i haven't blogged in ages

There are reasons for this.

1. I've been traveling.
2. I didn't know what to say.
3. I suck.

Sometimes I forget that I blog for myself. I know that you guys read it, and nothing excites me more than someone coming up to me and saying, "Hey Clara, I hope this isn't weird, but I read your blog, and that post about [X] made me think..."
(Why anyone would think it's weird is beyond me. If I didn't want people reading my posts, I'd keep a diary.)
But all of that said, I blog because it sorts out what's in my head. The issue right now is that my head feels pretty sorted out, which doesn't make for especially stimulating blogging.

When I look back on posts of the past (note to self: this is alliterative), I love scrolling through spring of '09. That's when "mentally unstable clara" was born, and I feel like I got some great blogging done in those days.

The other issue is that every time I try to write something, I can't help but imagine my mom calling me up and saying, "I read your blog post!" and me wanting to (A) hang up immediately or (B) die. I'm pretty sure I'm at a point in my life where I don't need my mother's input on every thought that goes through my mind, but I'm inclined to put those thought up here where she can see them, which anyone would rationally argue constitutes permission to comment.

These are my conundra right now (why does no one say "conundra"?). And that's why I've been a terrible blogger lately.

Love always,
Clara

italy in stop motion

Also, girls at a park.
I miss you guys a ton.

True story: Today I have a billion things to do and all of them are making me want to hyperventilate. I just came back to my computer and thought, "I have simply not been making enough lists." Erika has influenced me in so many ways.

Also, the other day I ate a Magnum Gold(?!). Now that Michelle can confirm that they exist, you guys need to find some pronto.

Love always,
Clara

it's been six days

Obviously I suck a lot, but also I've been really busy between moving out of my apartment in Bologna, embarking on an epic journey home (in macchina, no less), and roaming the city of Bern with David for the weekend.

Leaving Bologna was sad. That's all I can really say about that. Oh, and there was a transit strike. That sucked.
The thing about the Italians is that they're good at a lot of things (food), but they're also not good at a lot of things (bread) (my priorities are absolutely in the right place). One of the things they're not good at is taking Clara where she needs to go on the day that she needs to go there. Instead, they are good at absolutely refusing to do this.
The train-operators and the related professionals decided that the day I needed to get home was the right time to plan not to operate any trains. This led to at least one nervous breakdown, but my father the saint actually drove down to Bologna to pick me up. Added bonus: I got to bring Stella the bike.

Hanging around Bern with David was great. I'd always known that my Swiss friends and my Potomac friends were different, but it's never been so clear... it sounds cliche, but I keep realizing how much I love both groups for exactly what they are. Heathens and snobs, mostly, but I really do love you guys.

Today I've been busy with a project that should be live soon. The d'azeglio girls will know what this is I think. Get excited.

Love always,
Clara

reasons italy is great

• The men will stop their cars to tell you that you are fantastic.
• Gelato errday.
• Everything sounds cooler when you add "... in Italy" to the end.
• People wear harem pants in public all the time, which makes it socially acceptable.
• Italy is a country in which I have no family members.
• It makes American history look like a joke.
• Even the back alleys are pretty.
• I never really liked being thin anyway.
• It's acceptable to openly laugh at the strangers who hit on you.
• Everyone has a sexy voice.
• I've essentially forgotten that there is a drinking age anywhere in the world.
• Doing basic tasks becomes an adventure (e.g. "So today, I asked for directions, and I got them in Italian!")
• Strangers are so nice!

Love always,
Clara

names by which I have gone on the internet

clarabeyer
1998 - 2000. My dad set this email address up for me for some reason when I was like, six. I sent emails to my grandfather at F666666 and experienced Instant Messaging (tm) with CeCe Conner. (On that note, IMing is hard when you're not even sure about how to spell things.) This was back in the day when people didn't think their email addresses should have anything to do with their real names, so I was really quite progressive.

roklime104
2000 - 2003. I decided my real name was boring. Also, I liked the color lime green and I liked going rock climbing with my dad on sunday afternoons and I thought it was a subtle thing to imply that I "rokked," as it were. This was the same time that I developed a fear of heights, actually, and would climb up the wall with no difficulty only to have a panic attack at the top.

klairahgal48
2003 - 2007. I decided my real name was so boring that I couldn't even bear to use it in real life. My friends had names that started with the letter K and so I wanted to conform while making myself cool and different at the same time. At this time in my life, I tried to write novels that mostly focused on a girl named "Elizabeth" deciding to go by "Liza" when she moved to a new town. Also, my two first relationships developed on this IM account. In fact, they almost entirely existed on this IM account.

clarachick44@yahoo.com
2006. For some reason AIM was not enough. Victoria Thomas told me that Yahoo was the cool thing to have and we posted song lyrics as our away messages. I don't remember ever talking to anyone on this account.

clarazzle44
2007 - 2008. CeCe convinced me that this was a good idea. I was in that awkward phase where I realized that I do not spell my name with a K, but wasn't sure whether I wanted another fun handle or a "serious" email address. Also I had a thing for the number four, it appears. This was the time that I'm pretty sure all of us were "invisible" online all the time, just waiting to see.

