i'm up in the woods

I feel like it has rained five days out of every week for the past two months.

Yes, Tom Tancredo is racist and out of his mind, but don't throw bricks at him. Let him spout his madness and then voice your opinion fairly, non-violently. The "Dance for Diversity" was a better idea of protest than heckling and hurling stones. It was not fruitful.

"A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinions of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu." -- Marcel Proust

My extensive research on the Carrboro Farmers' Market, area farmers and other local foods groups has made me more eager to grow things, to get dirt under my fingernails. After interviewing three of its members, I even considered joining FLO Foods next year. But then I wondered if I could bear being judged for everything I put in my mouth. I blame all of this on Angela, the indefatigable Pollan evangelist.

One of my biggest weaknesses: notebooks and stationery. I love paper. I do, I do, I do.

"Roses for Stalin" is one of most hilariously creepy things I've seen all week. I've seen it before, but I was reminded, in my media ethics class, how bizarre it is.

Reading Lolita has been an unbelievable experience. It's one of the most beautifully-written books I've read all year. And one of the most unsettling. Who else but Nabokov could make a pedophile a sympathetic protagonist? I don't know what to do with Humbert Humbert, and that is perhaps what Nabokov wanted.

I went running yesterday morning in the damp haze on the Battle Park trails. It was so fresh and still that I had to turn off my iPod and just listen to the birds, exchanging thin bits of song, the distant murmuring of a flooded stream, squirrels crackling through the leaves, my breath and my feet, pounding in synchronized rhythm.

I have been thinking, and praying, about the Pratts all day for the past two days.