You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2007.
Ugh, I have been so unbloggy lately. Well, I’ve been reading blogs, just not writing. Why, you may ask? Laziness. Also compulsive reading and online game playing. And I have bursitis in my shoulder, which I thought was an old-person disease but is apparently pretty much a strained muscle. How does one get bursitis? Apparently, repetitive motion, such as clickety-clickety typing all day, can do in your shoulder. So I’ve been taking prescription-strength ibuprofen and occasional muscle relaxers (stupid non-preferred brand expensive muscle relaxers) and sleeping only on my right side to avoid hurting the shoulder more. Now I think I’m having some sort of pain reliever tolerance build-up or something, though, because for two days I’ve been getting headaches when it’s time for my medication, as if I need ibuprofen to keep myself normal. So I’m cutting down on that. Which feels sad, needing to cut down on my ibuprofen usage because I’m getting addicted. Like I’m sort sort of weird druggie person or something.
Ahem. What else is new? Well, I have been helping E out with his new job, where Tony Soprano Jr. is his boss. So I’ve been driving around in unbearable heat and humidity, going to the houses of rich people and picking up donations for the firefighters’ union. I should feel all humanitarian about this, I think, but really I feel like I’m working for the mob: “$10 for protection, for $50 you get tickets to see a crappy local band along with your protection! No donation? We’ll break your legs and your car windows.” The boss-man is this semi-bald old dude who shaves the rest of his head, drives a shiny gold Cadillac with vanity plates and listens to Snoop loudly. He also doesn’t seem to believe in holding his cell phone to his ear – rather, he lies it in his lap and yells into it. I can totally imagine him with a huge fat cigar at a strip club with some bimbos on either arm and a shit-eating grin on his face. After I met him today I felt awesomely naughty and mafioso, so I went and spent part of my gas money on Starbucks. Because, you know, that’s what mafia gun molls do. Totally.
Briefly:
And also because I have life insurance, and social security will pay money. Sadly, I’m worth way more dead than alive. I’m surprised E hasn’t figured out how to kill me yet.
Yet more hours whiled away looking at other people’s crafts and beautiful things – StumbleUpon is the mother of all entertaining time wasters for me right now, and I keep finding wonderful artistic things that I love, love, love. Plus since I’ve been feeling depressed, it helps to make things a little more bearable – at least until I start up with the “why can’t I do that??” stuff. Then even that gets depressing and I go play online games or something.
For starters, I just found this site, which I love the title of (“happy things” – you can tell it’s a place that’ll make you feel good), and which features these incredibly gorgeous, colorful quilts and crafts. She’s also got two recipes I absolutely must try – a chocolate egg cream, which is one of my favorite things in the world, and some peanut butter balls with honey and wheat germ – yummy!
These are just awesome – print them out on a regular old sheet of paper and voila! Awesome little toys/decorations/whatevers. I’ve subscribed to find out when they put up new stuff, and have plans to make some of thee on our next rainy indoor day.
I love monsters, and Boyo loves monsters, and how can you not love these and these? Monsters that look snuggly and lovable, but ready to defend you whenever necessary are great for scary, stormy nights.
I’m not much of a jewelry wearer, probably simply because I don’t have much jewelry, but I’ve found some awesome stuff lately. I’m just going to list them here:
Lulu Smith – fabulous resin jewelry, my favorite is the Ripple necklace.
Blend Creations – these beautiful carved ox bone pendants are amazing.
Petal Ring – I didn’t check out the rest of this site, but I loved this ring (found via Babble, whose Droolicious is sometimes amazing, sometimes just too full of overpriced T-shirts.)
Here’s my favorites page at Etsy – full of stuff I dream about at night. I still don’t have the bird’s nest ring I promised myself for my birthday 7 months ago, but maybe when I get my next bonus I’ll have a little Etsy spree and get all sorts of goodies.
I had something else I wanted to say, but I just got caught up in ogling earrings on Etsy and forgot. Damn porn!
Right now, the air is so damp and warm that my skin feels as if it has an oily layer of moisture over it; the damp so heavy that even though foggy nights here usually smell like salt and tide right now it just smells like parking lot. This despite a thunderstorm today so spectacular that the first loud bang made me shriek, and Boyo ran across the house and jumped into my arms and cried.
