Miss OJ Gets a Life

This about sums it up

2011-11-11T10:32:00.000-05:00

If your reaction to my last post was "TL;DR", then here's the Sparknotes version:

This was not a Halloween costume. This was this morning.

I am officially a crazy cat lady.

Funny story about that...

2011-11-05T11:38:00.000-04:00

I used to change the blog's tagline periodically, every time I thought of something funnier (to me) than what was up there. But for a long time now, it's been "Like a crazy cat lady, minus the cats."

Well.

Funny story about that.

I have five cats now.

It is all James's fault, of course, because until we got married and he moved in, I did not have any cats. Of course, he only brought the one cat with him; the remaining four were kind of a joint effort but really mostly my fault.

Seriously, Hobbes is adorable. Wanna rub his belly?

But let me start at the beginning. When James was living in his bachelor pad, he shared the house with his landlord's cat, while the landlord was in Texas. Sunshine (also called Gurndy, for reasons unknown), was a big bad orange lady, a mostly outdoor cat, and at sixteen years old, definitely the Grand Dame of the neighborhood. When the landlord returned to bring her back to Texas with him, James decided, hey, he really liked having a cat. So in February, we went to the animal shelter and returned with an eight-month-old orange tabby. His "pound name" was Kevin, but James immediately renamed him Hobbes. He is not a Kevin, but he is such a Hobbes.

So in May, we got married and Hobbes and James moved in. I have always been a dog person, but I like Hobbes. He is a playful, charming cat who loves belly rubs, playing with twist ties, and napping. He's also adorable. If all cats are like Hobbes, then yes, I love cats.

Yes, she has perma-bitchface, but she's a great cuddler.

So when one of my co-workers sent around a picture of a sweet gray-and-white kitty she found in her alley, we (but mostly me) decided that a second cat was the best idea ever. Hobbes could have a playmate while we were at work. One cat was easy, so two cats would be easy too, right?

Of course right!

So we adopted the gray-and-white lady, named her Zoe, and immediately found out that while Hobbes loves her, she hates Hobbes. Hates. Awesome. So we worked on keeping them segregated and introducing them slowly (no small feat in a one-bedroom apartment!) and prayed for better days ahead.

Then we realized that Zoe was pregnant.* What the shit. We did a little denial dance for awhile, but when you're petting a cat and you can feel the kittens moving around inside her, it's hard to stay in denial. We weighed the options (keep the kittens? pregnant spay? keep the kittens? pregnant spay?), but before we reached a really final decision, she trumped us all and gave birth on everyone's favorite living room chair.

Of course she did. She's a cat.

OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG.

Have you ever seen teeny-tiny day old kittens? They are MIND-BLOWING with their cuteness. They fit in the palm of your hand! They look more like guinea pigs than cats, and since they're not very mobile yet and they can't quite meow, they mostly just wriggle around and squeak, and you guys, there are not words in any language for how cute they are.

So... two adult cats + three kittens = full-on, undeniable crazy cat lady status.

The kittens are now seven weeks old, still MIND-BLOWING with their cuteness, and, alas, soon to be dispatched to their new homes. They romp and play, still aren't quite big enough to make real meows, and they drive Zoe crazy. Every so often she'll look at me all wide-eyed, like "Can't you do something about this?" Mama, if you can't, then I definitely can't.

She still doesn't get along with Hobbes, and we're still not sure what we're going to do about that. Once the kittens are gone, that might help. Once she's spayed, that might help. Or...maybe she'll just keep on keepin' on, and hate him forever. Maybe we'll find her a nice place where she can be the only cat, and keep the third kitten to be friends with Hobbes? I don't know.

But there it is: I am a crazy cat lady. Full stop. Life's weird.

Singing along to: The Weepies, Be My Thrill

Ten on Tuesday: "Working Hard for the Money" Edition

2011-08-17T20:56:00.001-04:00

I borrowed this from Erin at Down the Rabbit Hole. I know, I know, first post in months and it's a quiz. Oops?

1. What do you do for a living?
I’m an "archive assistant" at a DC museum, processing a large new collection. There's a lot of stuff in boxes, which I'm unpacking, cataloging, photographing, labeling, and sorting. If I were a superhero, I'd be CataloGirl: by day, I'm a mild-mannered contract employee, but by night, I fight for truth, justice, and item-level location tracking!

2. What’s your favorite thing about your job?
I love my co-workers, I love the actual building in which I work (art storage warehouse), and I love the behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of a museum.

3. What’s your least favorite thing about your job?
The tedium. Look, I have the right personality for this job--if I weren't doing this, I'd be a librarian*--but cataloging is not a barrel of non-stop thrills. The collection I'm working on is very quirky, and that helps, but some days are a drag.

4. If you weren’t a ____________, what would you be?
Easy. I wrote a blog post about this once. My number one answer, realistically, is probably a copy editor. Sweet fancy Moses, that makes me boring. But I would be really, really good at it! That makes it less boring, right?

5. What is something that you would love to get paid for that you think no one would ever pay you for?
Reading? Writing? Crocheting? Sitting on my patio drinking coffee? Taking gratuitous naps? So many possibilities, so few willing sponsors...

6. If you could have any job for exactly one day, what would it be?
Professional driver on closed course. No question! I could drive really fast in fancy cars on windy mountain roads and it would all be totally legal and sanctioned and also badass. (I would say astronaut but only if I were in space, but realistically, I know I'd be puking my guts out the entire time, and the stars would be wasted on me.)

7. If you had to do manual labor, what would you do?
If we're willing to qualify "art handler" as manual labor, than that, in a heartbeat. Heck, I'd do that even if I didn't "have to." Wrangling art, loading trucks, playing with crates? Rigging? Sign me up! But first I'd need to get more piercings and tattoos; I am way too clean-cut for that job right now.

8. What is something you were forced to learn in high school that was supposed to be super important, but you never actually use?
Oh goodness, almost all of it. Especially the math. And although this was in college and not high school: LATIN. Oh, Latin. Everyone was all "Oh, Latin! Latin's so helpful! You'll love Latin! Latin is the greatest!" I got a 750** on the language portion of my SATs without having taken Latin, guys, and it hasn't done much for me since then, except to use up way too many of my precious college electives. I do not love Latin. Latin is not the greatest.

9. Who was your favorite boss? Why?
Actually, I've been pretty lucky with bosses so far. My boss from the catering company did the flowers for our wedding. My first boss at the museum (when I was an intern/volunteer) introduced me to beer and taught me to harness my Jedi powers. My current boss is pretty cool, too. But my favorite so far might be my first boss: Becky at the catering company. I never would have stayed there that long if not for her. She rocks.

10. Where would you rather work: Dunder Mifflin Paper Company (The Office), Wernham Hogg Paper Company (The Office, UK), or Initech (Office Space)?
I'm keeping Erin's answer here: If I work at Initech do I get to dispose of my old office equipment myself?

*Actually, I pretty much AM a librarian, except with art and archival material instead of books.
**This was back when there were only two sections, each graded out of 800. Because I'm old.

Singing along to: The Imagined Village, Space Girl

Space girls!

2011-07-06T19:43:00.000-04:00

I have been seriously digging this song and this video lately. A great tune AND a montage of the Ladies of Science Fiction? Yes please!

Well.

2011-07-04T09:27:00.001-04:00

I wore this expression all day. (Photo by Annabelle Dando Photography)

When I left you last, I was very concerned about earrings, because I was about to get married, and those were the Most Important Earrings In the History of Jewelry. It's funny, the things I thought I would care about for the wedding, and the things I actually ended up caring about.

I thought I would care deeply about the state of my nails, and maybe the wedding would be my motivation to finally stop picking at them and for once in my life have the nicely-manicured hands of a grown-up, and not a nervous fifteen-year-old. This did not happen. The stress made my cuticle-picking habit worse than ever, and as a consequence I said my vows with several bandaids on my fingers, with stubby fingernails, which I'd inexpertly painted myself, sitting on the kitchen floor the day before the wedding. And I didn't care at all.

I thought I would care about whitening my teeth, and I did get as far as clipping Crest White-strips coupons from the newspaper...but I never actually used them. When it came down to it, I could not summon even a single ounce of concern for the appearance of my teeth. I mean, they're just teeth, right?

We got married at the beginning of May, and I haven't been to the gym since November at best. I thought I would care...but I didn't. And I still rocked the dress.

I thought I would care about fancy table numbers (I was going to embroider them, oh yes I was), I thought I would care about the cake, I thought I would care about pretty placecards, and why wouldn't I? I am a detail person--often I can't see the forest for the leaves--and I like to make nice things.

But I didn't.

And it was still the best party of my life. I threw dignity to the wind and danced with all my friends and my shiny new husband, and I drank a lot of champagne, and I hugged a lot of people, and I cried during the toasts, and I smiled until my face hurt, and oh, you guys, it was the best. Being married is the best.

Singing along to: Gregory Alan Isakov, "John Brown's Body"

The most important earrings in the history of jewelry

2011-04-21T19:19:00.000-04:00

So here's the thing: I am decisive in inverse proportion to the importance of the decision. This has never been more evident than during the wedding planning.

Picking a venue? Super-easy.
Picking a photographer? No sweat.
Picking a wedding ring? Mildly stressful, but once I psyched myself up to spend the money, it was a done deal.
Picking earrings to wear? IF I PICK THE WRONG ONES THE WORLD WILL END.

I finally ordered some, and so far no apocalypse, but y'all, I have been browsing Etsy for weeks looking at earrings. WEEKS. I spent more time weighing my earrings options than I did weighing my dress options.

And by the way, lest you think this is some bridezilla thing and further proof that weddings in America are out of control, then I invite you to come to Target with me and witness my terrible agonies in the paper towel aisle.

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Promising Light

I want to watch this all day...

2011-03-06T11:31:00.000-05:00

...and then re-organize my bookshelves.

Seriously, is this the awesomest, or what? I LOVE the Internet.

This happens every time

2011-02-22T21:54:00.000-05:00

"Mo' money, mo' problems" is not something I find myself saying a lot, because, frankly, I have yet to experience "mo' money." I mean, I do okay, you know, which right now means "not going into debt, but also not saving nearly as much as I'd like." Yes, I have an emergency fund. No, I do not have anything resembling retirement savings. (Yes, I know that's bad.) I actually cried a little bit when I did my taxes. (Nope, no refund. Being a contractor is so awesome, you guys! Thanks to the self-employment tax, I can PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE of not having any benefits of any kind, ever.)

ANYHOW.

My point is, I am doing just well enough that when a little bit of "found money" comes into my life, I can reasonably teeter between "spend it on something sensible, like groceries" and "spend it on something fun, like gray patent leather Sperry Top-Siders."* Part of me thinks I deserve a bit of a reward for spending the past two and a half months eating beans and rice, with the thermostat set at 60 degrees. The other part of me keeps reminding me that there's a reason I've been doing that, and further more I'm just now getting to a place where a) my lifestyle is sustainable and b) I'm getting used to the frugality, so why kill the streak now?

For reference, the "found money" is a $100 Visa gift card I got for finding a new apartment via Rent.com. I could do a lot of things with $100. I could buy three weeks' worth of groceries. I could buy a sewing machine and one or two "learn to sew books." I could buy the necessities for the dog I'm adopting on Friday.** I could buy the aforementioned shoes. Point is, I could go back and forth on this for weeks, because boy, there are a lot of things you can do with $100! And pretty much all of them are justifiable, at least a little bit!

So come on, Internet. You excel at giving advice, solicited or not. Tell me what I should do.

--

*No, I'm never been a boat shoes kind of girl before, but they're gray! and shiny! Other than the price tag, what's not to love?

**YAY

Singing along to: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Home

A nerd with a needle

2011-02-10T21:29:00.000-05:00

I know I have other places on the Internet where I talk about crafts, but I wanted to share this anyway.

Yes. I embroidered an ampersand. Why? Because it's my favorite piece of punctuation, obviously, who doesn't make tributes to punctuation to hang by their desks?

Also, note to self: Life is too short for that much satin stitch. I mean really.

Singing along to: Tom Petty, You Don't Know How It Feels

I get the greatest phone calls

2011-02-08T21:20:00.000-05:00

My phone rings. It's Comcast.

Me: Miss OJ.

Comcast rep (CR): May I speak to Mr. or Mrs. OJ?

Me: Um. There is no Mr. OJ. But I'm Miss OJ.

CR: Oh, I am so sorry for your loss.

Me: Um. I'm single. I was never married.

CR: Oh, I can understand that. I'm quite happy just me and my cat!

Me: Um.

CR goes on to describe some super-expensive Comcast plan that would somehow mysteriously save me money. I decline, citing budgetary constraints. She goes on to assure me that it's a great deal and also something about how her cell phone service is so bad that she can never make calls or receive calls at her daughter's house so I should totally add a landline. I decline, and resist the urge to sell her on AT&T.

**
I'm at work. The phone rings.

"Miss OJ," I say.

"Hi... Is this the Justice Department?" says the caller.

"No. This is [a totally different and completely unrelated agency]."

"Oh... You don't happen to have a directory for the Justice Department, do you?"

Your taxpayer dollars are at work, sir, but they're not working that hard.

**

Singing along to: Cat Stevens, Morning Has Broken. I want to walk down the aisle to this song. Luckily, it is actually a legit Church hymn, so I can do that.

On the bright side, I've gotten some good mileage out of this one

2011-01-27T22:36:00.000-05:00

So a month and a half ago, I ventured out of the nest, out of my parents' house and into my very own bachelorette pad. This was, as all things are, a process, and it never seems to end. Thanks to college, Ikea and hand-me-downs, I have most of the things I need to get by: a coffee maker, a couple of pots and pans, a slow cooker, a cocktail shaker, that sort of thing. Still, there's always something, isn't there? I still don't have a microwave, a snow shovel, or a vacuum cleaner, and there are various other things that I don't need, but which I would like to have: a chair or two for the balcony, a kitchen rug to put in front of the sink, that sort of thing. But I'm slowly chipping away at it--last weekend I even bought a broom and dustpan!

And thank goodness for that.

Yesterday and last night, it snowed. Not a whole lot, not even enough to get me out of work today, but several inches nonetheless. Enough.

So, tra la la, getting ready for work this morning, tra la la, I'm leaving on time for once, aren't I such a good grown-up, tra la la.

Then I got out to my car and realized, Oops! It's covered in five inches of snow, and surrounded by an impenetrable ridge of snow left behind by the snow plow. And unlike my fiance, I do not drive a Jeep. My car can't handle that sort of challenge. Boy, wouldn't this be a nice time to have a snow shovel.

Well, I do have an ice scraper/snow brush in my car, so I busied myself with cleaning off the car, and hoped that if I ignored the rest of the snow, it would go away.

It didn't.

So then I stared really hard at the snow for awhile, hoping that the Power of My Rage would melt it all.

It didn't.

That's when I started to get desperate. I ran through a mental inventory of everything that I owned, trying to figure out which possession would make the best slapdash snow shovel. Nothing really came to mind. I tried using my feet to kick and push the snow out of the way, which actually worked pretty well, except that it's hastening the death of my favorite sneakers.

Aha! I thought. THE DUST PAN.

Yes, the dust pan. I dug out my car with a dustpan and my feet. I got to work late and bedraggled and feeling--once again--like someone somewhere made a terrible administrative oversight when they let me out into the real world.

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Your Fake Name is Good Enough for Me. New album came out on Tuesday!

I'm either doing this completely wrong, or completely right

2011-01-23T22:01:00.000-05:00

Despite my generalized distaste for the wedding industry, I occasionally read wedding magazines, and I subscribe to several wedding blogs. I don't think the habit has skewed my perception of what constitutes a "proper" wedding, or what sorts of things are necessary or justifiable, or whatever. (If anything did that, it was working at a caterer for six and a half years.) Sometimes I find ideas for things that I like, and can do cheaply, and other times I just laugh hysterically.

But one thing they all seem to agree on--one thing everyone seems to agree on--is that planning a wedding is a full-time job. They sympathize with you, the hapless, time-crunched bride-to-be, about how hard it all is, how nobody understands, it's so much work, incorporating all these details that only you will appreciate!

I kind of feel like, if it's that much work, if it eats that much of your free time, then you're doing it wrong. Now, granted, James and I are not planning a wedding for 300 people, neither of us are in law school or a medical residency or whatever, nor are we trying to plan a wedding that will take place in a different state than the one we currently live in. There are definitely complicating factors that are not present for our wedding.

But still. I routinely go days at a time with barely a thought for the wedding to-do list. Partially this is because I'm a procrastinator, and partially it's because I just haven't found that much to stress about yet. Making the save-the-dates was no big deal, so I don't think invitations will be that much worse. I've sorta started on the centerpieces, but they're pretty basic. I'll make place cards once we have RSVPs, but that'll take, what, two or three episodes of Bones? No biggie. There's just not that much to do.

I think. As I said, I also don't spend that much time worrying about it. Any fellow wedding slackers out there?

Singing along to: The Black Keys, Howlin' For You

My Google searches are much lamer now that I'm a grown up.

2011-01-20T20:09:00.000-05:00

So it turns out that electricity is expensive. I'm on the utility company's "budget billing" program, wherein I pay a set amount every month, which they adjust periodically based on my actual usage--but so far I have paid for less than I have actually used. Not good. I want to make them owe me money. So I Googled "how to save money on your electric bills."

Apparently, that would be an easier task if I owned instead of rented and/or if I had a lot of money, because here are some of the most common tips:

Install ceiling fans, and use them instead of the air conditioning.
Make sure all your appliances are Energy Star.
Switch to gas heat and/or a gas water heater.
Make sure your attic is well-insulated and while you're up there, install a whole house fan!

Yes, let me get right on those things! I'm sure my landlord (and my upstairs neighbors) would be thrilled if I installed ceiling fans.

Unfortunately, what I've discovered is that I already do most of the easy, non-invasive things, like turn off the lights the moment you leave the room, and open the blinds to let in more warm sunlight during the winter. Most of my lightbulbs are CFLs. I do my laundry with cold water.

What's left? Shiver, apparently. And I hate shivering.

Singing along to: Mumford & Sons, Winter Winds. Y'all, this album--Sigh No More--is SO. GOOD. So good!

Movin' out

2010-12-13T09:24:00.000-05:00

So I moved on Saturday. Boy was that an ordeal. I wasn't really ambitious before, but I am now, and my sole motivation for Making It Big is this: Hire movers.

But I guess it went all right. Everything fit in the truck, nothing broke in transit, and at the end of the day we were all still able to stand upright. No small victory there. And now, two days later, I'm nearly unpacked, except for all my books (eight. boxes.), all my Ikea furniture is assembled, and I've even put up and decorated a small Christmas tree. (Apparently having my own place is making me more festive than I used to be, because I spent a lot of physical and mental energy finding the perfect [read: small, cheap, and pre-lit] fake tree.)

So far the biggest pain in the ass has been the Case of the Missing Cookware. At some point in between moving out of the trailer at the end of graduation, and moving into the apartment on Saturday, I lost a box of my kitchen stuff. Now my pots and pans, kitchen knives, utensils, and Gladware are all MIA. Since I don't have a microwave yet, either, I can't so much as boil water for pasta. If they don't show up somewhere, I guess I'll go to Goodwill and see what I can find there, to tide me over until wedding/registry gifts start showing up. I also bought a box of assorted disposable utensils, which, yes, I am rinsing off and reusing.

It's very glamorous, this bachelorette lifestyle.

Singing along to: Jakob Dylan, All Day and All Night

All we are is ducks in the wind...

2010-12-09T23:12:00.000-05:00

I am moving out of my parents' house and into an apartment the day after tomorrow. Let's not talk about the to-do list that's buzzing around my head like a large swarm of angry bees.

No, really. Let's not.

Instead, let's watch (for the fifteenth or sixteenth time), this video of baby ducklings (and their mama) being all blown about by a strong wind. I don't know if it's funny or sad or both, but I do know that I laughed till I cried the first few times I watched it.

Ahhhhh. I feel better now. Don't you?

PS: You can thank my fiance for that wonderful, awful pun I used for the title.

Singing along to: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Mary Jane's Last Dance

Notes & Asides, again

2010-11-25T20:26:00.000-05:00

Gratuitous Photobooth picture 'cause I have a shiny new MacBook.

I am feeling very gloaty over the fact that the save the date cards that I'm making for the wedding only cost $0.40 a piece (including postage!), as if that totally negates the places we are going over budget. (We could help the budget more by eliminating save-the-date cards altogether, but as we are inviting a fair number of out-of-towners, we'd like to give them plenty of warning to find good deals on airfare.)

Still! Forty cents each! And they are very cute. They've got owl stamps on them, and faux woodgrain. I'd love them even if they weren't the product of my labor.

