conclusions?

Oh man oh man oh man. This blog bit the dust in a mighty, mighty way, and for that, I truly do apologize, for all of the three people who actually followed this thing in all its sporadic, paradoxical and over-vocabularized glory. But here I am, back in AMERICALAND, where the air itself tastes like freedom and the portion sizes are phenomenal and the Diet Coke is like a waterfall, Honestly, though, it's been a pretty solid mix of being glad to be back (my bed, my dog, being able to do laundry not in a sink, driving around with the old gang) and a painful, vicious missing of everything I left in Europe. And a lot of it has been a dull butter knife of a reality check: Tulsa, you know I love you, but you are so ugly compared to Vienna (and I don't fault you for that because it's Vienna, after all), and your people, while they are the friendliest, nicest folks you'll ever stumble upon - there's something about them that makes me think not "How did I get here" but "How was I ever here." And "How do I get out of here." But where else can you go sit in a bar, waiting for your brother to finish mopping up the humidor, and have a tipsy chat with the other lingering patrons who tell you all about their wedding and the piece of cake they've got saved in the freezer and the perils of in-laws, and then, afterwards, they hug you? Complete strangers giving you a hug - that's Tulsa. Or at Wal-Mart - Wal-Mart itself! - the cashier can't ring up the iPod broadcaster you've bought in preparation for your epic journey across the baking hot West, so she simply asks how much it was, and you say the real price (28) and she says, "Let's call it 26." Wal-Mart for the win! The Midwest! Walt Whitman-style exclamation points! Coffee!

So in short, Tulsa, I will not marry you, but you've been a good mistress and I'll definitely be back for conjugal visits. You are, after all, a sluT backwards.

I left Vienna on June 30th at 1:40 p.m., rode a train across Austria into Germany, flew out of Frankfurt on July 1st in the mid-afternoon, landed in Chicago at 4 p.m. on the same day, downed a cheeseburger and nearly went into a caloric coma, arrived in Oklahoma at 10 p.m., went to a bar with my parents, and passed out at 4 a.m. in my bed. Prost, my friends, prost to that.

And since I've been M.I.A. from the internet for going on three weeks now, I could go up to my room (a simple fact which is still astounding to me, even though the ennui of summer is already settling in) and grab my handwritten journals and report what I did, but everything has changed, as the song goes, so instead, here's a run-down of Europe vs. the U.S.of A. We had to fill out all these "DIGEST YOUR EXPERIENCES AND ADVISE FUTURE STUDENTS QUICK START PROCESSING ALL OF THIS" surveys, but I remember a lot of what I wrote, though, at the time, I was more than likely hungover, sleep-deprived, and utterly unprepared for the tests I had to take later that afternoon. So:

4 Things You Will Not Miss About Being Abroad:

1. The roommate. Anna was very nice, and while I was tempted to leave her some form of poorly-worded German note saying "I'm sorry we weren't better friends, but I was satisfied with living with you, I hope it was mutual, have a nice life," I totally didn't. Granted my mind was elsewhere, but still - rooming with someone sucks. Hands down. The liberty to sleep when I want, to sit at my computer when I want, to have a wardrobe exploding with dirty laundry without the anxiety that I'm grossing someone out - that's priceless. The dorm wasn't the best, either, between the constant partying for that motherfucking Euro soccer tournament, the unfriendliness of my Soviet floor-mates, and the Coke machine that was constantly out of Coke. A friend of mine back home asked me once whether I spent my time with Americans or Austrians, and I said Americans, naturlich, because the language barrier is immense. To which he replied, "Don't they all speak English?" And yes, they do, 8 year old Austrians speak better English than I do German, but the inability to casually converse, to say, hey Anna, how was your day, will you be out late tonight, was maddening. On the other hand, being surrounded by German and German-speakers and Austrian customs made our little band of Americans the fastest, snuggest group of friends I think I've ever made, and I miss them all more than a phrase like "I miss them" can convey.

2. Expenses. Things are expensive in Europe, and the guilt of all that money stalked me like a homeless dog for most of the trip. My dad already gave me the "Now that you're home stop using the credit card you're on your own sport" talk, and I will never, ever ask what the grand sum was because it's probably more money than I'll ever have in my pocket again. Again, the upside of this is the beauty of the American dollar, how a $20 dress is completely worth it because you can't find dresses for 13 Euros; likewise, 50 cent drinks at Quiktrip are beyond amazing, and let's not talk about gas prices because everyone wants to talk about gas prices and all I have to say to that is OBAMARAMA. But we got pretty good at doing things for cheap - our last Saturday was beautiful, we traipsed into the Wienerwald one last time and walked that long hill down to the Donau, sat on its banks and waved at the passing motorboats. I could've lingered there all day, with the sun on the water and my feet dangling above, the bees in the flowers and the sky so much bluer than it is here.

3. Massive Inconveniences. When I went to Wal-Mart yesterday, my shopping list looked like this: iPod dojigger. New purse. Bobby pins. Polaroid film. Socks. Padded envelopes for long-distance packages. Cell phone. And within an hour, I had all of that and more in my cart - and yes, the consumerism is hideous and the people are all overweight or with bad haircuts (OR BOTH), but do you know how long it would've taken to acquire all that in Vienna? An Apple store, a beauty shop, a junk store on Mariahilferstrasse for the purse, a camera store, a Handy dealership, and the post office - longer than a day's worth of errands, and I went without (though I regret not taking my Polaroid with me). And this is all just whiny, I know, but if it was raining, which it more than often was, no way would I have left the womb of my dorm or the accommodating couches at the Central Abroad office.

4. Existential Angst, Boredom, Loneliness, and Insurmountable Pressure. This is the stuff they do not warn you about, and you heard all about it through this blog - here, in Oklahoma, I wake up and think about what I need to do today, and the list is always fairly long but at least there is one, and it does include such things as "Eat Sezchuan" and "Take Penny for a perambulation (because if she hears the word 'walk' and then you flake out on her she mopes around the house for hours)." In Vienna, we were stumped, and while I like having ideas and suggesting wild plans, the resulting responsibility of that almost negated any fun we'd try and have. We finally figured out that Down Time - like watching Forrest Gump and drinking the cheapest wine we could buy - was as much fun as Crazy Up Time - like spending all our money at the Prater to ride that enormous swing with our shoes far below on the ground and Vienna spread out in a sunset below us. But you know as well as I do how much I stressed and worried and felt like a colossal waste of time and space, and maybe it was just me. I don't regret it, though, because when things ironically got easier towards the end, when we didn't panic about how little time we had left but rather started really enjoying every moment of it, it felt so much better compared to the mess I was going through in April, in February. And that's when I decided this was amazing, and that I'd give crappy answers when anyone back home asked, "Well how was Europe?"

Of course I changed. You can't not change after something like that. Did it rattle my perspective and challenge me and put me in new situations and make me question and reevaluate everything I'd known? Sure. But a lot of that was individual, certain circumstances, neuroses paired with serendipitous happenings, fate and chance and preset coordinates together. So I can't help you, wee young undergraduate, to make your decision; it's a chance you've got to take, and I shake your hand and say God Speed, send me a postcard when you get there.

On to the sappy business, though I've been waking up early from this jetlag all week and by around mid-day I'm pretty bamboozled, after spending the morning at the keyboard with a cup of coffee, so it's a little familiar to have this cathartic outpour of babbling to start off the day. The coffee doesn't help much, either.

4 Things You Will Miss About Being Abroad:
(More like 400 - little things, so many Kleinigkeiten - but I'll do my best.)

1. Cafes. Corny as it may be, I remember very distinctly one windy afternoon where I decided to go be a fancy-pants and sit in one of the finer cafes in Vienna, surrounded by Austrian yuppies and businessmen on cellphones, where the waiter called me "lovely woman" (bad translation, it doesn't sound that weird in German), and I sat there with my coffee and my cigarettes and my journal and again, thought, what am I doing. But it made a lot of sense all of a sudden - in Vienna, coffee shops are a given, you can spend days in there and no one minds, you can order a coffee that could be downed in two sips but you're supposed to linger and look at the clouds and observe the passersby. And that's what I love doing; writing at home (ask sometime and I'll tell you about the semi-perverse way I've written down my entire life in various notebooks - I'm on #24 and I'm 21 years old), while not a chore, was always something done alone in my room, when I was aching for sleep or dying of insomnia, and Vienna is the place to go for that kind of mentality. It fit so well with me, regardless of everything else that shouldn't have made sense - the Austrian highbrow lifestyle, the impossibility of German, the fussbudget attitude while I was an Okie in dirty jeans and a t-shirt most of the time. And Vienna has around 1000 cafes - the trusty Aida, where I finally swiped a cup and it's sitting beside me now full of sub-par, over-sweetened Folger's, and our favorite, the Votiv Park cafe, run by a family and straight from 1948, with a little dog who loved nothing more than running after people on the sidewalk and barking, the 11 year old boy who practiced his English with us. I miss that a lot.

2. Public Transportation. You want to go be on top of a mountain overlooking the foothills of the Alps? Half an hour and you're there, in the heart of the wilderness. You want to see an exhibit of modernist painting in a former palace? Ride the D line around the Ring and get a student discount. You need to be on the other side of the city at midnight, get drunk, and get back home in one piece? U-Bahn, a block of walking, and take the Night Bus back. It was all so so so easy, and especially now that I'm 21, when going to bars with my friends is something I can and want to do, the simple fact of not having to worry about how am I going to return to my bed without a ticket, a DUI, or dead in a ditch is nearly unbearable in its absence. Especially when you are a lush like me. We finally made it to TGI Friday's for the Happy Hour in Vienna, because we were aching for America, and we downed probably a gallon's worth of margaritas, but this was the middle of the day, and we collapsed in a park for a puppy pile until we were sober enough to get some coffee without making American asses of ourselves. It was great, totally worth missing Class & Charter Day.

