now, tastes more like real life

Tumbling

2008-07-16T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm hanging out over here for a little while as a blogging experiment. I will do my best to put comments on it. For some reason it feels more welcoming -- and the dumb thing is, I think it's because the edit post screen in Blogger is BRIGHT EFFING WHITE and sort of makes me feel like I'm in a doctor's office. I just realized that. Memo to UI designers.

Let's get totally out of control tonight.

2008-07-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

Thank you, internet/T-shirt gods.

(via)

More JS.

2008-07-05T12:46:00.001-07:00

More. My dad told me to watch this. He's feeding the obsession. I should start a new blog. It could be called "Segelize It." Ha!

Jason Segel and NPH sing Les Mis.

2008-07-04T23:39:00.000-07:00

Enjoy. That is all.

Inanity

2008-07-02T14:50:00.000-07:00

I'm really spaced out today due to work and also I went off antidepressants and the withdrawal is kicking in (oh yes, I was on them, fun fact, internet), so I am really dizzy and having sort of strange out-of-body twitches. So I am in bullet point mode.

Yesterday at Walgreens I bought these new "Tic Tac Chill" things. They're larger versions of Tic Tacs and they have no sugar, and they are freaking DELICIOUS. I am so glad I bought them on a whim. Basically you put one in your mouth and get that awesome white-Tic-Tac flavor, and then after a little while it dissolves in a little frenzy of sweetness. To quote Dan, "it's like a little climax." With very little fear of being judged, I completely agree with him.
I am reading John Green's "An Abundance of Katherines," which I bought a while ago on a Lindsayism recommendation, and started reading since Casey introduced me to the awesomeness that is John Green's blog. While I am only two chapters in, I loved the dedication: "To my wife, Sarah Urist Green, anagrammatically: Her great Russian / Grin has treasure -- /A great risen rush. / She is a rut-ranger; / Anguish arrester; / Sister; haranguer; / Treasure-sharing, / Heart-reassuring / Signature Sharer / Easing rare hurts." It's accompanied by this Roth quote (from The Human Stain): "But the pleasure isn't owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you."
I was listening to a "This American Life" this morning (the Ten Commandments; I'm only partway through but I love Shalom Auslander to pieces) and it reminded me of the one that Peattie and I listened to on our drive to LA a few weeks ago. It's called "What I learned from Television" and the best part about it is this little segue bit when Ira Glass reveals that he loves the OC. Seriously. Ira Glass. The OC. It's almost as mind-blowing as seeing Sasha Frere-Jones stoned on Pot Psychology. (NSFW, obvi.) The best part about it is that a) Ira Glass admits that he cried at the OC finale and that b) to explain the character Taylor Townsend, he says she is "pretty much exactly like Paris on the Gilmore Girls". I bet he has a soul-absorbing crush on Jason Segel, too.

Ok. Enough for now.

Boys of My Youth.. part 1

2008-07-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

Last night I finished my book club book for this month, "The Boys of My Youth." I won't get too into it since I want to save that for after my book club, but I really enjoyed it. It wasn't what I expected and yet it was still fantastic. Very well written, shocking, sad, and yet comforting, too. And familiar despite the fact that in many, many, ways the author's life is very different from my own. But I loved this last bit (not entirely a plot spoiler, but it is sort of a spiritual-ending-of-the-book spoiler, so as a warning -- Sarah, I'm looking at you), when she and her best friend from middle school are listening to a voicemail from a new man in her life:

"Hi, Jo Ann, this is X," he says and then leaves a long, rambling, totally coherent message and hangs up. Oh man. He's shimmering in my living room like a genie released from a bottle. I don't know whether to faint or kill myself. Elizabeth laughs unbecomingly. I put both hands around my own neck. We do our silent screaming routine. We are no longer bored.

I feel pretty good about the women in my life these days, and I think it's in small part to moments like that one. I guess maybe all of us feel that way, at least sometimes, but maybe it's all the time, and maybe it never goes away, and I'll feel that way when I'm 50 as much as I do now. I think that is comforting... it's sort of scary, but comforting, just because I'm not alone.

More on this later.

This is what I mean.

2008-06-30T14:58:00.000-07:00

Sarah: have you checked bwe today?

Sent at 2:56 PM on Monday

me: no

Sarah: omg

me: ?

i am lookign at it now

Sarah: animals

pressed

against

glass

Memo to David Plouffe & Barack Obama

2008-06-30T14:52:00.000-07:00

Dude. I love you. I have donated. A lot, actually, considering my economic situation at the moment (somehow spent away my yearly bonus, my stimulus check and my tax refund within the span of like two months). I believe in the whole grass-rootsiness of your campaign, even to the point where I've forgiven you for backing out of public financing despite your embrace of it in principle. I'm finding it hard to forgive you for never mailing me my T-shirt that I bought back in January, even though at the time I wrote it off as just another $40 worth of a donation... or for having a really crappy customer service phone line. I am also pretty skeptical that you will ever mail me my "limited edition" DVD of your "More Perfect Union" speech, even though I donated before your "deadline" (read: end of the month, for reporting purposes, obvi) for that and before my friend Peattie did, and he got his DVD two weeks ago. Plus, I'm pretty pissed that you decided that the death penalty is ok, even if you only think it's ok in extreme cases, and I'm also pissed that you backed out of the fight on the FISA bill. So now I'm especially pissed that you keep sending me, every day, e-mails urging me to donate now! in order to get another "limited edition" T-shirt. So. Stop. Thank you.

We read blogs.

2008-06-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

Sarah wrote her own post about Friday night here. It's much more coherent (and, arguably, more honest) than mine was, due in part to her lack of a blogger hiatus and also to the fact that I mostly just wanted to talk about Jason Segel.

It is highly entertaining, and awesome, that I have a friend here in the city who is just as plugged in to ridiculous interwebby incestuousness as I am. Someday we'll break through.

Word Overload

2008-06-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

Well I watched a lot of TV this weekend. It was all actually a result of what happen Friday night, which was essentially accidental drunkenness. Sarah and I went to Zeitgeist right after work on Friday, split a pitcher, and then rolled up to Zoe's house where she cooked us a fabulous meal -- Parma ham and melon, caprese, and polenta cakes with a sort of veggie-mess-of-delicious-onion-and-mushroom-and-garlic-saute on top. A brief dance party at her place (where Sarah and I spent most of our time trying to perfect the Peattie dance) led to a trek to our favorite ground zero of non-divey dive bars, the Lone Palm, which is conveniently yet occasionally unfortunately located exactly halfway between Zoe's house and my own. We adjourned to my place for drunk munchies (although, since I have been watching what I eat, the available snacks consisted of a salami stolen from Dan, rice cakes, Laughing Cow cheese, and graham crackers. Seriously) and Arrested Development and all fell asleep on the futon. Morning started with each of us wondering exactly how we had ended up in such a state, and then Zoe and Ace and I went to Bar Tartine for brunch. Ace and I promptly returned home and back to the futon, where we watched a full disc of Undeclared and then adjourned for naps -- and then after that we started the next disc, which I finished on my own. At 9pm I faced the world briefly, renting the third disc and purchasing a very strange assortment of food at the bodega -- a Cup-O-Noodle, pickles, chocolate milk, and sour apple rings. I should clarify that I have not eaten Cup-O-Noodle since college, and damn, was it salty and delicious. I also ate it with a salad! Go me. Anyway, I finished Undeclared, which was only alright, but had enough cute moments to carry me through, and also led me to develop a weird crush on Seth Rogen with glasses. Yeah, I know. It's ok though, since Jason Segel continues to be number one. There is one episode where Lizzie, the main girl in the show, has sex with Adam Sandler, and is all worried to tell her boyfriend Eric (hrm, Jason Segel) about it. When she does, he's super thrilled for her, and my comment to Ace was that Adam Sandler was on her "list" -- i.e. the list of five celebrities that you are allowed to sleep with (given the chance) even if you are in a relationship. This may be some freakish invention of my generation but I know a lot of people who have lists. I am stating now that Jason Segel is on my list, although I don't know if I can really have a list if I'm not dating anyone, but perhaps it's more of a disclaimer: "Be prepared to share second-degree cooties with someone who wrote himself a movie role where he is fully, frontally nude, and also is obsessed with muppets." Um, ok, stopping now given the utter improbability of all of this.

Anyway, as it happens the Adam Sandler appearance in "Undeclared" inspired me to rent and watch "50 First Dates," which is actually very cute although totally ridiculous and unfortunately still riddled with awful Adam Sandler movie gags (you know, Rob Schneider's entire being, a walrus puke joke in the first ten minutes, an ambiguously female/male person making sexual comments). I subjected Ace to this movie just two days after subjecting her to "Definitely, Maybe," which is cuter and has less ick factor, and I have a girl crush on Isla Fisher. Then! We watched an episode of "How I Met Your Mother" on one of those illegal movie and TV episode aggregator websites.

(Perhaps you may be detecting a trend, which is that I've watched a LOT of TV lately.)

I'll wrap this up now since I'm sure it's boring, but the last thing I wanted to say is that yesterday morning Ace and I (Ace was sick this weekend, and I was first hungover and then lazy, so we were partners in laze crime) watched "The Bourne Ultimatum." I'd seen the first two movies and while I liked the first one a lot, the second one was kind of a blur to me and I didn't remember it at all. The third movie, however, was really good. Like, really good. I know they always say it's non-stop action, blah blah, but it really is, and it's super tense and only slightly hard to follow. Plus, Joan Allen kind of kicks ass, and this movie brings Bourne and Nicky (Julia Stiles) closer to getting it on, which I have been rooting for all along since I love Julia Stiles. In fact, for that reason alone I hope they make a fourth movie.

Related anecdote: When I was a kid, I remember my mom giving me "Sweet Thursday" to read and telling me that I would like it because there's "a little bit of romance in it." It was my introduction to Steinbeck -- I read that before "Cannery Row" -- and I love that my mom pulled that sneaky middle-school teacher trick to get me to read real literature instead of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book for the twentieth time. When you're a kid, you really don't want your parents to use "there's romance in it" as a persuasive tactic, because, ew, they are your parents, and for some reason we're all raised to pretend that we aren't interested in sex when we're little, but the truth is we're totally fascinated by it. And the funny thing is, I still think I'm like that with books and movies, hence half the tension in "Bourne Ultimatum" for me stemming from this chase scene where Nicky and Bourne are separated and being pursued by an assassin, and I was terrified that the killer would get to Nicky before Bourne could, and then they could never get it on. Seriously, I said this aloud. I am such a damn girl.

Alright. Enough for now. I miss blogging. Sorry for the logorrhea.

I hope and I pray for Hester to get just one more A

2008-06-25T16:46:00.000-07:00

I spent half of last week trying to finish "The Music Man" on DVD -- yes, I own it on DVD -- and as a result I had the Music Man on the brain. I had a serious moment where I serenaded Ace with "Sadder but Wiser" and realized how totally effing bizarre that song is. Sort of scandalous or maybe sexist except that the whole movie is a satire, at least parts of it are, and so I take all that in stride. I happen to think that it's one of the best musicals ever, although I admit I'm not a huge fan of musicals in general, but apparently it won the Tony over "West Side Story" back in the day. It's highly cheesy but I love it to pieces, I suspect because it feels somehow familial. My grandparents taped it off of channel 13 when I was a kid (channel 13 became, and maybe was at the time, UPN, imagine that), and one of the kids in the movie (the little blond boy who dances and pushes the library cart around) apparently lived down the street from my parents. Plus, my grandpa was from Iowa, so somehow I imagined that this gave me some kind of personal stake in the movie. Either way, I had a grand old time watching it the other day and was just struck, not surprisingly, with the urge to watch "Sadder but Wiser" again on YouTube, an urge primarily stemming from my wondering whether it was actually on YouTube, which it is, and which in retrospect is not surprising. Enjoy.

This made me miss being an English major.

2008-06-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

“Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” was the formula of the movement that Pound invented, in 1912: Imagism. In the Imagist model, the writer is a sculptor. Technique consists of chipping away everything superfluous in order to reveal the essential form within. “It took you ninety-seven words to do it,” Pound is reported to have remarked to a young literary aspirant who had handed him a new poem. “I find it could have been managed in fifty-six.” He claimed that his best-known short poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” took a year and a half to write, and that he had cut it down from thirty lines:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The form “made new” here is, of course, the haiku: two images juxtaposed to evoke a sensation—in this case, according to Pound, the sensation of beauty. It’s important to recognize, though, that the subject of the poem is not “these faces”; the subject is “the apparition.” (Otherwise, the first three words would be superfluous, subject to the Imagist razor.) The faces are not what matters. What matters is the impression they make in the mind of a poet. That is where the work of association takes place. This is what poets do: they connect an everyday x with an unexpected y.

(from The New Yorker, June 9. Also, further proof that you should always read all of The New Yorker, even if you think an article will bore you, as I thought with Pound because, come on, Pound.)

On freckles in literature

2008-06-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

Forgive me this indulgence as a freckled person, but I'm re-reading "Middlesex" now and I forgot how damn good the whole part with the Obscure Object is, partly (for me) because of this description of the first time Callie sees her, which is the best description I think I've read of a freckled person. It doesn't make me feel vain and it's not really flattering even, and considering the entire drama of Callie's relationship with the Obscure Object I really don't know if I should be so in love with this passage, but dammit if Eugenides isn't a really captivating writer for me sometime, perhaps especially as he describes people of my kind:

Part of my interest was scientific, zoological. I'd never seen a creature with so many freckles before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies of freckles hurtling and drifting to every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe. There were clusters of freckles on her forearms and wrists, an entire Milky Way spreading across her forehead, even a few sputtering quasars flung into the wormholes of her ears.

Since we're in English class, let me quote a poem. Gerard Manley Hopkin's "Pied Beauty," which begins, "Glory be to God for dappled things." When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheaded girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing in her color combination, the ginger snaps floating int he milk-white skin, the gold highlights int he strawberry hair. It was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.

This is ultimate vanity, actually, but not the kind that stems from me thinking that the Obscure Object and I have something in common here. It's the kind where I sit around and feel vaguely envious of a fictional creature for having tons of freckles but not so many that they blend together the way mine do. Stopping now, and focusing on how I just really like this part and, in fact, have felt the entire last third of this book lift itself from "it's alright" to "it's captivating." I started re-reading this because my book club was reading it, and the first time I read it I was only mildly appreciative. I thought maybe on second read it would be different, and the first third of the book is indeed fantastic. It slows a bit in the middle, I think, but at least so far the end is defying my memory of the first time around. I'll report back later when I'm finished.

Project Jigsandioffonado

2008-06-16T10:08:00.001-07:00

I'm running around a bit this morning but last weekend deserves a mention. Peattie and I drove down to my parents' house in Whittier Friday night for a whirlwind weekend at home for me. Saturday, we went to (the new) Father's Office in LA with Casey and her boyfriend Bob, where we ate the best burgers ever and I had an Alesmith ESB and a Rogue Nut Brown. Then after a brief time lounging around my house, we drove with my parents down to San Diego to visit the new Toronado that opened down there a few weeks ago. There we had even more awesome beer and a lot of great conversation, including a debate about whether to turn my room at home into a library and proof that your parents can always surprise you. Peattie noted that we got some great quote candidates for "Best Quotes of 200gr8". I'll write this for JJ's benefit and say that I had a Port Brewing "Ruby Black" porter, part of a Carnegie 2006 porter (my dad's favorite beer), a Port "Hop 15," and then a Russian River Damnation. Peattie had a lot more than that, but three and a half beers was plenty for me and we all fell asleep in the car except for my mom, who stoically drove the entire way back from SD. Sunday was a nice brunch of baked apples and Belgian waffles, and a long slog through the Sunday crossword puzzle, before it was off north again for a long, but beautifully sunsetted, drive. For a harrowing hour or so, we listened to Game 5 of the Lakers-Celtics, which (thankfully) ended well for me. The radio station we found (after a long search and Peattie saying "fuck baseball" no less than three times, to my actual shock) was from Fresno, so when we cut over to the 152 heading west, it started to get verrrry fuzzy and we almost didn't get to hear the last two minutes of the game. That panic only contributed, as you can imagine, to the panic related to the Lakers' slim four-point lead.

So, as usual, a nice trip home reminded me of several things I want or need in my life. (We were talking at one point about our companies' mission statements and I referred to Google's "Ten Things Google Knows to be True." It's kind of like that.) I forget how much I love warm weather. It was hot as hell Sunday and on the drive back, but completely lovely. I remembered how good it feels to spend Sunday morning lounging around a sunny house, doing a crossword puzzle and reading (if only our living room got some sunshine). And as lame as it seems, doing crosswords with people is so much better than doing them alone. A good plain cup of coffee can make your morning.

I think it's almost time for a Summer Manifesto.

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

2008-06-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

Oh yes. While I'm MIA blogwise, please feel free to check out my shared items. All my non-work related thoughts at work have gone into these, which are the most I can do extracurricularly this week but also the least I can do to maintain my sanity. I think you can see some of the state of my brain by the one-word comments I've sunk to.

Hello for now.

