peakaboo!

"Pan, who and what are thou?" he cried huskily.

"I'm youth, i'm joy," Peter answered at a venture,

"I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg."

This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook 

that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form.

--J.M. Barrie

Write, right?

I came across this article on Dylan's Google reader and it seemed particulary applicable to me! Here is the deal-as I am doing "academic" research I primarily think of myself as a collector of stories and a story teller myself, one who is telling how i see how all the other stories really make one larger narrative. So for all thos nerds out there: 

What’s the Story with Academic Writing? A Narratology of the Academic Essay

creative non/fiction.

did you know there is a genre of writing called creative nonfiction. I think if i were to dream about becoming a writer, which i do, i would dream of writing creative non fiction.

I have been toying with the idea of learning how to be a journalist. Then i can do research that people actually read-watch-listen instead writing things for dusty libraries or the endless labrynth that is the internet.

there is a trick to learning the right amount of time to spend with yourself in silence and how much you need to go out and move your feet and let your lips tell stories and your ears take in the absurdities that are our neighbors realities.

it is a a strange thing to wake up in the middle of winter, on a day when the weather is below freezing to a room beaming full of sunlight, literally hot like a solar powered oven. i am baking here in my sleep, hidden under blankets just to keep the mositure in. i want to wear shorts and see my knobby knees. I want spring and every morning is misleading.

i went to a contact improvisation class-this is a kind of contemporary dance for those of you who dont know. She taught in english for me and she asked if you call the the thing on the back of a snail a house. You do? Dont you? the floor is an unforgiving dance partener.

I have had a cough I havent been able to kick for weeks. for some reason the goo is sticking to the inside of my lungs. stubborn. i imagine the goo growing inside, multiplying. I dont believe that is actually what is happening, but I am not sure any longer how to get rid of it. If only i had a turkey baster maybe I could suck, slurp, it out of there. ew.

this is the parliment in Budapest. It sits on a very large river. 

well. it. time to try to do some work. 

A List.

Vodoinstalater

Lately I have been:

• Eating lots of fish. Today I had pasta with tuna. Yesterday some large fish and some little catfish, and salted tuna, with tomato paste on crusty bread. The day before that? Bakalar-traditionally eating in Dalmatia on Christmas eve. What is it? Fish stew-dried cod to be precise. In exchange I offered some Thin Mint girl scout cookies-compliments of my mom. 
• Speaking a lot of Croatian. Croatian families. Croatian tutors. Other people who are learning Croatian. Using the word "dobati" instead of "imati" when asking for things...because you say "can you give me that" and "can I have that"...
• Thinking about English grammar a lot. Do you know the rule for when you use that or which? I do. But I am not explaining it here. 
• Watching: I saw the movie the fighter-which was excellent but lead to an awkward event where quoting a scene from the movie at an inappropriate time led to lots of giggles and uncomfortable feelings.
• Listening to a poetry reading and straining my ears to catch even just the gist of a poem or two. 
• Watching: I went to an excellent contemporary dance/ballet about war and love with excellent live accompaniment and fluid movement-very much inspired by contact improvisation. The props were minalist and perfect. There was a little boy in the audience whose father was playing the upright base in the band-he looked over to his father sitting on the edge of his seat, his hands clasped in between his knees, always glancing over as if to ask "should i do something?" The dather kept playing, occasionally giving his son a thumbs up, or a scrappy pat on the sholder. 
• Watching: I saw Mare-the girl I speak English with play a guitar concert. She was awesome with her rendention of "Yesterday" by the Beatles. Also playing at her concert was a young women playing the Harmonika and it was the coolest thing I have seen. Her finger were like little nimble workers and the rest of herbody still had to sway and open and close and shrink and grow again to contort this instrument into making such lovely sounds. 

I really like that I am still learning exciting things about Croatia. Including fish. There is only one sandy island in Croatia-Did you know?! 

A few brief reading notes.

Gender Trouble-Judith Butler 


I am slowely making my way through Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. I say slowely, because rarely can I read more than a few pages at a time and I feel more compelled at this moment to read texts specifically regarding masculinity. However, I thought it would be nice to start a sort of "reading" diary on my blog where I can just post a few interesting quotes and thoughts pulled out the texts I have been mulling over the last few months... For now, I'll just start with some quotes and how they may inform or be related to my research. Please keep in mind I am treating this blog as a "work in progress", a place to share the messiness of unfinished work and the tangled nest of lost thoughts floating about my head. So, please share your thoughts but recgonize I am not trying to make flawless arguments. Hvala!


It is my impression that in Gender Trouble Butler is trying to challenge the reader to think about gender in a completely new way. When I first picked up Gender Trouble and made my way through the first twenty pages or so I found nothing earth-shattering. What I did find, however, was an attempt to write about a sensation I had always had. Perhaps it is because my academic growth happened in Women and Gender studies Post-Butler, suggesting that her ideas, theories, or writers has informed my education in a kind of osmoses kind of way. We never read Butler, but her presence in the field is obvious now that I am looking at her 'pivotal' text.


"There is no 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a ficion added to the deed--the deed is everything." -Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Mora
ls as qtd. in Gender Trouble (34)


Judith Butler, thus goes on to state in many ways her own thesis, "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively consistuted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results." (34) Gender Trouble


"If it is possible to speak of a "man" with a maculine attribute and to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it is also possible to speak of a "man' with a femine attribute, whatever that is, but still to maintain the integrity of the gender." (33) Gender Trouble 


"to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination" (42) Gender Trouble

"Sve što je lijepo kratko traje"

"Everything that is beautiful runs short"

Tomorrow is Valentines Day.

