snap, or anti-snap?

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2009-10-16T15:07:00

2009-10-16T19:18:47Z

so the thing that i've been working pretty feverishly on and kind of self-destructing over? that was the talk i gave this morning. which went well, after the hitches.

see, for some reason, my computer decided that this file, this ONE file which contained my talk, out of all the other files i have ever sent on this computer, would PRETEND to attach itself to the email i was sending myself, and then not actually attach. so, when i sent my talk to myself, along with a couple other files (which were fine), and looked at the file to make sure it had a little paperclip next to it showing that things had indeed attached, and then biked to school, when i got there there was no talk. NO TALK. I got there fifteen minutes early - not enough time to go back home. i think everything drained out of me right then. i know i was there and standing and trying to figure things out, but i was in that place where you're only not on the verge of tears because you are too stunned.

so.

rebecca and dan k., there for the talk, drove to my house, and rebecca tried to send the talk a couple times . it didn't come through. so she cut-and-pasted it into the text of an email, which DID come through. So the talk started, twenty minutes late. and then it went really well. i read ok, though my voice was a touch shaky at the beginning and i stumbled rather more than usual, because i was still so completely adrenaline-filled from the panic. people asked questions, i answered them, and sounded pretty authoritative. there were not all that many people there, but enough that it wasn't totally bare.

and then i had a nice talk with my adviser, who is just absolutely lovely and was kind and said a bunch of helpful things, as usual.

so things turned out well.

but man, getting there has been pretty awful.

i can't decide whether i want to take the rest of the day off, or just go back to work.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2009-10-02T14:41:00

2009-10-02T18:47:05Z

my grandma died this morning. She was in her early nineties. she was scheduled to move from my parents' house into a care facility down the road from them on October 5. she felt like she was being put away - "warehoused," she called it. my parents have taken care of her for something like eight years now, and my grandma had medical issues that made it increasingly impossible for them to give her the care they needed. they said that once she heard they were moving her, she began willing herself to die. my parents tried really hard to keep her alive - too hard, i think sometimes - she seemed to be ready to go. she's been sick for so long that this isn't surprising to anyone, but it still hurts.

i exchanged a couple of letters with her recently - they don't make much sense, but she was trying.

i'm named for her - her first name is my middle name - and i've always felt connected to her for that. she liked roses and birds and quilting.

i will miss her.

i am still trying to decide if i will be able to make it out to the funeral. i have so much to do right now. we'll see.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2009-01-20T20:22:00

2009-01-21T01:25:24Z

inaugural hypothesis:

i think that obama messed up the oath (just a little, that fumble on "faithfully") on purpose. what would make more sense, before giving that nearly perfect, soaring endorsement of our nation's values and proclaiming his place at the head of it, than to say "but wait! i'm one of you! i mess up really important things!" then everyone is sympathetic, thinking that obama is just like a nervous groom so in love that he can't remember what to say - and therefore even more receptive to his speech than before.

a political rant - i'm sure i'm repeating what you've already seen somewhere.

2008-11-06T03:28:49Z

personally: busy as all hell, trying to finish up important papers, having trouble focusing (as usual around now), otherwise happy, healthy, etc.

i wanted to (like i'm sure everyone else) talk about the elections, because i think that what's happening is really weird. i'm glad that obama won - i think it's pretty awesome for a lot of reasons. he validates a spirit of idealism - inexperience wins because it has good ideas. the race issue is pretty incredible; it's strange to think about how terribly important the man's face is now and will continue to be. his family, too. he validates also intellectualism - he was a professor, which is lovely and perhaps what i find the most inspiring, in the face of the kind of anti-intellectualism the country's been facing. and watching it, thinking about it, i felt it - the electricity, the adrenaline.

so yes - yay obama.

but i also think it's interesting what this has done to politics in america. sure, it's galvanized a lot of young voters -- into a tremendous and efficient political machine. and perhaps that's the only way to get things done. but i wonder how many of those kids would have been commies and anarchists, otherwise. i wonder how many of them would have voted for third parties. the whole platform of change - it's great, and i think that some changes will certainly be made. but this is not the bloodless revolution that a lot of people are making it out to be. we have the same broken parties, the same broken system, and the same broken country as we had before. it's just that now most of the people who call for change think that change has occurred - "yes we did" - and now they can go home, or perhaps volunteer to support the "new" system. i honestly don't think that, in the very long term, this system is sustainable, in its previous or in its soon-to-be incarnations. this election is a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart... of a dying patient. it's beautiful, it's powerful. but i wonder, how much longer?

