The Kind (of Wheat) You Don’t Take Home to Mother

Can wheat be sexy? No, wait — don’t stop reading my blog. Allow me to rephrase: Wheat can be sexy — and exotic! … You know, if you’re American.

freekeh (FREE-kah) — noun: wheat harvested when still green and then roasted.

I feel like it makes me sound obnoxious if I say that I enjoy a menu more when it teaches me new words. Regardless, I have to admit that I feel no shame in bringing my iPhone to the table and using it to make sense of what’s been laid out before me. And I especially like seeing how the dictionary definition differs from how the server explains it. For example, soubise. Says the internet: “A béchamel variant whose velvety texture benefits from the pungency of onions.” Says the server: “It’s white sauce.” And I really like catching the restaurant dressing up simple fare in fancy terms. — haricots verts used for plain old green beans, for example.

Freekeh, as a word, manages to make wheat more interesting — a little lusty, a bit weird, sort of scary, a skosh threatening. I can’t comment on the taste, because my life has so far been freekeh-free, but my superfreak friend Kristen’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal tells me that freekeh offers either a smokier or grassier flavor than that gutterwheat you’ve been eating all this time. I trust Kristen — a sort of culinary guinea pig over at Food52 who consequently has a lot of guilt about eating guinea pigs now — and now I feel bad for not knowing about freekeh sooner. You know who has known about freekeh even longer than Kristen? Arabs. Culinary up-and-comer though freekeh may be in the Western world, it’s not a new dish the cuisines of Egypt, the Levant or the Arab Peninsula, according to Wikipedia. It can also be known by the name farik — literally “rubbed” in Arabic, as a result of the thrashing process it undergoes — which seems like an alternate transliteration of the original Arabic. That one’s only sexy if you interpret it as an extremely affected pronunciation of freak. And I do. Mostly because I know it actually means “rubbed.”

Heh.

Previous words of the week after the jump.

• acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, beeturia, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer, brinicle
• catholicon, cecaelia, cephalophore, cherpumple, chilver, chyron, cockernonnie, collywobbles, coprolalia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, culaccino, cummingtonite
• darkle, deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingbat, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui, exoterica
• fabiform, Feghoot, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
• gallinipper, gnaborretni, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hobson-jobson, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus, hoyden
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai, izod, izzard
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
• lagniappe, leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, maroon, milt, mongo, mooncalf, morepork, muzjiks
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, padiddle, pareidolia, pavonated, perendiate, perigee, petrichor, pettifogger, pettitoes, phlegmagogue, pismire, pixilated, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc, quiff
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung, runcible
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, sharrow, shebang, sinople, slampadato, slubberdegullion, stan, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• tappen, teratogenesis, tergiversate, tetromino, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tutoyer, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane, umiaq, umquhile
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, widdiful, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

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Another Kristen, Another Life

So I tend to see people I know in people I see. It’s not a bad habit, per se, but it can be a frustrating habit when I see resemblances that no one else does. I don’t know why this is. Maybe I just see smaller details than other people don’t notice — expressions, poses, the vaguest hints at someone else. Or maybe I’m just wrong. Regardless, I do this often enough that it has become a minor character trait, and I was recently gratified to learn that I’m not entirely off base.

This is Kristen — friend, lover, business partner and competitive bobsled teammate:

Here she is, terrified and in a tree (as she frequently was for most of college):

And here is a Superman cover depicting Lois Lane that we all agreed looked eerily like our little “muffin in the rain.”

(What was in Superman’s forbidden room? We’ll never know. I’m guessing Kryptonian porn.)

Recently, Spencer stumbled across a photo of the actor Matthew Fox standing beside a woman who looked a great deal like Kristen:

I suspect that the woman is Fox’s wife, Margarhita Ronchi, And while she generally doesn’t look like Kristen, I think the resemblance in this photo is rather striking — and conducive to many, many questions about Kristen’s personal life. Really, does this mean she could be married to Matthew Fox? Lost reference?

Paperweights

“Anything can be a paperweight.” This was the conclusion I made at the end of a long-ago conversation with friends about the strangeness of paperweights being souvenirs that people would actually pay for. Compared to paperweights, other souvenirs are inherently better. Snow globes, for example. Or postcards. Both serve a function that a “just anything” can’t. I can’t remember if the friends and I reached a unanimous agreement on this or not, but I at least arrived at the belief that paperweights were inherently inferior to other souvenirs because literally anything can be used in place of them. A stapler. A mug. A tape dispenser. A rock. A well-behaved baby. Even a moderately heavy writing implement could successfully prevent a small stack of papers from blowing away. If one was for some reason hung up on the notion of pinning these papers down with a memento from some vacation, there’s enough to pick from on the vacation itself. A seashell. A different kind of mug. A vacation place rock. A well-behaved baby that happened to have been conceived while away. Really, anything can be a paperweight. Why do people have such problems keeping their papers from blowing away? Can’t they just close their windows or, if the problem really is so bad, move to a less drafty house?

Upon Finding a Photo in the Kitchen Drawer

This essay concerns a photo I found. However, that part comes five paragraphs later. In fact, I don't even mention the photo in the below paragraph. So if you're especially eager to find out about the photograph, I suggest you skip down. If you feel okay with a bit of exposition, however, keep reading the paragraphs as you come to them. I think it might make the part with the photograph make a bit more sense.

I live in an old house. Through a small bit of research, Aly, Spencer and I have learned that our house once constituted a part of a hotel enjoyed by wealthy and famous of early 20th-century California. (It’s less nice now, I suspect, but it’s livable.) My house even pre-dates the 1925 earthquake that knocked down most of the city and then allowed it to be rebuilt in red-tile-roof Spanish mission-style, making my house the only building I've lived in that's older than my grandmother. Behind me, where I'm typing this now, there's a sliding glass window that looks out onto the stairway. This window shows the age of the house by virtue of the fact that looking at it at an angle reveals a smooth ripple through the glass, which I'm led to believe is characteristic of old, old glass. Thus, there's a chance this glass once looked out onto the outside, rather than the inside, and out onto a very different Santa Barbara.

Given the house's age, its weirdness makes sense, I suppose. By virtue of having stood here for so long and having housed so many people and having been brutally divided into apartments, its current state surely differs greatly from its initial design, hence why some of its features defy logic. For example, the floor in the plant room — which used to be Amber's bedroom and Betsy's office and most recently Spencer's technical bedroom — tilts down perceptibly as it nears the outer wall. Clearly, this room was a porch in an earlier incarnation, and the arc of the floor exists so that rain would run off into the garden and not puddle. The second bedroom — formerly Byron's, formerly mine, and formerly Betsy's before that — lacks a closet, so we suspect it might have once been a dining room. If that's true, the third bedroom — now Aly's, previously Kristen's — might make more sense, as the back wall of its closet is actually a revolving door that would lead into the kitchen if it wasn't being blocked by the refrigerator. What would appear to be Aly bedroom’s cupboards actually open onto the kitchen shelves, where we store the plates and glasses. We suspect Aly's room once served as some kind of butler's room or something, hence the accessibility into the kitchen. Oh, and despite that it only has three bedrooms, the house has fifteen different doors, including the non-functional revolving door, the locked door that leads to the neighbor's balcony and the completely sealed door in the dining room that I didn't even notice until I had already lived here for a year. Clearly, the place has a history, the vast majority of it I'll probably never even know before I move out.