3. The People I Didn't Know. I can count the number of people I encountered that made me glad to be in Europe, but inherently, as they were Europeans, they were a boatload more intriguing than your average American Joe. The British lads in Oslo that made my last night in Norway worth remembering, solely through some pleasant conversation. The German Angel in Berlin who rescued me from a bathroom stall on my 21st birthday. Necmiye, the Kurdish girl I went out for coffee with half a dozen times, who made me realize I could be funny in a foreign language. Anatol Eschenmueller, our professor, with all his hysterical English idioms and dry, little old man voice and incredible wardrobe. The Austrian girl I met on one of my last nights, who not only volunteered to try her Bankomat card in the cigarette vending machine (they have those in Austria, unfortunately they're useless to someone sans Austrian Bank Account), and though it didn't work, she walked with me down the block as we were going the same direction, complimented my German, and wished me a good trip home. The man at the hostel in Amsterdam who gave me cigarettes and just chatted with me. All the wacky characters at the Goethe Institut: Liebe Stefania with her little girl's voice who kept trying to set me up with Kamil, the dreamy Polish RA, and Terada-san in all his 61-year-old Osakan insanity, Walter Dooley the Irishman who I was crushing on so hardcore even though he's 30 years my senior, Bosco the dancing African, Adnan and Ana, Pawel, Darko, Le and Lin and Jin, the Turkish mafia, everyone everyone everyone.

4. And finally, most obviously: The Gang, The Homies, The Crew, My Friends. Suzanne, as she was filling out this same "PROCESS YOUR ABROAD EXPERIENCE" survey, had written under What She'd Missed the following: 1. You guys. 2. Beer. 3. Beer. I feel the same exactly, maybe with the added #4, Beer With You Guys. Because we were all smitten with each other, a little conglomerate of American co-eds from various time zones and states, different schools, different and all so much the same, and that's been the hardest thing to adjust to: knowing Suzanne will not be making an immaculate dinner tonight, that Annie is not downstairs on facebook where I can send her a message to meet up for coffee, that we won't be dragging Tommy to do some fun thing in the woods, that Rachel and Kevin and Blake are all in their respective hometowns, and that Rob isn't around to get a late night beer while all the Austrians are watching the soccer game on the projector screen set up in the bar. That's been the hardest by far. And like I said, "I miss" doesn't come close to the feeling of it; while home is exciting and interesting and comforting, I'd kill for one more day. That's why we're all going to Disneyworld sometime, because it might, just maybe, be as magical.

So thanks, everyone out there in cyberland, for reading, and I hope it was enjoyable, and I'd like to thank the Academy and the Internet and the Austrian People and the Alps. I've got to go take the dog on that perambulation now, get out of my jim-jams and mail some love letters, but it's been grand. I'll be seeing you. Good night.

still here.

Monday: Tacos and a fruitless quest for Sachertorte. That's about it.

Tuesday: Grumpy internship, and then Breakfast for Dinner, following the completion of my Referat on Thomas Mann, which awed my professor solely because I put stupid captions on the pictures. Aside from an easy A, I'm grateful to Malloy for at least teaching enough of the basics on Thomas Mann that I had ample material to bullshit with. I never said I was a good student. [ Irrelevant Aside: Mom likes to tell me I peaked in middle school, which is so reassuring for someone healthily in the smackdab of the first quarter of her life - according to my mother, I'm currently a shell of my wunderkind, 12 year old self -- liken that to what I remember of middle school - a lot of angst, a bad haircut, and Pepsi One.] So we stock up on beers at the conveniently always-open Supermarket at Westbanhof, cook some greasy, delicious eggs n' bacon, and get drunk enough to expound on all manner of Ex-Patriately things. Namely our dogs. That was a joke. In honor of that Goddamned PainInTheAss Euro Soccer Tournament I wrote about, Suzanne snagged some facepaint, and in a moment of drunken "This is a good idea" she covered me in it, so I went home with Annie prepared to answer anyone who dared ask which country I was supporting with "THE UNIVERSE." Mainly I looked insane.

Wednesday: Met with Necmiye, the Kurdish girl in one of my classes who I see once a week to work on English (basically we get coffee and talk about how annoying our class is), and then blasted Grammar time. I hate Grammar class, as does everyone on this trip, because it's not the useful, practical stuff we learned at the Goethe-Institut, it's structureless, meandering lectures about grammar forms we will never, ever need to use. Fortunately this week we actually learn something worthwhile, and afterwards, Rob and I go to the Votiv Park Cafe, also known as THE BEST CAFE IN THE WORLD, and have another of those ambling conversations that has no real route but made me feel a lot more sunny about This Whole Business afterwards - and talking, the mere act of communicating, has been one of the benefits of being here, whereas at Hamilton, no one ever says anything or listens to anyone unless they're drunk and then they forget it in the morning. Of course, that's not the case everywhere, but I think the kids here know me twice as well as the people I go to school with, despite having known me less than 6 months; maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I'm a little bitter, and maybe that's just how it is. Point being, I love that cafe - the only waitstaff being a friendly old man, this little kid who can't be more than eleven, and a tiny dog.

Thursday: Toured Parlament, which was fun, solely because it's in the middle of the "FAN ZONE" which has barricaded nearly every interesting building in Vienna. Annie and I dash over to the Modern Art Museum to see an exhibit called "Bad Painting, Good Art" which was, as promised, horrible, but we had a fine time. I doodled Kanye West on my notes during class. I am getting very good at doodling Kanye West.

Friday: University Class is snoresville, Annie meets me and we go on an Aida mission after a giganto lunch of sushi. One thing I do not want to eat when I get home - fucking sushi. I've had enough sushi to populate an aquarium. Weather is horribly cold and wintry, so we waste a few hours in a bookstore looking at coffee table hardbacks until we go see "The Happening" which may honestly be the worst movie I've ever seen - granted, my standards of Freaky Things has been raised to new heights by the perfection of The Twilight Zone. Afterwards I meet up with Ceci, from high school, and take her tp the Zwoelfapostlkeller for some schnitzel and beers, where we just end up gossiping about our graduating class (who's married, who's about to get married, who's in Asia, and who has a baby). Surreal, to say the least, to be throwing around names from my high school yearbook with a fellow Tulsan in the middle of Vienna, Austria.

Saturday: LAKE HUNT. Going only by a vague sense of direction and the big blue blot on the map, Annie, Tommy and I went questing for this lake, which we found and promptly lounged beside and enjoyed the weather for the ten minutes that it wasn't cloudy. Falafel dinner. Realized Neubaugasse is a really, really long street. Watched 6 episodes of The Twilight Zone with Annie due to lack of energy, money, ideas, and do not regret it, because Dennis Hopper was once very very young and a Neo-Nazi and poor William Shatner wasn't imagining the gremlin on the wing of the plane. Granted, it was just a man in a sheep costume, and much more frightening when I was small.

Sunday: Into the woods, twice in one day - first with Annie, wandering into Grinzing and looking down at the panorama of tiny Vienna and pointing out all the landmarks we now know: the Spittelau trash compactor tower, the Riesenrad, Stephansdom and the Votivkirche. Later, I went on my own and got lost, ended up in a field, and just kind of sat there for half an hour as the dog-walkers and joggers went by, thinking damn, this is just about it, isn't it.

And that's it.

grumpytimes.

Hello out there. Schizophrenic though it may be, I'm about to negate that last post with a much-needed List of Grievances, just because I am running low on smokes and maybe this will help. In short, let's call it Why I Am So Done With This Right Now.

The Internship has gone from making me feel altruistic and righteous to making me want to slam some small skulls in with a baseball bat, and it's the same kind of frustration that arises after any job. I know I felt pretty murderous when I was a waitress, but there were ways to vent that steam, and besides, I left every night with a wad of cash in my apron, so it was suffering for something. This, now, is just annoying - kids don't listen to me, kids make fun of my German and then don't listen to me, and today, I just left early after prowling around the off-limits, third-floor attic (think where Bastian reads The Neverending Story), after being informed in one class that I was simply "unneeded" (which was fine), but then the next class just wasn't there, and I was waiting around when I thought fuck it, I don't care, I'm going. And what am I doing this for - I don't regret it, not yet, but goddamn, I could do without it so much. 7 a.m. wake-up for 3 hours of nothingness and 1 hour of being yelled at by Austrian kids.

The rooming situation is still silent and awkward and just exhausting; and I realize I was so happy this weekend because I had the room to myself. It's silly and shallow but stressful, because where the hell am I supposed to go? And if I hear one more shitty chick-rock song--last night, Grandaddy's "Hewlett's Daughter" came on, and when she changed it 30 seconds in I fought the urge to shout "NEIN LASS ES."

Broke. I am broke. I am always broke. I am always hungry and always broke, and being hungry makes me exhausted, but having to withdraw from my bank account for the third time in as many days is stressful, because money, when I am ever going to have money, if I keep going the way I'm going the answer is probably never, and I wonder with a laugh whether I'd be much cheaper to support if I was dead and then I wonder how serious I am about that, so I just keep being hungry and think this is stupid, and when I eat it's disgusting and I'm sure this foretells of some deep psychological troublement between Rachel and Food but right now it's just making me 'edgy,' as my mother is so fond of saying.

EVERYONE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET SEEMS TO HAVE FALLEN OFF THE GLOBE. Or they are crazy, like my mother, who is counting down the days until we can go to a casino together and I'm really not too hot to do that. And there are few things worse than waiting for a response, especially when it's something as meager as a "hello how is your life," and it's wearing me down. Like all my clothes are worn down. And I have no money to replace them. Oh, and I can't do laundry, aside from washing it in the sink or dragging it across Vienna to someone else's dorm.

Lastly and largestly, the Motherfucking Goddamn SonofaBitch PieceofShit PainintheAss Euro Soccer Tournament. You want to go lie in the big, rose-filled park by the Hofburg palace, and read? Oh, sorry, we've closed it, because 50,000 drunken Europeans are amassed around the giant megascreen TV broadcasting the soccer game that's blocking off the entire street, and we've closed all the museums, too, because why would you want to go in a museum when there is FOOOTBALLL!?!? Also, don't try sleeping, because whoever won the day's game will invariably be drunkenly celebrating in the street until dawn. I'm tempted to buy my own flag, wear it as a cape, and go screaming through the streets shouting "CHINA!!!! GO CHINA!!! EURO SOCCER CHAMPIONSHIP CHAMPIONS!!!" Or just start carrying a gun.

And sure, I have no right to complain, but I never did honestly. But again, like the Internship, I step back and think, "Why am I here, what am I doing here, what does this matter?" And it doesn't, at all, which somehow is not liberating anymore but just a waste, of money and time and energy. I know what I want to do and I haven't been doing it, because I can't. And this is all whine but lordy, lordy, lordy, does the Going Home sound sweeter by the second.

In the meantime, did you know you can watch the ENTIRETY of the original Twilight Zone for free online? My latest fantasy - Rod Serling shows up in my room, telling an unseen audience how "Rachel Richardson, 21 years of age, recently published and combating anxiety and ennui in Vienna, was about to realize the preciousness of her precociousness as she briefly ventured into...THE TWILIGHT ZONE." And then I'd be all "FUCK ROD SERLING I CAN HEAR YOU AHHHHH" and then some freaky shit would probably go down. By which I mean because I'd be in the Twilight Zone. Not because Rod Serling was in my room. Doo-doo-doo-do-doo-doo-doo-do.

thens, nows, and laters.

