Thursday, May 29, 2008

I FORGOT...

SHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETZ!

PRETZEL MELT! TURKEY, PROVOLONE AND MAYONNAAAAAAISE!

I LOVE AMERICA!



GO PENS!

Monday, May 26, 2008

where my love lies waiting silently for me*

so this friday i will return to pittsburgh, finally, after having been the farthest distance i've ever been from home and for the longest amount of time. my mom dropped me and my three suitcases off at pittsburgh international airport on september 5, 2007; i will return at 8:30 pm this friday, may 30, 2008.

i'm not moving back, only visiting. which sounds fucking surreal to say. i guess i had always thought about moving out of pittsburgh; i'd imagined myself in many places - penn state or washington DC in my high school days, berkeley in the days in college when i was convinced i needed a fresh start - but had never really come close to doing it, to leaving. until prague came up and i said - well i've got nothing better to do.

i suppose it's changed my outlook for the better. i think before i would have been content to stay in pittsburgh forever (and actually, part of me still feels that way. a little part of me wishes i had never left. sadly, there is something comforting about having such a provincial view of the world, and that is a feeling i'll never get back.) i wanted to settle there, even at the age of 23 (which, 9 months ago, i thought was old). but now i know that pittsburgh isn't going anywhere, and that what i really want is to live as many places as i can before it's too late, before i'm married (or in a serious relationship) with a family (which i want) and a "real" job (which, actually, will be my life's goal to avoid). a year here, a year there won't bother me. returning to pittsburgh, for the foreseeable future, will not be a move, just a visit.

which, let me tell you, feels awesome.

i guess it's a trite saying, but you really do have to move away before you realize how much home means to you. i've never loved every single thing about pittsburgh more than i do since i've been abroad and i've never wanted to go back as much. i cannot WAIT to indulge in all the things that i used to consider commonplace:

primanti's sandwiches
dr pepper (fountain drinks. free refills. and ICE.)
pierogies
cheap beer and more importantly, mixed drinks at a comparable price
JEOPARDY!
burritos (and mexican food in general)
chicken caesar wraps from hemingways
baseball
giant eagle
fast food options other than mcdonalds
PIZZA
being able to buy blue jeans that aren't ugly
shitty oakland bars with familiar faces
(and bars with jukeboxes)
the lack of graffiti (compared to here)
good old PAT transit, and actually riding in a car
the imperial system of measurement
my friends.


around christmas i felt that spending almost $1000 to go back to a place for three weeks that i'd lived in for 23 years was a bit insane. now it's worth every penny. it kinda makes me enjoy being away, strangely: i always want to feel this excited to return there. this might sound stupid, but it's the kind of town you never really leave. (who do i think i am, don henley? was i born in the fucking hotel california? yeesh).

i want to go to as many places as possible so that someday i can tell my kids - trust me, this is the best city in the world.

but for now let me know if you want me to bring you some mac and cheese from boston market.



*homeward bound, simon and garfunkel

Thursday, May 22, 2008

when you say california girls, what do you really mean by that?

i recently purchased "Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys," for the low low price of $12.99. this purchase has renewed my faith in iTunes as a music purchase medium. finding this was kinda like if your parents steal your baby blanket from you because you are 18 and still carry it around, give it to goodwill, someone buys it, then you find it at some jobber down the street's garage sale a few years later for 50 cents. iTunes has sold me back my childhood, and at what those in the biz call "a steal."

my dad used to bump the beach boys in the car. he had a different greatest hits tape, but it included all the standards - beginning with "kokomo," around to "wouldn't it be nice" and "i get around." the sweet harmonies and unmistakeable falsetto are ingrained in my brain. anna might make fun of me, but listening to the beach boys takes me back to a time way before i even began to think that someday i might really enjoy the feeling of nostalgia.

ANYWAY, in my now (hopefully) more mature and educated state, how i listen to some of these songs has changed. one too many higher level literature classes has ruined my ability to enjoy words (whether written or sung) without thinking about what the really MEAN. this leads me to the "california girls conundrum."

the beach boys are renowned for singing about the simple things: girls, living in sunny california, going to the beach, surfing, and being popular in high school. ironically, wasn't brian wilson addicted to cocaine or something? anyway thats beside the point.

the song "california girls," on the surface, seems to fit right into this mold: the Boys wish to champion those bikini-clad, bleach-blonde, ditzy-yet-lovable girls that reside in their home state. or DO THEY?

in the first verse, they sing:
"well east coast girls are hip/
i really dig those styles they wear/
and southern girls with the way they talk/
they knock me out when i'm down there/

the mid-west farmers daughters/
really make you feel all right/
and the northern girls with the way they kiss/
they keep their boyfriends warm at night."

as he goes on to croon "i wish they all could be california girls," the listener assumes that he has experienced, even enjoyed, all of these girls from different areas of the states, but that they could never top the girls he knows and loves from california. he even begins with a conversational marker, "well," that while not officially, at least in use suggests that he might continue later with a "but." "well, these girls are great, but california girls are the best."

but, keep listening! in the next verse he continues:

"the west coast has the sunshine/
and the girls all get so tanned/
i dig a french bikini on hawaii island/
dolls by a palm tree in the sand/"

this verse is startling because, in all the 1000 times i'd heard this song, i thought this entire verse was about girls from the west coast and/or california. but upon further research, he mentions hawaii! another example of girls he likes that are NOT california natives.

and finally, the death blow:

"i been all around this great big world/
and i seen all kinds of girls/
yeah, but i couldn't wait to get back to the States/
back to the cutest girls in the world."

so here's what i'm thinking. the Boys are not suggesting that california girls are superior to girls from all other places, domestic or foreign; they are suggesting that they prefer girls from the United States and they wish that all of these different, wonderful girls could all live in california and, therefore, in closer proximity to where they live.

doesn't this blow your freakin' mind? all my life i was under the impression that i was somehow inferior to my west-coast counterparts (and if you've ever seen the video for david lee roth's cover of this song, thats probably the way he interpreted it, too. in fact, you should watch this video, it's hilarious: david lee roth, already too old and it's still only 1985. in fact, he tried as hard as he could to ruin that song by including confederate flags, suggestively shucking an ear of corn, and singing in the key of H. and still failed. )

anyway, i wonder if my dad knew what he was getting my brain into when he harmlessly sung along with these beach boys ditties... that i'd still be thinking about it 15-20 years later.

now, if you'll excuse me, i'm going to go watch van halen videos on youtube.

