Well, This is Unexpected.

I’m in love.

A Lack of Internet…

…means I am not updating as often as I should be. I know, and I’m very sorry.

And now I’m off to return to my life of wading through burns and traipsing through the woods and climbing into secret treehouses.

Wait, What was That Again? Wait, What was That Again?

I’m back on the Isle of Mull; it’s been almost exactly a year since I left this place, determined to come back to here and to Scotland in general. And here I am, back back (to Cali, Cali), with my suitcase on the floor and my facestuff cluttering the bathroom until Tuesday morning. I’ve seen Laura and Derwyn and Sleazy Charming and Morrison and all I need to do now is see Baby Munro and I will just squeal with glee and fall over. Morrison has also given me shifts at the pub so I am clearing tables and serving food and bantering with staff and trying not to spill shit on customers while trying to act like I know what I’m talking about… like when I’m asked what the soup of the day is and I reply “tomato and basil” when in fact it’s been changed to “cream of mushroom” for the late afternoon crowd.

Life is so good.

And Here’s Where It Gets Tricky.

So after having spent most of the past month and a half or so in two places for extended periods of time (Nairn for over a month, and the Orkney Islands for about 10 days) and a couple of weekends in Dumfries and Fort Augustus , 04 August through 31 August looks to be an insane amount of movement for yours truly with no more than five days being spent in one place at a time.

Ready, Freddie?

04 August – 07 August: Pitlochry (traveling alone).

07 August – 09 August: camping somewhere (with Chris, Perv Sinclair’s brother).

09 August – 14 August: Mull (with the boys and Laura!).

14 August – 15 August: Glasgow (one night in a hostel).

15 August – 18 August: Dublin (Nicolette arrives from San Diego!).

18 August – 21 August: Galway (further adventures with Nicolette).

21 August – 24 August: Belfast (more Nico & Yumi togetherness).

24 August – 28 August: Dumfries (with Perv Sinclair and family).

28 August – 31 August: Edinburgh (festival time with Perv Sinclair).

I expect to be exhausted and ready to get back to farming by the time WWOOF-ing resumes in September (remember: Yumi returns to the States on 21 September, and San Diego on 26 or 27 September — excited, my friends? I am, to see all of you!). And like I said, that part is not set in stone. I am supposed to be in East Linton farming for three weeks, but the rest of Europe beckons me onward… along with my empty(ing) wallet. So maybe I’ll farm for two weeks before running away. Sigh. I’m going to be so broke fall quarter, I will have to nurse one drink over the course of an entire evening and eat porridge day in and day out. But. Totally worth it, my friends. I’m only young once, I’ll only live once, right? And I do believe that this is what they call “having the time of your life” in that “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” kind of way.

If I smile anymore my face will break.

Blue Eyes.

I heard of M. (or, as most of my friends have been calling him, The Skipper) the first night I traipsed down to the pub, cozily dressed in my black coat and green scarf; I walked into a room that had maybe seven or eight people inside, and an adorable bartender who smiled at me as I smiled back. Cute, I thought, but very, very young. Before long I was perched on a barstool, laughing my way through my bottles of beer (which eventually gave way to gin and tonics, but of course) at the various antics of those around me; even as Heather and I tried to have a relatively normal conversation about horses and children, the repeated questions of “Would you like to see my knob?” and “Would you like to see my come face?” had me in stitches, barely able to drink the drinks that kept appearing in front of me.

It was in this drunken muddle of conversations that M. was first mentioned, and then again on Saturday night, and then again on Sunday evening, and then again on Monday afternoon. By the way, I know this sounds like I was drinking like crazy, but I really wasn’t — Sunday I abstained completely from booze and insisted on having a Diet Coke or juice, despite the grumpy faces turned in my direction, shrugged apologetically and told them I didn’t want to be hungover the next morning for work, which is true. “You need to learn to be Scottish!” they’d all say. “How do your livers handle it?” I asked Shane, the aforementioned adorable bartender. “What liver?” he replied, with a straight face.

