Saturday, August 16, 2014

Done my hair up real big beauty queen style.

View of Warwick from Caesar's Tower in the castle
Hot damn.

Just a malty half of August, and then apparently the Darkness descends. If nothing else, blogging reminds me how quickly time goes by, almost six months since I left San Francisco, so I default into having fun.

Sticky summer days from the double heat waves, and I avoided asphyxiation on the Tube, where the temperature is hotter than the limit for transporting livestock. People smell like rotting almonds and I woke up on a bus to someone rubbing my knee. Everyone's in heat these days.

A distinct Stark family seriousness permeates the warnings I'm getting about winter's arrival, but until this rain turns to the white stuff, I'm going to continue amusing the sundry Brits by oversharing that I've gone commando ("I haven't worn pants in three weeks!").

That and eating salt beef bagels while half-naked by the shining canals of sleepy Vicky Park.

Terrace lunch o' oily little fishes in a tomato sunflower seed soup, crusty Turkish bread.
I needed a filing rack, found one by the rubbish bins the next day. I thought about how awesome a small nightstand would be, and came across one in black two streets down. #universeprovides (I still remember how I made Sir Erik Lehnert agree with this when fireworks just started going off at a hidden beach south of Fort Funston right after sunset).

It's incredibly Californian of me, but on a certain level, I kind of do expect things to work out.

And as summer closes up shop, I can agree with the British that their summers are pretty magical when you come down to it. There's something about the glowing hazy days where you just sprawl with your friends in the grass until you're so toasty warm that you dive into the communal swimming lake, your toes sinking into the earthy greenness at its depths.

In a wedge of Islington that feels like Oakland, we write one wish on a trio of golden balloons, and I scratched out something embarrassingly heartfelt. I'm handed a tarot card that tells me to take full responsibility, and then a girl plays violin and we're just rolling around on tattered blankets in the grass. A paper lantern floats up with a hearty cheer and barely clears the trees before probably setting the council home next door on fire.

Our Kasbah in the time of Flood
And the music festivals!

The Lambeth County Fair was foggy reggae and sharp cider, pineapple mai tais in the long Brixton market for twilight, and cheap pizza. When the sky opened up and everything sank into torrents and torrents of wet, we all fled for the closest tent. If this had been the sequel to Noah's flood, we would have realized we chose poorly since the "Lambeth City Development Tent" is not the sexiest name for a post-apocalyptic commune.

We sang the opening chant to the Lion King song until little heads start popping out of adjacent tents and hollering that the rain was letting up. Note to self: curry goat is great for plodding half-drenched towards more food.

On the way home, I kept thinking various street incense peddlers were selling palo santo. I should have brought a little stick of it to London, such a comforting smell.

No luck finding it here yet, though I haven't been looking too hard.

A little girl and I missed our green light because we were staring at the sunset.
Royal Courts of Justice: "Can I just sway here back and forth and pretend I'm the Amazon from Diablo?"
Homerton is a cozy little subworld of Hackney, and I'm in love with the supermarket manned by Turkish bros downstairs, where I'm slowly making my way through their meat pies and tubs of hummus. Besides the Turks, it's also a Kurdish populace, as well as a big community of the Hasidim up north.

On these rainy walks home down Mare is a Sainsbury's where I periodically buy two egg tarts for 75p (what is this nutmeg atop?). And the walk to and from work is something I kinda look forward to every day, just fifty minutes in the morning and early evening to decompress or muse about things. I'm usually on the terrace watching the sun go down until the wind blows my basil plant over and threatens to tear skin.

I swear these ladies aren't trying to sell you anything from Anthropologie.
Walking through London never gets old, and I make it a point to wander down sidestreets when I can. Everything is old, just musty history all the way down. And no church fatigue yet, since I still pop into each little chapel and cathedral, and the gothic-variant sprawl is pretty glorious.

Summer sun bleeds out the colors while we rotate on a wooden wheel next to a thousand-year Roman wall. City commuters huff and tut at us on our perpetual motion machine, but we're happily getting nauseous and centrifugal.

I talk us into walking across Tower Bridge to hunt for a giant blue parrot the size of a bus, but the nod to Monty Python is gone.

Copacetic.

Hampstead Heath = summer.

They haven't spotted you yet.

Dharmender after I stuff him with french toast, sausage, and melon prosecco.
For Heist, we were a squad of eight rookie criminals breaking into a five-story building to steal a pricey painting. Dark little room for the awkward landlord to give us code names: Rhino Hole, Beavertooth, etc.

You may call me Illegal Practice for future dastardly deeds.

With immersion games, you suspend your disbelief in order to slip into character, but there really were some moments where a fight-or-flight-or-poop mentality kicked in.

We sledgehammered a wall to gain access to the adjacent office building, slipped around security cameras, and then I was sent to go turn off the next set of surveillance. I walk into the server room in my janitor garb and a security guard immediately appears in front of the blinking machines. Third time was the charm here, as Nina faked a five-alarm epileptic seizure and Zorah deactivated everything.