the inherent racism in a lot of the coverage is kind of disturbing, but not my main problem: still, though, an anecdote.. Watching NBC's coverage last night, as the cameras were showing group after group of voters, one commentator said something that can be distilled to: "look at all those black faces.... and white faces too, there are white faces too. we truly have overcome race problems in america." the fact that those faces distilled down to just black and white (to say nothing of the absence of other colors ) is disturbing, but it is truly terrifying that this is what we call "transcending race."

the lack of uproar over what could be the passage of proposition 8 in california, along with similar measures in arizona and florida, is also kind of incredible. seems that in a lot of the liberal blogs i've looked at (salon, daily kos, huffpo, etc) it's a sidebar if addressed at all - "oh, by the way, it's awful how gays and lesbians cannot marry. but at least obama won! that will make everything ok, right?" the attitude of hope extends to these measures - young people mostly voted against it, so it's just a matter of time, and we don't need to worry too much now. i spent some time this morning talking to a friend who is moving (in a completely work-determined decision) to join her girlfriend in california soon. i was trying to look for silver linings, of some sort - making what is actually a similar argument to the one that white supremacists are making about obama's election: perhaps this is actually good, because it will make people conscious of this issue, force a crisis, so there will be a revolution. "great," she said. "so maybe in another fifty years. yeah. that's comforting. great." obama himself says in his acceptance speech: "It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference. It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states." yeah, right. the fact that so many people are crowing over this "historical" election that changes the face of discrimination, that they say means they can now tell their children that anyone can be president, is really utterly absurd and a moment of terribly egregious cognitive dissonance when there's a footnote in small print: we included gay, but we don't really mean it - not only can you probably not be president for a long, long time, you don't even get the same basic rights as other people.

perhaps the most problematic thing, though, is the measure in arkansas, which i desperately hope is overturned by the courts. this is the one that says that unmarried but cohabiting individuals cannot adopt or foster children. i hardly know where to start. there is the fact that the measure actually states "unmarried cohabiting sexual partners," which means that the state needs to know whether or not you're having sex, and with who, in order to determine your fitness to raise a child. it means that if you, like an increasing population of happily married couples, live apart from your chosen partner, you may raise an adopted child with him or her, but if you wish to live together you may not. it means that if you remain unmarried to your long term partner for tax reasons, you may not adopt a child. and of course, it means that if you wish to have a child with your partner, you can have one, but it will not technically belong to both of you, and you'll have to push it out yourself or hire a surrogate, even if you'd rather not add to the population crisis. that anyone could vote for such a thing bespeaks the worst kind of bigoted selfishness - keeping an adoptive or foster child from a loving home not just because of the sexual orientation of its parents, who are denied the ability to marry, but also anyone who decides not to marry for any reason. it blows my mind, it really does.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-09-16T13:56:00

2008-09-16T18:00:46Z

i hate being so stupidly over-sensitive that a reproach can make it really difficult for me to work. it's a problem i've tried to deal with, but even if i can get myself to work when everything's ok, if anything's wrong i get panicky and very, very distractable. and it's my fault - reproaches happen, one has to know how to deal with it without this dumb fear.

also, i received the recordings of finnegans wake today, from the library. i can't listen to it yet, because i have too much work to do, but once i turn in my draft papers i should be listening to it all the time. i wonder if i can put them on my ipod?

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-09-09T13:35:00

2008-09-09T17:36:34Z

also, it's annoying remembering remembering dreams.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-05-22T14:01:00

2008-05-22T18:12:01Z

so today in my class we watched the tristram shandy movie (which is, by the way, really funny). we talked a lot about meta-narratives, and how to distinguish between narrative and reality, and how often it's very very difficult to do so, if there even is a difference. i was asking them how they thought that the critical theories we learn in class could be useful to them. one of my students stopped me after class and asked how i used the theories in my own daily life. i told her that i do think about them consistently, and try to be lucid about what society is trying to tell/sell me, but that i'm also just really interested in stuff like how it's so weird that we are in time. she was confused. so i talked to her a bit about how we have this moment, and then it's over, and it's over for everyone everywhere, and then it's just gone, but it's in our memories, and this happens every single second, and then the memory is often unreliable, so what actually happens to the past when you remember it wrong... and her eyes kept getting bigger and she just kept saying "whoa" in a genuinely thoughtful voice.

