Hallo!

So here I am again, back from the big black hole of non-blogging. A more private and sometimes wonderful place, but also bad for my development as a writer and for my development as a person, I think. It is crucial for me to have an outlet like this. Is that exhibitionist? Maybe.

"Alsof een engeltje over je tong piest" is my favorite Dutch expression. It means "food of the Gods," but it translates literally to "like an angel pissing on your tongue." Those Dutch know what good taste means. :)

The photo above is not from any of my birthdays, but from Alex's fake birthday just before we left Amsterdam. Despite my utter lack of claim to the photo, or the birthday, it's an apt capture of my current spirit. I just turned 22 and instead of feeling on the brink of crisis (which I halfway expected, given the precedent set by many sobbing older friends), I feel shifted somehow, and grounded, and relieved, and increased, and new. 21 was the most difficult year of my life so far (except for maybe 15, which was no picnic), but 22 will be a good one, I can feel it. I've been settling deeper and deeper into a lovely Buffalife cocoon, and simultaneously ripping apart the nest and mentally preparing myself for/fantasizing about newer and farther adventures. Working at the bookstore and remembering why I love it and why being entrenched in it is difficult for me, making new friends and keeping old friends and doing new things in the midst of old things and not allowing myself to stress about the details. Every day contains some small fragment of the revelation that the world is my oyster - nothing to do but whatever I want. This is such a powerful, and lucky, and tempestuous time in our lives. I hope I can make the most of it.

Here's a passage from Baudelaire about flaneurs (I'm not done with them yet, believe me - whether or not I ever again study modernism again) that pretty much sums up the lost ocean of being I've been grasping after for the past few months of transition, and am finally beginning to reclaim for my own -

“The crowd is his element as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world and to be the centre of the world and yet remain hidden from the world - such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince and everywhere rejoices in his incognito.”

I'll have some things up soon. I've been not writing much of anything, creative or non, for the post-Macalester whirlwind of summer laze and bookstore daze, but some sort of floodgate broke the other day and I'll be getting back into the groove momentarily. In the meantime, you can czech all my supertalentedamazing hep cat friends and fambly on the sidebar, there.