this time, hopefully
one of my flatmates has a tube of gel with this slogan on the back:
hago lo que quiero con mi pelo.
(trans): i do what i want with my hair.
fuck yeah man, fuck yeah.
today we had to go to the municipal police* to attempt to acquire a residency card to allow us to be in spain for the year legally. we tried once before and the guy told us that we had to come back the next morning at eight am to get a number. when we returned there was a cue of about 100 immigrants waiting in the cold. we knew immediately that something was wrong. it's funny the sense of automatic unbelonging that you feel in the presence of poor, third-world looking people. it's not the kind of unbelonging that a person of colour might feel amongst a group of whities. it's like, oh no, there must be some kind of mistake. i can't have to line up here. i don't want to immigrate, i just need to stay here for a year. isn't it obvious? look at my skin for god's sake!
so when we got there today we weren't gonna take shit from the guy. and eventualy it turned out that it seems that officially that is how the system works. you are meant to line up in temperatures below zero to get a number for when to come back and then be told that it's the wrong day and come back again until eventually you are a semi-legal immigrant.
i'm thinking that i might research some of this stuff for my assignment here. the kind of floating amnesty that travellers receive (and indeed expect) that most migrants could never dream of. like, when i go to the bank and apologise for my poor spanish and smile sheepishly at the beautiful teller. and the other woman says, oh, you'll have to speak slower, he's from australia. oh, she says, and smiles a charming smile, and begins to speak in crisp, delineated syllables.
enjoy your time here. people say. i wonder how often mgrant workers get that. ok, the work day goes from ten to ten with a twenty minute lunch break inbetween. but most importantly, enjoy your time here. tell your friends and family back home.
us travellers are allowed to enjoy our time here because we're like a constant ripple through the landscape. we come and we go, and another takes our place. the most important thing being that we go. we disrupt the social landscape very little. the mgrant, however, as so often is the case is perceived as part of a wave. and nowadays, we all know how destructive waves can be. how radically they can alter the landscape. i remember hearing that after the tsunami, people from the maldive islands were saying that the maps would have to be redrawn. the islands no longer resembled the maps. you only have to talk to your grandparents about this phenomenon in australia. ask them about the suburbs they grew up in. mine lived in campsie for quite a awhile, when it was all white except for a few greeks or whatever. but now, oh, watch the grave expression sweep across their faces like a wave of third-world migrants. you wouldn't even recognise campsie now.
*they have lots of different police in spain. i think it's an attempt to confuse eta as to which ones to blow up. i spent several days terrifically excited at the cars i saw driving around with policia floral on their bonnets. flower police, i thought. that's fucking fantastic! eventually someone pointed out that there's no l. they're actually policia foral, whatever the hell that means. some spanish thing that's not in my dictionary.
wow, before i started this blog, i could never have imagined the profound sense of humiliation and dejection that comes from looking at your blog every day and seeing no new comments. i guess it's kharma, because i've always been the most invisible avid blog reader. i mean, i've probably only ever posted about two comments, but i read everyone's blogs.
i'll feed you fruits that don't exist
i'll leave graffiti where you've never been kissed.
if only you would beck, if only you would.
i've just been writing this request to send to uts to get a $5000 loan for the last six months here. Well, i think it's actually $6000. ie, you get $5000 but you get a debt of $6000. but hey, what's another $6000 debt between friends? i mean, i'm sure the cops aren't gonna come round to break my knees if i can't pay it back. they'll find other reasons for that.
so i had to write about 1500 words telling them about how motivated i was to study. and also say something about my commitment to the uts community and to internationalisation. i don't know what they meant by either of these things. i've never seen a uts community. i've seen brainless admin, and i've seen a few activists who, let's face it, don't have a great deal of contact with a whole shitload of people who attend the uni, and then i see a thousand faceless people who wandered off trains and into overcrowded classrooms before piling back out towards their homes again where they interact with their communities. in fact, the only time i have seen something like a uts community was either here in spain or on the plane over. and if they want to know how committed i am to the four other girls here in pamplona? sure, there nice enough. a lot of fun usually. but you know, we're just mates.
and internationalisation? i once read a little about the split between marx and bakunin at the first international. does that count? if i were more of a gentle, left-leaning moralist i would probably be getting all indignant about how clearly aimed at capital loss-reduction all the questions were. like, it was pretty transparent. how will this study help your uts degree? i see, but how will that help uts? i was in two minds as to whether to include my links to the students' association when talking about my involvement in the uts community. i mean, we definitely had a little community at vertigo, but, somehow, i don't think that's the community they were talking about. it's like john howard asking you what you do for the australian community and you replying that you're very involved in your local mosque. wrong answer muslim. the answer is: i make great kebabs next to a pub in a pleasant area. like baulkham hills, or the sutherland shire. and i do not mix with illegal immigrants.
i was in a flat, overhearing a conversation that went something like:
but if i wore a shirt that said 'proud to be white' people would be all like...
fuck me. thought i'd escaped that conversation. i didn't bother cross the room to join in.
