communication breakdown

I really wish I was better at talking to people. it's not that I don't want to make conversation, most of the time, it's that I honestly don't know what the hell to say. I don't know what to talk about in order to get to the point where you can talk about everything. I guess it's something you're born with, or you're not, and if you're not, you're fucked, and everyone else will get to do the things you want to do.

I miss this so much.
I've been going to the rink, skating by myself, with a puck as often as I can, but that's just treading water, really.
covering the women's team for the newspaper makes me want to be on the ice, in the locker room, so badly - we hang out outside the locker room door waiting for them to come out and you can hear everybody whooping it up, yelling, laughing, having an awesome time because that's what you do in the locker room.

I've probably been around just as much hockey this year as I ever was in any year, except maybe sophomore year when I played Team Pittsburgh, but this year I've played five games. five. the rest I've watched from the press box, which is a weird, weird feeling.
I always want to tell the girls - the girls who are fucking awesome, whom I pretty much want to be - "I play too, you know! I miss the shit out of it and I am insanely jealous that you get to be a Division I hockey player and you are awesome!"
but that's not really objective journalism.

I miss my linemates.
I saw a group on Facebook the other day that was called something like "we're not gay, we're just linemates!" and I cracked up because yep, that's Evie and Kim and me. Turbo, Zippy and Slug. my favorite line in the history of hockey (aside from Kennedy-Staal-Cooke for the Pens - in that analogy, Evie is Kennedy, Kimmy is Jordan and I'm Cooke, just for the record. we've discussed this.)
I miss just being chill and goofy with those guys, running up and down hotel hallways making a ruckus, playing three games a day and lying around the lobby in between.

I miss skating hard, shooting, handling the puck, backchecking (I'm a defensively-minded weirdo, always), having a team. I need a way to have a hockey team in my life next year like I can't even tell you.

every night I have the strangest dream

I don't know why, but when my brain starts to wander around lately it keeps landing on this strange, specific little memory of mine from almost ten years ago. Prince Edward Island, Canada (yes, my family takes the weirdest/greatest vacations ever, why do you ask?), on some random little playground - a very modest one, just a slide and a swingset as I remember it. climbing all over things with my brother, who must have been, what, about eight at the time.

and there was this man and his little kid there - the kid was probably around four or five, and very friendly, adorable little guy, and he kept saying things to me and Tom, and it took us quite some time to realize he was speaking French. he was a teeny little French Canadian boy who probably thought we were a pair of aliens for not being able to understand him. (and Tom, who is his father's son and can never understand why anybody besides his absolute closest friends should EVER talk to him, trying to just smile and nod at the poor little guy, absolutely no clue what's going on.) and eventually the dad realized what was going on and explained to our mum, and they had a good laugh, and then he explained to his kid, and that was that.

it's weird, because I don't remember a lot else from that trip. I was ten, or maybe nine. I know I wore a lot of sleeveless basketball shirts, boys' shirts of course, and we went to a beach with nearly white sand dunes and water so cold it turned my legs purple within a few minutes. (Canada: Orlando it is not.) there are a couple streets that I think I can picture on the Island, or somewhere in Maine on the drive up, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the image in my head is actually from Colorado, two years ago (or potentially Washington, two years before that). I hardly remember Maine - just some touristy shops with lobster keychains - and I don't remember New Hampshire at all, even though I was most certainly there. it's a strange feeling.

well, this is a self-indulgent post. I guess that's kind of characteristic of blog posting in general though, so nbd.

mother russia, do not suffer

I really want to go to Russia. see Moscow.

take the Trans-Siberian Railway.

see St. Petersburg.

be in fucking Siberia. LOOK AT THAT. LOOK AT IT.

and hopefully not end up in a bar fight with this crazy bastard:
no, but seriously. I want to go to there.

I never get when people say, "don't worry, just relax, it'll happen when you're least trying." I mean, are there different levels of trying to make something that you want to happen, happen? that is, if you're really not trying, at all, I kind of doubt good things are going to happen to you. I mean, if you just lie on your couch all day and really don't try...shit's not going to happen. and if you're actively doing anything at all...you're trying.

I SWEAR I HAD SOMETHING TO SAY THAT WAS INSIGHTFUL, BUT IT'S 2:33 AM AND I HAVE APPARENTLY LOST IT. never mind. do, or do not. there is no try. I think that's what I'm trying to say.

gonna start a revolution from my bed

you know, I don't really care that Oasis is basically just an amalgamation of every British guitar band since the Beatles. those boys have written some great fucking songs.

clear and bright

seeing real snow pile up in the city for the first time
and I can't say I mind it.
even gray and packed dense on the train tracks
wet, dripping haphazardly off the roof of my building
forming odd, misshapen monuments
and resting fragile, untouched, still white
on tops of things like mailboxes
and parking meters
where no one has yet decided it's in their way.

and outside the window on the fourteenth floor,
snow-dusted trees blur the hard lines of the landscape like smoke
a pleasant enough change.

