Quodlibets

An Invitation

Actually, four of them.  I have four Vox invites that I'll give to the first four people to comment (with an email address).  I don't think I'll be moving over to Vox full-time, but I may somehow make Vox my media blog.  More on that if/when I decide to do that.  I don't have much to say about Vox right now--I just started fooling around with it this evening--but my first impression is that it seems pretty cool.

It's like the popular new kid in town (among bloggers, I guess), so this is your opportunity to jump in and make friends before the new kid realizes you like Star Wars a whole lot more than drinking and boys.

You know what I mean.

Lust (Book?)

I want Chuck Klosterman to be my boyfriend.  Right. Now.

That is all.

The Kateromo Two-fer Meme

So my sister just did these two memes, but instead of repeating questions, I just elminated the doubles and turned it into a big ol' meme.  My two year anniversary of blogging is Sept. 9.  So this is just an early celebration of that.

Two Names You Go By
1. Mano
2.

Two Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
1. A lacy yellow bra
2. a light yellow cotton tank

Two Things You Want in a Relationship:
1. respect
2. friendship

Two Things You Want Really Badly:
1. To lose ten pounds
2. A nice computer bag.

Two pets you had/have:
1. Maggie, a doxie-poo
2. Allie, a crabby tabby, who is still kicking it at 17(?) with my mom

Two Favorite Sports:
1. Football
2. Curling

Two people who will fill this out:
1. No one, since Kate did it first

Two things you did last night:
1. showered
2. exchanged shocked statements with S about last night's Weeds.

Two Favorite Places to eat:
(now how can I pick just two?)
1. the now defunct 302 West
2. Frontera Grill

Two People that live in your house:
1. Me
2. S

Two things you like about yourself:
1. confidence
2. intelligence

Two things you ate today:
1. a big ol' plate of nachos at Tierra Grill
2. pickles, at dinner

Two people you Last Talked To:
1. am talking to Kate right now
2. well, I talk to S all the time; if not him, my dad

Two Things You're doing tomorrow:
1. working
2. watching Project Runway w/Kate

Two things that make you laugh:
1. Friends.  That show ALWAYS makes me laugh.
2. My. Name. Is. Errrrl.  (said with Indian accent)

Two Favorite Holidays:
1. Christmas
2. Any day that is a day off work.

Two last films you've seen:
1. Saved!
2. Transamerica

Two Parts of your Heritage
1. Italian
2. German

Two Things that Scare you
1. Airplane travel.  Has since before, you know, 9/11.  I've NEVER been a good flyer.
2. There is a long list of things that terrify me:  fire, tornadoes, earthquakes, being mugged, being raped, being killed, car crashes, S dying, etc etc.

Two Everyday Essentials
1. Burt's Bees chapstick
2. a good book

Two of your Favorite Bands or Musical Artists
1. Sufjan Stevens
2. something, something with people

Two Truths
1. The only thing that doesn't change is that everything changes
2. shit, I don't know.  The world is too grey for this kind of thing.

Two Things you Hate
1. I really like my sister's answer:  pop culture snobbery.
2. Being very hot or very cold.

Two Physical Features that Appeal to You
1. Eyes
2. Erm.  Eyes?

Two of Your Favorite Hobbies
1. Reading
2. Eating

Two Places you Want to Go On Vacation:
1. ITALY NOW.
2. ITALY, DAMMIT

Two Things you Want to Do Before you Die
1. There are too many fucking things to do before I die.  This is a depressing question.
2.

Two Ways that you are Stereotypically a Chick/Guy
1. Spiders are GROSS
2. I love love love purses and shoes

Two Things You Normally Wouldn't Admit
1. I spend hours feeling bumps and blemishes on my body, convinced they're cancer
2. The pill sucks.  It's left me with no sex drive.  (You know, maybe all those people against contraception should latch onto the fact that the pill totally kills your sex drive, and promote the pill as a way to prevent sex.  Really.  It's like this giant catch-22:  take the pill to have safe sex, but when you're on it you want nothing to do with sex.)

Fat Duck, Fat Goose

Have you ever eat foie gras?  I haven't, and it looks like I won't have much of a chance to in the city that I live in.  It's not news anymore, but the City of Chicago banned the sale of foie gras in restaurants, meaning I can never go to mk and try it.  Or any of the other restaurants that served, of which apparently, there weren't an overabundant number.

I can't say that I've ever been curious to eat foie gras, liver being one of the things I have spent my life avoiding, but I can say that I am MORE curious now that's it's been banned.  I did have a teeny little encounter with foie gras at the now defunct (a moment of silence, please) 302 West in Geneva.  S ordered a steak of some sort, can't remember which, and it came with a little foie gras butter.  He actually tasted it, and said it was fine, but I was too chicken to take a taste.  What can I say?  The idea of liver is revolting to me.

