When I don't have internet access, I write.
I hope that everyone had a very merry Christmas! Personally, I had a great time just catching up with family. We had the presents and dinner together on Christmas Day, then caught up at the park for lunch on Boxing Day. I left feeling bloated. It's not exactly an intelligent idea to eat lunch until you're full then have two bowls of dessert... I had a handful of chips for tea and barely ate today.
So as I didn't have internet access for a while, I spent quite a while writing. This is a poem that I wrote on Christmas night from sheer boredom.
Poison drips from the bottle
Scentless colourless clandestine death
Nothing odd 'til the skin starts to mottle
No sign 'til your very last breath
So as you lay there gasping for air
I look you coldly in the eye
You try to cry out in despair
But you must wait to die
And now your body lays in the cold
Moving to rigor and decay
There's not a soul that needs to be told
As I leave you and walk away
I quite like that one, more because of the subject matter. I did get bored, if you didn't already figure that out. But yeah.
Oh, in my Santa stocking (pillowcase...) there was an A4 spiral-bound notebook/journal type of thing with a skull on it. Man, it's awesome. My current notepad is A5 and 60 pages (from Smiggle, with a cat on the front) and I'm 26 pages through, even though I've only been consistently writing for about a week. Six and a half pages was of a story that's below. Also, there was a large bag sort of like the Country Road or Ghanda ones that everyone at school seems to have, but it's black with pink and purple flowers on it. It is very cool and it's thankfully big enough for the skull notebook. But enough about that.
I wrote another story yesterday, entitled Terminal. It looked really long in my notebook, but only ended up being a little under 2000 words! It was just my interpretation of what it would be like being in an airport. (Cough, going on the exchange. I began with that quite subtle but it got very unsubtle throughout.) So here's Terminal.
---
Terminal
It’s busy. Not quite Christmas-Eve-mall busy, but I-need-to-get-here-and-I-need-to-get-here-now busy. But that’s okay. In fact, I love it. There is a mixture of a million emotions in the air and on faces. There’s a little girl in a sparkly pink dress and kiddy-pink shoes, holding her mother’s hand with a look of curious excitement on her face. A man sits about ten metres away from them, with a navy three-piece suit and a briefcase. He’s ignoring every person, choosing instead to look at his watch and run his hand through his thinning brown hair every two minutes. I don’t think he’s noticed the huge clock on a nearby wall. If he has, he’s ignoring it to avoid eye contact.
I’m sitting in silence, drinking in what I see. There’s a beautiful madness to it. I’m curled on a chair, suitcase at my feet. My jumper-clad arms encircle my legs, which are covered by a pair of dark-blue skinny jeans. I’ve got the fidgets. Arms crossed. Legs dangling. Leg on the seat, hugging it. Standing. Sitting.
There’s a general chorus of excited chatter amongst the people I’m near. They talk about family, Christmas, boys. There are a hundred languages in this room yet only two are audible, discounting pig Latin as an official language. The excited chatter bounces around, flying from person to person. They stand, they sit, and someone’s reclining on a stack of suitcases they’ve commandeered, with a carry-on as a pillow. It can’t be comfortable. I have the hardcover of Harry Potter number five in there.
The fidgets have reached my hands. My thumbs have started a war entirely of their own accord. I start untying a shoelace, criss-crossing the laces in a weird combination of boredom and anticipative jittering. Untie. Retie. Undo, fiddle, braid. It’s hard to braid when there are only two strands of cord.
Someone’s sitting next to me. I don’t really register who it is. Despite the searing summer heat outside, she’s wearing skinny jeans just as I am, but there’s no jumper. There is, however, a scarf of red and black. She’s tied yellow ribbons around each end. Way to be subtle about our destination.
