At the Library

Its been two weeks since I’ve written anything so I’ve relocated myself to the local library with my laptop to try and bang out some of what has been bouncing around in my head recently. I was hoping the silence of the library would be conducive to some creative output. Even when its quiet at home I still have trouble getting much done with my partner in endless procrastination, the Internet, right at my fingertips. There is wifi at the library as well but mercifully I’ve forgotten my login details. Turns out even the monastic environment of the Kensington library is full of things to keep me entertained. There is a healthy handful of local crazies scattered around the reference room muttering to themselves. There’s a man sat at the end of my table who looks just like Gene Wilder with his crazy-face on. He has a giant dictionary open in front of him and has been staring at the same spot on the page since when I sat down twenty odd minutes ago. Across the room a perfectly normal looking guy in a navy v-neck sweater vest is lifting and lowering a book laid flat on his palm. His eyes follow the book up, then back down, then back up, and back down again. Over and over again. Even in moments of excruciating boredom I’ve never resorted to this. Gene Wilder just bit the eraser off the end of his pencil and swallowed it, ew.

Looking in the other direction isn’t any less fascinating. From the window I can see onto the roof across the street where a construction worker in a neon jacket seems to be telling some kind of joke with to his two colleagues. He is jumping up and down and throwing his hands up in the air. I don’t really understand but his two friends roll their heads back in laughter so I laugh too. Then one of the others starts jumping up and down as well and they are both throwing their hands up and now its weird. I feel like I’m witness to some rooftop satanic ritual right above Kensington High Street. I wonder what the people with their mountains of study materials piled in front of them think of me… A school-marmish woman with a crazy birds nest of curly hair keeps glaring at me every time I pick my nose, which is pretty often.  I keep making eye contact with someone every time I look up. Nobody seems too dedicated to what they are doing, we’re all glancing around the room sighing and looking at each other like:

“This is so boring, right?”

“I know, lets crack open Youtube and watch that video of the fat kid screaming on the rollercoaster again.”

“Again? You’ve seen it like a thousand times…”

Such is how my imaginary conversations with complete strangers go.

Its taken me fifty minutes to observe the goings-on at the library leaving me three hours and ten minutes to do something a bit more productive. Oh, but now this old woman just slumped down in one of the seats across from me and pulled an epic embroidery project out of her torn carpetbag. I swear everyone just comes here for the free heating. That’s what first attracted me after all. This lady is a pro, pulling the needle and thread high above her head for each stitch. She looks like she’s going to put the needle right into her forehead every few seconds so its hard for me not to stare in ass-clenching suspense.

Those of us who aren’t here to finish our crafts projects, or eat erasures, are often here to escape the headache of living in a two room apartment with a significant other. Judd Apatow summed it up beautifully in yesterdays Sunday Times by writing, “At first you spend hours getting dolled up every time you are going to see each other, but fifteen years later you’re pooping with the door open.” Fifteen years? Try one year, Judd. I stopped trying to make myself presentable months ago; probably around the time I lost my job. Now I’ve gone back to cutting my own hair with fabric scissors and administering the good old sniff test on clothes I pick off the bedroom floor, “That’s clean, that’s clean, ew thats dirty, that’s clean…” I also find myself wishing most days that it were socially acceptable to wear pajamas outdoors here, like back in Vermont where until a few years ago one didn’t even have to go out wearing anything. Today I’ve managed to make myself look hygienic enough. I showered and put on some jogging pants, which were a steal at £2, and a cobalt blue sweater I found at the back of my closet this morning. Its London Fashion Week and all the newspapers are full of catwalk images from the different shows. The only thing I’ve noticed among all the photos of anemic Russian models is almost everything is cobalt, so I feel pretty on-trend with my sweater (sorry, jumper). The fact that I just happened to find it this morning, at the apex of cobalt-happy fashion week, may be a sign that all is not lost…

Ok, just to keep you up to speed, sewing lady is now showing Gene Wilder a bunch of holes in her fur coat and asking where the missing bits of fur are. I swear I don’t make this shit up.

