I can't decide how i feel about this.

my worlds keep colliding

mountain men on letterpress stationery.

oh my.

nailed it

"Lamentably, we fell away from our intended divine context and from the task for which we are by nature fitted. We mistrusted and distanced ourselves from God and then, very naturally, from one another. In our arrogance and fear we flounder through our existence on our own...But at the same time our fundamental makeup is unchanged. The deepest longings of our heart confirm our original calling. Our very being still assigns us to "rule" in our life circumstances, whatever they may be....And we still experience ourselves as creative will, as someone who accomplishes things, constantly desiring to generate value, or what is good, from ourselves and from our environment."

-Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy p.23

My nails match my car!

A Million Miles In A Thousand Years by Donald Miller

Day off.

Project

I bought this bulletin board for five bucks but HATED having a big brown square on my wall. It is now a beautiful slate blue square (yes, rectangle, I know) on my wall! I painted the pushpins for it too because they were green (the green ones were cheaper). It has stuff on it now but it doesn't look cluttered and messy because it looks (a little) less like a dorm room fixture. Yay!

Zander was chillaxin' in my bathroom while I got ready the other day.

I'm mostly posting this because I'm making "the face" that I tend to make in pictures.

I hate "the face"

Also, I can kind of see why my stepmom sometimes told me I have a lazy eye.

not an impressive showing

The BBC says the average person has only read 6 of these:

[x] 1 Pride and Prejudice
[x] 2 The Lord of the Rings
[x] 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
[x] 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
[x] 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
[x] 6 The Bible
[x] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[x] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
[x] 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
[x] 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

[x] 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
[ ] 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
[ ] 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
[x] 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
[ ] 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
[x] 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
[ ] 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
[x] 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
[ ] 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[ ] 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

[x] 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
[x] 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
[ ] 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
[ ] 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
[ ] 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
[x] 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[x] 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[x] 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
[x] 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

[ ] 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
[ ] 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
[x] 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
[x] 34 Emma - Jane Austen
[ ] 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
[x] 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
[x] 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
[ ] 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
[x] 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
[ ] 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

[ ] 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
[x] 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
[ ] 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude
[ ] 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
[ ] 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
[x] 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
[ ] 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[ ] 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
[x] 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
[x] 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

[ ] 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
[ ] 52 Dune - Frank Herbert
[ ] 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
[x] 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
[ ] 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
[ ] 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
[ ] 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
[ ] 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
[x] 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
[ ] 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[x] 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
[ ] 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
[ ] 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
[ ] 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
[ ] 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
[x] 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
[ ] 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
[ ] 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
[ ] 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
[x] 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (yes, its a guy's book)

[ ] 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
[x] 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
[x] 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
[ ] 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
[ ] 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
[x] 76 The Inferno – Dante
[ ] 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
[ ] 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
[ ] 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[ ] 80 Possession - AS Byatt

[x] 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
[ ] 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
[ ] 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
[ ] 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
[ ] 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
[ ] 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
[x] 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
[ ] 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
[ ] 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
[ ] 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

[x] 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
[x] 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
[ ] 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
[ ] 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
[ ] 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
[ ] 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
[ ] 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
[x] 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
[x] 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
[x] 100 Les Miserables — Victor Hugo

hilarious.

Freak Tomato

yes, but does it travel eastwardly?

On a random drive up to my hometown yesterday, my spontaneous companion was talking about a person being "caught in the jet stream of fate", referencing how sometimes things just come together perfectly for a person when it's completely out of their control. I rolled my eyes. And then I saw this today and found myself whispering out loud "omg totally the jet stream of fate."


Muslim occasion letterpress stationery. Swoon. Sometimes stuff is just too cool. Maybe one day it will even be in Arabic script. If I had classy Arabic-speaking friends who could read and had a mailing address I would SO be ordering more than one of each of these. They even have tiny cute buttons that say "salam" and other fun stuff at the Etsy site.



Speaking of Ramadan...it's totally messing up my diet. I know, obviously, but hilarious. Today I ate half a sandwich, a tomato, two slices of muenster and a s'more. And I drank a little Green Machine juice that I just discovered expired on August 16th. Oops. Definitely not even the sketchiest thing I've consumed this week.

Ramadan is kind of awesome. It's amazing to gain total consciousness over what goes into my body and when (not so shocking that I would delight in control), which is especially meaningful because I work at Starbucks and sometimes realize that I've had my daily recommended water intake in coffee instead. I've been seeking to grow in kindness especially at work, where we often communicate only in sarcasm. I can't honestly say that it's going very well, so I'm glad that Ramadan isn't even halfway over yet and I still have time to hone my anti-sarcasm craft. Oh and I broke the fast at the mosque on Friday night and it made me REALLY homesick for North Africa. I can now say that I don't really love Sudanese food and I much prefer breaking fast huddled around a table with a family, drinking soup from a bowl and helping the little ones peel eggs.

to know

We sat laughing on the patio of the coffee shop, my finger holding my place on page three of the library book I'd chosen, his resting open against his chest. We had spent the afternoon wandering. First among rows of sweaters, pointing out contenders for the "maybe I should dress like a grad student" plan and the ones that matched his eyes; among books, losing and finding each other first at the book store, then at the library where the books are free and there are more chairs. He had indulged my love for argyle and I pretended to be horrified when he pretended to be in the market for a rifle. We disagreed slightly on styles of camping- he a former boy scout and I the proud owner of a gourmet camping cookbook.

I assumed we were ready for a break from all the acquainting, but our coffee, his hot, mine iced, sat ignored on the table. We got distracted from making a plan for dinner by telling stories about old friends and bad dates and the people who turned out to be both. He pretended to read when I answered my phone but then responded to everything I'd said. Even with the promise of the evening ahead, we still had enough to say that the books and coffee (my two favorite things) went unnoticed.

I've been under such strange circumstances for the past several years that I'd all but forgotten the subtle nuances of getting to know a person slowly from the beginning. All of a sudden the new person knows the names of all of your old people. You can brush arms without flinching or saying "sorry." Discussions about books and movies end with "you'd like it." There had been no lengthy introduction, but hundreds of tiny ones instead.

Once, someone said to me "I know that about you" and I am still convinced that those are perhaps the sweetest words to be uttered by a newly familiar voice.

The inside of my bag. Are you kidding me? I'm not even in school.

Silence

When it's quiet at sunset it's so odd not to hear the call to prayer echo off the empty streets; to sense the community sigh in relief.

Hey! I know that guy!

I took this picture with my phone last night at Inglorious Basterds. That guy in the middle is Paul Rust, who I worked with at my dorm in college. Pretty awesome.