She’s started to talk to me, other tongues leaching into the English. The excitement she’s radiating is as obvious as the air conditioner in this terminal, which the goose bumps on my arms will testify the existence of. I feel more excited than I can hear in her voice, but it has barely betrayed me bar a persistently jiggling knee. I can still feel something, though. I may as well have swallowed an entire bottle of detergent, there are so many bubbles that I can feel in my stomach. I couldn’t eat this morning, despite how long it’s going to be before I next get an opportunity to eat at home. I know the date. I want it to be here both tomorrow and forever away. That adds to the bubbles.
A cool, relaxed voice alerts us that we should board, followed swiftly by a more authority-commanding voice that blends those two languages that I hear so often together in a command that’s clearly addressed to us. “Time to go! Komm mit, bitte!”
Oh, no. Here comes that detergent again. I scrabble around the pile of bags we’ve thrown together as a dozen others do. One smart soul didn’t donate theirs to the couch, and stands juggling them into a manageable arrangement. Oh, there’s my suitcase. It’s in my hand now. Got my shoulder bag. Carry-on is over near one of the boys. He’s just seen the tag, and chucked it my way. I smile. “Danke.” “Bitte.” Our voices are barely heard by each other over the hubbub.
I stretch the handle of my suitcase out and hold it upright with my elbow. Ellenbogen. I think that’s plural. Oh wait, it isn’t. I’ll check once we’re on the plane. I swing my shoulder back around, so that its strap is on my left shoulder just above my suitcase-supporting elbow. It rests on my right him, near the hand that will soon hold my carry-on. I’ve got my suitcase balanced too, so I pick up the carry-on.
I don’t think that quite everyone else thought to pack sensibly. Someone is scrambling with three suitcases. I’d lend a hand if I had a spare. Someone else has two bags without straps or wheels as well as their carry-on. They’ve balanced it somehow. Surprisingly few people chose to go with the more manageable combination of bags that I went with. I feel intelligent.
Those of us that were ready in about thirty seconds have thrown down our bags - or at least the ones that weren’t quite hands-free - and assisted with the juggling. I see a few people with tickets grasped between their teeth. We’ve finally got it all juggled, and those of us who were the wires to the trapeze artists are preparing ourselves. Finally, after that six-minute ordeal, we’re ready.
And we aren’t walking slowly at all. We’re making up for the excess four minutes and nearly running to the boarding area. The excited chatter has all of a sudden gotten psychotic, deranged, lunatic. The general air of excitement is nearly suffocating me, and that detergent is not helping in the slightest.
I can see carry-on bags that are obviously stuffed with warm clothes. We’ll be getting warmer before we get to the wintry climates, that’s for sure. I’m glad I stuffed my book into my suitcase before we started walking. My carry-on would have been too heavy otherwise. Anyway, I have my notebook and some pens. That’s all I ever need. I make my own fun.
We’ve reached where we start to board the plane. Most of us have our tickets in a pocket or (for a few less organised folk) between our front teeth. I can see someone who dumped their suitcase and is digging through their bag, finding their ticket after about thirty seconds of searching that probably felt like an hour. Someone else grabbed their suitcase with a foot, stopping it from falling over. Words are exchanged, with friendly faces.
I show my ticket and step through the metal detector as my bags are X-rayed. They have all the bags ready for the flight, at an earlier request. That makes it easier. I get through without a hitch and so do my bags, although a couple of people were held up momentarily due to fillings in their teeth. No surprise. I guess security didn’t want to take any chances, so we’re delayed. But just a tiny bit. We’re soon continuing on our way.
As our suitcases have all been taken away, we are just accompanied by our carry-on luggage. We walk past white walls and walls of glass displaying the grey tar of the runway underneath a summery blue sky that we will not see for over a month. I don’t want to think about reacclimatising to a summer that has not been confronted for ten months. If it is possible for one to get more excited about this, every single one of us has.
And now we’re walking towards the plane, excitement reaching an all new high. We’re all holding our tickets and passports, which were easily accessed compared to the chaos of before. Every step taken leaves a footprint of anticipation; every skip in a stride is happiness with nowhere else to go. There are people walking past us, echoing the terminal of before. A woman walks past, holding the hand of a man who holds a small child. A grim-faced businesswoman in what could be her thirties or forties breezes past with a handbag. I think she is meeting someone, as her pace is determined.