In a probably futile attempt to organize these jumbled things I pass off as blog posts (see also: every paper I've ever written), we're going high-concept tonight, so brace yourself, this might get hairy.

I am good with the Now right now. Now being me, in my dorm room on Boltzmangasse, far from all the idiotic hubbub of the Euro Soccer championship that has basically assaulted Vienna and made everyone into drunken noisy idiots with flags painted on their faces (and we all know how much I like facepaint), after a rainy-sunny day of unwarranted stress and an excursion down the Danube, a movie with my friends in my room because Le Roomie is out for the weekend. Now is good. And it's harder than it should be for me to say that with conviction, but it always has been - as my writing colleagues always tell me, Rachel Cannot Tell A Straight Story. Linearity is not my forte, and I keep journals and read through them too much and am usually jumping between the Past and the Future, neglecting the Now, and not always by accident. Now, though, right now, is pretty grand, and made grander by the Later (because tomorrow is Sunday and I can wake up whenever) and the Then of what was today, and what was last week, and last year, and all those everlasting other 'last's.

Because we had us some times. I don't know who you are out there reading this right now, but regardless, we have had us some times, you and I. Maybe in 12, at the Toga Party of my 20th birthday, or just watching Planet Earth stoned on a Sunday night or climbing on top of the refrigerator to graffiti the ceiling, or maybe it was my freshman year and we were on the roof of Babbitt passing out on each other and falling out of common room windows to get on to Minor Field, or maybe it was a Super Pie in the Keehn FacApt and then dancing all over the furniture.
Or maybe it was in Oklahoma, maybe we were mini-golfing and having fine dinners to judge our servers by our own standards of waitressing, maybe we were driving around doing nothing but listening to music and wondering what we should do with ourselves. Maybe we were on a porch, smoking each other's cigarettes, or we were in a pool with the dogs running laps around the perimeter, or riding on a scooter. Maybe we were in my backyard in dresses, or in coats, and the fire was lit and Penny was under our feet falling asleep. Maybe it was in a courtyard at lunchtime when we weren't yet licensed drivers. Maybe we were in New York City eating Indian food.
Regardless, there were some times, and we should be glad of them.

And today was all hills and rivers, wineries and coffeeshops, spending the day out in the countryside of Vienna, seeing Benedictine monks perform their midday prayer in a Baroque sanctuary, and it was glorious but it wasn't; because it looked so nice, so unreal and yet so ordinary, but really, I was much happier when we came back, when we acted like college students and crammed as many people onto a dorm room bed as possible to watch a movie on my laptop.

The week was rough, doing all the work I haven't done all semester while Vienna went wintry again, confusing my obligations with my responsibilities and drinking too much coffee and not sleeping well (for the record, I've decided Hell is someone listening to The Carpenter's "Close to You" on repeat for the better part of two hours while you are trying to sleep and can hear Karen Carpenter's anorexic croon from all the way across the street - seriously I was on the brink of screaming "SHUT THE FUCK UP OR AT LEAST CHANGE THE SONG" but I don't know what it is in German). And the weekend was off-kilter, drinking and eating and spending too much and then today's reaffirmation that this group of students in Vienna is absurd, myself and friends included - no sitcom writer could come up with these characters, ask me about it sometime - but it's all right now. It's all right now. All of it is right now, and it's all right, now.

And the future, flying cars be damned - I'm going to drive across the country in July. I'm going to graduate college. We're going to have a new President. And the ever-so-important Petting of Penny and Drinking With Family is only three weeks away. Three weeks after all this - doesn't seem real.

So that's my Nows and Thens and Laters, my Soons. They don't make much sense, I'm sure, and I'm sorry, but there they are - and what are yours?

take me to the river, take me to the river.

IT'S JUNE. In exactly one month, I'm going to be semi-comatose on my plaid couch in Tulsa with Pennycakes in my lap and a suitcase too heavy to take up the stairs and probably drinking a 32 ounce QuikTrip cup of Diet Coke and Strawberry Fanta (try it it's delicious) full of incredible, incredible ice. But I'll also be away from here, here where the transportation is simple, the weather is balmy, and well, it's Europe. I won't be in Europe anymore. Europe, where we have ourselves some epic weekends (see also: what follows).

Here's a true story: I do not like beaches. I do not understand beaches. Granted, my lone experience with beaches has been either the rainy, stormy shore of Washington or the overcrowded, overheated sand-in-your-swimsuit beaches of Italy. In Italy, in 2005, I was fresh out of high school, still acne-faced and braces on my teeth and wearing dorky glasses with orange frames - the rest of the girls on the trip, meanwhile, and there were only two boys to speak of, were babes. Simply babes. I was not a babe. I don't really think I qualify as a babe now, but I definitely was a lot farther from babeitute in 2005 than I am now. So, our first day in Italy, we take a train from Florence all the way to Cinque Terra, this clump of five little towns on the Mediterranean coast, and the train took so long that I think we were only there for about 3 hours, during which our chaperones went hiking and I found myself with all the babes of the trip on a beach. (If this sounds familiar, it's the first scene of 'Primavera' which you can read in your latest copy of Red Weather plug plug hint hint shameless self-promotion). And there I am, pale and pudgy and uncomfortable in my tankini, the first two-piece bathing suit I'd ever owned, and there are these babes in their bikinis, drinking malt beverages and smoking cigarettes, and next thing I know everybody's taken their tops off. They jokingly invite me to do the same, but there was absolutely no chance, and that whole silly vignette of an experience kind of haunted me for the rest of the trip, like I should be shaking my fists at some unjust God with a sadistic sense of humor and shouting "Why can't I do that, too? Aren't I 18 and full of life and in Italy?!"

Well. Yesterday I was 21 and full of life and in Austria. And you can see where this is going, I'm sure - but we decide, it's hot out, let's go jump in a river. So we ride out to the Alte Donau Beach, bearing enough sunscreen to slather our shamefully pale bodies, and I'm wearing the same swimsuit from 2005, but the whole thing was so wildly different this time around. First of all, Austrian beaches aren't really beaches - we were lying on a lawn, in the shade of some giant deciduous trees, and there was a stretch of rocks before the Donau proper, and we splashed right in along with the naked babies and overweight old men and swam around and ate some oranges and reapplied the sunscreen. And, because this is Europe, there are breasts everywhere - breasts you don't want to look at and ones you do, old women and college students and everything in between. The whole time I was thinking about those girls back in Italy, girls I haven't seen since that summer, and that was really the main motivation that made me decide to just go ahead and bare it all (that, and one of my friends who was essentially raised in a sauna and therefore knows the delicate decorum of public nudity already had). So I did. And it was fine. And then we put our clothes back on, ate some home-cooked hamburgers, feasted on gelato, and played Scrabble in a bar. It may have been my favorite day here, not just for the cycle-completion of Rachel's Personal Struggle With Going Topless On Beaches (get me drunk enough and I'll tell you the half-dozen other Naked stories I have, courtesy of Hamilton College), but just the simple, fantastic niceness of lying around all day, smoking cigarettes and swimming, with good friends and good weather. Yet another ridiculous thing I can say I've done, though you see why my parents don't read this.

On Friday, though, things were not so pleasant. Went on a RESCUE MISSION to retrieve a fainted friend from the clutches of H&M, only to find out she'd been shuttled off in an ambulance already - she was fine in the end, suffering from Europe's Lack of Air Conditioning more than anything, but I spent a good few hours pretending I was a hero or at least a hobbit on a quest, and then showing up, sweaty and stressed, to the Central Abroad Vienna brochure photo shoot, which, I will not lie, I attended for the free food. Because I deliberately ditched the Central Abroad official Blog job, having had my share of bullshit blog entries, and because I was, and am, less than thrilled about this whole experience from a paperwork standpoint - and sure, I'm being young and rebellious, but having the "photo shoot" only reinforced why I refused to work for them. To disclaim - our program directors over here, Ruth and Marie, are fantastic, and I have nothing at all against them, but we've all had several venting sessions where we compared our arduous and disorienting experiences with the heads at Central, and our own incompetent Study Abroad directors. So, at this photo shoot, we were at a cafe that I've never set foot in, and I camp in cafes pretty often, forbidden to smoke and drink, and as we enjoyed our cakes and pastries, the official employee from Central College shoved a tape recorder in our face and made us repeat and reword everything we said until it matched what she 'needed.' Completely unsurprising, and I wasn't really annoyed, but check your local Study Abroad office sometime this fall for the new brochure, because, chances are, I'm all over it, looking unflattering with a mouthful of cake and with some bullshit quote about the "greatness" of the program. Admittedly, I very much enjoyed being photographed and feeling like I was famous - and like I said, free cake.

That night, though, we went out to a bar on the Danube Canal, a place I'd been only once before when I walked home at 4 a.m., and though it was a Saturday night, the place was eerily quiet. Beers in hand, we were just lounging at the picnic table when a grungy, greasy potential bum who looked like the ghost of Kurt Cobain asked if he could sit with us. So we said sure, for lack of knowledge of how to say no politely, and it was odd at first, but he turned out to be completely harmless and friendly, and willing to work with us and our beer-battered German skills (haha, get it?! beer-battered! THINK ABOUT IT). In fact, he was pretty sad, as he said his friend, someone in his sixties, had cancer, and it wasn't looking good for him, and then he just stared out at the water until saying goodbye. Poor Franz. Almost as sad as Martin, the little boy who lost his shoes.

But then, while we girls were in the bathroom, we came back to find a new guest at the table, who, upon finding out we were Americans, proceeded to lecture us on how we were killing people, how we kill children, how we bomb schools, all in broken English and as he could barely stand up. And that's one of the things Central Abroad does not tell you when you leave for Europe - you have to shoulder the entire fucking stupidity of your government, your legislative system, your country's mistakes. And I tried to tell the guy - the only incident I've encountered of out-right U.S. Hatred - we were Americans, but we weren't America, but he followed us to the bar and kept needling us, until Suzanne finally dropped some smack-down in hasty German and told him to essentially fuck off. We tried our best though - as this jackass kept accusing us in English, and we just said "We personally did not do that" in German, "We did not elect Bush," etc. And I'm not waving a flag for U.S. Pride or anything, I know we've done some stupid things, but there was nothing to be done about it right there at the bar. Even if a fight had broken out, what would've happened? An American and an Austrian would have gone home with black eyes. That means nothing in terms of the Real Problems of politics. That does no good to the bombed schools and dead children and all the other gruesome things this guy wanted to tell us about.

