Carcassonne (but mainly other thoughts)

Finally found a computer, but given that I have less than a week left before I return home, I figured it would be easier to just write a monster recap of everything when I go back to the States. Should be fun to write... haha. I'm in Carcassonne right now -- the walled city that the board game is named after. Detail shall follow eventually.

Found out today that one of the victims in the Santa Barbara shooting massacre was my brother's classmate in high school. I looked him up on Facebook and showed his photo to my mother. She recognized him. My mother was heavily involved with this one parent group at our high school that holds an annual fundraiser each year (she was even the Chief once... received a plaque from the city during her term, as a matter of fact... lol). He volunteered at this event, so my mother knew the boy and his mother. One of the traditions at the annual event is that for the last performance of the evening, all of the student volunteers go onstage and perform a coordinated dance. My mother told me that the boy was naturally shy and more withdrawn, but he still went up to perform with everyone. After the show, his mother told my mom that she really appreciated that her son had a chance to go onstage and open up a bit more. Supposedly after that, he gradually came out of his shell more.

I know that life isn't fair. But really, I have no words to describe just how much this... sucks -- and even this word doesn't do justice to the mixture of anger and sadness I feel when I think about this. This boy was nineteen years old. He died, just because he happened to be living with someone with violent tendencies who may very well have been mentally insane. I was researching housing options in New Orleans before I went on this trip... and really, how will I know if a future roommate is going to be okay or not? Even a cursory meeting in person or via Skype might not be enough to detect trouble.

And I guess what makes me sad more than anything is... nineteen was fours years ago for me, which doesn't seem like much but really... nineteen is still so young. I didn't know the boy personally, and based on what my mother has told me, I wasn't as withdrawn as he was... but I think anyone who has been uncomfortable with his/her own shyness can relate to those little breakthroughs when you shed the wallflower for a moment and slowly come out of your shell. I can look back on these four years and trace those little moments, those little cracks when the walls started coming down. And perhaps I'm just blindly speculating at this point... but I feel like this boy was getting there, only to be cut down too soon. And by someone who, from the accounts I've read, harbored irrational hatred towards everyone, but especially women. (There are a bunch of articles on the killer and the culture of misogyny in the US, but I'll leave that topic aside for another day.)

You can't rationalize this sort of thing. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time, living with the wrong housemate. I would hazard a guess that I'm more conscious of my mortality than most people my own age. My mother and I had a conversation about this recently. She tackles her art projects obsessively, while I try to write as much as possible -- because our biggest fears are that we could die at any moment before the prized idea in our heads can materialize into the physical world. And that's what scares me the most.

Amsterdam

NOTE: I'm writing these Europe posts on a hotel computer, so I'll be revising them with photos when I return to the States.

As mentioned previously, I'm currently on a two-week trip in Europe to celebrate my last summer of freedom before I sell my soul to a medical career. My mother and I decided to join a tour group instead of having to stress about the itinerary ourselves--plus, there were a lot of places in France I was interested in but my confidence in my French is sorely lacking for these more remote places. I should have expected this, but I was still slightly surprised that I turned out to be the youngest member in this tour group. In fact, my mother is probably second youngest (or at least, she looks significantly younger). Nearly everyone else are elderly, retired Taiwanese-American couples from California and Texas whose children are already full-grown and married.

I flew into Amsterdam on Friday morning, and we left this afternoon to go to Brussels. Since I'm going to be editing this post later, I'll just write some quick notes about Amsterdam:

• Really love the vibe of downtown. There's history in all the architecture, and I love being near water, so it was nice seeing the canals everywhere. Houseboats!
• Briefly walked through the Red Light District with my Asian tourist herd, which was a bit awkward and funny at the same time lol. I did not realize that the hookers literally are on display in the window, so one nearly scared the crap out of me when she started posing behind the glass. Also, there are sex show advertisements in plain sight, which was a bit strange having to see those while walking next to my mother.
• We went to two museums today: the Rijks Museum and the Van Gogh Museum. The tour only gave us about an hour each to roam freely. I have never seen my mother move through an art museum at neck-breaking speed. Normally when we go to the museums in SF, she peruses the exhibit for hours and even backtracks to admire her favorites once more. Also... when we were outside the Van Gogh Musuem, a GoogleMaps car drove by. So there's a chance I might be in front of the Van Gogh Museum on GoogleMaps street view in the future lol.
• I don't really get a chance to do this since we're always hurrying off to places, but I would LOVE to sit down at a streetside café and just people-watch. In Amsterdam, people are dressed so much more fashionably then what I see regularly in the States. There are interesting characters everywhere. Also, some of these Dutch guys are quite handsome... tall lean figures, beautifully-colored eyes, yup.

I don't know when's the next time I'll have access to a computer. I have a tablet and my smartphone but I hate typing on mobile devices and would much prefer blogging on a keyboard. So I have no clue when's the next time I'll be writing another post. We're spending another day in Brussels tomorrow before heading to Paris (YUSSSS) so I'll write about my adventures in Brussels next time. Toodleloo!

Extinction of a Personal History

 "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

For one reason or another, I wandered back to Xanga today and discovered that the site is under major construction. I couldn't even find a single trace of the morbid relic from my dark middle school years, and at a glance, it didn't seem like anyone else's teenage testaments existed anymore either. Or at least, there was no way for me to access them, anyways.

(Side note: I still can't believe I'm 23. Ten years ago on this day, I'd just barely become a teenager. Like, what.)

Is it weird that I feel vaguely sad about this? Not that I ever planned on returning to that weblog platform again, but somehow it used to feel permanent--as in, I could go back to that site decades later and laugh at how crazy-emo-stupid I used to be. I couldn't explain how pixels and computer script work to you to save my life, but that little digital corner of the Internet housed a piece of the person I once was, and it's not hard for me to see how it influenced who I am today.

After reading that last sentence, you're probably thinking, What the fuck Sophelia... that's some serious cheesin' right there. But a few things happened in April (especially one incident that left me dumbfounded at its sickening irony) that made me reflect on certain past incidents with a more objective eye. In particular, I started thinking about this blog's genesis. And really, it all started with Xanga. If I had never made that crazy-emo-stupid Xanga, I may never have started blogging. If I had never written those crazy-emo-stupid posts, The Anathema would never have left those witty comments and the seed would never have germinated, growing into the thorny nest of brambles that eventually swallowed my naivete whole.

I might have sounded incredibly bitter just now, but in reflecting these past few weeks, I'm really not. It has been five years since I turned 18 and graduated from high school. No denial here: I used to be bitter. But I wouldn't want anyone to hold me accountable for the crap I did when I was at age 18; I'd like to think we've all grown up into better people who'd probably roll our eyes at what little shits we used to be.

For a long time, I latched onto anger because it was the easiest emotion to deal with. One thing I've learned in the last five years is that anger hurts less than sorrow. Anger directs the negative energy away from you. Sorrow causes you to dwell within it. And with this knowledge, I traced back through everything that had happened with The Anathema, and I realized just how much I relied on anger to distract myself from sorrow, and just how blindly self-centered I'd been. Fifteen-year-old Sophelia thought she'd been soooooo obvious. Twenty-three-year-old Sophelia looks back and thinks, You must be DELUSIONAL if you think anyone else would read THAT much into every insignificant little thing you timidly tried to convey, you oblivious twat.

I mentioned The Anathema to a college friend last autumn, and they were a bit stupefied to hear that I hadn't completely trashed all of the memories from my head. Quite possibly, they were politely masking a tempered rendition of my reaction to Love in the Time of Cholera's obsessive Florentino Ariza. But the truth of the matter is that, as pathetic as it sounds, The Anathema will probably never leave me. Love or hate, The Anathema breathed life into my first words as a writer, as the entity named Sophelia Lee. The whole affair is so deeply ingrained in my history, it is impossible to ever extract this thread from my past without unraveling the entire fabric of who I am now.