However, on a smaller scale, I'm continually reminded of the history of the past few "generations" of people who've lived here. For example, former tenants get more mail on a daily basis than do the three current tenants. A magazine for Betsy, a check for Kristen, something strangely legal-looking for somebody named Deirdre, credit card application for a different Drew, arty stuff for a girl named Lisa-With-The-Ugly-Last-Name, generally nothing for me. Or there's what happened a few months back, when Spencer and Aly were explaining the house to our friend Graham when he revealed that he had actually dated Lisa-With-The-Ugly-Last-Name and played a small hand in making the house look the way it did. (Bamboo curtain rods for one, and the strange plywood-and-styrofoam structure that blocked off part of the sun room at the top of the stairs and which Aly and I sent crashing down the stars one night in last year a fit of frustration.) And knowing about a connection between Graham and this Lisa girl struck me as so odd because I had never personally met her and only previously knew about her through stories Amber had told and from seeing her name on all the fucking catalogues that she never bothered to unsubscribe from. Yet I know for a fact that I'm still using some of the furniture she bought when she lived here years ago.

Another: One day, Spencer found a secret compartment in the attic. Inside, he found a dusty grocery bag full of papers — photocopies of articles from women's magazines and a partially written thesis paper by someone named Marian who went to Stanford. On a whim, I looked her up on MySpace to find out if she wanted them. Months later, she wrote back, this Marian, saying that she did live in my house for a period and that she no longer needed her old research. She also mentioned that the lead singer of The Ataris lived in the next-door apartment back when she lived here, and that she remembered hearing him fight with his girlfriend and then have loud sex. Everyday. (We, for the record, still hear our neighbors doing similar activities, though the people next-door now aren't rock stars.)

This all seems quite important in light of the fact that I found a photograph in the kitchen drawer a few weeks back. The photo looks like this:

It’s Kristen, whom I know fairly well and who lived here at the house just over a year-and-a-half ago. I don’t know who was standing on the other side of the camera, but I can be sure that that’s Kristen. Despite being able to readily identify the girl, though, I couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that had I been not me and instead some resident of this house just one generation down the line, I’d have no idea who the girl in the photo was or even when the photo might have been taken. For whatever reason, it seemed notable that I held in my hand an artifact that proved how quickly knowledge about this kind of stuff can be lost. This photo — like the blue leather chairs in the kitchen or the old-fashioned school desk or the lime green wall clock — has a story behind it and a reason it’s in my home. But in a very short amount of time, anyone who might know that story could leave, rending all subsequent tenants to wonder how and when and why a certain thing arrived. Example: Who is the man in the tiny framed photo above the dining room table? I don’t know, and I have no way of guessing whether the photo is retro-faux-wannabe old or genuine, full-on old.

Beyond being just any old photo, qualities of the Kristen photo lend it to being even more mysterious. I don’t know why, but whoever snapped the Kristen photo eventually printed it out in monochrome — and a tinted monochrome at that, which gives the photo a bit of an aged look. Furthermore, the photo had been living in the kind of kitchen drawer that wreaks havoc on smooth finishes — picture frame nails, paper clips, twisty ties, pencils, thumbtacks and countless Allen wrenches, all waiting to make the kind of scratches that that lend a photo the look of something that’s seen better days. Finally, there’s what’s actually in the photo. Beside from just being an image of Kristen, it’s an image of Kristen sitting at a table in an unfamiliar location — a restaurant? some other home? — and dressed in a way that I might describe as anachronistic. All that dangly costume jewelry ornamentation makes her look almost flapperish, but her hair looks pretty contemporary. The photo itself is clear, but not crystal clear, which might make someone think it could be older than it is.

I’m not sure even I’m communicating my point here at all, so let me try some other way: I find something special in both being able to imagine why a certain item might be mysterious and to dream up all the hypothetical stories about why it exists and who made it. I find something alluring in the notion that the true story behind that object can be quickly lost, leading later passersby to do the dreaming up themselves. But perhaps most of all, I find something empowering in the knowledge that I know the real story but very soon others may be at a loss to explain who and what and why is.

There’s something in this photo — maybe it’s Kristen’s expression, maybe it’s the overall time vagueness, maybe it’s a quality I haven’t even processed yet — that I like. Whatever it is, it represents everything: the weirdness of my house and the nature of memory and the stories inanimate objects carry with them (or don’t, as the case may be). There’s something in this photo and I just had to write about it.

These Lambs Ain't Silent

Very appropriate to have received on Halloween, this postcard came from the now-New York-located Kristen, who is attending grad school to learn how to make monster movies. I think.

It's a real film, and one that I might tack onto my Netflix queue. (I just hope I don't somehow get the other Black Sheep instead.) I could swear KrisDina and I had a conversation about this very possibility — or, more realistically, inevitability — while driving through a road-blocking flock while in New Zealand, but that could just be my imagination.

Read the back! The back!

A demographic of one indeed. And please note that stamp Kristen used to send this postcard bears a picture of Marvel comics superheroine and zombie ninja Elektra, making this the second association between a comic book character and Kristen this year.

For the record: another time sheep were disturbing.

Princess Hat for Monkey

Last week, I found an old email that I believe I sent to Kristen as advice on what she should wear to a tennis date. The email reads as follows:

you may have heard us restraining laughter outside your window last night. this happened because spencer and i thought it would be funny to tell you that since you will be playing tennis at a resort, you should dress in formal tennis attire. you know: white sweater, white skirt and such. this quickly escalated into the following list:

• old fashioned hoop skirt
• bonnet
• hobnail boots
• bloomers
• thong outside of bloomers
• gloves
• jangly bracelets
• Puritan punishment stocks
• ski mask
• goggles
• funny mustache disguise glasses
• princess hat
• Carmen Miranda hat with fruit
• monkey to play inside hat
• princess hat for monkey
• kneepads
• buckles, buckles, buckles!
• pilgrim hat for formal occasions
• lady in waiting
• lots of tule

keep in mind, this was funny to us at 2 a.m.

hope the weekend goes at least this well.

It made me laugh then, it makes me laugh now.

What’s Wrong With Muriel Puce?

Good friend and sometime Cereal Box reader Lauren did me a total solid last week and asked for use of two of my photos in Get:Art, a fundraiser for Project Angel Food, a Los Angeles nonprofit that delivers meals to people with terminal illnesses. I like Lauren and am all for helping those with horrible diseases, so I was happy to donate the follow images for her to frame, place on a wall and sell as a means of raising money.

