a_for_allie

Philly has been on my mind lately.  I thought I would post pictures of my Philly.  Here is South Street. Pronounced "Saalth Streyt."  The first picture is my sister and my good friend Ivona walking down the main stretch.  The second is The Eyes gallery, a shop that sells imports from Mexico, South America and India.  You can buy anything from a luchadore action figure to a Frida Khalo life-sized bust. The third is Jim's Steaks.  Jim's Steaks has one of the best cheesesteaks in Philly.  They're nice too.  They made me a cheese and vegetable 'sangwhich' and didn't give me a hard time.  I can't wait to visit in September!

 I got my hairs cut.  After six months of being inconsolably poor I scrounged up enough money to get a proper haircut.  When I lived in Philly I worked next door to a salon so haircuts were like water.  This going for months without experienced scissors chopping into the nonsense I call my hair was rough.  Life is hard you know?  And with that gross emo lament I give you an equally lame-o emo portrait of my new coiffure.

 I miss you Julia

Why my sister is wonderfully fantastically ridiculous.

 Tchotchke', coming from Yiddish 'tshatshke', "a trinket". Other spellings are chotchke and chachka.  A McLaughlin family past-time. Its one part curator, one part collector, one part ironic-ridiculous-sometimes-ugly-art-lover.
 
 

 I have a profoundly hard time doing work unless I have a ridiculous amount of pressure on me.  I have to feel like the world is ending, pressing down on me to complete work.  I used to write essays hours before they were due.  I would study for tests 45 minutes before I had them.  Graduate school IS NOT conducive to such procrastinatory efforts.  In fact, grad school is quite the opposite.  You're expected to laboriously poor through every possible source pertaining to your research and consider each one AND, get this, take notes. 

Every 20-30 page paper I have ever written was written from source to paper.  Meaning I never took notes! I would read a book, find a passage that pertained to my topic and type it into my paper and discuss it.  I got good grades too.  So when I started grad school, I thought I'd do the same.  I even gave myself three days to write my first paper. Three whole days, thats an eternity in procrastination time.   Needless to say, my paper was not graded kindly.  It was a 3,500 word paper and my argument was sound but it didn't display a full grasp of the material I had used ie I hadn't poured over every possible freaking source for a month.  But curiously enough, the other paper I turned in with it (written in 2 1/2 days) was graded very well, like super crazy well. 

I was torn. to waste innumerable hours on facebook and LoL Cats? Or actually be a good student?  I have found a happy medium.  I give myself a few weeks to figure out a paper and find obscure, intranslatable sources with German names as long as their content but I recently got back a few papers that were marked very harshly, too harshly.  Every person in my program is angry with this particular lecturer, very angry actually.  This lecturer is practially a peer as far as age and experience are concerned.  Our papers were butchered.  According to this marker we should have spent an eternity pouring over material that was essentially unrelated to our prompts.  I wear grades like a badge, so this was a big blow.  Academic praise is my crack.  

Despite my procrastinatory style, I do care A LOT about my grades.  I had figured out how to have fun and do well and was loving it.  Why do some graders have to be miserable and ruin everyone's fun? I'll venture to guess it all has to do with being intimidated by students.  That's crappy though.  Grow a personality and some confidence and learn to consider papers in a realistic light.

SO I struggle right now to work on my dissertation.  I'm having a really hard time finding the motivation to pick up a book  as my deadline is months away.  I need to find a source of pressure.  I need some flipping deadlines.

 I was in the kitchen, washing my hands with a flat mate's handsoap.  It was the soap I had used when I first moved to Edinburgh.  Everything about my first days here came rushing back.  The overwhelming feeling of potential, of anything could happen poured over me and I tasted the chocolate digestives I ate so much in my empty room.  I could smell my first friend in Edinburgh's flat, the slightly antiseptic and incense aroma of the sheets on their futon.  The emptiness that I first felt crashed down on me, but it was a good emptiness.  It was a neutral empty, sweet and hopeful.  This smell, was the Edinburgh I would have lived if I hadn't met my boyfriend.

My life in Edinburgh was fine, just fine, level even, like a fish tank filled to the top.  I had adventures, met people and found new friends. Then I met him, the boy.  He jumped into my level fish tank and showed me the excitement of waves, crests and splashes.  He unsettled my routine adventures and brought a promise I had never really considered.  So as I smell my scented fingers and taste my original Scotland I revel in the fact that I took a different road, one that has brought me to an entirely unexpected place.  New hopes, new adventures, new potentials.

 I was thinking about home today.

I was thinking about it because I had a take-away coffee in my hand and was talking on my cell phone and I got a look from someone that was kind of like "really? you do that?"  And (in my head) I was like "yeah! I do!  I grew up in LA so shut the hell up!"  While having this secret/not real fight with this person who may or may not have really though that I realized once again, that for the ten millionth time, I am the odd man out.  I am a foreigner.  