***

Threadless has got to stop making space-themed t-shirts. (And sending me coupon codes.) I already have two; my co-workers might be a little weirded out if I buy another. Heck, I might be a little weirded out if I buy another. But seriously: how am I supposed to be fiscally responsible in the face this? It has seven rocket ships! And a flying saucer! And I have a coupon code...

***

I'm not sure I've mentioned it here, but I have a crochet blog now. I haven't updated it in about a month, but as I'm just now putting the finishing touch on a pair of small projects, I might soon. Still, you should go check it out. Crochet is really cool, and not at all knitting's frumpier cousin.

***

I have some sort of cold or sinus infection or something, but the worst thing about it is the itching, oh sweet fancy Moses, the itching. My face itches from the inside, which I imagine is what an alien infestation feels like. Any moment now, some three-headed purple lizard thing will come bursting out of my skull and take over the world.

***

I just got a new computer, a shiny, shiny new MacBook, and so far what I'm enjoying the most is its ability to handle streaming video. My old iBook just couldn't, most of the time, but now I'm able to binge all I want on Netflix Watch Instantly. (Currently on season six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) This computer upgrade coincided nicely with the sick day I took yesterday, and is making it all the more tempting to take another one tomorrow.

(Making tomorrow's potential sick day less tempting: the fact that I don't have anything resembling paid leave. No work, no money. Damn it!)

***

Oh, right, it's Thanksgiving now. (It wasn't Thanksgiving when I started writing this post.) I'm thankful for a whole heck of a lot of things, but I think that John Scalzi's Thanksgiving Grace, science-fiction style, can sum it up for all of us.

Notes & Asides

2010-11-14T18:07:00.001-05:00

I am not ~~usually~~ ever a fan of Christmas crafts (or, for that matter, excessive holiday decorating), but I am nevertheless planning the construction of (what I hope will be) a Christmas wreath to make Martha cry. It will be kind of like this one, but tackier. And glittery-er.

Hello, future neighbors! This is what happens when you let 23-year-old girls sign leases.

***

If you were going into space, who would you want to drive your spaceship? Easy: Hoban "Wash" Washburne. He plays with toy dinosaurs, he rocks the Hawaiian shirts, and oh yeah, he's a leaf on the wind. What more could you want in a pilot?

Unfortunately, both Wash and private space flight are the stuff of science fiction right now, so to tide us all over, I made a "Wash is my co-pilot" bumper sticker over at Zazzle. You can buy it, if you want, and if you do I think I get ten whole cents from the Zazzle people. It's practically a charitable donation.

It's true: I am a genius of graphic design.

***

I want to learn to embroider. That sounds like a good hobby for someone who hates to sew, right?

***

I keep trying to think of more to say, but I keep getting distracted by wedding shoe* shopping. (And wedding jewelry shopping. And something awesome to wear in my hair for the wedding** shopping.) Now that I've got the dress out of the way, I can focus on the really fun stuff. Etsy and Zappos won't know what hit them.

*But not the "white satin pumps" kind of wedding shoes. No, I am looking for something significantly less lame. And more re-wearable.
**Unlikely to be a veil. I'm thinking hair flower or very pretty headband.

Some things feel exactly the way they should

2010-11-03T22:26:00.000-04:00

In my last post I mentioned--ever so casually--that I found a wedding dress.

So casual! Tra-la-la! Just a day in the life!

But DUDES.

I found a WEDDING DRESS. To wear at my WEDDING. The wedding at which I will GET MARRIED.

I KNOW, RIGHT?

Okay, enough with the caps lock. But still: wow. It was kind of a moment, and I was not expecting it to be. There are a lot of things in our lives that are supposed to be "moments," and in my experience, most of them aren't. That's fine. I don't think my life is emptier for it. I don't expect them, they don't happen, and yet I manage to make good and fulfilling decisions, decisions I am very happy with. I picked my college and my major and my apartment and a lot of other things without having any "moments." I kind of expected a wedding dress to be like that too.

I'd already tried on a number of dresses in a couple stores when I found mine, and I was already ranking them in my head: yes, no, maybe. My feelings about most of them could be summarized thusly: if someone handed me that dress and told me that's what I was wearing, it would be just fine. I'd look good, and I'd be happy. There were a few more that were definitely "me"--my biggest criteria was that I didn't want a generic strapless ballgown, or any kind of ballgown, for that matter--but for the most part I was feeling very methodical about the whole thing.

And then I tried on my dress. I got a weird fluttery feeling as it settled over my shoulders. The glimpse of myself that I caught in the mirror as the saleslady zipped it up* was something different altogether.

"Wow," I said, as I looked at my reflection. ("Wow," I said again, when I looked at the price tag.)

Then I walked out of the dressing room, and my mother cried and my aunt cried, and I kid you not, other women's mothers cried, and even I had to blink back a few, and that was that.

So I had a moment. And now I have a dress. Isn't that something else?

(We also have--in no particular order--a photographer, a chapel, a reception site, a bridal party, a florist, and a mock-up of an invitation design. We do not have a priest or a caterer. It's a work in progress.)

--

*This dress, I am pretty sure I will be able to put on all by myself on the big day, which is a relief. I will also be able to use the bathroom all by myself on the big day, which is an even bigger relief. I don't think it's really blog appropriate, but I'll go ahead and say it anyway: I am almost positive I would not be able to pee with someone else present. It was kind of weird, having someone help me get dressed. I had to remember to shave my legs before the shopping trips, and wear presentable underwear. It was a burden.

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Upwards Over the Mountain

Meanwhile...

2010-11-02T21:13:00.000-04:00

So, when I left you, I was pretty preoccupied with apartment hunting, and the awfulness thereof. Apartment hunting turned out to be, in fact, so awful--and made me feel so inexplicably depressed--that I abandoned it for more than a month, in favor of flipping forlornly through the Ikea catalog and going wedding dress shopping.

(That actually turned out to be a really good choice--the start date of my job ended up getting delayed by an additional two weeks, and it was another few weeks after that before I was finally able to fill my days with billable hours. As a result, I still haven't gotten my first paycheck. Yeah. Also, I found a wedding dress.*)

But at some point I had to get back on the horse, so one afternoon I plugged a new city into Apartment Finder's search, found a new apartment with really good ratings, went for a visit, liked what I saw, applied for a lease, and got one. I will be moving on December 11. Maybe by then I will have gotten a paycheck.

I am excited. I am back to the Ikea catalog, I am looking into getting my grandparents' fabulous mid-century dining room set re-finished, I am bookmarking tutorials for tacky/awesome wreaths with which I can decorate my bachelorette pad. I am throwing myself at startlingly grown-up to-do lists (renter's insurance? a BGE account? a credit card?) and actually making headway on them.** I am doing better than I thought I would. It's not as hard as I thought it would be.

I am also depressed. Still? Again? I'm not sure which. Intermittently, inexplicably. It's all the changes, of course. Probably. Maybe not. I'm not sure. Mostly, I don't really care. I am functioning, it will pass, I'll be fine. Mostly, I'm just tired of having to remind myself--constantly, with great effort--that these are not my real feelings. They feel real, but they are an illusion. The fear that crowds my mind when I'm tired and overwhelmed, the terrible distrust of my own judgment and capabilities, it's not real. It will pass, and my real feelings--the excitement, the confidence, the capability--will remain.

But the depression, as I said, is intermittent. Today was better than yesterday, which was better than Sunday, which was better than Thursday. All of which was probably worse than a month ago, but probably also worse than a month from now. I think we are trending upward.

So, there's that. That, and maybe sometime this week, a paycheck.

We live in hope.

---

*More on that later? Maybe. Probably not. But maybe.
**James has promised me the trophy from this hilarious, deadly-accurate Hyperbole and a Half post. He's right; I've earned it.

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, God Made the Automobile

Earth below us, drifting, falling...

2010-09-13T23:31:00.000-04:00

Via Gizmodo, who says "After watching this video, you will like to be an astronaut too." Well, Gizmodo, I already do dream of being an astronaut (thanks, Ray Bradbury), but this just intensifies it.

I'm not going to lie: watching this, I actually teared up. It starts up, and it's pretty and all, but thirty seconds in when the sun rises, it's unbelievable.

PS: Follow this link above to the original Gizmodo post; it has several more amazing videos.

Unintentionally horrifying crafts

2010-09-11T21:55:00.000-04:00

Many years ago, my maternal grandmother crocheted me a "pillow doll," which is basically a large, round pillow with a doll's torso protruding out of it, and the whole thing is crafted to look vaguely like a doll in a ballgown (sort of like this). I have had this thing for so long that I don't remember not having it, and as a consequence, she's in pretty rough condition. Most of her hair is gone, one of her eyes no longer stays open, and her plastic torso is cracked so badly that her left arm will no longer stay attached.

She is horrifying, actually, and every time James sees her he starts singing Jonathan Coulton's "Creepy Doll" song. I don't blame him. It kind of fits. Which is why I'm going to try to restore her, which will basically involve cleaning the yarny parts and replacing the doll torso. No, crocheted doll pillows aren't really to my taste, decoratively speaking, but her sentimental value compels me.

So now I'm trolling the Google looking for doll torsos, which I will no doubt have nightmares about tonight. You laugh, but man, doll-making supplies are creepy. These websites have categories dedicated to "miscellaneous faces and heads" and "doll eyes." Apparently you can buy doll wigs made of real human hair. There are kids with cancer who can't even get wigs made of real human hair. I dare you: scroll down this page and tell me you didn't flinch at least once.

So far I am not having any luck finding an actual "pillow doll" in the right proportions and with the right hair color (red), so I may have to resort to buying a regular vinyl doll and removing her legs.

When I finally go postal, that will be the sentence that the prosecution trots out to prove that I've been a danger to society all along.

Singing along to: The Doors, Waiting for the Sun

Don't worry, I'm properly ashamed of this

2010-08-30T22:35:00.000-04:00

Last summer, I wrote a post about all the things I found while I was looking for the keys to my bike lock. (Needless to say, I did not find those keys.) Take a look at that list; bask in the ridiculous items it contains (11 batteries, a Metro bus map of Virginia, 2 packs of frog-print tissues, a plastic Christmas wreath, an expired New York City subway pass, etc).

Think about what you would have done with those things.

Yeah... I didn't do that.

I kept those things.

Well, okay, "kept" is a strong word. "Kept" implies that I made a purposeful decision to keep these things; in fact, I just stuck them back in the corner where I found them and forgot about them.

I remembered them again this past week, when some strange fit of productivity possessed me for nearly the entire week, and I attacked all the dark corners of my room and closet, and finally threw away things like the expired New York City subway pass and the Metro bus map of Virginia. (I don't ride Metro bus. I don't go to Virginia.) I threw out so much shit and it felt so good.

And now, when I finally move out, I don't have to pack things like the camera strap I have never used. I almost kept that camera strap, actually, because what if I want it? What if I need it in a year? I had to forcibly tell myself that if I haven't wanted it in the past three years, I won't want it in the future. I had to have this conversation with myself multiple times, over multiple items. But in the end I threw them all away.

I feel lighter.

Singing along to: Wilco, On & On & On

Apartment hunting is the worst (but I still love Thoreau)

2010-08-29T23:31:00.000-04:00

I realize there is a lot of back story to this post. To make it short: I got offered a job. I accepted. Then I got offered a different, better job: a contract job at the museum where I've been volunteering for the past two years. There was some agonizing and some Catholic guilt, but since I hadn't actually started job A yet (thanks, long-ass background check), I took job B. I haven't actually started that yet, either, but it should only be another week or two. And there was much rejoicing.

And now that I have a job lined up, of course, it's time to start apartment hunting. I kind of thought apartment hunting would be fun, and not too stressful, and pretty soon I'd have a sweet place and I could go shopping at Ikea and use my grandparents' awesome mid-century dining room furniture.

Turns out, apartment hunting is not like that. Apartment hunting is balls.

In apartment hunting, you spend a lot of time on Rent.com, make a list of places to visit, visit them, find out that half of them are too sketchy, a quarter of them don't have any openings, and the remaining one or two are okay. So you start to think, okay, maybe I have found a good home for the next year, and you apply for a lease (but don't sign anything yet), and your application gets approved. So you investigate that okay-looking place on ApartmentRatings.com, and you discover roaches. Infinity of roaches. And maintenence staff who seems to have accepted the dominion of their roachy overlords.

BALLS, you say. INFINITY OF BALLS.

One or two roaches, sure, that's an acceptable hazard of apartment living. That's what Raid and heavy textbooks are for. But the roach army, no, you will not tolerate the roach army. You will not accept the dominion of the roachy overlords.

So you're back where you started, except this time you're surfing rent.com and apartment ratings simultaneously, and so far the best bet you've seen is in a totally different county and may or may not have any available apartments (but who can argue with a 97% recommendation rating?).

Luckily, there's Thoreau, who may not be able to help you find an apartment--who would probably find the whole concept of apartment living abhorrent--but who can still, nonetheless, wax eloquent about finding someplace to live.

At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all where to be bought, and I knew their price.... Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly.... Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. (Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived and What I Lived For)

Well put, sir. Well put indeed.

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, On Your Wings

Notes & Asides

2010-07-12T18:04:00.003-04:00

It's been awhile since I was an active forum participant anywhere, but I just joined Ravelry, kind of on a whim. It's geared towards knitters, crocheters, and other fiber-y people, but of course knitting is assumed to be the default, there as everywhere else. Still, it looks like it has some useful tools, especially for connecting with other people who are working on the same pattern, even patterns from books, magazines, etc. So we'll see how that goes. If you too are on Ravelry, go ahead and look me up--my user name is (of course) missoj.

Plus, maybe it will help me track down some good crochet blogs.

***

I am kind of afraid I'm turning into a Crazy Plant Lady. My deck-top herb garden--which in past summers has consisted of two pots of basil, tops--now includes eleven pots and seven different kinds of plants* (more, if you count each variety of basil separately). I also beat back the weeds and planted some flowers around the corner of the house. It all seemed like such a good idea at the time, but now I have to figure out what to do with all that greenery. (Growing herbs and not using them seems like such a waste.) Cooking is the obvious solution, but there are only so many herbs I can use in any given meal. Suggestions and favorite recipes welcome.

*Basil, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, lavender, and some bachelor's buttons just to add a bit o color.

***

I downloaded a free wedding planning app for my iPod from the Knot. Boy, was that a mistake. Which, yes, I should have foreseen. Whatever. It has an FAQ section, which includes some legitimate Q&As (i.e., what's the correct order for a Jewish processional?) and some mind-melting ones (i.e., platinum is too expensive for us. Are there alternatives?). WHY DO I LIVE IN A WORLD IN WHICH THAT IS A REAL QUESTION? Of COURSE there are alternatives to platinum, have you not heard of GOLD or even SILVER, or EVERY OTHER MATERIAL EVER? Holy MONKEYS, people, this is why it's fashionable to hate on the wedding industry.

Okay, deep breath.

***

I grew up under a rock, which is why I am only now, at the age of 22, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel for the first time. I know, I am a terrible Whedonite, but luckily Netflix Watch Instantly is here to shine a light into the darkness of my ignorance. Unfortunately, the statute of limitations on spoilers has long since expired, so no matter how carefully I navigate the geek-o-verse, they still slip through. Please don't add contribute to the spoilage in the comments. I am on season 4 of Buffy right now (and season 1 of Angel) and I am finding it all most enjoyable--the perfect blend of shameless camp and Important Questions.

Waiting in limbo

2010-07-08T23:16:00.004-04:00

The fateful email I referenced in my last post arrived on Monday--a federal holiday, I might add, which only confirms my suspicion that it was all automated anyway, which begs the question of WHY IT TOOK SO DAMN LONG.

Whatever. It arrived, and set me to another task, and now I'm waiting for another email. Luckily that email isn't quite as crucial (I think?), which is leaving me with plenty of energy to stress about other (related) issues.

I still don't want to elaborate, except to say that the timeline that "real life" is forcing me into is really uncomfortable. I think it will all end happily, and one specific upside is that I will almost definitely be able to move out of my parents' house before my 23rd birthday*, but in the meantime, I am waiting here in limbo.

I am also counting down the days until I can quit my job at the caterer. That's the other eventual upside of all this: no more working nights and weekends, coming home with other people's food all over my shirt and apron, feeling grouchy and out of sorts from trying so hard not to be grouchy and out of sorts. I keep setting limits on how soon I am allowed to quit and I keep revising them. I started out telling myself that I'd cut back on hours once I started somewhere else and then quit as soon as I went full-time elsewhere. At this point I am ready to quit as soon as the first paycheck from Elsewhere arrives. It might not be the most practical or responsible thing to do, but I have been there for nearly six years and I have never liked that job.
I am ready to be immature, indulgent, and infinitely more sane.

But none of that will happen until several more emails have come and gone. Boy, this real life thing is awesome!

--

*please don't judge me.

Singing along to: Deb Talan, Rocks and Water

Do they make a cream for worrywarts?

2010-07-03T01:14:00.002-04:00

They say that a watched pot never boils. Turns out the modern-day equivalent of that is "a watched inbox never gets any email." It doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well, but as someone who has spent a considerable portion of the last thirty-six hours staring at her inbox, I can testify that it's true.

Well, partially true--I did get emails, I just didn't get the email I need. My future depends on this, people, and it is not happening nearly as promptly as I would like. Certainly the "one business day" turn-around time that I was promised has come and gone.

I'm really not comfortable getting less cryptic than this. It's a job situation, a good job situation, but also a confusing and overwhelming one. I feel like Harry Potter standing in the hallway full of doors in Book Five, except that there are really only two doors and I can see what's on the other side of them. What's on the other side? Worry, mostly. Infinite new possibilities for worry. And the potential for crushing disappointment. Good things are waiting too, but I'm so talented that I can even find things to worry about when good things happen.

(People tell me I'm a pessimist, but I think that is unfair. I look forward to every day as a brand-new opportunity to stress out about something. If that's not optimism I don't know what is.)

Possibly my boss at my volunteer job could sense the panic lurking beneath the casual tone in my last email, because he closed his reply to me with this: "Use the Force. It will guide you. You can do this."

It's an oddly calming little mantra, actually. And it makes me laugh, which also helps.

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, The Night Descending

Top Five: Songs

2010-06-28T22:27:00.003-04:00

Not the songs I have listened to most recently. Not necessarily even the songs that I've listened to most frequently. But definitely the songs that continue to resonate for years. These are the ones I come back to again and again:

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For by U2. I finally heard this song live in concert in September, and while I won't say that the experience changed my life, I will say that I shed at least five real and actual tears. I believe in the Kingdom Come, then all the colors will bleed into one, but yes, I'm still running...

Graceland by Paul Simon. Generally I prefer Paul Simon where he belongs, in the company of Art Garfunkel, but I also love. this. song. Mostly because I don't think it's really about Elvis's mansion. And I may be obliged to defend every love, every ending, or maybe there's no obligations now. Maybe I've reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.

On Your Wings by Iron & Wine. Oh, come on, you knew Sam Beam would make the list. He makes every list. Even the non-musical ones, probably. Now, according to iTunes, Free Until They Cut Me Down is my #1 most-played song of all time ever, but On Your Wings is #2.... and #1 in my heart. God, there are guns growing out of our bones. God, every road takes us farther from home. All these men that you made, how we wither in the shade of your trees, on your wings we are carried to the sea. God, give us love in the time that we have...

Green Eyes by Coldplay. I liked this song before I met James, it's true, but he solidified its place in my heart. And before you jump on the Coldplay hater train, I think you should know this: it is not a piano song. Sure, it's not the most lyrically complex song ever written, but Chris Martin does know not to end a sentence with a preposition, and you know what? We will dance to this song at our wedding. That is all the justification I need here. Honey, you are the sea upon which I float...

Tonight, Tonight by the Smashing Pumpkins. It's true: the Smashing Pumpkins are a little bit weird. And yes, Billy Corgan does look like Lord Voldemort. But given the lyrics, well, it's possible that they have nevertheless managed to write a semi-inspirational song that I actually like. The impossible is possible, indeed! The impossible is possible tonight, tonight. Believe in me as I've believed in you tonight, tonight...

So...what songs are on your list?

A positive kind of wedding

2010-05-20T21:00:00.001-04:00

I have alluded to this on Twitter, so I have basically already scooped myself, but one of things I am enjoying most about wedding planning so far is looking at all those online checklists (because yes, I do have an account at Brides.com and Martha Stewart Weddings--but not The Knot, and I am not doing message boards) and deleting all the items that just don't apply.

This is entertaining simply because there are so many items that don't apply to our wedding. No, Martha Stewart Weddings, we are not going to plan our own engagement party, and no, Brides.com, we are certainly not going to register for engagement gifts. I mean, what the hell? If someone wants to throw us a party, that's cool, but I don't expect it, and I certainly don't expect a gift just because I managed to snag myself a man, especially since most of these people will probably feel moved to buy us a wedding present too.