They’re apparently priced at $100 or so each, which I’m kind of astounded by. It’s the highest monetary value anybody’s ever put on my artistic efforts. It’s also the first time anything I’ve ever done has been exhibited in any kind of art-ish forum, so hurray for that. I might just have to head down south — if not just for this, then for Hilly’s submission, which I’m told implements some image of me into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Less Than a Snow Fairy, More Than a Sugar Plum

Just to prove that we didn't completely debauch the spirit of the holiday, here are some entirely more wholesome pictures of us in the post-party aftermath, during which we mustered the energy to go ice skating at Earl Warren.

Photo credits go to Laura.

Apex

I'm standing at the front of a catamaran built when I could barely walk and my daily routine consisted of Legos, playing astronaut and a very special daily event called "juice time." Ahead of me, black meets black and the only way I can tell the sea from the sky is by looking for the whitecaps that rush forward from this void and crash onto the ship's deck. The horizon — or at least the subtle distinction between black and black that I'm guessing is the horizon — bobs five feet above my head and then quickly drops out of sight, and every time the boat sweeps downward, I feel like all of us — me, Kristen, Dina, the two Canadian girls, Giacomo from Lake Como and the two guys from London, who, incidentally, have dressed up like pirates — are going to be digested by some pulsating dark-fleshed organism not unlike the giant clams we saw earlier in the day, during our first scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef.

The crew of our ship, the Pacific Star, seems rather blase about this whole scenario. They tell us that we're welcome to remain at the front of the boat provided that we cling to the rail with two hands. (At this point, I note that the London guys' hands are occupied by (a) a rubber cutlass, (b) a can of Victoria Bitter beer, (c) a toy telescope, and (d) another can of VB, and I imagine how ashamed their families will feel when they hear that their sons were found drowned in the waters off the coast of Australia, dressed in pirate drag.) Regardless of the crew's attitude, however, we rail-clutchers have realized that a front-row seat for barrage after barrage of underwear-soaking waves is the absolute best place to be on the boat at the given time.

It's simple, really.

This being our last night on the Pacific Star, we've all been drinking, a fact generated by a choice rendered poor when the boat crossed into a stormy patch marking the place where tall, incoming waves meet an ebbing tide and the run-off of several rivers that empty into this region of the Pacific. The waves peak here, when they might not have anywhere else in the ocean, explains our skipper. As such, standing anywhere inside the boat will make even the sober passengers walk like drunkards. Queasiness ensues. And the best cure for seasickness — which, by the way, I'm just starting to get — is to look to the horizon, however obscured the current meteorological conditions may make it. Who cares if the rain is cold and stinging and may have just evolved into hail? Each large wave that hits us is as warm as bathwater, making our precarious position as figureheads on this vessel the warmest and therefore best place on the boat. We tip forward again, the water splashes and I once again hear that automatic, uniform amusement park squeal. Only when it's done do I realize that I helped make it.

- - - - -

We boarded the Pacific Star on Wednesday night, shortly after we arrived in Airlie Beach. We had initially planned for the day to have been spent at Magnetic Island — the local beach attraction near my aunt's house in Townsville, which we may well leave Australia without having seen — but whether conditions have left "Maggie" stormy enough to warrant looking elsewhere for entertainment. Not wanting to waste a day of our last week down under, we Greayhounded it down to Airlie Beach, the best place to catch a pleasure cruise around the Whitsunday Islands, a scattering of green spots that contrast nicely against the teal of Australia's portion of the Great Barrier Reef. The names of the islands are too whimsical and beautiful to seem real: among them, Daydream, Dumbell, Plum Pudding, Perseverance, and Double Cone — the last of which being "Dina's spiritual homeland," one writer points out to me.

Previous tour groups and abroad study programs have taught me that approximately ten percent of any travel party I move with will be piles of shit encases in human skin. This, however, proves not to be the case with the Pacific Star. As I systematically approach the boat's twenty-some twenty-something passengers, I find each to be remarkable tolerable — personable, even. And entirely attractive, if in a whitewashed Bunim-Murray kind of way. We're like a floating United Nations, if the United Nations actually got along together and consisted solely of Australia, South Africa, Canada, France, Italy, England, and the United States. (Like I said, whitewashed.) My favorites were easily the French couple — friendly, but withdrawn, and looking like Adrian Grenier and Mayim Bialik, respectively. (Also, you have no idea what a big part of our trip Mayim Bialiak has been. Love you, May-May. It wouldn't have been the same without you.)

So in the midst of a good travel group, Dina, Kristen and I konked out in our room — the only above-bottom level cabin and, thus, the one place on the boat where you didn't have to sleep in the smell of sewage. That next morning, we woke up to Whitehaven Beach, the nicest spot on Tongue Island and, if we're to believe what our divemaster told us, "the second-most photographed place in Australia." (He did not specify what was the first.) The sand here is ninety-eight percent pure silica, so dropping a camera on this beach effectively ruins it. That didn't stop us from taking pictures, however, and as soon as I get back to California I'll be uploading the photos from this last leg of the trip. The water was great, though full of sting rays, and those sting rays being the kind that can actually stong you — definitely not the touch tank variety. We stayed long enough to sunburn the tops of my feet — the right somehow worse than the left — before continuing to our first dive practice.

The beach they dropped us at was about as far from Whitehaven as we could get while remaining in the Whitsundays. Think Monterrey peninsula: not much sand to speak of, rocky, cold and fraught with crashing waves. Top make matters worse, the water was also littered with a fine, brown substance that our skipper identified as coral spawn — essentially the little coral gametes washing around in search of a receptive lady coral to make new life. It's here that nature first bared her nasty teeth to me and a particularly strong wave washed me over some coral and, stupidly, instinctively, I put out my hands in order to stop myself. I grazed the tips of the coral with my right hand. Bad move. Not only is sea water rich with foreign-to-landwalkers bacteria, but the coral itself, as I learned, secretes a mucous that can irritate skin. Soon enough, I was back aboard the boat. And slightly less soon, so was everyone else; the conditions proved to bad for diving, what with the coral cum clouding the water and reducing visibility to only a few feet.

We spend the night on the boat back in a cove, where out skipper turned the deck lights on. The light reflecting off the water beneath us drew moths, which in turn drew schools of small white fish. The fish proved prey for a squadron of squid, which glowed orange. The whole nature-versus-nature show climaxed with the arrival of three of four dolphins, which frolicked, lept and then ate as many squid as they could. Me: delighted. Me: awed by nature. Me: more aware than ever that even the pleasant looking nature can be vicious.

The next day, Kristen, Dina and I had our first real dive. Following a simple skills test, we floated down to the bottom of a relatively safe area of the reef. I've never before had the sensation of standing ten meters below the ocean's surface and still walking on sand. What we can't see when we above water truly is beautiful. Alien, colorful, delicate and all those other Steve Zissou adjectives. I must admit, however, that being around coral that's seen millennium after millennium roll by is slightly off-putting. As a newbie diver, I was faced with moving in a full 360 degrees of motion, as well as having plastic flippers extending the clumsiness of my body enough that I was in constant fear of kicking something that would, in turn, bite me back. Despite the divemaster's warnings, I also sliced my hand on a barnacle while gripping the rope we used to pull ourselves out from the ocean. Drew: zero. Nature: two.

