Jealousy is a funny thing. I'm not jealous of people with vast amounts of money, or talents I don't possess. There is the occasional professional jealousy, but that's usually more akin to admiration for a writer with great skill than it is to envy. And yet the smallest thing this afternoon knocked me over, and I hate the fact that I now am possessed of what Shakespeare described as the emotion "which doth mock/The meat it feeds on (Othello)," also describing "How all the other passions fleet to air,/As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair,/And shuddering fear, and green-eyed jealousy(The Merchant of Venice)!"
I've had a really nice day. Got up, went to the an awesome class at the gym, came home and have been relaxing. The first issue of my subscription to Entertainment Weekly arrived in my mailbox this afternoon. Ole Miss beat the Gators, Miami lost, and FSU is currently looking more like their old selves than they have in awhile. Then earlier this afternoon, I noticed on Facebook that my cousin Matt is in London. He travels a lot for business, so that wasn't anything new. I shot him a note and jokingly told him to have a pint for me while he was there. He wrote me back just a little bit ago, telling me that he's actually on vacation, and his wife Sarah and his sister, my cousin Carrie, both flew over and joined him in Brussels, went to Paris while he continued to work, and are now hanging out in London, visiting with one of Sarah's brothers.
Being Navy brats, they've always traveled a lot, even as adults, and it's never phased me. I certainly have a longing to travel, have never been jealous of their globe-trotting. But London... I've always wanted to walk along the Thames, look at the Crown Jewels, stare up at Big Ben and wander amongst the giants resting in Poets Corner at Westminster Abby, not to mention just taking in the atmosphere of a city with a history far older than the country of my birth. And suddenly, sitting here reading Matt's note about Carrie being excited because she'd never been to Europe before, I found myself possessed by jealous thoughts, mixed with equal parts of inadequacy and mild despair, that flashed rapidly through my brain: Will I ever make it there? Or once I do, will I be too old to really enjoy it (the sensible part of my brain asking at the same time, 'And how old will that be, exactly?)? I think that if I had a different job and made more money, I'd be able to hop on a plane at the drop of a hat. I can hardly afford to go visit my brother in Oregon in the spring, much less fly overseas.
But at the same time, I'm mentally admonishing myself for this stupid, defeatist attitude. Who says I'll never go? Only me, and only if I listen to the ridiculous blather of the little cartoonish devil I'm preparing to flick off my left shoulder. I will make it there some day. Until then, I'll content myself with a post card, because Carrie never fails to send me one from wherever she travels. :)
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Word Crack (*all credit for this amazingly accurate description of book obsession is due to Sabrina Simon)
"I don't know why, but every time I'd read a book,
I'd end up wanting to fall in love."
- Seyyed Ebrahim Nabavi
I'd end up wanting to fall in love."
- Seyyed Ebrahim Nabavi
As any of my good friends can tell you, I have a serious book problem. My duplex is filled with books--I moved in with 14 boxes of them, and after only three years, I shudder to think how many more I've acquired. I am in perpetual need of bookshelves, and yearn for the day when I will have built-ins in a library all my own. It's an addiction, really, bordering on obsession, especially when I find something I like. And recently, I found something new.
For several years now, I'd noticed the proliferation (if a four-book series could actually be called that) of stark, black books, always bearing a hint of red, be it fruit, flower, ribbon or chess piece, on the cover. The Twilight Saga, I learned from the beginning, without much interest at the time, was about a high school girl who falls in love with a vampire. Honestly, it seemed silly. And since they were geared toward those in their teenager years, a time of life I left more than half a score ago, they didn't arouse my pique.
Then, about three weeks ago, I was talking to my friend Michelle, who, as a 35 year-old mom of two, hasn't been in high school for a while either. After mass one Sunday, we sat in her minivan chatting. She'd recently had surgery, and she told me that one day, while recovering at home, she happened to pick up Twilight, the first book in the saga, that her 17 year-old baby sitter had accidentally left at the house. Bedridden and bored with television, she decided to give it a shot. And to make a long story short, she was hooked. "You have to read these," she said. "They're so good. I know they're not 19th century English literature, and I do feel kind of goofy since I'm old (hardly!) but the writing is amazing. And Edward (the vampire/hero) is my new boyfriend."
Of course I didn't tease her. I've had my share of crushes on fictional characters, heaven knows (Laurie in Little Women, Gilbert in Anne of Green Gables, and of course, Mr. Darcy) . And she had me a bit intrigued. So on a trip to Wal-mart the next day, I picked up the first two books, Twilight and New Moon, both in paperback and both on sale. Between Tropical Storm Fay, who threatened to come this way and then never did, the primary election that caused all kinds of work-craziness and another book, a biography of Nell Gwynn that I was determined to finish before I started anything else, I didn't start reading Twilight until the middle of last week.
I read most of it Wednesday night. The next morning, driving to work, I found myself scrawling my thoughts about the book down on the back of a work email I found in my purse (because writing and driving are something you should do at the same time, right?), lest I forget them. Frankly, I was amazed. I'd stayed up until nearly 2 a.m. reading, then woken up and read some more between breakfast, showering and dressing for work. The act of putting the book down and leaving for the office was almost physically painful (not the first time I've experienced this with a book, I might add), like a knot in my chest. I was suddenly in their world, and leaving it to spend 8-odd hours at the newspaper had me yearing to go back.
The book, as all really good books do, transported me. My reading was so fast, and I read quickly to begin with, that I'd go a page and a half, skimming it practically, then have to stop myself and go back to re-read more slowly. As the plot thickened, an endorphin rush kicked in as my eyes flew in a frenzied rush down each page. As I drove to work, jotting down notes, even the songs on the radio seemed to reflect the mood of the book. Strange. Or perhaps it was only my imagination.
I think part of the fascination is that the story has such a sensual air, a guilty pleasure. When I wasn't reading, I was bouncing plot points around in my head. What if such-and-such a thing happens? Or if Bella (the heroine) does this? On my way home from work that day, although I still had one chapter left in Twilight and hadn't even begun New Moon, I stopped and bought books three and four, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, which had only been released earlier in the month, in hardback (I should point out that I rarely, if ever, "mix media." If I start a series in paperback, I try and keep it complete in paperback. This of course, can be frustrating if there's several years between books, and the waiting becomes too much to bear. I knew I wouldn't be able to wait a year or so to buy these in paperback, so went for it). Like Michelle, I was completely taken in by the flow of author Stephenie Meyer's writing--her attention to detail and the ease with which she seemed to capture so many "firsts" for Bella and Edward perfectly. Plus there was the mystery factor...how did the "traditional" vampire myths not apply here? Was it even possible for Edward and Bella to be together, when her blood called to him? And being single, I was of course living vicariously through this intense, deeply passionate yet chaste relationship she'd created for her main characters.
And reading them, there was even a part of me that, as a writer, was respectfully jealous--wishing I could turn a phrase or capture an image as well. It makes me wonder sometimes if, writing as I do these days for the deadline and inch-count driven format of the daily newspaper, if I've lost (hopefully only misplaced?) my creative writing ability.
I didn't bring the books to work with me to read during my lunch breaks. When I'm into a book, I'm noisy. I giggle, sigh, laugh, make sounds of frustration, cry (this happened several times when Edward said something moving...ok, sappy and romantic), talk to the characters, or even beat the book against the sofa cushions (which I did once when Bella was about to do something stupidly heroic yet unnecessary). My coworkers would think I'm mental...which clearly I am, but there's no reason to make it more obvious. Plus, I knew I wouldn't be able to give the books my undivided attention with certain coworkers who interrupt my lunch to ask work-related questions even when they see I'm reading (rude!) or when one of the customer service ladies up front inevitably starts yakking about the latest exploits of her cat. I am a very selfish reader.
But I digress (if that's even possible in a post this long!). Coming home that Thursday night, I finished Twilight and dived immediately into New Moon. I was off the next day, since I'd worked the Labor Day holiday, and so I just kept reading. I did stop to make a sandwich for dinner, and to watch about three hours of Turner Classic Movies (the original Ronald Coleman version of "Raffles" and a William Powell film "Jewel Robbery") for about three hours. There was the occasional bathroom break, but before I knew it, it was 4 in the morning and I'd finished the book, essentially in one sitting. Nut that I am, I figured out how many hours it had taken for me to read the book, which I then (quite nerdily) broke into pages per hour. 565 pages in about 6 hours equals roughly 94 pages an hour. Yes, I know, it isn't "War & Peace," but still. Scribbled on the back of an envelope next to my calculations is the sentence "Can't wait to start Eclipse. But must get some sleep--Edward-like dark circles under my eyes will result. 4:13 a.m."
Going out of town to visit my friend Michele and her husband Tim in Lakeland this past weekend certainly slowed my reading of Eclipse (which I don't regret, since it was great to hang out with them. Ironically, Michele (who's 32, btw) had been hearing about the books from several friends (and teens in the youth group she helps out with) and had meant to ask me about them when I told her of my new addiction). But I did manage to get some reading done, and finished the book this past Sunday night, staying up far too late. I was tired at work, and at night, I was actually having dreams where Bella and Edward were having conversations--too bad I can't remember what they were about.
Monday and Tuesday nights after work, I came home, scarfed some dinner and settled onto my love seat to read Breaking Dawn, not even bothering with the TV or the Internet. And as I reached the last 50 pages of the book Tuesday night (ok, it was about 12:15 Wednesday morning), I slowed my pace, reading dawdling and even reading passages aloud to savor what was left. And when I finished, I just sat there, musing, almost amazed it was over.
Michele (the one in Lakeland) had made it to the middle of book two last night, so I had the satisfaction of emailing with her back and forth today while we were at work, asking her what she thought (she's equally sucked in) and trying my best not to hint at things to come (she "yelled" at me in all caps at one point when I teased her too much with an insinuation about how my feelings for one of the characters flip-flopped through the third book. I promised I'd give myself 50 lashes with a wet noodle and then refused to give anything else away, even by hinting).
Tonight, clearly, I still have these books in my head, or I wouldn't be blogging about them like a giddy teenager. I almost felt bereft, not having one of them to come home to after work. Is it too early to start rereading? And my friend Michelle (the one who persuaded me to pick them up in the first place--she has two ls in her name-- perhaps I should be using last names) and I have a pact. We're going to go see the Twilight movie together when it comes out in November, so, if we happen to be the only 30-something, obsessed Twilighters in the crowd (which I doubt will be the case), we at least won't be alone.
For several years now, I'd noticed the proliferation (if a four-book series could actually be called that) of stark, black books, always bearing a hint of red, be it fruit, flower, ribbon or chess piece, on the cover. The Twilight Saga, I learned from the beginning, without much interest at the time, was about a high school girl who falls in love with a vampire. Honestly, it seemed silly. And since they were geared toward those in their teenager years, a time of life I left more than half a score ago, they didn't arouse my pique.
