extremely loud and incredibly close - a review'ish

I finally finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I was sad to see it go because it's been a good friend these last few months, sitting on my night stand, sometimes on top of other books, sometimes under them, sometimes with a glass of water on it, or a cup of tea. I was only able to digest it in small doses. I put the it down to read other books in the last three months. I read, The Road Less Travelled, Edward Bond's Lear, The Sun Also Rises, Trout Fishing in America, The Dharma Bums, Letters to a Young Poet, The Art of Happyness, The Crying of Lot 49, The British Abroad - The Grand Tour, and 4 Shakespeare Plays. None of which I've felt compelled to blog about. Im not sure why this is, but I wrote the person who recommended this book to me on October 10th and said that "if ever there was a book that was written for the sole purpose of making a grown man cry it would be this on," and I meant it.

The book evokes an emotional response based upon a few basic triggers. There's the dad son relationship thing that always gets me. There's the 9/11 thing that of course is sad. There's the impossible love story. The tortured artist. The scared kid. The grieving wife. The grieving mother. The grieving everybody. The more I write about these things now though, the more I feel tricked. And I guess that's something that I must have picked up on earlier when I wrote that line to a friend - that the book feels somewhat contrived. If I was to make a list of everything that I could think of to get an emotion out of somebody, it would include the things I just listed. This should make me upset. I should feel tricked, and in some ways I do, but Jonathan Safran Foer's greatest accomplishment in my opinion, is that a person can read this book knowing all of these things and not care. Which is to say that it doesn't get in the way.

And it's not all sad, there's mystery, and there's adventure, and discovery, and colorful writing, and incredible witticisms from a clever nine year old. Oskar (the protagonist) is my hero. Maybe it's because, like Oskar I read as far as I could into A Brief History of Time when I was younger, and had to put it down partly because the math was getting too hard, and partly because it was giving me to much anxiety. Maybe its because he's incredibly funny, and I wish I could have come up with the line "Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake." Whatever the reason, I'm not embarrassed to say that I want to be like a nine year old, and though I'm sure it will give you heavy boots to read it, as it did me, i highly recommend it.

cheers,
nate

english / welsh accents

I was at a dinner part at some friends' house a while back tried to catch some accents on video. What I ended up getting was mainly a bunch of people eating, but in between the bites of food I picked up a few accents, and it was nevertheless entertaining.

And even though Im sure they're gonna kill me for putting this on the blog, here it is... (sorry guys!)

quiet in the village

The semesters over! and all's quiet in the student village right now. Most of my American friends have left for good (miss you guys already) and everyone else has gone home - well except for my asian homies (its too far for most of them to make the trip), and one Canadian girl. But thats pretty much it.

So, Im using this time to catch up a bit on the blog. I've been kind of ambivalent about the whole blogging thing in general, but I've gotten comments from a few people on the lack of updates, and by the looks of the counter at the bottom of the page, at least a few people have been checking it out (or accidentally clicking on it, which I guess is entirely possible), so I guess I'll keep at it for a while. I'm planning to put a few postings up here pretty quickly, if not tonight then tomorrow. There's lots to blog about, here's a glimps of what's to come...

- there's the trip to Mallorca, Spain a few weeks ago
- the pictures from the 3 London trips I've taken so far
- the dinner party video that I took to try and capture some of the different accents
- the story about the Londoner and the African that we went clubbing with in Picadilly Circus
- and the picture of my flat mates that I've been meaning to throw up on here, so you can see who I'm living with - actually why don't I just throw that up now...

Here's me with Ben and Stacey (aka my little welsh sister) on the first night we all moved in back in September...

study abroad election interview

A few weeks ago, before the election, one of the exchange students from Ohio interviewed a few of us about whether or not we felt disconnected from the election coverage, and i got my 15 seconds of pseudo-fame - hehe. Check it out...
http://www.palestra.net/videos/play/17986)

live gig @ milkwood jam *video

In a new town far away, and with the encouragement of new friends - and my flatmates where no doubt tired of just hearing me sing in my room, i finally got up the nerve to get on stage and do an open mic night with my guitar and belt out some of the songs ive written over the years. Milkwood Jam is a local venue here in Swansea that has an open mic night on Wednesdays for singer songwriters. Here's the video (thanks big time to dan for taking it!)...
10 seconds wide

she's not alone

kurt vonnegut - rules for writing fiction

a friend of mine posted this somewhere today and figured it was worth throwing on here...

