Struggling Single Twenty-Something

What I Want the Most

2012-02-12T09:51:00.000-08:00

A year ago, I blogged about how I moved past hating Valentine’s Day. At this point, I actually kind of like it because it gives me an excuse to spoil myself—and as an introvert, I have always enjoyed the pleasure of my own company, so I take whatever excuses I can. But as I’m another year older and single for another year, I have to admit that I’m reflecting on some things.

Now, before I say anything more, I want to note that this is not a woe-is-me-I’m-single post. It’s not an OMG-my-significant-other-RAWKS! post, either. (By the way, those two things are equally annoying, so basically, everyone should just shut up about their relationship statuses.) But it is a musing on getting older and how I find myself looking at the future differently in my late twenties than I did in my early twenties.

You notice my bucket list here? Lots of fun stuff on it—skydiving, mountain climbing, and some stuff that isn’t in a Tim McGraw song, like owning a boat, recording a song, and being a bestselling author. I also have my list of travel goals that I hope to make some progress on over the next couple of years.

But the truth is, I would give up every other item on both of those lists if it meant that I could have only these three:

Fall in love with an awesome guy who loves me back, have a wonderful wedding, and stay happily married for the rest of our lives
Have at least two kids
Own a house in the Boston suburbs

That’s it. Those are the things I want the most out of life. They are not extraordinary things. They’re things that millions of people manage to do without much trouble. And yet, for me, they might be the hardest items on my bucket list to accomplish. Let’s take a look at them.

Not only have I never been in a relationship, I have never been in love. So my heart has never been broken, but I also do not know what romantic love feels like. And as easy as it is to get cynical and think that real love doesn’t exist or that all relationships will end, I know that’s not true. I know people who are really, truly in love and will be together for the rest of their lives. And I always think of my paternal grandparents, who lived through the Great Depression and World War II and who were happily married for sixty-six years until my grandfather’s death. Real love happens, but it has never happened to me, and more than anything, I want to find someone with whom to spend every day for the rest of my life.

I also want at least two kids. The challenge here is accomplishing the part before that, love and marriage, in time to make that happen. It’s very hard to get pregnant without fertility treatments after age thirty-five or so. If I met a guy tomorrow, I’d have to date him for at least two years before I’d consider getting engaged. Then we’d be engaged for about another year and have at least a year or two of being married and childless before having our first kid, which would make me a first-time mother at about age thirty-two. Which is fine, but remember, this would be the absolute earliest. I’d consider adoption in the future as well, but even if I were to adopt, I wouldn’t want to be too old when becoming a parent.

The side effect of wanting kids so badly is that it has made me pickier about whom I’m attracted to. When I look at dating sites, I end up thinking things like, “Is his career stable? Does he seem mature enough to be a good father? Does he value the same kinds of things that I do?” I just feel like I can’t waste time with someone if I can’t see a long-term future with him.

The other reason I want to find someone who is mature and financially stable is because of the third thing I want: owning a house in the Boston suburbs. Specifically, a house that is on enough land to be more private than living in the city and has at least three bedrooms and a backyard. And a house that is located in a Boston suburb that is on the commuter rail and has a good school system. And, the hardest part, a house that my hypothetical future husband and I can afford.

Now, I am pretty good at saving money. Despite paying a lot in rent and earning the first word of my blog title by working in a not-so-lucrative industry, I have managed to save a decent amount. And one of the reasons I was so excited to become a sales rep was because if I make my number, I get a much bigger bonus than I used to get. But even so, the Boston suburbs are ridiculously expensive, even if you’re just looking for a modest three-bedroom house, and it will take me a long time to save enough money for a down payment. What if I can’t meet a guy who can afford to help me buy a house?

What do you guys think? Have you found your priorities changing as you get older? What do you want the most out of life, and do you worry about how you may never achieve it?

Song of the Moment: "Beige Curtains"

2012-02-07T20:20:00.000-08:00

Riki Lindhome is the blonde one from Garfunkel and Oates (I can never remember which one is Garfunkel and which one is Oates), and both she and Kate Micucci have done some solo work as well. My friend Jenny introduced me to this Riki Lindhome song, “Beige Curtains,” which makes me smile every time I hear it. Even if you don’t have an ex as douchey as the guy in the song, I think every girl can relate to these lyrics.

Valentine’s Day is coming up, and whether you’re single, taken, or somewhere in between…be grateful this year that you’re nothing like a pair of beige curtains. You’re not a simple girl—you’re a Katie girl.

He's a Ghost, and He Writes to Us! Ghostwriter!

2012-01-19T20:23:00.000-08:00

Over the summer, when some friends were over at my house for my birthday, we somehow ended up talking about the old PBS shows that you all know I love. When we talked about Ghostwriter, someone mentioned the music video the kids made to a song called “You Gotta Believe.” I said I was pretty sure it was on YouTube somewhere, broke out my computer, and sure enough, there it was.

A friend had gotten me an Amazon gift card for my birthday, so that incident inspired me to spend it on Season 1 of Ghostwriter on DVD! I just recently got around to watching it, and I have to say, it holds up REALLY well.

So, here’s where I describe the show for those of you who were not fortunate to discover this gem of public television when you were in elementary school. Ghostwriter was a live-action show set (and filmed on location) in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was about a group of pre-teen kids who were the only ones who could see a ghost they called “Ghostwriter.” Ghostwriter only appeared as swirls of color, and he communicated by rearranging letters to form words. The kids could only communicate with him by writing to him. They called themselves “The Ghostwriter Team” and, since Ghostwriter could read things that they didn’t have access to, they solved mysteries with his help. They wore black pens on string around their necks, and when they needed to get the whole team together, they called a “rally,” where they wrote “Rally” and their first initial so that Ghostwriter would carry the message to everyone.

Jamal was the first team member to see Ghostwriter. Only the audience knows this, but Ghostwriter actually came out of a book in Jamal’s basement that he and his dad knocked over when looking for a trunk for Jamal’s sister to take to college with her. Jamal was slightly full of himself but was also usually the leader and the peacemaker of the group. He lived in an old house with his parents and his awesome grandmother, Grandma CeCe, a perpetually cheerful letter carrier.

Lenni wrote songs (including “You Gotta Believe”) and raps that sound like, well, a twelve-year-old wrote them. Her widowed father was a jazz musician, and they lived in a loft apartment with a big electric keyboard. Although she wore the world's weirdest clothes, even by early 90s standards, she was the one I wanted to be my best friend.

Alex and Gaby were siblings who lived below Lenni, behind their Salvadoran family’s bodega. They shared a bedroom and were constantly bickering, but could also be very sweet to each other. Alex loved to read mysteries, had female penpals all around the world, and tended to think in grandiose terms (like, when Jamal first suggested forming the Ghostwriter team, he wanted them to have secret video cameras in their boots). The aptly named Gaby never shut up and always wanted to be the center of attention, but she was also really observant and often picked up on things that other missed.

Tina was an aspiring filmmaker constantly found with a Camcorder. Her parents were from Vietnam and owned a tailor shop, and when Alex met her, it was love at first sight. The two of them eventually began the adorable kind of relationship that tends to happen with middle schoolers.

Rob. *sigh* Oh, Rob. Rob was my first crush, EVER. And I have to say, my eight-year-old self had good taste. He had that cute, floppy, 90s hair, and he was a very shy writer. His dad, whom he often clashed with, had just gotten out of the air force and he’d spent most of his life moving around, which made him reluctant to trust new friends. He also made REALLY bad decisions sometimes, like looking for someone in an abandoned subway tunnel or going to a hotel room alone to confront the villain. But he was awesome-- when he first joined the team, everyone told him he could ask Ghostwriter anything he was wondering about, so he asked, "Is Elvis dead?" Nothing ever came of this, but I always thought that Lenni kind of had a thing for him, too.

In the second season, they introduced a couple of new team members—Hector, a kid whom Alex tutored (and who grew up to be a Real World cast member!), and Casey, Jamal’s younger cousin. That season also included the aforementioned music video, Ghostwriter traveling through time, pre-10 Things I Hate about You Julia Stiles, and, sadly, the departure of Rob, who moved to Australia. I can’t wait until that and Season 3 come out on DVD.

It aired on Sunday nights, and the format was pretty cool—before showing the new half-hour episode, they’d show the episode from the week before, so that you could either refresh yourself or see what you missed last week. Four or five episodes made up a case, and before the new episode aired, a narrator would recap the clues and facts from the previous episode. I used to write down all the clues in a casebook that I’d made and try to solve the mystery myself. Some of the mysteries were the kind of thing you’d expect middle schoolers to get involved in—a group of video gamers stealing kids’ backpacks to use their quarters to practice at the arcade, someone putting up smear fliers to sabotage Alex’s campaign for school president—but some were actually pretty intense, like Jamal being falsely accused of setting a store on fire or barrels of a hazardous chemical being buried in the community garden and making everyone sick.

The thing that really strikes me upon re-watching it is that, despite the acting not exactly being Oscar-caliber, this was a very intelligently written show for kids. Its purpose was to help kids with their writing skills, but it accomplished that in such a subtle way that I only realize now what I learned from it. They snuck in a lot of lessons about writing concisely, capturing the way a person speaks, writing persuasively, and how to get your point across. Rob says at one point that the good thing about writing is that, unlike talking, you can work on it until you get it right, and that’s a line that I really took to heart.

It also touched on some surprisingly serious issues, like gang violence, drugs, and alcoholism, which kind of shocked my sheltered suburban self when I was a kid. In my favorite series of episodes, a homeless poet Rob is friends with disappears, and they eventually discover that he is a Vietnam vet and took off on his own. They don’t actually say “PTSD,” but that’s obviously what he had, and those episodes make much more sense to me as an adult. They often introduce some character subplots that didn’t have to do with the case, too, like Tina’s older brother rebelling against their Vietnamese parents and Lenni being uncomfortable with her father dating again.

The team hoped that one day they would solve the ultimate mystery: who Ghostwriter really was. Sadly, the show was canceled due to lack of funding before that could happen, but a little Internet digging turned up what the answer to that question would have been!

Other random thoughts on these episodes:

These kids are so early 90s cool, yo. They wear their orange baseball caps backwards and write their own rap songs.
The role was recast after the first two cases, but for those, you know who played Jamal’s dad? FREAKING SAMUEL L. JACKSON!
Wow, the police on this show suck. On the episode where Jamal is accused of burning the store, the cops just let everybody waltz in and mess up their crime scene and Lenni picks a key piece of evidence right up off the floor. Also, in the episode with the poisonous barrels, how on Earth was the team able to figure out who dumped them before the cops were?
Alex and Tina had the cutest first kiss EVER. They were hiding in a truck when a criminal they were chasing spotted them, and Alex said, “Well, whatever happens, at least we’re together,” before giving her a quick peck on the lips.
Sometimes I have a hard time remembering life before the Internet. This show reminds me about things like card catalogs and encyclopedias.
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but I have a freakishly good memory. I remember the weirdest details of things that happened years ago. And frankly, I am amazed at how well I remembered this show. The only thing that’s different is that the kids now look so YOUNG to me! These kids really were about the age of the characters they played.

You know what? If you’ve never seen this show, I think you need to remedy that. GHOSTWRITER PARTY AT MY HOUSE!

Karaoke Ring of Death: January

2012-01-18T08:44:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year from KROD! That's the theme this month-- the new year, whatever that means to you. You can find me over at Kandace's One Red Wall.

I have the privilege of hosting the wonderful Alexandra of The Tsaritsa Sez. She's hosted me a couple of times and I'm happy to have her here! Tsa, it turns out, doesn't just write a great blog, but also great hip-hop lyrics, and here she is performing one of her original songs. I'm quite impressed! I'll let her take it from here.

Hi all, and Happy Karaoke Day! I feel very lucky to be hosted today for Karaoke Ring of Death by the lovely Katie. My name is Alexandra and I have a little blog called The Tsaritsa Sez. I also help run this karaoke show along with Jes and Kanriah, and we would love to have you join us next month for more singing (and perhaps drinking) in front of the camera.

This month our theme is "Hello 2012, Goodbye 2011," and so I have chosen to perform a
song that I wrote called "Fall Back / Stand Up" which brushes off negativity and calls for unity among the disenfranchised. I spent the last 18 months unemployed and applying for every job that I could find. I also got creative and started making my own work via blogging and freelance writing, and became involved with the 99% Movement. The song declares that we need to take the power into our own hands, and the only way to do that is with action. I hope that you like it and perhaps find it inspiring.

Dear Weather,

2012-01-07T11:58:00.001-08:00

STOP IT. It is January 7th, and there is NO WAY that it should be as warm as it is today.

