Read in Reverse

Happy New Year

2012-01-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

One of the best things about living in California is that, on the second of January, the following things can happen: t-shirt weather; a hike to the ocean, with waterfalls; snacks with friends on the cliffs above the beach; whale sightings at sunset.

Happy new year, everybody.

12 of 12: September

2011-09-13T21:23:00.000-07:00

12 of 12! Welcome. Credit and thanks to Chad Darnell for a) inventing and b) hosting! Onward.

7:11 - So so SO much more awake than I would like to be.

8:10 - Sherlock surveys the scene and keeps the stuffed mice under control. It's good to have him around. (For safety reasons, you know.)

1:05 - Baby shower leftovers: fancy mac-and-cheese and chicken-apple pigs in blankets. Lunch of champions, obviously.

1:06 - There are a lot of weird off-brand chihuahuas in the world, but Coco here is not one of them. She's awesome and adorable, even when she's trying to charm me out of my pigs in blankets.

1:35 - Scenic 3rd St., Dogpatch, lunchtime.

6:20 - Driving into the sun, headed to the Mission...

6:23 - ...where I drive UP Dolores St....

6:24 - ...and back DOWN Dolores St.

6:25 - The actual mission. It's super pretty.

9:45 - Home from (sadly unphotographed) dinner, and deciding I need to refresh my Neko Case collection. As one does.

10:02 - Sherlock helps.

10:20 - So, you know how everybody says this show is great? They are not lying. IT IS GREAT. You should watch it.

Happy September, everybody.

12 of 12: July

2011-07-12T22:35:00.000-07:00

12 of 12! July. Chad Darnell. Yup.

6:51 - Up.

7:43 - Everybody loves a girl with her own tire gauge and needlenose pliers...right?

9:03 - Welcome to San Francisco! Happy July! Here are your mittens.

10:40 - The Standard Deviants production office: where the magic happens.

11:17 - Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW, one of a number of things I brought back with me from LA.

12:30 - Picking up lunch at kitchenette. Yup...that's a garage. Where I got my lunch.

12:34 - That's "no relish," as in green olives, because they are the fru-its of the de-vil, as are all brined vegetables.

12:42 - Grilled eggplant and heirloom tomato sandwich with feta on green-onion slab bread, with a side of Vietnamese-style caramel corn (caramel, peanuts, fish sauce, chiles, lime). Not cheap, but not bad.

6:23 - Traffic meltdown in the East Bay. Quick! Shorter and red, or longer and yellowish?

6:37 - Aaaand longer and yellowish wins it.

7:30 - At least dinner's waiting for me when I get home. ...I am Don Draper.

8:40 - A walk in the wind, minus headphones, because one can really only listen to so much NPR before things get a little crazy. Obviously.

12 of 12: June

2011-06-12T22:17:00.000-07:00

12 of 12! Welcome! Kudos to Chad Darnell, originator and keeper of the flame.

8:31 - Up, and not too early. As it should be.

9:00 - Cereal stew: Special K with Red Berries + Kashi GoLean Crunch chaser.

9:16 - The way things should be.

10:40 - I moved last Saturday and started a new job on Monday, so this is pretty much how things are right now. Stuff'll get put away...someday?

11:00 - Basket of cat.

12:24 - The Old Navy dressing room, where I try on half the store and buy exactly nothing that I can wear to work.

1:20 - This is probably only funny if you know my dad and his twin passions for Rubio's and building stuff.

1:37 - Al Zampa Bridge, southbound. (It only goes southbound.)

2:50 -Visiting for a friends-and-family screening of Cars 2, thanks to my pal (and Pixar rendering guru) Susan.

5:07 - Eeee! A picture with the Pixar lamp and ball is like Disneyland for grownups.

5:48 - Continuing my quest to assemble a proper work wardrobe, with mixed results. (I didn't buy the dress; I did buy fancy new jeans.)

9:40 - Strawberry rhubarb pie from Ikeda's, which would have been worth the trip to Reno even without, like, graduations and family events and details like that.

Going places

2011-05-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

I just bought a plane ticket to Reno.

Let me tell you a little about this trip: I will fly out of LAX at 8:05. IN THE MORNING. Do you know how early I will have to be at the airport for this to happen? And do you know how far before that time rush hour traffic begins? Then I will fly to Reno. Reno! Which is as cheesy as, and yet not as exciting as, Las Vegas! Then I will attend my youngest cousin's high school graduation. Now: I am very fond of my youngest cousin, and I am more than happy to attend any events in her honor, but a three-hour list of strangers' children, read aloud, is--I'm sorry to say--quality knitting time, at best (except, of course, for the part where we stand up and whoop and holler, because we are a classy bunch).

Still: I am so excited. I get to go somewhere! It's been awhile: since driving west from DC eighteen months ago, I have made many trips between Los Angeles and San Francisco, plus exactly one weekend road trip from Los Angeles to Phoenix. That's it. I haven't been on a plane since August. And I owe so many visits: by rights, Glenna should be dragging me all over Toronto by now, and let's not even talk about how many times I'll have to go to Seattle to make up for my college roommate's willingness to come to me in my hour of poverty. And the East Coast! It's been entirely too long since my last back-porch Sunday lunch with my aunt and uncle. I haven't had ciders at Deacon Brodie's and dinner at Gazala Place with Lauren, or a sleepover with Sarah, or been furniture shopping with my brother, in just a million years. And I'm a little mad at Broadway for having so much stuff I want to see (The Normal Heart with Jim Parsons and Lee Pace! Company with Neil Patrick Harris and Katie Finneran and Stephen Colbert and everybody else in the world!) when they know I can't make it. Rude, right?

But Reno. RE-NO! It's beautiful to me, like a corny, smooshy song from the 70s. It's going to be a million degrees, and I'm all, Excellent for strapless dresses! I will be sharing a hotel room with my parents, which in my mind just means Extra bonding time! It's all an exotic getaway, with suitcases and hotel continental breakfasts (maybe with those make-your-own waffle bars!) and my very own TSA scanner/pat-down dilemma! The excitement of it all: be still my heart!

So, see you all in Nevada. I'll be the one cheering for everything.

12 of 12: April

2011-04-12T22:42:00.000-07:00

Heyyyy, 12 of 12! Credit to Chad Darnell, guru and gracious host.

Anyway:

7:34 - Up, suspiciously early for a sleep-in day.

8:10 - Out for a run. Looking a little hippy, there, shadow! What gives?

8:16 - Running down Triunfo Canyon Road, which I always call TRIUNFO! Canyon Road, emphasis on the TRIUNFO!

9:13 - There is nothing quite like the realization that you are shaving your legs with the equivalent of a bladeless twig, and that Target sells a six-month supply for like $7.

10:11 - If there was ever a question, this grocery list in progress is further proof that I am my father's daughter.

11:47 - Cramming my eighteen pounds of groceries into a single basket, as you do, because using a cart is so much lamer than hunchbacking it around the store with an overloaded basket. Obviously.

12:15 - Throwing together some Sweet Pea and Tuna Salad for a few days' worth of lunches, and listening to everything on my iTunes with a listened-to rate of exactly one. Recommendations: Find some hidden treasures, and follow up with a mint or twelve.

12:50 - Yesterday, I used the last of my Christmas gift cards to buy Tina Fey's new book. (Thanks, Brydon!) The problem, here, is that I have things to do, and now I don't want to do any of them. I just want to read hilarious and embarrassing, yet oddly uplifting, stories about growing up and becoming a TV writer.

1:25 - Speaking of things to do: Have I mentioned that I write book reports for work? Why did nobody tell me this was an option? Here, my thoughts on a surprisingly well-written zombie book.

6:13 - This is how Starbucks gets you: Just the right armchair, just the right afternoon light, just the right level of white noise, just the right kind of music to drown out via Frightened Rabbit on headphones, just the right kind of milk and sugar without ever having to buy more. If I ever get any writing done, it was probably there.

7:33 - It is, in my opinion, one of the great secrets of home cooking that roasted asparagus tastes an awful lot like potato chips. (Plus fish. And potatoes, which also taste like chips with the proper application of olive oil and salt.)

8:40 - Yes, this is our freezer. Yes, it is full of Drumsticks. No, it is not always like this. Yes, I had an intense conversation with myself about the importance of one Drumstick per day. Not two. ONE.

Happy twelfth, everybody!

Zen and the Art of Air Bed Maintenance

2011-04-11T23:02:00.000-07:00

These days, I spend a surprising amount of time and mental energy on my bed. I don't mean while on my bed—I mean the bed itself requires a certain degree of involvement. When I moved to LA, I folded the seats of my VW Golf down and packed up the entire contents of my bedroom-to-be, including the brand-new queen-sized double-tall air mattress my parents had recently bought as extra sleeping space for their cabin. Nearly six months later, the air bed and I are hanging in there, still experimenting with degrees of firmness, concepts of object attachment, and the ideal conditions for avoiding puncture wounds (or not). I think I've learned a few things about air bed life:

- Inflatable things need, or at least cause, constant monitoring. Air bed ownership (borrowership) is a constant fact-finding mission. Is the bed losing air? Is the bed sitting on top of any cords? Is the bed too close to the wall, and rubbing against it? Is the air bed anywhere within the vicinity of pins, needles, or anything else that might cause it grief? Is the bed too firm or too soft, causing neck pain? With the air bed, change is bad.

- Inflatable things get holes. It's hard to express the irrational sense of doom that came over me the first time my bed sprang a leak. It's not like I had no other place to sleep; there are no fewer than four full-sized couches, one love seat, and one totally unloved gigantic armchair in my house. But because air beds aren't made for activities other than being perfectly horizontal (more on that in a moment), the odds of detecting a leak before it's four a.m. and your head is resting on the ground are slim—and somehow, that particular exchange with gravity is, at that time of the night, the very worst thing imaginable. These days, the occasional hole isn't such a big psychological event (so far they've all been located on the sleeping surface, and easy to find—and I pray daily that the side seams never give out); outdoor stores sell air bed repair kits, but I've had plenty of success with a Sharpie to mark the hole, a glob of Super Glue to close it up, and a triangle of hot pink duct tape to keep everything in place and looking classy. Because I'm nothing if not the paragon of good breeding and high standards: my bed is, after all, a double-tall.

- Inflatable things are not immune to mildew. When combined with a foam egg crate, mattress pad, flannel sheets, down comforter, two pillows, and a human being with functioning endocrine system. Ask me how I know!

- Inflatable things are not for sitting. This is perhaps the worst thing about having an inflatable bed: real mattresses don't "crush" around the edges, making them ideal for sitting on, say with a laptop. Like, to write. Or watch TV. Or read without putting one arm to sleep. Not so with the air beds, which will leave a person V-ed against the wall without a second thought, and then possibly spring a leak just for the sake of revenge. (Enter the ugly fold-up camp chair I also appropriated from my parents, which stands in for my beloved antique armchair but is simply not the same.) It's distressing.

