word from a bird in a puddle...and what is travelling for?

today we're leaving for matagualpa from grenada today...sunday we climbed a volcano (mumbacho) and put our heads in the clouds! yesterday i saw some islands, monkeys and trees, a volcano's rocky vomit that grew trees. (as tmo and i know well, beautiful things can be crafted from vomit.)
generally, it is funny travelling this way--in a little bubble made from cordoba-dollars. good to see people doing things, to feel the fluidity of my place in the world...or at least the millions of tiny worlds that are always just out of view. to brush up against something hard and distant, and to remember what i can and cannot do with my hands; what i can make and transform, and how i still don't know how to build a house or fix electrical wires or give an allergy shot, but i can make necklaces and zines and drawings--
if we all had to rely on what we could create out of nothing...?
funny, this time, maybe like many travels, to feel somewhat displaced, a little homeless except for the home built of fellow souls, soon unlimited by the walls of the bäo...echoing jbird i am wondering what we're waiting for...

mumbling muttering packing a subtle smoke behind the jungle-garden, air like sweat sweat like pools like a night in the mumbai airport six years ago, silence silence and i am so much the sister/a she, reading "wind-up bird chronicles" and confused about reality and dreams--dreaming intensely (my mother is pregnant and z is playing with clowns and a thousand-year old ficus named the thief wife is just around the corner)--

adraft adrift.

my favorite part of spring is jumping.

snippets of the bäohaus now available on the interwebz! share with friends, family, and remember the state of our house from faraway.

in other news,
today was my first day of school. (sounds of my life)
it was dumb and also interesting--"global warming" and "environmental history of the earth."
in the semcoop today i stood at the counter talking to dana and seeing hannah and someone said, do you have any books to buy?
i put down the book i'd accidentally picked up
and replied, "no, i have a lot of books. probably if i could take all the words they contain and scramble them up enough, i'd have all the books here. so i don't think i need any more."

this past weekorso has been like crawling through a brightly-lit tunnel,
keeping my peripheral vision open and my blinders put away,
this refrain of not-getting-back-to-something-old, i'm doing-this-a-new-way,
and neonomads and buddies and
sometimes searching searching for lost objects in a house that is an organized, sparkling disaster zone.
(i mean disaster in a good way, like "catastrophes" like ice dams opening up and creating the channeled scablands. like close calls that make you realize how much you stand to lose. like catastrophic departures that put enough distance between you&you that the missing starts to hurt and then watching your love grow as independence flourishes and autonomy learns to coexist with codependence like gabe and vlad asleep with their paws wrapped around each others' disastrously furry bodies.)

today this happened to me:
i was walking by the sem co-op, on the phone with z, and boarded over the curb and almost went sprawling. dana was walking by and paused-laughed and i yelled "oh shit." ten feet later, i heard,
"you just cursed in front of a church!"
me: uh...(looking around for a church and all i see is the sem co-op but okay)...oops.
he: want to be friends?
me: sure. what's your name?
he: here. (offers me the piece of paper he's holding) do you have an email address?
me: yes...but can we be friends without email?
he: just read it. all my info is there.
me: okay. what's your name?
he: just read it.
me: i'm eliot.
he: bye!

friendship is complicated these days,
complicated like the scablands and globalization and kissing,
a crumpled-typed note addressed to "nice ones,"
pink soup.
complicated like dreams i'm not sure i want to share in case they come true
photographs that i'm not in because i remember the feeling of a body behind a camera
and check-ins and sometimes honesty that hurts
like face wash that stings and you know it's doing something
(unless it turns out it's bleach and acne is not as bad as corroded flesh)
and anyway, what is that makes one shiny?
in the end, no one wants to be alone but we're so good at being lonely.
as soon as i say, "i don't know you," we are something to each other and
i have been taking pleasure in the weaving and woving and wivening of threads and stories,
delighting in the doing-being-becoming-brilliance of my buddies
because if i am enlightening myself, it is because i am surrounded by sources of light.
and in these days which are waxing and waning by the hour,
my hunger for artifacts is checked by a growing taste for kombucha
or if those things aren't causal,
they're correlated by event C, the walls and floors and bruises and glittery eyebrows and earfuls of facepaint and long breakfasts and cowboy coffee
and these bits of being here and also not-here. mostly here.

my bike is sad today, but i am not.

oh and,
skillshare/potluck/d.i.y.seder at the bäo tonight! if you weren't invited and are on this blog, you're invited
now.

plenum und barbaren

hello fellow squids,
i find myself on a couch in schwabing-west, afloat in my head up to my ears.

i made it to the airport on friday in high spirits. the stewardpeople on lufthansa just kept offering us glass after glass of wine and then brandy/bailey's...absurd. e, my travelbuddy and "colleague," fainted twice on the plane for mysterious, possibly malarial reasons but we landed without catastrophe. couldn't find a way to call our couchsurfing host, christian, so we just showed up at his house which worked out okay after all.

that night, we went to the ludwig-maximillian-universitat where the students are striking, occupying the main student center (which is fucking echoingly huge) to demand free university education, democratization of education. in the plenum, they were also talking a lot about "bildung" vs "ausbildung"--something like self-edification/intellectual nourishment vs job training. tons of universities across germany, austria, and some of the university of california schools are occupied.

this place had been occupied ("besetzt") for about 2 weeks and this weekend i happened to walk into the international students' plenum on education reform. classes are stopped and apparently the students have a right to protest there (or so i was told), which is why they haven't been forcibly removed. i talked to a lot of people about their participation and why there is little organizing of a student movement (at uchicago, or among lots of schools, or internationally) in the US. of course a lot of it is privatization--how much can you protest when you've paid, or someone has paid, so much money for you to be at that institution? the accountability of administration and investors to the students and faculty is also clearly quite different at private US universities as compared to here in munich.

anyway, it was a pretty amazing thing to see...so many signs, people (a huge lecture hall full...maybe 300, 400? more?), lots of crusty-looking freaks and queermos and lots of "normal-looking" and impassioned kids...and all of this discussion about the facticity of science and what the purpose of the university is, whether happiness matters...happening openly, in the main lecture hall of the school with no "adults" in sight.

so yeah, that was cool. then some band started playing and e, jeanne, christian and i danced on the desks and drank and talked to kids. we did a radio interview...i'll let you know if i can ever find it online.

today, sunday, e and i slept till about 3p.m. and christian made pfannkuchen/german pancakes and then we wandered to this huge art/market festival (tollwood...some kind of semiannual thing) and i liberated So Much. it was the perfect setting--huge crowds, tiny booths, overpriced beautiful things...mmmm. i have some new little instruments for our house. then we found our way to this place that was doing reggae/jazz-improv (lelz you were basically there with me but you would have been able to jump onstage). also the walls in this place were fucking sick...there was a huge octopus (picture forthcoming), vomiting panda bears, lots o little buddies and tags [howyousayuhhhh] out the wazoo...

all in all, it's great to be speaking german, great to talk to other people who are traveling or working or doing cool stuff, push away some of my anxiety and come face-to-face with other anxieties (hrmhrmfinals, these things "queer" and "radical," what is awkwardness, the place of art in my life). i am missing the baohaus like woah and my attachments to people in general. i have so much of you inside of me.

love,
eliot

more info on the LMU occupation if you're interested
someone at the plenum talked about this site for int'l student movement