I WANT SNOW! This is Boston in January, and that is far from too much to ask. How is it that last year, when I was training for the half-marathon, we got something like six and a half feet of snow but this year there is not one flake of snow on the ground? The only snow we've gotten was over Halloween weekend, which was enough to knock out power lines all over New England but not enough to stick.

I am dying to go skiing on real snow. I want to see how lovely the bike path near my house looks when the trees on it are covered in white. I want to walk around at night as snow falls on very still, quiet streets that have not yet been disturbed by snowplows and sanders. I want to see how beautiful the snow looks when it hasn't been marred by dirt and footprints. I want to flop down and make a snow angel. I want to go skating at Frog Pond (something I say I'll do every year and never manage to do) surrounded by snow in the Common. I want to have an excuse to stay in sweats all day and read an entire novel with a big cup of hot chocolate. I want a season where it's better to stay in than to go out and to hang inside with friends, watching movies or playing board games. I want to see for myself how cute Juno is when outside in the snow (Yaaeey! The ground is all weird! I'm a dog!).

See, I love the seasons. It's why I never, ever want to live anywhere where it's warm all year long. Excuse my cliched descriptions, but I love the flowers and blossoms coming out in the spring, and I love spring rain. I love reading outside, going to the beach, and walking around in flip flops and skirts in the summer. I love autumn leaves, the change to a more comfortable temperature, apples, pumpkins.

And yes, I love winter, too, for all the reasons I've already mentioned. Sadly, winter is currently MIA. I don't know if it's global warming or La Nina or what, but in any case...you better get your act together, weather. Or else I'll...well, sadly, there's not too much that a human can threaten the weather with. But if there was, I totally would.

Way too warmly yours,

Katie

New Year Reflections

2012-01-01T10:13:00.001-08:00

Some years end and I feel like not all that much happened.

This year….yeah, a lot of stuff happened! And most of it was good. This was like my Energizer Bunny year—I just kept going and going, trying to accomplish as much as I could. Here’s some of what I did this year:

Got a new job that I really, really wanted.
Moved! I still live in the same neighborhood, but this new apartment is just a better living situation for me in every way.
Ran two half-marathons, one in Boston and one in Florida
Did a few other runs- the Harpoon 5-miler, the JPMorgan Chase Corporate Challenge, and the Jingle Bell Run 5K
Went to Disney World
Went to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter
Got my wisdom teeth out. Please don’t kill me, those who have had painful wisdom teeth experiences, but my teeth were only on the top and not impacted, so getting them out was just like having any other teeth pulled. I was conscious through the procedure, didn’t take anything stronger than Advil, and went out to 90s Night the same day I had them out.
Joined the bone marrow registry
Had a fun Valentine’s Day with friends
Had the absolute best weekend of my life at my five-year college reunion
Went out to Vegas for Jon and Steph’s wedding, where I had a lot of fun and met a lot of cool people
Saw Celine Dion in concert!
Had a really fun birthday party back in July
Went to my cousin Ryan’s beautiful wedding by the ocean in South Dartmouth, MA
Played on my office softball team
Made some new friends at work
Went to Aruba with my family for the second time, and I crossed an item off my bucket list by going parasailing
Joined 20sb and discovered a great community and lot of great blogs
Continued singing in my chorus and had a couple of solos in the concerts
Did a lot of exploring around Boston—places like the Arboretum, the Boston Harbor Islands, Castle Island, and the Franklin Park Zoo
Did a day trip to Portland, Maine
Went to several churches of different denominations—this will be discussed in an upcoming post, because I’m still not quite done with the project
Somehow, without even trying, managed to break my bad habit of watching reruns of old TV shows when I could be doing something more productive
I am actually astounded at how much my anxiety has improved. It has been a long time since I had a major anxious freakout.

One bad thing that happened this year—I didn’t blog about this when it happened, but my paternal grandmother died at age ninety-three back in May. Thank you to Megan and Cat, who were with me in the T station after a softball game when I returned a call from my dad and found out. It was sad and I miss her, especially at family events. But she was a wonderful lady who had a great, fulfilling life. Her health had been declining and she really missed my grandfather—her husband of sixty-six years—who passed away in November of 2008. So as sad as it was, I’m at peace with it. And I do have to say, deaths in the family really make you reflect on the family you have. I am very lucky to have such a large extended family that I’m close to both literally and figuratively.

Some disappointments in the past year:

I HAVE GAINED SO MUCH WEIGHT. I weigh more now than I have ever weighed in my life. I know everyone says this, but this year I am going to try to make eating healthier, exercising more regularly, and cooking at home instead of eating out big focuses of my life.
While I blogged a lot more, I am still having trouble motivating myself to get back to my fiction writing. I don’t know why.
I wish I had more money saved, but at least the reason I don’t is that I spent it on some fun stuff last year—like going to Florida, Las Vegas, and my college reunion.
My trip to New York.
Dating! More than anything, I want to find the man I will spend the rest of my life with, but dating just sucks so much. I only went on about four first dates and two second dates in the last year, so in 2012 I’m going to try to step it up, but I am starting to wonder if there really is just no one out there I would be compatible with.
I do not get nearly enough sleep because I stay up late for no reason. This is another terrible habit of mine that I need to break, and it’s probably one reason why I gained so much weight this year.
The Killing. Lesson learned: do not blog about a show before the season finale. Worst season finale EVER! Everything they said had led us to believe that we’d find out who the killer was by the end of the season, but a last-minute loose end meant that we didn’t, and it annoyed the crap out of me.

I don’t know if I’m making any resolutions per se, but here are some things I’m aiming for this year:

Successfully completing the 17-Day Diet
Much more cooking and baking
Completing an open-water swim
Running another half-marathon in November
Making it to New York for a weekend without being interrupted by a hurricane
Taking trips to both Southern California and Washington DC
Adopting a cat! I have been an aspiring cat lady for years. I adore my roommate’s dog Juno, who has convinced me that for the rest of my life I’m always going to have to have pets, but if I’m getting my own pet, I will start with a cat because they don’t require quite as much time.

I do have to say that overall I am very happy and very lucky, and I do appreciate that. I have a lot to be grateful for.

But This Is My Song

2011-12-27T11:05:00.000-08:00

I don't think I'm a very nice person. Really, I don't. If you're reading this thinking, "Oh, but I know you and you did/said this one nice thing this one time!" or "But I've been reading your blog and you seem like a nice girl!" I thank you for that, but I would like to think that I know myself better than you do and, really, I don't think I'm very nice.

Here’s the thing that a lot of people don’t realize until they get to know me better: I am constantly angry. It goes hand-in-hand with my anxiety, which is actually about a million times better than it used to be. But although my angry thoughts are generally not as intense as they used to be, anger is one thing I can’t seem to shake. If I’m mad at someone, I don’t just think, “I’m mad at you.” Instead, I jump to all kinds of hateful thoughts that I don’t really mean, but feel like I mean as I’m in my anger.

I have written here before about how a Brandi Carlile song applies to my life. Well, here goes a post about another one, “My Song.” Specifically, the last lines:

Here I am
I’m so young
I know I’ve been bitter, I’ve been jaded, I’m alone
Every day
I bite my tongue
Don’t you know my mind is full of razors
I’m not sure I can take it
I’ve nothing strong to hold to
I’m way too old to hate you
My mind is full of razors
To cut you like a word if only sung
But this is my song

I love this song because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt those words. I do feel like my mind is full of razors. Good example-- remember this post? I stand by that post completely because I was actually pretty calm when I wrote it--I purposely waited until I had calmed down to write it because the actual thought I have when someone’s cigarette smoke blows into my face is a lot worse than wanting to push a button to wipe smokers off the face of the earth.

I don’t like being this way, and I am constantly struggling against it, trying to be nice when being nice does not come naturally to me. Despite this, I do believe that most people really are nice. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my favorite books, and I love what Atticus tells Scout at the end of it: “Most people are [nice], Scout, when you finally see them.”

The problem is, though, that being nice isn’t “cool” in our culture. People always tout their sarcasm as if it’s a positive trait when a lot of times they use it to make fun of people. So much of the humor we see on TV is mean-spirited and at other people’s expense. Women will label themselves “bitches” as a reclaiming thing, but rather than use the word to mean “strong, opinionated, outspoken woman,” they embrace the worst connotations of the word “bitch”--the unapologetically catty, mean parts.

We condemn bullying in schools and cyberbullying among teenagers when we perpetuate it ourselves online. Jill wrote an excellent post recently about how the fashion blogging community can seem like high school. Nicole recently saw firsthand how uncharitably people react to news stories they really know nothing about. In college, I interned for a parenting author who, among other things, ran a message board for moms, and I saw how even women who should be setting good examples for their children could turn on each other and be petty and mean-spirited.

And this week, I saw it at 20sb--a very cliquey group of people ganging up on others who have done nothing to hurt them. Specifically, one blogger I admire a lot was very hurt by what went down.

And this really saddens me. I’ve written a lot about how in the past year I’ve connected with many great, talented bloggers, and the behavior I just described is not what I want that community to be. I’ve discovered a lot of kind, positive things that have come out of the 20sb community, like More Love Letters and Let’s Drop a Love Bomb, not to mention the friendships and connections that have developed.

Yes, we all need to vent sometimes. Yes, a little snark can be fun sometimes as long as it isn’t hurting anyone (Childhood Trauma and Television Without Pity are two good examples of this). Yes, you are allowed to rant about how you hate [insert overexposed celebrity here]. But saying mean things about people who haven’t done anything to you and who you know may very well be reading what you write...no. Just no.

It can be hard to resist cultural norms that say it’s okay to insult people and, in my case, to resist cutting with the razors in your mind. Not to be cheesy with a life-is-a-song metaphor or anything but to bring this post full circle, this is YOUR song. You decide how it goes, and it’s always better to do your own thing and go on singing no matter who it is who bothers you. Although I struggle with this, I try not to let those who bother me get the best of me. It’s my song, and my life.

Karaoke Ring of Death: December

2011-12-21T08:49:00.000-08:00

Happy holidays, all! That's the theme of this month's KROD. You all know how much I love Christmas, so this theme absolutely delights me! I'm feeling a bit of deja vu. Once again, I'm hosting Dave from The Fiction Factory, and once again, you can find me at The Tsaritsa Sez. Take it away, Dave!

Yammer-Lama-Ding Dong

2011-12-19T10:10:00.000-08:00

Recently, my company pretty much told us that we had to join a work-networking site called Yammer. I’d never heard of Yammer until the last couple of weeks, and I quickly discovered that it has an interface that is the world’s most blatant ripoff of Facebook.

The content, however? Not much like Facebook at all. You’re not going to reveal too much about yourself on a network made for people from work, for one thing. It’s not even like LinkedIn, which I primarily use to see what people I used to work with are doing now, because everyone on it still works at my company. You can “follow” people, but I don’t really know why you would—no one is posting anything to their profiles, so there’s not really much to follow.

What Yammer could really use, I think, are interesting groups. I remember when I first joined Facebook, I was excited to join groups like, “I went to public school, bitch,” “I played the recorder in third grade,” and “God…I’m awkward!” Several groups on Yammer have already been created, but those groups are a bit disappointing. They are exclusively about job titles or the division of the company you work for. I would love it if people would join groups with a bit more personality. Here are some of my suggestions:

-When I get hungry, I check the kitchen for leftover meeting food.

-Why don’t we have a CVS near the Boston office?

-Me? Dancing at the holiday party? Uh, no, no, I didn’t do that!

-Rocks have fallen from the ceiling onto my desk (Side note: I think people think I’m exaggerating when I say this, but seriously, pebbles are constantly falling from the ceiling in my office, which is a former warehouse.)

-I only eat at the restaurant downstairs because I’m too lazy to buy lunch anywhere else

-Publishing needs more straight, single men!

-We want a microwave on the sixth floor!

-Free bagels are the only reason I come to work on Fridays

-Cookie day is the highlight of my month

-I have tallied the number of times a higher-up has used a buzzword during a long meeting

-Whenever I think about changing jobs, I remember that the sodas here are only twenty-five cents.

Song of the Moment: "Tollite Hostias"

2011-12-17T16:56:00.000-08:00

In college, I sang with the chorale and loved it. Every year, we put on three Christmas concerts, and among the songs on my ginormous Christmas playlist are those from a recording of one of them.

Along with the traditional Christmas songs like "Joy to the World" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," one song we always sang was "Tollite Hostias," an oratorio by Saint-Saens. It's a Latin song that translates to, "Bring offerings and worship the Lord in his holy habitation. Let the heavens rejoice and the earth exult in the presence of the Lord, for he comes. Hallelujah."

But aside from the concert, we also sang it at every concert after-party at precisely midnight. Imagine a bunch of drunk college kids jumping up and down while singing a Latin song in four-part harmony- it's pretty much the most amazing thing ever.