2008-06-12T15:27:00.001-07:00

Oh man, what a week. I don't know when the next time is I'll manage to catch a breath. I hate being a shitty blogger, especially so soon after I promised to start a new blog, but with work the way it is this week, and, frankly, with my mind the way it is this week, I just can't focus enough to write much. Work has suddenly gotten a little frantic, partly due to a couple of days offsite and partly due to my boss being on vacation and partly due to God knows what usual magic goes into the insanity of this place. I've forgotten a couple of things lately which I really hate doing. Outside of work I've been busy as usual, although moderately so. I made a vow to myself and my nutritionist to stop drinking on weeknights (exception: very special occasions, so I'm really aiming for not drinking 3 nights a week, which sounds like not very hard except that I'm used to having at least one beer or something nearly every day, embarrassingly), so that's toned down the outside-of-work shenanigans (in the two days since I made said vow). That said, I've been slightly busier of late thanks to the NBA finals which I'm actually following, in a complete bandwagon leap to Lakers fandom. (Disclaimer: Having grown up in LA, and with a Lakers fan father, I think my leap is justified.) I've actually watched every game so far.

This is more of a check-in and a promise to write more when things have calmed down -- I am driving down to LA and San Diego this weekend with Peattie, but I have planted "DO NOT PLAN" nights on my calendar next week for some down time, so the calm is in sight, albeit not soon enough -- and also just a complete random plug for my participation in the San Francisco crafty scene. Elizabeth and I went to the Lotta Jansdotter printing party at the Craft Gym last Saturday, and while we were printing our linen swatches, we got our photo snapped, apparently by an Apartment Therapy blogger. So here we are on their site. (She is the one with the little pink tank peeking out from underneath a brown shirt.)

The plan for calmness also includes plans for more crafting.

A sample conversation (from my work chat!)

2008-06-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

Kim's new status message - going just a little bit crazy 1:09 PM

me: i am going a lot crazy

i think maybe i should have all hormones removed surgically from my body. do you think there is some kind of medical procedure for that??

After I sent that message I had this moment where I was worried suddenly I had IM'd the wrong person. Thank God it was Kim, one of at least a dozen people at whom I spew dramatic ridiculousness every day.

Out of sight, Offsite

2008-06-05T20:04:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed my blog lacks post this week. I have an "offsite" for work today (well, I had one today) and tomorrow, so I am not glued to my computer as usual. That, and tomorrow night I'm helping host a Belizean dinner party, and tonight I am going to watch (on TiVo) the Lakers versus the Celtics, and the rest of this week I've been pretty insanely busy, as usual. Not to mention, I've even been busy at work thanks to the shortened work week. Shocking, I know. So this is merely an apology for the lack of entertaining and self-referential posts. It's rather disappointing that I've been so busy during the week that Obama finally won the nomination, since I have a lot of thoughts on the matter and no time to write about them. So consider this a promise to be back in full force later on, next week or this weekend, once I've had a chance to catch my breath (and I'm not counting the workshop on meditation I had in my conference today).

Demographics

2008-06-03T18:04:00.000-07:00

Awesome graphic on the New York Times front page right now of how different demographic groups in different states voted for Clinton or Obama. Go! Now!

The mundanity of your own life...

2008-06-03T17:32:00.001-07:00

I was particularly struck by this quote from this video about a couple (journalists) who spent a day less than 15 feet away:

"The hardest part, I think, is the recognition of the mundanity of your own life. It's all very well to have a mundane life when you're just living it yourself. You know, the fact that you wanna go get up and Xerox something the fact that you, you know, wanna go grab another cup of coffee. And that's fine when you're doing it in your own mind, but when someone else is observing you doing it, you realize, what a waste."

It reminded me of Friday, when Pablo hung out with me while I worked from home. Even when I wasn't explicitly working, he had to sit there and watch me check e-mail, flip back and forth between chat windows, browse my Google Reader, buy a concert ticket online, etc. It made me feel foolish, for lack of a better word. I felt silly when he had to wait a bit longer for me to put sugar in my coffee. All these things aren't actually big deals, but they are sort of strange little mundane parts of everyday life that you don't think about unless someone else is around, reminding you.

I couldn't help but wonder...

2008-06-02T14:26:00.000-07:00

Well, I know you were waiting for it... the inevitable "I am a girl, I have a blog, therefore I have an opinion on the SATC movie" moment. I would resist, except I can't. Obviously GIANT SPOILER ALERT, in case you care.

I had the option to see the movie on Friday night, but instead chose to go with a bunch of my girlfriends (like every other woman in the country) on Saturday. After a pretty quick, though delicious, brunch of huevos rancheros at Laurel's house, Laurel and I rushed to the Century Cinemas to meet six other ladies for the insanity. We walked in and beelined to the only available set of 8 seats in the theatre that weren't in the very front row -- the 8 seats on the side in the second row. Yeah, not only did I see this movie, but I saw it REALLY CLOSE UP (things I observed: Steve has some kind of mole on his ass, Carrie had a stain on her dress in the scene where she told Samantha she was engaged, and Big has gray chest hair). I was armed with a Screwdriver and three cans of Sofia champagne. I knew that the movie was two and a half hours long and I was not sure I could take it.

Before I get into my actual criticism of the movie, let me just comment on one irrelevant thing. PREVIEW FOR SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS SEQUEL! It looks like they decided to skip books 2 and 3 and go straight for book 4, probably because America Ferrara or Blake Lively decided that they could/would only commit to one sequel given their new TV fame. Nevertheless, I am pretty damn jazzed.

Anyway, so then the movie itself. Aside from the gross product placement and totally gratuitous, unnecessary scenes (fashion week? Christie's auction?).... aside from the way that things seemed pretty damn abrupt most of the time, in order to cram into a movie the kind of things that normally would happen in a season... Did it strike anyone else as totally unfeminist? Or, if not unfeminist, then, didn't it just seem to you that it was ridiculous that after all that, Carrie still took Big back? That all the girls insisted that Miranda was wrong to leave Steve? I admitted yesterday to my friends that, had the latter event happened in a season, I could have accepted it. I've always loved Steve, and I can accept that one transgression need not be the end of one's marriage. But in the movie, Carrie and Charlotte couldn't seem to blame Steve for cheating, and it almost seemed like you could read into it that Miranda was to blame, for not recognizing the problem in her sex life, for loving her job to the point of distraction/destruction of her relationship. Then, to even act as though Miranda's angry outburst at the rehearsal dinner was remotely responsible for Big's entirely inexcusable freakout! Can we talk about blaming the victims here? Really?

I don't quite share Dodai's rage over Samantha in this movie. I felt as though she was the only person who really took charge. She managed Carrie's broken marriage/wedding. She held them together when it seemed like they would all fall apart. Her compassion was high, and it's irrational to hate her for breaking things off with Smith because she "loves herself more" -- the truth is that he had become the center of her life, and not just her personal life but her job, too, and who wants that? I will say again that the relative shortness of the movie (to an entire season of episodes) probably gave this plot short shrift as well. How did Samantha ever let Smith become the center, plastered photos of him all over her wall? And did she, like Steve, have to leave her relationship because Smith, like Miranda, was devoted to his job (I'm making a comparison for rhetorical purposes, not necessarily agreeing with this argument). Was Smith actually distant? Was he actually in any way aware that he was making her feel dependent on him when he bought her the brooch, and if he wasn't, does it matter?

Charlotte was the only one whose life was drama free in this movie. Ace, my roommate, wondered if that was some kind of message -- you will only be happy once you've settled down, and not just settled down, but settled -- for a man who is less attractive, but rich and giving and blah blah? I'm not entirely sure about that, but it's still worth wondering.

Another beef I had with the movie was the moment when Samantha has gained weight and the girls are absolutely horrified to see her little baby pooch. Seriously? Please kill me now. I believe it was that moment when I turned to Laurel and said "I can't believe that millions of women, including us, are paying for this." It's like being charged for the loss of your dignity.

I hate to hate on things I used to like, but I reserve the right to have a split opinion. In some ways, I was satisfied with the movie, mostly just because it had some funny moments, and it was kind of fun to see the ladies a little further on in their lives. I kind of liked to see Carrie confronted with the fact that she was forty, seeing Brady and Lily (Charlotte's adopted daughter) grown up, seeing all of the women living at least a slightly different lifestyle than they did in the show. But in other ways I felt like it was shoddily made, far, far too capitalistic, and frankly it did not give me, as an American woman, the endings or lessons (or whatever you want to call them) that I feel like I deserve. These women are, and always have been, not exactly archetypes so much as a representation of the split personalities that so many of us have in us. There is a bit of each of the women in each of us, at least there is in me (although I don't want to sell myself short by saying that that is all I am, shudder). How could the producers, the writers, whoever, let them down like that and let them lose themselves, when the entire goodness of the old show was the idea that above all it was yourself and your friends to whom you should be true?

One final note. I read Dodai's rant about the movie with interest. It has always been obvious to me that the SATC girls are incredibly flawed. Materialistic, obviously. Self-absorbed? Obviously. Incredibly privileged and whitewashed? Yes. Yes. Yes. (The moment where Charlotte said she wouldn't eat anything because she was in Mexico was perfectly in character and I didn't take offense because of course Charlotte would say shit like that. Miranda's "Look! A white guy with a baby" I was more iffy about, just because I'd hope Miranda would be more wise than that, but it's not hard for me to accept that she isn't. Louise from St. Louis was really hard for me to take, since she was all of a sudden the only non-white -- or adopted, sweet, dressed in pink Asian four year old -- character in the movie and represented some terrible kind of sweet, down-home innocence that I couldn't help [ACK] but take in a bad way. Oh, those clueless black folks from the middle of the country.) It's one of those cases where I was not at all disillusioned by those aspects of their characters, because they have been there all along. Instead, the question is: do the writers/producers know that about the characters, and more importantly, do the millions of women paying to see this shit in the theatres know that? And do the masses that watched this movie this weekend realize that in many ways, their heroes in Blahniks let them down and are leading them on the wrong path? Are those viewers going to fight back, or continue to be misled? I hate to start judging media (it reeks of Tipper Gore to me), or suggesting that producers have some kind of moral right to tell a properly empowering story, but I am also pretty damn convinced that this stuff is poisonous to women.

Grr. All I know is, I yelled a lot at the screen on Saturday. So much so that I got shushed. I don't really regret it, either. Now I'm just trying to forget all this hoopla and find something else to think about.

I like that my friends support me for my typos and neologisms.

2008-06-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

10:49 AM Zoe: favorite saturday moment=you coining the term "neuroticism"

10:52 AM i really want to go to more movies, buy slurpees, and dump a half a bottle of vodka into them

=best idea ever

10:55 AM me: hahahaha

let's do it. whats the next ridiculous moies we want to see

moies = movies

thats about as real of a word as neuroticisms

10:58 AM Zoe: moies about neuroticism

obvi

Paella Party

2008-06-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

"We are so a Stuff White People Like post right now."

I don't know if I'd put it that way (even though I did). What we were was more of a New York Times Style article that Stuff White People Like would have posted about. Yesterday, after a day in the sun at the park (so what else is new), a group of my friends and I made paella for dinner. I know this all sounds really awfully pretentious, and by "this all" I mean arguing for your inclusion in a Times trend piece, but seriously. Let me paint the picture, since none of us remembered our cameras.

Justin just recently moved into a new place, this goofily-floorplanned place with a relatively small, though airy, kitchen, blessed with an awesomely retro stove and a dishwasher, thankfully. It's tucked in between a narrow hallway and a big, high-ceilinged "breakfast nook" type sun room with giant windows that yesterday were letting in golden light and cold breezes. There's plenty of room to cook while others stand around with wine glasses and listen to music, which is what we did. Hot Chip and Spanish wine, here we come.

Paella itself, it turns out, is really easy to cook. Wine glasses in hand, we stirred up two giant skillets, loaded with sausage, lamb, mussels, shrimp and baby scallops. While we were waiting for the rice to simmer, Dan suggested we ad-lib the game of Apples to Apples. He started with the adjective "gregarious," which I won with "bees," and then I threw out "sour," which got me some choice political nouns, and then Ace moved to "vestigial," which I unfortunately did not win with "pennies." (Peattie won with "liver.")

The conversation was also peppered, pun slightly intended, with Ace's question of the weekend: if you had to gender salt and pepper, which would be which? I don't want to taint your answer, so I won't give my opinion, but I will admit that salt is a frontrunner for female. (I pointed out that women like salt more than men, something evidenced by me, Laurel, and the giant pickle I'd eaten as a hangover-appetizer for dinner, which had more than 120% of my daily recommended sodium.) Somewhere in the middle of the cooking time, there was also a brief, though intensely yuppie, conversation about the difference between paella, jambalaya, and bouillabaisse (and just thinking about this is making me hungry.)

That moment was the moment when Pablo, who was visiting this weekend from Edinburgh, and who had already expounded on Dan's and my yuppie lifestyles (which we argue is much more bobo than yuppie, as evidenced by, among other things, the shitty state of our tiny old apartment), looked meaningfully at me across the room and I yelled out "Yuppie!" for him. Then I said we belonged in a Times style piece. Which we do. I love my friends. We are bohemian and bourgeois, techy and fuzzy, political, active, outdoorsy, cultured, mainstream, indie, all that. And nights like yesterday sort of epitomize that. So maybe we don't belong in a Times trend piece so much, we just belong in our lives. And the glory of documentation lies in the recognition and savoring and saving (and remembering) of the variety and, er, spice (saffron?) of life.

Next up: Dirty Apron Kitchen Club does summer picnic. I can't wait to learn how to make me some fried chicken.

M&Ms

2008-05-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

I may be the only person on the planet who considers M&Ms a friendly food for those suffering from orthodontic work. The day after my wisdom teeth were removed, I went to a barbecue birthday party and ate ice cream, then sucked on M&Ms for the rest of my meal. Today, I gave up and started doing the same. It kind of works, because part of the trouble of these damn braces is that the pain is just distractingly bad, and eating mitigates it somehow, therefore making me feel less like a chipmunky loser and leaving me more able to concentrate. So a continual M&M in the mouth helps with this problem. Plus, the braces completely prevent me from rushing through the (miniature) bag, and that's probably better for all involved.

After my teeth stop hating me, I'm going to absolutely devour a salad and some apple slices. And a piece of bread. And a Giordano Brother's sandwich (last night we were going to go there before the Jamie Lidell show, but went to Kennedy's instead, thank God, because I can actually eat paneer and rice).

Done dreaming of food now. You guys must think I've entirely lost it.

Parisian Flashback

2008-05-29T12:29:00.001-07:00

This morning Dan drew my attention to a post from the Frugal Traveler about a week living in an apartment in Paris, and compared it to our Thanksgiving weekend there in 2003. It's fitting that today I would indulge in such nostalgia because Pablo, our long-lost-to-kilts-and-PhDdom friend, is descending upon our household this evening for another brief weekend. So without further ado, I present a few shots from Paris, back in the day. (Confession: The night these photos were taken, the four of us -- Dan's now ex girlfriend was there too -- bought four bottles of wine. Devon decided she didn't want any. So we took it upon ourselves to finish the rest. I think I could probably hack a bottle-plus these days, but back then I most definitely could not, and the night did not exactly end well for me. However, I have survived to post the photos on the Internet.)

The three of us. Check out my sweet PJ pants.

Possibly one of the most ridiculous photos of these two ever taken.

Shadowy me and Dan.

All IKEA, all the time!

The Road

2008-05-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

I'm actually really excited for the film of "The Road," even though I loved the book and have no idea how it will work in movie form. The Times did a really interesting bit about the filming here.

(via)

Condi

2008-05-28T16:51:00.000-07:00

I saw Condoleezza Rice and David Miliband speak at Google last week. It wasn't nearly as rage-inducing as I expected, even though I'm still baffled by Rice's obvious intelligence yet complicity etc. with the Bush administration. She is terrible at delivering the party line, but sticks to it stubbornly, as you'd expect.

I found David Miliband kind of attractive. Is that wrong? He was in any case much more interesting than she was.

Also, you can see the back of my head in the video. I'm sort of in the second row in the shots where you can see 3-ish rows, towards the right, in a white shirt with shortish brown-red hair.

Beards

2008-05-28T16:45:00.000-07:00

I've totally written about this before but I continue to love men with beards. Saw this dude at the A's/Red Sox game on Sunday (he was also wearing a kind of funny hat) and really, I cannot explain my extreme attraction. Anyway, so in a related note I really appreciate this dude who is trying to grow "all types of beards." I feel like he is not playing entirely by the rules because sometimes he grows a full one and then shaves off bits to make a moustache, instead of growing just the moustache. But that is because I am a weird advocate for facial hair (best realization of the weekend, of which there were many: Friday night, while at dinner with my friend and his parents, I saw fit to text my friend Justin and tell him "BTW, I love your moustache." I have no idea why, and I was not drunk either, so there's no excuse for my lack of remembering the reason for this). Anyway this is pretty amusing, mostly because you can see how facial hair totally changes the look of someone's face! Like, look at the soul patch (how nerdy, ew) compared to the Van Dyke (like, hello, ew, looks like a criminal) compared to the Zappa (charmingly nerdy in a way I can't explain) compared to the everything. It's worth a look.

Your latest braces update

2008-05-28T16:16:00.000-07:00

Someone just pep-talked me into eating a grape. And cottage cheese may be my new favorite food. It's like cheese curds! Only non-fat and sort of foamy, which is, let's be frank, the creepiest part.

This is what we are up against.

2008-05-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

(via)

Graffiti + Jesse's Girl = Amazing

2008-05-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Yes.

Postcard from the Baby Daddy?

2008-05-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

This particular Postcardfromyomomma is pretty fascinating. You have to read the comments. Aren't you on the edge of your seat?

Things I have eaten today

2008-05-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

-Oatmeal
-Smoothie
-Cottage cheese with honey in it
-Two pieces of sushi. This part was very difficult, but it was those ones with the soft wrappy thing around plain rice, so I could just kinda choke it down. I was desperate for something solid.