we kept talking about the book and the movie and theory, and finally she said, "i just came into this class thinking that, you know, we'd read some books and talk about if we liked them or not.. i didn't expect this stuff. it's so cool and weird. i didn't think that the class would actually make me think these things about my life and stuff."

i'm still all happy from this. this is when i really like teaching. the "you just blew my mind" look is totally priceless.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-05-19T16:50:00

2008-05-19T21:04:44Z

working at getting the dress longer. thanks, hannah and angie! also, got the bike grease out of the pants.

i am really getting next-to-nothing done lately. this is probably good for my mental health, but definitely bad for my project and my teaching. i need to establish some kind of routine, something that includes exercise and time for project work and teaching and time for myself and for being social...

i also want to be writing poems again. it falls by the wayside, when i'm trying to get other stuff done too.

my computer has taped to the screen the question: "how much of my life will i waste on the internet?" this is a question i need to pay more attention to. i have so much to do, so much that i love so much and that i am so interested in, and i waste so much time.

time, soon, to take a shower. and try, hard, to actually get something done. at least, to plan class for tomorrow.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-05-16T17:43:00

2008-05-16T21:44:57Z

does anyone know how to stretch a sweatshirt so it's longer (not wider) again, after shrinking it? my new sweatshirt-dress is now scandalously short, after washing it on cold and drying on low, just like the care instructions said. do i just need to get it wet in cold water and tug at it as it air-dries?

this comes immediately after getting bike-grease on a new pair of pants. bah.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-05-02T08:37:00

2008-05-02T15:58:22Z

so i'm in portland! i always, always forget what it's like to arrive back here. i was trying to explain it to my father: that even the overpasses are familiar, that the the angles and colors of the roads and the trunks of the trees, the windows of buildings, the depth of the sky, it's all so piercingly exactly right, even if i don't belong here anymore. this place is lodged somewhere in my optic nerves, as shadows, and it's jarring when everything lines up.

i was talking to my mother this morning about being a child. she was saying that she wished she'd've sent me to private school when i asked to be, so many times. that she didn't realize how important it would be. this is significant to me because i've spent a lot of time thinking about it; how bored i was, how much i feel like a lot of time was wasted. she was saying that she just didn't realize how important it was. i was thinking, "but i told you!" but i was a kid. i wish i'd have had the words to tell her that it would be necessary, that i'd do whatever i needed to do, but i didn't have the breadth of experience to know that i could insist on something like that. she said that she projected herself onto my childhood, thinking that perhaps she had wished to have things like that but ultimately it wasn't that important to her, she grew out of it, so i'd grow out of it. it's hard, looking at the past like that. i suppose that i'm really happy where i got to, so ultimately there's no reason that i'd want anything from before to be different. but still. it's there, that "if."

anyway. it's off to portland with me. hopefully i will see people soon.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-04-17T10:47:00

2008-04-17T15:00:46Z

the weather is getting lovely. i like spring. i forget that it's going to happen each year - i start believing that it'll be winter forever, that my windows will always stay closed. and then, suddenly - 70 degrees and sunny. bam.

i've been running and going to the gym, which makes my body and mind happy. i am also eating more cookies. given the amount of exercise i'm doing, i think that this is a fine state of affairs.

my advisers want me to drop teaching this summer, and teach myself german, so i'll hae more time for reading. unfortunately, i'm pretty locked into my contract, and it's an extra $5k that i could really use. but i think that perhaps i will see if i can skip the first half of the german course - i took a year of the stuff, i already know a little bit of it.

my summer class will be the "intro to critical reading," and i just found out that in the fall and spring i'll be teaching "lit. and the contemporary" which basically means teaching anything i want. so, for the summer I think i'm going to start with wilde's essay "the critic as artist," then tristram shandy, endgame, and finally some 20th century poetry. i really want to focus on how various kinds of critical reading can manifest as creative endeavors, which should make the class more fun. i will be teaching from 10:30am to 1:30pm on tuesday and thursday, which may not sound like much to you 9-5ers, but three hours of teaching is a hell of a lot of work. but like i said the money will be good - i've been far less careful about money lately and it really shows in my savings account. i need to do a lot less eating out and a lot more drinking water instead of an expensive beer when i go out with people.

