This Blog Has Moved (AGAIN!)

Find me here from now on. That's www.aliteralgirl.com. I've got my own domain name and everything! Cool, huh?

THIS BLOG HAS OFFICIALLY MOVED...

It's a little scary for me to say this (I feel as if I'm literally uprooting myself), but this blog, the one you're reading now, has officially MOVED to aliteralgirl.wordpress.com. It now lives here, and nothing but the web address (and, ok, the design) has changed, so please please visit me here from now on. Update your bookmarks, your newsfeeds, your brains. I'll even remind you again of the NEW ADDRESS! It's: aliteralgirl.wordpress.com.

Thanks for bearing with me, and for reading my blog; from now on, I'll see you here...

Photosynthesis

The city this morning was heartbreakingly beautiful. Puffy clouds and air so fresh you could drink it (I seem to have a thing about this). I detoured, went gliding down Broad Street and curled up St. Giles so that I could buy a sandwich and a pastry from a cheerful woman. Traffic, thick traffic, all the way towards town, but the roads away from town were clear and the city in spite of the traffic still had that air of Easter emptiness. I saw a girl in a striped shirt-dress and boots pedalling towards the Bodleian, her basket laden with bags and books, and thought how lovely it would be to have woken up early just to work in a library, to come out into the sun at intervals like a young stalk needing to photosynthesize, to maybe have tea later at the Vaults & Gardens cafe, outside in the graveyard where the chairs overlook tombs and flowers and the yellow-bodied dome of the Radcliffe Camera.

Hurst Street, Springtime, 6 am

I wake at the unfamiliar hour to animal sounds. Noises like foxes fighting; exotic screeches carried down the street by wind or proximity. You are asleep until I stick my head out of the window, peering left and right past the dawn-bathed terraced houses.
"That sound," I say.
"Cats?" you say. Fall asleep again. I go into the bathroom, where the window overlooks a single street lamp. As I am watching it, through the blinds, observing the sallow glow against the almost-bright morning sky, it goes out. Apart from the emptiness it might be mid-morning.

Back in bed, the fox-sounds have stopped. Now it's only birds. Doves? In that way that early-morning birds have of making repetitive songs with their hoots and growls, they are like the worst pop song on the radio. Over and over again in my head (I'll forget the tune by afternoon). You are still asleep, and I ponder getting up, going outside, to see the street before anyone else sees it. Sunday mornings are best for this; no early commuters whistling past on bicycles, smugly more productive. All the drunks have gone to bed. For the first time in a long time I perceive how ugly all the cars are, lined up nose-to-tail, cows going to slaughter, in various shades of modern, various kinds of disrepair. There was one last year with a smashed-in window, that sat on the corner of Leopold Street and Hurst, and for months if you wanted to walk past it you had to pick your way through broken green glass. The houses still look bare--even the ones with gardens out front are still suffering the effects of winter gloom.

The thing about this street is, it wears its shabbiness well. Last night as we rounded the corner I said to you how I fond I was of the place where our street meets Magdalen road--of the pub with her bicycle rack, her evening-yellow windows, the red-and-green facades of the bookshop and the café, the weary half-rendered lettering of Silvesters ("E TERS STORES"), with its pots, its herbs, its kitchenware.

Not a soul about this morning, and as I try to fall asleep my mind is suddenly full of a Boston autumn, the crispness of the Charles River and the smell of rich people's houses in the Back Bay. Couldn't be further from where we are now. I close my eyes to picture the promenade in October better, the strange dome of the half-shell in afternoon light, the runners, the girls in skirts and light coats, stretching the days of sensible dressing out as long as possible. I think for certain I won't fall asleep but I do, with you and the pop-songs of the morning birds and the empty river of street that runs between James and Magdalen.