We step near the entrance to the plane, where there appears to be a delay in the boarding. No matter. One of my friends - the one with the black and red scarf with yellow ribbons - is bouncing where she stands. One of the boys is asking the teacher something, most likely what a word is auf Deutsch. Two girls are confirming translations of phrases with a phrasebook that the teacher probably hasn’t seen. The line starts to move; someone behind me squeals and hugs me from behind before hugging everyone else here that she knows.
We all filter onto the plane as our tickets and passports are checked yet again. There are a couple of people wandering around with bemused expressions on their faces, clearly lost. One of the boys in my class is talking to a tall blonde flight attendant. Well, he’s talking to her chest - I don’t think he’s noticed that she has a head. It’s immature, but I’m giggling as I walk along to find my seat.
I finally find my seat, and squeeze past someone’s legs so that I can sit. It’s a window seat that my ticket indicates. I couldn’t be happier; I adore the scenery from a plane.
I’m sitting next to one of the girls, who is flipping through a magazine with an expression of disinterest. She soon picks up her bag and stuffs it in, before pulling out an iPod. I can hear the music despite not having an earphone, which is a little worrying. Rather than sit bored, I pull out a notepad. Nothing comes to mind, so I just draw flowers.
One of the boys looks at the seat number, his ticket, then at the seat before finally sitting in it. He was the one who was staring at the flight attendant’s chest. It’s a little awkward for me. Yet he just sits and stares.
It takes about an hour for the plane to prepare to take off. Ten minutes ago, our teacher came around and told us that we were meeting at the first corner we came to at the stopover. She then asked if we knew where a couple of the other girls were sitting. No response. Hardly surprising, but I’d assume that she found them.
The announcement came that the plane was about to take off. I quickly buckled my seatbelt after putting away my notepad and pulling out my camera.
Everyone’s sitting; seatbelts are clicking every so often. The engines are clearly on, and the plane starts rolling just after I start to record. The girl next to me offers some chewing gum to the boy, then to me. I take some and thank her. “Danke.” Rather than respond with “bitte,” she squeals “I know, I know!” I think she means about my use of the language when we’re actually on the trip.
The plane is going ever faster. I’m trying not to juggle the camera as my hands tremble. She’s squealing; he’s barely containing his excitement. They’re both watching out the window, as I’ve got the camera down the bottom and I’m leaning back to watch forwards as the plane slowly lifts and we speed through the sky towards the trip of a lifetime.
---
I quite liked that one. It's more descriptive and honest than a lot of stuff I write. It may not be accurate, but that's hardly a shock. The last time I was in any airport was six months ago yesterday, the last proper airport like the one I was talking about in that was in 2004, when I went to Sydney with Mum to see the Lion King on broadway. I'm not sure if it's accurate, but I've tried to have the general stuff.
Despite the fact that I named no names, a lot of the story played out in my mind with the faces of my classmates. There was a girl who I shared a room with for a term, wearing the red and black scarf and hugging everyone at one stage. She was also the one sitting next to me on the plane in my mind. There's another two girls who are quite close who I pictured checking phrases together, and I had it that the teacher didn't see the phrase book as it would defeat the purpose of a language trip, even though it would probably be useful as a lot of stuff we've studied isn't really that sort of thing. They were also the girls I pictured the teacher looking for. I saw one of the boys who has quite blonde hair as the one who sat next to the girl in the scarf on the plane. For some reason, he was the one staring at the flight attendant's chest, but only really in the story - I only really saw myself walking away giggling. Then there was another one of the boys, who has black hair, who I saw lounging on the luggage. If I go, I really want to do that for my own personal amusement. My sense of humour is warped like that. Also, I reallyreally love window seats. It was just a stream of consciousness written down, so I've had to fiddle with some of the tenses which are still a little funky.