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.

vote day. yay!

i stayed up all night watching the election in the little pub here in the student village - a decent crowed of international students showed up. I've gotta say, im so damn proud of my country right now! I wish i was back home, so i could feel the excitement from the inside, instead of feeling more like an american observer than a participant. I did get my absentee ballot to the county clerk on monday though, so i guess i can say i've taken part. -I will wearing a big smile today. cheers america, nate.

i dropped my earbud in my coffee

i dropped one of my new earbuds in my coffee this morning, the right one i think. which sucks because i just bought a good new pair that i really like - a vast improvement on the tiny, ringy-pingy mess that the stock ipod ones are. before i did though, i listened to one of my new favourite podcasts - its from the theMoth.com who does a weekly podcast of people who do an unscripted and note-less short storytelling at a venue in NY. i listened to the one from 8/25 this morning. you should too - its good stuff, seriously.

cheers,
nate

okkervil river in britain

my favorite band is crossing the pond - i couldn't be more excited - gonna see them in london on february 11th! Im doing my best to get an interview for the radio station, so wish me luck. If your not an Okkervil River fan you should be...

p.s. please don't p2p their stuff. d-load it here... The Stand Ins(or where ever, just don't pirate it!)

all jacked up on flu meds

im still feeling sick today, can't sleep, and im all jacked up on some weird british version of theraflu. One decent thing has come out of this tho - i just watched a really good movie. It kind of reminds me of the movie Wonderboys with michael douglas. speaking of michael douglas, I met some older ladies the other night when i was having curry with some friends who said that they were just at his and catherine zeta jones's house earlier in the week for their nine year old daughters birthday - small world. catherine zeta jones is from wales in case you didn't know, and they apparently have a big house up on the hill in Mumbles - (where i go windsurfing every week.)

Anyway. the movies called Smart Peopleand it's got that girl from juno in it and dennis quaid. and i kind of pirated it off the internet and feel kinda bad about it -so somebody buy it please! so then i won't feel so bad. it also reminds me of the book by richard ford called The Sportswriter,which i highly recommend because its probably one of the best contemporary fiction books ive ever read.

alright, i think the beds calling me again, so im gonna go, but see the movie -its good stuff.

freshers flu. haiku.

I'm sick again - and by 'sick' i mean 'ill' because i've been corrected here for saying so. This must be the fourth time i've gotten the freshers flu in the last two months. I swear i've been taking my vitamins ma! So now I'm in bed, trying to sleep, but sleep won't come. I wrote a few haiku's about it...

bring on the pillows
hot - cold and all over yuck
chicken soup my soul

maybe just lay here
fuss with covers, sweat, and snot
write-off the new day

sleep won't come tonight
tissues cover bed and floor
good gobbiddie goo

beach / gower

I sleep with my blinds open at night in the hopes that the sun will come out in the morning and wake me with a wave of light. As you can imagine, it doesn't happen too often here, but it did this morning, and since the sun is out, im heading to the beach. So here's some recent beach pics of the bay here in swansea and some of the gower that i took when Tim came out and visited this last week, so you can appreciate what ill be appreciating here in a bit...

swansea - city center - pics

in case you might be wondering what swansea looks like, i took a few random pics when i was downtown yesterday...

sunday = news/politics day

tomorrow (sunday) is looking like a pretty busy day... im doing an interview on overseas voting with a girl from ohio who appearently does reporting for fox news, so that should be interesting. Then im gonna be sitting in with the news radio show to talk about american politics, and maybe comment on what little i know about british news and such - you can listen in online if you wanna - its from 1 to 3pm... www.xtremeradio.org

side note: i filled out my absentee ballot, but haven't sent it off yet becuase it needs to be notorized and appearently they don't have notories over here because when i asked at the bank, and at the post office they didn't know what the heck i was talking about! If anyone has a clue about what i can do about this let me know. Otherwise i think im going to have to just call the county clerk in albuquerque on monday.

cheers,
nate

radio show

i stumbled into the studio on campus today for my first official radio show! i've teamed up with an english girl who did an exchange at UNM last year and we're doing a show from 3 -5 on thursdays. we play music on the show, throw out random trivia, and even have a guinness challenge where run down and slam a pint at the pub below the studio -gotta love the whole european pub on campus thing! So, if you want to check it out you can listen live online if you like during that time, or you can even listen to past shows via the website... www.xtremeradio.org - (just so you know, in order to get it to stream on your computer you're probably going to have to click on the "how to listen" tab, and scrole down and click on the mp3 streaming link on the bottom of the page)

absentee ballot

alright, got my ballot in today! they sent it to me via email and im meant to print it out, sign it, scan it, and send it back. gotta love that. it's giving me time to research who im going to vote for in the local elections. Thea sent me the link to the alibi's voter guide so that should help. thanks sis. im a bit impressed by how simple the whole process is - almost as impressed as i am by this...
... gotta love good ol lazy americans.

