bug off December 31, 2007

So my productive time-off was interrupted yesterday when I suddenly found my ass glued to the toilet shortly after noon. I immediately went through all the culprits for who could have poisoned me.

My cat, Gandalf? No, he needs me to feed him.

Boyfriend, Scott? No, he needs me to sleep with him, which I obviously can’t do while I’m sitting on the toilet.

The Mexican waiter who fed me lunch yesterday? No, he liked my smile too much. Also, that was more than 24 hours ago, so this couldn’t be food poisoning.

I ran out of conspiracies and eventually had to succomb to the fact that I had a stomach bug.

So instead of punching out more grad school applications or freelance projects or really anything remotely related to writing, I curled up on the couch and watched Miss Potter – which has been sitting in its Netflix envelope for 4 months – and (before & after) started reading Kitchen Confidential.

I’m about 100 pages into it and loving it. On top of Anthony Bourdain’s hottness, wit, and very interesting path to culinary enlightenment, it’s a great book to read when you can’t eat anything. I felt like one of those Emeril Live audience members who have been starved just so they can make orgasmic noises over the thought of someone cutting roasted red pepper in front of them. Oh yeah, baby.

I pretty much wallowed around in my filth until 7 p.m. when Scott walked home in the rain with a bag full of soup and Gatorade. Bless him. It was also at this time that it finally occured to me to take some Immodium.

So, I’m feeling better today, but I still woke up a little ill. I’m all doped up on the blue stuff, which I can tell you works much better than the pink stuff, although it doesn’t taste as good. I also have a serious case of cabin fever but I can’t trust my butt 5 feet outside the door. 

And, strange thing, my stepmother called to ask me if I knew who Evanescence was because some guy on the airplane next to her was wearing a T-shirt that said their name and was watching a concert DVD on his laptop with “a very gothic looking girl with long hair and a full band – but it sounded like, I think you call it, Alternative Rock?” And in the course of this conversation, she also informed me that my dad has had the same stomach bug as me, although his sounds worse, and that it also took him a whole day to take any Immodium. Double Bizarro: The last time I flew out of town, the guy next to me in the airplane was also rocking out to Evanescence, which he previewed by saying “I listen to some very awesome music” before leaning his earphone over my way.

Excuse me, I think the toilet is calling my name again.

music & musings December 30, 2007

 

Since I’m reading Virginia Woolf again, but left my book sitting at my desk at work, I decided to rewatch The Hours this evening. This was also an excuse to sulk more on the couch and nurse a knot in my shoulder that formed sometime last night after my Tylenol PM kicked in. I still love the movie and its many characters (haha I always forget Claire Danes is in it) and holy shit how did I forget/not ever notice that Philip Glass wrote the score? No wonder those heart strings were vibrating.

And while on the subject of music, I thought I’d cross-post this sorry list from my other blog since it is seasonal et al:

My Top 10 2007 in Music

1. Peter Bjorn And John “Writer’s Block”
2. Andrew Bird “Armchair Apocrypha”
3. CocoRosie “The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn”
4. Radiohead “In Rainbows”
5. Band Of Horses “Cease To Begin”
6. The National “The Boxer”
7. Amy Winehouse “Back To Black”
8. Dolorean “You Can’t Win”
9. Grant-Lee Phillips “Strangelet”
10. Feist “The Reminder”

It’s mostly pop-y but perhaps that shows my glimmer of happiness in 2007. As for the old stuff, however, this year I’ve dug more into the Nick Cave, Robyn Hitchcock, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell…and more recently thanks to some thoughtful gifts & borrowings…Bob Dylan, Jessie Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter, and the genius known as Townes Van Zandt

My fortune has also risen this Christmas due to two very generous gifts that so far I have been too scared to sit down and plug in for fear/knowledge that I will quit doing anything else just to play with them – a beautiful wood grain LP/Radio/CD-player-recorder from my Dearest and a silver iPod from my other parents. I feel like I just stepped in two dimensions at once.

overcast days are always the best December 28, 2007

In The Mail: 

• UNC Greensboro application
• Univ. of Virginia application

Two down, six eight to go!

I returned in town on Wednesday, went into the office yesterday, and am taking today, Monday and Tuesday off. I needed a vacation after my vacation spent with family, and to just do whatever the hell I need or want to do. Today has been the perfect stay-at-home and get shit done day (see above). It’s rainy, somewhat chilly, and overcast outside. I’m thinking about making a pot of chili con carne (my carne = venison) later if those yummy Christmas leftovers don’t call my name again (broccoli, cheese & rice casserole, baked ham, dinner rolls, green beans). And then maybe curling up with a book or a movie on the couch, or both, plus a cat.

right now December 24, 2007

Sitting in my dad & stepmom’s living room in TN, with a fire raging at 3:00, Christmas tree with colored lights and ornaments at 12:00, TV hurting my ears and eyes with its blasting football at 2:00 (are they deaf already? is this was years of Doobie Bros. concerts does to you?), stepmom on her laptop at 9:00, 1 of 4 chocolate labs around my feet, and one major headache forming.

