tl;dr, part ii: metropoli (restless nights)

[thene]

(Posting from back at home; bus wifi was 2 broke 2 post. Some strange malady has overcome my dogsitter; not only did she fail to drain my liquor stash, she also cleaned my kitchen. I have no idea what is wrong with her.)


-i am tl;dring my tl;dr on the bus back from NYC. It's eight and a half years since we last stayed here, rather than driving straight through to get somewhere else, and I'd forgotten how intensely loveable it is, and like all cities, all the more so if you aren't 19 and broke. Right now I love it so much that it's given me this whimsy of a life I never lived there, the same way I used to wander in W1 and stretch out my arms and touch Soho's stones on either side of me and wonder if I'd ever get to live there; and now there's the bare windswept trees in the shadowed green corners of Manhattan, and impossibly jumbled terraces, and grand dirty balconies north of Central Park; given the social pyramid I assume I'd be one of the people living in carefully stowed bedding under a scaffold, emerging in the streets at 1am to pick bottles out of commercial trash.

I know everyone has some kind of optimum comfort peopledensity or whatever, but I legit don't understand the ones who don't hang beside me on the extreme edge of that spectrum, head tilted upward at the skyline. It just seems natural and obvious to feel intense comfort and pleasure in dense, high-demand, obscene-rent locations where everyone else clearly wants to be there with you (because they love other people); and then you start navigating from the sun's glass reflection and seeing it all as an old, slow-growing brain of rock and steel, neon-flaring synapses and human neurones stretching from one cellular block to others far away, umbilical tunnels and dark veins, with generational adaptations forming progressively nonsensical shapes, its limbs stretching as it emerges from the sea.

truth, I love architecture and landscaping because I can't describe it, it's just there, doing things, platonically perfect spatial things, aesthetically and associationally inflaming. It occurred to me today as we were scurrying to catch our bus back to Boston that the only cause of the whimsy is that I've no bad memories of New York City, and it was the first place in my life I could have ever said that of. It is my escapist pastoral idyll, no lie.

Boston is going to feel very small when I get home, even knowing what a staggering improvement it was on what I had before, even knowing it has the advantage of being a place where I can maybe possibly survive. I am way happy there but maybe I'll one day get drawn into a metropole, maybe I'm just gradually clawing my way up to somewhere I ought to be - I don't know. I know how these cities make me feel, but I don't know what I'm able or willing to do for that feeling. But I'm an optimist, and I am also starting to get it - in the sway of the god of the red earth and the oasis, famine and feast, I know my easy life will get much harder before it gets easier again, and I know that the shittiest parts of it are long over and as time passes I am only ever going to get stronger and more able and more a functional part of this world. And I don't rule anything out, but lol, I have not even found my feet yet from the last major life upheaval though I would in no way assume that it will be the last I'm going to have. Fits and starts, joys and sorrows. I feel young today and (being as I am an ongoing trainwreck) I've barely started being whatever the hell I am ever going to be, and I don't know where this paragraph is going except for north back to Boston and my flailing search for my next job.

-also we went to MoMA on Saturday and it was about 95% complete shit. This is depressing; I've spent the last eighteen months not hating contemporary art in Boston, Pittsburgh and DC. There are amazing things on the fifth floor of MoMA, eg. Girl Before A Mirror, but tellingly they are all about a hundred years old and by people who were actually talented and had meaningful statements to make.

Comments

[lynx]

I've lived in Santiago (the capital) almost my whole life, and believe me, I get what you say about the feeling of the other people in a bigger city.

I just KNOW you'll do amazing in your search for your new job. *hugs*

[thene]

aaaah I want to visit you in Santiago now. (I seriously hope I can go to South America sometime in the next couple of years). I love cities hopelessly. It is this physical craving thing :(

agh, at this point I'm just hoping the agency find me something that lets me learn to do more so I'll have more skills for the future? Thanks for the vote of confidence, though.

[lynx]

My relationship with Santiago is weird. I don't know if I would recommend someone to travel +20000 kms to visit it. But damn if I don't love this city, and know its good points as well as the awful ones. Santiago is like a part of my family to me. If you come, please tell me and I'll be ecstatic to show you around ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING and talk your ear off and basically be the most cheerful santiaguina you'll ever meet XDDD

*Sends positive vibes in your direction* The agency is aware of what you're worth, I'm sure of it. It's just a matter of time. Hang in there.

[thene]

honestly, I've just always wanted to visit South America, particularly the Andes, for reasons I can't define. My favourite coworker rn is Peruvian and she agrees that I should go there. :P (I love her so much - she's very kind and interesting and cultured. She's the one who told me about living in Louisiana in the 1960s and having to stand on the bus because she wasn't white or black). So I figure I am GOING to end up there soon, just not sure exactly how it's going to happen.