But Edinburgh is filled with "foreigners."  Yes this is true.  But as a foreigner, I can say that doesn't make it better or worse.  Its kind of exciting being from far away but its also a label that sometimes bypasses your ability to express yourself as an individual.  When I lived in Italy my main label was "americana stupida" or "turista stupida"  and the most common phrase I heard was  "ey! Americana! Voglio fare sesso con te!" which, if you don't understand, I recommend you translate (but it may not work because of inappropriate diction.) The general gist is American girls are easy, which is not true.  Well okay, sometimes it is, but not all the time.

But back to thinking about home.  At home walking down the street is different. There is a different definition for who you are, you are a type.  I was a coffee-shop-working-art-history-student or "annoying art student".  Walking the streets of Philadelphia (not like the song) was fun, getting coffee and talking on my phone was a good time.  I spent a large amount of time walking about Philly, adventuring, discussing and drinking coffee.  I feel like in the UK I am still, to some extent, an American and thats about it.  Though admittedly I sometimes try to distance myself from my ethnicity.  I have heard some of the most obnoxious and stupid things come out of American's mouths here in Edinburgh.  Not any American grad students mind you, I think they're here studying abroad for a semester.  I revel in the fact that on several separate occasions I have been mistaken for a European or someone from Ireland.
The last time I was in Philly.

But the last time I was in Philadelphia, the encompassing, comforting familiarity of it all was delicious.  The soaring buildings, the busy streets, the homogenized accents, knowing what to expect and knowing where everything was, it was absolutely amazing.  Mind you, I was sick and done with it before I left last year, but coming back to it was great.  But on my flight back to the UK I came to conclusion that  it wasn't America that I missed, it was familiarity; which can certainly be cultivated in the UK for myself.

But what is home?  I'm not going to get all cliche-y about this, but after a certain point in your life, home changes.  Is home just familiarity?  I grew up in LA and went to University all the way across the US (where my parents grew up) and made a new "home for myself."  Before I left for the UK, My mom moved from California back to New Jersey so now I have no home in LA.  I only have New Jersey or Philadelphia, but even then, they're not my home or my familiarity.  So where is my home?  

I have decided that for now my home is here in the UK.  I can make my own familiarity and see where it takes me.  I have a lovely built-in circle of friends, a great boyfriend and a start at making a new home.  

 Sooooo,  I got a job at the Scotch and Whiskey place of which I am super super excited about.  One, its is a super groovy place to work; and two, I'll get to be a Scotch Connoisseur which is classy.  Training starts in a few days.  It was quite the debacle however, but its worked to my advantage. I said I could work full time, they said "awesome" and then gave me the job.  Then I found out that I cannot legally work full time with a student visa and proceeded to freak the fuck out.  Tom was super nice, calming and supportive (as he always is,) so I calmed down and did what I usually do FIGURE IT OUT.  

So first I took a long walk, consulted legal people about how many hours I can technically work and then settled on resigning myself to the fact that I would have to come clean and let my almost, so close, I can taste it job know that I could only work half the hours I said I could and face the consequences.  I called them, they told me they would get back to me.  They called me a minute later and said "we still want you."   Soooo, I have a job.  No more being frazzled over spending money on groceries or booze (booze always wins) and no more sleepless nights of trying to figure out how I am going to afford to pay rent.  Woo. 

 I secretly love bad movies.  I will watch anything that has a blatant romantic subplot.  The kind that is unmistakably forced and undeveloped.  The kind that after an inordinate amount of bad puns and catchy one liners ends in a mandatory kiss that plays to an orchestral crescendo thats meant to give your goose bumps.  Chemistry, it seems, is not a requirement anymore.  Thats okay with me.  As long as I am utterly and thoroughly absorbed in a cheesy story line for  90 minutes I'm happy.  

I loved The Mummy.  Yes the film that came out in 1999 when I was in High school.  Brenden Fraser was my future husband (preferably with the long hair--see jail scene).  The movie's characters were two-dimensional, the plot was simple and the romantic subplot was absurdly lackluster, it was perfect.   It also appealed to my dorky art history sensibilities.  I noticed that the bad guy was named after Pharoah Djoser's royal architect and vizier Imhotep and even dorkier, that the ground plan was loosely based on two specific Egyptian pyramids, Ramses and Khufre's tombs.
Needless to say, I needed to get a life, but also the movie was entertaining.  

Bad movies are often immensely entertaining.  Romantic bad movies are even more entertaining. Romance has the uncanny ability to become so profoundly cheesy that you just can't look away; like a car crash.  Romance novels embody this same quality but with less dignity and more absurdly over-the-top fantasies come to life.  Writers can get away with more crap because a director doesn't have to figure out how to make it suitable for an N-17 or rated R audience.

And the names... The names that some romance writers come up with.  I think the best I've ever heard was "the Falcon". Yes his name had the the word "the" in it, delicious, I know.  And the names and descriptions they come up for various body parts while partaking in their passionate and elicit affairs are even better. "Plowing her forrest" was pretty good as was "witnessing his giant stalk rise."  I guess I am more of a fan of bad, ridiculous, poorly written romance.  

I guess I just love camp.  Campy anything. If its cheesy, its funny,  Like a Velvet Elvis painting or a porcelain cat, it will make my day.  Don't get me wrong, I am all about being fancy, the fancier the better.  But everyone needs cheese in their life.