Collecting things

I haven't felt like I've had much to say in the past two months. So far, I'm not sure I've really had much of an idea of what this blog was supposed to be for. Updating friends and family on my progress back towards health was well and good...for a while. But now I'm mostly there in major ways, and one day looks pretty much like the next at this point. I will be going back to DC within the week. I think it will be difficult in some ways, but I'm also confident that it's time now.

Today I've spent some time preparing for the trip: going through my clothes -- summer and winter -- and taking the cast-offs and never-worns to Good Will; gathering odds and ends together from all corners of the house; and doing a bit of shopping for some wintertime essentials. My activity these days still has to be interspersed with down-time in my chair to give my back a rest, and I'm increasingly fidgety in these moments. I don't want to be wasting time any more, but I haven't yet worked back up the momentum that allows me to enjoy being busy most every moment of every day. Hopefully that will come once I'm back at the school and surrounded by bustle and activity again.

In one of these down-times today I was idly poking around the internet, a bit irritated for being so idle and half-heartedly looking for some passive entertainment. Through a series of completely random links (this isn't web-surfing so much as web-wandering) I found a beautiful new blog to enjoy. The photography is stunning and his subject matter really touches me. His commentary is also great, whether applying an apt quote or analyzing the different components and movement in his photos.

And it reminded me of one of my other original purposes for this blog: to collect things I love, whenever I happen to run across them. Many of the blog's photos are inspired by the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. (Interestingly, Wyeth's paintings were also the inspiration for the set designs for one of my favorite movies, The Village.)

The minimalism and "cleanness" of the paintings remind me of another, newish favorite of mine: Edward Hopper. I love his paintings: the watercolors and the oils, the early period and the late period. I suppose this is very cliche among art afficionados, but I find the sparseness of his paintings oddly moving. If people are inclined to look down on Wyeth and Hopper as being conventional and pedestrian (the way intellectual elitists might look down on "family values"), I can only say I think they're simple and beautiful, and worth loving for that reason. Hopper's paintings draw you in to the interior lives of ordinary people. In fact, they remind me very much of O. Henry's short stories. I'd love one day to edit an collection of O. Henry stories illustrated by Hopper.