Most of the other items I've deleted from various checklists are less likely to make Miss Manners reach for her smelling salts, but they would probably give some people pause. We are not having a videographer. We are not having a calligrapher. We are not having a florist, and probably not having a baker either. We are not having a DJ. We are not writing our own vows. The bridesmaids won't match, and the groomsmen might not either. There might not even be the same number of each. I am not hiring someone to do my hair and makeup (and I'm certainly not going to grow my hair out for the wedding). We will not being going on an exotic honeymoon.

I don't mean any of this as a criticism of couples who do have these things. I don't think minimalism (and frankly, we're not that minimalist--it won't be a courthouse wedding) makes us--or our wedding or our relationship superior. I am not trying to gloat here. I am trying to express my relief that there are so many things I just don't care that much about. It feels so good. And I do not want anyone to think that I am defining our wedding by the negatives, because I really don't see any. How could I, when I have so much to look forward to?

After all: We will be throwing a party with people we love. We will be eating good food and drinking good beer and wine. We will be making our own invitations, doing our own flowers and centerpieces. We will be listening to music that we and our guests love. We will have delicious dessert. He will be handsome. I will have a good hair day. We will be standing at the altar surrounded by our families and our best friends. We will pledge our lives to each other in the same words our parents and grandparents and generations of other couples have used.

And we will grow old together.

Frankly, I think that's enough.

Singing along to: Lisa Hannigan, "Sea Song"

It's been a spring

2010-04-21T20:32:00.003-04:00

To get straight to the point: Here I am! Still alive! With all ten of my fingers still intact, although you wouldn't know it from my minimal internet presence.

To get to the point the long way around: It's been quite a spring. Here's the bullet points version, because believe it or not, even "the long way around" is still the abridged version of Events I've Been Distracted By.

My brother, who is a junior in high school, recently found out (along with students at 12 other archdiocesan schools) that when his high school closes at the end of the school year, it will not reopen in the fall. This is a huge blow for everyone--students past and present, teachers, parents, and staff--and my feelings about the matter are as complicated as the situation itself, but I think I'm justified in saying that this is a terribly unfair situation for him and his fellow students--the juniors especially. Their peers are looking at colleges. They're looking at high schools and colleges.
My paternal grandfather passed away a few weeks ago. This was hard for all of us, as he was my last remaining grandparent, but I think the hardest part of all was admitting that it was time to let go: he had been in a slow decline for the past year and I think he was ready to go home. Still, the space between knowing that it's time and accepting that it's time can be difficult to navigate.
My dad started a new job in New Jersey (speaking of long stories...), so he's now Monday through Friday there and weekends here in Maryland. The deep, deep irony of this situation is that the entire reason that my parents were willing to consider this inconvenient alternative to moving is that they didn't want to disrupt my brother's final year and a half of high school.
And, to top it all off... James and I are engaged! Yes, after all that, something good did happen this spring. I have talked a lot of smack about Other People's Weddings over the past few years, so now I guess it's time for me to put my money where my mouth is and do this up right. So far my opinions about weddings haven't changed much, and yes, I can still use the phrase Wedding Industrial Complex with a straight face, so we'll see how it goes. My attitude remains what it always has been: if, at the end of the day, I'm married to my best friend with our family and friends around us, then a successful wedding took place. That's what I'm most excited about.

And that's where I've been for the past month and a half. How about you?

Singing along to: Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, "Two of Us"

Book Review: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

2010-03-07T20:12:00.002-05:00

The other night I made the mistake of watching 2012. It was a dreadful movie*, of course, and although it's hard to pick the one thing that made it most unbearable, I think it was this: if I squinted hard enough at the screen, I could actually see the gears that made the plot go 'round.

When the answer to the question "Why did X just happen?" is "because the plot told it to," then you know you have a bad story on your hands. And for 2012, "because the plot said so" was the answer to every question. Every action of every character, every lurch of the plot, required a suspension of disbelief.

Generally speaking, you should not ask your viewers (or readers, since I'm trying to segue into a book review), to suspend their disbelief more than once or twice. In poetry they call it a conceit, but you get one, and you make it count by exploring it to its fullest. (Examples of conceits: poems written from the point of view of inanimate objects or animals. Or complex extended metaphors like John Donne's compass.)

In fantasy, this conceit is probably magic of some kind. In science fiction, the conceit is usually something like faster-than-light space travel or artificial intelligence or gobs of sentient species that we can actually communicate (and procreate) with (I'm looking at you, James Tiberius Kirk). And really, these three things are so commonplace in science fiction that unless you're writing the very hardest stuff, the kind that astrophysicists can read without screaming, then you can sometimes do all three without losing your reader. But if you're writing that kind of book (and there's nothing wrong with that kind of book, I love that kind of book) then you're probably not thinking too hard about the effect that all these conceits have on the world you're creating, other than to radically expand the dating pool. You just don't have the space.

But ideally--and I think this is observably true in most really good science fiction--you pick one crazy idea and you run with it. You chase it down every dark alley, you watch it play out over decades, you dissect it and put it under the microscope. If you can do this well--if you can really extrapolate the effects of, say, faster-than-light travel on society, in a way that feels honest and logical, then even the most scientifically-minded reader will probably forgive your liberties with physics. To my non-scientific mind, accurately recording the effects is far more important than manufacturing some pseudo-scientific explanation of the cause. Whatever it is, think it through.

And that is a long explanation of the best thing about Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. (In fact I think that was the only reason I kept reading this book, because the characters were uniformly unpleasant.) Alfred Bester thinks it through.

The conceit is teleportation, which in the world of his book is called jaunting. The "science" is foggy, but he makes up for that by being rigorous in the way he carries it out. There are rules: it is not possible to jaunte more than 5000 miles in one go (or is it...?). You cannot jaunte someplace you have never seen before (seen in person: a glimpse through a window might do, but a photograph will not). Nearly everyone can jaunte, although it must be taught, and it requires some concentration.

Simple enough, but what's fascinating is the way he follows it to all its logical conclusions. What would happen to the poor slobs who just can't jaunte? What would teleportation do to the economy? How would it affect class, race, and gender relations? The crime rate would skyrocket, obviously--how would society deal with that? How do you imprison people who can teleport? He comes up with some really interesting answers to these questions. (The description of the jaunte-proof prison is particularly chilling.) The story is not about teleportation, but it takes place in a world where teleportation is possible, so its existence underwrites virtually every action--exactly the way cars and airplanes underwrite most facets of our lives. From the perspective of a writing geek, it's fascinating.

Which is good, because as I mentioned above, the characters aren't that gripping. It's a revenge story, centered around an anti-hero--murderer, thief, rapist, the works. He eventually grows a conscience, a development that I didn't find convincing or redeeming. Also, the story's multiple threads get tied up in a "one big explanation" chapter, wherein everyone conveniently finds themselves in the same room and All Is Revealed. I hate that. Oh yeah, and the chapter in which the hero undergoes a "mind expansion" of sorts involved some seriously trippy typesetting that got old fast.

So: read it for the beautiful title. Read it as a great example of thinking things through. Probably don't read it for the characters.

---

*Actually, I'm surprised that it scored as high as it did on Rotten Tomatoes.

It's a little ironic that I can't think of a title for this one

2010-03-03T19:25:00.004-05:00

There are many reasons I love science fiction, some of which I may blog about some time, but here's one of the big ones:

Science fiction, as a genre, is filled with fantastic titles. And I'm not just talking about cheesy gems like "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers," which, yes, is an actual movie, and yes, is a great way to pass a Saturday night. (Of particular note are the special effects, especially the scene in which the flying saucers destroy DC.)

No, I'm talking about the truly classic titles, the ones that roll off the tongue with the rhythm of a sonnet. I have read decided to read plenty of books on the basis of their beautiful titles alone--and most of them, for whatever reason, have been science fiction.

These are some of my favorites:

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. (Weird book. Probably not the best intro to Heinlein.)
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. This one has also been published as "Tiger! Tiger!", a reference to the William Blake poem. That title is probably more appropriate to the book, but I like the Stars better anyway. I just finished this book, actually, mostly because of the title, and when I can summon up the mental energy, I'll post a review.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein again--he really does get good ones.
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. Or The Martian Chronicles. I like them both equally.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, while not as poetic as some of these others, is still pretty fantastic.
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Brief, but like, totally deep, man. Ponder it.
Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany
The Years of Rice & Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke

And, possibly the best of the bunch:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. This is the story upon which Blade Runner was based. I guess the original title was too long to fit on the movie posters, but damn, Hollywood. Way to drop the ball.

Obviously, I get weak in the knees for overlong and overwrought titles.

Now I know the genre has a lot of utilitarian titles, and no doubt some truly unfortunate ones as well, but I've never met a mystery or romance or fantasy title that can compete with the above. (Granted, I'm not as well-read in those genres.) Also, I feel I should clarify: I have not read most of the books on this list, so my affection for the titles does not necessarily stem from an affection for the work itself. (Or in the case of Stranger in a Strange Land, I like the title in spite of the book.)

So: what are your favorite titles (science fiction or otherwise)?

Meanwhile, in an alternate life...

2010-01-26T22:54:00.003-05:00

Singing along to: U2, No Line On the Horizon

At this moment, in this universe, I am not employed. Well, okay, technically I am not unemployed, but rather woefully underemployed. Still, I am unemployed in my chosen field. My chosen field, for the record, is: museums! Specifically (and this is a long-term career goal, here), I want to be the collections manager for an art museum. That is why I am currently a professional volunteer.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is: unemployment. At least in this universe, because we all know that there are billions of other, simultaneous alternate universes out there, universes in which reality is totally different from what we think of as real. Universes in which I have a job.

Now, I hope I'm a collections manager in one of those other universes, but just in case I'm not, here are some other jobs I would settle for:

Astronaut: I know, is this a cliche or what? I think this one is an inevitable byproduct of too much Ray Bradbury, a writer more in touch with his inner wide-eyed eight-year-old than any other. Still: he convinced me. I want to see the earth from above, I want to touch the surface of the moon, orbit Jupiter, walk in zero gravity. I also want to live in a universe in which the slightest stray lurch does not make me motion sick. I suppose it should also be a universe in which I'm good at math and science. Although I know, objectively, that working at NASA, even being an astronaut, is not much like the Golden Age of Science Fiction made it out to be, I still get a little sentimental every time I pass the exit for NASA/Goddard on my way down I-295.

Horse Breeder/Trainer/Olympic Three-Day Eventing Gold Medalist: This one's for my inner eight-year-old, because this is pretty much what I wanted to be from the age of four till about twelve. (Heck, I still get excited every time I drive past the pasture with horses on my way to church.) I read every word that Marguerite Henry ever wrote. I wrote detailed life histories--veritable equine soap operas--for all my model horses. I can still remember the way the stable smelled. I miss all those daydreams sometimes.

Professional Driver on Closed Course: This is the one out of left field, but I have always thought it would be so cool to be one of those people who drives the cars in car commercials. Think about it: you get to drive the most souped-up version of any given car, really fast on awesome mountain tracks (a backroads roller coaster, if you will), without having to worry about someone else coming the opposite direction around that hairpin turn. (I am such a rule-follower that part of the appeal for me is being able to drive fast without having to worry about tickets.) All your friends would be so jealous whenever the car commercial came on, and you said real casually, "Oh yeah... I remember we filmed that one in Switzerland. Yeah, that's my head you see silhouetted in the window." Aww yeah...

Copy Editor: I know. How can this possibly be a dream job? But here's how I see it: I already do this job anyway. I can't read anything without scanning for typos and inconsistencies, and most of the time, I find them. If I'm going to do it anyway, I might as well get paid for it, right? There is a certain appeal in a job, however unromantic it might be, that I would be really good at. I mean, it plays right into my general forest-for-the-trees approach. (Forest for the trees? Heck, sometimes I can't see the forest for the leaves.)

So... what are you doing in the alternate universe?

2010-01-22T23:01:00.004-05:00

Singing along to: Wilco, On and On and On

I can exhale now. I got a rejection letter for that job yesterday--yes, an actual letter, delivered by the post man. I hadn't even thought to keep an eye on my mailbox. Maybe I'm revealing my age here, but it seems so old-fashioned to send a rejection letter. I suppose it's more professional, but they already wasted their time on me. Why also waste forty-four cents and a piece of letterhead?

I guess that sounds more bitter than I mean it to. The letter really did surprise me though: not its contents as much as its non-digital nature. I still can't decide if I was expecting its contents or not.

So, there's that.

Why I haven't fully relaxed in three weeks

2010-01-20T20:28:00.004-05:00

Singing along to: The Zombies, This Will Be Our Year

I have finally figured out why I have not had much luck in my job search so far: it's because I have been with the same guy for five and a half years.

You see, the job search world is exactly like the dating world. And most of what I know about the dating world is conjecture and second-hand evidence.

The way I see it, going on a job interview is like meeting an attractive guy (or girl, pick your favorite) somewhere, and chatting for twenty or thirty minutes, and deciding that you can totally see the two of you getting along great for the next couple years at least, and you're pretty sure they can see it too, I mean, you're totally their type. And hey, you never know where things could end up! You could part on good terms after a couple years, both of you grateful for the experience, or you could stay together for the rest of your lives and live happily ever after.

And then you and the attractive person exchange numbers and he promises he'll call soon, and then you go home and find yourself unable to exhale fully and you have a small aneurysm every time the phone rings or you see you have a missed call because oh crap, oh crap, what if it's him? And you go back and forth on whether to pick up the phone when he finally does call because what if he doesn't like you, can you choke back your disappointment long enough to get through that phone call with dignity? You're not sure. Maybe you should let it go to voice mail for everyone's sake.

At some point it also occurs to you that he might email you instead, so you go from checking your email ten times a day (which is totally normal and not at all obsessive, even if you don't get that much email) to checking your email whenever you're in the vicinity of wireless internet or you get a free second at work or it's been more that five minutes since you last checked.

But! He doesn't call (or email). It occurs to you that maybe this is a test. Maybe you need to call, and you ask everyone's advice on this, because you want to show you're interested, but you don't want to look desperate (even though you are desperate, you haven't gone on a proper date in, well, ever), he's probably just busy and will totally call tomorrow, whatever. Back and forth you go, and your friends' heads are swiveling back and forth like they're spectators at the Emotional Tennis World Championships.

Finally, you email. He admits he's been busy but will totally call soon. Lather, rinse, repeat from paragraph three.

You start to wonder why this whole process can't be less "He's Just Not That Into You" and more "elementary school." You know, back in the days when all you had to do was tell your best friend about your crush, swear her to secrecy with the full knowledge (and hope) that she'd tell, and wait for your crush's reply to work its way back through the grapevine, a process which took about as long as recess. No muss, no fuss.

And that is basically where I am right now, if you substitute "potential employer" for "attractive person." I cannot handle the stress of suspense and rejection and hope and despair in the early stages of dating. Or job searching. I just want to commit and settle down, like a grown up!

Housekeeping

2010-01-18T22:36:00.002-05:00

Singing along to:

So maybe you're thinking that things look a little different around here. You're right! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have finally embraced the new Blogger layout system. I may even stick with it this time, as opposed to the other few times I've tried it, cursed a lot, and switched back within 24 hours. Long story short, Haloscan, my previous commenting system, decided they were going to start charging real cash money for a previously free internet service. That's lovely for them, but I don't pay real cash money for previously free internet services, so here I am, using Blogger's commenting system* and shiny new layouts, admiring how much better Twitter looks in my sidebar.

(While we're on the subject of boring blog housekeeping, I'm also in the process of switching my now-mostly-defunct art blog back from Wordpress to Blogger, a process I expect to be a huge pain in the buttocks. I'm probably one of the few people on the Internet who hates Wordpress, and frankly it's not worth paying for the hosting. I also have a theory that if I actually like the blog platform it uses, I'll pay more attention to it. At the very least, I won't be paying real cash money for the privilege of having it there to ignore.)

*Unfortunately, although Haloscan allowed me to export all my old comments, I couldn't find a way to import them into Blogger, so y'all's sparkling wit has been lost in the vortex. Sorry!

And people say I'm not romantic*

2010-01-08T22:55:00.003-05:00

Singing along to:

There are all kinds of love songs. There are sweet and simple love songs (The Beatles: "I Want to Hold Your Hand"). There are kind of weird and idiosyncratic love songs (The Pogues: "Fairytale of New York"). There are love songs about people you've only just met (The Doors: "Hello, I Love You"). There are love songs about your pants, and the singer's desire to be inside them (okay, actually, that's basically every love song ever).

And then there's my very favorite sub-genre, love songs about death. This might just be an indie-ish pop thing, I don't know (my taste in music is not terribly wide-ranging), but it does seem to be a trend. (Five songs is a trend, right?)

Besides, nothing is more romantic than death, right? Of course right!

Iron & Wine, "Naked as We Came"
Of course Iron & Wine is at the top of the list. Iron & Wine is at the top of every list I make, even the lists that aren't about music. I just plain love Iron & Wine, despite Sam Beam's awful mountain man beard. I'll admit this isn't my favorite of their songs, but I guess it's all relative, because iTunes tells me I have listened to it 181 times. "I lay smiling like our sleeping children. / One of us will die inside these arms, / eyes wide open, naked as we came."

Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Follow You Into the Dark"
This is one of my favorite Death Cab songs. Despite having one of the most ridiculous names in my iTunes library, they write lovely songs with fantastic lyrics. And I say this despite the sad and unnecessary bit of anti-Catholicism in verse two. (I have never heard a nun--or anyone else--assert that "fear is the heart of love.") Still: "If Heaven and Hell decide / that they both are satisfied, / illuminate the 'NOs' on their vacancy signs / if there's no one beside you / when your soul embarks / I'll follow you into the dark."

Wilco, "On and On and On"
This is actually the only Wilco song I know, which is probably heresy in some circles, oh well. So how coincidental that it also happens to be a morbid love song? Clearly it was meant to be. "One day we'll disappear together in a dream / however short or long our lives are going to be. / I will live in you or you will live in me / until we disappear together in a dream."

The Frames, "Lay Me Down"
The story that Glen Hansard sometimes tells in concert to go along with this song is a hilarious and self-deprecating tale of wildly over-the-top teenage love. The video (linked above) is also a bit odd (okay, very odd). Nevertheless, the song itself is gorgeous. "And lay me down / in the hollowed ground. / Down by your side I will stay / so lay me down."

Dolorean, "Dying in Time"
I could not find a video for this on YouTube, BUT you can listen to it on their mySpace page. It will probably be the only time you go on mySpace all year. "I pray it not come too soon, / I pray it comes without pain. / May it not be by avalanche, / may it not be by hurricane, / may it come to us both just as day turns into night."

I'm sure there are some I've missed--if you think of any, let me know in the comments!

**

*I do try to encourage that thought, not sure why, but let me tell you this: it is a lie. It a huge fat whopper of a lie. Here is the truth: weddings make me cry, even weddings in movies or on TV. I sobbed my way through 65% of Up, particularly that heartbreaker of an opening montage. I re-read Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" all the time and two of my favorite books are love stories. And in case you're wondering, I do have a favorite Shakespearean sonnet: number 130: "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun."

Why they did not admit me to the Jedi Academy

2010-01-06T20:05:00.003-05:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Waiting for Superman

Would you like to hear something sad and pathetic, something that proves I have watched Star Wars several dozen times too many?

Of course you would! That's what the Internet is for!

Well, here it is:

I wish I could use the Force.

And duh, who doesn't, but let me offer an example: Right now I'm sitting on my bed with my laptop, all comfy-like, with the dog using my foot as a pillow, all comfy-like. Getting up would be a great disturbance to us both. Still, I need my planner, which is sitting on the floor four feet away, and this is my first thought when I realize I can't reach it from where I'm sitting: "If I had the Force, I wouldn't have this problem."

And I have that identical thought all the time. "If I were a Jedi knight, I wouldn't have to get out of bed, I could just beam my socks out of the drawer and onto my cold feet." Or, "I bet parallel parking would be a whole lot easier if the Force were on my side." Or, "Do you mean I have to walk all the way across the room to put my clothes in the hamper? Can't I just use my Jedi mind powers to guide them in?"

Basically, I imagine having the Force as being something like that scene from Mary Poppins where she makes their room magically clean itself, combined with a dash of the Summoning Spell from the Harry Potter books, mixed in with a liberal dose of lazy. It's a wonder more Jedi knights don't look like Jabba the Hutt, because if I were a Jedi knight, I would do nothing but sit on the couch, slice bread with my light saber, and use the Force to put in a new DVD and summon more cups of coffee.

I would be the most awesome Jedi knight EVER, and you can be damn sure I'd be the one all the apprentice Jedis (Padawans?) would want as their wise mentor. Possibly I would be like the Dude of Jedi knights.

What would YOU do with the Force?

Did anyone actually enjoy 2009?

