and wrapping up this trip

[rm]

I need to repack my luggage. I have no idea how I'm going to make all this stuff fit. I'm bring back a lot of gluten-free croissants for me, and chocolate and trinkets for everyone else.

Things I would squeal if I could find here as souvenirs, but I've tried and have failed: 1) a non-sporty looking stopwatch (do they even make such anymore? I've not seen one other than the one my father has from his days clocking ad copy) 2) bike bells. I would totally send all my Torchwood peeps bike bells. Alas, I can only find cow bells. I bet some of you actually want cow bells, but I have to draw the line somewhere.

Outside suddenly there are a lot of hollering young people, drunk and dancing about, I assume after some sort of sports match. I went out there to look at them, and felt all sorts of bittersweet, mainly about people who have never existed; a lot of this trip has been like that for me, but I've not been awake enough to find the words for it, or really, much of anything. I'm so permeable, and really, as a writer and as an actor, that's my job and because it's my job I can be all clinical about it like I'm supposed to be. "It's just stories," we say. "It's just pretend."

Well, yes, because I'm well-trained and have good filters and all that, but I also feel things I'm not "supposed" to feel all the damn time ... so the kids screaming outside as I watch them from the balcony where I'm storing the cheeses and chocolate creams I bought since my room doesn't have a refrigerator make me mourn for a gap year I didn't take, but wrote about once in the life of a man some other people made up.

Switzerland has been like that constantly. The storing pots of chocolate on the terrace too! OMFG, the pots of chocolate!

Meanwhile have just caught the Doctor Who preview for the Christmas episode. It manages to confirm the Doctor has sex and also make me cry because he's wearing a lei, and it's the weird thing where it's like OMGWTFBBQ, he's just come from Jack telling him thank you for the favor he hasn't done him and Ianto yet in IHNIIHBT and there's a banana daquiri sitting on the TARDIS console, RIGHT NOW. Okay, you don't care, but I CARE.

May finally do an LJ Idol home game entry. "Bearing False Witness" is very tempting, although I am unlikely to address the literal meaning of the phrase and instead focus on story telling and what it means to honor things that have never even happened.

I wonder how the Duty Free is at the airport here.

Comments

[pin-drop.livejournal.com]

Wow... I'm a little blown away by you right now. I absolutely know what it's like to feel a weird nostalgia for a character whom I'd mostly left behind, and then I see something which reminds me so strongly of him/her that it's almost like remembering someone who's dead. ...Or not dead, exactly, but maybe someone I used to be close to who's moved far, far away and to whom I no longer write. "Oh, she'd have loved this," I catch myself thinking. "I'll have to take a picture and show him, I'll have to send her one of their albums, I'll have to tell him to read this, I'll have to tell her to try this restaurant sometime." And it doesn't feel like gratuitous emotion -- it just feels like I miss them, a cross between missing a way I used to feel, and missing someone I used to know. It's wonderful to know I'm not the only one who does this.

(Unless of course I've read far more into your entry than was actually there. If so, I'm sorry, and feel free to ignore my psychotic babblings.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

Nope. Yeah. Although nothing I've particularly left behind in this case, but Switzerland has made it more acute. It's living with the missing who were never here.