That was another example of my stream of consciousness.
I hope that everybody had a very merry Christmas. I hope you all have a happy new year too :) and lailah tov.
So as I didn't have internet access for a while, I spent quite a while writing. This is a poem that I wrote on Christmas night from sheer boredom.
Poison drips from the bottle
Scentless colourless clandestine death
Nothing odd 'til the skin starts to mottle
No sign 'til your very last breath
So as you lay there gasping for air
I look you coldly in the eye
You try to cry out in despair
But you must wait to die
And now your body lays in the cold
Moving to rigor and decay
There's not a soul that needs to be told
As I leave you and walk away
I quite like that one, more because of the subject matter. I did get bored, if you didn't already figure that out. But yeah.
Oh, in my Santa stocking (pillowcase...) there was an A4 spiral-bound notebook/journal type of thing with a skull on it. Man, it's awesome. My current notepad is A5 and 60 pages (from Smiggle, with a cat on the front) and I'm 26 pages through, even though I've only been consistently writing for about a week. Six and a half pages was of a story that's below. Also, there was a large bag sort of like the Country Road or Ghanda ones that everyone at school seems to have, but it's black with pink and purple flowers on it. It is very cool and it's thankfully big enough for the skull notebook. But enough about that.
I wrote another story yesterday, entitled Terminal. It looked really long in my notebook, but only ended up being a little under 2000 words! It was just my interpretation of what it would be like being in an airport. (Cough, going on the exchange. I began with that quite subtle but it got very unsubtle throughout.) So here's Terminal.
---
Terminal
It’s busy. Not quite Christmas-Eve-mall busy, but I-need-to-get-here-and-I-need-to-get-here-now busy. But that’s okay. In fact, I love it. There is a mixture of a million emotions in the air and on faces. There’s a little girl in a sparkly pink dress and kiddy-pink shoes, holding her mother’s hand with a look of curious excitement on her face. A man sits about ten metres away from them, with a navy three-piece suit and a briefcase. He’s ignoring every person, choosing instead to look at his watch and run his hand through his thinning brown hair every two minutes. I don’t think he’s noticed the huge clock on a nearby wall. If he has, he’s ignoring it to avoid eye contact.
I’m sitting in silence, drinking in what I see. There’s a beautiful madness to it. I’m curled on a chair, suitcase at my feet. My jumper-clad arms encircle my legs, which are covered by a pair of dark-blue skinny jeans. I’ve got the fidgets. Arms crossed. Legs dangling. Leg on the seat, hugging it. Standing. Sitting.
There’s a general chorus of excited chatter amongst the people I’m near. They talk about family, Christmas, boys. There are a hundred languages in this room yet only two are audible, discounting pig Latin as an official language. The excited chatter bounces around, flying from person to person. They stand, they sit, and someone’s reclining on a stack of suitcases they’ve commandeered, with a carry-on as a pillow. It can’t be comfortable. I have the hardcover of Harry Potter number five in there.
The fidgets have reached my hands. My thumbs have started a war entirely of their own accord. I start untying a shoelace, criss-crossing the laces in a weird combination of boredom and anticipative jittering. Untie. Retie. Undo, fiddle, braid. It’s hard to braid when there are only two strands of cord.
Someone’s sitting next to me. I don’t really register who it is. Despite the searing summer heat outside, she’s wearing skinny jeans just as I am, but there’s no jumper. There is, however, a scarf of red and black. She’s tied yellow ribbons around each end. Way to be subtle about our destination.
She’s started to talk to me, other tongues leaching into the English. The excitement she’s radiating is as obvious as the air conditioner in this terminal, which the goose bumps on my arms will testify the existence of. I feel more excited than I can hear in her voice, but it has barely betrayed me bar a persistently jiggling knee. I can still feel something, though. I may as well have swallowed an entire bottle of detergent, there are so many bubbles that I can feel in my stomach. I couldn’t eat this morning, despite how long it’s going to be before I next get an opportunity to eat at home. I know the date. I want it to be here both tomorrow and forever away. That adds to the bubbles.
