ramble through the bronx

Monday, August 25, 2003

back in belmont!

complete with coconut bread from Kensington Market, nettles and raspberry leaves for Meredith, plans for the evening, and a new roommate all hooked up, from Denmark!

The busride back was uneventful. I sat next to an Israeli man who was doing business with Lockheed Martin in Syracuse. I didn't ask him much about his business, as it was 2 am. He did ask me whether I read Feuerbach and Schopenhauer along with Hegel. I kind of grunted. Sleepy post-Customs. The customs man gave me the usual snarky look & raised eyebrow when I said I studied philosophy. Luckily he didn't want to inspect the nettles.

Thanks everyone who made time to come out and see me in Toronto! and sorry I didn't make it to Ottawa. I'm a horrible person.

ethical question of the day

Is it nosy, prying, or sneaky to google friends and acquaintances? and then, if you find things out about them (say, geeky websites they maintained in high school, or that sort of thing), can you bring it up without being embarrassed or ashamed that you googled them in the first place?

To show that I'm vulnerable to this too: google "jane a. dryden" and look about four entries down... yup, I called myself the Noyster at one point. Long story. (well, not even that long. just not really that funny, almost ten years later). ah yes, and the dragons-inn. oh the fun.

jane 1:24 PM [+]

who knew?

I hadn't realized that my yahoo email name (which I also use on various internet things), little miss hegelian, wasn't quite original... good old woody allen beat me to it, as this movie site shows. (I have the terms 'little' 'miss' and 'hegelian' highlighted, so you can find the quote to which I refer).

They have it here explained: "Miss pseudo-intellectual neo-fascist Hegelian. "Pseudo-" is a useful prefix meaning false or fake. "Neo" means new, and "Hegelian" refers to the philosopher Hegel."

How helpful.

Now I feel horrible that I've never seen Sleeper. I'll get on that...

(I think this ranks about as high as Marshall McLuhan's cameo in Annie Hall. Well, only for me. oh well.)

jane 3:21 PM [+]

yay, comments!

although, of course, since I'm rambling into the void, the numbers are all "0", but it's nice to know that the potential is there.

huzzah!

jane 3:06 PM [+]

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

...so nifty. I saw the link to it in Terese Neilsen Hayden's blog. what fun!

It was right after this post and comments about the blackout & energy deregulation / regulation.

And I never thought that I would be better off, power-wise, in New York than in Toronto. But I'm getting used to the dim lights here. And I guess the reduced air conditioning in all the Toronto office buildings will help settle (for the time being) the perpetual war between the always-too-cold-at-the-office and the men-in-wool-suits-who-want-the-AC-cranked-on-high.

jane 2:40 PM [+]

back at Robarts library

For people who have never been on the campus of the University of Toronto, there's no real good way of describing the madness that is Robarts Library. It is also known as Fort Book. Legend has it that Umberto Eco was at a semiotics conference at U of T and visited Robarts & there had the idea for the library in The Name of the Rose. It's 14 floors. One set of elevators stops at the 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 14th floors, and the other set stops at the 1st, 4th, and 9-13th floors. The building is the shape of a peacock. The man for whom it is named, John P. Robarts, killed himself. (he had been premier of ontario for a while and killed himself in 1982).

Here's the Wikipedia entry for Robarts.

Shouldn't a library be homey rather than brutalist?

Anyway. I'm there doing some editing work for my professor. And checking email. And enjoying the (very meagre) air conditioning (a true luxury in Toronto at the moment).

jane 1:20 PM [+]

The subways are running again!

I love how the number of arrests made Thursday night (850) was less than the average number of arrests in NYC per night (950). That's fantastic.

Now that things seem to be up & going in New York, I'm off to Toronto, where, as the Star puts it "Lights come on, outlook still dim". oh well. At least I'll be home...

jane 9:29 AM [+]

so I didn't manage to make it to Toronto last night

obviously.

I was stuck in the Bronx, but it's OK, since I met up with my friends, and we had a big ol' party on Joe's front porch, before I went to crash at my friend Matt's, since my apartment was a little too far away on a very dark street (and on the 5th floor -- fairly warm!), and to be absolutely frank, going back to my empty apartment would have been far creepier than sleeping on Matt's couch. so there.