Oh, actually, you don't have to imagine it! It looks like someone has uploaded a recording of it to YouTube. This brings back some great memories, and I'm glad that current choralers are carrying on this tradition. Enjoy.

Some Cool Blogs That Aren't Mine

2011-12-09T22:40:00.000-08:00

Awhile ago, I wrote about some of the blogs I read. Wow, a lot has changed since then! My Google Reader has, like, quadrupled in size since I joined 20sb, and I’ve also discovered some great blogs on my own. If you’re looking for something new and interesting to read, here are some of my suggestions:

Hyperbole and a Half

I’m not big on favorites. I don’t have a favorite book, a favorite song, or a favorite food because simply can’t pick.

Hyperbole and a Half is my favorite blog. You’re probably already reading it, but in case you’re not, here’s its story. It’s written by twenty-something Allie Brosh, who tells crazy stories about her life and illustrates them with goofy Paintbrush drawings. Allie is absolutely hilarious and a fantastic storyteller (and pretty, too), and I kind of want her to be my best friend. She writes about everything from her crazy antics as a child to the adventures of her mentally challenged dog. Two of my favorites are Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving and one that’s appropriate for this time of year, The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas. Allie is writing a book right now that will be published in about a year, and sadly has not been blogging as much. But I can’t wait for the book.

Catalog Living

Actually, this is coming out with a book, too! Anyway, you know how in furniture catalogs, the furniture is always arranged in really strange ways? This blog imagines the lives of Gary and Elaine, the people who live in the catalogs. Every day, there’s a picture accompanied by a snarky caption, and it guarantees me at least one laugh per day.

Diary of a Dying Girl

The author of this blog, who calls herself Jorah Day, has a terminal condition. She doesn’t discuss it on the blog because she wants it to be more about her life than her impending death (although if you’re really curious, she did once go into detail about it on 20sb). But that’s not why you should read her blog. You should read it because she’s an absolutely amazing writer. She just has a wonderful way with words and of constructing a narrative. She’s currently going through a difficult breakup and has written about it with a lot of honesty and self-awareness. You know those people who come off as cool precisely because they don’t try to be cool? That’s Jorah.

Sweeney Says

I’ve already talked a bit about her (if you weren’t following the story, it thankfully ended happily—Derrik and the other two boys were released and have returned to the U.S.). Sweeney is just so funny and interesting and down-to-earth and sometimes falls into gutters in Ghana. I’m always excited when she updates. Plus, right now she’s in grad school in Paris, which has led to some interesting posts about her experiences as an expat.

Sara Swears a Lot

Last year, Sara won an award for “Blogger I’d Like to Get a Drink With,” and after reading her blog for a bit, you can see why. The girl is hilarious and, yes, does swear a lot. And did I mention she started the Karaoke Ring of Death? There’s a lot of heart mixed in with the humor, though. She recently got married, and she managed to write very poignantly about how happy her marriage has made her without being annoying, which is an accomplishment in itself.

Childhood Trauma

Sara, Sweeney, and three other bloggers write this site, which snarks on all our favorite book series from when we were kids: The Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, The Boxcar Children, Goosebumps, etc.

Talk Nerdy To Me Lover

I talked about this site and its founder, Jen Friel, in this post.

Wishcake

I don’t know what it is that makes this blog so good. It could be Kerri’s clear, honest, confident-yet-relatable writing style. It could be the lovely design. It could be all the cute pictures of Kerri’s baby daughter, who was born in August. In any case, it was one of the first 20sb blogs I started reading, and definitely one of the best.

It’s Like I’m….Mmmagic!

Brandy is a teacher in Canada. She has a lot of funny stories about her students, lots of strong opinions, and a certain “it” factor that makes her blog awesome. She also started The Secret Project, where fellow bloggers send in secrets they’d like to get off their chests and she posts them anonymously.

Smile Big and Pretty

Jas is a writer, an actress, and occasionally a train. Not to mention hilarious and adorable. She has funny stories about everything from the world’s sketchiest audition to accidentally storming into a Ugandan church holding the clothes she was about to wear for a pin-up photo shoot. She wants to move to LA to help further her acting career, and I read her blog partly in hopes that I can say I knew her back when.

These are just ten of the blogs I’m reading—there are dozens more! So many that I can’t even list them all here. Housekeeping detail: I have updated my blogroll on the right, so check out some of the other blogs there, too!

Derrik Sweeney

2011-11-23T06:48:00.000-08:00

I've been posting lately about how I've gotten involved with 20sb in the past year, which has led to blog swaps, Karaoke Ring of Death, and me connecting with multiple awesome bloggers.

One blogger who I started reading pretty early is Sweeney of Sweeney Says- you might remember she made a guest appearance on Erin's Karaoke Ring of Death. She's an awesome person with a great personality, and one thing she writes about a lot is how much she loves her parents and three siblings.

Her younger brother, Derrik Sweeney, has been in the international news over the last 24 hours. While studying abroad in Cairo, he was arrested along with two other students amid the protests. The circumstances are not entirely clear at this point, but I wanted to direct whoever is reading this to Nicole's blog and also her Twitter, where she's been updating as much as she can. If you're reading this, please keep the Sweeneys in your thoughts until Derrik is brought home safely.

Karaoke Ring of Death: November

2011-11-17T17:17:00.000-08:00

Sorry I'm late! It's been a busy couple of days, especially with the new job, but there's no way I wouldn't participate in the 1st anniversary edition of KROD, especially when the theme is 90s songs! You can find me at Daniella Robin's blog The Chronicles of a College Girl. Here's David from The Fiction Factory doing one of my favorite 90s songs. I'll let him take it from here.

Hi all!
I'm very happy to be a part of this incredible celebration of all things karaoke! I wasn't involved from the very beginning, but I would have if I'd known about it at the time. Anyway, I'm really glad that the theme was 90s songs, because that means I get to bust out a little Counting Crows (Mister Jones, to be specific) for you. They're probably my favourite band of all time, and I discovered them back in my teenage years. In fact, I liked them so much, I would sing along to the songs without even knowing the real words. I have since improved. That being said, I do mess up just a little in the video, but I kept it anyway, because messing it up is sort of a part of KROD anyway. So, once you're done checking out Katie's coolness, hop on over to my blog, where the celebration continues!

Song of the Moment: "The Green Fields of France"

2011-11-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

Today is Veteran’s Day, the anniversary of the end of World War I, which ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It also happens to be 11/11/11.

Believe it or not, I have a Veteran’s Day song for you. “The Green Fields of France” is an old song about the grave of a World War I soldier. It’s been covered about a million times, but this one is by the Dropkick Murphys. The lyrics are very thought-provoking, especially the last verse:

And I can’t help but wonder, oh Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you “The Cause”?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well, the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing and dying, it was all done in vain.
Oh, Willie McBride, it all happened again
And again and again and again and again

Katie Recommends: Crazy, Stupid, Love.

2011-11-10T19:34:00.000-08:00

I didn’t think much of this movie when I first heard of it, but it got very good reviews and word-of-mouth, so I made a mental note to check it out. By the time I finally did, it had been in the theaters for awhile, and I’d kind of forgotten why I wanted to see it. So I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable comedies I’d seen in awhile.

Here’s the thing: I absolutely love good romantic comedies. “Good” is the key word. They have to be both genuinely romantic and genuinely funny to be good, but sadly, Hollywood has long since forgotten how to make good rom-coms. But Crazy, Stupid, Love. (what’s with the weird punctuation, by the way?) is not only genuinely romantic and genuinely funny, but unpredictable. An unpredictable romantic comedy is rarer than an imperfection on Ryan Gosling’s body (which, by the way, is on display in its full glory in this movie), but this movie actually is. Part of the reason why is that it’s an ensemble movie—there are several storylines going on simultaneously. In the opening scene, Emily (Julianne Moore) drops a bomb on Cal (Steve Carell) in a restaurant: she’s been cheating on him with a colleague and wants a divorce. Depressed, Cal takes to moping about his life in a bar that Jacob (Gosling), a smooth young womanizer, frequents. Jacob decides to become Cal’s wingman and takes it upon himself to mold Cal into his own image. We had previously seen Jacob trying to pick up Hannah (Emma Stone), a pragmatic recent law school graduate, in the same bar, but she resisted his advances. That’s not the last we see of the two of them together, though. Meanwhile, Cal and Emily’s seventeen-year-old babysitter, Jessica (Analeigh Tipton) has a crush on Cal, while their thirteen-year-old son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) pines for Jessica.

Unpredictable? Suprisingly so. A friend had mentioned to me that there was a big twist she didn’t see coming—for me, there were two. Combine that with believable characters, lots of laugh-out-loud moments, and some moments that are genuinely touching, and you’ve got yourself one very good movie. It won’t win any Oscars or anything, but it definitely gives me hope that Hollywood might have some more good rom-coms up its sleeves.

Other movies I’ve seen lately:

Margaret

There’s an interesting story behind this movie. Director Kenneth Lonergan, whose previous movie was 2000’s You Can Count on Me, shot this movie, which stars Anna Paquin, Mark Ruffalo, and Matt Damon, among others, back in 2005. Then he and the studio spent years fighting over the movie’s final cut. There were lawsuits involved and it was a whole big mess. While they were waiting for the movie to come out, Anna Paquin went on to star on True Blood and win a Golden Globe, Mark Ruffalo went on to get an Oscar nomination for The Kids Are All Right, and Matt Damon kind of shrugged and said, “Eh, I’m still Matt Damon. Hey, why don’t I go get revenge on Jimmy Kimmel?” Unfortunately, when the movie finally did premiere, it got very little notice despite good reviews. In Boston, it was in the theater for about a week, and I only got to see it because the Brattle Theater showed it last weekend.

Anyway, Paquin plays Lisa, a high school student in New York wracked with guilt over her involvement in a fatal bus accident. As Lisa is running alongside a bus trying to get the driver’s (Ruffalo) attention, the bus runs a red light and kills a woman (Allison Janney) in the crosswalk. In a state of shock and grief, Lisa lies when the police ask her if the light was red or green, but as the enormity of the situation hits her, she does everything she can think of to try to make amends.

The title comes from this poem, which Lisa is studying in school. It’s definitely a downer, so don’t watch this movie if you’re in the mood for something light, and I can definitely see the signs of a fight over the final cut. There are some scenes the movie could definitely do without and others that seem to be missing an additional scene. But overall, it’s a great movie, and the acting, especially by Paquin, is excellent.

The Help

I had recently read the book, and the movie did not disappoint. It was very well-cast: Emma Stone as Skeeter, Viola Davis as Aibileen, Octavia Spencer as Minny, Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly, Allison Janney as Skeeter’s mother. Some of those were surprising choices, but I think they all worked out well. And Jessica Chastain was a hilarious Celia Foote—she’s an actress I hope to see more of.

I’ve described my feelings on the book already, and the movie didn’t change much other than changing the sequence of some events. The one pretty big changed involved the reasons around Constantine’s firing—they cut the Lulubelle story, I’m guessing, because Lulubelle would have been hard to cast. One thing I loved about this movie, though, is how it’s completely about women and their friendships with each other. Ever since I learned about the Bechdel Test, I can’t help but put every movie I see through it (although there are plenty of good movies that don’t pass it—and some, like Crazy, Stupid, Love., don’t involve women talking about anything but a man but also don’t involve men talking about anything but women), but this one aces the test. There’s one very small romantic subplot, but it’s almost beside the point. People have focused on the role of racism in this movie, but I think it’s just as much about sexism.

Bridesmaids

What, you haven’t seen it yet? What the hell are you waiting for? Go rent it now! Seriously, though, this is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Kristen Wiig needs to be a leading lady more often. I LOVE that this was such a breakout movie for Melissa McCarthy, whom I have loved since her days as Sookie on Gilmore Girls. I love that it didn’t go for any of the wedding clichés—there’s no Hangover-esque bachelorette party and no obnoxious Bridezilla (in fact, the bride, played by Maya Rudolph, is the normal one). And I love that, despite being about an impending wedding, it’s not about romance as much as it is about women’s friendships. Like I said about The Help, it’s a topic that doesn’t get enough attention in the movies, and I hope the success of this movie means that we’ll see more movies focused on women.

Song of the Moment: "Leave the Light On"

2011-11-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

The most difficult nine months of my life started five years ago today. (No, I wasn’t pregnant.) I’ve told more people at this point what I was going through during that time, but it’s still too personal for me to write about on a public blog. I will say, though, that this was the first time in my life where I realized that the crippling anxiety I felt sometimes might be a legitimate problem and not just a personality quirk, although it took me longer to do anything about it.