Cowley Road, 4:30 pm

Sometimes Simon & Garfunkel is the only suitable soundtrack. Even when the sky isn't cloudy. Today it's a wide sheet of azure that the Mediterranean would be jealous of. I like the way the building across the street, made of blackened red brick, slants, moves away from the Cowley Road at a precise angle. The graffiti scrawled in white, below the beetroot window frames: Total Texaco Fuel Oppression in Burma. A poetic structure, as I sit here listening to the hum of ice-cream eaters, smelling burnt toast. Watching balding man in an army-green coat, brown leather brogues, smoking. Joined now by a woman with black hair and black boots. She's taller than him, but they're both made in miniature, fragile, transient beside the brick. Three girls, one in pink, one in blue, one in green, passing by. The delivery bicycle with its vast basket, shiny silver bell (I'm reflected in the domed steel). The shadow of this building is slinking up the side of the one across the road. Stealthy springtime: before you know it the sky will darken and the evening will dawn, the drunks will come out to play, the chill will slide back into the air and the dark hairs of you thin arms will stand on end, soldiers at attention, reminding you of a photograph taken at that September party, when you wore the jacket of his uniform over your sleeveless dress and leaned against somebody's garden wall.

And We Don't Even Own This House

On days like these, I'm reminded of the ranch. We have a dead something festering in the walls or under the floorboards somewhere; all we know is that the smell is strongest at the spot just before you enter the kitchen. The Man comes home from football wanting to take a shower; but a pipe has burst, or broken, or done whatever it is pipes do, so that the kitchen is flooded with a sudden stream of water before we turn the main off. By sticking our heads in the cupboard under the sink (him in football kit, me in an oversized and ripped man's shirt and a pair of silk pajama shorts because I thought, silly me, I might have an early night) we ascertain which particular bit of pipe is the problem ("You see the silvery one?" he says. "No, not that silvery one, that silvery one."). But what good is knowing this? I have the imprint of a wet review section of the Guardian from six months ago on my feet and the Man can feel some "fraying," but neither of us is taking a bath tonight, I can guarantee that. As we carpet the kitchen in newspaper we talk about the smell, which the Man is convinced is like galvanized rubber. "It's dead rodent," I assure him. "I got very used to that smell in my childhood." Which makes my childhood sound horrific; it wasn't, quite the opposite, just infused, every so often, with eau de decomposing rat. Or eau de galvanized rubber, if you prefer.

A Country Evening

Just as we finish scrambling along the wet shores of a makeshift lake, my phone rings. We're behind a perfectly English stone wall, sheltered from the muddy road running away from the village. Just a 9-year-old boy and myself. We've been exploring the outskirts of the village, the secret swampy places between water and meadow, for nearly an hour. At one point, after I sink in the mud, I tell my companion about the time my Dad and I donned wellies and walked the length of our local creek, following it until it met the sea. Now he's calling me, my Dad. From Buellton, the truck-stop town of grocery stores and auto-repair shops. I can't see civilization from here (maybe the gleam of a thatched roof beyond the wall) but I can talk to California. I'm watching the 9-year-old leaping over a stream in the same way I used to do while I waited for my Dad to finish his work in the garage. I'm speaking to that same Dad while I watch the 9-year-old. There's something strangely circular about this, and something dizzyingly meta. And, more simply, something rather delightful.

(Also, re: the last post, this, from Alain de Botton: "Journeys are the midwives of thought.")

Thought in Motion

I'm starting to think that I'm like one of those kinetic powered watches. Fueled by movement. When I was very small, my favorite thing to do at home was to think. For many people, thinking may be an active process only in the mind, but for me, it was (and, I'm increasingly aware, still is) a physically active process as well. At eight I traced a path around a pile of rocks outside my Grandparents' house. It was a small circuit and it might have made anyone dizzy, but maybe that was the point: in my dizziness I created stories for hours. Sometimes I bounced a ball against the side of the house--one of those red rubber balls, the ones we played four-square with in the playground at school. I was a good four-square player and bouncing the ball against the wall gave me practice as well as time to crawl inside my own self. I climbed the rocks behind the house, too. Some people might have said I was a little feral, even. I sniffed my books and sometimes, when I was out walking in circles around the pile of rocks, I took a bookmark with me to simulate the feel of words, which were so tied already to the act of reading.

