Day Five

Yesterday was trouble! Rachel's roommate Sam and his mates spent the entirety of the day in the kitchen cooking chicken paprikash with fried noodles, drinking wine and brandy. Oh, sweet temptation! Before our instincts got the better of us, we scooted out the door to downtown Brooklyn. We went to the Temple of Awesome, an origami-fueled sculpture conceived of by Grayson Cox. We spent the better half of the afternoon folding sqaures of origami into shapes which, when blown into, form cubes. The origami served as the perfect diversion for the afternoon, as it did not require much energy or brain power, both of which we are highly lacking at the moment! Throughout this process, I have learned better than perhaps ever before the values of patience and stillness, and origami is the perfect venue for practicing them. At the end of the session, we had around 2,000 cubes -- 8,000 short of the final goal, but off to a good start.

In the evening we continued our movie-watching spree with "Papillon," a 1973 prison-break caper starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman as two convicts sent to a French penal colony in French Guinea. At one point during the movie, Dustin Hoffman's character said to McQueen's, "temptation resisted is the measure of true character," which caused both of us to nod at each other in agreement.