it's official, part II

I don't know when this happened either, but now I'm not just someone who cries at poignant sociological experiments, I'm someone who cries -- in public, no less -- at reality TV. A reality TV show I'm not even watching.

Maybe I saw part of the Top Chef premiere after the Project Runway finale, and maybe I kind of saw the end of another episode after that. And, OK, maybe I accidentally downloaded last week's episode from iTunes (yes I accidentally paid for it... it's only $1.99... I spend that much on coffee some days... that doesn't mean I LIKE this trash or anything... it just sort of fell into my open browser window...). And tonight I went to the damn gym specifically at 6 p.m. on a Friday, knowing that I'll have to take a shower before I can leave the house again later and therefore will be stepping outside into the 30-degree night with wet hair, just so I could see this week's episode.

That doesn't mean I'm watching it or anything.

Ahem. So here is a brief recap. Actually, HERE is a brief recap, told better than I can tell it, plus I missed the first 10 minutes and all the drama about the bacon-and-avocado ice cream.

I came in right as the big quiet sexy guy who always wins immunity was winning immunity. The main challenge this week is to create a dish for TGI Friday's menu, and it would be judged by a TGI Friday's chef guy and a bunch of firefighters and the really annoying permanent judges, whatever, some contrived thing, OK.

The bottom three -- as in, one of them will get kicked off the show at the end of the episode -- are:

1) an older guy who made this psychotic Alice in Wonderland thing that looked completely inedible, but you sort of had to give him points for trying

2) this woman who was sort of out of her league because she's a fancy high-end chef who hadn't ever been to Friday's or something, and whose dish was too salty

and 3) this horrendous, obnoxious, ridiculous asshole overgrown frat boy who insults all the other contestants and basically ruined the last challenge for his whole team. He, Michael, spent $8 of his allotted $100 to buy beer to drink and put back some damn cheese he needed for his gross nasty cheesesteak so he could get something for himself. He is the kind of guy who can't hold down a job and is proud of it, and he is the kind of guy who ostensibly makes good television.

[Insert paragraph about how yes, it's reality TV, and yes, they're stereotyping and editing people into characters. Totally true, and I'm sure applicable in this case, but you can't edit words into people's mouths and I would bet everything I have in this world that real Michael is not measurably different than TV Michael.]

Do you see where this is going? Michael didn't lose, and the woman -- Emily -- had to go home. You guys... it was so unfair. It was SO UNFAIR. Emily looked like someone I worked on the paper with in college, and like someone you would actually be friends with amid the sea of fake personalities. She was quiet, and she wasn't sexy like big quiet sexy guy, and she didn't make good television. They sent her home EVENTHOUGH, as the recapper put it, Michael deserved it so much more.

She cried. She cried so much because she CARED, maybe more than she should have or whatever, but you could just see how this was humiliating to her and how she couldn't stop and how oooooh I hate that freaking Michael. When the final verdict was announced from those obnoxious, manipulated judges, she couldn't even look at them, and then when she told the rest of the characters (er, contestants), big quiet sexy guy just folded her into her arms and she sobbed and sobbed. Aargh. The unfairness of the world is too much tonight, I'm serious.

I'm going to hit publish now before I delete this and try to deny I've ever seen this show. Is it the hugging? Maybe it's the hugging. Geez.

(Side note for the cooks: Some of the food, especially the grilled cheese and tomato-red-pepper soup and the skewer things and the mint fruit salad looked so good I wanted to reach into the screen and take some. The recipes seem pretty doable, too.)

it's official

I don't know when this happened, but I'm now someone who cries at things like the Free Hugs Campaign. (The You Tube video streams better, perhaps because the real site is getting too much traffic from sappy individuals like yours truly.)

a lot of sentimental valiums

I swear I've thought of six different things to blog about in the last week or so, and not a one is occurring to me now that I need some form of procrastination. Working this many hours sucks all non-election-related thoughts into some secondary brain area that will not be accessible for another, what, 10 days? Come back, secondary brain area.

