Second Thoughts

I’m on the plane from London to New York, a friendly flight attendant made an espresso for me fresh, and I’ve decided to try to write something down.

It’s been a whirlwind trip, a weekend in Oxford, one in which the shock of jet lag (not to speak of adjusting) kept me confused about my thoughts and identity on a pretty consistent basis. Along with the fact that this confusion and missing identity was already the case all of last week (I'll say that without expanding), as time winds down on this Sunday evening/morning things are slowly coming into focus. Creamy espresso helps. So does The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

It was a brilliant blue sky on Friday there, which was surprising both because one expects clouds in England, and because every other time I’ve been to a famous university, it’s been gray. Saturday the clouds showed up for the afternoon, and today it rained.

I’m talking about the weather, which is boring. It was a needed weekend. I left New York and my own recently obsessive solipsism with it, and tagged along with E., getting a sense of her life there, her friends, and how much her life revolves around the newly-acquired sport of rowing. Met all the friends who are an extension of that sport, along with a few others. There’s a lively spirit there, not the reserved intellectualism that I somehow imagined. It felt enlivening to be back in Europe in the British Isles, back in Oxford after a short visit last time. There’s a smell to it, something, a cheekiness to conversation and lots of up-beat ways of saying words, placing the accent at the end. I find myself automatically adopting the way of speaking, which I noticed that I do even with foreign accents while I was traveling in Europe. We would be in Italy, and if I was trying to communicate with an Italian I would speak English with a sort of Italian accent, as if that would make it easier. I am trying to figure out if that approach is empathetic or imperialistic.

This new Virgin Atlantic plane feels really strange: all the lights are white halogen, quite cold, and the bathroom is spacious and lit with blue light. It feels like a nightclub.