- Inflatable things need love, too. Let me clarify something: I have a bed. A real one, a queen-size with a modern sleigh-bed frame and the world's most comfortable mattress. With springs and everything! I adore that bed, and I live daily with the bright and shining hope that we will be together again some day. In the mean time, let me also assure you that it is quite possible to get attached to an air mattress. With the right sheets and the proper level of exhaustion, that blissful moment of flopping (or, in my case, crawling gingerly, taking care not to stress the structure of the mattress; see above) down with a great sigh of "MY BED!" is absolutely possible. Never mind that it's a glorified pool toy. In that moment, it's the most glorious pool toy.
Some day, I imagine I'll be reunited with my beloved, sittable, non-mildewing, non-hole-prone bed, and I will be a grateful and slightly more happy-go-lucky girl on that day. However, I've developed a strange affection for the air bed. It's served me well. And in case of emergency, well, you probably won't see anybody else bringing their beds along.

12 of 12: February

2011-02-14T12:05:00.000-08:00

Heyyyy, it's 12 of 12, back in action after a month where I took the pictures and then was too busy to upload them. Soooo, yay for not having a life? All credit to Chad Darnell, creator and keeper of the 12 of 12 flame; for more, check out his site.

7:45 - Up.

11:27 - Proctoring a practice SAT, and let me tell you: there's nothing more exciting than watching high school students take a test for four hours on a Saturday morning. (Good book, though.)

1:34 - High school students, naked plaster ladies frolicking...must be Saturday?

1:55 - Gas is SO EXPENSIVE right now. Why is nobody else freaking out about this?

2:02 - My beloved salsa bar at my beloved Sea Casa, neighborhood health-conscious taqueria extraordinaire. Because sometimes a girl just needs some grilled fish with her pureed roasted tomatoes.

4:05 - Malibu Canyon, which is so cool that I'm always a little surprised it's a valid way to get where I want to go.

5:34 - Awesome.

5:58 - Did you know that there are grown-up monkey bars/rings/climbing ropes on the beach at Santa Monica? This is my friend, showing off an upper-body-strength-to-body-weight ratio that I cannot even hope to emulate.

6:05 - ....Winter? Okay.

6:10 - Cool! I feel like there's a geometry word problem waiting to happen here, but maybe that's just me.

8:03 - My feet. Not my fire.

8:10 - Any evening spent around a fire at the beach with friends, blankets, wine, and burgers can't be all bad. Or ANY bad, actually.

Happy Valentine's Day, all!

2011-02-05T22:09:00.000-08:00

People, sometimes I look at this poor sad lonely blog, and I get weighed down by how much I haven't said here. Like how I moved and what I'm doing and where I'm living, and how I actually did last month's 12 of 12 but was too busy to upload it until it sort of seemed too late. It's so hard being me!

I can't do those things, but I can tell you about some things I'm pretty into these days, because if there's anything I enjoy, it's making others love the things I love. Here are some of those things:

- The Hemlock Ring
When you're a new knitter, there are certain projects that you think, if this is what knitters do, knitters must be crazy people. Things like, I don't know, lace blankets based on doily patterns from 1942? That said, a good stern blocking and extra-pointy bind-off edge make me feel like a fiber arts badass.

- Espinacas con garbanzos!:
Aha! You wouldn't click if I said "spinach with chickpeas," but this is not just spinach with chickpeas. This is tangy, and spicy, and Spanish, and totally deserving of a gratuitous exclamation point. I make it without the bread, but with a link or two of the orangest, most Spanish-like sausage I can find, and it shocks me every time with the depth of its deliciousness.

- The Civil Wars:
I went to a couple of their shows around LA in December and January—my roommate and I are tangentially acquainted with Joy Williams, having worked with her family and occasionally with Joy herself at summer camp—and fell instantly in love. Now their new album is number one on iTunes (just ahead of Mumford and Sons' Sigh No More, which is also pretty great), allowing me to be both thrilled for them and insufferably smug for knowing allllll about them, like, a month ahead of time.

- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I KNOW. I'M SUCH A REVOLUTIONARY. But no, really, the entire reading world is not lying to you about this series. I may not sleep until it's finished. (I also just finished Life of Pi, which I loved for completely different reasons; perhaps someday I will read something not from the Book Club Favorites! shelf, or whatever.)

See? Was that so hard? Let's do this more often, shall we?

12 of 12: December

2010-12-12T23:00:00.000-08:00

Happy merry feliz 12 of 12! All credit to Chad Darnell, keeper and curator of the 12s. Enjoy!

8:35 - This is a visual represntation of the weekly moment where I try to convince myself that an hour and twenty minutes is totally enough time to make it to church on time, including shower and drive time. I think the ushers would disagree.

8:50 - Not helping the punctuality situation: my roommate's late-night art project, a candy-assisted thank-you card/book for her Secret Santa beneficiary/victim. She had to give it away...why, again?

8:52 - Loading up the candy book, some old-timey Dr. Pepper, and the recipient's favorite Do-Si-Do Girl Scout cookies. Out of season. Because my roommate's magical like that.

9:47 - It seems that my thirty years of careful avoidance of the banana portion of the fruit-and-cream oatmeal pack was unnecessary all this time! Fake bananas in oatmeal are delicious!

11:09 - Admission of guilt: I wasn't totally excited about church this morning until I got there. Advent, man. Just TRY to stay apathetic.

12:34 - Tortillas. Cheese. Eggs. Salsa. Lunch.*

1:15 - Tag-teaming Miss Osborne's post about plum pudding (with recipe, oh la la!).

1:47 - Seeing the light at the end of the Hemlock Ring. Only, um, 3500 stitches to go? Plus laughably complex bind-off?

3:36 - Talking to my mom, I think.

6:30 - Post-running dinner--this, simple and amazing--and Buffy. Willow approves.

8:15 - My down-the-street neighbors have Linus and Charlie Brown in their front yard! I don't know these people, but I would like to. Clearly, they are delightful.

8:34 - Packing for tomorrow's whirlwind--read: very short--trip to Vegas! Packin' my stilettoes and my bail money. By which I mean jammies and a toothbrush.

Happy holidays, people!

* It now occurs to me how gross this lunch looks. Sorry about that. Mmmm, brains!

12 of 12: November

2010-11-14T18:23:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the second-to-last-ever (official) 12 of 12! This is the brainchild of Chad Darnell, who's been a generous and thoughtful host for however many years. Thanks, Chad!

And:

6:45 - Morning glamor shot. Ooh la...la?

6:47 - Soul-crushing winter darkness aside, waking up after the sunrise is SO MUCH BETTER.

7:46 - Not gonna lie: commuting (the) 101 through the Valley is a trek. But it's not so bad on a sunny, traffic-less Friday morning (ultra-depressing NPR reports of late notwithstanding).

8:35 - Welcome to Universal. We love our entretenimiento!

8:50 - Meet my pal the Hulk, who greets me at the bottom of the elevator every day. In my mind, his barely-contained rage at being replaced by Ben Stiller will someday simmer over, evidenced only by the smashed remains of a Little Fockers poster...but maybe that's just me.

11:00 - Yeah, that Post-It says "Reading Pile."

12:14 - Actually, though, why didn't anybody tell me that I could work for a production company and write book reports all day?

1:15 - Clam chowder and a spinach salad for my Friday afternoon.

3:47 - Every afternoon for about two hours, the sun disappears behind the NBC Universal building. I feel like this must be some kind of metaphor.

5:36 - Partially empty parking garages freak me out. Too much Alias in my brain, I think.

9:30 - Reading The Historian in front of our roaring fire; truthfully, REM sleep commenced approximately .003 seconds after this. This is why I'm so awesome at parties.

11:37 - Aaaand killing one last picture, mostly for my mother, who wants to know what my new room looks like. Here, Mom!

See you next month.

12 of 12: October (Moving Day Eve Edition)

2010-10-12T22:35:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the packing-up edition of 12 of 12, in which I prepare for and try not to stress out about tomorrow's big move to Los Angeles. Credit for 12 of 12 goes to one Chad Darnell, purveyor of this fine photo meme.

Onwards:

8:06 - Up.

8:07 - Sherlock says good morning, by which he actually means "please rub my tummy now."

8:50 - I wait all year for day-after-Thanksgiving pie for breakfast, and you're telling me I could do this all the time? I just have to make a pie? WHAT.

9:10 - Streaky in-between-coats legs for a table I decided to paint purple—aubergine, really—because I figure there's nothing like a good home-improvement project while you're trying to move out of your actual home.

10:47 - Drawer and desk, drying.

12:30 - Yes, this is a yellow mustard and yellow tomato sandwich with cheese. Only the best for me.

1:20 - The messy, unsettling, everything-is-everywhere stage of packing.

2:40 - Last night's Chuck is FAR more interesting than the proper ratio of clothes to boxes in my life. (Ooh, Sarah Walker wants to marry Chuck Bartowski! Can't say I blame her.)

3:40 - Packing up the medicine cabinet; also, if you look carefully, the Tootsie Roll bank I got in second grade and still use as a change keeper.

4:29 - Fabio: seats down, doors open.

5:10 - Fabio: half-packed, with tons of room left over. Thank heavens for a hatchback car and an engineer dad.

6:18 - Pre-posting tomorrow's Austenacious, in anticipation of how much I'm not going to feel like posting when I get there.

P.S. 10:15 - Pie for dessert. Shhhh!

What I'm Watching

2010-09-30T00:15:00.000-07:00

Oh, people, sing it with me: It's the most wonderful tiiiiiiime of the yeaaaaaaar!

Earlier than you thought, right?

I don't, of course, mean the holidays, with their emotional stress and financial duress and nutritional abyss. I mean the TV premiere season, where new shows blossom and great old ones continue, and suddenly everybody's way more into fiction—whether or not they admit it. It's a beautiful and promising time, premiere week.

As usual, here's the semi-annual rundown of What I'm Watching:

Sunday

Mad Men
10 p.m. on AMC
Premise: The lives and loves (and lusts) of Madison Avenue ad execs in the 1960s.
I think this is the first time in the history of Mad Men that I've been able to think critically and strategically about it mid-season—normally, everything in the Mad Men universe happens so slowly and with such subtlety that patterns don't emerge until the trajectory of each season is complete, when everything aligns with a satisfying click. But the times, they are a-changin' as the show approaches the mid-60s, and the tenor of Don Draper's life is both more fun (Don and Lane seeing Godzilla in the theater, Peggy riding circles on a motorcycle in an empty sound stage) and more depressing (Don's move from "business drunk" to "mopey, barfy alcoholic") than it was when he had a second life in the 'burbs (speaking of, little Sally Draper's experiences in the '60s are going to put her in therapy, or worse, for all of the '70s—aren't they?). This season is faster-moving than anything we've seen before, but maybe that's an homage to the cultural shift we're seeing in the show. Whatever it is, it's still great, if not even better than it's ever been.

