ROOOOOOOOXXXXANNE! - 03:37, Monday, July 30, 2007

My husband Jeff graduated from Penn State Uni in May. He had dropped out of college in 2002. Disillusioned with pretty much everything about life he packed in his Electrical Engineering degree, and moved back home to his parents to figure out what to do.

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Then he met me.

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One of the things I quickly realized about the USA is, if you don't have qualifications life is extra hard. If you're taking over your mom and dads business or you're starting your own or you have 20 years experience etc etc of course they might not be needed, but from where I was standing, Jeff and I needed all the help we could get. Two years after he dropped out and now newly married to yours truly, I persuaded him to go back to college and this time to do something he loved instead of something he thought he should be doing. Hating offices and cubicles and loving the outdoors, he choose Forestry, and in 2005 he went back to college. While I set about the task of supporting us both ( I don't recommend it to anyone, newlywed, new immigrant and soley responsible for keeping your marriage financially afloat for 2 years - fun fun fun! ) So 2 years later in May 2007 Jeff graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Forest Sciences.

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For his graduation present I wanted to get him something super cool...so I got him a ticket to see these guys in Philadelphia:

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Ok so we're only 30 and 31 years old and might be too young to remember them first time around, but good music is still good music. We both love The Police. I know a lot of people think Sting is a wanker but there's no doubt The Police were a cracking band. Listen to their greatest hits album and you'll remember how awesome they are. I remember days when I was 19 spent in my friends council house passing a spliff and listening to people trying to play the bongos along to "Don't stand so close to me."  

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The tickets were outrageously priced, about $250 -$350 a pop and with our non-budget we couldn't afford them. Then I got lucky and found out that if you had a Best Buy loyalty card (which for some reason I do) and you emailed your membership number to Best Buy on a certain day and a certain time that Best Buy would then email you a link to a website where you could buy tickets 2 weeks before they went on sale, and get 2 tix for the price of 1. Still pricey but what the hell.

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It was worth it, the show was fabulous. It was held in the Philadelphia Phillies baseball stadium which was enormous and seemed poorly staffed (don't events like these always seem like that?) but the atmosphere was tangible and the weather was hot and sticky. We had great seats, we made our way down to the field near the front and as soon as Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers came on I squealed like a 5 year old on Christmas morning. Possibly my fave song was "Message in a Bottle" and of course, "Roxanne."  Which everyone drunkenly screeched along to. During the concert me and my husband agreed on one thing -  Sting is a total and utter bastard,  we're so jealous of him we want to reverse over his face. Not only is he a good looking fella in real life, he also played the bass like a fiend and his voice sounded like it hadn't changed a bit in 30 years. When Elton John sings now I cringe a bit because he's losing it with age. Sting is about 104 and still able to hit every note and belt out every "eyyy -oooh" with the power of a 21 year old. Add to that , he's in one of the coolest bands ever and the fact that he has zero fat on his perfect yoga toned body and Jeff and I were convinced that there's nothing the man hasn't got. Bastard. Here's some pics of the show:

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The Police @ Citizens Bank Park - Philadelphia, 7/19/2007

Dialling up - 12:20, Thursday, July 26, 2007

Our DSL has gone up to $40 a month. Forty bloody dollars!!!!

Way too much in my opinion so after some discussion with Jeff we've decided to take our cable modem back today. I'm sad because I'll miss being able to get on the internet everyday, but to be honest, we can't really afford it right now.

Dial up here I come.......

Going Amish. - 08:09, Sunday, July 22, 2007

Where is Home Again? - 09:14, Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Northerner Abroad - 06:42, Saturday, December 9, 2006

Kevin Smith is in the Hizz-ouse!!!! - 10:18, Saturday, September 23, 2006

back to reality. - 04:17, Friday, June 30, 2006

I know, I know. I haven’t written anything in God knows how long. Honestly, the gap from when I last wrote to now, is filled with nothingness. I haven’t anything to tell of note. Apart from the fact that I haven't been able to figure it all out yet. It being the big IT life, marriage, myself, God etc everything. IT.

At the end of 2005, 2006 lingered with a promise to be a better time than 2005. It hasn’t lived up to its promise so far.

2005 was incredibly difficult for me. I felt increasingly socially isolated and disconnected. I had no job for the most part, due to visa restrictions for a large chunk and depression-led apathy for the rest of it. I suffered bouts of homesickness that felt so strong and overwhelming that the word homesickness didn’t do my misery justice.

