FIREFLIES

i was sitting on a bench reading in central park right around dusk today, and i happened to look up from my book to see fireflies dancing all around me! it was AMAZING. i wish i had had a camera with me, but even if it had i know i couldn't have captured even a thousandth of the magic of it. annoyingly, the only thing i could think of as i was watching them was the "pirates of the caribbean" ride at disneyland.

something major is being filmed all down my street and the avenue perpendicular to my street. there's trailers and cameras and equipment and roadblocks and stuff everywhere. i can't figure out what it is, though. but it's so funny....the new yorkers walking around don't even seem to be giving any of it a second thought, like it's something they see all the time so it doesn't even register anymore.

this is a short post cause i don't got nothin else to say. thanks to all you peeps who comment...it makes me very happy. love you!

and today's picture from the archives is.....

d.c.

hello to all my loyal readers! i hope you'll forgive my lack of posts lately; it's the result of a week of laziness and yesterday and today spent frollicking around the capitol. d.c. was pretty awesome, especially considering the government paid for my whole trip (except for the hamburger i ordered at midnight last night, dammit). while all of the monuments were incredible, as was getting to visit the offices of both california senators and meet with their top staffers, as was getting to meet some pretty goddamn amazing kids (ya'll think you're worried about ME? think about the family of the kid going to IRAN. or how about bosnia herzegovina? or tajikstan? yeah.), the MOST TRULY AMAZING PART OF THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE WAS..............

MY HOTEL ROOM.
i got a HUGE, luxurious room ALL TO MYSELF, and i felt so sophisticated and grown-up. i even ironed my blouse, because i felt like it was an appropriate thing to do in a grown-up room like that.

so let me give you a little context. some of you might remember the arduous boren scholarship application process, through which i really don't know how i survived, and others might know that i actually received this award. to sum it up, it's a scholarship awarded by the u.s. government to undergrads who plan to study in regions, and study languages, that aren't often visited/studied by students and that are deemed critical to national security. check it out, i'm on the list! -- http://www.iie.org/programs/nsep/undergraduate/2008scholars.htm

so the government (the dept. of defense, specifically) brought us all to d.c. and put us up in a nice hotel so we could have a reception ceremony and information sessions and meet each other and bla bla bla. last night at the reception table they organized the tables according to region, which was a pretty interesting means of deducing what regions america deems "critical." let's just say there were about 40 people crowded around the middle east table, and the sub-saharan africa table had 6. counting me. SIX. i guess the government doesn't really feel like a bunch of starving, aids-ridden africans are much of a threat. go figure.

then today we all had appointments to visit our senators (or, as was the case for almost everyone, their staffers) and congressmen. luckily there were about 20 kids from california, so that diffused some of the potential awkwardness. so we got to go to barbara boxer's and dianne feinstein's offices and talk to their foreign affairs staffers, which was pretty interesting. then i snuck away from the group and went to another building and crept around until I FOUND IT:

HILLARY'S SENATE OFFICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thank god no security guard saw me trying to take this picture, because i must have looked hella suspicious.

i also had some time to do some tourist-y stuff yesterday. i saw......

the capitol

the washington monument


the lincoln memorial (it was really breath-taking, so props to johnny for guilt-tripping me into walking all the way up to it, which i wasn't going to do because i'm LAZY)

a really, really creepy trail of some kind of animal poop leading all the way up to the lincoln memorial, and....

the white house, of course.

i'm wiped out. the bus ride back tonight took like an hour longer than it was supposed to because of traffic, so i was not a happy camper by the time i got back to ny. now i'm gonna crash.

but i think i'm going to make it a tradition of ending my posts with a cute, random picture from the ashley archives. today's pick:


me and johnny eating a healthy, homemade supper in some midwestern state on our road trip last summer.

the met

i went to the met yesterday.



they have a lot of stuff there. it was overwhelming. at first i was gonna try going in the order of the map so that i could visit everything, but after i spent awhile in the byzantine section and all that middle age european stuff, i said screw it and headed straight for the modern section. thank god i dropped art history, because i DO NOT have the patience for all this stuff. i just want to like what i like. and i know it's cliche, but boy do i like the impressionist stuff. it's just so much more ALIVE than everything else. they had ROOMS FULL of van gogh. i almost wanted to cry.


and monet....
and matisse....
and on and on and on....
and then inevitably we arrive at the contemporary stuff, where we find THIS crap:
i don't care how much someone wants to try convincing me that pollack, or any of this other canvas-painted-one-color crap, is art; i'm going to continue plugging my ears and singing la-la-la-la-la-la because it's terrible and i'll NEVER believe them.

i had a good time, though. but right when my museum-weariness hit its peak and i HAD to get outta there, the second i stepped out of the building it started bucketing rain, so i had to stand around for an hour and wait for it to stop.