Later I took longer walks in the hills. Being stationary made my mind cave in, my thoughts turn idle, as if my brain was made of syrup. I made stories up in my head and if I was feeling particularly excited about one I had to go out, I couldn't sit still, not even in a rainstorm. If I sat still the thoughts festered, but if I walked, they came easy and in great numbers. I think my breath was tied to my ideas somehow.

It became less literal over the years, as, it seems, many things do. When we're children, things manifest in concrete ways, but by the time we've reached adulthood we've found ways to complicate even something as simple as the process of thought, so that metaphor is all we have left to describe ourselves. Now what happens is that journey--going somewhere, travel--stimulates thought. Not even necessarily about the place itself, but, as with the watch, the movement of self sets something else in motion.

I'm a travel writer, in the way that travel can be taken to mean the trip from one end of the garden path to the other.

Like Being a Kid Again

We made a few sausages today. We're making more tomorrow. All I'll say for now is, PIG INTESTINES FEEL SO WEIRD. I stood there unraveling them (they're puzzles), rinsing their insides with water so that we could fill them with minced pork, and all I could think was, this is way, way better than play-dough.

Fés, Summer, 2007 (A Poem in Prose)

Fés, Summer, 2007

From the bruised-sky countenance of an English summer (three hot days and a thunderstorm) we fly south; we are young.

At Bab Boujaloud, the blue-green gate, we look up, eyes hot, sweating diamonds onto a street paved with dust. Hey, Bob Dylan! Ali Baba! Nice girl! (I like being your nice girl, while you, today, are all shaggy brown hair, beard, sunglasses).

I like it when you speak French, when you say shokran, when you sit for hours, beneath a lamp, sketching its lace form, each precise indent, measuring with your eyes. You are intimate with it; I want to ask how these things are done, but the silence is all that keeps us cool.

Kif? We watch the owner of the café, carefully rolling, with stained and heavy hands, a joint. Kif? He says. Then I lose track; we swim home through Fauvist paint (even you look made of blue and green now). We follow sex with a nap, wake with eyes ringed red to dancing music. Listen to that, you say. (Perfect bliss).

In sudden palaces, children play, women scrub the smell of decay, the rot of orange blossoms from the floor. The tiles arranged with surgical symmetry (mathematics by color). We spend our days walking imperfect circles around the riads, the minarets, the medersas. We spend our nights too hot to touch.

Mornings made of honey and a single cube of sugar dissolved in the ocean of your coffee. I prefer mint, hot, sweet, so you teach me to tie a paper napkin round the glass because it was something you learned, once. I read the guidebook to you: It seems to exist suspended in time.

Even the shadows are still.

The Circus at Night

Through an open window I can see that the circus has come to town, planted itself on the top of a grassy knoll, where I stood a week ago in awe of the city spires, drenched in dusk-light. Walking past it now, in the chill of early spring, I don't see the city spires, but hear the music. Whimsical; accordions and whistles. The big-domed tents and the splashes of red-and-yellow and the grass, eerily bright at this time of night. The twinkle of lights. I can't see any people; are they inside the tents? Are they ghosts? How has this series of structures, this thing which is to me more an idea than a reality, come to be so suddenly on this grassy knoll? I hear the familiar squeak of my bicycle wheels; I fail to understand the apparition.

And what, anyway, do I actually know about circuses? Nothing really. Once I read a book in which a girl and her brother, wounded in combat, limping, dour, soured by years in the trenches, visit the circus. Once I knew a girl who objected to circuses because of the animals. She didn't say why and I didn't ask. Once my parents went to see the Circ du Soleil, the circus in the sun, the circus made of human bodies, with some friends. They're things I know only from the outside, circuses.

Coming down the hill that I cycled up hours earlier, my fingers turn to ten fat icicles, it feels. I no longer know when I'm squeezing my brakes. I arrive home and it hurts just to turn the lock in the door. The city is indecisive; is she playful, or cold and somber? Is she warm or is she still rapt in the throes of winter? Does she--and do we, by extension--miss her students, in this time of their absence, or is she reveling without them, a feather set free upon an April wind?

Impossible to tell, tonight.

Bruises and Bills and Boot-Heels, Oh My

This week has probably not been one of the finest of my entire existence. I promise this won't be one of those whiny "everything's gone to shit" posts, but I fell down the stairs at work yesterday. FELL DOWN THE STAIRS. Just saying.