i just brought three histories of mathematics home from the library, and one of the members of my committee is telling me that we "have a lot to talk about" regarding how much kant i need to read. a little later today, i will go to the grocery store. until then i think that i will read virginia woolf. i should grade papers this afternoon but i might read kant instead. we'll have to see.

so: there's my life. it sounds mundane and probably is, but i've really been happy lately. i think that i might, strangely, be discovering something resembling a balance.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-03-18T23:36:00

2008-03-19T03:37:40Z

out of everyone i know that i spoke to today, i think only one or two people did not compliment my hat.

that is one of the reasons i like hats.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-02-24T18:20:00

2008-02-24T23:28:46Z

posting old photos on flickr includes looking through a lot of old photos. in a lot of those picures i look like my own sibling - not like myself. i've changed. but so has everyone else; we look different, many of us are closer to being grown-ups.

the strangest thing, i think, about those photos is that they are all full of people - from when there were lots of people around all the time.

i'll be posting pictures over the next week or so, including the ones from my bike-trip and the rest of the ones from europe. i actually had all the ones from the bike trip in the uploader and annotated, and it ate that work. so i'll do it again later.

right now i am reading:

minima moralia - theodor adorno
the golden bowl - henry james
a universe of consciousness - gerald edelman
some values of landscape and weather - peter gizzi
a christmas carol - charles dickens
new science - giambattista vico

lovely books, but i'm looking forward to reading a few fewer things at one time.

tomorrow i think i get to figure out what my fall teaching assignment is - and for the summer, too. this is the first summer in a long time that will involve be-there-every-day work. oh well - the summer after, i'll only have to work for 6 weeks teaching, and i can travel for the rest, hopefully. i've been thinking about doing another bike trip - but this time, going down the west coast. i.e., with the wind.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-02-17T21:18:00

2008-02-18T03:36:27Z

i need some hobbies so i can amuse myself when i start to get lonely.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-01-09T02:51:00

2008-01-09T07:55:37Z

i am having an awful lot of trouble falling asleep lately. like, i'm not sleeping much at all. i stayed up night before last night and if i didn't have to teach tomorrow i'd do it again tonight. i wonder why this is - i'm not drinking any coffee.

this semester is shaping up to be incredibly hard and incredibly rewarding. i'm very excited. or, i will be, once i iron out all of the logistical troubles that are making things more difficult right now.

also, i am in the process of finishing an online scrabble game where i have managed (mostly through luck) to get over 500 points. i am inordinately proud of this fact, and feel pretty silly announcing it here, but i am proud of it so i'm going to say it anyway. the scrabble widget in facebook is my friend. it's a way to waste time that makes me feel like at least i'm kind of learning something.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2008-01-06T17:15:00

2008-01-06T22:18:47Z

i spent last semester, i think, kind of taking a break in a lot of ways. i mean, of course i had a lot of work to do - that's what grad school is about. and yet, i wasn't working nearly as hard as i know i can, i wasn't doing anything extra, i wasn't exercising or watching what i was eating. and that's fine - i needed it. i've never been particularly well-balanced, and i spent last semester learning that i really can hang out with friends and kind of slack off sometimes and it is sort of ok.

but i need to bring that back to a little bit more disciplined, without going overboard. at this point i really have no excuses for the fact that i don't get all that much work done except that i'm not self-disciplined enough right now. so: self discipline is the goal.

i think i should start by not getting up at 1pm anymore. that'd be good.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2007-11-03T11:25:00

2007-11-03T15:40:32Z

i have apparently been tagged to list six things that make me happy, which is good. but i don't really have many friends on here who haven't already been tagged so i'll just list them myself.

1) at some point i became significantly less nervous about teaching.

2) i have 2 very good friends and a number of pleasant acquaintance-friends here. this is just about the right number of people for me, and it's nice.

3) it is fall. i love fall.

4) my home, despite being kind of messy a lot of the time, has shaped up nicely. it's a pleasant place to be.

5) i have been buying books like crazy, and as far as i can tell it's only going to keep going.

6) coffee.

