Dear NBC,

I know that whoever reads this email is not responsible for writing shows like The Office and 30 Rock. But I'm fed up and I need to actively fight against a topic that keeps showing up on your shows.

Tallahassee is not full of hicks, uneducated slobs, and southern belles. Sure, it has a funny name (although thinking so is actually prejudiced since it's a name given to it by Native Americans). It also happens to be surrounded by forest and unincorporated towns and lies very close to the Florida-Georgia border.

But the very fact that it is the state capital and has two successful and historically important colleges should be enough for writers and producers to realize that Tallahassee is actually a vibrant and diverse city full of intellectuals and innovators.

I'm not denying that Rick Scott makes the whole state look bad. But I attended Florida State University and graduated from a program that is consistently ranked highly, alongside ivy leagues. My professors attended Harvard and Yale. I worked hard and received a departmental academic award.

Florida A & M is located in Tallahassee, as well, and has a rich history of academic and professional success.

Both universities bring individuals from all over the world to Tallahassee. I wasn't born and raised here, but I enjoy it. And I don't like rednecks.

If you're going to allow your writers to consistently rail against Tallahassee, at least use reference material that is consistent with the culture and events of Tallahassee. Shows like yours influence popular opinion about this town. I don't want to be ashamed about where I live.

Please forward this to the necessary viewers.

Sincerely, Leah

classical music

I think that young people are socially discouraged from preferring classical music over modern, popular music. But if you're looking for something with which you can truly and freely emotionally identify, classical music has, in my opinion, much more to offer.

Symphonies offer up their melodies to soaring emotions - intensity, bravery, anxiety, ecstasy. Classical guitar offers nostalgia. Brooding piano music is great to think to. Opera is chilling, humorous, and awe-inspiring. Choral pieces in all their grandeur remind the listener of the brilliant things humans can do when they work together - they offer hope. Besides the emotional connection one can make to classical music, there is a wealth of history and drama, lightness and darkness, associated with the long and widespread history of pieces that fit within the genre. They force the listener to look outside of their contemporary, well controlled context into the minds and experiences of hundreds of years of composers, musicians, and listeners.

Classical music can touch your soul while pop music barely skims the surface. Sure, it covers the gamut of human experience - from love to anger to desire to regret - but it rarely allows you to turn away from those feelings. It instead urges you to stay in the melancholy of an experience. Like gaping at Lady Gaga in a meat suit, you want to move on, but you can't turn away.

Classical music prefers your full attention, but doesn't distract you from going about your day. With each new song, you discover a new piece of history. You learn when you listen. And what you hear is organic. It is real, without sound mixers and auto tuning and synthesizers.

Through classical music, we realize that humans are immensely talented all on their own. We are given the aural promptings to work through our emotions, or we are distracted enough by the beauty of unified sound to let our emotions work themselves out. We are encouraged to see our life in the light of vast human history.

And maybe, through classical music, we will work less to create facades for ourselves and more to seek out authentic talent - to work hard and achieve something more beautiful, and more compelling, than popular music in its very nature ever can.

too nostalgic to resist

In 2011, I:

• started a daily style blog
• took some really great classes (Narrative Ethics and Job)
• sang a song in Hebrew at a campus event
• graduated summa cum laude from college
• received the Religion Department award
• did my first serious photo shoots (and got paid for 2.5)
• got my first full time job with benefits
• learned custom framing
• visited Indiana with my family
• sang a solo at my grandma's church
• celebrated my one year wedding anniversary with Daniel
• quit my first full time job with benefits
• became a nanny
• tried more crafts and recipes than I did in 4 years of college
• became the owner of two Roborovski hamsters (RIP Huckleberry, or Hermes)
• began two short stories
• sold items on ebay
• cut off all my hair
• went to San Francisco (!)
• bought, with Daniel, my first piece of non-folk art or student-made, original artwork
• celebrated Christmas with Daniel's and my family simultaneously
• participated in Andrea's wedding as co-matron of honor and wedding singer

In conclusion, last year was full of incredible changes and wonderful adventures. I am in a place, with a set of new experiences and new skills, I couldn't have anticipated. I never thought of my life past 2011 since it marked my college graduation. But life is still going, and going well. 

I wanted to start the new year with a little observation. I wrote this at 12:00 am to mark the moment 2012 began:

On the new year

I saw a beetle fly

in the light

of a street lamp

slow, illuminated, upward

moving.

the tree with the lights in it

I live for this, too:

"When the doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw 'the tree with the lights in it.'  It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years.  Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it.  I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.  I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed.  It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.  The lights of the fire abated, but I'm still spending the power.  Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared.  I was still ringing.  I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.  I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it.  The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam." 

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). 

travel-related haiku

on Turbulence:

Turbulence is like

a roller coaster, except

higher and no brakes

Jiggling around

Ears popping and a headache

Plane rides are no fun

The pilot now speaks

Choppy wind is upon us

Rain clouds down below

on The final step toward home:

Charlotte is a place

within North Carolina

that I've never been

I will go there now

but only see the airport

a brief vacation

Boarding a plane home

I am Tallahassee bound

Ugh! Work tomorrow

mucinexDM

Last night, I was coughing a lot, as I am getting over a cold. I took some MucinexDM in the hopes that it would tackle both the mucus problem and the coughing problem.

The first thing I noticed was that I couldn't sleep at all. My body was tired, but I couldn't settle down. I fell asleep for a few minutes or hours at a time, then awoke again to restlessness. At around 5 in the morning, I awoke to my quickening heart beat. I lept out of bed and ran to get some Gatorade, but then felt nauseous and collapsed on the floor. My limbs were numb and my heart wouldn't stop accelerating. I told Daniel I needed to go to the hospital, but he recognized the beginning of a panic attack and told me to breathe in and out deeply.

Once my heart rate got under control, the nausea returned. I vomited several times over the next few hours and ended up sleeping on the carpeted floor right next to the bathroom. If I began to think about making calls to get off work, my heart rate would go up and I'd have to make myself breathe in and out.

The nausea and irregular heart rate continued in waves until the medicine wore off at 1:00 this afternoon. I slept for another three hours and was finally able to eat some food.

self portrait

tools: vintage jumper, tea, tripod, and photo editing software.