I found myself in an unfamiliar place, no job, no family, no friends and was left scratching my head as to how the fart I got here from where I had been 12 months previously. Of course 12 months previously I was in a job I loved, in my own home that I adored, working for the first time without any kind of disillusionment creeping in, for a local government and police based initiative called a “Community Safety Team.” It was one of the most fulfilling jobs I’ve ever had while also being crappily paid. Not that I cared too much about that then, as making ends meet never seems such a chore when you’re happy. I'd spend hour after hour in the gym, all the spinning instructors knew my name. I was honing my bod in preparation for the enjoyment and wonder of an American guy I’d fallen desperately in love with.

I’d never known love like I did before I met Jeff. It was literally like being clicked into place when I met him, and being away from him sucked so badly that I actually felt like I was aching physically at times. My mission in life was to enjoy the time I had left in the country I was born and raised in, (and I was immensely, much to my surprise) and then park my ass next to Jeffs for the rest of my life. It's like that question about the end of books, what happens during the time you live happily ever after?

Cubes. - 02:19, Thursday, December 1, 2005

They Walk Among Us...! - 01:40, Sunday, October 23, 2005

This is all very strange for me. My husbands’ family is skeptical of anyone who doesn’t work 60 hours a week of manual labor or who drinks herbal tea, let alone people who go all Roswell on your ass. My father-in-law is one of those types of blue-collar men who own a log-splitter, a tractor, and has a snow plough attached to their truck for 5 months of the year. He can fix anything with some gaffer tape and a coat hanger. When he had colon cancer, he was back at work about 3 months earlier than he should have been because not going in to work was not an option. What I’m getting at is, I know there is no way on earth my father-in-law would invent this out of thin air. Apparently the object was triangular and had seven lights on it and was moving much slower than you’d expect a regular plane to. Jeff thinks there may be government aircraft being tested around up there, as his parents live in a very remote part of PA.

Anyway, after Jeff went to bed I decided to Google “UFO Pennsylvania�? and low and behold if a whole shitload of websites didn’t come up pertaining to UFO sightings, and even a Roswell style crash landing, in the same bloody COUNTY as Jeff’s family is from!! About 30 mins down the road there is a small town which had a flying saucer crash land into a farmer’s pond in 1974 and apparently since then that place and the surrounding area has been a hotbed of UFO sightings.

I even looked at a kinda road map of UFO travel in the USA based on the evidence of sightings it suggests UFOs tend to stick to the same flight paths. The map states that UFOs will first be sighted in the Gulf area in the south then move up north and arc across north eastern PA where my in-laws live. This is all pretty bonkers stuff to take in. For one, I’m not sure if I believe in UFOs really. I used to think it was all a part of bored Americans over-active imagination. It just feels too ridiculous to say that I 100% believe in aliens whizzing about above us. However, not sure how I would feel if, as I was sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner at my in-laws next month a noticed something out of Mars Attacks flying over the roof….If I seem to disappear from the site for a while, notify Mulder and Scully.

http://www.burlingtonnews.net/carbondale.html

Viva La Revolution! (of your mind and heart) - 06:27, Friday, September 30, 2005

Last night I watched a film that affected me the way a book does. The Motorcycle Diaries had been sat on my coffee table for two nights running. Along with The Wedding Date and Monster-in-law. Sometimes I want to watch what I know will be a good film and sometimes I want to watch brain candy. Monster-in-law was a pile of shite, irritating and overly long. I’m bored of J.Lo and hope that she either stops making films soon or her star begins to seriously fade. Michael Vartan was mis-cast I thought and Jane Fonda was okay I guess. The Wedding Date was a lot better than expected, made even nicer for me I think because the main character lives in America but she grew up in England and has her family there. Anyway, I’d watched both of these average films before finally saying to Jeff, “We’re paying $1.89 a night for these DVDs maybe we should watch the motorcycle diaries tonight so I can take it back.‿ You know the way a book can become almost all-consuming? As though your life barely exists outside of the book, that the story within the book engrosses you so much it seems as though the life you have going on outside of it is merely a passing distraction until you go back to the book.