Then, about three weeks ago, I was talking to my friend Michelle, who, as a 35 year-old mom of two, hasn't been in high school for a while either. After mass one Sunday, we sat in her minivan chatting. She'd recently had surgery, and she told me that one day, while recovering at home, she happened to pick up Twilight, the first book in the saga, that her 17 year-old baby sitter had accidentally left at the house. Bedridden and bored with television, she decided to give it a shot. And to make a long story short, she was hooked. "You have to read these," she said. "They're so good. I know they're not 19th century English literature, and I do feel kind of goofy since I'm old (hardly!) but the writing is amazing. And Edward (the vampire/hero) is my new boyfriend."
Of course I didn't tease her. I've had my share of crushes on fictional characters, heaven knows (Laurie in Little Women, Gilbert in Anne of Green Gables, and of course, Mr. Darcy) . And she had me a bit intrigued. So on a trip to Wal-mart the next day, I picked up the first two books, Twilight and New Moon, both in paperback and both on sale. Between Tropical Storm Fay, who threatened to come this way and then never did, the primary election that caused all kinds of work-craziness and another book, a biography of Nell Gwynn that I was determined to finish before I started anything else, I didn't start reading Twilight until the middle of last week.
I read most of it Wednesday night. The next morning, driving to work, I found myself scrawling my thoughts about the book down on the back of a work email I found in my purse (because writing and driving are something you should do at the same time, right?), lest I forget them. Frankly, I was amazed. I'd stayed up until nearly 2 a.m. reading, then woken up and read some more between breakfast, showering and dressing for work. The act of putting the book down and leaving for the office was almost physically painful (not the first time I've experienced this with a book, I might add), like a knot in my chest. I was suddenly in their world, and leaving it to spend 8-odd hours at the newspaper had me yearing to go back.
The book, as all really good books do, transported me. My reading was so fast, and I read quickly to begin with, that I'd go a page and a half, skimming it practically, then have to stop myself and go back to re-read more slowly. As the plot thickened, an endorphin rush kicked in as my eyes flew in a frenzied rush down each page. As I drove to work, jotting down notes, even the songs on the radio seemed to reflect the mood of the book. Strange. Or perhaps it was only my imagination.
I think part of the fascination is that the story has such a sensual air, a guilty pleasure. When I wasn't reading, I was bouncing plot points around in my head. What if such-and-such a thing happens? Or if Bella (the heroine) does this? On my way home from work that day, although I still had one chapter left in Twilight and hadn't even begun New Moon, I stopped and bought books three and four, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, which had only been released earlier in the month, in hardback (I should point out that I rarely, if ever, "mix media." If I start a series in paperback, I try and keep it complete in paperback. This of course, can be frustrating if there's several years between books, and the waiting becomes too much to bear. I knew I wouldn't be able to wait a year or so to buy these in paperback, so went for it). Like Michelle, I was completely taken in by the flow of author Stephenie Meyer's writing--her attention to detail and the ease with which she seemed to capture so many "firsts" for Bella and Edward perfectly. Plus there was the mystery factor...how did the "traditional" vampire myths not apply here? Was it even possible for Edward and Bella to be together, when her blood called to him? And being single, I was of course living vicariously through this intense, deeply passionate yet chaste relationship she'd created for her main characters.
And reading them, there was even a part of me that, as a writer, was respectfully jealous--wishing I could turn a phrase or capture an image as well. It makes me wonder sometimes if, writing as I do these days for the deadline and inch-count driven format of the daily newspaper, if I've lost (hopefully only misplaced?) my creative writing ability.
I didn't bring the books to work with me to read during my lunch breaks. When I'm into a book, I'm noisy. I giggle, sigh, laugh, make sounds of frustration, cry (this happened several times when Edward said something moving...ok, sappy and romantic), talk to the characters, or even beat the book against the sofa cushions (which I did once when Bella was about to do something stupidly heroic yet unnecessary). My coworkers would think I'm mental...which clearly I am, but there's no reason to make it more obvious. Plus, I knew I wouldn't be able to give the books my undivided attention with certain coworkers who interrupt my lunch to ask work-related questions even when they see I'm reading (rude!) or when one of the customer service ladies up front inevitably starts yakking about the latest exploits of her cat. I am a very selfish reader.
But I digress (if that's even possible in a post this long!). Coming home that Thursday night, I finished Twilight and dived immediately into New Moon. I was off the next day, since I'd worked the Labor Day holiday, and so I just kept reading. I did stop to make a sandwich for dinner, and to watch about three hours of Turner Classic Movies (the original Ronald Coleman version of "Raffles" and a William Powell film "Jewel Robbery") for about three hours. There was the occasional bathroom break, but before I knew it, it was 4 in the morning and I'd finished the book, essentially in one sitting. Nut that I am, I figured out how many hours it had taken for me to read the book, which I then (quite nerdily) broke into pages per hour. 565 pages in about 6 hours equals roughly 94 pages an hour. Yes, I know, it isn't "War & Peace," but still. Scribbled on the back of an envelope next to my calculations is the sentence "Can't wait to start Eclipse. But must get some sleep--Edward-like dark circles under my eyes will result. 4:13 a.m."
Going out of town to visit my friend Michele and her husband Tim in Lakeland this past weekend certainly slowed my reading of Eclipse (which I don't regret, since it was great to hang out with them. Ironically, Michele (who's 32, btw) had been hearing about the books from several friends (and teens in the youth group she helps out with) and had meant to ask me about them when I told her of my new addiction). But I did manage to get some reading done, and finished the book this past Sunday night, staying up far too late. I was tired at work, and at night, I was actually having dreams where Bella and Edward were having conversations--too bad I can't remember what they were about.
Monday and Tuesday nights after work, I came home, scarfed some dinner and settled onto my love seat to read Breaking Dawn, not even bothering with the TV or the Internet. And as I reached the last 50 pages of the book Tuesday night (ok, it was about 12:15 Wednesday morning), I slowed my pace, reading dawdling and even reading passages aloud to savor what was left. And when I finished, I just sat there, musing, almost amazed it was over.
Michele (the one in Lakeland) had made it to the middle of book two last night, so I had the satisfaction of emailing with her back and forth today while we were at work, asking her what she thought (she's equally sucked in) and trying my best not to hint at things to come (she "yelled" at me in all caps at one point when I teased her too much with an insinuation about how my feelings for one of the characters flip-flopped through the third book. I promised I'd give myself 50 lashes with a wet noodle and then refused to give anything else away, even by hinting).
Tonight, clearly, I still have these books in my head, or I wouldn't be blogging about them like a giddy teenager. I almost felt bereft, not having one of them to come home to after work. Is it too early to start rereading? And my friend Michelle (the one who persuaded me to pick them up in the first place--she has two ls in her name-- perhaps I should be using last names) and I have a pact. We're going to go see the Twilight movie together when it comes out in November, so, if we happen to be the only 30-something, obsessed Twilighters in the crowd (which I doubt will be the case), we at least won't be alone.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Ikea--Disney World for home shoppers
My goodness, it's been ages (I sense Sabrina, likely the only one who ever checks this anymore, dancing in her chair somewhere up Huntsville way at the sight of a new post).
I spent last weekend in Orlando, visiting with best friend Sarah, her hubby Michael and their oh-so-handsome 7 week-old son Peter. It was a delight to meet the little guy and spend quality time with Sarah, something I hadn't done in several months.
The Saturday I was there, Sarah asked me if I wanted to visit the relatively new Ikea store.
We pulled off I-4 at the International Mall exit, crawling through traffic headed to different parts of the shopping district. We turned a corner, and there in front of us was a massive Wal-Mart sized building painted in blue and gold (after flipping through the latest half-inch thick Ikea catalog the night before, the size shouldn't have surprised me). We were there by about 11 am, but already the main parking lot was full, and there were red-shirted men directing traffic to an unoccupied vacant lot across from Ikea's parking lot. We busted out the stroller, installed a sleeping Peter in it and made our way to the entrance.
First thing we did was grab a map (a map!). As we rode up to the second floor (the Showroom) in the industrial size elevator, Sarah explained the concept. Top floor had all the various layouts of furniture/lighting/dishes/housewares/carpeting/flooring set up in little vignettes. Every item was tagged with name and price, and conveniently, there was a lined area on the reverse of the map where shoppers could write down the name and price of whatever lamp/cushion/frame/sofa caught their fancy. The bottom floor was the Warehouse, where everything so creatively arranged upstairs was organized for purchase downstairs.
As I pushed the stroller, admittedly overwhelmed with the crowds of people, the arrows on the floor directing people in the appropriate traffic patterns and the scads of attractive yet inexpensive home decor, Sarah wandered amongst the displays, writing down shelving options. It didn't take me long to fall in love with a massively over-sized teal chaise lounge and a set of lamps. I also quickly began to harbor a sneaking suspicion that I could get in serious trouble very quickly if I wasn't careful. Admiring decorative items and extensive bookshelf displays as we wandered, I noticed the chair area. One style caught my eye, and reminded me of an arm chair I inherited from my grandparents. It is a squat, 70s-era chair upholstered in an orange and yellow burlap-like material, and despite the color, it is my favorite. I have to check, but it's possible the chair isn't as old as I imagine, but merely of Swedish styling.
After further meandering, sighing over furnishings and pointing out features we both liked and despised, Sarah, Peter and I were hungry. So without further ado, we repaired to the cafeteria. Yes, there's a cafeteria, selling Swedish favorites such as yummy meatballs (bags of said item, frozen, are also available for purchase). Placed near the children's furnishings area (a riot of fun color that made me long to either be a child again or have some of my own, if only too decorate their rooms (not the right reason, certainly)) the food was inexpensive and tasty, served on real dishes with real glass and silverware. As we ate and Sarah nursed the baby, I people watched, laughing at the balloon-animal artist and magician who stood not too far away entertaining laughing children. I was tempted to take a picture, and almost expected a costumed creature to walk by.
We wandered some more after eating, picking out a rug and sea creatures mobile for Peter's room, and then decided to make our way downstairs. I found the lamp and flowered lampshade I wanted. The baby began to fuss as we followed the arrows back and forth, and I found myself briefly disgruntled at the people with carts who seemed to just park in front of us. And it took forever to get out of there, rather like being at a theme park after a long, hot, sunburned day when you can't wait to get to the car but the people in front of you can't seem to gather their family and shopping bags fast enough. Instead of turnstiles, there were easily 40 checkout lines, but they moved smoothly despite the number of people with large crates of assemble-it-yourself furniture jockeying for position in the shortest line.
At the end of the afternoon, though admittedly tired, I still very much enjoyed my experience. And it got me to thinking. As we'd looked at furniture, I kept saying how one day I'd decorate my home nicely using some of the antiques I have in storage and other new items. Sarah asked me why I should wait.
That got me thinking. See, although I've lived in my duplex for three years, I've hardly hung anything on the walls. And the antiques from my grandmother don't fit in my living rooms with the window-unit air conditioner. Despite the furniture, I used to be so good about making my spaces homey and imprinted with my personality, but for some reason, haven't with my current home. And the more I thought about it, I realize I don't want to decorate my current space, mostly because it would imply permanence. And I don't want to stay here. I'm not sure where I do want to go just yet, but when I do, and have found new digs, I'm pretty sure I'll be returning to Ikea.
I spent last weekend in Orlando, visiting with best friend Sarah, her hubby Michael and their oh-so-handsome 7 week-old son Peter. It was a delight to meet the little guy and spend quality time with Sarah, something I hadn't done in several months.