2010-01-05T10:48:00.004-05:00

Singing along to: nothing

I know, I know, all the cool kids did their 2009 recaps last week, back when it was actually 2009. Let's just blame my lateness on the post-traumatic stress, okay? Because 2009 was awful, probably as bad as 2005, formerly the gold standard of crappy years.

2009 exploded into (onto?) my life like a crap-filled balloon--almost literally, since according to my Twitter, I started off the year by stepping in dog poo in bare feet. It was, as I suspected at the time, an omen.

To get more specific, allow me to recap the four requests I made on January 1, 2009:

1) A real, full-time job that pays a living wage and doesn't kill my soul.
2) More bookshelves.
3) Minimal graduation-related depression.
4) Pants that fit.

NONE OF THOSE THINGS HAPPENED. NOT EVEN THE PANTS.

My pants situation, in fact, has gotten even more dire, since I ruined a pair of jeans, a pair of khakis, and my black dress pants this year, and have been unable to find suitable replacements for any of them.

And let's not EVEN talk about the employment situation. I am still working at the caterer, and I'm sure you can imagine how much business is booming for high-end caterers in this time of economic peace and love and cups running over, because who doesn't want to have a $30,000 wedding when they can't even pay their mortgage? Business is booming so much, in fact, that instead of getting the pay raise I haven't gotten in three years, I got a pay decrease. A decrease. That's what we all got for Christmas, a 5% pay decrease through April 1, on top of the decreasing hours we've all seen because business is so bad. I didn't think it was possible to hate that job more than I did, but it turns out it is possible. In fact I reach new depths of hatred and despair every time I go in there. (That's when I can even summon up the energy to hate it--most of the time now, I just feel an all-consuming apathy.)

I had a job interview last Wednesday, for a job that could be pretty okay, despite being in a horribly inconvenient location (Virginia). I should hear back about that sometime this week, and what I hear will either be 2009's parting raspberry or the beginning of good things in 2010. (And the beginning of all-new reasons to stress, but at least it would be stress that pays more than NINE DOLLARS AND TWO CENTS AN HOUR, because YES, that IS what I make at the caterer now despite the fact that I've been there five years and I can tend bar* now.)

So? 2010? Whatever. I'm too burned out to care.

*I know what you're saying: you're saying, "Claire! If you can tend bar, leave those fools and go work as a bartender! Make copious money!" Unfortunately, I am not that good of a bartender yet. I can hold my own against wedding crowds behind your average ten- or fifteen-liquor open bar, but have you seen how many kinds of booze real bars have? Have you heard the kind of weird-ass drinks people ask for? I'm not there yet.)

I love my space heater more than I love the planet

2009-10-01T11:19:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: U2*, October

Before I start, I'd like to make a public service announcement: For the love of all that is holy, people, stop using "green" as a verb! (i.e., "As a company, we are committed to greening our manufacturing process..." or "This year we'd like to invest in the further greening of our home..." Just typing those sentences makes me feel syntactically dirty.)

Despite the atrocities language that it has engendered, however, the "green"** movement has some pluses that have nothing to do with your feelings about global warming. I think we can all agree that clean water is super, and that trash littering the highway is less super. Recycling is both rad and easy and the rainforest is kind of gorgeous. Whales are neat, and so is the money you save with energy-efficient lightbulbs or whatever. (Especially since no matter what Ben Bernake says about the recession, nobody has any money. Especially underemployed recent college graduates with liberal arts degrees.)

So I do what I can. I try to bring reusable tote bags to the grocery store and the mall, I turn off the lights when I leave the room, I use rags instead of paper towels for house cleaning. Sometimes I even remember to unplug my cell phone charger when it's not in use. I lived in the only trailer on campus that recycled, although we had to lug our recycling halfway across campus to do it.

But there are some things I am not willing to compromise. Like the space heater in my bathroom. I use that sucker year round, because people, bathrooms are cold. All that gleaming glass and tile is frigid, and this is one place where your grandmother's scolding advice to "just put on a sweater" does not apply. I hate being cold. I especially hate being cold and wet, which is why that little space heater and I are best friends. We have had it for as long as I can remember, which means it is probably about as energy efficient as your average tank.

I don't care. It keeps me warm.

(It also keeps the mirror from fogging up, because oh yeah, I also like hot showers. Oops.)

Sorry, Al Gore.

--

*Did I just see U2 in concert on Tuesday night? YES. YES I DID.

**or "hippie" or "crunchy granola" or "tree hugger" or "this whole global warming thing is just a hoax perpetuated by Al Gore to get a Nobel prize" or whatever your preferred adjective is

If I had $1 for every time I had this conversation, I wouldn't need a job

2009-09-19T13:52:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Modest Mouse, The World At Large

The conversation goes something like this, and everyone who has recently graduated or is on the cusp of major life changes can probably recite it word for word along with me:

Well-Meaning Person: So! You just graduated, right?

Me: So it would seem.

WMP: You going to graduate school?

Me: Not if I can help it. Ha ha.

WMP: So what are you up to lately?

Me: Working at the caterer. Still. Volunteering at the museum. Still. They can't get rid of me. Ha ha.

WMP: Have you asked the people at the museum if they have a job for you?

Me: OH MY GOD WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT? Oh right, because they're understaffed and out of money. Just like everybody else.

WMP: So are you applying for jobs?

Me: Wait, you mean you have to APPLY for them? I thought they handed them out with the diploma. I was actually starting to worry that someone had screwed up at graduation.

WMP: ...

Me: Yeah. I've been applying for jobs since February.

WMP: Oh. What was your major again?

Me: Medieval Studies. Which is probably why I haven't found a job yet.* Ha ha.

WMP: Ha ha.

Me: Yeah, you're just glad I made that joke so you didn't have to.

--

*I don't know why I keep using this line. It is not funny, and any traces of funny it may have once had have long since been steamrollered into oblivion. The forced levity of my delivery probably don't help either.

--

But it's all okay, because Ben Bernake has just come out and said the recession is, like, basically over. Soon we'll all be rich and happy and employed again! Right? Right!

The adjective of the weekend was "backwoods"

2009-09-13T20:47:00.004-04:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Homeward, These Shoes. How much do I love Iron & Wine? So much!

This weekend, James & some friends & I decided it would be a great idea to go to Pickin' in the Panhandle, the annual West Virginia bluegrass and barbecue* festival.

It was, indeed, a great idea. (Honestly, how could any event involving a barbecue competition not be a great idea?) But like all great ideas, it could only be fulfilled through strife.

Backwoods strife.

Back Creek Valley is, as the festival website promises, quite beautiful. It is also accessible solely by way of winding, country-mountain roads, the kind that don't have stripes, or enough room for two cars to pass each other comfortably, or guard rails between your car and a deadly tumble down the mountainside. Basically, they are backwoods roller coasters.

So when the sun's shining, and you're in the passenger seat with your right foot mashing the Invisible Brake Pedal, and you're cradling your gas station coffee in one hand and gripping the door handle in the other, and the car's coasting down the mountain at fifty miles an hour in neutral, those roads are a lot of fun. They also kind of negate the need for that coffee.

They're a little less fun when you're tired out from some less-than-satisfactory camping sleep, in the driver's seat of a car that isn't yours. It might be better in a more familiar car, but as it stands, those roads become less roller coaster, more steely-eyed test of driving Zen. (Absolute regard for safety might dictate that you drive at the same snail's-pace of all those other out-of-state cars, but pride compels you to at least drive at the speed limit, or what you presume would be the speed limit if the road were well-trafficked enough to actually warrant posting one.) Still, it's kind of fun. There's a sense of triumph when you reach your destination, like your cushy suburban upbringing hasn't left you entirely soft.

Those roads are not at all fun at midnight, when you're alone in the car, trying to navigate an area pock-marked with abandoned barns, rusting mobile homes, the occasional possum, and God knows how many lurking deer, the kind you know are just waiting to leap into your path and help you file your first auto insurance claim. Sure, you could be around a campfire, roasting hot dogs and listening to bluegrass, but you're not, because the campsite turned you away at 11:00 pm, for reasons known only to them, and now you're one wrong turn away from a starring role in a backwoods horror movie. It goes without saying that your cell phone doesn't get any reception.

Eventually everything worked out all right: Although the original plan of me meeting everyone else at the campsite didn't work out, James and I were finally able to get in touch, and his parents kindly let me crash at their place at midnight. We tried the campsite again the next day, and they let us in without blinking, despite telling James last night that the only way they could let me in would be if he threw me in the backseat with a blanket over me.**

Then we ate some barbecue, drank some beer, listened to some bluegrass (including a wholly unexpected cover of Death Cab For Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark"), and ate some delicious campfire cooking.

It was good times.

---

*Barbecue: on the list of words I can never remember how to spell. The "q" in BBQ always makes me think there should be a "q" in the actual word. Turns out there's not.

**Did we have a camping pass? Yes. Yes, we did. We even had valid festival tickets! What we didn't have were the special glasses so we could read the invisible text on the website about no admission after x o'clock.

I bet you see the punch line coming from a mile off

2009-08-02T17:33:00.005-04:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Friends They Are Jewels

Things I have found while looking for the keys to my bike lock

A dilapidated plastic Christmas wreath

11 batteries

A coaster from the Crescent City Brewhouse in New Orleans. (I have never been to New Orleans.)

Phone chargers for every cell phone I have ever owned, and probably one or two I haven't

A photo keychain from Christmas Dance 2004: "Candy Cane Christmas"

A button that says "I [heart] Maui." (I have never been to Maui.)

A Virginia/DC Metrobus map (I do not ride the Metro bus, and I don't spend much time in Virginia either)

A New York City subway card that expired in May of last year

17 euros

2 packages of frog-print tissues

All the tubes of chapstick I've lost over the past year

....and so much more

Things I have not found while looking for the keys to my bike lock

The keys to my bike lock

Things I do when I'm feeling depressed

2009-07-29T22:17:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Dearest Forsaken

Contemplate arranging all my books by color. It's OCD made visually arresting: seriously, look at these pictures and tell me that doesn't look awesome. I haven't actually done it yet, but I promise you'll know if I hit rock bottom, because I will have rearranged my bookshelves in accordance with my good friend Roy G. Biv.

Read Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." That poem is like a seventeenth-century version of "Let's Get It On", and you know what? If I were his coy mistress, it totally would have convinced me.

Look at job postings. Which, I'm sure you can imagine, does wonders for my mental health.

Re-read Henry David Thoreau's spectacular essay "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," from Walden. (You can go ahead and read it here, but you should also just go ahead and find yourself a copy of Walden.) Maybe it's the hippie in me, but I've always had a weakness for the Transcendentalists, and that particular essay never fails to resonate.

Listen to a lot of Iron & Wine. Oh. Wait. I do that all the time, happy, sad, or in between? Never mind.

Thoughts on the eve of a college graduation

2009-05-16T01:00:00.004-04:00

Singing along to: Lisa Hannigan, Sea Song

Once I was able to disassociate my ambivalence about graduation from my graduation cap & gown & hood, I was able to have a whole lot of fun playing dress up. Turns out it's the best costume I've put on in years. Depending on how I accessorize (and how I decide to wear the hood), I can be Harry Potter or Emperor Palpatine or even a serious academic. (Okay, I admit, the last one is a stretch.) I could also, if I so chose, jump out of an airplane in my gown and parachute down to safety, because it is just that huge. It's nearly ankle-length (and I'm 5'8"!) and it definitely conceals the Senior Week Fifteen (like the freshmen fifteen, except four years later and the result of infinitely more mixed emotions and [at least in my case] beer).

***

Speaking of accessorizing, I am sort of regretting my choices in graduation footwear. Today was solid: moderately trashy cork-heeled shoes from Payless (complete with a red cherry pattern on the foot bed). Obviously the perfect choice for dignified events like Phi Beta Kappa initiation, Honors Convocation, and Baccalaureate Mass. Tomorrow, though, I'm just wearing some nondescript brown heeled sandals. Sure, they work with my (adorable!) dress, but with the black polyester pillowcase I'll be wearing for most of the day, they are totally blah. Comfortable, versatile, and boring. This would have been the perfect occasion for red shoes, and somehow I didn't realize that until right now. I'm slipping.

***

Speaking of shoes (again), I think I earned some sort of girl-power award today: I helped move a fridge out of a third-floor dorm room in three-and-a-half-inch heels and a skirt. I did make my brother go down the stairs backwards instead of me, but still: win.

***

I've always thought taking down posters is the most depressing part of packing up a dorm room, because stuff on the walls is what makes a room (or in my case, a trailer) look like people actually live there. Well, it's doubly depressing when iTunes spins up the Beatles' In My Life. Somehow that ended up on the graduation party playlist I'm crafting, and I'm not really sure how. I guess I must have added it, but I've been trying really hard to put on music that a) I like, b) won't offend the party guests, and (most importantly) c) is not about moving on and saying goodbye and looking back on happy memories blah blah blah I DON'T WANT TO CRY ABOUT THIS, ITUNES, SO QUIT TRYING TO MANIPULATE MY EMOTIONS. In other words, I might want to take In My Life off the list.

***

The other night I was very tired but staying up with friends anyway. So I sat on their couch with my eyes closed and mentally added "in bed" or "that's what she said" to the end of everything they said. It was pretty hilarious, and I think I'm going to use that same trick to keep myself amused during the "commencement exercises" tomorrow.

***

When I graduated from high school, I made a point of wearing waterproof mascara, because I was sure I would cry. Turns out I was so done by then that I didn't shed a tear, even as my classmates sobbed around me. I just made a weird face when I got my diploma. This time around, I'm not feeling nearly as done, so I'm breaking out the waterproof mascara again as a sort of insurance policy against crying, ie, I probably won't if I wear it. Mostly, I'm counting on my intense distaste for ceremonies, crowds, and folding chairs in the hot sun to get me too pissed off to cry. We'll see how that goes.

***

Everyone's graduation-related Facebook statuses make me want to puke.

Conversations with my roommate

2009-05-05T21:42:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Slumdog Millionaire

I walked in triumphantly, having just completed the last final exam of my undergraduate career.

"I just finished my last final," I declared. "I want to celebrate. I'm going to do something that I don't usually do."

"Drink?" my roommate asked.

"No," I said. "Get takeout!"

And I did. I got honey bbq wings. And they were delicious.

***

Honestly, the sense of freedom that's gradually settling over me is amazing, and something I'll probably write more about later. It's also an illusion, but I'm trying not to think about that now. I guess I just did too good of a job bribing myself with visions of sloth over the past few weeks, which contained more late nights in a short period of time than in the rest of my college career combined.

I should have written my thesis on list-making

2009-04-28T13:51:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Aeroplane

Things I would rather do than finish my thesis:

Clean the bathroom.

Make a summer rock and roll playlist on iTunes.

Go to the residence hall office and get some toilet paper.

Wash dishes.

Re-fold all of the clothes in my dresser.

Play on the tire swing that appeared in a tree outside a nearby classroom building. Sure, it would probably end in death and/or paralysis, but it would get me out of doing my thesis, right?

Things I have already done today to avoid writing my thesis:

Go to the RHO to get toilet paper (turns out it didn't open till 1:00 today).

Walk to 7-11 to get a gallon of milk.

Go to the gym.

Take out the trash.

Read a long geek-speak article about how a large and dedicated group of Internet geeks hacked Time's most-influential people poll.

Hang out with James after he got off work.

The million-dollar question

2009-04-28T00:00:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine w/ Calexico, Dark Eyes. From the I'm Not There soundtrack.

One of my classmates just asked me if I've figured out my future yet. This question, by now, is annoying no matter who it comes from, but it's especially galling from someone who has, in fact, figured out her future yet. She's been accepted into her first choice law school, and while I am genuinely happy for her (no, really, I am), it makes her question a lot less sympathetic than it would be coming from someone else.

Yes, I know, she probably didn't mean to rub anything in my face.

But I next time I'm telling her that I've gotten a job as an exotic dancer.

An update on my thesis

2009-04-21T00:53:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Resurrection Fern

I like to say that I am drowning in my thesis. This is actually an (unintentionally) appropriate metaphor, since my thesis is all about the meaning of the sea in Old English poetry.* I have about sixteen pages written, out of the thirty-ish I need to turn in. The problem with this is that while I am halfway done in terms of page count, I am about two-thirds done in terms of "things I need to talk about." Which means I will probably feel as though I've said everything I want to say around page 25, but with some creative stretching and padding might make it to page 27, while my adviser continues to talk about 30-35 pages. I don't think she realizes that I'm having this problem, and she has said she dislikes "fluff," so hopefully the finished product will be such a shining example of Strunk & White's Rule 17** that she'll sign off on 27 pages or whatever I actually produce.

On the bright side, while I hate writing my thesis, I still don't hate my thesis, precisely. The topic is kind of lame, and totally obvious if you read the poems (wow. they talk about the ocean. a lot.), and the secondary sources are a pain in the butt, but at least I still love the poetry. Here are my two favorites:

The Wanderer: five minutes of searching didn't turn up a poetic translation that I liked, but this prose translation by Robert E. Diamond is pretty good. (Here it is in Old English if you're fancy. I'm not fancy.***) PS: If you know your Tolkien, you might find some familiar words here.

The Seafarer: Modern English translation by Jonathan A. Glenn; original Old English.

*Does that sound as fascinating to you as it does to me? Probably not, since even I don't find it all that fascinating.

**"Omit needless words."

***I cannot actually read Old English, a fact both my adviser and I sort of forgot when we decided on a topic that requires an analysis of the poets' (not the translators') word-choice. Thank goodness for side-by-side Old English/Modern English editions and the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon dictionary, even if it using it will probably make me blind.

True confessions of a prodigal undergrad

2009-03-31T21:01:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Simon & Garfunkel, Fakin' It

I've spent the entire semester so far hiding from my thesis adviser. This is easier said than done, as I'm taking a twice-weekly class with her, and she lives in the building in which I work. Unfortunately, she cottoned on to my scheme a couple weeks ago, and today I finally dragged myself to her office to discuss the the progress I've made since we met in December.

I have actually made negative progress since that meeting, since I seem to have lost the preliminary bibliography I made months ago. Oops? Luckily it was easy to reconstruct, since I still have all the books on my shelf, where they guilt-trip me every time I sit down to watch Bridezillas. I've gone so far as to put little post-it flags in the relevant passages of some of the books, and I do have ten or so pages on roughly the same topic as my thesis from a paper I wrote last semester.

The above paragraphs explain why I'm frankly surprised that my thesis adviser didn't rip me a new one this afternoon, although we did settle on a brutal writing schedule that will, with luck and a lot of hard work, have me ~~churning out~~ lovingly crafting thirty-five pages of erudite scholarship on "the meanings of the sea in Old English poetry" by... May 4?

I know. I know. The next four weeks will be so awesome that I am jealous of myself.

Several great ideas

2009-03-26T20:26:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Once soundtrack, Gold

I have a number of great ideas that I've been meaning to share with the Internet, in the hopes that someone more well-connected/more motivated than I will steal them and implement them. Such as:

A cookie dough candy bar. The inspiration for this came from the cookie dough Balance Bars I occasionally have in lieu of lunch. Here's the thing: there aren't any practical, dignified options for people who like cookie dough. Sure, you can eat it straight out of the Pillsbury tube, and that's delicious, but it also screams "romantic comedy, right after the Hot Jerk breaks the Girl-Next-Door Heroine's heart and makes her doubt her faith in humanity, so she washes down the bitterness with cookie dough, her Sassy Minority Girlfriend, and Casablanca, while we all yell at her to just get with the Hot Hero already so we can live vicariously through their bliss while we too scarf down raw cookie dough." Even when you're happy with your life, it's hard not to feel a little pathetic when you eat cookie dough like that.

The other cookie dough option is cookie dough ice cream, which is delicious, but not so great to stick in your tote bag for a mid-afternoon pick-me-up. Which is where my candy bar idea comes in: chocolate coating, layer of crispy cookie (like in a Kit-Kat), layer of cookie dough. Seriously, with the right name, this thing would market itself.

***

Attaching the same song to multiple albums in iTunes. It has always annoyed me that, as far as I know, iTunes requires that I either have multiple copies of the same song, or incomplete albums. Both options irritate my inner librarian. Look, it should not be that hard to tell iTunes that, for example, "Where the Streets Have No Name" belongs on Joshua Tree and Best of 1980 - 1990, and to have it remember which track it is on which album. If I can remember these things, why can't a computer program? I want to be able to listen to a complete album (in the correct order, obviously), but I also don't want two or three copies of the same song on my "All U2, All the Time" smart playlist. (Can I tell you how much I love iTunes' smart playlist feature? So much!) I can't be the only one who feels this way, so make it happen, iTunes!