I’ve always been more of a bookworm than a film buff. I own about 200 books and about 4 DVDs. I did just get the Father Ted box set for my birthday though so I guess that pushes it up to 5. When I read ‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker, although I didn’t fully understand some of the dialogue, as it was written in the dialect spoken by the characters, I did become so pulled into the story I felt like I was beginning to talk like the characters when I talked to myself inside my head. ‘The Bell Jar’ by Sylvia Plath and ‘She’s Come Undone’ by Wally Lamb, ‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote and ‘The woman who walked into doors’ by Roddy Doyle are all examples of books where I‘ve felt as though they became a big fixture in my life, as though the characters lives were running parallel to my own at that point in time. I still think about the characters from those books from time to time. the same way I wonder what my mate in London is doing now, I think about these people. The motorcycle diaries had a similar effect. Even after I had watched it, I felt the enormity of what I had just watched was still brewing inside my head, I was still digesting the affects of the journey of these two men. Made all the more potent, in my opinion, because it’s a true story. I feel annoyed at myself for not being better educated about Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

When I was younger, I was into all sorts of cultural touchstones I thought I should be well-educated on. The First and Second World War were a speciality, helped along by a Dad with a passion for political and world history and a large collection of books and video to match. My Dad was always pretty awesome in that way. He saw me reading Chekhov once, unbeknownst to him; it was for college, but the next day I came home to find the complete works of Chekhov lying on my bed. This would happen quite a lot throughout my adolescence. When I gave up studying History to do Performing Arts the poor guy had a meltdown. Two days of arguing later and he finally let me do what I wanted.

Later on when I went to University I started writing for a music 'zine which had bits of politics and literature thrown in. The editor was 10 years older than me, incredibly intelligent and her articles read like PhD textbooks. I wanted to be able to hold my own so I attempted to school myself on things I thought I needed to know. Cambodia and Pol Pot, the French Revolution, Surrealist theatre, Aneurin Bevan, Ghandi, Virginia Woolf, The Spanish Civil War, Germaine Greer, the Vietnam War, Naomi Wolf, The Beat Poets, Steve Biko etc. I ended up knowing little bits about everything. The editor, Mary, suggested I read a book called ‘Lipstick Traces’ by Greil Marcus. I knew bits about everything that it quoted on the blurb, Dadaism, Punk music, Antonin Artaud, the French situationist movement, the Lettristes, American politics, Berlin theatre during the war, etc ‘Lipstick Traces’ is about how all these things are sociologically interwoven and one begat the other. I barely made it past the preface. The book went way over my head and I had to read it again and again and I still couldn’t grasp it, I felt horribly stupid. I loved all that stuff but couldn’t really explain it all to you.

I read Jean-Paul Sartre (natch) and didn’t like it! Same with Kerouac, I thought "On the Road was a load of mysogynistic bollocks. I felt as though both should’ve changed my life  but I felt they were over-rated and a bit unaffective. I even read bits of Mein Kampf, the worlds most boring book. Geez Hitler may have been some kind of evil genius but he couldn’t write for shit. That put me off reading anything written by political leaders ever again. I did want to read Chairman Mao’s little red book but I never got round to borrowing it off my then-boyfriend.

I knew that Che Guevara had written ‘Guerilla Warfare’ but I never knew he had published diaries. Che Guevara always seemed like a male thing that I never really ‘got.’ A bit like why men will stay glued to the screen like its life or death if anything about the mob in the 50’s comes on and has either Pacino or De Niro in it. Not even the lure of a bit of slap n’ tickle can get them away from those films. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was always an image for me, that famous photograph. A poster on boys bedrooms, a face on a T-shirt. I knew about the Cuban revolution had happened and knew a bit about Castro and that the CIA had tried to kill him with an exploding cigar (that thought always makes me chuckle) but that was it. However after watching ‘The Motorcycle Diaries I feel like I missed something important. Very rarely have I felt compelled since I left higher education to educate myself on something like this. Now I feel I want to read everything ever written about the man.

The film is a journey across South America Guevara took when he was only 23 with a friend of his. The sort of thing loads of kids do every year, on gap years or whatever. It’s the sort of thing I did when I first came to America, when I was 25, thinking I was running away from England and my crappy life and boyfriend I didn't have the guts to end it with. I didn’t think then that coming to America, working with Jewish Seniors, some of whom were Holocaust survivors would change my life.It did. Completely. I consider myself very lucky to be able to say I even met people who had been in Auschwitz, Listening to one old lady from Brooklyn tell me about the day she was liberated was the most humbling experience I’ve ever had. Last year when I worked there again for the summer, just before he left, a little old man called Max Greenbaum shoved a videotape into my hand with a piece of paper wrapped around it and told me in his Polish/New York accent, “show this to everyone you know."