I drove home listening to Lazy May on repeat, and then Cobra Tattoo, and thought about rain and poetry and how cool it is that the Mountain Goats tend to name songs seemingly at random (though Cobra Tattoo isn’t one of those).
Today at work I did the google people I used to know thing and found out that someone I used to be very dear friends with died earlier this year. We haven’t been in touch for about 6 years, but I’ve periodically thought of her and sent postcards that have gotten returned “address incorrect”. I’d sigh, put the card in the junk closet, repeat again later – and now I can’t send postcards, I can’t have that hope that they’ll make it to her. I had always thought we’d get back in touch and she’d meet my son and we’d drink coffee on the porch together again, talk about our lives, reminisce about our smoking days. Now what do I do? It’s too late to send her husband or her son a card, and of course “address incorrect”. Anyway, that feels awkward and small. I want to visit her, but how do you do that? How do you find a grave? I’m so fucking sad right now. I was feeling the crazy creeping in anyway, tonight – my skin itching underneath, my brain heavy and sort of twitchy… The crazy doesn’t need anything else to help it along. I wish I had a beer. I wish I still smoked. I really wish she wasn’t dead.
Rest in peace, Mary. You are missed.
- That chocolate danish would have made me thinner
- I would be wearing these:
but they would feel more comfortable than these:
- My job would be surfing the internets for cool sites
- Therefore, I could drink beer at my job and I wouldn’t have to actually wear shoes at all – except that of course the comfort would be so great I’d want to wear them anyway.
- Sufjan would be dying to meet me and whisk me away to someplace fabulous, and when I had to tell him “I’m sorry, I’m married. I wish it could have worked out” he would shower me with gifts and sends me love letters and writes songs about me.
- The above wouldn’t be embarrassing to post, even though I am not 13 anymore and should really be over this sort of list.
Last night I was listening to Clem Snide in the car and realized that I have a whole ton of songs just meant for a really crazy relationship, the kind with crying and yelling and clothes-ripping sex and booze-fueled vows of love.
Without further ado:
song for the beginning, when you first meet and you’re so in love it hurts:
Being in Love, Songs Ohia
******
song for when you’re in love and everything is perfect, perfect, perfect:
Nothing Gives Me Pleasure, Josh Rouse
******
song for fighting and breaking shit:
Something Beautiful, Clem Snide
******
song for when everything is so awful you both wish you would die and that everything would pretty much explode around you, and everything hurts so bad but you still love each other so. damn. much:
No Children, Mountain Goats
******
song for the anniversary where you try to avoid each other like crazy, and there are probably tears:
Our Anniversary, Smog
******
song for the end, when you’re breaking up because you have become awful people:
Good Woman, Cat Power
******
song for trying to forget the whole damn thing and failing miserably:
Crown of Love, The Arcade Fire
******
Listen here.
Just found this on the blog of the lovely & talented Carson Ellis, one of my very favoritest artists. I am so in love with this picture right now!
I’ve just started reading Which Brings Me To You, a collaborative novel in letters by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott, and even though the reviews that say it’s overwritten for letters (“This book is full of superb writing, and that is precisely its problem. Billed as a ‘novel in confessions,’ ‘Which Brings Me to You’ consists of a series of letters exchanged by two young lovers-in-the-making…The trouble is Jane’s letters sound an awful lot as if they’ve been written by an award-winning author and writing instructor with an MFA. So, alas, do John’s. To say this spoils the fun is to understate.“) there is something about it that has immediately caught my interest – namely, that it is a novel written in confessional letters.
Let me explain. There is something that feels utterly vulnerable and naked about writing down confessions in letters, stamping them, posting them off to a stranger in another state; but something about that vulnerability feels me to like freedom, too. The freedom to say “Fuck it, I’m going to finally tell the truth, I’m going to say all the nasty things I’ve done, admit all the thoughts I’ve had that I couldn’t ever admit to. I’m just going to put it all out there in this letter, let this one person know who I really am.” Not that I am a liar or someone who is too into putting a good face on things – I tend to be honest and unable to keep a secret, I say what’s on my mind and put my feet deep in my mouth because I didn’t think first. But there are still things I’d rather not admit to anyone. Or things I have admitted, but in a sort of skimming-over-the-surface way, because I don’t want to go too deeply into them, or have no one to tell the whole dirty story to.