Rufus Wainwright's "Poses" has flooded back into my life suddenly, after I overdosed on it a couple years ago and after XPN wouldn't stop its funding drive even after I gave money. Public radio stations should develop some kind of magical feature that lets you plug in a secret code to prove you already ponied up and turns off the heckling. I still feel guilty and the begging makes me sad. Anyway, I needed background noise, couldn't deal with more election-talk on TV or money-talk on the radio, and thus could only choose from one of the three CDs I have in my office. One is Zero Seven, which makes me fall asleep, and one is... I forget, but it leaves me with Rufus. And I am reminded that he is lovely. The end.

Another reason to love Anne Lamott: The Rights of the Born.

Randomness concluded. When the secondary area is re-activated, there will be more content, I swear...

birds do it, bees do it...

... even really blurry turtles do it, apparently. Fall in love, that is. Here by popular demand:


It's book week at Slate, and today there was this, from this:

I read somewhere once that in the 1960s fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more sensational than made-up stories could ever hope to be. Our new problem -- more profound, I think -- is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact.

This is well-said.

This is an anemone. Anananananemone.

gluggle-uggle-uggle

We will have to wait for the professional photographer for good photos of Shannon's lovely aquarium-style birthday, because almost every picture I took yesterday came out looking like I'd been holding the camera underwater with the fish. Nineteen out of 20 photos without the flash are too blurry to keep. It's funny how stuff begets stuff; this new camera, which I adore and have owned for less than six months, now only makes me want a better camera.

But what I can do is transcribe my favorite conversation from yesterday. The scene: Shannon and Gaby are standing in front of a big, backlit wall of oversized photos.

S: What's that one?
G: Ladybugs.
S: What's that one?
G: Clams.
S: And that one?
G: Bees.
S: How about that one?
G: BORED.

Ha! So adorable, that kid, and her mom is pretty great too. I feel acutely lucky to have her in my life, as a matter of fact. I can't believe we've known each other for seven years at this point, and that we're both knocking on 30's door.

OK, time for baseball -- oh hey, it's the postseason! Suddenly, it is the 42 seconds out of the year I care about this dumb sport, and I need to figure out which channel Fox is and start staying up way too late to watch extra innings and stuff. Speaking of late, go Yank... er, wait a minute...

the dawn's light, a little later

I told myself I wasn't allowed to write again until I had all the photos uploaded and captioned; exactly one month later, here we are!


Awesome, drippy moss was worth the wait, right?

Here is the whole thing at the Kodak Gallery, which is great for ordering prints that get delivered right to your local CVS but, I have to say, not so user-friendly with the 80 zillion hours of upload time required for each photo.

the dawn's early light

Harbor Head Lighthouse, Campobello Island; sign above the tank of Herman, Deer Island's largest lobster, who lives at the 45th P@rallel Motel; kayaking on the Bay of Fundy off Spencer's Island, Cape Chignecto, Nova Scotia; sunrise at Schoodic Point, Acadia National Park.

Mm yes.

More pictures and a link to the Kodak Photo Gallery thing when I have everything uploaded, which may be a while. But vacation was wonderful, suffice it to say -- wonderful enough that it made the 472 emails waiting in my inbox a little easier to take.

blame canada...

... if you cannot reach me for the next week, because Canada is where I'll be. I hear there might be moose there, and possibly Mounties, and maybe Cartman. I'll report back.

you make me happy when skies are gray

Run, do not walk, to your nearest theater to go see Little Miss Sunshine.

Here, here is the trailer.

DUDE(s). I loved that movie. I don't even have anything all that coherent to say about it, except that I really, really liked it. I've also never been in a movie theater -- or any kind of room, maybe, come to think of it -- that was so full of other people reacting to something in exactly the same way I was. There was clapping and shouting out loud and laughing and also laughing and crying at the same time. Kind of unreal. It just feels so much bigger than the some of its modest parts.

Everyone else likes it, too, and the Chicago Tribune got it just about perfect with, "It's difficult to convey the sheer joy of watching these characters interact." (Almost everyone else, I should say. Shut up with your "rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill," second-rate Village Voice, what do you know, and stop being so in love with your own mediocre metaphor.)