I’m just glad to find the internet, and a couch for that matter. I’ve been staying at my mom’s this week and even though she sorta described the place as “near complete” for my stay, the house that’s been in renovations for the past 3 months still is lacking any surface to sit on that isn’t 1) in a room with them with a TV blasting or 2) a bed surrounded by a mountain of boxes. We opened presents early last night in my old bedroom, with my bed shoved against the wall, 2 wing-backed chairs, a flat screen TV (sitting on my old vanity,) hideous prom pictures next to more hideous George Bush pictures on my bulletin board and no Christmas decoration in sight. It was weird. But I did luck out because I GOT A NEW VACCUUM CLEANER and yeah that pretty much sums up the person I’ve become in the past couple years. But it’s RED and SHINY! I want to rush home to NC, make a drink, throw on a coctail dress, and suck up all the pine needles that are all over the floor after my cat has undoubtedly knocked every ornament off the tree in my absence.

But anyway, since I can’t really relax at my mom’s right now, I came over here to my Dad’s for some solace. Except that as soon as I walked in the door, I was assigned to decorate two trees and relight a wreath. So, I’m finally sitting down and enjoying the free wi-fi while my dad prepares an awesome meal that involves ribeye, asparagus and red potatoes (like father, like daughter). Tomorrow I will be in my mom’s kitchen – the only room that hasn’t been destroyed yet – and will prepare our dinner for Christmas afternoon. I plan on getting everything done before she gets home at 2 and starts criticizing me for not measuring stuff because I actually cook and don’t have to measure what a cup of celery chopped looks like. 

Before I say anything else….have a Merry Christmas!

more on Queens readings in January December 20, 2007

More details provided by the Observer today (click link)

On poetry, Dylan, and ‘The Big Lebowski’ December 18, 2007

Check out this delightful Q & A with former poet laureate Robert Hass over at the Wallstreet Journal. I got a bunch of teaching ideas from it. He hits the nail on the head about what makes poetry transcend to the person who is new to it.

(Link courtesy of Poetry Hut)

ways to avoid working on your grad school applications December 17, 2007

• Tell yourself Christmas is ALWAYS more important and a magical time of year where everything will happen as you planned it, even if you get majorly distracted.
• Plan a party. Parties are always time consuming!
• Have said party, and get really drunk while celebrating that you’re not working on grad school applications.
• Drink with the only other person you know right now who is also applying for grad school. You’ll both make each other feel better.
• Keep drinking.
• Wake late the next morning, because there’s really no point to starting your day early. Especially with that darn headache. Where did that come from anyway? oh yeah.
• Tell your boyfriend you’ll give him a ride to work ONLY if you can have Bojangles for breakfast.
• Return to the house, sit on the couch, and don’t move unless you need to refill your soda, eat leftover party food, or take a pee.
• Watch all of the Lord of the Rings trilogy ON TV – with commercials every 5 minutes.
• Don’t look at the clock.
• Pet your cat. You haven’t let him in your lap in months because you’re always sitting at the computer and can’t have him typing KJ:KSLRERI FRISKIES LKJDFJ in the middle of your grad school essays.
• While you’re at it, forget about the 4 freelance writing projects you said you’d get to your editor by Monday. Yeah, that’s right, she can wait until Wednesday.
• Go out of town on Friday and cross your fingers that when you come back, you’ll get everything done in the 2.5 days before deadlines. For at least those first 4 applications. Thank your lucky stars that the other 6 aren’t due until Jan. 15, which you know, is like a year from now anyway.

domestic heroines in literature December 13, 2007

Continuing our conversation from yesterday, slightly, there is an interesting article up on Book Slut about how poet and author Jill Bialosky created her character for “The Life Room” (a book I have not read, although it sounds enticing!):

“When I was a young reader the models in literature for women protagonists who struggled between passion and domestic responsibility were Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Edna Pontellier, and Lily Bart. There were others but these destitute heroines were the ones that left an impression. Passion was terminal; female protagonists swept up in love affairs ended up killing themselves. The message was that abundance of feeling led to tragedy. If women in novels were not killed off by their creator, they struggled like Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady or Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch to define themselves against erotic desire and the confines of marriage. I wanted to create a contemporary heroine with deep emotional intelligence and intensity who could find a way to balance passion and selfhood.”

why do we like “a little sexist” movies? December 12, 2007

Poet and writer Meghan O’Rourke has an interesting article up on Slate right now about the somewhat sexist slant in one of 2007’s number 1 film comedies, “Knocked Up.” You can read the full article here.

