I looked like Sherlock Holmes the other day.  An unconscious reminder to myself of how much I miss London?  Perhaps. I have a feeling this will occur more and more frequently, so I figure I should define this phenomenon upfront.  It’s called London Melancholia.  It’s a term I’ve borrowed and adapted from Freud and Butler with their theorizations of gender melancholia and heterosexual melancholia, respectively.  Let me explain. I’ll use Butler as the example. From one of my final papers:

Through her engagement with psychoanalysis, Butler describes how Freud’s account of the Oedipal complex and bisexuality underpin what she comes to call the ‘primary taboo against homosexuality.’  It is argued that Freud’s account assumes for heterosexuality, therefore creating a heterosexual melancholy of sorts, wherein which the object of the loss of same-sex love becomes inscribed on the body.  Therefore, the most polarizing feminine or masculine subject, the most ‘adamantly’ heterosexual, becomes the most melancholic. As Butler notes, “Gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition.  This prohibition sanctions and regulates discrete gendered identity and the law of heterosexual desire.

---

Angela McRobbie.  The Uses of Cultural Studies.  (London: Sage, 2005), 77

Ibid.

Judith Butler.  Gender Trouble.  (New York: Routledge, 2006), 85-86

So now London melancholia would occur when one inscribes the loss of London on one’s person through various speech acts, thoughts, emotions, clothing, etc.  I’d been contemplating this before I left and so I jotted down how my London melancholia might play out while I was on my last Ryan air flight back from Malaga. Here’s what I came up with: 

I might wear skirts and leggings (big might) with tall boots.  I may say “cheers” or “hey mate!”  I may wear long wool peacoats.  I might say ‘whilst’ just for the hell of it.  I may refer to my professors as ‘tutors’ and my semesters as ‘terms.’  I may randomly burst out with my rendition of ’4-3-6- to *pause* Paddington’ or nnnnew cross gate (I do believe only one other person will understand my love of this).  I may drink wine like crazy.  I may make fun of other Americans.  I may never wear a sweatshirt again (lie, I’m wearing one now).  I may sing (and dance) to the ryan air theme song upon any faint reminder of said airline.  I may wish for a slight drizzle or clouds in the sky.  I’ll get excited upon any mention of socialism.  I might start grafitting sexist adverts… I’ll say ‘advert.’  I’ll start using single quotes instead of double (as evidenced).  Cell phones will be mobiles.  ’To go’ will be ‘take away.’ I’ll still be confused when I use the words class, course, lecture, department, lesson, etc.  I’ll have the urge to swipe my oyster near any form of public transportation.  Strongbow will be my drink of choice.  I’ll rile up MUSG in an attempt to relive my Goldsmiths Student Assembly days–the most legislative power I’ve ever had.  

Having been back for almost a month, I have had strongbow a solid three times and have reverted to wearing a long wool coat. I’ve also just recently applied to become a safesite, and pass out 500 condoms (for free!) to my lovely Catholic institution that cannot discuss birth control methods and thus can’t even mention the STI prevention power of condoms.  

I miss London immensely, mostly because the Feminist Society at Goldsmiths is doing so many amazing, awesome things in the near future–a zine, self defense classes, Miss University protesting, feminist film festival (complete with feminist PORN!), and the list goes on. And my London friends, I miss them dearly. I cannot express how glad I was to find some amazing people to spend my time with there. Hopefully, one day, we’ll reunite. Until then, I’ll be wearing my British flag earrings, wool coat, and Sherlock Holmes hat. Yes, even in the summer.

-generally, don’t be so gd judgmental

-look for the good wherever it might be hiding

2) Have the courage to be creative

-go for it

-actually pursue the ideas in your head–they could land you in riches, who knows!

-(a lot easier said than done)

3) Do not comment on McAsshole’s Blog

-we’ll see how long that one lasts…i’ll try my hardest though

-correction: do not comment on the irrelevant shit. 

