föstudagur, október 29, 2004
I'm baaaack.
So my trip around New England was fun. Started out by going to Boston to stay with Stulli and Sissa.
So lets see...straight description of what I did, when, and with whom, followed by an anlysis of my reaction and feelings toward Boston, how's that sound?
First off, the ride to Boston was looong, like almost 9 hours (with a half hour stop in NY). Got into town a little earlier than I'd said cause I caught an earlier bus, so I ended up sitting on Stulli's front step for about an hour or so. The thing is, I've gotten so used to me being late for stuff that I have forced myself to be ready earlier. So I'd look at the timing schedules, figure out when I'd need to leave, when I'd need to wake up and such, and then set my clock for an hour earlier than that, just in case everything goes wrong. So nothing went wrong and I was at the bus station 2 hours before I should have been. The ticket lady was nice enough to just change my ticket so I could catch the next bus instead.
Anyway, Stulli and Sissa come home and we go immediately to a party with some of their musician friends. Nice people, very different from the people I've gotten to know here in DC. More on that later...Day after that was spent lounging around, and watching game 3 of the Red Sox VS Yankees. Stulli had to wake up early on sunday morning to go to some studio. I decided to tag along. This was one of those "studio-in-a-barnhouse" studios, way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a white picket fence, a bunch of huge slightly hilly meadows, and a lake. Pretty surreal. So while Stulli was recording, I was going to go for a walk. I didn't. Instead I slept in the car. But it was still interesting.
The rest of my week with them was spent going to visit music schools, going out to eat, and watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees. For game 7 we actually went downtown to a sports bar, watched the game with all the bostonian neanderthal sports-types and their girlfriends, and the other fascinated, non-sports types like us, not really there for the sports, but for the spectacle invariably surrounding the sports. As the Sox slowly but surely beat back the Yankees, the bar became louder and louder, at moments becoming completely deafening, for example when Some Dude hit a home run while the bases were loaded, also known as a Grand Slam. Once the Sox actually won the game, the whole scene erupted in screaming, jumping, and generally hysterical people, pounding each other's open palms, proving to me that even in a heightened sense of sports-induced fervor, their social boundaries were so ingrained as to stay intact. In Iceland, if we were to win the Swedes in handball (our own little rivalry with a curse), and you were at a bar downtown with loads of drunk people, the person next to you would be liable to picking you up and swinging you around in glee and then tossing you to the next person to do the same.
Outside, the scene was just as crazy, the streets absolutely stuffed with people shouting, cheering and generally very happy. The police had an obvious but as of yet, neutral presence. The actual size of it was not the most interesting thing to me. I've been in crowds of this size before, even larger. No, it was the way the crowd acted which interested me. I am of course cursed with only being able to compare things in the US to things I know, being Icelandic mostly and to a small degree European. So I will compare this crowd to a Icelandic/European crowd.
The most striking thing is the lack of physical contact. In a crowd this huge, and after such a significant event (for those of you who didn't know, this is an 86 year old feud with the yankees, otherwise know as The Evil Empire, by the Rebel Bostonians), normally you'd (I'd) expect to be jostled, bumped into, toe-trodden, and in general, tossed around by the waves of movement as the people comprising the crowd tried to combine movements of joy with movements of trying-to-stay-the-hell-on-my-feet. In fact, this did not happen at all. Once in a while someone would bump into you, but in the most part, you'd have this bubble around you. Granted only about half an inch thick, but still there. Sure you'd bump into people and touch them while trying to get past, but definitely not the suffocating closeness apparent in places like Roskilde. It was as if every person had like a tiny, yet significant negative magnetic charge.
So anyway, people start to climb up stuff and stand on ledges doing some stupid dance (don't know what that's about) and then we decided to head home, since nothing was really happening, people just seemed to be there to wait for something TO happen. Pretty much as soon as we left, people started to break stuff.
What the hell is that all about?
