(fine)

i'm really dragging this out, aren't i? it's now wednesday morning, earlier than i care to admit, i fly out of bologna in 24 hours, i have made little to no progress on my packing, and i just woke up from a dream about being stranded on this subway platform in the dark waiting for a train that wasn't supposed to stop, even. i was in berlin when it was divided sitting around with a bunch of kids all night at one of these ghost stations but no one seemed to mind that we were there.

lately we've all been watching the euro cup, they have a big screen set up in piazza and last night italy beat france when it was storming, pouring with so much lightening but everyone was still crammed into the piazza screaming and cheering and honking horns in the rain. i love the italian team mostly for their dramatic antics. i also love that babies in strollers out way past any decent american bedtime are already craning their necks to see the game. i rode my bike home in the storm as fast as possible and gave everyone soaking wet hugs in front of my house as they ran to catch the night train to lecce.

i said goodbye to monica last night and she kept saying that she couldn't really process all of us leaving, that she was still expecting to pass us on the street next week like always. we made plans for when each of us comes back 10 or 20 years from now and are walking through the piazza and see monica in bici, come una bandita, and it's nice thinking that really in my lifetime nothing here will change. my magnolia tree finally bloomed, mostly last night.

i'm wrapping this up, now, 6:43 am on thursday with my last cup of coffee in italy on the stove. i've been killing myself since i got back from my trip with not being ready to leave, even after nine months. it doesn't really seem possible that this year is over. i'm always too attached for transitions. i stole my favorite coffee mug from elvira and buried it in a suitcase, if that makes it any clearer. i should probably start dragging everything down to the train station. goodbye, blog.

j

Stand up for the champions

hello blog. i write you from the kitchen table on the monday before the thursday i go home. my gray cat that lives on the balcony across from me just went inside, so i'm pretty sure it's about to start raining again. i just got back from a ten-day trip to berlin, copenhagen, and prague, and my feet feel like i actually walked from city to city instead of flying. sometimes when i write this blog i sound like a failed stand-up comic.
berlin is absolutely incredible. i think it might be the biggest city in the world. it seems like it goes on forever, not in the consistently fading identical ugly athens apartment building way but sort of sporadically being pieced together by someone from thousands of other cities and neighborhoods and decades. it gives the feeling of changing constantly, like at any time there are too many things going on for you to possibly choose from. i can see myself living in berlin. not someday, but now. i think i could comfortably move there right now, despite my lacking german. i say comfortably as though the moving process is something i handle well, which is entirely a lie. my life is packed in boxes and piled on the floor of my room and the walls are bare and i really can't stand it.
i should tell you about copenhagen and prague, but it would be more fun with pictures and i can't put any up now because my computer, ronnie, went into a coma about a month ago. hopefully i can put some up after i get home. i've been taking some kind of scrambly last minute photos around ferrara, and every time my shutter clicks and the photo i just took reappears on the screen everything looks ten years older than i remember.
i will at least tell you that ann and i look(ed) scandinavian with this refreshing sun/wind burn on our faces and even lighter blonde hair, food for the squardos back in ferrara, while in copenhagen we fit right in. the city is quieter than stockholm, but apparently if you're a beautiful young couple you move to copenhagen and push around a surprisingly elegant baby carriage. in prague i felt like i was running into kanzulaaks all over the place. i kept seeing my grandmother, strangely. all of the bakeries make kolackys but they're round.

i just watched my brother graduate online. congratulations, jeffrey.
it looks hot in nashville

Brodo.

dear blog friends,
i’ve come to the conclusion, not all that recently, that i am a terrible blogger. i’m no good at this, but you know who is? the girl from the Blow. that girl can really write a blog. she’s a musician, semi-famous, living in i think Portland, and her life couldn’t be further from mine. i don’t even know her last name, nor how to properly pronounce her first. but she writes this blog, updated rarely, and talks about moving into a new apartment and not wanting to unpack or stay the night there, but building a nest out of a ficus tree and other tiny houses instead, and reading it i feel like i’m kind of looking down on her from above although i don’t know what she looks like or the apartment, really, other than that it has a ficus tree, or had one until it died.

