-skydiving.
-innocence and experience.
-revolutionary road and your own personal paris.
-how having heat rash is a crappy way to spend the last week of summer before prepping for the semester becomes an absolute necessity.
-preserving fruit and other Hannah Housewife adventures.
-a weekend of weddings and sitting in the car (or, How I Went to Minnesota And Ate A Lot Of Food And Hugged A Lot Of Friends).
-evoking "place" and finding "home".
Showing posts with label metablogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metablogging. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Well Worth Watching - and Segues!
Have you seen Everything is Illuminated? No? Well, go and put it at the top of your Netflix queue. Right now. It is the best movie I have seen in a long time. A very long time. This movie has lines just a quoteable as The Big Lebowski. It is touching and heartwarming and tragic like Finding Neverland (except without the whole akward 'is James M. Barrie maybe a little too into that kid?' thing) and Wings Over Berlin (except shorter). Oh, and it's funny, too. How can you not love a movie with a dog named Sammy Davis, Jr. Jr. and a very memorable scene with a potato? Hi-larious hi-jinks, I'm telling you. And then there's that whole 'plot' thing, with its valuable 'themes' like identity, memory, family, the role of the past in our present understanding of ourselves and the world, and friendship and shared experience overcoming the barriers of linguistic and cultural misunderstanding. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
Trust me. See this movie. You will love it.
I would like to read some of Jonathan Safran's novels now.
Currently, I'm reading The Master of St. Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee. It's quite complex and thought-provoking, but I'm not really enjoying it. Coetzee paints his geniuses so bleakly. Plus, novels set in Russia always make me cold. I actually don't know if I've ever enjoyed a Coetzee book... To be fair, I read Foe ages and ages ago and I never finished Waiting For the Barabarians so that just leaves Disgrace, and the sexual violence that fuels the plot of Disgrace is hard for me to stomach, so I will have to finish this one and sort out my thoughts before I make any proclamations.
On the other hand, I really, really love Regina Spektor's album Begin To Hope.
Oh what? You were expecting a cohesive blog post? On one singular subject? That does not meander? Too bad, so sad, it's too late at night for me to do that. You should consider yourself (yourselves? Does more than one person even read this blog?) lucky, because here is a list of relatively banal subjects about which I have refrained from waxing eloquent, even though the impusle moved me, JUST IN THE SPAN OF ONE MERE WEEKEND:
-Things Overheard On The Bus That Make Me Happy
-Why I Love My Kitty
-Why My Kitty Is The Best Kitty In The World
-Don't Go To Tar*Get On A Saturday Because Children Scream
-I Have Decorated My House Some More! Look At My Decorations!
-I Made Spotted Dick For Breakfast
-Why I Don't Like Grading
-My New Postage Stamps Are Cheap And Flimsy
Just kidding. I wasn't really going to write about that last one. I just made it up to be funny. Aren't you diverted? Didn't I say that I was only going to write wittily and elegantly/eloqently in this blog? What time is it? Why am I not in bed yet? Whose idea was it to drink coffee after 7pm? Stupid coffee.
Do you know how sometimes, when you don't have a lot of time, and maybe you are feeling kind of poor and/or low energy, and you just don't feel like making dinner, ordering in or going out? And maybe it's just all you can manage to eat some scrambled eggs and toast? Even if you don't really like scrambled eggs? And then the situation sort of magically becomes Officially Very Exciting once you declare that you are not just having scrambled eggs because they are easy and inexpensive and one of the few edible items left in your fridge, oh no, YOU hare having scrambled eggs because you are having Breakfast For Dinner, you lucky thing you?
Breakfast For Dinner is awesome and delicious! It's a celebration! It's dangerously and exhiliratingly close to (shhh, don't tell...) breaking the rules! Upsetting the norms! Etc!
Well, perhaps not too surprisingly, the same trick works when you are feeling tired and worn out and grumpy and not-necessarily-in-the-mood-for-going-out-or-hanging-out-in-a-large-group-of-people on a weekend. This bleak situation can be remedied by declaring a shockingly decadent Sweatpants Night! Break out the comfy clothes, the ice cream and a good movie! Nope, you can't make it should anyone try and tempt you out to the bar - you've got plans, you're having an Official Sweatpants Night with your sweetie. Your friends are free to join you, but they have to wear sweatpants and bring their own pint of Haagen Das and not talk during the movie, because those are the rules of Sweatpants Night. It's like the fun part of a slumber party, except for that everyone who doesn't live at your house goes back to their house to go to bed, so no one wakes up with genitalia drawn on their face -or if they do, at least it's not your problem. Magic. I am brilliant. People should pay me money to use this idea.
(Now you know what I really did this weekend.)
Trust me. See this movie. You will love it.
I would like to read some of Jonathan Safran's novels now.