WHOA

2007-09-26T00:44:53Z

so i grade papers and do work in a little window-alcove - like a window seat. no screen. feet out the window. just now i was assaulted by a confused praying mantis! those things are fucking huge! i thought it was a bat! it really scared me! i didn't even know that we had praying mantises here. we had them in an aquarium when i was in 6th grade, so now that i think about it i sort of assumed that they only existed in captivity or something. this one was very pretty, it had purple under-wings and looked very smart. i found myself talking to it much more than i talk to other bugs when i coax them out the windows.

also: i have probably 25 papers still to grade. they take about 20 or 25 minutes each. i have to have them done by 3pm tomorrow. this means: a little more than 10 hours probably. 5 hours tonight and 5 tomorrow? i hope so.

i have been drinking coffee lately. it's helping.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2007-09-23T10:52:00

2007-09-23T15:07:54Z

i have a tremendous amount of very very interesting work to do, and unfortunately i don't have the time-management skills to make sure it all happens. i need a better to-do list. a few of the things i want/need to do:

grade my students' papers
look over changes in the graduate student handbook
buy office stuff
buy food
read mallarmé
buy modernist poetry books
create specific syllabus for my independent modernist poetry course
go running/to the gym/biking

see: this is the stuff i need to finish in the next day or two so that i can get to the stuff like:

read everything TS Eliot wrote
read a lot of what Wallace Stevens wrote
read a couple of layman's books on neuropsychology as it relates to memory
read some Robin Blaser essays/poetry
begin my project proposal/bibliography

however, by wednesday of next week i will also have:
something to read for teaching
something else to read for history and representation (i.e. medieval historiography)

so. all of this means get off the damn computer sarah and start doing something!

hm! i feel better now, actually. things are much clearer.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2007-08-08T23:10:00

2007-08-09T03:14:47Z

here i am at rebecca's house. home. oh my god. there is so much bad in the airports. trying to get on the flight in dublin, apparently the US customs computers went down. so i waited in lines for at least 3 hours. but then the rest of the flying was ok and i am home now.

and i will turn my phone back on soon.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2007-08-07T18:37:00

2007-08-07T17:44:06Z

aug 4-5. arrived in dublin, went to a party in the country, drank beer and stayed in a nearly abandoned house for the night singing songs.
aug 6. james joyce museum, and writer's museum - both slightly disappointing. then a couple pints of guiness which were not disappointing - really good, actually. and a sandwich. it got really cold and i walked around arm in arm with angie and we got yelled at a lot by boys, something which i think was irish slang having to do with lesbianism. crazy.
aug 7. got to the airport and gave them my confirmation number and then realized that i had a paper ticket which i put in a pile of important papers and apparently sent home. so i spent 8 or so hours trying to get a copy of the ticket sent from cheaptickets to the dublin airport, spending a like $60 on phone calls in the process. now i'm booked for a flight tomorrow for an extra $400. what a penalty. and this after all my passport problems, and losing my sleeping bag, and losing my license, and that money. i don't really understand why i have such bad trip karma. sometimes i think the gods are punishing me for hubris. i don't know. anyway though i'll be home tomorrow, at least.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2007-08-01T12:04:00

2007-08-01T17:14:29Z

have gotten to sevilla and its real fucking hot here. which is pretty nice in a number of ways, but also sweaty. we spent the night from paris to barcelona in a train. we had gotten first class tickets, which i had never had before for a sleeping car. but the last first class sleeping car was broken so we were put into a second class car which was "converted" to a first class car, which meant that a couple of the beds were folded up so that there were 4 instead of 6 beds, and there was a little bottle of water on the pillow. and angie and i were put up at the top, which meant that the conversion didn't do anything - our heads were still smunched. so i made a stink about it and we got put into a second class car all alone so we could put up the rest of the beds and stay up late drinking wine and talking about boys. much better. and i learn quickly now: squeaky wheels and all.

my grammar is getting better and better and worse and worse in that it is making more and more sense to me but is more and more incorrect. but i like it better that way. angie speaks japanese to me and i speak french to her and we both talk a little bit of italian and spanish at each other. angie is getting better at french than i am getting at japanese.

we went to barcelona and gaudi architecture is beautiful but i like his sketches better; there is something about pencil sketch that really hits me hard. i think i am designing a tattoo because of gaudi and picasso. maybe. i have been talking about designing a tattoo for years and years, but maybe for reals this time. golden spiral and chainring, yo! totally. maybe. and the beach was lovely and the water was nice. i am getting a little bit of a tan. we did not stay out late, though, which made me sad. we saw the picasso museum which was lovely and wonderful and i would either like to be or marry picasso i am not sure which. what a genius. monstrous, incredible.

