I love Jim/John and his man-cardigan. More men should wear these (besides my roommate, who does wear one).

Gossip Girl!!

Let it be said that my dad introduced me to the OC. He was at work and called home to me, sitting lazy on the couch the summer before I went abroad, and told me I just *had* to watch the episode. I tuned in somewhere in the first 15 minutes and was pretty much an instant fan. God it was so good that first season.

Anyway so I have now been waiting for Gossip Girl to debut on the CW since whenever it was I found out that Josh Schwartz (wunderkind creator of the OC) was affiliated with it, which I think was when I found out it existed at all. I've watched the 10 minute "preview" on their website, I've already looked up the whole cast on imdb to find out what I recognize them from, and it's been on my gCal for like, a month. Anyway. So all I'm saying is, I feel really vindicated by several of my favorite blogs announcing that they LOVE it, even if they may actually just be snarkifying about it. But I mean, Eat the Press said it was nothing short of spectacular.

I'm going to dinner with someone tonight (I used to say "I have a dinner date tonight" but people always get way too excited like I actually have a real date), but you can bet that by tomorrow morning I will have watched this shit and verified my own prescience and good taste.

My friend Justin got a write-up in the SF Weekly for his moustache (R.I.P.). It's pretty hilarious.

My big debut

I hosted an authors talk at work on Monday. I was nervous as hell to meet him, let alone introduce him, since the video ends up on YouTube. But it wasn't so bad! I have lots of thoughts about the talk and the author himself, since I have a new swelling of literary admiration for him now, but since I am, after all, at work, I'll just leave you with the video for now. He reads my favorite essay at the end (after the Q&A). It almost made me cry. No joke.

People really love Gmail

This isn't an advertisement or anything... But Google did this contest where you could submit a video of how Gmail *really* works, behind the scenes. And people submitted some really awesome stuff! The whole video has lots of little chunks of awesome videos from all over.

Watch it here.

And if you watch the video, or click on one of the spots in Africa on the map, you can see my roommate, on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, in a yellow jacket marching with the Gmail M-velope. Coolness.

Hey, it's me, the delinquent.

For some reason I haven't felt inspired to write lately. It's sort of annoying... I just feel generally uninspired and lazy and incompetent. But perhaps I'm extrapolating this from my feeling the past couple of days of complete inactivity. I've been sick, sick, sick, and in that way where I just can't do anything, am not inspired, am just lying on the couch hacking up a lung and feeling too lazy to go buy more cough syrup (although when I did, I found myself wandering around the streets of San Francisco in a daze, like I'd never seen sunlight before, and also like I was on some sort of very strong sedative or the date rape drug or something). And I watched the entire first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer today.

I really told myself sometime in 1997 that I would never become the kind of person who liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Times, apparently, do change.

Anyway, I guess from this momentary late-night (for me, since last night I was in a codeine haze around now - and will be soon!!) post it means I'm maybe, sort of back in the blogging game. I'll try at least.

But first, recovery! And legal narcotics!

Finally!

I always miss out on the cute things at Frecklewonder because I never get to the shop on time to buy my favorites. But this time I remembered! And I got this cute shirt. I like it because it ties in with my newfound fascination with the 70s. The colors are nice. I hope it fits!

I think half the reason I want to buy things from this shop is because of her freckles.

Why I love my city

This past weekend I had a borrowed digital SLR from work. We took TONS of pictures. Some of them are here (I haven't uploaded the ones from Saturday yet). My favorites from Sunday (Dan took all of these I think, he pretty much commanded the camera yesterday):

I love my hair. I'm sorry that's vain.

This is what SLR can do for your food photography.

Dan and I went to The Apartment and I bought a couple of awesome old photos and a postcard. This one is a postcard from 1910, and Dan caught it in the focus here (Justin is reading it).

Fannnntastic glasses.

On our walk home to our place, the shadows were perfect.

Bootie?

How do I put this? Bootie was awesome Saturday night. Entirely worth the 45 minute line and 15 dollar cover. And we're so going back.

I love this 3191 from the other day. Calvin and Hobbes is one of those things I wish I could re-read again for the first time, like watching episodes of the Office.

It is a truth universally acknowledged.

Pablo will hate me for saying this but, guys, Becoming Jane was actually pretty good!

I saw it with Belton, one of my two friends who I go to all (bad) romantic comedies/movies with, like, for example, The Wedding Date and Raising Helen. And we went in hopeful but not totally confident. But I quite liked it. I didn't treat it like a close biography or anything - I thought of it as a Jane Austen movie/book that I'd never seen/read before. It was pretty clever and there were a couple of good dance scenes and good characters who were all like shades of Jane Austen characters in books and James McAvoy is kind of hot in this although he reminds me of Rachel's boyfriend which is... odd. But like Daniel Craig he has the bluest freaking eyes I've ever seen, except they are less sky blue and more this sort of dazzling periwinkle. Also, Sarah and I almost died in the last 3 minutes of the movie thanks to a minor revelation/surprise moment.

Recommended. Really. And now I need to go back and research Jane Austen's life to find out what really happened.