During this time, I discovered Beth Hart’s “Leave the Light On.” I listened to it over and over, and it kept getting stuck in my head. The specific lyrics didn’t have much to do with my situation—the song is about Beth Hart moving on from her life as an addict—but I kept hearing, “I leave the light on, I leave the light on.”

I’d read The Song Reader, which I’ve talked about here before. And the thing that strikes me about this period of my life is that I stayed optimistic even though I was sad and terrified. I don’t know if I could be that way if I went through another bad period of my life like that. When I look back at my journals from that period, there’s a lot of hope and humor mixed into it. So maybe the song was telling me to “leave the light on,” or reminding me that I already was, but either way, it was very comforting. Despite its obvious, heavy-handed message, I still find it comforting in sad times.

The Wallet Story

2011-11-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

I have a feisty independent streak, and while sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes it makes me forget that I can ask for help instead of doing everything myself. After I moved, I had a bed from Ikea delivered, and when I mentioned it to a friend, she said, “Oh, if you’d told me I would have driven you to Ikea so you wouldn’t have to pay the delivery fee!” Then this past Sunday, our Internet went out when our modem committed suicide, and my roommate (a grad student who had a paper to research) and I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how we were going to deal until Tuesday when the new modem came. Six hours later, it finally occurred to my roommate that, duh, we could just ask the next-door neighbors for their Internet code (we live in a duplex, so we didn’t even have to leave the front porch). Juno the dog is officially smarter than both of us. If one human won’t pet her, she tries to get another one to do it-- if she were a person, she’d definitely do the same thing with the Internet.

Which brings me to another awkward-moment story from this past summer. I’m on my office softball team, and one day after work, we had a game, which we carpooled to. It was a cloudy, rainy day, we started late, and the game was pretty long. So when it was over, rather than heading to the Southie dive bar we always go to for beer and free pizza post-game, we were all tired and didn’t feel like staying out any later, so instead, we all piled into cars and headed home. I got into a car with four other teammates, hoping the ride wouldn’t take too long since, like the rest of us, I’d had a few cans of Miller Lite during the game and really needed to pee.

We got to Central Square, where we dropped one guy off, and by then, I knew I couldn’t make it the rest of the way home. I asked to be let out of the car, dashed into the nearest ice cream shop, and used the bathroom there, figuring I'd take the T home from there.

When I got out, I thought, “Hey, since we didn’t get our free pizza tonight, I should go buy a couple of slices.” So I walked to a nearby pizza place and ordered two slices of pizza. I reached into my purse for my wallet so I could pay, and--holy shit.

My wallet was not in my purse.

I was about 90% sure that it had fallen out of my purse at my desk at work, since I’d definitely had it when I left for work that morning and didn’t remember seeing it during the game. It was either that or someone had stolen it out of my purse at the field when the entire rest of my team wasn’t looking, which was unlikely.

Now, I need to emphasize how unfortunate it was that the one time I left work without my wallet, it was this day. On any day where I didn’t have a softball game, I would have taken the T home and realized when I got to the T station that I didn’t have my wallet and, therefore, my T pass, and would have headed back to work to get my wallet. And if we had gone to the bar like we usually did and I’d discovered when trying to buy a beer that I didn’t have my wallet, I would have just walked back to the office (pretty close to the bar) and gotten it.

But no. This was the one time where I both didn’t take the T home and didn’t go to the bar. And on top of that, I was in Central Square- THREE MILES from home. So instead of discovering that my wallet was gone in the comfort of my home, I was stuck with no T pass and no money to buy a new one. I had no choice but to walk those three miles home. (Luckily, it had stopped raining by that point.)

So that solved that problem, but then there was the matter of how I was going to get to work the next day with no T pass and no money. I looked around my room once I was home and spotted the penny rolls I’d made but was putting off taking to the bank. I had five or six rolls of 50 pennies each-- enough to buy me a $2 one-way T pass. A quick glance at bank opening times revealed that none of them opened until 9:00 AM, the time I needed to be at work. What to do?

Then I remembered Coinstar, which I tend to avoid using because they take a percentage of the money you put in. There was a Coinstar at a supermarket a mile from my house, so I decided that I would get up early, walk to the supermarket, put my penny rolls into Coinstar, and use that money to get a $2 T pass to get to work.

And that’s exactly what I did the next day. When I got to my desk, I located my missing wallet and the rest of the day went on as planned.

By the next weekend, the whole situation seemed funny, and I told the story to some friends at a birthday party. I was feeling pretty pleased with my resourcefulness at finding a way to get to work with my limited resources.

Until someone said, “Why didn’t you just ask your roommates to borrow two bucks?”

**record scratch**

Uh, yeah. Or I could have done that.

Things On the Internet I Don't Get

2011-11-01T07:04:00.000-07:00

There are two extremes when it comes to social media—those who think it’s the most amazing thing to happen this millennium and don’t know how we ever lived without it, and those who hate it, think it’s a complete waste of time, and believe we should all go back to corresponding by phone and the postal service. Bloggers generally fall toward the OMG AMAZING end of the spectrum, but I think I fall somewhere in the middle.

Let’s talk about what I love first. Obviously, I love blogging. I love, love, LOVE Facebook, partly because I’ve probably been on it longer than you, unless you’re one of my college friends or you were an Ivy League student in the spring of 2004. Boston-area schools were on it pretty early, when it was still Thefacebook.com. I was actually slightly late to the party—I held out until December of 2004, when Erin guilted me into it by saying that when she clicked on our dorm room number, I was the only person in our suite who didn’t show up. (Yep, it used to do that—a fun way of finding out who people’s roommates were.) I’ve told you about how much I love my Google Reader (damn you, Google, for the changes you’re making to it!). And I love sites based on a specific interest, like 20sb and Goodreads.

But there are a lot of things on the Internet whose popularity makes me scratch my head. Here are some of them:

-Twitter. I know, I know, I’m one of the very few bloggers out there who doesn’t also use Twitter, but really, I just do not like it. I find it very aesthetically displeasing, for one thing. All those @s and #s and RTs look so damn ugly to me. I don’t like how it forces people to use abbreviations and misspellings because of the character limit. And I’ve never quite gotten the point of it. If you have something quick to say, can’t you just make a Facebook status update? Plus, I know a lot of people are just on it to follow celebrities, but I guess I’m not interested enough in any celebs to be willing to do that. I’ll “like” them on Facebook instead.

I don’t know. I think Twitter speaks to our collective lack of attention span or something—I just find it fundamentally bothersome that people’s thoughts and feelings can be reduced to badly-spelled, misused-symbol-heavy, 140-character posts. I really hope Twitter goes the way of Myspace (for the record, I was never on Myspace, either—all those teenagers with glittery pages where music played when you opened them turned me off).

-Foursquare. Back in the days of AIM, I felt the need to let the world know where I was at all times, but I’ve long since outgrown that. Now, here’s where I sound like a Luddite, but really—if you want to know where I am, can’t you just call me and ask?

-Tumblr. So, I guess technically Tumblr is a blogging platform, but that’s not what people use it for. Mostly, they just share pictures that they find elsewhere on the Internet. And they follow their friends on it and join groups to find the kind of pictures they want and “reblog” the pictures they find from other people. I really, really don’t get it. I don’t even like blogs that have too many pictures in them—I want to READ blogs, not look at photo albums. So I definitely don’t get posts that consist of only one picture.

-Pinterest. This is kind of like taking computer bookmarks and Tumblr pictures, combining them, and laying them out in bulletin board format. I sort of see the appeal of this because you can find new links through it, but it’s nothing I’d want for myself. If I see something I want to bookmark, I just bookmark it.

-Fashion blogging. Now, there are zillions of these out there, so someone must be reading them, but I can’t imagine why. I admit I’m a bit biased because, despite being a pink-wearing, chick-flick-loving girly girl, I’m not the slightest bit interested in fashion. But, no offense, but I genuinely don’t understand why anyone should care what outfit you wore today. If you find a good theme, like Jill did, I get the appeal of that, but I find 99% of fashion blogs ridiculously boring.

I know, I know, GET OFF MY LAWN, KIDS! But I guess the point I’m getting to is that despite the way some people talk about it, social media is not an all-or-nothing thing. Even if you don’t share all my specific views, you probably have your own opinions about what sites you like and don’t like. So I think it’s a bit silly to say you love or hate ALL social media, because the odds are that you probably don’t. I don’t love social media. I love Facebook, blogging, Google Reader, 20sb, and Goodreads. And plenty of people out there have views that are the reverse of mine—Kerri, for instance, loves Twitter but deactivated her Facebook account.

What about you? What do you love and what do you hate out there on the World Wide Web?

Song of the Moment: "We Like to Party"

2011-10-31T17:55:00.000-07:00

I remember my sophomore year of high school, my friend had a big Halloween party that was a lot of fun. This song was definitely playing there, and my friend was singing it in gym class on the day of the party.

Also, recently I went to 90s Night at Common Ground with some friends (and it was AWESOME). Beforehand, I was going through my 90s playlist on my iPod, and some people were giving me crap about all the Vengaboys songs I had on it.

Well, here's "We Like to Party" as the Song of the Moment, so TAKE THAT!

Oh, and here's a picture from the Halloween party I went to this past weekend. Happy Halloween, all!

Some Good News

2011-10-27T19:32:00.000-07:00

I try not to write too much about work here, but I have some very good work-related news that I'm going to share with you.

As most of you know, I have worked in editorial at a large textbook publishing company for over four years. While I love it, I'd gotten to the point where if I wanted to move up any higher on the corporate ladder, I'd need to get some sales experience. I'd tried unsuccessfully numerous times in the past to get sales jobs, but on Monday, I finally got one. On November 7th, I will begin working as a sales representative at the same company I work for now. It's an inside sales job, so I'm just moving down a couple of floors.

I'm very excited! I really love working in the industry I'm in, and this is a great career move for me. I loved working in editorial and there's a lot I'll miss about it- I had great colleagues and a boss who is one of my favorite people on the face of the earth (like, really- that's not sarcasm), but it was time for a change.

In the four years I've worked here, so many people have come and gone. But I'm glad that I stumbled into something that I actually enjoy doing all day long. A lot of people my age can't find work, or at least can't find something that makes them happy, but I am thankful every day that I am where I am career-wise. I can't even imagine how different my twenties would have been if I hadn't gone to work at this company.

I tried posting this on Facebook yesterday, but sadly, GIFs don't work there. I feel like doing the Pete Campbell promotion dance from Mad Men:

There are plenty of things about my life I want to improve. I want to meet the man of my dreams so I can get married and have kids. I want to lose weight. I want to get back my motivation to write fiction. I want more money and to be able to travel more and eventually buy a house. . But I'm glad that work is now exactly in the place I want it to be.

Karaoke Ring of Death: October

2011-10-26T12:19:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's Karaoke Ring of Death time again! This month, the theme is Halloween. My video is being hosted by Alexandra of The Tsaritsa Sez, one of the superstars of 20sb! I am hosting Jes of Jes Getting Started, who is doing "A Little Piece of Heaven." I didn't know this song until today, but it works really well for Halloween. Take it away, Jes!

Hey guys this is Jes from Jes Getting Started, one of these days I will finally figure out what it is I am getting started. This month brings us one month shy of #krod's 1year birthday so it's the first Halloween we get to experience together. I wanted to stay away from the obvious scary songs and do something a little different. Me outside the box? No way, never. I tried to be all artsy with my video and my "costume" but really I just look like some knife wielding psycho with no eyes. In other words, totally awesome. Also don't you love my video editing skills? #winning Make sure you swing by my blog to check out Liz's rendition of a spooky childhood song that took on "special" meaning as an adult.

Karaoke Ring of Death - Halloween from Jes Getting Started on Vimeo.

In Defense of Boston

2011-10-19T21:04:00.000-07:00

I did many things over Columbus Day weekend this year—celebrated Erin’s birthday and played with her adorable new kitten, got some sushi with Julie, ran the half marathon, ate pizza with my roommate, watched Mean Girls and Legally Blonde on TV, ate a pumpkin muffin, and spent all day Monday and Sunday afternoon and evening lounging around the house recovering. Unfortunately, one thing I did not do was meet Jen Friel.

One of the many websites I’ve discovered through 20-something bloggers is Talk Nerdy To Me Lover, run by the incomparable Jen Friel. This girl has fascinated me since I started reading TNTML. She’s a study in contradictions: a gorgeous girl who has built her online following around her nerdiness, a girl who is smart enough to finish high school at age sixteen but chose not to go to college, a former professional model and actress who would rather be the one running the show, a girl from a well-off Connecticut family who spent a year couch surfing and living out of her car in the name of following her website dreams. But I’m also fascinated by her willingness to be open and put herself out there. She calls herself a “lifecaster” rather than a blogger, and she does not hold anything back in telling her audience about her life. She protects certain people’s identities and doesn’t write about certain things for business or legal reasons, but other than that, her life is right there, out in the open.