Friday, May 16, 2008

things i love about europe

there are advertisements and sometimes movie posters on the walls lining the escalators in the metro. on the poster for that "what happens in vegas," someone wrote "fuck" on ashton kutcher's face.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

as long as it's talking with you, talk of the weather will do

the other day at the beer garden in riergrovy sady, drew acknowledged what most of us were thinking: all we talk about these days is the weather.

it's finally warm here in prague. like, really warm, not just the tease of a balmy day in the middle of february -- and suddenly it has become 100 times more pleasant to live here.

winter here was strange. it wasn't all that cold - in fact i can think of maybe 2 weeks of the whole winter, one just before christmas and one in february -- when it was really cold. other than that, it was a manageable cold. still cold enough for a jacket, but not so cold that you thought about throwing yourself in front of the 9 tram because it wasn't the 24.

it wasn't a bitter cold winter here, but it was bleak. the sky had been gray since september. i mean i can remember several fucking cold days in the pittsburgh winters i grew up in, but it never seemed quite as dreary and depressing as a mild winter in the czech republic. i've lived through blizzards and states-of-emergency due to ice storms and negative windchills but the sun always seemed to shine. and spirits were usually high with the hope of spring being right around the corner. even with such extremes, in pittsburgh we at least had 4 seasons. in the czech republic, it seems like there are two: summer and depression.

but summer is finally here. summer, not spring. on the first page of "a moveable feast" hemingway writes about the weather in paris, describing it thusly:

"then* there was the bad weather. it would come in one day when the fall was over. we would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the place contrescarpe."

the phenomenon that hemingway describes about paris's bad weather arriving is exactly how prague's warm weather arrived. one day it was in the low 40s and rainy and the next it was 75 and sunny and hasn't looked back since.

so, seemingly overnight, everyone is in a better mood. we're all walking to work, walking all the way to town just because we can, making extra trips to the store just to enjoy the sunshine. we've spent every night out at the beer garden (which is a european phenomenon that i give an enthusiastic two thumbs up) because drinking outside is far superior to drinking indoors. the weather's newfound clemency has even painted a new coat on the freakshow that usually congregates outside hlavni nadrazi. the lawn almost looks inviting now. almost.

consequently, about 80% of our conversations either revolve around the weather or begin with a comment like "it is SO nice out today" or "i can't beLIEVE how warm it is." i suppose it seems like empty small talk, but it's the only thing on our minds. i guess rightly so - weather affects what you eat, what you wear, what you do for fun, where you live, your demeanor. wars are fought over weather. weather has given a lot of people (namely al gore) a career. so maybe it's not such small talk.

or maybe we don't have anything better to talk about... just like i don't have anything better to write about.



*that is the first two sentences of "a moveable feast" and can i say how big a fan i am of beginning a book with the word then? genius.

Friday, May 02, 2008

the disco tram

all right, so the disco tram that i mentioned earlier. i suppose i owe an explanation, as promised.

last week, as she is wont to do, debbie was perusing the New York Times travel section and stumbled upon an article entitled "After midnight in 10 European cities."

The premise is this: you pay 320 crowns (so, at a current exchange rate of 15 crowns to the dollar, about 20 bucks) for the privilege of boarding an unnumbered tram at namesti miru filled with 50 strangers who share the common interest of wishing to dance to disco music while drinking warm staropramen and hanging on to the nearest pole, strap or unsuspecting dancer for dear life. all while fighting the forces of a bladder full of beer. this continues for two hours as the tram traces routes you didn't even know existed to parts of town both remote and familiar, the endpoint being the club "roxy" near namesti repuliky.

during the two and a half hour tram ride, i posed for several pictures with perfect strangers (sadly not THE Perfect Strangers), asked for 4 beers, was given 6 and paid for 10, considered peeing in an empty beer can, a trash bag or simply in my pants until finally being allowed off the tram to pee in a park, met a canadian, did not meet a czech gentleman with curly hair speaking english with a british accent because he was at the back of the tram and we were at the front (the layout of public transportation discourages mingling, probably for good reason), and successfully communicated in czech with the affable, yellow-vested security guard manning the tram's middle door. "kolik minut until we stop?" yeah, i am pretty proud of myself for that one.

i suppose enjoying this kind of event lies in mastering the fine art of being just drunk enough to still be able to stand, despite the jerky movements of prague integrated transport system. much the same as it's american counterpart, the party bus, the "party tram" is not for the casual drinker. maybe i'm being a negative nancy, but i would almost rather have just paid the cover for roxy and started the night there.

on the bright side, drew and i managed to persuade a taxi driver to take us to JZP for "sto," which is 100 crowns!!!! this is amazing and completely warrants my use of four exclamation points in the previous sentence. 100 crowns for a cab ride is almost unheard of.

also, i didn't get hit in the head with any drink containers. so i suppose it was a good day.