Quodlibets

Here's something interesting

I still use LibraryThing quite devotedly.  I enter all new books I purchase, and I tag almost every book.  I've tried to be diligent about applying the "unread" tag, and updating and erasing that tag from books I've subsequently read.  I'm not buying as many books, which means my useage of LT has gone down.  I've never reviewed books in LT, because book reviews aren't my style.  I've written a few here, when I feel really passionate about a book (in either way, good or bad), but in general, I don't read other reviews of books, and so I don't do it.  I've always felt that books are such individual things, and that what hits me squarely might turn you off completely, and that's pretty much why I don't read reviews.  It probably doesn't help that I love romance novels, which are among the most maligned of books, and so I take all book reviews with a grain of salt.  (To be honest, I put a LOT of stock in movie reviews, often NOT going to see a movie based on a review, or harboring a desire to go to a movie because of a review.  It's not always the case--no one's keeping me away from "Knocked Up" this weekend, no matter what--but I do trust movie reviews, and I can't say why.  Maybe because my tastes are very mainstream; yet, my book tastes are mainstream.  American women read romance novels in droves.  Perhaps movie critics are better at tapping into and loving mainstream movies because there's no shame in it.  Movies are meant to be entertaining, but ah, books, not so much.  We're very confused about books, thinking they have to mean something to be good.  But I'm beating a dead horse here.)  Anyway, long story short, I don't do book reviews.

That might change, however.  LT has introduced a free book program!  Sort of.  Essentially, the 500 people whose library had the highest degree of similarity to a list of books Random House gave LT have the opportunity to receive ARCs of books put out by Random House.  There are very limited copies of each book--20, 17, etc--and so it's sort of a contest to see who wins (?) each book.  If you do receive the book, you then read it and review it on LT.  I signed on.  I'm not sure if I'll ever get a book; I'm in the lower half of that 500 people, and that hurts my chances a bit.  Furthermore, I'm not sure I can actually produce a review, if handed a book.  That means that I'll likely go down in the standings a bit, and probably will hurt my chances of receiving another book.  Which is okay. 

I thought it was worth it to try.  I like books so much, and I'm always looking for new books to read, and hey! these are free.  It's not random; you are required to sign up to receive each book, so I'm not going to be sent anything that I think looks horrible.  That doesn't mean books won't be horrible, but it means that I can control what gets sent to me, in some senses.  It's a high degree of autonomy, I guess.  And right now, LT isn't getting paid for this program, it's just sort of a partnership, to see what happens.  Maybe it won't work.  Maybe it'll work too well, and LT will start getting paid for it, in which case, I'm not sure if I can keep playing along.  In the future, LT hopes to open this to other publishers too, which makes me feel better about it.  Did I mention that this involves free books?  Yeah.  You had me at free.

Ranty

I'm in this ranty, cranky mood right now.  I just want to spew forth venom on topics ranging from the scandal in the justice department to things about ex-friends that just make me want to scream.  And every possible topic in between, including, but not limited to:  toxic chemicals in popcorn and diet soda, co-workers + job = bad, cicadas being diiiiisgusting, traffic being f-ed up for no good reason, gas prices being jacked because oil barons are greedy assholes (the price of oil is falling, you bastards), buildings being too cold in the summer to work in capris/skirts/short sleeves, the music industry in general, the frustratingly unclean apt. I live in, crappy boring summer nights spent doing nothing because I did all the fun stuff at work during the day, not knowing what to feed myself because I'm trying to avoid chemically stuff, Sam hating his job, etc etc.

I'm sure I could go on forever, but I'm trying to not to be too unbearable and it's probably failing miserably.  I don't know why I'm in such a bad mood, but jeez, it's really bringing me down.  Maybe a walk will help.

(Then again, maybe not.  Those cicadas are really freaking gross, people.  They were all over the sidewalk and pavement near a big tree in the parking lot today, and it felt like I was walking through a minefield of disgusting HUGE bugs.  I almost screamed, and I am not kidding.  Instead, I swore badly under my breath the whole time I was walking through the obstacle course of dead cicadas.  Ewk, ewk, ewk.  I'm ready for them to go away again.)