a good day

today has been one of those good days that i imagined that i would have when i was back in albuquerque and thinking about what life would be like when i got to here, and hoping that i would strike some kind of balance between all the things i was hoping to accomplish when i got here in terms of being engaged and submersing myself in the lifestyle comes with being in uni and particularly uni in europe. a day that involved sleeping to a good hour, heading to the beach between lectures, playing basketball and going for a good run, and having dinner and watching a movie with friends. not bad.

colin powell is all about obama

Im still waiting on my absentee ballot to come in - and Im sure a lot of people in my family are hoping that it doesn't because they know I'm going to cancel out at least one of their votes! I've already commented in early posts about the fact that just about everyone I've met here is for Obama, even my american politics professor is unabashedly is all about him, and now it looks like Colin Powell is all about him. He just came out on Meet the Press today in support of Obama - he also had a lot of criticism for the republican party. Check it out...

palin's SNL rap

check out amy poehler's palin rap from last night, it's the funniest shiznit ive seen in a while...


almost as good as the oh so classic natalie portman rap...

barefoot running

There's something about barefoot running that really appeals to me. It's the simplicity of the whole thing. I've always enjoyed running in general, over biking and what not, for that reason, and getting out there with (literally) nothing but a pair of shorts on adds more of a kind of primitive and connected element to what you're doing.

I've been working in barefoot runs for a few months now mostly on trails, and on the beach out her in swansea, and I'm convinced that it's been helping my running + it just kind of feels good to do, I worked in 5 barefoot miles of the 16 I ran today along the beach and it felt great! I've been, or I should should say "had" been, keeping up with Tony Krupicka's blog (an avid 180mi a week or so runner and ultramarathon winner who's a big proponent of barefoot running) until he stopped running back in June, and subsequently stopped blogging for the most part, due to having a couple of neuroma's in one of his feet.

With that said, I still think that running barefoot can be good for you if it's done in moderation. If you've never run barefoot before I suggest you give it a shot, just the act of doing it will force you to run in a different way that you might be used to. You end up running mainly on the balls of your feet because, for lack of a better explanation, it just hurts to much to do the standard "land on the heel and roll with it" kind of approach - it's way too jaring on the body to do it that way, so instead you end up treading with quick and light steps which creates less impact on the body and increases leg turnover. Here's a good article on it if you're interested in more about it... http://www.marathonandbeyond.com/choices/clift.htm.

stonehenge? - never heard of it.

So one of the most interesting things about my trip, or rather leading up to my trip, is that about half of the english and welsh students that I told I was going, said that they have never heard of it. wtf! - how could people have never heard of stonehenge? I haven't really been able to figure out why. Maybe its because they have so many old buildings and ruins around here that it's hard to keep up with them all? or maybe they just haven't seen "n.l. european vacation"?

I went on the tour through the american studies exchange department at the uni. Our first stop was in avebury which ended up being a little more impressive than stonehenge, both in size and the fact that you can actually get up and close and touch the stones unlike at stonehenge.

Here's a list of similarities:

. both were built in the neolithic period around 3000bce (or of you're sara palin - right about the time that dinosaurs and humans were living together, shortly after god created the earth) .

. both are in the shape of a circle .

. both have stones that are 15ft or so high, and weigh around 40tons - or about 6 yellow school buses .

. both are not far from each other in southern england .


Here's a list of dissimilarities:

. stonehenge is about the moon and the sun / avebury is about fertility and magnetism .

. avebury is around a quarter mile in diameter / stonehenge is around 110ft in diameter .

the beach - swansea

So im admittedly spoiled here, Swansea is the closest university in the world to the beach, and the weather's been unheardofly sunny for the last week or so. I've been heading down for runs about every other day sans camera, but I did get a few pictures the other day when I walked down with a friend. There was some guy out there with a shovel and a bucket, so we stopped him to ask what he was doing and took a few pics. Apparently he was digging for fishing worms...





..

freshers week

So here I am right in the middle of freshers week, mildly-overwhelmed and extremely under-rested.

