Pictures and Gund

Italians walk uncommonly slowly along the street, but why hurry when it is such a nice day, and there is a park on one side of the street and ancient architecture on the other? On the other hand, though there may be seperate street lights for pedestrians, why bother waiting for the little man to turn green? Just pick your moment and stride straight through traffic -don't hurry or you'll look like a tourist- with your head held high. Timid people or foreigners who hesitate will even notice that the tiny cars and high-heeled Vespa riders automatically slow down at the sight of waiting pedestrians, and are surprized if they don't take advantage of the break in traffic.

Enough with the descriptions. You people demand pictures.

The problem is that when it comes to the famous sites, there are so many much better pictures on the internet and other places for you to look up. In fact, it is one of the small pleasures of life for me to open a huge book of gorgeous photography and be able to say casually, "Yeah, I was there."

What is awesome about being here is being here, able to touch what millions of people throughout the centuries have touched, able to experience the vastness of certain places, to note the casually perfect collections of angles in a view from a back street. Pictures really can't convey the experience. They just prove that you were there because your smiling mug has been inserted into the frame.

With the knowledge that I was about to take photos that would be exactly the same as thousands that have been taken before me, I invited my friend Bobby Gund to help me out. Somehow, the process was made slightly more enjoyable with the introduction of something that really could not be explained.

Here we are at the Fountain de Trevi.

Here we are the edge of the Spanish Steps, which are not particularly interesting in themselves, but are great places to watch tourists wander around in the heat with maps, and pretend that you are not secretly one of them.

Here we are by a magnificent fountain which caused some scandal when it was unveiled due to its sensual nymphs, but it is so big that you cannot really take a picture of the whole thing.

Here is a great one of Triton. We became rather familiar with this towering aquatic sight since we got lost together and used this piazza as a reference point. There is a street that goes right through everything called Via d. Tritone which ends here.

Did you know that unless there is a sign declaring to the contrary (I have yet to find one) you can drink the water? It is incredibly wonderful, on a hot day, to remember this when you stumble upon one of the bazillion fountains randomly scattered throughout the city.

It think that the bees, which are scattered throughout the monuments of the city, are the symbol of some rich family that paid for most of the stuff. You can even find them in the Sistine Chapel.

For your amusement: a smoking centurion. Our Art and Architecture professore, who had just finished an impassioned explanation of Etruscan art and history, had made us all laugh by suddenly admitting that he did not like visiting the Colloseum because, "Eyeh hateh theh fake Romans!"

That's all for now, folks! Tune in next time for "a day in the life," a commentary on allowing dogs on the metro, or maybe a newsclipping about how some crazy american student became a great cat burgler and stole designer clothes until she was tracked down by the police, who figured out who she was by the size of the clothes she was buying. Seriously. I didn't care about designer clothes until I was faced with streets of the stuff. Now I am wishing to be a model.

Linguistics

Me: "Biongiorno!"
Megan: "Guten Morgen. No, wait, that's German! Biogiorno."
[Pause]
Megan: "Did you sleep well last night?"
Me: "Moy bien, gracias. No, wait, that's Spanish!"
[Laughter]

Learning a new language is not simple a matter of decoding a linguistic cypher. It requires a shift of mindset. Suddenly, you cannot equate anything with its name, but must keep the abstract idea seperate and then pick which word, phrase or connotation to express it verbally.

This sounds pretty difficult, but most people don't realise that language itself is a translation of thoughts and ideas into a collection of sounds that may or may not evoke the same idea in another person. These sounds are so superficial that they may change completely from area to area; not just country to country, but even family to family.

I love my Italian lessons. I love how learning a new language is not as gargantuan a task as it may appear. It may be difficult if you are confined to vocabulario, forced to memorize a list of words and their equivalent words in English, but when the words are in context they are remarkably easy to undertand, especially since all language is a bit like the next. Remembering is the hard part, but even then it is much easier to remember what a certain phrase or word means when you are actually using it, immediately equating it with its  meaning instead of another code (your first language).

On the other hand, the strain of absorbing as much as possible stirs depths of (mostly unused) brain power normally abandoned. Hence the sudden hodge-podge of language. It've even started to use the Latin that I was sure had been lost to the abyss! Interestingly enough, I even find myself struggling for English words when speaking to my roomates, or catching myself or others gesturing instead of speaking when we do not know the Italian equivalent, although we are perfectly capable of conversing in English. This blog post itself began with rather shaky eloquence, as if English were my second language, before my first language began to flow again.

I love to hear the bambini speaking! They suddenly seem so much more clever and interesting with their little voices babbling in Italian!

Ti Amore! I love you! (Yes, this was shouted to some of my friends. Ah, the perils of being young and pretty.)

