Thursday, March 05, 2009

Collapsible German Building

I am currently house sitting for a friend who is gone for a month. I am in South Austin, near everything hip & groovy, in a 60 year old house in what has become a very expensive neighborhood. I haven't lived by myself in 4 years, and before that I lived by myself for the majority of my adult life. I was afraid I might be lonely but that is not the case.

I am in heaven. I had been living with a friend this past year in an 800 sq. ft. house, and before that lived with my boyfriend or a roommate in a tiny dorm room at McMurdo. Now I love these people I lived with dearly, but the bliss of living alone I had forgotten. I have to force myself to leave this cozy quiet nest. I never turn on the a/c whereas my previous roommate ran it if it were over 60F outside. I  never hear TV or radio or play music. I have just been hypnotized into peace with the gentle sounds of cars driving by, the ceiling fan humming overhead, and the train that rumbles by at midnight. I hear the tinkling of windchimes somewhere and my little dog is nestled next to me on the bed. I feel myself wanting to fiercely hold onto this privacy and control over my environment. I have yearnings sometimes to buy a house (because it is a good time right now) to use as investment & for rental income, but after living alone for 5 days (with the added bonus of wifi in my bedroom again!) I wonder if I just want to buy a house to live in again. After 4 years of the seasonal, nomadic lifestyle and feeling like I'm really getting the hang of it (ie: travel more, stay in Austin less, roll with houselessness); at the same time, the more nomadic I get, the more delicious this ephemeral "rootedness" experience I'm having now is (and had for many years and completely took for granted). When I first got a job in Antarctica the thing I was most afraid of was having a roommate. I don't have good experiences with roommates in general, and I have to assume that I am the difficult one to live with. I am usually too scared to communicate with them, and often feel like I am in a prisoner/jailer type situation. I am highly particular about the temperature of the house being what I want it to be when I'm just sitting around (which is mainly what I'm doing in a house). I don't ever want to hear television when I am not watching it. If it is my house I own I expect the person to stay in their room & be quiet, which is how I am when I live in someone else's house. But last summer I shared an enormous old house with a man who was so quiet that I often did not know whether he was there or not. He didn't have a car so I truly didn't know without knocking  on his door, and later found out he was hardly ever there, but when he was was as sylphlike as a cat, silently padding along the acres of hardwoods, like watching a character in a movie with the sound turned off. The perfect roommate. Some people are loud & come from noisy families. I grew up in  a house where you could hear a pin drop 24/7 and I think that early programming has stayed with me. The one time that I felt I was truly going insane was when I was living in a condo where I could hear noise above me & on one side. For me it was a nightmare - and this condo complex was right on a major highway, which was why most people moved out eventually. Ironically, I find highway, train, traffic noises very comforting.

This is a boring post. Now no one will ever want to be my roommate - haha! Oh, and the past few weeks has shown me that my reverse "SAD" is getting worse. It was in the 90's last week. It is in the high 80's this week & I can hear the annoying condensers & lawn equipment already. The relentless, stabby feeling sun is always out, and this year, once again, I tried to "toughen" myself up & have been going on two hour walks every day around the lake. There is dappled shade but a good 1/2 hour stretch of sun beating on my head. That is what kills me: the exposure. I have to come lay in bed for several hours with a "sun headache" until I can get up again. This hot and sunny weather compromises my life to the point where I don't really have a life in this climate. I am just waiting for cold or clouds, or travelling to find it & it's rarely there. We had a glorious winter month where it was very dark & cloudy and not above freezing for a long time. I was so happy. I loved that movie "Frozen River" because of the snow and ice everywhere. I changed my mind about doing the trans-siberian this summer because I decided I want to do it in the winter, when there are no tourists and plenty of beautiful snow. I chose the container ship because it leaves from London (where I've heard it is cloudy, but not on the four occasions I've been there) and arrives in Buenos Aires in the Dead Of Winter. I was never into Goth or vampire stuff, but I must have vampire or mole blood. 

Film Review: "Two Lovers" has been touted as "art," with stellar performances by Joaquin Phoenix and others. It was pure shite! Here's this super loser guy whose around 30, lives with his parents, tried to kill himself by jumping into like 5 feet of water in the first scene, and has not one, but two gorgeous women wanting to sleep with/marry him. And I mean really beautiful! One of them is Gwyneth Paltrow, who is a goddess in my book, and I don't even like blondes. And usually I find Joaquin very sexy, but in this film he was so pathetic & had such low personality marks that I could just never buy why he was able to get both of these gorgeous babes to sleep with him. His room looked like 12 year old boy squalor central, and he was a delivery boy for his dad's dry cleaning business. He had been institutionalized, and from this film you'd think he was the only available bachelor in the greater NYC area. I mean, I lived there too, and dating was rough, but there were plenty of guys to choose from. The odds were good but the goods were odd. Now these women were co-dependent messes, but usually if you are model gorgeous, that is not a factor. The funnest part of viewing this film was taking the piss out of it with my friend Jaime, who made me laugh so hard near the end that I never regained composure. I guess the thing that was most surprising is that I never cared about any of these people. The director didn't make any of them lovable - only the sweet blue-eyed father of Phoenix's character conjured empathy from me, but not a whole lot because there was no tough love, no consequences for his son's reckless, narcissistic behavior. It was actually refreshing to see the rich lawyer sugar daddy, because, even though I think the filmmakers wanted us to see him as a sleazebag, he was such a strong, self assured character that he was actually the most likeable; not all wishy-washy, self-absorbed and goal-less like the love triumvirate. Don't waste your money seeing this one, unless you have some irreverent friend to go with you and laugh at how pathetic everyone is!

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