Month: April 2016

My Week in Culture: Of Princes, Carousels, and Idris Elba’s Voice

I know I owe y’all pictures from Istanbul and a food post at some point, but this will have to tide you over for the moment.

The first part of this week was mainly spent watching the local news report on the sever flooding in the Houston area.  This was very reminiscent of Tropical Storm Allison, and less than a year after the Memorial Day floods on 2015, so the local stations were pretty much on Flood-Watch 24/7.  The main difference is that this time it was actually reported OUTSIDE of Houston.  I don’t know if you remember, but when TS Allison hit in June of 2001, the worst of the flooding occurred on the same weekend that convicted terrorist Timothy McVeigh was executed.  If you didn’t live in the immediate Houston environs, you might not have heard a peep about the catastrophic conditions in Houston.

This time, I actually saw national and international news stories about the flooding.  Yay?  There are times when it feels like Houston is totally off of the radar for the rest of the country and world, never mind that we are the 4th largest city in the nation.  I hate that when we do make the news, it takes something like this to remind people that we exist.

Perhaps the biggest cultural news of the week is the death of Prince, musical genius and master of persona.  The outpouring of grief that we saw occur worldwide shows just how much he influenced popular music and popular culture.  I also think there is an element of purity when it comes to Prince.  Michael and Whitney’s legacies were at times overshadowed by their personal demons and drama.  With Prince, we are allowed to mourn someone who meant so much to us without the asterisk(*) that is their personal legacy.  We are allowed to revel in his weirdness, because for so many people it helped us embrace our own oddity.  

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In Which Geek Magnolia Visits the Pope

Hello Geeks!

Still playing catch-up on the blog.  Today we have pictures from my visit to The Vatican.  And no, I didn’t meet the Pope.  Apparently that’s on Wednesdays, and frankly, I was on a schedule.

My apartment in Rome was just south of the Vatican, and I could hear the church bells when I sat out on the balcony, even though I didn’t have an astonishing view as in Florence.  But the train station that was merely steps from my building was the closest to it, so any time I ended up in the station, there were nuns, priests, and monks thick on the ground.

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In which Geek Magnolia sets off in search of herself.

Hello again Geeks!  It’s been a weird 2016 so far, what with the layoffs and such.  I’m still trying to figure out my next step in life, and as stressful as it is, it is in a way, liberating.  Yes, I have to watch my money, and searching for a job is no fun, but I also have a little bit of freedom to figure out what I want to be, and how I want to approach life.

I won’t say that I’ve been depressed, because I’ve seen depression, and I don’t think my struggles have been that hard.  But I have been down, waffling between hope and exhaustion.  In order to kick-start my mood and tell myself life will still be good, I decided to indulge in my favorite thing ever, travel.

Thanks to Turkish Airways, I was able to get a round trip ticket to Italy for a steal.  So tonight, I’m sitting in my AirBnB apartment in Florence, looking out my window at the bell tower of Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Il Duomo), and blogging about my adventures.  Pretty okay, right?

A Room With a View
A Room With a View

Warning:  Image heavy.

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