magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

dreamt that i was on a weird little airplane with some of the other ehp kids. it was sort of like a winabego with wings. we pulled around in a driveway before takeoff and someone asked "doesn't someone famous live here?" but it turned out to be annette, my dad's girlfriend. i said hi, and told her that my dad had gone off somewhere. she was worried, and i wanted to tell her that he had not left for good, that he was only at the store or something, and would be back soon, but i didn't and then we were pulling away.

we put our seatbelts, or more like the harnesses in the space shuttle, on. but we couldn't take off because there was drawbridge being raised ahead of us and the runway wouldn't be long enough. they were raising the drawbridge because the vice president was going to give a speech on the radio.

but instead there were answering machine messages. back and forths between jesse helms and chalrton heston about how they were such great friends and respected each other so much. and i was in a hotel with a strange plastic contraption, pretending to be one of them but really a mob hitman, hired to kill the other one. i snuck into the suite that they were staying in. on a table in the entryway were plans for a modified version of the contraption i was carrying. in a room to my right was the person who i was impersonating, asleep in bed with his wife. they had already arrived.

i snuck out and hid behind a line of fancy clothes that were hung along the hallway. they belonged to a movie star and there was a bellboy patrolling along the lenght of them and shining a flashlight into them. i tried to squeze myself as far as i could into the corner, and didn't think he'd see me. and he turned to go back the other way, but then heard something and turned back to look. i panicked and jumped out of the clothes, springing towards him and pushed him over a railing and four or five stories down into the atrium.

i sprinted to the elevator and took it down to the ground floor level since the lobby was one level higher and i figured i could get out of the building without being seen. on my way out i pulled a fire alarm as a diversionary tactic.

i was outside and feeling slightly secure in the fact that i had on an outrageous pair of sunglasses and if anyone saw me they would focus on those and not on what i actually looked like. but then there were all sorts of people with cameras taking pictures and the chances that one of them would get a shot of me kept increasing with every turn i took.

i jumped over a low fence topped with razor wire. then another. and another. each fence got higher and the barbs on the razor wire got larger and larger and more and more comically out of proportion but no less sharp. eventually i cleared the last fence and began to climb a tree. from within the tree my awareness began to shift. from myself, still the hitman, to the police below who want to bring me down for questioning, to the mafioso below who want to knock me down and kill me so i want talk, to the bewildered onlookers.

i fall out of the tree. i'm in the head of another mafia man. the don is saying, "this is what he does in his spare time?" then i'm back in my own head and he's saying, "you're out of the gang." and i push myself up painfully and hobble away into a waiting alley.

then i'm me, bean, and i have a camera and i'm walking down streets lined with portraits by "van gogh". of himself and his girlfriend (she may have been asian) throughout their lives. they were big and colourful and some were numbered and i started taking pictures of them.

and the alley is a hallway with my mom and sam and we're talking about photos. some that have been made into magnets or bubble stickers and there's a photo of aaron and rei all dressed up at a wedding, apparently my dad's sister's renewal of her mariage vows.

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my last day in gubbio. early bus. photos of the roman theatre. the park where i had to climb over a wall to get out, the lower gate having been open but the upper gate locked--and i ended up with a piece of crabgrass lodged in my eye for my trouble. (i didn't realize this until later, having originally thought it was a speck of dirt that i would blink out. but waiting for the bus back i rubbed my eyes because of the sun and felt something still in there. and fter much deliberationi got it out, a piece of grass looking more like a giant, black eyelash.) emily.s and sonia. david.p and alex.l. then back up to the top of the mountain by myself. i charted a trecherous path to the next peak and once there found that there had been a path around the other side. the view was amazing. and it was quiet but for the bugs and perfect and i would have liked to curl up in the mountain grass int eh sun and doze off (the two coffees didn't last long). back to the ruins and i stood atop the highest wall and looked out over gubbio.

back to ponte calcara at lunch time. sat with angelo's sister on the bus. exchanged maybe three words--we're both shy, my italian sucks, and i'm not sure she knows any english--but it was a friendly face in a sea of snotty school kids.

and my other assignment. (i also rememberd today what my italian assignment was, but that will have to wait until i'm back in rome.) a visual piece on language. i had playing with the idea of the tower of babble, with chandler's observation that even the birds speak italian, with feeling lost. i ended up doing a comic strip. three birds on a tower. one speaks english. one says "qua" (here in italian). the other sings birdsongs. there's also a caption that reads: as if the flight of three birds in a foreign land could somehow make everything clear. which is a reference to an ancient etruscan practise of divining the future (weather specifically) from the lfight of birds observed from a particular spot in gubbio.