marengos is the name of one of the big night clubs in pamplona. lets get one thing straight from the start. the music was bad. i can't really explain how, because each song was bad in its own way. there was a guy with a handlebar moustache behind some large console with a thousand cds at his disposal. the absolute highlight, far and away, was when they played some weird version of let's get it started (ammended version, of course). i forced myself to get up and have a boogie only to be assauted with something really, reall bad directly afterwards. and as i sat there in that club at 3 am on a firday morning, the idea occurred to me that this play might be the most perfect representation of the contemporary radical-ethical environment. what i mean by that is that some of the most difficult questions of radical ethics such as: is political violence ever justified? is the idea of a historical vanguard ever unproblematic? now i'm not saying that i figured out whether or not political violence can be justified last night. but i have a feeling, that if you want to approach these answers, you'd be best served by studying thoroughly the situation of marengos at 3 am on a friday morning. all the quandries were there. is it relevant to talk about radical change when everyone is so comfortable and happy in our present society [disregarding the idea that that happiness might be the direct result of the exploitation of other societies and individuals]? i mean, these people seemed happy. dancing away, perhaps never even thinking that there could be something more out there than early nineties salsa trance stuff. did something need to be forced? but who am ito say that this stuff is shit? i was going to get more complicated with this, but it sounds too pompous. fuck it, i'm over it. i want hand-made noodles and jizzy dumplings.
i decided that i wanted to take another class over here. at the moment i'm only studying spanish and it's not a real big workload. also, all the students in the class are, of course, from other countries. so i decided that i wanted to take a regular course. so in an hour or so i'm heading off to a course called surrealismo en el cine y la literatura. for those who don't speak spanish, it's about surrealism, in the cinema and literature. it may be way beyond my capabilities, but hey, it sounds like fun. and i don't actualy have to pass any of the subjects that take while i'm over here anyway. what's a failed subject or two between friends, hey dilan?
i am expecting, that the class will consist entirely of spaniards, all charming and friendly. they will take me under their collective spanish wing, nussle bme in their collective spanish bossom, whispering useful frases into my ear at every opportunity. and i'll come out of it with perfect spanish and my own little community. i don't see how it could possibly turn out any other way.
in other news, i have no real idea what i want to do my research projects over here about. and i know that usually these are ad hoc pieces of shit that nobody really puts any thought into, but as i tried to explain to some french friends last night in mangled spanglish, when you do a course with the career prospects such as my course, there's really no point in being lazy. it's not like i'm going to sneak out the other end with a degree that will double as a ticket into any top four firm in the country. the people at centrelink aren't going to care. so i may as well.
About a week ago i had a dream that woke me. Frightened and shaken, at two in the morning, unable to sleep for an hour or so afterwards, not really wanting to sleep again either. In the dream a man tried to stab me. And at the point that I woke up, he seemed to be having success. My mother had warned me about this man, roaming the streets. She had used a word to describe him. I desperately want to remember this word now, because it was such an odd description, I’m sure of it. I get the feeling I accepted the term only because I was in a dream world, and it’s the kind of word that would never fly in the waking world, because it was wholly inappropriate. She told me to be careful walking back to my house that night from where we were in a cityscape that was pretending to be Sydney. Particularly, as she pointed out, since I wasn’t wearing any shoes. I told my mum not to worry, that there was no safe route to my house, as I had to walk up a small dark street no matter which direction I went, and that this guy wouldn’t want to stab me in the feet anyway. Well he wouldn’t, right?
But I decided to jog up the first side-street; a more open, lit street than the one I would have to turn left onto. The jogging made me feel stronger, less vulnerable, and to back this up I clenched my hands into tight fists, even knocking them together a couple of times like a boxer ready to fight. They cracked freshly against each other. Nobody was going to mess with me.
Of course as I was doing this I reached the corner, and as I turned the guy was there, walking towards me, and I was caught completely off guard. I slipped backwards and lay on the ground, struggling to get up and defend myself but knowing that I couldn’t. The man was ugly. His hair was very short and straight, that horrible stage that comes a few weeks or months after shaving your head. He may have had scabs on his face. But his ugliness was that kind of severe ugliness that you didn’t want to make too much of because he may have actually had an intellectual disability. The other thing that I knew in my head was that this guy was meant to be a trained killer. The last thing that I knew was that for all my stupid bravado I was dead. Just as vulnerable on this night as every other.
as i approached my uni, the tiniest little flakes of snow began to make their way lazily to the ground, and as i walked they got a little bigger, the air a little less clear.
it seems that every album i listen to over here just makes me want to shake my little white-boy ass. in my room, in the streets, at uni.
here is a list of things on this topic:
music for watching snow float: dirty three.
music for late-night walks home: a tussle between the cure and kid koala [both different enough to make it easy to distinguish whether this is a kid koala night or a cure night].
music to pick people in your head to play it to [eg, that spanish girl you met the other night, or the french guy, or allthe other students when you finally have a party]: tzu.
music to take to other parties and force on people: dj shadow.
music to dream of sharing with poor fools who have never heard it in your room late one night: jeff buckley.
music to go to sleep to: decoder ring or cinematic orchestra.
alba
another skinny white boy
antipopper
asti
english lessons
hon
no se puede
somnambulist
today
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