Off up North

and finally the rain came down in Falls Church, Virginia, as Londoners experienced their first sunny afternoon in what seemed like years..

but not until Dad, M and I had made it safely to the Mall (not shopping (!), but the huge, long strip of grass with the Washington monument at one end that is lined with an impressive number of world-class art galleries and museums that are completely free to the public) and back, and also out to Roslyn to see the "Bodies" exhibition. I was initially a bit skeptical about this exhibition, believing it to be the work of Gunther von Hagens, who had some bad press with his Body Worlds exhibition some years back. However, this exhibition is apparently quite unrelated (other than perhaps with regard to the technique used to prepare the specimens?) and was quite fantastic. The whole exhibition is laid out in such a way that you are effectively walking through a sort of "Beginners Guide to Anatomy" in 3D. The body specimens are sensitively portrayed so that (I think) even the squeamish (which includes me!) could not object and it's very educational. I would recommend anyone with even the vaguest interest in Medicine to go and see it. Unless you are planning to train as a doctor and therefore dissect bodies at Med school, this is probably the only chance you will ever get to see the inside of the body as it really is.

By the way, I have included a new link on the blog to flickr, where I am beginning to house all my photographs. I am afraid I have not got around to labeling each and every one, but I include a brief summary at the beginning of each 'set' of pictures. So please feel free to browse and email me if you want to know what a particular photo is about. Also, some of you may have noticed that I have included a link to Facebook, the latest time-devouring addiction to sweep the globe! I found this article in the Washington Post the other day that describes the phenomenon quite amusingly. (In case you need to register for this, I include the article at the end of this posting)

Off to NY today, then Montreal tomorrow, then up to the Ashram on Friday to begin my four weeks of... hard work.. well some detoxification and lots of yoga anyway! :) Click here to see my gruelling schedule..


"Great Britons" at Washington's National Portrait Gallery


Independence Avenue, Washington DC


Names of victims, Holocaust Museum, Washington DC


Dad's Buddleia finally attracts the "right sort" of customer
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Not Clicking With the Facebook Crowd

Monday, July 30, 2007; A15

I'm a no-good, lowlife, antisocial, shunned, pathetic excuse for an 18-year-old.

Or so says my Facebook friend count, 161 -- 90 within my Washington network -- which recently began to plateau dishearteningly. Apparently, all my acquaintances, my classmates and the people I've "heard of" have already publicly befriended me, leaving me, a social-networking neophyte, foundering in the low three digits.

I've been through my friends' friends, my friends' cousins, random people I met once at parties, students from my old school, students from the college I won't attend until September -- but that D.C. total hasn't quite inched up to 100. It's drowning in a sea of friend totals triple its size.

Am I that unlikable? Why won't a few more people click that all-powerful button and friend me? (At the least, a few more of my 20-million-plus fellow Facebook users could write on my wall; with no new messages for three days, it's beginning to look a little bare.)

Facebook has brought to the forefront of my social life a necessity I seldom considered before selling my soul and signing up two months ago: friend quantity. Sure, we knew that the cool girls reigned in high school, but never before has such an unquestionably accurate popularity meter indicated down to the last individual your worth as a human being (or, at least, the precise number of people who thought you were worth the two seconds it takes to "friend" someone).

The quality of those people is, of course, far less important.

Emily Yoffe wrote about this phenomenon in Slate earlier this year, recounting what it was like to try to make friends online at 50-something. A Post reporter, Howard Kurtz, conducted a similar experiment last month. Yet I never thought that as an 18-year-old, a charter member of the Internet generation, I'd be having a comparable online experience, stressing about ways to enumerate my friends so other people will think I'm popular.

There are other stringent quantitative standards to meet, too. You should be "tagged" in at least a few hundred photos loaded onto other users' pages, a number that is displayed prominently below your profile picture. If not, you surely haven't attended enough parties or other social events to have moments worth photographing. Shame on you.

I occasionally scold myself for buying into the superficiality of online social networking. But to delete my profile would be to admit defeat, and what would my friends -- real and otherwise -- think if I gave in? Still, nothing can belie the masochism of logging in daily. A few mouse clicks reveal photos of parties to which I was not invited and wall-to-wall conversations regarding outings that no one bothered to tell me about.

Somehow, though, addicted and dead set on avoiding crippling uncoolness, I struggle on with Gatsby-like tenacity. A thousand "friends" is the new American Dream.

I may still harbor the hope that Facebook will shut down, allowing my social life to return to the solace of private text-messages and cellphone conversations. But in the meantime, I'm considering inviting a few (in-the-flesh) friends to a movie via e-mail. Hmmm. Given my stagnant social clout, maybe instead I'll write on their walls so all the world can see how great my plans are. Then all 161 of my friends (friends' cousins, one-time acquaintances, people I've never met) will know what I'm doing this weekend. I can't be unpopular if everyone knows I have such spectacular plans, right?

Maybe I'll take my camera and snap some great I'm-socially-content-and-having-a-grand-time photos while we're out.

Jennifer DeBerardinis is a freelance writer and student.