Monday

Chuck
8 p.m. on NBC
Premise: Fomerly "nice underachiever accidentally downloads government secrets to his own brain; becomes reluctant spy"; now presumably "full-fledged spy slowly recruits loved ones for ultimate espionage family!" At least, I hope so.
This season, Chuck finds itself in a funny position—that of having survived. It's a show that's constantly on the bubble, always being saved by some fan campaign (which NEVER works, except for here), and having a fourth season at all is some kind of a small miracle. Last year, the premise of the show changed completely—Chuck still works at the Buy More, but it's just his cover. He's a capital-S Spy, complete with a new and improved Intersect, actual weapons training (he's still partial to tranq technology, bless his heart), and permission to leave the car on missions. He's made things officially official with Sarah, and none of his loved ones still think he's just a Stanford dropout with a minimum-wage job. So now what? I think this is where, if they know what's good for them, Chuck changes again—and becomes a spy family show. I think this is where they become The Incredibles minus the powers, or the later seasons of Alias minus the downward spiral. I also think this is where they take the opportunity to disprove in no uncertain terms the famous and misguided Moonlighting fallacy, allowing Chuck and Sarah to remain in a committed relationship without becoming either boring or dumb, or both. Whether or not this is the actual trajectory of the show, I can't say—but either way, I have faith.

Lone Star
9 p.m. on FOX
Premise: Young Texas oil man leads a double life. And, one supposes, lies about it.
Well, this is depressing. Lone Star was, if you can believe it, the only new show on my fall schedule—and it's gone two weeks in. Under normal circumstances, I'd blame FOX's long and storied history of smothering great shows before their time, but here I'm going to have to blame the viewing public. Lone Star was a good show that was consistently marketed by FOX and well-received by critics—but nobody watched it. Like, nobody. So long, surprisingly adept grab for Friday Night Lights's off-season audience. We hardly knew ye.

Tuesday

Glee
8 p.m. on FOX
Premise: Rag-tag band of glee club dorks find themselves and sing about it.
In the stable of TV-boyfriend personalities, Glee is like that guy who's totally cute and seems like a total catch, but who won't ever take out the garbage when you want him to. I spend my Tuesday nights with it, and sometimes we have a lot of fun together, but just as often it drives me crazy. I want so badly for it to be a great show—to be as good a show as it could be. What if it had coherent storylines and discernible themes? What if it understood set-ups and pay-offs? What if it had snappy dialogue and dance-y musical numbers plus the emotional depth of Freaks and Geeks or Gilmore Girls? These, ladies and gentlemen, are the things that keep me up at night. I thought the season premiere was a mess—no actual arcs of any kind, less-believable-than-usual behavior on the part of Schuester and others, and where's my sometimes style guru Emma Pillsbury?—but I also thought it was par for the Glee course (with, to be fair, an excellent opening sequence, a cool duet of "Telephone," and a new character played by the fifteen-time national female arm-wrestling champion). And predictably, I sort of loved "Britney/Brittany"—not because it was great, but because it was competent, and it had John Stamos as a (presumably musical) dentist. I just don't learn, do I?

Wednesday

Modern Family
9 p.m. on ABC
Premise: Three branches of the same family are hilarious and endearing.
I know exactly when I decided I'd be watching Modern Family: Sarah and I were in Times Square, sitting on our suitcases and listening to Broadway on Broadway, and the ABC jumbotron overhead was looping ads for Modern Family, Cougarville, and whatever horrible thing it was that happened to Katherine Heigl on Grey's Anatomy last season...over and over and over. For like four hours. Halfway through, they had me. ALL RIGHT ALREADY, I said, I WILL WATCH YOUR NEW SITCOM, WHICH ACTUALLY LOOKS SORT OF FUNNY. GET OFF MY BACK GEEZ. And, really, I have no regrets over Modern Family. It's like Arrested Development, if Arrested Development were nice. There's no way I could ever choose a favorite character, nor would I want to (except, if I had to, I might choose Gloria because of that episode with her and Jay's dog butler, but then where does that leave me and Cam?). Also: every time I watch it, I say to myself, "This is the show I wanna write." Now that's good TV.

Thursday

Bones
8 p.m. on FOX
Premise: A socially awkward forensic anthropologist and her hottie FBI partner solve murders using the victims' skeletons.
It's true that my sunny, happy murder show has taken a turn for the heartbreaking over the past year, what with Brennan always riding away in some taxi, sadly, and Booth making his patented Face of Unrequited Love all the time. But here's the thing: as previously noted, Bones has a history of knocking my socks off just when I completely expect to be disappointed, and—ahem—with five seasons of waiting and a romance that's beginning to strain credibility, this is probably a great time for them to work some of their magic. This season's premiere was essentially unambitious—after "The End in the Beginning," I expect only silly alternate-universe hijinks, and am mildly disappointed with anything else unless it involves the circus—but it also carefully emphasized the Jeffersonian crew as one big happy wisecracking family, which is ultimately what keeps this show afloat, especially in the absence of Booth and Brennan having mercy on us all and finally making out. Which doesn't mean you're off the hook, [Showrunner] Hart Hanson. We know what we want.

30 Rock
8:30 p.m. on NBC
Premise: Tina Fey plays herself, only single. (A behind-the-scenes look at the life of a female head writer on a sketch comedy show.)
To those on the inexplicable and insulting "women aren't as funny as men" train—which, by the way, don't ever say that to me—I say, consider 30 Rock when it's written by Tina Fey and/or Kay Cannon, and consider 30 Rock when it's written by anybody else. One is hilarious and wise and true, and sometimes guest-stars Matt Damon as Liz's soulmate, and one is inconsistent and sometimes ends with un-Liz Lemon behavior and a broken heart on my part. (I'll let you decide which is which.) I'm sorry to say that I think 30 Rock is beginning to age in strange ways (not that you'd know it from the premiere, which was written by Tina Fey and was totally spot-on), but it doesn't—I'll watch Liz Lemon 'til the end.

So that's the fall schedule, and you can be sure that I'm fully aware of how unambitious it is. No new shows! How is that even possible? I'm not even carving out time for the new JJ Abrams project, Undercovers, which goes against my personal pro-JJ philosophy, and I found No Ordinary Family tedious when I saw it this summer. No matter what good things I've heard about The Event, I have automatic resentment for anything that presents itself as "the next Lost." I'm thrilled to see Melissa McCarthy—Sookie St. James from Gilmore Girls—working again, but I can't get into Mike and Molly. The new stuff's not speaking to me, is all.

Of course, this isn't exactly everything. I'm still hanging on every word of Friday Night Lights and very much enjoying Leverage as a hiatus show. I have every intention of giving Community another try (I didn't connect with the early episodes at all, but I loved the heck out of the paintball episode). I gave up on Parenthood last year, but now feel the nagging desire to start up again. I hope to catch up on Fringe and The Good Wife, which I hear only sparkling things about, and I'm only on Season Three of Buffy. There's a lot of TV out there, and so much of it is happening without me—but a girl's got to have a life (...I hear). So this is where I'm starting.

12 of 12: September

2010-09-13T11:51:00.000-07:00

In which fall comes to 12 of 12! For more, see Chad Darnell.

8:38 - Up.

9:15 - What were Sunday mornings created for, if not for reading in bed with cat? This is Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather, which is unexpectedly wonderful.

12:20 - Researching funding options for a documentary series I'm working on. Please, Diddy?

12:40 - Tasty Dog, brown mustard, no onions. Greatest.

2:28 - Triumphant sock knitting; less-than-triumphant Niner football. Ouch.

3:54 - Admittedly trying to squeeze a last-minute post between 12-of-12 posts, so I can pretend I update this site regularly. Amazingly, it worked!

4:57 - Note: When one leaves on time for church, one might get there early! Some of you know how revolutionary this is for me.

5:03 - Still early.

7:45 - Post-service ice cream sundaes; my friend John mixed strawberry and butter pecan, which I pretended in the moment not to judge, but...ew.

7:52 - Good, good friends.

8:40 - Catching up on the way home from church: Promised Land, in which Ira Glass opens with his "I wish" song and Starlee Kine finally gets to go to Disneyland.

9:07 - Finding that elusive space between "clothes" and "jammies" where so much work gets done. Excellent.

To October and beyond!

Thirty and flirty and thriving

2010-09-13T00:34:00.000-07:00

I turned thirty a few weeks ago.

I went to Disneyland for my birthday, because of course nothing says "new horizons of maturity" like singing animals, hordes of children in polyester costumes, and unrealistic expectations about love.

Actually, it was because I have these friends, Maggie and Sue and Mandy—actual, honest-to-goodness lifelong friends. We're scattered all over the West now, and living a diversity of lives, but there was a time when we used to own coordinating Winnie-the-Pooh paraphernalia and talk along with the safety warnings on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and so we set aside the weekend between three of our birthdays to spend together. Specifically, Sue and Mandy and I spent two days revisiting our ~~awkward~~ glory days and then road-tripped to Scottsdale to visit Maggie and her new baby (newborns being un-conducive to the continuous riding of the Matterhorn, unless of course you are my parents and allegedly don't mind handing off your infant son to the ride attendant for a few minutes, which by the way I am absolutely not making up). In any case, I have to say: I don't actually talk to any of these girls all that often, but it doesn't seem to matter. Something about thirty years of shared history makes it easy. We're exactly who we always were, only more so—different-er than we ever have been, if that's even possible—and I think we fit together better than ever. I'm pretty sure our six-year-old selves would have approved (but also would have encouraged me to buy those sequined Minnie Mouse ears that I showed such discipline in leaving in the store. Ah, well).

Thirty didn't hit me hard. I didn't and don't feel especially contemplative about it; it's not like the weight of the universe is pressing on my lady parts. If anything, I'm feeling the opposite—the sense of confidence and self-acceptance they say comes with a new decade, but not in a hair-care-commercial kind of way. It's not an angsty age, thirty.

That said, my good friend Amanda wrote a great post for her birthday this spring: Thirty-Onederful Wishes for her thirty-first year. I loved what she had to say, and I decided to steal her idea (because that's another thing about being thirty: knowing when not to reinvent the wheel; also being able to make silly statements like "that's another thing about being thirty," like life is Marie Claire magazine). And so.

Thirty wishes for thirty years:

I want to be the salt of the earth. I don't want to settle. I want to know a good thing when I see it. I want to spend my days writing something I love: TV, or not. I want to control my tongue. I want to be a faithful friend. I want to visit all fifty states (current count: thirty-nine). I want to visit Africa, Cape Horn, and the Great Wall of China. I want to be better at conflict. I want to knit everything. I want to read everything. I want to give a home to a child who needs it. I want to look my reptilian nemeses in the eye and not run away screaming. I want to take my future family to Mount Hermon. I want my current family to be healthy and engaged and not afraid to have fun together. I want to live in an old house with hardwood floors and lots of windows and probably floral wallpaper. I want a teleportation device. I want a gentleman with selected characteristics of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zachary Levi, John Krasinski, Jon Stewart, and Jon Hamm to fall in love with me. Seriously, though, I want to meet a guy who makes me tingle but also makes me want to share a life with him. I want him to want the same thing. I want to make gluey potatoes and German pancakes like my mom's. I want a guest bedroom, so my friends don't have to sleep on the couch when they visit. I want to say "I want" less. I want to tell my friends how much I love them. I want to road trip. I want to find the elusive balance between interrupting with the answer, rudely, and not knowing the answer, vapidly. I want to run a race with my dad. I want to learn how to apologize. I want to try out for Jeopardy! I want a Roomba. And, of course, I sincerely and unequivocally want world peace.