HOWEVER i did happen to have the energy to take photos of my street and apartment building when i got back! here's my street:


and here's the distance from my front steps to central park:
and here's my apartment! it's #27. you can kind of see the number above the door. it's the building second from the right.

okay i'm all posted out. i need to go find a proper blouse to wear to work tonight. but before i sign off, i thought i'd post one last picture. i found this one in the depths of my computer and i thought it was funny cause johnny looks funny.

poison coconut

my roommate lauren and i were walking down the street when we happened upon a cracked coconut just laying there on the sidewalk. all the parts were there and there was a puddle around it (a puddle of coconut juice, we're presuming), so we're figuring it fell from somewhere? the sky? god sent it? i don't know. but it was so beautiful and it smelled so good, we couldn't resist bringing it home. now lauren's peeling it and washing it, and i don't care if it's smothered in anthrax, we're eating it. we're just going to resist looking at our situation objectively, because if we stop to consider that we just picked a cracked coconut up off the streets of new york, then we won't be able to justify eating it.

don't hate.

waitressing is HARD

i'm going to say it again, for emphasis: WAITRESSING IS HARD.

i started another job today, because for some weird reason i think the other one might have slipped through my fingers, and because i think the shifts at the new one might work better with my schedule. it's called edgar's cafe, and it's only 1 street over from my apartment. how's this for cool: the cafe is situated on the former site of edgar allan poe's mansion, where he wrote "the raven."

cute, huh? kinda corny the way the ceiling's painted, but it has a nice atmosphere. and the desserts look INCREDIBLE. they have every type of cake/pie/tart imaginable. i was salivating while she was showing them to me.

anyway, i started training today (for which i apparently don't get paid...?) and it was cool but hella stressful. it makes me have an INSANE amount of respect for waitresses. not only is it physically exhausting, but it's mentally taxing, too....so much to keep track of! and i have a feeling new yorkers aren't as forgiving of their waitresses as restaurant patrons in other parts of the country might be. oh well. maybe it'll help me develop a thicker skin or something.

so now i need to do work, because apparently fridays are working-from-home days for my internship. mehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....

i'm a goddess

today at my internship sam (my supervisor -- yes, mom, the one who looks like a hanson brother) asked me to do something for her and when i finished she told me i was a goddess. i've never felt so satisfied in all my life. her praise is like oxygen.

so it's about 11 pm, and i just got back from a little walk around my neighborhood (YES it's safe CALM DOWN), and it's finally starting to cool down and it was so nice. it feels like europe here, the way people are still sitting out on restaurant porches (porches? is there a better term for the outside areas of restaurants?) at 11 at night. and everyone's out walking their dogs. and some people are eating dinner on the restaurant porches with their dogs right next to them, which seems kinda weird. whatevs.

today i went with my roommate to some guy's apartment so she could buy his air conditioning thing that he advertised on craigslist. i'm glad she asked me to go with her because craigslist is sheisty, though if he had turned out to be a psycho serial killer i don't know that i would have provided much defense. anyway, i'm glad i went because i think we finally kind of bonded, even though we've been living together in very close quarters for 2 weeks. granted, we mostly talked about "sex and the city," but i guess what else is there that really matters? (fyi the guy was not a psychopath and was actually quite normal, except for the fact that he's getting his phd in chemistry. wtf now that IS crazy)

i think i'm going to cut my hair short again. remember this girl? although all i've ever wanted was to look like this: (that's cat power, btw. i actually wouldn't mind having her voice, either. but she can keep the alcoholism.)

wassup

sorry for the lack of posts lately. it's so strange how for the most part my days consist of sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours, but it wipes me out so much. by the time i get home at 6ish i'm pretty much ready to knock out. which is why i haven't posted in awhile.

things are going really well. EXCEPT for the HEAT. dear god. i think it's worse than any weather i've ever experienced. by the time i get into work in the morning i'm literally drenched in sweat. and not even my apartment offers a reprieve, since we don't have AC other than the dinky little portable thing we set up last night (which, luckily, happens to be conveniently located right next to my bed, meaning as the night wears on and i'm tossing and turning and SWELTERING i can keep ever-so-slightly turning it until it's pointing straight at me).

i'm sitting DIRECTLY in front of it right now.

i had work off today (and by work i mean my internship), but then got called in for an intern meeting at 2, which pretty much killed any possibly cool plans for the day. i'm dying to go to the moma or the met or something and i want an entire day to do that...and an ENTIRE DAY of air conditioning. because p.s. the AC at my internship office sucks too.

i decided to get all domestic when i got back from the meeting. check out my skills: TOFUUUUUUUUUU. my next conquest? Mmmmmmmmmmm salmon. i realize that neither of these are top ramen, but i couldn't help myself.

