different names for the same thing

13:55 Ha, Conservatives' new slogan is 'now for change'. Surely oxymoron. Next: 'Labour: takin' it easy'; 'Lib Dems for regulated dictatorship'. #

18:40 Tube Walk from East Acton: Wormwood Scrubs, swings, crows, canal, rusting industry, strange found objects & people not seen for 3 years. #

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Ahahaha. In 2012, as the Mayan Long Count comes to an end, the Prez leads America into The Singularity. Wearing bunny slippers. A little comic by Dan Goldman.

(Ancient, powerful witch Thessaly in the Sandman comic wore bunny slippers for a whole story arc as well, so for me they've come to symbolise being so damn competent that it becomes irrelevant whether or not you're wearing the right clothes to project an image of power. Which kind of works here as well.)

As is typical of me, I started a slightly more considered post about the inauguration but didn't finish it. Perhaps I'll get a chance later on.


Blue Monday hit us hard. It's been a bit grim around these parts. But here are some more things found on the web - mostly science-flavoured if not actually scientific - which have brightened things up:

Science Tattoos. Some of these are really beautiful - I love the carbon atom, and this diagram of the spread of an epidemic, and subatomic doodling. I wanted a tattoo for ages and never settled on a design, but these make me think I want one of a stylised, ambiguous image poised halfway between a diagram of an atom and a map of a solar system. Zoom in, zoom out.

An animated video on how to imagine ten dimensions. I saw this ages ago after squiddity told me about it, one night after Planet Angel (that was an interesting night during which I also heard about surreal numbers, but sadly when I looked them up I understood them not at all. I'm glad surreal numbers exist, though). But it just popped up again on my twitter feed. I don't know how well-founded it is but it's certainly fun.

Via undyingking, a graph showing which language people around the world refer to when they don't understand something, along the lines of "it's all Greek to me". Apparently lots of languages express incomprehension by saying "sounds like Chinese", but the Chinese say it sounds like "the Heavenly Script".

The discussion on the post is full of interesting comments too. Some Germans say "it's all Bohemian villages to me", which I can relate to - Czech is such a crazy pile-up of consonants. People wade in to wave the Esperanto flag and get told off. It's fun, in a quite geeky way.


And something not web-ephemera, though you can see pages from it at the author's website (I recommend you do. They are gorgeous): last night I got lost for hours in a graphic novel called The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, which Dan found in the library. It's a wordless story about an immigrant leaving his oppressive homeland to come to a strange new culture full of bizarre animals, peculiar mechanical devices and beautiful, incomprehensible script. It's full of fantastical invented things, and sometimes putting fantasy elements in a story about real-world issues can undermine it and make it seem like the author is making light of said issues, but in this story it really works because by creating an imaginary culture he makes us experience the immigrant's culture shock. I read it while listening to Ulrich Schnauss's dreamlike shoegaze electronica, which was just perfect. I wanted it to go on forever, and also to be able to draw better myself, and choked up a bit thinking about taking risks and new beginnings and such idealistic stuff. It is, in summary, Rather Good.


Hey, the sun's out and it's nearly the weekend. I'm coming down to London for Black Plastic tomorrow, rah! Rather looking forward to dancing to discrete songs with words, like I always used to. See you there?

This is bluedevi's subconscious mind. I'm sneaking back on LJ - quickly, while Conscious Mind isn't looking. If it notices I'm posting, the jig is up. Conscious Mind will start thinking and overthinking and getting all overwrought that it's been ages since it posted last, and decide that obviously what is required is a ten-thousand-word completely unnecessary Life Update, and then where will we be? Either stuck writing the damn thing for several days or not posting at all, that's where. And, quite frankly, I'm bored of not posting by now.

In fact I'm thoroughly bored of Conscious Mind's lily-livered objections to everything. "Oh but I can't do that, someone might think it sucked." "Oh but this is not as good as [insert world-famous awesome person here] and therefore there's no point." "Oh but wah wah mih mih." SHUT UP Conscious Mind. I've a good mind (hee!) to take over and shut you in the wardrobe where you can't make so much trouble.