Ask me again at thirty-one.

12 of 12: August

2010-08-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

Another month, another batch of photos. 12 of 12 is the brainchild of Chad Darnell; blame him.

8:06 - It was a dark and ~~stormy~~ foggy ~~night~~ morning.

8:45 - French toast! On a WEEKDAY! Hanging out with retired parents rules.

8:50 - Alex reaps the leftover benefits, which he then guards zealously from Sherlock, who doesn't recognize them as food anyway.

10:45 - Act IV, take two. Or three. Four? Hard to say.

11:38 - Water lilies and a goldfish in my parents' backyard pond; slightly less romantic than Water Lilies due to non-cleaning of algae filter. Yum.

3:30 - Zipping to the library to pick up some old photos from a librarian friend.

3:38 - Let me just say: 1995 was not a cute time for any of us, and Academic Decathlon sadly did not have a "please stop looking like a dork/dressing like your grandmother" event. But...but at least we memorized all the capitals of Africa and were intimately familiar with the history and economic impact of the Nestle Corporation. Right?

7:20 - Hand and Foot with friends after dinner...

9:30 - ...followed by birthday peach cobbler! Which is the best kind of peach cobbler!

9:45 - Somebody forgot to birthday-ize the cobbler, but this is healthier, anyway. Happy early birthday, Mom!

10:30 - Watching the Perseids from the driveway. (With flash.)

11:45 - Sherlock's default position/location.

Now I'm never going to get a job

2010-08-07T00:31:00.000-07:00

So, I haven't been writing much about my summer—and it's all because I'm looking for work. This is the Internet! People read things! Don't you know about Heather B. Armstrong, who got fired for blogging on the job ~~and then got huge ad contracts and a book deal and now doesn't need a job-job anyway~~? How can I start on my personal path to Internet stardom if I can't get hired, so I can get fired?

But, you know, there's a larger life truth here: sometimes it's not worth existing on the Internet if you can't tell funny stories. I think this is one of those times, and I'm pretty sure the getting-hired portion of this story isn't going to be a problem anyway.

So. This is the story of how I accidentally ditched my friend and watched a horror movie instead of having a job interview.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to interview for an internship at a production company that shall not be named. We made an appointment for 2 p.m. the following Monday, and my contact said she'd call on Friday to confirm—which she didn't. Meanwhile, I wasn't even sure which of my many applications the interview corresponded with, and couldn't find any definitive mention of them on Google, which of course is always a good sign. Ah, well. Glenna and I road-tripped to San Diego, caught up in the geek vortex that is Comic-Con, and then headed for LA.

Monday afternoon, I dropped Glenna off at a Starbucks on Sunset with promises to be back in an hour. The address I had was a house in the Hollywood hills, with a gate, so I called my contact and told her I was waiting outside.

"Oh," she said, "I thought we'd agreed that I'd call on Friday to confirm."

So did I, of course, but I didn't point that out. People flake on phone calls all the time--and she hadn't said we weren't meeting if she didn't call. So there I was, perched on the side of a very steep hill behind the Chateau Marmont, sweating profusely due to it being summer and all, and preparing to leap out of the way in case of any lizards that might dart into my path (Have we talked about my lizard phobia? Well, there you have it: I have a lizard phobia).

Then she said, Well, we're having a screening this afternoon at 2:30, and we were going to invite you—which was totally a lie, because when were they going to invite me to the thing they didn't think I was showing up for, exactly? But I said I'd go and texted Glenna to tell her I'd be awhile.

The screening was over on the West Side, and took me forty minutes of Sunset construction traffic and a couple of U-turns to get to. So I got to this office building, parked, and found the screening, and we all stood around while the actual DVD showed up from somewhere across town—during which nobody, including my contact, talked to me. Eventually, I cornered her and asked her a) who she was, exactly, (answer: the assistant) b) what we were watching, and c) how long the movie would be. At 3:30, the DVD showed up—a feature-length sci-fi/horror movie, apparently, that the company was thinking of converting to 3-D—because the only thing better than horror movies is horror movies that appear to be eating your face, right?

The movie was about ghosts and drugs. Ghosts and drugs with a side of rape and torture, actually. Not a slasher movie, so there was that, but let me say again: ghosts and drugs. Awesome.

The assistant had made some vague noises about my coming back to the studio after the screening—but by the time the movie was over, it was almost 5:30, and poor Glenna was still at Starbucks with nothing but her knitting and a crushing case of allergies, and also I'd spent the previous two hours watching ghosts/drugs and planning my exit strategy. I told the assistant I had to go, picked up my car from the valet (joy), and rewarded myself with a lollipop on the way back across town. Because, trust me, everything's a little better with a lollipop.

Hilariously, on the way out, one of the higher-ups—I still don't know who he was, because of how the assistant didn't tell me anything about anything—was all, "Great! Can you work tomorrow?"

I said I was sorry, but I really, really couldn't.

12 of 12: July (Summer Camp Edition)

2010-07-13T15:07:00.000-07:00

Happy mid-July, everybody! For more 12 of 12, check out Chad Darnell—it's his baby.

8:08 - Waking up at my aunt's house in Santa Cruz.

9:13 - This day sponsored by anti-Plague pills and hopes that my summer cold isn't really tuberculosis, like in a Eugene O'Neill play.

9:30 - The actual, literal happiest place on Earth. I don't care what Disneyland told you.

10:11 - Outside at camp, listening to the morning speaker as the fog burns off.

10:30 - My summer camp is better than your summer camp because my summer camp makes donuts from scratch every morning.

10:45 - Giant Slip-n-Slide on the rec field! My pal Olivia's out there somewhere.

12:40 - Down the road at the world's greatest taqueria, Taqueria Vallarta.

2:30 - Random boating, because we are at camp.

2:32 - Olivia, Amy, me, and Tim on Zayante Creek. We are, it turns out, terrible boaters.

5:12 - Playing Shanghai before dinner, in which I almost win, but we run out of time.

6:59 - In the so-called Pretty Potty, known mostly for the giant summer staff after-hours dance party the custodial staff threw (throws?) there annually. You'd be amazed.

9:15 - Highway 17, Los Gatos. Heading home.

The Summer of Buffy

2010-07-06T23:11:00.000-07:00

This summer, I'm going through a rite of passage. It's a little late, to be honest, but you can just call me a late bloomer.

This is the Summer of Buffy.

I missed Buffy the Vampire Slayer the first time around—I was in high school and college, and getting my monster-of-the-week fix via The X-Files, and I'm not sure what happened. I wasn't paying attention? I wasn't into vampires? I didn't know about Joss Whedon (though, to be fair, nobody really knew about Joss Whedon in those days)? Whatever. I missed it.

I put it off for nearly a decade—not because I thought I wouldn't like it, but because I knew I would love it. I wanted to be in a place where, just in case, I could mainline Buffy without the normal trappings of an adult life—job, rent, you know how it goes—to distract me. I was thinking pregnancy bed rest, or possibly surgery for my nonexistent bunions. Well, you know what's a lot like both of those things, without the painful physical implications? Unemployment.

I just finished the first season, and I'm surprised about a lot of things.

I'm surprised by how many of my assumptions have turned out to be wrong: There's a sense in which, by being on the internet, Buffy's bound to become a part of one's fannish vocabulary. I knew things! Things about the plot! Except for the part where the things I knew were mostly inaccurate in fact or in context! I blame the internet.

I'm surprised that Buffy's mom is still alive. For example. I thought she died right off the bat, but Christine tells me that's much later.

I'm surprised at how little backstory there is: Buffy's the Slayer, period, end of discussion. It's nice, cutting straight to the (vampire) chase.

I'm surprised by how short all of Buffy's skirts and pants are. Did we really do that?

I'm surprised by Angel: I came to David Boreanaz via my weird affection for Bones, and I wasn't sure I'd have any patience for Baby Boreanaz's broody ways. This just in: I was a crazy person. Of course Angel made all the girls' hearts go pitter-pat! He's tortured and he has a soul and he wears that leather jacket, and it's super hot! Smitten. Immediately.

I'm surprised by Sarah Michelle Gellar: I like her. Huh.

What I hear about Buffy, over and over, is that I haven't even scratched the surface of it—that the show is barely itself in the first season. I like it anyway, though, Scooby Doo "and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you kids!" vibe and all. It's dopey and funny in a way that I can identify as the germ of later Whedon hilarity. I'm impressed by his imagination, and his willingness to be obviously metaphorical, and the many ways he invents to show us the monsters of adolescence, or of life generally. I'm excited to see what happens (not that I don't already know, right?), or at least whether Buffy's clothes ever get less horrendous (also up for a Stacy/Clinton intervention: one Willow Rosenberg). I see good times ahead.

Next up: in which I become a big girl, TV-wise.

12 of 12: June

2010-06-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

Summer weekend 12 of 12! Rock on. For more, hit up Chad Darnell.

8ish: Awake. Housesitting again.

9ish: Taking Milo, my housemate for the week, out for a run. PSA: the "dog in one hand, Fresh Air in the other, while running" model is an exercise in multi-tasking.

10ish: Waiting for my water to boil with an issue of Craft: so old that they were...still making a magazine. Because there's nothing better after a run in ninety-degree weather than a nice, hot breakfast?

11ish: The very last episode of The Wire. I'm so glad to have seen it, and I won't forget it, but do not watch this show unless you are prepared to feel some feelings, people.

1ish: I point out my lunch (tomatoes and ricotta on toast with poached eggs) entirely for the purpose of boasting about my first-ever successful execution of the lauded but risky-sounding whirlpool method.

3ish: Fresh lemonade with fresh mint, Four Corners Cafe, San Pablo Ave. at Solano. So good that I walked six blocks each way and sat in their un-air-conditioned cafe to drink it.

4ish: Lemonade-fueled work flurry.

5ish: Walking Milo around Albany, land of cute tiny houses and spectacular gardens.

7ish: Adorability ensues: My friends Al and Ellen's thirty-seventh wedding anniversary. With cake!

8ish: The sunset through my dirty windshield.

8:30ish: Freeway, Alcatraz, and the Golden Gate Bridge at dusk. In that order.

9ish: Christine making popcorn. From scratch! It's like a science experiment! Yield: baseball and Anne of Green Gables, in that order.

Happy summer, all!

12 of 12: May

2010-05-12T22:44:00.000-07:00

Happy 12 of 12, everybody; all credit/blame goes to Chad Darnell. Enjoy!