What was I going on about? Oh right, how I’ve let myself go. Well this reference room is full to brim of people who have let themselves go, probably after moving in with someone. When you live in such close quarters with someone there’s only so much you can hide, and after awhile you can no longer be bothered to hide in the bathroom with the door locked every time you have to pick your nose. I think the horrible realization that we can never control our nocturnal farting is the gateway drug to the complete breakdown of domestic barriers. Before you know it just closing the bathroom door feels like a chore. Pretty soon your surroundings follow suit…the dishes don’t get washed and the trash doesn’t always quite make it into the bin. But to be fair a lot of this has to do with the Polly-Pocket sized house I live in where two dirty plates in the sink makes the whole counter look like something out of that gross reality show where they go into crazy people’s houses and clear out decades worth of garbage and dead pets hidden under stacks of newspapers dating back to the 60s. Likewise a few clothes piled on the floor of my itty bitty bedroom feels like a little fabric Everest I have to climb over to make it out the door. Growing up in my parents’ house all I had to do was cram everything into a closet or the endless black-hole of the attic where boxes could just disappear. Now if I don’t take the trash out every day I don’t even fit in the kitchen. So to escape I’ve established all sorts of satellite homes around the city, the library being one. There’s the bakery on Holland Park Avenue, a cavernous bookstore on in the city (where I have a bad habit of sitting down to read the first few chapters of a book and then walking out with it later, completely forgetting to pay), and the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park which I visited yesterday. The Serpentine is great not only because its free but also because its tiny, so I can walk in and out without making much of a commitment to the increasingly snooze-worthy exhibitions of conceptual art they hold. Yesderday I saw another coma-inducing show by another contemporary German artist. Again the walls were covered in endless scribbles and photographs that required an entire essay to contextualize. A lesson to contemporary art galleries everywhere – if its too boring to look at, its certainly too boring to read about. For years I felt guilty for blowing past the endless wall text that have come to dominate galleries and museums until one of my most brilliant professors at school said one day, “I don’t go to galleries to read, I go to look.” I’ve used this comment to justify my new technique of bolting through exhibitions at breakneck speed without a single glance to the accompanying text unless I find something so visually beautiful or fascinating I actually want to read about it. Regardless, I still enjoy visiting the pretentious shows at the Serpentine. Yoko Ono’s solo show this summer really reached a new pinnacle of self-indulgent art installations. The Sky Cam was a real doozie… A flat screen TV mounted on the wall showed a live video of the sky above the gallery to make the viewer re-evaluate their perception of the environment and realize that anything can become a work of art through re-contextualization…zzz…zzz…zzz… I asked one of the gallery guards:

“Can’t I just go outside and look at the sky.”

“The Sky Cam makes us view the sky in a completely new and eye-opening way.”

“Yoko told you to say that, didn’t she?”

To fair to the gallery, though, they have had some killer exhibitions that I couldn’t help but record with my camera-phone. This is a perpetual argument I have with the gallery guards.

“Sir, no photography is allowed!”

Then I think I’m real smart holding the phone up to my ear pretending to be in the middle of a serious conversation while secretly taking photos, until a guard in another room always calls me out.

“You’re not allowed to talk on your phone in here!”

“Jeez, am I allowed to breathe!?”

Its always a good time.

Its been just over two hours since I arrived and I’ve managed to churn out about two thousands words of nonsense without even touching on all kinds of topics like my recent fair-weather internship that was brought to an abrupt end last week with the Border Agency’s threat of deportation. So rude. I could spend all day writing about my odyssey to obtain a visa, but I’ll have to do that another day, my eyes are sore from staring at the screen, its dark outside and I have to go home and make dinner and watch the Youtube video of the fat kid on the rollercoaster.