So We'll Go No More a-Roving

I've been meaning to update for ages but nothing was coming out in any sense of order. Hence the disorder below. 

Everyone said that spending a year away changes one, makes you better, deeper, keener or some other vague attribute. I'm old enough to feel as if I don't need really dramatic revision, and when I look in the mirror and see the same person I always did (with slightly worse fitting clothes due to London's on-point cheese game). I'm not distressed, just a bit baffled. Surely some visible mark has been made, or should have been. I can't have alighted in Newark the same absent minded dreamer that slipped off to Japan yesterday.

Off Iceland. I love airplanes. 

And now I am back in my dear, grimy oversized New York City, which has exactly one year to convince me that it is the best city in the world and I should stay put. The past year is a lovely long dream from which the waking, while a bit wistful, is neither jarring nor unwelcome.

 Hello, native skyline

My resolute and patient gentleman friend came to London as school ended and we spent a vigorous week sightseeing, and in my case, saying goodbye to the city and art and architecture I love and loved and will always love. We went to Portsmouth and looked at the boats.

The- hrm!- Twilight of British Naval Power (hrm)

We went to Dorset and looked at a hill fort.

Maiden Castle, complete with lurky sheep.

We gaped and admired a (recorded) history so much longer than our own. 

Burnt out church, and I am not making any references to how I feel about religion right now!

Like New York, the solidity of London makes leaving easier. It will, barring something really dramatic, be there the rest of my life and I can return whenever funds and time let me. It's nice to think of Marianna safe in the Tate, always stretching by the window, of the great heavy houses along Regents Park, white and kind of horrible, of generations of obstreperous coots around the narrowboats in the tangled canals.

Au revoir.

But I am home and it is wonderful to see my family and my friends (so calm! So settled! So mature!) and my cat, who is so embedded in my parents' house and friendship with their
fancy abyssinian that I can't take him back to my apartment. I miss his derpy face, crazed meeping and all. I had a burst of domestication and sewed two shirts and made tomato sauce. Which I then spilt on the lighter colored one.

Best friends with not a shred of manners between them

And now I need to find a job that pays me, and get my nifty paper helmet into production (I can finally talk about it! Provisional patent filed, suckaaaaas!)

                            

Here is the Shameless Self Promotion Link

I signed up to volunteer once a week, fixed my hair, pitched a bunch of too-young clothing, grubbed out my apartment, and made the grudging, final decision that it's time to grow up just a little bit. The next year is going to be devoted to thesis, job hunting, portfolio building, and trying to get my careless, haphazard self into some form of self-sufficient order.

Today I went to the Queens Museum, which is remote but consistently great. I looked at the giant model of New York City, which looks like this:

1/1200 scale.

It's nice to be reminded that my home is big and varied, familiar or not. It's good to think of the world in terms of topography, of cities in terms of the underlying land. I forget, with the grandeur and beauty of human made things, that the most constant and fundamental attribute of a place it the land it stands over. 

And it was good to return to the landscapes I know well- the missed and familiar Hudson Highlands,  the hazy overlooks and un curated rock formations, the comparatively warm Atlantic. I expected everything to look pale and brown compared to the fantasy of Japanese mountains the fairytale of English countryside, but no- it is beautiful and I feel peaceful here. 

And in one week school will start and I will not be peaceful at all.

About time.

-Isis