“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You people are wonderful, thank you for all the lovely comments and emails from my last post. I’ve really been blown away by how something that felt so personal and unique to one community has turned out to be a pretty universal emotion and feeling. Such is the way of all fear and trepidation, I suppose. Either way, reading through those was the most cheered I felt in a week.

In the meantime, while one aspect of life has been a pit of turmoil, others have been tripping quite merrily on without time to waste. The human experience is a strange, fractal thing… Currently I’m working on one project that might or might not have anything to do with the Miss America contest, another involves wrestling through multiple layers of online security which makes me feel much more advanced and technologically impressive than I am. Nifty things and amazing work happening over in freelance territory.

Also our five year (!) wedding anniversary is coming up Tuesday. Don’t ask me where the time went.

Here are your links for the week, add anything else worth reading about and let me know what you’re getting up to in the comments!

The tumblr find of the week reminds us that not all advice is helpful.

Interesting portraits of first year college students. We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of me starting college (clutches self a bit to realize that) but I don’t have many photos from that time period still hanging around. I’ve never been a big picture taker until we moved to London, and even then very few of myself or Jeff. I wish I had more from my college days.

Everything about this story is pretty horrifying.

Really interesting TED talk on how we as a society are using people with disabilities as motivation, which on its face seems good but as the speaker points out, has a pretty bad side effect.

Longtime readers know I simply cannot resist a good art mystery!

This American Life did another live show (their last one was one of my favorite things of 2012, so I was too excited not to share).

I bear witness of the high heel insert, personally.

A source of some confusion to various friends and acquaintances, I have never been to Disney World/Land. I have been to Euro Disney, but those in the know tell me that this is Not At All the Same Thing. So, people who know better than I, tell me what you think of Disney Land’s original prospectus?

If you are suffering from an insufficiency of cuteness this Friday, may I offer this as a balm?

I would kill to get my hands on one of these 18th century pattern books on fabrics and textiles to sift through on a rainy afternoon.

A cover letter from Leonardo da Vinci.

I loved this piece on the world of incredibly valuable but often invisible work and how much we rely on it.

Summer sales are lovely, forbidden things. Some of you go and buy something fabulous from GiGi New York for my sake, please. Let me live vicariously.