This One Time in London Town

  you can't see it, but i still can

it was the sweetest thing/ the freshest couple in town, common said so / stop me before i say too much / so maybe i'll just say how great it looked that moment/ right there on the top of the bus /always, the top, his hand in my hand / the beautiful time / before you reach your stop / and trip your way back down to the street/ the real view never quite the same again / after seeing it from the top /

don't look now, you'll ruin it

London, From the Top of a Bus

you must be somewhere in London / you must be loving your life in the rain

Oh, London.

I just found this silly little thing I wrote when I was in London and it's so awful and wonderful at the same time that it made me laugh. I really do have bad luck on escalators, it would seem.

This is what I wrote. I called it "Escalator." How clever. Sheesh.

I stood on the right, staring straight ahead like everyone else. I wondered if anyone knew, just from looking at me, that although I stood still, staring straight ahead as the escalator took us to the surface, my heart was pounding, my palms were sweaty. The crowded subway, with its escalators lined up with unfamiliar British faces, terrified me.

But I couldn’t let that overtake me, so I just stared ahead at the tall man in front of me with the broad shoulders and the yellow backpack, with the great ass in bad jeans, and I started to wonder where he was going. Did he have a girlfriend? If so, would she be like me—I mean personality wise? What would she look like? And the more I wondered the harder I stared at that great butt in the bad jeans and now the crazy me wanted to reach up and squeeze it, or at the very least tap his shoulder and ask some silly question about directions, because hey, I’m American, what do I know? And then I’d get to see if his face straight on was as mesmerizing as his profile. And maybe he’d like what he saw when he turned around and it would be love at first sight!

But I thought so long that when the escalator reached the top I almost tripped, and as I looked down at my feet, I lost the yellow backpacked great ass in bad jeans mesmerizing haunt of a man who might have been my future husband.

Oh, dear. I guess I haven't changed too much since then. I'm still tripping all over myself on escalators, thinking silly thoughts about boys. Except now I have a blog.

The Music Plays and You Display Your Heart

I love how music can bring you right back to not only a specific time, but a specific moment, or a specific feeling. Even when the memory or the feeling is painful, it becomes therapeutic, listening to a song, revisiting it.

It’s like how I can’t hear Norah Jones’s first album, “Come Away With Me,” without immediately being in the back seat of my brother’s car the day after my mom died. We were driving to Bloomington to get clothes from my dorm. Funeral clothes. I think I was in the back because our cousin Micaela had rode with us. I don’t know. Certain details, you lose. But what I know is this: I pressed my forehead against the tiny window of Jay’s Cavalier, and lyrics like, “My heart is drenched in wine/You’ll be on my mind forever,” burned into my brain. I felt too empty to cry. I loved it. I hated it. I knew my mom would love it, and that she would never, never hear it. The album was about her. She was in every line.

So even though hearing “Don’t Know Why” or “The Long Day is Over” doesn’t send a searing pain through me like it did on that first listen, I still think about it. And now, it’s soothing. Maybe, somewhere, somehow, my mom can hear it. Mostly, I think about that heartbroken girl in the backseat, and I wish I could tell her everything was going to be okay.

Then there’s Ben Harper’s “Diamonds on the Inside” album. I promise you, every time I listen to that title track, suddenly it’s the summer of 2003, and I’m back at home after my first year at IU, sweeping the kitchen floor while Dad worked in the yard outside. 19, back at home, motherless and heartsick—I was quite a pill for my poor father to live with. But that evening, “Diamonds on the Inside” came on, and I swept the floor, singing under my breath, nodding my head. It was exactly what it needed to be.

And don’t even get me started on the following song, “Touch From Your Lust”—that just brings up all sorts of 19-year-old angst. I didn’t know what the hell Ben Harper meant when he sang “I’ll be your country gentleman/ if you will be my Mason-Dixon queen” but I knew it spoke to whatever I was feeling, right at that moment.

What the hell? Why do I remember sweeping the kitchen floor and listening to Ben Harper?

That’s music for you. I could go on. And on. And on. (I’ll try to refrain, though.)

Tonight, maybe because I sorta sound like Tom Waits with my ridiculous raspy bronchitis voice (hot, right? gross), I suddenly had this urge to listen to his album “Closing Time,” an album I haven’t listened to in years.

The cd was somewhere in my apartment, I knew it. But I also knew that if I dug around to look for it, I was going to have a coughing fit, and I’m getting a little tired of coughing fits. Luckily for me, there’s this magical device called the Internet.

Poetry Slam Tuesdays: My Love Letter to London

My world kind of flipped upside down on me in the last 24 hours.