After that morning, the Pacific Star sailed far out onto the reef. Far enough, in fact, that we couldn't see a spot of land anywhere on the horizon. I had never before experienced the bare curvature of the earth like this before. Our skipper told us that the area we were over was a place most diving outfits don't take tourists to. He called it "The Cathedral," though I have no idea why. See, while the certified divers took a big kids trip out, we snorkled about. I was enjoying marine-gawking at a forty-five degree angle when I felt a strange burning sensation on the small of my back. "Can't be a jellyfish," I told myself. "I'm wearing my stinger suit." So such luck, however: I quickly felt another sting on my shoulder. Fearing immediate death by the irukandji, I hopped out of the water. I had apparently fallen victim to the little fire jelly, a cute little fucker who, when agitated, sends off stinging cells that can pass through even high-quality stinger suits. I was not amused. Neither was the girl from Buffalo who took one on the neck.

I had nearly given up on becoming a man of the sea when I had a chat below deck with Heena, a Briton who had opted against venturing into the water again after the bad experience at the pseudo-Monterrey Peninsula. She reminded me that I wouldn't have the chance to dive on the Great Barrier Reef again. Somehow, she made more sense than Kristen or Dina. So I went, fearing the worst. Forty minutes underwater, breathing through that awkward mouthpiece and treading around a host of fluorescent creatures who could on a whim string, strangle, immobilize or otherwise maim me. It didn't look good, especially considering my track record, but I dove anyway.

I had a great time.

And that's as far as I'm going to attempt to write about it, really. I didn't get hurt, so I can't write about that. And as far as words in my personal vocabulary go, nothing can really come close to describing the beautiful freaks I saw on the reef. I had a great time. I don't regret it. I had a great time. I saw stuff. I had a great time. Fuck you, ocean. Take that. And I had a great fucking time.

That night, we endured the tossing about at sea I described earlier. It's all basically how I said it, even if I neglected to mention that Heena's fiance, Shaun, spent the night hurling off the back of the ship. But you don't need to know that. We survived — poor placement on the deck aside — and now the worst of it all has become a good story to tell.

The night after we returned to Airlie Beach, a handful of us met up at a bar to celebrate Dina's birthday. We commiserated with all the "I still feel like I'm on a boat!" and "Look how sunburned I am!" and reveled in the fact that a bunch of kids from different spots on the globe all know the lyrics to "Wonderwall" backwards and forwards. We drank (heavily). We danced (humorously). I went to bed (early).

For me, this was effectively the end of the trip. After returning, we had less than a week left, just enough to drive up to Cairns to catch our flight back to Auckland. But as a climax, I think it works rather well. Or is it bad luck to deem what you're doing falling action before you're done with it?

[ you snooze you lose. well i have snost and lost ]

The Fish Are Back

Since Kristen is presently mailing a bottle of New Zealand wine to her parents, I'm going to round out my posts from the Antipodes with a summary of food-related learnin' I've gleaned so far.

1. The New Zealanders refer to bell peppers as "capsicum," though KrisDina and I can't help but pronounce it "capiscum." It's a far uglier word either way.
2. From my time in London I learned that the default flavor for purple candy is blackcurrant, not grape. Upon trying a Skittles machine in our hostel lobby, I found that green here is apple, not lime.
3. Coffee is strange here. A generic cup of coffee is a "flat white," and is buried beneath an inch of foam. I, for one, hate foam. I have tried ordering simply black coffee but can only get espresso, or, worse, a double shot of espresso.
4. Tomato sauce, the condiment that best approaches American ketchup, tastes of cloves.
5. "Kiwi" is an odd word when ordering food. I've frequently not known whether a dish bearing that name contains kiwifruit, kiwi bird or is simply something characteristic of the Kiwi people.
6. Two words: hamburger rings.
7. On the subject of burgers, it's not uncommon to get a slice of beet on burgers here.
8. Pavlova is wonderful angel kibble imported from the nicer districts of heaven.
9. A thing exists that is called ginger wine. And it is a good thing.
10. A popular beer here is Monteith's, the brewery for which is in Greymouth, which we actually drove through two days ago. They have more varieties here than most mainstream American beers do. Two of note: Monteith's Radler, which has lemon zest in it, and Monteith's winter brew, which has a cinnamon aftertaste.
11. The Minus 5 bar made several of its drinks with a variety of Absolut vodka that I had never encountered before: Absolut Pepar. And that's in the sense of jalapeno peppers, not peppermint.
12. And, finally, Kristen was very pleased that the McDonald's apple pies here are fried, not baked as they now are in the United States. I, however, find the pies to taste like shit no matter how they're cooked.

I feel really full, to put it bluntly.

Please Be There

Hey.

Upon being asked the very relevant question "What have you been doing, anyway?", I realize that I've been remiss in saying exactly how my time down under has been spent. Besides KrisDina, the Moleskine and some chatty waiters and waitresses, no one but me can say whether I've actually been spending this vacation well or merely sitting in the Auckland airport, thumbing through travel pamphlets of places I'd like to go but won't on account of this country being all crazy and backwards and funny shaped and who really needs two islands, anyway? In that light, I thought I'd share.

I guess I've been just a little reluctant to do so when the occasional internet kiosk affords me the opportunity because I feel guilty. You're there and I'm here and I didn't want to rub your nose in it. But I care and since I did leave, I thought you should know that I did so with good reason: to take advantage of the opportunity to see a new place and see it well.

(And, please, note that I'm doing this writing in none-too-cheap internet time. So while I will spare no detail, you must afford me the opportunity to lapse into stream of consciousness ramblings, commas and homonyms be damned. Also, the constraints of this computer have forced me to change my writing style slightly. For example, I cannot figure out how to type an em dash, and only you could fully understand how much that it presently killing me.)

Days zero through three: The Land of Auck

Despite a little research, I actually have no idea what the "auck" in "Auckland" means. It's an odd little syllable, and, in a way, Auckland is an odd little town. It's not the capital of New Zealand, though I think most people would bet that it is. And though it's a fairly large sprawl, complete with the skyscrapers and ethnicity-centered suburbs you'd expect from a large town, you can drive too far in the wrong direction a bit and suddenly find yourself in rural territory with sheep and cows and rhubarb and the like. In any case, the day after day zero -- the one I spent on One Tree Hill getting the full Auckland panorama, KrisDina and I went searching for this little breakfast spot her boss recommended. Trouble: the Atomic Cafe no longer exists. In its place was a still fully good restaurant called One 2 One, which served fejoia smoothies the likes of which I've never encountered. We walked up K Street, a central thoroughfare, past this weird shopping arcade that seemed entirely devoted to hipsterware. Had Brenna seen it, she would have had a happy little seizure, for sure.

We caught a ferry to Devonport, the part of Auckland that lies on the other side of the bay, and walked around in its suffocating quaintness and then hiked up Mount Victoria, which boasts a cannon that the Kiwi government installed to fight off the oncoming Communist Russian army, which never came. Odd place. A little man like a hobbit came by and showed us into an old bunker, which the Aucklanders have turned into the meeting place for the local bluegrass music players association. Like I said, odd. It rained like it hasn't done again until today, actually, and we decided that the safe, dry option for the night was to catch a movie.

