Stonehenge and The Last Unicorn

it seemed to me fitting to post about the 1985 animated feature the last unicorn and the mysterious stone circle erected around 3000 b.c. in the same entry.

people at work asked me what i thought of stonehenge, and my immediate smart-aleck response was that it was rocky--which is an adequate description, if sarcastic and uninventive. but i did enjoy it very much. it was fun to contemplate the mystery and good for the soul to be out of the city and see the rolling green fields of salisbury. the audioguide also included an excerpt from thomas hardy's tess of the d'urbervilles which made me ecstatic. i've been saying i wanted to see stonehenge because of its being an important setting in that novel.

since the visit, i have become mildly obsessed with the idea of ley lines (not obsessed enough to do any research, mind you, but obsessed enough to mention it). the theory of ley lines is that important spots of worship are built along or on an intersection of these invisible lines. very druidic. it had been a long neglected theory until the whole new age movement came along.

to the last unicorn. my, oh my, i can't begin to give a critique. but it was a riot at times. it was screened in an old anglican chapel (and admission was free) and someone gave me a chupa chup lolly, so i don't know that the night could have been any better.

i love this postcard.

i don't love breaking out in stinging blisters after accidentally grazing some obscenely poisonous plant (this morning my hand still stings a bit as i type, but don't worry i shall overcome.)

last night i saw the musical billy elliot. i bought the ticket from a "half-price ticket kiosk" in the heart of the theatre district, and i really think Rick Steves may be right when he calls those ticket booths "scalpers with an address." i bet i could have gotten a cheaper, and perhaps better, ticket from the box office.

anyway, billy elliot was a pretty stunning production. while the first half left something to be desired it really picked up and won my love after intermission.

I feel I owe my public some blogging.

Life has been busy in London (much busier than my student life was in Italy. I chalk it up to volunteering full-time (it is a 9-5 gig, baby) and my one-hour commute each way (but I have been whipping through books.) I am residing with a family, and for their hospitality in taking me in and treating me so nicely I often spend my evenings home in their company chatting or watching some movie, and spend many evenings away from home trying to soak up the sites of this thriving city!

But everything has been wonderful.

Compared to Italy, I feel entirely at home. It is wonderful to actually be able to express myself with my arsenal of words fully loaded! Bless that mother tongue!

I feel like I have done hardly anything though, when in actuality, I have done quite a bit.

I have been to the Science Museum, Tate Modern (and I saw Ai Wei Wei's (free him China!!!) sunflower seeds, not all of them from the original exhibition, but a very sizable pile, about as tall as me), the Tate Britain, Trafalgar Square, the London Pride Parade, the Hyde Park Ward, the play The Woman in Black, seen the outside of Buckingham Palace, listened to Mumford and Sons play in Hyde Park (I didn't have tickets to the concert, but I found a good peep hole through the walls around the official space, and the sound carried nicely on a June afternoon), and have seen the inside of a good many pubs. One Saturday night, we got caught along with a stag party (in American language, a bachelor party) and went pub crawling a bit with a crazy bunch of lads, until we tired of them and just settled in to dance.

I also had a homeless man tell me I looked sexy eating my ice cream. I told him sincerely, "That was not my intention."

And I will do my best to take more pictures in the future! I just bought new batteries for my camera!

in a new york minute

you can embarrass yourself a million times.

i hate being an obvious outsider. i like to pretend i am a cool-as-cucumber real resident of any metropolis i visit. but the time has come to indulge my out-of-towner status because, quite frankly, there's no escaping minor bouts of idiocy when it is me my mother, and my grandmother traveling in a pack.

here's a list of today's blunders:
1-grandma ran across the street, when the sign read "don't walk" mind you, right in front of an ambulance with its sirens blazing.
2-we walked into a broadway show that we didn't have tickets for.
3-i lost my phone. i swear i had had it in my hand. i must have set it down or something, but i have no recollection of what i did with it. i had it in my very hand and then two minutes later i had no idea where it could even be.
4-while stepping off the subway, a tube of mace fell out of grandma's bra.

maybe i'll get some pictures up here. maybe, i took a lot on my phone, so that's not possible.

but life is good.

