justinian presents his church to the pantocrator

today I:

1. drove around too much
2. checked out too many library books, which I don't have time to read
3. got sick of driving around and stopped for lunch
4. paid too much money for my lunch
5. spent more money at a craft store across the street from the cafe where I ate lunch
6. watched too much of the late-90s american remake of "godzilla"

I also undertook a second successful cooking endeavor: a dill rice stuffed artichoke. I also wanted to try a tomato-eggplant sautee but ended up getting a little too overwhelmed with the attention my artichoke required.

my sister says I do not have enough common sense to cook. for me I think the problem is attention-span related. but my mind is slowly learning all of the skills it needs to help me cook

just like my body is learning how to run faster for longer periods of time. today I managed to make it a whole mile and a half without starting out walking/stopping to walk (shut up I just started running after six months of not running at all. also I wasn't a very good runner before. ask joe white, he saw me stumble flushed and panting into the music house after my fifteen-minute jogs around beloit). I'd like to be able to do two and a half before summer's out. then again, that's in something like fourteen days.

one of the books I checked out (they're both about turkey dammit amy get over it) devotes a whole chapter to aya sofya which upon seeing it instantly became my one of my favorite buildings in the world. here's what john ash has to say about it:

"Painted a disconcerting shade of deep rust-pink, the vast external mass of Justinian's masterpiece can have a crushing effect on the visitor. It is not graceful, it does not soar towards the heavens: rather, is is as if the entire burdensome weight of more than 1400 years of history has been rendered visible."

here is what he says about one of the empresses whose likeness in mosaic appears in the church:

"By all accounts [Empress] Zoe was a remarkably empty-headed woman. She had the childish habit of talking to her favorite icons, and in her later years devoted much of her time to the concoction of new perfumes."