yesterday's uefa champion's league final had all the drama, heartache, and joy we've come to love in the world of soccer - a fierce 1-1 tie, double overtime, penalty kicks, rain, sweat, blood, and tears. even if chelsea weren't my team, my heart would have gone out to john terry in the end - his obvious despair at the end of the game would only have left the staunchest man u fan unmoved.
i never was a huge fan of any sport until i experienced all that soccer could be while living in europe. there is such a pure love of the game there, this worldwide phenomenon which brings people together all over the globe (and, like everything that brings people together all over the globe, leaves this isolated little island of ours called america untouched). it takes me back to the first time i really experienced soccer, during the 2004 european cup in portugal.
of course i realize that my posts go off into tangents, which usually seem unrelated to those people not fully familiar with the inner workings of my brain. i realize this because upon looking at anything i've written, there seem to be a profusion of dashes and parentheses. and because i've been told this by quite a few people.
but there is a method to this madness, and it stems from a number of reasons. i'll seek to be succinct in laying out these reasons, will lay them before you in an organized fashion befitting a research paper or a thesis. anecdotes will be relied upon however, and the Reader may be required to participate in a few mental calisthenics.
spoke to two of my very dear friends from heidelberg today after a long time. we bemoaned together (well, the three of us, in separate conversations with each other) how everyone seems to be moving away from heidelberg, and i suggested it may be best to meet somewhere in the middle of the atlantic.
my brother tells me that when i become interested in something - be it a film, book, author, television show, whatever - i become something like a woman obsessed. he's 14, so he says it to tease (and i tell him he's wrong). but secretly, i've realized that he's very right.
since watching "mrs. parker and the vicious circle," dorothy parker has become my newest point of interest, and i will read anything i can get my hands on to know more about her, and about the algonquin round table (also known as "the vicious circle").
of course, this all stems back to my interest in anything pertaining to the 1920's - the "lost generation," the meetings in paris of minds like f. scott fitzgerald and earnest hemingway, the flapper generation, the jazz age, sylvia beach's iconic "shakespeare and company," the emptiness and hedonism of a generation between wars, books by evelyn waugh. all of that however lay in the realm of expat life, which was rampant in the 1920's. dorothy parker however has brought me home.
watching two movies about the '20's back to back ("bright young things" and "mrs. parker..."), along with my recent book purchases ("the beautiful and the damned," "a moveable feast," and the diaries of anais nin) have probably fueled the obsession. or as i like to think of it, stoked the fires of my curiosity.
the algonquin round table began as a joke. in 1919, one member invited another to lunch at the algonquin hotel, supposedly to celebrate the latter's return from europe. in fact, the former took the opportunity to thoroughly roast the latter, and the joke was enjoyed so much that lunch at the algonquin became a daily ritual for this collection of literary humorists, satirists, wits, and critics.
they met there for lunch (and outside of lunch) from 1919 til 1929. the "ten-year lunch" resulted in countless collaborations, friendships, and affairs (both real and imagined) between the circle. from this group arose the cultural icon that is "the new yorker."
like any friendship, it had its tensions, its jealousies and critics. after 1929, when the group disbanded because of projects that took them outside the scope of new york city, many found they no longer had anything to say to one another. they became dissatisfied, and dorothy parker herself derided the group as just a bunch of jokesters looking for a forum for their wit.
but something about the idea appeals to me nonetheless.
i finally finished watching "mrs. parker and the vicious circle," which i loved. the movie was a bit too long, but the scenes in which dorothy parker recites bits of her biting poetry to perfectly match a certain situation in her life, as well as the buzz of the 1920's literary circle and that unsatisfied, ever-present love between dorothy and mr. benchley, made it worthwhile. it made me go back and read some of my poetry books as i haven't read them before.
of course, my taste in poetry still veers towards the sarcastic and sharp-witted - the "up-yours" poetry that is e e cummings is my favorite, and has been for awhile, but after looking up and reading some of dorothy parker's verse, that may change. one of my favorites is a poem entitled "experience":
"Some men break your heart in two
Some men fawn and flatter
Some men never look at you;
And that cleans up the matter."
snow today! big fat flakes of it, which somehow made me insanely happy, even when they got into my eyelashes and down the back of my neck while i cleaned my car off at 6:30 tonight in heels and work clothes (my business pants are drenched and hanging on the chair in front of me as i write). it blanketed thickly and quickly.
on the way home, it turned into rain...
it reminded me of the time it snowed, and goobs and i (me in my glasses and both of us in our household sweats) walked down to the Schlossgarten and made snow angels, and had a massive snowball fight. i think we scared the nice couples who were there to watch the snow fall onto the brightly-lit jewel of a city below.
before that, in the fall, we had stood together at the railing above the aqueducts, contemplating the beginning of a semester. the trees above us were golden, but somehow, the trees next to us were not. we realized the the spotlighting from below made the leaves glow with in a gold light, and it reminded me of that old fairy tale, about the 8 dancing princesses and their dancing slippers - the one where the 8 sisters find a city beneath the floorboards, and they pass trees with silver leaves and trees with golden leaves, cross the river to meet the 8 princes they dance with every night til dawn.
snow makes me fanciful.
well, that sums up this post rather well, don't you agree?
i realize that once again, i'm slacking off in the blogging department. i actually write a lot, it's just that i have limited internet access at work, which means that all the stuff i type up gets saved in ms word and then sent to my webmail so that i can access it at home....
and i'm lazy as hell.
i realized this today while looking at old e-mails. i've kept every single e-mail from my heidelberg days - all the ones from 2003 through today. gotta love the larger inboxes. not that there were a lot of e-mails from when i was actually physically there; europeans are still creatures who like personal interaction better than interaction via the middleman. it used to be so easy to meet up for coffee or lunch spontaneously, to catch up with friends and get work done all in the course of the same day. my relationship with certain friends is written out in long communications, while with other friends, the true depth of our relationship can hardly be seen in our rare and infrequent missives.
i'm so bad at keeping in touch. there are so many people i've lost touch with over the last 2-odd years (i still can't bring myself to believe it will be almost 3 years in march), and i'm not quite sure how to reconnect. maybe once i see them again in person, it will remind us gently of the times we had. incidentally (purely out of curiosity), i see that a round-trip ticket from philly to stuttgart in oh, say, mid-february, costs only 400 bucks - a lot cheaper than i had imagined it to be...hmmmm...
in other news, i was very proud of my old alma mater today - manuscript specialists at the university of heidelberg have discovered the true identity of the mona lisa! i've never been prouder of old ruprecht karls. though apparently, they discovered this back in 2005, and no one knew until a german radio station made it public. modest to a fault, my heidelbergers!
so my personal statement for law school is about bananas. which reminds me, i should finish that first, then come back to this topic, at length, later.