Oh crap, it's spotted me -

It might take me a while to find the words to describe this last week. Certainly longer than I have before I go to catch my plane. It´s been beautiful and difficult and scary and glorious and exhilarating and I may never be the same again. Of which, hopefully, more later. But now I´m starting the long journey home. Flying to Lima tonight, and tomorrow night setting out on the punishing 18-hour flight.

I´m going to miss this town, the river view and the noisy motocarros and the heat that manages to be both baking and humid, the street tat sellers and the hymns drifting from the door of the cathedral. I´m going to miss the forest, with all its noise and swarming life and tangible spirit. I´ll even, in a perverse way, miss the endless variety of crazy bugs. They crawled in and out of cracks in the walls of the cabin I was staying in: shiny red ones, big brown crickets, a preposterous creature maybe 4cm long with big glowing green patches on its shoulders, like headlamps. Sometimes a golden sheeny lizard that moved like liquid would come in and hunt them. I watched the drama from my hammock in the candlelight. They couldn´t get me there.

The thought of home is so strange. "You´re going to have withdrawal symptoms," Dan said on the phone earlier, "I´ll have to get loads of plants to put around the flat." "Can you imitate bird calls too?" I asked him, and he obliged till I creased up with laughter against the wall of the phone booth.

And yet. I was dreading having to stop being Travel Me. I love being Travel Me. But since yesterday I´m almost eager to be back. I have a new sense of purpose. Get back home, do the next bit, throw myself at all my tasks and projects. Next! Bring it on! Woo!

Shame those things - and boyfriend hugs, and sprawling sleep without worrying about insect repellent - are on the far side of a horrible long leg-crampy itchy-face journey that goes through the Kafkaesque nightmare of US customs. But enh.

So down to the Anaconda Craft Market to grab a few last souvenirs, and then the last motocarro ride, and goodbye Amazonia. It´s been a great pleasure making your acquaintance. One day I´ll be back.

Back home forests are deep cool peace and balm for the soul, the feeling of your chest unclenching and your heart slowing down as you walk out of the jagged noise of the urban world into the quiet greenness. They´re somewhere to go when you´ve been run ragged, to restore yourself and get a treehugging fix to help you cope with the madness outside.

The rainforest is not like that.

Walking into the jungle on the first day of the trip felt more like getting off the airport bus in the middle of Bangkok. A million alien stimuli coming at you at once, some of them dangerous. Your brain spinning up to high speed, labouring to take it all in while also looking out for yourself. This is the pulsing, pounding, frenetic capital of nature. The traffic is mad, the nightlife is high-octane, the crime rate is sky-high (especially in the Murder Zone at the surface of the river where thousands of fish race to devour millions of insects before the birds can devour them) and the most amazing, unlikely, diverse, specialised stuff happens: creatures and plants fill weird little niches the way a big city supports funny little shops, oddball artists and products that only certain subcultures want to buy.

( ... )

Last night in the Hobo Hideout I managed to fall asleep though there was a room party going on nearby with chatter and terrible sub-sub-ambient, sub-Chillout-Moods music. What did wake me up was the man outside my door bellowing "Guys, turn it off and go to bed. I have a fuckin´ busy day tomorrow."

It´s the real backpacker hostel deal. Poky with shared bathrooms and dog-eared posters for local activities. But not what I hoped for, lots of other travellers hanging out in the common room. I was on my own in Lima and Pucallpa, intimidated by the chaos of the places and the sense of danger into posher hotels where you don´t meet people, and now that I´ve found my feet I want to talk to someone who´s having the same experiences as me. But very few seem to be on the move at the moment. I´m spending a lot of time at the Yellow Rose, the travellers´ hangout down the street from my hostel, slouching in their comfy chairs and drinking beer in the heat of the day, but it´s hard to break into people´s twos and threes and randomly say hi.