-do not comment just to make yourself feel better. comment for a purpose besides self-righteousness

So I leave in 3 days.  I have to check out of my hall, the place where I’ve lived for the past three months, in about 7 hours.  I spent my last evening here getting the delicious and cheap food I’ve come to love here on New Cross Way–Caribbean jerk chicken at “Cummin up” (haha) and the always tasty chicken and chips from Tasty Kebab.  I also packed and went out to Hobgoblin one last time for a drank of Strongbow. Mmm.   Oh, and yeah, I cleaned my bathroom that I only kinda sorta cleaned once throughout my stay here.  So that was fun.  I still have stuff laying all around me that I’m waiting to pack.  Also, I’m stupidly listening to the most melancholic music ever.  But that’s like half of what I own.  

*pauses to wipe non-existent but metaphorical tear from eye*  

I will miss this place greatly.  I will miss the people 10000x that.  I will miss the situation, the timing, the circumstance, and the relation of every single part of my time here.  It fit together quite nicely and I couldn’t have hoped for anything better.  I know I will stay in touch with the friends I’ve made (joys of facebook) but I also know that time continues and there will never be a situation like this again.  At this point, I can mourn this fact, but at the same time realize that I do not know what the future holds, so anything is possible.  I mean that in the most vague-est of ways, of course.  I’d apologize for my abstract sentences, but they just make too much sense to me. 

I keep going around thinking “this may be the last time I’m doing this.”  I went to fill up my water bottle in the kitchen and thought that.  This is not a good thing.

New Cross.  Maybe I’ll name one of my kids that.

1) Foucault’s History of Sexuality: Volume 1

2) Iris Marion Young’s On Female Body Experience

3) Ellen K. Feder’s Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender (A book given to me by doc monahan before I left.  Yeah, haven’t read it yet.  For shame!)

As my title alludes to, though, I’ve been increasingly obsessed with books and bookstores. (Hah, like I wasn’t before.)  But this past week, it’s gotten out of hand.  On top of the four or so books I had already bought here, I bought 8 more!  In a span of 3 days.  Not a smart move because I have to somehow bring said books home with me.  But I won’t worry about that now.  I’ll just revel in the gloriousness that is Oxfam and random shops like Bookmarks, your friendly socialist book source!  (I swear, socialists are the nicest people!  It’s the anarchists you have to watch out for…)  So anyway, the list of books I have bought here so far are as follows: 

-A Brave New World by Aldoux Huxley

-Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

-Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

-Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

-I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

-Immortality by Milan Kundera 

-Sexing the Cherry by Jeannette Winterson

-A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy by Charlotte Greig

-The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

-Sexism and the System: A Rebel’s Guide to Women’s Liberation by Judith Orr

-The Earth in the Attic, a book of poetry by Fady Joudah

-The Dharma Blues by Jack Kerouac

Basically, it’s a random assortment of banned books, feminist-y books, radical/revolutionary-y books, and philosophical/political-y books. Love it…and cannot wait to read…at some point in my life.  (sigh)  There’s just too little time and too much to do.  I think I might try the ‘book a week’ deal for 2009 though.  I’ll probably get through three weeks or so, but it’s worth the effort, no?

Desiree misses people, not places; situations, not things.

Desiree needs to stay busy or she’ll just pre-emptively depress herself.

Desiree shant be trusted traversing around this beautiful city alone. She’ll only continuously romanticize it in her head.

Vid is a little long. Deal. 

“Ah, love, let us be true 
To one another! for the world, which seems 
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
So various, so beautiful, so new, 
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 
And we are here as on a darkling plain 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

–Last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach” via Caity

Well, now that I’m ‘done’ with my papers (I more consider them works in progress) I will have time to update this sucker more often and hopefully backtrack a little and talk about my trips to Paris and Amsterdam and all the demonstrations I’ve gone to.  ALSO, I’m excited to hopefully get the time to edit some vids.  Yay! 