Things I'm thinking about

I'm moved in, finally, or rather, I'm moved out of my old place. But I'm not settled yet. Here are some things I've been thinking about as I'm getting settled and exploring:

-Rugs. I need a rug for my room, and we probably need one for the living room as well. These are (currently) the candidates for my room, but I haven't explored very much: Moroccan window rug (I have wanted this one in orange for a while, but they are out of orange - I'd get brown), honeycomb rug (I am apparently on a bee/honey curiosity kick), or Ikea orangey rug which kind of looks like a cross between mushrooms and a brain.

-Curtains. I have these filmy curtains on my front window that came with the apartment. I need to replace them, since they are somewhat transparent and people can probably see me changing. They are also ugly. I think I'm going to replace them with these pretty bird curtains I had in my room growing up, from Urban Outfitters. But that throws my decorations into a tizzy, since the bird curtains are very bright and multicolored and my bed right now is this increasingly annoying Laura Ashley white with red-and-blue tiny flowers printed on it. With some brown and gold tints here and there. Plus with these curtains it's hard to get that orange rug I want.

-Lampshades. I have this sweet (as in, rad) owl lamp and no shade for it. I want this one from Anthropologie, but it's, um, $100.

-Plants. For my front yard. I want some grasses, but I also want some flowers, and I need only plants that can go in planters.

-The 70s. I just watched the movie "Diggers" - it's really very good - and was incredibly inspired by the fashion. It's sort of mid-later-70s working class slash 70s collegiate/Love Story, if you really want me to paraphrase Lucky magazine style. Lauren Ambrose has these great outfits. And Maura Tierney has my haircut, only she rocks it slightly differently (and also I'm in sore need of another one). That movie, combined with my purging of magazines from my household (which involves me going through old Lucky magazines bookmarking pages to tear out, so that I can use them as inspiration for a) shopping for new clothes in the aesthetic i want and b) combining old clothes to create the aesthetic I want), is really making me think seriously about my clothing. I'm tired of only wearing jeans, flats and tshirts/sweaters/cardigans. It gets really predictable. I really want this particular dress from J. Crew (second row, far right, the plaid "Bridget" shirtdress). I might really buy it. (Also PS, I love Paul Rudd in Diggers.)

-Tea tins. I have TONS of tea and it's all in boxes and currently since our kitchen is tiny, tiny, tiny all the tea is in a paper bag in my room. I want to get vintage tea tins and put the teas in those so it becomes decorative.

-A new wallet, and a new purse. I want a worn brown leathery purse, a kind of golden light brown (see: the 70s), with some nice strappies. And I really need to replace my wallet. I got it for $5 in the Fashion District in LA and it's fake Gucci and getting torn and really not cute.

-Movies. I'm falling behind! There are so many I want to see and so little time. And I feel sort of lame staying in every night in my new city to watch Netflix. Justifiably lame.

-Honesty. I have been driving and traveling a lot recently since I now have a much longer commute and I've been thinking about just owning up and being totally straight with everyone on this blog. Meaning, not write it so much like a public service announcement and more like a journal. I'm not sure I have the time to do that though. It usually takes a lot of energy to parse my emotions into functional, readable, meaningful sentences for public consumption.

Is it just me who thinks this is unintentionally funny?

In northeastern Texas, advocates of abstinence education vow to fight for their mission because to them, it is not just a matter of sexuality or even public health. Getting a teenager to the other side of high school without viruses or babies is a bonus, but not the real goal. They see casual sex as toxic to future marriage, family and even, in an oblique way, opposition to abortion.

“You have to look at why sex was created,” Eric Love, the director of the East Texas Abstinence Program, which runs Virginity Rules, said one day, the sounds of Christian contemporary music humming faintly in his Longview office. “Sex was designed to bond two people together.”

To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”

Is that so?

(NYTimes.)

Well, this is just too appropriate

I like this little blog called Indexed. A girl makes pithy little diagrams on index cards and scans them in. This one is very appropriate given my move last week (which just finally, almost really, ended yesterday with the final import of stuff from my old apartment to the new, even though we still don't have plates or a dining room table. And may never end up with the latter, given how small our living room is!).

JK Rowling speaks

SPOILERS. Don't read this if you haven't finished Harry Potter 7.

But otherwise, do. And then we can discuss at length.

I'm opening the closet, now I'm opening the closet

Awesome, awesome, awesome:

R. Kelly is to issue 10 new instalments of his cult video series "Trapped In The Closet."

The original "hip-hopera" became a huge hit two years ago, especially in the U.S. where the DVD sold almost 250,000 copies.

Following the story of a man named Sylvester (Kelly), the drama featured 12 cliffhanger episodes with bizarre plot twists based around used condoms, midgets, and bed-hopping.

The 10 new episodes will be released on DVD on August 21.

According to Billboard.com, these will find Kelly portraying an old man named Randolph, complete with a pot-belly and a fake white beard that nearly falls off mid-scene, as well as a preacher in a grey Jheri-curl wig and garish orange suit.

In one of the final chapters, Kelly's Sylvester character talks business with a Sopranos-esque mobster who is eating a giant plate of spaghetti.

I am already planning a viewing party. What beverage do you think is most appropriate? I am thinking coke and rum, in tribute to another R Kelly masterpiece. It can't be a forty, because, see, R Kelly is too classy for that.

julia: Oh my god its

julia: Oh my god its ghastly

I used to worry with

I used to worry with Silvia that jk rowling would die before she finished the last book. But now i am worried that i will

Litotes

Litotes

The wand is great for

The wand is great for pointing