The Saturday I was there, Sarah asked me if I wanted to visit the relatively new Ikea store.
We pulled off I-4 at the International Mall exit, crawling through traffic headed to different parts of the shopping district. We turned a corner, and there in front of us was a massive Wal-Mart sized building painted in blue and gold (after flipping through the latest half-inch thick Ikea catalog the night before, the size shouldn't have surprised me). We were there by about 11 am, but already the main parking lot was full, and there were red-shirted men directing traffic to an unoccupied vacant lot across from Ikea's parking lot. We busted out the stroller, installed a sleeping Peter in it and made our way to the entrance.
First thing we did was grab a map (a map!). As we rode up to the second floor (the Showroom) in the industrial size elevator, Sarah explained the concept. Top floor had all the various layouts of furniture/lighting/dishes/housewares/carpeting/flooring set up in little vignettes. Every item was tagged with name and price, and conveniently, there was a lined area on the reverse of the map where shoppers could write down the name and price of whatever lamp/cushion/frame/sofa caught their fancy. The bottom floor was the Warehouse, where everything so creatively arranged upstairs was organized for purchase downstairs.
As I pushed the stroller, admittedly overwhelmed with the crowds of people, the arrows on the floor directing people in the appropriate traffic patterns and the scads of attractive yet inexpensive home decor, Sarah wandered amongst the displays, writing down shelving options. It didn't take me long to fall in love with a massively over-sized teal chaise lounge and a set of lamps. I also quickly began to harbor a sneaking suspicion that I could get in serious trouble very quickly if I wasn't careful. Admiring decorative items and extensive bookshelf displays as we wandered, I noticed the chair area. One style caught my eye, and reminded me of an arm chair I inherited from my grandparents. It is a squat, 70s-era chair upholstered in an orange and yellow burlap-like material, and despite the color, it is my favorite. I have to check, but it's possible the chair isn't as old as I imagine, but merely of Swedish styling.
After further meandering, sighing over furnishings and pointing out features we both liked and despised, Sarah, Peter and I were hungry. So without further ado, we repaired to the cafeteria. Yes, there's a cafeteria, selling Swedish favorites such as yummy meatballs (bags of said item, frozen, are also available for purchase). Placed near the children's furnishings area (a riot of fun color that made me long to either be a child again or have some of my own, if only too decorate their rooms (not the right reason, certainly)) the food was inexpensive and tasty, served on real dishes with real glass and silverware. As we ate and Sarah nursed the baby, I people watched, laughing at the balloon-animal artist and magician who stood not too far away entertaining laughing children. I was tempted to take a picture, and almost expected a costumed creature to walk by.
We wandered some more after eating, picking out a rug and sea creatures mobile for Peter's room, and then decided to make our way downstairs. I found the lamp and flowered lampshade I wanted. The baby began to fuss as we followed the arrows back and forth, and I found myself briefly disgruntled at the people with carts who seemed to just park in front of us. And it took forever to get out of there, rather like being at a theme park after a long, hot, sunburned day when you can't wait to get to the car but the people in front of you can't seem to gather their family and shopping bags fast enough. Instead of turnstiles, there were easily 40 checkout lines, but they moved smoothly despite the number of people with large crates of assemble-it-yourself furniture jockeying for position in the shortest line.
At the end of the afternoon, though admittedly tired, I still very much enjoyed my experience. And it got me to thinking. As we'd looked at furniture, I kept saying how one day I'd decorate my home nicely using some of the antiques I have in storage and other new items. Sarah asked me why I should wait.
That got me thinking. See, although I've lived in my duplex for three years, I've hardly hung anything on the walls. And the antiques from my grandmother don't fit in my living rooms with the window-unit air conditioner. Despite the furniture, I used to be so good about making my spaces homey and imprinted with my personality, but for some reason, haven't with my current home. And the more I thought about it, I realize I don't want to decorate my current space, mostly because it would imply permanence. And I don't want to stay here. I'm not sure where I do want to go just yet, but when I do, and have found new digs, I'm pretty sure I'll be returning to Ikea.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
I was tagged
I was tagged by Sabrina, who has officially shamed me into posting on my blog for the first time in 9 months. Thanks B! :)
The rules of the game:
*Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
*Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself on your blog, we all want to know them.
*Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
*Let each person know that they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
So, here, in no particular order, are 7 random facts about me:
1. If they ever make another Charlie Brown special, I could totally provide the voices for any adults in the episode. You know how when Charlie Brown's teacher or mother, or any other adult they encounter for that matter, speaks, all we ever hear are "Mwaa mwa mwaa mwa mwa mwaa mwa" sounds? Well, I'm a pro at it. At least everyone in my office says so. :)
2. I maintain a sporadic e-mail correspondence with my old high school theology teacher, Amy Welborne, who, for Sabrina, Joy, Jenny and any other Santa Fe alum who happens to stumble across this, is now a Catholic author of multiple books. She lives in Indiana and has remarried and had two more children, both boys. The youngest is, I think, 2 or 3 now. Katie is in high school, but the two older boys have both graduated from college. Yeah, it makes me feel old, too.
3. I am, for all intents and purposes, addicted to milk. If I go to long without it, I'm not a happy camper. I think this is on my mind at the moment because I'm currently out of milk......I could really go for a cold glass now. I drink it with just about everything. It goes great with pizza, steak, turkey, anything. Not that a nice beer doesn't go well with the aforementioned entrees, but you can't pour beer on cereal, now can you?
4. While I keep a majority of the movie ticket stubs from films I see, unlike Sabrina's, they aren't organized by year into tidy rubber-banded piles. I find them in random boxes and old purses when I clean them out. I think there are even a few in my little fire safe...not sure why. But that's not my fourth random fact. Number four is I have a tendency to collect wrapping paper. I suppose it's a little bit of a fetish, but I just love Christmas wrapping paper. Most people I know will buy a couple rolls of wrapping paper each Christmas and use all of it, wrapping all their gifts in the same two or three patterns. I know others who will buy new decorations for their tree every year (throwing out the older decorations--shamefully wasteful, I say) and then buy paper to match the gifts to their tree. That's too obsessive-compulsive for my taste. When it comes to wrapping paper, I enjoy variety. Lots of bright colors and different patterns. Cartoons and angels and flowers. Stockings, Santas, robots in red and green. The space under my tree is a veritable smorgasbord of wrapping paper delight! And if there's getting to be too much paper leaning toward say, the blue end of the spectrum under the tree, it's time to wrap the next gift in a paper that has yellow, purple or orange. Ok, perhaps I'm a bit OCD myself here. But I get it from my mom, who still has some of a really large roll of paper she bought back in the late 70's (she bought 2 rolls. I think the first one was finally used up in 2004). She actually has to hide new rolls of gift wrap from my dad when she buys them. I've been very good an only bought one new roll of wrap this season.....of course, I still had 3 rolls from last year that I hadn't opened yet.
5. I enjoy going to the gun range for target shooting. It's not something I get to do very often, but it's fun to go with my dad and brother Ethan. I have a pistol, so it's good to practice occasionally. The last time we went--Father's Day weekend--I got to fire my Dad's AR-15. I'm a decent shot. I hit what I aim at.
6. If this whole journalist/writer thing I've got going as a career doesn't work out (and if all the shirt-folding jobs at Macy's are taken), I think I might has a future as a wedding planner. I'm now in the midst of bridesmaid gig #2 (technically, it's #4, over the course of my life, but I'm talking recently here), and I'm helping with a lot of the planning. I've been to cake tastings, dress fittings, table-linen rental haggling sessions, orchestrated bachelorette parties and bridal showers and put out fires regarding catering costs, aggravating future mothers-in-law and an inability to find shoes. By the time my friend Michele gets married in April, I'll have been a bridesmaid for more than a year and a half. I guess it's good to know that I have career options.
7. Classic, original Nintendo is still my favorite video game system of choice. Sure, I love the Wii, and some of the other systems aren't too shabby, but you can plunk me down with the original Super Mario Brothers in a heartbeat. I was actually saddened when I went to play Ghostbusters II on Halloween (a suitably seasonal choice, I thought), and the console wouldn't read the cartridge. Alas, only a camo-green screen appeared, try as I might to insert the cartridge softly, or with force, or while the console was tilted sideways. My friend Jason, who is equally enamored with the original Nintendo, and I are plotting a game swap soon. I don't think I'll let him borrow the Power Pad though. I mean, he is one of the sports writers at the paper, but I still don't think he'd get really pumped about Dance Aerobics or World Class Track Meet.
Now - who to TAG? Frankly, I have no idea. If I could post this on Facebook it would simplify things greatly. I'll have to ponder the tagging question. But I'll take suggestions. :)
The rules of the game:
*Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
*Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself on your blog, we all want to know them.
*Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
*Let each person know that they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
So, here, in no particular order, are 7 random facts about me:
1. If they ever make another Charlie Brown special, I could totally provide the voices for any adults in the episode. You know how when Charlie Brown's teacher or mother, or any other adult they encounter for that matter, speaks, all we ever hear are "Mwaa mwa mwaa mwa mwa mwaa mwa" sounds? Well, I'm a pro at it. At least everyone in my office says so. :)
2. I maintain a sporadic e-mail correspondence with my old high school theology teacher, Amy Welborne, who, for Sabrina, Joy, Jenny and any other Santa Fe alum who happens to stumble across this, is now a Catholic author of multiple books. She lives in Indiana and has remarried and had two more children, both boys. The youngest is, I think, 2 or 3 now. Katie is in high school, but the two older boys have both graduated from college. Yeah, it makes me feel old, too.
3. I am, for all intents and purposes, addicted to milk. If I go to long without it, I'm not a happy camper. I think this is on my mind at the moment because I'm currently out of milk......I could really go for a cold glass now. I drink it with just about everything. It goes great with pizza, steak, turkey, anything. Not that a nice beer doesn't go well with the aforementioned entrees, but you can't pour beer on cereal, now can you?
4. While I keep a majority of the movie ticket stubs from films I see, unlike Sabrina's, they aren't organized by year into tidy rubber-banded piles. I find them in random boxes and old purses when I clean them out. I think there are even a few in my little fire safe...not sure why. But that's not my fourth random fact. Number four is I have a tendency to collect wrapping paper. I suppose it's a little bit of a fetish, but I just love Christmas wrapping paper. Most people I know will buy a couple rolls of wrapping paper each Christmas and use all of it, wrapping all their gifts in the same two or three patterns. I know others who will buy new decorations for their tree every year (throwing out the older decorations--shamefully wasteful, I say) and then buy paper to match the gifts to their tree. That's too obsessive-compulsive for my taste. When it comes to wrapping paper, I enjoy variety. Lots of bright colors and different patterns. Cartoons and angels and flowers. Stockings, Santas, robots in red and green. The space under my tree is a veritable smorgasbord of wrapping paper delight! And if there's getting to be too much paper leaning toward say, the blue end of the spectrum under the tree, it's time to wrap the next gift in a paper that has yellow, purple or orange. Ok, perhaps I'm a bit OCD myself here. But I get it from my mom, who still has some of a really large roll of paper she bought back in the late 70's (she bought 2 rolls. I think the first one was finally used up in 2004). She actually has to hide new rolls of gift wrap from my dad when she buys them. I've been very good an only bought one new roll of wrap this season.....of course, I still had 3 rolls from last year that I hadn't opened yet.
