the district sleeps alone tonight

i think i could stay in dc forever. there is way too much to possibly ever take in, nonetheless in three days. here is what i've done thus far

yesterday

waited in line for silly tourist tickets and time slots for the next three sites

washington monument

holocaust museum

bureau of engraving and printing

smithsonian castle

museum of african art

freer gallery

sackler gallery

hirshhorn museum and sculpture garden

world war II memorial

nighttime driving tour of dc and virginia with my cousin

today

library of congress (this includes getting my reader card!)

capitol (but i didn't actually tour it)

postal museum

union station

botanical gardens

vietnam memorial

world war I memorial

white house (again, didn't tour)

jefferson memorial

national art gallery east - complete

national art gallery west - didn't finish bottom floor

national art gallery sculpture gardens

national archives

all of the art....i don't even have words. stella, mondrian, giacometti, liechtenstein, de kooning, frankenthaler, o'keefe, rothko, pollock, warhol, rembrandt, monet, manet, matisse, picasso, leyster, rubens, renoir, cezanne...the list goes on and on. just seeing lavendar mist made my life. i don't know how many times i was coming up an escalator or turned a corner just to have my breath taken away.

i love walking into a room and instantly, like star-crossed lovers, coming eye to eye with a piece and knowing it is something unmistakably liechtenstein (or insert any of the above names here). being on that level (though i have so so so much to learn, and there is so much i do not know about art) and just...feeling the art on a spiritual level. like i said, there aren't words.

well, off to bed for me. another long day ahead of me tomorrow, what with trying to squeeze the rest of dc into one day!

on things i have accomplished today

travel insurance? check.
hostel for amsterdam, to get things started? check.
international student id? check.
loads of empty memory cards? check.
bank deposit? check.
one last target shopping trip? check.
uk sim card and international phone? check.
new travel-friendly debit card? check.
backpack? check.

okay, okay. i confess. i booked the hostel on tuesday. everything else though, i did today.

way to much left to do? definitely.

harry potter verrrrrry soon :) nap time for now

he saw reality, and thought it was a dream

a few passages from c.s. lewis' perelandra.

---

one can't put the difference into words

the old footing is not easy to recover

the picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. and if you wish - if it were possible to wish - you could keep it there. you could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. you could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other

nothing is great or small, save by position

it surprised him that he could experience so extreme a terror and yet be walking and thinking - as men in war or sickness are surprised by how much can be borne: 'it will drive us mad,' 'it will kill us outright,' we say; and hen it happens and we find ourselves neither mad nor dead, still held to the task

either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. and if something, who could set bounds to it?

ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact with purely terrestrial - was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the fall

the terrible silence went on. it became more and more like a face, a face not without sadness, that looks upon you while you are telling lies, and never interrupts, but gradually you know that it knows, and falter, and contradict yourself, and lapse into silence.

all in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a merely accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident. the whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. the pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can.

and then, without any apparent movement of the will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial, there had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge 'about this time tomorrow you will have done the impossible'

except for the song it was all very still

nay, the very beauty of it lay in the certainty that it was a copy, like and not the same, an echo, a rhyme, an exquisite reverberation of the uncreated music prolonged in a created medium.

we have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking

'i do not call it the beginning,' said tor the king. 'it is but the wiping out of a false start in order that the world may then begin

as soon as we think we see one it melts away into nothing, or into some other plan that we never dreamed of, and what was the centre becomes the rim, till we doubt if any shape or plan or pattern was ever more than trick of our own eyes

looking on

rome, may 2009.
cupola, st. peter's basilica

all the best intentions

this could be my last cigarette
no, this could be my last regret
i sat and watched the matches burn down
down down down down to my fingertips
i sat and thought of you
a thought or two and i, and i can't resist.

and the lights, they dim like i knew they would
when it gets dark i start to think of you
'cause friends don't even compare to you
i just want something i can hold on to
when times get bad, my habit just got worse

this could be my last cigarette
no, this could be my last regret
i sat and watched the matches burn down
down down down down to my fingertips
i sat and thought of you
a thought or two and i, and i can't resist.

and the lights, they dim like i knew they would
when it gets dark I start to think of you
'cause friends don't even compare to you
i just want something I can hold on to
when times get bad, my habit just got worse