I was reading the paper. I should have known not to do this, as once, when I was about six, I was reading a book whilst walking down the street with my Dad, when all the sudden a parking meter sprung from the earth and hit me in the face and I fell down, but it's not an excuse anyway. I tripped over my own feet with about three stairs to go, and stopped my fall by hitting my head on the wall in front of me. I was so surprised by this that I couldn't decide if I should cry or laugh or what, so I just gathered myself up and pressed a palm to the painful part of my head. After a little while it occurred to me that I was just standing on the landing with one hand clapped to my head, looking loony, and that maybe I should move, so I took my hand away from the bump and saw blood. Well, head wounds do that, I thought calmly, and I went upstairs to the staff toilet and splashed water on my face.

All well and good, but by the time I had got back down to the office again, it was bleeding again. I should mention that it wasn't bleeding profusely, not by any means. More just...seeping. So when a co-worker asked idly if I'd hit my head, I said, yeah, I fell down the stairs, and giggled, and she said Oh my gosh, you mean right now? Because your head is bleeding.

Well, that was it. I could no longer pretend that my clumsiness was casual. Instead, I had to go across the road and get ice from the kitchen. Only they had no ice, so the chef brought me a plastic bag full of frozen corn. My boss wanted to bandage it to my head so that my arm wouldn't get sore holding it there, but I drew the line at being an English patient lookalike. After a half hour of idleness I put a plaster over the cut and threw myself (metaphorically, not literally) back at my work.

I felt fine, and I wasn't prepared to linger for long on the incident, especially not as it highlighted an example of stupendous ineptitude. But after ten thousand questions, expressions of sympathy, Natasha Richardson comparisons, and suggestions that I drink a little less at work (I don't drink at all at work, in case you're tempted to take that literally), I began to fret. It doesn't take much to make me fret (I suffer, after all, from varying degrees of generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and hypochondria, which is a common but very unfortunate combination of ailments), and the internet, let me tell you, is the jackpot of fret-fuel.

So if you ever wanted to know what could possibly happen to you if you hit your head, causing your brain to strike your skull and begin bleeding, look it up online and then PANIC. By the time I got home to the Man, I was a proper wreck. "I don't want to die because I fell down the stairs," I sobbed at him, in his arms. He (and everyone else) had already asked me if I felt dizzy, nauseous, if I'd blacked out, if I had any symptoms whatsoever of a series injury, and the answer was no, I don't think so, but the problem was of course that by that time I'd worked myself up so much that I did feel a bit dizzy just from the worry.

"Don't worry," he said to me, after I'd convinced him to help me look up head injuries online, after we'd ruled out together the possibility of concussion, "You're going to be fine." I decided to start blaming everyone else for my panic. "I wasn't worried until everyone else started saying things," I said, which was true, to an extent.

Having dramatized the event as much as possible, I decided it was finally time to settle down, take some Paracetemol, have some dinner, relax, and practice how I was going to tell this story to people in the days to come. I decided to acknowledge the fact that actually, I hadn't hit my head that hard; that by now, the only sore part of me (besides my ego) was the bit of broken skin at my temple. I decided all this was easier, in fact, than working myself up into an epic panic.

My relaxation was aided by a solid hour spent reading passages from Enid Blyton's Famous Five books, which sounds dull until you realize that they're riddled with gems like this one: "'That queer-looking man seems to like Dick,' said Anne."

***

And then I awoke the next day and in spite of a distinct tenderness near the wound, felt good, until my spirits were dampened by the din of the bills in the study, clamoring to be paid. I would pay you, I told them sternly as I tried to find an unoccupied slice of desk on which to put my tea and branflakes, if I could pay you, but you insist on being so large as to be unmanageable. In response, they just moaned some more, and huffed, and one or two even did a little angry jig atop my computer.