A cool, relaxed voice alerts us that we should board, followed swiftly by a more authority-commanding voice that blends those two languages that I hear so often together in a command that’s clearly addressed to us. “Time to go! Komm mit, bitte!”
Oh, no. Here comes that detergent again. I scrabble around the pile of bags we’ve thrown together as a dozen others do. One smart soul didn’t donate theirs to the couch, and stands juggling them into a manageable arrangement. Oh, there’s my suitcase. It’s in my hand now. Got my shoulder bag. Carry-on is over near one of the boys. He’s just seen the tag, and chucked it my way. I smile. “Danke.” “Bitte.” Our voices are barely heard by each other over the hubbub.
I stretch the handle of my suitcase out and hold it upright with my elbow. Ellenbogen. I think that’s plural. Oh wait, it isn’t. I’ll check once we’re on the plane. I swing my shoulder back around, so that its strap is on my left shoulder just above my suitcase-supporting elbow. It rests on my right him, near the hand that will soon hold my carry-on. I’ve got my suitcase balanced too, so I pick up the carry-on.
I don’t think that quite everyone else thought to pack sensibly. Someone is scrambling with three suitcases. I’d lend a hand if I had a spare. Someone else has two bags without straps or wheels as well as their carry-on. They’ve balanced it somehow. Surprisingly few people chose to go with the more manageable combination of bags that I went with. I feel intelligent.
Those of us that were ready in about thirty seconds have thrown down our bags - or at least the ones that weren’t quite hands-free - and assisted with the juggling. I see a few people with tickets grasped between their teeth. We’ve finally got it all juggled, and those of us who were the wires to the trapeze artists are preparing ourselves. Finally, after that six-minute ordeal, we’re ready.
And we aren’t walking slowly at all. We’re making up for the excess four minutes and nearly running to the boarding area. The excited chatter has all of a sudden gotten psychotic, deranged, lunatic. The general air of excitement is nearly suffocating me, and that detergent is not helping in the slightest.
I can see carry-on bags that are obviously stuffed with warm clothes. We’ll be getting warmer before we get to the wintry climates, that’s for sure. I’m glad I stuffed my book into my suitcase before we started walking. My carry-on would have been too heavy otherwise. Anyway, I have my notebook and some pens. That’s all I ever need. I make my own fun.
We’ve reached where we start to board the plane. Most of us have our tickets in a pocket or (for a few less organised folk) between our front teeth. I can see someone who dumped their suitcase and is digging through their bag, finding their ticket after about thirty seconds of searching that probably felt like an hour. Someone else grabbed their suitcase with a foot, stopping it from falling over. Words are exchanged, with friendly faces.
I show my ticket and step through the metal detector as my bags are X-rayed. They have all the bags ready for the flight, at an earlier request. That makes it easier. I get through without a hitch and so do my bags, although a couple of people were held up momentarily due to fillings in their teeth. No surprise. I guess security didn’t want to take any chances, so we’re delayed. But just a tiny bit. We’re soon continuing on our way.
As our suitcases have all been taken away, we are just accompanied by our carry-on luggage. We walk past white walls and walls of glass displaying the grey tar of the runway underneath a summery blue sky that we will not see for over a month. I don’t want to think about reacclimatising to a summer that has not been confronted for ten months. If it is possible for one to get more excited about this, every single one of us has.
And now we’re walking towards the plane, excitement reaching an all new high. We’re all holding our tickets and passports, which were easily accessed compared to the chaos of before. Every step taken leaves a footprint of anticipation; every skip in a stride is happiness with nowhere else to go. There are people walking past us, echoing the terminal of before. A woman walks past, holding the hand of a man who holds a small child. A grim-faced businesswoman in what could be her thirties or forties breezes past with a handbag. I think she is meeting someone, as her pace is determined.