1, 2 i love the way you kiss me
you know we're never gonna get it right
i need something to hold me
i need something for the winter time
we sat inside the headlights
you laughed about the life i talked about the dreams
and now i know you're on your way
you're leaving with all the best intentions
and you're all buttoned up
slam the door
you leave the car
you take a walk i used to walk you on
i walk i used to oh

when it gets dark i start to think of you
'cause friends don't even compare to you
i just want something i can hold on to
when times get bad, my habit just got worse

this could be my last cigarette
this could be my last cigarette
this could be my last cigarette

hell is other people

last night, i couldn't sleep. i started and finished this book after i finally got off the computer

'who really knows? i could have dreamed all this'

favorite passage is from his interview with clarence darrow

'the presence of those cameras finally acknowledges,' he said to me, ' that justice systems anywhere, anytime, have never cared whether justice was achieved or not. like roman games, justice systems are ways for unjust governments - and there is no other sort of government - to be enormously entertaining with real lives at stake.

i also started another c.s. lewis book that i forgot i hadn't read it yet - till we have faces.

also, i am itching to see another show....and since i love listing things, here are three lists. everything is better in threes.

bands i really want to see again

mgmt
person l
mae
the rocket summer
jacks mannequin
all-american rejects
passion pit
band of horses
conor oberst and the mystic valley band
manchester orchestra
death cab for cutie
natalie portman's shaved head
portugal. the man
forgive durden

bands i really, really, really want to see for the first time

jimmy eat world
girl talk
incubus
fun
fleet foxes
brand new
crystal castles
pretty lights
broken social scene
sunny day real estate
jeremy enigk
lady gaga
blonde redhead
les savy fav

in an ideal world?

the format
the starting line
something corporate
be your own pet
neutral milk hotel
this is me smiling
taking back sunday (circa 2004)

we must be guided by circumstances

i finally finished that hideous strength today. i need to type up my favorite quotes from the first two books in the series, so look for perelandra and out of the silent planet soon. definitely worth reading, i was just taking it way too slow. enjoy.

---

youth and age touch only the surface of our lives

isn't seeing believing?
it may be - for children or beasts.

the sadness that came over him had novelty in it

her actual state of mind was one she could not analyze. her expectation was strung up to the height; something that would have been terror but for the joy, and joy but for the terror, possessed her - an all-absorbing tension of excitement and obedience. everything else in her life seemed small and commonplace compared with this moment.

...that when you mean well, he always takes you to have meant better than you knew. it will not be enough for always. he is very jealous. he will have you for no one but himself in the end. but for tonight, it is enough.

[one] who could enjoy things for their own sake

have you ever noticed, said dimble, that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?. . .you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room or indecision and choices are even more momentous. good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse.

i'm afraid there's no niche in the world for people that won't be either pagan or christian. just imagine a man who was too dainty to eat with his fingers and yet wouldn't use forks!

now the suspicion dawn upon her that there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent.

in its light you could understand them; but from them you could know nothing of it. there was nothing, and never had been anything, like this. and now there was nothing except this. yet also, everything had been like this; only by being like this had anything existed.

words take too long. to be aware of all this and to know that it had already gone made one single experience.

it was well that both men had some knowledge of poetry. the doubling, spilitting, and recombining of thoughts which now went on in them would have been unendurable for one whom that art had not already instructed in the counterpoint of the mind, the mastery of doubled and trebled vision.

they could not bear that it continue. they could not bear that it should cease.

they were laughing again, but it was a different kind of laughter. their love for one another became intense. each, looking on all the rest, thought, i'm lucky to be here. i could die with these.

they felt themselves taking their places in the ordered rhythm of the universe, side by side with punctual seasons and patterned atoms. . .under the immense weight of their obedience their wills stood up straight and untiring like caryatids.

it was also strong like a mountain; its age was no mere morass of time where imagination can sink in reverie, but a living, self-remembering duration which repelled lighter intelligences from its structure as granite flings back waves, itself unwithered and undecayed but able to wither any who approach it unadvised.