To ease my guilt and shut them up, I paid my half of the rent and my portion of the gas bill, which made me feel momentarily better, until I realized that I'm just about at the end of my coping-tether. The catalyst for this realization was the knowledge that I'd been wrongly charged £20 by a broken cashpoint in Fulham. For an instant I blamed Fulham (maybe the big smoke, knowing I've rejected it as a place to live, is somehow out to get me), but I couldn't hide for long from the fact that I'm a postgraduate student living in a graduate's world. I'm ignoring the credit crunch, the recession, the big scary black monster in the corner, whatever you want to call it, because my problems are deeper than that.

Here's how it is: I reached a point today where I no longer understood how I could go on like this. It baffled me, this realization. I actually sat down on the couch and pondered it. Because I've never been happier, emotionally, fundamentally. I have someone to love, and who loves me, and we live in a beautiful city and do beautiful (if not very lucrative) things, and our life is both exciting to me and soothing, gentle. But here I was on a glorious March morning wondering how we were going to pay those loud bills in the study after all, how, indeed, I was going to pay for groceries and to have the heel stuck back onto my boot and to get my coat, now impossibly soiled, dry-cleaned, how I was going to buy laundry detergent, do all of the little things that require money.

It's not that I don't work, it's that I don't work enough--but I can't work more, without sacrificing my masters degree (and, also, the legality of my visa--not to mention my sanity). In that bleak moment I couldn't stop myself from wondering if my fall down the stairs was not symbolic in some way, if perhaps I am not only falling but also hitting a wall in my work, my career (my career? What career?), my financial well-being.

But then, this evening at university, a successful and well-respected novelist began his chat with us by recounting how just yesterday, he'd been walking down his street, head turned, distracted by the for-sale signs on a pair of houses, when suddenly he smacked into the side of a metal pole, and look at the mark on the side of my head, he said.

So real writers have those moments too. And anyway, the really annoying thing about not having any money isn't not being able to pay the bills; it's not being able to buy the Man a really super birthday present.

Our First Mature Trip To London?

Didn't start very encouragingly. Boxed red wine in the station ("it's like being with a rugby team," the Man kept saying). An impromptu train switch at Reading. The night already folding in on us. I'd been at work, then caught in a downpour, then at home, then late, then not late (a kindly friend had lied about the train time so I wouldn't miss it). It was suddenly cold again; what happened to the almost-summer of last week? Another world. I needed gloves. And maybe socks. On the tube a toddler bounced between his mother and his father, every shift on the tracks a new hazard. Many stops later (or maybe not so many; I forgot to keep track), a part of London unidentifiable to me. We walked against the wind. Fulham. You hear so much about Fulham, but until last night it was just another London name.

Past a nursing home. Everything looked suburban. Not expensive but empty, tired, devoid of spirit. Around a corner, a sudden pub. We ate round a long table. Potted shrimp, scotch eggs, salmon, terrine, soft bread. Mashed potatoes, curly kale, slabs of bleeding beef. The Man looked especially happy. "Are you happy?" I said, looking over the top of my red wine glass. "Meat," he grinned, reminding me of my dad's 50th birthday (picture: a barbecue pit by the beach, some friends, and nothing to eat but pounds and pounds of tri-tip, which my mother had bought thinking it was the manly food to get). I even got past my fear of meat that hasn't been cooked so well it looks black and enjoyed the tenderness (a little).

We sat on couches after. Shared an espresso, the Man and I, with a sugar cube. Back on the tube. We all shared no-hot-food-on-the-bus-back-to-Oxford horror stories (there are many). We were on the bus back before midnight. All so civilized. At St. Clements we alighted. As always I felt cold. I had to pee. I'd fallen asleep on the coach and my neck felt bent the wrong way. At home, relief, the sighs after a long night, but also a bewildered and delighted sense that neither of us had once considered screaming in frustration, this time.

Cheesy But So What

I'm taking this as a good sign: after I had a minor meltdown in All Bar One this evening I came home to sulk in bed and read my news feeds, and what should I see but this little piece of advice:

"Do you have a dream? Do you really want to get published? Then quit with the excuses, get off your butt, and make the dream happen."

Inelegantly phrased, perhaps, and a little on the wrong side of cheesy, but like I said: so what. We all need a little of that every once in awhile, especially after recovering from some semi-public tear-shedding (is that embarrassment I sense?).