The New York Times, obviously, has some great pictures.

and looting in Ottawa and Toronto! so bizarre! who thought it could happen?

Hope everyone else in the East is OK.

jane 12:55 PM [+]

oh, and I have to add this link on "Mirages in the desert" -- weird stuff to be seen on road trips. It includes the tree of Utah as one of the "strangest". yup. so is the whole salt desert (please click on that. you need to see the picture. you really really do). Look! it's all bloody salt!!

also, in honour of Virgin, Utah (near Zion National Park, one of my new favourite places in america),

Virgin Utah - Concealed Weapons Course and Gun Safety Training

(rachel and I drove past that antique store and loved its sign)

Virgin, seems like such a friendly place... but Meredith would not ever be able to get a Unicef job there, since it's a UN-Free zone.

huh. so how about that gun ordinance.

(wanna dare me to do a Google search on 'Virgins With Guns'?)

jane 1:28 PM [+]

on my way back home

I'm at work, preparing a lesson (I'm teaching a friend how to read French, in order to pass the departmental exam this fall), and am very excited about getting on the night bus tonight to Toronto.

I have two cities that qualify as home: Toronto and Ottawa. I have a parent in each (well, my mom lives in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, but she grew up in Toronto and lived in Toronto and hates where she lives right now), good friends in each, and strong emotional attachments to each. I think, ultimately, I'd prefer settling down in Ottawa, the city in which I was born, and which is smaller and more comfortable, and is marginally less pretentious (government employees show up to work in sweats. I can deal with this).

While I'm visiting Toronto this time around, I'm going to head to Ottawa over either Canadian or American Thanksgiving. I need to spend time in both.

Anyway. just another homesick canuck...

***

three rocks

There are three rocks on my desk in my Bronx apartment.

One is a pinky orange piece of rock from Wyoming. I grabbed it near the Ames Monument when we got lost near there, in the fog. (The adventure in which we saw the black SUV with New York plates). We were delirious.

One is a blue-and-yellow painted piece of ceramic from the "Tree of Utah (Metaphor)" in the Great Salt Desert of Utah. (it had broken off, and was lying on the salty ground). We were delirious.

One is a blue-veined piece of red rock from near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Looking over the edge, along Bright Angel trail, and walking along, seeing shell fossils 8,000 ft up from sea level, and.... I was delirious.

So. Lucky rocks. Lucky, delirious rocks.

I think they're lucky.

jane 1:04 PM [+]

the whole blog thing

this is bad. this is really addictive. I've been surfing & looking at others' blogs. there are so many really interesting people out there. I especially liked Fighting Loneliness With Vodka and there's a monster at the end of this blog. I wish these people well, even though I don't know them and will likely never meet them. Maybe it's time for me to go home.

jane 6:55 PM [+]

now I get it...

Larissa is a county within Thessaly, Greece! That's why the character in Sandman is known as both Larissa and Thessaly... (this is the fun thing about working in my professor's office -- she has a great map of "Cities of the Philosophers in the Ancient Western World"). neat!

also, randomly found as I should have been typing up Aristotle reading lists, is another Sandman site, Who Killed Dream of the Endless?.

done now. back to work...

jane 3:54 PM [+]

thunder!

jane 2:46 PM [+]

things to brighten up your day

I know I have a link to the left to the Nation, but I wanted to also point out specifically the Daily Outrage blog. Whenever I feel overly calm, hopeful, complacent, etc., etc., etc., I turn to this. It never fails.

one of my favourite recent posts was this one about napalm.

oh, and for more fun, if you haven't yet subscribed to the emailed Harper's Weekly Review, you're really missing out.

ok. now REALLY back to work.

jane 2:29 PM [+]

albania... albania... albania...

Well, Meredith and I sat and had some coffee and chatted, and she said she hadn't heard anything about possibility of being sent to Albania, and just then the phone rang. She has a phone interview with the Albania people tomorrow morning. Yay, fun with Unicef. So I sent some emails around to people who might know people looking for housing... I guess there's some sort of Rubicon-crossing going on.

There's a website called Albanian.com, Home of Albanians Online, which is running a survey on "What is the main factor you consider naming your Albanian baby" ... that's more or less the only thing in English. (I didn't answer the survey, since I'm not going to have an Albanian baby any time soon, although it's entirely possible I might meet a nice Albanian man here in Belmont, since there's a sizable Albanian population).