So then we had some indignant drunken Doeners. I doubt we'll be going back to that place anytime soon - an eventful weekend by the waterside, though, and I'll see you all soon.

correspondence.

I shouldn't be blogging as I have to be at an U-Bahn station in approximately seven hours to meet for a tour of Communist Architecture in Vienna, and I am also a little bit drunk because tonight it was Heimfest and while the rest of the people in my dormitory were downstairs drinking or outside smoking, Annie and I played a fierce, inebriated round of cards in her room while listening to such hits as "Geh Mal Tanzen" by MO-DO and "Moskau" by the highly underrated Soviet disco group, Dschengis Khan. All of which are available on Youtube.

But here's the news:

"Dear Rachel Richardson,
I am pleased to inform you that our editors have accepted your story
“Trapeze” for publication in the minnesota review."

This is a direct copy and paste from the email I just received, because it's true, it's happening, it's Highly Significant and Unbelievable but, like I said, I'm kind of tipsy so I can't elaborate more than that. I'm 21 years old and I'm getting published in a national literary magazine - the issue doesn't come out until September, but if you're bored sometime this fall, go hunt down a copy at Border's and have yourself a read. I've been celebrating since I heard the news, which was potential news until just now, and I'd already been celebrating tonight but hey - anyone who wants a drink with me when I'm stateside again, let's go and toast to success and stardom. Or at least publication.

This is another gem from my inbox today:

"Dear Rachel,
Penny and I were talking last night, and she asked how you were doing. I said you were fine but ready to come home. She asked when you would be home, and I told her, but I’m not sure she understands how long a month is or what I meant by “July 1.” I probably should have said “x number of sleeps after the next full moon,” but then I would have had to consult a reference book to find out when the next full moon is, then add up the number of nights after that, and by the time I had done all of that, Penny would probably have forgotten what we were talking about. "

From my father. I love my dad. I love my dog. I love all you lovely people out there. And I hope, honestly and truly and sincerely, that life is going just as swimmingly well for you, wherever you may be.

lost and found.

All right. In the immortal words of Kanye West, who actually may be God - or actually, in the words of Chris Martin (that's twice now I've typed it as "Christ Martin"), who sings the chorus, and that may be the best thing he's done since getting hitched - "do you think about me now and then? cos I'm coming home again." Really, all that past sentence meant to say was this Kanye song is incredible, and so is the Fantastichen Vier, the biggest German rap group in Europe, and so was the Bosnia-Herzegovina entry in last night's Eurovision spectacular, which we toasted to with tall cans of Ottakringer, a bag of pretzels, following another amazing Suzanne dinner of sloppy joes, because they taste like America. These sentences are going out the door but that's because I've been out the door, noon to dusk, I've been doing, I've been in the mountains and the streets! Or in a dorm room watching the Eurovision finale. And let me just say, Bosnia-Herzegovina got robbed, ala John Brown on the White Rapper Show. Ya feel me?

Weirdly, watching Eurovision really put everything in perspective; lately we've been the exploring expatriates, courtesy of another long weekend (Austria loves random Thursday holidays) and the finally improved weather - it was winter all week, gray skies and glum, but the sun finally crept back out and it turned into Spring again. And Europe - there's a helluva lot in Europe. If you've never seen Eurovision - and who would, as it's been pretty irrelevant ever since ABBA - it's basically American Idol, only for the ENTIRETY of Europe, simultaneously a geography lesson (Moldova? Serbia? AZERBAIJAN!?), dance party, and hysterical - every ridiculous bizarre foreign music you've ever seen on Youtube times 10 and broadcast live. Sadly, the majority of contestants had been raised on a steady of diet of Horrible American Pop Music (the tart from Greece took a page straight from Christina Aguelleiaerhhowdoyouspellthat's book with "My secret combination/it's a mystery for you/use your imagination/I'm not easy but I'm true" - apparently her bidnez comes with a Master Lock), but there were a few standouts: Azerbaijan had some devil-angel theme going on with lots of glass-shattering falsetto, France was one bearded dude and his bearded, female back-up singers, Spain was every song you hate to love, and Bosnia created some power-pop, indie-fied anthem though the performance was way too weird to win. Ireland didn't make it to the finals, but they entered a turkey puppet screaming obscenities and basically mocking the whole absurd thing. Basically, if you have a few hours to waste, search for any of the entrants on Youtube and enjoy.

But things have been on an up, and so have I. Got some good news on Wednesday which I won't yet publish (winkity wink, har har) or make public or publicize because it's not finalized, but we went out to celebrate, knowing we had no class the next day, and the evening could have easily been titled, "Writers Talking About Writing When They've Been Drinking." Because it is amazing, to have two giant beers with your Schnitzel dinner, to go wandering into Vienna, end up in the smoky Cafe Hawelka where's there's no menu but plenty more beer to have, where we three CreWri majors had one of those winding, exhaustive conversations that make the whole "I will never have a real job" part of majoring in what you love seem like a minor side effect. It was grand, just like Vienna, and maybe we overdid it a little and I stole a bottle of bubbly water, but it was pretty great nonetheless.

Thursday and Friday, I crammed on my new-found hat (which makes me look like a newsie but keeps weird men from saying things at me which is beginning to get pretty goddamned annoying and chokingly ironic) and Annie and I took an amble that went all over this pretty little city. Again, I always forget what a simple panacea just Having A Walk is, especially when they day's nice and you have nothing better to do. Beers at the stand-by Zwoelf Apsotlkeller, a restaurant in some medieval brick-arched cellar, visits to the Kriminal Museum, the Butterfly House, and, of course, new Aida Cafes. We wandered into a district we'd simply overlooked in our previous walkings - and Vienna, though it has too many people for me, though it's code of living is a little still and formal, though it's weather is unpredictable - it's a pretty great place, if you go out with your feet and look around. On the same street, a stone's throw from the MuseumsQuartier where hip twenty-somethings flock on all nights of the week to drink grocery-store beers in front of museums holding priceless works of Klimt and Schiele, there's a clock museum, a Polaroid store, and a furniture dealer with an old dog inside the door who will let you pet him without attracting the attention of the owner. We capped off the evening with a trip to the Volkstheater to see ,,Der Besuch Der Alten Damen" - a horrible, disturbing play Annie and I had to read in Deutsch 140 - but for 4 Euros, it was a steal - plus, the theater itself is all Austrian Grandeur, just like the cafe across the street where the Ham&Cheese Sandwich I had (a standard on any Austrian menu) was served under chandeliers.

So the weekend proper was dedicated to being out in the wilderness, with the necessary exception of Eurovision. Saturday, we took an U-Bahn, a bus, and a lot of steps up to the Kirche Am Steinhof, a church built by Jugendstil genius Otto Wagner (Jugendstil being the German name for the super-decorative, turn-of-the-century stuff that Mucha, Klimt, et al did - Art Nouveau in French - basically it's really, really pretty and I love it) on the grounds of a sanatorium. And the church was certainly worth the trek, though it was 6 Euros to go in, so we settled for walking around the exterior and then took off a random path that, in the end, led to a vista of the surrounding hills. And that's what's important, that's what I always forget - take a path, just a little dirt lane where no one's looking, and you'll end up in a field of wheat-weeds that reach to your waist, with the foothills of the Alps in front of you. Incredible, really, and so much better than a photograph or a description, because, like the meadow I found in Schwaebs oh-so-long-ago, so much of the moment was in the actual moment, the actual turning around and seeing, emerging from the trees into the great wide open. Ride the 41 to the end of the line on a whim and you'll find Narnia. Take the long walk around the Ring Strasse and you can wash your feet in the fountain in front of the Russian Soldier's Memorial. And even when nothing really happens - you don't find any actual wild boars at the Lanzier Zoo, even though you walk a few miles and lounge on a hillside overlooking the city, again in the thick of the trees - things still happen, because we didn't see any boars, didn't find anything more exotic than bilingual children being yelled at in both German and English for leaving their shoes in the grass ("Martin, we're leaving. You can stay here, but at night the animals come out and they are very hungry. Now where are your shoes?"), but the sheer happy exhaustion of being Out and About made our meager dinner of whatever we had left in our cupboards taste so much better.

If you asked me how it was going, I can finally answer beyond the usual, "Oh, it's going." Because it's going, and it's going quickly, but it's going pretty good. More importantly, I'm going - eventually home, but that's an eventually I'm not counting towards anymore. And that's what's good with me. What's good with you?

into the blue again.

Preface: Sorry about the length. I suggest getting some coffee or something, because you can do that in America! Drink cheap, crappy coffee all day long! It's glorious!

Time does funny things in Europe. Yesterday, I tried to update this thing, and ended up with a paragraph trying to rationalize my very third-graderly, first-time-at-sleepaway-camp feeling of plain ole Homesickness, because that's what it is, and it's raging right now, as constant as a cold, and I can't really explain it or excuse it. I'm trying my best to keep it at bay, but there's no real remedy, and it does creep up on me and keep me quiet - that, or I've run out of things to say after nearly five months abroad. Yet another reason to look forward to being back, where I can start stories with, "Well in Vienna" rather than "Back in Tulsa/Hamilton/America in General." I'm flying home a week earlier than anticipated, though, thanks to some finagling with STA Travel and my father - originally, I'd booked my flight for the 8th of July, naively thinking I'd be smitten with being broke and bored and exhausted all the time and want a week extra to travel, and I'd landed on a decision for where to spend that week, which, as time went on, was becoming more and more daunting and dreadful to me. Hamburg, Germany, though - where I could speak the language, see My Morning Jacket, go to the North Sea in the daylight, and get back to Frankfurt easily for my flight out - and then my father, after I told him the idea, innocently asked, "What about coming home?"

What followed was one of the most awful experiences I've had here: literally ransacking my desk to find my flight information (I should take a picture, the collection I have here on my desk is pretty incredible - dried flowers, either picked or purchased, books and letters and doodles, Polaroids I never pinned to the wall, the stray Euro cent), drafting nervous emails and waiting for the response, running back and forth to the kitchen for a dozen cigarettes and not seeing anything but the interior of Delores, my 92 Oldsmobile, the green walls of my room, the view down Erie Avenue - literally blinded with the hope of home, equally ashamed that I was so gung-ho to get the hell out of here, as if this were Nam and not, well, Vienna. And, initially, the answer was it's impossible, but I did some digging and felt pretty low for a few days, until my dad writes me, "Hey, Spud, success. See you on the first."