Sunday I'm in Love

We sit in Christ Church meadows by the daffodils, watching a stream of toddlers drawn as if by magnetism to the mound of dirt beside the pathway. One rolls repeatedly down the mound until his father tells him they're moving on.
"I don't want to go," says the boy.
"Well, we're going, anyhow," says the father, and scoops up his other son, dissapears behind some trees. Dirtboy takes one last lackluster plunge through the mess, then sprints after his family.

After sandwiches which are too big for our mouths, we share a banana. I practise pouting my lips, the Facebook face, the look that other girls take on when posing for profile photos. I can't plump them up enough without looking demented, descending into giggles. I give up and we watch more children, attracted by the mound of dirt. We watch the toddlers who have just learnt to walk careening down the path, thrilled by their own movements, unsteady but unwavering in gusto and intent. The Man says maybe I'm a little like that, too.
"I get the impression," he says, "that at the age of about four, you decided you'd mastered all the basics, and from then on out you were just going to read."

It's more or less true, I say back. (Later, walking down the flat surface of the High street, I trip spontaneously. More true than less true, I think).

At the kissing gate by Merton college he traps me, kisses me sweetly.
"Is that because no one can see us?" I say.
"It's because it's a kissing gate, you moron," he says. Kisses me again.

After we circle the city with our footsteps we come to settle at a bar on the High street where we sit close to the window, watching pink blossoms shuddering in wind. He reads the paper while I attack Essays in Love. There's the strange sadness of a Sunday as the afternoon wilts into evening, as we move away from weekend papers, ipmromptu picnics in the garden, towards alarm clocks, early morning stresses, hours spent at work.

I look up every so often to make a different point about de Botton's book. At the reference to Aristophanes, I balk.
"I find the idea that we're all looking for someone who was once a part of ourselves really lonely," I say. "Like, I want the person I love to be different. I want company."
"I'm not sure that's what that means," he says. Whether he's right or not I don't know, but it highlights how differently we can read things. "It's just about completion."

A huge clock hangs from the cieling of the bar. It makes me feel both unwelcome and excessively desirous of staying all at the same time. The same way that being in a train station makes me feel. I know I'm in transition, but I could stay for hours, I think, watching everyone else, going somewhere else. Rhythms marked by a minute hand (is it coincidence, then, that the Man tells me this bar used to be a music store?).

Later, I finish Essays in Love in bed. I have read the entire book in a day and feel heavy with de Botton's relationship woes. Sleep comes easy, and when it comes, it is quiet.

Pages Devoid of Guilt

The other day, Thursday, my day off, the sweetest thing possible in the middle of the week, I got a solid few hours' (writing) work done in town and decided to reward myself with the one thing I don't need more of: books. So here's how I spent the birthday Blackwell's gift certificate, at long last:

The Other by Ryszard Kapuscinski
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth
The Return of the Solider by Rebecca West
Essays in Love by Alain de Botton

The weight of them in my bicycle basket on the way home afforded me great happiness indeed. I've spent some time feeling them, smelling them, turning pages, reading paragraphs at random. This ritual of acquisition seems not ugly, as perhaps it should do in dire times (surely he who has a spare £20 to spend on books shouldn't do so with quite so much unrestrained glee), but kind, rewarding. I've found the one place that my overdeveloped sense of guilt doesn't stretch to, and it's nice to spend a few moments every so often here, smelling the books.

Drinking the City

Except for the part where I sank ankle-deep in a hidden bog on the southern edge of South Parks, my run this evening was unbelievably beautiful. The sky , and pink blossoms everywhere, and a rain of fragrant white petals, and a red sun over the spires, which, in the thick dusky light, looked made of silver and dreams, hardly real, maybe not real at all. All the big trees lining the park were still bare and through black boughs a wind came wafting.

I know it sounds strange to say (and not a little unhealthy), but sometimes I like going for a run when I'm already a little thirsty. That way the cool air feels like something to drink. I am drinking the city, I like to think. (Then I self-consciously remember that line from Belle and Sebastian's "Stars of Track and Field": "You only did it so that you could wear your terry underwear and feel the city air run past your body.")

