less than a week. beyond excited.
just bought this incredible lonely planet guidebook today. this is going to be awesome awesome.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
“I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.”
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
I read this book last January, and today a friend gifted it to me. I remember last time I read it I was inspired to write again for a while, to the point where a friend and I discussed writing novellas. Hopefully rereading it will result in inspiration striking again.
British museum - mummies. Kind of creepy, very cool.
Yesterday was incredible. Mummies and Mamma Mia make for a good day. As does walking through Harrods, a real-life version of Vogue.
Italian pastry shop in Soho, London. Cannolis! Joy.
Jim Dine’s Putney Winter Heart #8 (Skier). I’ve been reading about the symbolism and all, but I just really like the heart motif and think this one is especially beautiful.
I had a few minutes before my tute today and took a walk around Christ Church meadow.
It’s not an unusual scene, especially not for me - coming from the middle of nowhere, new jersey, but it’s nice. I can feel the overwhelming scope of what’s out there and how much more there is to the world and how big things are in comparison to me doing badly on an exam. I like feeling small. It happens either when I am in a bustling city and surrounded by people going and being and doing or when I stand somewhere like this and begin to realize just how immense the world is.
Also, looking through Plath’s journals today, something I do fairly often. It amazes me how eloquent she could be even in her journals.
“I want to live each day for itself like a string of colored beads, and not kill the present by cutting it up in cruel little snippets to fit some desperate architectural draft for a taj mahal in the future.”
Coffee break, Tuesday, early AM, London. Even early in the morning, London is so much more alive than Oxford.
Op-Ed Columnist - Our Politics May Be All in Our Head - NYTimes.com
This is interesting, on some basic level it does make sense (conservatives being sensitive to fear), but I can’t really comment on the science.
One important and interesting point Kristof makes:
“Conservatives may be more responsive to health reform, he suggested, if it is framed as a national security argument. For example, American companies complain about the difficulty of competing with foreign companies that don’t have to pay for employee medical coverage. In that sense, our existing health care system leaves us vulnerable.”
This makes intuitive sense, but also makes you wonder. How has healthcare reform been framed? Would people really be more responsive if they considered that it was weakening American companies in global competition? Or wouldn’t they be more responsive if the perceived threat was to them, individually, also? Isn’t that the problem we’re facing - convincing people for whom the lack of healthcare reform is not an individual threat?