So, in short, I'll probably be able to re-emerge from the womb of my home by Independence Day. Someone arrange a crazy party and we'll get drunk and set off fireworks on somebody else's property.

In the meantime, we've had tests. Stupid, impossible tests, about Austrian History, and rather than pay attention in class, I drew comics or remembered the last time I heard the name "Metternich" and "The Congress of Vienna," which was back in Mr. Wheelah's room at BTDub, and then I'd think about how good a roll from the Booker T cafeteria sounded right about now - basically, I was completely unprepared, and felt pretty shitty afterwards. But, again, my father, the Voice of All Reason and Wisdom and Dadliness, emailed me to say, "Chin up, sport. Go out and take a walk. Eat some struesel."

Which was adorable because there's no such thing as 'streusel.'

And, as a disclaimer, my mom is also awesome but she does not understand The Internet and when she emails me IT IS IN ALL CAPS AND HAS SUBJECT LINES LIKE "JUST WANTED TO SAY HI!" AND THEN I FEEL LIKE SHE IS SHOUTING AT ME EVEN THOUGH SHE IS NOT ALSO HER SYNTAX IS A LOT LIKE THIS.

So I did as Pops prescribed: Took a walk. I enjoy walk-taking. So does Penny. This is why we are best friends. Actually, I started off with some coffee and scribbling and just got so damn down that the walk was accidental, a desperate idea of going anywhere solely for the sake of going. But it turned out to be the best thing I could've done. The Guertel follows the outer ring of the city, where the U6 line runs aboveground, easily demarcated by this giant brick wall with all these nice arches and shady lanes on either side - it's hard to describe. But I got turned around, which is rare for me because I've got a compass in my head (probably from growing up in a city where streets either run N-S or E-W) and just kept walking, breaking in the 5 Euro sandals Rob and I found in some cozy, Turkish-run courtyard flea market right off of Mariahilferstrasse, the shopping, neon-lit, consumer-crazy street of Vienna (where, incidentally, we saw Iron Man on Friday and it was a lot more awesome than it should have been - robots! I love robots!). Along the Guertel actually feels like a neighborhood; it's easy to forget there's such busy-ness as Mariahilferstrasse just a Strassenbahn ride away - and it reminded me of walking around Hyde Park in Chicago, exactly a year ago.

So I saw some trees down a street and literally ran into a gigantic park. Vienna, for all of my complaints, knows parks, and I like parks. So does Penny. This is probably why we are best friends. But Penny is in America, and Austrian dogs are insanely obedient, so the dog-runs in Vienna are about three times the size of American ones and the dogs usually clamber all over each other while the owners just stand there, unless the dog is a very old golden retriever, in which case the dog will wander over to where I am sitting and let me pet it for a quarter of an hour. And then some other dogs will decide that underneath my bench is the best place for their love-making. So then I was sitting there, petting one nice dog, while two others dry-humped beneath me. STUDY ABROAD WHOOOOO.

But then! The quest continued! Past the Vienna ICE BAR (it exists! capes! ice! bar!), and then I boarded the 41 Line to ride it to the end, and basically found Narnia. If you're looking for Narnia, and aren't we all, it's at the end of the 41 Strassenbahn line, in Poetzleindorf, where there are random, eerie statues in the trees, where there are deer running through the woods or in the fields of wheat-grass, and if you go at dusk, it's silent save for crickets and the occasional owl. Beyond beautiful, and so quiet and nice and that's all I could think as I walked around: I found Narnia, and why are there so many mosquitoes in Narnia.

And, to add adventure to more adventure, last night was Vienna's annual Life Ball, this huge, gay-tastic celebration to raise AIDS awareness, and basically the ragingest, craziest, themeiest party in all of Central Europe. The theme this year was "Landing on Planet Life Ball," so here are all these nutty Austrians spray-painted silver wearing antennae, in addition to an elaborate fashion show where aliens danced with ballerinas, some silver cowboy rapped in German, midgets on motorcycles, lots of models wearing very little, psychedelic unitards and dancers pretending to be on acid, pirates and pole-dancers. I'm not making this up - it was insane, though the crowd was too thick to be anywhere near the action, so we watched the show from the jumbo TV set up in front of the actual happenings - but, if you count that as "seeing live," which I do, I also saw the following list of celebrities: Alan Cumming, Kim Catrall (she spoke German!), Naomi Campbell, a very bizarre Sharon Stone (possibly a robot?), AND DEBBIE HARRY. And a lot of drag queens.

Plus tonight we're cooking Breakfast for Dinner!!!! Okay the end.

in the making.

Two posts in two days may seem excessive, but it's been a Weekend of Note and due to the arbitrary holiday, it's not over yet, though, to be honest, I'm straining a little to maintain the Everything Will Be All Right attitude considering El Roomie just walked in and I forgot to buy toilet paper for the bathroom. Ick. I stole a roll of TP from a cafe, but I had to leave it at another dorm, because, for once in our lives, we were Going Out and who Goes Out with a roll of stolen toilet paper in her purse? That's what you don't learn from Preparing For Your Study Abroad Experience pre-meetings and waivers and informational brochures - you will more than likely steal toilet paper from a cafe up the street because you are a broke American (in more ways than one) and it'll probably be awkward to live in your room, especially if your laundry is literally exploding out of your wardrobe and your desk is a collage of empty Coke bottles, train tickets from months ago, mate-less earrings and contact cases. Dear Reader, consider yourself informed, I guess.

So Going Out is good, and I've missed it, though I never much was one for it, unless it involved an elaborate theme, free beer, and facepaint to dance and/or stand awkwardly around in a dark, graffitti-covered, and probably structurally unsound basement. Some of my home-slices took advantage of the long weekend and headed for those Alps we have in Austria, and I stayed back, due to a perpetually empty bank account and some lingering childhood bias against Mountains (when we went for the umpteenth time for the Rockies, some part of me was always wishing we were off to see the sea - and I would still take water over rocks any day). So the weekend was wide open, and prime time for experiencing the jumpier side of Viennese nightlife - not that my friends and I are complete recluses, though I've spent practically days at my computer chicken-pecking away at hopeful, too-long story drafts, but when we go out, we end up in a smoky cafe near Stephansdom, or down in a cellar brewery where men in suspenders play The Third Man theme on the accordion, and that's great, but where do the twenty-somethings go to dance about and get sweaty? I had no idea, but some kid on our program did, and fortunately extended an invite last night to me and Suzanne, so, following my fourth viewing of The Third Man since I've been here and an immaculate dinner cooked by Suzanne, we got ourselves done-up and pre-gamed with someone else's vodka. Sure, we were overdressed, and sure, we were in mixed and pretty bizarre company, but the Young And Stupid Girl in me Who Only Wants To Get Drunk and Dance was pretty amped to just be Out, with new people, at some cramped club on the banks of the Danube Canal, where if you sat at a picnic table long enough someone would come by asking, "Grass? Cocaine? Only 5 Euros."

And music - another simple thing no one warns you that you'll miss. How many games of Kings did we play listening to Girl Talk or Velvet Underground? How many gallons of gas did I waste, driving around Tulsa aimlessly with the windows down and some indie mix CD in the player, unlabeled but named? How many hours have I spent in the basement studio of WHCL, blasting choice tunes to a grand total of 3 listeners, if I was lucky? We're sitting outside, smoking cigarettes or cigarettes emptied of their tobacco and stuffed with some headier wares (I passed, though, yet again, everybody just wants to get me high), and all of a sudden, from inside where some Austrians are awkwardly dancing around like they're in someone's apartment and not a public club, in plain view of hundreds of people - Beirut. Spoon's "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb," the DANCING ANTHEM of this semester. Interpol. Oh, did my little indie heart soar, even if it was the lone indie heart at the table.

But really, the highlight of the night, and the highlight of the entire weekend, maybe of the entire time in Vienna, was the silent, lengthy hike back from the bar. I was tipsy enough to walk across nearly the entirety of the city - and you haven't seen Vienna until you've seen it at 3:30 a.m. on a Sunday, the buildings dark, the streets empty, a ghost town, everything huge and vast and so silent. I gave the handful of change in my pocket to a haggard-looking guy I passed by the Hofburg palace, but, aside from him, I was completely alone. Stephansplatz, where hundreds of Italian tourists are usually chattering and eating gelato, completely deserted, the cathedral shooting up into the sky - and the silence inside, unfathomable. The Spanish Riding School, where guys dressed like Mozart are usually conning you into buying concert tickets, utterly empty. Heldenplatz in front of the Hofburg palace, where there are concerts and rallies and demonstrations, where Hitler once spoke, as dark as if no one had ever been there. The epic, imperial architecture of Vienna is pretty awesome in the middle of the afternoon, but in the middle of the night, as the sky's just getting light and the birds are starting to chirp - incredible.
And I have to admit, it felt pretty awesome to come back to an empty room at 4:30 in the morning, the room just starting to get light - reminded me of a lot of other all-night adventures, drug-induced or paper-caused or otherwise.

So I woke up at 2 p.m. today, which was fine, and have spent the entire day reading Bradbury, feeling as lost as an astronaut and relating far too much to stories about rockets and aliens (Mars and Vienna might as well be the same to me), and being interrupted twice by two entirely different conversations started by two remarkably similar men. First, I'm just sitting against a tree, enjoying the slight hangover I have, when some guy just walks over, crouches down, and asks me how I am, what's my name, stuff I wasn't going to volunteer until I finally had to get up and walk away - I don't know what he wanted, but I just wanted to be left alone, and the whole thing disturbed me. It's not uncommon for passing men, usually African (I don't know why, that's just how it is), to just shout stuff at you - nothing derogatory, just a "Hello beautiful" or "Wie geht's", but it's pretty annoying - but this was the first time someone approached me and where I had to leave my cozy tree spot for another. Within fifteen minutes, though, another guy comes over to me, and, as if he knew what had happened, demonstrated how to actually converse with a strange girl. He asked if I had a lighter, which I did, and then simply said, "Wienerin?" meaning, are you Viennese? And I said no. "Neither am I," he said, in German - which was pretty apparent, given that he was black and Vienna is as about as white as cottage cheese. "I've lived in Germany for many years, but I'm only in Vienna for a semester. I'm a student. And you?" "The same," I said, again in German. "Just here for the semester." "It's practically a summer's day," he said, and then, cigarette lit, bicycle beside him, bid me have a nice day and left.