After I got a stitch in my side running down Divinity Road I walked for a bit. It occurred to me that I need more walks in my life. (They wash the mind, clarify the thoughts, allow fully formed sentences to appear like ghosts in my head.)

Home again, I took the laundry down from the line outside. Earlier we ate bacon sandwiches in the garden. I don't know if the Man did it just to humour me or not, but we sipped pineapple juice, and he read me an op-ed piece on Obama while I read him Tim Dowling at the supermarket checkout. At one point I laughed so hard I worried the bite I'd just taken would drop right out of my mouth. Now the dark has sagged over East Oxford. The kitchen is glowing yellow (the yellow walls make that happen, I think). My very muddy shoes are in the middle of the hallway, and my left leg is spotted with dirt. I think I'll have a bath.

The Anxiety of Age

I hear this in my head. I hear, I'm too young. I want to say, how can you be too young, but I don't say anything at all in response. I think, well, maybe I am. I look for evidence of it. Who got published at 22? Who had a relationship at 22 that lasted past 23? Who had a relationship at 22 that lasted past 23 that was healthy and beautiful and went on and on and on? Who did anything meaningful at all at 22, except die, maybe. There were a lot of 22-year-olds, a lot of 20-year-olds even, who died in wars.

We live in such a perverse world. I mean this in the most literal sense possible. Opposition, contradiction. We value youth, we say. We want our Hollywood stars fresh-faced, wrinkle-free. But real youth--the youth measured not by lines on a forehead but by years, by how much we've done, by how much we haven't done--we disregard. We call it cute, we call it charming. We want our fashion models that way because we don't want our fashion models to be anything we respect. Then we draw a line.

All we've done is extend adolescence. When I was a teenager I used to think that the ideal age to be was somewhere in one's 20s. I used to think that that's what everyone craved. Teenagers wanted to be older, everyone else wanted to be younger. And now I find I've reached what I thought was the golden era, the time-of-all-times, only to learn that I'm still in the teenage-hood of society. Nobody thinks a 20-something can do anything worthwhile, because we're, as they say, still learning.

This has turned into more of a diatribe than I meant it to be. All I meant it to be was a thought: that here I am, paying my own rent, expected to make a fool of myself. I know what I write now will, in ten year's time, be irrelevant; I know my tone will change, my voice, my point of view. But still, I'd like to think that if I'm old enough to support myself, I'm old enough to be trusted with my own heart, my own soul.

Living in a Yurt in Kathmandu? I Saw the Status Update.

Has Facebook made the high school reunion redundant?

Yes, I realize I'm delving into the trite and the technical, but a few months ago I received an invite to my high school reunion and, to steal a phrase from Carrie Bradshaw (not something I ever saw myself doing, ever), I couldn't help but wonder: in an era where every breath we take is published and publicized, what's the point?

I saw myself standing with my colleagues on the campus where we spent our awkward years, nodding my head. "Oh, so you're working in finance? Yeah, I thought I saw that on Facebook. Married? I noticed your relationship status had changed. Babies? Your album was cute. Grad school? Running your own business? Running seven marathons a year? Converting to Mormanism? Living in a yurt in Kathmandu? I saw the status update."

In the heady days before Facebook, when it was possible for someone you'd spent four intensely uncomfortable years with to slip completely off your radar in a day, I envisaged the high school reunion with some satisfaction. My social discomfort at the time, my shy, blushing-at-everything countenance, made me the perfect candidate for a major five-years-later comeback. I would breeze into the room looking gorgeous and tanned (why do we think that tanned is somehow an indicator of good physical and emotional health?), my hair styled precisely to the trends of the moment, my clothes impressive in their well-tailored flattery and their obvious expense. I would have someone at my arm from well outside the sphere of the Santa Ynez Valley--an Englishman, preferably, who I'd met in New York City, where I'd settled after college to finish my novel (the one with the big advance) and write an enormously popular column. I would be a little tired--just got back from a trip to South Africa, research for my next book, you know--but the transformation from angst-ridden outcast to real-world success would be stunning.