For now, I’m off…but not literally (my computer owns my soul.)

au revoir

From A Softer World:

I like people who think about what they read, too.  And I’m much more attracted to “interesting” than “beautiful.”  But then again, beautiful is usually my interesting and interesting is usually my beautiful…am I not not making sense?

So I am very much looking forward to updating this thing and compiling videos and such.  I should be able to begin doing all this after next week.  I just hope my computer will have enough space to hold all the files until then.

Oh, and quickly, I’ll just say that I’ve been pre-emptively depressing myself lately with thinking about the fact that I only have 3 more weeks here.  Life is such a damn roller coaster sometimes, simultaneously going up and down…where are the controls?  I’m both ridiculously happy to be here right now and experience the things I am experiencing but I also cannot wait to see everyones lovely faces at home.  Life is grand, life is grand.

Over the past two weeks I have gained many a stamp on my passport.  Nov. 3-7th was reading week so no classes.  Hmm, what to do?  *twiddles thumbs*  How about Rome?  And Paris?  And Bath? and Stonehenge?  Sounds like a plan. end internal dialogue

On Nov. 1st I travelled to the town of Bath as well as the ancient ruins of Stonehenge.  

An old pile of rocks with mystical powers

the cuteness that is Bath

I arrived back home from that day trip around 9 p.m. only to wake up the next morning at 3:30 in order to catch a 4 o’clock bus to Victoria station where from there we would get on a 5 o’clock bus to take us to the airport.  (All for the love of cheap fares)  We arrived in Rome around noon that day, November 2nd, checked into our hostel, basked in the warm air, ate delicious pizza and brushetta, chilled outside the Colosseum and Trevi fountain, drank some wine on the street out of plastic mini cups and then had more delicious Italian food.  Day two we woke up to sunshine and decided to head to the Colosseum and the Palatino (ancient ruins).  Oh, this was a beautiful day.  Weather, people, FOOD, sights, all just glorious.  I will forever remember the spinach panini like thing I ate for lunch that day.

After all the outdoor goodness, we came back to our hostel and rested up for the night ahead…Spanish Steps Pub Crawl!  For 20 euros we got a t-shirt (best part) and unlimited wine or beer at the first place + 3 shots + a shot for every bar we went to that night which totaled 3 more.  Not a bad deal.  The Crawl was a really good time.  And getting home that night was even funner! /sarcasm.  Okay, so we left the last bar around 2 a.m. and didn’t get back to our hostel until 5.  The trip shouldn’t have taken us more than half an hour and yeah, it took 3.  Long story short, we got on the bus going the opposite direction even though it SAID it was going to Termini (where we needed to go).  So we rode that for like 40 minutes to the end of the stop in the opposite direction, waiting about a half an hour, confused and sitting on an empty bus, and then finally got off and hopped on another one that promised to take us where we needed to be.  From there we probably waited another hour until we got off the bus and had to walk in the rain from the train station to our hostel.  But D’oh! we couldn’t find our damn hostel which was literally only about 4 blocks away from the station.  And on top of all this mess, the boys ditched us.  Still not over that.  We settled in that night errr morning, got us much sleep as we could until they kicked us outta the hostel and then headed off for some museum-ing.  We decided on Villa Borghese where we saw some awesome Bernini statues and other cool paintings and whatnot.  It was a very impressive gallery.  We then wandered the city, entered a swanky area, exited said swanky area, and finally met up with some friends for dinner.  Oh Italian food, how I miss thee…

I woke up the next morning to Caity telling me Obama won.  It was kinda like Christmas…iiiif you woke up 3 hours late for it and were on the other side of the world.  I deeply missed being in Grant Park that night but I enjoyed hearing all the stories from people, especially my mom who called that morning and kept reiterating how a sort of “calm” and soothing feeling had fallen over the nation.  She seriously used the word calm like 5 times…I had her on speakerphone, my trip mates can back me up.  It was cute.  