The next morning, our Larry took us to Cousin Francie's strawberry farm, which sounds like the hokiest thing since taking your scoliosis-suffering cousin to a barn dance, I know, but was actually quite nice. I met a cousin of whom I had previously only seen photographs. Francie also let us pick as many strawberries as we felt like, which was enjoyable in that city kids-doing-farm-work-as-a-novelty, Marie Antoinette-playing-peasant kind of way. The we caught a bus to this tourist trap called Kelly Tarlton's Antarctic Encounter and Underwater Experience, where we gawked at penguins and sting rays the size of a Mormon family dinner table. Then we saw Auckland's harbor district, which is called the Viaduct Basin for reasons I do not understand. We wanted to go be all looky, but we ended up having one of those monumental ice breaker dinners, where everyone tells personal stories and becomes best friends. We ate mussels, but the things had little crabs buried inside their shells. Later, someone explained that the crabs were being digested by the mussels, which would account for the little guys' soft shells and blanched coloring. (We did not eat the crabs.) Funny thing about dining out in a country where tipping is not customary: the waitresses think nothing of letting you wait forty-five minutes for your bill.

It being dark enough at that point, we hiked over to the Sky Tower, Auckland's fairly new iconic structure, which lights up in neon green and purple at night. Picture the Space Needle as designed by a ten-year-old with a Buzz Lightyear complex and you get the idea. The deck has glass floors, which allow you to see the city your hovering over. We took lots of pictures. The snooty French hostess rejected us from the revolving restaurant at the top, so we had to settle for drinks at the cafe just below. There, we discovered L&P, a New Zealand-only soda that tastes like a deeper, more mellow lemonade.

Days four through six: Rotorua, the geothermal city

After Avis rejected us, we turned to the only car that Budget could offer us: a lemon yellow Volkswagen Polo. An ominous color, I know. The car's lameness was compounded by the fact that it essentially looked like a rolling Easter egg. The drive to Rotorua included a stop in Tirau, which bills itself as the corrugated metal capital of New Zealand. This lofty title is evidenced by several corrugated metal statues -- a sheep dog, a sheep, a shepherd and then a praying mantis, I presume to break up the monotony -- though I couldn't help but look at them and think of Ruffles potato chips.

The first morning in Rotorua, we went to a hillside reputed as a prime site for zorbing, that ridiculous extreme sport where you roll around in a big plastic ball. It was actually quite fun and well worth the $45 it cost -- kind of like falling, but roughly twice as pleasant. After that, we went down the street to the Agro-Dome. I remembered liking this place from when I saw it as a kid, but KrisDIna didn't seem all that stoked on seeing what essentially amounted to a sheep show. They quickly realized the error of their ways. I don't know how they do it, but they make sheep-rearing seem flashy and fun. A negative: the sheep do not stack up into a pyramid cheerleader-style like I remembered. Turns out they merely line up on a pyramidal stage. A positive: the sheepdogs they have do run up and down the sheeps' backs in an entertaining fashion.

We also went to a place called Kiwi Encounter. I finally got an up-close look at a real-life kiwi bird. They're bigger than I remember, but still essentially a potato with feet and a long beak. The people there help breed the kiwi bird and then release them into the wild, so we even got to see a one-day-old kiwi hatchling. Fun fact: the egg grows inside a female kiwi bird until it's roughly half her size, rendering her immobile, vulnerable and in a great deal of discomfort. I also found out that my beloved cassowary, relative of the kiwi bird, is native to Australia and now I want to see one, ride it, steal it, take it back to California and name it Charlie.

That night we went to a hangi, the Maori version of what is called a luau in Hawaii. The whole deal had this air of inauthenticity, however, since it was held in a hotel. The food was good, especially the kumara, which are tubers that taste like sweet potatoes should. However, I felt oddly guilty during the cultural performance afterward. Like the Native Americans, the Maori kind of got a raw deal. And they totally have the right to pedal their culture to tourists as much as anybody else, but I felt like they kind of sold our to these busloads of Canadian and Korean senior tour groups kind of in the same way that I feel like Chumash sold out every time I see their name affixed before the word "casino." The performance included a love ballad duet that told the story of a Maori youth and maiden you fell in love despite being from opposing tribes and thusly sang to each other from the opposite shores of a lake that separated them. But although the male lead was played by a suitable Maori man, the female part was played by a menopausal-looking woman who could have easily been his mother. I got kind of sad when I characteristically overthought the situation and guessed that this particular troop couldn't find a young Maori lass talented or interested enough to play the part.

We woke up the next morning and set out for Hell's Gate, a geothermal spa that had a good, proper Maori name until George Bernard Shaw visited and noted that the place looked too much like the afterlife his atheist soul was doomed for to be called anything else. The sparse foliage and bubbling gray mud has this allure that I guess I have to attribute to its otherwordliness, for lack of anything else. The best part was the mud bath and sulphur spa we took after. Supposedly the stuff has medicinal properties. I think it gave me blackheads. Fun and dirty, all the same.

Too late in the day, we found, we set off for Lake Taupo and then Napier, the city known for its art deco architecture. So well known, in fact, that they nearly didn't have any room for us. We chanced upon a hostel with a vacancy just before we would have had to push south to Waipukurau, luckily. Our first tase of down under nightlife. Bar music doesn't suck here, it turns out.

Days six through nine: Waipuk, where everyone's a Mackie

Funny how everyone in my dad's hometown looks like him: my dad fatter, my dad taller, my dad wrinklier, my dad balder, my dad as a lady. This whole stay was exactly what you'd expect from any occasion in which a relative from out of the country comes to visit. We pinballed from one relative to the next, for breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, tea. All very nice. I got to see my grandmother, whom I hadn't seen in eight years. Everyone prepared me for her not remembering me -- she's in a home now -- but she did and I was very happy. Oh, also we got to ride four-wheelers around a sheep farm and eat lots of red meat.

Days ten through twelve: The aptly named Christchurch

We flew from Napier to Christchurch on the south island. This city has more houses of worship than I could count, and all of them looked a few centuries older than they possibly could have been. We stayed right near the central Anglican cathedral, however. We also overslept and only had time the next day to go see the city's art museum, which had lots of contemporary stuff I really liked, though the names of the featured artists all escape me now. That night, we ate at my cousin Hamish's. I don't remember meeting him, though we apparently did the last time my family came through Christchurch. It's so odd to see cousins not too much older than me living in the suburbs with a wife and kids old enough to have some concept of what "the cousin from America" means. They named their daughter Skyla, after the Minnie Driver character in "Good Will Hunting," so there's still a flair for pop culture-addled youth in them. He took us up to an overlooked called "Sign of the Kiwi" -- and yes, there actually is a wooden sign with a kiwi bird on it -- and the city looked nice from all the way up there.