then a train again, and i like sleepers pretty well. and now we are in sevilla and it is hot and we drank a lot of wine and had a lot of tapas for the afternoon. these europeans are big social drinkers. whoa. but its nice. ate a lot of ham. and now i will perhaps sleep because it is like 100 degrees or more and everyone is siesta-ing anyway. but later we will go out and have lovely adventures, and tomorrow we will go to the beach in cadiz, and a couple days later we will go to dublin and then i will be home in like a week! less than a week! whoa! i keep getting paperwork from school about insurance and tuition and i almost cannot even conceive of dealing with it because it is so far away. but my french is better now and i know infinitely more about art and altogether this summer has been pretty incredible.

also i have learned a million things about travel like this, which means that inevitably i need to do something like this again. like that paris is too expensive and one should only spend a day or two there but really not eat anything there because the food in italy and spain is also incredible and 1/3 the price. and spend a ton of time in florence. i learn that i really love the museums and i really just want to spend a lot of time there. 1. museums. 2. wandering. 3. food. 4. beaches. and that is what vacation is all about. also, eurrail passes are probably a rip-off. maybe not everywhere but southwestern europe definitely.

more on that later. for now it is time to go sleep off the afternoon cervezas and tapas so i can get up to go to a flamenco club tonight.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2007-07-22T01:04:00

2007-07-21T23:28:27Z

so i have done a lot of things lately. we started in rome. we ate some ok pizza and really good melon and proscuitto, and walked around the neighborhood. we saw a castle, but i have forgotten the name of it. the next day we saw st. peters basilica, after we did something else that i don't remember. all of this i canfill in later. st. peters was tremendous, just really huge. we saw lots of statues of popes. one pope looked like he was considering something very quietly. another looked like action, like he was getting ready to say °pope power GO!° but he did't move. since i went to mass in sacre coeur, i have discovered that catholic churches make me want to kneel. like so much that i feel phantom pressures in my knees. it is very strange. so yes, we did a lot more things that day that i would have to check in my journal to figure out. the next day we saw the roman forum and the colosseum, which were really phenomenal. i kept thinking that there is so much history here, that this is a big part of how western civilization gets to where it is now. these things in rome area all so incredibly massive, too. later that night we saw the pantheon, the spanish steps, the trevi fountain, and several other things that i had not heard of. all, still, huge. marble. gorgeous.

all of this happens while we are staying in a beautiful hostel. about 5 blocks from st. peter's, with a rooftop terrace from which we could see much of rome. huge sunny room on the cool side of the building, with marble floors. bigger than almost any hotel room i've stayed in. kitchen for our use, and yogurt with cornflakes for breakfast. free espresso. altogether a great place to stay. the next day, we went to florence, and got there at about 1 in the afternoon. we met our hosts, breditz and dimas, and followed them to their house. which was right in the center of florence. like, really in the middle of everything, a beautiful place. they're student-age and the place was decked out in incredible style, with writing all over the walls, fabric hanging everywhere, a bar, turntables, little signs and paintings and weird awesome kitsch all over the place. breditz took us into our room, which was pitch black, and he started whispering to us that we needed to be silent until he told us we could speak. now, this guy seemed pretty awesome, but we had just met him and now he has brought us into a room with him and told us to be quiet. but then he told us to talk and make noise, and turned out he had a noise sensitive light in there so we saw the room only when we were making noise. there was a normal light too, though. we walked all over florence for the rest of the afternoon, eating gelato and stumbling out of random narrow streets into plazas with tremendous beautiful important buildings. like, turn a corner and this huge thing opens up before you. like walking down the street and turning to where you think a friend's office might be, but instead wham! you see the ocean. we came back home and breditz made us tunafish pasta which was really very good, and we drank some wine. and then we went up onto a hill and drank more, drinks called negronis, which are martinis with campari and man they are bitter and will knock you on your ass. then we went down by the river and talked and discovered the next day that we had obtained a lot of mosquito bites.