before the other angels a man might sink: before this he might die, but if he lived at all, he would laugh. . .unquenchable laughter

it was like the first beginning of music in the halls of some king so high and at some festival so solemn that a tremor akin to fear runs through young hears when they hear it

but the realisation that he had forgotten trouble him more than it would have troubled another. it was like the first cold breath of winter - the first little hint of a crack in that great seconday self or mental machine which he had built up to carry on the business of living

nothing but nonsense syllables would occur to his mind

if i take a step in any direction, he thought, i may step over a precipice

christianity was a fable. it would be ridiculous to die for a religion one did not believe. this man himself [christ], on that very cross, had discovered it to be a fable, and had died complaining that the god in whom he trusted had forsaken him - had, in fact, found the universe a cheat. but this raised a question that mark had never thought of before. was that the moment at which to turn against the man? if the universe was a cheat, was that a good reason for joining its side? supposing the straight and normal was utterly powerless, always and everywhere certain to be mocked, tortured, and finally killed by the crooked, what then? why not go down with the ship? he began to be frightened by the very fact that his fears seemed to have momentarily vanished. they had been a safeguard . . .they had prevented him, all his life, from making mad decisions like that which he was now making.

this, combined with an inarticulate want for the human companionship to which he was accustomed, gradually plunged him into depression. sorrow such as only animals know - huge seas of disconsolate emotion with not one little raft of reason to float on - drowned him fathoms deep. in his own fashion he lifted up his voice and wept.

often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. but he cannot make this knowledge real to himself.

increasingly, his actions had been without motive. he did this and that, he said thus and thus, and did know why. his mind was a mere spectator. he could not understand why that spectator should exist at all.

he half saw: he wholly hated.

as he now saw, one might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one had seen it.

but now that it's so very nearly time for me to go, all this begins to feel like a dream. a happy dream, you understand: all of it, even the pain. i want to taste every drop. i feel as though it would be dissolved if i talked much.

---

as for me, it's nothing new just another two years

but he understood at last what dumbledore had been trying to tell him. it was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but dumbledore knew - and so do i, thought harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents - that there was all the difference in the world.

i remember when i read this in the fall, and this passage really struck me. it still does. children's fiction or not, it is always the simplest words that really resonate the most.

i fooled the crowd

forgive me, you cut out again - it seems so easy just to blame the reception
but theres something wrong and i dont know why
Why you, you never say goodbye so please just leave,
you dont mean that much to me you keep the ring,
ill take those saturdays in bed
cause i know you need them
as for me its nothing new just another two years
i wish we'd always wake up new,
refreshed and born again with nothing left to lose
but we dream too much and who needs a crutch?
pull off the bandage, theres no wound
so please just leave, you dont mean that much to me
give back the ring, keep all those summers with your friends
cause you know you need them
as for me its nothing new just another two years
that im here losing sleep
your sore thumb,
your best defense is miles from home
oh and it reads like a letter, with the words all broken
erased them with a razorblade
cause youre gone i was lost then i found you
but im breaking down now that...

---

im nicotine , im coming clean
i fooled the crowd
when i made it sound like i was more than ready
strike up the band, deprive my sleep
cause there’s no love like apathy
the bell that tolls rings loud enough
that it should have woke us up
im trying to find truth
in words, in rhymes, in notes
in all the things i wish i’d wrote
cause I feel like i’ve been losing you
i read your last entry
over-privileged kids keep crying
the need to fit in gets harder
when living life from a screen
old classmates please drop all your pens
don’t write a word cause i won't reply
and I’m not bitter, no, it's just i’ve passed that point in my life
im trying to find truth
in words, in rhymes, in notes
in all the things i wish id wrote
cause i feel like ive been losing you
each night it ends too soon
you dont hold me like you used to
and your eyes look like theyve seen too much
'cause it's always some excuse
too tired, too obtuse
you look so far removed
this time i fear i’m losing you for good
im nicotine, im a cash machine
im the color green
and you should've seen the looks I just received
i need a reason to let go
an intervention, or a lullaby
something to cure me, please believe me--
im trying to find truth
in words, in rhymes, in notes
in all the things i wish id wrote
cause i feel like ive been losing you
each night it ends too soon
you dont hold me like you used to
and your eyes look like they’ve seen too much but
it's always some excuse
too tired, too obtuse
you look so far removed
this time I fear I’m just not getting through

i have a love/hate relationship with last.fm

...because i feel like it never fully reflects what ive been listening to. id say girl talk is at the top this week, really, but since ive been listening to feed the animals in the single mp3 form, it only comes up once for every time i listen to the whole album. oh well.

revisiting

today is dedicated to reading this -