[Now, it's possible that iTunes already has this feature and I haven't found it yet, or that it's in the new version of iTunes that I haven't bothered downloading yet. If this is the case, I would love to know. It is also possible--probable, even--that there is some other music player software out there that has this feature and many others, and it is so much better than iTunes and everyone who listens to music should use it. Fine, but I'm not interested in new software right now.]

***

My great ideas, once I lay them out like that, are not very impressive. Nevertheless, I like them, so get cracking, Internet! Steal them! Make them happen! You don't even need to give me credit, although I would appreciate a free case of those candy bars, once they hit stores.

A Shameful List:

2009-03-19T22:25:00.004-04:00

Singing along to: Blink-182, What's My Age Again?

Activities that make me grateful I do not keep a swear jar, although they make me think I probably should:

Cooking. I kind of like cooking. I am even reasonably okay at cooking sometimes. (Ask me about the Irish cream pound cake I made for St. Patrick's Day! Or my awesome homemade tomato soup!) But damn does it involve a lot of stress and mess.

Job applications. Especially job applications that use USA Jobs and/or the federal government's application manager website. In fact, I'm trying to applying for a job right there now. Key word is "trying": this is easier said than done. For one thing, this questionnaire makes me look far more incompetent than I (think I) actually am. For another, I think the application instructions were written by a professional obfuscator.* Hell, the fact that the application even requires instructions is a bad sign.

Getting in and out of bed every day. This is not (quite) as ridiculous as it seems. See, I'm sleeping in a bunk bed for the first time in my life, and I'm on the top bunk. And the combo of high foot board + low ceiling = bruises and pain getting into bed. In the mornings I just sort of tumble down trying to get to my alarm clock, and that's painful too. Okay, no, you're right. It's still a pretty ridiculous reason to break out the seven dirty words you can't say on television.

Navigating New Facebook. I know, I know, I complain about Facebook, like all the other lemmings, but (also like all the other lemmings) I can't quite seem to break free from the pack that's stampeding toward the cliff side. Okay, that cliched metaphor broke down fast, but you get my drift. New Facebook is annoying and I don't quite know how it works anymore, or how to get all these people's stupid quiz results out of my stupid news feed (which used to be New Facebook but is now Old Facebook, I guess), and... yeah. Swear words! That's where I was going with this. Damn.

*Did I just make up that word? I think I did!

Meet Guido and Francesco

2009-01-18T20:50:00.003-05:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Evening on the Ground (Lilith's Song)

I love my roommate because she and I can talk about so many different things. Our conversations aren't just about gossip, they're about the important things in life, like feminism, nineties music, art vs. craft, and Italian men.

Yes, Italian men. She was describing her tall, dark, and handsome ideal, who is apparently Italian and named Guido.

Yes, Guido.

I told her that is silly, because the Guido I know is Italian, yes, but also has greasy hair, crocodile shoes, and a shirt that's halfway unbuttoned so that you can admire his gold chain and his fine pelt of chest hair. You will probably meet him at a nightclub in Rome hitting on American women half his age. Guido knows that American women swoon over his accent, so he pretends to know less English than he does. Guido's pants are tighter than mine are and he got his teeth whitened to emphasize his fake tan.

We eventually agreed that she must have been getting Guido mixed up with his cousin, Francesco, who is in fact a Mediterranean dreamboat. Francesco might wear his shirt half unbuttoned, but only because he's been working in the olive groves all day. Francesco does not wear a gold chain and his thick, dark hair is not greasy. Francesco knows where to get the best gelato and cappuccinos in Florence, and he will take you to visit them on the back of his red or yellow Vespa. Francesco's accented English is earnestly adorable, but he does not use it to his advantage like Guido does.

Apparently my roommate and I have very different stereotypes about Italian men.

Either way, we've decided we're going to start talking about Guido and Francesco like they're real people.

Notes & Asides

2009-01-15T21:49:00.002-05:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Freedom Hangs Like Heaven

It is 20 degrees outside, and the same girl has just gone out sans shoes for the third time tonight. I am half-tempted to offer her my shoes, just because I'm cold just looking at her, but I'm assuming this is a deliberate choice on her part, and who am I to judge?

***

Also, a boy just took his shirt off outside. Now he is standing on a bench, smoking a cigarette in nothing but jeans and a beater. Underclassmen are so dumb on so many levels.

***

Over the break, I wandered aimlessly into J. Crew and walked out with an utterly perfect, classic black wool sleeveless dress, the kind that you can wear to any event at any age and always be dressed just right. You know the dress. The Little Black Dress. It was originally $149 and probably worth every penny for the amount of wear it will get. But people, this Holy Grail of Ladyhood cost me $17.91. From J. Crew. For a perfect dress that fits like it was made for me. I might as well give up on shopping, because I will never find another deal that good.

***

For the first time in my life I am sleeping on a top bunk. I'm not afraid of falling off in my sleep, but I've always hated top bunks because there's no place to put my glasses. Worse than that, this particular top bunk is near-impossible to get into. The combination of low ceiling + high footboard makes every bedtime an acrobatic event with a high risk of injury and damage to the furniture. (At least Bed, Bath, and Beyond sells these. That should at least solve the glasses problem.)

***

I'm not very hungry but I still want chicken wings. Blame the carryout menus that are always sitting on the desk at work. That and the fact that in the tastebud Olympics, the gold medal will always go to something deep-fried, and not the Wheat Thins I packed for a snack. It doesn't matter how hard I try to develop healthy habits. I will never convince myself that deep fried is not delicious.

I think I've written this post before

2009-01-02T22:49:00.002-05:00

Singing along to: One More Cup of Coffee, Roger McGuinn & Calexico

Remember all of those mildly optimistic things I said about 2009 yesterday? In that post where I pretended that I don't absolutely hate change and am not totally freaked out by the passage of time?

Well, screw that.

I am not mildly optimistic. I do absolutely hate change. I am totally freaked out by the passage of time.

I am, in fact, almost paralyzed by fear--irrational fear, of course, since there are good things that will come from 2009. I know that intellectually, but Internet, I am so scared. And I have no idea what to do.

2008: A reflection

2009-01-01T11:51:00.000-05:00

Singing along to: Forest Sun, Twenty Toes in the Sand

Dear 2008,

I hope you're sitting down for this, because it's a big one: You were not terrible. In fact, you did one better than that, and accomplished something that even the past few non-crappy years haven't: you were kind of good.

I know: whoa.

Let's review the highlights reel, shall we? On January 1, 2008, I asked you for four simple things:

1) A sense of direction (literal and figurative)
2) More bookshelves
3) A trailer to live in for my senior year
4) Complete mastery of the art of deadpan humor

You gave me:

1a) A figurative sense of direction, via the frickin' sweet Smithsonian internship this semester. I know what collections management is now, and I know that the prospect of working in museum storage can get me out of bed at 5:30 am on my summer vacation. Definitely a win for 2008.

1b) A (slightly better, but still not very good) literal sense of direction. I mean, I still can't get anywhere I haven't already been to, but I've been to more places, particularly in downtown DC. All that walking around the city that I did this summer really paid off. So I'm awarding the year half a point for that one.

2) No extra bookshelves, but the dollar bookstore in Hagerstown closed. This reduces the number of books I will acquire, and thus my need for shelf space, but is also obviously a Bad Thing. Negative points.

3) Well, I didn't get a trailer for the fall of my senior year, but it looks like two of my friends and I have scored one for the spring of senior year. Half a point.

4) I kind of forgot about this "resolution" and I also was unable to take any more classes with one of my favorite professors, who has a PhD in deadpan and English literature. Plus, complete mastery of the art of deadpan humor is obviously a lifelong pursuit. A year simply isn't enough time. Still, I worked on it. Half a point.

5) Assorted bonus points for: lovely beach vacation; creation of an awesome Pandora station (seeded with Iron & Wine, Death Cab for Cutie, and the Weepies); four and a half (totally rad) years with James; being twenty-one; an under-the-wire, museum-filled trip to New York City in December; a really great haircut.

Overall, 2008, you done good, and better yet, you're setting me up for a possibly okay 2009, despite that whole "graduation" thing that 2009 is springing on me. I have an internship at a Baltimore museum in January, James has a full-time job he starts on January 6, and I'll be moving into a trailer park for the spring semester. Good things, all.

Love,
Claire,
(who might actually kind of miss 2008, especially if 2009 turns out crappy after all)

***

Dear 2009,

Unlike previous years, which only had to be better than 2005 (not hard), you actually have something to live up to (see above). Please don't fail me.

Here are my simple requests:

1) A real, full-time job that pays a living wage and doesn't kill my soul.
2) More bookshelves.
3) Minimal graduation-related depression.
4) Pants that fit.

Is that too much to ask? I don't think so.

I am too much of a downer to say that I am optimistic about you, 2009, but I will definitely say that I am interested, which is a word that can go both ways (a la the ancient curse: "may you live in interesting times.").

I've got my eye on you, 2009. Let's see what you can do.

Cautiously yours,
Claire

Whatever the opposite of a pants party is

2008-12-31T16:56:00.003-05:00

Singing along to: Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova, You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

Is it bad that all I really want to do tonight--New Year's Eve, the last day of 2008, which was a pretty okay year--is work on my afghan, watch a movie, and maybe add some Bailey's to my coffee? Alone?

Yeah, it's probably bad. I'm blaming it on the fact that I am in A Mood, which I am blaming on pants, and the fact that I can't find any that fit and I really need some.

I am not blaming the fact that pants don't fit on my butt or my thighs or any of the usual suspects. Sure, I haven't been as healthy as I could be lately. Okay, it's showing a little bit. But I still basically like what I see in the mirror. Also, finding pants is hard even when I'm in good shape, because butt + thighs + 5'8" = really better off in skirts.

Except that it's winter and there are only so many days a week I can tolerate tights and I'm starting a new internship with a business casual dress code on Monday and this is what my pants wardrobe looks like: 2 pairs of dress pants, neither of which I like a whole lot. 1 pair of kinda-saggy khakis. 1 pair of jeans without any holes, not that they count as business casual anyway. (And only three pairs of jeans total.)

So yeah. A Mood.

Announcement: I Am So Over It

2008-12-01T19:50:00.004-05:00

Singing along to: Death Cab For Cutie, I Will Possess Your Heart

"So over what?" you may ask.

"Over EVERYTHING," I would reply. Here, allow me to elucidate:

I am So Over:

this cafeteria turkey sandwich I got for dinner. How can something with hummus be so bland and so disgusting at the same time?

the fact that this turkey sandwich is the only thing I have for dinner (other than a granola bar) because I'm at work for the next seven hours

speaking of work--yeah, I'm over that, too

SCHOOL OH MY GOSH LET'S NOT EVEN TALK ABOUT SCHOOL (although I might elucidate even further on that one later)

all pants that are not the sweatpants I am currently wearing. Unfortunately "no sweatpants to class" is one of the only fashion rules I follow, so I still have two more weeks of mostly wearing real pants

the thesis that I haven't even written yet, because no, I still do not have a topic (which is why I am probably at the top of my thesis advisor's "things I am so over" list)

Winter, rain, and any weather that is not sunny and 75. Yes, I know it's not actually winter yet. That sad fact just makes the cold even less bearable.

my loaner laptop.

Powerpoint presentations

Pretty much everything else in the world that has ever happened.

Yeah, I'm a delight tonight. Sorry, Internet.

Links & Notes & Asides

2008-11-30T19:53:00.003-05:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Free Until They Cut Me Down

I tell you what, when I fail NaBloPoMo, I like to fail it spectacularly. Even though I have had a loaner laptop for weeks now, I haven't been able to think of anything to say, and without a little sidebar badge for motivation, why bother, right?

***

Lately I have had the worst craving for a real cappuccino in a real mug. Starbucks and Caribou Coffee don't do this; you're better off finding an indie coffee shop, better yet, an indie coffee shop in Europe. I blame this desire on my discover of the awesome blog Urban Sketchers, which is chock full of delightful sketches of utterly charming coffee shops, all of which no doubt serve real cappuccinos in real mugs. Most of them are European, too. Figures. Anyway, check out all the wonderful and inspiring sketches, from a whole host of different artists and cities.

***

A friend and his girlfriend stumbled across this link, and they immediately thought of me. I can't imagine why. I mean, it's not like there's anything funny about a juvenile trick like replacing the word "wand" with "wang" in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. HA. Who am I kidding? That shit's hilarious.

***

Is your cat trying to kill you? Of course it is! It's a cat; evil and murder are its twin middle names. Here's proof. Don't say I didn't warn you (and next time, get a dog).

***

I think I hate baking too much to actually try making homemade oreos, but that won't stop me from bookmarking the page and then drooling over it periodically.

***

I finally saw Wall-E the other night, and it was every bit as great as I'd hoped. Robots + space + Pixar = a trifecta of awesome that cannot possibly disappoint. Screw kittens and bunnies--it turns out the cutest thing in the world is actually two robots popping bubble wrap and holding hands. Who knew?

***

Finally, a quote from a Kurt Vonnegut book, in which a character addresses a group of science fiction writers and sums up the continued importance of science fiction as a genre:

"You're the only ones who'll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that'll last for billions of years. You're the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."

Well said, Mr. Vonnegut. Well said. (And thanks to the Daily Galaxy for passing that nugget along, since--confession time!--I have never read any Kurt Vonnegut.)

Mad crazy computing

2008-11-10T19:30:00.008-05:00

Singing along to: the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Internet, my geek friends, and an Apple "genius" all agree that the logic board on my (heretofore) trusty iBook is fried, a diagnosis which made a lot more sense to me when I learned that "logic board" is Mac-speak for "motherboard." It was a light bulb moment followed quickly by a despair moment, and my laptop is currently in the ICU awaiting a logic board transplant.*

In the meantime, I have a loaner laptop, which is a huge relief. I was starting to get twitchy from technology withdrawal, even if I could check my email in the computer lab. Unfortunately, because this computer came from my dad, it's running Ubuntu, a flavor of Linux. I am not a convert. Here's why:

No iTunes, and I don't really like Amarok, the music player that's running instead. Apparently it has cool features, but I can't even figure out how to play an entire CD without having to individually click every song into the playlist box. And I only just now found out how to browse all of the music I have on there.

Firefox's spell check is set to British, not American. Okay, maybe this isn't Ubuntu's fault, and yes, it's easy to change, but I'm choosing to be annoyed anyway.

Firefox just flipped out over Pandora (this school's internet does not like Pandora) and since I couldn't figure out how to "fully" close out of Firefox, I had to restart the whole damn computer. I am less ticked about the crash and more ticked about not being able to shut down a program when I want to.

The wireless isn't working. I'm usually near a plugged-in connection, but no more surfing in the living room in front of the TV. Then again, I spend entirely too much time doing that, so maybe this is a blessing.

I've had to reboot twice in the past two hours because various programs (*cough* Firefox and Amarok *cough*) are freezing up. That is Windows-level crap right there.

Mostly, the difficulties stem from the fact that I'm using a computer I haven't spent the last three and a half years customizing to my exact preferences. So, in the spirit of fairness, here's a bright side: Open Office runs so. much. faster. On my Apple, I usually keep Open Office up all the time, because it takes forever to load and I'm very impatient. On Linux, it opens in a blink. Also, I just figured out how to make the icons in the bottom task bar not bounce when I mouse over them. Yeah, I know, it's a very "Mac" thing, but I turned it off on my Apple, too. Oh, and I just figured out how to change my desktop background!

My computing skillz, they are off the hook.

***

*Yeah, it's possible I've been watching too much House lately. Don't blame me, blame USA: they show reruns all the time and since I only just got into the show, they're all new to me.

Deja vu all over again

2008-11-05T12:31:00.003-05:00

Singing along to: the cheerful clickety-clack of people typing in the computer lab.

It's time for me to bow out of NaBloPoMo. It's been a short and not-particularly glorious run, but circumstances have conspired against me. By which I mean: my computer is not working.

I know, I know, we just did this. So, at least I have everything backed up, except for my bookmarks and those three iTunes songs I bought since the last time I synced up my iPod. I think those are losses I can live with.

If, that is, this isn't just another fake-out like the last one. I'm not sure: the symptoms are slightly different, and they seem more dire, but what do I know? I just shut the lid on it to take it home from work last night, and when I popped it back open an hour later, I had nothing but a sad black screen and an unresponsive power button. Right now it's sitting in a corner with the battery out so that it can think about what it's done, and if that doesn't work, I have one key combination to try and a couple of Mac-saavy friends to bribe with...something. Cookie dough? Bailey's? Eternal gratitude? My options are limited, and I'm not sure how many of the above I'm willing to share anyway.

So, no more NaBloPoMo. Sorry, legions of rabid fans.

Apparently there's an election on

2008-11-03T23:43:00.002-05:00

Singing along to: the Doors, Love Her Madly

(I'm already sensing an emerging theme for this year's NaBloPoMo, and that theme is "Oh crap it's fifteen minutes till midnight. What can I write?")

In other news, America is electing a new president tomorrow. Did you know that? I mean, I think I might have heard something about... once or twice.

HA.

People, I am so sick of this presidential election that if we do not have a president-elect by Wednesday morning I might just lay down on the train tracks and let the Metro put me out of my misery. That is how much I hate the election, the candidates, American politics, and everything associated with all of the above.

These people have been campaigning for two. years. They started their campaigns when I was nineteen years old, and now they think that I want to invite one of them into my life for the next four to eight years.

HA!

HAHAHAHA.

I am not apathetic, and I am moderately politically aware, but I am baffled by the people who are still able to throw their heart and soul and energy into campaign for these self-important windbags. How have they eluded total burnout? How can they remain optimistic, even idealistic, in the face of such relentless mud-slinging and polarization?

Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I fundamentally distrust any person who wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says "I deserve to be president of the United States of America. I want to be. I should be. I am up to that challenge." I believe that there is a certain amount of arrogance--even entitlement--required to run for president, and that sort of ambition is exactly the kind I don't want in public office.

I think Douglas Adams said it best when he said that "anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job." I believe Plato said something along those lines as well, but I'd rather have a beer with Douglas Adams, so I think he wins.

I think, at this point, the only politicians I can possibly believe in are local politicians--the ones who also hold "real" jobs, and have to live in the same community their decisions directly affect. But I suspect that even here, the darker side of human nature shows itself more often than not.

Which is why I prefer to labor in the trenches with the rest of the normal people, do what I can as best I can, and pray that the lesser of the two evils--whoever that may be in this case--gets in and out of office with minimal damage all around.

All that having been said, VOTE, damn it all. I sent in my absentee ballot last week, and while I am not at all thrilled with my choice of candidate, I know I wouldn't have been happy with the other guy either. However, I have secured my complaining rights for the next four years and earned a free coffee at Starbucks, so all in all I suppose it was a job well done.

There. Aren't you inspired?

Notes & Asides

2008-11-02T22:44:00.003-05:00

Singing along to: Buddy Holly, Dearest

To the chatty people sitting next to me at Mass: if you want a freaking social hour, go to Starbucks.

***

So, I didn't dress up as a real Catholic school girl (or anything else) for Halloween. I just put on my everyday clothes, went to the museum, and then went to a corn maze and watched Dial M for Murder. I know. My lameness, it is boundless.

***

Speaking of Things That Are Lame, my roommates were watching football or something all day, so I couldn't even indulge in my usual Sunday sloth-fest and watch Bridezillas and Platinum Weddings all day. (Shut up. We all have our vices, okay?)

***

How did it take me three and a half years on this campus to realize that even if none of the newspaper vending machines have the Sunday paper, the 7-11 will? Granted, it never occurs to me to go to 7-11 for anything, but still. It's kind of duh.

***

Excellent news: I got an internship at a museum in Baltimore! It's in January over Christmas break, so I may have to skip a few classes for it, but it will be so. worth. it. Huzzah!

Here we go again

2008-11-01T23:59:00.001-04:00

Singing along to: Sufjan Stevens, Chicago (acoustic version). If it were possible to make out with a song, I would totally be all over this song. Is that awkward? Yeah, sorry.

So I did that thing last year, NaBloPoMo, where you write a blog post every day in November, and since I've been a blogging slacker lately, I thought I'd do it again this year. I spent all day reminded myself to write a post today, it's the first day of November, don't screw it up already, write a post.

Whether or not I actually remembered on November 1--or whether I remembered at, say, 12:01 am on November 2--isn't really important, is it? I mean, the day isn't really over until I go to bed, is it, and I'm still awake.

Anyway, without further ado or equivocation, here's to November: clogging up your feed reader one useless blog post at a time. Come on, join me for some fun.

A little birthday contemplation

2008-10-29T23:47:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Xavier Rudd, Messages. It's kind of a preachy song, but I bought it from iTunes anyway because in the refrain he sounds exactly like Paul Simon and...apparently just listening to the real Paul Simon isn't enough? I don't know.