@clarabellum
2008 - present. Twitter is the best. Mr. Abbott, my seventh grade advisor and American History teacher, used to call me that, because I was smart, I suppose. When I was constructing my new clever mature internet identity, this seemed like a way that I wanted to portray myself.

csb324
2008 - present. When I set this up, I knew I needed a gmail account but wasn't sure for what. I was in the mood to be cryptic (a la F666666) when most people on the internet were using their real goddamn names. Clara is countercultural as shit. You know. The standard.

Love always,
Clara

florence and le ragazze

I'm sitting in my kitchen watching The Office and reading The Oatmeal and eating italian cheese singles.
Earlier today, we sat in the park and ate cake and cheese on crackers and drank wine and listened to Taylor Swift.
I seriously am beginning to think I live a charmed life. Sliced cheese and cake and Taylor Swift and wine and The Office are some of my favorite things.

Yesterday a bunch of us went to Florence. I bought some leather sandals, and we saw the Duomo (which is much more impressive from the outside, not to be an Italy-snob) and had what was probably the best meal of my life. I had some seriously green gnocchi with tomatoes and bacon-pieces, and sea bass, and then we shared some cheesecake and tiramisu.

I really want to come back to Italy when I'm older. Maybe I'll work here for a year or something and teach English. Even to be an au pair for a summer later on would be awesome. I just need to be back in Italy in the foreseeable future, for an extended period of time, please.

Love always,
Clara

P.S. The woman who told us about the clips clipped a bag of clips to our door. The Italians are so much friendlier than the Swiss! In other news, I fail diplomacy.

we're not good at a lot of things

It turns out that living independently involves a lot of things that we don't know how to do. One of these is hanging things on a clothesline.

In related news, we ran into our sweet neighbor in the courtyard this afternoon.

Neighbor: Always there are things here! Then you must wash them again!
Me: I know! Mi dispiace molto...
Neighbor: It's okay... There exist... clips!
Me: Oh, we don't have any. So sorry!
Neighbor: I will gift you clips. I will put there!

Seriously, we're not good at a lot of things. But we have really nice neighbors.

Love always,
Clara

not naked

In the following dialogue, consider the fact that the italicized words were shouted out the window to our downstairs roommates.

Erika: Guys! Come up! We're naked!
Me: That's not true!
Erika: I guess I shouldn't say that out the window. We're fully clothed!
Me: Yeah!
Erika: We're actually wearing nun's habits! 

Tonight is Erika's birthday and we're having a grand old time. Get ready for stories. Last night I talked to a Canadian about women's rights in France and tried to scale a wall.

I am going to miss Bologna so much.

Love always,
Clara

mind-grains

Michelle: Clara's mind-grains can tell the weather, and I can tell the romance.

Michelle has come back from an evening. The rest of us have been doing homework and trying to find somewhere to watch Harry Potter. She is just full of stories.

Homework sucks. The heat sucks, and migraines suck (even if they can predict the weather), and people who can't figure out the past participle in english even though they're from Nebraska suck, and feeling like a giant inflatable balloon sucks.

But Italy is wonderful.

Love always,
Clara

have i really not blogged since verona?

My apologies.

Love always,
Clara

lalalala i feel better

Problems, consider yourselves solved.



Love always,
Clara

letters to juliet

But really. We're going to Verona tomorrow. I'm wearing a floral dress and I'm going to hum to myself about love all day long.

I'm tempted to write Juliet a letter, not about my love life (interesting as that might be to exactly-no-one-other-than-me) so much as about myself.

I've been thinking about self-esteem lately, see, because it has been pointed out to me that one must live with oneself, hopefully, for a very long time. Unless you can see yourself as the greatest damn thing that's ever happened to the world, it's going to be really lame.

Rather, imagine you had a twin, but your twin sucked. I mean, insert whatever adjectives you will into the next bit of this, but in my head this hypothetical twin is awkward and ugly and always says the wrong thing at the wrong time, and people don't like this hypothetical twin at all. Now imagine your twin came with you everywhere and just embarrassed you at every turn, and people couldn't tell the two of you apart. That's a bit what it's like not to like yourself all that much.

