Dear lonely, neglected blog,

Here are some things I'm loving lately.

This article:

"How To Talk To Little Girls"

This music video:

And this quote:

"I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then. " ––Michael Cunningham, The Hours 

Become Someone Else

via

Isn't this a clever advertisement for reading?

I am so excited for justforfun reading this summer.

So far, my list includes 

finishing:

Freedom

Kaaterskill Falls

The Last Report on Miracles At Little No Horse

(maybe) Paradise 

Also:

The Road

East of Eden 

Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Falling Toward Heaven

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual 

Mere Christianity 

The English Patient 

In All Their Animal Brilliance 

Fahrenheit 451

The Lighthouse 

July, July

And that's all for now. Any suggestions? 

Final Countdown

Fourteen Days.

Twenty-One Days.

Twenty-Four Days. 

And it feels so good. 

Mostly. 

First and third images via weheartit. 

Words

Stephen Fry on why I will never love my usage class:

You Shouldn't Have

Some gifts, good gifts say 

I thought of you 

But plenty of others say

I thought I was thinking of you

but really

I was thinking of me

--This American Life #428

Nancy Updike, you can host any week.

And "struggly" is now a word in my book. 

Thursday Night Thoughts

Loving this song:

Wanting a brown-er version of this hair (someday I may work up the courage): 

And wondering if this blog will ever become more than a carefully orchestrated sliver-of-myself.

So much depends upon...

1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. 

Or rather, the lack thereof can render five-dozen cookies completely mushy and inedible. 

There goes an entire bag of chocolate chips and an hour of my Sunday evening.

At least the apartment smells nice. 

Missing the Days...

When I slept more than six hours at night. 

And I woke up in time to apply eyeshadow instead of just a barely noticeable trace of mascara.

And I changed out of the shirt I slept in.

And I did all of my poli. sci. reading.

And I stayed awake during tutorials.

Or at least thought of something insightful to say in my rhetorical-analysis-induced sleep?

Ohhh midtermsresearchpaperspaperspaperspapers you kill me.

BUT the best part of Valentine's Day is gummy cinnamon hearts. 

By far.

Face It. You Lost It.

So I left my favorite waterbottle in my Poli Sci class last week. The teal plastic one with the press-button flip top. It may be a little scratched and probably leaks BPA (whatever that means), but I've had it forever (four years?) and it's been everywhere with me. All over the US and UK. And maybe, though I can't say for sure, Vietnam.

I keep hoping it will turn up. But then I hear D.W.'s voice in my head. You know when she narrates the "Arthur's Lost Library Book" episode? When Arthur loses the library's latest scare-your-pants-off club book and everyone's mad at him because they all want to read it? Remember? No?

Oh okay.



Skip to 1:50. Or you could just watch the entire episode and relive some blissful childhood memories.

Tuesday Tedium

Tuesdays are the worst.

8 am staff meetings followed by class and work till 6:45.

(With several short breaks that are usually spent skimming far-too-long readings. Sometimes a 20 minute nap.)

Now I have two papers to write along with plenty more reading to catch up on. But I just want to make cookies and watch Portlandia videos. Or both, preferably. 

*The following is mostly just prewriting for an essay. Feel free to ignore.*

We just finished Fugitive Pieces in my Women's Lit. class. Everyone seemed to love it, but I didn't so much.  Well, I can certainly appreciate it on a sentence level.  The prose is remarkably lyrical and could certainly be classified as prose-poetry.  Michael's metaphors and imagery are truly evocative––surprising yet precise.  Although, they do become somewhat...distracting at times.  I tend to agree with one critic who labeled her writing "over-accessorized."  But what Michaels seriously lacks, in my opinion, is character development.  Maybe this seems insensitive, but Jakob is far too maudlin and well...pathetic for my liking. No not my liking. My understanding.  While I think it is an interesting idea to explore the effects of the Holocaust on the second generation that never experienced the ghettoes or concentration camps, it's just not believable for me. Yes, Jakob lost his family at a very young age, but Athos becomes his family.  I don't understand his habit of comparing every woman he meets to the sister he hardly knew? For fifty years? And his claim that the most important events in his life are the ones he never even witnessed? I don't buy it.  Not because it isn't possible. Michaels just doesn't make it believable.  She's too tied up in describing the exact shade of the Mediterranean or the whisper-weight of white linen on olive skin.  But most troubling, or at least incomprehensible, is Jakob's sudden healing.  After decades of self pity, a few pages of sexual exploration with a woman half his age rectifies that? Really? I suppose he calls it love. But Michaels doesn't prove it.  What the novel lacks is Eliot's objective correlative––a concrete representation of and explanation for Jakob's extreme melancholy. (Which is somewhat ironic because Michaels references this concept several times.)

That's all I suppose. I don't think I'll actually end up using any of this though. It certainly doesn't answer any of the far too leading (in my opinion) "discussion" questions.

January Highlights:

clementines. 

AND this video:

It's been a long month. Here's to a healthier, more productive and warmer (?) February.

Maybe some more blog action too.

No promises.

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