deja vu

I'm teaching right now. Sort of. I'm sitting on the grass with my students and they have their laptops open, writing. The sun's setting, light coming through the trees and bouncing off a big map of the school, so that every time I look up it blinds me. The students are lovely here, bent over their keyboards, young brows furrowed. Can I say their young brows are furrowed? They are.

It's not quite as romantic as it sounds. I mean, it's lovely out here, and the sun is well-deserved after an astonishingly gloomy summer. But I think I'm moving back into my depression, old friend. It's arrived fiercely in the last few days, leveled me. It feels shameful. I'm working on kicking it out the door, but who knows how long that could take.

The students and I have had a semi-painful discussion about poetry, in which I had to explain why it's not true that "there's no wrong answer." If you can't support it with the text, folks, it doesn't really exist. I wish that were true: that there are no wrong answers. I wish I could tell them that and smile and nod when they say something absurd. But there are so many wrong answers it makes me ache.

In non-achey news, we found a place to live. In Waltham. Which means we have to leave our ward, but we'll have more money, and we'll be close to the hip/happening Moody street. We'll see if we're hip and happening.

Must go. The chickens are restless. Time to teach again.

Posted by Deja at 2:58 PM | 5 comments  
Labels: boston, outdoors, sad, teaching

A cat in Monterosso, the town in Cinque Terre where we stayed. He was sitting patiently on the windowsill of a fancy seafood restaurant. On the counters just below him were mounds of prawns and squid and eel and floppy fish. He didn't seem to want to get in, just sniff deeply, remember such a world exists. Who can blame him?

Can you see the man in the window? We thought he looked like an aging Popeye.

Posted by Deja at 9:54 PM | 4 comments  
Labels: Italy, kitties, things that cause life to be good

Got home Sunday at eight or so, having bickered all day. We're so not bicker-ers. We were tired and ready for non-vacation time.

I had to teach Monday afternoon. I thought my syllabus for the class was on my laptop. It wasn't. I thought it was perhaps on another laptop, which was in the shop. It wasn't. I learned this an hour before class started. Whoops.

Maybe the syllabus never existed. Maybe I'm out of my mind. Maybe all the gelato turned my brain to mucus. Ew.

Anyway, then I had jury duty. They didn't pick me, glory be.

Then I had to write the syllabus that perhaps never existed.

All this to say, Paris? I was in Paris? How very odd. This is a different world, a different life, and I haven't even unpacked yet. My pretty pink shoes are still wrapped in a scarf, tucked in my backpack. It's been too rainy here to wear them anyway.

But I do remember. Our very last night we rode the train into the city and wandered around, bickering, trying to find somewhere to eat. Once we had food in our bellies, we were friends again. We had landed on that little island we went to before, at the same restaurant even. Then we waited in a long long line for one last ice cream cone. I got green apple and strawberry sorbets. We walked along the river, saw Notre Dame lit up, saw teenagers pouring vodka in bottles of soda and a young man in a short black skirt and a curly pink wig. That stroll along the river felt like a big smooch goodbye. Goodbye Paris, goodbye vacation, goodbye little moment out of all the moments.

Posted by Deja at 9:41 PM | 2 comments  
Labels: bummer, france, things that are strange, things that cause life to be good

I'm way behind, yo. We've been to Cinque Terre, now we're in Rome. We fly back to Paris tomorrow and then home to Boston the day after that.

I've gotta say, we've had a lovely lovely trip, but we're SO glad to be heading home.

Here's my advice: if you make it to Italy, the place to go is Cinque Terre. It was probably our favorite place throughout the whole trip. It's an area along the Northern coast, a series of five colorful little fishing villages. We went swimming in the Ligurian sea (which is very very salty, it seems to me), ate the best food of the trip (bruschetta, foccacia, pesto, pine nut gelato, chili pepper herb tea, etc), took a boat to a few other towns, lounged on the beach in fancy beach chairs and read books. A man walked down the beach carrying a big basket full of huge tropical leaves and chunks of fresh coconut shouting, "Coco, bella coco!" Oh how I loved that man. And each little town had a few friendly kitties lounging in the sun. It felt like a team of experts had designed the happiest place in the world for a Deja and a Sam. We were in love with each other and with that place.

Anyway, that's a very brief and sorry excuse for all the lovely days that have been in between my last post and now, but it's late and the Internet ticketh, and I still need to pack for Paris. But here are a few pictures.

The shoes.






Dang. And all I have time for are the shoes. I have more stories to tell. When my Internet isn't attached to a clock and a credit card, I will tell them.

Posted by Deja at 1:18 PM | 8 comments  
Labels: Italy, shopping

Okay, I did.

Okay, I bought three pairs--one hip, pink (ish), pretty, heeled item (you'll see, once I'm back to real Internet access); one pair of shockingly comfy blue sandals that Sam had a crush on; one pair of more conservative, lovely deja-esque mary jane-ish dark brown ones. We were in that store for about ten years, Sam trying to convince me to get all three, me squealing at the impracticality of it all, but not being able to put any of them back. And the Italian woman who runs the place mounting in irritation. In the end, they were a steal--much less than I would have paid in the states. And they'll make perfect school shoes. Plus, I'm in love them. It was the kind of purchase you take out of the bag and box as soon as you get home, even though it's too rainy for leather shoes, but you just have to look at them again, to hold them and snuggle them to your face.