There are parts of me that I love (and they tend to be the bits I identify with the most - smart, offbeat, cute, et cetera) but there are also bits that I don't, and I have to bring them around and feel ashamed of them. To hell with that.

And then there's the fact that commentators (I cannot call them journalists, but they are undoubtedly participants in "the media") are constantly throwing us information about how my generation is too in love with itself. We're too entitled and too self-absorbed and we never had to go all the way to the library to look something up and we should get off their lawns. (I really think that's all there is to this issue. The baby boomers are upset, like every generation before them, that the new generation is doing cool stuff.)

The point is, I'm trying to ignore all of that and reject this ridiculous mindset and acquire self-esteem someplace. And, as I've learned, writing about things seems to help.

Love always,
Clara

THE ARCADE IS ON FIRE

The last couple days have been a fantastic whirlwind that I cannot begin to describe. On monday I peeled eleven pounds of apples. On tuesday I went to Milan to see an Arcade Fire concert. Today I think I'll clean the kitchen.

At the concert, the moon was matching my tattoo (a waxing crescent. Getting anything waning permanently installed on my body would surely fortel a premature death, and that's no good at all), and it occurred to me that I'm nineteen, at an Arcade Fire concert in Milan, and this may be as good as it gets.

I mean, I hope not, but if it is, then it's not like I have that much to complain about.
How much in life can anyone really ask for?

Anyway. These are #whitegirlproblems. The last few days have been awesome though.

Love always,
Clara

basil battle

Erika: Have you blogged about your day of nothing?
Me: Not yet. That's the thing about nothing days. There's nothing to say, really.

The most exciting thing I did today was search for basil, but let me start from the beginning.

I've been feeling gross lately, with a sore throat that hadn't gone away for a while, so yesterday I decided it was time to call a doctor and find out what exactly was wrong with me. I more or less had diagnosed myself with viral tonsillitis, but I don't exactly have the medical authority to make that kind of call.

I called the doctor that we'd been told to call this morning, and he said he'd come over and do a house call (why don't we have those in America, by the way? Do we? Have I just never found a doctor who does them?) in about an hour.

In that time, Erika and I decided it would be a good idea to clean the kitchen, so that he would not be shocked by the conditions in which we live. We're really not bad. We do spend a lot of energy on kitchen-cleaning. During this cleaning period, I took a box of fresh basil off the kitchen table and put it somewhere.

The doctor was wonderful (and confirmed that whatever I have is a virus and therefore all I can do is pop ibuprofen and sleep). He was actually from Alexandria, had worked at the hospital at which I was born, and knows my grandfather. There's something very comforting about being in the presence of someone who knows your grandfather. Anyway, then I went back to sleep for a while.

Fast forward to a little while ago, when I realized it was almost nine thirty and I hadn't had any dinner. Caprese salad seemed like a quick and easy thing, so I got to chopping tomatoes and mozerella. And then it was time to find the basil.

The basil was not in the refrigerator. The basil was not in the part of the cabinet where I tend to put things. The basil was not on the couch. The basil was not in my bedroom. The basil was nowhere to be found.

Me: Where would basil go? Where does Clara put the basil, when Clara does not put the basil where she should put the basil?

It has yet to be seen. I ended up using dry basil from our spice cabinet instead. Take that, basil bastard.

Erika: Say hello to the eggs!
Me: Hi eggs! Oh they're cute.
Erika: Aren't they? They have no idea they're about to be charred...
Me: Hey, we're going to put you in very hot water, and then eat you!
Erika: Don't tell them! They'll run away! Like the basil! My god, Clara, what did you say to the basil?!

Love always,
Clara

heaven

Erika: This is literally heaven for me right now. This song, white wine, Italy, and zucchini in a pan.

Michelle: You're so smart! That's why we hired you!

Love always,
Clara

show and tell

Sometimes I get excited that I'm somewhat able to communicate in italian. Then I remember that my abilities are about on par with your average first grader.
Your average first grader who has some very particular language-related learning deficits such as a spontaneous inability to conjugate.

Today we were hanging out with our language partners (some wonderful Italians from the University of Bologna). This point was abundantly clear.

Lusine: Ho comprato un grande limone! [I bought a big lemon!]
Marco: And?
Lusine: That's it!

Our stories have the sophistication of a show-and-tell in elementary school. "Um... my favorite movie is Elf... it is very funnier... yeah... I love Elf."

Ich liebe Bus*, basically.

Love always,
Clara

*If that didn't make sense to you, roll with it, because it's sort of an inside joke that I have with myself regarding my own inability to speak German when I was fifteen. Literally translated, it means "I love bus."