OK, I have to go watch the trailer again.

the greens of summer

Hiking at Great Falls this morning made me feel all artistic-like. I was dawdling so much, taking pictures of leaves and bark and bugs and tiny worms, that J had call up to the friends ahead of us, "Hold on, we have to wait for Ansel Adams." Ha.


The Falls, they are Great. We were on the Virginia side; I'd only been on the Maryland side before.


This was on the lookout spot where we were standing... probably 30 feet higher and 20 feet back from where the water is now. Impossible to imagine the water that high.


Moss, rolling stone, etc. etc.


Note the accompanying image.


... makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah...

[obligatory lyric from the musical "hair"]

So, do any of you watch "Grey's Anatomy"? I just got the first DVD of the first season from Netflix, and I enjoyed it very much. I also enjoyed P*trick Dempsey, aka Dr. McDreamy. (Said dreaminess caused one of my roommates to exclaim "revenge of the nerds!" when recalling his character on "Can't Buy Me Love.")

Anyway, I think I just got a haircut that looks remarkably like his hair on that show, and... not sure it's a good thing. My hair is SHORT, circa 1996 levels of short, and feel like Dr. McDreamy without the dreamy. Or the doctor. Actually, looking at those two photos makes me realize the hair looks like the "Can't Buy Me Love" Dempsey, not the "Grey's Anatomy" Dempsey. I am skeptical:


See, that's me being skeptical. Also me looking like Mad-Eye Moody from the Harry Potter books, not sure what's up with that either.

just a bowl of cherries

Cherries at Larriland Farm, home of all the fruit picking I've been doing recently with Shannon and my very favorite Gaby, among others. (I really, really like my camera, by the way. A whole lot.)

I've also been doing a fair amount of cooking recently; something about it makes me feel grounded, like my life is organized and centered if I have time for it. Eating yogurt and toast for dinner still serves me well, but making brown rice curry salad and blueberry-lemon muffins and >gallo pinto and tart cherry pies (Exhibit A:


pretty, no?) has me feeling like things are a little more together than they probably actually are.

It's July in DC, suddenly stupid sweaty summer, and I am reminded that I hate this damn season here, and it makes me want to move somewhere less swampy.

I fell off the bike! But I got back on, and now my cool giant scratches are almost completely faded, even though I'm still wearing the big special band-aids over them.

I went to the dentist today and I have two cavities. So much for the goal of 365 days without tooth decay. Sigh.

J and I are going to Canada (blame Canada! blame Canada!) for a vacation in early August. Yay vacation. Let me know if you have any good New Brunswick Nova Scotia tips.

Speaking of vacation, I am ready for Alissa to come back from hers, because I miss emailing her. I had a really fun time in Lanky last weekend with these wonderful crazy old friends whom I adore. H and K came to our barbeque the other night. There are more fun visits and trips in the future. OK, maybe there are a few redeemable things about summer...

with thoughts of you i am aglow

You should go read/watch "Daniel Gr*ss eats a book. By Daniel Gr*ss." Ha!

So most of you probably know this by now, but after 28 bike-less years, I can finally (mostly) ride one! J's magic system, which I think basically consisted of just being really patient, has paid off. No one told me that it feels kind of awesome. Thanks to those of you who have also tried over the years -- I'm sure there was some cumulative effect happening, too.

Rejection letter count: lucky number 13. Moving on.

We had a very lovely Friday in Philly, walking on the Forbidden Road (Liss, that is what it was called, right?) and eating delicious pasteballs and seeing sweet G*rlyman with H and siblings. The rest of the weekend was fun and relaxing in that Lancaster-coma way. And now we're back to Monday, back to real life, nose to the grindstone, pedal to the metal, etc. etc. etc.

For the record, I am very much into this new bluegrass-y S*rah H*rmer album:

Well now how did they get that lady on TV
Laughing so naturally
For a Wal-Mart ad
Is it not as bad as I thought?

What else? Nothing else. You watched the book-eating thing, right? No? Go now, I'm serious.

green is all there is to be

Isn't there some line from a Muppet song about sitting on a lilypad? Totally slipping my mind.

