July 1, 2009
1:03 AM- Yale: G-31: My Desk, The Cupboard Under the Stairs
Hi everyone!!! So, this is the first official entry to the Yale Diaries, even though it’s from Saturday night and it is now early, early Wednesday morning as I post this. I originally wrote these down in my notepad, thinking I’d have a chance to type them out/send them all later, however, the JSA program has different plans. Though I have made many new friends (most of them my amazing roommates) and am loving (more or less) my classes- the actual schedule of the program has something against its students remaining healthy, functional people. There is no water, except at the cafeteria and it is SO HOT HERE!!! Haha. Then there’s the actual schedule which has you up by seven and the very earliest you can get to sleep is at eleven thirty-ish (Because out RA, she’s like a camp counselor, Laura, is nice, but she makes it a point to never stop talking at bed checks. She is the only person in the whole world that subtle hints followed by glaring doesn’t work on (I’m seriously kidding about the glaring).
My point is that I’m having a lot of fun, I’m really tired (It’s one AM here), and I miss EVERYONE so very, very much. I love you all, and I wish you were here with me or I could magically transport myself to California every night like Dorothy with her magic red slippers. :D
I’ll type out/send the next blog as soon as I can, I’ll try really hard to make time tomorrow, and to actually write about life here at Yale (It’s like its own town! Seriously! Oh my goodness….). I miss you and love you and can’t wait to see you. Honestly.
Love,
-Bianca
June 27, 2009
9:30 PM- Los Angeles Airport
Never having actually been in an airport of any kind before, you can imagine my surprise when I found them not to be magical places filled with wonder, but rather huge, frightening masses of building materials; generic gray carpet with red flecks, and acres of gleaming white tiled walls. The place, as I somehow managed not to notice in my intensive ignorance- is absolutely huge- ad filled with people. Thousands of people, scurrying this way and that, consuming, sipping at coffees while reading science fiction novels three inches thick while juggling small children to keep them from screaming at their unfortunate situations. People lay across the big, black chairs formed in rows like a movie theater. They munch on snacks and sniffle to themselves a little.
You have to understand that every one of these people is in the same position you are: everyone’s leaving, everyone’s going somewhere, whether it’s back to the homeland or someplace totally new and different. Everyone here is susceptible to some kind of anxiety- and the epic, sorrowful instrumental music certainly isn’t helping anything. Though I expected the various, upbeat forms of Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me the airline seemed to be going for a tear-shedding rather than smiling experience.
All in all, I think that this went fairly smoothly, incredibly so for me. I got through security (which, despite the name of the airport, is far from lax) without being asked to leave or giggling nervously. I managed not to hold up any lines for more than five seconds and make it to the general area of my terminal without assistance (A nice woman who worked for the airport had to lead me to gate 74 after that, but I really did have the general idea) and I even got through everything without talking to strangers (As both Tia’s Bertha, Nana, Minnie, Gina, as well as my mother, warned me about). At first, I was surrounded by parents bearing more or less excited children, but now they’ve been replaced with the sullen teens and average Joe types. Despite the fact that my phone has enough battery for maybe two calls before it looses it’s life completely, I’ve not been able to resist the urge to text and call nearly everyone who I know is still awake and just when I finally put my foot down and bade everyone a good night, more began to call me back. I suppose there’s always payphones…
PS. The ground beneath me is shaking, at first I thought it was my knees trembling from holding up my laptop, set upon my smallish backpack, but then I remembered that I am at an airport and planes are huge…
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Sedaris
Last night I spent four hours waiting in a line of well-read, dry-humored people, fending my ever-impatient mother off by either telling her that it would only be ten minutes more or that I would owe her a kidney should she ever need one. She agreed at the end of the night, as we tried to find our way home from deep in the heart of Los Angeles at 11:36, that, yes, I would definitely owe her a kidney.
As I waited, I spoke with many brilliant and equally interesting people. One older woman talked to me about her own troubles with learning French (Like Sedaris) as she had bought a house in France in the first hour that she had arrived in the country with her husband. I thought this was a little Diane Laine but said nothing but "Wow."
David Sedaris, in hopes of keeping his fans pleased, I imagine, read essays and then passages from his own diary. Many were about Breast Milk- the theme of his tour, as he told us- all were hysterical.
"Ladies," He read from his diary in a passage about a fake Weight Watchers meeting, "You cannot tell me that you've never turned your own breast milk into butter and then slathered that butter on fudge and pressed pecans into it, because I know you have. If you denied that, you wouldn't be just big and fat, you'd be big, fat liars." The crowd nearly wet their pants.