***

My twenty-first birthday was on Monday, and since I went home for the weekend, it turned into a low-key three-day celebration. On Sunday night we had family over for dinner, and that was nice*, and on Monday night I hung out in a friend's trailer and drank tea with creme de menthe and ate cake, and that was nice too.

But the best moment of all, for reasons I cannot quite articulate, was actually fifteen or twenty minutes on Saturday night. The house was quiet, and James and I poured ourselves some Bailey's and sat crossed-legged, knees touching, looking at each other over the rims of our glasses.

"We're grown-ups now," he said. "That's hilarious."

"I know," I said. "Who let that happen?"

And we laughed, because it is funny. Oh sure, we probably have a long way to go before any real adult could call us grown-up with a straight face--hell, before we can call ourselves grown-up with a straight face--but we were fifteen when we met. Sixteen when we started dating. We have grown up since then, grown up and grown together. We've faced a few storms in that time, and we're facing another setback now, but for fifteen minutes on a Saturday night we got to live in our own future. I'm more excited about it than ever.

***

*except for the hour or so where they all gathered around the island in the kitchen and shouted about politics, and instead of joining in I crocheted in the family room and listened to James ask my grandfather about the Navy.

A conversion, of sorts

2008-10-20T16:30:00.004-04:00

Singing along to: Gin Blossoms, Jealousy

One of the items on my 1001 Things list is "Back up everything that is on my computer. I am one hard drive meltdown away from disaster." Well. Funny story about that.

Backing up my files is one of those things I know I should do, like taking a multi-vitamin or dusting my bookshelves, but which I keep putting off until a later date because the need really isn't that pressing, is it?

Yeah, well, I guess I should get around to the multi-vitamin and the dusting, too, because this weekend I had a come-to-Jesus moment with the backing up. For a period of about thirty-six hours, from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, my beloved iBook wouldn't do anything except flash a gray question mark and think very hard about running the troubleshooter CD before ultimately decided to ignore it. My dad fiddled, I fretted, we took a brief trip to the Apple store to discover that you now need to make reservations at their "Genius bar", and I made mental lists of the things I thought I'd lost. Every time I thought of a way to recover one thing (like all the songs I bought from iTunes, which I remembered I have on my iPod), I would remember another thing that was gone. (Like my extensive and carefully curated collection of Internet bookmarks, which still hasn't recovered from all the losses it sustained when I switched computers in 2005.)

And then, just as my dad finished getting an old laptop into working order with Linux, so I'd at least have something to use while we figured out my iBook, the iBook came back to life. I spent about two seconds rejoicing, and then I broke out the 32-gigabyte flash drive. All of my documents, music, and photos now have a second home: on 6 DVDs in the top drawer of my dresser at home, with the mismatched socks and the reject pajamas. Special!

It was a weekend of highs and lows, really, because I think also found The Boots. There are just a few problems: a) should I buy them even though they cost $69.95 more than my self-imposed limit (but they are perfect! you can't put a price on perfect!) and b) can I find them in my size (11) and my color (cognac)?

Winning the Lame Award

2008-10-15T23:54:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Resurrection Fern

My mom is exceedingly hard to shop for. She never wants anything, and when she does it's almost always something useful: slippers. A new robe. A gift card to Kohl's so she can buy work clothes. Et cetera. Plus, she doesn't really listen to music, and while she is an avid reader, she doesn't re-read, so there's no point in buying her books. Nor does she re-watch movies that often. (She loved the movie A Beautiful Mind so we bought it for her for Christmas one year. I am fairly certain she has not removed the shrink wrap yet.) She's not a gardener, she doesn't cook recreationally, she doesn't scrapbook--nothing that would lend itself to easy gifting.

I used to (okay, still do) (gently, lovingly) mock her about this quality. Until just now when I realized:

Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all.

It was easy to ignore when I was younger, because eight-year-olds always have a list of things they want. (Mine began and ended with "a horse." Or failing that, a lot of Breyer horses.) But as I've gotten older, it's gotten harder and harder to come up with the birthday or Christmas list that she and my relatives ask for.

In fact, my list this year, which took me days of thinking really hard* about, is completely lame. I admitted as much when I emailed it to her. She in turn said that she was hoping for something a little more "fun" and "frivolous." You know, because I'm a twenty-one-year old girl, should it be this hard?

But it is this hard, which is why my birthday list included a tea kettle (not even an electric one, just a regular old stove kettle, which I only haven't bought myself because they are inexplicably expensive) and wellie warmers (also kind of expensive, but what do you expect from L.L. Bean?). I'm not going to lie: I hope I get those wellie warmers, because do you see how cute they are? And how cozy? And you know how much I love my rain boots. So the wellie warmers are exciting. Other exciting items on the list: a cookbook and new headphones.

I'm currently writing my acceptance speech for the Oscar of Lameness; you're all invited to the award ceremony.

*For once these are not sarcastic italics.

Dilemma

2008-10-12T23:07:00.004-04:00

Singing along to:

On the one hand, I am tired. I have spent most of the day watching Bridezillas on the TV, and witnessing all that human train-wreckery is really draining, as you might imagine.

On the other hand, my roommate is not here tonight, which means I feel compelled to stay up as late as possible just because I can. It's a good thing I am environmentally aware, because otherwise I would have the lights on and the music blaring in my room even though I'm not in it. Just because I can.

Stay up or sleep? Sleep or stay up?

Sheesh. Even on the weekends I can't get a break from tough decision-making.

Update: I stayed up. First I did laundry like a loser (a loser who was running out of clothes) and then I caught up on my pop-cultural education by watching Dirty Dancing, which I'd somehow never seen before. Was there hot chocolate? There was. Did I shed some tears during the final dance sequence? Possibly. Would I kill for some of those early-sixties halter dresses and/or Baby's dancing shoes? Obviously. And most importantly: Was I wearing outrageous lipstick even though I was sitting around in soccer shorts and a t-shirt? Hell yes! It is a scientific fact that chick flicks (especially '80s chick flicks with rocktastic soundtracks) are much more enjoyable when you're wearing outrageous lipstick that possibly does not flatter your skin tone. I don't know why it's true; it just is. You should try it sometime.

***

Speaking of tough decision-making, I finally got my "thank you gift" from working at Orientation, which means I can start looking for a pair of Awesome Boots on which I can blow that gift card. I think I'm going to go to Macy's tomorrow.

Of course, the decision probably won't be as tough as it could be, since I am stymied by a) large feet (10.5--no one wears a 10.5 except me) and b) large calves. Not large by the standards of normal human beings, just large by the standards of fashionable shoemakers, who are apparently unaware of "muscle."

Nevertheless, I am very excited about these boots.

I can't wait

2008-10-06T22:33:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Once soundtrack, Trying To Pull Myself Away

The most exciting thing to happen to me this year is really something that's happening to my boyfriend.

James got a "real," full-time, techy job in D.C. He starts next week. He'll be looking for apartments in the area soon.

I am so proud of him, and also: I. Am. So. Excited.

We've been in a long-distance relationship for more than four years now. Before that, I guess, it was a long-distance friendship, maintained through the magic of instant messenger and the occasional phone call. We see each other at least once a month, usually twice. As LDRs go, that's probably pretty good.

But the distance is still there.

Soon, though, it won't be.

I keep trying to expand on how I feel about this, but my thoughts keep circling back to "awesome. awesome. awesome." This is the next step in our relationship and I am so ready to take it. I have no doubt that it will be a good step, but at the same time: I have never been in a "normal" relationship, with fewer than ninety miles between Girl and Boy. I am probably over-thinking this, but I don't know how they work. I am excited to learn. At the same time, I am surrounded by those attached-at-the-hip college couples who spend every waking moment together, so that it's hard to just get a decent girls' night in now and again. And I can see how it's an easy trap to fall into: I love this guy. Why wouldn't I want to spend every waking moment with him? Still, I believe James and I will find a sweet spot, because I believe that all these years of long distance have made us good at pursuing our own interests and friends while remaining a couple, a team. (Also helpful: the fact that we won't be living in the same residence hall.)

But: lunch dates! dinner-and-a-movie dates! monument hopping! picnics in the park!

And: When I'm out with friends, I no longer always have to be the single-girl-who-isn't, the one who has a boyfriend many of her friends have never met. I can't wait to bring James into my group of friends. They're excited too, and I think they'll get along.

Also: I love this city so much, and I can't wait to help him fall in love with it too. Stepping off the train and seeing him waiting for me on the crowded platform is a moment straight out of a classic romance movie, but I expect that spontaneous dates have their charm as well, and I can't wait to discover it.

But mostly, I can't wait to continue doing--but with greater ease and greater frequency--the thing I love doing most: just spending time with him. His couch, my couch, watching a movie, listening to music, ordering a pizza, sitting and reading while he plays a video game, napping while he reads, playing basketball, whatever. Doesn't matter. All that matters is: him and me, me and him. Us, peacefully and happily and oh so easily coexisting.

That's all I want to do, for the rest of my life. This is the beginning of that.

And I can't wait.

It's October. I'm allowed to talk about Halloween now.

2008-10-01T11:37:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: the Weepies, Painting by Chagall. Am currently obsessed with this song, and not just because it name-drops one of my favorite painters. Here, listen to it on YouTube.

Now that it's October, and my rules permit me to discuss Halloween (but not Thanksgiving! And certainly not Christmas!), I need to brainstorm a costume idea. See, Halloween is on a Friday this year, so I'll be attending a Halloween bash thrown by some friends. And clearly, I need a costume.

Preferably one that does not involve the word "sexy," because oh my gosh, the truest of all truisms in Mean Girls was when Lindsay Lohan observed that "Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it."

Except that, yeah, I do say something about it.

So I need a good costume that doesn't shamelessly pander to male fantasies in the thin disguise of feminism and empowerment. Yeah, because nothing says empowerment like dressing up as the sexy nurse to your boyfriend's fully-clothed surgeon.

Ahem.

My original idea was to dress up as 1945--you know, fabulous retro dress and shoes, "done" hair, red lipstick, the works. Really glam up. Unfortunately, the search for the perfect fabulous retro dress and shoes--while a noble one, and one that I will pursue--requires both time and money, neither of which I have in abundance right now.

My new idea, which I came up with just now while I was thinking about "sexy" costumes, is to be a Catholic school girl. A real and authentic Catholic school girl.

A real and authentic school girl is probably wearing a lot of eye makeup, but maybe didn't brush her hair that morning before she threw it up in a messy bun. (The messy bun is the official hairstyle of Catholic school girls everywhere.) Sure, she rolled her kilt, but she is also wearing pajama pants underneath it. She may spend a lot of time in the tanning bed, but she didn't shave her legs this morning, and she doesn't care. Et cetera.

What say you, Internet? Surely nothing says "festive Halloween spirit" like the subversion and re-appropriation of sexist imagery!

...right?

Plus, you know, I already have all the costume parts in the back of my closet somewhere.

Shattering the illusion of domesticity: an anti-climactic misadventure

2008-09-25T01:11:00.004-04:00

Singing along to: Dave Matthews Band, Crush (part of my Rockin' Nineties Mix Tape--a work in progress)

I am always open to new and delicious ways to caffeinate myself, so when I noticed the recipe for "authentic" chai tea on the Bigelow's Vanilla Chai package this morning, I was all over it. It's not that much more time-consuming than my usual method of tea preparation, but it is considerably more delectable. And it's so simple that I don't even have to consult the instructions every time I want an authentic chai experience. In brief: bring 3/4 cup water, 1/4 cup milk, and the tea bag to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 2-4 minutes. Sweeten liberally and enjoy with episodes of Mythbusters and South Park.

See? Simple.

I just forgot one important step; namely, "don't set the tea bag on fire."

They really should specify these things on the directions, because yes, I had a Fire Event in my kitchen today.

While the tea boiled merrily away, the little paper tab on the end of the tea-bag string (does that have an official name?) made contact with the stove burner and the next thing I knew, I was cooking with fire.

Oops.

So, blah blah blah, turn off the burner, move the pot off the heat, turn on the fan so that the smoke alarm doesn't go off, and say a little prayer of thanksgiving that none of my roommates were home. The whole thing was surprisingly adrenaline-free.

Really, it wasn't any big deal, and I don't have the energy or brainpower right now to rewrite it into a dramatic and hilarious tale of my culinary shenanigans. Actually, at the moment, I barely have the brainpower to keep my pronouns straight as I type, but my job requires me to stay up for another hour and a half, so here I am, blogging about nothing and trying to convince myself to finish filling out the Orientation evaluation despite the amnesia that's already set in.

Really, with the life I lead, it's a wonder the reality-TV moguls haven't been begging me to star in my own unscripted prime-time reality-based show. Pilot episode: Claire stares at the Internet for two hours, and can't tell when to stop writing the stupid blog post already.

Yeah, I think that's my cue to leave.

The generation gap

2008-09-22T18:16:00.004-04:00

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Sodom, South Georgia

Yesterday afternoon, my brother and I went to church together, and we listened to the radio as we drove back. "Seven Nation Army" by the White Stripes came on, and I turned it up, because hey! I know most of the words. Obviously I need to roll down the windows and sing along.

"Dude," my brother said. "This song is old. I can't believe they're playing it on the radio."

"It's not that old!" I said.

"It's from, like, 2003," he replied, with the sort of disparagement that only a fifteen-year-old can muster. With that tone of voice, you'd think the song was from 2003 B.C.

"I remember this song from high school," I insisted. "That is not old."

"Yes, it is," he said. And then he laughed at me.

Internet, my brother thinks I am a fogey! And I think he may be right.

Tour of the Internet

2008-09-13T21:10:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Billy Joel, It's Still Rock and Roll to Me

It's Saturday night. All the cool kids are having fun, and I'm sitting at the front desk watching them leave. I could sit here and wallow in misery and fantasize about ordering a pizza, but why limit myself? I can do all those things and post a bunch of links. I'm multi-talented like that.

I haven't actually read any of John C. Wright's books, and his livejournal is mostly really long posts about politics, but sometimes he livens things up with really long posts involving vintage science fiction covers, and that is why I keep him in my feed reader. This post, for instance, attempts to define science fiction, and the pictures alone make it worthwhile.

Diesel from Mattress Police hates Thomas Kinkade's "artwork." So do I. But he's funnier at hating than I am.

People make really stupid mistakes with Photoshop. Thank goodness the Internet is here to document it.

People also make really crazy-looking cakes. Luckily, the Internet is staying on top of the disastrous cake world as well. What would we do without you, Internet?

Look! Someone knitted an Anne Boleyn doll. With a removable head. Sweet!

The 2008 results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are out. They are so bad they're good, which is, you know, the whole point.

Speaking of contests on the fringes of literary culture, the Guardian did an article on the Diagram Prize, which celebrates "the oddest of odd book titles." Who wouldn't want to read a book called "A Colour Atlas of Posterior Chamber Implants"?

Sky Play: an awesome photo set on Flickr. I wish I'd thought of doing cool things like that.

This website is helping my new kitchen and I to be much better friends. It's also making me hungry.

Aaaaaand that's all I've got, folks. Enjoy!

Letters to You

2008-09-13T13:26:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Aimee Mann & Michael Penn, Two of Us

Dear Iron and Wine/Frames/Death Cab for Cutie Pandora Station,

You're beautiful. I love you. Let's cuddle.

Except, dude, Pandora, you have got to stop being so slow and wonky. You're making our love affair much more difficult than it needs to be.

Love,
Claire

***

Dear New Facebook,

I hate you. You're ugly and you don't make sense. And sure, I won't really switch to MySpace, but I can totally pretend I want to! Admit it, you'd be jealous.

Hatefully Yours,
Claire

***

Dear CUA Student Newspaper,

Your grammar and spelling may have improved marginally, but that only serves to focus attention all all the things that haven't improved: namely, your abysmal content. Honestly, you might want to work on that, because reading the latest edition is still the most fun I can have on a Friday night without breaking the law.

Smoochies,
Claire

***

Dear Tiny Kitchen in My Apartment,

I love you more than I thought possible, and except for the tiny sink and the tilty stove burners, you're kind of awesome. I almost...enjoy cooking. And I never thought I'd say that. You're magical.

xoxoxo,
Claire

A Tutorial

2008-09-09T18:18:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Barenaked Ladies, Be My Yoko Ono

How to take your dinner from "going to be delicious!" to "wow, that was gross" in ten easy minutes!

In brief: Forget to defrost the chicken.

At length: Plan to make chicken fried rice for dinner. Prepare ahead of time by cooking the rice at lunchtime. Forget that a little bit of rice goes a long way, and throw two cups of uncooked rice in the pot. End up with enough cooked rice to feed five starving children for a month. Go about your business, come home hungry, get out the frying pan and realize... your chicken is still frozen solid.

There ain't gonna be chicken fried rice tonight, baby.

Take stock of the rest of your pantry and realize that you have a lot of ingredients, but not quite enough of any of them to make something. Decide to get started on all that rice and make a cheese and rice omelet. Realize that all the burners on the stove are totally crooked, and you cannot make an acceptable omelet on a stove that is so radically off the level.

(Actually, you probably can, because you are a really good omelet-maker, but that's an exercise that should probably wait until you have a little more kitchen zen, and tonight the kitchen's aura is all wrong.)

Yell obscenities. (Good thing none of your suite-mates are home.)

Give up. Go to the Pryz, and use one of your precious meal blocks to get a take-out box of pasta. Realize almost immediately that this is a bad idea, but it's too late and you're hungry, so what can you do?

Sit down, back at your apartment, take a bite of the pasta, and realize that it is the closest thing to airplane food you've ever had on solid ground. It doesn't taste like pasta and alfredo sauce and (allegedly) chicken, it tastes like high altitudes, recycled air, and itchy polyester stewardess uniforms.

This is a good opportunity to practice projecting an air of resigned suffering; don't waste it.

After dinner, enjoy the meal's one gustatory bright spot: single-serving packets of instant vanilla pudding. You didn't have enough milk for tomato soup, but you do have enough for a little cup of Jello delight, so you scarf it down, even though you know you should savor the fact that it actually has flavor.

The final step is the most important, touching as it does on one of the most important philosophical questions of the digital age: If a blogger has a crappy meal and doesn't tell the Internet about it, is she still a blogger?

So make sure you tell the Internet; your very identity may depend on it.

Housekeeping notes

2008-09-04T21:23:00.002-04:00

Singing along to:

Eventually, when I am feeling less lazy (so, probably on Saturday night when I start my cushy desk job again), I am going to do some housekeeping around here. Mostly, update my links lists to reflect the blogs I actually read, as well as those nice blogs who link to me.

So. If your blog links to mine, now would be a good time to drop me a comment and let me know, so I can return the favor. Or even if your blog doesn't link to mine but you think it's awesome anyway, let me know. Self-promote a little. I don't mind.

Also, because I am going to be very, very bored once my cushy desk job starts back up, tell me about your favorite place to waste time on the Internet. Addict though I am, I am kind of behind on the Cool Internet Trends, so chances are any site you suggest will be new to me. I mean, for pete's sake, I just realized a few weeks ago how awesome Pandora is, and even now I forget it's there.

The years have been short but the days go slowly by

2008-09-03T19:47:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: The Shins, Pink Bullets

Reasons why time is moving too fast:

I got an email today entitled "Commencement 2009." An email about commencement. My commencement. Which will happen in less than a year.

I saw a sign advertising a senior class barbecue and realized with a start that is my class. (The barbecue was crappy, though. Maybe it would have been better if I had been eligible for the free beer, but I doubt it, because apparently the beer was crappy too.)

I just "applied" for graduation, and decided how I want my name to appear on my diploma.

The interrogations have begun. "So--you're a senior." Yes. So it would appear. "So, do you know what you want to do when you graduate?" Well, I've considered all my options and it looks like retirement offers the best benefits package. And I know I'm qualified for it.

People (and by people I mean "my adviser") are suddenly expecting me to write a thesis and pretend that I know stuff.

My friends keep making morbid comments about things like "our last first day of classes" and "paying the rent next year" and "real jobs." Shut up, guys! You are making things very hard for me here in the Kingdom of Denial.

So, yes. I am in denial, or at least I am trying to be, but it's very, very hard and I don't know if I'll be able to keep it up much longer. I know I shouldn't even try to keep it up much longer, because Real Job Searches aren't allowed in the Kingdom of Denial and a Real Job is what's going to keep me from, you know, starving to death next year. Or moving back home, which is an equally distasteful prospect. (It's not that I have issues living at home--my parents and I get along fine--it's just that I feel like it would be a step backwards.)

My well-documented hatred and fear of change are constants in any equation, but the other problem I'm running into here is that I don't feel as old as I am. I know I joke about being an old lady, and in many ways I am, but at the same time--in my head it's still 2006. My brain lags several years behind the calendar, and especially my age. To me, there is a much bigger difference between nineteen and twenty than there is between eighteen and nineteen, and sometimes I still think of myself as a teenager. It's not that I doubt my own maturity or capabilities, it's just that... I don't see how I can possibly be old enough to graduate and catapult headlong into the "real world," whatever the hell that is.