Am off to sunny, lovely Detroit (the third time in nine months!) but will be back late Monday night, and I hereby vow to start cooking again when I return...

paperback writer

1. J.K. R*wling has a problem, and I thought the exact same thing as the Bookslut people... "Gee, it sure is hard to find... uh... piles of money lying on the ground around here! And, let's see, um, new iPods! And freshwater pearls, and bars of solid gold! Yeah!"

2. Eight rejection letters and counting. Can we make this into a drinking game somehow?

3. They had some kind of reception at my office last night, and this morning there were all of these large, live potted trees left over. Apparently they were rented, and a guy was taking them outside by himself, so the trees were lined up in front of the elevators in the morning. In the afternoon, when I went to leave, the elevator door opened and there was just a lone tree, standing there, no person in sight. (First thought: aah?; Second thought: cool; third thought: K's "tree"?)

4. May I recommend W*lla C*ther's "My Antonia." I picked it up at a used book sale it thinking it would be a good-for-me book, a classic I'd never read, and wound up loving it intensely. How could you not:

Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. (18)

ocean crossings, mountains to climb

I spent the weekend in the Garden State, first going to a wedding in Cherry Hill and then to visit J's friends in Princeton. My train came in at 10 last night and it was pouring; I thought I'd treat myself and take a cab, but when I went around to the front of the station, there was this Lord-of-the-Flies-style scenario unfolding. People -- about 300 wet, snarling, insane people -- were jostling for the cabs like their lives depended on it.

Didn't take long for the Metro to look very inviting, but at the end of my cheap and soothing little interval underground, I had to walk home in the downpour with my suitcase, which sadly did not contain an umbrella no matter how much I tried to will one to appear.

I chose a route home that would deliberately be up one of the more residential streets with a lot of trees to protect me from the rain (note to future self: that totally doesn't work). There was this man standing in one of the really pretty, careful gardens outside some of the row houses on the street. He was standing next to a gigantic rosebush taller than he was, with these lush bright pink blooms, and very carefully squeezing the water from the blossoms into a big plastic cup. He did it so gently and gingerly. It took my breath away.

I don't know why he was doing it, if it was because he wanted to use the rosewater somehow or if it's bad for rain to pool in the blossoms, but it made me think of this song, and of the ways people can be gentle with things and each other without knowing anyone else is paying attention.

a thousand words

OK, they may not be worth that much, but I've been taking a lot of pictures with my new digital camera. Things really do look different through the lens. LCD screen. Whatever.

More words forthcoming someday soon...

from Lidiosyncratic Idife

(That doesn't work as well as "Hiami Merald," does it...)

Hi, everyone. This is A, from Idiosyncratic Life. (Hallo!) Since a lot of my readers also read this blog, I just wanted to let you know why I recently took down a few posts. My company is implementing a policy that regulates its employees' "online presence." We are allowed to have blogs, as long as we get permission first. They cited recent examples of journalists getting dooced, etc.

So I took my trusty laptop into the Grand Poobah's office and showed him my humble little blog. He got a kick out it, actually, gave me his approval and placed a record of his permission in my file. Which is actually probably a good thing, mutual protection and all that. I will probably be extra careful about swapping words a la "Hiami Merald." I took down "Musing" because I didn't want the first thing Grand Poobah to read as he reviewed my blog was that I was occasionally called a "fat dyke" in high school graffiti. That entry is now back up.

Yes, my boss's boss's boss's boss now knows about Bella and her Monkey toy. I am, however, allowed to refer to myself as "Chunky Photojournalist Barbie," which he thought was hilarious. He also knows I own a deranged fluffy white cat that pees on the dog's toy box from time to time, but what can ya do?

So that's the update. Okay? Okay. Thanks for understanding and please keep reading!

long ago, somebody left with the cup

I have been systematically reading through the archives of mimi smartypants, who is one of those famous-for-the-Internet people (much like famous-for-DC people, I guess) that I can't believe I didn't discover earlier. She is awesome, and I am sure I am subconsciously going to mimic her style, so I might as well do it openly and use a list for starters.

1. Have I told you I have an aquarium at work? I do. It's awesome. It's directly in my line of vision, and I watch my little zebra danios swim around all day. One of them, the biggest one, has taken to guarding the front right corner of the bottom of the tank, where there just so happens to be a very tasteful plastic treasure chest. (My friend R. felt very strongly that all fishtanks should have treasure chests. So be it.) A greedy pirate fish? You decide.