USA USA USA (and London)

so I was actually assigned to make up two playlists for the magazine here at school. best assignment ever. the first one - the theme for this issue is "travel" - was a list of songs about various cities, and this is what I ultimately ended up with:

1. "Waterloo Sunset" - the Kinks
2. "Dirty Water" - Dropkick Murphys (Boston, of course)
3. "New York, New York" - Ryan Adams
4. "Washington, DC" - the Magnetic Fields
5. "Hotel Yorba" - the White Stripes (there actually is a Hotel Yorba outside of Detroit, it turns out)
6. "Graceland" - Paul Simon (Memphis)
7. "Proud Mary" - CCR (New Orleans, yo)
8. "Houston, TX" - Deer Tick
9. "Skyway" - the Replacements (Minneapolis <333333)
10. "Olympia, WA" - Rancid
11. "Portland, Oregon" - Jack White and Loretta Lynn (so fucking weird and I love it)
12. "Save Me, San Francisco" - Train
13. "Los Angeles" - Sugarcult
14. "Santa Monica" - Everclear

honorable mention: every Fountains of Wayne song about New York and North Jersey (but dude, there are eight million songs about New York, I could make several volumes of CDs of just the NYC songs on my iPod); every Dropkick Murphys song about Boston (they're pretty much the only ones who write about this fine city, aside from, uh, Jonathan Richman); every Green Day song that mentions real places in the Bay Area (fffff I want to go back and see them all so badly); every Chili Peppers song about Los Angeles (aka every Chili Peppers song that isn't about sex or heroin); every Clash song, and every other Kinks song, about London. also, "Good Morning Baltimore" from Hairspray. that one was tempting.

anything really obvious, or anything less obvious but still awesome, I missed? I feel like there are probably a ton.

watch me leave it all behind

One of the most exquisite feelings I’ve ever had is the one of realizing you are in a place where you’ve never, ever been before, and you have time to explore on your own terms.
I’ve felt it driving around Pennsylvania, up mountains and through corn fields; I’ve felt it racing across trails in the Rockies winding ever higher; I’ve felt it when I found myself, rather by accident, in a part of Boston I’d never seen before, alone, on a cold sunny morning when I had no obligations until the afternoon.
It is a feeling that I’ve imagined could go on forever, as long as I keep moving into that which I have never seen before.

i want to go (back) to there

Places I Miss, Ireland edition, because I feel like it (click to make any of the pictures bigger as usual):

the first picture I ever took outside of North America...our hotel door in Galway. that place was sweet, though. maybe it was just the places we stayed but I think standard Irish hotel rooms are bigger than American ones.

legit rainbow.

Oscar Wilde was chillin' in the middle of town so I thought I'd say hello.

CHEESEMONGERS.

the town square, which was way too pretty.

Galway is pretty much The Town of Random Splashes of Color. random houses in the middle of a row are suddenly blue or red, random little pennants and things. it's lovely.

sky over river = one of my favorite things in the entire world

see? random colorful houses.

western Ireland looks a bit like the end of the world, in general. in an awesome way.

we didn't walk on footpath. well, we did a bit but we also walked on rocks.

nnngh ocean

lol Tom.

people in Galway match their cars to their houses, apparently.

though this one was a bit off.

if you weren't aware, I have a serious thing for rivers.

Joe fucking Strummer on a chair. wot?

this would get hella epic if I did the whole trip, actually, so we'll just leave at that because that's all the best ones from Galway.

and this has all made me want to reread A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. why am I such a pretentious literary ass?

social media saturation ftw

so I currently have:

a Tumblr, which is like Twitter for non-retarded people (although I don't really like it that much, honestly), mainly to connect with people here at school;
a Livejournal, mainly to talk to people I know through various fandoms;
a Blogger...blog, for shit I don't feel like posting on LJ, for the two people who actually read it, haha;
my old Xanga, which I'm never getting rid of because it's hilarious, and I actually posted on it a couple times in the fall for the hell of it;
and now I'm thinking about getting a Wordpress blog to post writing-related stuff. as in fiction I am trying to write. but I'm afraid I'll get one and then that'll completely jinx my writing brain. my writing brain is very susceptible to things like this, and it starts and stops being useful completely of its own volition.

possibly a problem, as I want to be A Writer, but not even really the most pressing obstacle, considering the issues I have with things like, you know, plot. oh well.

[this is a public service announcement, this is only a test]