I understand what you mean about family...London is like a parent that threw me out, lol. It's a very expensive city just to get around and do basic things in, even though I wasn't paying rent, and I couldn't find a job there, so I moved in with M instead; Atlanta sucked but at least we could survive. London is like a sleepy dragon with smoke streaming out of her nostrils. I don't feel so much from Boston - it's like it's not big and dense enough to have achieved that critical mass that turns stones into something that lives. The people here are wonderful, though.

And, thank you - I feel a little less pressed for time as my non-agency job wants me to stay on part-time after next week, but, sigh, still need to find something to move on to. Professionally, it's been an incredible three months, I just don't know how to keep up the momentum.

[lynx]

Yay! It's settled then :D You should come in our winter. Santiago its at her most beautiful then, with the snowy mountains. Of course you have lots of snow there (and the snow here doesn't reach the city), but in a sunny day after a rain, the mountains look like something out of a postal card. And in those days, sunsets are the most beautiful thing.

Your Peruvian coworker sounds like an amazing person :D Now I feel really curious about what else she could have lived through. How old is her?

I'm sad about your relationship with London... though not surprised. It's a place I want to visit, but I've been told it's not the most welcoming of cities. As for Atlanta, I know nothing about it. Boston, I've researched a bit since the MIT is there and I RP an AU young!Otacon. Seems like a nice place to live, albeit... indeed, not a big city. Must be peaceful.

[1000kindsofrain.wordpress.com]

I like the word metropole. My optimum comfort peopledensity is zero; this is unfortunate as I count myself in that quota. Haven't GM'd in years; but have an inspirational plot for Murder Mystery which I must polish and convince people to play. I spent two hours last night disputing with creationists about whether evolution exists. Apparently the Roman Catholick church is not orthodox Christian; we knew that, I think. They wanted to do it all again next week; I said half term.

[thene]

Thank you. I first made it up in 2010 - here, I was obv using it to imply magnetic forces, but it was originally describing the inhabitants rather than the city's own magnetism, which is to say it was half of an awful, obscene shipping metaphor that I do not regret in the least.

I GMed a fair bit in my mid-teens but barely at all since, but in this case it was one of those things where Somebody Had To - Fiasco doesn't exactly need a GM so much as a consensus on how to develop the game, and as there were so many players and almost all of them were n00bs, I kinda had to shepherd the plot around the group, getting progressively worse with every scene :) Murder Mystery is not a thing I have played!

Creationism was the only thing I ever got a first in at university, trufax - on a long essay I wrote about its motivations and fairly transparent purposes as a movement (ie. winning American court cases, not advancing scientific knowledge).

[1000kindsofrain.wordpress.com]

My original comment made my life sound interesting. That was a significant error.

Not obv to me. My first thought was of a rotational pole. And my second of a singularity in an equation (a point where an equation becomes infinite is known as a pole). So it conveyed the sense of metropolitanism peaking; a point to which people are drawn and orbit. Your magnetic analogy sounds like broken understanding of magnetism. (Do you want a physics lesson?) Incidentally the word "metro" comes from the greek for "mother" (metropolis = mother city) so maybe a metropole could be abstracted into the idea around which ones life revolves; "labyrinths are my metropole".

If my degree had been in role-playing, I would have got a first. But I haven't role-played since Uni. By "Murder Mystery" I meant a "Murdery Mystery Evening" - the role-playing equivalent of painting-by-numbers, where you persuade a bunch of middle-aged people who have never fondled a d20 to engage in rundimentary role-playing. (I'd moved into diceless role-playing so this is fine by me.) If I do it for charity, I will persuade people to indulge my passion.

The creationists were interesting. I don't know the court cases you're alluding to, but their church building is Victorian so I guess their denomination predates that. (*cough* parallel evolution *cough*) That said, horizontal gene transfer from American species is very evident. But they all seemed earnest. One was open-minded and rational, and that's why I'm going back. In fairness, we are all reliant on experts, and have to somehow guess which ones to believe (there's a measles outbreak in Wales because people made the wrong choice on MMR expert). I am just trying to show them that the bible is contradictory, that they are making a conscious decision to resolve those contradictions in certain ways and/or interpret the evidence to support external dogmas (Trinitarism), and that they could therefore choose to interpret it differently. Agreeing with me would mean leaving their community of friends so I don't expect to win; but I hope to lay foundations that will enable them to jump ship when the opportunity presents itself.

Incidentally, this post (http://www.skepticink.com/lateraltruth/2013/03/08/chuck-your-privilege/) might interest you. And the whole blog is very good.

[1000kindsofrain.wordpress.com]

*facepalm* I was reading a story and encountered a Hotel Metropole. So I googled it. There's a whole wikipedia page devoted to the concept of a metropole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropole) and many hotels with that name. (Just because it's not in my dictionary, doesn't mean it's not a word.)

I will leave it to lexicographers to determine whether you coined a new word or a new use of an existing word.