So then I went and goofed around on the baby grand piano in the Central Abroad office. Not bad, for a Monday.

happenings as of late.

Just to answer the obvious question, inherent in all Study Abroad blogs: what the hell have you been up to?

Well, babies, it's been a stretch of days with ups and downs, mainly on escalators, and ins and outs, mainly going into coffee shops and supermarkets and classrooms. Much has not been notable, and that's due to life becoming Life-like again, by which I mean, this is all very ordinary now, and I'm looking forward to The Return (as of now, one month and twenty-odd days) solely for the feeling of New again, the wonders of the Taken For Granted: Quiktrip. Riverside. Bueno. Penny. All those things that make Oklahoma so very strangely great. And I've been looking forward to the Going Back since I got here, and if there's anyone out there wanting to shake some of the proverbial sense into me, thinking "GOOD LORD RACHEL YOU ARE IN EUROPE EVERYTHING SHOULD BE MIND-BOGGLING AND AMAZING QUIT WHINING," you have to understand the circumstances. I was in Tulsa for two weeks before I left, knowing I'd be back for a week before leaving again, making my total time at Home in 2008 something like a month, at a time when Home is a very liminal, fleeting thing (by this time next year, I'll - fingers crossed - be preparing for my graduation, apartment-hunting in whatever town I end up in, sending forms to Yon Graduate School, whichever one it may be). When last semester ended, Hamilton had become a Hamilton I didn't want to stay at but not one I wanted to leave either, knowing my crew would be back and only lacking me - there's a handful of friends I haven't seen since May 2007, with their own Study Abroad experiences already over. I have no money, and too much time, and the way things are now has leveled into some form of okay-ness.

They're not reading this because I haven't shared the link (for reasons of I like to write about smoking), but I want everyone to know that my folks are awesome. My whole ridiculous family is awesome, otherwise I wouldn't get drunk with my friends here and babble on for half an hour about the strange phrases we Richardsons use, the dichotomy between me sitting in Europe right now using words like 'dichotomy' and my infinite number of knocked-up, Army-enrolled, meth-addicted cousins (it's a very mixed batch), what October in Arkansas feels like and seeing the shack my father grew up in - literally a shack, in the middle of the woods, that housed a dozen family members at any given time. Tomorrow's Mother's Day, and I'm actually looking forward to calling home. I called my dad the other day, feeling lonely and out-of-sorts, and he imparted some very Dadly wisdom when I apologized that they were spending all this money for me to be here and it wasn't life-altering, moment-to-moment excitement, not the kind of thing I'd come back and say "Wee Underclassmen, you absolutely must go abroad, it'll change your life." My dad simply said, "That's all right. 6 months is a long time. You can have bad days, and if you tell yourself you're supposed to be having the Best Time of Your Life then of course you won't. Besides, you've been to Norway. You can say that now."

And then I thought, "Well, hell. I have been to Norway. That's pretty fucking awesome." And that is just a fact.

There were other instances that added some weight to the perpetual scale of How Is Rachel Today (because, looking back through the past few posts of this blog - and as an aside, what does one do with a Study Abroad blog when the Studying Abroad is over? - this really has been as much about me as it has been Vienna, which I can't really help, but it'd be untruthful somehow to start every sentence with "Today I saw this" - if you're after Viennese History, I recommend Wikipedia). I found out, after a more-grueling-than-it-should-have-been wait, that the stories I submitted for the annual Hamilton prizes did win, which means I get a nice coupon for my tuition, which makes my parents like me. I'm editor-in-chief of the lit mag next year, and still part of WHCL. I told my Viennese peers in one of my literature classes all about kudzu. I left a bakery without getting my change, making my Ciabatta Proscuitto five times as expensive as it should've been (to be fair those sandwiches are BEYOND delicious). My "boss" at my internship told the director of my program we were having "communication issues" when I thought everything was going fine. It rained a whole lot. I got drunk and remembered how stupid I am when I drink that much. I likened my experiences in Vienna with another kid on the program's and felt like I was doing everything wrong. I missed Class and Charter Day, but I received some touching emails from various points of the world that made me feel worthwhile. I started a story, pitched it, and started again. Pretty standard stuff; if you charted it, it would look a lot like a heart monitor (apparently called an electrocardiogram?) but that's better than a flat-line, or at least makes for more interesting blog posts.

But to answer the question, here is what I did: explored the expansion of the U2 line which opened today because of the blasted Eurowelt Soccer Championship that's going to make Vienna a madhouse in a few weeks. Wandered through a new park at twilight after having some pricey Sachertorte at the Mozart Cafe, and gawked at the giant, hideous, Nazi-built bunker towers that were built to withstand the Apocalypse and look appropriately apocalyptic. Went to the Rathaus for a free classical concert, mixing Culture and Beer, and saw the Vienna Boy's Choir. Saw 2/3rds of Sigfried, the massive Wagner opera, at THE Operahouse in Vienna, which was grand and great except we were standing up and couldn't endure the whole 5 hour show. Drank White Russians in a dorm kitchen and felt like I was at college again. Sat on the banks of the Donau Kanal and didn't go to class. Took a test entirely in German. Sat on a statue with some beer. Finished my 22nd journal.

And I have goals, small and silly though they may be: to have one infinite, ridiculous night, wade through some fountains without getting yelled at, drink in the open, see some more good shows and explore the outer reaches of the city, hang out with more people on the program, take a boat to Bratislava.

I've had the LCD Soundsystem song in my head for some time now, not only because it's been exactly a year since I listened to it exclusively for the better part of a week, but also because the message is pretty clear - and it's so middle school journal to quote lyrics but they're lyrics for a reason, so don't you judge me! - but it's simply this: it keeps coming, and it keeps coming, and it keeps coming til the day it stops. That's about the sum of it, right there. That, and shaking it like a Polaroid picture.

where is that large automobile?

On the way to the movie tonight, a nice, breezy walk up the street, past the Strassenbahns clattering along and the French Institut with its giant lawn that we want to camp out on, across the street from the two-spired church that's never open, a jaunt away from the U-Bahn hub where you can get cheap, tasty pizza, and a flew blocks up from the Danube, I said to Annie, "This is what's required of our study abroad program--Riding roller coasters. Walking in woods. Lying in parks. Drinking coffee. Drinking beer. Petting mules." And she said, "And never doing any work." And I said, "It's pretty great."

Because that's true. It's May, and if you'd told me two months ago that it would ever even be May, I might not have believed you. Being abroad for six months has its obvious draws and obvious downfalls--it's six months, but then again, that's six solid months--but one of the things I'm grateful for, and I think we're all grateful for, is the springtime. A lot of other programs are finishing up now, kids shuttling back to the U.S., maybe road-tripping to Hamilton for Senior Week, already "seniors," but I'm here until July, and while that means I have yet to do a stitch of actual work and herd of finals wait for me when most every one else I know will be sleeping in and working shitty summer jobs, it also means I have two glorious months of sunshine and warm weather, when simply Being Outside is activity enough.

And yes, it took me four months to find some sort of contentedness, some semblance of balance, stability, adjustment, whatever you want to call it, but it's finally here and I hope it sticks around.

I don't know where I left off, because it feels like a decade since I updated this, but Annie and I have undertaken a quest to visit every Aida in Vienna. This means trekking to the far districts, ones we don't even know about, and drinking a lot of quality coffee served by some middle-aged waitress in pink and brown. Out of the 26, we've accomplished 7 already, and, at this rate, I'll be done by mid-June, just when BRMC comes to town and I rock my face off. We also went on a mission to find the Prater--not the fantastically terrible amusement park side of it, but the giganto park on the other side, which we discovered and which was amazing and where we lay on the grass for a long time sending ESP messages to all the leashless dogs running around to come be our friends (AND IT WORKED). Think Woodward Park times maybe a million, and if Bell's were tacked onto the side, and then you have the idea. We went back to the Prater last night for the big May Day festival (as for the Hamilton event of the same name - don't get me started. Eve 6? Really? Everyone's just going to wait until that stupid "Blender" song and then leave to go get drunk - plus it's inside, again. Wtf?), which involved a lot of people, a lot of people drinking beer, and a lot of people who had just drank a lot of beer getting on rides. We rode the smaller Ferris Wheel and were midway in the air when the fireworks started going off - and that was something. I was almost glad that my camera was dead, because it's a sight I don't think I could reproduce, and I had to watch it with my own eyes - fireworks erupting over an amusement park in Vienna. Pretty phenomenal.

PLUS we rode a roller coaster called Boomerang, and while I may or may not have received a bruise from being thrown upside down, backwards, and straight down, it was completely worth it. There's something really cathartic about screaming for dear life for about a minute and a half - all your problems and issues pale in comparison to looking directly at the ground from several stories up right before you plunge. Beer was necessary afterwards.

Today, we actually made it out to the Wienerwald, that huge stretch of woods surrounding Vienna, where the vineyards are plenty, the tourists are easily avoided, the views are stunning, and you'll probably get to pet a mule. I mean, I did. It was a bit like the cherry on the sundae, though, after all those gigantic trees, the sheer niceness of the weather - Rob kept describing it like he was Bob Ross painting some landscape on PBS - "Those crickets. And then a crow. Perfect." And that's one thing I really want to do when I get back - walk around more. After going on a long, city-wide amble with Annie on Thursday, I can safely say there are few more satisfying endeavors than just walking around - except maybe driving around. That's pretty awesome, too.

a week for words.

It was a red-letter week in terms of correspondence. On Monday, after sleeping through my Internship, I found an missive in my mailbox from one Mr. Henry Leung, all the way from California, perhaps having flown over China and the mighty Pacific. This of course called for a large cup of coffee at Aida, the retro-tastic chain coffee house with the same color scheme as the bathrooms and kitchen of the house I grew up in on 58th street: Nifty Fifties Pink and Brown. And, I'll admit, as wonderful as the letter itself was, I was just as amped about seeing my name on the envelope, above this crazy foreign address that still makes absolutely no sense to me.

And then, on Tuesday, after a glorious day with the chit'lins and an afternoon of pure unbridled malaise, what should I find but a package from Ariel, containing, as described in her own words: jeans, a letter, a few pieces of candy. And what jeans! Glorious, American, Old Navy Jeans! Without those dratted holes in the attractive inner thigh region (it's called friction, friends. Maybe you have been blessed with regular-sized hips, but I'm an Okie with a pelvis just begging for birth. I can't put it less weirdly than that)! This also called for a large cup of coffee, at another Aida cafe, in the middle of a rainstorm.

