C'est Nice

(This was written earlier today on my train trip to Lancashire, England, where I am right now. I know. I can barely follow myself.)

There needs to be some adage along the lines of:

If you think things are shitty now, wait until you fall into that pile of crap.

I’m sitting in the waiting room of the Carlisle train station. Where is Carlisle? That’s a very good question. My answer is: who the fuck knows? It’s somewhere in between Leeds, Lancaster, Edinburgh and Glasgow. I don’t even know whether I’m in England or Scotland, though I guess it doesn’t much matter. “How did you get there?” you ask. I would say you are a very astute person, much more astute than I, for I cannot answer the question.

If we really want to point fingers, we can begin by pointing them directly at the internet. Last night, I got into Edinburgh, made it to my hostel to find that, lo and behold, my hostel has free wireless internet! What, ho! Bounty, abounding, and all that. So I plug in, and everything’s fine. I e-mail someone I’m supposed to meet up with there (late, to be fair), check out various and sundry activities that I’m thinking about taking part in, doing last minute checks of trains I’m supposed to take. It’s lovely.

I went out and had a bite at the Elephant Room, where J.K. Rowling supposedly began scribbling Harry Potter onto napkins (I must say, their napkins are quite good for writing, though not that great for wiping your face, but I digress). I had an excellent cup of chili. I went along to a bar recommended to me by a friend in Nice, the Brass Monkey (a pattern?), which was a classy bar. They have a backroom that has the general feeling of a harem, but has a large movie screen on which, supposedly, they often show movies. I had been hoping for a pint, a movie, and maybe striking up a conversation with someone. I got the first thing, but not the latter two. I drank half my pint in silence, and found no one to talk to. But it was okay, I chalked it up to fatigue.

But then, upon arriving back at the hostel, I made the mistake of going back to the e-mail. Literally just as I was getting ready to close down the machine, I got an e-mail from my contact in San Francisco with the Parks and Recreation department, who was answering some questions I’d e-mailed him, among them saying that all of the positions at the day camp I had been hoping to work for had been filled. Now, let me explain: I will still have a job in SF this summer, I just won’t have my ideal job description. The way I reacted, however, you’d think a close friend or relative had just died. I immediately began feeling oppressively lonely. I looked around the hostel for someone who I might be able to at the very least bitch to, but everyone there had a general feeling of into-themselves-ness. I had to work hard not to burst into tears right there at the table. It was, at the very least, trying.

And this isn’t even the part I really blame the internet for. Next, I started looking up the quickest way to get back to New York. I was in a state of panic, loneliness, and just slightly (half a pint’s worth, anyway) tipsiness. I didn’t do anything to rash, but I did text my friend Charlotte, who is currently visiting her Grandmother in the north of England, and asked her if I could go to hang with her for a while. She texted back, probably scared out of her mind that something dreadful had happened. I spent the next 13 hours going back in forth in my head what to do... stay on my original trip and risk possible extreme depression and loneliness in the highlands of Scotland? Or scrap the trip, go to Charlotte’s grandmother’s house, hang out with my friend, and then go home?

It was a pretty miserable 13 hours, let me tell you. I tried to go to some of the museums this morning, and almost ended up crying in the middle of the Scottish National Gallery. Quickly, I realized it was the indecision that was killing me, and I decided that, although things could turn out fine up in the highlands, there was no real need for me to be there, and it would be good to hang out with Charlotte a little more, especially if I got any other job rejections. I also realized that one of the reasons I was feeling so yucky was that I had had very high hopes for Edinburgh, and the fact that I was bailing on it made me feel... wussy? There is a machismo thing in here somewhere, a not-giving-up thing, but there’s also the idea that eventually you’ll stop touching the electrified cupcake. I rejected the machismo, and still feel like a little bit of a loser for doing so. But anyway. I wrote a letter to Edinburgh on a napkin, which I think I’ll reprint here.

Open Letter to the City of Edinburgh:

I wish I could say in my defense that I tried really hard to combat my lonliness. That I called in all my contacts, that I made a real attempt to meet people, new people, to connect, to make the most of a difficult situation. But I didn’t. I let the negative energy wash over like a tsunami, and didn’t try to swim to higher ground or to find shelter. And I gave up.