my other roommate moved in last night, which means i no longer have my own room. but she's SUPER nice and chill, and much more overtly friendly than my other roommate, which is a relief.

hmmmmm what else? have you seen "you've got mail"? well apparently that movie was filmed almost entirely on the upper west side, which is where i'm living. remember the cafe that tom hanks and meg ryan meet at on their first date? well that cafe is called Cafe Lalo, and it's just a few streets down from me, and i went the other night and it's SUPER cute.



i got a cannoli and it was DELICIOUS.

now i'm going to try to do something productive.

disclaimer: this post is a downer

now, i know that many of my readers aren't the fondest of hillary. i can understand that. but i miss her. or, i suppose, it's more that i miss what she represents. i know that the politically correct thing during the primaries, or any election, i guess, was to choose your candidate based on their issues. i tried to do that, and there were a few of hillary's positions on issues that i didn't necessarily agree with. but try as i might, i had a very hard time getting over the "gender thing." i think we can all admit that the media treated hillary like shit (pardon the language, but it's true). i mean, hillary nutcrackers? seriously? and the fact that if anybody had even come close to making a race joke on par with the women jokes that were made about hillary, there would have been outrage. i'm sorry to use this space to talk about something so controversial, but i read this (http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/woman-in-charge-women-who-charge/) and saw this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-IrhRSwF9U&eurl=http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2008/05/27/sexism_sells/) and i literally felt like i was going to throw up. chris matthews can go jump off a bridge because he's a dumbass and not one thing he says is even remotely intelligent.

staying on the gender theme, i've been thinking alot about my internship duties. my primary job is searching for news from East Africa that pertains to women, peace, and security. which basically means i spend all day reading articles about rape, domestic violence, girls being abducted to be sex slaves for the army, no women in power, and on and on and on. and here's something uplifting that comes up a lot: a huge percentage of the rapes and other forms of violence against women that occur in war-torn countries, expecially africa, are committed by the UN peacekeepers themselves. where the hell are these women supposed to go for help if the people behind this seemingly god-given institution, the people who are supposed to be doing the saving, are perpetrating the worst crimes themselves? sometimes i feel like, instead of posting the stories i find on the website, i should just write in huge bold letters, EVERTHING STILL SUCKS AND IT'S NOT GOING TO CHANGE AND IF YOU'RE A WOMAN YOU'RE SCREWED SO GOOD LUCK BECAUSE NOBODY CARES. it's very discouraging.

sorry for the downer post.

excuse me, are you accepting applications?

i swear to god i never want to use that line again in my life. i traversed just about the entire island of manhattan today (and don't think i wasn't considering heading down to brooklyn) and, all told, probably applied for about 20 jobs. my god i'm tired. but i never got lost once, which i think will continue to be a source of pride for me for quite some time. i actually did end up getting a job, but for some reason i just don't feel satisfied with it. it's basically coffee depot's new york equivalent, so i'm definitely the right woman for the job, but maybe i'm just getting a little tired of that coffee shop scene. not to mention i'd much prefer a waitressing job for the mad tippage. anyway. it's called Pecan Fine Foods and Coffee and it's in the West Village, which is about a half hour subway ride from my apartment. not too bad, i guess. i'm supposed to go in for training on saturday, so i'll do that unless i get a call before then. or maybe after then.

i went out to dinner with a friend tonight, and we ate SO MUCH and it was fantastic. we got sangria but first spent like 10 minutes stalling the waitress while i quizzed elizabeth on the info on her fake i.d., and then the waitress didn't even end up carding us. i got delicious mango sorbet for dessert and overall we spent a lot of money but....when in rome, i suppose.

i feel like i see so many weird things throughout the day and i always think, man, that's gotta go on my blog, but then i don't end up sitting down to write until i'm half asleep so i forget about all the cool little stuff. i keep meaning to take a picture of my street and the front of my apartment building cause it's super cute, and i also want to take a picture of central park from my front doorstep, cause it's literally like 10 steps away.

okay. bedtime for me. night ya'll.

high five

i had a pretty exciting experience this morning on the subway. i was riding along, minding my own business, trying to do my best impression of a native new yorker by not making eye contact with anyone and looking really pissed off at nothing in particular, when a middle-aged businessman in a nice pinstripe suit turned to me and said, "does this train stop at 42nd street?", and i'll be damned if i didn't answer him like i've been riding the subways my whole life. not only that, but i was so confident in my answer that he didn't look like he doubted for a second that i knew what i was talking about. HIGH FIVE TO ME.
(the bear's for johnny)










also wanna see what my boss/supervisor looks like?

