magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

it's just shy of seven on a wednesday evening. as things stand right now, i have not added any actual entries to my website in two and a half months. i do have some content to fill that gap with: dispatches from my week in sweden and a few thoughts written during the rest of my cross-continental traveling, a couple scattered scraps of paper that i scribbled on while i was in the hospital, a handful of email exchanges that i could edit into something readable and (possibly) interesting, some random thoughts and dream notes, and the last week or so is fresh enough in my mind that i could reasonably reproduce an impression of what has happened. i don't think i have enough to recreate daily entries for that whole lost two and a half months though. it's a shame, in part because i had managed to write something for every day for over three years, but mostly because the last two and a half months have probably been more saturated with worthwhile stories than any other extended period during those three plus years.

i do have daily pix finished through the middle of december, another three weeks worth of photos that i'm waiting for the development of, and some idea of what i could do for the past two weeks. i'm not sure how i'm going to reconcile putting images into the calendar for which there are no corresponding entries. it seems like bad design, or false advertising, or something. but i guess that's what i'm going to be doing for the time being, and i'll either think of something else or i won't.

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aaron called me this evening. we had a pretty good conversation. mostly about school. he's taking some environmental policy sorts of classes. "that's what i'm thinking about going in to after school," he says.

"so are you going to end up going to law school?" i ask.

"i'm looking into it."

i think that in a way i'd be a tiny little bit jealous. i mean, i've definitely found something that i love, i want to be an architect (with maybe a slight side road detour into music), but i've always been sort of intrigued by law. maybe it's all those lawyer dramas that i've watched on tv. i'm sure it's not quite that exciting most of the time. but it is intellectual, and very oriented towards problem solving. so's architecture of course.

we talked, briefly, about sustainability and urban design. which falls somewhere within the bounds of both of our current paths. i think there's probably also a number of other meeting points, in spite of how widely divergent our respective courses of study seem to be. that in itself if kind of interesting. that's part of why i'm here in rome, that synchronicity of finding common ground and inspiration in incredibly varied things. that's why i want to do music, in part. that's why i think aaron's last three and a half years of hard science will be incredibly useful to him even if he decides he wants to become a lawyer.

it was nice talking to him. i'm glad that after all these years of not really knowing each other at all we're finding some sorts things in common.