6. If this whole journalist/writer thing I've got going as a career doesn't work out (and if all the shirt-folding jobs at Macy's are taken), I think I might has a future as a wedding planner. I'm now in the midst of bridesmaid gig #2 (technically, it's #4, over the course of my life, but I'm talking recently here), and I'm helping with a lot of the planning. I've been to cake tastings, dress fittings, table-linen rental haggling sessions, orchestrated bachelorette parties and bridal showers and put out fires regarding catering costs, aggravating future mothers-in-law and an inability to find shoes. By the time my friend Michele gets married in April, I'll have been a bridesmaid for more than a year and a half. I guess it's good to know that I have career options.
7. Classic, original Nintendo is still my favorite video game system of choice. Sure, I love the Wii, and some of the other systems aren't too shabby, but you can plunk me down with the original Super Mario Brothers in a heartbeat. I was actually saddened when I went to play Ghostbusters II on Halloween (a suitably seasonal choice, I thought), and the console wouldn't read the cartridge. Alas, only a camo-green screen appeared, try as I might to insert the cartridge softly, or with force, or while the console was tilted sideways. My friend Jason, who is equally enamored with the original Nintendo, and I are plotting a game swap soon. I don't think I'll let him borrow the Power Pad though. I mean, he is one of the sports writers at the paper, but I still don't think he'd get really pumped about Dance Aerobics or World Class Track Meet.
Now - who to TAG? Frankly, I have no idea. If I could post this on Facebook it would simplify things greatly. I'll have to ponder the tagging question. But I'll take suggestions. :)
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
City of contrasts
I couldn't publish my entire column on my trip to Louisiana last month in the paper, so here's the entire thing:
One of my girlfriends and I recently took a week-long road trip to
Louisiana for our birthdays. Michele grew up less than an hour from New
Orleans, and I was born in Louisiana, though I’ve rarely been back to the
state of my birth, and I’d never been to the French Quarter and Mardi Gras.
What I discovered was a city filled with contrasts. There is faith and
immorality, devastation and renewal, but underlying it all was a spirit that
I hadn’t seen before. New Orleans is unlike any city I’ve ever visited.
The huge bag of beads I brought back from my trip to New Orleans smells
like the French Quarter – a combination of stale beer and Mississippi River
water. To me, it’s a foreign scent, but to the locals it means home.
There’s a definite vibe in the Quarter. Music blares from every open
doorway: jazz and blues and Zydeco competed with Salsa music from a Cuban
cigar shop, while down the street, I heard reggae and Gretchen Wilson’s
“Redneck Woman” trying to drown out the Scottish rock band The Bay City
Rollers.
And the diversity in people was staggering. Families with small children,
hippies who hadn’t bathed in days, one obviously wealthy couple who were
dropped off in front of Café Du Monde in a chauffeured car, grandmothers
wearing feather boas carrying large plastic cups of beer, couples young and
old, some heading to the several fancy restaurants the Quarter boasts, a
drunk woman with her group of friends who poked me in the shoulder as she
walked past me and said, “And I love YOU,” people who actually live in the
Quarter on their balconies just watching the tourists go by.
The heavy police presence in the Quarter was surprising, even for me.
Michele said in years past, there might have been one officer every few
blocks or so, but now, there were groups of three or four on every block.
Because of the recent crime statistics, I suppose city leaders want to make
sure tourists, whose patronage is so very needed to help New Orleans recover,
feel safe.
And I did. While I was offended at the blatant ads in the windows of some
of the sex clubs along one stretch of the Bourbon Street, I never felt
fearful for my personal safety. There is so much history, and so much to
seen and do.
And I have to mention the parades, of course. We didn’t actually go to any
in the French Quarter, because it would have been too crowded. I had to ask
Michele about some of the preparations being made along Bourbon Street
though, since I noticed huge metal supports being placed under balconies.
She explained the supports were needed to shore up some of the old balconies
that, on their own, can’t hold the weight of the crowds who gather on them
to watch floats go by.
“And they have to grease them to keep drunk people from shimmying up them,”
she said.
We did go to two other parades, though. One was the Krewe of Thor, in
Metairie, the other the Krewe of Omega in Hammond, a nearby town. Families
were in evidence at both these parades, where I learned you have to be
quick, or someone with faster hands will snag the beads flying in your
direction, and that some people go to parades to gather beads to sell back
to people for the next year. Recycling beads – who knew?
Which brings me back to smells. There were so many new smells on my trip,
things that trigger my memory, most of them related to food, which is a huge
part of the experience: the Cajun spiciness of 250 pounds of boiled crawfish
Michele’s Uncle Ricky boiled the first day we were there; the heavenly odor
of Café Du Monde’s café au lait and powdered sugar-topped beinettes. They’re
the only thing the Café sells, but so famous and so melt-in-your-mouth
delicious it manages to stay open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, serving
only that on marble tables and faded green chairs sticky with years worth of
powdered sugar.
Then there’s the Corner Grocery on Decatur Street, a dingy little 100-plus
year-old grocery and deli (home of the Mufellata sandwich). They’ve been
family-owned that whole time, and have a poster-sized photo of Pope John
Paul II over the cash register. The floor is uneven and the food is stacked
cheek by jowl, but the whole place smells of garlic, peppers and spices, a
concoction so potent and I almost feel bereft walking back out into the
street.
St. Louis Cathedral sits just behind Jackson Square, an area formerly the
daily home of artists and street performers. Some of the performers – water
harpists, singers and trombonists – are back, as are the fortune-tellers
lined up directly opposite the cathedral entrance, who will read the bones,
tea leaves, your palm or a deck of Tarot cards. But the artists are not.
I’ve seen pictures from years past where you couldn’t even see into the
Square, there were so many paintings hanging on the black iron fence that
surrounds it. On my trip, there were fewer than 10 artists displaying their
wares.
It’s merely one example of how Hurricane Katrina changed the Crescent City.
Glen, the bartender at Pat O’Brian’s who served me my Hurricane (which was
extremely heavy on the run…I had to nurse it), admitted the crowds in the
Quarter were thinner than before Katrina.
“Forty percent of the population is just gone,” he said, at the same time
adding that crowds this year were already heavier than in 2006, when mostly
locals attended a smaller Mardi Gras celebration. “We’re already more busy
than last year.”
And though some people are coming back, damage from the hurricane is still
evident. Along the interstate you can still see rusty water lines along
walls and bridge supports where the flood peaked. There are a lot of
businesses on Canal Street that are still boarded up, as well as some
high-rise buildings with glass blown out of many of the windows in the upper
storeys. In Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans that directly abuts the city,
we saw many houses that bear the mark of police and National Guard soldiers
who went from house to house searching for bodies – giant orange Xs spray
painted on the front doors, no windows and for sale signs in the yard. I’m
not sure who will buy them.
And yet, in the midst of these derelicts, some homes have been reclaimed.
One or two have new front doors, and well-manicured lawns.
Some of the famous cemeteries were underwater after Katrina, too. And when
hey call them “cities of the dead,” they aren’t kidding. Some of the crypts
are made from solid blocks of marble, shipped from Italy and hand-carved.
Others tower 60 feet into the air. They have statues and stained glass, and
some of them are truly beautiful; miniature castles, or churches, and one
was even modeled after an Aztec temple! Multiple generations lay their
family members to rest in each mausoleum. When we toured Lake Lawn Cemetery
in Metairie, I noted some with the earliest date in the 1820’s, and the
latest burial in 2004.
There is so much more I could write. There is a determination to the people
of New Orleans, something I don’t know if I can capture in the short space I
have here.
But in the liner notes to his tribute cd to the city, “Oh my Nola,” New
Orleans son Harry Connick, Jr. said it better than I could.
“New Orleans is a city of paradox…sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so
entwined yet so separate…the blurred lines from the dark blue of Mardi Gras
to the periwinkle of Ash Wednesday morning…”
And he’s right. Another famous singer, Jimmy Buffet, sings “There is a thin
line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.” New Orleans straddles that
line, and embraces it.
One of my girlfriends and I recently took a week-long road trip to
Louisiana for our birthdays. Michele grew up less than an hour from New
Orleans, and I was born in Louisiana, though I’ve rarely been back to the
state of my birth, and I’d never been to the French Quarter and Mardi Gras.
What I discovered was a city filled with contrasts. There is faith and
immorality, devastation and renewal, but underlying it all was a spirit that
I hadn’t seen before. New Orleans is unlike any city I’ve ever visited.
The huge bag of beads I brought back from my trip to New Orleans smells
like the French Quarter – a combination of stale beer and Mississippi River
water. To me, it’s a foreign scent, but to the locals it means home.
There’s a definite vibe in the Quarter. Music blares from every open
doorway: jazz and blues and Zydeco competed with Salsa music from a Cuban
cigar shop, while down the street, I heard reggae and Gretchen Wilson’s
“Redneck Woman” trying to drown out the Scottish rock band The Bay City
Rollers.
And the diversity in people was staggering. Families with small children,
hippies who hadn’t bathed in days, one obviously wealthy couple who were
dropped off in front of Café Du Monde in a chauffeured car, grandmothers
wearing feather boas carrying large plastic cups of beer, couples young and
old, some heading to the several fancy restaurants the Quarter boasts, a
drunk woman with her group of friends who poked me in the shoulder as she
walked past me and said, “And I love YOU,” people who actually live in the
Quarter on their balconies just watching the tourists go by.
The heavy police presence in the Quarter was surprising, even for me.
Michele said in years past, there might have been one officer every few
blocks or so, but now, there were groups of three or four on every block.
Because of the recent crime statistics, I suppose city leaders want to make
sure tourists, whose patronage is so very needed to help New Orleans recover,
feel safe.
And I did. While I was offended at the blatant ads in the windows of some
of the sex clubs along one stretch of the Bourbon Street, I never felt
fearful for my personal safety. There is so much history, and so much to
seen and do.
And I have to mention the parades, of course. We didn’t actually go to any
in the French Quarter, because it would have been too crowded. I had to ask
Michele about some of the preparations being made along Bourbon Street
though, since I noticed huge metal supports being placed under balconies.
She explained the supports were needed to shore up some of the old balconies
that, on their own, can’t hold the weight of the crowds who gather on them
to watch floats go by.
“And they have to grease them to keep drunk people from shimmying up them,”
she said.
We did go to two other parades, though. One was the Krewe of Thor, in
Metairie, the other the Krewe of Omega in Hammond, a nearby town. Families
were in evidence at both these parades, where I learned you have to be
quick, or someone with faster hands will snag the beads flying in your
direction, and that some people go to parades to gather beads to sell back
to people for the next year. Recycling beads – who knew?