8:00 - Waking up; no, I have not painted/gotten new sheets/gotten new apartment. I have, however, gotten a house-sitting gig, so there you go.

8:20 - Watching Lost first thing, before the Internet spoils me. Clyde helps.

11:15 - Hibiscus tea cooler, script notes, and sunshine at the Peet's on Fourth St. My life is so hard.

12:30 - I'm unclear on the necessity of giant soccer balls hanging from the ceiling of Bette's Oceanview Diner, but then again, does anybody ever really need giant soccer balls hanging overhead, especially when there's already retro adorableness and breakfast food involved? BONUS.

12:50 - Brunch-for-lunch with Caroline, and before you ask: yes, we each had savory egg-based dishes plus a shared stack of pancakes, and no, I do not regret this decision.

3:05 - Oh, work-hunting, you are un-fun.

4:38 - Scandalous traffic getting from Highway 13 onto Highway 24.

5:34 - I'm going! Officially!

5:52 - This is the part of the day where we have sausage, onion, and olive pizza for dinner...and I pick off all the sausage, onions, and olives. Starving children in Africa, I apologize.

6:20 - Awana, before the establishing of order.

7:17 - Did your Wednesday involve a cardboard diorama of Paul and Silas's miraculous escape from prison (Acts 16:25-36), complete with yarn river and tiny prison bars? I thought not.

7:34 - Fifth- and sixth-grade Awana girls, who make life just that much more delightful. Noisy, but delightful. (Posted with their permission, promise!)

12 of 12: April

2010-04-13T00:43:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it's 12 of 12 and I'm out of town, or hanging with friends, or doing something really interesting. Today is not one of those days. It's not Chad Darnell's fault, but ultimately one could say that 12 of 12 is. ("Fault", "inspiration", whatever.)

Enjoy!

8:03 - Awake and wearing my giraffe jammies. You know, as you do.

8:49 - I wasn't going to say anything, but: yes. I spent this incredibly rainy Monday morning in bed with my computer and my cat. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

10:05 - Austenacious got a new header over the weekend, and if you think finding a tiny disco ball, photographing it, and Photoshopping it into a website header shouldn't take six months, well...we'd probably like to work with you. Heh.

1:30 - Leftover chili, pineapple, and SunChips: lunch of champions.

1:33 - Finishing up Season 3 of The Wire, about which I can't say anything for fear of Sarah stringing me up by my fingernails. Or, more appropriately, whistling "The Farmer in the Dell" and shooting me in the head with a .45-caliber shotgun. (However: !!!!!)

1:45 - The end of the Citron wrap is nigh, but those 540-stitch rows in the last section are not to be trifled with. I'd better find me some strapless dresses and some chilly summer evenings to show this baby off.

3:13 - Scripting away: Acts II and III, draft two.

4:24 -We have this bizarre talking Caller ID feature that announces aloud who's calling (as well as showing it in a pop-up bar at the bottom of the TV; when the robots overtake us, at least I can go down blaming Comcast), and today the phone told me with great specificity that "Nra" was on the phone.

4:48 - The great thing about California is that, even if it rains, things will look like this eventually. And by "eventually" I pretty much mean "within twenty-four hours." We wouldn't have it any other way.

7:26 - Rehearsing the Ukrainian Alleluia with forty of my closest friends.

8:40 - Post-rehearsal debrief, because nothing says "Praise the Lord" like cold beverages and cheese fries.

9:07 - Mysterious glowing cider, Triple Rock.

If I had a blog, this would be a really big day for me.

2010-03-30T22:13:00.000-07:00

I realized recently that I've completely fallen off the blog-reading wagon. It turns out that, as far as my own reading habits go, enthusiasm for the blogs of total strangers corresponds directly to having a job I'm trying to avoid; in a sense, I guess it's a good thing that I'm out of touch with these corners of the internet. Theoretically, I am so busy doing work I like and/or trying to get work I like that I have completely forgotten to snoop through the lives of people I've never met. (I speak the truth! Productivity is my middle name! These are not the droids you're looking for!)*

With this in mind, I've trimmed my blogroll—I got rid of the site about the hipster stay-at-home dad with the super-cute kids, the celebrity fashion site that exemplifies all that is great and good about the internet but that I somehow never actually read, and Mindy Kaling's sadly defunct shopping site (I guess this is what happens when you are hilarious: you sign a seven-figure development deal with NBC and stop needing to write for free about ridiculous Things You've Bought That You Love). I kept a couple of knitting blogs—as one does—but mostly I refined my collection of food blogs. Because that is something I never get tired of: the urge to make ridiculous, complicated, and/or expensive dishes because somebody has a really nice camera.

First, I added Smitten Kitchen, because leaving SK off the blogroll any longer would be like telling my (theoretical) really awesome boyfriend of five years that I'd really prefer to keep our relationship "just between us." Consider this my very own food-blog Jumbotron proposal: I cook from Deb's blog all the time. To wit: for dinner tonight, my family ate mushroom marsala pasta with artichokes; before dinner I'll have a bit of the Guinness chocolate cake I whipped up this afternoon—for the second time in two weeks. SK is my first line of defense against lack of recipe and/or inspiration, and also now includes frequent but not content-diminishing pictures of the cutest baby of all time, and I'm so pleased to have made an honest blog of it. Our love is pure and true!

I also added Thursday Night Smackdown, with which I have been acquainted approximately an hour and a half, and which I can already tell is good people. We're talking the Invisible But Obvious Membership in the International Siblinghood of Poached Egg Obsessives kind of good people, which is, I think, akin to finding a whole spate of long-lost cousins on the internet—cousins who like their eggs runny and plopped on top of all manner of non-breakfast foods, even, which is even better.

So I guess this is a step in a positive direction: finally, somebody's found something useful to do with that new Information Superhighway, if by "useful" you mean "including leafy greens, lots of champagne vinaigrettes, and recipes that requires ice cream makers I don't own."

Not that, you know, non-food blogs aren't worth reading. Despite my own lull in making the rounds, there's lots of good writing to be found that has nothing to do with what to make for dinner. And everybody likes a good sporadically-updated, non-subject-oriented yet cat-heavy life chronicle, right?

....Right?

* Note that this does not include the many and varied (yet also somehow redundant) social networks out there: Facebook and Twitter and Blip.fm and Goodreads and that horrendous hipster time-suck Tumblr, which I don't even USE but cannot stay off of, regardless. What if something awesome happens on the internet and I miss it?

12 of 12: March

2010-03-13T23:37:00.000-08:00

What has two thumbs, speaks limited French, and didn't forget 12 of 12?

All credit/blame for the twelve-photo obsession goes to Chad Darnell. He started it.

8:15 - Up; not quite at 'em.

8:41 - Nothing like starting the day off with a ten-minute Lady Gaga/Beyonce lesbian prison-movie music video, right? Yet Sherlock appears unimpressed.

9:22 - Packing for a weekend in LA. Jewelry bag: check. Makeup bag: check. Knitting bag: check. Round brush: check. Laptop cord: check. Well-intentioned but unnecessary running shoes: check check.

10:38 - Heading over the Altamont Pass and into the valley.

11:05 - Green hills, orange wildflowers. Say what you will about I-5; it's a total showoff in the spring.

11:30 - Somewhere between nowhere and nowhere (or rather, Santa Nella and Harris Ranch), central California.

1:28 - Bringing fries along after lunch at In-N-Out (#2, protein-style, with grilled onions); oddly, they weren't good, and I didn't finish them.

2:17 - Post-Kettleman City, pre-Grapevine. More wildflowers.

3:00 - At last, the Grapevine. It's like a reward.

4:15 - Waiting on a light in Van Nuys on the way to visit recent California transplant Sharon.

8:08 - Mango and blackberry sorbets at Sharon's; I like how sorbet offers the dual illusions of ice cream and virtue.

11:42 - My final destination: hanging with Kendra and roomies for the weekend. Worth the drive!

What I'm Doing; or, 0 of 12

2010-02-13T13:14:00.000-08:00

February 12 was pretty much a normal day. I did stuff. I didn't think too much about it. That is, until I went over to Heather's to watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, and she said, "Let me take a picture of you for 12 of 12!" and I said, "Wait, today's the 12th?" and she said, "Smile!" and I said, "Aaaaargh."

So. I have no pictures, today, of myself 1) waking up, or 2) writing, or 3) walking to Trader Joe's (via the yarn store), or 4) eating sweet potato bisque, Dubliner cheese on crackers, and a mineola for lunch, or 5) making the maiden tweet on Austenacious's brand-new, steeped-in-emotional-ambiguity Twitter feed, or 6) driving to Heather and Erik's for the Olympics, or 7) getting verklempt over stand-up comics falling in love on NPR, or 8) eating heavenly gingered eggplant and chickpeas over basmati rice for dinner, or 9) realizing that I now get two weeks of hunky Brian Williams on my TV without having to watch the news, or 10) eating heavenly rose water-buttermilk sherbet and cornmeal-orange shortbread, still warm from the oven, for dessert, or 11) coveting that flying-harness dude's job in much the way that I have previously coveted Tinkerbelle's job in the Disneyland fireworks show, or 12) coming home, feeding cats, and crawling into bed.

Nevertheless, it occurs to me that, in quitting my job and moving cross-country and then completely failing to post here, I may not be doing an excellent job of explaining what exactly I'm doing right now.

Well.

Fair enough.

I'm writing. I'm keeping up with Austenacious and trying to post to P.S. BTW like a normal person. I'm eyeing this blog guiltily and promising to post more. I've just turned the Act IV corner on an original TV pilot script, which I hope to use as a calling card so that I can get somebody to pay me to write more scripts.

I'm doing a bit of freelance work—writing short celebrity bio blurbs for a website about celebrity net worth, should anybody out there be wondering about the financial situation of, say, Zac Efron and/or Donald Trump—and looking for more. This involves much stalking of Craigslist, much writing of cover letters, and much pondering of the distinction between a writing gig and a writing job.

I'm taking a screenwriting class at the local community college, as my eighteen-year-old self says, "I thought I worked hard in high school so I wouldn't have to go to DVC?"

I'm singing with my old choir, because I simply haven't had enough Latin in my life lately.

I'm house-sitting an apartment and two cats in Albany.

I'm running.

I'm flossing my teeth regularly, because seriously, people who don't have jobs are not too busy to floss.

And that's the gist of it: working, trying to make writing my work, alternately hoping for and obsessing over the future, and trying to make the present workable. I'm glad I'm doing what I'm doing, because it's a chance at something awesome, and because not doing what I'm doing is a terrifying prospect, long-term. In any case, it's not a bad gig. Job. Whatever.

12 of 12: January

2010-01-12T22:51:00.000-08:00

Happy January, cats and kittens! As always, credit/props/blame to Chad Darnell, 12 of 12 originator and guru.

PHOTO TIME.

8:15 - Up. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

8:40 - Off to the park for a run to celebrate seeing the sky. (Seriously: IT IS SO FOGGY HERE.)

