I feel pretty shit. Not like feelings-shit, but sick-shit. I'm hoping it's just a girl thing and will be over when other girl things are over in a couple of days. As a result after work I did my usual cleaning and then stayed in bed with Infinite Jest and napped, which is actually quite pleasant. Being lazy is so much nicer when my head feels all fuzzy and my abdomen hurts.

I will never understand why the students don't know what cereal is. I buy cereal every week. It says cereal on the box. I pick from a selection of cereals. This is very perplexing.

I don't think anyone else has made me cry as much as this person and they don't even know it. This probably isn't true. There are probably many other people who have made me cry more. I sit around and wonder why I come up as so insufficient and the only answer I can come up with is distance, but this doesn't seem like enough of an excuse. I might need to actually remove this person from my life entirely. Not like I have before, entirely entirely.

Vienna was good.

Now I'm back in Freistadt and everything feels anti-climatic.

The noise in my head is high pitched and whiny and sort of absurd if you aren't me. 

Why do I have to go to Vienna? Why is Vienna three hours away? 6:00am is too early to get up. I'm going to have to meet so many people. What if they don't like me? My face looks bad. What if I can't find where I'm staying? I want to stay in bed drinking tea and reading David Foster Wallace. Whine whine whine. 

I am turning into an agoraphobic. But only because I travel somewhere every weekend. I'm tired.

Vienna until Sunday.

I'm gonna go home and make dinner and watch Gilmore Girls and pretend I am Rory Gilmore.

Blair: My goal for Prague is to not remember anything.

I'm really excited to go to Prague with Blair in April.

I read an article with a student today that claimed that part of the reason little girls like to wear princess dresses is to claim their identity as female. It occurred to me that this is still what I'm doing. I am trying to form an identity. .

Munich

First we drank a 2 liter zombie. I don't know what's in a zombie because I only ever drink them when I am very drunk. 

It took us a long time, but we finally finished. 

The next day I bought a dirndl. 

It made me very happy. So happy I drank 2 and 1/2 liters of beer. 

Then I accidentally took lots of pictures of my boobs while trying to take pictures of my dirndl. 

The end. 

A 2,000 piece puzzle is much harder than a 1,000 piece puzzle. Much more than twice as hard.

Waking up when it's light out is so much better than waking up when it's dark.

I finally told my landlady about the flood in my bathroom (there has been a gathering of water on the floor for at least a month now) and now her Mann is here to fix it, but it bothers me because my privacy has been interrupted which is exactly why I didn't say anything in the first place. I am turning into a hermit. 

I have the same realizations repeatedly, which I guess means they aren't really realizations, but every single time it's shocking and painful. In five or so minutes I will forget these things and continue on in my happy, somewhat oblivious state.

My stomach does not like it when I drink 2 and 1/2 liters of beer. My mouth however, likes to talk a lot and it's all sort of nonsense. My eyes like to cry. Uggghhhh.

Last night:
Drank wine in the hostel.
Rode the train with a really drunk girl crying 'Mamaaaaaa ich weiss nicht maaammaaaaaaa.' The boy she was with assured her that he had indeed called her mother.
Looked around for somewhere to drink. Found a place called 'Erotische Drinks.'
Bought a two liter zombie with lots of giant straws. Pictures coming later.

Today:
Dirndl buying!

I am going to Munich this weekend to buy a dirndl. I will soon have many boyfriends. 

Here's a section of an essay I wrote about flash fiction that I like a lot and usually forget is an essay. Maybe if I post more writing I will write more: 

A.    How to write again

All your future prospects tell you they don’t want you and your boyfriend breaks up with you. When he breaks up with you, you are drunk. Tell him everything you ever wanted to say to him. He wipes off the eyeliner that is dripping down your face and pulls up your dress, which is falling down. You wonder why he is doing this. Why people do nice things to people they don’t care about. He makes the claim, “I really cared about you.” Make him walk you to a friend’s apartment so you don’t have to spend the night alone. Wake up at 6:30 in the morning with the worst hangover you’ve had in months. Walk home. Spend all the other nights alone. Spend the next few weeks thinking about new things that you want to say to him.

B.     How to mourn

Write a lot of stories about people that you cared about. Realize that relationships are like that, those little moments. Try to picture things as a whole and realize that you can’t, that everyone appears in small fragments of things that were said. Consider whether this is because most of your past two relationships were spent drunk. Write about the relationships of your friends. Become surprised to find that they can be summed up almost entirely in a few sentences. Think about life like a dictionary. We are defining things. This is why you don’t like plot: yours always end up open ended. A debate about what, “I really cared about you” means.

C.     How to stick things together

Find a female writer. Realize you find female writer’s much easier to be around because they are attractive in a different way. Write together over coffee. While both of your lives are functioning you write about nature and the state of politics. You both become rattled at the same time and you start writing things about love. She asks you how to cover up a hickey, but you don’t know because you’ve never tried to cover them up before. Sometimes you experiment with plot, but neither of you are sure how to make one. The characters are the two of you, stuck together, and you marvel how it comes out as one of you.  You refer to everything you write as a prose poem. Eventually you give up on the idea of narration. Together you worry about the future where you will continue drinking coffee with other female writers. 