And I'm only blogging now because, goddammit, there are words in me and they want to get out somehow. We had some new age "group chat" about our expectations, goals, blah de blah, and I was the only one in the room who didn't list "Improving My German." Because, truthfully, and maybe it's Herr Mosburg's fault from back at Booker T, but German has never inspired me. I joked about it with Rob, saying this German business wasn't one of my priorities, but then, I didn't know what my priorities actually were, which was probably a problem. But he said, "Well, reading and writing are up there, aren't they?" And that's true. Being bilingual would be great, sure, but I haven't got the Itch to learn it, the way I do with writing. And that's what it is - call it passion, call it a rare literary disease, but right now it's like a mosquito bite that I'm sure would probably heal fine if I'd stop nagging at it, and then I could go on and become a happily mediocre Grown Up who sometimes remembered her wild delusions of writerly grandeur (see also: My Father), but I'm young and stupid and full of wild ideas and there are few feelings better than a good scratch when you've really got an itch, metaphorical or physical. Which is probably why Penny is so happy all the time.

Speaking of tiny dogs, it was also a red letter week in terms of them. Annie and I went on a late night dessert hunt following a dinner of waffles (we are very healthy beings) and headed to the Votiv Park Cafe, a little local joint where the lone waiters are an old man and an adolescent boy, where the Sachertorte is handmade, and where there was a tiny dog running around, being typically Austrian and indifferent. So I leaned down and scratched it, and it took a shine to me and hopped up on the seat and stayed there. Exciting stuff, I know, but Dog Withdrawal is one of those things they don't tell you about in all the Culture Shock Bullshit.

And speaking of tiny things, let me give you a profile of some of my favorite citizens of Vienna.

Felix. 9 years old. Looks exactly like he'll grow up and be the lead singer of Frog Eyes. Makes a point of reminding me about his English Great-Uncle every time we interact, but also asked me how to spell my name when we were learning "I like" and "I don't like" so he could announce, "I like Rachel." So great.

Lottie. 8 years old. Actually, she is Rory Pavach from Hammyton. It's downright freaky. Translated the entirety of "Where is Spot?" for my benefit when we read it this week. I learned the word for "turtle" and then they quizzed me on it.

Kid Whose Name I Do Not Know, but he's probably 10 years old. Very impressed by my sneakers. Also asked me if I liked Guns N' Roses.

Kid As Tall As Me Though He Is 10 Years Younger. Actually that is just disturbing to me.

There's more - the tiny Indian boy, the girl who speaks immaculate English already, the Raised By Indie Parents boy with his blazer and bandanna around his neck, the ones with glasses and lisps, pretty much any one who says hello to me in the hallways, and so on and so on. They're pretty great, altogether, though I wish I didn't have to get up at 7 to teach them, because I'm mostly dead by the time noon rolls around.

And that's the news from over here. I'm looking forward to: seeing The Go! Team next week, eating a banana with some Nutella tomorrow, running around in the Springtime weather, deplaning in Oklahoma and waking up at 6 a.m. for a week from jet-lag, having my first legal drink in America, finally perceiving this wealth of time as the rare opportunity it is.

i'll have the weekend, light on epiphanies, please.

It was and it wasn't, to be honest, but I'll make a meek attempt at avoiding existential anguish this time around, head more towards the "WHOO STUDY ABROAD BLOG" post. Something to enjoy while your latest NPR Podcast downloads - speaking of which, I'm addicted. Nothing like a nice hour of This American Life while I'm riding through the hills of Bohemia on a bus, highlighting Jerry Springer's former political career and the evolution of Appalachian nuns. Really. Dude, I do go to a liberal arts college, and that does make me unique and chill. Srsly. But, as for that last pseudo-meltdown, I apologize for going bonkers on the internet - I have a written journal which I'd been neglecting when we last spoke, you being the wide cyber audience, me at my microphone/keyboard, and I just got back from buying a new notebook since I have a mere 30 pages left in the old one (being the Italian Leather one we got for being National Book Foundation campers back in '01, when I was a wee 14 year old).

So! Prague Part Two, then. Our program went on a most-expenses-paid trip to Prague this weekend, which was grand aside from the weather, which was gray and rainy until we left, but did provide some nice sunnage for the 5 hour ride back to Vienna. Last time I was in Prague (and can we all just take a minute like I just did to acknowledge the mere ability to truthfully start sentences with phrases like that, and hopefully not writhe in our seats with jealousy and/or self-loathing), it was all party and people and madness - the city was a terrible, incomprehensible maze of consonants and Czech, and it still was, this time around, but it definitely upped itself a few notches for approachability. I mean - I like Prague. I've decided that. It's a lot more exciting than Vienna - as I said to Rob, Vienna is all 18oos imperial, and Prague is more 1904. I think I lean towards 1904. Feasted our eyes on some Art Nouveau, sampled Czech beer on Central's bill, took in all the sights on a massive tour around the city (which was unbearable solely for the never-ending rain), basically touristed as well as we could, but Prague, unlike Vienna As Far As I Know It, doesn't make you strive towards having a massive night.

For instance: Saturday night, after a good hour and a half lying in our hostel beds drying out from the rain, we headed to a restaurant for a feast, since we weren't footing the bill. It may seem childish to order Beef Tartar as an appetizer solely because it's the most expensive option, but when it's not your wallet doing the work, and when it's being paid for by the same people who didn't tell you any of the things you actually needed to know about living in Europe (such as the need for an Austrian bank account to do laundry in an actual washing machine - I'm getting pretty good at old-fashioned sink laundry, doo-rag and all), a "free meal" means soup beforehand, schnitzel for dinner, strudel for dessert, beer to wash it down and coffee afterwards. We were pretty much dead with sheer calorie intake by the end of it, but man - I have not eaten that well since The Diner. So we go out to take the Czech streets, knowing the exchange rate is for once on our side, and we literally stumble into the main square, with those Gothic towers and that Astronomical Clock and all that. Our chosen bar turns out to be the best idea ever, since there's a live band playing 1920s standards - clarinet, standing bass, a drum kit with only a snare and a cymbal, trombone, trumpet, and banjo - and I proceed to order a Bloody Mary and pretend we're the Lost Generation. Awesome.

On the way back to our hostel, liberally liquored after a Pina Colada (which was a Lotta Colada, really), Prague proves itself to be as surreal as ever. First, a black man in a pirate outfit, just chilling outside. Then, some people shouting in English: "YOU HAVE SEX AT HOME?!" "You're so loud." "I'M SHORT!" "That's why." Also, though I wasn't there to here it: "Fuck you, you logical being!" Lastly, three guys in head-covering Mickey Mouse masks, looking sinister and bizarre. All this in addition to the drag queen wielding a dildo we saw the night before. When we make it back to the hostel, the madness continues - two British dudes, drunk off their skulls and searching for a lighter, which, of course, I had. So I gave one of them a light, tried to get rid of him, only to have his friend come barging into the room - fortunately not my room, but room of other Central kids - and it was awkward and disturbing until I re-learned what I'd discovered in Oslo - British people are awesome. So, for the next hour and a half or more, wasted British fellow babbles with us, having as weird of a night as we are. Truthfully, I was tickled because he called me "quick" and "clever" which are things that I take for granted at Hamilton since Hamilton itself is supposed to be proof of such attributes - but a compliment's a compliment, and it was nice. The next morning we saw him and his band of British mates leaving the hostel in full Smurf attire, blue paint and all. A better ending I could not have invented.

I bought myself a cigarette case, because if I'm going to keep up this retarded habit, I might as well look classy doing it, and I was playing with it all the way back to Vienna, listening to Beirut (of course) as Bohemia rolled by. It was a nice weekend, really, and though a phone call to my family killed my buzz a bit afterwards, I went to bed at peace.

And that is the news for now, darlings. Back to wasting time and washing my socks in the sink.

writers writing about what they write about when they write.

oh you wouldn’t want an angel watching over /surprise, surprise they wouldn’t wannna watch / another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults. - The National, "Mistaken for Strangers"

it's been a long time since i've felt Just Happy but i do now. i think that simple happiness is something that has tended to elude the both of us, but right now i don't feel bored or itchy or important or anything. it's a relief. - my best friend from high school, message to me, April 8th.

I'll tell you the tangible parts of this first, in hopes of making some semblance of sense. I had a good weekend; an indulgent, over-priced dinner at the lone T.G.I. Friday's in Vienna, solely for the nostalgia of good old American Restaurantism, hallucinating that we were actually on 41st and Yale, that I could walk out to my Oldsmobile and drive the three miles home with my iPod roaring and Marlboro smoke drifting out the window. Annie and I partook of the unspeakably awesome Natural History Museum, a steal at 3.50 Euros, with dinosaur bones and epic architecture and 100 year old taxidermied animals, including a walrus, and let me tell you, walruses are really fucking big. Drinks on Thursday and Saturday, little smoky cafes where we talked about death and our siblings and god knows what else. Saw The Third Man today, after taking the tour on Friday, seeing all the locations where they filmed. And then I came home, digging around online and uncovering a wealth of "publisher's blogs," detailing the perils of the business of books, the boring work-world of words, and felt shattering doubt come storming through the window like a crazy, malicious wind.

Because, really, what am I doing. What the hell do I think I'm doing.

Do you know about my State project? Well, let me tell you. It's the dumbest idea I've ever had, up there with novel-length Harry Potter fanfiction, with running three campus organizations at one time, with that time I tried to do Atkin's and nearly crashed my car driving home from Booker T due to lack of blood sugar. The gist is this: 50 pieces of sudden fiction, truncated stories no longer than 4-5 pages, one per state, ala Sufjan Stevens (I know, I'm a hack). Yesterday I finished California, and, after recycling a pair of exercises from workshops past, I've nudged this little monster of mine to 17 pieces, clocking in at 55 pages, 1.5 spaced, 12 pt. font. Fascinating stuff, I know, but this bastard of mine is the first real "project" I've ever undertaken - something with a set beginning and end, something that lets me read Wikipedia all day and push myself to experiment, something that makes me feel like I'm doing something real and actual and worthwhile. I received a 2.5 grand school-funded grant to go on a road-trip across the American West this summer with another Hamilton student, to hypothetically help me finish this thing. It's going to be my thesis, when that time comes. And it's ridiculous.

