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tarigwaemirBlair Hall Apts., on the Feast of Ste. Catherine
My father is watching a show on Korean television--I think it's the one where celebrities travel to different countries and experience various aspects of foreign cultures--and for some reason, they started playing the Lord of the Rings soundtrack to accompany scenes of preparation for an elaborate Hindu festival. The music is as beautiful as ever and makes my heart ache just to hear it, and the festival itself looks gorgeous and elaborate and colorful, but...the two are not compatible. Especially when the Irish whistle is playing.
I'm back home, after a...rather remarkable experience on the UC shuttle yesterday. We gathered in lines in front of Lowell House, waiting for the UC shuttles to arrive (they were late) in the pouring rain; my suitcase was soaked despite my umbrella by the time they came, thirty minutes late. After immense confusion over which buses were going to Grand Central and which to Penn Station (it later turned out that all the buses were stopping at both, but we needed to put our baggage in separate compartments depending on destination) and even more disorganized milling about as various UC officers tried to collect tickets and check people off a list of names, we finally got onto the third and last shuttle, where there were exactly eight seats left. I sat at the very back seat, next to the bathroom, and L.P. ended up in the very front. We had to use cell phones to communicate. >_<
We departed at 4 and took a strange detour by MIT. It didn't help that we were travelling in Thanksgiving rush hour traffic. We also ended up going by all sorts of roundabout routes, presumably to avoid heavier traffic, including going into New Jersey (of all places!) and entering Manhattan by the Lincoln Tunnel. We arrived at Grand Central at 11:30, eight and a half hours after we left. My parents were not pleased. I was severely carsick. I went home on the subway (which was at its slow, midnight pace) and got back at about 12:30 in the morning. What a nightmare. Sitting next to the bathroom didn't help--no, not because of that, but because the artificial scent of the air freshener inside made me nauseous.
But I'm back home, and I spent Thanksgiving eating Korean food (what bliss!), watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and sleeping. Yum, sleep!
There have been considerable changes to the apartment decor in my absence. The walls have been repainted, courtesy of our superintendent. Three new cushions hand-stitched by my mother from an autumn leaf pattern decorate my former mattress (it is in the living room, covered with a lace spread to pass for a makeshift second couch, and my father sleeps on it when I am home). Our fifteen-year old dining table, which had long been plagued by loose screws, has been replaced with a smaller wooden table about half the original size. A cabinet with sliding doors takes up the empty space. The fifteen-year old bookshelves, with peeling white enamel and missing nails, have finally been discarded for taller shelves of a pale pine color--I can no longer reach the top shelf easily and will have to resort to jumping to reach the books there. But now most of my books are lined up properly, instead of being piled on top of one another in ungainly heaps. Of course, Mother still disrupted my careful librarian scheme of classification, but that's just my obsessive-compulsive streak speaking.
I used to imagine this apartment in dull golds and white--our wooden floors in imaginative exaggeration glow orange in summer sunlight, and our furniture all in uniform Ikea white--but over the years it has mellowed to shades of pale wood (still Ikea, though), and somehow I think this change in color reflects something of the ways in which my family has changed. Growing up, my father used to repeat, "when we make money," the way that certain families in children's literature repeat, "when our ship comes in," and I dreamed up houses in that implicit conditional. But somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about such things and became attached to our old, broken, stained furniture, so carefully repaired and patched to look pristinely clean. But now with his new job, with a new sense of breathing room, my parents have returned to dreaming--we've replaced many of our old apartment fixtures over the past three years or so, especially after I started college--and I'm not sure what to make of it. I mean, not that I'm not happy to have larger bookshelves and to stop worrying about leaning my elbows on the tabletop, but fifteen years. I remember seeing these tables and shelves being delivered to our house--why, one of my earliest memories is the exact arrangement of chairs stacked carefully on the half-assembled dining table--and I even remember watching my parents assemble all this Ikea and Target furniture. Yes, yes, the ambivalence that comes with change, blah, blah, blah--but there is a certain sort of love involved in taking care of what you have, knowing that it is, for whatever reason, irreplaceable.
::sighs:: Holidays make me sentimental. Anyway, the new bookshelves do look lovely. ^_^
Yours &c.
