I sit on my new bed bouncing gently on the flimsy IKEA springs, my eye drawn to the bits of color scattered about among the stark whiteness of the walls, so modern as they are, exhausted in mind, body, and soul, for reasons apparent only as they reside in the puffiness of my eyes and the lines underneath them. A couple of days have passed in anticipation of having plans, inhaling eagerly in anticipation of the numerous things to be done, and then failing to exhale as something unravels each time and the thrill of being among the company I prefer to keep is delayed a day or two or indefinitely further. This is a normal part of life, but it is contributing to my exhaustion as I end up doing plenty of things but none of them as I had planned originally. I am generally too much of an organized person accustomed to planning things out, highly amenable to consistency and put under stress to its alternative, so the lesson is perhaps to chill the fuck out to breathe and allow that life sometimes happens without you holding the levers.
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I don't believe there is any Vietnamese food in all of Lisbon. Certainly there is none that I have come across to speak of. I need my fix of pho! Portuguese readers, all 2.7 of you: fix this. Or at least provide assistance so that I can.
•
There is a tangible strain in my interactions and relations with people from home. I kvetch of boredom and draw blanks, struggling to remember my connections to the soil of the other side of the large pool of water separating us, but my antipathy to the university and general disconnect from life at home at this point is such that the process sits at more of an ebb than a flow. I'm not so terribly bored, really (although I am irritated by the boredom forced upon me by virtue of the ongoing scheduling circus), nor do I not want to share or listen to what's going on, I just find myself recounting blankly when the appropriate time actually comes. There are also worse problems to have than claiming a sense of dullness to the inevitable regularity of life as it happens here in meeting new people and living through the daily adventures that come with being in a culture still new and a language still alien, as a certain endearing fellow put it to me recently.
•
Having moved, I find myself quite joyous at having all of the creature comforts I expected to be living with upon arrival but instead got used to living without at the old apartment, an almost perverse happiness at living on a baseline standard that is by no means unreasonable. I do, however, like the feeling of being more connected to smaller things in life; the joy of simply being able to make a stovetop espresso is more satisfying than it may appear in writing to be. It is just as well that the apartment itself is stark – both in its blank, undecorated white walls and unvarnished angular design and its grand scale. It is magnificently large, enormous by any standard, and in combination with its cold modernism, we the occupants are left to make of the space that which we desire. This means interacting with each other frequently, in our case, eating and studying happily in the common space, and generally establishing a sense of life as though the apartment were some sort of canvas upon which to do so.
•
I have determined the extent to which some of my friendships in this city have begun to run in realizing that I can have heated conversations with noted differences about things highly sensitive without it ruining acquaintance afterward, which is remarkable in and of itself but all the more so given the short period of time. I've also developed friendships with very different sets of people, which is proving to be highly appealing as I am able to have a wide range of people with whom I can exchange ideas and contacts, blather on about anything and nothing, and rely on to be able to get out of my house and go do whatever the hell it is there might be to do at any given time on any given day. I am also not alone in the various nightmarish bureaucratic goings-on left still to do as a result, for which I am completely grateful.
The wheels keep turning and we're moving...somewhere. Think of it as that point of the road trip when you're driving through Kansas and you realize that you've been doing nothing but staring at flat, idle landscape for several hours and all of a sudden you have to use all of your energy to put yours eyes back into focus.
•
I don't believe there is any Vietnamese food in all of Lisbon. Certainly there is none that I have come across to speak of. I need my fix of pho! Portuguese readers, all 2.7 of you: fix this. Or at least provide assistance so that I can.
•
There is a tangible strain in my interactions and relations with people from home. I kvetch of boredom and draw blanks, struggling to remember my connections to the soil of the other side of the large pool of water separating us, but my antipathy to the university and general disconnect from life at home at this point is such that the process sits at more of an ebb than a flow. I'm not so terribly bored, really (although I am irritated by the boredom forced upon me by virtue of the ongoing scheduling circus), nor do I not want to share or listen to what's going on, I just find myself recounting blankly when the appropriate time actually comes. There are also worse problems to have than claiming a sense of dullness to the inevitable regularity of life as it happens here in meeting new people and living through the daily adventures that come with being in a culture still new and a language still alien, as a certain endearing fellow put it to me recently.
•
Having moved, I find myself quite joyous at having all of the creature comforts I expected to be living with upon arrival but instead got used to living without at the old apartment, an almost perverse happiness at living on a baseline standard that is by no means unreasonable. I do, however, like the feeling of being more connected to smaller things in life; the joy of simply being able to make a stovetop espresso is more satisfying than it may appear in writing to be. It is just as well that the apartment itself is stark – both in its blank, undecorated white walls and unvarnished angular design and its grand scale. It is magnificently large, enormous by any standard, and in combination with its cold modernism, we the occupants are left to make of the space that which we desire. This means interacting with each other frequently, in our case, eating and studying happily in the common space, and generally establishing a sense of life as though the apartment were some sort of canvas upon which to do so.
•
I have determined the extent to which some of my friendships in this city have begun to run in realizing that I can have heated conversations with noted differences about things highly sensitive without it ruining acquaintance afterward, which is remarkable in and of itself but all the more so given the short period of time. I've also developed friendships with very different sets of people, which is proving to be highly appealing as I am able to have a wide range of people with whom I can exchange ideas and contacts, blather on about anything and nothing, and rely on to be able to get out of my house and go do whatever the hell it is there might be to do at any given time on any given day. I am also not alone in the various nightmarish bureaucratic goings-on left still to do as a result, for which I am completely grateful.
The wheels keep turning and we're moving...somewhere. Think of it as that point of the road trip when you're driving through Kansas and you realize that you've been doing nothing but staring at flat, idle landscape for several hours and all of a sudden you have to use all of your energy to put yours eyes back into focus.
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