Everyone spoke of M. with affection, and told me of his madcap adventures, including (but not limited to) the night when he decided to drive a car off the pier into the ocean and his weeks spent away at sea as a skipper in various locations — India! Iceland! — around the world. Everyone spoke of him with a smile, called him sweet and amazing and fantastic, and told me how glad they were that he was back for the first time in five weeks. And unfailingly, everyone said to me, either with seemingly parental concern or conspiratorial amusement, that M., the perpetual bachelor, would probably try to chat me up.

But Monday afternoon rolled around and there was no sight of him. I drank my Beck’s in the pub as Ian talked to me about odds and ends (or bits and bobs, as they would say here) and of course brought up M., who, at that moment, drove by. “It’s too bad he’s not coming in,” Ian said, and I wondered, for a moment, intrigued, what he would be like. In my mind I pictured him as very tall, very textbook good-looking and cocky, full of himself, dark haired and with a pick-up line on hand for every single girl who came to Rousay. That I knew how to handle; that I had encountered before, in San Francisco and elsewhere, and I was a bit disappointed that I would not meet him to bandy arrogantly back and forth with. Sometimes it’s fun to indulge the fratboy who lives inside a bit, to let him out to play and trample all over men who think the gateway into my pants is unlocked with bravado.

After tea that same night, my last night on Rousay, I thought to myself, Right, I can either go sit in my room and be antisocial and journal, or I can go back to the pub and have a few drinks. And so I went back, hoping that the pub would be filled with familiar faces, and I arrived to see Kirsty behind the bar, Jacques having a drink, and an unfamiliar person sitting on the farthest barstool on the left. I said hi to Kirsty, to Jacques, and sat down at the bar after taking off my coat, and Kirsty said to me, “This is M.,” to which I must have looked confused, because she followed up with, “the one who drove the car, you know?”

“Ah,” I said, leaning forward and extending my hand, “the infamous M.,”and he laughed, partly amused, I think, and partly self-conscious.

Later I would notice a variety of things about him: that he is actually shorter than he appears, that he has lines etched into his face by his eyes (“seaworn” is the word that comes immediately to mind), that his biceps are out of control, that he is always ready to laugh and quick to return a quip, that his fingertips are rough with calluses but paradoxically gentle when they touch. For the moment, though, I noticed that his eyes were blue — not startlingly so, not like Josh, one of the farmhands who was at Trumland Farm, whose eyes were almost electric in their brightness, but soft and clear and kind.

M. smiled at me throughout that evening with those eyes, smiled at me with them until 2:00 a.m. when Kirsty finally declared the pub closed; those eyes that relaxed me almost instantly, along with the realization that he was nothing like I had expected — there was no sign of brashness, of arrogance, to be found (my inner fratboy crept away sulking at the lack of a battle); those eyes that had me scooting over on my barstool and laughing as he asked me to armwrestle, and, when Kirsty insisted he would let me win like a gentleman and I still said no, he said, sadly, “I just want to hold her hand;” those eyes that made me reach out and trace the tattoos on his forearms and let him rest his hand on my thigh; those eyes that prevented me from pulling away when he beckoned me closer and told me I was a lovely lass.

I laughed at that last one, especially as he insisted on telling me that roughly twenty times in the span of about five hours. “Such a charmer!” I said, and meant it — I had forgotten how lethal Scottish charm is, had forgotten the craziness of Morrison and Baby Munro and Sleazy Charming taking over our apartment months before Wifey and I took over theirs. I had forgotten the effects that a dry, self-deprecating wit, a sweet compliment coupled with a crude sense of humor, the accent (M.’s went in and out of the Orcadian dialect, which made it all the cuter), stories of a life so different from mine, and the gaze — you know: the gaze — coming from an older man have on me. It’s lethal, I tell you, and, while other men are attractive as well, this killer combination, this charm (and really, there is no other word for it except that: they’re charming motherfuckers, damn them all) is very Scottish in its particularity. I was perfectly fine being unaware of its existence until May of last year, and now I’ve been spoiled rotten — I blame Wifey.

“You’re so ridiculous,” I said, pushing at his shoulder and turning away, feeling almost bashful. “Am I?” he said, “I mean it, though.”