One other happy thing before we do laundry: We ate dinner at a little place overlooking the Arno, and while we ate our ribolitta (sp?) and salad, a little river otter came swimming up to us. He got out on the beach and groomed himself, cleaned between his toes and smoothed his fur. He reminded us of a kitty. I asked the waitress about him and she said he was a cross between a mouse and beaver, only she didn't know the English word for beaver so she held two fingers up to her mouth like long teeth. We loved the mouse-beaver.

Tomorrow, we head here, Cinque Terre. Italy is fine by me.

Posted by Deja at 8:48 AM | 5 comments  
Labels: creatures, italy shopping, things that cause life to be good

So I got sick. Real sick. I'm feeling better enough now to be out and about, but yesterday I slept and slept. I'm pretty sure I was feverish and my throat closed and ached; my nose hated me. Sam spent the morning tracking down vitamin C and orange juice in little Italian pharmacies where they luckily understood the phrase "wife sick" and were willing to help.

I finished reading Poisonwood Bible (which I adored until the last 100 pages or so) and read all of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (which I absolutely did enjoy--quick and delightful, if full of some unrealisticly lovely dialogue). I can also recommend The Cellist of Sarajevo, mostly. I found it to be rather, slightly, oh, dramatically written? May I say that when it was about such a terrible event? I think I can. I was in a swoon for it for many many pages, but then it seemed the characters thought thoughts that were too similar, ultimately too simple or something. Nevermind. I'll do a goodreads for each of them soon. All I meant to say is that I read all day, which was nice.

Back to Italy. We're in Italy, but yesterday I wouldn't have known it if the OJ carton wasn't in Italian. When I tried to go out in the afternoon, it only took about thirty seconds before I felt dizzy and terrible and whined for Sam to take me home, which he did. We ventured out again after dark, when it wasn't so hot, and I'm happy to report that I did sort of fall in love. We stayed away from the city center, found this lovely dark restaurant with a red velvet couch-thing and kind waiters and we ate simple, tasty food. I had some spaghetti object with thyme and lemon, Sam had the spaghetti object with an incredible, classic tomatoes and herbs sauce, then we split a grilled vegetable plate with some sort of smoky cheese on the side. And we may have ordered a dark chocolate souffle with bitter orange sauce, maybe, which I might have taken tiny bites of, despite my stuffed nose. As I said, the day had cooled off and there weren't so many drunk teens with cleavage and/or tight jeans. We strolled along, in love, talking about romantic things like ... budgets and grocery shopping. It was pleasant indeed.

Today the heat wave seems to have broken. I'm sitting at the Internet cafe which overlooks the Arno. The back door is open so I feel a delightful breeze. My nose is stuffed slightly and my throat feels ick-ish, but I'm confident I don't have the Pig Sick, which we looked up all the symptoms for yesterday, of course.

One more thing. In my feverish haze, I kept feeling stupid for my last post, which I also wrote in a feverish haze. What was I thinking saying David was a sexy beast? What am I, 12 years old? Yes, sort of, anyway. What really happened when I saw David is that from behind it looked like he was participating in a trust exercise with me, like he'd get the nerve up to fall back into my arms any second. And I would catch the leggy teenager in my arms, under his strong shoulders, and he would sigh the sigh of 500 years, stand, ruffle my hair with his enormous hand, and stride off. The female busts in the other room would sputter jealously.

And that is what I really thought of David.

Posted by Deja at 3:37 AM | 5 comments  
Labels: Italy, sickness and health

Okay, so much to say, but the clock's a'ticking at the old Internet Train Cafe, and so I must be brief.

-David is one sexy beast.

-Uffizi Gallery gives you the history of art in under 2 hours, but by the end you want to kill yourself.

-Pizza is yummy, even without cheese.

-I bought a black leather purse, thinking I would be practical because I don't have one, then remembered I DOOOO have one. I should have bought the pink one after all.

-Lemon gelato. Pistachio gelato. Coconut gelato. Chocolate gelato. Minty chocolate gelato.

-Sam stepped in a big pile of crap. I tried to say, lookout lookout! But he didn't know what to look out for. Next time, we have a code word.

-I have a fierce cold and sore throat. I blame this on the gelato.

-Italian people hate me. I can't speak Italian, so they either look at me like I'm a moron or ignore me. It's depressing.

-The truth: we wish we could say we were enjoying Florence more. It is damn crowded and damn hot and sometimes it smells like sewage, and the locals seriously seem so irritated with tourists. Not that I can blame them. We're doing our best to fall in love, but both of us are getting ill and it's making it hard. Tomorrow we have absolutely nothing on the schedule. That will help, we hope.

Any tips on what to do when you're weary of travel?

Posted by Deja at 11:43 AM | 10 comments  
Labels: bummer, food, Italy, sam