being a twenty-something is harder than i anticipated. probably because i thought, in my infinite self-conceit, that i would just cruise through it.

but i intend to make these the best days of my life, come struggle, strife, joy, elation, victory, loss, love, heartbreak, pain, healing.

which isn't so hard to do when i have so many wonderful people in my life who love me.

and i am going to london in a week and to new york in three days.

i really am the luckiest kid in the world. i've got it good.

i am just like the rest of my kind

i'm in a particularly writerly mood today. which generally is a result of me having had huge swathes of time on my hands and have filled them by musing over my life, and those musings needed space outside of my brain, thus i feel compelled to let some of them ooze into sentences and paragraphs.

this american life ran a show the first week of may which was titled "this week." in that one hour of air time they covered events that occurred just in the week prior. they got a big break with the biggest news of the last couple months falling in that week, the announcement of the death of osama bin laden, but they covered lots of smaller, less typically newsworthy events as well. like a young couple with conservative, strongly religious parents were moving in together, a kid was learning to ride a bike, and a young twenty-something girl, freshly graduated from college moved back home.

the latter was the most compelling, not necessarily because the girl was compelling. i was more intrigued by the interviewer. he had been a this american life intern the year before. and despite a dream internship, he had graduated jobless and like his interviewee had returned home. he called that time the most depressing six months of his life.

i am those kids. and it punches you in the gut. you know that you've got skills and talents and abilities and ambition and work ethic, but for some reason, you can't move yourself. maybe for some people it's because the won't settle for anything less than exactly what they want. and what they want doesn't want them, at least right now. however, for me, i am stuck because i am a chicken. i hate rallying recommenders and doling out application fees. i hate answering the little essay questions about why i believe children are our future, or explaining a time when i had to communicate to an unreceptive listener, or how i could contribute to the company.

whatever it is that keeps me and the thousands of kids who swarmed to their parents' basements last year and last may in our childhood bedrooms, it is draining us. i feel less motivated than i ever have in my life. i feel depressed, not necessarily clinically (although, i am a frequent online depression test taker, usually scoring mild to moderate), but i am more inclined to spend all day reading other people's blogs or watching tv than moving my ambitions along.

i am not where i thought i would be on the cusp of 23. but i had pretty high hopes for myself. but i wouldn't brand myself a failure. my friend recently pointed out Florence and the Machine lives with her parents. being a bamboccione isn't wrong for everybody. but i think living with the parents for me is a symbol of something bigger, a symbol of the suppression of my dreams for cowardice. for fear of failure.

but, baby, when you've got nothing you've got nothing to lose.

thank you, bob dylan.

i think i will now listen to "like a rolling stone" and make a list of goals, as i often do when i feel like it is time to crawl out of my "rut."

hipsterdom

sometimes i wish i was a hipster.
because they seem pretty cool.
but i only have one pair of skinny jeans and and i graduated from byu.

and i don't cut my own hair and have pretty dorky musical preferences.

but i do like this american life.
and i usually wear that pair of skinny jeans at least one time a week, even though i think they make my feet look like clown feet, never mind my analysis of how they don't always flatteringly contour my legs.

i think i just perceive hipsters as possessing a little more reckless abandon than me.
i'm not a terribly organized or anal-retentive person, but i am a devastatingly acheivement-oriented person. i think that things have to have an outcome and i have to be mapping a course to successfulville with every action i take.

once i told my little sister's hipster friends (and Randi may actually be able to claim the title 'hipster') that i had a lyrical soul. and the asked me if i wrote songs or poetry and when i responded no they just sort of glanced quizzically at me. i don't know why i said i had a lyrical soul. i just felt that i did at the moment and needed to share. but maybe my lyrical soul is caged by my rational self and those hipsters couldn't tell that deep down i was one of them.

actually, her friends may have been more emo, was emo the precursor to the hipster? or have they always been distinct and separate? is a hipster just a slightly happier emo (with the male equivalent growing a beard instead of donning eyeliner)? these are important social questions here.

and this is effectively a late night rant that i will wonder what possessed me to push publish in the morning. but i'll publish it anyway drunk off of late-night, exhaustion-induced uninhibitedness.