Things that Amaze Me:

• I am living in New York and I have not had good pizza (not for a lack of trying)
• Ditto Chinese
• Ditto bagels
• Inwood is a pleasant place to live but has a dearth of good eateries
• It has been four years since I was last in Italy
• Anytime I hear music written by Johan Sebastian Bach
• Ditto Beethoven
• The power and beauty of nature
• My sister is 30 – she will always be kind of a kid in my mind (maybe this is because she has a kindred spirit or maybe it is that she is the shorty of the family). Nonetheless, I do recognize that she is a strong, intelligent, and fun woman.
• We have had Zeus for seven and a half years
• Airplanes
• Most of the first-year students I am teaching were born in 1988 – the year I was deciding where to go to college, got my drivers license, and finalizing my adolescent existential crisis.
• Sara
• My iPod has the same amount of memory as my computer
• One of the most popular video games is about being a vandal and criminal
• Zephyr’s metabolism: she can eat and eat then lounge and sleep all day, yet she remains thin as a pin.
• Water. Not water as to drink, although I do appreciate a good, crisp, cold glass of water, especially when it’s hot or I am really thirsty, rather water in the landscape. Be it a river, lake, the ocean, or even a pond, I find a certain spiritual tranquility when I stand in the presence of a body of water. Some of my favorites: Lake Tahoe, Big Sur, Reykjavik, Capri and the Amalfi Coast, Catalina Island, Tulum, Lago di Como, the west coast of Sweden, Acadia National Park, and Cinque Terre
• I am very close to being in my LATE thirties
• Pre-colonial Mesoamerican architecture
• How much our dogs shed
• The capacity of humans to both love and hate (and how often they can not distinguish the two)
• The ignorance of many of my students when it comes to geography and their apathy on the matter
• The internet

There are myriad more, but I will save them for later.