Meanwhile, Lonely Planet's Albanian entry says that "The security situation in Albania remains unstable. Visitors need to exercise extreme care, maintaining a high level of personal security awareness. The presence of unexploded munitions along the Albania/Kosovo border is suspected, and travel to the Bajram Curri and Tropoje area in particular should be avoided. Crime is rampant, with armed gangs operating." Should I be worried about Mer? will Unicef take care of her? Although they (Albanians, not Unicef) do have very good turkish coffee... our locksmith made me some turkish coffee once in his shop and it was absolutely lovely. He told me all about moving to New York from Albania and how he built himself up by working two jobs until he could start his own business.

All right. Here's the Unicef Albania link.

Is it just me, or is Albania a frequently-cited "random" place? It crops up in the fourth Harry Potter book, since Voldemort surfaced in Albania, and that's where Bertha Jorkins was killed. It was also the country, in Wag the Dog, with which a fictional conflict is invented... if memory serves, the movie has lots of lines about the relative obscurity of Albania. This site describes it thus: "Why Albania? DeNiro's spin doctor is asked. His response: Why not? Nobody knows anything about Albania. And unfortunately, this is the truth." When I mention Albania to people, they seem to get it confused with Armenia. Even though everyone got the phrase "ethnic Albanians" drilled into their heads during the Kosovo conflict! such craziness.

I should get back to the work that I'm supposed to be paid for doing... although payment at this point is still highly hypothetical... if all goes well, I should be paid $700 August 22nd for the work I've been doing this summer, and then the second week of September I should start receiving my assistantship money. who knows whether this will actually occur?

jane 1:46 PM [+]

I put up some different links, just to brighten the place up a bit. I'm going to go get some coffee, and keep tinkering with this later. I'm not sure there's any real rhyme or reason to what's up there right now -- it was just what i thought of at the time.

jane 9:34 AM [+]

The Goth Thing, or Theory of Wonderment

Written June 18, 2003:

The Goth Thing

Yes, I admit it. I am reprehensible on both sides. I was a goth in high school, when it was somewhat trendy (note that I was in high school from 1994 - 1998; note however also that I never succumbed to the Marilyn Manson fandom thang -- I was somewhat "purer", being a fan of Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, and Sisters of Mercy); and I "outgrew" it when I hit college and a change of city. Thus, I am neither free of the gothic taint, nor do I have the merit of being consistent throughout. I confess.

What I further want to admit is that now, as I'm technically an adult (I have moved countries, I am in graduate school, I'm paying rent and utilities and debts and my friends are marrying and having kids and divorces and so forth), I want to go back to my gothic phase. Not so much that I want to paint my face white and my eyes black and run around in velvet, but I that I long to regain the sense of mystery, of mystique, of everyday glamour that I had during that time. I would come home, light a candle, sing, and write poetry. Now, I come home, open a beer, and watch T.V. This is not progress.

So what is acceptable, and what is merely escapism? The university I attend now, while in New York City, is fairly conservative. While I used to be an honest NeoPagan (which indeed calls for a separate essay), the philosophy I study leads me to a more agnostic position (cf. David Hume) and I feel like a poseur rather than a pagan wearing a pentacle.

I wear a large amount of black. I have black pants, black sweaters, black t-shirts, black tank-tops. My glasses are black plastic (yes, the trendy square kind). When I wear jewelry, it's silver. I feel comfortable with these things. And yet the black that I do wear feels more like grad student wear, rather than Mystical Being of the Night. I guess this is reasonable, given that I'm far from being a Mystical Being yadda yadda. But I see people on the street who fill me with further ambition... Maybe I should wear a bit more black eye-liner, and extend the edges slightly?

I used to write a lot of short stories and a lot of poetry. I cannot write either anymore; my imagination does not tend toward those things. They were a way of living a mystical existence -- I'm going to use that term, problematic as it is, to represent living somehow beyond the everyday. I'm not sure it's authentic, in the Heideggerian sense, but it's something beyond just "getting by".