I have a pen pal right now – an actual pen to paper writing pen pal – but there is something that I feel is lacking with each letter. Granted, we’ve only written once or twice, we’re not comfortable with each other yet; but at the same time I have the feeling that it’s always going to be “I’m at x place, bought this postcard, it’s raining, I’m going to do this thing now, gotta go.” Which is nice, because who doesn’t love getting mail; but is also unsatisfying, because I want our letters to be juicy and exciting, not everyday. I want getting the letter to be not just about the niceness of getting a letter, but about the content, too. Kind of like how reading blogs isn’t just about the internet, it’s about that peek into someone else’s life – that sort of sleazy peeping Tom feeling is what I love most about blogs, the moment when you read something and you wonder “If this was ‘real life’, would that person admit to this? Would I, if we knew each other to have coffee with, know that about her? Would we be this real if there wasn’t the barrier of all this wiring?”
I guess I could use my blog for confessions, but somehow I don’t feel quite like that would satisfy me, either. There is no give and take with that, comments or not. And there’s also the fact that I know, in the back of my mind, that none of this is really as anonymous as I’d like to pretend it is – anyone could easily find this and read it. I suppose there should be the thrill of discovery that could come at any moment in that, like being 16 and having sex in the car parked where anybody could catch you, but there’s not. The thrill is the cozy intimacy of letters, of another person’s confessions winging back to meet mine – the thrill of something that is really a secret, of words that nobody else will ever read but the two of us.
First, I am shamefaced at the way I ended yesterday’s post. It worked out better in my head earlier, but by the time I typed it up I couldn’t remember how I worked out the end, and so I just slapped something on there and shut my eyes and hit publish. You will have to ignore the cheesiness.
Second, this post will be utterly dull except to me. I love lists, and secretly love memes even though I’m not always 100% sure I know that the fuck they are. But I found this one at Badger Books, via Whoopee (one of the funniest blogs over), and I loved the listyness of it and the fact that the rules are so convoluted and weird. So I am putting it here, because, dammit, this is my blog and no one reads it anyway. (Side note – don’t you sometimes wish you were British so you could type “no-one” and not be totally pretentious? You could also use “colour” and “realised”, which I prefer to the American spellings. And my husband would stop teasing me about how I say “rather” with a weird accent.)
Ahem. Anyway. Meme.
Instructions: Look at the list of books below.
Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicize the ones you’re planning to read.
Cross out the ones you won’t read / aren’t interested in.
*Star the ones on your book shelves.
Place (parentheses) around the ones you’ve never even heard of.
Do nothing to the ones that you may or may not read.
1984 – George Orwell
(The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho)
Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt
Angels and Demons – Dan Brown (what the heck, I read two others of his)
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell
Anna Karenina – Tolstoy (I am so not a classics girl if I don’t have to be)
*Anne of Green Gables – L. M. Montgomery (though I think my copy is actually on my mom’s bookcase, not my own actual bookcase)
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
(Atonement – Ian McEwan)
*The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (I have 2 copies of this, I think)
*The Bible
Blindness – Jose Saramago (never heard of)
The Bourne Identity – Robert Ludlum
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
The Celestine Prophecy – James Redfield
*Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White (multiple copies of this, too)
The Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M. Auel (read this many, many years ago, and I remember it feeling sort of naughty and forbidden because of the sex scenes)
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
(Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell)
Confessions of a Shopaholic – Sophie Kinsella (I love chick lit but didn’t like this that much)
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon (loved this and made everyone I know read it)
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (it was okay, but I still don’t get all they hype)
(The Diviners – Margaret Laurence)
Dune – Frank Herbert
East of Eden – John Steinbeck (I think I might have read this for school, but then again I might not have)
Emma – Jane Austen
(Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card)
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
(Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald)
(Fifth Business – Robertson Davies)
Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk (loved this book)
(A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry)
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck
(Good Omens – Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman)
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (again, for school)
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (I actually liked this)
*The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (great book)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
*His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (another favorite)
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
I Know This Much is True – Wally Lamb (He’s my first boyfriend’s uncle)
Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
(In The Skin Of A Lion – Ondaatje)
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (school again)
(Kane and Abel – Jeffrey Archer)
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