-Maria

PS. Please excuse any spelling mistakes. I am doing my best, but not only are the keyboards slightly different, but all the spellcheck programs, even on Engligh programs such as blogger, have switched to Italian!

A Note on Roman Blogging

Originally, I wasw planning on blogging about my trip to Rome in a seperate blog, Have Brain, Will Travel, with the understanding that foreign correspondence would be more photogenic and less abstract than previous entries.

However, I have not changed. The way I think has not changed. In fact, my surroundings have cetainly not changed either, in the sense that they are less inspiring or retard truth, so I found that these entries would be quite comfortable with the rest.

Of course, I will supplement anything that I write with pictures and Italian observations, so do not worry about that!

-Maria

My Indian Name is Gets-Stared-At-By-Deer

It is incredibly depressing how fast muscles forget. One week you can run the length of the street- leaving you gasping like a hooked fish, sure, but you get there- but after only a week or two of hiatus you can barely trot half way before feeling like your chest is imploding. I refer, or course, to my own painful experience this evening, but my dismal chances of winning a marathon are not the topic of this post.

A quarter of the way through my route I surprised three deer. All three began their mandatory skip toward the trees, startlingly huge tails flashing, and then stopped to watch me huff past: the pathetic human who would never master a healthy four-legged gait on her fingernails.

The encounter reminded me of one those memories that is so brief, but that you know will be ingrained in your head until you die, it's so clear.

....

I am maybe seven years old, and I am standing on a path in the Pocono mountains, gazing straight ahead at  a grove of trees. There are deer moving through these trees, only a few yards away from me, and though there were probably fewer, if you want the same impression that I had imagine that there are twelve. They are moving very quickly, but all the verbs generally used to describe their action have too many syllables to avoid sounding bumpy, and deer do not bump. They might spring, as if released from whatever magnets keep them closer to the grass than the clouds, but they do not bump.

Anyway, the deer are moving in a singularly liquid and effortless way directly across my field of vision, and there is a fallen tree straight in front of me, over which they navigate.

Years later, my digital art teacher will open my eyes to the principles of animation, the most pertinent one for our discussion being Anticipation. Anticipation dictates that if a character's fist is going to go forward into another's nose, it must first go back, winding up for the punch. If the bat it going to swing to the right, sending the ball into a home run, it must first go a bit to the left, anticipating the impact. If you are going to jump up, you must first croach down, or it doesn't look real.

The deer didn't get the memo. In my little-girl story, they stream across my vision in a perfectly smooth, completely unrealistic line that curves up a bit over the log and then comes down, effortless, silent and completely mesmerizing. Even at seven, I knew it was impossible. Real life is like that.

....

Most of the way through my own personal walk of shame, I startled a few more deer. It was a little darker by then, and they were a bit farther away then my first spectators, so all I could see were a bunch of bouncing white lines. It took me a minute to figure out what they were.

~Maria

Mea Culpa

I have been informed, by someone that I love desperately and who loves me, that I may have been an idiot when I wrote the blog below. Who knew? Apparently everyone except me.

I do not take back anything that I said. It is all true. I will not try to soften the violence of the post, because that was the way that I felt. If you think any less of me for reading this post, then I deserve it. However, if I have hurt anyone with what I wrote, I am now groveling in apology and begging you to forgive me and promising over and over that I did not mean it.

I did not realise that what I lashed out in hurt would hurt anyone else. I was under the (apparently mistaken) idea that a written note would be far less hurtful and confrontational than a speech. I still believe that I would not have been as clear, nor would have gotten people's attention as well, if I had tried to voice my hurt in person, but I did not mean to actually hurt anyone else. If I have, you can come punch me in the face.

I would also like to clarify a few things:

1) I will enjoy Rome. There are so many things that are much more important to me now, and I am so stressed and confused that I wish rather heartily that I am not going, but since I am, I will make the most of it.

2) I love you all. If you were actually thinking those things (I know some of you were) then do not feel like I love you any less, because I don't. I tend to keep things that hurt me to myself, so they fester and just make me miserable if they are bad enough to stick around. I am trying to prevent that from happening by voicing things and maybe resolving them, but I don't have much practice. Pity my pathetic communication skills. I had (have) valid points, but a  bad method of letting you know.

3) If you were one of the few people who were not hurt, saw that I was, and reached out to comfort me, thankyou, thankyou, thankyou. I really needed, and appreciated, that. I cannot tell you how much it meant to me. Thanks.

~Maria

Warning: Extremely Angry, Ranting Post

There are two things that I would very much like to scream right now. One is easy to understand, the other is not. Here is the first one:

I DO NOT THINK TOO MUCH!