When you are spending a day experimenting with soft foods, you end up Googling things like "cottage cheese" just to come up with a way to make it less disgusting. My friend Laurel eats it with yellow mustard and let me tell you, I would have killed for yellow mustard around 11:30am. Then I read the entirety of this post and got hungry for more cottage cheese with all these fixings. It's amazing what you want to eat at times like these.

Currently I am just dreaming of a milkshake. There really is nothing else I can imagine not hurting right now.

Oh, and by the way, this is all much, much, much worse than the time I got my wisdom teeth out.

Adventures in Bracey Eating

2008-05-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

(That was a poor attempt at making an "Adventures in Baby-Sitting"-like title.)

Last night my friend Kevin and I went out to dinner. At first we were going to go to Lolo, this newish place that is supposed to be pretty cool. Then I found the menu online, and everything was encrusted in nuts or panko or something ridiculously not good for my mouth at the moment. So instead we went for Weird Fish, because I figured fish is kind of easy to eat. What was awesome about it was that Kevin was all for the constraint of eating only newly-braced-person-friendly food. So we ordered clam chowder, tortilla soup, blackened catfish with sauteed spinach and pureed yams, and fish cakes. It was pretty hilarious. Kevin ate the tortillas from the soup and we mashed the oyster crackers deep into the chowder to make them soggy. The coleslaw, unfortunately, was all him. But the peanut butter cream pie...

Today, of course, I'm in major pain as these stupid things have rubbed my mouth raw. And it's harder to chew. I am on to smoothies and oatmeal for breakfast. Sigh.

A little late for the holiday weekend, but...

2008-05-27T16:45:00.000-07:00

Brace Face

2008-05-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

I am now officially starting my orthodontic journey. this morning I got braces put on my (bottom) teeth. Before you ask what color I got, I will explain that they are apparently a new kind of braces... they are called self-ligating brackets, and they are like little snappy things that are glued to your teeth and then clip down over the wire, instead of having bright bandy things on each tooth. They look absolutely terrible and I totally am glad that I never mocked anyone in my youth for being a metal mouth, because if I had not I would be really, really afraid of karma's bitchiness. At any rate, I am now making strange faces all day because these things feel so damn weird, and I can't believe that at the age of 24 my fate for the next year and a half (plus or minus 6 months) is to floss my teeth with one of those weird fisheye threaders and refrain from eating popcorn and uncut apples. Really, I knew that I was a late bloomer in many ways, but do I have to get the adolescent dental experience as well?

So it doesn't hurt right now, I just look and feel like some kind of freak. But that is the report. And don't ask for pictures. I'm not ready for that yet.

Read the full description.

2008-05-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

WTF?

no subject

2008-05-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

Bacon IN a mimosa. it just happened.

A life of leisure

2008-05-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a date. I even slept over.

Don't get excited. It was a "date" with my friend Zoe, and it consisted of the two of us sitting on her floor drinking kir and eating brie, and concluded with me getting so tired (not, I should clarify, drunk) that I ended up deciding that the four blocks' walk back to my house was far too far, so I stayed there. I miss sleepovers of the girl sort. I woke up this morning and, since my boss had essentially given me carte blanche to work from home today anyway, sent a quick e-mail and then hopped off to Happy Donuts for breakfast with Zoe and her two visiting friends from Carleton (who arrived fresh off the super shuttle last night around midnight). After a decadent breakfast of crullers and white-frosted cakes, not to mention coffee (I'm back on that bandwagon, too) and milk, I walked home in the sun from Noe Valley.

Let me tell you, there is nothing so nice as a leisurely weekday morning in San Francisco in the spring. I never really get to enjoy days like this -- even now, I'm working in my house, which has the strange kind of blue-tinted lighting that masks the orangey-ness of the daylight -- but the glimpses I get always surprise me. There are so many people out and about! There was a line at Ritual out the door, and crowds clustering to eat breakfast at Boogaloo's -- on a Friday! It's so social and inspiring and all I could think about was how much I want to work here in the city, preferably in some absurdly flexible job that allows me to wander around city streets during the daytime. Also, I want to go thrift shopping. I have certain wants.

I also thought of what I personally think is a great idea for a blog. I'm going to think about it a bit more and let you know if and when I start it. It's not a money maker, just an intellectual exercise, and something I think would be really good for me to focus on. (And, ok, dream of working in coffee shops in the sunshine.)

Take me out to the ball game

2008-05-22T12:57:00.001-07:00

Ok, so it is probably no secret that I am obsessed with me and my little sister as children. It's sort of weird, but I love pictures of us. I don't know if it's some strange existential angst or nostalgia or what, but whatever, I've come to terms with my strange self-love, and so should you. Anyway, so my dad has been on this binge of scanning all our family photos to digital copies, and he's also been turning our old family videos to DVDs. He sent me this digital file today. Please watch and enjoy the adorableness.

Things that make me want to tear my hair out (a list of one)

2008-05-22T12:32:00.000-07:00

This article:

...another Obama supporter, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, calling Obama the first black politician to "come to the American people not as a victim but rather as a leader." You hear this kind of talk all the time. Never mind the dignified glories of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Colin Powell, Kurt Schmoke, and others. We have arrived at the crux of the matter. So much of the educated white people's love for Barack depends on educated white people's complete ignorance of and distance from the rest of us. [...]

Which brings me to South Carolina, where I was born and raised. I was there before and during the primary. Recall the moment. Obama was gaining on Clinton--but had also just lost New Hampshire and Nevada. A loss in South Carolina, and he would have been done for.

It's worth remembering that the majority of blacks still think O.J. Simpson is innocent. And, in times like these, when a black man is out front in the public eye, black people feel both proud and vulnerable and, as a result, scour the earth for evidence of racists plotting to bring him down, like an advance team ready to sound an alarm. Barack needed only a gesture, a quick sneer or nod in the direction of the Clintons' hidden racism to avail himself of the twisted love that rescued O.J. and others like him and to smooth his path to victory, and, therefore, to salvage his candidacy. After Donna Brazile and James Clyburn started to cry racism, Barack was repeatedly asked his thoughts. He declined to answer, allowing the charge to grow for days (in sharp contrast to how he leapt to Joe Biden's defense a month earlier). But, while he remained silent about the allegations of racism, he gave speeches across South Carolina that warned against being "hoodwinked" and "bamboozled" by the Clintons. His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of "the White Man" masquerading as a smiling politician: "Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us," he says. "You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled."

By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist. As soon as I heard that Obama had quoted from Malcolm X like this, I knew that Obama would win South Carolina by a massive margin.

(via)

Just because I can

2008-05-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

I am inexplicably stressed out. By which I mean, I am half-explicably stressed, and the rest is just some kind of pent up stress that is probably some combination of hormones and medications and my own peculiar anxious brain and chemicals. So as a result, all day I have just sat at my desk and tried to think of blog posts to write, because at some point this morning I had a truly brilliant insight I wanted to share here and then I totally forgot and oh, I actually think that is part of my stress. I believe that this is the kind of occasion that could potentially call for one of those apparently-so-addictive-doctors-don't-prescribe-them-anymore Xanaxes. In other words, come on chemicals.

I think part of my angst stems from reading a lot of blogs this week, which gives me a really strange, antsy feeling, because I want to live my life and chronicle it at the same time, and yet I am stuck at my desk, which is none of the above. This is also why I overeat.

I had another pseudo-realization last night -- which is, why the hell are people freaking out about the oversharing on the Internet? Why does the fact that people blog about their lives throw people into some kind of major tailspin over the "Millennial" generation? Because last I checked the entire purpose of blogs was to overshare. Is this some kind of genius simplification of an overwrought New York Times trend piece type situation, or am I just stating the obvious?

Stating the obvious should be the name of my blog.

I love my friends.

2008-05-22T09:48:00.001-07:00

Sarah: ok, i sent the "we're total fucking bad asses" someecard to our flip cup team

and he just responded...he woke up still drunk this morning

finally, i was less drunk than someone!!

9:46 AM me: woo hoo!

Sarah: i puked and rallied at the bar, so maybe that's why

And it continues...

2008-05-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

Earth to the Clinton campaign:

In other words, the Florida/Michigan brouhaha is much ado about nothing. Even if Clinton gets her way with the two states, she'd still need about 80 percent of superdelegate commitments to secure the nomination. Clinton's arguments about electability and the popular vote might persuade a dozen delegates, or a couple dozen, or perhaps even the majority. It won't persuade 80 percent. (Or more realistically, the 90 percent she'd need if there is some sort of compromise on Florida and Michigan).

From here. This is all driving me absolutely crazy. I really, really, really can't handle the kinds of arguments that are coming from the Clinton campaign about FL and MI. It actually feels unhinged to me.

(Of course, the above argument assumes that the MI delegates that were not for Clinton get counted for Obama. Which the Clinton campaign does not want to happen.)

Doodle4Google

2008-05-21T14:26:00.001-07:00

These are pretty awesome, although there is an excess of "What if we saved the environment/achieved world peace" doodles. Not to mention -- two doodles made from hands (see grades 4-6, region 2, and grades 10-12, region 7)???

The ones I like best are the ones that, like real Google Doodles, replace the letters with other objects (check out grades 10-12, region 2 and 3, and grades 7-9, region 1, 5, and 6). I also quite like the one from grades 4-6, region 10.

I think the winner of this competition is going to have their doodle up on Google tomorrow. Not a bad deal.

On Tina Fey being "curvy" (or not)

2008-05-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

Since I had lost my April 28 New Yorker, it took me a while to actually read the Anthony Lane review that had people pissed off back in, well, April. Here's the part in question:

Angie is skinny to Kate's curves, loose-tongued to her zipped-up sense of fun, fertile to her barren jealousy. Angie wears pedal pushers and tank tops, whereas Kate stalks around bare-legged in skirts that lurch to a halt two inches above the knee, which is a length that Christy Turlington would struggle to carry off. It's possible that Fey, like other television stars, is unused to being framed in full length, and, thought in complete command of her deliver -- dry, spiky, but unthreatening -- she hasn't yet made up her mind how funny her body is meant to be. She isn't big enough to make a joke of her ripeness, like Bette Midler, but she's no Lily Tomlin, either. She could do worse than steal a trick from Lucille Ball -- a lovely, elegant figure who taught herself to be graceless.

Alright, so obviously* this is annoying, but besides being sexist, it's also inaccurate. Tina Fey isn't big at all, nor is she curvy to Amy Poehler's skinny. Hello? Look at them here. I always thought -- and think -- that Tina Fey is kinda bony -- her body and her attitude/delivery are sort of the same -- "spiky," wry, laidback. She's not ripe at all, and in this movie she's the opposite of ripe because she is, oh that's right, unable to have children of her own. If anything it's Amy Poehler who is ripe -- and she shows off what "curves" (I fucking hate that word**) she has way more than Tina does because she dresses kind of skanky. Tina's skirts that "Christy Turlington would struggle to carry off" actually professional on her, which, hello, dumbass, is part of her character. (She is just a little tightly wound.) Plus, they actually look pretty good most of the time.

So in other words, not only are you apparently kinda sexist, Anthony Lane, but you kind of sucked at reviewing this movie. (Which, for interested parties, was actually pretty good.)

*Emily Gould comments that Tina Fey is "normal-sized," but I have to say that the women of the Gawker blogosphere (by which I mean the Jezebel girls and then Emily Gould), for all their more-mainstream-than-Feministing championship of women and all that, still totally suck at perceiving "normal" women's bodies. For them "normal" seems to be "unfamous," but still thin as shit. Perhaps that is because they are all some kind of pseudocelebrity themselves (case in point), and therefore have skewed perceptions. At any rate, I think Tina Fey is pretty hot.

**Every single magazine that has a "size" issue or a "body" issue or who wants to show you jeans or swimsuits or what-have-you "for your body type" always labels one type "curvy." That is their PC word for "fat," and they never actually have clothes for real people who are overweight and not like big boned or whatever. I want clothes for people who are supposed to be kinda skinny with not a lot of waist, but who have managed to add on 20 pounds at some point and therefore are "curvy." Not to go off on a rant but one good thing about Self magazine (besides everything) is that when they do a body breakdown, they actually do it by shapes, like "bigger in the middle" or "bigger on top" and shit like that. Anyway, just a thought.

On a related note...

2008-05-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

I finally cleaned my room yesterday in preparation for the house cleaner's visit. I'm not one of those people who cleans for the cleaners, I'm one of those people who is so dirty that in order for the cleaner to enter the domicile, I have to clean. Not kidding. The past two or three weeks my room literally exploded and I had approximately five separate piles of clothes (laundry, coats, recent clean laundry, clean laundry pulled from drawers, and clean laundry that had been air dried) and like 14 days worth of mail in the entry to my room. It was truly sickening and probably hazardous to my health. (I think there were also like 8 glasses of water half drunk and also a mostly-drunk PBR can on top of a stack of New Yorkers. Not kidding again.)

Anyway, so the point of all this is that in an amazing, unheard of twist (I am full of these non-revelation revelations today), I feel much more relaxed and clear-headed today. It appears that a clean room does indeed equal a clean mind. After the room was mostly clean, I found myself discovering new things I could do to make it feel more clean. I put the subwoofer I'm no longer using in the closet. I got rid of my desk which I'd replaced with a piano two months ago. I managed to find real clothes for work today instead of a tshirt with jeans and a sweatshirt. I even remembered to floss last night before bed. I feel like I can face the world. This, my friends, seems to be a true accomplishment. Now if only I can sustain it through this weekend. Hurrah!

I am writing the title to this post after the rest of it and I feel an extreme amount of self-distaste right now.

2008-05-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

This is probably going to be a really lame post but whatever, I believe in honesty and over-sharing on the Internet.
It's funny that Ellen posted about this book "Frugal Indulgents: How to Cultivate Decadence when your Age and Salary are under 30" on her blog this morning, because last night Justin and Elizabeth were talking about living decadently/extravagantly. I remarked that I was certainly living decadently because our house cleaner was coming this morning and I was planning to take my laundry to the wash and fold (which I totally did). This morning, while I waited at the counter for the wash and fold woman (who was late) to be dropped off by her husband for work, I felt totally sick of myself for being such a goddamn yuppie. I swore to myself that the only reason I pay for others to clean my laundry and house (the latter rarely, the former increasingly more frequently) is because it's better for my mental health and also because sometimes it's just like paying for time rather than service (like, for my own time). I also swore that my next apartment would have a washer/dryer so I could avoid this kind of self-hate before 8am. Then I heard my dad's voice in my head, telling me that everyone has 24 hours in every day (this might be blended with Liv Tyler's dad's voice in Empire Records, except I am not on speed), and saying that you don't have time is not really an excuse because you have a lot of time. Only not really, I tell myself, so I paid my $22.50 for my laundry and marched back home.

Anyway, all this is sort of part of this recent realization I had which is that (surprise) I don't have it that bad. Please bear with me during this awful, terrible, white upper-middle class professional city-dweller moment while I realize that while I want things I can't afford, I can actually afford most things I want. Plus, I can afford to pay for my laundry, buy the occasional episode of "Gossip Girl" on iTunes, purchase organic vegetables in the middle of a global food crisis, not to mention get $65 haircuts and $12 manicures. This is all very terrible of me but I feel like I've been living under the impression that I wasn't well off, and suddenly I realized that I actually kind of am, comparatively speaking. It is sort of a strange experience to come to terms with the fact that maybe you are one of those privileged people you've spent a majority of your life judging.

I can't believe I just wrote this entry. It's so much worse in print. Ack.

Oh yeah, and also, we got HDTV last week.

A poem

2008-05-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

I finally got to the April 28th New Yorker after losing it twice (I ended up borrowing a copy). I am glad I got it for a lot of reasons, but I especially liked this poem.

Here Name Your

My friend spends all summer
mending fence for the elk to blunder

back down and the cows to drag
the wires and the snow to sit and sag

on, so all the twist and hammer and tauten
and prop amounts at last to nought, knot, tangle.

The next year he picks
up his pliers and fixes

the odds all over again. There are no
grownups, and I think that all of us children know

and play some variation on this theme, the game of all join
hands so that someone can run them open.

Then war whoops, shrieks, and laughter
and regather together

as if any arms might ever really hold.
I'm trying to finger the source -- pleasure of or need

for -- these enactments of resistance, if Resistance
is indeed their name. I'm trying to walk the parallels to terminus --

call them lickety-split over rickety bridge,
tightrope, railroad tie, or plank as you see fit --

trying to admit to seeing double,
innumerable,

to finding myself beset by myself
on all sides, my heart forced by itself

for itself, to learn not only mine
but all the lines --

crow's flight, crow's-feet, enemy, party, picket,
throwaway, high tide, and horizon -- to wait

in the shadows of scrim each night
and whisper the scene. Always, some part

of the heart must root for the pliers, some
part for the snow's steep slope.

--Dora Malech

It's one of those poems where I feel like the tricks are obvious ("nought, knot" for example, or "lickety-split over rickety bridge") and yet I don't think I ever would have thought to do it myself. Well, most poems are like that, but this one's charms are sort of obvious and sort of obscured by the obvious ones, if that makes any sense.

Forgive me for this twee-ness

2008-05-20T15:04:00.001-07:00

The last few days I've been semi-methodically clearing out feeds in my Google Reader in an effort to waste less time on the Internet. That sounds paradoxical and it totally is. But I have so much backlog from various blogs that I needed to clear out all the unread items so I could start over without feeling burdened. So that led, today, to me going on an Etsy binge. I haven't bought anything... yet... but that is not the point. Check out these tailor-made-for-Emily finds...