But it's not really a moral/ethical issue with me.  I can't put my finger on it, but I think it has something to do with the idea that most of the meat we eat is raised unethically.  And most of the eggs too.  It's hard to justify the current American meat industry, and well, foie gras producers aren't really very common, and it seems that it's more of a small sort of production, where animals aren't kept caged, and they're touched by human hands and they don't live in their own feces.  It turns out that I'm pretty much right about that; I read an article by Jeffrey Steingarten saying as much. 

I've been harping on this whole thing for a long time, but I try to make an effort to eat mostly meat that I know was raised humanely.  It's INSANELY hard to know this for sure, but I'm willing to bet that Purd*e and T*son aren't raising chickens humanely.  And I'm also willing to bet that any red meat you buy in a supermarket is a) subpar quality and b) raised inhumanely.  This means that I don't eat a lot of meat at home, and when I do, I try to buy it from places like Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.  It's expensive this way, but seems better.  Now, all that said, I can't say that I wouldn't eat foie gras.  I can't even say that I wouldn't bring it home and cook it, if I happen to taste it somewhere and love it (a prospect that I find hard to think will happen).  It just, well, it just doesn't seem as bad.

And of course, I am a foodie, and I am influenced by other ones.  People like Tony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman, who are all at once scornful and saddened by the stupid foie gras ban.  It makes no sense to them, and I believe them that foie gras can be transcendent (for other people, not me, of course).  So yeah.  I'm against the ban.  I think the ban is the stupidest waste of time.  The City didn't have better things to do?  For god's sake, it's not even as if foie gras is being produced in IL, because it isn't.  I don't think we've saved any geese or ducks from the evil of fat livers.  We've just made gourmet a little less gourmet; we've just dimmed the bright lights of the Chicago restaurant scene a little bit.  That's all.

And, Chicago's made me want to try foie gras, and I assure you, I didn't want to before.

New purse

I'm addicted to 1154 Lill, which is a custom purse-making store.  You pick a design, pick the fabrics you want, and three weeks later, voila!  Purse:

I love it.  It's bright and cheery, and it's WAY more crazy than I thought I could deal with.  But I'm finding that I can carry a purse like this and it's okay.  Plus, I LOVE yellow.  It's my favorite.

Update:  I just looked at the photo closely, and in it, you can sort of see one of my other Lill bags.  It's behind the new bag sitting on the chair--brown with a pink-flowered pocket--and it's honestly the best bag I've ever carried. 

The Low Price Leader

I don't shop at Wal*Mart (in this post, now referred to as WM), ever.  I haven't for a long time, and I've spent some time trying to convince other people that it's not a good idea to do so.  It rarely works; my mom said to me last Thursday, "I did something that'll make you mad." and she was talking about taking my brother to WM to buy some college/dorm room necessities.  And I know S's mom goes to WM way more often than I'm comfortable with; "It's so cheap" she says.

The fact of the matter is, none of us is really tied in any way to the WM economy.  None of work for companies that supply WM, none of us work for WM, and even though S and his dad work in retail, neither of them work at independent stores that might be in danger because of WM.  (Though I suspect that if Mr. S and Mrs. S had stayed in IL, and he'd continued on in his old job, he'd have had to concede that the new WM in my hometown took some of his business away.)  Anyway, the point is, our jobs don't hang in the balance of WM.  So it makes very little difference to any of us whether or not WM plays fair, or even whether it plays at all.  And to be honest, none of us are really in the position that we can't pay a little more for an item.  I don't shop at WM, it's true, but I don't NEED to shop at WM. 

I just finished The WalMart Effect, and it was a chilling confirmation of what I already felt.  The author doesn't seem nearly as disturbed by WM as I am, but he makes points that echo how I already feel.  WM is stunningly bad for this economy, in so many ways.  The author has said that at WM, people have efficiently shopped themselves out of jobs, and it's a telling statement.  We want cheap, and we seem to not care how much wreckage surrounds that cheapness. 

My mom said, when she told me that thing last Thursday that she didn't have any choice, which might be true, but also cuts to the heart of the matter.  In some places WM is the only dog and pony show in town, and you have to support the beast because there's no place else to buy milk and gallon jars of pickles or cheap salmon.  Reluctantly, I can't be mad at people who shop in the only place that they can shop (though, like the author says, we voted with our wallets, and if we're miserably shopping at WM, it's because we chose to miserably shop at WM).  But I do feel very strongly that if there is a choice to be made, the choice should be to shift what little buying power you have away from WM.