Day fourteen through two days ago:

We picked up our second rental car, a tan Nissan Pulsar. There is not sadder phrase in English than "tan Nissan Pulsar." It was cheap, though, which was good since a rock cracked the windshield of the Polo and we had to pay through the nose. Kristen claimed to have actually compiled a list of the Pulsar's pros and cons, and the cons truly win. Worst of the worst: no functional tape deck or CD player.

In our shit-colored car of shittiness, we drove all the way down to Queenstown, which took nearly all day. Pretty country though, and finally stuff that doesn't look anything like countryside in California. Queenstown is this awesomely quaint little ski town and adventure sport mecca. We stayed at a hotel named for the owner's cat, which blew, then spent the next day testing our propensity for extreme intensity by taking a gondola to the city's overlook. It's quite beautiful. As with the rest of the glacier-scarred south island, sediment in the lakes makes the water a pretty teal color. Also, Queenstown is framed on nearly all sides by mountains, the most craggy of which are one of the only ranges in the southern hemisphere to run from magnetic north to magnetic south. Their name: the Remarkables, which sounds like a Motown group, I think.

Easily the best day we've had in the whole trip was the second one spent in Queenstown. We went over to Shotover Canyon, where we rode a jet boat through this seemingly dangerous rocky stretch. The drivers get off on making the boats veer as close as possible to jutty rocks and then pulling 360-degree spins. Quite fun and not as soaking as you'd expect. We did this when my family came through eight years ago.

Then we bungy jumped. At the place where the sport was invented, no less, a bridge with a long Maori name that commonly gets abbreviated to "K Bridge."

I'm not sure, but I think the drop is 43 meters, though that measure doesn't really capture how steep it feels when you're standing on the ledge. The girls went first, since they weigh less, and I had to stand up there alone, save for the bungy nuts who work there. The think about bungy jumping that's really scary, however, is that the harness isn't as comprehensive as you'd think. It's really just a few scraps of fabric cobbled together. Part of it is just an ordinary bath towel. And yet somehow this thing is supposed to prevent you from falling to your death.

So I'm standing there, listening to "Dyer Maker" play with its "Oh oh oh oh oh oh / You don't have to go-o" and when the guy finally counts down from five, I just stand there dumbly. So he tells me to look straight forward and then he counts again. And I step forward and as I start to fall, I see that there's this random sheep on the hillside opposite the bridge where I'm jumping. And it's nowhere near a grazing area and I my mind fixates on this sheep and the last thing I can remember thinking is "Oh look! a sheep!" And I've been in New Zealand for more than two weeks and I've seen more sheep than I've seen people and I'm bungy jumping for the first time and all I can think to say is "Oh look! a sheep!" And then I'm hanging upside-down at the bottom. I couldn't tell you what the fall was like. I think I blacked out.

That night, sore and dazed, we went to the Minus 5 bar, where everything is made of ice and you can only stay for a half-hour. They give you gloves, since the glasses are also made of ice. Things get blurry.

Whatever day I'm on now:

So here I am in Hokitika. I guess I won't see the glowworm dell, though writing this letter to you has been more fulfilling than that would have been, I think. The past two days have consisted of a lot of being in the car, driving though this lush scenery that looks like the backgrounds from Donkey Kong Country, though I don't think that will mean much. It's nice. Rain forest imposed on glacier country, with quaintness abounding. Franz Joseph Village was cold and the view of the glacier was obscured by this kind of low-lying cloud that hugs around mountain midsections and looks like moustaches. We're flying from Christchurch to Sydney on Wednesday, and it's hard to believe I'll be seeing a whole other country before I'll see you again. I hope, if nothing else, this letter proves that I've seen a lot and been making good use of my time.

Write back. Tell me what you've been up to. Go into great detail. I care more than you know.

And, now that I think about it, don't be surprised if I take up your post-as-open letter trend and put this on the Cereal Box. I don't think I can bare to trudge through all this again, at least not on a keyboard.

All my love,
Drew

Nudge

I never do this, but can I please direct your attention southward to the wonderful line of dialogue that has developed out of the comments attached to the post "Deadly Youth." Maybe it's finals stress. Or maybe it's the best thing that ever happened. And for the lazy, I'll provide a transcript.

Anonymous:

I care nothing for the Marvel or Capcom universes. If they really wanted to make a game that would grab my attention, they'd propose what would happen if the universe of ABC daytime soaps fought the Muppet universe. Now that's worth spending quarter's on.

Me:

Uh, what if the world of My Little Pony took on the world of Tranformers?

What if Adult Swim took on The TGIF line-up from 1992?

What if Greek mythology took on your third grade class?

What if my floor freshman year took on the Twelve Tribes of Israel?

What if the characters from every SNL spin-off movie took on the four food groups?

What if the "Creature from the San Andreas Fault" fought Mothra?

What if Death itself fought that one time in when you were slow dancing in junior high and you got a boner and had to keep dancing with the girl pressed up against you until the boner subsided?

Kristen:

amazing choices drew.

i want to play too:

what about if your recurring childhood nightmare took on your recurring teenage fantasy? i know you can picture exactly that. or my recurring teenage fantasy? or the precocious young hispanic kid's future recurring teenage fantasy?

what about if all the back to the futures rumbled? there'd be like 45 different michael j. foxes and lea thompsons to choose from.

or ... what if the periodic table of elements battled the periodic table of sex poster that they sell in bong stores?

or ... all the fancy little dogs in paris vs. our editing seminar last year? i picture them all pouring through the windows and door in their little t-shirts, devouring all the strange girls.

do more.

love, kristen

Me:

answers to kristen.

1) if that happened, i'd be having sex on a train with a mermaid and i'd be drowning and the train would be going out of control. i think. weird video game.

2) i could not picture your recurring teenage fantasy because you did not know me in high school and therefore your life must have been too boring to have real fantasies.

-OR-

it would involve a mermaid and me and some weird re-creation of the greenhouse scene from "sound of music." no wait -- that already happened.

-OR-

precocious hispanic child would team up with wolverine and they'd both be wearing wedding dresses and they'd have to fight me and a mermaid, both wearing suits. not the best game for children, but it has potential.

3) the mind boggles trying to think about how many michael j. foxes and lea thompsons would be selectable. i think the character selection screen would be confusing and repetitive. however, we could call it "back to the future: mcfly melee," and that makes me happy.

4) what? stay out of bong stores.

5) i think this is your best bet. i think the yappy dogs, led by linda ronsdstadt II and alphonso van floof, would be fairly evenly matched against the girls from our writing class, led by that airhead girl who wore earmuffs and that sassy girl who i liked but who i suspect did not like me.

tourney, of course, would be the boss and his weapon would be the red pen of permanent omission.

and what? the dogs had t-shirts?

how about this: all the STDs in your body grow to the size of elephants and you have to fight them with mops, brooms and three castmembers from "kids incorporated"?

Anonymous (I think Nate):

what if the staypuft marshmallow man fought new york?

no.

Kristen:

1) mermaids are super hot.

2) they probably were mostly wearing little sweaters and the occasional dogberet but i just really love little dogs in little t-shirts.

