We got back to Knoxville late Wednesday night, and for some reason I’m still feeling jet-lagged and out of sorts. Maybe it’s just the depression that sets in each time I return to the routine and responsibilities of “real life” after a great vacation.
We’ve been running around town at such a pace that when we finally do return to the hotel each night, I don’t have much energy left to write. Here’s a snapshot of the last few days.
When we arrived yesterday at St. Paul’s, we discovered that it was closed to tourists. So after snapping a couple pictures, we headed south, taking the millennium footbridge across the Thames to the Tate Modern.
With two hours to kill before our room was ready, we dropped off our bags and wandered through the Egypt and Greece rooms at the British Museum.
On May 1st, just a few days after Joanna and I return from our trip to London, I will begin a full-time job as a web designer at the university, and I’m damn eager to get started. I’m especially excited about my new title: Artist.
I’m still not sure why she grabbed me that day or why I’m the one who gets to share life with her. To say I’m grateful wouldn’t come close to expressing the mystery of it all.
Last week, a friend sent us a link to a British Airways deal, we talked about it for a day or two, and then we made our reservations. Twelve days, eleven nights, taking off three weeks from Friday. Crazy.
I’m fighting the urge to buy a house down the street. It’s been on the market for several months now, and, after finding pictures of it online, I can see why.
Joanna still tells the story of the first time she visited my family at Christmas. Although she had come from an upper middle-class home, she’d never seen so many presents under a tree. In fact, they weren’t just under the tree. They were under and around and near the tree. They were piled in corners on the opposite side of the room from the tree.
Welcome to Long Pauses (version 8.0). Consider this redesign a usability study.
I love that this photo managed to capture all fourteen of our guests (plus the top of Jo’s head at the bottom of the frame), and I still enjoy looking at the expressions on their faces.
While sipping my second glass of wine, I did my best to affect the look of someone waiting for that old friend I had arranged to meet — you know, staring intently across the room, even rocking forward onto my toes from time to time for a better vantage — but apparently I failed miserably.
I’ve come to feel increasingly alienated from evangelical culture, and politics is an important reason. I used to write about this a lot more on Long Pauses, but I grew tired of my own voice and my own hypocrisies. Too much finger-pointing. Plus, the results of the 2004 election broke my heart. I’ve felt more than a bit defeated and hopelessly cynical ever since.
Instead, I’m working on another conference paper — this one to be delivered next month in Atlanta, which is an easy drive, and thank God for that.
A few years ago, some friends and I threw a surprise party for Joanna. The coolest present she got was a life-sized cardboard cutout of Legolas — the perfect addition to our Orlando Bloom-themed party, which was all about pirates and elves and horses and my then-31-year-old wife’s Peter Pan syndrome.
That is how George Fasel began his first post at A Girl and a Gun. He became one of my Daily Reads a month or two later. Like I wrote in the comments there, as saddened as I am to hear of George’s passing, I’m also feeling strangely inspired and encouraged by his example.
I’m not a slob. Really. Which is why I grabbed my camera this morning. I wish I could say that I had doctored this photo or had carefully arranged my bedside table for dramatic effect, but this is what I woke up to. Sad but true.
The reason I haven’t been posting lately is … well … it’s because, apparently, I’m getting dumber.
What so impressed me about the episode is that, even during the final, most emotionally-rich scenes, Lowe never slips into scene-stealing TV actor mode.
“Well, we don’t know what’s happening exactly, but it must be big. Speculate away!”
Many of us who opposed the war did so, in part, because we feared that destabilizing Iraq would provoke a civil war that would prove a humanitarian crisis worse than even Saddam’s regime. I wonder how American sentiment toward our role in Iraq would change if we admitted that the civil war has already begun?
Never walk through the kitchen appliance aisle at Target when you’re craving coffee and have a credit card.
Remodel your guest bathroom. Strip wallpaper. Apply three coats of joint compound, sanding between each coat. Roll on a coat or two of primer, then two coats of paint.
People who blog are, by their nature, archivists, and posts like this serve to capture a significant (relatively speaking, of course) moment of development. I found several such pages while digging through the archives and enjoyed revisiting them.
Long Pauses has been a much-needed retreat for me this year, and I genuinely appreciate the small community that has gathered here.
We got stuck in 20 inches of snow in Dayton and ate beignets at Cafe du Monde. All in all, a good but exhausting couple of weeks.
In the last month, Bush has given America’s highest civilian honor to George Tenet, the man who most on the right scapegoated for his “slam dunk” on Iraq intelligence. He’s nominated a petty criminal for the nation’s top security position. And he’s repeatedly emphasized his support of Donald Rumsfeld. I think we’re reaching a point when Bush’s statement of “confidence” will be read quite differently from how it’s intended.
“Static is the place where there isn’t much–abandoned buildings, fog, cotton fields forever–but the absence has a presence. There’s sound in the silence, like the wheel grind and tape hiss in a Mountain Goats song.”
And then one of my Mexican students reminded us of the 1968 Olympics that were held in Mexico City, where only ten days before the games opened 267 students were gunned down and more than 1,000 were wounded during a protest at the Plaza of Three Cultures. And then two of my South Korean students told us of their government’s secret decision to send troops to Vietnam despite the public’s protest against such a move. And then one of my Chinese students, a remarkable young woman who exudes joy like no one I’ve ever known, said, “Yes. The same in China. During the Cultural Revolution.”