10 things; 2 lists

5 Things I Like about Sam
1.  He's passionate about photography.
2.  He's the nicest person I know.
3.  He never gets mad at people, only inanimate objects (like the cheese that slides off of a piece of pizza).
4.  He's a very good hugger.
5.  He lets me drive everywhere, except that he's glad to drive rental cars in other cities when I don't want to drive.

5 Things I Don't Like about Sam
1.  It takes him forever and a day to make a decision.
2.  He can't multitask.
3.  He only gets mad at inanimate objects, never people, which can lead to things like computer banging and throwing.
4.  He doesn't like any of my music.
5.  He doesn't eat vegetables. 

Hiatus

On the way back from Salt Lake City today, I saw a woman literally destroying her book as she was reading it.  She was ripping 5, 10, 20 pages out at a time after she'd finished with them.  It was a romance novel she was ripping up, so maybe she viewed it as some sort of throwaway literature, but still.  Can you imagine ripping up a book that way?  It was horrifying.

We were in Salt Lake City over the holiday weekend for a wedding.  My cousin Tbhs got married to her fiance, as nice a guy as you could ever hope to meet.  The wedding was fine; the bride was lovely and the reception was very nice.  Not the most fun wedding I've ever been to, but I think the good times are predicated on you knowning tons of people at the wedding.  Which we didn't.  I barely ever see this cousin, simply because she's lived far away for her entire life.  So I don't really know her, so it wasn't as fun as some other cousin weddings.

Otherwise, SLC was incredibly dull.  It seems like a very sterile city; the food was nothing to write home about (save for a trip to the CA chain Rubio's), and the town is very boring.  There's nothing much to do and see, and it's not even really a city, by my estimation.  I live in a city.  SLC seems like a suburb with 10 tall buildings in the middle of it.  Even walking, which was certainly do-able, seemed sort of pointless when faced with the six lane roads going everywhere.  They're supposedly the relic of the 2002 Olympics, but whatever.  They make the city into a driver's paradise and a walker's hell.  But the people seemed mostly happy and my cousin the ski bunny (the bride's younger sister) really does seem to love the city.  There was nothing really wrong with the place, but then again, there was nothing really very right about it.

We did make a day trip to Park City, which was nice, though sorta not the most fun.  Park City is a resort town, but it's a winter resort.  I can't imagine the place in the winter, with the boarders and the skiiers everywhere.  In summer, it was shoppers and bikers and hikers, all enjoying the outdoors.  I sort of don't love the outdoors, so it was only so-so.  And the shopping did get pretty repetitive after a while.  Still, it was somewhere I'd never been.

In fact, the whole trip was basically just a trip to somewhere I'd never been, coupled with a wedding obligation.  I'm home, and that's nice.  Too bad there's a work week ahead.

A night among the hipsters

Sam and I went to see the Kings of Leon tonight.  He really likes the new album (I think I prefer the first, if I can be said to prefer one or the other), and he got on the guest list tonight, so we were able to attend the sold out show.  The crowd was about half hipster, and half frat boys.  Afterward, Sam pointed out that there is a dearth of cock rock right now, and those guys will latch onto anything that sorta sounds like it.  Anyway, it was an altogether annoying crowd.  Some observations:

• Dude, if you have a dress on, take off the pants.  It's a dress because you don't need to wear pants with it, and if it's too short to be a dress, honey, get a shirt that fits.  And take off the fucking leggings.
• On the same note, if your shirt is so long it covers your short shorts, figure something else out.  Because you look ridiculous.
• The full body shakes?  A seizure?  No, an inventive new dancing style that made me want to find some leather strap to shove in his mouth, just in case he swallowed his tongue.  Keep still, frat-loser.  Nod your head, or move slightly back and forth.  Otherwise, you look like you got a disease.
• Okay.  Neon pink, green and yellow nikes with no socks, a button-down work-style dress with a wide emerald green belt, HUGE neon pink plastic earrings, and a hairdo that probably took three hours to make look like it took five minutes do not an attractive combination make.  Look, hon, you're trying too hard.  It's okay to like some hipster/trendster clothing choices.  I myself am carrying a purse that is more trendy than classic, and I have a nose ring.  But when trendy throws up on you?  You just look stupid.
• Dude, holding up your phone at a concert makes you a giant tool.  I know, we've all done it, but that doesn't make us any less of tools.  Have you ever received a phone call from a jerk at a concert?  You probably feel one of two ways about it:  a) you asshole, you're at a concert I want to be at, so fucking leave me along or b) what?  I can't hear you.  Is that clapping?  What's that noise in the background?  Where ARE you?  A subway tunnel?  Seriously.  Do your friends a favor and leave them alone at 10:15 on a Saturday night.  If they wanted to hear the Kings of Leon, they'd be at the concert.
• Shit, don't bring your mom to a concert at the Riv, no matter how much you love her.  I guarantee she'll hate every loud, uncomfortable minute of it.
• Are you the kind of person who claps along to songs?  Screw you.  I'm so against crowd concert participation it's ridiculous.  I don't even clap if one of the band members is onstage exaggeratedly clapping his hands over his head to try to involve the audience.  Anti-effort?  Maybe, but also anti-lameass, and since concert crowds are nothing but lameasses these days, I'll keep my hands to myself, thanks. 
• And look, after the show, I don't care how drunk you are, you idiot, but you should really learn how to tell if a cab is occupied.  It's like, the easiest skill on the planet to pick up.  Number lit?  Free cab!  Number not lit?  Occupied.  If I had a dollar for every time some drunk loser tried to flag down an occupied cab tonight, I'd be able to at least treat Sam and I to a meal at Fogo de Chao.  It's so not hard, it's easy.  And while you're at it, drunky, how about NOT harrassing the people who legitimately hailed those cabs?  How about not sticking your head in the back window and trying to bribe them into letting you jump in?  How about NOT attempting to open the back door of the cab and jump in while there is already a passenger in the car?
• And finally, I was saying this to Sam earlier:  every time I start to think drinking = not so bad, I go to an event like this, where I see asshole upon asshole being drunk and assoholic.  I saw one girl practically drag her falling over, slurringly embarrassing date out of the venue, while he bumped into random strangers.  Another guy RAMMED into me on the street, while we waited for the bus.  There were countless drunk idiots trying to catch cabs.  And then, right as we were almost home, we walked by a couple of people--a belligerantly drunk male, yelling at his sober-seeming (compared to him) lady-friend, telling her how awful she was, and how she was accusing him of lying and how dare she and he wasn't a liar, and she just sighed and said, I wasn't calling you a liar, and I thought, girl, get out of that relationship now.  Belligerant drunk = bad bad bad. 

Anyway, the Kings of Leon were fine (through my earplugs), if slightly too loud for my taste.  I couldn't see a damn thing for 99% of the show, but I'll say this for Caleb Followill--he's got a niiiiiiice voice.  It's dreamy.  You don't even have to see him to think about doing bad things with him.  For all I know, he's ugly as a toad.  But he sounds delicious.

He didn't eat. Anything.

5 Things Sam definitely didn't eat before me

1.  Asian food.  I mean, none.  No Thai, Chinese, Indian or Japanese.  Now though, he's tried all of them, and will even consent to eating Chinese food occasionally.  Once he ordered it in when I wasn't home, which was astonishing.  He actively enjoys Indian food now, and we go out for that once in a while.  He doesn't like Thai overly much, though I can persuade him to eat it about once every six months, and he flat-out doesn't eat Japanese, unless it's Yakitori, and even then, only very seldomly will he eat that.  It was such a treat to move to the city and realize that lots of Chinese restaurants do Japanese and vice-versa, because it means I can have my tempura and miso, and he can have sesame chicken. (Which is currently the only Chinese dish he eats.  But better just that than nothing.)

2.  Seared Tuna.  I like seared tuna a LOT.  We've been to a few restaurants that have it, and every time we eat it (which is admittedly very rarely) Sam seems to like it more and more.  I also made that seared tuna salsa thing for our dinner party, which he liked a lot.

3.  Fish Tacos.  Sam lived in the land of superb fish tacos for years and never ate one.  If I lived in fish taco land, you can bet I'd be eating them every week.  In fact, when we're next in CA, we'll probably just alternate Wahoo's with In N' Out.  Who needs real food when you've got fast food like that?  We also tried to cook fish tacos once, and although they didn't taste very much like real fish tacos, they tasted good, and Sam and I talk about cooking Halibut again.  We just haven't done it.

