muddy river

Yesterday was a great day because we got to escape from our editing cave in the journalism school. We had a picnic, unsuccessfully launched a kite, played Frisbee, went hiking in a state park and saw the biggest (or second-biggest) tree in Missouri. After the day's adventures, a group of us went to a winery on the Missouri River in Rocheport, Mo. I think it's the first time I've really enjoyed drinking wine. It was a lovely evening and I've sincerely enjoyed the company of my fellow interns. (Mom, you can see photographs from yesterday's adventures.)

I went to church this morning with Anna, my suitemate, and really enjoyed it; it was refreshing. What they sang, how they did communion, how the service was constructed, reminded me a lot of my church in Raleigh, Vintage 21. And what do you know? There was a reason for that. Karis Church is an Acts 29 Church, which is the group that Vintage is affiliated with. Pretty amazing. I got excited about this summer, too, because I found five Acts 29 churches within 10 miles of my house in Denver.

I am quite happy here, well-adjusted. But just as I am becoming comfortable in Columbia, I am getting nervous about Denver. I want so badly to succeed there. I work from 4 until midnight tomorrow on the copy desk for "The Missourian" and then have varying shifts through Thursday, until I fly out for Colorado on Friday morning.

I really miss having tea every morning.

Also, this is why I love, really love, Proust:

"The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which will give us or take us from the hope of an appointment for the morrow, and, until that word is uttered, our alternate if not simultaneous imaginings of joy and despair, all this makes our attention in the presence of the beloved too tremulous to be able to carry away a very clear impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the senses at once which yet endeavors to discover with the eyes alone what lies beyond them is over-indulgent to the myriad forms, to the different savors, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we immobilize. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; our mental photographs of it are always blurred."

And Joanna Newsom is blowing me away this afternoon. "Monkey and Bear" is magnificent.

That's all for now.