re-upping

It was fun last year, so let's have a re-meme...

1. What did you do in 2006 that you'd never done before?

Watched the world's highest tides come in at the Bay of Fundy. Cared about tides at all. Learned to like pretty much all seafood. Took a lot more work-related responsibility. Rode a bike.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Yeah... I always make them, and I always sort of keep them. Emphasis on the "sort of" part of that sentence -- I need some new ones now.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes, and more people close to me are on the list (and the list of potential adoptive parents) for 2007.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No, unless you count James Brown and Gerald Ford. Which I do not.

5. What countries did you visit?

Canadia.

6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?

More time for everything. More writing. More self-discipline (that's the same as 2005's wish, sadly). Some sort of coherent life plan.

7. What dates from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Er, hm. Is it bad that I already am not remembering any?

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Learning to ride a bike. At last, my friends.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Not riding said bike a little more, and not keeping some of my health-related resolutions from last year.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Not except for my DAMN TEETH, the evil bastards.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Bike!

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Are we avoiding political topics? We are, right. Um, non-political: Margaret Atwood, for writing the most amazing book for 2006. Also Mark Haddon and several other authors, and the good folks of Bookslut for telling me about them.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

No politics, la la. Maybe some of those non-underwear-wearing celebrities, although I can't pretend I really truly care about that.

14. Where did most of your money go?

The verbatim answer from last year: If only I knew. To Amtrak, to car repairs, to various yarn stores, to my overpriced gym, to eating out way too much. [Plus: DAMN DENTIST. --ed.]

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Going on vacation with J. Seeing a friend I'd worried I'd lost touch with. Going back to African dance. Dumb reality TV.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?

The Weepies' "Gotta Have You."

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) happier or sadder? both, sometimes
b) thinner or fatter? about the same
c) richer or poorer? about the same

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Bike riding. (Hello, theme.) Exercising in general. Cooking. Visiting my family.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Worrying, again. Watching stupid television shows.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

Too late, but I had dinner with friends and went to Lancaster the next morning. We will be trekking out to Rockville to go to a party on New Year's.

*(now is where I started editing last year because this is getting boring and repetitive)*

23. What was your favorite TV program?

Top Chef. Or Grey's Anatomy, when I get to watch it with Shannon.

25. What was the best book you read?

Abovementioned Atwood and Haddon.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?

The Weepies, also abovementioned. Thanks, H.

27. What did you want and get?

Love, happiness, etc., barf. And a digital camera.

28. What did you want and not get?

Nothing I'll admit to.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?

Little Miss Sunshine.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

29, and J. cooked a lobster. It ruled.

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Second verse, same as the first: If I had gone a whole year with no cavities. This is getting really repetitive, sorry.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?

Nonexistant? But I did get really nice work-appropriate shoes.

33. What kept you sane?

All y'all. (I learned to spell "y'all" correctly this year, also -- thanks, Cindy.)


34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

McSteamy. I'm such a cliche.


38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006.

Oy, again. Let's do another quote:

"As humans, after all, we become that which we seek. Dairy farming makes men steady and reliable and temperate; deer hunting makes men quiet and fast and sensitive; lobster fishing makes men suspicious and wily and ruthless." -- Linda Greenlaw

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Five green and speckled frogs, sitting on a speckled log, eating the most delicious bugs. Yum, yum, yum.

kept down by the Man

The Dental Man, that is. I walked in my door just now, home early from work on a beautiful sunny day, picked up the mail, leafed through it, la la happy. What is this? Oh, an envelope from my dentist. He must be writing to wish me a happy Chanukah, right? Wrong. A bill.

(I'm going to write this next part in white, because it is really scary. Highlight it if you're not afraid of the scary scary number.)

$1,061.84

I knew this bill was coming, and I knew it wouldn't be pretty. I already paid them $850 back in the middle of all the fun, but this payment was waiting on the dentist to check to see if my insurance company would waive its $1,000 per year limit.

Hey, guess what?

It wouldn't.

[Editor's retrospective note: Why did I think it was even a possibility? Why did the dentist's office? Insurance companies aren't exactly known for flexible and forgiving policies.]

This means that I've had $2,911.84 of dental fun in 2006. Here's the part where I could go into how I have a somewhat large credit card bill this month, and how I am supposed to buy plane tickets to Amsterdam, Prague and Vienna next week. But I won't. Instead, I will just say... damn it.

a statistically representative survey

Apologies for the long absence -- things have been v. busy, so I'm a little behind on my reality TV viewing... and thus have nothing to discuss on ye olde blogge. But I am in need of opinion and turning to you in supplication. Some questions, written in traditional poll-speak:

1. How do you feel about the following poem -- very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative or very negative?

2. Do you feel that the inclusion of the word "death" makes the poem appropriate or inappropriate for a festive occasion?

3. If this poem were read at your wedding, would you be pleased or not pleased?

(Please be advised that the pollster -- me -- loves this poem very much for some reason, and the lines "O, to take what we love inside/ to carry within us an orchard" bring a bit of a lump to her throat every single time she reads it. Said pollster is just not entirely sure it's appropriate for a bridesmaid-y toast.)

---

From Blossoms, by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

demanding a recount

I might take it back -- this interview makes Emily sound really terrible. The defense "I've worked in really good restaurants, so I couldn't possibly have made food that's too salty" is incredibly stupid. I hate what she says about the woman who didn't like her stupid upper-crust ice cream, and her incredibly snotty comments about Friday's and being a chef in general. All the rest of those people are chefs too, and they managed to figure out how to do this, so don't blame the show for your lack of creativity. I kind of can't stand her now. It's all sooo coooomplicated, you know?

I worked 20 hours in a row, post-election, and now I have tomorrow off. And let's just say I'm too jaded to say more than this, but I'm not sad about the outcomes of said elections.

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.