I just read an interesting article about Barack Obama in this month's Esquire magazine called "The Cynic and Senator Obama" by Charles P. Pierce. I enjoyed it and wanted to email it to my husband, so I used the "email this article" function on Esquire.com. After I entered my email, my husband's email and hit send, this popped up:
Um, what?
I bought my ticket today and my friends and I are already planning on partaking in a few special cocktails here beforehand. We've been waiting a long time for this and now that it's so close, it's that much harder to wait. All I can say is that it better be good!
I am a bit of a packrat. I keep things. Lots of things. Things that have significance only to me. I often keep these things in my purse or wallet, tucked away where I forget that they're there and then rediscover them at random times. I just switched to a new purse (a smaller one, trying to declutter) and in doing so also had to get a smaller wallet. This forced me to go back through the wallet I've carried for several years, a travel wallet I bought in 2002 prior to a 5 week trip to Europe that had lots of areas to stash things. One of the things I found was an old Magic Hat #9 bottle cap that has the words "Be Here Now" on the underside that I got on a beer sometime early in my college days (Magic Hat had sayings on all of their bottle caps once upon a time, I imagine they still do). My mind has been getting away from me a bit lately, so that was a nice reminder to take a deep breath and get back into the present. Here it is:
I also have a set of ticket stubs from Rocket from the Crypt's last concert ever that my husband and I attended in San Diego on Halloween 2005 and a guest pass to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that my husband gave me right after we started dating. So they are things that just feel good to have with me, that have good vibes. Another thing I found was a note card, folded in half and soft from wear, on which I'd written the following words in black ink:
"Ask yourself some questions on your true desires and the meaning that you want to give to your life. Don't hesitate to start a phase of introspection and inner searching to discover your personal legend. Give philosophy a bigger place in your search for happiness."
This was a horoscope that blew me away when I read it, probably sometime in mid-2000. It was one of those times when I really needed to hear something like that and I wrote it down and put it in my wallet because I always wanted to remember it. Here I have rediscovered it in 2008, many miles (both literally and figuratively) away from where I was when it first seemed significant and it is just as good a reminder now as it was then, it really brings everything into focus for me. The philosophy that I believe needs a bigger place in my search for happiness is Mindfulness, I have studied it a bit (in this book) but really need a refresher...phase of introspection, here I come.
So. I finally finished Atonement last week. I’ve been wanting to read it for ages, it is an award winning book (National Book Critics Circle fiction winner in 2002) and spawned a hit movie. I am someone who must read the book before I see the movie and I am not someone who likes to analyze a book (hence the book club I helped found where we read books that are coming out as movies and instead of sitting around and talking about the book, we just go see the movie and then get drinks afterwards), I just want to read and get absorbed. I have heard such good things about this book for so long that I was psyched to finally start it. I was still psyched when I was 50 pages in, thinking that it must pick up soon. Slightly less psyched on page 100 when it was still “setting the scene”. It finally picked up around page 200. I am not someone who can stop reading a book once I’ve started, I gut through it even if it’s awful. Atonement wasn’t awful, the prose was beautiful but nothing really happened for a really long time! I kept at it and ended up getting into it on a recent flight to Boston (for the marathon trip) and finished it on the way back home, but wow. I know most people won’t stick with a book like I will and I’m thinking maybe my expectations just got majorly inflated due to the amazing reviews that both the book and movie received. All in all, looking back, it was a great book. It was very well written and the storytelling is very smooth. But Part I was so long and the pace was so slow. Since the movie was apparently so amazing and got nominated for so many Academy Awards, I almost think this is one case where it’s alright to skip the book and see the movie.
Now The Time Traveler’s Wife, on the other hand…read this book! It’s coming out as a movie later in 2008 and I am cautiously optimistic, but the book is just so wonderful, one of my favorites of all time and it would be a shame to skip this book and see the movie, which could end up a total butcher job, and miss out on the story as it was initially created.
Happy May Day! The calendar I chose for 2008 is called "Space Views from the Hubble Space Telescope" and I flipped to a new month this morning and there is the coolest new image for May, the Cat's Eye Nebula.
Is that not the coolest looking thing? It is approximately 3,300 light years away from Earth. A light year is a measure of length, not time, and is the distance light waves can travel in a vacuum in a year or approximately 5,878,625,373,183.61 miles. One of the things I find the most fascinating about viewing things in space is that the light waves that hit our eyes and allow us to "see" stars/nebulas/galaxies etc at a precise moment, actually left or departed the star/nebula/galaxy hundreds or thousands of years ago. In the case of the Cat's Eye Nebula, the light waves that are producing the image in our minds left it 3,300 years ago. Therefore, it very well could be (and perhaps is) long gone in "real time", like at this very moment even though we are looking right at it! Crazy. Time is relative when you're talking about space anyway. I have done some very lightweight reading on quantum physics and it is fascinating stuff if you can wrap your mind around it. I found a quote (how fitting!) that sums it all up nicely: "Quantum Physics: The dreams stuff is made of." Indeed.