So that day, day three, we visited the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel.  It was sitting in the Sistene that I heard about Prop 8.  Like everyone else at home, I kinda had that three hours of glee before I learned that although our nation had made great strides with electing Barack Obama, our first African American president, we still have a long long ways to go.  And we always will.  It just horribly saddened me to think that people thought they had the right–and on top of that, they had the WILL–to write hate and discrimination into their constitution.  I have faith, though, that as a nation, and with an Obama presidency, great strides are going to be made on all progressive fronts.  And hey, did you not love Wanda Sykes coming out loud and proud for the first time in public?  “I am proud to be a woman. I am proud to be a black woman.  And I am proud to be gay.  And I love you all, now let’s go get our damn equal rights!”

Hmm…I see that I am slowly going off topic.  Right, so back to day 3.  THE POPE! WE SAW THE POPE! We saw him ride around in his little popemobile!  And we took pictures with him on a screen in the background!

I would have much preferred to see Barack Obama though.  Le sigh.

That afternoon I had delicious food YET AGAIN and then went on a quest for the Pantheon.  On the way, however, we stopped in an artsy piazza where I bought a pretty water color painting from a real perv.  How about that for juxtaposition?  Caity and I bought 2 paintings for 30 euros from this guy and he was really nice and all but when I asked if he’d do 2 for 30, he said something to the effect of “you two?” with a smirk.  I’m dumb when it comes to these instances of fuckery, but Caity and I giggled it off until we came to the realization (yes,after we paid him) that he was making a pretty sexist joke.  

So after that we stumbled upon the Pantheon and then headed back to Trevi fountain for one last look.  We had dinner that night with two more friends from school that joined us all in Rome.  We attempted to go somewhere fancy cus it was our last night there. BAD IDEA.  We ended up at some place that obviously took themselves way too seriously.  It was silent in the restaurant with waiters constantly walking by to see if you needed anything.  And they were pretty rude on top of it.  Needless to say, we felt very out of place, but it’s a story to tell our kids, I guess.  Or well, you, my dear readers reader. 

Thursday morning the boys got scooters and scooted around the city while the girls went omgz shopping!  We got our last meal at some cute Italian eatery where a small chubby Italian man with a lovely smile served us.  It was, again, needless to say, deliciious food.  We then ordered our last scoops of Gelati (we were required to eat one a day) and headed towards the bus stop.  Rome was lovely and although I didn’t throw any coins into Trevi fountain (one for love, one for marriage, and one for coming back to Rome) I do home one day I can return.  Love would be nice too.  Marriage? Meh. We’ll see.

Okay, that was substantial enough, right?

Oh! One more random tidbit about Rome. It was real weird–we kept seeing random people we’d met or seen multiple times on the streets of Rome.  For instance, one of the bartenders at the first bar was on our bus home that same night, although it was like 8 hours later (because of our getting home debacle).  And then we saw one of Caity’s friends she made that night  the next day on the streets of Rome working at some fancy restaurant we passed by.  I did a double take, saw the guy, said hey, Caity ran off, I ran with her, and then we just left the poor guy standing there.  I waved goodbye at least. *shrugs*  And last but not least, while we were at the Vatican, I saw these two girls taking a picture of themselves kissing in front of the Pope which I thought was hilarious, so I took a picture and then the next day they were in line in front of us for the bus back to the airport.  Crazy.

So yeah, overall, huge thumbs up to Rome!

Since this is a really long post already, I’ll save thoughts on my Paris and Amsterdam trip for later.  In other news, I don’t think I’ve shared this yet:  I will be going to Dublin Dec. 9-10th and Malaga, Spain Dec. 15-18th.  I hope my bank account holds until then.  If not, capitalism has granted me with seemingly unlimited credit, so alls well….right?  Right.  Goodnight, people.