3) i gotta dig deep for the next round.

k

Bri:

This is the greatest thing I've ever read...

What if that one person you really REALLY wished you hadn't hooked up with took on a flock of your friends who have inexplicably turned into kindergarteners?... Under-water?

What if David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust took on David Bowie as Jareth, the Goblin King in Labyrinth?

What if my weirdest sex dream (this is Bri, by the by) took on Drew in a suit and the precocious young Hispanic kid in a wedding dress? (I know now that the background would consist of bleachers with Wolverine in a wedding dress--knitting--sitting with a suit-wearing mermaid filing her nails on one side and the Mad Hatter sipping tea with Brandon the wonder dog who is smoking a phallic cigar on the other side.)

Anonymous (Sanam? Nate again?):

What if a giant asteroid was going to crash into earth and a ragtag band had to fly to it and blow it up?

No.

Kristen:

ok, so Mr. Belvedere, Dr. Ruth, Chef Boyardee, and lovable tough guy Lt. Dan from Forrest Gump round out a killer tag team equipped with Nerf sports gear where every Nerf ball is soaked in people-disintegrating chemical compounds and studded with pitbull teeth.

vs.

all the skeletons in your parents' closets have emerged, donned St. Pepper's-reminiscent psychedelic marching band gear and initiated a parade of shame and doom, shaming and dooming all in their path!

speaking of Chef Boyardee, how about the stale smell of Spaghetti-Os that permeated my pre-school goes head to head with the person i become when i black out drinking?

or

your underwear has to beat a snakecharmer at tetherball.

and up-down-left-right-select gives you the ability to fart the top 20 Cingular Wireless ringtones.

k

Lauren:

what if the extra half an hour i am gonna have to spend staying late at work, because i've been reading this blog, to come up with kiss ass tag lines to write in a letter i should have written this morning inciting a certain pissed off donor to still love project angel food...fought all of the creative intelligence in this blog dialogue...

if they tied blogalogue and my undercompensated guilt trip would each be worth $6.50.

Lauren:

i will suggest one more...

"I know you are but what am I."

vs.

"I'm rubber and you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you"And a capper: what if the video game was that all the female characters from "Tiny Toons" had to fight a monster made out of all your elementary school art projects?

Saint Couchette

sooner than scheduled and then we didn't go see the sistine chapel because we decided they wouldn't have us and besides i felt too dirty and tired and sore (and not in the good way) and charlie and i went straight for the train station to meet up with kristen and agnes in barcelona which meant a long train ride only i didn't mind and i wrote (transcribed directly from the blank back page of Charlie's copy of William Lycon's The Philosophy of Language) 

I decided Rome is a lot like a bunch of hyperactive children with no concept of foresight or planning who nonetheless build their own city... on the sun. As beautiful and grand as I found Rome, I've got no idea how these lunatics got more than two thousand years of history under their belts. Aeneas would not be proud. During the ride from Rome to Genoa we passed a waterslide park. I contemplated saying "Fuck Agnes and Kristen and the good nation of Spain" and spending the remainder of my vacation as a slide guinea pig. Neither Charlie nor I have a clock and we are not far enough on this trip to worry about time yet — Pisa stands between us and Genoa yet. It's like timeless like a rolling casino... on the sun. By the heat I know it’s day but no real time... The woman sitting next to me appeared to be reading some script for an Italian TV show. She was making marks here and there, so I suppose she might be somebody important. Evidence that, rather, she was crazy, like many people I have ridden public transportation beside: she had stuffed the script, a low-quality photocopy, in a Popo Gigio notebook with dozens of other papers. She did not speak a lick of English and neither did the script (I peeked). I'd like to think it was a family-oriented one-hour police drama about a recovering alcoholic cop divorcé who marries his partner, a sexy teenage witch superhero who hears prophetic messages from her talking log, then raises an eclectic assortment of international ghost children (one of whom struggles with his or her sexuality) and together they all form a rock band that travels the country, uncovering arcane governmental conspiracies regarding the existence of stop motion-animated aliens. Oh, and they have a dog named Tiger. (and a second passage) Everything was different after I left my shoes at the Hotel Stromboli. I did it on purpose, of course. These shoes I've had for more than a year and I still liked them, but foot odor demons possessed them long ago. Plus they had holes in their soles. Perhaps that's how the demons got in there in the first place. Their heaviness outweighed their usefulness. On a similar note, I decided against returning to the Sistine Chapel this morning. I opted to get to Genoa earlier and Charlie didn’t fight it. I'll probably regret this decision later, just like the shoes, which really weren't in such bad condition, now that I think about it. Maybe it’s the way my stomach flipped when I saw the Vatican — stunning, beautiful, damn close to perfect, but it made me feel sad. All that money donated over the years by hardworking Catholics over the years built a palace of marble and gold fancy enough to trap God inside. Glorious and gluttonous, it’s everything that’s right and wrong with Catholicism, my religion, stamped in my brain forever. And the maid at the Stromboli probably just threw my shoes away. Next stop: Livorno. How many to Genoa? Nice? Barcelona? London? Hollister? I’m wearing a t-shirt advertising a Joy Division album I'm not sure I've heard. As beaches blur by in my window, Italians cluster against the water like mussels on a rock, sleek and shiny. I wonder what Justin is doing. How do you say goodbye to an answering machine? 

 i think i thought nice was nice, even if i only saw the nice outside the train station and i think nice is where lucy is from and i thought about how great lucy is and how she's only in san luis now and i could go say hi some day if i only had here number but the train didn't board until way late at night and our car was full of backpackers desperate to get to barcelona and i swear the french punished us by not starting the air conditioning until way late and we were wet with sweat and thirsty and hungry from not eating all day but it did eventually pull out of the station and charlie and i shared our car with all these girls from california including this one named ashley who i found attractive in a rose mcgowan way and she went to the same high school in lafayette as shannon and we saw valeria again and i thought maybe valeria boded well for the rest of the journey since i felt so bad about stranding her back in interlaken and these horrible frenchwomen with sour faces like vinegar got in our car too and gave ashley and i dirty looks for talking and i don't think charlie liked ashley all that much but we had to leave anyway because we were in someone else's seats but charlie found an open, empty couchette and we crashed there and Ah, the couchette. I think I have never have felt such a wonderful embrace as that of the leather bench-bed of that vacant couchette car. I only gained three hours sleep, but the alternative was total zombie status in Barcelona. If I ever become fantastically wealthy and build my dream mansion, I will include a couchette room, in which the couchette experience will be perfectly simulated, rocking and creaking and flashing lights passing through the edges of the window drapes and everything. No sweeter word exists in the French language before "couchette." Saint Couchette, the patroness of the travel-weary. the ride through the spanish countryside to barcelona made me feel homesick because i thought it looked a lot like california, what with the golden hills and agriculture and all and even the people speaking spanish made me wish the train could have just kept going across the atlantic and all the way home only it didn't because that would be silly and instead it took us to the barcelona train station where we saw valeria a third time and i'm totally convinced that little ecuadorian woman is an angel because she serendipitously stopped us directly in front of the internet station where we could check our mail only the news wasn't as good as i had hoped Excerpts from Kristen's bad news epistles, the first of which bore the subject "Big Problem":

ag and i just got to barcelona and the journey went fine, just took a while. on the metro on our way to go find a hostel, ag's money belt was stolen out of her little backpack. no cash was in it but both her passports, her american green card, her student visa for paris, her expired ATM, her eurail pass, and her social security card were in there. we went to the police station and reported it and it seems that she might need to go to paris ASAP because there is an actual canadian embassy there and here... i saw two guys get on, one had an accordion and the other stepped between me and ag. while one was playing the accordion to distract us apparently, the other unzipped ags little back pack that she was holding in front of her and pulled the money belt out we think. ag also saw a third guy that was making eye contact with the other two that may have been involved. ag noticed it was unzipped a little when we got off and the metro was just leaving. if you want to meet us in barcelona or paris, we'll work it out when we find out info from the embassy. but if you don't want to wait to find out or travel that far, thats ok too. i'll be emailing you asap about the next results.