Bunny ring
They have owls too.

Sad owl print:
HER NAME IS MINERVA, FOR CHRISSAKE.

And this whole set of little drawings that I love! They are sort of Frog-and-Toad/Beatrix Potter esque. I think I like the raccoon and squirrels the best.

I wonder if my animal obsession is some bizarre nesting instinct. Sarah and I were just talking about nesting instincts (mine is nourished weekly by Bethany's three blogs chronicling her motherhood), and I think this is just further damning evidence.

It's like some kind of periscope into my head

2008-05-19T13:39:00.000-07:00

I have the craziest dreams lately. Last Thursday night, I had a dream that Jim actually had proposed to Pam, after the Andy business, by teasing her about something being in his coat pocket, so she had to get it out and then there it was, a ring. Friday night, I dreamt that a ton of us woke up late (like 9:15) for Bay to Breakers and had to relocate from the start to around Alamo Square. And then last night I had a dream that the Oregon and Kentucky primaries took place, and Barack Obama's expected 16+ elected delegates from Oregon somehow had been discounted (not that they'd gone to Clinton, they just somehow did not exist) and he still didn't have the pledged majority and the race was still, still, still going on.

All this gives you a somewhat disturbing image of what my brain spends its time on. (The sad part is that the third dream is probably going to come half true - even if Obama wins as expected, Clinton shows all signs of going on with the race, including claiming that 2025 delegates is not the required majority, and Obama's camp is not planning to claim the nomination even if he hits 2025 tomorrow.)

B2B2KGreat

2008-05-19T11:09:00.000-07:00

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Those were the words Obama said facing a crowd of 75,000 in Portland and those are the words I say when I think about Bay to Breakers yesterday.

B2B really is San Francisco's finest moment. Saturday night, Peattie said, "I wish Bay to Breakers wasn't tomorrow." I thought he meant because we maybe weren't prepared, because he was tired, because he wanted to do something fun Saturday night and knew he shouldn't in order to rest up for the next morning, but no. He clarified: "Because it's going to be another whole year before it happens again." Somewhere around the starting line yesterday morning, I realized I completely agreed with him. Seriously, it's such a great day. I can't really picture it for you if you weren't there, but I came away from the day with a million little snapshots in my head, and I almost want to write them all down here to ensure I remember them forever. However, I think I'll spare you. All you need to know is that we started at the beginning. We lost people immediately and found them again, as you are wont to do. We lost people at what I call the Bermuda Triangle, the block between Hayes and Fell on Divisadero. Those people we didn't find again. We picked up a keg at a friend's house on Fulton, and I don't remember what happened to it. We saw the buffalo. And hours and hours later, we made it to the beach. I dipped my toes in the ocean. And then we took an epic N-Judah ride back to Duboce Park, where after a stop at JJ's house, we went to Naan and Chutney on Haight and wolfed down our only food since (in my case) a bowl of cereal at 6:30am. Satisfaction of a race well staggered.

God, I love Bay to Breakers.

Some pictures. The top one is the entire alphabet, plus symbols, minus H, Q and U, who were running very late. So we met them at 7th and Howard, except by that point we'd lost, like, everyone else.

This is the first word we spelled.

They were really excited about this. The colors... so amazing.

Not spelling anything, just felt like posting this one. Me, Laurel (R), and Zoe (Z). W (Sarah) is on the left you just can't see her face.
All Laurel and I wanted to do was spell "drunk." U was late, so we spelled "DRINK" instead. Ace (D), Laurel (R), Eli (I), Nick (N) and me.

Then we spelled "DRANK." JJ is "A."

Then they realized they could spell "RAW" and I just wanted to be in the letter so after they did that I threw myself on the end for "RAWK." (Laurel, JJ , Sarah, and me.)

Hours later we finally found U, and then we had lost N. This is me, scanning the crowd, looking for someone who could fake being an N. (Ace, Laurel, this guy Rick I met yesterday while I was yelling at him for not showing up earlier, and me.)

Brought to you by the letter K.

2008-05-15T16:08:00.000-07:00

I've sort of been hesitating to post about this because I'm worried about blowing the total awesomeness of it all, but... screw it.

Bay to Breakers, a.k.a. Best Day Ever, is this Sunday, and my friends and I have collected together (with a lot of people I don't know, but who are friends of friends and visitors from out of town) to be the ALPHABET. We are all going to be wearing bright t-shirts with letters (some of us are symbols). We can spell things all day. It will be really awesome. My friend Peattie had the idea and we're all sort of shocked and awed that it's actually happening, but it really, really is. Obviously it hasn't happened yet, but there's been enough entertaining buildup to get me jazzed about it. Such as: calling each other by our letter names all week (I feel like I am in Gossip Girl, especially every time I address Justin as J) and sending out lots of videos of Sesame Street. Like this one, which Laurel sent today, and which I am pretty sure I've drunkenly sang before (Sesame Street is so deeply embedded in my brain) and which we are planning to drunkenly sing again, this Sunday, while winding our way through the maddening crowds of San Francisco on the Best Day Ever.

I'm not the letter E as you might expect -- Elizabeth got that one -- instead I've gone with K for Kettering, which is swiftly becoming a nickname that I actually respond to.

When Obama wins....

2008-05-15T15:32:00.000-07:00

You know how they talk about how TV totally changed politics? And then how the Internet changed politics because of blogs and stuff? I feel like this election has really reached a new Internet, media peak. The sheer numbers of weird memes and things... as evidenced by the fact that I've posted about most of them. Anyway, here is the latest (a little late)... When Obama Wins.

A John Hagee Is Crazy Alert

2008-05-15T15:15:00.000-07:00

Here.

When Sen. John McCain was forced to distance himself from Pastor John Hagee earlier this year, he denounced the pastor’s attacks on Catholicism. But asked why he wouldn’t “repudiate” Hagee’s endorsement of him, McCain found something to praise.

“I'm grateful for his commitment to the support of the state of Israel, and I'm very grateful for many of his commitments around the world, including to the independence and freedom of the state of Israel,” he told CNN’s Campbell Brown on April 29.

Hagee’s commitment to Israel, however, is itself controversial: It’s rooted in the belief that the Jewish state will — soon — be the site of Armageddon.

It's not even so much a critique on McCain for seeking out and enjoying his endorsement. It's mostly just a comment on how some people out there are batshit insane.

Things that are Younger than John McCain

2008-05-15T12:59:00.000-07:00

First let me make a small disclaimer: sometimes I like things for purely humorous reasons and not because I think they matter (much) politically.

So, John McCain, as we know, is pretty old. For a Presidential candidate. I've seen him speak twice in person and he looks/seems even older in person. But whatever, he seems to be generally mentally on top of things so I won't judge. That said, this site "Things that are Younger than John McCain" is really funny. It's good especially because of the comments, like those on this post (check out #8 and #9). Plus, it is sort of educational! Chocolate chip cookies, born in the 30s. Good to know!

(via Serious Eats)

More on R. Kelly (I just can't resist)

2008-05-15T12:52:00.000-07:00

I showed Dan, my roommate and resident R. Kelly (and in fact all trashy hip-hop) expert, the R. Kelly trial blog I linked to earlier, and he countered with this.

Seriously, I will never be able to decide if R. Kelly is insane or some kind of secret genius. It's kind of like how I can't decide if people on the Hills are really really stupid, or just really cleverly manipulating the fame machine. In their case I think I think the former, but with R. Kelly it's like I just can't decide. I mean he wrote a hip-hopera! And this is a song about his hair dresser filled with tons of absurd sexual innuendo! And! And! He wrote a song called "Sex Planet" which is also filled with tons of absurd sexual innuendo! Seriously, I just can't express my bafflement and awe at the man who is R. Kelly. Sex trials or not.

Rambles.

2008-05-15T11:54:00.000-07:00

Several thoughts are running through my head today. First, I love it when San Francisco is hot. The predicted high for today is 92 in the city, which is absolutely insane, and it completely changes the feeling of things. I happen to be working in the SF office today, and my trip to work got me sweating, plus it made me feel like I was going to work somewhere like Chicago, not my chilly city by the bay. It's not just hot this week, it's sort of hot and humid and hazy, the kind of hot that is also cloudy, and the cloud pins all the heat and (dare I say it?) smog in around you. Luckily I have no problem with heat, although it does make me want to wear shorts to work which is sort of a no-no, even at my company. Instead, I've had to resort to skirts and dresses, which has made me once again question my wardrobe and made me seriously consider a revamp. I half-promised myself recently I wasn't going to buy new clothes until I got rid of old ones, but I keep having to dip into the old ones when my newer ones don't turn out to work in my favor, and in general I'm having major wardrobe malfunctions and stressful moments (when I was dressing for my friend's confirmation on Sunday, in other words, when I was dressing for CHURCH, I actually threw a crying fit, and maybe I also said "Fuck God"). Anyway, this is all not the point. The point is that San Francisco in the heat is a totally different city. On my walk home last night there were scores of people out on patios outside of cafes that are normally dead quiet. Half of it feels bohemian and the other half is the sort of underside of the city that you don't always see - but either way it is good.

The other thing that's going on this week is my second killer sinus infection of the season. I know you're all really excited about a paragraph that starts like that, but I'm not planning on going into the details except to say that my allergies are the worst and if I lived in the 19th century I would most definitely be branded as sickly and confined indoors to knit and stuff like Colin Craven or Mercy in "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" or maybe Mary Ingalls prior to going to the school for the blind. Thanks to, you know, modern medicine and stuff, I am still rallying for work every day, although each night I've gone straight home, watched mindless television, and gone to bed, on average, at 10pm. Anyway, so today I implemented a new strategy... the case of medicines. I busted out an old make up case and filled it with my various accoutrements of illness. I am awesome.

This morning I took the bus to work instead of the BART. I always take the BART, and that means that I always walk by the same crack dealers near the corner of Mission and 16th. Seriously, they are always there in front of the same store, and that entire block from 17th to 16th is like a little obstacle course of high people missing teeth. While that does tend to wake you up a little, I kind of didn't feel like it today, so I took the Mission 14 bus instead. Which is ironic, or something, because the Mission 14 bus is filled with crazy people all the time. I don't think I've ever been on it without crazy people. This morning the crazy person was sitting in the front area singing this almost tuneful, nevertheless wordless song for the entire ride until he got off somewhere around 3rd street. It was loud enough to fill the entire bus, and very bizarre. There is nothing like a little San Francisco crazy person culture to start off your day.

Anyway. Back to it. Whatever it is.

This is why blogs are awesome.

2008-05-15T11:27:00.000-07:00

BEST!!

(via)

Obama in an unmoderated debate

2008-05-14T16:32:00.000-07:00

I have to agree with Hendrik Hertzberg here. When Obama spoke at Google last year, his speech was good, but his Q&A was better. I think a town hall format, or a non-moderated debate format, would highlight some of his assets very well. He's quick on his feet.

(tip to Justin for the link)

P.S. Yay for Edwards and NARAL endorsements!

Why Kissing Jessica Stein is amazing.

2008-05-14T12:51:00.001-07:00

I love Rachel for posting this:

Yoga guy: In what ways do you feel we don’t click?

Jessica:In what ways? We don’t click in any ways. We don’t have chemistry, or banter, or common interests. You’re a yoga instructor, you get colonics, you don’t understand the chaos or absurdity of life, on this planet and in this city. You don’t understand irony, or ethnicity, or eccentricity, or poetry, or the simple joy of being a regular at the diner on your block—I love that. You don’t drink coffee, or alcohol, you don’t overeat, you don’t cry when you’re alone, you don’t understand sarcasm. You plod through life in a neat, colorless, caffeine-free, dairy-free, conflict-free, banal self-possessed way—I’m bold, and angry, and tortured, and tremendous and I notice when someone has changed their hair part, or when someone is wearing two very distinctly different shades of black, or when someone changes the natural timbre of their voice on the phone. I don’t give out empty praise. I’m not complacent, or well-adjusted, I can’t spend 50 minutes breathing and stretching and getting in touch with myself, I can’t even spend 3 minutes finishing an article. I check my phone machine 9 times every day, and I can’t sleep at night, because I feel that there is so much to do and fix and change in the world, and I wonder every day if I am making a difference, and if I will ever express the greatness within me or if I will remain forever paralyzed by the muddled madness inside my head. I’ve wept on every birthday I’ve ever had, because life is huge, and fleeting. And I hate certain people and certain shoes. And I feel that life is terribly unfair and sometimes beautiful and wonderful and extraordinary, but also numbing and horrifying and insurmountable. And I hate myself a lot of the time, but a lot of the rest of the time, I adore myself and I adore my life in this city, in this world we live in, this huge and wondrous, bewildering, brilliant, horrible world.

(sigh) And in these ways, I feel that we do not click.

Yoga guy: So you don’t think it’s gonna work out right now?

—Original scene from Kissing Jessica Stein that didn’t make it into the movie

Kissing Jessica Stein is underrated or underrepresented, probably because of the whole lesbian thing, but the reality is that I relate much, much more to Jessica than I ever could to Carrie Bradshaw or any of the other SATC girls, who are supposed to be our New York archetypal women of our generation (or the one a bit ahead of us). She's such a disaster, but in the ways I am a disaster, and now I feel the urge to go watch this movie as soon as possible.

Standing in Love

2008-05-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

I thought this little bit was lovely... it's about the difference between "falling in love" and "standing in love." In some ways it's what we always have known, that the giddy feeling of falling in love must at some point give way to a different kind of love, blah blah blah. But what I liked best about it (besides that idea of "standing in love" with someone) was this:

When you fall in love, you want your partner to be faithful to you because if they are not it threatens your loneliness again. They might leave you, and leave you alone. This is possessiveness. So it is quite possible to find two people who are apparently in love with each other and who actually feel no love for anybody else. These are the kind of lovers who are completely annoying to be with. They are so involved with each other that they do not notice the rest of the world. They make you feel alone when you are with them. They think of love as luck and that their luck is in – and conversely, that everyone else’s luck is not.

There [sic] luck is not in, though, because their love is, in fact, what Fromm calls ‘an egoism together’; they are two people who identify themselves with each other, and who solve the problem of separateness by enlarging the single individual into two. It is in fact narcissism – they love themselves in each other; they see each other as Narcissus starred into the lake. They have the experience of overcoming aloneness, yet, they are separated from the rest of humankind – which is why you feel lonely or annoyed in their presence. In fact, they too remain separated from each other and alienated from themselves, though they daren’t admit it and so become even more absorbed in each other. Their experience of union is an illusion.

When you stand in love, though, you want your partner to be faithful to you but not because you cannot be alone but because it represents to you the faithfulness that must exist between all human beings who are to relate well to each other. In other words, it is not an exclusive possessiveness but an expression of an inclusive love for all humankind, potentially at least. Thus, the nicest people to know who are in love with each other are those who make you feel part of their love, whose love generates a welcoming home, brings out the best in you and so on. They have learnt the art of love with each other and it results in generating love that they have for others.

I have always tried to make the argument that best couples are those who are additive -- who you can spend time with in a group and who don't suck the energy out, but instead add to the room, add their own energy, which is from two people but not only for two people. This puts it a bit better than I've been able to -- additive is such an non-lovey word: turns out the kinds of couples I like, and the kind of couple I want to be a part of, are those who are "standing in love." This really comes back to the essential issue of balance in relationships that I've been struggling with for the past year -- the lameness of codependence and the sweet spot of independence yet coupleness that as far as I can tell is incredibly, incredibly hard to find. Worth looking for, though.

(via)

Clinton 2012?

2008-05-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

Pretty fascinating take on whether or not Clinton could conceivably run in 2012, assuming she loses the nomination this time.

(via)

Maybe if I didn't spend so much time on lists of books, I'd read more

2008-05-13T16:17:00.000-07:00

I find myself physically incapable of not filling out any kind of online survey about reading. Case in point, and forgive me for the incredibly long list on my homepage: this list of 1001 books you should read (before you die? I think it's based on a book of that title). Bold means I've read them. I put asterisks next to those I have copies of in my room right now.

1. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro*
2. Saturday – Ian McEwan*
3. On Beauty - Zadie Smith
4. Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
5. Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
6. The Sea - John Banville*
7. The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
8. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
9. The Master - Colm Toibin
10. Vanishing Point – David Markson
11. The Lambs of London - Peter Ackroyd
12. Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
13. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
14. Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
15. The Colour – Rose Tremain
16. Thursbitch – Alan Garner
17. The Light of Day – Graham Swift
18. What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
20. Islands – Dan Sleigh
21. Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
22. London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
23. Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
24. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
25. The Double – José Saramago
26. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
27. Unless – Carol Shields
28. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
29. The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
30. That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
31. In the Forest – Edna O'Brien
32. Shroud – John Banville
33. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
34. Youth – J.M. Coetzee
35. Dead Air – Iain Banks
36. Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
37. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster*
38. Gabriel's Gift – Hanif Kureishi
39. Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
40. Platform – Michael Houellebecq
41. Schooling – Heather McGowan
42. Atonement – Ian McEwan
43. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
44. Don't Move – Margaret Mazzantini
45. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
46. Fury – Salman Rushdie
47. At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O'Neill
48. Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
49. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
50. The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
51. An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
52. The Devil and Miss Prym - Paulo Coelho
53. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
54. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
55. The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
56. Under the Skin – Michel Faber
57. Ignorance – Milan Kundera
58. Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
59. Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
60. City of God – E.L. Doctorow
61. How the Dead Live – Will Self
62. The Human Stain – Philip Roth
63. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
64. After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
65. Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
66. Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
67. House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
68. Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
69. Pastoralia – George Saunder
70. Timbuktu – Paul Auster
71. The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
72. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
73. As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
74. Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
75. Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
76. The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie*
77. Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
78. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
79. Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
80. Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
81. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
82. Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
83. All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
84. The Talk of the Town – Ardal O'Hanlon
85. Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
86. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
87. Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
88. Another World – Pat Barker
89. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
90. Veronika Decides to Die - Paulo Coelho
91. Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
92. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
93. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
94. Great Apes – Will Self
95. Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
96. Underworld – Don DeLillo
97. Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
98. The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
99. American Pastoral - Philip Roth*
100. The Untouchable – John Banville
101. Silk – Alessandro Baricco
102. Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
103. Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
104. Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
105. The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
106. Forever a Stranger – Hella Haasse
107. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace*
108. The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
109. Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
110. The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
111. Morvern Callar – Alan Warner
112. The Information – Martin Amis
113. The Moor's Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
114. Sabbath's Theater – Philip Roth
115. The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
116. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
117. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
118. Love's Work – Gillian Rose
119. The End of the Story – Lydia Davis
120. Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
121. The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst
122. Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
123. Land – Park Kyong-ni
124. The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee
125. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
126. Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
127. City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
128. How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
129. Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
130. Felicia's Journey – William Trevor
131. Disappearance – David Dabydeen
132. The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
133. The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
134. Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
135. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
136. Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy
137. Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
138. Complicity – Iain Banks
139. On Love – Alain de Botton
140. What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
141. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
142. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
143. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
144. The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd
145. The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
146. The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald
147. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
148. Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar
149. The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
150. A Heart So White – Javier Marias
151. Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
152. Indigo – Marina Warner
153. The Crow Road – Iain Banks
154. Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
155. Jazz – Toni Morrison
156. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje*
157. Smilla's Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
158. The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
159. Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
160. The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín
161. Asphodel – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
162. Black Dogs – Ian McEwan* (at my parents' house)
163. Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
164. Arcadia – Jim Crace
165. Wild Swans - Jung Chang
166. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
167. Time's Arrow – Martin Amis
168. Mao II – Don DeLillo
169. Typical – Padgett Powell
170. Regeneration – Pat Barker
171. Downriver – Iain Sinclair
172. Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres
173. Wise Children – Angela Carter
174. Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
175. Amongst Women – John McGahern
176. Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
177. Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
178. Stone Junction – Jim Dodge
179. The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
180. The Things They Carried – Tim O'Brien
181. A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
182. Like Life – Lorrie Moore
183. Possession – A.S. Byatt
184. The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
185. The Midnight Examiner – William Kotzwinkle
186. A Disaffection – James Kelman
187. Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
188. Moon Palace – Paul Auster
189. Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
190. Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
191. The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
192. The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
193. The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
194. The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
195. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
196. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
197. London Fields – Martin Amis
198. The Book of Evidence – John Banville
199. Cat's Eye – Margaret Atwood
200. Foucault's Pendulum – Umberto Eco
201. The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
202. Wittgenstein's Mistress – David Markson
203. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
204. The Swimming-Pool Library – Alan Hollinghurst
205. Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
206. Libra – Don DeLillo
207. The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
208. Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
209. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
210. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
211. The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
212. The Afternoon of a Writer – Peter Handke
213. The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
214. The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
215. The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind
216. The Child in Time – Ian McEwan
217. Cigarettes – Harry Mathews
218. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
219. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
220. World's End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
221. Enigma of Arrival – V.S. Naipaul
222. The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae
223. Beloved – Toni Morrison
224. Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
225. Matigari – Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
226. Marya – Joyce Carol Oates
227. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
228. The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis
229. Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
230. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
231. Extinction – Thomas Bernhard
232. Foe – J.M. Coetzee
233. The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
234. Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
235. The Parable of the Blind – Gert Hofmann
236. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
237. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
238. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
239. A Maggot – John Fowles
240. Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
241. Contact – Carl Sagan
242. The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
243. Perfume – Patrick Süskind
244. Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard
245. White Noise – Don DeLillo*
246. Queer – William Burroughs
247. Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
248. Legend – David Gemmell
249. Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi
250. The Bus Conductor Hines – James Kelman
251. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
252. The Lover – Marguerite Duras
253. Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
254. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
255. Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
256. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
257. Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
258. Neuromancer – William Gibson
259. Flaubert's Parrot – Julian Barnes
260. Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
261. Shame – Salman Rushdie
262. Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett
263. Fools of Fortune – William Trevor
264. La Brava – Elmore Leonard
265. Waterland – Graham Swift
266. The Life and Times of Michael K - J.M. Coetzee
267. The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing
268. The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
269. The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus
270. If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
271. A Boy's Own Story – Edmund White
272. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
273. Wittgenstein's Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
274. A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
275. Schindler's Ark – Thomas Keneally
276. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
277. The Newton Letter – John Banville
278. On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin
279. Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
280. The Names – Don DeLillo
281. Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
282. Lanark: A Life in Four Books – Alasdair Gray
283. The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
284. July's People – Nadine Gordimer
285. Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
286. Broken April – Ismail Kadare
287. Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
288. Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
289. Rites of Passage – William Golding
290. Rituals – Cees Nooteboom
291. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
292. City Primeval – Elmore Leonard
293. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
294. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
295. Smiley's People – John Le Carré
296. Shikasta – Doris Lessing
297. A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
298. Burger's Daughter - Nadine Gordimer
299. The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
300. If On a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
301. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
302. The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
303. The World According to Garp – John Irving
304. Life: A User's Manual – Georges Perec
305. The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
306. The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
307. Yes – Thomas Bernhard
308. The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
309. In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
310. The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
311. Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
312. The Shining – Stephen King
313. Dispatches – Michael Herr
314. Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
315. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
316. The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
317. The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
318. Ratner's Star – Don DeLillo
319. The Public Burning – Robert Coover
320. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
321. Cutter and Bone – Newton Thornburg
322. Amateurs – Donald Barthelme
323. Patterns of Childhood – Christa Wolf
324. Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
325. W, or the Memory of Childhood – Georges Perec
326. A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
327. Grimus – Salman Rushdie
328. The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
329. Fateless – Imre Kertész
330. Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
331. High Rise – J.G. Ballard
332. Humboldt's Gift – Saul Bellow
333. Dead Babies – Martin Amis
334. Correction – Thomas Bernhard
335. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
336. The Fan Man – William Kotzwinkle
337. Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee
338. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
339. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
340. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
341. Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
342. A Question of Power – Bessie Head
343. The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
344. The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Italo Calvino
345. Crash – J.G. Ballard
346. The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene
347. Gravity's Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon* (at my parents' house)
348. The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
349. Sula – Toni Morrison
350. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
351. The Breast – Philip Roth
352. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
353. G – John Berger
354. Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
355. House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
356. In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
357. The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
358. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
359. Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
360. The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
361. Rabbit Redux – John Updike
362. The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
363. The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark
364. The Ogre – Michael Tournier
365. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
366. Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke
367. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
368. Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett
369. Troubles – J.G. Farrell
370. Jahrestage – Uwe Johnson
371. The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
372. Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
373. Pricksongs and Descants – Robert Coover
374. Blind Man With a Pistol – Chester Hines
375. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
376. The French Lieutenant's Woman – John Fowles
377. The Green Man – Kingsley Amis
378. Portnoy's Complaint – Philip Roth
379. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
380. Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
381. Them – Joyce Carol Oates
382. A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
383. Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
384. Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
385. The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch
386. Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
387. Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
388. The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
389. 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
390. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
391. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry
392. The German Lesson – Siegfried Lenz
393. In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
394. A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
395. The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
396. Chocky – John Wyndham
397. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
398. The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
399. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
400. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
401. Pilgrimage – Dorothy Richardson
402. The Joke – Milan Kundera
403. No Laughing Matter – Angus Wilson
404. The Third Policeman – Flann O'Brien
405. A Man Asleep – Georges Perec
406. The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West
407. Trawl – B.S. Johnson
408. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
409. The Magus – John Fowles
410. The Vice-Consul – Marguerite Duras
411. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
412. Giles Goat-Boy – John Barth
413. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
414. Things – Georges Perec
415. The River Between – Ngugi wa Thiong'o
416. August is a Wicked Month – Edna O'Brien
417. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
418. Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O'Connor
419. The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
420. Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
421. Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme
422. Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson
423. Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
424. The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
425. Herzog – Saul Bellow
426. V. – Thomas Pynchon
427. Cat's Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
428. The Graduate – Charles Webb
429. Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
430. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
431. The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
432. Inside Mr. Enderby – Anthony Burgess
433. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
434. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
435. The Collector – John Fowles
436. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest – Ken Kesey*
437. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
438. Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
439. The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
440. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
441. Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
442. Girl With Green Eyes – Edna O'Brien
443. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
444. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
445. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
446. A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
447. Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
448. Solaris - Stanislow Lem
449. Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
450. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
451. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
452. The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O'Connor
453. How It Is – Samuel Beckett
454. Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
455. The Country Girls – Edna O'Brien
456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
457. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
458. Promise at Dawn – Romain Gary
459. Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee
460. Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
461. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
462. The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
463. Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
464. Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
465. Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
466. Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
467. Breakfast at Tiffany's – Truman Capote
468. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
469. Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
470. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
471. The Bitter Glass – Eilís Dillon
472. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
473. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
474. Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
475. Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
476. The End of the Road – John Barth
477. The Once and Future King – T.H. White
478. The Bell – Iris Murdoch
479. Jealousy – Alain Robbe-Grillet
480. Voss – Patrick White
481. The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
482. Blue Noon – Georges Bataille
483. Homo Faber – Max Frisch
484. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
485. Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
486. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
487. The Wonderful "O" – James Thurber
488. Justine – Lawrence Durrell
489. Giovanni's Room – James Baldwin
490. The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
491. The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
492. Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
493. The Floating Opera – John Barth
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
495. The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
496. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
497. A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
498. The Trusting and the Maimed – James Plunkett
499. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
500. The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
501. The Recognitions – William Gaddis
502. The Ragazzi – Pier Paulo Pasolini
503. Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
504. I'm Not Stiller – Max Frisch
505. Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis
506. The Story of O – Pauline Réage
507. A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
509. Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
510. The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
511. The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler* (at my parents' house)
512. The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
513. Watt – Samuel Beckett
514. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
515. Junkie – William Burroughs
516. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
517. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
518. Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
519. The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
520. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
522. Wise Blood – Flannery O'Connor
523. The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
524. Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
525. Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
526. Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
527. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
528. The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
529. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
530. The Rebel – Albert Camus
531. Molloy – Samuel Beckett
532. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
533. The Abbot C – Georges Bataille
534. The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
535. The Third Man – Graham Greene
536. The 13 Clocks – James Thurber
537. Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
538. The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
539. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
540. The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
541. The Garden Where the Brass Band Played – Simon Vestdijk
542. Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
543. The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
544. The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
545. Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
546. The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
548. All About H. Hatterr – G.V. Desani
549. Disobedience – Alberto Moravia
550. Death Sentence – Maurice Blanchot
551. The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
552. Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
553. Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
554. The Victim – Saul Bellow
555. Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
556. If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
557. Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
558. The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
559. The Plague – Albert Camus
560. Back – Henry Green
561. Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
562. The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andri?
563. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
564. Animal Farm – George Orwell
565. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
566. The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
567. Loving – Henry Green
568. Arcanum 17 – André Breton
569. Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
570. The Razor's Edge – William Somerset Maugham
571. Transit – Anna Seghers
572. Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
573. Dangling Man – Saul Bellow
574. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
575. Caught – Henry Green
576. The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
577. Embers - Sandor Marai
578. Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
579. The Outsider – Albert Camus
580. In Sicily – Elio Vittorini
581. The Poor Mouth – Flann O'Brien
582. The Living and the Dead – Patrick White
583. Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
584. Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
585. The Hamlet – William Faulkner
586. Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
587. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
588. Native Son – Richard Wright
589. The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
590. The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
591. Party Going – Henry Green
592. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
593. Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
594. At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O'Brien
595. Coming Up for Air – George Orwell
596. Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
597. Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
598. Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
599. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
600. After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
601. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
602. Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
603. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
604. Cause for Alarm – Eric Ambler
605. Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
606. U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
607. Murphy – Samuel Beckett
608. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
609. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
611. The Years – Virginia Woolf
612. In Parenthesis – David Jones
613. The Revenge for Love – Wyndham Lewis
614. Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
615. To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
616. Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner
617. Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
618. The Thinking Reed – Rebecca West
619. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
620. Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
621. Wild Harbour – Ian MacPherson
622. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner* (at my parents' house)
623. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
624. Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
625. Independent People - Halldor Laxness
626. Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
627. The Last of Mr. Norris – Christopher Isherwood
628. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? – Horace McCoy
629. The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
630. England Made Me – Graham Greene
631. Burmese Days – George Orwell
632. The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
633. Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
634. Novel With Cocaine – M. Ageyev
635. The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
636. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller*
637. A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
638. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
639. Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
640. Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
641. Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West*
642. Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
643. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein*
644. Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
645. A Day Off – Storm Jameson
646. The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
647. A Scots Quair (Sunset Song) – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
648. Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
649. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
650. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
651. To the North – Elizabeth Bowen
652. The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
653. The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
654. The Waves – Virginia Woolf
655. The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
656. Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
657. The Apes of God – Wyndham Lewis
658. Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
659. Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
660. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
661. Hebdomeros – Giorgio de Chirico
662. Passing – Nella Larsen
663. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
664. Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
665. Living – Henry Green
666. The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
667. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
668. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
669. The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
670. Harriet Hume – Rebecca West
671. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner* (at my parents' house)
672. Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
673. Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
674. Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
675. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
676. Lady Chatterley's Lover – D.H. Lawrence
677. The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
678. The Childermass – Wyndham Lewis
679. Quartet – Jean Rhys
680. Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
681. Quicksand – Nella Larsen
682. Parade's End – Ford Madox Ford
683. Nadja – André Breton
684. Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
685. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
686. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
687. Tarka the Otter – Henry Williamson
688. Amerika – Franz Kafka
689. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
690. Blindness – Henry Green
691. The Castle – Franz Kafka
692. The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
693. The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
694. One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
695. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
696. The Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
697. Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
698. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
700. The Counterfeiters – André Gide
701. The Trial – Franz Kafka
702. The Artamonov Business – Maxim Gorky
703. The Professor's House – Willa Cather
704. Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
705. The Green Hat – Michael Arlen
706. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
707. We -Yevgeny Zamyatin
708. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
709. The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
710. Zeno's Conscience – Italo Svevo
711. Cane – Jean Toomer
712. Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
713. Amok – Stefan Zweig
714. The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
715. The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
716. Jacob's Room – Virginia Woolf
717. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
718. The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
719. Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair
720. The Last Days of Humanity – Karl Kraus
721. Aaron's Rod – D.H. Lawrence
722. Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
723. Ulysses – James Joyce* (at my parents' house)
724. The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
725. Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
726. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
727. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
728. Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence* (at my parents' house)
729. Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
730. Tarr – Wyndham Lewis
731. The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
732. The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
733. Summer – Edith Wharton
734. Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsen
735. Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
736. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
737. Under Fire – Henri Barbusse
738. Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
739. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
740. The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
741. Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
742. The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
743. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
744. Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
745. Locus Solus – Raymond Roussel
746. Rosshalde – Herman Hesse
747. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
748. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
749. Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
750. Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
751. The Charwoman's Daughter – James Stephens
752. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
753. Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
754. Howards End – E.M. Forster
755. Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
756. Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
757. Martin Eden – Jack London
758. Strait is the Gate – André Gide
759. Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
760. The Inferno – Henri Barbusse
761. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
762. The Iron Heel – Jack London
763. The Old Wives' Tale – Arnold Bennett
764. The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
765. Mother – Maxim Gorky
766. The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
767. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
768. Young Törless – Robert Musil
769. The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy
770. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
771. Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
772. Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
773. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
774. Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
775. The Golden Bowl – Henry James
776. The Ambassadors – Henry James
777. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
778. The Immoralist – André Gide
779. The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
780. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
781. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
782. Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
783. Kim – Rudyard Kipling
784. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
785. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
786. Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Somerville and Ross
787. The Stechlin – Theodore Fontane
788. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
789. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James*
790. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
791. The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
792. What Maisie Knew – Henry James
793. Fruits of the Earth – André Gide
794. Dracula – Bram Stoker
795. Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
796. The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
797. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
798. Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane
799. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
800. The Real Charlotte – Somerville and Ross
801. The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
802. Born in Exile – George Gissing
803. Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
804. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
805. News from Nowhere – William Morris
806. New Grub Street – George Gissing
807. Gösta Berling's Saga – Selma Lagerlöf
808. Tess of the D-Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
809. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
810. The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
811. La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
812. By the Open Sea – August Strindberg
813. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
814. The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
815. Pierre and Jean – Guy de Maupassant
816. Fortunata and Jacinta – Benito Pérez Galdés
817. The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
818. The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
819. She – H. Rider Haggard
820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
821. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
822. Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
823. King Solomon's Mines – H. Rider Haggard
824. Germinal – Émile Zola
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
826. Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
827. Marius the Epicurean – Walter Pater
828. Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
829. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
830. A Woman's Life – Guy de Maupassant
831. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
832. The House by the Medlar Tree – Giovanni Verga
833. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
834. Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert
835. Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
836. Nana – Émile Zola
837. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
838. The Red Room – August Strindberg
839. Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
840. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
841. Drunkard – Émile Zola
842. Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
843. Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
844. The Hand of Ethelberta – Thomas Hardy
845. The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
846. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
847. The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
848. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
849. In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
850. The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
851. Erewhon – Samuel Butler
852. Spring Torrents – Ivan Turgenev
853. Middlemarch - George Eliot
854. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
855. King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
856. He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
857. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
858. Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
859. Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
860. Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
861. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
862. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
863. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
864. Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
865. The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
867. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
868. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
869. Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
870. Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu
871. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
872. The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley
873. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo*
874. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
875. Silas Marner – George Eliot
876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (abridged)
877. On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
878. Castle Richmond – Anthony Trollope
879. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
880. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
881. The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
882. Max Havelaar – Multatuli
883. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
884. Oblomovka – Ivan Goncharov
885. Adam Bede - George Eliot
886. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
887. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
888. Hard Times – Charles Dickens
889. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
890. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
891. Villette – Charlotte Brontë
892. Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
893. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
894. The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
895. The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
896. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
897. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
898. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
899. Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
900. Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
901. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
903. Agnes Grey - Anne Bronte
904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
905. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
906. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
907. La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
908. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
909. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
910. Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
911. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
912. Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
913. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
914. Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
915. The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
916. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
917. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
918. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
919. The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
920. Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
921. Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
922. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
923. The Red and the Black – Stendhal
924. The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
925. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
926. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
927. The Albigenses – Charles Robert Maturin
928. Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
929. The Monastery – Sir Walter Scott
930. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
932. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
933. Persuasion – Jane Austen
934. Ormond – Maria Edgeworth
935. Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
936. Emma – Jane Austen
937. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
939. The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
940. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
941. Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
942. Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth
943. Hyperion – Friedrich Hölderlin
944. The Nun – Denis Diderot
945. Camilla – Fanny Burney
946. The Monk – M.G. Lewis
947. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
948. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
949. The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
950. The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
951. Justine – Marquis de Sade
952. Vathek – William Beckford
953. The 120 Days of Sodom – Marquis de Sade
954. Cecilia – Fanny Burney
955. Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
956. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
957. Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
958. Evelina – Fanny Burney
959. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
960. Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett
961. The Man of Feeling – Henry Mackenzie
962. A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne
963. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
964. The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
965. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
966. Émile; or, On Education – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
967. Rameau's Nephew – Denis Diderot
968. Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
969. Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
970. Candide – Voltaire
971. The Female Quixote – Charlotte Lennox
972. Amelia – Henry Fielding
973. Peregrine Pickle – Tobias George Smollett
974. Fanny Hill – John Cleland
975. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
976. Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett
977. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
978. Pamela – Samuel Richardson
979. Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
980. Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus – J. Arbuthnot, J. Gay, T. Parnell, A. Pope, J. Swift
981. Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
982. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
983. Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift
984. Roxana – Daniel Defoe
985. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
986. Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
987. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
988. A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift
989. Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
990. The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
991. The Pilgrim's Progress – John Bunyan
992. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
993. The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe 994. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly
995. Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
996. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
997. The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
998. Aithiopika – Heliodorus
999. Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
1000. Metamorphoses – Ovid
1001. Aesop's Fables – Aesopus