I have no defense, and all I can offer to you is that it’s me. Another time, we could have become great friends, inseparable perhaps. But I wasn’t here, wasn’t in it to win it. Perhaps I was ready to give up before I had reason to, and then mildly bad news (delivered parenthetically) showed me despair, and from there I found my own way out (the possessive pronoun is, at best, a courtesy).

It was a confluence of factors that conspired against you, but it was still up to me to bear the weight of them, not you. And maybe I couldn’t. Maybe my panic was my subconscious (or whatever) telling me that I had bitten off more than I could chew. I have no problem admitting that mistake. They say if you’re going to walk into walls you should run into them; but isn’t it better to be running, grazing walls, then either smacking into them or walking? A compromise to reduce the risk. But then, that’s always sparated me from those that seem to succeed: my unwillingness to shove myself out on a limb and hope it doesn’t snap, or that I get gobbled up by some bird of prey. But osme qualities are intrinsic. What if I’m just not a gutsy person? Again, not your fault, but I’ve managed to make you pay. Sorry about that.

Thankfully, you don’t seem bitter, having given me a free bottle of cider, part of a game I wasn’t even aware I was playing. Those are the best games, because if you win, you win, and if you lose, well, no harm done. Much unlike the incipient cause of my departure. No one would ever call it a game, besides our friends at Milton Bradley, but it is one. One we acknowledge has losers and winners. Keeping score is for all intents and purposes impossible. The sports pages filled with statistics don’t come close to the sheer largess of numbers that one uses to follow this game, and it’s pleasures. I meant to write players, and I have some trouble identifying the source of the slip.

Once when I was in high school, someone in a class of mine cheated on a standardized test. The company that writes the test asked us to give written testimonials. The instructions at the top told us to not cross out anything, but to explain why whatever we wrote was erroneous, why we think we wrote it. It was interrogation of the kind seen on cop dramas by paper proxy. It was wholly uneffective, owing to the inevitable nihilist or existentialist or whatever ist you subscribe to’s dialectic train crash of the mind. We all knew who did it, and none of us ratted him out, and I’m doubtful if he ever got caught.

So was he the risk taker? Is he living the life that flits into my mind whenever the phrase “happily ever after” is mentioned? Would this guy even find himself here, friendless, lonely, and entirely unmotivated to rectify the situation? It’s a useless question; one can’t plug two different people into the same social/circumstantial formula and hope that the two results mean anything, especially when placed next to each other.

But, none of this matters particularly. I am taking responsibility for my train crash, for you being spurned. I flew into it like a mosquito released in the general vicinity of a bug lamp. I went Zap, and after that there was nothing left to do but go somewhere else. To change the formula. I may regret it greatly, I already do, but know that I’d also regret it if I made the opposite decision. There it is and none of it matters, because I’m sorry.

All right, so maybe a little corny. But hey, it was therapeutic.

When the shit got deeper, however, was when, attempting to change trains in Carlisle from my train in Edinburgh to my train to Long Preston, near where Charlotte’s grandmother lives. The lady at the Edinburgh station told me the wrong transfer station. I don’t know still which one I should have gotten off at, just that I got off and found myself stuck in Carlisle for about ninety minutes. I’m finally on a train that’s going where I need to go, but I feel even crazier now than I did yesterday, and that, my friends, is saying something.

Anyway, now my plan is to spend the weekend with Charlotte, go up to Glasgow when she goes back to Nice to see another Niçois friend who lives near Glasgow, Gillian. Spend a couple of days with her, take the ferry to Belfast, where I’ll be staying with Irish Claire’s parents and hopefully hanging out with her friend Fra who I met in Nice a week or so ago, then return to Dublin to stay with Brena Clark and family, who made me feel extremely welcome when I was there before. And then go home, perhaps May 9^th, if I can change the flight. I have to work out a few other things before, but I’ll keep everyone posted.

Until then, I’ll be writing on napkins.