I was there earlier, having breakfast and watching a gecko clambering around on the wall, when I saw a mini-play unfold. Two older white guys were sitting near me. One with a white buzz-cut and jungle shorts and a petulant, slightly squeaky voice; the other big and paunchy with jowls and mournful John Kerry eyebrows. The squeaky one really didn´t like Bill Grimes, who is mentioned in the guidebook as someone who runs good jungle cruises. He kept saying "in this business..." so I figured he was a rival. He monologued for easily 20 minutes about all the things Bill does wrong on his boats and at his wildlife lodge. What happens if you´re showing someone the tame anaconda, it gets skittish and you´re sued for negligence? What happens if one of the monkeys bites someone and they have to get a rabies shot? What happens if your group meet a jaguar and you haven´t got a pistol? With the shared bathroom on the boat, what if someone needs to take a screamin´ shit? The word 'irresponsible' featured a lot. He got squeakier and squeakier as he went on and on. I wondered what Bill had done to him, what petty infighting went on in the clique of macho jungle men, and reflected that he wasn´t putting me off doing one of the tours at all, considering the amount of bias wafting off his words. The other guy fidgeted and sighed, repeatedly let his eyes glaze over and then caught himself, and now and then said something equivocal which suggested he thought Squeaky was overstating matters. Quite suddenly Squeaky stood up to go. "You have a good day," said the other guy. "I will," Squeaky said emphatically. I wondered. He appeared to be the sort of person who liked to exist in a state of outrage, so it seemed unlikely.

After various men engaging me in conversation in netcafes, I have discovered that the moment when a conversation becomes creepy is when they ask where your hotel is. Saying "So you don´t want friends?" when you refuse to tell them, then saying they want to come to your hotel because their cousin works for the company you´re booked on a tour with and they want you to deliver a special letter, does not make it better and is a good time to go and do something else. This is irritating when you´re in the middle of a post.

But unlike Squeaky I do not live in a state of irritation. I love it here. And though I thought it was just a pre-storm thing, it turns out the birds flock at dusk every day, presumably to catch insects. Which is cool.

It´s funny the effect losing my bag has had on me. I´d spent weeks carefully constructing this travel self, prepared for every eventuality. Scoured shops for clothes that would cover me up against the insects and dry quickly if I hand-washed them. Packed universal bath plug, two kinds of adaptor, earplugs, a mini-pharmacy. Hunted for tiny toiletries so I wouldn´t have to haul about big bottles of shampoo etc. The careful packing was proof against all the dire warnings and something I used to reassure all the people who were worried about me. It was a mental security blanket. And then it got lost, and I had the odd experience of having to re-buy everything haphazardly, having a foreign rucksack full of unfamiliar Peruvian products and an odd assortment of clothes, all the best of a bad lot rather than anything I´d have chosen. The security blanket is gone, and... I kind of like it. Only having a small bag is brilliant. I´d packed light but this little bag is even lighter. When I´ve been travelling before, the transitional bits between one place to stay and another have been an ordeal. Haul the big heavy bag to the new place as quickly as you can, dump it, lie and gasp for a bit and then explore. This way you can check out of somewhere in the morning, wander around all day, arrive at the next place in the evening and not even be tired. The line between essential and desirable things to bring has moved.

Then there´s language. I know a bit of phrasebook Spanish. I can book things and ask directions and stuff. Somehow (arrogantly, it seems now) I thought this would get me by. I was picking it up all the time, after all. But obviously it´s not enough to talk to people, to understand them, to express things beyond the sort of "Mrs Lopez works for Rover. She has a good salary" stuff in my Instant Spanish book. I am saying things are very good, with the genders mixed up half the time, and saying thank you a lot. And like I found in China, when a lot of your coping strategies revolve around language it feels pretty naked to be without it. But I´ve discovered something very interesting. If you haven´t got much language you are forced to be open and straightforward. You meet some little village kid who throws a handful of leaves over you to welcome you to her village and instead of trying to think up something sensitive and appropriate to say, you just ask what her name is. If you want to ask for something you just ask for it, just the words you need, without ringing it round with a maze of caveats, circumlocutions and apologies. You just say what you mean.

So I was lying on my mat on the floor of a wooden house deep in the jungle last night, staring up at the dark rafters of the banana-leaf-thatched roof. There was a crack in it where you could see one star. The room was full of zigzags of cricket noise, punctuated by dripping from the trees. And I realised, suddenly, that everyone in this house thought I was Dutch and none of them knew my name.