It was a video Steven Spielberg had made of him talking about his time in Auschwitz when he was a young man. Rather than the death camp he went to a work camp and spent a couple of years carrying sacks of cement that weighed 60lbs up ladders when he only weighed 90lbs. The paper wrapped around the video was a photocopied letter from Steven Spielberg thanking him for taking part and being interviewed. I didn’t know what the hell I was in for when I came to America the first time. I got a job teaching drama at some place for old people, that’s pretty much all I knew when I got on the plane. The first time I remember walking past someone and seeing the number tattooed on their arm I went cold. I was only there for 5 months and yet the experience was something so completely out of the ordinary that it ended up affecting everything about me and my life so far. Not just that but I also met Jeff at that place so it was a double whammy really. I’m doing the sort of thing with that film that people do with songs. You know the way your favourite songs, or the ones that hold a particular memory or sense of nostalgia for you are usually ones that you listen to and incorporate your own life into the storyboard of the song, to make it your own. It’s not something I feel is necessarily a good thing but its common if nothing else. I once spent weeks lying in bed after getting my heart well and truly broken, I mean I was utterly crushed. I drank too much vodka and lay in bed listening to Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ album followed by a steady diet of ‘Angie’ by The Rolling Stones, ‘Iris’ by The Goo Goo Dolls and ‘Black’ by Pearl Jam. Those songs were not about my life in any way, shape or form but I made them be, and back then they hit a chord in me that rang true and even now, years later I still am taken back to that time and those emotions when I hear those certain songs. I think this film is like that, but only more so. The thing I am most surprised at is the way it’s made me question everything from political and societal systems to heaven and hell. Does democracy work? Can we say America is a successful country when there are tens of thousands of people who have to let their teeth rot out of their head because they can’t afford a dentist? Or people who go to bed hungry or people who wander the streets homeless? I don’t know.

 There is a scene in the film which has being re-playing inside my head since I saw it. On Guevara’s 24th birthday he is at the end of a period where he spends a few weeks volunteering at a Leper colony. The place is split by a river, on one side of the river is where the lepers live and on the other side is where the doctors, nurses and nuns who care for the lepers live. Towards the end of the evening, after he’s blown out the candles on his cake Guevara goes outside and stares across the river at the people who have leprosy on the other side. He can’t truly enjoy himself or his birthday celebrations because of the segregation between them and so chooses to jump into the (very wide and full of big hungry fish) river and swim to the other side so he can spend the latter part of his evening with the people who have leprosy. The scene and the motivation behind it are incredibly powerful for me. It makes me question the whole thought behind heaven and hell. If for some reason I went to heaven when I died and saw hell far below me, with people in it who were ‘unsaved’ how could I carry on enjoying myself knowing there’s probably some people I know down there burning for all eternity? Yet I do believe in God and Jesus and I believe in a God of love and compassion, but could God who loves us send us all into hell? If he wasn’t going to do that then Jesus wouldn’t have had to go through the horrific torture and grisly death he went through. Or would it just become something you are eventually de-sensitised to, like the current suffering going on around the world. You know its there, you know there are street children in Brazil who just disappear, that every 3 seconds a child in Africa dies and yet you know that besides donating money, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it, unless you intend to become a doctor in the Red Cross, join the Peace Corp, or do a VSO. Why did this film affect me so much? If the 23 year old Argentinean medical student hadn’t have gone on this trip around the Americas I doubt whether he would’ve become the Che Guevara that the world knows today. Few people have the same kind of life-altering experience as this, but then I don’t know many people that set off on the back of a motorcycle with a friend with the intention of just seeing what happens along the way. I traveled to Mexico in the back of a beat up van with a load of scousers once, but the experience was hardly life-changing. It only affirmed that I shouldn’t travel with scousers ever again.

In a way I think the world would be undoubtedly a much better place if everyone had a journey like that of ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ Getting out of your comfort zone, turning off the TV, stop reading the newspapers and going to see what’s happening in the world can only improve and enrich who you are.