We were all captured after stealing the painting when the guards all charged in and noticed the door ajar. To our credit, three of us kept escaping from custody, and I ended up breaking the game, hiding in a pitch-black room when...all the doors locked down.

I whispered to Duchess on my walkie-talkie, tried all the musty windows, if only I could have sweated my way to safety.

I ironed a shirt for the first time in my life for this. Be proud of me.
I am now one of those people who ask human rightsy questions at stockholder meetings. The BT annual general meeting was a ton of fun and it was an incredible experience that I'm glad Aditi and I both got to share.

And we even got a little press in The Guardian and I blogged about it on Huffington Post!

Phil didn't seem as enthusiastic as the exclamation point would indicate.
I had such high hopes for the co-op that invited me to interview, and I honestly left so disappointed that it almost bled in the mindmap into me being irrationally mad. The softball question was what co-op life meant to me, and after talking about how one of my favorite things is coming home to a scrappy crowd of merry folk handing you food and a beer, everyone at the interview looked taken aback, if not offended.

"We really want to make sure you understand that we are eight separate people living eight separate lives here."

"We rarely will eat together, but you can leave extra food out when you cook for yourself."

"There's a list if you want to complain to someone about fixing something."

I push a little on what exactly they mean by co-op, and honestly it comes down to how they have no landlord. It's weird that this British definition disqualifies many American co-ops, and most Americans wouldn't consider them to be a co-op either (apparently British and American egg regulations also outlaw each other). And is the fact of paying rent to a different entity really something to bond over?

They have an occasional party together, but in terms of community, that's about it. Not enough to stumble home on the daily through a dark set of angry tunnels and trundle across broken glass, that's for sure.

They invite me to the next round of interviews anyway, and I just kinda snort and chuckle at the same time.

Snuckling is what that would be called.

All I mutter for a few minutes after seeing this was, "That's actually a castle. Woah."
I get some credit for not making any Downton Abbey references all day.
Warwick Castle is amazing on a weekend trip with Monsieur Kitchen, and as we duck through the portcullis, I can almost see the pock marks that invaders might have left in the stone. I get my fill of jousting, and most small boys are swinging wooden swords at anything that moves. Plate of piggy with all the veggie sides my mind's eye can envelop, and then some sponge cake to christen it.

Giant birds of prey swoop overhead three times a day, and between shows, they're just sad and tired.

Simba, this will one day all be yours.
In all the glamour of Castle Time, I was really most impressed by the British love for orderly queuing.

People continuously poured onto the top of a tower and with just a tiny spiral staircase going down, Brits just automatically formed a spiral queue where nobody cut anyone else, there was no yelling, and all was orderly.

I'm still not used to how flat the horizons are here, and everything is tiltshifted pasture.

Sir Kitchen leading us up and down more spiral staircases ad infinitum.
I like to mix up how I consume beverages.
For Yelp's 10th birthday party, Nina and I decked ourselves out in white, or perhaps she did, and I just bought a cheap cotton shirt from Primark.

Oodles of food since we got in an hour before all the plebes, but my favorites were the two French guys, Jules and Michel, who make up Jumi Jam. And they even bag me a jar of pear & earl grey jam to take home.

White roses and baby's breath, and I'm clutching it all in a mason jar on the sleepy bus bump home, nodding off and catching it over and over in the nick of time. 

It's like cupcakes were just naturally-occurring phenomena.
Zorah's birthday was the first party at my Homerton abode.

Perfect to-and-fro of people as we duck onto the terrace between rain showers, and then the neighbors start squawking about too much bloody noise between made at 11 pm on a Friday. 

Violet: "In my life as a small adorable dog, I have never received so much affection."

I still don't know what Pimms is, and I helped make three larger pitchers of it.
I recently tried to steal a painting with the two ruffians on the ends.

Bright-eyed Harkirit (I'm a fan of Greek epithets) delivering my red velvet cake to the Fun Sponge, who apparently turned seven.
I'm wrapped in my puppy paw blanket (Thanks Hannah!), having rice cakes and strawberries, wind whistling through the city, remnants of Hurricane Bertha wisping its way down from Cambridgeshire where it is flooding.

Pods of people sailing across the Thames
The quiet backglow of London's Chinatown
Finally caught Lilting by myself at the Hackney Picture House around the corner. And yeah, Ben Whishaw pushes a good majority of my buttons, but it's worth a watch. Hey, 96% on RottenTomatoes.

Theatre Four numbers sixty loamy green seats at most, with complimentary tea and biscuits for the few silvery people with wise things to say, talking about winter tubers in a washed out Scottish accent.

Star cookie insisted on a selfie.
I'm sure no one else thought to make a "This is Sparta!!!" comment
Next Thusrday, Chris and I are reuniting the three musketeers with Tristan. Most appropriately in Paris!

With Lincoln in tow, we have six full days in the City of Light to eat our weight in baguette.

Now go play yourself some psychedlic folk. I'd recommend Megafaun's The Longest Day.

Reprievers at Friday lunch spot. Lynn pointed out it's like a UN delegation.