Currently, I'm reading The Master of St. Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee. It's quite complex and thought-provoking, but I'm not really enjoying it. Coetzee paints his geniuses so bleakly. Plus, novels set in Russia always make me cold. I actually don't know if I've ever enjoyed a Coetzee book... To be fair, I read Foe ages and ages ago and I never finished Waiting For the Barabarians so that just leaves Disgrace, and the sexual violence that fuels the plot of Disgrace is hard for me to stomach, so I will have to finish this one and sort out my thoughts before I make any proclamations.
On the other hand, I really, really love Regina Spektor's album Begin To Hope.
Oh what? You were expecting a cohesive blog post? On one singular subject? That does not meander? Too bad, so sad, it's too late at night for me to do that. You should consider yourself (yourselves? Does more than one person even read this blog?) lucky, because here is a list of relatively banal subjects about which I have refrained from waxing eloquent, even though the impusle moved me, JUST IN THE SPAN OF ONE MERE WEEKEND:
-Things Overheard On The Bus That Make Me Happy
-Why I Love My Kitty
-Why My Kitty Is The Best Kitty In The World
-Don't Go To Tar*Get On A Saturday Because Children Scream
-I Have Decorated My House Some More! Look At My Decorations!
-I Made Spotted Dick For Breakfast
-Why I Don't Like Grading
-My New Postage Stamps Are Cheap And Flimsy
Just kidding. I wasn't really going to write about that last one. I just made it up to be funny. Aren't you diverted? Didn't I say that I was only going to write wittily and elegantly/eloqently in this blog? What time is it? Why am I not in bed yet? Whose idea was it to drink coffee after 7pm? Stupid coffee.
Do you know how sometimes, when you don't have a lot of time, and maybe you are feeling kind of poor and/or low energy, and you just don't feel like making dinner, ordering in or going out? And maybe it's just all you can manage to eat some scrambled eggs and toast? Even if you don't really like scrambled eggs? And then the situation sort of magically becomes Officially Very Exciting once you declare that you are not just having scrambled eggs because they are easy and inexpensive and one of the few edible items left in your fridge, oh no, YOU hare having scrambled eggs because you are having Breakfast For Dinner, you lucky thing you?
Breakfast For Dinner is awesome and delicious! It's a celebration! It's dangerously and exhiliratingly close to (shhh, don't tell...) breaking the rules! Upsetting the norms! Etc!
Well, perhaps not too surprisingly, the same trick works when you are feeling tired and worn out and grumpy and not-necessarily-in-the-mood-for-going-out-or-hanging-out-in-a-large-group-of-people on a weekend. This bleak situation can be remedied by declaring a shockingly decadent Sweatpants Night! Break out the comfy clothes, the ice cream and a good movie! Nope, you can't make it should anyone try and tempt you out to the bar - you've got plans, you're having an Official Sweatpants Night with your sweetie. Your friends are free to join you, but they have to wear sweatpants and bring their own pint of Haagen Das and not talk during the movie, because those are the rules of Sweatpants Night. It's like the fun part of a slumber party, except for that everyone who doesn't live at your house goes back to their house to go to bed, so no one wakes up with genitalia drawn on their face -or if they do, at least it's not your problem. Magic. I am brilliant. People should pay me money to use this idea.
(Now you know what I really did this weekend.)
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Post the first
Friends have long suggested that I "get myself a blog." I am a noted navel-gazer and meanderer, but will strive here for economy and wit. Haha. Frankly, I've been itching to join the ranks of the blog-havers for a while now, but have refrained. Partly because I'm not sure if I have much of a story to tell that others would want to read, and I already have several other options for writing into the void. The other part of why I have refrained is because certain family members of mine are pro-privacy and anti-blog - to the point in fact, that when the first Blogs were spawned on the Internets back in the day when it was powered by hamsters running on wheels, these certain family members of mine (who I love dearly) said some very negative things about the practice of blogging that sort of stuck in my head to the point that I'm still not sure how comfortable I am being entirely open in this very public forum. However, as certain other Wise People In My Life have known to say: nothing ventured, nothing gained. And I need practice writing for an audience, a creative outlet, and a way to stay in touch with friends that allows me to communicate more than two sentences at a time. Hence this venture.
Oh, and speaking of sentences, the title of this blog is derived from a Maximo Park song "The Coast is Always Changing," which was the third song to pop up on my iPod when I shuffled it in search of some good lyrics to turn into a title. It resonated with my goal of using this space for good (economical, eloquent) writing as opposed to scribbling, but it has other, weightier connotations for me as well.
Oh, and speaking of sentences, the title of this blog is derived from a Maximo Park song "The Coast is Always Changing," which was the third song to pop up on my iPod when I shuffled it in search of some good lyrics to turn into a title. It resonated with my goal of using this space for good (economical, eloquent) writing as opposed to scribbling, but it has other, weightier connotations for me as well.
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