strawberry tea, identi-tea, and confuzzled writings

This week has been an odd one - I can't seem to drink enough strawberry tea. Now, those of you who know me (or at least know my roommate of this past year) will understand that I have strong tea loyalties. On those floaty days when ties don't bind and my strings have come a bit loose, a cup of bewley's black tea is where I turn. Sure, I've been known to order the occasional cup of green when I'm feeling low on antioxidants, or peppermint when my tummy is, well, feeling low in and of itself, but fruity teas generally disturb me. They trouble my palate, distort my tastebuds, and often leave me feeling worse than when I came to the cup in the first place.

So maybe it's the shit-tetley selection available in this side of europe that has turned me off to black tea, or maybe I'm feeling a bit underhydrated (though this seems unlikely, given my levels of beer consumption). Rather, I think my tea tastes are changing....if for no other reason than because everything else seems to be changing as well. I'd like to thank ms. Maura Barnacle for her astute observations regarding human identity, human desire, human change.

Everyone needs that place. That place where questions don't seem to exist, or at least where the answers don't matter. Jan Patocka would say that this place does not exist on earth - for the greeks and the unfortunate civilizations which cannot (and did not) but follow, we have to deal with the shaking of the myth of our lives. Our strings to the gods, to God, have been cut. Or, perhaps just stretched out over a few centuries, and then plucked by whoever caused all of the stretching. We try to trace the path of our string back home, but the vibration makes it impossible for us to hang on.

I think dear Jan is right on this one. I ran away for a year so that I could somehow find myself - so that I could stop covering up whoever it is that I am with a grade point average, with history papers, with number of hours studied before finals, without angsty basketball games and angstier poetry. But I'm not finding myself here - I'm multiplying. I can't stop the questions from coming, so each time I answer I deliberately redefine the person I present to the questioner. I try on different others - I have 8 combinations of majors and minors at my disposal, I believe and I don't believe in the pope, and sometimes I'm michelle or charlotte on a Tuesday night.

But this is still progress, or if not progress, then change. When I undertook my first attempt at running away to find my authentic self, I tried to do it solitarily - what are we really made of, if we're only us in relation to someone else? What we are [I decided] is a composition of those actions which we undertake when we are alone, when no one is watching. So I kept people from watching. I kept my facebook blank and my mouth closed (to the detriment of many a seminar participation grade), except for perhaps one person, whom I haven't had contact with in a year as of this week (would that be a stretchy connection, or a snapped one?).

If that was this quietest, this is certainly the loudest year of my life. My mouth is open, and there is that white noise to deal with - that constant buzzing and straining to pick our familiar phoenemes like some sort of language vulture over a pan-euro corpse. Prague is constantly hauling my proverbial ass out of bed (also, my literal landladies with their attempts to install digital television in my flat). I've taken to setting my skype status to invisible and staying off aim most of the time - mostly because I just can't withstand any more input. I've got to do the reaching, these days. And make attempts at restful sleep in the meanwhile.

Every so often here, when I decide to wander the city alone, a weird terror overtakes me. It's that penny-spinning terror I think that's what happens when we realize that a string has been clipped, or worse, when we've clipped a string ourselves. That's going to remain an incomplete thought for a bit...

I like the scene of Maura sitting in the same cafe - the cafe that looks a bit younger, her looking a bit older. Levinas puts a lot of importance on the face - the face of the other, and, by inference, the face of the self. Maybe the strings get to know faces, and when the faces change, the strings become unsure of themselves. Their nervous knees start to wobble, maybe even without the influence of the master string plucker.

Or maybe, dear Narcissus, I should forget all of this foolishness and go bang the hell out of the czech population.

-Other