The guide/interpreter guy who had set it up for me to come here, the son of the painter (thereby hangs a tale), had gone home, as had the nice English-speaking boy who drove the mototaxi. I had heard the others, all exclusively Spanish-speaking but for a tiny Japanese girl with no English either, saying I was from Holland. It was what they heard no matter how many times I said "Irlanda". And when they´d spoken to me earlier they thought my name was Gloria or Ji-dah or Dray-da, and I´d say it again and they´d look puzzled, then shrug. It was just an impossible collision of consonants. So there I was, in the middle of the forest. I´d lost my stuff, I´d lost my language, and now it was as if I´d even lost my nationality and my name.

And that felt kind of liberating as well, so that I nearly laughed out loud. It was as if all the extraneous nonsense had been stripped off some fundamental thing that was me. But who ´me´ was wasn´t important. I´m Nobody, I thought, so I can be whatever I like.

Unfortunately all I could actually do at that point was go to sleep, but it´s the principle.

Hasty post: I´m about to get on a little local plane to Pucallpa, on the far side of the Andes in the beginnings of the rainforest. I´ll be staying in a jungle lodge on an oxbow lake of an Amazon tributary, on stilts over the water. From there it´s a riverboat to Iquitos, which you can´t get to by road, which is awesome. I thought I´d be all YAY YAY YAY SMELL YOU LATER LIMA but actually it´s grown on me a lot in the last day or so. I found my travel legs, I got out of the horrible Manhattan Inn and into the glorious faded-colonial-glamour Gran Hotel Bolivar in the centre of town, which only cost a couple of dollars more. I went to the brutal concrete pile of Museo de la Nacion, which was stuffed with fascinating folk art and the kind of place you can only find in a city. They still haven´t found my bag, but they say they´ll send it on to the next place I´m staying because it´s the airline´s fault, and at this stage I don´t care. I´ve bought a little backpack and a few essential bits and I am out of here.

(Clothes shopping in a supermarket in Lima was a weird experience. Everything was either polyester with shoulder pads, ruffled up-to-the-chin librarian prim, or tiny and made of spandex. So I am wearing a man´s T-shirt which I cut down with a scissors. Get this: on top of a design of tribal suns and bird shapes, it says "Forgive me for my mistakes, I´m still a kid learning the responsibility of being adult." I think this is hilarious.)

Anyway, must fly.

I am sitting in the North Terminal at Gatwick, waiting for the check-in desk to open. I am simultaneously a bit weepy, after listening to melancholy folk songs on the bus about leaving your lover behind to go a-wandering, and breathlessly excited the way I used to be on Christmas Eve as a kid.

It's been a hectic but brilliant week. Thank you to everyone who dined and partied with me for my birthday and who came to the exhibition launch. (Myself aside, it all looks fantastic, by the way. Go check it out if you have a chance.) But at last all the sorting has been done - or most of it - and I am off. I haven't slept properly and I'm knackered, but my god do I feel alive.

Typing furiously till the credit runs out: I'll get to Lima in something like 21 hours from now and collapse into the airport hotel, which is called the Manhattan Inn and looks tacky but reasonably undodgy. The next day I have a local flight to Pucallpa, up in the Andes, and some time I don't know what to do with before that because mum has made me promise not to go into Lima itself. She has a friend who lives there and says it's a crime-ridden hellhole. "They'll pull the earrings off your ears," she says. Hmm.

But I'd better check in. And find coffee. And carbs.

that is, both the Fringe and school coursework season, I will sleep for a week, and then I will do things like: Baking bread. Wandering at random taking photographs, wearing skirts that swish round my ankles, with no deeds to do, no promises to keep and no stress-knot in my stomach. Writing. Painting. Laundry. Seeing people I miss. Trying out that new brush which is sitting there looking at me, damn its nonexistent eyes. Reading the books which are also somehow staring reproachfully at me, whispering to me of the delicious juicy ideas inside them. Spending a few hours drawing with my Copic markers, not drawing anything in particular, just playing. Snuggling on the sofa watching TV which is neither useful nor improving. Going to the swimming pool across the road. Reading comics in bed with Dan. Dancing and talking nonsense late into the night. And so on. But for now... I'm about to run out for another insane evening. Just three more days like this to go.

If you're coming to the comedy at the Mitre tonight, you'll see a motion blur shaped like me there.