Vote with your wallets.  Avoid WM.

We! Are! ND!

I think I may have mentioned on this blog my inability to ignore the movie "Rudy" if it's on TV.  I mean, I'm watching it right now, on one of the movie channels we get.  I actually watched "In Her Shoes" before this, but then I realized that there was still about 15 minutes left in "Rudy", and I just couldn't ignore it.

So when I put this movie on, I inevitably end up crying.  The ND fight song, and the crowd chanting "Rudy Rudy Rudy", the stadium, the sack, the carrying off the field--it all equals me sobbing on the couch.  And I've only just watched the last 15 minutes of the movie.  The last 15 minutes, and I'm sobbing.

It's not only that, however, but it's the music.  The new Mark Wahlberg movie, "Invincible" (?), uses the music from Rudy, and I am seriously thinking it's probably a movie I would love.  I almost got teary during the preview, and that's absolutely not an exaggeration.  It's sad and pathetic, and S told me just five minutes ago that he wanted to fling ice cream at my face, as I sat on the couch chanting and clapping my hands and laughing gleefully.  And yes, I do those things every time it comes on, and yes I'd do them even if I was alone.  (Like the way I HAVE to dance to the song "Brandy" if it comes on, no matter what.)  The point is, I'm probably obnoxious about this, and S just might get Rudied to death.

I really think that at least some of my sheer emotion at this movie comes from the mingled emotion of my college years, which were transacted at SMC.  I don't know exactly how to explain it, and I didn't even go in that much for the football, but it's pretty cult-like.  It's crazy, and I can tell you that if I were to watch college football on TV some Saturday, it'd be ND, all the way.  But also, besides all that ND emotion, I'm a heavy fan of the underdog.  I like the Cubs, for god's sake.  And if the loser is loveable (not all are, clearly), I'm even happier.  Rudy was such an incredibly loveable loser, at least in the movie.

Anyway, I'm done crying now, but if you chance across Rudy on TV someday, you can bet it's on at my house, and that I'm sitting on the couch with tears streaming down my face, chanting, "Rudy, Rudy, Rudy......"

Nick Hornby is my hero

I loved Nick Hornby before (although sadly, not so much his last book), but now I love him even more.  In a piece for a British paper, he basically says what I think and say all the time, which is that there is nothing wrong with reading for pleasure, for entertainment.  In fact, he urges it.  And he emphatically states that we err in thinking 'good' books have to be difficult. 

But my favorite part in the entire article is when he asks people to stop "slagging" on other people for their reading choices.  Even if it's *gasp* The DaVinci Code.  Because, Hornby's point is, you have no idea how that person came to be reading that book.  Personally, I didn't like it.  But I don't enjoy really any thriller, so it's no stretch to understand why.  But S?  He read the DaVinci Code, and he hadn't read a book since high school.  I was/am inordinately proud of him for sticking with it, and finishing it.  I'm a little disappointed that I can't really interest him in any of Dan Brown's other books, but the fact that he read and enjoyed a book?  Golden. 

And I think that's exactly what Hornby's point is:  any book that has someone who wants to read it, who enjoys reading it is okay.  Our object should be, as happy readers, to get other people to be happy readers.  Sometimes it's the DaVinci Code that will evoke that response.  Sometimes it's the new Ian McEwan or the new Julia Quinn.  And I'm sure for some people it's new autobiographies or a new book about the importance of Kant.  If we want people to read for pleasure, we have to promote the idea that it's not crap to read romances, or thrillers.  We have to stop thinking that the only purpose of reading is to educate, is to "improve the mind". 

Because yes, reading CAN be about that.  But it shouldn't JUST be about that.  And quite frankly, educational books can be insanely boring.  No one picks up a Calculus text for fun.  Well, okay, MOST people don't.  But you get my point.  And Hornby's.

(link to article via kottke)

"Happy families are all alike..."

Lately I've realized that I'm heavily censoring what I write on this blog.  I mean, to the point where I'm not blogging very often because everything that I would talk about seems somehow too private or inappropriate for my audience.  And it's nagging at me, because part of the reason I started this thing was as a journal, as a way for me to talk about what's important to me, about how I feel about things.  It wasn't meant to be smart, or even have important things to say, and yet all the things I want to say, I can't say.