Any suggestions for how to regain this sense of the mystical are welcome. It's not, I emphasize, that I've lost my sense of wonder -- I do philosophy all the time, and I wonder plenty about that. But philosophy can sometimes be less... less transcendental (not at all in the Kantian or Husserlian sense! just in a layman sense!) than I'd like. Maybe what I need is religion? spirituality? But I can't force myself to believe in things of which I'm skeptical. I just want a sense of extraordinariness to pervade the everyday.

Addition, August 13, 2003, 12.43 am:

Theory of Wonderment

After having reread two of my favourite books, Forests of the Heart by Charles de Lint and American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and having recently gone to a booksigning by Neil, before which I'd reread some of his Sandman graphic novels, I think I understand what I was getting at back in June. They both seem to have captured what I mean about a sense of extraordinariness in the everyday, a sense of gods, monsters, and assorted fey figures walking among us, hidden from us except for certain times, to people who are observant. One of the Sandman books, Brief Lives (the name taken from John Aubrey's book, which is worth reading for its anecdotes of the lives of people like Hobbes and Descartes), opens with the overview of those who have lived far longer than the "normal" human life span - those who remember woolly mammoths, the last ice age, the first Atlantis, that sort of thing. Clearly they're smart enough to stay away from scientific examination. Why not?

I don't seriously think that there are such 10,000 year olds, but why is it more likely that there is a personal god, than that there should be fairies and djinn and people who pass among us who are not the same as we are, in some deeply magical way? Why? Why not?

Listen. I'm willing to carefully examine claims, critically and with detailed argument, when they concern something the outcome of which will affect human life and well-being. I'm not anti-scientific. I try to avoid being flaky. I just think that it's possible that part of an honest agnosticism is also an admission that magic could be real, for the simple reason that it can't be proven either way to be real or not real, just the same way that agnosticism involves the admission that god may or may not exist. (That's why it's so much more fun to take the agnostic position than the atheist one. And that's why "Brights" are so dull.)

I don't want a surgeon to say that she's using magic to implant a heart, or scientists and politicians to think that the solution to the whole in the ozone layer is prayer to genies rather than implementation of Kyoto and stronger agreements and efforts. Really, it's a difference that is no difference. There is nothing, I think, empirically different about the observed world if I admit to the possibility of magic or magical beings. But my outlook, my reaction to a moonlit night, to a moment of stillness within me, to missing keys, to hope, to despair -- this changes.

jane 9:09 AM [+]

america. and roommates. roommates who aren't american. americans who aren't roommates.

August 12, 2003, 11.41 pm

I'll post this tomorrow, but for now just believe the time written by hand (or rather, by keyboard, but with my very own fingertips pressing down upon the keys, rather than the automatic timestamp of a distant system clock) above.

There's a strange sort of roommate politics (ethics?) around one roommate planning to move out while the other plans to stay. One has no incentive to put anything into the shared home (since that person is about to leave), and yet the other does not want to seem ungracious or nagging. And yet, in this situation both are friends, and genuinely wish the other the best, and genuinely want a good home, just not the same home. Meredith wants to paint the bathroom, and while I'm excited to paint, I'm not sure how seriously to take her painting suggestions, especially in areas where we disagree. If I'm going to be here for at least another year, whereas she's going to leave as soon as the new place is settled, why should I oblige her in agreeing to paint the bathroom green? (Although the point may be moot, as I seem to have won the argument by pointing out that green walls won't do our faces any justice as we use the bathroom mirror for applying makeup, as we do regularly, since we have no other major mirrors in the whole apartment. Rusty orange may yet win the day).

By the way. I think I'm going to set up a separate blog, attached to this one, for discussing issues of ethics and politics, since I'm interested in pursuing the difference between them, or the similarities between them, for my dissertation. I will invite comments, questions, criticisms of my reasoning, and the like, as things go by. Given that I have at least a full year before I can even begin to propose my dissertation (I can't do it until after I get through comprehensive exams), that should be enough time to have gained an idea of the issue through the blog. So stay tuned for that.

(Of course, that last note presumes that I have a readership. Clearly, I don't, and even if I did, they would long since have left, as I didn't post for over a year. But someday someone may read what I've written, and think that it's mildly interesting, mention it to a friend, and it goes on and on. Alternately still, I'll mention my blog as an example to the friends from the department who'd never heard of blogs --see the last post-- and they'll question and criticize me. How can I go wrong?)

So... I believe that I promised that I would write about my road trip. Here it goes.


