2007, in photos

Last night, as I was falling asleep around 11:40 (yes, lame, but I'm 100% fine with that) i told my husband that 2007 has been one of the best years of my life. It really has been.

the evidence:


rome. my heart explodes in love for rome


friendship. lea, renae, valerie and I at the baha'i temple.


my beautiful garden.


boston. and my newfound love for baseball.


being the star mascot at my company's national conference (what a bizarre yet wonderful experience!)


visiting my grandpa's farm in iowa with the whole family.

almost too much to name. It's hard to condense all the good things, great and small, about this year into a few photographs and a couple paragraphs.

happy new year, friends. here's to another one that's even better.

once again

"I am happy here: when I or other have bruised my life, I close my eyes against the hurt and think of Rome; as possibility, and hope. And I feel more related to my environment and to my circumstances in Rome than I do anywhere else on earth; I am blessed, intensely delighted, satisfied, and reconciled. The world is lovable when the world is Rome. Everything good in my nature is nourished here. My body feels safe here. When I love the space around my body, I love my body. For the rest of my life I will love Rome and think better of my life for having known Rome. Rome, rooted and ethereal, stretching from earth to heaven, casts aside so little and embraces so much--there's room for me. It is everything; it is elegant, robust, common, spectacular, vulgar, exquisite, and above all rare...

Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much."

-barbara grizzuti harrison, italian days

a slew of emails in my inbox from my rome classmates, among other things, brought me back into the reverie today. some days it's like treading water in memories.

Rome O Morte

people keep asking me what was my favorite part of the trip to Rome. what a loaded question. my favorite thing? just BEing there. walking around. the street signs and cobblestones and graffiti, just the physical geography of the place itself, tiny streets and the hills with their poetic singing names, janiculum, esquiline, capitoline.



despite the fact that I have not been there in more than five years, i barely needed to consult a map. i remember those streets, feel like I remember them somewhere deep inside me, as if my arteries had rearranged themselves into a map of the tiber, via del corso, the lungotevere. . .



anyway, it was a good trip. our apartment was perfectly located in the dead center of anywhere we wanted to go. i discovered the most perfect gelato combination (caffe and bacio, coffee and hazelnut/chocolate). bought pretty paper at the lovely Fabriano store. visited the caravaggios at San Luigi dei Francesi and Santa Maria del Popolo.



we rented bikes at villa borghese and raced around with my mom and little brother. we ate some of the best sandwiches, seriously, the sandwiches: breathtaking! stood in line for hours at the vatican museums talking to a pleasant retired couple from canada. i bought red shoes, and the ruffliest blouse you've ever seen, and a watercolor from a street vendor in piazza navona.



my italian improved daily. we learned to navigate the idiosyncratic roman ways of life, the giving of correct change, the proper way to cross a street. i was disappointed at how crowded it was, but the people-watching was phenomenal. i had the chance to spend some good time by myself, drawing at my favorite fountain, shopping, taking pictures in the early evening post-nap.



the last day I woke up early to photograph the ponte sant'angelo, and it was just me and a streetsweeper and the misty sunrise tiber. so maybe that's my favorite part of the trip. just me and the city.



I honestly feel as if I'm wading and dreaming through all of this. it was so charged with emotion before during and after that the actual experience feels cloudy. returning home was a rude awakening and I was surprised at how hard I cried. and it hasn't helped that I've been working 12 hour days this week, and we woke up to two inches of wet snow this mid-april morning. just feels like everything is floating around me. I'll get over it, I know, and part of me appreciates the feeling. but it's hard to reconcile the two worlds.



it was great though. having been back gives me a peace I haven't felt in a while.

looking back and forward

i found this in an old diary, written about a week before i left for rome the last time:

"diary, I get scared about this whole Rome thing ... but then I think, adventure! and discovering a whole new world and the whole new person I can become in that new world."

kind of gave me chills to think of how true it ended up being. and, kind of makes me wish I wrote more passionately in an online diary like I used to. the thought of that level of earnesty makes me cringe a bit, but I really shouldn't be ashamed.

i have a lot of feelings right now. we'll leave it at that.

today at work I fueled my romey daydreams with seven more minutes on the ipod and a bottle of archer farms blood orange italian soda. only a few more days until I can get the real thing again.

things that are good.

+ i bought the 14 minute version of Rappers Delight on iTunes today. Best 99 cents I ever spent. big bang! i got clientele!

+ for the most part, the weather has been nicely cool and springlike lately. I've been taking long walks after work almost every day. i love feeling the endorphins kick in after about a half an hour.

+ this friday I came home to an amazon box in the mail. i didn't order anything from amazon so I was pretty curious. inside was Borat, sent by my little brother. how sweet is that? Mike and I watched it and nearly hyperventilated laughing at the naked wrestling scene.

+ seeing all my rome roommates at a wedding this weekend in iowa city. complete with all the families and babies in tow. then later at night playing strip 'em match 'em at the Atlas. why do i love bar games so much?

+ speaking of Rome. we leave in ten days. sometimes I get so excited I can feel my heart beat faster. other times it makes me so emotional I just want to put my head down on a table and cry. but mostly I'm trying not to think about it too much so I can actually get work done and lead a normal life for the next week and a half.

Missed connections

Caravaggio, Calling of Saint Matthew. San Luigi Dei Francesi, Rome.

Tonight was the last night of my art history class before the final. Despite being slightly stressed about having to do homework and write papers again, I couldn't have asked for anything more. It's really renewed my passion for art history. I keep leaving the library loaded down with giant art books.

However. Since this was mostly a Renaissance course (Europe 1300-1750), a lot of the things we covered were already familiar to me, having already seen and studied them. And lived next door to them. For as much as I saw in Rome, I keep discovering so much more I never saw, never bothered to stop into, or never even knew were right beneath my nose.

We looked at this Caravaggio in class tonight. I love it, the light and the positioning of the hands. Paintings like this are hard to process as slides or images in books though. The real thing is a million times better. So, to torture myself, I looked up its location. Here's a little map.

yellow line=my walk home from class a few nights a week.

arrrrrgh.