i missed the bus

I miss busses every day. I have to take two separate busses to getfrom my place to my school--the bus trips aren't long, it's just that London is a mess of streets and it's rare you take one to get to whereyou want. And the busses are the old double decker style, and usuallyfun to ride unless you've had too much to drink. Nonetheless, bussesmust be caught, and i am an expert and how not to catch busses. Part of it is inattention, part of it is obsessiveness. I would sit at abus stop and record every time and bus number if i didn't have ahundred things to do. Usually, one of those things is actuallycatching the bus. Missing a bus uually makes you feel like you are losing time. Time out of a schedule that is crafted, not by you, and not necessarily by a higher power, but by the world as a whole. In the complex system ofthe world, you had a place, and it was on that number 29 bus that just whisked past you. You can usually even watch them pass by. A visual marker of your inability to flow with your own program.

And this sort of thing happens all the time, not just with busses. Meetings, mail calls, TV shows, trains, dates, friends' parties, salesat H&M, double features at the cheap theatre, late night exhibitionsand due dates for presentations. Sometimes i get it right, and iremember to unlock my cell phone before i get the bus to the train tothe plane to Italy for the weekend, to see my parents and to give themimportant mail. But sometimes i miss. I think it's inevitable. Ithink anyone living in a city will only get 60% of it right. At best. I never really felt this way in St. Augustine. I never felt therewas a bus passing me by that i was missing. I don't mean thismetaphorically. I mean, there is nothing operating, really, to tell you if you're on time or not. My life there was, show up for work,leave work, relax myself until i was feeling unstressed, and then work on a project. Do it again. It wasn't so much that it wasn't a busylife; it was more that i never had to feel like i was/wasn't doing theright thing. Anything was ok, because "nothing" was so pervasive. I realize this is starting to sound like gibberish, but it's late and there are loud girls saying "Oi" next to me, and they won't fucking shut up.

I got a Chinese girl drunk today. I'm proud of that. Me and my greek friend, Demitrius, took out Mai Cheun and ordered her beers. It's officially a secret, but Chinese people are fucking hilarious drunks. Not on purpose, of course.

how are you doing in London?

short answer is that i am fine. If you took a statistical average of my moods over the past 3 months, running the gamut from urban wonder to gutter depression, the average, with a high degree of variability, would be "just fine." Of course, i don't think that i have been "just fine" since i got here, owing basically to the fact that London is both the perfect and the worst city for someone like me. Somedays i am working crazy, devising psych experiments and reading papers, writing on consciousness and what memory might look like in the brain, and then i come home and stay up all night with Greeks and Indians (london is full of greeks and indians), drinking and telling stories in ways that only cross-cultural groups can enjoy. Like a benetton commercial.

Some days are not so good, and they typically involve money, because most anything in this city involves money. London is, by far, the most expensive city on this earth. Never mind the crappy (and getting crappier) exchange rate with the dollar, just getting across the city can cost you $2 (bus), $4 (tube), or $10 (taxi), and that's just from my apartment to school. And i havent even mentioned my program, which is sort of a great example of why i have been sticking to neuroscience rather than psychology; my program is in the psych dept, and it's no surprise to tell you that psychologists are roughly 95% of the time full of horseshit. I don't know if it's a mark on the greatness of my New College education, but i learn little in the classes. The saving grace is the project i'm doing, which is good and is with good people, who are neuroscientists and not psychologists and like facts and socially relevant information.

What keeps me happy, what keeps me delighted and amused, is the details of history and the people around that i cannot help but become audience to. I live in an apartment within stone's throw of Harrod's, the hugest department store in the world, and also the poshest. Right now i sit in a hall 10 feet from the preserved body of Jeremy Bentham, the original Libertarian. People here speak in British accents ALL DAY LONG. How could i not be constantly amused?

The key is not to be lonely. Scratch that, the key is not even to be alone. I used to think there was significance in the difference between the two, but living in London is all or none, you're in or you're out, right now, join the party or suffer. So i'm trying to join the party, trying to date Finnish girls and Swiss girls, trying to drink half as many pints as my British friends and still be able to walk home.