A couple weeks ago (or Tuesday, I can't remember) on the bus I kept thinking to myself:

You think you're really cool don't you, sitting in the back of the bus in Upper Austria in your miniskirt and purple tights, listening to hip hop and riding to see your friends in Linz.

I responded to myself:

Yeah, I actually feel pretty cool right now.

A couple nights ago I was lying in bed thinking about how when I was little I used to play the Little Mermaid and wonder if I would be pretty like Ariel when I grew up.

Spent the entire bus ride home yesterday thinking about how I like riding on buses and trains by myself and how I like myself more when I am traveling.

Then I got tired and hungry and just wanted to be back.

It must feel really bad to be a bear and wake up from hibernation. You would be so hungry and so disoriented. What if all the other bears went to eat without you? This is how I feel pretty much every time I wake up from a nap ever.

I got my kindle.

Ate my first mango of the new year.

Took a long nap.

That was today.

My favorite scene in Underworld so far was the scene with Marian and her lover. All the stuff about bombs and the World Trade Towers and I like the scene in the studio apartment where two people have unhappy sex.

An interesting fact about the morning is that it has no syllables.

Stayed out to sometime between 4-5 in the morning. Very hungover. Want to sleep forever.

I watched a movie about WWII last night and people kept talking about Linz and I kept thinking "I am going there tomorrow."

I miss boys.
We talk and I don't say that I miss you.
I say, "I need to get ready for work. Okay, go do something else. That's fine."
Except I miss you. Let's talk. You can hit on me and I can pretend that I don't like it.

I'm being really cool and sitting in Mcdonald's and drinking tea on a Friday night. At what point do I stop getting self conscious about how much of a social life I have?

The teacher room is filled with teachers and there is nowhere for me to sit and it's really awkward so I'm pretending to be really busy, which is actually me checking Katie's blog, figuring out what my new zodiac sign is, which is really ludacris, because I am totally a pisces and not an aqaurius and now writing this blog post about nothing (but they are all about nothing aren't they?). I think I'm going to try and go for a run today as a lot of the ice has melted. The try part is the fact that I haven't even attempted to run since September. I'm starting to get compulsive and crazy about eating healthy except for the fact that I recently recieved a large package of cookies. I have gotten too adjusted to being by myself all the time. Doing things on the weekend sounds really difficult. I will however attend the 'We are still so fucking rich party' in Linz to celebrate pay day. Hopefully it will be fun.

The Alpha Sigma Alpha wigwam.

I'm in Mcdonald's and cannot stop laughing about this concept. It's sort of embarrassing.

Apparently I've been elusive all week. And I thought people were ignoring me.

I feel much better today. I took a long nap. I worked on my puzzle. I drank tea and ate toffee. Now I am at Mcdo's drinking more tea and lesson planning. 

I keep thinking I have high self-esteem, but I think I’m confusing words. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. I can’t speak German or English (today the guy at the electronics store said my German keeps getting better and I laughed and said no). I don’t really though. I think I’m attractive. I think I can attract people when I want to attract people. I like myself. I like the things I like. But sometimes when I’ve been alone for awhile (like really alone, not single, alone in my apartment or alone on the streets) and I’ve been alone since Saturday in Freistadt, I start thinking a lot and it always turns into lists of people that I want to talk to that I no longer talk to. It turns into an issue of caring. I know that soon I will just go to sleep and I will wake up in the morning and I will be fine and it won’t matter and the why of it almost doesn’t matter anymore and not all of them have been boyfriends or whatever, but all of them are boys, even boys I didn’t like in that manner. I want to sit across the table from someone (I want to say anyone, but there’s a list of people it could be) and just have a conversation. I just start to feel distant and bodiless. I start counting hours. 

I feel awful.

Two things:
I don't think I am going to buy zucchini anymore. I don't really like it.
The Austrian news comes on at 7:20. They may have the metric system, but at least the U.S. has the six o'clock news.

I want to tell you to read Underworld, but I can't. I can't tell you anything at all as that might imply things that are true.

Here is a prose poem I wrote over the summer. 

He said: I want to know where to find you.

            All the people he was really in love with worked in the service industry. Baristas, the girl at the sandwich shop, clothing store cashiers. How many times can a person really go shirt shopping and have it still be innocent? I worked in the wrong places and he could never find me.

            When I go out I like to sit at the bar. This is the same concept: the word bar. Bar, planted in the ground, it holds you rooted though your feet are not touching the ground. There is always a person on the other side. There are people around you and you sip slowly together, slowly ease into conversation. Though these people change, they might as well not, they all drink the same beer, have the same belly. Either are too young or too old.