with that in mind, and since, inconceivably, i haven’t made it at all clear to you after a year of going on and on about studying, or trying to, and living in italy, (the country of inefficiency masquerading as charm, a phrase i read recently and the most accurate description of anything i’ve ever heard), i would like to tell you that my apartment smells constantly like a mixture of parmesan cheese and coffee grounds. usually in the morning it smells like sticky red wine in the bottom of glasses, too.

lately i’ve become strangely domestic, cleaning my house all the time and lining up my shoes. i even bought a mop, and some lemon-scented stuff to mop with.

i’d also like to mention that american architects really failed when they decided to eliminate the courtyard from the center of apartment buildings. i say that because when i walk out onto my balcony and stare blurrily at the trees and the gravel, probably 20 or so times a day, i always know that there are at least three other people out on theirs staring just like me, and probably a few more peeking at me through their blinds or watching me, like one woman, the one who has the pulley system, with her hands cupped around her eyes pressed to the glass door. in my apartment in new york i watched the office people wheel around on their wheelie chairs all day, but they never knew i was there, and i never woke up to them yelling at each other balcony to balcony, like my grandpa used to do with ernie when they’d listen to the baseball game on the radio. this week, my great aunt josie died. she was the one who baked the nutcups, and i don’t think we ever met. she was 86. the last thing, i guess, that i have to say tonight (it’s wednesday, and i should probably be out standing in a piazza instead of eating burnt popcorn and watching late night tv reruns online) is that mitch albom was on the colbert report recently and i still can’t get over it. the writing, and by that i mean the published, world has come to be dominated by special interest groups in a way that i find more than disconcerting. tormenting, maybe. i also read an article in the new york times saying that while people read considerably less today than they used to, the percentage of people writing and being published, or writing blogs perhaps more terrible than this one, is higher than ever. higher than ever but i can’t seem to find any true and great work that has come out of this verbose generation. besides this girl’s blog, anyway. i entirely hate the word verbose, do you know? it sounds snootier than it is. i’ll keep looking though. william james austin is certainly more than a start. thank you, by the way
i can’t stand being this long-winded.

goodnight, from a very clean room,
j

This is an idea I stole

(i hope you don't mind)

Josh Ritter - Roll On
The Black Keys - Oceans & Streams
Belle & Sebastian - We Are The Sleepyheads

BLOW - Come On Petunia
Neko Case - Star Witness

Spoon - Stay Don't Go
Bob Dylan - Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts
M. Ward - Today's Undertaking
Anais Mitchell - Cosmic American
Eric Clapton (or Tom Rush) - San Francisco Bay Blues

Ryan Adams -Two Hearts
Rilo Kiley - Don't Deconstruct
Bright Eyes - Devil Town
Art in Manila - I Thought I Was Free
She & Him - You Really Got a Hold On Me
The Traveling Wilburys - Handle With Care
Bon Iver - Creature Fear

The Weakerthans - Without Mythologies

i think that pretty much sums up april. 226 days down, 52 to go. that sounds a lot more outrageous than it is, maybe. also, i've been working for a while on an america playlist. most of the songs are about highways or trains. i don't think i planned it that way

Il quattordicesimo. Gli amici del buio.

Dear you,

Yesterday was probably the best day I’ve had in Ferrara. No one really has class on Fridays, so despite the threat of rain Ann and I decided to have a picnic in the park. We wandered around the market for a while and then took sandwiches (peanut butter and honey for me) to a dry bench in Parco Massari. We convinced Marie to join us and played for a while on the squeaky swings and these crazy red slides built into the side of a hill and then when it started raining we took cover under huge pine trees that make a little fort beneath the branches. Riding back into town we were blinded by the wet cobblestones because the rain was pouring down on them out of the clear blue sky. Out of the clear blue sky! April weather is bizarre here.