8:47 - Path, sun, Rian Johnson on the Creative Screenwriting podcast.

9:57 - Apparently, I have become the kind of person who eats Great Grains and reads The New York Times.

10:10 - Deep thoughts in my Inbox.

(Personally, am torn on this issue. I do miss tasty Season 2 hipster hair, but the new look has grown on me. Could maybe do with--dare I say it?--a tad more product.)

10: 35 - Research for Austenacious. No, really.

12:30 - Taking a break for some thank-you knitting.

12:50 - Lunch: grilled cheese with apple and spinach (too much; next time, apple OR spinach!) and Jon Stewart totally failing to intimidate John Yoo (the scary constitutional lawyer, not the First Pres music director, though that would be fun, too).

3:15 - Seeing a man about a website. At Starbucks. Ooh la la!

7:50 - Sherlock enjoys watching my mom play with her people toys.

8:20 - Trying for an after-dinner burst of productivity, with mixed results.

8: 40 - How all good days should end. Obviously.

See you in February.

And to all a good night

2009-12-25T07:45:00.000-08:00

SoHo, New York City; November 29, 2009

Right back where we started from

2009-12-22T22:54:00.000-08:00

News alert:

HAPPY.

Long Haul II: Tennessee, not Williams

2009-12-15T21:00:00.000-08:00

Fake Facebook status: Liz's camera cable is somewhere in the back of her car.

...Along with the rest of her worldly possessions.

So long-haul pictures will have to wait, but rest assured that we've made it to Nashville (via Charleston, SC) and are making friends with barbecue and the Grand Ole Opry. Tomorrow it's off to visit Elvis's "body" at Graceland and then Carrie in Arkansas; more smoked/sauced meats may be necessary.

Updates as news breaks.

The state of things

2009-12-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

A telling (albeit slightly disgusting) anecdote:

The other night, I had this dream--not that I remember anything now, only that it was epic and sprawling and I think my friend Sue was in it--and in the middle, I woke up juuuust enough to register that my mouth tasted bad. Really bad. Consistently bad. Like rubber.

And then I realized there was something in my mouth.

And then I realized I was--wait for it--chewing on an EARPLUG. I had taken my right earplug out of my ear, put it in my mouth, and chewed it into pieces. (The left one: still in.)

It's still in bits on my night stand.

Stress eater, meet teeth grinder? In any case, I can't stop giggling about it. When I win my Emmy with a character who wakes up with earplugs in her mouth, you'll know.

...

In other news, today is my last day of work. Last! Day! Of work! What?!

Holy crap.

It's been real

2009-12-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

You know, I've come to like DC, in a weird kind of way. I like going to things that begin with "National," and the lit-up view of the Capitol from Pennsylvania Avenue. I like the cathedral gardens, and the pizza sandwiches with hot peppers (and a small Oreo shake) from Potbelly. I like snow freak-outs and dogwood blossoms and hanging out with Lincoln whenever I feel like it.

Which, obviously, is why I'm leaving a week from today.

Did I forget to say that earlier?

I've had a good time here--really. When I take stock of the experiences I had and the places I went and the people I met, experiences and places and people that wouldn't have crossed my path if I hadn't come here, I'm grateful. It was hard, too, both confusing and clarifying, but this year has been like nothing else I've ever done--and certainly like no place else I've ever lived--and I wouldn't trade it. I'll even miss it, some.

But there are other things I want to do, professionally, that aren't accessible in DC without, at the very least, a bus ride to New York; to stay wouldn't be a good use of my time. My parents have graciously offered me a crash pad while I take a shot at writing full-time--while I polish and send out my work, take whatever freelance gigs I can get, save up some money, and see what happens. I fully expect a wild-goose chase, but I'm hopeful and in a take-no-prisoners mood. And really, what better time to leave a stable government job than in the worst employment market in eighty years?

In the mean time, I'm a total to-do list hound. I dream about crossing things off of my master pre-move list, and somehow seem to have transcended procrastination for the time being. Mail: forwarded! Return route: decided! Prescriptions: refilled! The car is in the shop today, getting an oil change and a couple of new tires; I'm dying to get it back so I can put the seats down and start loading boxes. Packing up a furnished apartment is bizarre--I'm about two-thirds packed, and everything looks more or less the same, like I'm not leaving at all. Sherlock, of course, is just psyched that I've finally embraced his passion for boxes of clean clothes (little does he know what horror awaits--he's going on the plane with my brother). In any case, by this time next week, everything will be packed, cleaned, locked and left, and I'll be on the road to Charleston (Liz & Al National Tour Stop #1).

Until then, you'll know where to find me: just look for the giant flag of packing tape.

Black Friday

2009-11-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

I've come to the conclusion that my favorite holiday may, in fact, be the day after Thanksgiving. It's not that I don't like Thanksgiving itself--I do, very much. I have no problem with the family project of putting on a huge meal, or with first-time-around mashed potatoes, or with well-loved stories tossed over my aunt's epic centerpieces. But, to me, the wreckage of the next day is even better: food and family, deliberately de-ceremonialized, is where the real fun happens.

My family does a Thanksgiving sleepover model--we're divided into Thanksgiving West in Santa Cruz and Thanksgiving East in New York, but both incarnations involve staying over, so that Black Friday is all about the morning-after sleep-in, leftover pie for breakfast, and hanging around the kitchen together. On the West Coast, we sometimes take a walk on the beach, or go downtown for lunch before everybody wanders home. It's more of each other than we've seen all year, usually, and there's time to talk and hang out and be who we are when it's not a major holiday. It's a good time.

This year, I went to Thanksgiving East, and spent Black Friday fighting a cold, but also sprawling on the couch with my brother, knitting, and assembling my Christmas list. We grazed on turkey sandwiches (cranberry + Grey Poupon for me; some kind of mayo thing for him). We hung out with my aunt and uncle. Eventually, we mustered the energy to leave the house and see Fantastic Mr. Fox; then we came home and sprawled some more and we all watched an old Poirot Mystery until bedtime. That's it. It was nothing, but it was great--it was us being together, with nothing else to do and nothing else expected of us, and that's a great holiday memory.

Plus, you know. Pie.

It's November 13th

2009-11-13T08:15:00.000-08:00

How did that happen?

I have no photos to share--the date-remembering impulse took the day off for Veterans' Day, apparently. I can tell you that I went to work, ran in the dark, had leftover brown rice and acorn squash for dinner, and watched Bones one and a half times. So, you know. Aren't you sad you missed THAT?

She said you're like a disease without any cure

2009-11-05T18:23:00.000-08:00

I went to the doctor today. My right eye has been acting funny lately, messing up my worldview a bit--being the freckliest girl in the world, it is unsurprising that I would have a tiny mole on my lash line, rubbing up against my eyeball and making me inappropriately teary, but that doesn't make it less uncomfortable. It's just another day in the life of the temperamentally-skinned. Thanks, genetic legacy!

Luckily, I have Kaiser health care, the kind where I call the advice nurse at 9:30 and they ask if I'd rather have the 10:15 or the 1:30 same-day appointment. I show up and flaunt my eyelid to my GP and to the opthalmologist's assistant; flaky-mascara lecture and eyeball-numbing glaucoma test notwithstanding, we all seem to agree: as terrifying as the intersection of opthalmology and dermatology sounds, minor surgery may be the way to go, here. Soon, the opthalmologist himself shows up. He looks around, resists the urge to flip my eyelids inside out like a junior-high boy, and shines a few lights in my eyes. He hmmmmms to himself. He looks at me.

"Well," he says, "We're going to hold off on the mole. At least until the conjunctivitis clears up."

Let me translate that.

PINKEYE.

I am twenty-nine years old, and I HAVE PINKEYE.

This is actually not that surprising; it seems like, in this world, you're either a pinkeye person or you aren't, and I most definitely am. I was that kid in preschool who practically bathed in eyedrops (but never got good at taking them--even now, I am a reluctant eye-dropper on the very best of days). For whatever reason, I'm conjunctivitis-friendly. It's nice to know I'm accommodating to all, don't you think?

In my (extensive) pinkeye experience, this'll all blow over. I've got eyedrops and ointment(ultra-thick eyedrops: AWESOME, UNIVERSE) and a check-up appointment for Monday; even going without my contacts seems to be keeping the ick at bay. Until then, I'm just trying not to start a Swine Eye epidemic. That would be embarrassing.

Side ponytails, unite!

2009-10-25T13:48:00.000-07:00

When I was a little girl, my brother Ben and I had a club. We were the Tiger Club (tigers being both intimidating and pleasingly stripey), and mostly I remember having meetings via flashlight in Ben's closet, and plotting to build periscopes out of hand mirrors and paper-towel rolls, and always having to make up a new secret handshake because we'd forgotten the old one. Our parents inexplicably would not let us get a tiger to be our mascot; when I was six or seven, we eventually bargained them down to a turtle (practically the same thing anyway, you know) for which we saved up for months and then changed our club name to match. As you do. Scooter the turtle, I will have you know, was a fine and noble mascot for many years, and I think taught us all a lot about the joys of heat lamps and live crickets.

Last week, I picked my brother up at the airport--he's back in the States after five years abroad, and local to me for the first time since middle school. Thus begins the longest, most awesome Turtle Club meeting ever! He's so excited to be back in the land of pork and uncensored movies, and I am so excited to have him here for general bothering/fun-having purposes, even if it means driving him to every furniture store in the greater DC area until his apartment is furnished (I have a car; he does not). You can guess what we did this weekend.

So what I mean to say, I guess, is this: If you come to DC and it does not seem quite the same as it was, if it seems slightly more awesome and yet also slightly more weird, think of us, and know that the Turtle Club is hard at work.

Now, if we can just find enough hand mirrors, we can finally finish those periscopes.

12 of 12: October

2009-10-12T18:47:00.000-07:00

Heyyyyy, it's that time of the month again. So to speak. For all info and background on the 12 of 12 project, see Chad Darnell's blog; it's his baby.

And here we go:

8:45 - Waking up gloriously late. Thanks, Columbus/indigenous peoples!

9:34 - Making the morning admin rounds for the newly launched Austenacious; my assistant sleeps on the job.

10:22 - Stopping by the cathedral on my morning run.

10:25 - My favorite place on the cathedral grounds, the Bishop's Garden.

12:47 - Um, lunch. IT HAS FRUIT IN IT, OKAY? Don't judge me or my baked goods.

1:39 - On the bus to Georgetown.

2:01 - Taking myself to the movie show: Whip It, which I liked very much. It did not, however, help resolve my inner conflict over roller derby (in which I dig the derby culture, but also dig my bone structure as is).

4:04 - In Georgetown, waiting for the bus back up the hill.

4:25 - In line at Giant, where I didn't even bother to track down a basket. Note: hand-carrying frozen peas around will eventually make your hands cold.

5:53 - Working on an original pilot script. Anybody know any agents looking for fresh TV-writer blood?

7:20 - Magic risotto, starring peas and zucchini and a whole lot of parmesan. Time-consuming, but it keeps me fed all week.

