17 January 2008

snow!

snow today! big fat flakes of it, which somehow made me insanely happy, even when they got into my eyelashes and down the back of my neck while i cleaned my car off at 6:30 tonight in heels and work clothes (my business pants are drenched and hanging on the chair in front of me as i write). it blanketed thickly and quickly.

on the way home, it turned into rain...

it reminded me of the time it snowed, and goobs and i (me in my glasses and both of us in our household sweats) walked down to the Schlossgarten and made snow angels, and had a massive snowball fight. i think we scared the nice couples who were there to watch the snow fall onto the brightly-lit jewel of a city below.

before that, in the fall, we had stood together at the railing above the aqueducts, contemplating the beginning of a semester. the trees above us were golden, but somehow, the trees next to us were not. we realized the the spotlighting from below made the leaves glow with in a gold light, and it reminded me of that old fairy tale, about the 8 dancing princesses and their dancing slippers - the one where the 8 sisters find a city beneath the floorboards, and they pass trees with silver leaves and trees with golden leaves, cross the river to meet the 8 princes they dance with every night til dawn.

snow makes me fanciful.

16 January 2008

bananas and europeans and the mona lisa

well, that sums up this post rather well, don't you agree?

i realize that once again, i'm slacking off in the blogging department. i actually write a lot, it's just that i have limited internet access at work, which means that all the stuff i type up gets saved in ms word and then sent to my webmail so that i can access it at home....

and i'm lazy as hell.

i realized this today while looking at old e-mails. i've kept every single e-mail from my heidelberg days - all the ones from 2003 through today. gotta love the larger inboxes. not that there were a lot of e-mails from when i was actually physically there; europeans are still creatures who like personal interaction better than interaction via the middleman. it used to be so easy to meet up for coffee or lunch spontaneously, to catch up with friends and get work done all in the course of the same day. my relationship with certain friends is written out in long communications, while with other friends, the true depth of our relationship can hardly be seen in our rare and infrequent missives.

i'm so bad at keeping in touch. there are so many people i've lost touch with over the last 2-odd years (i still can't bring myself to believe it will be almost 3 years in march), and i'm not quite sure how to reconnect. maybe once i see them again in person, it will remind us gently of the times we had. incidentally (purely out of curiosity), i see that a round-trip ticket from philly to stuttgart in oh, say, mid-february, costs only 400 bucks - a lot cheaper than i had imagined it to be...hmmmm...

in other news, i was very proud of my old alma mater today - manuscript specialists at the university of heidelberg have discovered the true identity of the mona lisa! i've never been prouder of old ruprecht karls. though apparently, they discovered this back in 2005, and no one knew until a german radio station made it public. modest to a fault, my heidelbergers!

so my personal statement for law school is about bananas. which reminds me, i should finish that first, then come back to this topic, at length, later.