About me

...My name is Lauren...
...and this is my blog...

During the next year I will be in...
.::. Washington, DC: 06/21/09 - 09/01/09
.::. Home: 09/01/08 - 09/19/08
.::. Australia: 09/19/08 - 12/14/08
.::. New Zealand: 12/14/08 - 12/21/08
.::. Home: 12/21/08 - 01/04/09
.::. Washington, DC: 01/04/09 - 03/20/09
.:. Oxford, UK (pending): 03/30/09 - 06/10/09

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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives
~ Annie Dillard

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When I'm with my friends I feel home.
~O.A.R.

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“And yet for all this, as I say, I was homesick when I went away to school. For all this I can feel even now the keenest nostalgia, and why? Because it was mine, my youth, my home. Because I had turned my back on it. Because that is the way of the heart.”
~Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind

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“Think about the very concept of Santa for a second: A fat senior citizen in a tacky red suit flies around in a sleigh pulled by magic reindeer, delivering gifts for all the good little boys and girls in the world in just one night. It’s absurd. Yet kids totally buy it. Totally. And in small children, that pure, untainted faith is a beautiful thing. In grown adults, however, I find it disturbing. After all, how different is Santa from Jesus and Buddha and Allah and so on? But that’s an easy comparison for an atheist to make.”
~Megan McCafferty, Charmed Thirds

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There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
~John Kenneth Galbraith

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Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
~Robert Frost

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"I was sleeping, dreaming of dolphins, who were speaking of imaginary numbers and searching for the fourth dimension."
~Stand and Deliver

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"It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
~John Andrew Holmes

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"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd...Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."
~Anne Frank

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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of the telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
~Dr. Seuss

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Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
Priest: "No, not if you did not know."
Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
~Annie Dillard

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We need to learn how to love people and use things, instead of use people and love things.
~Anonymous

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Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.
~The Lorax

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"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Clus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen--I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemures and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into maddnes and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-aremed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars...that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the univers itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies...a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well enjoy it."
~Niel Gaiman, American Gods

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