2. I did finally send the letters referenced in the last post. Two rejections and one not-rejection which is really really not yet anything and probably will never be anything, so stay away, evil jinxing kinahurrah eye. Shh. Here, evil jinxing eye, read this part! LOOK OVER HERE: I got one "no new submissions" rejection and one "we like your 'clear prose' but not enough to take you on" rejection. Pay attention to those two instead.

3. I went back to yoga for the first time in almost four months today. We did goddess pose and moon salutes and yay, yoga.

4. J. and I are going to the Outer Banks this weekend for a mini-break, a la Bridget Jones. I have never been there before and am irrationally excited, but please don't let me come back with one of those OBX stickers for my car.

5. Conversation overheard at the gym (between two straight guys, I think, what are the odds?):

Guy 1: So then I said, dude, no way am I going to your house. And she was like, either you are or we're breaking up.

Guy 2: That's why you broke up?

Guy 1, defensive: Yeah! I mean, dude.

Guy 2: I mean, that was totally unreasonable, sure, but I wouldn't have broken up with her for that.

Guy 1: Come on! You would have broken up with her right after that zoo thing!

Guy 2, laughing: Yeah, I guess you're right.

What could "that zoo thing" possibly be? She wanted him to go to the zoo and she wouldn't? She refused to go to the zoo when he wanted to? Something extreme and crazy happened at the zoo that was so extreme and crazy it's self-explanatory to Guy 2?

it's hard out here for a wimp

Today is another foray into the Secret World of Daytime. I took the day off of work to further recover from California (a great time, but those redeye flights leave you a little raw) and get everything ready to send to the literary agents. I came to the coffeeshop so I could "focus" better than I do at home, realizing full well that they have wireless here, which makes "focus" very "funny."

So. Here we are.

You do realize that for my job, I write great swaths of text every day. Hundreds and hundreds of words; I just kind of stare at the screen and it happens. Ditto for the novel -- I had writer's block here and there, but it was mostly in the editing process. Quality is another story, but quantity has never been the problem.

I've now written, oh, 11 original words in the space of... three and a half hours. HOURS.

I've consumed two $3.50 decaf skim lattes (yes, I know how lame and "we met at the Starbucks diagonally across the street!" a coffee order that is, thank you), one $7 salad and four animal crackers. They have Nutella and strawberries on the menu here, and I may require an infusion.

I've made polite conversation with the woman sitting next to me, who is applying for a job at the World Bank. I proofread part of her resume for her! It's good.

I also examined her scarf to see if I could figure out its awesome knitting pattern. I couldn't.

I've written six or seven emails. I read an Oscars review and an article about D*na R**ve. I read the Project Runway page and am debating listening to the podcast now. I read blogs like it was my job.

Speaking of jobs, I would be fired from mine -- I would fire myself from mine -- if I worked this way. I'm averaging, what, less than four words an hour? And the thing is, this letter is already essentially done. I'm sort of trying to merge the creative and the straight versions, and put a beginning on it that doesn't make me sound like a leprous supplicant requesting an audience with the pope.

But what I'm really trying to do is put this off as long as possible, because it's scary. While I'm still working on the letter, I don't have to be actually sending the letter anywhere. This is the part I've been dreading, the one where the agents say no in a variety of painful ways -- through ignoring it completely despite your SASE, through stock postcards that suggest they never even open the envelope, through dismissive one-sentence letters of the "just not interested" variety, through one-paragraph letters that say your book is too boring/has been done before/could use a lot of work/isn't the kind of work they're looking for this year/isn't the kind of work they're looking for, ever.

(Did you know you're supposed to be happy about that last kind, because it at least shows they read it, and that means you're doing something right?)

Anyway. Everyone knows this is part of it, the part that you feel like you didn't really sign up for when you started writing a book. And that all good writers, the writers of the best and most famous books ever, get rejected over and over. Their rejection stories are like folklore.

So let's just do this, and enough with the whining. (I'm getting the Nutella...)