I shook my head, took a sip of my drink; by this point it was a foregone conclusion that I was into him, and that he was definitely interested in me. Dumb as I am when it comes to picking up on signals from people who are interested, it was so obvious from M. that I would have had to have been dead to not see it. “Sure,” I said, and smiled. It wasn’t a negation of the compliment, per se, nor was it a negation of my looks, per se — I do know that I am not bad-looking, but I am also aware of what I do look like, and also aware of the shit that comes out of peoples’ mouths when they are trying to pull. In that single word — “Sure” — I was trying to fit Look I know you want to kiss me, and really, I will probably let you, so you can stop it with the compliments because buddy, I’m a little too old for that kind of game, don’t you think? without sounding like a callous, cynical bitch of a girl.

He lifted my hand and kissed it, not the back of it, but my knuckles. “You’re lovely.”

Maybe it was the drinks that got to me; I had, after all, consumed something like four beers and two gin and tonics by that point. Maybe it was the fact that I was in Scotland, in the Orkney Islands, miles away from anyone and everyone who had ever said anything about my face or my body. Maybe it was that I had just begun to understand that being gazed at adoringly is sometimes nice, albeit intensely awkward when you’re not used to it, having almost never gotten it from those who should have given it to you the most (i.e., your partners in serious relationships — but that’s neither here nor there). Maybe it was his blue eyes. Or maybe it was all of the above, but whatever it was, I conceded and let him win.

“M.,” I said, “you are ridiculous. But thank you for the compliment.”

He leaned forward a bit and brushed my bangs off my face, and I let myself bask in his admiration for just a wee while, half-believing that it wasn’t sheer vanity that made me do so, as we sat together companionably, his legs against mine, as Kirsty turned on music and demanded that I take another drink, as Jacques joined in, while I protested and asked for water instead and begged for clemency on behalf of my liver and brain.

And that is how I met M., The Skipper, on my last evening on Rousay.

This Might Not Work.

There are moments in one’s life that are simply indescribable; I like to consider myself someone who is relatively skilled with words, able to string them together into coherence and sometimes, very rarely, actual beauty. Yet certain things — the first time I saw my brother’s face, one night from my first quarter of grad school where everything fell to pieces, just to name two — are almost impossible to pin down, or are, at least, for someone with my level of command of the English language. As such this post is entitled “This Might Not Work,” because I’m not quite sure if I can do full justice to one such moment, one marvelous, breathtaking moment, from my life, that happened on Saturday of this past week.

“What are your interests?” asked Carol, and almost immediately I told her, “Beaches, I need to find a sandy beach. Are there any on Rousay?” She shook her head, and told me to take the ferry to Egilsay instead, to go along a 3.7 km walk which would eventually open out to the ocean. So on Saturday morning I woke up (hungover, of course, having consumed far too many drinks the night before), put on my hiking boots, packed a sandwich and a banana, and went down to the pier to catch the ferry. The sun was out, and I saw on the deck of the boat for the short ride to Egilsay, arriving around 9:30 a.m. The next ferry back for me would not come until 1:35 p.m., which gave me plenty of time to explore Egilsay, an island which is even more sparsely populated than Rousay (Egilsay has something like 50 people living on it). The ferrymen smiled at me and I smiled back; it was a fortuitous beginning to the trek I was going on.

After briefly stopping by Saint Magnus’ Church, I resumed my walk; the weather was beautiful and I saw almost no one. Surrounded by green on either side I proceeded to walk the width of the island until I came to a field that looked like private property. I consulted the map, and it told me to go on. I pushed the gate open and continued onward, the dirt path having disintegrated to simply swaths of grass that had been trampled down. I stopped, wondering where the hell I was, and realized I could hear the ocean very close to me; in fact, I could see it very close to me. I tore through the remaining lengths of grass and eagerly walked up to a tiny little wooden turnstile and then everything in the world paused, for one beat, for two, as I looked at what was unfurling before me.

