The internet has been out for a few days in my apartment building. Most of the international students would have you believe it is the end of the world but I like having to go out to the library or a cafe to get internet. I waste far too much time at home on my computer anyway. I bought a bag of limes and have been squeezing chopped quarters and eighths of them into my water and onto whatever food seems to go good with them, which seems to be mostly everything. Last night we drank Leffe and Strongbow Gold, enjoyed some a lot of white widow with Jerry, the Container of Poor Judgement and watched Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. We've resolved to make this a Tuesday post-field-trip tradition. Our kind of amazing Art History professor has brought us not just to museums in the area but also to Haarlem, and the Haag.

As I'm getting older, I find myself downloading just as much electronic music as I always have, but mostly only really connecting with music made some time ago. I've been digging on funk and soul music since I held my Summer job, which allowed for music listening so long as it wouldn't offend old white people waiting for their Diet Cokes and paninis. James Brown gets my blood pumping. A good groove makes me want to dance and sing. Is that one measure of the quality of music, how much of a physical response it elicits? But then Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin On makes me feel like I want to lay down like they do in Trainspotting, and I'm guessing that was Sly's intention; Riot is still one of my favorite albums right now. Al Green clearly understood love on a profound level. If you can't get down to at least a couple D'Angelo songs, we can't really relate. I'm over halfway through Infinite Jest. I think that means I'm about to finish it in a relatively fast amount of time, though this is simply a prediction based on my prior reading pattern of taking months (or in this case, years) to finish the first half of a book and only days to finish the second half. I will make risotto tonight. I seem to have pretty accurately learned my lovely late stepmother's risotto techniques. I think one of the things that kills me most is that her encyclopedic knowledge of cooking is gone. Luckily those memories are not so tenuous. I have resolved to cook more. I've also learned my grandmother's grilled cheese sandwich secrets. Now to get that potato pancake recipe from my mother down...

I have a whole fuckload of photos from Europe. I may put some here soon.