Immersion Day

What a beautiful day in Italy. It was a bit cloudy this morning I guess, so my host mother decided today was a bad day for the beach, a decision I was excited about as I’d been apprehensive about it (who gets apprehensive about the beach? That is unnatural). Instead, we met for lunch at her friends house, where we ate some sort of potato pie, paninos, and red wine poured over peaches which tasted like sangria & jungle juice mixed together (red wine was not my first choice for a morning after, but what can you do – the peaches were great!). After, we drove up to Campeggio, the locals Fiesole. It. Was. Amazing. The clouds here are so defined, weather systems watchable. That shouldn’t seem so strange to me. Clouds roll in, and then rain commences. It’s that simple. The hills overlooked all of Florence, the Duomo, everything. To the left, I felt more of that uneasy feeling I had on the plane ride over of the panic of just being lost, of not knowing north from south, up from down, how large of a land mass one is standing on. Also frightening to me, which I find very surprising, is the idea of being unimportant, or of my location being completely inconsequential. Most of my life I have been “somewhere”, cities connectable to large urban centers, connected by familiar freeways, locations deemed important simply given their national affiliation (America). Looking out of the plane window over what were to me nameless small villages dotting the Tuscan countryside, I can’t explain it, a sort of stunting disorientation. Hello, ego.

Fifteen minutes down the road we stepped over a divider onto the hillside, tall green grass dotted with olive trees, put down our things and laid back.

Sometimes, like a dream, the world curls itself around you and paints a perfect afternoon. Sometimes you are a foreigner, lying on your back on a Tuscan hillside laughing at jokes you don’t understand with near strangers. Some things like these are translatable: a full belly, the sense of limitless time, thick clouds rolling in to cool the valley. On our walk back the rain came, gentle and cool, following us down the street and all the way home.

Tomorrow. I’m excited now for classes to start (and not just so I have a reason to get out of the house). I miss California and my friends there. Or who used to be there. Its hard to grasp that their absence isn’t something which can be resolved by my own return. Much easier to believe my presence will bring things back together again.
I have been listening a lot to the Broken Social Scene album and I do think it’s as good as the last. It makes me miss Los Angeles, the bustle, the people, the great big something. What is it? The pervasive self-importance that lends the insignificance required to live quietly, location doing all the busy work. You don’t need to do anything in Los Angeles to be interesting. But it isn’t that; there is a buoyancy there in the hope that is carried, the collective desire to unfold. You come to Los Angeles to “make it”, you don’t come because you believe that failure is possible. You stay through the traffic, through the smog, through the sprawl and you focus. You attain. But, of course, that isn’t it either. It’s just Los Angeles.