4.  Red wine sauce.  For steaks.  First of all, Sam very rarely ate steak before we started dating.  He might say he did, but I don't buy it.  He'd never had a really good filet mignon before, that's for damn sure.  Now, it's his old stand-by in expensive restaurants; he's probably eaten a filet at every type of upscale restaurant (Chinese, Italian, Mexican) in Chicago.  His favorite thing is a red wine reduction sauce, which is so odd, because he doesn't like red wine.  In fact, I would say he actively dislikes it.  It's very odd.  But you can almost guarantee that Sam will choose the steak with the red wine sauce on a menu, if it's there. 

5.  Veal.  Okay, he doesn't really eat veal now.  But I can guarantee he'd never eaten veal before he ordered it once at 302 West (sadly defunct now, though Niche aims to inherit its, well, niche).  Eating somewhere like 302 is always an adventure with someone like Sam, because he is so picky.  Usually, he'll order the one beef dish on the menu.  The time he ordered veal (osso buco, essentially), there was no beef on the menu.  We were with his parents, and there was a buffalo steak on the menu, and Sam just couldn't do it.  His dad did, however, and in retrospect, I bet Sam would have rather have had that (minus the "chili" underneath the buffalo [or was it bison?]).  But he soldiered through the veal, which he really didn't love, and he even tasted my veal every time I had it, in Italy.  I'm not sure he'd willingly order it again, not with beef on the menu, but it's a testament to how adventurous (for him!) he's become that he ordered it once.  In fact, it's a testament to how much he's opened up that he'll even go to a place like Niche, because he's taking a blind leap, essentially, every time we dine there.

Eating with Sam sometimes makes me want to scream (sometimes a girl just wants Greek food, yo), but he's literally come miles from where he used to be.  We're slowly finding a loose group of dishes that he can order when we go to any type of restaurant in the city, even if he does grumble about some of the types of food I make him eat.  If he hadn't gotten more adventurous, I don't know that we would have made it 5 years.  Really.

Dilemma

I really want to go to BlogHer.  In the worst way.  It's in my town, so close to my apt. I could almost (althought, sheesh) walk there.  In fact, if I wanted a nice long walk, I could walk there.  The dilemma is that it costs 104.something to register for one day.  And the one day I want to attend (I'm not so interested in Day Two), I will be attending an evening wedding.  I don't think that paying 104.something for a half day's attendance is worth it.  Furthermore, I don't think I can afford to pay that much for what is just a chance for me to listen to some of the bloggers I love reading.  I just can't afford it.  That's all.

I've written to BlogHer to see if there is any chance of half-day registration, but I'm not holding out any hope.  What should I do?  The wedding is so important to me; it's not one of those, "I barely know you but you invited me" sort of a wedding.  It's a long story, but suffice it to say that I'm jumping at the chance to go, and I won't jeopardize that with a conference, no matter how freaking much I'm DYING to go.  Argh.  I guess I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping that a half day thing is a reality, even though duh, I know it won't be.

Okay, now I'm just repeating myself.  Back to TV.

Update:  Elisa from BlogHer contacted me and offered me a pre-conference volunteering opportunity in exchange for a one-day pass.  I turned her down, because I think the volunteering would be a much larger time (and possibly gas money) committment than I have time for.  I'm busy the next 5 weekends, if you count this one.  I want to stress though that Elisa was incredibly geneous with her offer, and my not going is now on me, not them.  I appreciate the offer immensely.  It's just a really busy summer, I guess.

How Do I Love Thee?

Let me count the ways....

Sam and I (yes, Sam.  I'm sick of just typing S and I don't think either one of us is very anonymous on the web anymore) will be celebrating our fifth anniversary in less than a month, and I've been trying to think of something I can do for him, besides giving him a wad of cash that'll go towards his new computer.  This is the first time we've really done gifts; we've gone out for a couple special dinners, but most years our anniversary has just been noted and we've moved on.  (It doesn't help the anniversary that my birthday is a scant six days later, as it's kind of a one-two punch on the spending money.)  But I happen to think that five is a really special anniversary, and something that we should recognize and celebrate.  Me handing Sam cash?  Not very special and romantic.

So I decided that I'm really going to count the ways.  Sort of.  Every few days, or whenever I get the inspiration, I'm going to post a list of five things.  Not five things out of the same category, mind you, but a new list with five items every day.  Some are going to be really silly lists, and some will be kind of sappy and serious.  Some might be annotated, and some might just be lists.  It will totally depend on the the circumstances surrounding the moment I'm writing the post, and the character of the list. 