Which brings me back to smells. There were so many new smells on my trip,
things that trigger my memory, most of them related to food, which is a huge
part of the experience: the Cajun spiciness of 250 pounds of boiled crawfish
Michele’s Uncle Ricky boiled the first day we were there; the heavenly odor
of Café Du Monde’s café au lait and powdered sugar-topped beinettes. They’re
the only thing the Café sells, but so famous and so melt-in-your-mouth
delicious it manages to stay open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, serving
only that on marble tables and faded green chairs sticky with years worth of
powdered sugar.
Then there’s the Corner Grocery on Decatur Street, a dingy little 100-plus
year-old grocery and deli (home of the Mufellata sandwich). They’ve been
family-owned that whole time, and have a poster-sized photo of Pope John
Paul II over the cash register. The floor is uneven and the food is stacked
cheek by jowl, but the whole place smells of garlic, peppers and spices, a
concoction so potent and I almost feel bereft walking back out into the
street.
St. Louis Cathedral sits just behind Jackson Square, an area formerly the
daily home of artists and street performers. Some of the performers – water
harpists, singers and trombonists – are back, as are the fortune-tellers
lined up directly opposite the cathedral entrance, who will read the bones,
tea leaves, your palm or a deck of Tarot cards. But the artists are not.
I’ve seen pictures from years past where you couldn’t even see into the
Square, there were so many paintings hanging on the black iron fence that
surrounds it. On my trip, there were fewer than 10 artists displaying their
wares.
It’s merely one example of how Hurricane Katrina changed the Crescent City.
Glen, the bartender at Pat O’Brian’s who served me my Hurricane (which was
extremely heavy on the run…I had to nurse it), admitted the crowds in the
Quarter were thinner than before Katrina.
“Forty percent of the population is just gone,” he said, at the same time
adding that crowds this year were already heavier than in 2006, when mostly
locals attended a smaller Mardi Gras celebration. “We’re already more busy
than last year.”
And though some people are coming back, damage from the hurricane is still
evident. Along the interstate you can still see rusty water lines along
walls and bridge supports where the flood peaked. There are a lot of
businesses on Canal Street that are still boarded up, as well as some
high-rise buildings with glass blown out of many of the windows in the upper
storeys. In Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans that directly abuts the city,
we saw many houses that bear the mark of police and National Guard soldiers
who went from house to house searching for bodies – giant orange Xs spray
painted on the front doors, no windows and for sale signs in the yard. I’m
not sure who will buy them.
And yet, in the midst of these derelicts, some homes have been reclaimed.
One or two have new front doors, and well-manicured lawns.
Some of the famous cemeteries were underwater after Katrina, too. And when
hey call them “cities of the dead,” they aren’t kidding. Some of the crypts
are made from solid blocks of marble, shipped from Italy and hand-carved.
Others tower 60 feet into the air. They have statues and stained glass, and
some of them are truly beautiful; miniature castles, or churches, and one
was even modeled after an Aztec temple! Multiple generations lay their
family members to rest in each mausoleum. When we toured Lake Lawn Cemetery
in Metairie, I noted some with the earliest date in the 1820’s, and the
latest burial in 2004.
There is so much more I could write. There is a determination to the people
of New Orleans, something I don’t know if I can capture in the short space I
have here.
But in the liner notes to his tribute cd to the city, “Oh my Nola,” New
Orleans son Harry Connick, Jr. said it better than I could.
“New Orleans is a city of paradox…sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so
entwined yet so separate…the blurred lines from the dark blue of Mardi Gras
to the periwinkle of Ash Wednesday morning…”
And he’s right. Another famous singer, Jimmy Buffet, sings “There is a thin
line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.” New Orleans straddles that
line, and embraces it.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
'The Collected E-mails of Charles Dickens'
In my first post (I think), I wrote about how I was blogging against type, for lack of a better phrase, since I'd always kept written journals and have a great love for old books and letters. Well, Jay Leno had a conversation with guest Keanu Reeves last night that was oddly similar to that first blogging effort.
Keanu (who is now 41, believe it or not) was on the show to promote his new movie "The Lake House," which is about two people, his character and a woman played by Sandra Bullock, who write love letters to each other although they're living two years apart in time. So Jay asked Keanu, "In real life, are you a letter guy, or are you an e-mail guy?" To which Keanu replied, "I'm a letter guy." Jay said he was too, and that he preferred letters because they were more real, that when you're sitting and writing a letter, things sometimes flow from your pen that you wouldn't necessarily say in an e-mail. "I think it's because you can go back and edit emails, and correct them instantly," Jay said.
From the way I portray it, it sounds like they were having a really serious conversation, and to an extent, they were, but it was done in fun as well. I particularly liked Jay's comment about the permenance of letters. He said, "I don't think we'll ever see 'The Collected E-mails of Charles Dickens.'" And isn't that the truth....very few people save emails, or print them out for safe-keeping like they do treasured letters.
I actually wrote an honest-to-goodness letter yesterday. My brother Ethan is at Air Force ROTC field training in South Dakota right now, and as a cadet there, he's not allowed access to the telephone or e-mail (it's a distraction, apparently). He can, however, receive letters. So I wrote and mailed him a newsy one yesterday about different family things that have been going on since he left, results of some of the early World Cup matches and the minutiae going on in my own life at the moment. And now that I think about it, it's actually the first letter I think I've ever written to my youngest brother (birthday cards don't count). And while I know the content isn't exceptionally compelling, I think he'll save it. That's just the type of guy he is.
I think that's something you should do; save letters, I mean. It takes much more time and effort to write a letter than it does to type an e-mail. People put elements of themselves into letters, and like Jay said last night (although I really don't think he was trying to be as profound as this came out), you do sometimes say things beyond your original intent. Unlike an e-mail, you can't erase what you've written completely, either. I think letters are just more honest.
And will I go see "The Lake House?" Hmm, I'm not sure. While the idea is compelling, it might just be one I check out as a rental.
Keanu (who is now 41, believe it or not) was on the show to promote his new movie "The Lake House," which is about two people, his character and a woman played by Sandra Bullock, who write love letters to each other although they're living two years apart in time. So Jay asked Keanu, "In real life, are you a letter guy, or are you an e-mail guy?" To which Keanu replied, "I'm a letter guy." Jay said he was too, and that he preferred letters because they were more real, that when you're sitting and writing a letter, things sometimes flow from your pen that you wouldn't necessarily say in an e-mail. "I think it's because you can go back and edit emails, and correct them instantly," Jay said.
From the way I portray it, it sounds like they were having a really serious conversation, and to an extent, they were, but it was done in fun as well. I particularly liked Jay's comment about the permenance of letters. He said, "I don't think we'll ever see 'The Collected E-mails of Charles Dickens.'" And isn't that the truth....very few people save emails, or print them out for safe-keeping like they do treasured letters.
I actually wrote an honest-to-goodness letter yesterday. My brother Ethan is at Air Force ROTC field training in South Dakota right now, and as a cadet there, he's not allowed access to the telephone or e-mail (it's a distraction, apparently). He can, however, receive letters. So I wrote and mailed him a newsy one yesterday about different family things that have been going on since he left, results of some of the early World Cup matches and the minutiae going on in my own life at the moment. And now that I think about it, it's actually the first letter I think I've ever written to my youngest brother (birthday cards don't count). And while I know the content isn't exceptionally compelling, I think he'll save it. That's just the type of guy he is.
I think that's something you should do; save letters, I mean. It takes much more time and effort to write a letter than it does to type an e-mail. People put elements of themselves into letters, and like Jay said last night (although I really don't think he was trying to be as profound as this came out), you do sometimes say things beyond your original intent. Unlike an e-mail, you can't erase what you've written completely, either. I think letters are just more honest.
And will I go see "The Lake House?" Hmm, I'm not sure. While the idea is compelling, it might just be one I check out as a rental.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Lean not on your own understanding
Without a doubt, one of the biggest faith challenges I have is giving up control and trusting in God, especially when it comes to money troubles or relationships (or a lack thereof...tho' I'm trying to convince myself that I'm too old to be worrying about boys...or I should refer to them as men now?).
Lately it's been a shortage of funds, and the only thing I've been doing for the last few days is to try my best to trust in His will and pray for the ability to trust more completely....because otherwise I'd get myself so worked up and stressed it would do me more harm than good.
And today, of course, everything has worked out and revealed itself to be prefectly fine. I feel gloriously free and I'm oh-so-grateful. But I have this sense that it's almost like God's up there laughing good-naturedly at me, saying "I told you so, didn't I? Come on Anne, when are you gonna learn to really give it up to me?" :)
Ok, ok, I get it, and I think the trust thing is slowly but surely working its way through my thick skull. Now if we could only get this guy-thing straightened out...... :)
Lately it's been a shortage of funds, and the only thing I've been doing for the last few days is to try my best to trust in His will and pray for the ability to trust more completely....because otherwise I'd get myself so worked up and stressed it would do me more harm than good.
And today, of course, everything has worked out and revealed itself to be prefectly fine. I feel gloriously free and I'm oh-so-grateful. But I have this sense that it's almost like God's up there laughing good-naturedly at me, saying "I told you so, didn't I? Come on Anne, when are you gonna learn to really give it up to me?" :)
Ok, ok, I get it, and I think the trust thing is slowly but surely working its way through my thick skull. Now if we could only get this guy-thing straightened out...... :)
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Memories are made of....what exactly?
Well, I hardly intended it to be close to a year between posts, but frankly, I had practically forgotten I had this blog. Oh, it was there in the back my my mind somewhere, hidden away in some corner gathering dust, but by and large abandoned. So much so that I had to send myself a reminder email to recall my password!
What's funny, though, was reading the several posts I had left here and recalling how I felt writing them. I think I captured the cyclonic giddiness of my trip to Hawaii pretty well, looking back on it now. It was such a joyful trip, and I found myself laughing as I read my "Listing" post....I really could have left so many things out of my suitcases!
What prompted my return to blogdom? I was on my friend Joy's site, checking out pics of her son, and she had posted some pictures of her younger brother going to prom. He goes to the same high school we went to, and his prom is someplace glamerous, like Disney. When we were in school we had to stay in the county; no mean feat to find a decent venue in Polk County, Florida, I might add. So I posted a reply to her comment, trying to remember where our senior prom was....I probably have the ticket someplace, but honestly, it's only been 10 years. It's too early to be losing my memory, right?
Anyway, so much has changed in in the nine months since I posted last. I've moved and have a new job. I'm still writing, only full-time now for a daily newspaper, and consider myself so blessed to be doing something I love everyday. Sure, it's not the highest-paying gig, but I would rather love my work and be underpaid than be over-paid and miserable any day.
One of the reasons I started this blog (having looked back at my old posts) was to keep writing creatively, or at least somewhat artistically, on a regular basis. Well obviously I haven't kept up with that lately. But the intent is still there. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever write those books and essays that are occupying space in my brain (filed in a less cluttered corner than my blogger password), especially since I spend a large portion of my day at work writing? I hope that I will. In fact, just last night, actually, I sat here in my office at home and made some progress on a fairy tale I'd begun two weekends ago, a story inspired by my goddaughter, Nora, who when I visited her recently in Tallahassee, prefered to be awake than asleep.