You guys just won your little curse thingy, you're supposed to be happy. Go home and have crazy sex, don't go and break some stupid plastic sign. I mean, come on! I was not impressed. It seemed the whole point of this get together was twofold, one to go and have fun. Most normal people realized that this would only last for about half an hour, or until number two - starting a riot - happened. I also saw this after UMD won that basketball game last year. Students all went downtown, not really to celebrate, but to wait for the police to show up in their riot gear and for some nutters to burn something and then get taken down by the police. I guess they get some kind of kick out of it, because they stand there and hang around, all the way until the police see the need to start to get rough, and then everybody would make like a lemming and run away. To me it sounds like sick entertainment, spawned by a culture chock full of jaded young people who are totally bored with violence on tv, so why not make some of their own. But it's harmless because "they're celebrating" and they can blame it all on police brutality and thus excuse it in their own pitiful minds.
Sigh.
Anyway, the reason I got so indignant about this is because a girl died. The police used plastic bullets to subdue some of the rioters (who are almost always college students), and one of the bullets ricocheted and hit a non-violent student in the eye, killing her. That pretty much made me NEVER want to go to a post-sports "celebration" in the US EVER again, nor would I want anyone I know to go.
After all that Stulli and Sissa rented a car and we drove up to Vermont. They were going to stay in some farm, Stulli's grandfather owned, and I got a ride to Hildur's place out in the middle of nowhere. Those 2+ days were really quite nice, just hanging out, playing scrabble, watching tv, fooling around with instruments and such. On saturday we went to a fundraising dinner at the local church, thanksgiving style food, pretty good. Interesting gettogether, the kind where everybody knows everybody and such. Apparently, right before we got there, J.D.Salinger was there. After that we went to Hildur's friends' house, sat around and Bushwhacked (general term for a conversation centered around how much of a dipshit Bush is) for a while.
Sunday, Hildur and I went up to visit Dori, one of Hildur's ex-girlfriends. She owns some land way up north in Vermont, totally wooded, mountainous area, and she needed some help getting this lawnmower started. Well...lawnmower might not be the right term. How about something like Destroyer of Small Trees, or The Shredder of Shrubbery (bring us a shrubbery!). It was frankenmower, this crazy thing which literally could mow down small trees, but it was still pretty much the size of a normal hand-pushed mower...with a huge motor on top...and a choke...and 4 gears. So we cleared a 10,000 foot wide area underneath her apple tree orchard, which had become overgrown with small trees (ergo the destroyer of small trees. Seriously folks, the manual says it can cut reliably through trees/branches with a diameter of 2 inches. That's like, your ARM for example).
Adventure follows adventure, so we turned of the crazy mower, jumped into a huge pickup truck, and headed high into her land, saying things like "Is that the road? Oh wait, it's there." and then just driving through some underbrush and trees. Seriously, I think there never was any road, we were just lucky. Nah just kidding, but that road was pretty tight. In fact, at one point, where we had to turn around, we actually got quite firmly stuck. Of course, this being the far north-east of the US, everybody who's anybody has a chainsaw. Those trees hemming us in sure regretting growing where they had..er..grown.
Grabbed a train to New York, where I stayed for the next 4 days with my cousin Peter and his girlfriend Courtney. They were mostly busy while I was there so I just roamed around the city, doing touristy things. Went the the Empire State building, tried twice to get to the Statue of Liberty but it was sold out both times. Public Library, Times Square, Grand Central Station, Central Park, I even walked like about half the length of Broadway. I probably walked over 15 miles in NY. We went out to eat once, and peter and I went out to a couple bars the last night. It was calm and very nice. Just got "home" yesterday.
Oh yeah, and I bought new shoes, a $200 gold-plated mouthpiece designed by Maynard Ferguson, and a Game Boy Advance SP with 2 games.