***

That's a lot of navel-gazing after a long hiatus, but as I don't start work and volunteering at the museum until next week, I've had a fair amount of time to navel-gaze. And as I mentioned above, people do insist on forcing me to face reality, and there's nothing like the cold slap of reality to wake up my inner emo.

So... is (or was) anyone else as scared as I am? I mean, I know, intellectually, that I'll be fine, but that doesn't help much.

Ah, memes. And also books.

2008-08-12T21:28:00.001-04:00

Singing along to: Death Cab for Cutie, I Will Follow You Into the Dark

I just moved back to school today, and I really don't feel like doing anything except whining about my campus apartment (two dead roaches! that used to be alive! and a very small sink!), but that's probably not a temptation I should indulge.

So I'm going to indulge in a different but equally bad post idea: a meme! But it's okay, because it's a cultured meme, about books.

I stole this one from She Likes Purple. I have done this quiz or a variation on it a dozen times before, but books! That I may or may not have read! I can't resist. So, the following is a list of books printed by The Big Read, one of the many organizations devoted to whining about how Americans don't read anything anymore. Or something.

Key
1) Bold the books you have already read
2) Italicize the books you intend to read
3) Notes in parentheses next to note-worthy titles.

***********************

1) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
3) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4) Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
5) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6) The Bible (Parts? Do parts count?)
7) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8) Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
9) His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (I read the first one, liked it, and never got around to finishing the series. I am so lazy about series.)
10) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
11) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (And both of the sequels!)
12) Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (Dear Thomas Hardy, You have no idea how much I hate you. Love, Me)
13) Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
14) Complete Works of Shakespeare (Stealing Jennie's comment: Not his complete works, but enough to make bolding this only a partial lie.)
15) Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
16) The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
17) Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
18) Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
19) The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (How much do I love this book? So much.)
20) Middlemarch by George Eliot
21) Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell (I haven't seen the movie either.)
22) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (I probably would have liked this book more if my teacher hadn't been so obsessed with all the color words.)
23) Bleak House by Charles Dickens
24) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
25) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
26) Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
27) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28) Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (I think I've seen the movie?)
29) Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Lewis Carroll is a little too whacked-out for me.)
30) The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (I saw the animated movie a couple times.)
31) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Well, most of it...)
32) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
33) Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (Some of them, a long time ago. My fourth grade teacher used to read them to us.)
34) Emma by Jane Austen
35) Persuasion by Jane Austen
36) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (Why is this listed separately from the Chronicles of Narnia?)
37) The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
38) Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
39) Memories of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
40) Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
41) Animal Farm by George Orwell
42) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (I don't feel the need to go out and burn this, but I don't see how it's a must-read, either.)
43) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
45) The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
46) Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
47) Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
48) The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
49) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
50) Atonement by Ian McEwan (Just finished this a week ago, actually.)
51) Life of Pi by Yann Martel
52) Dune by Frank Herbert
53) Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
54) Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
55) A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
56) The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57) A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
58) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
60) Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61) Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
62) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
63) The Secret History by Donna Tartt
64) The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
65) Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (I read about half of it once...)
66) On The Road by Jack Kerouac
67) Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
68) Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
69) Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
70) Moby Dick by Herman Melville
71) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
72) Dracula by Bram Stoker (I haven't read this, but James did and said it sucked. I'll probably pass.)
73) The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
74) Notes From A Small Island by Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses by James Joyce
76) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77) Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal by Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
80) Possession by A.S. Byatt
81) A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (I hate schmaltz.)
82) Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
83) The Color Purple by Alice Walker
84) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
85) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
86) A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
87) Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom (For serious?)
89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90) The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton
91) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
92) The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93) The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
94) Watership Down by Richard Adams (Tried once. Meh.)
95) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute (But I read On the Beach when I was a teenaged hippie!)
97) The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (Read about two-thirds of it when I was eleven.)
98) Hamlet by William Shakespeare (Why separate from the Complete Works?)
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

********************

Total: Thirty. (And that's counting the Harry Potter series, Lord of the Rings, and the complete works of Will Shakespeare as one book each.) Not too shabby.

Your turn.

Hush dear, don't cause a fuss--I'll have your spam; I love it!

2008-08-02T21:31:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: my parents watching the Dick Van Dyke show. Rob thinks Buddy and Sally are dating! Scandal!

I like to glance through my spam box before I empty it, both because the subject lines are hilarious, and occasionally something gets misdirected. What I have learned from this, other than a lot of excellent euphemisms for boy-parts, is that there are trends in spam emails. "Male enhancement" offers are a constant, of course, and there are always a lot of emails promising compromising of videos of the celebrity breakdown du jour, but my spam box also features important updates on:

Science & Technology:

- Switzerland to be devoured by black hole
- Breaking news: Aliens landed in Ohio
- Laptops explode with over usage
- FBI on the hunt for Facebook users

Food:

- What details we should know about fast food?
- Get the max out of your sausage

Pop Culture:

- Spongebob denies reports that he's gay
- Vader of the Opera
- Secret - World Scrabble Championship - video

I mean, I never open spam emails, but subject lines like "Vader of the Opera" make it really, really tempting.

What's the best spam email you've ever gotten?

Post script

2008-07-25T20:02:00.003-04:00

Watching: 21, that movie with the college students and blackjack

The final blow of yesterday's terrible commute actually fell this morning: I drove by the gas station where I filled up yesterday and saw that its gas prices had dropped five cents a gallon overnight.

What can you do, right?

Commuting blues

2008-07-24T18:40:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Flogging Molly, The Kilburn High Road

The storm we had last night rendered my trip home from visiting friends absolutely torturous (it should not take over an hour to get from Brookland/CUA to Greenbelt. It just shouldn't.), so this morning I decided to sleep in and take the 7:40am train instead of the 7:00am train.

Now, with the 7:00 train, it is virtually impossible for me to be late to work. Short of me simply deciding not to go in, I cannot be late. And since under most circumstances, I am really good at being late, I usually take the 7:00 train.

But the 7:40 train should still get me in on time. And this morning, the 7:40 train let me sleep in.

"I'll be fine!" I said. "I'll get there in plenty of time!" I said. "I bet I will even have time for Starbucks!" I said.

"HA!" the universe said. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA." And then it canceled the 7:40 train. The next train wasn't until 8:30.

"FINE," I said. "I will drive to the Metro station." Except the gas light was on, so I had to drop $25.79 on 3/4 of a tank of gas before I could even think about the interstate.

But I made it to the Metro station with surprisingly little trouble. Then I found out the Green line was single-tracking between a few stations because of that damn storm last night, the one that started this whole mess in the first place.

In the end, I was only ten minutes late to work, although I thought it would be bad form to stroll into the office with Starbucks if I was late already. It was almost anti-climactic.

Of course, since I drove and Metro'd to work, I had to drive and Metro home. And if the Metro ride was slightly faster (if a little more motion-sick), the drive home was slower. It wasn't bumper-to-bumper traffic the whole time. It was just:

Smooth sailing, smooth sailing, smooth sailing, BRAKE LIGHTS, smooth sailing, BRAKE LIGHTS. Why? Well, because there are trucks parked on the shoulder outside the rest stop, like there are every afternoon. Duh! Or: because we are bored. Or: because it's only a mile to your exit and we don't think you've been in the car long enough, and besides, we're all really getting a kick out of your one-woman American Idol: Car Singing performance.

That's the thing I don't understand. I know why accidents and road work can cause backups, but most of the time there's no obvious explanation, and the backup clears up just as suddenly as it started. I am sure there are mathematical formulas that explain how that happens, but to my non-mathematical mind it just doesn't make sense: somewhere a couple miles ahead, there must be cars driving slowly with nothing in front of them. They're just driving slowly because they can, and the rest of us waste the best years of our lives getting high off diesel fumes from the eighteen wheeler in front of us and listening to a Dropkick Murphys CD over and over again because it's the only one we have in the car.

And that, my friends, is why I take the train.

2008-07-13T07:44:00.003-04:00

This is where I'll be for the next week. My main goal for the week is to not wear real shoes at all, the entire time. Have fun without me, Internet!

Summer in the city

2008-07-11T22:07:00.000-04:00

Singing along to: Belle & Sebastian, Piazza, New York Catcher

The internship continues apace, and although the commute saps my will to live, I do believe it is worth it, because the work makes me so happy.

Part of my commute, the non-exhausting part, involves walking a mile and a half morning and evening, from the train station to the office. (This is the theory, anyway--but my days have been peppered with so many Metro fires, missed buses, and Marc delays, that the normal days are an unexpected gift. I enjoy them when they come along, but I have learned to stop expecting them.) People look at me a little funny when I tell them about the walking part (since I could--and sometimes do--take the Metro instead), but I actually like it. I love walking in the city at all times, but the morning walks are my favorite.

At eight in the morning, the sun is out, but the air is still cool, and the swarming tourists are (mostly) still asleep in their suburbs and hotels. So it's just me, the under-caffeinated lobbyists, and the traffic noise, which serves as a pleasant reminder that I am not sitting in beltway traffic, playing word games with the letters on the license plate in front of me in an attempt to stay sane. Nor am I vacuum-packed into the Metro with my face pressed into the armpit of a total stranger, as my fellow riders resort to total silence as a way to counterbalance the necessary but uncomfortable intimacy of being sardined into small spaces.

I gloat about these things while I walk.

And I also people-watch, which is always an amusement. In the past week, I have seen: an old man in a yellow shirt doing tai-chi at the National Law Enforcement Officers' Memorial; a homeless man listening to the Jackson 5 on a staticky radio; a woman dressed entirely in purple, from her hair band to her fingernails to her Crocs; a man on the street corner hoarsely reminding us that we are all going to Hell and that no redemption is possible; an earnest white guy with very long dreadlocks singing that Jeff Buckley song "Hallelujah" at the top of the Farragut North escalator; and two interns debating whether or not dating a co-worker constituted an workplace romance. The conversation effectively ended when one of them mentioned Monica Lewinsky.

Including the commute, the internship eats about twelve hours of my day, and when I get home I don't have time to do much other than eat, talk to James for a bit, and watch half of a movie if I'm lucky. Then I go to sleep and dream about the internship at night. I know, whine moan whine--but I really do love it.

Quickie Book Reviews

2008-07-07T20:08:00.005-04:00

Singing along to: the Beatles, Come Together

The only downside of my internship is the commute (1.5 - 2 hours, each way), but even that downside has its upside: I get a ton of reading done. I don't remember the last time I blazed through so many books in so little time. It is heavenly.

So here are some drive-by reviews of what I've been reading lately:

Old Man's War by John Scalzi: A loving tribute to Heinlein's Starship Troopers (so, not the most original plot ever), but also well-written, funny, and filled with some interesting Technology of the Future.

Dune by Frank Herbert: The Lord of the Rings of science fiction: epic in scope, slow-moving at times, full of Heroic Dialogue, and distinguished by first-rate world building. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed. Also, it's a "classic of science fiction," so I'm 1/3 of the way done with one of my 1001 things.

The Frog King by Adam Davies: I picked this up at the dollar bookstore because I liked the cover. (When all books are only a dollar, such low standards of selection are totally justifiable.) I would not say I spent my dollar badly. This is basically chick lit, but with a male protagonist (guy tries to find love in the big city, but is hindered by his crappy job, crazy roommates, and numerous failings and psychoses). Unfortunately (spoiler alert!) he didn't get the girl and that annoyed me, even if it was more "realistic."

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: I bought this at the dollar bookstore because I love the title. I think it counts as a modern classic, so it also connects to my 1001 things. It was slow, somewhat meandering, and would send an English teacher into delights because of that whole "unreliable narrator" thing it's got going on. Still, it was interesting to watch Stevens's perceptions and understanding broaden slowly as he told his story, although whether or not the changes will stick is ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so. Those classic novels do love their artful ambiguity.

A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman: Meh. Interesting premise, capably written, but lacking in the overall execution. Mainly, she can't seem to decide whether everything has changed or nothing has. Also, her history is suspect in places, and she is prone to sweeping generalizations about times and places and the people who lived in them--sweeping generalizations that just so happen to perfectly illustrate whatever point she's making. More annoying than illuminating.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris: It is as simple as this: if you liked David Sedaris's other books, you will like this one. If you didn't, you won't. If you have never read his other books, you will like this book if: 1) You like personal essays that are very funny; and, 2) You are not easily offended. I liked his other books, I like personal essays that are very funny, and I am not easily offended, so this book made me chuckle out loud on the train on multiple occasions.

2008-07-04T12:12:00.004-04:00

STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born,
Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother,
After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements,
Dweller in Mannahatta my city, or on southern savannas,
Or a soldier camp'd or carrying my knapsack and gun, or a miner in California,
Or rude in my home in Dakota's woods, my diet meat, my drink from the spring,
Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess,
Far from the clank of crowds intervals passing rapt and happy,
Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware of mighty Niagara,
Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and strong-breasted bull,
Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow, my amaze,
Having studied the mocking-bird's tones and the flight of the mountain-hawk,
And heard at dawn the unrivall'd one, the hermit thrush from the swamp-cedars,
Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.

Photo: "The Tetons--Snake River" by Ansel Adams, 1942 (archives.gov); Poem: "Starting from Paumanok" (excerpt) by Walt Whitman, 1881-82 (The Walt Whitman Archive)

Musical Notes

2008-06-16T21:00:00.000-04:00

Singing along to: Cat Stevens, Wild World

Coldplay's new CD, which comes out tomorrow, is entitled Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends. I'm going to come right out and say it: this is a terribly pretentious title, and they better have a damn good album to justify it.

And at this point, sadly, I'm not optimistic. I'm not exactly pessimistic either; in fact, I'm doing my best to have no expectations at all. X&Y was a real disappointment to me (with the exception of a single song: "Kingdom Come," the last track). Everybody knew "Clocks," and "Clocks" is a piano song, so I guess they felt like they had to make everything after that a piano song.

Don't get me wrong: I like piano rock. But... that's not the Coldplay I fell in love with. Lately I've been listening to Parachutes (their first album, and my favorite), and it's actually not a piano-heavy album. Their first big hit, "Yellow," has almost no piano. "Trouble" does, but even that song sounds much more like "The Scientist" than "Clocks" (and "The Scientist" is a better song anyway). Heck, my favorite Coldplay song of all time, "Green Eyes," is 100% guitar.

Come to think of it, Coldplay isn't the only band who's deserted me lately. I've been doing my very best to pretend that Iron & Wine's latest album, with the exception of two songs, does not exist. U2's latest CD, Vertigo is all right, but it's not in the same league as their classic stuff (The Joshua Tree, War, Achtung Baby, et cetera). Jimmy Eat World has successfully made the transition from emo-tastic to generic rock band. (They hit their sweet spot in 1999 with Clarity and have been getting more forgettable ever since. I own their latest CD, and iTunes tells me that I've listened to it 3 times, but I sure don't remember any of it.)

Tomorrow, I suppose, I'll go on iTunes and listen to the thirty-second preview clips they provide, although I'll probably buy the CD regardless, because, well... I'm a sucker.

Nerd links that may amuse

2008-06-01T22:00:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: the Pogues, Fairytale of New York

I don't remember where most of these links came from.

***

I read Penny Arcade because it frequently makes me laugh even when I don't actually get the esoteric gamer jokes (which is most of the time), but lately it's been in a bit of a slump. Nevertheless, one of their recent comics exactly sums up my feelings about the Hobbit sequel movie that New Line will be releasing...some time. I mean, I just don't get what the movie will be about, other than "making lots o' money." Which, come to think about it, is plot enough for most studios (and many audiences) these days, but still. Tolkien deserves better.

***

Somebody made a sand sculpture of Yoda sitting on Darth Vader's lap. Don't you feel a little more fulfilled now?

***

I haven't bothered actually reading this article, but I do love all the pictures of deliciously retro Soviet space-race propaganda. They even had moon-landing Christmas cards!

***

I'm sure that ice buckets shaped like R2D2 are a dime a dozen, but Han Solo in carbonite ice cube molds? Now those are a treasure.

***

io9 has the trailer for Joss Whedon's upcoming show, Dollhouse. It looks cool, and hey, maybe it'll last an entire season before it goes the way of Firefly.

***

Also from io9, from forever ago, a silent animated video about the loneliness of space. Take home message: Space is huge, beautiful, and depressing as hell. Excellent! Seriously though: it's a pretty video.

***

And at this point, my typos seem to be outnumbering my correctly-spelled words, so I'm going to put away the computer and crack open a good old-fashioned science fiction novel. Currently reading: Dune by Frank Herbert, and Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Enjoying both.

Dispatches from the front lines of catering

2008-05-26T22:04:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Barenaked Ladies, The Wrong Man Was Convicted

I've worked three weddings in as many days, but that's not very impressive: the caterer has done five weddings since Friday, and I'm pretty sure at least one of my co-workers worked at all of them. Still, I was getting a little loopy by the end, and the guests--well, they're always a little loopy.

For your amusement and because I have to get it out of my system, here are several (slightly fictionalized) conversations that I had with today's guests while walking a tray of shrimp-n-dip. Their questions are verbatim, my answers are somewhat embellished.

Guest: Is that dip for the shrimp?
Me: No. It's actually turkey gravy that I'm carrying around just for kicks.
Guest: Are you sure?
Me: Positive.

Guest: Do I just pick up a shrimp?
Me: No, ma'am, you just open your mouth and I'll toss one in.

Guest: Can I dip the shrimp?
Me: No, sir, that dip is for ornamental purposes only.

***

Last night, my dinner consisted mainly of fortune cookies, because there was an Asian-themed buffet station and not much else. I have six fortunes in my apron pocket, but I probably ate more than that. Fortunately, the bride and groom passed up the opportunity to get customized fortunes, because the "authentic" ones are so much more fun (especially if you add "in bed" to the end of any of them, not that I would ever make jokes like that, obviously). Here's a selection:

"Every person is the architect of his own fortune."
In other words, don't believe anything a fortune cookie tells you. Including the above statement.

"A modest man never talks to himself."
I guess I'm not a modest man. I may be a modest woman, but this fortune is sexist and won't tell me.

"You are never selfish with your advice or your help."
IN BED!

"If you wish good advice, consult your mother."
OHHHHH, YOUR MOM. BURN!!

"You will receive a surprising gift very soon."
Actually, this came true. The bartenders split their tips among all of us tonight, and I walked away with twenty-seven dollars in cold hard cash.

Against Chair Bows: A Manifesto

2008-05-25T13:27:00.004-04:00

Singing along to: the Shins, Girl Inform Me

I mentioned in a previous post that one of the weddings I worked last weekend featured hot pink chair bows. I mentioned that nothing good can ever come from chair bows. I also mentioned that my boss says she thinks of me every time we have chair bows. I am not quite sure what to make of this. Does she associate me with chair bows because of my frequently-stated hatred of them? Because nothing good can ever come of me? I don't know.

We don't usually see chair bows that often at the caterer, and that is all to the good, but they seem to be coming (back?) into style. We had them again last night, this time in a sheer white and shiny incarnation, and trust me, you have not experienced all that life has to offer until you've tied bows onto one hundred fifty chairs. If today's bride has opted for chair bows, I will lay myself down in the street and let one of this town's many Harley gangs escort me to the Great Hereafter.

Because chair bows are evil, and I hate them for many reasons, which I will now elucidate in an attempt to persuade others of their sinister natures. If even one bride decides against chair bows after reading this manifesto, all my sufferings will have been worth it.

I hate chair bows because they are such a pain. Last week, the bride had the florists tie on the bows, but they tied them on wrong, so after they left we re-did them all. Last night we did them all ourselves. After the wedding we have to take them all off, gather all the ones that are strewn across the dance floor because the mother of the bride wanted to wear them, and count them. This is a pain.

I hate chair bows because they look stupid. As I mentioned, the catering staff ties them, and while we have many and varied skills, most of us do not have master's degrees in Tying Pretty Bows. My bows, for instance, always end up lopsided, so one loop is pointed up and the other is pointed down. My boss says this is because I do not fluff them enough, but even the most enthusiastic of fluffing can only cover so many faults.

I hate chair bows because they encourage drunken shenanigans. As I mentioned, last week the mother of the bride had a drop too much to drink, so she and several of her friends tied the chair bows on themselves, bandeau-style, and also used them to do the limbo. Without chair bows, they might not have become the laughingstock of the busing station. Chair bows erode dignity.

I hate chair bows because they are uselessly floofy, and so very Barbie Dream Wedding. They feed into the bride-as-princess mentality, and as such bring to mind all those terrible old Disney princess movies, and their terrible messages about love, marriage, and womanhood. They are excess, and not even pretty excess, which is occasionally excusable, because hey! pretty!

