Austria trip day two
I'm still in Austria. I'm a little sad, but I'll get over it. I feel an artisty self-hatred I haven't experienced in a very long time. I'm also tired. I'll get over both of those soon enough.
Here is today's adventure.
Today is Sunday. In the afternoon here, it is still the morning back at home. I've been trying not to think about that too much, because it's very confusing.
I woke up at nine this morning feeling like death. Either I have a cold or I'm allergic to something in the air, because I've been congested since I got here.
I took a shower. The shower here is like a lot of European showers I've been in: high-pressure widely-spaced streams of water from a detachable showerhead. The detachable showerhead is nice. It gave me a sort of a scalp massage.
I had Nutella on toast for breakfast. We bought the Nutella yesterday, but it's already half gone. I think I ate most of it. This is not a surprising development.
After I had breakfast and showerered and was kind of a dick to the rest of my family, we left. You can't entirely blame me for being a dick. You'd have been too, if you'd been woken up at what felt like three in the morning and told you couldn't go back to sleep.
We walked to the Parliament, which is an imposing Greek-styled building made of white stone. The columns are Corinthian-Ionic combinations and there are little statues of men and satyrs and cherubs and other mythologic creatures all over the facade. There's a big fountain out front with mermen holding up shells as well. It had Hermes on it, I think. That probably symbolizes something. I don't know.
An Asian tourist took a picture of my family. He was probably taking a picture of my brother's fish hat, but for a minute I thought he was taking a picture of me. I was feeling a little monstrous that morning, I guess.
We had lunch in a restaurant called Wienerwald. I ate garlic bread with mozzarella. Isaac had cheese wrapped in meat wrapped in more meat covered in breading and fried, which was called Cordon Bleu. Lots of things are written in French as well as German here, and sometimes English as well, and it's very confusing.
We'd planned to go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but it was closed, so we went to the Leopold Museum instead. Most of the art museums in Vienna are situated around this courtyard called the MuseumsQuartier, which is next to a street called Museumsplatz. Those translate to 'Museums District' and 'Museums Place', respectively.
The MuseumsQuartier courtyard had a big convoluted catwalk made of red-painted plywood and held up with purple milk crates in the middle of it, which was left over from Vienna Fashion Week, which is ending today.
The Leopold Museum was pretty cool. They had a bunch of Klimt and some sixties concert posters and some tiny, surrealistic drawings based loosely on Freud's writing. I spent a long time looking at some of Klimt's stuff. I wondered a lot what he was thinking while he was painting and what he intended the paintings to mean.
I drew the view out of one of the windows and got pencil lead all over the pad of my middle finger. A light-haired young woman with a somehow European-looking face (I think it was her nose did it) followed me around for a good part of the time I spent in the museum. I assume she and I were just looking at things at the same speed, but I swear sometimes she'd finish looking at a room full of paintings before I did and then wait until I was done before moving on.
I bought two postcards and a button in the Leopold gift shop and then reorganized the buttons on my bag so that they were in chromatic order.
Then we walked to the gelato store near our apartment. I had chocolate and lemon, which is Schokolade and Zitrone in German. Those were two separate flavors, not one with chocolate and lemon mixed together. Both were delicious, but not when combined. Next time I buy ice cream, I'm paying more attention to how the flavors are going to interact with one another.
Now I'm back at home. It's about 5. We're going to cook ravioli for dinner. I doubt we'll go back out again today. We're all very tired.
I don't mind hanging around the apartment. It has a room with one side open to this hollowed-out column of courtyard, walled in with flats on all sides. I think they're flats, at least. People seem to live in them. It's very peaceful for the most part, although I did hear someone yelling over the phone late last night. There are vines on the exterior walls of the buildings, which are either painted concrete or stucco. The courtyard is paved in hexagonal bricks arranged in a honeycomb pattern. (Is there another way to arrange hexagonal bricks? I don't think so.)
Every once in a while, a pigeon flies past. I don't know where they're headed to in such a hurry.
Dad is going to buy me a camera cable tomorrow, because I forgot mine at home. Somehow I have to avoid taking more than fifty photos in the remainder of today. I can probably manage that, though.
German is an interesting language. Written down, it's charmingly silly, but somewhere between mouth and page it becomes aggressive and irritable-sounding.
About my emotional breakdown on the plane yesterday:
I've been writing a story since March of 2011. That's a year and eight months. I finished the first draft in October of 2011, and I've been editing it on and off ever since. It, uh. . .it isn't very good.
When I started writing it, I was so excited that I even had anything to write, that I was writing, that I wanted to write, that I had an idea and a plot and characters who actually did something for once. I kept that momentum for longer than I'd ever kept writing momentum. I wrote nearly 40,000 words. Basically, I wrote a short novel.
I've been editing it slower and slower and with more and more reluctance, and on the plane yesterday came to the realization that I ought to give up. Here's why:
It fulfilled its purpose, I think. It was 40,0000 words of coping mechanism. I just wish I'd realized it wasn't worth finishing sooner, so I could have wasted less of my time before moving on.
This story isn't dead. There are still parts of it, characters and concepts and images and snippets of ideas, that are worth keeping
and nurturing. I might rewrite it from scratch, in a shorter and less agrammatical format. But I'm not editing this draft any more. I am filing it away along with everything else I've written while venting other upsets. No one is going to get to read it. It's time to move on.
Here is today's adventure.
Today is Sunday. In the afternoon here, it is still the morning back at home. I've been trying not to think about that too much, because it's very confusing.
I woke up at nine this morning feeling like death. Either I have a cold or I'm allergic to something in the air, because I've been congested since I got here.
I took a shower. The shower here is like a lot of European showers I've been in: high-pressure widely-spaced streams of water from a detachable showerhead. The detachable showerhead is nice. It gave me a sort of a scalp massage.