So this trip, especially the Boston/Vermont part, got me thinking more about music and my future. I did go to like 5 music schools in Boston and I immediately felt much better there than in DC. Traditionally I have tried to stay away from making such decisions right off the bat, because by nature, they're not very logical. However, recently I have started to trust my gut instinct much more than before, if only for the reason that I don't always have the time to allow my brain to catch up with my gut. And just like that first day, when my gut told me I'd hate DC it also says I'd love living in Boston. So that's definitely something for me to think about.
In any case, at this point, all I have to think about is packing up and buying my ticket, all that other stuff comes later.
Oh yeah! And mamma and pabbi just sold our house and bought a new one! They will move right after new year's. Exciting!
So my trip around New England was fun. Started out by going to Boston to stay with Stulli and Sissa.
So lets see...straight description of what I did, when, and with whom, followed by an anlysis of my reaction and feelings toward Boston, how's that sound?
First off, the ride to Boston was looong, like almost 9 hours (with a half hour stop in NY). Got into town a little earlier than I'd said cause I caught an earlier bus, so I ended up sitting on Stulli's front step for about an hour or so. The thing is, I've gotten so used to me being late for stuff that I have forced myself to be ready earlier. So I'd look at the timing schedules, figure out when I'd need to leave, when I'd need to wake up and such, and then set my clock for an hour earlier than that, just in case everything goes wrong. So nothing went wrong and I was at the bus station 2 hours before I should have been. The ticket lady was nice enough to just change my ticket so I could catch the next bus instead.
Anyway, Stulli and Sissa come home and we go immediately to a party with some of their musician friends. Nice people, very different from the people I've gotten to know here in DC. More on that later...Day after that was spent lounging around, and watching game 3 of the Red Sox VS Yankees. Stulli had to wake up early on sunday morning to go to some studio. I decided to tag along. This was one of those "studio-in-a-barnhouse" studios, way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a white picket fence, a bunch of huge slightly hilly meadows, and a lake. Pretty surreal. So while Stulli was recording, I was going to go for a walk. I didn't. Instead I slept in the car. But it was still interesting.
The rest of my week with them was spent going to visit music schools, going out to eat, and watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees. For game 7 we actually went downtown to a sports bar, watched the game with all the bostonian neanderthal sports-types and their girlfriends, and the other fascinated, non-sports types like us, not really there for the sports, but for the spectacle invariably surrounding the sports. As the Sox slowly but surely beat back the Yankees, the bar became louder and louder, at moments becoming completely deafening, for example when Some Dude hit a home run while the bases were loaded, also known as a Grand Slam. Once the Sox actually won the game, the whole scene erupted in screaming, jumping, and generally hysterical people, pounding each other's open palms, proving to me that even in a heightened sense of sports-induced fervor, their social boundaries were so ingrained as to stay intact. In Iceland, if we were to win the Swedes in handball (our own little rivalry with a curse), and you were at a bar downtown with loads of drunk people, the person next to you would be liable to picking you up and swinging you around in glee and then tossing you to the next person to do the same.
Outside, the scene was just as crazy, the streets absolutely stuffed with people shouting, cheering and generally very happy. The police had an obvious but as of yet, neutral presence. The actual size of it was not the most interesting thing to me. I've been in crowds of this size before, even larger. No, it was the way the crowd acted which interested me. I am of course cursed with only being able to compare things in the US to things I know, being Icelandic mostly and to a small degree European. So I will compare this crowd to a Icelandic/European crowd.
The most striking thing is the lack of physical contact. In a crowd this huge, and after such a significant event (for those of you who didn't know, this is an 86 year old feud with the yankees, otherwise know as The Evil Empire, by the Rebel Bostonians), normally you'd (I'd) expect to be jostled, bumped into, toe-trodden, and in general, tossed around by the waves of movement as the people comprising the crowd tried to combine movements of joy with movements of trying-to-stay-the-hell-on-my-feet. In fact, this did not happen at all. Once in a while someone would bump into you, but in the most part, you'd have this bubble around you. Granted only about half an inch thick, but still there. Sure you'd bump into people and touch them while trying to get past, but definitely not the suffocating closeness apparent in places like Roskilde. It was as if every person had like a tiny, yet significant negative magnetic charge.