Went out with my girlfriends from work last night. Many, many hours later, when my cabbie finally turned on to my street, just as I leaned up to tell him where my building was, he slammed on the brakes. And I slammed into the partition. Busted my lip open. (Luckily my teeth stayed intact this time.)

Somehow, I manage to wake up this morning to call in to work for my "on call" shift. (Since we can't request time off work, the on call shifts are to cover the bar's ass in case someone gets sick or doesn't show.) I'm half awake. I dial. (Err, push the talk button.)

The phone rings. And rings. And rings.

I think you know where this is going. No one answered the phone, and I crawl back under the covers and go to sleep. I figure I'll just explain what happened when I get to work later this afternoon.

I'll leave the rest out for now, but clearly I'm not at work tonight. Turns out, I do have a breaking point, and today I reached it. But I think quitting my job warrants an entire blog post, so I'll save that for another day.

So seeing as how it's Tuesday evening and I'm still in my pjs, I figure I might as well go for it and make this Tuesday's featured poet...me. (Yeah, I know. It's scary.)

I wrote this poem right before I moved to Chicago. I was sitting in my apartment in Bloomington thinking about how terrified I was to quit my job and move to this city. Thinking about my mom and wondering what she would think. Thinking about how terrified I was before I left for London, but how studying abroad there changed my life in about 5,000 fantastic ways.

The Time Traveler's Wife!

Finally! The movie adaptation of The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is coming out on August 14. I first read the book when I was studying in London in 2005, and me and my friends there passed this around and gushed about our love for it. Why so much love? It's a great love story and science fiction all in one, it's clever, it's largely set in Chicago...it is just all around goodness.

And to make it all even better, the casting could not be more dead on. Rachel McAdams plays Clare, and Eric Bana is Henry--as if Henry wasn't already my dream man in the book, now he's in the form of Eric Bana?! Yum. And Ron Livingston is playing Gomez? Love. It.

I could do without the uber-cheesy running into each other's arms in the meadow bit, but aside from that, the preview leads me to believe that they've managed to adapt this with a limited gag factor. Let's hope that's the case.




I can't wait! In the meantime, if you haven't read the book, come over and borrow my copy. I actually reread it earlier this year, so all I have to do is wait.

Oh, Henry and Clare!

More Adventures on the Blue Line

No one ever fully prepared me for the weird things that would happen to me once I became a dedicated public transit user. I really don’t remember anything strange ever happening on the tube in London. Just a lot of Brits reading books. The only minor nuisance was getting stuck on a bus with noisy school groups—but when it’s mini-Brits in uniforms squealing in a British accent, “But I wanted MacDonalds!”—somehow, it’s much less irritating than being stuck on a bus with a group of loud American children.

But here in Chicago, every day it’s something (though sadly, not all as memorable as Monday morning’s commute).

Tuesday afternoon a man clucked at me—yes, CLUCKED—as I walked past him on the stairs. A few minutes later, as I was trying to hide behind my Bitch magazine and ignore the inevitable claustrophobia that sets in during rush hour, I glanced over the top of the magazine to find two nuns staring at me in horror. I grinned at them and continued reading. Hee hee hee.

But this morning I had a special hipster delight on my morning commute. If only I had had the audacity to pull out my camera and capture these two young men’s ensembles. If only. But I did have the pleasure of overhearing this:

Faded Jean Jacket-wearing Hipster: "I mostly just love that album cause it's like, ‘we're recording this on a 4-track in our basement’ and the quality is just, so raw and real."

Super Geek Hipster, nodding: “I know exactly what you mean. Exactly.”

Alison, nudging the middle-aged woman next to her: “Look at this fucking hipster.”

Middle-aged woman: “I know exactly what you mean. Exactly.”

So maybe that last part of the conversation didn’t happen. But it should have. Instead, I almost missed my stop, had to duck under Super Geek Hipster’s arm to get out, and then almost fell over due to the powerful wave of BO.

So you’re the one stinking up my favorite record store! I knew it!

Effing hipsters.

London, almost

Chicago felt like London this morning
just before the rain:
the damp, the slight fog
the gray blending into pavement
and the chill felt deep, but bearable
like London winter
beautiful in its ugliness
poetry for the heartbroken
for the wanderer
alone but surrounded

and though I love sunshine,
Chicago’s London fog
was so beautiful
every step took meaning
like walks in Chelsea to the tube
I feel my feet hit the pavement
moving, moving

so I keep going
even if the chill hits my bones
even when my insides burst with gray
even through an almost-London damp morning

the gray is only gloomy
if you make it that way.