Superficial Joy

It's over. I am devastated. The cycle of grief has begun. On my way home this afternoon, my 36 hour-long relationship with Alexander Hamilton finally came to an end.  [Spoiler Alert: he dies in the end]. At 3 1/2 hours to go I stopped listening for a few days to prolong the grief. Yes, I've completed the entire Ron Chernow biography of our first Secretary of the Treasury. I'm not gonna lie, I was only interested in the book initially because of the Broadway play   Hamilton . I've listened to Act One so many times I just had to find out the real story of this amazing man (Really, I think I wanted to see how much of the play is true). But it grew on me. It took a few chapters, but I eventually got sucked in. There were definitely a few chapters where I zoned out for miles at a time (like, for example, all those words about the Federalist Papers), but overall I bet I heard about 70% of the book. And by the last 10 hours I was all in. It is an incredible story...

The cherry on top: spending the evening with a new friend Last Wednesday was a treat! A unique show about Vincent Van Gogh came to Abu Dhabi. It was called Van Gogh Alive: The Experience . Some of the places it's visited are Beijing, Berlin, Bogota, Budapest, Charlotte, Florence, Hangzhou, Istanbul, Krakow,  Milan, Moscow, Phoenix, Rome, Seville, Shanghai, Singapore, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv and Warsaw (it you are near it, go!). It's really hard to describe, but is was amazing. It didn't involve paintings but instead, images projected on screens scattered all over a set of rooms. Every 34 minutes the program begins that involves sounds, images, words and sometimes video. Maybe it's easier to let you read about it yourself. You can see people standing and sitting while the program is playing. These are big! The landscape screen in the middle is probably 6 feet tall. Along a small corridor were 2 sets of exhibits. One side was a...