The sun stayed out, so we settled into a café for a few hours with iced coffee. At some point we decided to call Monica, our professor from the fall semester, and a half an hour later she came to meet us bearing the cake she'd just made. After cake, we hopped back on our bikes and rode to this countryside kind of tucked away in the middle of the walled city. As anyone who has visited Ferrara knows, there isn’t a speck of green anywhere, not a tree or a plant or a patch of grass to be seen. But Monica found us blooming cherry blossoms and green fields and two really incredible cemeteries that otherwise I don’t think anyone would realize existed. On these little gravel roads I found it completely impossible to determine where we were in the city on the map in my mind. It occurred to me as we rode around in the sunshine just how attached I am to this place. How attached we’ve all become. Whatever other Italians have to say about it, or however un-noteworthy it may be according to American travel guides, I’m pretty sure that none of us is ever really going to be able to leave this city. We identify with it, I think. It’s nice. I keep telling people that I think I’m probably going to die here someday and they think I’m being morbid. Choking sentimentality is what it really is.

Monica invited the three of us back to her house for more cake and strawberries. While we were there, she gave me a copy of the book of poetry she wrote and recently had published. Monica is basically my editor right now for the translation I’m working on of a short story written by one of her old friends in Ferrara, Gianfranco Rossi. But Monica seems to be friends with just about everyone here. She unfolded the long table and laid out a blue blue tablecloth and called it a festa della primavera. A spring party, she said, better because it was improvised. We sat around for a few hours eating and talking and being watched from time to time by a white cat on the next balcony or old people across the way. Honestly, it was the greatest day I can remember having here in Ferrara. I even had to wash my feet when I got home. The telling sign of a really good day since I was a little kid.

I think I’ve picked up the Italian tendency to overdescribe, and I’m not sure I like it. In fact, I'm sure I don't. When I start averaging more than six adjectives per noun, will someone please slap me?

In other news, Italy just elected itself a new prime minister. And by new, I mean the same prime minister they've already "elected" twice before. And by prime minister, I mean evil billionaire. I was talking to Monica about the election this weekend and she said that whenever she talked to her friends about voting, they all said they same thing: The electoral process is a mess! The law really needs to be changed, and I'm not going to vote again until they fix it. This seemingly outrageous attitude bascially sums up the cyclical horror that is Italian politics these days.

What does all this mean to me right now? I just found out that Berlusconi owns my grocery store, and now I can't shop there again. I have to find another, and it's all because of Silvio. Boo.

a presto,

j

Il tredicesimo. Pena di vivere cosi!!!

My bike broke today. Again. Just big fat stopped in the middle of the road. I took it to the bike shop in my neighborhood and probably should have been a little more suspicious when the man who has so few teeth gave me this wide grin as he wheeled it inside. As it turns out, the price of replacing a bike tire has doubled in the last three months. 20 euro to 40 euro. As far as I'm concerned, that tire better be made of pure gold. Or at least really expensive Swiss chocolate or watches or something.

Tomorrow I fly to Paris to spend a week wandering. Bookstore-ing, coffee-drinking, too much pastry-eating, and weather permitting a fair amount of park-sitting. I'm bringing my film camera. It's Easter break and I have Wednesday to Wednesday off. In America, we would call this a two-week spring break, wouldn't we?

Here are some pictures I promised my snowbound mother of the already-blooming garden in my cortile. I meant to tell you at some point about my neighbor who takes care of the plants. Whenever she gardens, she wears this blue vest. Blue like Snuggle fabric softener, if that makes it any clearer. With it she wears matching blue gloves and a blue beret. I've never seen anything like it.

Also, I just finished reading a Murakami novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and now I can't stop looking at people's faces.















I've also been listening to an album that this guy wrote and recorded living by himself in a cabin in the woods in Wisconsin. It's called For Emma, Forever Ago, by Bon Iver. It's also incredible.