Speaking of fairy tales, I wish I could remember the ones I used to make up for these two little girls I babysat for in high school (who are now both taller than me. One is even in college!). I would make them up as I went along while I was putting the girls to bed. The stories were probably rambling things that meandered through other tales I'd read, but I remember them being pretty good, even if they were made up on the spot. :)
What's funny, though, was reading the several posts I had left here and recalling how I felt writing them. I think I captured the cyclonic giddiness of my trip to Hawaii pretty well, looking back on it now. It was such a joyful trip, and I found myself laughing as I read my "Listing" post....I really could have left so many things out of my suitcases!
What prompted my return to blogdom? I was on my friend Joy's site, checking out pics of her son, and she had posted some pictures of her younger brother going to prom. He goes to the same high school we went to, and his prom is someplace glamerous, like Disney. When we were in school we had to stay in the county; no mean feat to find a decent venue in Polk County, Florida, I might add. So I posted a reply to her comment, trying to remember where our senior prom was....I probably have the ticket someplace, but honestly, it's only been 10 years. It's too early to be losing my memory, right?
Anyway, so much has changed in in the nine months since I posted last. I've moved and have a new job. I'm still writing, only full-time now for a daily newspaper, and consider myself so blessed to be doing something I love everyday. Sure, it's not the highest-paying gig, but I would rather love my work and be underpaid than be over-paid and miserable any day.
One of the reasons I started this blog (having looked back at my old posts) was to keep writing creatively, or at least somewhat artistically, on a regular basis. Well obviously I haven't kept up with that lately. But the intent is still there. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever write those books and essays that are occupying space in my brain (filed in a less cluttered corner than my blogger password), especially since I spend a large portion of my day at work writing? I hope that I will. In fact, just last night, actually, I sat here in my office at home and made some progress on a fairy tale I'd begun two weekends ago, a story inspired by my goddaughter, Nora, who when I visited her recently in Tallahassee, prefered to be awake than asleep.
Speaking of fairy tales, I wish I could remember the ones I used to make up for these two little girls I babysat for in high school (who are now both taller than me. One is even in college!). I would make them up as I went along while I was putting the girls to bed. The stories were probably rambling things that meandered through other tales I'd read, but I remember them being pretty good, even if they were made up on the spot. :)
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Listing to port
I certainly hadn't intended four months to go by in between posts! I don't think I could possibly do justice to everything that's happened since April; if I did attempt it, this single post would probably meander so much that anyone who began reading it would lose interest before they hit the half-way mark. So, in order to avoid sending my (very few) readers on a trip to dreamland, I've chosen what I think is the most sussinct way to present a mostly chronoligical history of the past four months: a list.
1. I am still writing and occasionally taking pictures for the Florida Catholic on a free-lance basis. I've had more pieces published, and am becoming slightly more adept at taking publishable photos.
2. Shopping for the Hawaii trip was lots of fun, and draining on the bank account. And it seemed that whenever I thought I'd finished, I would find something else cute that I absolutely needed to take with me to the islands.
3. K-mart merging with Sears was a very good thing for me. On super-clearance I found a massive navy blue rolling suitcase for $24, and the pink linen dress I wore to my cousin's wedding (which looked not at all like something you would find in a K-mart) for $13.
4. Packing the aforementioned clothes items into the above-mentioned navy suitcase (and a smaller green one) was made 1000% easier by the creative people at the Spacebag company, who, through American Tourister, market bags that you put your clothing in, and then procede to squeeze all the air out of, thus shrinking the volume of the clothes and making room in your suitcases for things like shoes, hairdryer, toiletries, cameras, and the multiple other sundries that you think you'll need (disposable underwater camera, anyone?) but never use. Happily, both my suitcases came in at under the 50lb. weight limit (though the larger case admittedly topped out at 47lbs.) And no, I didn't wear all the clothes I took with me. I could have left three pairs of shoes and a few belts at home as well.
5. "The Count of Monte Cristo" is a very heavy book, but well worth carting half-way across the world and back. I don't understand how I managed to avoid reading it all these years. What a fantastic read! I also took 2 other books with me, which ended up merely adding extra ounces to my already heavy carry-on. Remind me why I needed two decks of playing cards, again? And did I listen to any of the cd's I took with me? Again, no, so I could have left the portable cd player on my bed. Well, these things are good to know for future reference.
6. The flight to Hawaii (non-stop from Atlanta to Honolulu) was very long. Airline food (on Delta at least) is very good. Bathrooms on airplanes are very small. During the flight I read, played Scrabble, slept not a wink, and avoided watching the in-flight movies (though "Hitch" I saw later. "Elektra" just looked too wierd for me.). I saw New Mexico (red and clay brown-sculpted mountains and valleys) from the air. And the last three hours of the ten-hour flight seemed closer to three years than their actual length.
7. I really have no words to truely describe Hawaii. The mountains are breathtaking and the beaches are beautiful. It is warm, but humidity is minimal and there is always a breeze. I hiked the Diamondhead Crater with my brother Ethan the first morning we were there, went to museums, lazed on the beach, walked a lot, visited the USS Arizona Memorial, ate far too much food. I hung out with family, joked around with my cousins, my cousin's other cousins, and my cousin Matt's now-wife Sarah's cousins, tried several tropical drinks, did lots of shopping and probably spent too much (again). The wedding was beautiful. I turned a nice tan (yes, I used sunscreen...no burning for me) and took over 300 pictures. One day, I will go back.
8. The flight back was fine, actually shorter than the flight out. Readjusting from a six-hour time difference, however, was not. I think the exhaustion of jet-lag is the closest I think I have ever felt to being dead. I couldn't fall asleep til 4:30 or 5 in the morning, and wouldn't wake up til nearly 2 in the afternoon. Once recovered from jet-leg, I promptly caught a summer flu bug. Lovely.
1. I am still writing and occasionally taking pictures for the Florida Catholic on a free-lance basis. I've had more pieces published, and am becoming slightly more adept at taking publishable photos.
2. Shopping for the Hawaii trip was lots of fun, and draining on the bank account. And it seemed that whenever I thought I'd finished, I would find something else cute that I absolutely needed to take with me to the islands.
3. K-mart merging with Sears was a very good thing for me. On super-clearance I found a massive navy blue rolling suitcase for $24, and the pink linen dress I wore to my cousin's wedding (which looked not at all like something you would find in a K-mart) for $13.
4. Packing the aforementioned clothes items into the above-mentioned navy suitcase (and a smaller green one) was made 1000% easier by the creative people at the Spacebag company, who, through American Tourister, market bags that you put your clothing in, and then procede to squeeze all the air out of, thus shrinking the volume of the clothes and making room in your suitcases for things like shoes, hairdryer, toiletries, cameras, and the multiple other sundries that you think you'll need (disposable underwater camera, anyone?) but never use. Happily, both my suitcases came in at under the 50lb. weight limit (though the larger case admittedly topped out at 47lbs.) And no, I didn't wear all the clothes I took with me. I could have left three pairs of shoes and a few belts at home as well.
5. "The Count of Monte Cristo" is a very heavy book, but well worth carting half-way across the world and back. I don't understand how I managed to avoid reading it all these years. What a fantastic read! I also took 2 other books with me, which ended up merely adding extra ounces to my already heavy carry-on. Remind me why I needed two decks of playing cards, again? And did I listen to any of the cd's I took with me? Again, no, so I could have left the portable cd player on my bed. Well, these things are good to know for future reference.
6. The flight to Hawaii (non-stop from Atlanta to Honolulu) was very long. Airline food (on Delta at least) is very good. Bathrooms on airplanes are very small. During the flight I read, played Scrabble, slept not a wink, and avoided watching the in-flight movies (though "Hitch" I saw later. "Elektra" just looked too wierd for me.). I saw New Mexico (red and clay brown-sculpted mountains and valleys) from the air. And the last three hours of the ten-hour flight seemed closer to three years than their actual length.
7. I really have no words to truely describe Hawaii. The mountains are breathtaking and the beaches are beautiful. It is warm, but humidity is minimal and there is always a breeze. I hiked the Diamondhead Crater with my brother Ethan the first morning we were there, went to museums, lazed on the beach, walked a lot, visited the USS Arizona Memorial, ate far too much food. I hung out with family, joked around with my cousins, my cousin's other cousins, and my cousin Matt's now-wife Sarah's cousins, tried several tropical drinks, did lots of shopping and probably spent too much (again). The wedding was beautiful. I turned a nice tan (yes, I used sunscreen...no burning for me) and took over 300 pictures. One day, I will go back.
8. The flight back was fine, actually shorter than the flight out. Readjusting from a six-hour time difference, however, was not. I think the exhaustion of jet-lag is the closest I think I have ever felt to being dead. I couldn't fall asleep til 4:30 or 5 in the morning, and wouldn't wake up til nearly 2 in the afternoon. Once recovered from jet-leg, I promptly caught a summer flu bug. Lovely.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Friday, April 01, 2005
Be not afraid
I have a picture leaning up against my computer monitor. It's a card depticting Pope John Paul II, greeting the crowds in New York on his first visit, as pope, to the United States in 1979. In the black and white photo, he's lifted his skull cap off his head and is waving to a crowd that isn't in the picture. He looks joyful, a subtle smile on his face, yet tired, as if after a long flight. But in my imagination, and knowing what little I do about his personality, you can almost see the energy he absorbs from those unseen many.
What a contrast to the pope we have seen recently. A man frail and bent by illness, who has struggled in the past weeks as the world watched. And tonight, as he lies near death, the end growing closer with each breath he takes, I think he must still be joyful. In his room in the Vatican, I think he somehow knew that there were thousands upon thousands in St. Peter's Square, and around the globe, praying the Rosary for him, their prayers giving him the strength to hold on a little longer, to pray for us as we pray for him. For at this point, he is closer to God than we are.
Some friends of mine, who were married on New Year's Eve, went to Rome on their honeymoon. While they were there, they attended a public audience with His Holiness in their wedding attire, the tradition being that when a couple comes to the audience so dressed, the pope will individually bless their marriage, often giving them a rosary or a medal. They have pictures of themselves, kneeling before John Paul, receiving his blessing. They told me that, while he was obviously struggling and in pain, his eyes were still so vibrant and full of life; that they could tell that the pope was doing his best to carry the cross he had been given and endure those physical limitations, while still serving his people. So very few are gifted with such strength.
I wasn't quite 2 when that picture was taken in New York, and I certainly wasn't aware that there was someone called a pope at that age. But as I've grown older, I've learned to love this man, our pope, not only because he is the leader of the Catholic Church on earth, but because of his strength and perseverance, his love of the Blessed Virgin Mary, his unwillingness to conform to those would change the precepts of the Church, his love for freedom and for his defense of life in every stage. He has traveled the globe and made himself available to those who would otherwise have never seen him. He has healed rifts in politics and changed the world in so many ways. Although he is the third pope that has held the Chair of Peter in my lifetime, he is, for all intents and purposes, the only pope I have ever known.
Who will be our new pope when John Paul II is gone? We can only add to the prayers which we pray now; that not only will John Paul's passing into the arms of God be eased, but that his successor will carry on the work that he has left behind; that our new pope, and the Catholic Church as a whole, should be not afraid.