Total: 94. I am therefore inspired to pick up all the copies of books on this list that I already have and finish off a list of 100. I could also theoretically sign up for this.

The best part is that a good number of the books on this list I own but have not read yet were purchased in one fell swoop of a buying binge, at Logos bookstore in Santa Cruz, just a few weekends ago. Am I psychic somehow, or just a huge bibliophile?

(via)

Jazz Old Hands

2008-05-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

What I need is for this list to be boiled down to like, the top 10, or 5, and then maybe I could finally get into jazz like I've always said I wanted to.

Obama's religion

2008-05-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

The thing that has bugged my dad the most about Obama's campaign (although he is a supporter) is Obama's constant reiteration that he is Christian. (We're a non-religious family so that tends to rub us the wrong way; although intellectually obviously we don't care, sometimes you have that gut reaction to someone where you want them to believe the exact same things that you do.)

I've been telling him all along that he has to repeat that fact because generally you don't get elected in this country if you are anything but Christian, but lately I've changed my tactic to "if he doesn't keep saying that, people will keep talking about how he's Muslim." It's seriously fucked up. So hear hear, Alex Balk, for this comment.

Because I'm sort of re-hooked on Gossip Girl

2008-05-09T14:56:00.000-07:00

Oh, kill my beating, 15-year-old girl heart now, why don't you, television:

"It really does feel like we’re living the show sometimes," says Penn, who for the record is pretty much exactly like Dan, all cheekbones and philosophical musings.

It's unbelievably cruel for New York Magazine to confirm that secret wish of all females that TV actors and their characters are the same person. Especially in this case, since I have had a soft spot for Penn Badgley ever since that terrible, but awesome, show "The Mountain" which was canceled halfway through a season since literally only Cristina and I watched it. ("Jack and Bobby," which was also awesome, suffered the same fate, and we never found out which son was going to grow up and be president.)

These are the things I worry about, besides John McCain

2008-05-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

I maintain that if I were to go back to school, one of my top five choices would be as some kind of media studies person analyzing "The Hills." I don't even watch it anymore -- my tolerance level is way, way too low for that kind of bullshit -- but I maintain a mild academic interest in it as a cultural phenomenon. Read this article about Heidi and Spencer to understand -- it's unfathomable and creepy.

Together, they have leveraged many bits of their lives -- Heidi's plastic surgery (nose job, breast implants), her real and continuous falling out with Lauren, the possibly faked ups and downs of their relationship and the cruel public mockery of Heidi's popstar aspirations -- to fit the 24-hour news cycle. They have retained a publicist, Cindy Guagenti of BWR Public Relations, but she seems to have a hands-off approach to their full-on courting of the press. Often, staged-looking paparazzi shots accompany their doings: It's Easter, and Heidi and Spencer have bunny ears on! Spencer comforts a crying Heidi after people are mean about her music video for "Higher" on the Internet!

Harvey Levin, the TMZ guru, said this fakeness factor actually adds to the fun: "They are so lame, and so staged and canned, that it makes it almost entertaining and fun to poke fun at. The secret for them is that they get the joke."

And Hilton, whose lawless blog has caused frequent earthquakes that shake the publicist-driven and fawning Celebrity Industrial Complex, mused over the setups and fictions in a telephone interview. "Genius and pathetic at the same time," he said. "But more genius than pathetic."

I really hope not. Stuff like this actually makes me feel like America is doomed; the apocalypse is, actually, closer than we think.

(via)

Personality-mapping the United States

2008-05-09T13:17:00.002-07:00

This has already been multiple places online, including my friend Rachel's blog, but please explain why there is a strong neurotic population in Oklahoma? I don't get it.

If they had interviewed me for this study they would have got one solid purple dot over in the San Francisco Bay Area. Damn hippies.

What the campaign is really about?

2008-05-09T11:50:00.001-07:00

Roger Ebert has a blog, which is pretty cool. I never read his column, and only watched him on TV, so it's weird to actually read his writing for once. Especially when it's about my favorite subject, Hillary Clinton's campaign (ok, perhaps that's my second favorite subject, but it's all tangled up now, obviously):

The campaign was not about political positions, but about sheer desire.

Way to say it, Roger. And you even say it in a way that makes me feel kind of sad for it all. It's a pretty shitty way for her to go out, without ever expecting it, and clinging for dear life. What a world, what a dynasty. We'll have to see how it goes.

(via)

The Empire Strikes Barack

2008-05-08T10:21:00.000-07:00

These "12 Internet Memes that Took Obama to the Nomination," while (slightly) premature, are nevertheless hilarious. Most of them I'd at least heard of, although I didn't watch all of them due to my ongoing "I can read lots of junk at work but can't manage to squeeze in video time" (unlike my extraordinarily lucky roommate with two monitors and his own office, who manages to watch full movies at work while actually working, a level of multi-tasking I can only reach while "working" from home) problem. However, they don't exactly lose anything in belated watching. My favorite (of the ones I'd never seen before) is the "Star Wars" parody, so I'm posting it here:

Obviously there's zero nuance in these things, but whatever. You just have to love the Internet.

Plouffe

2008-05-07T17:02:00.000-07:00

My friends have developed a weird kind of e-mail-hero worship of David Plouffe. Not actually kidding; it's like the way you think you know the people whose blogs you read, when really you don't, and all we do is read his mass-marketed e-mails. Anyway, apparently he's afraid of the spotlight, which only makes him more intriguing. Dude deserves a killer job in Obama's administration (assuming it eventually exists).

So would that make Eric, Larry, or Sergey Hugh?

2008-05-07T16:58:00.000-07:00

My friend Kim hosted Jon Carroll and Leah Garchik at Google a week or so ago. You can watch her very smooth intro and the event itself on YouTube here (the story about the orgy is quite hilarious and sometime in the first half, since that's the half of the talk I attended), but my favorite thing to come from this event (not that I had anything to do with it) was this quote in Carroll's column soon after:

I think maybe Google is the Hefner mansion of the 21st century. It too rises from a fantasy - what if you had all the information in the universe at your fingertips? - and it too has sensual amenities to ease the workload. Since the whole idea of Google, it would seem, is that no one should ever have to leave work, one does wonder how it handles courtship rituals and related activities. I imagine they are handled in some officially unofficial way, though, because the Google environment is very carefully thought through.

As for the first half, yes. As for the second half, good question, man, good question. I decline to state. I don't even know myself.

A really dumb complaint

2008-05-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

There should be a website like "White Whine" for "Google Whine." Like this, thought to myself for the second time in a week upon opening my (free) container of veggie sushi I got from the kitchen just yards from my desk, "Why don't they give me more wasabi and soy sauce, and less fucking ginger." Which sounds absolutely absurd considering there are cyclones in Myanmar and all that, but really, to indulge me for a moment in being entirely shallow, why is it that prepackaged sushi packs only give you one measly packet of soy sauce, and seem to think that to mitigate the spice of that pea-sized ball of wasabi, you need like a quarter cup of ginger? WHY!?!!

Election Night

2008-05-07T10:35:00.000-07:00

My friends and I are big dorks. It was my friend Jordan's birthday yesterday, and so a bunch of us went out to Toronado for some beer and sausages from Rosamunde's next door. Always delicious, yes, but the real show of the night as far as I was concerned was a couple of time zones away and brought to me by my Blackberry. I will not lie, I refreshed the New York Times Indiana primary results about every three minutes, even though it only actually updated maybe every seven minutes. I'd last looked at the county results map around 7pm, and so from then until 9pm all I knew, or guessed, or hoped, was that Lake County hadn't reported yet. I also will not lie, I definitely sang part of "Gary, Indiana" in the middle of a dive bar. My friend Sarah and I had each pledged to ourselves and our comrades to not go on from Toronado to the second destination of the night, the Page, primarily because I wanted to sleep and she wanted to avoid repeating any drunken decisions similar to those she made at our Cinco de Mayo celebration Monday, but with 89% of the votes in, I couldn't in good conscience go home and miss the chance to toast a victory for Barack Obama after a night of inching margins and percentages. So we went on, with a second pledge to only have one beer at the second bar, and were rewarded with CNN broadcast on the TV. (More bars should really show political results. Toronado was showing NBA playoffs, whatever that is all about.) We all had our smartphones in hand -- I had two phones, one refreshing the Times in case they got the results before CNN, and one texting my dad -- and we clinked glasses about six times.

And, ok, we were obviously going for a long shot, but I had also expected, or worried, that Clinton was going to hit like 8% minimum victory in Indiana, the polls not being promising, and also history not exactly being encouraging what with "close" races in PA and OH turning out only in her favor. So a loss for Obama by barely 20,000 votes is fucking A-OK for me, and I feel like all this is finally happening. I can't really say anything because I feel like I'd jinx it, but I am feeling good today.

Finally, overall I realized that I may need to be sedated on Election Night this November, which happens to also occur on my birthday. I was wired from the moment returns started filing in from Indiana until 11pm last night, and that's despite the two and a half beers I had in that time. I seriously have no idea how I'll manage to keep my heart rate at any reasonable level when what's at stake is not just one state, but the chance to finally get a Democrat back in the White House. Seriously, even now I'm freaking out about it.

At last!

2008-05-06T13:02:00.000-07:00

I consume a lot of online media every day. I'm subscribed to 120 feeds in my Google Reader, and I share a tiny percentage of that with you on this blog. It's obscene, really, the number of things I could take time to read every day. (I don't; they build up, and when I have a home sick day I spend a lot of time weeding through them again. It's sort of like the way I deal with physical excess -- I pile up clothes all over my room until some day I have time to put them away. Judge away.) Anyway, all this is to say that there's some stuff I love but don't blog about since it takes time to open up another window, arrange the links, etc. Thankfully, Google has finally introduced a new sharing feature in Reader where, when you share an item that you've read, you can write a comment. Can you believe it took them this long? (I should insert here that my opinion is not the opinion of my company, obviously.) I can't. But I'm absolutely thrilled. And I should take this moment to point out that if you want to read my shared items, and you aren't one of my "friends" in Google Reader or don't use Reader at all, you can go here. Go forth and consume the Internet.

A (tacit) celebrity endorsement I can get excited about.

2008-05-06T12:46:00.000-07:00

Hey, we got Stevie Wonder on our side. Go us.

I'm actually serious.

And because I can: "Top five musical crimes perpetuated by Stevie Wonder in the '80s and '90s. Go. Sub-question: is it in fact unfair to criticize a formerly great artist for his latter day sins, is it better to burn out or fade away?"

If it's rampion you want, rampion you shall have.

2008-05-06T11:25:00.001-07:00

Ok. All my cooking blogs have been talking about ramps this past week. I have not read too deeply into any of the posts to find out what ramps are, but apparently ramps have like the shortest season of any edible, although I maintain that my inability to get a good apricot tops this whole ramp season business. (I also exaggerate, I have no idea how long ramp season is compared to other seasons, but people are freaking out about ramps, so I assume it's short.) Anyway, I also have no idea how ramps taste. Are they like leeks? Onions? They look like leeks and onions... I think. A wikipedia search could easily solve this problem but I prefer to keep it all mysterious because a) I've never ever seen ramps in a store near me and therefore they are pretty irrelevant to my life and b) whenever I hear the word "ramp," all I can possibly think about is this episode of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" with a "Fractured Fairy Tale" bit where Rapunzel's mother wants to eat rampion.

Anyway, so the upshot of all this is that I'd rather tie my concept of "ramps" to an obscure cartoon than find out what it actually is. At least for the sake of blogging about it, and now I'm going to look that shit up because now I'm wondering if ramps and rampion are the same thing. Or if the latter even exists. Plus! I have the immense pleasure of presenting you with this, the product of my YouTube search efforts, and truly awesome:

(Just so you know, ramps are wild leeks that taste kind of like onions and garlic, and rampion is some rando flower in Europe.)

Thinking about Islam...

2008-05-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

My dad sent me this bit by Sam Harris, author of "End of Faith" and "Letters to a Christian Nation." I have only read the former of the two titles, and I confess I don't remember it well. It had some compelling points, but I was not entirely swayed by his argument that religion in moderation is basically as bad as religious extremism because it sanctions it somehow. Despite not having any kind of religious upbringing, I have a soft spot for religion. I don't like to condemn my friends who do have a religious faith. Maybe it's just me being a sentimentalist. I also have some respect for the traditions and forms of faith -- and being ridden with anxiety like I am, I have a longing for a kind of solace and inner peace that I imagine religion offers some people.

Still, it's very interesting to read Sam Harris' points of view. He is willing to say things that people don't like to say, and this article proves that at the same time that it asserts the necessity of such speech. He certainly does put his money where his mouth is.

I recently finished reading "Three Cups of Tea," which I could talk about at length but which is essentially just a story of this guy, Greg Mortenson, who after a failed trek up K2, stumbled across a remote rural village in Pakistan and became crazy committed to building a school there. After a lot of false starts and adventures, he ended up building more than 50 schools, "women's activity centers," and various random other things (for example, in order to build the first school, he realized he had to build a bridge, and he helps them get clean water which completely halved the infant mortality rate). Mortenson believes that education is at least a major key to bring about the end of terrorism, because schools like his, which teach math and writing instead of Islamic extremism like the madrassas (which in the chronology of the book start cropping up everywhere, like mushrooms, and scare the shit out of him), and give villagers options beyond sticking around where they were born tending to yaks and joining up with terrorist organizations. His other big sticking point is how important it is to education women, an assertion that is not totally backed up with facts/evidence from his own schools; however, there was some statistic in the book that shows that communities with more educated women have better health and life expectancy or something like that.

The reason why all this is relevant is because the entire book is filled with assertions both from the author and the Americans and from the local Pakistani people who work with Mortenson to bring about these changes that they are not like the Muslim extremists or the terrorists of whom we are all afraid. It's a major, major theme in the book. So I am torn when I read these "academic" perspectives on the intrinsically violent nature of Islam and then these anecdotal, experience-based stories which indicate the opposite. Or which focus less on the textual shit, the stuff buried in the Qur'an, and instead focus on the lifestyles of the people whose faith rests with and in that book. I mean, in one example in this book, the leader of a village has a Qur'an that he cannot even read, and he is a paragon of virtue, open-minded, dedicated to providing a school for his village, especially for the girls. His granddaughter ends up being the first educated woman in the region. I like to think that there are more men and women like that out there, and indeed, there are more mentioned in the book. But he also can't read his holy book, which academics inform me is filled with all this bad stuff. So what does all that mean? What's the takeaway?

All I can think is that it's very important for us to try to get to know Islam on both an intellectual level and on an experiential level. I think in Harris' case, although I don't know for sure what kind of Muslim-country-tourism he's gotten up to, he relies at least somewhat on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has had first-hand experience with some of the worst that Islam has to offer. (I have her book "Infidel" on my to-read stack and I keep thinking I really need to push it higher up in the queue.) But what am I supposed to do? Just reading "Three Cups of Tea" I learned tons about Pakistan. I vaguely knew that there were different tribes there, but had no real grasp on that fact. And I'm not planning on making a trip out there anytime soon, so I have to reach for information where I can find it. I think if nothing else, that is something I'd like to take away from this Harris piece -- more information, not less, is good.