9:41 - Skyping with my friend Carly, whom I've known since birth and who is now super-adorable and thinking of becoming an English major. I approve.

That's all, folks! See you all next month.

Introducing Austenacious

2009-10-12T17:06:00.000-07:00

I have a new website. Maybe we're not fully ensconced in the 21st century yet--there are no cards for this, no "it's a site!" banners, no candy cigars to hand out. Instead, we have frantic networking and checking of Google Analytics, which is plenty entertaining to a new website owner, but it somehow lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

Meet Austenacious, where the women are accomplished, the men are smoldering yet virtuous, and nobody ever gets mocked for being a great reader (or, for that matter, for taking pleasure in a great many things).

This is a labor of love--or, really, a labor of friendship. Brainstorming began with Christine and Heather before I moved to the East Coast, and our slogan, "Jane will keep us together," has proven true: we have the full inboxes and the hours logged on Skype to prove it. We think Jane would have liked what we're doing: reading and watching and thinking and talking and laughing and definitely, definitely eating, and looking at her works with the required sense of humor. We certainly like it.

So now you're invited to look around: check us out, join the discussion, leave a comment, tell a friend! (Especially that last one: the internet is a big place; getting the word out is tough.)

Welcome.

A perfect size six, with eyes like the Pacific Ocean

2009-09-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

So, here's some crazy news for anybody with a) two X chromosomes and b) a birthdate between 1977 and 1985: Diablo Cody is adapting the Sweet Valley High books. What?! Now?! This is just one big swirling eddy of emotion for me.

First of all: Diablo Cody. Good writer; potentially obnoxious person. I liked Juno, after the first ten minutes, and I've heard pretty good things about her show The United States of Tara. So, no complaints creatively. But last year, I read an article in the New York Times--maybe in the magazine?--about Cody and three of her friends, a sort of girl-screenwriter cabal, who traipse around Hollywood and drink in the morning and wear matching jewelry and occasionally write stuff. The article was completely annoying and pretentious, and made them seem completely annoying and pretentious, and although I would like desperately to have my own cabal of girl-screenwriter pals with whom to traipse around Hollywood (less so the morning drinking and matching jewelry), it did not make me love her in the way that it was probably intended to. Mostly, it made me want to throttle her and then take her existence and her Oscar to retool as my very own. So you'll see why she and I have a rocky relationship.

Now. Sweet Valley High. These books were off-limits to me as a kid, but I sometimes read them anyway (sorry, Mom!), a depressingly Elizabeth Wakefield act of rebellion. I was especially into the crazy multi-generational super-special ones that followed the lines of the girls' ancestors: remember the one with the horsey circus chick, and her daughter the flapper? More recently, I often played the Sweet Valley High board game with my college roommates; we'd fight over who got to be the twins, and who got stuck with snotty Lila, and then we'd all steal each other's boyfriends. I think there were special outfits involved (for the game pieces, not for us). Special times, those long evenings arguing over who needed whose Science Club equipment. Now, I mostly get my SVH fix through The Dairi Burger. But it's a thing. I mean, really: does the love of the late-80s pre-teen book series ever really go away?

It seems to me that this combination is a brilliant but dicey one. To make it really work, it'll have to be utterly biting--deeply familiar with and specific to the Stepford reality of the books--which places it above the heads of kids today, who haven't read the series and wouldn't get the humor. As an alternative, they can try to update it in setting and/or tone, in which case it might either miss the original tone of the books, completely fail to address the hilarious lack of self-awareness in the books, or both. (The second one is unlikely: Cody's sense of irony is probably stronger than her sense of smell.) So it'll have to be a very careful operation: mean enough--in a tough-love kind of way; after all, Cody is a fan--to satisfy the old-school Sweet Valley fans out there, but friendly enough to attract younger girls who don't know anything about, for example, the time Jessica stayed out All Night Long and was maybe raped by a guy named Scott and his pet mustache. I'm not saying it can't be done, and I'm certainly not saying Cody's not the woman for the job. If anything, she's probably exactly the right woman for the job. But if it doesn't go well, if it isn't pitch-perfect, it could be a disaster for all. And everybody knows there are no disasters in Sweet Valley.

Par-tay

2009-09-15T04:09:00.000-07:00

So, you may have heard that I went to New York again last weekend. It was great--Sarah and I spent some (okay, maybe a lot of) time at The Strand, and we saw Bye Bye Birdie. We sat in coffee shops and talked about all sorts of deep and life-changing things--the depressing trend from suspenders to belts on men, why Neil Patrick Harris is our (well, mostly her) favorite...you know, the usual.

And then this happened:

Turns out Sunday was Broadway on Broadway, an enormous free concert in Times Square featuring a number from each of the musicals either currently open or about to open, a total of twenty-one segments. We watched them all, started planning our exit strategy--like people leaving a baseball game after the seventh inning--and then: the skies opened up. With PAPER.

This is why I like New York: getting on the Bolt Bus on a rainy Friday afternoon, did I expect to find myself in Times Square in an absolute blizzard of colored paper? No. No, I did not. And yet, there I was. I'm still picking mysterious confetti out of bags and pockets. (Also, as Sarah commented, any [obviously mental-illness-induced] future desire to spend New Year's in Times Square has officially been dispatched: confetti party minus the frostbite! WIN.)

12 of 12: September

2009-09-14T15:39:00.000-07:00

I feel like the occasional weekend 12 of 12 makes up for all those entries when it's a random Wednesday and I'm all, "Hey! Guys! Look at these pictures of my cat!" So much the better, then, that this month there's weekend travel involved: a much-planned, much-discussed sort-of-birthday-but-really-just-because trip to New York with Sarah.

As always, credit/blame for any and all 12 of 12 madness goes to Chad Darnell.

8:17 - Morning in "my" room--my cousin's old bedroom, which I adore--at my aunt and uncle's house.

11:38 - On the Metro North train to Grand Central with Sarah, watching the Bronx go by and eavesdropping on the people around us.

12:00 - The main hall of Grand Central never ceases to amaze. I love it for its green, astrology-themed ceiling and for its flippy schedule boards and for its excellent signage. Also for the time I saw a huge crowd of little girls in matching Jonas Brothers concert t-shirts corralled by the world's two most long-suffering mothers.

12:27 - Sarah (right) and I (left) met up with Lauren (middle) for lunch as part of Lauren's continuing mission to introduce me to every delicious and/or Broadway-relevant restaurant in the Theater District.

12:40 - The girls had normal food. I had comically large nachos.

2:13 - The holy grail of New York bookstores. Haul: The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon; When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris; a small and beautiful letterpress edition of the love poems of Pablo Neruda; and a Strand bag.

3:36 - Still there, in the half-price basement. You don't hurry through eighteen miles of books, okay?

5:06 - On a rainy day in the Village, what could be better than a window seat and some (admittedly not very chocolate-y) hot chocolate? Sarah agrees.

6:11 - I hereby declare this the best 12 of 12 ever, simply by virtue of PUPPIES! at a pet store on Christopher St.

7:34 - Back uptown for Bye Bye Birdie, still in previews. Verdict: John Stamos is unreasonably good-looking and wears suspenders very well; Gina Gershon should not be singing in public, period; Bill Irwin is not as famous as his talent indicates that he should be. In other news, I continue to think that being a Broadway chorus member must be the most fun job of all time.

11:03 - Stage door from afar, which is what happens when small talk with famous people is unappealing (Me: "BFFs or nothing!") or when you'd just rather not spoil the illusion of your favorites (Sarah: "But what if Bill Irwin isn't nice? Even if he is singing 'Happy Birthday' to that girl?").

11:50 - Seven whole grains on a mission or no (apparently their ad campaign on This American Life made an impact on me?), I do appreciate Kashi's presence in my hour of dire hunger. Thanks, Kashi!

Thanks, New York.

Finding Don

2009-09-11T07:41:00.000-07:00

This isn't mine, but I want to help out, especially today.

From Sars:

OPERATION FIND DON

Don: A (Very Very) Brief History

Don is a man I met on September 11, 2001. Don and I became "disaster buddies," and ever since, I've wanted to thank him for hanging out with me and helping me keep it together — but I haven't seen or heard from him since we parted ways late that morning.

What Don Looks/Looked Like

Don is an African-American man. I would estimate his age at between 25 and 35 on that day — probably not younger than that; possibly older, but not much. That means he's 30-ish to 40 now.

Don is between 5'9" and 6' tall, and probably weighed 160-180 pounds. (I suck at estimating men's weights.) In any case, at that time Don had a fit build — not pudgy, not skinny, well put-together.

Don had short hair and a goatee at that time. I do not recall any jewelry; he may have worn a watch, I don't remember. No glasses.

Don had on a grey windowpane-plaid suit and was carrying a black soft-sided briefcase.

Don didn't really resemble anyone famous, except Blair Underwood around the eyes a little bit.

Other Possibly Relevant Facts

Don and I met in the lobby of the Bank of New York building, located roughly at Wall Street and Broadway. We left the bank together at approximately 11 that morning.

Don lived at that time in Jersey City, or thereabouts — he took the ferry to Jersey City to get home, from a slip somewhere around Hester Street on the west side.

Don had come into the city that morning via the PATH train, and had gotten off at the World Trade Center stop. He had come into the city for work, but I don't remember whether his business that day was actually at the WTC complex; I don't believe it was. If he had gotten separated from any work colleagues, he didn't mention it. I don't know what he did for a living, and I don't know if his job was based in Jersey City or in lower Manhattan, but I got the impression that he was in the city for an errand or meeting, and that he didn't regularly commute in.

As I said, I don't recall a wedding ring; Don did not mention a wife or any other family at that time as far as I can remember.

Don's birthday is September 11. No idea what year, but based on my estimate of his age it's probably in the late sixties or seventies.

Why You Should Care

Because it's a mystery, a puzzle, a story that needs an end. Because Don is everything good and friendly about the world. Because I owe him my thanks, and possibly a cold beer. Because it's his birthday.

What You Can Do

Do you know anyone in Jersey City, or anyone who lives or works near there? Have you heard a story like mine — secondhand, thirdhand, on someone's journal? Do you recall reading or hearing anywhere about people who ran for the Bank of New York, walked uptown a bit, and took a ferry to New Jersey? Post in the comments, or email me at sars at tomatonation dot com.

And if you are in fact Don? Well, don't just sit there. Show yourself. My mom's friend swears you were an angel and she'll keep believing that shit until I can prove otherwise.

Suggestions? Clues? Conspiracy theories? Send 'em my way. I'll add any new information as it comes in.

In short: Don. He's still out there. And he's another year older.

Update, 2009:

The latest news is that there is no news; if I hear anything, I will let you know, but I haven't heard anything…and it's starting to look like I won't. I don't think I would recognize Don if I saw him on the street, anymore; I doubt he would remember me, especially now that my hair is so different.