mostly at charlie's urging, he and i went to paris, but not before i cursed both agnes for allowing some swarthy accordion man charm her into dancing away all her valuable documents and the six or so hours we hung out in barcelona, which passed like a kidney stone, although we did meet this cute viennese girl named mary/marie who knew more about swedish rock and david lynch than hot girls usually do and she reminded me of someone i can't quite place in my mind and she said i reminded her of thom yorke (which i kind of have trouble taking as a compliment) and also the lead singer of coldplay (which i guess i take as slightly more of a compliment) and we stayed with her until she went her own way and left us with the stereotype of the american nuclear family where the dad was in the navy and i suspect didn't like me and the mom was a dead ringer for peggy hill from king of the hill and they told us some stories about how they used to be wild before the wed and bred but i suspect their wild was on the wild side of mild I arrived in Paris after two straight days of travailing travel and I arrived in Paris after two straight days of travailing travel and instantly wanted to escape to home by moving my flight up a few days. Upon the advice of the A, C, and K or D.A.C.K., however, I took a hot shower, brushed my teeth, exchanged the brown pants and Joy Division shirt I had been wearing for the last two days and allowed myself time to reconsider. One afternoon on the streets of Paris and I submitted to the city's allure. And now here I write. As it should be, nine days.

Meg Ryan Breaks the Fourth Wall

Roman holiday.

I’m glad Rome is hot. That’s how I imagined it, reeking of baked asphalt. The sun is presently baking all of Europe, in fact, but it looks like I might not suffer in the Spanish heat, as the train from Milan to Barcelona is booked through August 16. Beyond that, me and Charles-in-Charge split from the girls temporarily so they could go see Barcelona early. No we have to negotiate new plans from opposite ends of Italy.

And now, in true Faulknerian style, a host of surprise guest narrators. First, a note from mom reminding me that, yes, it really is as hot as I think and, yes, Jim Vanderszwann has not also died in my absence:

Hello again Drew,

Just want to let you know that your tube with the posters has arrived and is waiting for you in your room. If you mailed the box with the clothes at the same time I guess it will be not far behind. I was listening to the news tonight and Jim Vanderszwann said it has been unusually hot in Europe this summer. Even London has been hot . . . so hot that they shut down the Millennium wheel because it was too hot inside the capsule that people were getting sick...like being in a giant terrarium for a whole hour! I am supposing you got a chance to go on the Wheel? Anyway, keep us up to date on your travels, have fun, stay safe. Love you, MOM

And that's not all:

Drew--

Okay, so I got my pictures back from London already, and — oh, man — there are some real winners of you. It's great, you amuse me even a zillion miles away. Let me know how your travels go and where they take you. I'm really jealous. Bastard. Lafayette is super boring; I can't wait to start work. Good to hear from you. . .

*Shannon

p.s. "I hope they don't procreate in there" -- Colin, in frustration about the noise level of our fellow students.

An email hilariously sent to me by Kristen — the same Kristen with whom I am travelling — updating me as to what I have done on my vacation:

hey y'all,

Leaving Interlaken today for florence. it was amazing. we got advice about a cool hike to take in the alps in this town called grindelwald or something and it was even prettier than interlaken. drew likened it to a model train town and it was so true, it was the most picturesque perfect little swiss town. and we hiked up to this glacier and it was way way pretty. and in switzerland, they're really into kids and novelty, i have decided. they're just everywhere. on the mountain we hiked, there were these toboggan rides for 4 francs. everybody comes to interlaken for the extreme sports like hang gliding and bungee jumping but those are expensive! so we took the little toboggans instead and it was awesome. the whole town is pretty expensive so the first night, we ended up eating at hooters because it was the cheapest place in town. hooters. hope you all are having a great summer.

love,
kristen

Good to know I'm having such a great time. But Kristen's right about what i said about the model train-like appearance of Switzerland. The whole countryside has, to steal the coinage of Agnes, a "manicuredness" to it that it is nearly too perfect. Italy, with its cracked sidewalks, and overgrown, weedy gardens seems more realistic.

And finally, an email titled "I am addicted" from a newly reintroduced character:

Your "online journal" is like a bad reality show. I just can't stop reading it. You have changed so much, but it's still you. Maybe it's just that I haven't seen you for so long, it's kinda like getting back to old time. Either way, I don't what I'll do once you stop writing.

- Meg

Meg Ryan goes through the fourth wall. I like guest narrators. Fifteen days.

Baby You're No Good

and then i picked up kristen at heathrow and she told me that our flight was leaving in two hours when i thought i had until the next day so we had to tube back to brixton at the last minute and i got my stuff but we missed the flight anyway and lost our money but we got new tickets on a later flight but the airport was stanstead and not heathrow and a nice cabbie who sang camptown races drove us there and kristen got to see buckingham palace and parliament and big ben and the tate modern and the eye but only from the window of the cab and we get there earlier than we thought (because we thought we were going to be late) and give the nice but slightly off cabbie and extra twenty quid because he got us there on time and he didn't charge us a hundred quid like the first cabbie said he would and the flight was okay and linda ronstadt really made it a lot better and you're no good you're no good you're no good baby you're no good and i couldn't tell if the two ladies next to me were lesbians or just really european and then munich isn't really munich but munchen which confused me a lot and we found agnes and charlie okay and it's way hot here in germany even hotter than it was in london but the germans really like running all their words into these huge compound things that are hard to read because i guess they aren't hip to the space or the comma or even the hyphen and they put and s and an s together and it looks like a beta and german people are way nice and not shitty like kaspar was and i saw a brauhaus (beer house but more like an auditorium or meeting hall than the little pubs in london) where hitler held one of his first big nazi rallies and i guess this used to be hitler's place and the glockenspiel was amazing but it was only built in like 1900 or 1985 or something like that and i realize now i suck for not having gone seen soft cell in hyde park when i had the chance and so we leave in a few hours for interlaken but it's a seven hour train ride and apparently i get to be cameron diaz if we play charlie's angels or three engels für charlie and i'm in an internet cafe and i think if there's one person i would be missing most