I have to say, when I started reading this piece, I was a little skeptical of the feminist take on it. Maybe that’s because I loved “Knocked Up” and haven’t seen it since it was in the theatre, so my memory of certain scenes was lacking until O’Rourke mentioned them again in her argument. Also, I like to think that I’m a pretty good judge of gender communication/bias in the media and usually do have an “off switch” when it comes to movies that portray women in either a ridiculous or a sexist light. So how could I like “a little sexist” movie? 

When it comes to comedies, as I’m just now self-discovering, I’m probably less critical of how humor is played in the gender context. At least in this film, I could see past how the female characters were alienated in equal play of their independence from their male counterparts because I was having such a great time laughing at the penis jokes.  Even O’Rourke admits that she “laughed until [she] cried” while watching this film. Yet, she makes a strong argument:

“If Apatow tries, in Knocked Up, to suggest that guys need to grow up a bit to meet women’s high expectations, he, like his own characters, doesn’t seem to get that maybe there’s a lot more to women than these expectations. You might say his critique is muddied by its own joyful enactment of male high jinks, and the corresponding absence of anything similar on the part of the women. So when Debbie tells Pete that she, too, might want time to watch movies by herself, it seems utterly unconvincing: She seems too focused on the mechanics of family life to do anything that … pointless and solitary. “

O’Rourke also relates the sexist nature of “Knocked Up” to one of my favorite movies of all time, “High Fidelity.” At first I thought, blasphemous! But she has a point: both female leads have that disciplinarian stereotype – or to put it in layman’s terms, they lack the “fun factor” as they “grow up” – whereas the male characters in their relationships show that their lives are full of entertainment and hilarity apart from the woman’s (wife’s) whip.

In these characters’/film makers’/storytellers’ defense, I will say one thing that makes these comedies more appealing and less offensive is that the female characters do have more depth than say, female characters in a Will Ferrel film. You don’t just see a blond boob stick waving her finger as her man runs down the street naked. No, you see women talking to other women, women talking to men, women expressing emotions and demonstrating that they can – although maybe more successfully with their emotions on the side – carry their own weight. Doesn’t Heigl’s character in “Knocked Up” work her way up in her TV job before finally admitting that she has to take maternity leave? Doesn’t Laura in “High Fidelity” show that she is happy in her lawyer job and can support herself and maintain friendships – without Rob?

Perhaps I have some personal connection off the screen to these films. In my own life, I am the overly ambitious and so-far career successful woman, who sometimes does set her own interests and time aside to aid her relationship with the “schlubby slacker guy” (No offense, Love). It’s something Scott and I talk about a lot, and something I feel guilty about a lot: He sets time aside to practice his music, and doesn’t sacrifice his art often just to spend time with me. Whereas I am almost always looking for a chance to eat dinner together, run errands together, or go see some stupid comedy together rather than sitting down and giving myself the time to write and work on what’s most important to me  – or even to allow myself to do something “pointless and solitary.” And say I do have something planned, but get pulled away from it…I’m usually silent rather than woeful. I consider my give the huge dutiful weight on the side of the give and take. And what does that make me come across as when I ask something of him? The bull that cracks the whip, the disciplinarian, the very stereotype I hate to see women put into, and most definitely myself.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not blaming anyone, but just pointing out how easily we can accept certain terms for ourselves, or for the entertainment in our lives. And part of the reason I spend so much time with my boyfriend is because he isn’t just my boyfriend, he’s my best friend.

I probably won’t get rid of my “High Fidelity” or scorn anyone who purchases “Knocked Up” (Hmm… I bet I could get a good discount on the DVD through my job…). But rather, perhaps when I watch these again in the company of others, I’ll consider striking a conversation up afterward about the hidden secret lives of the women in these films. Hopefully, my fellow viewers’ eyes won’t glaze over as we munch on the last of the popcorn. But just like advertising, where a razor can be linked to a goddess just to make a woman buy it, we need to be more careful (and open) about what we accept or don’t accept of the women and female characters we watch in the movies. We can have a good laugh, but not at our own expense.

Now Reading December 11, 2007

Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

&

 

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (note: I have started this book 3 times but never finished it. However, Mrs. Dalloway is one of my all-time favorite reads. I’m going to try to stick to it this time!)