Thinking is like seeing. I may not like what I see, but that does not mean I should not have looked in the first place. I may stare at one thing more than others, but that does not mean that I am looking too much, but too little. Most importantly, just because other people do not depend on their eyes as much as I do does not mean that my dependence is bad.

I DO NOT THINK TOO MUCH!

It hurts because I usually get "you think too much" when something is really bothering me, and all it means is that it is my fault for being upset because normal people don't think about that kind of thing, or care. So I'm abnormal, and it's my own fault.

The other thing that I want to scream about will take some explanation. I am absolutely raging furious about this. I am stomping through the earth's crust hopping mad, and it is not because of what I want to yell, but because of your reaction.

It will be a knee-jerk reaction of pity for my short-sighted feelings. It will be a sudden feeling of superiority and "well, she will realise how stupid she is being when she gets older." It will be a completely unthinking, and therefore moronic, urge to tell me that I am wrong. Here goes.

I DO NOT WANT TO GO TO ROME!

There! You see? Squelch that immediately! Stop looking at me that way or get off my blog! STOP LAUGHING! If I could get in your face and scream until you saw that I really meant it, I... still wouldn't. I am too nice. I would cry, and you would leave the room thinking that I was being a baby and that I will get over it. This is why I want to scream right now.

I DO NOT WANT TO GO TO ROME!

You know what I wanted to do this summer? I wanted to take a class in oil painting at the community college. I wanted to volunteer in youth ministry, and find out where I could get involved with foster care or child services. I couldn't because I was working too hard to pay for this darn trip.

I want to be independent. I want to have my own place, and buy art, and take dance classes, and have a dog. I want to travel, but to linger where I want, and talk to people, and see things that interest me (which usually means that it doesn't interest other people) and have the time to find an interesting job, and BE HAPPY. There are actual people with actual problems that I would like to do something about. Hey, I might even have not gone to college at all this fall, and- DON'T YOU DARE! DON'T YOU DARE SAY SOMETHING WITHOUT THINKING OR I WILL PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE THROUGH THIS COMPUTER SCREEN!

College is an expensive and powerful tool, that should only be used when the job calls for it, and when the worker has the time and attention to make sure that it is being used properly. Right now, it is not being used properly at all. I hate it.

No. I will not feel differently later. This is not a fad. I have hated it for the past two years. Three years ago, I stuck to something that I hated and I have yet to look back and say I was glad that I did. DO. NOT. TELL. ME. THAT. I. AM. BEING. STUPID. OR. EMOTIONAL. I don't even like the fields I am majoring in, and do not plan to get a job with them.

I DON'T WANT TO GO TO ROME!

Rome is a splendid place. In fact, I've been there. (if only long enough to discover that it looks exactly like to pictures) I would love to travel there, and absorb the atmosphere and the culture, and revel in being in the Eternal City, but not now! Not during college! Not without knowing the language! It is not what I want to do right now, not even in the top 20, for goodness sake, and it will take me years, money and confusion away from the things that I DO want.

YOU ARE STILL THINKING THINGS THAT ARE MAKING ME FURIOUS!

This is not some great opportunity. Italy is no better than America, and not the only place with history and beauty. Italy is not going to suddenly close its borders, or airplanes suddenly stop flying. If you think I am being stupid, and that this chance is akin to winning the lottery, and that I would be turning down the equivalent of touching Elvis, getting a free Ferrari, and being declared queen for three months (none of which I actually want), YOU go. There is no excuse for you STILL BEING HERE that you could bring up that I could not match. And me going will keep me from plenty of things that would give me much more pleasure than the gracious permission to throw pennies in the Fount de Trevi.

I really don't want to go. I will, though. And then I will finish the school year. And then I will finish college because I will be a senior. And then it will be two years later from today and I have no guarantee that I will be any happier, though I do guarantee that I will be older and in debt.

People will tell me that I am being ridiculous if I complain because everyone has debt and hardly anyone knows what they are doing when the finish college. Yay. I'm jumping off cliffs, but everyone else is doing it, so it must be all right.

DON'T YOU DARE TELL ME I AM THINKING TOO MUCH!

Winston

Well, I am duly disappointed in myself for neglecting to shower this blog with brilliance, but several occasions, plans and activities in my real life have pushed documenting them to the background. One of these distractions is my new friend, Wilson, who is currently living with me.

I know he is a bit lacking in certain areas, but he listens more than he speaks, which is a fine quality in anyone.

(I do have to admit that it is a little embarrassing how well he fits my running shorts. )

Anyway, I do not know if you can tell from the picture, but he has a very strange texture that I found impossible to work with, so, naturally, I covered him in toilet paper.

This surprisingly effective paper-mache technique has given him a little bit of class, but I must confess myself not entirely sure of what is going to happen to him next. I have a few ideas, but none of them are perfect... I will, of course, keep you "posted."

~Maria