But here's the truth of it: we can't shock each other anymore. Everyone I'm friends with on Facebook is already going to know what I look like these days, that I'm living abroad, that I'm getting another degree. If they read this blog they'll even know that I'm poorer than dirt and have no wildly popular column to boast about. We grew up with each other, my classmates and I, but then (and we were really the first generation to do this) we continued growing up with each other, remotely. We saw all the college relationships, distilled to a single line ("in a relationship with...", "it's complicated with.."), all the parties, distilled to a wittily-named online album. We saw the shifts in geography, the aquisition of degrees (or not), the weddings, the children, the message that so-and-so wrote to so-and-so. What's left to tell?

I ask myself, too: am I bitter because I'm not going? In that sophomore-year vision of an eight-year-older me, I never once considered skipping the event. But here I am, and the pressures of adulthood dictate that I stay put at the end of April, remain in Oxford, with (go figure) my Englishman, working on (go figure again) my book, living my already very public life. (But frankly, the way the weather is looking today, you couldn't pay me to miss Oxford in full springtime bloom.)

A very close friend of mine wrote me a letter recently. "To be perfectly honest," she wrote, "I think without you there I would be reverted back to the shy/awkward/semingly semi-retarded person I was at Dunn," and the awful truth is, so would I. I can picture the scene much more clearly on this side of graduation. I would stand there, with my loyal Englishman at my arm, looking nice, dressed well, holding in my head the knowledge of my in-process book, my Oxford life, the places I've been, the places I'll go, and I would become as dumb and uncomfortable as I was at 15.

Maybe I ought to be happy that Facebook has made it possible for me to feel smug without ever having to set foot on the campus of my alma mater. Maybe it's not that Facebook has made the high school reunion redundant, exactly; it's that it's made it redundant for people who only ever considered going for the shallow aim of proving a point (i.e., you were wrong about me; in fact, I was wrong about myself). Maybe it's that it will make the event less about showing off and more about socializing in a genuine way.

I'll never know--but, because I can, because this is the world we're living in and this is who I am in it now, I'll blog about it anyway.

The Breathing Space Between Hilary and Trinity

My mood at the moment: lustful. I lust for longer days, warmer evenings, summer dresses. I lust for new clothes (I spend hours at the computer, clicking photographs of things I can't afford). I lust for the glow of inspiration to sparkle into a frenzy of of productivity. And by wanting this so much, I stay stuck (it's the trickery of Spring).

The city has emptied herself again, tipped the students out, and we see who is left. "The arselickers who stayed," Philip Larkin called them (called us). But all I can think is that now that they are gone I will go to the Bodleian and get lost amongst the books.

Suddenly Monday nights are blank in a good way, they are quiet again, and as I glide wraithlike down the High street under eleven o'clock darkness there might be no one but me in all the city, no one but me and the lonely kebab vendor, in his cloud of grease and chip smells, no one but me and the lonely kebab vendor and the ghosts crawling over the college walls, frolicking in the gardens while they can.

(The Man gets home late, I hear him undressing and the birds starting to wake simultaneously; he slips into bed beside me while the night is melting into morning, and our window is wide open).

I forget how still Jericho is. On Plantation Road I lean against the curb with my bicycle, so warm I've shed even my cardigan, and wait for a few minutes just to feel the sun and the stillness. Later a friend and I sit in the garden with a bottle of strong beer between us, chasing a pool of sunshine to the edge of the grass. It's like a wilderness this far away from the house, hugging the brambles coming over the fence.

We talk of Africa. I haven't been to Africa, I almost say, but the truth is that I have. I forget that I have; the Africa I've been to is smoky, spicy, sultry in the way I imagine the Middle East to be (but how would I know?). Not the Africa I used to dream about. But then, we all have different Africas, maybe; and I think about how complicated our relationship with place is, anyway, how much love and experience it takes to get to the root of it.

Later I meet the Man for a drink; we should go back to Fés soon, he says, apropos of nothing, nothing but the strange exhilaration which has overtaken everyone now that the weather is turning warm again. Is it really only the warmth, the clarity of light, that makes us believe in the glory of the future, the adventure of a summer, again?

Funny, I think.