Those of you in New England who have Comcast cable (like me!) can find Jen under your On Demand options, too. She explains how here!

One other cool thing about Jen is that she does her best to meet new people wherever she goes. When she was in Boston in September to film her show, she didn’t have such a good time, and she explains why here, here, and here.

So when she was back in Boston over Columbus Day weekend, I shot her a note hoping that we could meet up, and it made it onto her blog! But unfortunately, the timing never worked out between Erin’s birthday, Jen’s filming schedule, and me having to recover from the half-marathon. I am happy to say, though, that despite one asshole at Trader Joe’s, she had a much better experience this time around. I’m just sorry I couldn’t be a part of it.

Her experience in Boston got me thinking, though. Is it really harder to pick up guys in bars here than it is elsewhere? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was. On my ill-fated night in New York, I was in a bar for about fifteen minutes, and I was surprised at how many people talked to me. In Boston, though, I barely know anyone who got a relationship or even a hookup by meeting someone at a bar. One time, Julie and I were at The Burren when the bartender told us that two guys at the other end of the bar wanted to buy us refills on our drinks. We accepted, and I think waved at them from across the bar, and…nothing. They didn’t even come over to say hi!

So, yes, having had zero luck at finding a boyfriend here, I would say that Boston is not the place to go to find a date. However, I kind of do take exception to her characterization of Boston as a cold, unfriendly city, although Jen’s certainly not the first person to say so.

This is the thing—I think what people mistake for unfriendliness in Bostonians is really just a desire to give people their privacy and space. It’s a mentality that’s the complete opposite of that of a lifecaster who shares anything and everything about herself with the world. I’ve never been to LA, where Jen lives, but from everything I’ve heard, it’s much different there. It’s full of people in the entertainment industry, so I would not be surprised to learn that people there reveal more about themselves and try to connect with more people that they meet.

But in Boston, I don’t assume that people want to talk to me; I assume that they don’t. I want to meet people at parties, at work, at events, but when I’m riding the T, walking down the street, or eating in a restaurant, I just want to get off the T/get to where I’m going/eat my lunch. If I saw someone sitting alone in a bar, I’d assume that she was either waiting for her friends or wanted to be alone and undisturbed—because I know that if I were in a bar alone, that’s what I would want.

I don’t think it’s a friendliness/unfriendliness thing as much as extroversion/introversion. Boston is an introverted city. People here don’t dislike each other; they just draw energy from themselves more than they do from others. Of course there are people who are rude and inconsiderate, but don’t those people exist in every city?

I obviously can’t speak for all Bostonians, but I can tell you from my personal opinion that when dealing with strangers in public, I try to think of how I would want people to act toward me. If I were sitting in that seat on the T, I would want someone getting on the train to find a seat other than the one right next to me so that I would be more comfortable. If I were alone in a restaurant, I would want to be left alone.

But sometimes it’s not so easy. The golden rule isn’t foolproof—not everyone wants others to do unto them the way you would have others do unto you. As Sars has discussed at Tomato Nation, what if you see someone crying in public? What should you do then?

I remember one incident that happened almost a year ago—the Friday before Halloween last year. I was taking the T home, and a girl got on and sat down across from me. I couldn't tell whether she was wearing a costume or not. She was in her twenties and pretty, with chin-length blonde hair that stuck out a bit on the sides. She was wearing black fishnets, tall black boots, a short skirt, and a red top along with a lot of makeup. It was something a goth teenager might wear, but on her it looked out of place. If it was a costume, though, I couldn't tell what it was. She was staring at the floor as tears filled her eyes.

What had happened? Had she been rejected by someone she liked? Was a family member dead or dying? Had she gone to a party and felt unwelcome there? Had she fought with her friends?

I'd cried on public transportation before, and I remembered just hoping desperately that no one would notice and giving a quick, "Yeah," to the one person who asked me if I was okay. I was grateful then to live in Boston. To me, the lack of response felt much more respectful.

But this girl wasn't me. What if she was sitting there becoming more depressed by the thought that no one noticed her tears? What if she was new to the city and taking this as a sign that everyone here was unfriendly and cruel? What if this wasn't just a momentary sadness and she was considering suicide?

I leaned forward and said, "Are you all right?" The corners of her mouth turned up a little bit and she said softly, "Yeah, I'm okay." She didn't say anything else until we got to Central Square, where she got up and said, "Thank you," to me with that same small smile as she got off the train.

I think there’s a time and a place for being open and friendly, but there’s also a time and a place for keeping to yourself and giving those around you their privacy. Bostonians tend to value the latter more, but that doesn’t mean we’re not nice people. I remember one time a woman started to feel sick on the T, and everyone was giving up their seats, asking her how she was, walking with her once she got off the train.

I know I’m a bit biased, having lived in this area my whole life, but if I didn’t love it so much, I would have left by now. There’s an episode of Sex and the City where Carrie walks out on a guy after he says he doesn’t like New York, saying, "If Louis was right and you only get one great love, then New York might just be mine...and I can't have nobody talkin' shit about my boyfriend."

Substitute Boston for New York, and that's exactly how I feel.

1/2 + 1/2 = ?

2011-10-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I completed my second half-marathon, this time in Boston. Megan also ran it—her first half-marathon—and did awesome!

Here we are at the finish.

This course was hilly and difficult, much harder than the Princess race—the hardest part of that one was getting up at 3 AM. But I’m really happy to say I finished with a respectable time, although it wasn’t as fast as I wanted it to be due to the heat. I really do not do well exercising in heat—that’s one reason I did swimming for so long, I think! But yesterday was unseasonably hot out—80 degrees in Boston in October! WTF? I want my nice fall weather! So while I made really good time for the first eight miles, I hit a wall when we had to run uphill over a bridge where there was no shade, and around Mile 11 I threw up. I think I may have had a bit of heat exhaustion—it wasn’t until after I finished and got some Gatorade that I started to feel better. As much of a pain as training in the winter for the Princess race was, it was MUCH easier than running in the heat. But I’m really happy that after that unfortunate detour I was still able to finish!

I have to say, though, it will be awhile before I attempt another half-marathon—I’m thinking next fall I might do one in Newton, but my next athletic attempt will probably be an open-water swim. While I was training for this race, I ended up neglecting other forms of exercise I love—swimming, yoga, Zumba, classes at the gym like Pilates and abs workouts. While I enjoy running, I don’t live and breathe it like a lot of serious runners do. I’ve heard people talk about getting a “runner’s high,” and I have no idea what that is. Actually, when I run I get more angry than anything else—my mind tends to wander and I imagine scenarios, and by the end of the run I’m mad at someone for something that never happened.

This is the thing, though: never in a million years did I think that I’d be someone who completed two half-marathons in less than eight months. If you check my bucket list, I talk about the open-water swim and eventually a triathlon (although I have some serious catching up to do with cycling before I can do one of those), but nothing about running. I did JV track for three years in high school, but I never thought of myself as A Runner. As a kid, I knew adults who were serious runners—so serious that they wouldn’t do a popular two-mile race in my hometown because “it’s only two miles," and I used to roll my eyes at that. Now, I can actually relate to that mentality.

I wish someone would tell this to high school and college students. When it comes to sports, it’s so easy to feel like whatever you are as a teenager is what you’ll be for the rest of your life—in my case, mediocre swimmer and girl-who-only-does-JV-track-so-she’s-doing-something-during-the-offseason. But none of that really matters after you graduate—after that, you don’t do anything for scholarships or to get colleges’ attention, but just because you want to. Look at me—I always thought of myself as a terrible athlete as I was growing up, and I still don’t consider myself a good one, but here I am doing two half-marathons in a year, thinking about doing another one, and hoping to do at least a couple of shorter road races by the end of the year.

If you didn’t know me, you might think that perhaps I actually am A Runner. I certainly don’t think of myself that way, but the point is that if I wanted to be A Runner, I could be.

Song of the Moment: "Rain"

2011-10-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

No deep meaning behind this one…it’s just raining tonight. There is something very satisfying about big downpours of rain—it’s very cathartic. Plus, I love the excuse it gives me to hang around inside and watch a movie, take a bath, etc.

Not much deep meaning in this song, either—it’s Madonna, after all. When I was a kid, I took dance for about seven years, and I remember we used to warm up to this song, stretching out on the floor. This seems like the kind of memory I might have made up, but I feel like I remember doing those stretches one evening when it actually was raining out.

I have an entire playlist devoted to songs about rain, and this isn’t the best song on it, but somehow it’s always the one I want to listen to first when it’s raining out.

Runner-up: “The Beauty of the Rain” by Dar Williams

How I Ended Up in NYC on the Eve of Hurricane Irene

2011-10-02T17:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, I need to follow up that last post, which was very serious, with something lighter. So here’s a story about me being an idiot to lighten the mood.

How much of an idiot? I went to New York City the day before Irene hit.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the dumber I think I am, so I’ve only told a handful of people about it. But what is blogging for if not for celebrating your own idiocy? (Hell, I’m even doing karaoke on my blog now.)

So, remember when I made a list of things I wanted to do over the summer? I actually managed to cross quite a few, but not all of them off of the list. I went to the beach, the Boston Harbor Islands, the Arboretum, the zoo, Castle Island, and Portland. The rest I’ll have to accomplish some other time.

But I was really, really determined to get to New York this summer. I wanted to enjoy the pleasure of my own company and do all the touristy things that actual New Yorkers roll their eyes at. I had it all planned out:

o I would depart in the early afternoon on a summer Friday, when I only work half a day.

o I would take the Bolt Bus from South Station.

o I would go directly to the Times Square TKTS booth to buy tickets for a musical that night, preferably Mary Poppins or Avenue Q.

o I would check in at Hotel 17, which Rebekah had recommended to me as a nice budget hotel in Manhattan.

o I would get dressed up and go to the theater.

o Saturday morning, I would wake up and utilize my tickets to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

o Then I would take the subway to Coney Island, where I would ride the Cyclone, etc. and then head to a bagel shop to get some Real Brooklyn Bagels.

o Sunday morning, I would head to Central Park, where I would go to the zoo, take a lot of pictures, and relax somewhere comfortable while reading whatever book of The Hunger Games trilogy I was on.

o For lunch, I would grab a big slice or two of New York-style pizza.

o Then I would head to a museum near Central Park, perhaps the American Museum of Natural History.

o And then I’d get back on the Bolt Bus and be home in time to shower and get a good night’s sleep.

Decent plan, right? DAMN YOU, IRENE.

So at the beginning of the week, rumblings about Hurricane Irene began. Gradually, people started mentioning that it could hit New York City as a hurricane and FLOOD MANHATTAN OMG THE WORLD WOULD COME TO AN END.

Around Thursday it started to occur to me that this hurricane might mess up my plans for this trip. Should I reschedule? But…but…I already have tickets to the Statue of Liberty! And my hotel is booked and I can’t cancel it now! And I bought my bus tickets! Can’t let all that money go to waste, right?....Okay, maybe I should cut the trip a little bit short, as it looks like it will be raining all day on Sunday. Central Park is probably not a good idea, as I’d probably get soaked. Coney Island probably isn’t, either. Damn. That’s a few items on my travel goals list I won’t get to check off. Oh, well. At least I can still go to a show and see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I’ll just head home Saturday night, I guess…

So I changed my bus ticket to Saturday night. Bolt Bus had actually cancelled all their bus trips on Sunday, but the weather report was showing that the rain wasn’t supposed to start until Saturday. And Friday was supposed to be the classic calm-before-the-storm day—eighties and pleasant, not a cloud in the sky, all that.

Then I checked the Statue Cruises website and discovered that the tours of Liberty and Ellis Island had been cancelled for both Saturday and Sunday. You’d think that would be the moment where I decided that the trip was not a good idea, right? Yeah, you would think that.

So, work got out on Friday. One of my coworkers was leaving the company and it was her last day, so a group of us took her out for lunch. During lunch, I mentioned that when I left the restaurant, I was heading to South Station to take the bus to NYC. My much-smarter-than-me coworkers pointed out that there was a hurricane about to hit NYC, to which I replied, “Yeah, but I’ll be out before it gets there…I think…”

It was beginning to dawn on me that this was probably a mistake. But my list, guys! And my other list! And my hotel reservation! And this was really the last weekend I’d be able to do it for awhile! If I didn’t do it that weekend, it would be a long time before I’d be able to!

So I hopped on the Bolt Bus, read Catching Fire, put in earplugs to drown out a loud conversation in some European language that I didn’t recognize, made a mental note to buy Mockingjay at a bookstore in NYC. Just as we got to NYC, I got a text message from Bolt Bus saying to check my email for some important information. My phone has basic Internet—I can check email and do some basic Web browsing, but I wouldn’t trust it for normal Internet function like a smartphone has. So I logged into gmail from my phone and looked at my latest email.