*Life of Pi – Yann Martel (I have it but haven’t been able to get into it at all)
*The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis (once I found out about the Christian symbolism, years after reading it, it was sort of ruined for me, though)
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery (I don’t know how I never got around to this book)
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring – JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers
The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gael Garcia Marquez
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
*Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (read it twice, I really liked it)
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Bradley (pretty sure I read this long ago)
(Neuromancer – William Gibson )
The Notebook – Nicholas Sparks
(Not Wanted On the Voyage – Timothy Findley)
Of Mice And Men – John Steinbeck
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
One Hundred Years Of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(Outlander – Diana Gabaldon)
The Outsiders – S. E. Hinton
(The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett)
*The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver (haven’t been able to get into this, either)
(The Power of One – Bryce Courtenay)
*A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving (love his books)
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (I wish I could half-bold this, because I think I skimmed it rather than actually read it)
Rebecca – Daphne DuMaurier
(The Red Tent – Anita Diamant)
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
(The Secret History – Donna Tartt)
The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd
(The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zago)
She’s Come Undone – Wally Lamb (I used to have a signed copy, but lent it out and never got it back)
(Shogun – James Clavell)
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants – Ann Brashares (I can’t get past the title)
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
The Stand – Stephen King
(The Stone Angel – Margaret Laurence)
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
(The Summer Tree – Guy Gavriel Kay)
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
The Thorn Birds – Colleen McCullough
The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom
Ulysses – James Joyce
War and Peace – Tolstoy
Watership Down – Richard Adams
White Oleander – Janet Fitch ( I liked her 2nd book even better)
(Wizard’s First Rule – Terry Goodkind)
A Woman of Substance – Barbara Taylor Bradford (good old-fashioned trash, I use to devour this sort of thing!)
*The World According To Garp – John Irving
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Yesterday was my fourth wedding anniversary. Four feels like so many years, and so few years, all tangled up in one. We got married when our son was 1, so we never had that newlywed thing that most people have – we were already slogging through diapers and breastfeeding and fighting over the electric bill – but, damn, I look at that man sometimes and I just feel so blessed, so lucky and happy that he is mine. It’s cheesy, sure, but my heart just overflows. He will kill me for writing this, because the idea of me blogging about him freaks him out, but there it is. Here I am, E, proclaiming my love for you – come get me!
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At 5 a.m. in Back Bay, you are the only person awake besides the guy in the SUV tossing newspapers on front steps, his music blasting a somehow early-morning-subdued boom-ba-boom-ba-boomity. Surely in an apartment on this street, some businessman is eating cornflakes and watching CNN, but he’s got his lights dimmed and his windows shuttered so that the whole stretch is a dim grey ghost street. In Boston Common, there are a few scattered old homeless guys draped across the benches despite the damp – because where else can they go? All the storefronts are shuttered and dark. Even Starbucks doesn’t open til 6, an hour I would normally sneer at, but now see as downright reasonable. There are plastic-wrapped stacks of newspapers everywhere, apparently the Back Bay newsguy not being a solo act. A few garbage trucks rumble by, and then one lone car, the man inside gaping at E and I as if we are alien creatures. Nearing South Station, there are a few more people out, catching trains or exiting them; but still I hear mostly seagulls, reminding me that Boston is, after all, still a harbor town. Driving onto I-93 there is an explosion of activity that the sleeping city didn’t prepare me for – what are all these people doing awake at 5:30 a.m., driving away from the city on the highway, tires singing with last night’s rain? We stop for coffee in North Attleboro, what feels like far outside the city, my brain utterly fuzzy without caffeine. I get donuts, too, for that early-morning sugar rush. The people in Dunkin’ Donuts at this time of day in this ex-mill town that could be any other used-up New England ex-mill town are both oddly familiar and strange – they are early morning people, people I don’t usually see, but they are of the same type as all these other same towns: tired, wearing dirty baseball caps, watching you with suspicion, not saying hello or excuse me. We New Englanders are not renowned for our friendliness. Continuing on, we drive in companionable silence, listening to NPR, drinking coffee, watching the road go by. Everything is the same through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut – it’s like a big rolling piece of scenery with the same trees, the same storefronts, the same cars all pasted onto it and looping continuously. Looking over at E, I smile and wish him happy anniversary one more time, glad of four years (“four more wars,” he jokes). When you love somebody, sometimes, things are straightforward and simple – coffee, road trips, bad political jokes. You bite your tongue and you get a mouthful of blood, and isn’t that exactly what you expected?