It's partly because I am ever aware that my entire immediate family reads this, and I'm just not up to writing things here that I couldn't say to them, and those things exist.  (They exist in every family, every group of friends, don't they?)  I'm also cognizant that those people deserve privacy, they deserve to not have to face up to their lives plastered on the internets.  And S.  As much as I blog about him, I'm sure I could blog more.  But it's incredibly unfair of me to air our most private lives on this blog, as much as sometimes I need an outlet for those thoughts and feelings.

As I've said recently, I'm in a very self-involved period of my life.  Things haven't been so great, all around, and even though I'm basically happy, and have moments of joy, some things just aren't right.  It's hard to write this sort of blog when you are at the depths of self-involvment, when you're being introspective to a point that it sometimes makes you uncomfortable.  If I can't admit certain things to myself, how can I type them up here?  And if I'm grappling with some of the closest relationships in my life, how can I bring that here?  I can't.  It seems like those are the only two things I am doing these days:  thinking about myself and then thinking about myself and someone else and how we relate. 

I'm still reading, and consuming popular culture, but it's been taking a back-seat to all the other crap.  In fact, I'm in a bit of a reading crisis so big that I'm currently reading From Dawn To Decadence, which is, let it be said, a very big, excellent book.  I'm sure.  But the fact that I can't read for entertainment (because make no mistake about it, this book is not entertainment, not in the purest sense of the word) should say something about where I am mentally. 

And the hits just keep on coming. 

Let's be clear here, loved ones.  I'm not depressed, so you don't have to be scared.  It's not like that last time, when I could barely get out of bed.  It's nothing so bad as that.  And S and I are fine, absolutely.  But life seems to ebb and flow, to expand and contract, to move through hills and valleys, and well, I'm in a little bit of a valley right now.  These things move on, I know, so I'm certain I'll be fine in a few days, or a few weeks.  But I'm probably not the best company ever, and if I seem distracted, well, I probably am.

(I think a cupcake might help.) (Kidding.)

Seriously.  Lest you worry, it's nothing dire.  I'm just a little less cheerful right now.  That's all.

(Ten points if you can finish the quote that's the title of this post, and another ten if you can tell me where it comes from and who said/wrote it.  Please be honest and don't google.)

My little quirks

I don't like to be touched.  Ever.  I don't like to hug anyone, I don't like pats on the back or comforting back rubs.  Those things are not comforting to me, or congratulatory or warm.  They're awful and awkward, and they make me unhappy.

Lately, it's been especially bad.  I cringe when relatives come at me for a hug--though I know they're just trying to show affection.  And at home, there are times when I don't even want S to touch me, and he'd long been an exception to the rule (though when busy with something I simply cannot. be. touched.).  Mostly, it's when I get home from work, after a long commute, and I feel frazzled and rushed and unable to relax until all my stuff is taken care of.  If he's home already, he wants a hug or a kiss, and I just need some time to get to the place where I can do those things.

And though he's known for ages that I can't be bothered when I'm doing something--mostly cooking--he insists on trying to be affectionate during meal cooking times.  It drives me UP THE WALL.  Our little kitchen gets hot, and I feel harried and rushed during cooking.  I don't want to take a break to kiss, or hug.  I'm often too sweaty to consider wrapping myself up in another hot body, and I just. need. to. get. food. on. the. table. honey.  I think that he gets hurt, or upset when I turn down kisses at that time, but it really is not going to change.  It's not personal, it's just how I am.  I need to get my shit done before I can consider anything else.

I consider myself an affectionate person, or at the very least a loving one, to people that I do love.  I have no problems speaking my love.  I can tell S I love him in the middle of cooking dinner.  But when that love is meant to be translated to touch, I get squeamish.  I'm not talking about strangers here, okay?  I can barely hug my mom and dad, and I adore them.  I don't think this has much to do with my family, because no one else in it has these sorts of issues with touching.  But jesus, it's so hard.  I'm pretty sure I REALLY offended someone at my dad's wedding, because she came up to me and put her arms around me and started squeezing/stroking and I barely knew her and all I could think was "Get away, get away, get away."  I tried to be nice about it as I tried to get away, but it's really hard to say nicely "Please take your hands off of me right now." 

But I'm pretty sure that if someone didn't respectfully get back--well, I'm pretty sure that I could reach panic attack state with just what someone meant to be friendly touching.  It's horrifying, in some ways, isn't it?  At my college reunion, some girl from my major jumped all over me when learning I didn't like to be touched.  It made me hate her a litte bit, I have to say--and she was never someone I had any objection to.  I don't know.  I hugged a few people today at a baby shower, and it was fine, but it was mostly fine because I was in control of the hug.  I mean, I hug my mom, but she can't hug me.  Pretty sick.  (I bet there's some sort of touch therapy for people like me, isn't there?)