When I finally got up to see David Sedaris, right after I a rousing discussion with Sedaris' publicist's assistant (sweet lady) about changing my name to Bianc-O thanks to the odd way that the man who wrote out my name for Sedaris makes his A's, he turned out to be (despite some awful things that he writes about himself in his books, that we all secretly enjoy) an incredibly sweet, humble, hungry man. And funny. But that goes without saying.
I had just made a new friend, Vanessa, (Or Vaness-O, depending on who you ask) and she agreed to go up and talk to David with me, so neither of us would have to be alone. David Sedaris snatched up my books (In an completely non-rude way, of course) and began to doodle a turtle with Abraham Lincoln's face (or an Abraham Lincoln with a turtle body, depending on how one looks at it, I suppose) in my copy of When You Are Engulfed In Flames. At the same time, he aptly stuffed lettuce leaves in his mouth from his delicious looking (I hadn't eaten since lunch and lunch had been watermelon and popcorn) salad. He looked at me apologetically when I said hello, because of his current speech incapabilities.
"Don't worry," I said, "I'm glad to see you're eating, we worry, sometimes, about whether famous people get enough to eat." I was speaking for Vanessa and myself.
"You worry about me?" Asked David Sedaris through a mouthful of leaves (his mouth closed, of course, making his voice sound muffled but sentimental).
"Yes, of course," I said, "Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think to myself 'I hope David Sedaris got enough to eat today'."
He dismissed my made-up-on-the-spot fears by telling Vanessa and I just how much he ate when he was on tour, and how much he gained at these times. "When Hugh and I go back to Normandy," he confided, "I call it camp Pugslington."
After a few moments of discussion about the cat he had drawn in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim ("It's a cat that got in a fight." He declared quite seriously, to which I replied, jokingly, of course, "Sometimes I wish my cat could get in a fight and not make it out alive.") I finally pounced on my last chance to ask him my main question, the one I had mulled over for hours.
"Are you still afraid?" I asked. "Of the zombies? I'm terrified every time I pass a graveyard, are you still afraid of them?"
"I think about them all the time."
As I waited, I spoke with many brilliant and equally interesting people. One older woman talked to me about her own troubles with learning French (Like Sedaris) as she had bought a house in France in the first hour that she had arrived in the country with her husband. I thought this was a little Diane Laine but said nothing but "Wow."
David Sedaris, in hopes of keeping his fans pleased, I imagine, read essays and then passages from his own diary. Many were about Breast Milk- the theme of his tour, as he told us- all were hysterical.
"Ladies," He read from his diary in a passage about a fake Weight Watchers meeting, "You cannot tell me that you've never turned your own breast milk into butter and then slathered that butter on fudge and pressed pecans into it, because I know you have. If you denied that, you wouldn't be just big and fat, you'd be big, fat liars." The crowd nearly wet their pants.
When I finally got up to see David Sedaris, right after I a rousing discussion with Sedaris' publicist's assistant (sweet lady) about changing my name to Bianc-O thanks to the odd way that the man who wrote out my name for Sedaris makes his A's, he turned out to be (despite some awful things that he writes about himself in his books, that we all secretly enjoy) an incredibly sweet, humble, hungry man. And funny. But that goes without saying.
I had just made a new friend, Vanessa, (Or Vaness-O, depending on who you ask) and she agreed to go up and talk to David with me, so neither of us would have to be alone. David Sedaris snatched up my books (In an completely non-rude way, of course) and began to doodle a turtle with Abraham Lincoln's face (or an Abraham Lincoln with a turtle body, depending on how one looks at it, I suppose) in my copy of When You Are Engulfed In Flames. At the same time, he aptly stuffed lettuce leaves in his mouth from his delicious looking (I hadn't eaten since lunch and lunch had been watermelon and popcorn) salad. He looked at me apologetically when I said hello, because of his current speech incapabilities.
"Don't worry," I said, "I'm glad to see you're eating, we worry, sometimes, about whether famous people get enough to eat." I was speaking for Vanessa and myself.
"You worry about me?" Asked David Sedaris through a mouthful of leaves (his mouth closed, of course, making his voice sound muffled but sentimental).
"Yes, of course," I said, "Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think to myself 'I hope David Sedaris got enough to eat today'."
He dismissed my made-up-on-the-spot fears by telling Vanessa and I just how much he ate when he was on tour, and how much he gained at these times. "When Hugh and I go back to Normandy," he confided, "I call it camp Pugslington."
After a few moments of discussion about the cat he had drawn in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim ("It's a cat that got in a fight." He declared quite seriously, to which I replied, jokingly, of course, "Sometimes I wish my cat could get in a fight and not make it out alive.") I finally pounced on my last chance to ask him my main question, the one I had mulled over for hours.
"Are you still afraid?" I asked. "Of the zombies? I'm terrified every time I pass a graveyard, are you still afraid of them?"
"I think about them all the time."
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