“Dear Valued Customer, Due to the approach of Hurricane Irene to our service area, we are cancelling your schedule for Saturday, August 27, 2011 with Boltbus,” said the email.

Oh, crap! said I.

When I checked the Bolt Bus website on my phone (while I could check on my phone, buying tickets via the web on my phone wouldn’t be a good idea), I saw that all the buses for earlier in the day on Saturday were sold out.

So there went my one remaining plan still in place—the Broadway show—as my priority now was getting to the hotel, getting online, and buying tickets via another company. So I got to the hotel, waited for some anxious foreign tourists to stop talking to the desk clerk about the impending hurricane, got my room key, tried to figure out how to open the door to the old-fashioned elevator (if I’d been in a better mood I probably would have thought the elevator was cool), got to my room, and frantically tried to get online and search for bus tickets. Oh, my God, I have to be at work on Monday for my performance review, I thought. How on Earth am I going to explain this? “Oh, sorry, I got stuck in New York because I decided to go there as a hurricane was coming?”

Luckily, there was space on the 9:00 AM Fung Wah bus. I tend to avoid those buses if I can because sometimes they blow up, but I figured I had a better chance of getting stranded in a city four hours away from home than of blowing up on a bus. I had to beg the front desk to let me print out the tickets right away (thankfully, Hotel 17 was very nice and only charged me for one night when I’d reserved the room for two).

So…what to do? I couldn’t see a play, go to Central Park (too dark at that point), or go to the Statue of Liberty or any museums (closed for the night). That left…pizza and bagels.

So Friday night, I did get some very good pizza, then went to Barnes & Noble to buy Mockingjay, then used a New York guide I found in B&N to find a good bar in the neighborhood, where I ordered a drink. People on the street kept talking about how everything was shutting down—the subway would shut down the next day, and Broadway was going dark. The next morning, I got myself a bagel from a place recommended online as one of the best in New York, then headed to Chinatown to catch the bus. I ended up getting on an earlier bus and was back in Boston by 11:30.

I’d been in New York for a grand total of 15 hours, about seven of which were spent sleeping. My waking time in NYC was equivalent to the total amount of time spent on buses.

And then Irene happened, a tropical storm by the time she reached us, and not much happened. I didn’t leave the house all day and watched Six Feet Under on DVD. (Side note: I’m ten years too late on this, but wow, Six Feet Under is a really good show! I’m catching up on DVD right now and have finished the first two seasons.)

Sadly, many other people up and down the East Coast can’t say the same. Some people died; others experienced extensive property damage. So I hope this post isn’t seen as making light of a serious natural disaster—I just wanted to tell my own awkward story. I’m lucky that the only real danger I faced was the embarrassing possibility of having to explain why I was stuck in New York, and I never even had to do that.

I do wonder, though, what this Weather Channel guy would think of me.

Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month

2011-09-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

My Irish great-grandmother apparently used to pick up the paper and say, “Let’s see who’s dead now.” Going to wakes was part of her social life—that’s why the obituaries are called “the Irish society column.”

True to my Irish roots, I read the obituaries, too. When I do, I’m not looking for people I know, but for people who lived particularly interesting lives.

I have this weird compulsion, though, to find out more about the people who died young. I’ll Google them, read the comments on their obituary on Legacy.com, look them up on Facebook, look their friends up on Facebook. It’s always sad when someone dies young, but when I do this, I’m always hoping to find out how the person died, and hoping that it’s any way but the saddest way to die.

Suicide.

I don’t even like saying that word. But September is Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month, and I wanted to share my thoughts on the subject.

This is an issue I feel very strongly about. No one I know well has committed suicide, but I have friends who have been suicidal, which was terrifying. I’ve been through blue periods, but I’ve never seriously considered killing myself.

Bad stuff is always going to happen. People will die unexpectedly, get terrible diseases, suffer from physical pain, have hearts broken, lose jobs, lose friends, be treated cruelly, make terrible mistakes. But the slogan that people used in response to suicides and bullying in the LGBT community is true for everyone—“It gets better.”

Easy for someone who’s not suicidal to say, I know. Especially since people who commit suicide very often suffer from a mental illness like depression or bipolar disorder. I’ve gone through my own mental issues with my anxiety and I’ve had times where I felt like I’d never be happy again. But then I would wake up the next morning with at least a little bit of hope. Mental illness can rob a person of that feeling, which is about the saddest thing I can think of.

It’s easy to boil this down to something like “Get help,” or “Raise awareness of mental illness,” or “Get therapy and/or psychiatric medicine,” or “Hang in there for your family and friends.” But it’s not so easy to know those things when you’re in the middle of any one of the bad things that happen to people every day. Some people have more to deal with in life than others and some people take things harder than others do. But I’ve always believed that what’s good about life outweighs what’s bad, and it breaks my heart that so many people can’t see that.

Occasionally, people will talk in conversation about what the best and worst ways to die are. Death by chocolate gets mentioned in the “best” category, along with dying in your sleep of old age, and as for worst, getting tortured or eaten, or being killed by an exploding toilet tend to be mentioned. But none of those worst things, as far as I’m concerned, come anywhere close to suicide. I’d rather die in any other way than in the absolute fucking misery that suicidal people must feel.

So…I don’t know what else to say except what I’ve already said. Don’t kill yourself. Get help if you’re thinking about it. Try to get anyone you know who’s thinking about it to get the help they need. And for the love of God, be nice to people. There’s enough negativity in the world as it is—no need to make it any worse by being mean. As I’m sure many of the friends and family of the young people I read about in those obituaries will tell you, you really never know what’s going through someone’s mind.

Karaoke Ring of Death: September

2011-09-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've recently gotten involved in 20-something Bloggers and discovered a lot of awesome blogs through it. (More on that in an upcoming post!) I also recently discovered the Karaoke Ring of Death, which some fellow 20sb members started last year. Basically, you record yourself singing karaoke to a song that fits the theme of the month. Someone else in KROD will post your video; you'll post a different person's.

This month, the theme is "Songs From Soundtracks," and I have the privilege of hosting Erin of The Post-Modern Talko, a super-cool American living in Paris. Doing the Fresh Prince of Bel Air rap! Not only that, but there's a bonus appearance by recent expat Sweeney, whose blog Sweeney Says was already one of my 20sb favorites. And another friend of Erin's whose name I don't know, but apparently she's Canadian.

Here's Erin's intro:

Yeah Boston! What up, it's yer girl, Erin fromThe Post Modern Talko and I'm reporting to you live from France where I've been living for a little less than a year.

I was so excited to end up on Strug's blog because I used to live by Davis Square myself back when I was a catholic school girl at North Cambridge Catholic and have very fond memories of the Bean.

But I'm out in Paris now, partying and carrying on. If that's your bag than my blog is the right new read for you.

Normally I fly solo on my KROD missions but Sweeney fromSweeney Says has just moved to Paris too and we've been getting together to party now and then. Anyway, someone told me once that you're not a real American unless you know the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song and nothing will make you more defensive of your country then leaving it. Trust and believe.

Ok so enjoy the show and check out the other participants. Don't forget to Show Jes fromJes Gettin Started some love over on my page. The Master list will be up soon. OH and in case you were curious drague is french slag equivalent of hitting on someone. Hope to see more of you. Hope you like what you see.

Cheers.

As for me, well, this is my first time participating in KROD, and I have nowhere to go but up. My video is super-awkward. I'm nervous, I sound awful, I forget some of the words and come in at the wrong places, and I am also STONE COLD SOBER. What happened was that on Sunday I realized that if I wanted to get my twelve-mile run (longest run on the half-marathon training schedule) in and also watch the Emmys that night, I had to get the video done right away. And sadly, you can't really drink when you're about to run twelve miles. Well, you can, but the ensuing run would not be fun. Anyway, my video is up on another very cool blog, Kandace's One Red Wall.

Oh, and Kandace, Alexandra of The Tsaritsa Sez, and Jes of Jes Getting Started organized this month. Thanks, guys!

A Moving Story

2011-09-14T18:56:00.000-07:00

On Labor Day, I was sitting on Boston Common reading, and I was getting a little claustrophobic. There were people everywhere. Whenever I got up, I felt like I was going to trip over people.

Labor Day is a mystifyingly popular weekend for tourists to visit Boston. Personally, I can’t think of a worse time to visit our fair city. There are something like fifty colleges in or right around Boston, and over Labor Day weekend, the students at all of them are moving their shower caddies and extra-long twin sheet sets into their dorm rooms. Not to mention all the twenty- and thirty-somethings who are just switching to new apartments with 9/1 move-in dates.

I challenge you to find one twenty-something who has lived in one place for the duration of his or her twenties. I’m certainly no exception. I turned twenty just before my junior year of college, when I lived on campus in a four-person apartment. Over the summer I moved home, and senior year I lived in a different, six-person apartment. The following summer, I worked an on-campus job and lived in a different dorm room. Then I moved home for a month, after which I moved into my first apartment. After two years there, I moved to Davis Square. And at the end of July, I moved again, still in the Davis area.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to blog about this. Maybe because even after nearly two months, I’m not completely settled in yet. I still need a bookshelf, a dining room table, to get a few small boxes into my room, to give away some of the books I didn’t want, and to get rid of the boxspring that’s sitting in the dining room. Oh, yeah, did I mention? My new bedroom is up a flight of stairs, and I should have realized beforehand that my boxspring wouldn’t fit up those stairs. So I ended up having to sleep on just my mattress for a month, then figure out a time when Ikea could deliver a platform bed, then figure out a time when my dad could help me put it together.

Here’s the thing: even though I’ve moved twelve times, including in and out of dorm rooms, since I turned eighteen, I absolutely suck at moving. I can never figure out the most efficient way to pack. I always end up with random objects that don’t fit anywhere. I underestimate the amount of packing space I need, largely due to the hundreds of books I own (and my refusal to buy an e-Reader). If I’m using a moving van, I never get everything packed in time. If I’m using a car, it ends up so full that things fall out when I open the doors.

Is this a skill you can get better at? I like my new apartment, but I’m definitely not going to live here for the rest of my life. Am I always going to be moving-deficient, or is it possible that things could go better next time? (Actually, it would be hard for things not to go better—when I moved, due to sheer bad luck, it was literally the hottest day of the year.)

In the meantime, I love my new apartment. I’ve got a nice, quiet bedroom, Comcast cable with a DVR, a nice porch out back for reading the Globe on weekends, a very cool new roommate, and this lovely lady greeting me every day when I come home:

Yep, my new roommate has a dog! Juno is a three-year-old black furball (probably with a lot of flat-coated retriever in her) who loves everybody in the world almost as much as she loves attention. I love to pet cute dogs. She’s a cute dog who loves to be petted. It works out great.

September 11, 2001: Never Forget

2011-09-11T17:25:00.001-07:00

I want to write something about September 11th on today, the tenth anniversary, but I'm coming up blank. I feel like everything meaningful you can say about it has already been said. Five years ago, I wrote about my own experience that day- if you're curious, you can read about it here.

Today, my thoughts are with the friends and families of the victims of both the September 11th attacks and all of the subsequent violence. This is probably too much to ask for, but I hope someday we can look back on that day and know, with complete certainty, that nothing like it could ever happen again.

Caroline's Birthday

2011-09-09T08:22:00.000-07:00

Twenty-five years ago today, I met someone. Whenever people had asked two-year-old me what I wanted to name the baby, I said something very quickly that sounded like “Dickynup.” But I seemed to be fine with the name my parents had picked out for my new sister, Caroline Elizabeth, whom I called “baby Caroyine.”

I wish I had a scanner so I could upload a picture of us as kids. She was adorable, and still is. Here’s a picture of us during the Princess Half-Marathon earlier this year.

She’s the blonde one on the right who looks nothing like me and is insanely proud of being a couple of inches taller than me.

Like most siblings, we had a lot of fights growing up. But we also had a lot of fun. When I went to preschool, she cried hysterically about how she wanted her “Kaykie.” We used to play with our gigantic collection of stuffed animals in my room on Saturday mornings. We’d play out in the backyard, inventing all kinds of crazy games (one of which involved pretending to be vultures). We share a kind of weirdness in our personalities that only siblings can understand.

As we got older, we got to be a different kind of friends. We talked about boys, vented about people at school, complained about teenage issues. We hung out by going to the movies or watching The X-Files together instead of playing in the backyard. We made fun of the characters on Law & Order: SVU. Eventually, she decided to go to BC, where she was a freshman when I was a senior, and I loved having her on the same campus as me. She was in the honors program and on the swim team, met a great boyfriend, and continued being her awesome self.

