I'm alive.

It's been almost a month since I've posted.  I certainly think that is a personal record.  What have I been up to?  Well, on the 20th I went to New York City to get my visa, for which the paperwork turned out to be incomplete.  Surprise!  Luckily the dude at the consulate was understanding and let me scan and email in the rest of the paperwork, and I am now the proud owner of a very shiny "Investigation" visa from Spain.  Then I went to New Mexico for a week, ran down to Harrisburg to finish the afforementioned paperwork and also visit Little, and went to Seattle with my family for a week.

It's been busy.  Trip posts will follow.  When not traveling, though, I find myself slipping farther and farther into inertia.  I get up, get some exercise, try to read or study a bit of Hungarian.  Mostly I click through the internet, barely seeing what is in front of me.  I am a creature who requires work, or at least busyness, to remain sentient and active.  That, of course, is my own nice way of calling myself incredibly lazy.

I miss my friends.  I was laying in bed yesterday, staring at the ceiling, surrounded by dogs breathing their hot loving pants onto me, and a song in Hungarian came on my computer, summoned by my iTune's random setting.  I sat up, and stared at my computer.  "Oh," I said.  I realized that with the exception of a few words from my own mouth, I hadn't heard Hungarian in over five weeks.  I pondered how much I've already lost.  (In exchange, the multitude of emails and chats I've had to have in Spanish in the past weeks has definitely already brought some of my former fluency to me.)

So I went searching on the internet, and I am currently streaming Petőfi radio.  Petőfi is weird.  Lyla and I called it "Em Er Kettő, Petőfi Radio... we play whatever the f*** we want."  It is definitely eclectic.  It brings me back to my kitchen in Hungary, where Lyla and I would blare it everyday while cooking up our dinners and making our lunches to bring to work.  In our first tiny kitchen, where we had to act like line cooks and make announcements like "Coming behind you, hot!" as we moved and our elderly neighbors actually gathered outside our window and guessed what exotic thing the foreigners could possibly be cooking.  In our bigger kitchen in the second flat where Benci's little house lived, her small hands reaching through the bars of her cage to grab at us as we fetched something from the fridge, where she escaped and ate all her treats before throwing their container across the room, where she ran on the table and stole sips of beer, and where she regularly sat in the pocket of my hoodie while I cooked.

Where my friends would gather to peek at whatever I was making for dinner.  Where we had Thanksgiving, and Labor Day, and Memorial Day, and birthday parties, and "It's Tuesday!" parties...  Where Bálint's jaw would inevitably drop at the sight of dinner, overdramatic at the sight of food.  Where I first tasted Jon Clark's homemade cheese and marveled at the fact that someone I knew could actually make cheese.  Where Scott would deposit his beer, and Magda would pour shots of wodka (and no, that's not a typo).  Where Magdi pushed me out from in front of my sink and started washing lettuce while yelling that I was giving her nothing to do, all on her first visit to our house.  Where Anna would sit down and just talk and talk.  I miss these people, and as it turns out, I pissed Petőfi, too.

I got to cook, really cook, today for one of the first times since I've been here.  It was soothing and relaxing... chopping, mixing, stirring... it makes sense to me.  Food I know.  I'm good at cooking food, and cooking never changes and rarely offends.  It put me in a better place.  Now if only I could just stream everyone over the Internet...