My Road Trip Across the Alien Land of America with R. the Republican

Graduate school makes for strange friendships. One of my strange friendships is with R., a woman with whose politics I sometimes agree, and definitely I think she has goodness at heart, but who sometimes holds opinions that I disagree with strongly (example: liking the Bush administration). That said, she's fun, and clever, and caring, a good friend, and always up for a good time, etc., etc. I really do like R.

You know how there's a stereotypical split between East and West Coast people, between NYC and LA, between North and South California, between public transit people and car people, between cat people and dog people? On every part of that split, R. falls into the latter, and I fall into the former. Well, maybe not the North & South California split, since I've never lived in California at all, but from having talked to San Francisco people and Los Angeles people, I know where my loyalties lie.

The fundamental subtext of the road trip R. and I made, from June 21 to July 7, 2003, was our disconnect with respect to this split. I think R. hates New York for the same reasons I love it, and I think my antipathy to Los Angeles (though I was only there 36 hours, to be fair) was caused by the same reasons that she loves it. I like places where people are close together, where walking, cycling, and public transit are the norm and cars are awkward and out of place, and the nearest (very excellent) coffee is within walking distance and not a Starbucks. R. likes good roads and driving and driving to good coffee (to her credit, while she does like Starbucks coffee, she shares my desire to try to buy local, where possible). (should I point out that R., while claiming to be a Californian, actually grew up, to the age of 14, in Michigan?) So all of these sorts of reactions are going on, and I'm attempting to remain open-minded, since I'm just a random Canuck who's wandered into this bizarre country, and what do I know from California?

Capisce?

R. had to move her stuff back to Los Angeles since she will be teaching (adjuncting) at her alma mater this fall, and she had a couple weeks free from her NY summer teaching gig, and thus was going to drive out there, move her stuff into a storage facility, then drive back out to NY, teach some more, and ultimately fly back to LA, teach her first week, then fly back to NY, then drive back to LA for good (this last bit will occur over Labour Day weekend). She asked me if I wanted to come along for the first NY to LA to NY jaunt. I pointed out that can't drive (literally - I've never learned, and until the week before the trip I didn't even have a learner's permit). She said, that was OK, if I got a permit she'd teach me to drive along the way, and in any case she loved driving and my role would be navigator & entertainment & company. Alright then, I would love to, I said nervously & excitedly & shyly.

America!

The proverbial road trip! To the other coast and back!

Examine a map of the United States. Note Interstate 80, more or less the Lincoln Highway, and note its directness. It runs from the George Washington Bridge (which I can see from my window, here in the Bronx) to the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. On the way, it passes through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. Now note Interstate 5, as it runs from Sacramento to Los Angeles in an almost completely straight line through the Central Valley. Now note Interstate 15 from Los Angeles to Las Vegas -- the desert doesn't come across on the map, but if you look closely at the map you'll notice that the areas you pass through on that stretch of 15 are all military testing sites or military training sites or just generally places you won't want to be, with titles like "Roach Lake (Dry)". Now look at the windy stretches of highway from Las Vegas to Utah to Arizona to the Grand Canyon to the Navajo Nation to Four Corners up through Colorado to I-70. Now look at I-70, note I-76 from 70 back up to I-80 in Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, and the easy route home.

Our lives, for just over two weeks, were completely determined by the idiosyncrasies of the land we crossed on those highways. Weather, climate, people, everything changed with the highways. America is well-observed by highway. I'm sure trains run in many of these areas -- 70 follows a Union Pacific line for quite some time -- but I believe the highway has replaced the railway as the most American of transport systems -- all apologies to Woody Guthrie and his ilk. (Though I'll have to visit Germany and its Autobahn system sometime to continue to evaluate this claim).

Did I discover America? To quote Neil Gaiman in the Acknowledgements section at the end of _American Gods_, thanks his family, who "put up with my going away both to write and to find America -- which, it turned out, when I eventually found it, to have been in America all along." [Neil Gaiman, _American Gods_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2001; reprinted in paperback 2002), 592].

I discovered something about America. I'm still not sure what it was. I discovered so much of it that is empty of signs of humanity. It's one thing to pass through areas of the midwest that are heavily farmed and don't have so much in the way of population, but that look farmed and look like humans have been there, and something else to pass through certain areas of, say, Wyoming or Arizona or Nevada or what have you, and wonder how people ever ended up in such a place. (Of course, if you do this in Arizona, you're probably near some thousand year old ruins, which goes to show that people have been in a lot of places that a naive northerner would never believe).

