Today is NOT a Good Day to Die...

...or to get tetanus. And now, on to the story of the day...
Today I felt like a real city-dweller, so very clever and knowledgeable. I headed an expedition to a very small local art gallery, called Zone Zero, consisting of myself, my roommate Sisi, and another girl whose internship has not yet started, Audrey. The place is in Georgetown, which happens to be right next to the Barlow Center, where I live. So we wandered our way around Georgetown (in a sort of purposeful way, which I suppose definitely rules out the verb 'meandered' and such things), and didn't even have to look at a map once, I was that prepared. Once we finally found it, we discovered that it was in a large red brick building near the water, not on the main street, very tucked away, and that it was one suite and the door was locked. After much confusion at the little intercom thingy-ma-bob (as my mother might call it), we successfully got the owner and creater, a man named Jean-Louis, to let us in. We were not prepared for the wonders we saw next. The outside of the building was completely deceptive. I was expecting something dilapidated and shifty, but instead we found a space where nearly every surface was covered in the most beautiful, shiny hard-wood surfaces. We climbed a few very well-built staircases and met the owner up on the third floor. He showed us inside, to the one-room gallery, again with incredible hard-wood floors, with the pictures we came to see hanging throughout the room, suspended from the ceiling. He turned on some music that made me feel like I was either under water or in outer space, making the entire experience seem just a little surreal. The photographs were pretty awesome, and taken by a local artist. We talked with Jean-Louis for a moment, who seemed very surprised that anyone found his little gallery at all, and discovered that the artists sometimes come and present slideshows of their work. He gave us each his card so that we can come back and watch the artists. It was pretty neat, and we felt really cool for finding it.
From there we proceeded to Alexandria, Virginia, where we rode the free King's St Trolley down to another mysteriously minor art gallery. This one, however, was an entire building filled with independent artists' galleries, each in their own room actively working at their craft. There were Japanese art rooms, tapestry weavings, paintings, and prints. We were trying to catch an exhibit that is closing tomorrow, and met this wonderful woman with flowing grey hair that could easily have flown off her head at any moment. If her hair could talk it would speak Swahili. She even took down Sisi's address and is sending us an invitation to her next exhibit opening! On our way out we stopped in at the tapestry weaver's, only to discover that every one of her works is inspired by places she has visited in our very own Utah! It was a lovely day filled with random artistic adventures. The people we met were real artists creating real art with real purpose, and it was real neat to talk to them. We felt like we were starting to know the city in a less touristy way, finding such small, out-of-the-way galleries.
The metro broke down in Arlington Cemetery on our way back and they kicked us all off. That was quite an adventure too, as was the shifty TexMex food we found to eat at a diner that was definitely not designed to serve TexMex...

Time is a Trickster: An Explanation of a Fascination

The eyes of the moon gaze down, surveying all around. Can the moon hear the tree falling in the forest? "I see the moon. The moon sees me." Maybe the man in the moon is up there just laughing at us all - our antics to him, our lives to us. Then again, perhaps it is with the eyes of compassion that he watches us down here, silently wishing he could reach down and give someone a little nudge here, an urgent warning there. Why should we see the stars as still and silent? Why shouldn't they be our team, our backup? The stars, the heavens, are on our side. Just like the angels we could imagine flittering back and forth between them. Our existance intertwined with things beyond this sphere, larger than the realm of our consciousness - our meaning, our purpose, our being will go on long after all the ticks of mortal clocks - our feeble attempts to capture the trick of time - are heard no more.

Time, gripped by mortal hands and made to be linear. Divisions of an unknown substance run our lives. The tick and tock of the clock never stop, never vary, and yet despite our insistence on its linearity time still wriggles free of our increasingly tight grasp, to run away from us in leaps and bounds beyond those the imagination can conjure up, or to stop and stand in front of us, grim and immovable, like a solid wall we are forced to pick our way through bit by painful bit. No matter how hard we try to chain it up or tie it down, time always has another trick up its sleeve, another Hudini escape planned. Time needs only an instant to work its magic and pull the wool over our eyes long enough to take us on a careening roller coaster ride, drop us over the edge of a cliff, or force us to sit chained still, watching in agony every second we ascribe to it. Time is the ultimate trickster.

Big City #2...or is it 3 or 4?

When I went on study abroad in London this past fall, one of the things I was most excited for was finding out what it was like to live in a big city. I had a feeling I was going to love it, and love it I did. Every minute of it. Now I sit at a computer screen in Washington, D.C., yet another big city, thinking about how much I do love living in places like this, and feeling glad that I am lucky enough to do this again, for a second time. Then I realized that technically speaking, I was born in a pretty big city, and the city I have spent more than half my life in isn't one I would exactly call small, either. D.C. may not be my second big city after all. So perhaps my vague pre-London feeling that I was going to like big cities came more from experience than intuition than I thought.