kit-ping posted a meme in she wrote about five topics that someone picked because they associate them with her, and then offered to pick five things for other people. So here are the my explanations of five things kit-ping associates with me. (Comment if you'd like five things for you to write about, I guess.)

( travel )

Something astonishingly good just happened, which sadly reveals me to be astonishingly dim-witted ( Read more... )

Internets, tell me what I should be for Halloween! I have been searching for ideas but have not settled on anything awesome ( Read more... )

Today, for the first time, Justin and I did something that almost all of our friends have been doing since they moved to Qatar: we hired someone to come clean our home ( Read more... )

My church youth group leader died yesterday ( Read more... )

Quote of the day, from Justin: "You don't look a day over 29! Well, maybe a day ( Read more... )

I can't believe that everything that happened in 2007 fit in one year. I learned to love tea, visited a labor camp, weekended in Dubai with friends, hiked through Yorkshire, developed two strange allergies, had the most fun birthday party I've ever had, showed my parents around Doha, dyed my hair blue, spent a very unhappy week in Pittsburgh, ( Read more... )

A foreshadowing of my inevitable midlife crisis next year:

Me: "Just think: when the buddha was my age he was still a prince. He hadn't become an ascetic yet, let alone left the ascetics and become the buddha."

Dave: "When Alexander the Great was your age, he'd conquered the known world."

Today I came across this passage of Carl Jung, which I read once a very long time ago and which has always rung very true for me.

I always worked with the temperamental conviction that fundamentally there are no insoluble problems, and experience justified me in so far as I have I have often seen individuals simply outgrow a problem which has ( Read more... )

It's been a good day. I was moderately busy all day meeting with freshmen about their first English papers, and I met briefly with a colleague about a possible collaboration that will make me fabulously happy if it comes to fruition. And I am absurdly cheered by little things, like that my fingernails are still painted black from a party this ( Read more... )