What a contrast to the pope we have seen recently. A man frail and bent by illness, who has struggled in the past weeks as the world watched. And tonight, as he lies near death, the end growing closer with each breath he takes, I think he must still be joyful. In his room in the Vatican, I think he somehow knew that there were thousands upon thousands in St. Peter's Square, and around the globe, praying the Rosary for him, their prayers giving him the strength to hold on a little longer, to pray for us as we pray for him. For at this point, he is closer to God than we are.
Some friends of mine, who were married on New Year's Eve, went to Rome on their honeymoon. While they were there, they attended a public audience with His Holiness in their wedding attire, the tradition being that when a couple comes to the audience so dressed, the pope will individually bless their marriage, often giving them a rosary or a medal. They have pictures of themselves, kneeling before John Paul, receiving his blessing. They told me that, while he was obviously struggling and in pain, his eyes were still so vibrant and full of life; that they could tell that the pope was doing his best to carry the cross he had been given and endure those physical limitations, while still serving his people. So very few are gifted with such strength.
I wasn't quite 2 when that picture was taken in New York, and I certainly wasn't aware that there was someone called a pope at that age. But as I've grown older, I've learned to love this man, our pope, not only because he is the leader of the Catholic Church on earth, but because of his strength and perseverance, his love of the Blessed Virgin Mary, his unwillingness to conform to those would change the precepts of the Church, his love for freedom and for his defense of life in every stage. He has traveled the globe and made himself available to those who would otherwise have never seen him. He has healed rifts in politics and changed the world in so many ways. Although he is the third pope that has held the Chair of Peter in my lifetime, he is, for all intents and purposes, the only pope I have ever known.
Who will be our new pope when John Paul II is gone? We can only add to the prayers which we pray now; that not only will John Paul's passing into the arms of God be eased, but that his successor will carry on the work that he has left behind; that our new pope, and the Catholic Church as a whole, should be not afraid.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Slash and burn
I'm a free-lance writer, and right now I'm working on a profile piece for the Florida Catholic. They're doing a special section on vocations (which will run state-wide, not just in the Orlando Diocese edition where my previous articles have been published), and my story for this section is the profile of a local nun preparing to celebrate her 50th anniversary as a Sister of the Holy Name. I met with her Friday for about 2 and a half hours, but, it being the Easter weekend (and me being a procrastinator), I didn't really sit down to work on it until yesterday. My deadline to turn the story into the special section's editor is this afternoon, and that won't be a problem. My difficutly lies in another direction entirely.
I usually record my interviews and transcribe them later. Some people don't like to work this way, b/c it can be pretty time-consuming, but it helps me be more accurate. I also like the fact that I don't have to be constantly scratching notes while my subject is talking. I can make eye-contact and it's more like a conversation. Anyway, I was up late last night transcribing only the first side of one tape...and I have two more sides of tape to go. (Somehow, during that time, I managed to eat an entire solid chocolate bunny: 5 servings per one bunny. So much for trying to be in good shape for the wedding this summer, huh?). The one side of the tape turned out to equate 6 pages worth of single spaced interview. 650-900 words? I don't think so. Try the first page.
And so, the story is just not coming together with the ease that I thought it would. The problem is not that there isn't enough material, it's that there is too much, and it's all good stuff! It's so hard cutting good anecdotes, stuff you know that other people will think are neat, or could maybe relate to. And this nun, Sister Rose, has led a really interesting life, and she's a fantastic story-teller, who loves to talk about herself (though who doesn't, really?). I want to leave so much in, but don't think I'll be able. The "joys" of editing, I guess.
Fortunately, just before I took a lunch break, the special section editor (who, oddly enough, used to babysit for me and my younger brothers years ago) called and said that it's ok if I go over, and that if I can keep it at about the 1,500-word mark, that's ok; they'll edit it and maybe come up with a sidebar or something.
I just may be able to get it down to the 1,500-word area. Big sigh of relief. Now back to work.
I usually record my interviews and transcribe them later. Some people don't like to work this way, b/c it can be pretty time-consuming, but it helps me be more accurate. I also like the fact that I don't have to be constantly scratching notes while my subject is talking. I can make eye-contact and it's more like a conversation. Anyway, I was up late last night transcribing only the first side of one tape...and I have two more sides of tape to go. (Somehow, during that time, I managed to eat an entire solid chocolate bunny: 5 servings per one bunny. So much for trying to be in good shape for the wedding this summer, huh?). The one side of the tape turned out to equate 6 pages worth of single spaced interview. 650-900 words? I don't think so. Try the first page.
And so, the story is just not coming together with the ease that I thought it would. The problem is not that there isn't enough material, it's that there is too much, and it's all good stuff! It's so hard cutting good anecdotes, stuff you know that other people will think are neat, or could maybe relate to. And this nun, Sister Rose, has led a really interesting life, and she's a fantastic story-teller, who loves to talk about herself (though who doesn't, really?). I want to leave so much in, but don't think I'll be able. The "joys" of editing, I guess.
Fortunately, just before I took a lunch break, the special section editor (who, oddly enough, used to babysit for me and my younger brothers years ago) called and said that it's ok if I go over, and that if I can keep it at about the 1,500-word mark, that's ok; they'll edit it and maybe come up with a sidebar or something.
I just may be able to get it down to the 1,500-word area. Big sigh of relief. Now back to work.
Friday, March 25, 2005
"Vacation all I ever wanted, vacation had to get away"
Yesterday, my life took a sad and pathetic turn. I actually counted the days until I leave to go to Hawaii.
As of yesterday, it was 75, which would make today 74.
Witness the lameness that is me.
I should explain that my cousin is getting married there in June, and my entire family, including my nuclear family and a large portion of the extended branch, will be attending. I have never been to Hawaii, but then, neither has my family. We were never a family that took exciting vacations. Some people's families would save up and take a big vacation every couple of years or so. They'd go skiing in the mountains, or rent a beach house somewhere for a week, or go on a cruise. Not so my family. Our vacations were always car trips (sometimes 20+ hours) to visit other family ( my father's unspoken motto is "If we can't drive, we don't go," if that tells you anything at all). The one near-exception is the trip we took to Washington D.C. when I was about 13. I really don't think that counts, though, since it was bookended with two weeks staying with my aunt, uncle and cousins in Virginia. We might have stayed in D.C. for a total of three days.
I've only flown twice in my life, which would probably strike most people as pretty strange. And I've never been further west than Louisiana. So imagine my joy when my cousin Matt announces that he and his fiance, who, though not an Islander, was born and raised in Hawaii, would be getting married on Oahu. Matt is the eldest son of my Dad's only sister, and she would probably hunt him down and kill him if he didn't come to the wedding. And so, wonder of wonders, we're going. It's official, since we bougfht out plane tickets and reserved our rooms last week. My Mom and I are only mildly thrilled. We already have poured through a few guidebooks and I've already started a list of places I want to go. And we went shopping the other day and hit some sales, where we scarfed up some fun new summer clothes.
And yesterday, as I flipped through my planner counting the days until June 7th, my memory whisked me back to about the age of seven, when I would start counting the days until Christmas while it was still July. Because if it's five months until Christmas, then I could start writing my Christmas list for Santa at the beginning of November.
Do you see a pattern here?
As of yesterday, it was 75, which would make today 74.
Witness the lameness that is me.
I should explain that my cousin is getting married there in June, and my entire family, including my nuclear family and a large portion of the extended branch, will be attending. I have never been to Hawaii, but then, neither has my family. We were never a family that took exciting vacations. Some people's families would save up and take a big vacation every couple of years or so. They'd go skiing in the mountains, or rent a beach house somewhere for a week, or go on a cruise. Not so my family. Our vacations were always car trips (sometimes 20+ hours) to visit other family ( my father's unspoken motto is "If we can't drive, we don't go," if that tells you anything at all). The one near-exception is the trip we took to Washington D.C. when I was about 13. I really don't think that counts, though, since it was bookended with two weeks staying with my aunt, uncle and cousins in Virginia. We might have stayed in D.C. for a total of three days.
I've only flown twice in my life, which would probably strike most people as pretty strange. And I've never been further west than Louisiana. So imagine my joy when my cousin Matt announces that he and his fiance, who, though not an Islander, was born and raised in Hawaii, would be getting married on Oahu. Matt is the eldest son of my Dad's only sister, and she would probably hunt him down and kill him if he didn't come to the wedding. And so, wonder of wonders, we're going. It's official, since we bougfht out plane tickets and reserved our rooms last week. My Mom and I are only mildly thrilled. We already have poured through a few guidebooks and I've already started a list of places I want to go. And we went shopping the other day and hit some sales, where we scarfed up some fun new summer clothes.
And yesterday, as I flipped through my planner counting the days until June 7th, my memory whisked me back to about the age of seven, when I would start counting the days until Christmas while it was still July. Because if it's five months until Christmas, then I could start writing my Christmas list for Santa at the beginning of November.
Do you see a pattern here?
Monday, March 21, 2005
Word for the Day
More for my own benefit than for anyone else's, I took the time to look up 'cretonne' (see my last post, end of paragraph four). After Googling the word, here are the definitions I found:
Definitions of cretonne
n. - An unglazed heavy fabric 3
n. - A strong white fabric with warp of hemp and weft of flax. 2
n. - A fabric with cotton warp and woolen weft. 2
n. - A kind of chintz with a glossy surface.
n. - An unglazed heavy fabric 3
n. - A strong white fabric with warp of hemp and weft of flax. 2
n. - A fabric with cotton warp and woolen weft. 2
n. - A kind of chintz with a glossy surface.
Hmm. Ok. I then had to look up warp and weft. Apparently they are terms used in textile-making, often relating to rugs. Moving on...
Then I found this definition and the words origin:
Then I found this definition and the words origin:
cretonne
noun
noun
- 1. A strong cotton material, usually with a printed design, used for curtains, chair-covers, etc.
That's more specific, and gives a better idea of proper word usage. So, kids, that's our word for the day. Now go out and use it in a sentance! ;-)
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Drowning in Books
I'm reading a book called "Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books" by Paul Collins. It's a non-fiction account of the time Collins, his wife and young son spent living in the town Hay-on-Wye in Wales. I'm not sure why Collins moved from San Francisco to Hay, which is apparently very near the English-Welsh border, other than he'd visited before and loved it. His accounts of the locals, their habits and house-hunting, among other things, are charmingly descriptive, and often both intellectual and hilarious, with digressions to a semi-related, often laughter-inducing passage from some long-lost tome that no one has ever heard of.
Hay sounds like the town for me. There are 40 bookstores in this town of 1,500 people, some of whom are quaintly odd. 40!!! And not only are there innumerable bookstores, but all, save one, carry used and antiquarian books. I would be in heaven. I am a bibliophile, to put it mildly. There are stacks upon boxes of books in my house, and the shelves are all over-flowing. And I still go to the library and check out other books. Add to these the books I have waiting to be read, patiently sitting and asking for my attention, those that I've begun to read but put down in favor of something more entertaining or intruiging (yet still intend to come back to eventually) and those that I've read seemingly hundreds of times already that I try to peruse every year or so.