I hate chair bows because I have not read so deeply into anything since high school, with all those English, journalism, and creative writing classes I took, and anything that catapults me back into that "social commentary lurks everywhere" mentality is clearly something to be avoided with the same fervor I avoid Josh Groban, vegetables, and the word "nuptial."

It's fun to stay at the Y! M! C! A!

2008-05-19T17:02:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Dave Matthews Band, Satellite

I made my first trip back to the local YMCA today, and I was delighted to see that despite the massive renovation and expansion they've undertaken, nothing about the place has actually changed. The basement-level fitness center is still as stuffy as ever, the magazine selection is still terrible, and the retirees who work out there are still as inappropriately dressed as they've always been. Once, I saw a man lifting weights in khaki shorts, a polo shirt, and a sweater vest. Fo' realz! I think the old people's workout clothes are my favorite part of working out there.

Of course, for every adorable AARP member in press-and-dress pants, there is a yogaerobics lady in a spandex leotard, or (even worse) a Cardio Dude in tiny running shorts and a sheer wife-beater. This is probably the same Cardio Dude who is projectile sweating two treadmills over. (No, I don't think I will ever recover from that experience.)

Most of the people who work out at the Y are high school/college students and retired people, which makes for a pretty relaxed atmosphere, largely free of the uber-intense body builders who grunt loudly with every rep they do, just to make sure we are all aware that they are working very hard to lift lots of weight because they are serious athletes. I find those characters annoying, and they're not as fun to people-watch on the treadmill, mostly because their fake tans and well-oiled muscles are ten times more unattractive than the blue-haired lady in the twinset on the elliptical across from me.

I didn't realize how much I missed the place.

Premature aging

2008-05-17T19:53:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Cat Stevens, Wild World

I worked twelve hours yesterday (eight of them at the caterer, doing a seated served wedding for one hundred seventy-five, I mean seriously, who has that many friends, because I sure don't) and then I worked another nine hours today (buffet for seventy-five), and as a result of all that running around with trays of booze and crab-and-cheese tarts, I feel even more like an old lady than usual. That is, my body feels the same age as my mind and soul, and that age is eighty-seven. (The first weekend back at the caterer is always bad.) My feet hurt of course, and not just in a generalized way: each individual toe and blister let out little gasps of pain when I walk. My ankles hurt, and so do my calves and knees and hips. My lower back aches from all the standing, and my wrists are sore from the trays.

Also, my soul hurts from all the haterade that has been coursing through my system for the past thirty-six hours.

(Why? Well, for starters, the people today had hot pink chair bows. Nothing good can possibly come from hot pink chair bows. When my boss pulled them out, she told me she thinks of me every time we do chair bows. I'm not sure what to make of that.)

So. I got home and I hobbled around like an old lady while I made dinner for one (fish! pasta! corn! latte with cool whip!!) and listened to Cat Stevens hippie music. While I ate, I clipped coupons. After dinner I lay on the couch and shouted for someone to bring me a crossword puzzle and a damn cup of coffee.

Except, oops, I was the only one home. Except for the dog, who is very smart, but who still hasn't mastered the art of making the Perfect Cup of Coffee.

My day isn't as bad as this post makes it sound

2008-05-13T15:53:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Belle & Sebastian, Piazza, New York Catcher

Today, I:

Slept through my alarm and woke up 15 minutes before I had to leave for work.

Spent four absolutely freezing hours at work, because I guess they haven't gotten the memo that it's not August yet.

Continued to be sick, but not as sick as yesterday.

Wore my hot red shoes.

Got my fourth new nametag in as many summers at this job.

Forgot to join the Y. Maybe this evening?

Got notice that I accidentally had a package delivered to me at school, even though I'm home.

Saw Facebook pictures of an adorable baby, the daughter of a middle school classmate and his wife, with whom I went to high school.

Consequently, felt really old.

Decided to post this, even though I'm pretty sure it means my family will find the blog (if they haven't already). Whatever.

Why do I keep doing this?

2008-05-04T00:34:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: The Beatles, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

Depending on when you read this post, you may notice that things look a little different. This is not likely to last.

I have been a Blogger user since the day I began blogging, which is actually five years ago this month. And screw all the haters, I like Blogger, most of the time, and since there's almost nothing in this life that I like all the time, that is actually a ringing endorsement. I know that Blogger is not very sophisticated, and that it sometimes does crazy things, and that half of the blogs on Blogger are just foreign-language spam blogs, and that Blogger is probably a key element in Google's plot to take over the world, but I still feel bad when the Internet picks on Blogger and the people who use it.

That said, I have still not gotten over the frustration I felt when they switched over to the new fancy template stuff. That was almost two years ago, and I am A) still stewing over it, and B) still using the "classic" template that I started out with.

Except right now I'm not.

Several times since Blogger made the switchover, I have decided to try their new templates again, and every time I give up in frustration and switch back to classic.* This time, I gave it a try because I thought maybe I could incorporate Twitter more gracefully, as well as add some sort of useless "What I'm reading/listening to/digging right now" thing, which is possible in the classic template, I just can't make it pretty. So I backed up my old template in Notepad and made the switch.

I'm about to switch right back, because I still hate the new version, for most of the same reasons that I hated it back in 2006. If resisting change were an Olympic sport, I would be a gold medalist. I mean, my sidebar doesn't have to be that wide. I don't want to screw around with damn CSS to make my post titles not links, because convenience be damned, they just look ugly that way. I still haven't figured out how to add Twitter to my sidebar, or my intimidating copyright message to the footer. I appreciate that other people can figure out these things, and make their blogs look lovely, but I have neither the patience nor the inclination to spend time thinking about those things.

(This may, in fact, be why Wordpress, which the Internet generally acknowledges OMG AWESOME, frustrates me so much. Its practically infinite potential for customization seems to call for almost equally infinite ability to customize, on the part of the user. And frankly, I blog because I want to write, not because I want to spend a lot of time learning CSS, although that is on my to-do list.)

*You know what they say about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

PS: I just took one of Blogger's customer satisfaction surveys and told them that I still hate the new templates. Not that they care.

I got 99 problems, but a thesis ain't one

2008-05-01T22:20:00.001-04:00

Singing along to: Cat Stevens, How Can I Tell You?

Or rather, a thesis is one, sort of, but the problem isn't that I can't think of a topic. It's that I can think of too many.

I don't have to decide on a subject now, but I have several friends who already know what they're writing about, and their topics are uniformly cool. I'm jealous of them. Also, I think I'd feel better about starting a forty-odd-page paper in a couple months if I knew what I wanted to write on. Like most other aspects of the medieval studies department here, the thesis guidelines are fluid. According to my adviser, the only rule is that it has to be multi-disciplinary. No problem: at this point, I don't think I could approach history any other way, because I really don't believe you can separate the art from the literature from the politics from the religion. Not in the Middle Ages, anyway.

This free rein is frequently delightful (distribution requirements within majors is something for those silly history and English majors to worry about, not me), but in this case it's also stifling: so many choices, so little time! Plus, the subject that I'm especially interested in, rare books and manuscripts, is not really an option, probably. I have neither the skills (paleography, adequate Latin) nor the resources to tackle something that awesome for my undergraduate thesis. (But don't worry, I intend to spend graduate school--and then hopefully the rest of my life--getting much better acquainted with really old books.)

So I did what I always do in situations like this: I made a list of other topics that interest me. It's a long list. I also made a list of topics that do not interest me, in hopes that it might narrow things down a bit. It helped, but only a little bit. (That list basically consists of theology/philosophy (except for monasticism), Bede, and anything to do with Italy.)

I stared at those lists for awhile, and thought, well, maybe something on England, pre-1066. I really liked that book on Alfred the Great I read last semester, and he's both really cool (like Charlemagne, but English) and late enough to keep me safely away from Bede. Can't think of anything more specific offhand, but maybe if I do more reading something will come to me. Maybe.

Then I read Chaucer's Troilus & Criseyde for class, and, thought hmm, maybe I could write something on female sovereignty in medieval romances, which have done some interesting things with gender roles. Not exactly original, but this is an undergraduate thesis we're talking about here. "Groundbreaking" is not a requirement. Besides, it plays into my interest in gender, social history, and literature. (Also, "sovereignty" is an impressive-sounding word. I would feel smarter just having that on my cover page.)

Then I started writing a paper on the use of setting in Troilus, and thought, whoa damn, I could do a lot with this too, by expanding it to a discussion of the use of classical themes and settings in medieval art and literature. (Actually, that was the original topic for the current paper, but I quickly realized that it is way too big of a topic for a 5-7 page paper.) So I started getting excited about writing a thesis on that multidisciplinary mess, which happens to tie in three of my other favorite things: art, literature, and political power/rhetoric. (I have a lot of favorite things. That may be the source of my problems.)

Actually, it seems that my indecision is not limited to my thesis. Right now I'm in the midst of writing a paper, due tomorrow, whose topic I switched last night. I spent a long time debating the pros and cons of asking the professor about this (potentially a wise move, given that I turned in an abstract two weeks ago with proposed topic #1), but I decided in the end to follow this piece of sage advice, learned from my father: It's easier to get forgiveness than permission. And, after all, my topic has not changed so drastically. I'm still writing about the Bayeux Tapestry, I'm just considering it in a different light. A light that is much, much easier to write about and research. That's totally kosher, right?

Yeah, I hope so.

The Bayeux Tapestry comes to life

2008-04-26T23:42:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Simon & Garfunkel, Old Friends

One of my professors showed us this YouTube video in class the other day, and it was too good not to pass along. Behold, the Bayeux Tapestry, animated:

It starts about halfway through the Tapestry, skipping past the politics straight through to the blood 'n guts. It's pretty awesome, and maybe if I watch it enough times, I'll be inspired to start my paper on the Bayeux Tapestry for my medieval art history class.

Pope Fest 2008

2008-04-25T13:10:00.003-04:00

Singing along to: Simon & Garfunkel, Blessed

A week ago yesterday, I stood on the lawn outside the student center, waving my tiny white and gold flag in one hand, raising my camera in the other, and cheering Pope Benedict XVI as he entered the building to deliver his address on Catholic education. It was an interesting speech, especially since I am a product of Catholic education from my first day of preschool until now. Almost more exciting than the speech itself, however, was the fact that he was delivering it on our campus, while bishops and university presidents from all over the country sat in the audience, and we watched it simulcast on a huge projection screen on the lawn.

After the address was over, he left the Pryz in the pope mobile and we cheered and snapped pictures and waved our flags and signs some more. They told us that Regina Caeli is one of his favorite songs, so we sang it, off-key, out of sync, and in stumbling Latin, but still: how often do you get the chance to sing anything for the Pope as he rides through your campus?

I mentioned the Westboro Baptists in my last post about the Pope's visit, and I'm happy to say they were a complete non-factor in the day. The Secret Service kept them far away from anywhere they would see the Pope, and while a few of them camped outside Nationals Stadium to helpfully remind us all of our impending damnation, a friend who was at that Mass said that no one gave them a second glance. I believe in peaceful protest and counter-protest, but maybe in this case, peacefully walking right by was the best option of all.

(Although, a point of interest relating to the comments on that post: “God is love” actually comes from the first letter of John (4:16) and that is the phrase with which the Holy Father opened his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, which is Latin for the same.)

Love is a many-splendored thing

2008-04-22T14:52:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Death Cab for Cutie, I Will Follow You Into the Dark

I love many things.

I love notebooks filled with beautiful paper I couldn't possibly mar with writing, and I love cheap spiral-bound notebooks with doodles in the margins, scribbled quotations, and snippets of stories I will never finish writing.

I love art, all art, even art I hate, even art I don't understand, because it's there and it's useless, but we all keep making it anyway. I love strolling by myself through hushed museums. I love picking out postcard souvenirs in museum gift shops and taping them above my desk when I get home.

I love the way my paints smell and I love the feeling of brush plus paint plus canvas. I love cadmium red, Mars black, and cobalt blue. I love my favorite paintbrush, the super-cheap 1-inch wide flat that came with a set of brushes I got in my first art class in high school. (All the paint has chipped off its wooden handle, and only duct tape and sheer force of will are holding the handle and the metal ferrule together, but I will continue to paint with that brush until it falls apart in my hands.) I love opening my desk drawer and seeing neatly stacked sketchbooks, my favorite size, 8.5x5", just right for thumbnail sketches, brainstorms, doodles, and traveling. I love walking away from an art project with smudges on my face or paint on my jeans or fingers stained with ink, but an impeccably neat finished piece on the table behind me.

I love flannel sheets and winter nights and falling asleep in a heavy cocoon of blankets, long johns, and thick socks. I love waking up on cold mornings and realizing I don't have to get out of bed yet. I love waking up on Saturdays in the summer with sunlight slanting through the windows and a full day of nothing stretching out in front of me. I love the first day of spring, which for me is the first day I can go outside bare-legged and in flip-flops. I love cherry blossoms, forsythia, and crocuses. I love walking through crispy autumn leaves, and I love bare branches silhouetted against the sky.

I love silly things: piggy banks, bad puns, vintage dishes, owls, stale popcorn, the small rubber monster that sits on my desk and scowls at visitors. I love red shoes, striped rainboots, mary janes, peeptoes, and patent leather pumps. I love the clearance rack. I love sesame chicken, pesto, chocolate milk, hummus on my turkey sandwiches, chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, and coconut cream pie.

I love my bookshelves, perfectly organized and packed tightly with books I have read, am reading, will read, won't read. I love bookstores, especially used book stores. I love the way old books smell, and I love picking up a favorite book, opening to my favorite passage, and starting the story there.

I love sarcasm, dark humor, cynicism, and irreverence. I love fresh flowers and sleeping with the windows open. I love making lists and checking them thrice. I love fashion magazines, design blogs, and newspaper advice columns. I love black-and-white photography and very old maps. I love driving on the interstate. I love singing in the car with the windows rolled down.

On days like this, sunny and 75, I love everything.

Inspired by Jamie who was inspired by She Likes Purple, who says: "I challenge you to make your own list. The only catch? You can’t include a single person you know on your list. No “I love the way my husband laughs” or “I love hearing my little girl call for me.” It’ll be tough, I know. But this particular little exercise is about stripping away everyone who defines you and figuring out what you (not his partner; not their mother/daughter/sister/friend) love."

Time for confession

2008-04-21T15:56:00.003-04:00

Singing along to:

The other day I posted a list of things that I have sworn I will never do. I didn't include "pay a lot of money for face cream" on that list, but up until fairly recently I probably would have. And as of two days ago, I would have had to cross it off the list. Paying $23 for some damn face lotion is something I told myself was silly (and no lie: it is silly), but then I realized that I really like Clinique's "Dramatically Different Moisturizing Gel." It doesn't smell weird. It doesn't make my face shiny. It doesn't give me zits. A little bit goes a long, long way. (Proof: For the past four months, I have been using a 1.7 oz. travel-size tube that I bought to try it out. There's still a little left.)

So, screw the list, I decided. I'm sick of buying cheap moisturizer that leaves my face greasy and gives me a headache. I buy cheap shampoo, cheap body wash, and cheap most other things. I will SPLURGE and I will LIKE IT.

So I did. And I do.

But one thing inevitably leads to another, and I have another sin to confess--one more thing I swore I wouldn't do, at least not in this decade:

I bought an "anti-aging" product.

I know! I'm twenty years old! My face is dewy and fresh and has never seen a wrinkle! Just a few months ago I was still bitching about acne! I must be delusional!

And yes. I probably am. The only thing I can say in my defense is that it's face sunscreen, which is IMPORTANT, and which I actually needed because the Clinique lotion's one flaw is that it does not have an SPF. It has been several years since I've stepped outside without SPF on my face and I don't intend to start now. To be honest, I think the only thing "anti-aging" about Neutrogena's "Age Shield Face Sunblock" (SPF 55!) is the fact that sun spots + too much tanning = leather skin, which does, in fact, make you look old before your time, and makes you more likely to break out in skin cancer to boot.

We all cross things off our lists. Sometimes we regret it. Other times we just spend a little extra time admiring ourselves in the mirror afterwards.

Movie Quotes Games

2008-04-13T13:37:00.012-04:00

Singing along to: Flogging Molly, Between A Man And A Woman

Stolen from The Caffeinated Librarian.

The Rules:
* Pick 15 of your favorite movies
* Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie (or quote them from memory because you are that bad ass)
* Post them on your blog for everyone to guess
* Fill in the film title once it’s been guessed

These are your rules:
* No Googling or using IMDb search functions (Don’t cheat!)
* Leave your answer(s) in the comments

The person who guesses the most movies gets... well, absolutely nothing, except for the satisfaction of knowing that A) you share my exceptionally fine taste in cinema and B) you have no life, possibly. And really, what prize could be better than knowing that?

The Quotes:

"Dear Buddha, please bring me a pony and a plastic rocket..." Serenity, guessed by James

"That's the beauty of argument: if you argue correctly, you're never wrong."Thank You For Smoking, guessed by James.

"Oooh, he's so handsome! Just like his reward posters..." Robin Hood (Disney version, of course), guessed by Grace.

"We can stay up late, swapping manly stories, and in the morning, I'm making waffles!" Shrek, guessed by Mary Alice.

"Nah, Tone, you're just jealous. You know perfectly well that any bar anywhere in America contains ten girls more beautiful and more likely to have sex with me than the whole of the United Kingdom." Love Actually, guessed by Emily

"I'm a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That's what kind of man I am. You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It's science." Anchorman, guessed by Emily

"Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony." Monty Python and the Holy Grail, guessed by James

"It's not everyday you find a girl who'll flash someone to get you out of detention." 10 Things I Hate About You, guessed by Christie

"...what do you do? You laugh. I'm not saying I don't cry but in between I laugh and I realize how silly it is to take anything too seriously. Plus, I look forward to a good cry. It feels pretty good." Garden State, guessed by Emily

"We must meet this threat with our courage, our valor, indeed with our very lives to ensure that human civilization, not insect, dominates this galaxy now and always!"

"Consider the lilies of the goddamn field." O Brother Where Art Thou?, guessed by Mary Liz

"Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles..." The Princess Bride, guessed by Mary Alice

"If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will..." Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back guessed by Mary Liz

"Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he uh... he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18... Ah, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? High school-those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that." Little Miss Sunshine, guessed by Mary Alice

"Now if you two don't mind, I'm going to bed before either of you can come up with another clever idea to get us all killed - or worse, expelled." Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone, guessed by James.

Update: All the titles have been guessed (you guys rock) except for #10, Starship Troopers, which, despite its many selling points, is not the most quotable movie ever made.

Things I have vowed never to do

2008-04-08T01:49:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Cat Stevens, Rubylove

The Mom haircut: I may cut my hair short, but so help me, NO MOM 'DO.

Pop my collar.

Lie about my age.

Lie about my weight.

Become one of those D.C. commuter women who wears bright-white chunky athletic shoes with a business suit. They are ubiquitous here, but I will not join their ranks.

Dump someone because their literary tastes are too "middlebrow," whatever the hell that means. I mean, for Pete's sake.

Become a vegetarian. Frankly, a life without steak is not a life I want to live.

Go blond.

I have a long-standing theory that everyone makes lists like this, only to spend their entire life checking the items off, one by one, but still, we try. Effort is important, at least when you're looking back at events and trying to maintain a semblance of dignity.

So, what's on YOUR list?

Links explosion

2008-04-04T15:10:00.002-04:00

Singing along to: Nick Drake, Hazey Jane I

Today's Hijinks Ensue speaks to my heart. To say that I am excited about the beginning of Battlestar Galactica, Season Four tonight would be an understatement. For one thing, it is a phenomenal show. No, really. Good acting, good writing, compelling storyline, the works. Watch it. For another, thing I almost never watch TV, so finding a show that I love is something different for me.

Threadbared is long dead, at least in Internet time, but reading through the archives and mocking terrible sewing projects from back in the day is still a fantastic way to pass the time. Personally, I like Barbie & Ken's Crocheted Paradise.

Reason #764859 why Helen Mirren is who I want to be when I'm 63: she apparently turned down free botox. (She also proves that women don't have to cut off all their hair upon reaching a "certain age.") You stay classy, Helen Mirren!

Speaking of girly things and British ladies, Caitlin Moran writes an ode to "big pants," which is worth reading simply because she coins the term "arse trinkets" to describe tiny undies. Yes, I've been sitting on this link since January, but good humor transcends time.

Science fiction author John C. Wright has issued a literary manifesto of the most noble type, namely a clarion call for the launch of the New Space Princess Movement. I whole-heartedly support this idea, mostly because I think it would be pretty damn cool to be a space princess.

WE INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST TO BRING YOU AN IMPORTANT NEWS BULLETIN:

I GOT THE INTERNSHIP AT SAAM!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now my hands are shaky and I can't type right, so I think I'm going to put away the computer and have a one-woman dance party and maybe drink some more coffee, because why the heck not?