Adventures!

I love adventures. They're so adventuresome. But I generally hate packing. I get a mental overload trying to think of all of the possibilities for a trip and I almost always overpack.

Not this time. That's 4 weeks right up there. In two CARRY-ONS. And one of them isn't even completely full. I am so proud of myself that I had to share.

Coincidence!

I think not!

Wikipedia's featured article today is on Ba Cut, a military commander of a religious sect operating in the Mekong Delta/Vietnam during the 1940s/50s.

Hey, Hey! I'm traveling there in a few days! I think the internets are conspiring to give me a good send-off. Or you know, it could just be coincidence.

Traveling

I have a love/hate relationship with traveling. I love the sights, but I hate the tourist traps. Love the arrival at a new place, hate the overwhelming confusion. Love the food, hate the...well, I guess I don't really hate anything when it comes to food.

And I love flying and hate it at the same time. I'm not afraid of flying, but I hate the cramped quarters, the recirculated air, the uncomfortable seats, the weird aches that I get in my ankles...

And yet, there's a freedom in flying. An airplane is an in-between, and its passengers are, too. In between departure and destination, in between old friends and new, a metal box full of strangers has a shared experience of transition. My favorite part of a long flight is towards the end, when everybody realizes that they've just spent several hours sitting next to someone with whom they barely conversed. Little dialogues happen up and down the plane, as strangers make up for lost time. I just find it funny.

Anyhow, I cannot wait to visit my friend, E, in Vietnam, but I must admit that I am not looking forward to the flight. I'll try to post pictures, but no guarantees.

La Stanza Dello Scirocco Basket

I don't normally love crazy-modern decor, but this basket is so pretty that I want it. I don't care that I currently have no home to put it in...I just love this basket. I think that it would look delightful just about anywhere--with some fruit or rolls in the kitchen, with some brightly colored handtowels in the bathroom, to hold stationery on my desk, or in my creativity room, storing ribbons for wrapping paper.

You can find it at the MoMA store online, but for some reason the link wasn't working right.



Also...it's inspired by tornadoes. Holla!

Letters

In my first post, I mentioned a letter project. For my New Year's Resolution for 2010, I decided to write a letter per week to a person of my acquaintance: friend, relative, teacher, family friend, whoever (whomever?). I'm calling it The Great Letter Project of 2010, and I have it all planned out in Excel and everything.

The goal is 52 letters to 52 different people over the course of the year. So far, I've stuck to the project like glue (maybe even written a few extra letters), and I've really enjoyed it. Writing letters in this age of email, twitter, texting and IM is just so different, and I have greatly enjoyed the reactions of the people to whom I write.

What I've discovered is that writing a letter doesn't actually take very long (half the time it takes me longer to find a person's address than it does to write the letter), and I enjoy it far more than writing an email or a text. I also really like getting letters back (or even emails and phone calls), which reminds me that the best way to keep in touch with people is to reach out yourself.

And...I've learned a great way to keep a New Year's Resolution, which is to resolve to do something once per week (as opposed to a resolution which requires daily attention). It's far easier to have 7 days to accomplish a task than to only have 24 hours.

La Buena Maria Fontaneda

Looking forward to Madrid makes me remember all of my favorite things about Spain, like Maria cookies. They are absolutely yummy shortbread/vanilla/cracker/cookie things that I will often eat for breakfast when in Spain (and if I don't watch myself, I'll eat the whole sleeve). I like them so much that when I left in summer 2008, my housemom gave me TWO WHOLE BOXES to take home with me.

Don't they look delicious?

How fitting that my first Things-I-Like Thursday will be a cookie. Just saying.

titles

DNortonLand is a very beautiful place, full of smiles and sunshine and lots of butterflies (maybe a few daffodils). Or it's a place where I speak six languages. Or have a library full of a thousand books. Or even, when I was a child, it was totally a place where the characters from my favorite books came alive.

Basically, like any child with a pretty active imagination, I grew up knowing how to occupy myself and how to get lost in the vast crevices of my mind. Still do. In college, some friends noticed that I wouldn't always be completely focused on conversations happening right in front of me (sometimes even about me), so they named my daydreams "DNortonLand."

And I promised them that if/when I started a blog, I would call it just that.

madrid

Yesterday's post was too serious. So I decided to lighten it up a little today and think forward to Spain. I really want to find a nice Anglican church in Spain, which I think should be pretty easy, due to the large numbers of British expats in Madrid.

I'm not entirely sure what my criteria will be for a church. I am definitely leaning towards one that is close to where I live, and since I kind of love old Spanish architecture, I think that I will probably be more encouraged to attend a pretty church (especially if it is old!). Of course, the congregation, priest, etc... also matter in a church, but there's really only so much that I can do stateside, like look at pretty pictures.

So...looking online today, I found this one. St. George's Church in Madrid.



Anglican, adorable, and hopefully close to where I'll be living.

Capitalism/Democracy

I really enjoy political discussions. Not because I am very good at them or even because I hold very strong opinions and must share them with people. On the contrary, I really enjoy asking the question, "How do we go about creating the perfect world/improving the one that we've got?"

I especially like discussing these things with people who do have some very strongly held opinions (my brother, K, and his friend, V, come to mind), because I really enjoy forcing myself to see both sides of an argument and trying to reconcile them. I like the mental exercise.

Which is why I enjoyed receiving an email from K last night about an article by Charles Koch, linked here, complete with an argument by V about why Koch was wrong. K and V generally have some fiery arguments, and so I spent a long while thinking about why they couldn't see eye to eye on this particular article, realizing that whatever my thoughts were, they probably weren't going to change anyone's perspective. (Like I said, mental exercise.)

I realized that they were trying to argue two separate things, which is potentially where the disconnect between conservatives and liberals in the US lies. V was trying to discuss the political system, and K was trying to focus on the economic system; and while the two are related, they are not inextricable. In fact, capitalism has been shown to exist in several countries without democracy, but I'm not sure that you could say the same about democracy existing without capitalism.

As much as K and V (and anybody else for that matter) try to debate the values of capitalism and democracy, until they can separate the two, they are simply comparing apples to oranges and the argument will go nowhere. So yeah...in your political discussions, as in all areas of life, please be sure that you are talking TO your opponent and not AT them, because otherwise it can be very ugly.

intro

As I write this post, I am three months into a letter-writing project and approximately 5 months away from moving to Spain for a year-long Master's program in Spanish (also 5 months away from the day I turn 24, give or take a few weeks). 3 months until I travel to Middlebury, VT to participate in a 6-week Spanish immersion course, 2 months until I travel to my family's cabin, 1 month until I travel to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand to visit my friend Elizabeth(!!), 3 weeks until my next Spanish bookclub meeting, 3 days since I ran a 10k, and smack dab at the beginning of a book that I am trying to write.

But this whole chronology is forcing me to realize a few things about time. 1) It is linear. 2) It is cyclical. And 3) I don't really keep track of it very well, which is why I started a blog. I would journal, but with journaling, I am only responsible to myself (and my journal has now been overtaken by the book idea and it's really weird to flip between my life and the lives I am creating in my mind). So I am blogging, and hoping that my friends and family will motivate me to chronicle the big adventure which will be the next year of my life (or at least, I hope that this next year is a big adventure. It's a big adventure in my mind.)