I love words.  And I can't think of a way to better express to him how much I love him than to throw around words on this blog.  It is, somehow, from the very depth of me that I'll be writing these words, no matter how frivolous they seem.  And he has become a part of the very depth of me, and he should know it.  This is my quirky way.

5 movies I've hated, while with him
1.  Mullholland Drive
2.  Gangs of New York
3.  Solaris
4.  Vanilla Sky
5.  Rocky I

Things I love that are dubiously moral

Football, for one.  And horse racing, for another.  RealSports packed a punch last night on HBO--a double whammy about the NFL having its head up its ass about concussions and long-term effects and horses being so doped up during races that it's destroying the sport.  Both stories were incredibly hard to watch, though no moment was so hard as when two younger-looking (fifties, maybe) ex-football players literally couldn't answer questions, one because of early-onset Alzheimer's and the other because of short-term memory loss and dementia.  It was very devastating, the kind of devastating that brought tears to my eyes.  I personally have a hard time believing that football didn't contribute to these illnesses, and even though right now much of the evidence is anecdotal, it seems convincing.  I don't think it's just two men, or three; I think possibly the numbers are greater than can even be imagined, especially when taking into account mental illnesses such as short-term memory loss and depression, which ex-football players seem to suffer from in spades.

The NFL, of course, is denying any connection between multiple concussions and later problems, and is even saying that it's not proven dangerous to go back in a game before completely recovered from a concussion.  They deny that any of these men's problems have anything to do with football.  Because if they don't, it looks really bad, doesn't it?  It might even hurt the league in the long run; in fact, it's hard to see how it could NOT hurt the league.  One ex-football player says it's all about money, and he may be right.  Which just makes it all the more despicable.  And in fact, most of the guys who are still competant aren't asking that football stop being football, just that the NFL appraise every NFL player of the risks, so that each man can make his own decisions about whether to play while concussed--whether to play at all.  If that means more men opt out (though with the money the way it is, who knows.  Some of the guys who aren't stars, maybe, will opt out.  But guys making millions?  I'm not sure.), then so be it.  I do think that hand-in-hand with this, though, is the fact that coaches need to be aware of the risks, and allow and accept that concussed players (even if the players happen to be the star quarterback or the RB or whoever) may not be playing for a few days, at the very least.  Either way, it was a really horrific story, and really heart-wrenching to watch.  It's another football story that diminishes respect for the NFL and football, in general.

And as for the horse racing, I'm not surprised that the sport is corrupt.  I'm also not surprised that there has not been a Triple Crown winner in twenty-some years (the report last night coincides perfectly with my current reading of The Horse God Built, which is about who else, Secretariat), because drugs have weakend the sport to such a degree that horses no longer seem built for the kind of racing that the Triple Crown demands.  I don't think this current horse, Street Sense, will win it.  The Belmont at a mile and a half is too much for horses these days, and it's too much because training has broken down.  When three or four of the top trainers (Todd Pletcher being one, though his horses obviously didn't win the Derby, so there you go) have drug offenses on their records, that points to a dearth of integrity in the sport.  Which is too bad, because I'm of the opinion that there is nothing so beautiful as a great racehorse winning a big race.  I love it; I never grew out of that teenage girl love of horses, I guess.  But it means that there are no great racehorses anymore, because every win must be suspect.  It's ugly, and if I were a betting person, I'd never bet on the horses.  Too many problems with drugs.

Not to mention the fact that it's incredibly cruel to horses to race them drugged and injured.  An enormous amount of pressure is exerted on the leg bones of a racing horse, and running through pain--as though there wasn't pain--is insanely cruel.  Horses aren't sentient enough to make the decision to play through pain, like humans can, and furthermore, they can't then take care of themselves forever when they're living crippled from the cruelness perpetrated by humans.  Thousands of Thoroughbreds are sent to slaughterhouses every year because they're no longer winners or they're not breeding champions or they're barren--or they're too injured to do any of those things any longer.  And those injuries aren't always freak accidents.  Sometimes they're caused by negligence and again, cruelty on the part of their trainers.  It's hideous, and we're the only horse racing country in the world that allows such practices near our courses.  Drugs are mostly 100% banned in other horse racing countries, which means the sport is still as it should be.  Ability and training and jockeying wins races in England or Ireland, Australia or France.  There is no such assurance here in the states.  We (really) should be ashamed of ourselves.