My father is watching a show on Korean television--I think it's the one where celebrities travel to different countries and experience various aspects of foreign cultures--and for some reason, they started playing the Lord of the Rings soundtrack to accompany scenes of preparation for an elaborate Hindu festival. The music is as beautiful as ever and makes my heart ache just to hear it, and the festival itself looks gorgeous and elaborate and colorful, but...the two are not compatible. Especially when the Irish whistle is playing.
I'm back home, after a...rather remarkable experience on the UC shuttle yesterday. We gathered in lines in front of Lowell House, waiting for the UC shuttles to arrive (they were late) in the pouring rain; my suitcase was soaked despite my umbrella by the time they came, thirty minutes late. After immense confusion over which buses were going to Grand Central and which to Penn Station (it later turned out that all the buses were stopping at both, but we needed to put our baggage in separate compartments depending on destination) and even more disorganized milling about as various UC officers tried to collect tickets and check people off a list of names, we finally got onto the third and last shuttle, where there were exactly eight seats left. I sat at the very back seat, next to the bathroom, and L.P. ended up in the very front. We had to use cell phones to communicate. >_<
We departed at 4 and took a strange detour by MIT. It didn't help that we were travelling in Thanksgiving rush hour traffic. We also ended up going by all sorts of roundabout routes, presumably to avoid heavier traffic, including going into New Jersey (of all places!) and entering Manhattan by the Lincoln Tunnel. We arrived at Grand Central at 11:30, eight and a half hours after we left. My parents were not pleased. I was severely carsick. I went home on the subway (which was at its slow, midnight pace) and got back at about 12:30 in the morning. What a nightmare. Sitting next to the bathroom didn't help--no, not because of that, but because the artificial scent of the air freshener inside made me nauseous.
But I'm back home, and I spent Thanksgiving eating Korean food (what bliss!), watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and sleeping. Yum, sleep!
There have been considerable changes to the apartment decor in my absence. The walls have been repainted, courtesy of our superintendent. Three new cushions hand-stitched by my mother from an autumn leaf pattern decorate my former mattress (it is in the living room, covered with a lace spread to pass for a makeshift second couch, and my father sleeps on it when I am home). Our fifteen-year old dining table, which had long been plagued by loose screws, has been replaced with a smaller wooden table about half the original size. A cabinet with sliding doors takes up the empty space. The fifteen-year old bookshelves, with peeling white enamel and missing nails, have finally been discarded for taller shelves of a pale pine color--I can no longer reach the top shelf easily and will have to resort to jumping to reach the books there. But now most of my books are lined up properly, instead of being piled on top of one another in ungainly heaps. Of course, Mother still disrupted my careful librarian scheme of classification, but that's just my obsessive-compulsive streak speaking.
I used to imagine this apartment in dull golds and white--our wooden floors in imaginative exaggeration glow orange in summer sunlight, and our furniture all in uniform Ikea white--but over the years it has mellowed to shades of pale wood (still Ikea, though), and somehow I think this change in color reflects something of the ways in which my family has changed. Growing up, my father used to repeat, "when we make money," the way that certain families in children's literature repeat, "when our ship comes in," and I dreamed up houses in that implicit conditional. But somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about such things and became attached to our old, broken, stained furniture, so carefully repaired and patched to look pristinely clean. But now with his new job, with a new sense of breathing room, my parents have returned to dreaming--we've replaced many of our old apartment fixtures over the past three years or so, especially after I started college--and I'm not sure what to make of it. I mean, not that I'm not happy to have larger bookshelves and to stop worrying about leaning my elbows on the tabletop, but fifteen years. I remember seeing these tables and shelves being delivered to our house--why, one of my earliest memories is the exact arrangement of chairs stacked carefully on the half-assembled dining table--and I even remember watching my parents assemble all this Ikea and Target furniture. Yes, yes, the ambivalence that comes with change, blah, blah, blah--but there is a certain sort of love involved in taking care of what you have, knowing that it is, for whatever reason, irreplaceable.
::sighs:: Holidays make me sentimental. Anyway, the new bookshelves do look lovely. ^_^
Yours &c.
