forts, frozen corn, fish cookies, gutter noodles, faust arp

i keep wondering what my fifteen, or seventeen or eighteen year old self would say to me now. i saw things in black and white, i was ignorant and pretty judgmental but also probably annoyingly right about a lot of things. 

me and linden have a saying here; everything is grey. which sounds depressing, but it doesn’t mean melancholy grey, just hazy, unclear, no right answer grey. everyone will be talking about some important issue or ethical question, and i’ll say “i don’t think it’s black and white”, and she’ll say “is it grey?” and then we’ll laugh because of course it’s grey, like everything else. 

my other favorite exchange that we have on a regular basis is

someone: ‘are you guys hungry?’

us: ‘i could eat.’ 

we say it casually, maybe even shrugging, like ‘yeh, i mean i guess i could, yeh ok if you want’, when really we are like ‘yehhh! food!’. 

the other day i was walking through the park to town. the rain has made everything exceedingly lush, like walking through the shire in middle earth. an old man was sitting on a bench, and as i approached i saw him do the catholic hail mary where you touch your forehead and heart and shoulders (i think?). and i thought how amazing, this man is praying, and i felt like i walked through the presence of God. 

we rented bikes! it was such a dream. linden kept nearly dying because in the US they drive on the other side of the road. but it was so nice to just ride around, weaving in and out of traffic, speeding down the high street and over the bridge and round the roundabout. 

i keep having the weirdest dreams. i keep such strange hours here, so i’m in a constant state of delirium, and often in the morning i don’t know what was a dream and what was real life. i dream about dreaming. a number of times i’ve told people about something that happened in a dream, and they’ve informed me that that was actually real life.

the other evening i woke up after a nap thinking i was at home in sydney because there was banging and scratching at the door, just like my cat used to do when she wanted to come in. but the noises may also have been a dream. i dream about sleeping way too much.

another exciting thing was that one of my housemates went back to italy, so her room was free. we built a fort in there and watched movies and television. it was like a magical living room. it was a spare bed for those who didn’t want to travel back to their own bed. but then the university came and locked it. 

my eating habbits are constantly evolving. i eat ALOT of frozen corn at the moment. frozen sweet corn is so good. we went through a kilogram in two days last week. so good to nibble. we made lemon sugar cookies the other day. i was free styling, going off a vague memory of a recipe back home. my devil may care attitude paid no dividends as the resulting cookies tasted powerfully like fish. at first when you nibbled, it was like ‘oh ok, not bad, some sugar, some lemon, yeh’ and then a second later your face would twist as you realized, ‘oh,it tastes like fish?’ and wondered ‘whyyyyy?’. we also burnt the second batch, and they turned into a huge, dark, congealed mass of fish cookie. 

the other day i was sitting in a bed with a new purple cardigan from a charity shop that smells obscenely like old lady, i was sitting half way up, and for some reason i had tried on my friends glasses and i was drinking a tea. i felt so much like the grandma from little red riding hood. 

the other day we went to london to see The Punch Brothers concert, a band which linden loves. we were meeting the others in there, so me and linden and zeek ended up getting takeaway noodles and sitting in a side street in the gutter in the rain. then later when we were in line for the concert, we found dean but not max. for some reason, we all put our backs together and started rotating to try and see max. also hoping that when we did see him, he would feel embarrassed to be seen with the slowly rotating group of people. 

i spend most of my time at the boys flat. it feels like more of a home than my room, which i love, but can be claustrophobic and lonely. they have herbs growing on the window sill in the bathroom. one of their flat mates always cooks amazing food, which we get to eat if we are there at the right time. he even makes home made bread. what?! what kind of uni student does that. i have played so many games of mario kart, and now i’m even getting good enough to win sometimes, but not very often. 

i don’t have very much to do with my days now. i sleep late, go to bed in the early hours of the morning, and just generally enjoy being young because i don’t think kind of experience will ever repeat itself. 

i don’t like being alone at the moment so i’m never really alone. we’ve started going to starbucks to study and linden and max have better attention spans than me. i reach my study peak and then just become like an annoying child, literally poking them, making them look at pictures of my cat, and laughing at nothing. 

i’ve become obsessed with radiohead. ‘faust arp’ and ‘karma police’ sound like my insides. 

i also wrote a song which i might perform somewhere.