We're at the top of Sarangot and I swear you can see the whole country from up here or at least you could if not for the thick white clouds sliding like snakes through the mountain valleys around us and you and I are standing off to the side away from everybody else, it's always you and I, us, we, we're a team. We're talking about. What were we talking about? Hard to keep track of conversation that comes that easily. Hard to keep track of anything for folks like us. I remember we talked about how early it was. 4 AM it was that we had to get up. And with the sun still hiding below the mountain tops we weren't even sure it would be worth it. It would be, it would be gorgeous, like the whole world catching behind the safe boundaries of the Himalayas, but we didn't know that yet. I remember we talked about silly things that reminded us home. Like how many
Disney princess movies you were gonna watch back home. Like how I was going to sit in front of the TV watching anime and smoking weed for two solid weeks, nonstop, to make up for lost time. What else? All I wanted was to give you my words and then fill up the space they left with the words you spoke, not a fair trade, your words are so powerful, well chosen and carefully raised, fully pedigreed, mine are just confused and ambling mutts, uncertain where they're going or where they've been.
I remember standing quietly for a while. Most of the people at the top of the mountain that morning were standing quietly. This place was like a shrine. Or a graveyard. Silence, solemnity, and respect are demanded. So we just stood next to each other and didn't say anything. I wove your hand into mine and that was loud enough for me. Louder now than ever, as the clock ticked and our time ran out, the orchestra building into their final crescendos not resolving into warm easy comfort of major chords, instead into growing cacophony, pitches stacked senselessly against another and clearly unawares as to how or why.
I remember what was almost said. I remember catching your eyes (god those eyes) and we smiled at each other and you, you couldn't help yourself, involuntary, like a sneeze, "I'm gonna miss this" falls out of your mouth. "Nepal?" I ask her, knowing how stupid it is. She averts her eyes, then catches my gaze again, then squeezes my hand, and sighs, and looks away again. Nothing good lasts forever and we knew this ship wouldn't hold any water long before we found ourselves so far from land.
"Are you going to be okay?" She asks me.
"I don't want to talk about it. Not right now."
And so we just watch the sun rise.
It's been an interesting semester, and this has been an interesting assignment. I hope that was read in the smarmiest newscaster voice imaginable and if not please start over and do that. Okay welcome back. This actually has been one of the more unique assignments I've had to do in my four years at FSU, not because it was a blog -- I've had several professors assign something blog related in one form or another, welcome to the future -- but because of it's intense focus on intertextuality, of the whole network of blogs being a single text or body of texts. It was usually enjoyable having to interact with each blog in varying ways, while writing something itself still fully original (in the shallowest sense of the phrase). I'm almost envious of the lucky few strangers who will, by whatever mechanism, stumble into our little corner of the internet. Of course, I don't know if I'd say all of the blogs integrate seamlessly. For myself, figuring out how to best incorporate my current partners was often (always) awkward, or difficult, and at worst, it was tedious. I think that could well be a part of the charm though; our ultra-slick internet-age seems to have a thing for the awkward and the rough-around-the-edges. Intertextuality doesn't need to be seamless, at least I don't think so. Look at Vas, whose attempted intertextual relationship with Abbot's Flatland is jarring, confusing and unexplained, and often defiant of or contradictory to the core aspects of Abbot's work, not to mention Vas's inability to decide if it's physics were those in Flatland or in the "real world" as we know it. But, per Barthe "The Text is plural," albeit a bit literally here. Just as the many separate observations of Barthe's stroll that together formed a single Text, each piece individually observable, but ultimately forming an "irreducible plural," and here we have multiple individual Texts (blogs), each with their own small pieces together forming a solid, singular Text, consciously connecting together as small pieces forming a greater Text. No matter how awkward or half-assed this connection and combination may be, the assignments conscious focus on forming a body made of many interwoven texts make it an interesting experiment, a wonderful internet relic for some wayward Google searcher.
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