And then, there are the books I collect. Old books, musty with age. Books that, when you open them and smell the pages, exude the scent of aged paper, ink and dust. My grandmother is allergic to this smell, saying that it is caused by microscopic dust mites, and refuses to have many older books in her house. But I love this smell (not to be confused with the new-book smell and the scent of bookstores that only carry new books, which is also another favorite smell of mine. Those books are mysterys in their own right, and hold all sorts of promise. But I digress...). Many of the old books in my collection are merely old, and aren't all that valuable. Some have damaged spines. Many people would look at them and see trash. But they have character, and, much like the written journal, a past. They are treasures in their own right.
I try to read all of the old books in my collection at least once. Some are melodramatic novels, like "The Tides of Barnagat," by F. Hopkinson Smith, circa 1906, where I wouldn't have been surprised if the book ended with the sentance, "And the moral of our story is...". Others, though, are funny, like the "Modern Priscilla Home Furnishing Book," published by the Priscilla Publishing Company, which apparently put out women's magazines. This how-to book gives the with-it homemakers of 1925 handy tips on furniture arranging, instructions for making lampshades, the care of linoleum, and asks the all important question: "Where Shall We Use Cretonnes?" If the book mentioned what a cretonne was, maybe I'd know where to use it! :-)
But I think the main thing about collecting old books that really attracts me is the sense of history they have. For instance, inscriptions in books always fascinate me. Sometimes I can't even read the flowing cursive handwriting, or only the first name is legible, and the date, "Christmas, 1906." Or if I can read it, who was Bertha Langmill, and where was she in March, 1919? Was this book her favorite? Why did one person give this specific book to another in 1891? What was their relationship? And how did a book make it's way from East Middlebury, Vermont to the Friends of the Library booksale in Lakeland, Fl?
More fascinating still are the items people leave in books to mark pages. I've found handwritten poems, holy cards, pressed flowers, bits of newspaper and, once, a set of train ticket stubs from a trip someone made between Chicago and St. Louis in the 1920's. It's amazing to me that people don't flip through the pages of their books before they donate or sell them. I always leave the markers in between the pages where I find them. Often, the page has discolored to show the placement of these artifacts, and it seems wrong to move them somehow.
There's a book store in St. Petersburg that I've only been to twice. It's called Haslem's, and I long to return. It takes up an entire city block, and is filled almost entirely with used books. The last time I was there, with my Mom and brothers, I spent a blissful four hours searching the shelves, sometimes stopping to pause and just sit, taking in the unique smell of the thousands of old books, reveling in them, knowing that they have been places that I may never go (sitting also served the practical purpose of resting my arm, nearly numb from carrying the ever-weightier basket of books around the store). After those four hours, everyone else was hungry, but I wasn't even half done looking through the store. I could have happily stayed there the rest of the day.
Thinking about it though, if that one store took so much time, I would certainly drown in a whole town of books. You could never get me to leave. Maybe it's best that I don't live in Hay. :-)
Hay sounds like the town for me. There are 40 bookstores in this town of 1,500 people, some of whom are quaintly odd. 40!!! And not only are there innumerable bookstores, but all, save one, carry used and antiquarian books. I would be in heaven. I am a bibliophile, to put it mildly. There are stacks upon boxes of books in my house, and the shelves are all over-flowing. And I still go to the library and check out other books. Add to these the books I have waiting to be read, patiently sitting and asking for my attention, those that I've begun to read but put down in favor of something more entertaining or intruiging (yet still intend to come back to eventually) and those that I've read seemingly hundreds of times already that I try to peruse every year or so.
And then, there are the books I collect. Old books, musty with age. Books that, when you open them and smell the pages, exude the scent of aged paper, ink and dust. My grandmother is allergic to this smell, saying that it is caused by microscopic dust mites, and refuses to have many older books in her house. But I love this smell (not to be confused with the new-book smell and the scent of bookstores that only carry new books, which is also another favorite smell of mine. Those books are mysterys in their own right, and hold all sorts of promise. But I digress...). Many of the old books in my collection are merely old, and aren't all that valuable. Some have damaged spines. Many people would look at them and see trash. But they have character, and, much like the written journal, a past. They are treasures in their own right.
I try to read all of the old books in my collection at least once. Some are melodramatic novels, like "The Tides of Barnagat," by F. Hopkinson Smith, circa 1906, where I wouldn't have been surprised if the book ended with the sentance, "And the moral of our story is...". Others, though, are funny, like the "Modern Priscilla Home Furnishing Book," published by the Priscilla Publishing Company, which apparently put out women's magazines. This how-to book gives the with-it homemakers of 1925 handy tips on furniture arranging, instructions for making lampshades, the care of linoleum, and asks the all important question: "Where Shall We Use Cretonnes?" If the book mentioned what a cretonne was, maybe I'd know where to use it! :-)
But I think the main thing about collecting old books that really attracts me is the sense of history they have. For instance, inscriptions in books always fascinate me. Sometimes I can't even read the flowing cursive handwriting, or only the first name is legible, and the date, "Christmas, 1906." Or if I can read it, who was Bertha Langmill, and where was she in March, 1919? Was this book her favorite? Why did one person give this specific book to another in 1891? What was their relationship? And how did a book make it's way from East Middlebury, Vermont to the Friends of the Library booksale in Lakeland, Fl?
More fascinating still are the items people leave in books to mark pages. I've found handwritten poems, holy cards, pressed flowers, bits of newspaper and, once, a set of train ticket stubs from a trip someone made between Chicago and St. Louis in the 1920's. It's amazing to me that people don't flip through the pages of their books before they donate or sell them. I always leave the markers in between the pages where I find them. Often, the page has discolored to show the placement of these artifacts, and it seems wrong to move them somehow.
There's a book store in St. Petersburg that I've only been to twice. It's called Haslem's, and I long to return. It takes up an entire city block, and is filled almost entirely with used books. The last time I was there, with my Mom and brothers, I spent a blissful four hours searching the shelves, sometimes stopping to pause and just sit, taking in the unique smell of the thousands of old books, reveling in them, knowing that they have been places that I may never go (sitting also served the practical purpose of resting my arm, nearly numb from carrying the ever-weightier basket of books around the store). After those four hours, everyone else was hungry, but I wasn't even half done looking through the store. I could have happily stayed there the rest of the day.
Thinking about it though, if that one store took so much time, I would certainly drown in a whole town of books. You could never get me to leave. Maybe it's best that I don't live in Hay. :-)
Thursday, March 17, 2005
I see leaves of green....
It's been rainy and dim the last few days, so when I looked out the window this morning and saw more of the same, it was a little depressing. But for a little while this afternoon, before another front came through, the sun made it's way out from behind the clouds. And suddenly everything was green. Being Florida, it's been warm here for weeks, but without warning, it seems like Spring finally decided to declare itself. Shades of emerald and kelly green almost explode from the leaves on the trees, and when the breeze wafted over the scent of orange blossoms from my neighbor's yard, well....I can only wax so poetic, I guess. :-) Truely God's handiwork, and just in time for St. Patrick's Day tomorrow! What a wonderful world!
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Up, up and away
I originally signed up for Blogger merely with the intent to publish comments on my friend's blog, but a couple of months ago, decided I would give it a shot. But after I'd typed out my first post, which I recall as being pretty good (but which was probably no more than mediocre, hindsight being what it is), I tried to post it and suddenly, it simply disappeared.
That's actually one of the issues I have with blogs. I never thought I would actually start one. I suppose that I should explain this paradox, since here I am writing one. The best way to explain it is that I'm somewhat old-school. Ever since I was in the fourth grade, I've kept a written journal. I must have at least five or six mismatched books, filled with handwriting that has morphed from large, bubbly, juvenile markings to the current combination of print and cursive that I use today. Most people these days don't write anything, not even checks, and what I love about the written word on paper is the sense of permenance. Sure, it could be burned in a fire, or doused with water and destroyed that way. But a written journal has heft. There's a weight to a book filled with ink-covered pages. And it has value. Papers, letters and journals, even random scribblings, left by authors and humanitarians and scientists, presidents and criminals and kings, sell for thousands and are cherished by collectors and museums. Will blogs ever be so treated?
I cherish the journal that my mother kept the summer she spent as a Red Cross worker in Guatamala. In it I read about a woman who I love and know, but about a time in her life where I was no where near close to existing. And recently, I found a series of letters that my grandmother sent to my grandfather while they were engaged, while she was in Florida and he was stationed in Canada with the Navy. They're silly, hopeful letters, about her practicing cooking, wedding planning, the practicalities of obtaining base housing, everyday experiences, and her joyful response to the engagement ring he bought her. I only wish that I had his letters to her as well. But the ones I do have are a concrete link to them and they show how in love my grandparent's were, something that held true even when they were in their seventies, but in those letters, is still fresh.
And I think about the journals that I've written in, where I put down my troubles, joys, fears, struggles with my faith and ridiculous crushes on boys (probably more of this than any of the guys ever merited), and I know that someday my children will read them and have a good laugh, or at least come to know more about me as a young girl and a young woman.
So why am I condescending to blog, you might ask? Well, like everyone else, I also enjoy the convenience and speed of modern conveniences. I haven't been writing a whole lot lately, and I need to get back into the habit of doing it everyday. Let's call it an experiment. A flight of lunacy, if you will.
That's actually one of the issues I have with blogs. I never thought I would actually start one. I suppose that I should explain this paradox, since here I am writing one. The best way to explain it is that I'm somewhat old-school. Ever since I was in the fourth grade, I've kept a written journal. I must have at least five or six mismatched books, filled with handwriting that has morphed from large, bubbly, juvenile markings to the current combination of print and cursive that I use today. Most people these days don't write anything, not even checks, and what I love about the written word on paper is the sense of permenance. Sure, it could be burned in a fire, or doused with water and destroyed that way. But a written journal has heft. There's a weight to a book filled with ink-covered pages. And it has value. Papers, letters and journals, even random scribblings, left by authors and humanitarians and scientists, presidents and criminals and kings, sell for thousands and are cherished by collectors and museums. Will blogs ever be so treated?
I cherish the journal that my mother kept the summer she spent as a Red Cross worker in Guatamala. In it I read about a woman who I love and know, but about a time in her life where I was no where near close to existing. And recently, I found a series of letters that my grandmother sent to my grandfather while they were engaged, while she was in Florida and he was stationed in Canada with the Navy. They're silly, hopeful letters, about her practicing cooking, wedding planning, the practicalities of obtaining base housing, everyday experiences, and her joyful response to the engagement ring he bought her. I only wish that I had his letters to her as well. But the ones I do have are a concrete link to them and they show how in love my grandparent's were, something that held true even when they were in their seventies, but in those letters, is still fresh.
And I think about the journals that I've written in, where I put down my troubles, joys, fears, struggles with my faith and ridiculous crushes on boys (probably more of this than any of the guys ever merited), and I know that someday my children will read them and have a good laugh, or at least come to know more about me as a young girl and a young woman.
So why am I condescending to blog, you might ask? Well, like everyone else, I also enjoy the convenience and speed of modern conveniences. I haven't been writing a whole lot lately, and I need to get back into the habit of doing it everyday. Let's call it an experiment. A flight of lunacy, if you will.
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