So this one time I tried to write a book...

While I was living in London, I had the insane idea to try and write a book. An encounter had just taken place betwixt myself and a devastatingly attractive person, and yours truly was crafting some very intricate scenarios in my mind for how we would meet , and justifications for why someone so appealing would stoop to date a chubby American geek, such as myself. Then someone told a story about being at a banquet with E.L. James, novelist and main perpetrator of misconceptions about BDSM.

The proverbial light bulb went off above my head.

If James could write bad fanfic where nobody behaves like a real human and make millions of dollars off of it, why couldn't I write good fanfic with relatable characters and make, like, a totally reasonable amount of money?

And so began a period of furious writing; between June and August I churned out 30,000 words. By the end of September, it was longer than my Master's Thesis. As I worked on it, I came to realize that yeah, there was a love-story there, about a girl with issues and a big butt trying to cope with the experience of getting exactly what she wished for, but that wasn't the point of it. The real romance was between a girl (butt and issues still in place) and her city. I thought the point of the story was to write about my hilarious crush, but really it was an excuse to write about London and the scenes and sensations I felt while I was there.

So it seems kind of fitting, after my last blog, to post an excerpt of what I've written. An exploration, of my doomed love affair with London, if you will.
Even if it is just my Mom and my cousin reading this.

Me: Let me love you!

My Cousin: LET ME EAT YOUR FACE!

This scene is the main character, Dani (who is basically a better, more confident version of me), describing her walk to work after having had a romantic disappointment.

Enjoy (I hope)!
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The next day, I walked 45 minutes to work. This is as per usual because by some perverse quirk of the London transit juggernaut-clusterfuck, there is no tube or bus route that does not actually make this journey longer. One can, if one has the means, get a cab, but if one does not leave at exactly the right moment, exactly 9:30 or exactly 10:15 (by which time I would be super late for work) one will inevitably get sucked into the vortex of traffic that is the Old Street Roundabout. It isn’t an unpleasant walk, delicious smells waft from many dodgy looking food vendors, there is some badass street art, and the view is always improved by stubbly-jawed gentlemen in tight pants with meticulously tousled hair.

You routinely run into interesting, even anachronistic, characters that look like they were simply plucked from some exotic or past setting and dumped into the middle of a modern metropolis. For instance, I once saw a man who looked, for all the world, as if he had just wandered out of some spicy-scented middle-eastern bazaar onto the wet, gray pavement outside of Liverpool Street Station. He wore flowing white and taupe robes and a white cap on his gnarled, tan head. A thin, white tendril of a goatee spiraled off of his chin like a twisted tree branch. In his arms he held a huge bushel of peacock feathers, each one almost as long as he was tall. He didn’t appear to speak any English, but was hawking them aggressively to passerby with a toothless smile that never wavered.

That’s routine in London: the uncommon is so common that it becomes commonplace.

Routines can be depressing and monotonous, but they can also be a comfort. For instance, I find it comforting to walk past my neighborhood Subway twice a day, on my way to work and on my way home. It is a known fact that every Subway in every corner of the world smells exactly the same. It reminds me of home in a way that isn’t personal enough to incite homesickness.

More unpleasant is the smell of the people that one walks by, especially first thing in the morning. London women, especially those dressed in the sort of dressy casual business attire that marks them as working in the city, wear a prodigious amount of scent. When you walk past one of these gals, it hits you in the face like you’ve just walked into a tangible wall of synthetically produced fragrance. I think I could handle it more if the scents were varied, but there are really only five that I smell on a regular basis: there is the one that sort of smells like coconut, and the one that sort of smells like flowers, the one that smells nice but in an old shoe type of way, the one that I’m sure is meant to smell “spicy” but ends up smelling faintly of tacos, and the one that I think must be Chanel because it has a vague bottom note of Nazi operative. Equal parts delightful and disgusting, my morning commute always served as a reminder of where I was: the center of the known world.