but ships are fallible, i say

the past few days have been eventful. i met some new funny and cool british people at julia's pizza and wine gathering, which i am pleased about, because i have very, very few british, or rather i should say english, friends here. it's not terribly important i guess where people come from, only how you get on with them, but beneath this burgeoning scottish nationalism i am an anglophile after all, and more relevantly scotland is bursting at the seams with perceptions of the english and i have very few of my own to contribute.
following that was my last shift at work for about a week, which, though i really do like this job better than any i've ever had in the restaurant business, is just plain refreshing. i spent the afternoon hot-chocolating in a coffeehouse with my new friend jonathon, we broke so i could take care of some business, and then reconvened for an evening at the cinema with the producers, which was a lot of fun. i'm glad i'm making more of an effort to incorporate the cinema into my regular life here, especially because i haven't yet made a way to rent movies as i so frequently do back in the u.s. it's actually one of my favorite little pockets of cultural differences, the cinema, what with the half an hour of advertisements and the popcorn sellers actually bringing a cart into the individual cinema itself at the beginning of the show to sell beer, wine, popcorn, candy and ice cream. as if the world wasn't lazy enough.

yesterday julia and i had planned to go see this art exhibit that i have been anticipating for months now and then eat sushi, but she had some sort of crazy evening clubbing the night before and needed to sleep (not a good idea to take in art while drained, so i understood). wanting to take advantage of my free time to explore greater edinburgh while i still had the tangible drive, i came up with a new plan and instead went to the scottish national portrait gallery, walked quite a far way out to see the royal botanic gardens, and punctuated it all with starbucks and seize the day. julia and i then spent an evening of substantial conversation in a jazz bar that is literally up the street from me that i've never been to, which is pretty shameful of me. i have a strange relationship to live jazz. i spend a lot of time listening to old, recorded and incredibly revered jazz and i don't know much outside of that. the idea of just going and seeing some randoms playing makes me nervous, like how can i tell exactly what's going on and if it's good. but it is all really silly, and i just need to go and do it and pay attention and find a groove.

my day as an absorptive observer was very full. it was sort of exercise to juxtapose art and nature, especially because the art was exclusively focused on humans and their faces and bodies and representing their statures and meanings to our constructed people-world. there was a travelling exhibit at the museum called the bp portrait award that was the one cultural thing i managed to see while in london back in september. i of course looked at it again, because it is a remarkable exhibit, and experienced the sensation of being at home, a reminder of the ways i had drained myself out before to let myself be filled up by these pieces and my thoughts about them. the other exhibits were sometimes really provocative too - i got to see the faces of many important scottish figures, ones i had and hadn't heard of, and though i do find it difficult to look endlessly at portrait after portrait, it is true that some people are just so beautifully interesting-looking, and their image feels so worthy of being shown. in fact i wish i could know these people in real life.

travelling out to the royal botanic gardens involved more of the taking in, this time of new parts of the city that i hadn't seen. i was back in what is called new town, which houses the business district of the city. i was in the eastern part of it, and from what i understand the west end (as they call it) is especially posh and pretty. another day, for sure. but i still got some of the idea where i was, enough to remember that there are lots of people in the city who are not students and have no relation to old timey edinburgh or its historical hubbub (though i am really happy that i do have a daily relation to those things). at the gardens themselves, i got the feeling that i was probably doing this at the wrong time of year, because the extensive grounds was indeed green, but also inhabited by countless barren trees and bushes. i think this has some sort of austerity to it, but i admit it seemed quite samey after a while. i may have rushed myself though, because they were closing sooner than the website advertised and the place was teeming with running, screaming and crying children. because i was in such a quiet, bibulous mode it was interruptive to have kids running amok and taking the peace out of this chunk of nature, though i can understand how it would seem like a nice thing to do with a young family. i spent a lot of time in the glasshouses, taking in the smells and heat of the plants and their colours and intricacies. it all felt pretty cleansing, though more disorienting than something like going to loch lomond, an actual natural place, because you can't help but wonder, wandering through these different areas of plant biomes, "where in the world am i?!"
and let me tell you, there's nothing in the world like starbucks for that kind of re-orientation. actually, i hadn't been in ages so i didn't feel so bad about it : ) and i made a sizeable dent in the current book of choice.

i updated my photo website with some of my art/nature travels. those willing are welcome.

today i am spending the entire day writing emails and reading and preparing my flat for my esteemed guest rachel duffie. she won't be here until the wee hours, so i have all day to anticipate it! she'll be here for several days, so you probably won't hear from me again until afterwards. but i love sharing my home here with people dear to me, so i will up to exciting and fulfilling things, have no doubt.

i will end with a little excerpt from my book that is very saul bellow, for what a flawed, loveable writer he was:
"He was a little tired. The spirit, the peculiar burden of his existence lay upon him like an accretion, a load, a hump. In any moment of quiet, when sheer fatigue prevented him from struggling, he was apt to feel this mysterious weight, this growth or collection of nameless things which it was the business of his life to carry about. That must be what a man was for."