Should I write out the trip in detail? Maybe I will sometime. It's all in a notebook, the trip log, and when I get the pictures developed maybe I'll come up with commentary from them. But I'm not sure I'm willing to commit the trip to digital imprint yet...

I will confess that I fell in love with the vastness of Wyoming, and the complete beauty of Colorado. Those were my two favourite states. California is too obviously beautiful, and I think Californians (well, those of the middle and upper classes, at least... Californians with income) have it too easy. I'm suspicious of the perfect climate of Los Angeles. I'm suspicious of all the flowers. Where's the grit? Where's the difficulty? Where's the angst? Where are the cold cold winters? How can you trust someone who's never had to shovel a walk in -30C weather, with windchill? How do you know they appreciate the important things in life? What's to stop them from electing a movie star to governor, for the second time?

Alright, that's enough for now.

jane 9:02 AM [+]

I've spent the day learning about the Lovsan virus and getting it out of my system, which is also essentially a way of distracting myself from doing anything actually resembling work. Work, at this point, involves sitting down and finally hammering out the necessary changes to a couple of papers that I want to submit for publication, finishing a database I'm preparing for a professor on scholars working in the field of Neoplatonism, and preparing a lesson for my next meeting with a friend whom I'm teaching French. I think most of my trivial knowledge comes from procrastination -- so, if I actually got my work done as soon as it came up, I wouldn't be so good at Trivial Pursuit. Possible theorem? No real way of testing -- I don't know if I can avoid procrastinatory Internet poking-around for long enough.

So this is what my life has come to, over a year, I suppose. I had forgotten about this particular blog -- or, if not quite forgotten about it, not thought about updating it. Maybe there's some sort of yearly impulse to disclose my thoughts to the world -- or at least, that particular section of the world that reads blogs. I hadn't realized that the whole blog thing wasn't the blindingly obvious part of the Internet and modern communication that I thought it was, until I was at a local bar (Howl at the Moon, in the Bronx, just off Arthur Avenue), and mentioned having read something in a blog. I believe it was something about Pirates of the Caribbean being entirely enjoyable (which it was). None of the other five people at my table had ever read a blog, and only one of them had even heard of them. These are PhD students! I was quite surprised. Anyway...

I'm still living in the Bronx, near Fordham University. Here's a link to my department, by the way, from which you can get a to a list of faculty members, information about the FPS (Fordham Philosophical Society), and other things that sort of come up in my life.

Random post-breakup nonsense with Dan, of course, lasted throughout the year (the details of which I'll spare you). In the meantime, I dated a lovely fellow student named Sterling, but it didn't work out and we're back to being friends now. He, and others in my department, are all writing comprehensive exams in a couple of weeks. I have to write them next year.

The Bronx... well, what can I say about it? I sometimes feel at home, I sometimes feel entirely alienated (though it could be a result of living in the United States right now); I sometimes feel thrilled and excited that I'm in New York City, and sometimes I feel bored yet don't want to face the long subway ride downtown in order to do something other than the usual run to the Jolly Tinker (a bar on the other side of campus).

My roommate Meredith is sick and tired of her lengthy commute to & from Manhattan/Queens/Brooklyn (i.e., where most of her life is spent) and is looking to move out with some other friends of hers into an apartment in Chinatown. Thus I'll shortly be on the horrible roommate hunt. That's how it goes, I guess. We still love each other, but I understand her need to NOT commute an hour to an hour and a half both ways every day.

What am I doing right now? Loving the view out my window, of the George Washington Bridge at night. Listening to WFUV, Fordham's radio station (check it out if you like folk or americana). Listening to traffic and the odd sounds of car alarms or breaking glass. Feeling the breeze blow in, aided by my fan.

Now I will head over to Cafe Maggiolino, to meet up with my overworked friend Rachel, with whom I went on a two week road trip across America. Whew! That was craziness. I'll write it up and post it here when I get the chance, now that it looks like my heart wants to keep up with regular blog posting. We'll see if that worked out better than last year...

jane 9:29 PM [+]