We step near the entrance to the plane, where there appears to be a delay in the boarding. No matter. One of my friends - the one with the black and red scarf with yellow ribbons - is bouncing where she stands. One of the boys is asking the teacher something, most likely what a word is auf Deutsch. Two girls are confirming translations of phrases with a phrasebook that the teacher probably hasn’t seen. The line starts to move; someone behind me squeals and hugs me from behind before hugging everyone else here that she knows.
We all filter onto the plane as our tickets and passports are checked yet again. There are a couple of people wandering around with bemused expressions on their faces, clearly lost. One of the boys in my class is talking to a tall blonde flight attendant. Well, he’s talking to her chest - I don’t think he’s noticed that she has a head. It’s immature, but I’m giggling as I walk along to find my seat.
I finally find my seat, and squeeze past someone’s legs so that I can sit. It’s a window seat that my ticket indicates. I couldn’t be happier; I adore the scenery from a plane.
I’m sitting next to one of the girls, who is flipping through a magazine with an expression of disinterest. She soon picks up her bag and stuffs it in, before pulling out an iPod. I can hear the music despite not having an earphone, which is a little worrying. Rather than sit bored, I pull out a notepad. Nothing comes to mind, so I just draw flowers.
One of the boys looks at the seat number, his ticket, then at the seat before finally sitting in it. He was the one who was staring at the flight attendant’s chest. It’s a little awkward for me. Yet he just sits and stares.
It takes about an hour for the plane to prepare to take off. Ten minutes ago, our teacher came around and told us that we were meeting at the first corner we came to at the stopover. She then asked if we knew where a couple of the other girls were sitting. No response. Hardly surprising, but I’d assume that she found them.
The announcement came that the plane was about to take off. I quickly buckled my seatbelt after putting away my notepad and pulling out my camera.
Everyone’s sitting; seatbelts are clicking every so often. The engines are clearly on, and the plane starts rolling just after I start to record. The girl next to me offers some chewing gum to the boy, then to me. I take some and thank her. “Danke.” Rather than respond with “bitte,” she squeals “I know, I know!” I think she means about my use of the language when we’re actually on the trip.
The plane is going ever faster. I’m trying not to juggle the camera as my hands tremble. She’s squealing; he’s barely containing his excitement. They’re both watching out the window, as I’ve got the camera down the bottom and I’m leaning back to watch forwards as the plane slowly lifts and we speed through the sky towards the trip of a lifetime.
---
I quite liked that one. It's more descriptive and honest than a lot of stuff I write. It may not be accurate, but that's hardly a shock. The last time I was in any airport was six months ago yesterday, the last proper airport like the one I was talking about in that was in 2004, when I went to Sydney with Mum to see the Lion King on broadway. I'm not sure if it's accurate, but I've tried to have the general stuff.
Despite the fact that I named no names, a lot of the story played out in my mind with the faces of my classmates. There was a girl who I shared a room with for a term, wearing the red and black scarf and hugging everyone at one stage. She was also the one sitting next to me on the plane in my mind. There's another two girls who are quite close who I pictured checking phrases together, and I had it that the teacher didn't see the phrase book as it would defeat the purpose of a language trip, even though it would probably be useful as a lot of stuff we've studied isn't really that sort of thing. They were also the girls I pictured the teacher looking for. I saw one of the boys who has quite blonde hair as the one who sat next to the girl in the scarf on the plane. For some reason, he was the one staring at the flight attendant's chest, but only really in the story - I only really saw myself walking away giggling. Then there was another one of the boys, who has black hair, who I saw lounging on the luggage. If I go, I really want to do that for my own personal amusement. My sense of humour is warped like that. Also, I reallyreally love window seats. It was just a stream of consciousness written down, so I've had to fiddle with some of the tenses which are still a little funky.
That was another example of my stream of consciousness.
I hope that everybody had a very merry Christmas. I hope you all have a happy new year too :) and lailah tov.