next morning we got up sort of early and angie and i split up. she climed up the santa croce church, and i went to see the san marco monastary, where fra angelico painted a bunch of frescoes. this was the day of religious art, because after that we went to the accademia gallery to see michelangelo's david. david was everything anyone could hope for and more. he is 5 meters high, which you don't really realize until you are there looking at him, he's like the eiffel tower that way. too many photos and models, so when you are faced with the real thing you can't believe how perfect it is. though david really is better than the eiffel tower. he's under a huge glass domed skylight, so he is all bright. angie and i marveled about the fact that we couldn't find anything imperfect. he just looked as ideal as i could imagine, but not in a too-perfect kind of way. in the also surprisingly delicate and human way. lots of other paintings from that era in there, too. and then, on to the uffizi gallery, where we saw basically the history of italian art from the middle ages to the renaissance. lots of annuniations and crucified christs. botticelli, da vinci, michaelangelo, raphael, etc, and some new discoveries too. i recognized painting after painting, things i had seen in books. they are so ovely in person, it is so nice to see the brush strokes and the texture.

by the end of the day, and even before, we were both exhausted. it's easy to forget that three museums punctuated with crowds and relatively brutal heat is not a recipe for perkiness, even if the art is gorgeous and one is not exercising too hard.

then we got on a train for venice. after a little bit of juggling, we got to the right station and found our host in venice, a lovely boy named giulio. we talked with some of the other people he was hosting (around 8) and then fell asleep. which brings us to today. we got up, and giulio played tour guide around venice. we saw a fire station, post office, and garbage boats. we will not ride a gondola, because they are like 70 euros now, for a half hour or so, maybe more. too expensive. but we walked all around the city, which was fun. also, apparently right now is the biennalia, a contemporary art festival that happens every two years here. which means that they put art installations into all kinds of lovely old buildings that are usually not open to the public. it is so strange to realize that the art we see in museums actually hung in peoples' homes, that they had frescoes on their ceilings and all. weird. tomorrow we will see some glass blowing stuff, basilica st. mark, and other things too. and then we will go to the beach for a couple days because it's awfully tiring to sightsee all the time, without cease. i kind of just want to find a nice place to read tomorrow instead of going to see things, because i am so tired. but i can wait another day, i think.

so that's it! i will write aother update when i have internet again - the times are few and far between.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2007-07-14T15:00:00

2007-07-14T19:17:24Z

i am sitting here on bastille day and i really don't particularly feel like going out and walking about again - either i am here, or i am walking about: yay. i suppose i should go see the eiffel tower with all of those fireworks, but there will be a million people there. why do i want to go be stuck in amongst a million people? i have not been as happy with the crowds, lately. i am leaving for rome day-after-tomorrow and paris has been far too short, but i think only because i didn't make good enough plans. what do i want to see? i need to know. what do i want to accomplish? i need to know, otherwise, of course, how can i accomplish it?

also i think i have lost $300. i don't know where it is. i put it on my dresser, and now it is not there anymore. this was the money for the hotel and eating in rome. this is a problem, and i'm afraid that maybe i threw it out with the trash somehow.. i've gone through all the trash in the house, though, and looked under and over everything so unless it went out with the trash a couple days ago (i got it on wednesday) it has to be here, doesn't it? i have no idea. it's very stressful, having no idea.

but whether or not i have that particular money, i am leaving for rome on monday morning and i need to pack up my house here. i think that i do not like staying in a place for a determined short amount of time.

these are all useful things to know: little lessons.

bowl_of_lilacs @ 2007-07-04T17:08:00

2007-07-04T17:17:58Z

i love how certain foods seem to absorb flavors out of the environment. white wine that tastes a little like honeysuckle because there's honeysuckle in the vineyards. mangoes that taste like coconut. i am eating a chocolate bar right now made from costa rica beans and it tastes like bananas. well, not like. none of these things actually taste like other things. they just recall them. they set off the mental signals somewhere in the space between the food and your tongue, without actually assaulting your mouth.

sometimes i think that i should try doing the "take photographs of absolutely everything you eat for a period of time" project. it would be interesting. today i have eaten a thyme/labney/mint leaf sandwich, a couple dolmas, 3 macarons (pistachio, coconut, and salted butter chocolate), a beignet, half a baguette with various jams and stuff on top, 1/2 a big caramel with nuts in it, 4 squares of chocolate, 1/2 a mini-chocolate cake (the kind that's all raw and doughy in the middle), a nutella crepe, and an apricot. maybe i will skip dinner. (or, maybe i've already had it without realizing it). when i get home i will really have to change my eating habits back.

it is mosquito season now, and i have a lot of bites. also, the weather has been absurd. cold and windy, punctuated with fits of hot sun and drenching rain. everytime i go out i want to take sunglasses, an umbrella, and galoshes, and wear a tank top and carry two coats. july, indeed.