            One time I rode my bicycle past him and he started screaming, “You’re on a bike! You’re on a bike!” as if I should know better. I didn’t stop though it wouldn’t have been difficult.

            In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy run into each other at all sorts of functions, the best of which being the moors. He said: if only I could go out into the woods and find you there.

            When we definitely were not dating, he told one of his friends that it was a bad idea to hook up with people outside of a relationship. It hurts too badly to lose people. When he told me the story, I asked him where I had gone to. He didn’t understand the question or maybe he just didn’t notice I was there.

            When we were actually definitely not dating I sent him a poem and he said: this is not a place. 

I am organizing my documents. It's like how I like to clean when I feel bad. I am so separate from my writing that I am starting to like some of it again. Maybe I will post something that no one will read, but I am going to pretend everyone is going to read it.

"The more she loved him, the scareder he got."

I want such little things, but wanting anything at all proves to be wholly toxic to any relationship.

Every time I make an impulse buy it ends up being a mango.

I think it's over again. I didn't cry this time. The first time I cried a lot. Everytime after that I cried less and less until August when I cried a lot again. This time I'm not crying, even if it's actually over. It doesn't particularly matter. I will just be slighty more lonely than I was before. I will sit and do my puzzle and listen to music. I will actually put some effort into my appearance because when I do that I like myself more. I am not very needy right now. Conversely this is because I am so wholly needy that my needs have become basic. I don't need boys. I have a puzzle and I am going to Munich either this weekend or next and I get to see my dad in February and these thing are enough.

See the faraway pizza with mussels and squid on it? That was my pizza. Really good. 

Tiramisu and caffe lattes. 

All I did on vacation was eat. 

Beer and pizza forever!!!!!!

I am going to be the third wheel/alone forever because I only want to kiss/have sex with people that I care about and that care about me and no one cares about me and I don't particularly care about anyone. This sucks.

My dad sent me an email telling me that my aunt and uncle are getting divorced. I was sad when I read it, but all the sudden today I got really sad about it. Maybe it's because my head is congested and I can't think straight, but I got angry at adults (real adults, not people in their twenties) for no longer holding up the facade that life can be stable and good and someday I will be past this horrible turmoil of 22.

I went back to Italy after two years of being away. Italy seems to be a place I am continuously returning to though I have so many problems with it. This time I just went to Venice. Venice is distinctly different from other part of Italy in terms of the food they eat and the fact that the whole city goes to bed around 10pm. I understand the appeal of Italy. Every day we woke up and got breakfast (usually a sandwich, but one day I got a pastry and it was so good) and then walked around, getting lost and seeing museums and things until 2pm when it was pizza time. The pizza is so much better then pizza in Austria. Austria has the worst pizza of any country I’ve ever been to.

The first night I got too drunk and threw up. This was confusing to me. I didn’t feel overly drunk. I didn’t fall into a canal or do anything ridiculously stupid. I remember saying “It’s this fucking country, always make me vomit” as I was bent over the toilet. This means I made it three days into 2011 before throwing up. Really good.

I didn’t appreciate the Peggy Guggenheim last time, but this time I was in love. I get this tingly feeling all over when looking at art I really like. We heard this intern give a history of her life and it was really interesting. I really want to be Peggy Guggenheim. My life feels so incomplete because I am separated from artists of all kinds. Luckily on the return home, I found a large package of cookies and a kneeded eraser from the Art Academy.

I am sick now. I blame the dirtiness of Italy.

Also, look at this.Another time when I was too drunk.  

I'm going to Venice on a night train. This is where I forget about you. (this you referring to one you, not the general you of course) and eat lots of pizza and pasta and ride on boats to get everywhere and look at art.

I am a television addict without access to the shows that I like.
I am a writer without access to books in my native language.
Of course I am not going to be happy.

New Years Eve should have been better than it was. Why is it that all nights that are supposed to be extra good turn out poorly? 

I no longer have MTV. MTV decided it was a premium channel. Fuckers. This seems deliberate. Instead of watching MTV I watched a German dating show about farmers looking for love called "Bauer sucht Frauen." It was probably the funniest dating show I have ever seen.

When I walk into Freistadt Mcdonald's everyone stares at me. There are two possible reasons for this:
1. I'm super hot.
2. I'm really obviously a foreigner and thus everyone feels it's a good idea to stare at me and make me feel more foreign.
I'm just going to pretend it's 1.

The woman who works at the McCafe knows my order and gave me a stamp card. I'm a privileged McCafe customer. I never thought I would have such an honor.

Here are my New Years Resolutions:
1. Eat more mangoes. I really enjoyed the two whole mangoes I consumed in 2010 and want to continue this trend. Plus a whole mango only has around 110 calories.
2. Start running. I think this is my resolution everywhere, but I feel terribly out of shape and have a lot of time. The downer to this is that it's very cold outside.
3. Try to actually do a sprint triathlon in the fall.
4. Apply to graduate school.
5. Be happy with and without boys.