Musings and observations from a young woman of innumerable opinions.
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A college mate of mine has gone missing from her apartment in New York City. Have you seen Hannah Upp? Reward for any information on the whereabouts of this 23-year-old Spanish teacher.
Good lord, has it really been over two months? You've got to love the way the time just flies by between Thanksgiving and Single's Awareness Day ... oops, I mean Valentine's Day. Especially when the interim involves, besides the usual holiday festivities, the inauguration of the first African American president in the country. I spent Inauguration Week crashing on a couch in Georgetown. I ended up with no tickets to the main event (I know, cry your tears for me) but that just meant that I got to sit around and sleep in while the rest of the town was freezing in the 20 degree weather. But don't think I got away completely hassle-free; trying to make my train meant that I had to spend more than one hour in a taxi trying to get from Georgetown University to Union Station. That's about five miles. Yeah. An hour. On the other hand, and to quote Helen Fielding, the wilderness years are over! I have employment again! And it pays and everything. And I've gotten back to ...
I wonder if there is any such thing as human nature. In my experience, an action, deed or thought that will seem quite natural to one person will seem equally unnatural to another. Where one would speak, another would remain silence. Where one would run, another would fight. Where one would offer kindness and hospitality in any available form, another would turn a cold shoulder. It's not uncommon to hear, "it's human nature to do this or that," but the more I see of people, the more I am convinced that there is no human nature, only the nature of being a human: needing food, drink, air, rest, et cetera. For every traumatic or life-shaping event you've ever experienced, another has experienced only a void in that area. You can always tell when I've been doing my annual reading of 'David Copperfield' because I start to wonder things like this. I can't help it. There's such a variety of characters in that book, so many people who look at the same ...
Over the weekend I had brunch with an old family friend. This man and his wife had been my parents' next door neighbors when I was born. I was my parent's first child; this other couple, too, had a child at around the same time I was born, only it was their fourth. Shortly thereafter they moved to the other side of the country and morphed into that ambiguous sort of character of whom your memories are filled entirely by stories relayed and are not at all based in reality, especially when you don't have even a picture to help shape their forms in your mind. These former neighbors of ours stayed this way in my mind, with vague rumblings of 'Young Tommy's playing football at such a school' and so forth, for years. The most significant piece of news that stayed in my mind was that the mother fought breast cancer for more than ten years. So they remained until I applied to a college in their area, 3,000 miles away, and my mother and I decided to go take a tour of the...
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