Today she turns twenty-five. I still call her by the embarrassing family nicknames she’d kill me for revealing here. She’s in her second year at Villanova Law School, where she’s involved with student government. She’s still with the same boyfriend. She trips over everything in her path, but always gets right back up and laughs at herself. She loves puns, Martha Stewart's recipes, and Popsicles. She’s still adorable and hilarious, and I miss having her in the same city as me.

Happy birthday to the best little sister ever. I love you.

5 Years of SST-S: A Trip Down Memory Lane

2011-09-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

(By the way, thanks for bearing with me in my last post. I try not to get too angry or ranty on this blog, but secondhand smoke gets my blood boiling like nothing else, and venting about it was a long time coming. Now for a more pleasant post.)

Today is the five-year anniversary of SST-S. (Also my cousin’s birthday—happy birthday, Lauren!) Wow. What was I doing five years ago? And what have I done since then?

Five years ago I had just moved into my first apartment in Chestnut Hill with Christina and Chris. It was a fantastic apartment, and since it was about 500 feet away from my alma mater, I could kind of lull myself into believing that I was still in college. I was working at my first full-time job and making new friends. I had never been on a date. I was toying with the idea of eventually going to grad school for creative writing or journalism. Erin, Lindsey, and Jackie lived down the road in a tiny basement apartment. Julie had just moved to Inman Square. I was just starting to make friends at my new job. The Red Sox were at the end of a craptacular season, and Jon Lester had just been diagnosed with lymphoma.

The year that followed turned out to be a very, very hard one, for personal reasons that I still can’t write about on a public blog. Lots of ups and downs, and Christina was a saint for putting up with me through it all. During that year, I became obsessed with the final season of The O.C. The Boston Globe excerpted me a few times in their now-defunct “Readers’ Blogs” section. I went on Accutane and eventually stopped when I realized that it’s probably easier to get a handgun permit than it is to get a prescription for Accutane (you have to get a new one every month) when you’re a woman of childbearing age. I re-wrote my novel that was my senior thesis and started looking for an agent. I wrote for Not For Tourists and had an ill-advised biography that included the phrase “spews generational angst.” While researching one of my Not For Tourists pieces, I got lost in a park in the dark in East Boston and spent a terrifying half hour trying to find my way out. I tried to figure out which bars I could go to without running into too many college students. I went to a Christmas party where we spent the whole time talking about how tired we were and reminiscing about college. I went on a date with a guy I met at a bar. He creeped me out. I survived The Great Cartoon Bombing of Boston. I watched the 2007 Superbowl with a bunch of loud, drunk, slightly crass Greek Orthodox seminarians (aka my roommate Chris’s friends). Erin, Lindsey, and Jackie had to move out of their apartment after a sewage leak. I pigged out with Christina for the last episode of Gilmore Girls. I celebrated my twenty-third birthday by going to Potterpalooza in Brookline and getting the last Harry Potter book. I was happy. I was sad. I was scared. I cried, I had anxiety attacks, I had psychosomatic illness, I had hypochondria. Christina and Erin graduated from grad school and found jobs. Christina moved to Fall River just as I got a new job.

The next year started with a new roommate, Stephanie, moving into the room that Christina had vacated. I started my new job and hit it off right away with my new boss. Within four months, I got promoted, which I’m still insanely proud of. I made new friends at work. The Red Sox won the World Series again. I joined Match.com and went on some awful dates. I had a huge crush on a coworker. I reviewed books for TeensReadToo. I went on my first business trip to San Francisco and had the time of my life. I went on another business trip to Philadelphia and sat next to a hilarious woman on the way back. A lot of my old coworkers ended up working with me again due to a merger and the incestuous world of college publishing. I tried sushi for the first time and got completely addicted to it. I drooled over Michael Phelps. I got bitten by a dog. I got so sick of riding the Green Line to work all the time (Ginny just posted about how annoying all the college students on the B Line are) that I decided to move to Davis Square.

Year 3 started off in Davis Square, which I absolutely love. My commute to work was cut in half. I traveled to Savannah on business. Julie and I joined a chorus, which was a lot of fun. I voted for Obama and watched his inauguration with my coworkers. I got hooked on Damages and reruns of The Golden Girls. I went on a business trip to Georgia where, for the first time in my life, I got pulled over due to a broken taillight on my rental car. I also went to Chicago on business. I joined my office softball team. Unfortunately, I also started experiencing anxiety again that year, and I began therapy, which helped me a lot.

In Year 4, I went on more dates than any other year. I dated one guy for two months, then decided I didn’t want to keep seeing him, but the experience gave me hope. I took a great Grub Street class that helped my writing out a lot. I watched all ten Best Picture nominees. I went on Celexa for my anxiety, which massively improved. I got a new roommate, who told me within a week of moving in that my alarm clock was too loud and causing her to lose so much sleep she might get fired. (Seriously.) There was some drama this year—I didn’t get a job that I really wanted and thought that I would get. I was so upset—it felt like a bad breakup. There was some family conflict as well, and to this day I’m hurt by it. But plenty of good things happened, too. My sister ran the Boston Marathon. I traveled with my family to Aruba. And the year ended with me getting another promotion and traveling to Washington, DC on a business trip.

Year 5 was pretty awesome. I saw Wicked. I ran the Princess Half-Marathon and went to Disney World and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter with my sister. I went to my five-year college reunion. I went to Las Vegas for Jon and Steph’s wedding and went to a Celine Dion concert. I went to Aruba again and went parasailing. I went to my cousin Ryan’s beautiful wedding. I had a kick-ass birthday party. I started training for my second half-marathon, and I moved to a new apartment, still near Davis Square. (More on that in an upcoming post.)

I’m still single and still struggling. But would I ever go back to five years ago? Hell, no. Life has gotten so much better in so many ways.

I’ve now been on about twenty first dates. I’ve decided not to go to grad school, although never say never. Erin, Lindsey, and Jackie finally all moved out of their apartment. I’ve moved up within my industry and am hoping to move up even more. I’ve made a lot of new friends, particularly through work. Oh, and the Sox are currently battling it out with the Yankees for the division title and will probably make it to the playoffs this year. And Jon Lester recovered completely and went on to pitch a no-hitter and win the final game of the 2007 World Series.

Smoking Rant

2011-09-03T13:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think that if I could press a button that would wipe every smoker off the face of the earth, I’d do it.* Sure, there are a few of them I’d miss, but it would be worth it to be able to walk down the street and not have to smell and/or breathe in other people’s cigarette smoke.

I need to get across here the depth of my hatred of cigarettes. I have ranted here before about texting, obnoxious people on the T, and Arrested Development. But I would willingly travel the length of the T surrounded by obnoxious people, text until my fingers cramped, and watch the entire series of Arrested Development in one sitting if it meant that I’d never have to endure another person smoking ever again.

This is not because I don’t want people who smoke to die. It’s purely for selfish reasons. The smell of cigarettes makes me physically sick. I get headaches and stomachaches from secondhand smoke. If someone who just smoked a cigarette sits next to me, even that smell can make me sick.

But here’s the thing: even though smoking in restaurants, bars, and just about any place of business is illegal in Massachusetts, secondhand smoke is really fucking hard for me to avoid. Since I don’t have a car, I spend a lot of time walking around, and so many people walk down the sidewalks smoking and sending waves of smoke backwards. Or pause on the sidewalk next to a building to smoke. I am training for another half-marathon right now, and I cannot tell you how many times cigarette smoke has interrupted my runs.

Why on Earth is this considered okay? Yes, I know, it’s an addiction, it’s hard to quit, there are worse things that people could be doing, blah blah blah fishcakes. You know what? I DON’T CARE. Cigarette smoking is the only addiction that other people are forced to smell while minding their own business in public places. At least people who do hard drugs have the courtesy to indulge their habits in private.

And that’s not the only way that smokers ruin other people’s lives. I know three separate people, living in three separate houses, who lost their homes due to fires caused by other people’s cigarettes. I’m angry just writing about it.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot have any sympathy at all for anyone who forces other people to breathe in their cigarette smoke. If you smoke, you do it where no one who doesn’t want to smell it has to. Period. I don’t care if those places are hard to find. They should be. The alternative is quitting, not smoking where other people have to smell it.

Also, I just don’t understand it. Aside from the smoke, the physical act of smoking grosses me out, too. You are inhaling smoke into your lungs. I know that once you start you can get addicted, but…why would you ever want to try it to begin with? Just what is the appeal of inhaling smoke?

I’m also kind of amazed at how many people around here smoke. This is Boston, a city full of well-educated people who shop at farmer’s markets and do yoga and are obsessed with awareness of all kinds of issues. How are so many of them dumb enough to smoke?

And the only thing worse than a smoker is a self-righteous smoker. Googling “smokers’ rights” turns up more than 14 million hits. Um, I’m sorry, smokers’ rights? SMOKERS’ RIGHTS? Newsflash, assholes: YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS AND YOU SHOULDN’T. There is nothing written in the Constitution or the law of common sense that says that you should be able to smoke wherever you want. The rest of us, though? We most definitely have the right to be able to breathe the air in our own communities.

Oh, what’s that? Have I pissed some of you smokers off with this post? GOOD. You’ve pissed me off. But until I’ve forced you to breathe in chemicals that make you physically ill, all because you had the audacity to walk down your own street, I can’t say we’re even.

*I thought I'd made this clear, but of course I don't ACTUALLY want to wipe smokers off the face of the earth. I was being facetious. But I do want smokers to stop making me sick when I walk down the street, and I do genuinely mean every other word of this post.

Song of the Moment: "Fireflies"

2011-08-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

Labor Day Weekend, the unofficial end of summer, is coming up— so sad, although I do love autumn as well. It’s a great time of year, though, for this beautiful song, which I acquired from my friend Jenny. I don’t know any other songs by Ron Pope, but after hearing this lovely song, “Fireflies,” I want to check out more of them. It’s a song about two summer lovers having to say goodbye at the end of summer, and the lyrics are just gorgeous, especially the chorus:

Like autumn turns leaves,
The winter will breathe
Cold on our necks,
Snow in our paths.
Wherever she goes,
All that I know about us
Is that beautiful things never last.
That's why fireflies flash.

Blog Swap!

2011-08-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

I’m participating in 20-something Bloggers’ Blog Swap. My swap partners are Cate and Maureen from What We Covet. Please read my guest post on So You Think You Can Dance over there! Here are Cate and Maureen’s thoughts on summer reading.

As our summer vacations come to an end, we begin to realize what we’re about to lose for the next nine or ten months: warm breezes, Sno Cones, trips to the beach, and free time. Mostly free time, because when you live in North Carolina, those other three things actually come around with some frequency. However, with the loss of our free time, we find ourselves unable to enjoy them.

Above all these, we mourn the departure of our pleasure reading. Below we share our picks for summer reading while we all have just a little more time to indulge our literary fancies.

MAUREEN
Summer is the time for to tackle books that are just too big to fit in between Very Literary Literature, Volume I and Very Literary Literature, Volume II. Right now I've been working through George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, a sprawling epic that contains more characters I want to strangle than characters I do not. I have to read as much of it as possible at once because of the innumerable characters and complicated everythings.

I am also a fan of some forms of literature that many people disapprove of--like comics! A season where no elite scholarly types look down their noses at me is the best season, and one in which I may finally catch up on, say, Fullmetal Alchemist. However, it is important to remember to read only one type of comic at a time, because accidentally reading Gunnerkrigg Court from right to left will make it too much trouble for a lazy summer day.

CATE
My first preference is for something that I wouldn’t be forced to read during the school year or that I wouldn’t read in public (I’m looking in your direction, Sweet Valley High). Beyond that, I have only one requirement: that the subject is so engrossing I can’t put the book down. For some people, that’s Dan Brown’s latest code-cracking, scandal-mongering page turner. For me, it’s often one of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter series or a biography by Lady Antonia Fraser. Not only did she pen the lovely Marie Antoinette: The Journey (upon which Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette was based), but she has also covered the lives of Mary, Queen of Scots; all six of Henry VIII’s wives; Oliver Cromwell; and others. If you care anything about compelling, well-researched biographies, she’s your girl. When I’m feeling less historically inclined but still want to read non-fiction, I turn to memoirs of current pop-culture fixtures, such as my imaginary husband Scott Weiland’s Not Dead and Not for Sale: The Earthling Papers: A Memoir or James Lipton’s memoir-slash-Hollywood guide book Inside Inside. And on the rare occasions when those books won’t keep me occupied? I always fall back on my trusty trashy romance novels--particularly the ones written by Sabrina Jeffries, of course!