So anyway, people start to climb up stuff and stand on ledges doing some stupid dance (don't know what that's about) and then we decided to head home, since nothing was really happening, people just seemed to be there to wait for something TO happen. Pretty much as soon as we left, people started to break stuff.
What the hell is that all about?
You guys just won your little curse thingy, you're supposed to be happy. Go home and have crazy sex, don't go and break some stupid plastic sign. I mean, come on! I was not impressed. It seemed the whole point of this get together was twofold, one to go and have fun. Most normal people realized that this would only last for about half an hour, or until number two - starting a riot - happened. I also saw this after UMD won that basketball game last year. Students all went downtown, not really to celebrate, but to wait for the police to show up in their riot gear and for some nutters to burn something and then get taken down by the police. I guess they get some kind of kick out of it, because they stand there and hang around, all the way until the police see the need to start to get rough, and then everybody would make like a lemming and run away. To me it sounds like sick entertainment, spawned by a culture chock full of jaded young people who are totally bored with violence on tv, so why not make some of their own. But it's harmless because "they're celebrating" and they can blame it all on police brutality and thus excuse it in their own pitiful minds.
Sigh.
Anyway, the reason I got so indignant about this is because a girl died. The police used plastic bullets to subdue some of the rioters (who are almost always college students), and one of the bullets ricocheted and hit a non-violent student in the eye, killing her. That pretty much made me NEVER want to go to a post-sports "celebration" in the US EVER again, nor would I want anyone I know to go.
After all that Stulli and Sissa rented a car and we drove up to Vermont. They were going to stay in some farm, Stulli's grandfather owned, and I got a ride to Hildur's place out in the middle of nowhere. Those 2+ days were really quite nice, just hanging out, playing scrabble, watching tv, fooling around with instruments and such. On saturday we went to a fundraising dinner at the local church, thanksgiving style food, pretty good. Interesting gettogether, the kind where everybody knows everybody and such. Apparently, right before we got there, J.D.Salinger was there. After that we went to Hildur's friends' house, sat around and Bushwhacked (general term for a conversation centered around how much of a dipshit Bush is) for a while.
Sunday, Hildur and I went up to visit Dori, one of Hildur's ex-girlfriends. She owns some land way up north in Vermont, totally wooded, mountainous area, and she needed some help getting this lawnmower started. Well...lawnmower might not be the right term. How about something like Destroyer of Small Trees, or The Shredder of Shrubbery (bring us a shrubbery!). It was frankenmower, this crazy thing which literally could mow down small trees, but it was still pretty much the size of a normal hand-pushed mower...with a huge motor on top...and a choke...and 4 gears. So we cleared a 10,000 foot wide area underneath her apple tree orchard, which had become overgrown with small trees (ergo the destroyer of small trees. Seriously folks, the manual says it can cut reliably through trees/branches with a diameter of 2 inches. That's like, your ARM for example).
Adventure follows adventure, so we turned of the crazy mower, jumped into a huge pickup truck, and headed high into her land, saying things like "Is that the road? Oh wait, it's there." and then just driving through some underbrush and trees. Seriously, I think there never was any road, we were just lucky. Nah just kidding, but that road was pretty tight. In fact, at one point, where we had to turn around, we actually got quite firmly stuck. Of course, this being the far north-east of the US, everybody who's anybody has a chainsaw. Those trees hemming us in sure regretting growing where they had..er..grown.
Grabbed a train to New York, where I stayed for the next 4 days with my cousin Peter and his girlfriend Courtney. They were mostly busy while I was there so I just roamed around the city, doing touristy things. Went the the Empire State building, tried twice to get to the Statue of Liberty but it was sold out both times. Public Library, Times Square, Grand Central Station, Central Park, I even walked like about half the length of Broadway. I probably walked over 15 miles in NY. We went out to eat once, and peter and I went out to a couple bars the last night. It was calm and very nice. Just got "home" yesterday.
