Information gathering

I arrived in Champaign six days ago.

The trip itself was the usual transatlantic flight; an inordinate amount of time on your hands which you want to whittle away. Heathrow was as usual more of a hindrance than a detail of the voyage. Chicago was actually good though. I took the train for a change, and that was refreshingly different. visiting the city itself was also pretty fun, considering I had only had a couple of hours of sleep the night before, and had been awake for about 20 hours already. But seeing the cityscape in the distance was inspiring enough, and making my way about Union station was interesting in that U.S. train stations bear no relationship whatsoever to their European counterparts.

The train itself was pretty funny. firstly, getting on the train was as bad, if not worse, than getting on a plane. for a nation characterised by that independent streak, Amtrak is surprisingly adverse to the whole DIY philosophy that one could find in the U.K. for example. Nonetheless it was the first time that I felt that I was travelling in style. The train services are actually named; mine was called "the city of New Orleans", simply because it is the Chicago-New Orleans service. There is the coolest amount of leg room, the conductors are incredibly polite, the trains are double deckers (with the funny twist of luggage being held in the ground floor, and passengers chilling in the top floor), giving everything the peculiar feel of being taken back fifty or sixty years ago.

In any case...

back to the main point of the blog. I finally arrived here and can start taking care of all the medical, dental and optical records, files and examinations I have to take or submit for the peace corps. Since it all has to be in english, I have to have it all done by the 26th, thirteen days from now.

Some of the things I will have to do are standard: physical examination, dental X-rays, blood and urine tests. But me being me, what would generally be an easy process becomes convoluted through the intricacies of multi/trans/international lifestyles. I have to have medical records translated from spanish to english. Not only does this include my surgery report for when I had peritonitis fourteen years ago; in theory it also includes my immunisation history which by the end of this process will be brand spanking new and updated with the MMR, polio and Td "boosters" (making it sound like a video game). I probably have some of these, some others I do not, but I honestly do not have the foggiest idea at the moment.

In any case, I will be having the physical in three hours. I will soon find out the following: my height (feet/inches), weight (lbs), blood pressure (mm resting), pulse (bpm resting), hearing (whisper test or other gross test, which sounds pretty funny) and gross vision. They will also test for HIV serology, CBC, Hepatitis A, B and C, and the thrilling G6PD titer. All this gives Medicine the most byzantine of perceptions. In any case, being a thorough exam, I will soon find out if I have any of the above mentioned. I hope to high heaven I do not. In any case, any positive results will be extremely nasty surprises and in themselves rather ironic.

So this whole process has me looking back on my bodily history and remembering some pains and illnesses from way back when. Hopefully it will be worth it; I dont want to have to update it all with exotic and funny sounding tropical diseases by the time I'm through with it all.

flux capacitors

2008 has undoubtedly been amongst the most chaotic and effusive of years. And we are only half way through it, so there is more to come, undoubtedly... Change has been the order of the day (or year).

The programme so far then:


March: The family dog passed away. She was fat. She had gender issues. She was damn cool.

April-May: Last time I did papers and exams for university. I studied pretty hard. Thought I would be scraping by.

June: The post-exam period (last one for a while at least) and finally, my goodbye to Warwick. And the U.K. and student life in general. Exam results. Turns out I did pretty damn well.

July: Day I arrive back in Madrid, I see my home. The new home and the old home. The main difference between them? the former has walls. The latter, does not. Spain wins La Eurocopa.




When I saw the grounds of the old home, I stumbled. It was there, and it was not. The garden centre is half there, hugging the north side of the original area, and changed. A new greenhouse has fallen from high heaven directly on top of the pool. All the orchids inside it survived the impact. A new greenhouse has been built on another one, based on Israeli designs. The fish have been transplanted from one pond to another. But the rest of the grounds were rubble.
I felt as if I were walking in a trance. It took me a couple of minutes to rearrange things in my mind. I attempted to recognise where things were in relation to the past state of this place and space that I had grown up in. The physical component of the memories of my childhood, all those good and bad memories enclosed in a cocoon of walls, ceilings, roofs, branches, trees and ponds, were all rubble. All that is left are the kitchen tiles caked in grease, and the stained wall that my window "looked out" onto.
But as I was told where things were and where things would be, my perception started to change. I stood on the ground formerly known as home. But at the same time it was something else; 60-odd years ago it was built with hands not my own. It was just the same process by which I would not bear witness to other cycles that would occur within that crossover between latitude and longitude on the map, formerly an area where I had spent a good deal of my waking life. I would not see what had occurred here in the past and I shall not see what will happen here in the future. Thus, the only thing I can lay claim to are the memories shaped in that amalgam of dimensions specified within the context of my self. It is that correlation of dimensions that I call my own, not the place, space or specific coordinate.
I am my own master, and more so the master of my memories. I am prepared to make new ones, and by far the best place to begin is with one's own home and garden stripped naked and laid bare, becoming nothing more than sand and stone; an ideal tabula rasa with which to begin.

A similar idea is that of places one has lived in, the various loci witness to my existence: Danville, Swisher avenue; Champaign, Countrybend lane; Madrid, El Garbanzal; Warwick University, Westwood Compton, Hurst; Leamington Spa, Brunswick street and the High Street; Pavia, Via della Rocchetta; Aalsmeer, Linnaeuslaan... Homes are the constructions of wood and stone. But they also travel with you, constantly. The phrase "broken home" does not refer to the building but to the occupants. Thus people come and go, as do buildings, cities, nations, etc...

We are our own flux capacitors

Blog 2

Second attempt at blogging...

the first was a rather futile attempt made during university. Thing is, if I crash and burned during three years of undergrad mayhem (when time is actually at its most abundant), what will happen from now on?

Just wait and see...