And I feel the nightmares coming on, feel everything my best friend is telling me not to feel - itchy, bored, and important - so I dive into the bathroom for a hopefully chemically-soothing cigarette, looking out the window at the building across the street. Most of the time, the building's windows are dark, but every now and again I get a peek in someone's nursery or living room. Tonight, the library was lit up - a room of shelves, all those volumes, and all I want, all I think I want, is one of them to have my name on it, to sit collecting dust somewhere. If I'm lucky, someone will underline some phrases I wrote, dog-ear a few pages, scribble a note in the margins. And this is the same kind of panic, happy at times with the sheer hugeness of my hopes, impossible with the enormity of possibilities, that makes my palms sweaty when I go to Gardner's Used Bookstore in Tulsa, when I went to Strand in New York - all those books. All these people. It just starts a string of questions I can't finish: What? Why? How?

But tonight, I'm wearing my Feel Better Sweater, and I'm smoking, when I hear the most tremendous sneeze that echoes all down the street - this is sneezing at the level of my Dad, an explosion of allergies, epic and cranium-shaking. And I poke my head out of the window and look down at the sidewalk 4 floors below, but there's just a leashless dog and his hip chick of an owner. And then I look up, and there's a man standing on the balcony of the top floor of the building across the street, and he waves, and I wave, and then he sneezes again and goes inside.

So I just started laughing.

I sometimes think that my sense of humor might be the only thing rallying me through the days when I sleep too long, the afternoons when I'm glued to the computer, the nights spent alone. So I have that to be grateful for - and being away from Campus Bureaucracy, away from Tulsa Claustrophobia. It just swings so much. But the saying goes: This too shall pass, which I've always liked, because it means Hold Your Breath and Savor It, or Don't Worry, Tomorrow Is On Its Way Already.

But this is what I do when I ought to be reading things in German. So much for bilingualism, no?

EDIT:
Much better now, courtesy of a Nutella-and-banana sandwich and a day spent with the little 'uns at the Vienna school, in the lovely 18th district where there are sidewalks and trees and it feels like a neighborhood (my district just feels like a district). I made up 3 new verses to Head Shoulder Knees and Toes, and while some of the kids make me want to yelp and run away, it just makes the nicer ones all the much nicer. After Crazy Class - 30 something 2nd graders, a screaming teacher, one of those mandatory I'm-going-to-whine-like-a-dog-until-you-call-on-me-students - I have Nice Quiet class, where there was a birthday today, so all the children sat around the cake and said their wishes for tiny Paul, who looked about 7 though he was turning 10. Then they cut up the cake, and I was just wandering around the classroom, trying to stay out of the way, learning new words in German, when there's a tiny tug on my shirt hem and tiny Paul is asking me if I'd like a piece of cake. It was about the most adorable thing in the world.

So I'm not nuts, not yet, at least. Registered for my Senior Year classes and it's going to be baller - Lit Theory, PRISON WRITING (with Doran Larson OH SWOON), Murder Madness and Mayhem Russian Literature, and an independent study. Also got my housing in order and I'm in a suite, thank god. And, finally, I'm doing my laundry at someone else's dorm because this is getting a little gross (BUT KARLI AND ARIEL ARE SENDING ME OLD NAVY JEANS AND THAT IS WHAT I CALL TRUE BLUE.) The end.

nobody's reading this but then again it is spring.

Or: What A Little Booze and Sunshine Can Do.

Also or: A New List of Addictions.

As of today, Friday, April 11, exactly three months and 11 days since I landed in Frankfurt and exactly 2 months and 20-odd days before I return to Patriotic Soil, I am addicted to the following (in addition to cigarettes but I'm not going to list those unless I already did whoops):

Crackers: I'm on what I like to call The Cracker Diet. Crackers are cheap. Crackers do not go bad, at least not as dramatically as bread does. Crackers are also delicious with just about anything, such as cheese, honey, and more cheese. Also, cheese. I have apertifs for dinner. I'd like to amend my earlier statement about the Horrors of Dining Alone by adding that this experience is only dreadful when in the greater social context of A Restaurant. When it's in a Kitchen with Food You Prepared Yourself Even If It's Only Crackers and Cheese Again Because You Are Pretending to Be An Adult Now, it's glorious.

Doodling: Yes I could be paying attention and learning some German but I would much rather draw tiny caricatures of myself dressed like Robin and horribly drunk. I'm getting fairly good at it, too.

SUNSHINE AND NICE WEATHER: Makes a load of difference. This is Minor-Field, beer in the afternoon, laze away outside weather, when lying on some grass is an activity that can occupy most of the day. It's great. In fact, that's where I'm going now, before we reconvene for THE THIRD MAN TOUR which is going to actually explode my mind.

bad nights and good days.

Subtitled: A Weekend Worth Writing About.

My lone class was canceled on Friday, which gave me ample time to have what Annie probably rightly diagnosed as a complete and total blood sugar crash, wherein I, after sitting at my computer for far too long looking at such worthwhile sites as Where The Hell is Matt (and not the Kanye Grammy performance which if you have not seen MUST BE CHECKED OUT), have a smoke and then realize I'm about to fall over and am sweating and what feels a lot like dying. So then I ate something and realized my Just Don't Eat for Long Stretches Because It Is Expensive and I Am Broke and Overweight Anyway strategy was pretty fucking stupid.

But then! I met up with Pat Hodgens, a fellow Hamiltonian en route from his program in somewhere near London to a week-long farm stay in little town Austria, and we had coffee at this divey little coffeeshop that you would never suspect is completely awesome. I went there the first time on Wednesday night, when the tables were cramped and the waiters overworked - we asked if we could see a menu, and the tuxedo'd man just shouted "THERE IS NONE." But we also got secret Buechteln donut-cakes and pretended we were not lost Americans. Connie, one of Annie's visiting compadres, led us there before she departed for India - which just reinforced my loserly idea that everyone is having grander adventures than I am, which was, in turn, why it was so nice to see Pat, who is suffering the same Study Abroad Malaise and Confusion that I am. What are we supposed to be doing here, exactly? Aren't our lives supposed to be changing on a daily basis, and shouldn't we be having perspective-warping epiphanies when walking down the street? Why do we spend so much time missing our dogs, cheap beer, and readily-edible snacks? Other than being fantastic company for an afternoon, it was awesome to see Pat solely as consolation, because try as we might, not every single moment is going to be world-imploding. And maybe that's the realization we'll all end up having.

After a dinner of Doeners, Annie and I saw Juno, a nice little film and infinitely nicer when I wasn't seeing it by myself in Oslo and with a plastic cup of beer more fitting for a baseball game than a movie. Snagged some fancy ice cream and called it a night, due to sleepiness more than anything, and I was snuggled up in bed dreaming away when my roommate barged in at who knows what hour - not unusual, really, but this time she wasn't exactly alone. And though I might sleep through tornadoes at home, I was unhappily unable to drown out the noises of the hanky-panky going on in the bed on the other side of my room. Freshmen, take heed: do not have sex in the room when you're roommate is "asleep." Unless your roommate is actually, certifiably dead, as in not amongst the living, has perished, is a corpse, she will certainly, definitely hear you, no matter how quiet you're trying to be. It sucked. It really, really sucked. And I have not seen my roommate - or rather, heard my roommate - since, as she has disappeared for a day now.

But, on the plus side, so as not to deal with awkward morning encounters, I ran from the dorm on Saturday morning (after, of course, slyly scoping out and consequently judging this random dude - for some reason it would've been one thing had he been some dashing Austrian prince, but he was pudgy and had a neck tattoo and I was more than happy to never see him again) and stayed out as long as possible. Went to a nearby cafe and wrote for a while (my friends have taken to calling it "Pulling A Rachel" - I remember the same phrase had a completely different definition once, namely leaving a party without saying bye to anyone), told the awful tale of the night before to Annie, collected the boys and set off for The Third Man Private Collection.

I read an article about how certain areas of the world had a tourist boom following filming there - kids are gung-ho to ride the "real Hogwarts Express," nearly every native in Salzburg hates the Sound of Music - and I initially thought "HOW RIDICULOUS" until I remembered I came to Vienna because of a movie. I think I've seen The Third Man at least a dozen times since that fateful first viewing in Intro Film class Freshman year, and I'm going to go see it again as soon as I can (there's a theater here that plays it twice a week, year-round). I'm obsessed with Orson Welles and have his picture in my wallet (where a real photo of a real boyfriend ought to be). So, yes, I did kind of explode while we were at the Collection - we got to watch a scene from one of the original film strips, played through a 1936 projector, in addition to the approximately one million posters of the film, bios on all the actors, a room devoted to Post WWII Vienna to give a better context for the film, and souvenirs including a mug that reveals Harry Lime's face when you pour something hot into it (I didn't buy one, but I might). So awesome. If you haven't seen it yet, you really, really should, or better yet, you should wait until I'm available and we can watch my trusty copy together. That goes for everyone.

Satiated, we nabbed a bite to eat at the Naschmarkt and headed for the Reisenrad, the gigantic ferris wheel of Third Man fame, where Harry and Holly meet in the scene that made me fall in love with Young Orson Welles forever. I've been on the Reisenrad once before, in 2006 when Matthew and I ran around Vienna for one exhausting weekend, but it's still awesome - you can see all of Vienna from the windows, though we spent most of the ride shopping for rides in the surrounding Prater amusement park. Again, I have to go back with the script in hand, so I can threaten to kill my former best friend and say "old man" a lot and then deliver that kicker of a line about the Renaissance and cuckoo clocks (SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS HAVE TO WATCH THIS MOVIE). Instead, we rode some rides - my first 'dizzy mouse' roller coaster, next door to the Super 8 Bahn which was probably not as frightening as all my screaming made it seem, and then a gigantic spinning swing thing that lets you see pretty much all of Europe with naught but a bar between you and the rest of the world. Unfortunately, we were weeping by the end of it, not with emotion but merely with wind, because it's really damned windy on the top of the world. Annie, because she is batshit crazy, rode some horrible spin-you-in-all-directions-including-upside-down-while-strobe-lights-and-German-techno-are-playing
ride called EXTAZY - reminded me of The Himalaya at Bell's, solely for the awful air-brushed murals all around it. R.I.P., Bell's Amusement Park. I don't know what the hell Tulsa was thinking.

So amusement parks are great, and so is beer, because we had some sushi for dinner and actually found a bar, for once, under the U6 Line, where we talked about outer space for the better part of an hour and then managed to return ourselves home via Night Transportation. I was tipsy enough to run into the flower-beds of City Hall and snag a daffodill, because even though my jacket has multiple phony pockets, it does have ample space for a faux boutonnière. I had to spell-check that one, just for the record.

I think I'm watching The Godfather tonight with fellow dormitory-mates, and tomorrow I've got to teach English to small children. Indeed!