Oh yeah, and I bought new shoes, a $200 gold-plated mouthpiece designed by Maynard Ferguson, and a Game Boy Advance SP with 2 games.
So this trip, especially the Boston/Vermont part, got me thinking more about music and my future. I did go to like 5 music schools in Boston and I immediately felt much better there than in DC. Traditionally I have tried to stay away from making such decisions right off the bat, because by nature, they're not very logical. However, recently I have started to trust my gut instinct much more than before, if only for the reason that I don't always have the time to allow my brain to catch up with my gut. And just like that first day, when my gut told me I'd hate DC it also says I'd love living in Boston. So that's definitely something for me to think about.
In any case, at this point, all I have to think about is packing up and buying my ticket, all that other stuff comes later.
Oh yeah! And mamma and pabbi just sold our house and bought a new one! They will move right after new year's. Exciting!
sunnudagur, október 10, 2004
So here's what happened.
Last monday I figured I get a head start since Tótla had assured me they would all go to New Orleans the next (this) weekend. So I bought a ticket online. Then on wednesday, Tótla says they all backed out because they misread their school schedule, have tests right after the weekend and such. So there I was stuck with a non refundable ticket+hotel.
As soon as I heard this I had a little burst of anxiety telling me "don't go alone! don't do it!". I quelled that immediately thinking "well, this would be a perfect opportunity to travel alone, maybe do some writing." So I began to plan leaving, looking at busses and packing. During this time this bad, anxious feeling started to grow for some reason and right before I left, it got to the point where I just said "screw this, I'm staying."
Now, I'm not one to believe in premonitions or anything like that. I don't pretend that this feeling had something to do with a "feeling that something bad was going to happen". In fact I think people who say that are hiding the real reason for why they didn't go, whatever that may be. I'm not really sure why I didn't want to go, I just know when I decided not to, I felt immensely relieved and that's really all that matters. Do I regret not seeing New Orleans? Yes, but I will go there in the future, most definitely. I then realized that this feeling was identical to my school situation.
1. Opportunity to do something interesting in a far off place.
2. Already paid for
3. Alone
4. A feeling of unease towards it, and yet also a feeling that I shouldn't miss this opportunity
The only difference, it took me a year to make the decision here while only a couple days for the NO trip. So I think I've learned to listen to my gut feeling. At least there are no regrets about NO, as I know there will not be about USA.
Last monday I figured I get a head start since Tótla had assured me they would all go to New Orleans the next (this) weekend. So I bought a ticket online. Then on wednesday, Tótla says they all backed out because they misread their school schedule, have tests right after the weekend and such. So there I was stuck with a non refundable ticket+hotel.
As soon as I heard this I had a little burst of anxiety telling me "don't go alone! don't do it!". I quelled that immediately thinking "well, this would be a perfect opportunity to travel alone, maybe do some writing." So I began to plan leaving, looking at busses and packing. During this time this bad, anxious feeling started to grow for some reason and right before I left, it got to the point where I just said "screw this, I'm staying."
Now, I'm not one to believe in premonitions or anything like that. I don't pretend that this feeling had something to do with a "feeling that something bad was going to happen". In fact I think people who say that are hiding the real reason for why they didn't go, whatever that may be. I'm not really sure why I didn't want to go, I just know when I decided not to, I felt immensely relieved and that's really all that matters. Do I regret not seeing New Orleans? Yes, but I will go there in the future, most definitely. I then realized that this feeling was identical to my school situation.
1. Opportunity to do something interesting in a far off place.
2. Already paid for
3. Alone
4. A feeling of unease towards it, and yet also a feeling that I shouldn't miss this opportunity
The only difference, it took me a year to make the decision here while only a couple days for the NO trip. So I think I've learned to listen to my gut feeling. At least there are no regrets about NO, as I know there will not be about USA.