It was a completely deserted beach, a wee strip of golden sand surrounded by slabs of dark grey and nearly black rock. The water coming in in low ebbs and waves was crystal blue in places and darkened to a deeper shade in others, bringing in drifting shells here and there. There was no noise except the sound of the water. Even the birds had fallen silent.There was no noise except my voice, weakened, murmuring “Oh my God.“

I walked down onto the sand, placed my bag down and felt the most idiotic grin stretching across my face. This was what I had been looking for, in the various lochs and burns and rivers I had been in and around in Scotland, the unmistakeable tint of salt in the air. I hurriedly took off my hiking boots and outer layer of clothes until I was shivering in the breeze in my bikini, tying my hair back as I stepped into the Pacific Ocean, finally, after over a month of aching for it, after wanting to leap in on the various ferry rides I had taken in the past week or so. The water covered my ankles and immediately my feet went numb, and I laughed out loud as I jumped back onto the sand, hopping away from the lapping waves and feeling the sun beat down on my shoulders and arms.

It wasn’t until I sat down, felt sand under my hands and ass and thighs, felt the sweat starting to collect at my temples, that it struck me, the magnitude of this day — that I was on an island with a population of about 50 people, off the northern coast of Scotland, that I had said goodbye to loved ones and cares and responsibilities and trekked thousands of miles to return to a country that I felt some connection to for some unknown reason, and that I was sitting on a beach, with no one else around, where the only footprints visible besides mine were those of a bird, where it felt as though the world had left this remote piece of land, and me, behind, as though no one would be able to find me, or perhaps no one would need to find me, ever again.

I realized this and started crying, wept into my hands as the wind tangled up my hair and soothed the parts of skin that were already too warm to the touch. I cried, incoherently saying that this was all I had ever wanted, that this was perfect, that this was absolutely the most pure and clean and good and alive I had ever felt, ever, as though everything that had amassed under my skin for the past 26 years was being scrubbed away by the air itself, and I was becoming a wee child again, still untroubled and unhurt, still able to face the world with wonder and the thrill of not understanding what the future would bring. I cried with my head buried in my arms, folded over until my forearms touched my knees, cried until I was exhausted, cried on this exquisitely empty beach until I felt hollow.

I spent the next hour and a half on the beach, frolicking in the water, plunging in and then screaming with the cold when I realized I had forgotten to bring a towel to rub dry with, eating my banana and drinking sips of water and taking pictures that do no justice to the immense loveliness of this place. The remainder of my time on this beach was no different from how I spend my time on other beaches. There were no more emotional fits of crying, no more frantic journaling, and when I left I felt that it was good for me to leave when I did. Too much of it, I think, would have done me in, have gone from making me clean to making me hurt. I walked back up the slight incline and through the wooden turnstile and took three steps before turning around to take one last look at the water. With the exception of my footprints and the indentation of a message I left written in the sand, it looked exactly as it had when I arrived. I left it looking pristine, looking as though no one had ever come by and run up and down the sand. I left it looking empty, looking as though it was waiting, waiting and anticipating what the tide might bring in.

I left it looking how it had made me feel.

I know myself well enough…

…to know that I will never take the easy way out.

Holy Crap.

Okay, I know that it’s been a good 1.5 months or so since I passed my Qualifying Exams, but I’ve been waking up almost every morning thinking that I haven’t passed them yet. It takes a few minutes to adjust each time to the fact that those endless 18 months of nothing but bright lights flashing “QUALS! QUALS! QUALS!” in my brain are long gone, and that I returned almost all of those fucking library books before taking off on this adventure.

I realized today for the first time, while helping bake cakes, that I survived those 18 months with very little sleep, that I did pass my exams, that I am officially B.A., B.A., M.A., C.Phil. (the letters of my degrees are longer than the letters of my name. Ha!), that my professors (namely Patrick, Sarah and Camille, the three whom I adore and have worked the most closely with) trust that I will somehow produce work that will say and mean something in the field(s) of Performance Studies, 20th and 21st Century (African) American Literature, Structures of Genre and/or Queer Theory… and that I am expected to write a dissertation. Like, a real one. Like, for real reals.

HOLY CRAP.

Post-Quals Malaise.

“This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward” — William Faulkner, Light in August.

I have quite a bit to think about.

I spent most of today swinging in the hammock, reading Lewis Grassic Gibbon, then pausing to think, then looking out over the fields and thinking some more, then reading again, then dozing off, then reading until I wanted to think for a good long while.

A lengthier post is on its way.

Such a Casual Comment.

While weeding the other day, Therese says to me, “A weed is just a plant that’s growing in the wrong place.”

Such a casual comment, but one that I find strangely moving.