Odds, Ends

• S's hard drive died.  The hard drive in his laptop.  Died.  He was able to rescue all the files from it, I think, but otherwise, it is now dead.  Part of me is sad for him (and us) because it costs money to replace a hard drive, and what a pain in the ass expense to occur.  The other part of me?  Happy, because it means he won't be raging at his laptop and banging on it and slamming it shut in frustration because it won't do what he wants it to do.  He did not have a good morning yesterday, and it was very dispiriting because he was in very low spirits.  However, when we got home from brunch yesterday, he pressed some buttons on the thing, did a little tinkering, and calmly told me his hard drive was dead.  I mean, this in contrast to the keyboard-pounding maniac he'd been a short four hours before.  It was all very silly, his calm acceptance, and I thought it was a little fishy when he told me that he'd sort of known it was happening for the past few days.  Really?  Then why didn't he tell me that, so I knew that the horrible keyboard-banging would come to an end, eventually?  And I was convinced that we were going to have to buy him a new computer (something we can ill afford).  However.  It's nice to know that there won't be anymore rattling anger aimed at the computer, even if it does mean that he's out a little bit of money. 
• The other thing.  I did something big yesterday.  I cancelled my WW account.  I'm not near a goal-weight.  Most of the weight I lost on WW has come back.  But I'm not using it, and if I know me (and I like to think I do), I'll never really use it again.  It also seemed silly to be paying almost $20 a month for something that was sitting idle.  I can use that money elsewhere, I'll tell you that.  That money saved is enough for almost one car payment, and that's good enough for me.  I'm not sure what it means for my weight loss, except that I know that I'm tired of being guilty about every little damn thing I put in my mouth.  Most days, I hover between feeling damn good about myself and thinking that I need to diet away myself, and it's a really thin line I'm walking with the self esteem.  If I feel like I need WW in the future, I'll re-up.  But I think I've given WW enough of my money, and if I'm going to lose weight, I'm going to have to stop eating most things.  I've said it before, and I'll say it again--I can't eat real food and be skinny.  Never gonna happen for me.  I can live on an austere diet of lean cuisines and eggs and broccoli and 100 calorie packs, or I can not.  I think right now, I'm opting for not.  It's too miserable for me.  I'm not going to start eating like a crazy person--I plan on eating lots of veggies and trying to get the motivation to cook more often, because those meals are just better, all around--but I'm not going to go crazy in the opposite direction anymore either.  It's taken me a long time to come around to the idea that I'm not a failure because WW didn't work (I am terrified of failure.  Irrationally so, probably.), and that it's okay.  I'm going to be okay.  I just want to stop obsessing about what I eat.  No small thing, and for an American woman, it seems damn near impossible.  I also want to stop eating Lean Cuisines.  I mean, seriously.  I want them to be out of my life, permanently.  I need to search out some good lunch plans, but I just want to be done with fake meat and cheese, and dubious sauces.  Again, I'm not sure where that leaves me for lunch, but even if it leaves me with a slice of turkey on whole grain bread, that's better.  That's 40 million times better.  It's going to have to evolve.  And I think it might involve a lot of lunches that include bagels, and nothing else.  Maybe sugar-free jello.  Most likely, during the summer, lots of cherry tomatoes and fresh produce.  It might cost me more effort (making my lunch the night before?) but it will be worth it.  I hope.  And I know it's going to cost some effort to like myself every day, and not stress and worry about the number on the scale.  But that's going to just be something I work at.  That's all.  I'm also, after July 1st (after I can stop trying to wring every single workable hour out of my work day), going to try to work out a couple times of week.  That's something I miss, and I will do it, but I need to be very careful with my work schedule to acheive it, and I can't when I'm trying to work 40 hour weeks.  Otherwise my commute will turn into a bigger stress than the working out will relieve stress.  It's a delicate balance, but I'm going to make some adjustments, as soon as I can, and we'll see what happens.  It's all going to be a process, and I'm not going to talk about it, and I'm not going to spend hours thinking about it or obsessing about it.  Finito.  Basta.