Something worth thinking about.

And I call myself a beer lover...

2008-05-05T15:19:00.000-07:00

This is just depressing. My friend JJ, who writes a fantastic beer blog (I don't really know how it compares to other beer blogs, but that's because I don't read any others), posted this list of 125 Places To Have a Beer Before you Die. I really, really would like to hit up all these locations some day. In the meantime, I have been to...

The Growler List: 125 Places to Have a Beer Before You Die

1. Great American Beer Festival, Denver, CO
2. Grand Place, Brussels, Belgium
3. U Fleku, Prague, Czech Republic
4. Great British Beer Festival, Earls Court, London, England
5. Oktoberfest, Munich, Germany
6. Augustiner Keller, Munich, Germany
7. Abbaye de Notre-Dame d’Orval, Orval, Belgium
8. The Gravity Bar, Guinness St. James Gate Brewery, Dublin, Ireland
9. Monk’s Café, Philadelphia, PA
10. The Great Canadian Beer Festival, Vancouver, BC
11. Hofbrauhaus, Munich, Germany
12. The Brickskeller, Washington, DC
13. Rick’s Café, Negril, Jamaica
14. The Market Porter, Stoney Street, London, England
15. Cat’s Eye Pub, Inner Harbor, Baltimore, MD
16. Seats on top of the Green Monster in Fenway Park, Boston, MA
17. Mondial de la Bière, Montreal, Quebec
18. Horizon’s Café, CN Tower, Toronto, Ontario
19. Clubhouse box seats at the Saratoga Race Course, Saratoga Springs, NY
20. Beer Club Popeye, Tokyo, Japan
21. The Publick House, Brookline, MA
22. Infield at Daytona International Speedway, Daytona Beach, FL
23. Henry’s 12th Street Tavern, Portland, OR
24. The Hopleaf, Chicago, IL
25. World Beer Festival, Durham/Raleigh, NC
26. French Quarter during Mardi Gras, New Orleans, LA
27. Piazza San Marco, Venice, Italy
28. Zum Uerige, Dusseldorf, Germany
29. Toronado, San Francisco, CA
30. The Olde Mitre Tavern, Ely Court, Hatton Garden, London, England
31. Turn 4 Suites at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Indianapolis, IN
32. Rogue Brewery, Newport, OR
33. The Wynkoop Brewery, Denver, CO
34. Spuyten Duyvil, Brooklyn, NY
35. Great Lakes Brewing, Cleveland, OH
36. McMenamins Kennedy School Hotel, Portland, OR
37. Atelier am Dom, Cologne, Germany
38. Anchor Brewing Tasting Room, San Francisco, CA
39.The Flying Saucer, NC, SC, TN, AR and TX
40. Arend’s Nest, Amsterdam, Holland
41. Blues Bar, Stone Town, Zanzibar
42. SandLot Brewery, Coors Field, Denver, CO
43. Clark Street Ale House, Chicago, IL
44. Tailgating at a Southeastern Conference Football Game
45. Selin’s Grove Brewing, Selinsgrove, PA
46. The Great Lost Bear, Portland, ME
47. The Map Room, Chicago, IL
48. The Blue Tusk, Syracuse, NY
49. Woolwich Arms, Guelph, ON
50. Beach Bar at the Atlantis Hotel, Paradise Island, Bahamas
51. The White Horse Pub, Parsons Green, London, England
52. Redbones Restaurant, Somerville, MA
53. Lord Nelson Brewery Hotel, Sydney, Australia
54. Falling Rock Tap House, Denver, CO
55. Sleeping Lady Brewery/Snow Goose Restaurant, Anchorage, AK
56. In de Wildeman, Amsterdam, Holland
57. Andechs Monastery, Andechs, Germany
58. Charlie’s Bar, Copenhagen, Denmark
59. PINT Bokbierfestival, Amsterdam, Holland
60. Sierra Nevada Brewing, Chico, CA
61. Kr?ma, Ceske Krumlov, Czech Republic
62. Sapporo Beer Garden, Higashi-ku, Japan
63. Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island, MI
64. Sail and Anchor Brewpub, Fremantle, Australia
65. F.X. Matt Brewery Tasting Room, Utica, NY
66. Delerium Café, Brussels, Belgium
67. Birreria l’Orso Eletricco, Rome, Italy
68. Gösser Bierklinik, Vienna, Austria
69. Bariloche Ski Resort, Rio Negro, Argentina
70. d.b.a., New York, NY
71. Brewer’s Art, Baltimore, MD
72. Au General Lafayette, Paris, France
73. Schlenkerla Brewery Tavern, Bamberg, Germany
74. De Hopduvel, Antwerp, Belgium
75. Mr. Sancho’s Beach, Cozumel, Mexico
76. City Tavern, Philadelphia, PA
77. Die Weisse, Salzburg, Austria
78. Halve Maan Brewery, Bruges, Belgium
79. Tinkoff, Moscow, Russia
80. Le Bier Circus, Brussels, Belgium
81. TY Harbor Brewery, Tokyo, Japan
82. Irseer Klosterbrauerei, Irsee, Germany
83. Stockholm Beer & Whiskey Festival, Stockholm, Sweden
84. Goose Island Brewing, Chicago, IL
85. Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
86. Brewery Ommegang, Cooperstown, NY
87. Deschutes Brewery & Publick House, Bend, OR
88. Baumgartner’s Cheese Store & Tavern, Monroe, WI
89. Icebergs Bar, Sydney, Australia
90. Cantillon Brewery and Gueuze Museum, Belgium
91. Dogfish Head Ale House, Rehoboth Beach, DE
92. Belgo Central, London, England
93. Bruxellensis Festival of Characterful Beers, Brussels, Belgium
94. Felix in The Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong
95. Brasserie Federal, Bahnhof Zurich, Switzerland
96. Heineken Brewery, Amsterdam, Holland
97. Clark’s Ale House, Syracuse, NY
98. The Shakespeare, Aukland, New Zealand
99. Mahar’s, Albany, NY
100. Steamworks Brewing, Vancouver, BC
101. Cooter Brown’s, New Orleans, LA
102. McSorley’s Ale House, New York, NY
103. Kelly’s Caribbean Bar, Grill & Brewery, Key West, FL
104. Rose & Crown Pub, Epcot Center, Orlando, FL
105. The Church Brew Works, Pittsburgh, PA
106. Brick Store Pub, Decatur, GA
107. Sunset Grille & Tap, Boston, MA
108. The Ghost Bar at the Palms Hotel, Las Vegas, NV
109. Norwich Inn/Jasper Murdock’s Brewery, Norwich, VT
110. The Gingerman, Austin, TX
111. Library Ale House, Santa Monica, CA
112. t’Bruges Biertja, Bruges, Belgium
113. beerbistro, Toronto, Canada
114. The Dubliner, Washington, DC
115. John Barleycorn, Chicago, IL
116. Anchor Bar, Buffalo, NY
117. Gritty McDuff’s, Portland, ME
118. Top of the Hill Brewery & Restaurant, Chapel Hill, NC
119. The Bell, Aldworth, Berkshire, England
120. The Golf Tavern, Edinburgh, Scotland
121. Old Ebbitt Grill, Washington, DC
122. 5 Seasons Brewing, Atlanta, GA
123. Tim Schafer’s at Lake Norman, Sherrills Ford, NC
124. Stumbling Monk, Seattle. WA
125. The Happy Gnome, St. Paul, MN

Yeah, that's right. Four. My only consolation is that two of them are in England, and so that gives me some kind of cred (grudging credit to Sean and the CAMRA Good Beer guide). Though why they say to have a beer in Piazza San Marco, I have no idea. Venice is not exactly a beer town.

Jezebelles

2008-05-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

It continues to be weird to see pictures of people you read about on the Internet all the time. (Like seeing Ira Glass on video.)

But this is just my own elite opinion, so you can feel free to disregard it.

2008-05-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

Sorry to post old news, but this is the last straw. We have had enough of presidents who ignore facts in favor of their own self-interest.

(On a side note, welcome to my Clinton campaigning friend and new blog reader! Er... ha.)

Rhubarb, who knew?

2008-05-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

Dan and I decided to sign up for a CSA box. We chose Farm Fresh to You because they deliver directly to your home, rather than requiring you to go to a local pick-up center to pick up your box. That alone was a good decision, since our first box was delivered last Tuesday and I didn't rescue it from in front of our house until Thursday morning. You would think that we rushed crazy folk would be the worst candidate for a CSA box, delivering organic, local, slow food to your doorstep. However, it turns out to be a great idea! It's actually forced me to use fresh veggies and to cook in general, since I don't want to waste all this fresh produce arriving on my doorstep. Our first delivery included a small head of lettuce, a pack of strawberries, a bunch of carrots, two stalks of rhubarb, and a bunch of asparagus. My first reaction was -- rhubarb? I've never cooked rhubarb, and in fact, until this weekend, I'd never eaten it at all. So my first mission was to find something to cook with rhubarb.

I ended up choosing this recipe for big crumb coffee cake with rhubarb, and if I may say so myself, it was a really excellent choice. Tangy, really cakey with a hint of vanilla, with a lot of crumble on top. I actually think that I didn't put in enough butter in the top crumble, so it wasn't as "big crumb" as it should have been, but really, more butter would probably have given all of us heart attacks on the spot, so it may be for the best. We ate this as dessert for our brunch club on Saturday, just little bite-sized pieces really, and then had some more yesterday morning as a snack on our way to see the Annie Leibovitz show at the Legion of Honor. The recipe was delicious with rhubarb, and really quite easy to make (even when I had the totally wrong sized pan), and the blogger says you can definitely make it with other fruits as well. I imagine it would be pretty good with some cinnamon and apple, too. Sadly I took no pictures, but I promise that they don't look as good as the ones on Smitten Kitchen's website anyway.

Totally off my pseudo-diet, but whatever.

Candy

2008-05-02T11:33:00.000-07:00

I realized that when I filled out that survey thing with the top 5 favorite snacks, I forgot about the ultimate, ultimate ridiculous snack habit I have (although I am deliberately avoiding it because, whew, the floodgates, believe me): Lifesavers. Specifically, wint-o-green lifesavers that come individually packaged in the bag. They are so, so good. Yum. And if you must know, my second strange candy habit is Smarties. I used to eat them like ten rolls at a time and squirrel the wrappers away inside the couch cushions. Whenever Mom or Dad found them I felt so guilty. And that happened multiple times since I apparently did not learn from my mistakes.

Hovel2Home2Hangover

2008-05-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

Oy.

I was walking across campus this morning and thinking to myself that I love the collective hangover experience. There is nothing quite like it. I can't believe I'm romanticizing the hangover, but it's true! Some of the most hilarious times come from when you and your friends are all sort of just trying to process the previous evening... at brunch, on gchat, on vacation... there's a certain tingle to it, which may not make sense to you but it does to me. And there's this sort of tiny glory that comes from knowing exactly how another person feels, physically, in that moment, and knowing that all that stems from a collection of activities you all participated in the night before. It's a very alive moment.

Anyway, this is all sort of just a rambling thought inspired by, obviously the collective hangover. Last night was Hovel2Home, a purportedly small celebration of the fact that Zoe has a home (if not yet any furniture or dishes). The expectation was for it to be a few girls sitting around sipping wine and, I don't know, celebrating. But there were only two bottles of wine, and on a trip out for more we stumbled (not literally, at least not yet) into the Lone Palm, a spot which I realized is almost exactly between my house and Zoe's, and that is either a very good thing or a very bad thing. Last night, it was ground zero.

Not to say that anything so very bad happened. Nothing really out of the ordinary -- which is really just an indication of the fact that the people I know have boundless energy and a lot of enthusiasm for each other, which leads frequently to enthusiasm for booze. Who knew!? Anyway, it was a good night. Much bonding ensued. And then my friend Sarah, who unfortunately lives in Russian Hill, crashed at my house. The best moment of the morning, therefore, was when, readying myself for a late shuttle, and while I was sipping the water I had so thoughtfully put next to my bed the night before, I heard Sarah in the hallway drop a HandiSnack cracker that she'd found in Dan's room on the ground and say "10 second rule." These moments can't be made up or repeated. I'm telling you, the collective hangover is a glorious, glorious thing.

Thus, a day in the life. I promise my parents and parental/stable readers that I really do attempt to take care of my health more often than this blog or my gchat statuses would indicate.

UPDATE: Realized that Zoe had coined the perfect, the only acceptable, title for this post and changed it.

Designer Coffee Cup Sleeve Cuffs

2008-05-01T17:45:00.001-07:00

I am still super pissed that no one has ever made Louis Vuitton slap bracelets. This just reminds me of that fact.

Off to get a haircut. Be ready.

Tagged!

2008-05-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

I loved being tagged! I always want it to happen and it never does, so I just find random surveys around and fill them out anyway, because I love surveys. Memes are the slam book of the modern Internet age.

What was I doing 5 years ago?

Well, May 2003 I was midway through spring quarter of sophomore year, which means that Laurel and I were biking to and from golf class ("Golf for Business and Life") twice a week, purportedly on the way to Human Sexuality class (this was really what my schedule was like that quarter), but since we were going to be late anyway because the classes were on polar ends of campus, we would swing by Jamba Juice, usually not actually on our bikes because biking was hotter than walking, and sometimes we would put vodka in the Jamba. I think I'd filed to be an English major and was probably already admitted to the fall quarter in Oxford. Man, I miss those times.

Five things on my to-do list today (or things I did today - in no particular order):
1. Buy pinatas
2. return Peattie's car
3. get my hair cut
4. watch the Office
5. get an X-ray of my teeth for my braces deal

Five snacks I love, regardless of cost or nutritional value :
1. frozen grapes
2. cheese in any form, especially if paired with Pepperidge Farms Hearty Wheat crackers
3. iced tea with lots of ice and lots of sugar in it, cup after cup of it
4. these weird gluten-free oatmeal cookies they have at work
5. had to think seriously about this but ... wheat thins with cream cheese

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire, assuming I had to spend it on me:
1. buy vacation homes, one on a temperate lake/coast somewhere, one somewhere hot and beachy, and maybe one in the mountains too. and maybe one in Italy. and maybe one in Brooklyn.
2. stop working for a long while. perhaps invest, and then just quit working altogether and just attempt my whole blogging/writing/knowing about the Internet for a living thing
3. travel a LOT
4. always use the wash-and-fold. hell, actually I'd hire someone to clean my house and clothes
5. go on another American road trip, this time lasting much longer

Five bad money habits I have:
1. Taking money out from non-BofA ATMs and paying fees for it.
2. Buying extra stuff on Amazon.com in order to get up to the super saver shipping
3. Target. I can't buy less than like $150 there at a time.
4. buying cheap plentiful clothes instead of quality stuff
5. I think my entire life is a bad money habit. But let's just say, buying groceries I don't end up eating.

Five (four) places I have lived:
1. Whittier
2. Stanford
3. Columbia University
4. Oxford, England
5. San Francisco. Nice how I just eliminated Palo Alto there, right?

Five jobs I’ve had:
1. picture framer girl
2. bartender in England
3. assistant teacher person (at my old high school)
4. RA
5. admin

Five bloggers I'm tagging (in a total dork move):
1. That's what she said
2. Silvia
3. Sara
4. Bethany
5. Cri (unlinked on purpose)

John Mayer feathers his hair!

2008-05-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

I love him. I even like his tattoos. (Though allegedly now he has a bunch more on the left arm and that weirds me out, but I am going to pretend they don't exist.)

How privileged are you?

2008-04-30T17:24:00.000-07:00

I find this is pretty poor taste, and yet I feel compelled to answer it... it's a "how privileged are you?" test, and I have bolded the true statements. The original authors of this exercise are Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
Does it matter if it was when I was in middle school?
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician or professor
Am I forgetting anyone?
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
What does this even mean?
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
I assume this is definitely true.
9. Were read children’s books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
Piano was the longest-lasting one but there were some brief attempts at other stuff.
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
Well, unless you count the mocking in "Stuff White People Like" or the Obama "elitism" bullshit...
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
No! God bless scholarships.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
Assuming "GATE" camp didn't count.
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
I mean, not like the Four Seasons.
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
Nah, but this year I bought a hand-me-down, but for really cheap, so it almost counts?
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
25. You had your own room as a child
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
It was my grandma's old one and it was pretty retro and kick-ass. But I suspect there is a generational difference in answering these questions. Lots more TVs sitting around when I was a kid.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
Hell, I don't own one now!
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
Man, apparently privilege is synonymous with "artsy."
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family
Who isn't? I just knew Dad wanted us to turn off the lights when we weren't using them. Something I still am not always sure my roommate knows.

I got 20 out of 34. I will say that I think that I was very privileged growing up because my family cared a lot about arts and education and about me and my sister getting the most out of every opportunity. So even if we couldn't really afford stuff, we made it work. At least, that's my perspective on the whole thing. What's interesting to me is thinking that in comparison to so many kids I knew in college, I never really thought of myself as super privileged. I mean, these kids went to Disneyworld every year, their parents were neurosurgeons or what have you, they had gone on trips to Europe with their families instead of with their high schools, and my parents just finally got to Europe while I was there studying abroad. I feel really lucky, I guess I should say, that I got all the things I got. Anyway, this is a much bigger subject than this blog can really get into, and I feel somewhat touchier about it, even though it's actually a major issue for me. I can't count the number of times people in school assumed I was a trust-funder or that my parents were lawyers or something, maybe because I was white or maybe just because I went to Stanford. And it always bugged me a lot, because I felt like people didn't get that you could be smart and not have some legacy going back generations at some Ivy League school. That you could be a good person and not make a lot of money. I don't think anyone ever meant it that way, except for a rare one or two, but it always got under my skin, so these issues of "privilege" are important to me. Hence my posting this survey despite my cringiness about it.

