Mi primo giorno a Roma (My first day in Rome)

I haven’t actually slept since Friday morning, when I scraped four hours from 6 AM to 10 AM. Nothing makes sleeping harder than a tiny beam of light seeping through the crack between your curtain and the wall that magically always points at your eyes. For some reason that makes me think of the scene in the Hobbit (animated movie) when they’re all waiting for the moonlight to reveal the hole where the key goes in the dwarf mountain.

Annnnyyywwwaay...

I’m well beyond delirious punchy Sean now, and starting to slip into baffled and cranky Sean. I’m starting to feel really fucking haggard, and look even worse. I called my parents from the piazza, not realizing that it was 5 in the morning there, not even realizing that it was only 11 here. The light hits this place differently from planetary precession, so the shadows don’t look right to me. Longer? Shorter? I have no idea.

I’ve been trying to get by without using English at all, and it’s a slow start. I’m trying to be diligent about remembering words I regularly use and forget easily, and write down phrases that come to mind that I either learned or want to figure out. I’ve also got a file open just for dirty talking.

Italy is beautiful, the people are tolerant and at ease with themselves. They have the dignified air of a culture in recognition of its dependence on the tourist market, but stop themselves short of divesting anything less than Italian stoicism and pride at their work and day-to-day. Also, they're hot. From what I've seen so far, the sexy scales are actually skewed on the male side. Lots of sexy guys with perfectly groomed, toned, tanned, clothed bodies, and a few smatterings of cute girls in the girly stores.

Time really does move slower here, and nobody seems to care about a looming or soon-approaching anything. I asked about a mini-sm cable for my camera at an Italian-equivalent mall music store, and the employee just shrugged and said, “Nothing will be open today because of the festa, but you can get one during the week some time.” When I asked him where I could find it, he told me "across the piazza," which in Italy can mean pretty much any-fucking-where. The whole city is comprised of strada's, via's, and piazza's (a piazza is basically a stone courtyard with sculptures and lined on all sides with shops). Then he tried to sell me another memory card, assuming mine was full. Relaxed opportunism at its finest, like a really fat cat that decides to grace a crippled fly that just happened to fall near its paw with a few playful taps.

I can see how everyone tells stories about a friend they have who never came back. I’ve only been here a few hours and I already wish I was a local, happily shouldering the naiveté and euros of the millions of tourists who flow through Rome every year. The locals are immediately discernable in the fray of multi-cultural fucknuts like myself who walk around taking pictures of buildings, novel storefronts, and statues, with oversized street maps nearly blowing out of their hands and guiding them like a cartographic pied piper blindly into the streets. Amazingly, every incident I've seen like this (four, in the half a day I've been here) has been saved by the supreme skill of Italian drivers, who can somehow make their vehicles phase through solid rock, or shrink inward when squeezing through some tiny via and dodging some retarded aussie in a wifebeater. Maybe they slather their cars in olive oil and suntan lotion.

I bought an audio book of a popular Italian comedian to listen to when I’m walking around, in hopes that it will help me develop my ear more keenly to Italian phonetics, and a copy of the second book in the Hitchiker’s “trilogy” in Italian. I haven’t read the English version in at least four years, so it will be fun rediscovering the ingenious wit of Douglas Adams in a language that probably had to adapt itself to be funny around his unique narrative comedy. I even managed to have an exchange for more than two sentences with the woman working the counter, informing her that I didn’t know where to replace the book I had been eyeing before I’d happened on Adams. Tiny little proud moments like that are what will keep me going when I’m in a loud club and fail miserably and repeatedly to pick up any girls.

Something else I love about Italy: Familial responsibility. Since my arrival I have not been subjected to one screaming baby that wasn’t excused immediately, or any impetuous, fat, screaming children who have a mother casually ignoring them with text messages and television. People are actually present when they are in proximity to one-another here, probably because they don’t see the point of taking up space next to a familiar sentient being when all they’re doing is trying to ignore it while communicating with other sentient beings through an invisible medium.

On the note of proximity, something else culturally distinct from Americans that I’ve already begun to enjoy, Italians don’t mind closeness. Even now I’m sitting in a little café eating a club sandwich (with eggs and some really thick, soft cheese… my intestinal jury is still deliberating the verdict) at the end of three small tables stacked against each other on one wall of the café, and a man and his two sons came and sat down right next to me without any discomfort or readable emotions. He smiled at me at one point and offered “buon giorno,” then returned to his food. His sons both ate quietly and are now playing a card game, both of them probably around 8 and 10 years old.

I’m about to go back out into the heat and walk back to my hotel, where I can now check into my room and probably peruse the net for a bit before losing consciousness into the twitch-ridden hayride of my body and brain reclaiming the nutrients they need to survive. Being a Texan has already played in my favor in acclimatization, I’ve been able to hike around the whole city and not even need to find shade. That, and apparently Italians find Texans fascinating, probably because overseas we’re still residing within the echoes of Dallas (the show), oil rigs, horses, the Alamo, and George Bush. I want to find a screen printer somewhere in town and have a shirt printed that says:

“Mi dispiace, sono un stupido Americano. Prometto non provaró portare democrazia ecco.”

I’m sorry, I am a stupid American. I promise I won’t try to bring democracy here.