"Freshers" week is apparently a big deal in the UK. It's the week before classes begin and the time to meet other first year and exchange students, get registered for classes (which I did today), party a lot, and sign up for different societies [ i joined 4 of them... radio society (where i'll get to have my own radio show!), the triathlon society, the english ale society, and the windsurfing society!].

Each night out has a different theme. I think tonight is the "safer sex party"? I'm not sure, i just know that there are a lot of condoms being handed out, which brings up the subject of the sort of free spiritedness of the british culture that I've noticed, at least when it comes to sexuality. Another thing i noticed is the fact that the british aren't quite as religious as in the US. I haven't actually met a religious british person yet (and I've met a ton of them), and most people in the student village use the bible in their room as a door stop. Only about half of the population in britian believes in any sort of religion, with close to 50% being athiest or agnostic, as opposed the only around 10% in the US (i googled it). But enough about that.

I signed up for some uber interesting classes today, one of which is an american studies class that talks about american politics and the current election. Which reminds me - i registered to vote absentee balot online yesterday! It's really easy if you need to do it, just click here to go to the site. The british are really into american politics by the way, and are all about Barak of course! It will be interesting to get a european perspective on american politics.

Registration's kind of weird here though - instead of just registering online, you have to physically go to each department with a piece of paper and have the professors sign off on the classes you want to take, its beyond inefficient and it took 5 hours to register for my classes this morning, but i'm all done so it's all good.

cardiff trip

The nearest ikea and h&m are in cardiff about an hour away, so i took the train there yesterday to get some goods. I seem to have left my jacket in a hostel in london last weekend; the second rei jacket that i've lost in the last month (i guess i won't be buying any more of those!), so a trip to h&m was needed. My new flat was looking a little dark and boring, so thanks to the cheap digs at ikea my room has now officially been pimped. word.

the british museum

i came to the british museum today. i didn't bother to look at anything though. i walked to a park instead, passing the london school of architecture on the way.

i had spaghetti cabonara and a half bottle of wine at a little italian joint and bought a book at a little book shop across the street... Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

i started to feel bad for not looking at anything in the museum so i popped back in and looked around and do some sketching in the last 30 minutes before they closed.

swansea hotel

just got in to Swansea yesterday and checked into some little bed and breakfast that i'll be staying out for the next couple of weeks until the dorm opens up. here's a little video of the place and the view of the beach...

current read

thanks to ray for giving me his beat up copy of The Road Less Traveled.
if you haven't read it, you should. it's giving me a new perspective on things. 

great new word = cathexis. 

takeaway so far = delay gratification

random observations

. london tap water tastes like bottled .

. wet stone and low clouds make everything quiet and hushed .

. looking right is more important than looking left .

. the welsh accent is tough to understand, but gets easier after a few pints .

more later...

air india

flew air india from chi-town to london. it was the cheapest option ($437 one way from albuquerque). i was pretty happy with the flight. here's some pro's and cons...

Pros

• wicked good lamb curry, rice pudding, & coffee
• plenty of room for my guitar in the coat storage
• ticket was cheap
• the soothing voice of the stewardess on the intercom
• we arrived 45 minutes early

Cons

• the jean louis eau de toilette in the bathroom that everybody in the plane decided to use
• the barefoot indian guy next to me who kicked off his shoes and put his bare feet on my pillow (long story)

landed on london

Just landed. I ate what I think might be a traditional english breakfast?... baked beans, fries, fried egg, toast, ham, sausage, tomato. They served instant coffee which i find odd, but it was all good none the less. Amy Winehouse is playing in the background. 

about a dog.

I made a last minute trip to PetsMart to buy a few things for her in her new home; a new bed; some rawhide bones; a new collar tag with Jason's cell phone number on it. I put these things on the dining room table and spent half an hour in the back yard with Subi and their dog Baxter throwing the ball around and watching as she ate grass and panted. I looked threw the window to the backyard as I left; making sure she wasn't worried and looking for me. She was laid out on the grass chewing on her rawhide bone. She didn't look concerned. I felt reassured. I locked the front door and drove on toward the coast.

gas station shower

I took an 8 dollar shower at the Flying J gas station outside of Provo last night. I used the soap from the liquid dispenser, which stung my skin and eyes and stripped the oil from my hair making it impossible to run my fingers through it. Afterward we drove on for a couple hours, passing through Salt Lake City, which was bigger and more lit up at night than I would have expected. We stopped at midnight at a rest area near the border with Idaho. Subi was still a little wet from the stale pool of water that she jumped into on our earlier hike that day in Moab.  She laid her head on my stomach as we lay stretched out in the back of the Discovery and went to sleep for the night.