"They don't laugh at jokes...they laugh at tragedies"

Well. Not much to say. Tonight I saw that my friend Nick joined the world of blogspot, and I checked out his layout and realized that it was a picture of Stanton Park! We walked through that park every day this past semester that we went to class. I remember the first time we went to class, when Karan drove us, that she was surprised that I knew the name of the park. She said that many residents of Capitol Hill don't even know the name of it.

I miss D.C. I really miss my D.C. roommates. I miss being in a bubble in which people care about politics. Last week I went to Borders and stood in the magazine aisle, perusing news magazines, like Sojourners and another one that had a big article on the history of D.C.'s city plan by L'Enfant, and this lady with her two kids comes up, grabs the People magazine (which doesn't belong in the news aisle with Time and Newsweek, I would say) and makes a remark about Paris Hilton's latest pickle and tells her child to put up his book because, by golly, she has GOT to read about this, and her priority is reading the latest celeb news.

this is the summer of improvements for me...I'm going to try to work on a lot of things personally, and one thing that I really want to work at is to become a better informed person. It's hard sometimes, to overlook my own interests and "Daily Me" attitude of picking and choosing (like bypassing a story on Gonzales for the Travel section), but I am going to try to tune into NPR a bit more (podcasts probably), watch BBC news on PBS (they have amazing international coverage), and check into the newspapers more.

I'm reading Tuned Out, a book that I didn't really get into a lot last semester, and it has a lot of really interesting things to say about the disconnect between young people and the news. I found it so interesting that the author quotes this person who says that living in the suburbs is akin to isolation and getting away from the world. I'd never thought of it that way. The longer I'm here in KS, I'm realizing that I want to be a city dweller. It's just more interesting, and the community and civic aspect is really appealing to me. I'm sick of cookie cutter houses, applebees, and the same ol', same ol'. give me variety! give me some excitement! life is too short to be on the fringe of where things are going on, disconnected from it.