Bio
Maureen and Cate each hold a BFA in Creative Writing from an institution that shall remain nameless in order to protect the innocent who tried to teach them. Their aversion to actual work knows very few bounds, as evidenced by their joint blogging project, What We Covet.

CS&T

2011-08-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I never went to camp in the summer. I never visited relatives (they all lived near me in Massachusetts) and I never traveled outside of New England.

All I wanted to do was swim.

When I was six, my family joined a swim and tennis club in my town that was more like a community pool than a country club. C-Town Swim and Tennis Club (CS&T) had an L-shaped, 25-yard pool and a baby pool behind a clubhouse that had a lobby and two bathrooms. There were vending machines, lots of grass, and a four-square court. The tennis courts were located off the driveway.

In a game of word association, it’s the place I associate with both “summer” and “childhood.” I can’t remember what I used to do in the summer before we joined. From the time I was six, every summer was the same. I was at the club every day. I saw the same families every year and the same old friends. I started competitive swimming, the sport that consumed my life in high school, on CS&T’s swim team when I was seven years old and didn’t quit until I was too old to swim on the team anymore. And every year, the swim team was undefeated, like the basketball team in the movie Pleasantville. Actually, CS&T was like Pleasantville in a lot of ways: nothing ever changed, everyone was usually happy, and no one ever wanted to leave.

I could go on for days about all my memories of that place. The day I started swim team and was so tired that I collapsed, exhausted, into bed at home, ready to quit. My first ribbon when I was eight, for twelfth place at championships, which I was incredibly proud of. Draping towels over picnic tables and playing house with my friend Caroline in between swim team and swim lessons when we were little. (We usually pretended we were orphans who would get rescued by a rich old lady—we must have been reading the Samantha books in the American Girl series too much.) Playing games with friends over on the grass—I can still hear everybody screaming, “Witchy Witchy, are you coming out tonight?” Staying up all night in a tent at the club sleepover. Going out for ice cream with Andrea, my favorite lifeguard, whom I worshipped. Celebrating my ninth birthday at the club on a cloudy day and having the whole pool to ourselves. Spending all season trying to learn how to dive with Andrea when I was nine only to get the hang of it on the day of championships. Winning my first medal, for fourth place, at championships when I was eleven. Watching my dad win the cannonball contest at the club’s annual Family Day. Running away from Caroline as she tried to wipe her egg-smeared hands off on me after the egg we were using in the egg toss on Family Day broke all over her. Participating in skits at the club pep rally before championships. Going on a cruise of the Boston Harbor Islands with older kids on the swim team. “Catching” the little kids in the six-and-under age group, who only swam to the halfway point of the pool in meets and needed older kids there to help them when they finished. Going to Canobie Lake Park on a club-sponsored trip. Taking pictures in the deep end with an underwater camera. Celebrating my fifteenth birthday with a surprise party my friends threw for me at the club. Baby-sitting for CS&T families. Winning my first “Most Improved” trophy when I was fifteen. Taking a lifeguarding course with a bunch of friends when I was sixteen. Working at the club for four years when I was in college and becoming one of those lifeguards I had idolized.

You get the idea. As Josh, who was the teacher in that first swim lesson of mine twenty years ago (wow...twenty years ago?), says, it’s a special place. And he should know. He was a member as a child and joined the maintenance staff when he was fourteen. He became a lifeguard, then head coach, and until last year, when he was promoted to dean at the high school where he was previously a teacher, the club’s manager.

This summer, there are all sorts of things I’ve wanted to do. I made a list of everything I wanted to do this summer and have made good progress on it. I’ve also made a “Bucket List” of things I want to accomplish in my life and a list of places I want to travel. I’m amazed at how different I am now from that kid who just wanted to swim. As a child, I didn’t care about seeing the world. I didn’t want to travel when I had all I wanted right in my hometown. Why, I thought, would I want to spend my summer doing anything other than what I already knew I loved?

I’m twenty-seven now and don’t know what my future holds. I am, as my blog title indicates, a struggling single twenty-something who doesn’t yet, and may never, have the husband, kids, and house in the Boston suburbs that I so want. But if I ever do have kids, what I had with CS&T is what I want for them. Not necessarily the specifics of the way I used to spend my summers, but I hope that my hypothetical future children will be so happy with what they have that they can’t imagine that anything else could be better.

As for me, I’m working on getting myself to that place in my current life. Stay tuned.

Katie Recommends: Maine

2011-08-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

How has it been this long since I’ve written about books?! It’s certainly not because I haven’t been reading—I’ve read quite a few books since my last post about them. So, time to remedy that by doing a Katie Recommends about books.

Maine is J. Courtney Sullivan’s second novel—the first was Commencement, which I’ve already written about. Like Commencement, this book alternates between four different viewpoints, but this time, they’re the voices of four different women in different generations of the same Irish Catholic family: the alcoholic octogenarian matriarch, the outspoken family black sheep, the desperate housewife lamenting the current state of her family, and the thirty-two-year-old unexpectedly pregnant by her immature boyfriend. As the book continues, we learn a lot about the family backstory and what makes these women the way they are. Meanwhile, family conflicts play out as these four women convene at their family vacation house in Maine.

On a personal note, I loved the recognition I found in a lot of things—I have vacationed several times on the southern coast of Maine and knew a lot of the places they referred to, and I’m also from a large, Irish Catholic, Bostonian family. Little things made me laugh, too, like the obituaries being referred to as the “Irish sports page” (my Irish great-grandmother apparently used to pick up the paper and say, “Let’s see who’s dead now.”). But even if you don’t have that personal connection, the characters are very easy to relate to, and there’s both a lot of humor and some very emotional moments.

Usually when I do a “Katie Recommends” post, I throw in some things that I don’t like, but it’s been so long since I’ve written about books that I’m just going to stick with the best books I’ve read. So, for other books I’ve been reading lately:

Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos
I read a positive review for this book in the Globe, put it on my Goodreads “To Read” list, and kind of forgot about it until I was running out of ideas for what to read. So I bought this book last year before I went to Aruba along with three others, and this was the last one I read. My expectations weren’t that high, but oh.my.God. This book is amazing. It’s about three siblings from Nebraska who lost their mother, Hope, as children. Hope, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, disappeared when she was swept up in a tornado. The siblings are now in their thirties. Larken is an overweight professor struggling with fear and unrequited love. Gaelan is a promiscuous TV weatherman whose relationships are all very superficial. Bonnie is a quirky townie who works odd jobs and searches the garbage left behind after storms. When their father is killed by lightning, they travel back to their Welsh-American hometown of Emlyn Springs, Nebraska to observe old Welsh funeral customs and confront the truth about their mother’s disappearance, which we learn about through Hope’s old diary entries. The characters are so sympathetic and real, and the writing is just lovely. There are some wonderful lines in which Kallos gives us insight to the minds of the dead: what they see, what they want, what they feel.

Broken For You by Stephanie Kallos
Since I loved Sing Them Home so much, of course I had to read Stephanie Kallos’s first book, Broken For You. Both books are very warm, sad, and occasionally funny, with quirky, imperfect, lovable characters. This one is about Margaret, a divorced septuagenarian dying of brain cancer who decides to take a boarder into her Seattle mansion. Wanda, a young stage manager reeling from a difficult breakup, answers the ad, and moves in not knowing about Margaret’s illness. Both women have heartache in their past: Margaret’s divorce followed the death of her son, and her house is haunted by the ghost of her difficult mother. Wanda was abandoned by her parents as a child and is secretly trying to track down the boyfriend who broke her heart. Margaret also struggles with the knowledge that the beautiful antique china she owns was stolen by her father from European Jewish families during World War II—until she responds by breaking the china with Wanda, who then turns it into beautiful mosaic art. While I did like Sing Them Home better—this book’s plot relies a bit too much on coincidence—it’s still a beautiful, highly enjoyable novel. I can’t wait for Stephanie Kallos to write another book.

The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst
This is Carolyn Parkhurst’s third novel. I’ve read the other two, and this one makes her 3 for 3 with me. In fact, I like this one even better than The Dogs of Babel and Lost and Found. The protagonist, Octavia Frost, is a middle-aged novelist whose latest project is a book that rewrites all of the last chapters of her novels so that they no longer end tragically or reveal the pieces of her life, which has included the deaths of her husband and young daughter years ago in an accident, that have found their way into the books. As she’s about to turn in her final draft, she hears on the news that her estranged son, a famous rock star, has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. As she sets out to reconnect with the son she hasn’t spoken to in years, she discovers a lot of secrets about his life and starts to piece together how and why the murder happened. This book not only has a very original, suspenseful plot, but also includes the final chapters of Octavia’s books, both the original and rewritten versions. A lot of them sound like really good books—I kind of hope that Carolyn Parkhurst writes them for real!

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
This must have been an incredibly difficult book to write. It’s a comedic book that follows the life of Jesus Christ from childhood to crucifixion from the perspective of his made-up best friend that stays pretty close to the Bible story. And somehow, it’s funny and irreverent but also respectful of Christianity and the historical Jesus. A lot of the plot concentrates on the years before Jesus starts his ministry, of which the Bible says nothing. According to this book, Jesus spent those years traveling through Asia meeting the three kings who came to the manger where he was born. Biff’s personality can get a little irritating at times—he has a tendency to act like a 1st-century frat boy—but overall this was a fun, hilarious read.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Normally, very poetic language doesn’t do much for me, but the language used in this book is just gorgeous. Which is strange, because it’s a book about five sisters who all kill themselves. It’s written in the collective “we,” similar to Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End or Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” as the young boys of the town describe the sheltered but fascinating Lisbon sisters, aged 13-17, who become all the more mysterious and beautiful to them after the youngest sister takes her own life. The title pretty much gives away the tragic nature of the story, but it’s a wonderful book that manages to make the story beautiful without romanticizing suicide.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
I’ve had a bad run of luck with Pulitzer Prize winners—didn’t like The Road or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was meh on Tinkers and March, and liked but didn’t love Olive Kitteridge. But Middlesex, which won the Pulitzer in 2003? This I loved. It takes some serious talent to create an epic family saga with sympathetic and unforgettable characters that’s centered around consentual incest and intersexuality. Narrated like a Greek tragedy (it even starts out, “Tell me, O Muse,”) by Cal/Callie, a young man with a rare form of intersexuality that caused him to appear and be raised as a female during his childhood, it follows Cal’s grandparents as they immigrate to Michigan from Greece and start a family, all while hiding the secret of how their relationship began. This is just an amazingly well-written book—I can’t wait for Eugenides’s next novel.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Kyley gave me this book for my birthday, and it is HILARIOUS. It takes place in 1960s New Orleans and follows Ignatius J. Reilly, an obese, oddly-dressed thirty-year-old man who lives with his long-suffering mother and, despite his master’s degree and tendency to use multisyllabic words, is oblivious to the way the world works and will bellow at and berate anyone who gets in his way. After a car accident that puts his mother in debt, he is forced to go out and find a job and, in doing so, meets some quirky characters almost as crazy as he, plus causes a lot of chaos.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
I read this book just in time for the movie, which I’m planning on seeing. I know everyone and their second cousin’s dog has read this book, but you know what? Usually when a book becomes that popular, it’s because a lot of people liked it. And I am one of them. It’s narrated in different chapters by Skeeter, a white, struggling, single, twenty-something writer (like me!) in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi (or not so much like me at all), and two black maids, Aibileen and Minny. After discovering that the maid who raised her has left, which her family refuses to talk about, and rapidly tiring of her racist housewife friends, Skeeter gets the idea to interview the maids in Jackson for an anonymous book detailing their experiences. Although the maids are risking their jobs and even their lives as civil rights-era violence spreads through Mississippi, they decide that their stories need to be told. While the book certainly isn’t perfect, the characters are very well-written and the plot is, to use a cliché, a page-turner, with a lot of humor thrown into a story with serious subject matter.

Song of the Moment: Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters

2011-07-29T06:59:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago at work, we did a CD exchange where we made mix CDs for people in our group and ended up with five new CDs of our own. One coworker in my group included the Indigo Girls’ cover of Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” and there was one line in particular that stood out to me: “I thank the Lord for the people I have found.” I’ve loved Elton John since I was a kid, and I have over forty of his songs on my iPod, but I didn’t have this one. So I listened to his version, discovered that it was even better (and that it was in the movie Almost Famous, which I saw a long time ago and had forgotten about), and promptly bought it.

The speaker in this song lives in New York City, where I’ve never lived, but the idea in the song, of being overwhelmed and disappointed with where you are in life but still finding hope and inspiration from the people in your life, really resonated with me. I’ve felt that way a lot of times throughout my twenties—that even when things were crazy and upsetting, there were always people to hang onto—“I thank the Lord there’s people out there like you.” And I have been feeling very grateful lately for the people I have found. So this Song of the Moment is for all of you.