(via)

Babies!

2008-04-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

I'm really rocking the random posts today. Be glad I didn't post, in addition to the pandas, the sleepy bear and the baby lions (but feel free to follow those links!). But, on the subject of baby things, Will Arnett and Amy Poehler are expecting their first child this fall, and if that baby is not hilarious from like age 2 minutes then I will be shocked and disappointed. However, I will get over that, provided the baby is hilarious at like, age 19, after having a somewhat quiet non-celebrity childhood, when he/she realizes that he/she is actually so funny he/she just can't keep it down and then emerges out of his parents' shadows, in such an inconspicuous way that people don't even realize, until they do and it is awesome.

I don't even plan my own kids' lives like this.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

2008-04-30T15:34:00.000-07:00

Suddenly it occurs to me that the Judd Apatow backlash might all be bullshit. Let me see if I can explain.

I saw "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" last night and I was pleasantly surprised by it. I really liked it, in fact. It was funny and sweet and not overly filled with the standard Apatow crew (although several of them, obviously, appeared, thank you Paul Rudd I love you). Halfway through I thought to myself, fuck, this is a romantic comedy. And here's the New York Times sitting around talking about how the romantic comedy industry is freaking out because they aren't managing to capture crowds the way "You've Got Mail" used to, and they all want another "Wedding Crashers," which was not that funny, nor was it really that romantic. The Judd Apatow backlash constantly refers to his talent for portraying the loser guy, who always inexplicably gets the girl, even though she is like ten billion times hotter than he is. But "Wedding Crashers" was way more of a guy movie than any Judd Apatow fare, and I really don't get how people keep missing that point... maybe it's whatever freakish portion of the female population finds Vince Vaughn attractive.

Anyway, the new(ish) standard Apatow critique is that his female characters are two-dimensional. I will grant you that, to a point. I get that there was not much female character development in "Knocked Up," and the movie was primarily about the guys, although in my opinion not so much the guys who all lived with Seth Rogen in the house but more about Seth and Paul Rudd, who produced the funniest and saddest and best scene in the movie (when they are high on shrooms in the Vegas hotel room). However, I still think that Leslie Mann, despite coming off as somewhat shrill at times, was nevertheless incredibly sympathetic in addition to being legitimately funny. And Katherine Heigl, despite being the hottie who somehow was desperate (?) enough to sleep with the nottie, still showed a considerable level of strength throughout the movie, and there were hints of complication around her (such as when she runs into her old friends after buying baby stuff, and wants to hide it -- she's got issues with this, even if they are somewhat snobbish ones).

The girls in "Superbad" somewhat inexplicably go for the boys in the story, despite the boys being total idiots (or at least Jonah Hill was. Michael Cera is always adorable). But that was a teen movie, and it was more of a teen party movie, less a teen romcom (a la "She's All That," which is not so much a com except when it's by accident).

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall" was not much different, although I would argue that sheerly because Kristin Bell is awesome she manages to give some depth, even if it was bitch-depth, to a role that could easily have been just a figurehead (forgive me since that's totally not the right word for a film role). Critics have claimed that she doesn't come off well even when she is trying to be sympathetic, but I disagree. I thought she is clearly a smart woman, who is clearly stuck in a career that she wants and does not want at the same time, and is negotiating a level of fame that she isn't really emotionally equipped for. Perhaps I'm interpreting, but I think that stuff is there, and it in part excuses her bitchiness. The other thing about this movie is that Jason Segel is much more likable than Seth Rogen in "Knocked Up," partly because he is more attractive and partly because he is written to be less of a total loser (although definitely not a success, he at least has managed to keep a job and date a girl for an extended period of time, and he has a treadmill, whatever that means), so it's much more understandable when Mila Kunis goes for him. Less of the total "shlub," in other words.

Anyway, all this is a long way of saying that it's true that the women in Judd Apatow romantic comedies (and romantic comedies they are, so don't deny it, boys) are arguably more two-dimensional than the guys in the movies. However, as a woman, I can say that usually, I like romantic comedies because I like the men in them at least as much as I relate to the women. At least in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," I related to Sarah Marshall (on a more shallow level than, say, I relate to Sally in "When Harry Met Sally," but that is Nora Ephron's genius so I cannot explain further). The best romantic comedies out there have both relatable women and attractive (I mean physically and personality-wise) men. The worst have bland women and boring men. There are some, like "My Best Friend's Wedding," where the woman is supremely relatable but the guy is not really super appealing except in the way that you so completely identify with Julia Roberts that you competitively want her to win him and he therefore becomes desirable. And there's "Two Weeks Notice," where Sandra Bullock is sort of meh (I can't relate to her, I don't get it) but Hugh Grant is bumbling and sort of incapable of taking care of himself and I love that movie. So the one thing Apatow has going for him is that his movies have somewhat realistic men, who also happen to be attractive, despite being legitimately flawed both physically and emotionally. I think that's why I've gotten more of a kick out of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" than the romantic comedies I've watched recently -- and why, when I want to see a cute movie as of late, I dive into the archives instead of bothering to see a new one. Apatow movies aren't really guy movies. They still end well. "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" had its fair share of sort of fuzzy sunset moments. It also featured "pearl necklace" jokes and a pretty long (no pun intended) male frontal nudity moment/scene. So at risk of sounding like a moron and betraying my feminist roots, I think these movies are sort of unisex. And I consider that a strength, in a world where "romantic" movies have been relegated to the same world as chick lit and pink covers and all that. They are genuine crossovers, and I think the reason people are worried about them being sexist is less because they actually are and more because men actually go see the movies, and like them, and no one seems to be inclined to call them a click flick. So it's a case of a hyper-reaction, or something.

Anyway, this has been a very long ramble and I'm sure I'm leaving something out and probably will disagree with myself at a later point. But I'm pretty sure I'll be seeing "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" again, so I guess that's sort of the ultimate point, right?

(Side note: It reminded me of "50 First Dates." Just fun fact!)

All this inspired by this.

Kiss the rain

2008-04-30T13:13:00.000-07:00

If they really put Dawson's Creek on the new WB.com (so absurd), it will be so awesome. I can only wish that they keep the original music. The fact that they changed the music on the DVDs -- including the theme song -- is still one of the things that rankles me most, outside of real life issues like global warming and all that. Seriously! I mean, can you imagine this scene with any different song??

I'm dying a little bit right now. Ah! Seriously! I must find the tapes I had of all the episodes and get them digitalized...

Book from Yo Momma

2008-04-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

Yeah, this is actually happening. I continue to be pissed at myself for not coming up with this idea first. And will obviously buy the book.

Pandas make you smile

2008-04-30T11:55:00.001-07:00

I sat down to watch this video sort of daring myself not to smile and instead just giggled the whole time. Pandas are such strange creatures -- they sort of roll into things, they look like dolls, or beanbags, or clay, or something. Anyway, but they are also pretty damn cute, and those little eeping sounds they make certain don't hurt.

(NPR via CuteOverload)

I have to add here that when I saw BJ Novak do standup a couple months ago, one of his funniest bits was about how pandas are endangered, but it's hard for scientists to get pandas to mate. "Pandas! Don't think other pandas are cute!" was the punchline, and I still think it's hilarious.

I can't believe I'm still talking about this

2008-04-30T09:38:00.000-07:00

A pretty awesome Daily Show clip about the whole Wright controversy. I have to agree with Jon Stewart here (when do I not?). You sure can't say he's not charismatic.

Obama made another speech separating himself further from Wright and the general opinion on it is positive. I guess I never felt like Wright was that crazy, nor did I think it was necessary (since it seems fucking obvious to me) for Obama to point out that just because he went to church with this guy does not mean that he agrees with everything he says. I also think it's sort of absurd to assume that Obama in church is the same as Obama in government or campaign. I feel like I have different parts of my life where I may indulge myself in certain opinions or habits or whatever, but they do not bleed over into other parts of my life and indeed, they just give me more to think about and different perspectives. Has no one considered that maybe Wright's church was that for Obama? Having read "Dreams from my Father," I recognize that Obama has some anger, and he relates to the anger of minorities, perhaps specifically black people, against the inequalities that exist in this country. That obviously is a theme in Wright's church/sermons. And I think it is okay for Obama to have some anger and even to indulge it a little. Maybe he gets some of that anger worked out in church, maybe it gives him a way of thinking about things, or a way to connect with people who feel the same way. I'm speculating, but I could see this being true. Anyway, the bottom line is that this is all absurd, because we're still forgetting that there are shit tons of asshole white preachers out there, one of whom was sought out for endorsement by the McCain campaign! Jon Stewart, take it away again...

Whatever. I should stop writing about this shit and start talking about the issues. You know, like how Hillary Clinton and good ol' John McCain (who I am terrified is going to show up in my dreams some day, like some evil tottering gnomey grandfather demon) wants to repeal the gas tax, which is REALLY STUPID (and I link to just this one article out of the many, many possible links talking about how that plan will not work, nor will it do anything about, oh, I dunno, global warming, or the economy).

(via, via)

This is really what me and my friends do for fun.

2008-04-29T16:15:00.000-07:00

We are ahead of a trend. Or something.

A couple of months ago, at some random person's 11th (read: 44th; it was February 29th) birthday party somewhere in the depths of SOMA at like 4am, I commanded the friends I was with to "dance to the music in their head!" The DJ at this place was incredibly lame, and did not have the stuff we wanted them to play, and so I felt that this was the only solution. It was pretty sweet. Perhaps you had to be there. It was the weirdest crowd ever, in a dance studio that had been converted into a party locale. There were only about 40 people there, alcohol was for despite it being a private party, and there was a line for the bathroom (I suspect now because the bathroom was probably the hot spot, and perhaps there were lines in the bathroom as well as outside it). But we had a grand ol' time dancing to the music in our heads.

Then, in Belize, on the craziest night of the trip (the one that started with me and Justin "bonding" -- for the sake of research -- with this drunk 40-something Kentuckian at the pool bar at two in the afternoon), I was taking a little cat nap (ok, I was sleeping it off) when suddenly Dan woke me up and handed me an iPod. I was confused. What was going on? Why did I need this iPod? What was the point? I quickly realized that all of us had iPods! We were dancing to the music in our heads! This proceeded for quite some time, and I ended up ditching my iPod with its legit music and just shared headphones with Laurel (who, to be fair, was using my second iPod, what a yuppie I am, seriously). The thing you need to understand is, Laurel has ridiculous taste in music. Ridiculous in the sense that it is amazing and totally singular and specific to her. There are those of us who can tolerate it, and who even love it, but none of us could have originated it. I will at some point post a list of the songs that are on the "Laurel Party Mix," but until then just trust me: it's ridiculous.

The iPod party continued for some time. We ended up boarding the water taxi to town while still listening to the Laurel Party Mix. (The boys, I must admit, straightened up and did not listen to their music on the boat.) We fist-pumped the entire way there. At one point someone on the boat apparently made a judgy comment about "Where'd we learn those dance moves, Muhammad Ali?" (Or some other boxer, I am not sure.) I was in quite the aggressive mood that day (blame the rum punch), and so I responded with something like "Whatever, you don't even know, you couldn't understand," or perhaps something a little more colorful. Then someone remarked on what we were listening to (did I mention that we were singing out loud the entire time too? On a crowded boat flying alongside a Belizean coastline in the dark?). Either Laurel or I told them it was "the fucking Pet Shop Boys." (It really was.) This led to one of the top quotes from the trip: one passenger explaining to the other that the Pet Shop Boys were "a homosexual band from the 80s." Classic.

I will stop reminiscing now, except to say that after returning from San Pedro back to our resort, and after the best grilled cheese sandwich I've ever had in my life, we continued the iPod dance party. On the beach. In the wee hours of the morning. It was the strangest communion with nature and fellow man that I can really imagine. And Laurel fist-pumped so hard once that she jammed her elbow into my head. We are really, really cool.

And! This is the entire point of this post -- we are also apparently really trendy, without even realizing it, and possibly with less trendy music (although probably whatever Dan and Justin were listening to was way legit. I think James just listened to "La Isla Bonita" a lot, which I cannot blame him for since it's about the island we were staying on!). Seriously. There was a "silent rave" in New York recently.

Then, Dan's younger brother was in Sao Paulo and participated in a "Silent Disco."

This is apparently a large global trend and we totally did it before it was cool.

Thus concludes my delirium-induced self-indulgent blog post of the day. Also, I should clarify that the picture at the top of this post is one of the only ones from the iPod party in Belize. It doesn't show that all of us were participating. But it does indicate the awesomeness, if I do say so myself. You know, the haze, the warm glow, the blur, the headiness of it all. (UPDATE: I changed this photo from the original after consultation with Justin.)

P.S. Because this blog post would not be complete without another non sequitor (although at least it's not a parenthetical (damn)): "Today, we saw a junkyard dog attacking the bones of a rotisserie chicken." "Nature."

Weekend Lessons

2008-04-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

This is probably one of those things you shouldn't write about on the internet, but whatever, I am sort of delirious and it was one of my big weekend discoveries, so I am going to write about it anyway. I was in Santa Cruz this weekend, with a bunch of friends, on a quest to understand "what it's like to grow up in Santa Cruz" (we had three natives to show us around). Unfortunately, upon waking up Saturday morning, I realized that I felt like total shit and realized I seemed to have developed a cruel full-blown virus of some kind. So while my buddies were ordering mimosas at brunch, I was resisting evil egg dishes and guzzling water... and taking the Xanax that my friend offered me to help relax. I had fierce body aches and was struggling to find any kind of over-the-counter drug to help with that (ibuprofen being acceptable for headaches, but otherwise utterly unhelpful, plus it's kind of like I take it so much it doesn't do anything anymore, the way caffeine used to be for me before I gave it up). So while I whined about needing some kind of full-body relaxer, my friend busted out the Xanax, and boy did that shit do the trick. I only wish I'd had more than one, because it was really the only thing that made Saturday tolerable. (That, and I slept for like two hours at the beach, then went back to our home base and slept more, then woke up, ate dinner, and then went back to sleep. I really have no idea how all that sleep didn't cure me.) I really went to my happy place.

Lesson learned: prescription drug abuse might be a good idea.

Kidding. Mostly.

Who knew?

2008-04-28T14:00:00.001-07:00

I admit that the only reason I jumped onto this link was because Bookslut pointed out that this guy writes Jeopardy questions. It makes so much sense that a Jeopardy writer is also a poet. It makes me want to be a Jeopardy writer. And a poet. Anyway, I liked this one:

Valentine’s Day
by Billy Wisse

Before we start to cover for each other
There are some questions you will have to answer
— More than formality, less than ordeal —,
Young lady: Where’d you get that smile of silk?
What master painted you those heavenly eyes?
And as you take those issues up: Are you smart,
Slyly so? Does your speech sputter along
Then make radical swerves into the clear?
If so, no wonder this purple night is ours
Down to the raindrops in the gutter where they belong.
You understand I wouldn’t know love if it hit me
In the eye, where its image could make a home.
You have to keep on reaching me with words,
Using ones like “contingency” correctly
And “fatuous” in unexpected ways,
Summoning up a lifetime when you say
"…to northern Arizona," shooting phrases
Straight to the heart, out of the reach of thought.

(via)

More on Wright

2008-04-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

Somehow I feel like this is not going to help anything:

Mr. Wright said: “On November the 5th and on January 21st, I’ll still be a pastor. As I’ve said, this is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. It has nothing to do with Senator Obama. This is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African- American religious tradition.”

This may be true, but it's the kind of thing that will stir up the pot even more than it already has been. All these media types are just primed and ready to jump on anything that sounds remotely racial or accusatory (or both).

I wrote a lot more about this and then went back to reread it and deleted it. I decided that plain speech, and expression of opinion or belief, is more important than toeing the political line, even if it's the kind of speech that gets you (or that senator who used to be in your congregation) into trouble.

Still, I can't help it, whenever I read things that Wright says, I think it must be pretty interesting to know him. Whether you agree with him or not, and even, maybe especially, if you disagree with him, he must give you a lot to think about. And that is something to feel good about, I think.

CNN Exercise

2008-04-25T16:27:00.000-07:00

I have started watching "The Situation Room" 0n mute with closed captions while at the gym in the afternoons. I get really angsty while watching the show because one commentator will say something I totally agree with and then the next says some more total bullshit and I can't squeal with indignation because I am in the middle of the gym with a bunch of people, and so I instead have to bury my rage deeply and try to exorcise it via, well, exercise (who knew!?). Today for the first time since I've watched it they had Tony Snow on. He and Jack Cafferty got in quite the tiff. Jack was absolutely spot on, because he was talking about how Hillary is definitively behind in the race, and has to win all the next states with like 60% of the vote, and all the other folks started talking shit about whether or not Obama could get the white working class vote or whatever. Anyway, the best part was when Cafferty just said straight up to Tony Snow, "People are really tired of your former boss and they are ready for change in the White House," and then the two of them went back and forth with Cafferty spitting (I imagine) the phrase "your boss" out as often as possible. Like, way to stick it to him. Snow looked smug, like you would expect, and I got more angry and went faster on the elliptical.