three characters (well, two potential characters – certain friends upon discovery of my upcoming quest have requested to be included…we’ll see how that works out). There is currently no plot, but in the interest of keeping this month as painless as possible, I have decided on a genre and that being Humor (slash utter ridiculousness), hopefully a la Douglas Adams. We’ll see.

The uncertainty and proximate insanity of my impending adventure is a nice distraction from the well-phrased question of life, the universe, and everything. Because really, the answer makes about as much sense to me right now as 42 does. Who knows where I’m going – in just about any sense. In some ways I suppose it’s good for me to have to keep chillaxing and flowing with the proverbial river of life, but ambiguity is hardly my state of preference.

So, even if no epiphanies arise out of the 50,000 words I am going to shape into a novel, the break from stressing about life will be nice.