I had Nutella on toast for breakfast. We bought the Nutella yesterday, but it's already half gone. I think I ate most of it. This is not a surprising development.
After I had breakfast and showerered and was kind of a dick to the rest of my family, we left. You can't entirely blame me for being a dick. You'd have been too, if you'd been woken up at what felt like three in the morning and told you couldn't go back to sleep.
We walked to the Parliament, which is an imposing Greek-styled building made of white stone. The columns are Corinthian-Ionic combinations and there are little statues of men and satyrs and cherubs and other mythologic creatures all over the facade. There's a big fountain out front with mermen holding up shells as well. It had Hermes on it, I think. That probably symbolizes something. I don't know.
An Asian tourist took a picture of my family. He was probably taking a picture of my brother's fish hat, but for a minute I thought he was taking a picture of me. I was feeling a little monstrous that morning, I guess.
We had lunch in a restaurant called Wienerwald. I ate garlic bread with mozzarella. Isaac had cheese wrapped in meat wrapped in more meat covered in breading and fried, which was called Cordon Bleu. Lots of things are written in French as well as German here, and sometimes English as well, and it's very confusing.
We'd planned to go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but it was closed, so we went to the Leopold Museum instead. Most of the art museums in Vienna are situated around this courtyard called the MuseumsQuartier, which is next to a street called Museumsplatz. Those translate to 'Museums District' and 'Museums Place', respectively.
The MuseumsQuartier courtyard had a big convoluted catwalk made of red-painted plywood and held up with purple milk crates in the middle of it, which was left over from Vienna Fashion Week, which is ending today.
The Leopold Museum was pretty cool. They had a bunch of Klimt and some sixties concert posters and some tiny, surrealistic drawings based loosely on Freud's writing. I spent a long time looking at some of Klimt's stuff. I wondered a lot what he was thinking while he was painting and what he intended the paintings to mean.
I drew the view out of one of the windows and got pencil lead all over the pad of my middle finger. A light-haired young woman with a somehow European-looking face (I think it was her nose did it) followed me around for a good part of the time I spent in the museum. I assume she and I were just looking at things at the same speed, but I swear sometimes she'd finish looking at a room full of paintings before I did and then wait until I was done before moving on.
I bought two postcards and a button in the Leopold gift shop and then reorganized the buttons on my bag so that they were in chromatic order.
Then we walked to the gelato store near our apartment. I had chocolate and lemon, which is Schokolade and Zitrone in German. Those were two separate flavors, not one with chocolate and lemon mixed together. Both were delicious, but not when combined. Next time I buy ice cream, I'm paying more attention to how the flavors are going to interact with one another.
Now I'm back at home. It's about 5. We're going to cook ravioli for dinner. I doubt we'll go back out again today. We're all very tired.
I don't mind hanging around the apartment. It has a room with one side open to this hollowed-out column of courtyard, walled in with flats on all sides. I think they're flats, at least. People seem to live in them. It's very peaceful for the most part, although I did hear someone yelling over the phone late last night. There are vines on the exterior walls of the buildings, which are either painted concrete or stucco. The courtyard is paved in hexagonal bricks arranged in a honeycomb pattern. (Is there another way to arrange hexagonal bricks? I don't think so.)
Every once in a while, a pigeon flies past. I don't know where they're headed to in such a hurry.
Dad is going to buy me a camera cable tomorrow, because I forgot mine at home. Somehow I have to avoid taking more than fifty photos in the remainder of today. I can probably manage that, though.
German is an interesting language. Written down, it's charmingly silly, but somewhere between mouth and page it becomes aggressive and irritable-sounding.
About my emotional breakdown on the plane yesterday:
I've been writing a story since March of 2011. That's a year and eight months. I finished the first draft in October of 2011, and I've been editing it on and off ever since. It, uh. . .it isn't very good.
When I started writing it, I was so excited that I even had anything to write, that I was writing, that I wanted to write, that I had an idea and a plot and characters who actually did something for once. I kept that momentum for longer than I'd ever kept writing momentum. I wrote nearly 40,000 words. Basically, I wrote a short novel.
I've been editing it slower and slower and with more and more reluctance, and on the plane yesterday came to the realization that I ought to give up. Here's why:
- The prose is very, very poor. I have learned so much about writing since I started the story that the way I write is drastically different.
- I did very little research. I didn't look at how the psychiatric/medical system interacts with the prison system. I left the main character's job a vague 'oh, he does something in psychology' and gave him no reason to be working at a prison. I didn't set the story in a specific place or time. I didn't research criminal law, though I did do a lot of reading about psychopathy and serial murder.
- I was working out an issue. I wrote the story because I was working out an issue. That wasn't clear to me at the time, but now I'm done with that particular issue, it's embarrassingly obvious. The character dynamic conforms to a relationship dynamic I was in at the time, and the plot follows a path I was really worried that relationship was going to go down. After that relationship ended, the pressure I felt to finish the story was mostly so I'd have something to show people, instead of mostly being OH GOD THIS IS REALLY GOOD IMPORTANT WRITING -- because it didn't feel good or important any more. I no longer need to resolve that issue, so the story is no longer relevant.
It fulfilled its purpose, I think. It was 40,0000 words of coping mechanism. I just wish I'd realized it wasn't worth finishing sooner, so I could have wasted less of my time before moving on.
This story isn't dead. There are still parts of it, characters and concepts and images and snippets of ideas, that are worth keeping
and nurturing. I might rewrite it from scratch, in a shorter and less agrammatical format. But I'm not editing this draft any more. I am filing it away along with everything else I've written while venting other upsets. No one is going to get to read it. It's time to move on.