On the surface, I think Valentine’s Day is kind of silly. Do we really need an excuse to be sweet and kind and give kisses and watch movies with our loved ones? As much as I wish I could pass it over with no thoughts or inclinations, I have been thinking about it a lot the last few days. I suppose I have been thinking about it because I am at period where my relationships are in flux. The kind of relationships I have with even the people I care most about are being redefined by the ways we communicate with each other, the manner in which we are able, as defined by space and time, to show our love and support of one another. In the mean time I am also building new relationships, based on mutual trust, on cultural exchange. And the love, of course, in each and every one of these relationships is different and unique.

Two years ago when I was here I met with some friends of friends. Fiona, a good friend of mine, and a guy she knew from a summer camp that was from Zagreb, and I went for a coffee. It happened to be Valentines Day. They brought us stuffed hearts and I thought it was the sweetest thing, to be thoughtful for someone you have never met but you can assume has no valentines in the near-by vicinity. Last year I spoke with some friends. I made pink cupcakes for my students, vegan cupcakes with rose-water icing. I'm not sure they appreciated them. I even piped the icing into swirls and mountains, epic in their artistry. I have a spade from Valentines Day second year of college, which I found in the middle of a heart of miniature-potted plants. I took a Polaroid, which is now buried in a box somewhere in my closet in Kansas City and somewhere in that room is also a t-shirt with a penguin on it, watching hearts come out of a box and morph into butterflies. And then there are mix tapes and mix cds. And there was the year everyone got a valentine of their locker but me. And the year, way long ago in sixth grade when I got a fake valentine, a joke, and I remember looking up after reading the terrible things jotted down on a piece of paper and realizing I didn't care. I am sure that is the day I became a confident young lady and so on and so fourth. So, even if valentines day is a silly holiday full of false expectations and an excuse to sell many more hallmark cards it does serve as a marker of time. A day to exchange the tokens we use like bones from an archeological dig--the pieces of a ship being rebuilt that might one day explain an empire. It is an opportunity to create artifacts-to put into something tangible the things we express everyday in our phone calls, our hugs, our cups of coffee, the lending of a pen, or something more...our little undocumented acts of love.

That is something nice.

In Zagreb there is a museum called the musuem of broken relationships.  It sounds depressing, and some aspects of it are, however I think it is one of the must sees in Zagreb. As much as it is a tribute to failed relationships, it is also a tribute to the artifacts that contain meaning for us and the power that relationships have the potential to hold. The only reason these objects of ended or broken or tried or complicated loves have such weight is because these objects have been invested in by more than one person, because there was something worth risking heartbreak for at some point and that is worth commemorating. One of the most astonishing and exciting aspects of traveling is finding, halfway around the world people with whom you form bonds, to find in the unexpected corners a community in which you can situate yourself. At the end of my last trip here I wrote this, (warning, this is HIGHLY cheese, its like cheese garnished with cheese in a cheese bath...) 

"Ultimately I think I am always searching for a reflection of myself in other places, so I can place myself in some sort of a collective, of a movement, of something greater than myself. More so then finding parts of myself, parts I never had, I have added parts of the people I have meet here. I sought out at the beginning of this semester to find a community, to establish human connections, and I think I can say I have successfully accomplished my goal, with time to spare. My everyday life here is far from my everyday life at home. My everyday life here is constantly challenged by language barriers, by trying to make connections when I do not share the same physical space, or the same history. But I have discovered the best way to overcome these challenges to creating meaningful relationships here is to let go of my own inhabitations, to trust myself and to take chances."

I don't know what I am thinking about with all these thoughts scrambled here on my oh-so-very public blog except that I am always collecting those tokens as if creating a personal hard-record of my relationships to the rest of the world. The things that define and prove not only to myself but anyone rummaging around in my personal belongings that I didn't do it alone. If anything, its nice to remember, maybe on valentines day, there are people worth passing a token along, an object to hold or view or touch for those times when the meandering nature of our contemporary lives drifts us far from home and the people we know and love.

My valentines day present to you is my favorite love poem...

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Pablo Neruda

Pink and Black and Blue

I want my sheets to smell like spring, so I hang them in the sun, hoping the sun will bleach them of the winter stench of closed windows and steamy soups. I have had the apartment to myself all week and it is sometimes quite lovely to have a space to yourself. I have been reading, listening, and watching a lot. And saying some temporary goodbyes as well. I read an article that laid a clear path through the tumultuous woods that is data analysis. I made a delicious salad from the treasures found at the open market. I bought fresh milk, milk where the quality of the opaque white is inconsistent and one can see the strands of denser milk separating from the more watery aspects of milk. I have been studying Croatian. I have touched based with people who live their lives like giant grasshoppers, springing from one location to another, never resting, only letting the movement of their legs sing praise to the adventure of landing and springing into the air once again. 

I have forgotten about writing in my blog because the days seem to stroll into an unexciting bliss of normalcy. The sun, however, has been shining for days and has brought back thoughts of being very young again and spending the summer laying in the park and rumbling about barefoot in the fresh grass. 

Today is windy and I have an interview and high hopes of work to be done.

This past week I went a museum. In the museum my friend and I were the only observers. We found in the center of a room with very high ceilings a string weighted at the end with what appeared to be a brass top. The tip of the brass top grazed, most likely, a centimeter deep into a pile of sand and dirt. We touched the string and it began to sway, the weight working the way gravity forces it to, drew a symmetrical pattern into the sand. Perfect. With arcs, and criss crosses. When you stand there, silently, the sounds of the grains of the sand shifting hesitantly aside as the brass tip brushes the surface of the sand, sneak, on their tippy toes, into your ears. It sounds like the shifting of the earth or the tiniest whisper "shhhh...."