that's her second from the left. not the most flattering picture but my god is she B-A-D-A-S-S. she's like UN GODDESS. her name's sam cook and she's from south africa and she has a cool accent and she knows everything there is to know about women's rights and just about everything else in the world. and yesterday was her birthday so today me and the other interns went to the grand central station market (which was obscenely amazing) during lunch and bought her a strawberry-lemon cake and wine and we surprised her at the end of the day and it was good times.

first post. aren't you excited?

this is super intimidating. i know that all of you have been waiting with bated breath, losing sleep out of great anticipation for my first post. so i can't disappoint. which is why i've been procrastinating on starting the blog. high expectations give me anxiety.

so here i am. i had a few minor setbacks and nervous breakdowns at the beginning, but things are running more smoothly now. though strangely, i managed to make it to my internship yesterday just fine, navigating the subway system and the overwhelmingly hectic streets like a pro, and then today, just when i started feeling confident, BOOM i was HELLA LOST. and on top of that i had woken up a little late, so add to my panic attack over being lost another panic attack knowing that i was going to be late to work, and you have a not-so-pretty ashley. oh and add to that the thousands of blisters i have all over my feet because i made the smart decision to go for a 4-hour walk the other day in brand new shoes that are way too cute to not be feet-killers. and of course, it's humid as a muthuh out here, so i'll let you formulate that lovely image for yourself. but i survived. i was 15 minutes late but everyone's insanely nice and laid-back and my supervisor was out for the day.

i got my official UN badge today! check it out:

pretty cute, if i do say so myself. AND i can waltz into the UN anytime i want with this little baby, passing all those lame tourists by like i'm the secretary-general or something.
and speaking of the UN, check out this cool sculpture that's outside the entrance:
i think it's relevant, considering i'm working for a peace organization.

which allows me to segue nicely into some info about my internship. so i'm interning for the FIRST women's peace organization in the WORLD: the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). it was started in 1915 by a group of women who were calling for an end to the war. they set out a bunch of proposals for creating a "just an lasting peace" for the world, and President Wilson said that WILPF's proposals were "by far the best formulation which up to the moment has been put out by anybody." and some of their proposals were incorporated into Wilson's 14 Points. pretty cool. so i'm interning for a sub-project of WILPF's called the PeaceWomen Project. it's kind of a long explanation, but basically it was established in 2001 after the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1325 in 2000, which is the first resolution ever passed by the Security Council that specifically addresses the impact of war on women, and women's contributions to conflict resolution and sustainable peace.

our website (hahaha, "our") is www.peacewomen.org, and it has a ton of info about it if you're interested. also, one of the main responsibilities of the interns is to look for relevant news articles from around the world that pertain to women, peace and security, so i'll be contributing to the website as well. in fact, i actually posted a news item on the website TODAY (i didn't write it; i just found it and posted it....but it took my about 3 hours to figure out how to post it, so give me a little credit). check it out:

i know this post is getting long, so i'll wrap it up. basically, i'm still settling in but i'm getting more comfortable. the people at my internship are incredibly nice, and i could definitely see myself becoming friends with them outside of work. my roommate's nice, though we haven't really talked much yet. i haven't found a job yet, but i'm looking. i'll be interning 3 days a week, probably mon/tues/wed, so i'd love to find a little job for the rest of the week. i started my french cd today, and i'm starting to realize how crazy french pronunciation is (and by crazy i mean hard as hell).

i hung out with my friend elizabeth from smith yesterday. she's interning for the columbia journalism review so she's living about a 5-minute subway ride away from me. we got pinkberry and sat in the park and it was so nice to see a familiar face.


i went grocery shopping the other day and i felt so grown up. though the more i'm here the more i can't even begin to comprehend how anyone can afford living here, or how anyone anywhere can afford having an adult life at all. life is EXPENSIVE. i mean, my god, even suave shampoo costs 4 bucks; i don't even want to think about how much herbal essences costs. and MILK!?!?!? my god! i need to develop a taste for top ramen REALLY DAMN FAST.

one last thing before i sign off. i'd like to tell you about my lovely lunch experience yesterday. so the building next to mine is the UNICEF headquarters. there's a cafeteria in there which is, needless to say, frequented by a lot of very professional and sophisticated and intimidating UN people. so, one of the other interns, who happens to be french and insanely chic, invites me to go to that caferia to get lunch with her. i make this HUGE salad, go to the fridge to get a water, and somehow manage to slam the fridge door into my plate of salad so the whole thing goes FLYING across the cafeteria floor. and i mean ACROSS THE CAFETERIA FLOOR. and it was crowded. and everyone stared. and it was a big, delicious-looking salad. score 1 for me.

i miss everybody a TON. PLEASE call or email me whenever, though you probably all know that i have horrible returning-phone-calls etiquette, so it's a gamble. I LOVE YOU.