It's also possible that Don does not in fact want to be found, or that he's in the Yukon or something, but I've done the paid name/birthday searches and I've hoped that six degrees of separation would loop around, and I still haven't turned him up.

Thanks again to everyone who's mentioned it on sites they run or frequent, or to friends of theirs in the media, and to everyone who's sent words of support. I appreciate it. If you hear anything, or you want to mention it on your blog, please feel free — you never know.

Anybody know anything? Pass it on.

Remember me to Herald Square

2009-09-06T14:48:00.001-07:00

This post started out as a grab-bag post about the book I'm reading (Lolita) and the website I'm starting (watch this space for details!) and how I subsist entirely on tomatoes and chickpeas in the summertime--essentially, all the reasons people hate blogs, if people do in fact hate blogs--but it turns out that I mostly wanted to talk about New York. (And anyway, my love song to chickpeas is really only posting for the sake of posting. You're disappointed, I know.)

I took myself to New York for my birthday weekend--I met up with my friend Lauren and saw my new favorite piece of absurd legally dubious feminista musical theater, 9 to 5: The Musical. This may be like the time I started to see deep philosophical meaning in 13 Going on 30, but I loved it: talented women working together and loving it, dance-y production numbers, soaring girl-power ballads, truth about women and work and friendship and love, and Dorothy Hamill haircuts, all with music and lyrics by Dolly Parton, who is really just a walking, talking lesson in talent and work and grace and really enormous everything, isn't she?

And if all of that weren't enough, I propose that if Allison Janney wore a white suit every day, men in sparkly-pinstriped suits really WOULD follow her around everywhere, singing her praises and dancing in formation, like so (...wait for it, ignore the quality, and enjoy the rest of the clips):

We also improvised a walking tour of Lauren's (former, but still adopted, and hopefully again someday) stomping grounds on the Upper West Side: a stroll through Riverside Park, a bit of shopping, the low-down on which famous people live where, a stop for ciders in one of the ubiquitous neighborhood pubs (a book from which DC could stand to borrow a page or two: ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME, DC?). We did not meet any of the fictional characters who clearly inhabit that corner of the city (Liz Lemon, meet Joe Fox!), but there was much friendly chatter and making of small memories, and that is maybe the best thing you can hope for in a city like New York.

Even if New York weren't the most fun you can legally have on the East Coast, I think I'd have to go there periodically just to eat. That city's got FOOD. Every time I go, I find something new that I can't live without: enormous buttery jammy hamantaschen, or the hot spinach-and-goat-cheese croissant-y thing at the Israeli place we ate at after the show, or the cinnamon babka I bought at Zabar's--known to non-locals as "the Upper West Side grocery store in You've Got Mail where Meg Ryan has no cash," and to everybody else simply as "heaven"--and ate all week as birthday/breakfast cake. I suspect this is why New Yorkers walk everywhere: they wouldn't be able to move if they didn't. Too much good food just lying around, waiting to work its deliciously sinister magic.

So it's finally happened: I've become one of those people with "I Heart New York" stamped on their consciousness--perhaps not enough to ever live there full-time, but enough to dream about how I could, if I wanted to. (This is probably why I don't: people who live in New York, who can claim to be New Yorkers, don't dream about it--they move.) The good news is that, even as I dream wistful dreams of Jewish bakeries and eighteen miles of books, I'll be back--this weekend, to be exact, and then at least once (possibly twice) in October, and then for Thanksgiving. I'm so glad; I wouldn't want to leave it alone yet. We're just getting to know each other.

Making stuff

2009-08-23T16:20:00.001-07:00

I made risotto tonight. I did it partly as silent treatment on the script I'm working on (giving it a taste of its own medicine--YEAH, SCRIPT, I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU), but also because I bought zucchini at the Saturday farm stand that has apparently opened across the street from my apartment. And really, in August, when it's 90 degrees and 85 percent humidity outside and in, why wouldn't I want to stir rice on a hot stove for an hour?

I used to make risotto all the time--in the way that some people keep on hand the ingredients for, say, a quick spaghetti sauce or a grilled cheese sandwich, I decided awhile back to make sure I was always stocked up (a little risotto humor for you, there) on rice, onions, chicken stock, and white wine. It's a time-consuming staple--about an hour, start to finish--but it's versatile, one batch keeps me fed for a long time, and it comes with a pleasing sense of Making Something. It's you and the rice and some cooking music and a glass of that wine, like a little starchy kitchen party. And as a bonus, there are few greater motivations for getting through the morning than pulling a Tupperware full of cheesy ricey goodness out of the work fridge. I rarely use a recipe anymore--it's pretty standard, no matter where you look--but I used this one to confirm my quantities after my time away. Delicious.

I also pinned a sweater to the floor this weekend--at long last, I finished the February Lady Sweater, and for lack of a better place to block the lumpy-bumpies out of it, I laid it out on a few layers of towel/bath mat/carpet in the living room and pinned it into submission. All seems to be going well: it's almost dry, the inexplicable short side has lengthened out just fine, and Sherlock has done an admirable job of not batting at the pins. Vintage buttons are on their way via Etsy. Weather-wise, I won't be able to wear it for another month, at least, but all indications are that this may bypass "teachable moment/objet d'art" and go straight to "wearable garment." I call this a win.

12 of 12: August

2009-08-12T22:08:00.000-07:00

Welcome 12 of 12: Central Oregon Edition! I'm working in Corvallis for the week, taking advantage of Tillamook ice cream and non-oppressive Northwest summer weather. In the mean time, for more 12 of 12 madness, check out Chad Darnell's blog. It was his idea.

Onward:

7:54 - Okay, I deviated from routine, a bit. I was half-dressed before I remembered the date, and may in fact be wearing makeup already. Sue me. Next month: bedhead and eye boogers, promise!

8:36 - The OSU football stadium directly across the street from my hotel.

11:20 - The fatal e-mail: Cinema Hype's parent company has gone out of business, effective immediately. Blah blah blah, writing; what is this "paying to go to the movies" of which you speak?

12:27 - Some schools have gargoyles; OSU has...beaver door handles. So, about the same on the gravitas scale?

12:34 - The student union Panda Express, where a) my beloved tofu and eggplant no longer exists, and b) the mixed veggies are not vegetarian. You just think about that for a minute.

4:40 - The Lace Ribbon Scarf in Berrocco Ultra Alpaca, ripped out and re-started on the plane due to self-compounding errors. Better now.

6:33 - Central Park. Not the one you'd think.

6:42 - Waiting for a train as I wander downtown Corvallis in search of food that is not beer.

7:11 - Victory! Adorably artsy pizza pub American Dreams, where the fresh tomatoes are not so much "cooked" as "warmed by pizza." Still good.

7:43 - I don't think there's anything I can possibly add to this. It's just that, whatever you thought about central Oregon, YOU WERE RIGHT.

8:45 - At a work event, having been thoroughly welcomed to the Uzbek portion of the evening. And I don't think "welcomed" means anything legally binding, though it seems that I'm pretty excited about it even if it is.

9:24 - And a complementary good night to you, too, Hilton Garden Inn.

Waiting

2009-08-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

30th Street Station, Philly, la la la. Train to DC is one hour late--which is not quite long enough to take the subway downtown, have lunch/browse the used bookstores, and come back. And so I say thank you, Cosi, for your free internet while I sit on this bench and listen to the Departures board go flipflipflipflipflipflipflip.

In any case, it's too bad that my office is expecting me tomorrow; the urge to run the other way, to hop on the train to New York or maybe Boston or maybe anywhere else, is screwing heavily with my judgment. (I did, for about 37 seconds, consider a day trip to New York--arrive by noon, head home around dinner. But it's raining, and my suitcase and laptop are not going to a) carry themselves home or b) disappear temporarily.) Or I could blow it all off and stay here in Philly, which I now love for being artsy and beautiful and ugly and confident in its own awesomeness. DC feels, in comparison, like a place that does not totally believe in itself.

The good news: restlessness is, at this juncture, acceptable. I leave Tuesday for four days in Oregon and then a quick weekend trip to California. Any discontented energy can easily be absorbed by the jumping up and down going on in my soul, "work" trip or no.

Ah, well. I think I'm going to have some lunch and find a bag of Herr's potato chips. When in Pennsylvania, and all.

The birthday list

2009-08-02T13:39:00.000-07:00

In my family, holiday wish lists are kind of a big deal. They're a ritual of sorts: twice a year--T minus one month at Christmas and birthday--you'd better know what you want, or risk pointed e-mails and/or probing phone calls and/or the traditional threat of receiving only a blow-up raft on Christmas morning. We consider it a helpful gesture (for the gifters) and an insurance policy (for the giftee), and we don't mess around with it.

As a kid, my list was really more like a wish spreadsheet: Item (purple hoop earrings), Location (Claire's or similar), Price ($9.00?), Notes (Really really really want these!!!). My brother still divides his into categories: Books, Music, Movies, Miscellaneous. My dad just calls his "Cool CDs," knowing that letting us all loose in the Classical section of Best Buy without a guide is only asking for trouble, not to mention the wrong edition of The Four Seasons for him.

August is my birthday month--meaning I'm running late already--and in a sense, this year's list is not that hard. It's not like I don't want things. I wouldn't, for example, say no to interchangeable circular knitting needles, nor would I turn up my nose at a pretty and functional enameled Dutch oven, the Nigella of the cookware world. My Etsy Favorites is full of adorable things, and I'm happy to give my username and password to anybody looking for some whimsical gift ideas.

But there's a certain point where the list stops being about cookware (I'm so old, you guys) and starts being about all the things I really want but that don't wrap well--the things that aren't things, or that are things, but my family can't provide them without spending lots of extra time in their secret science lab/villainous lair. And I wouldn't want to put that kind of burden on them, you know?

And so I present my Alternative Birthday List 2009 (What I Really Want):

Extra hours in the day
Woman of Leisure status
Functioning teleportation device
Time speeder-upper/slower-downer device
Adoring and efficient literary agent (preferably television, but open to alternatives)
Daily clothes/hair stylist (Tim Gunn or similar)
John Krasinski in hot pursuit

And, of course, World Peace.

But I still wouldn't mind the Dutch oven.

Requiem

2009-07-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

Today we say goodbye to a pair of old friends--friends that have carried me, supported me, and made me look good in the clutch. My friends are tough and forgiving. They're never out of place. They also turn the bottoms of my feet black, which you'd think would have stopped by now.

I bought this pair of Reef skinny-strap flip-flops in May of 2001. I've worn them every day, March to November at least. They've been to Turkey, to Austria, to Croatia, to Slovenia, to Italy. They're bicoastal. They've been to Disneyland at least five times. I wear them with jeans and with shorts and with dresses and with my PJs. They get wet, they get dusty, and then they get muddy; they go through rivers and into lakes and along beaches. They have, due to some miracle and also to the strength of my toes, never been dropped off of a roller coaster and ended up on the roof of some amusement park outbuilding. They are magical flip-flops. Were I Jewish, I would consider nominating them for some kind of holiday: eight years from one year's worth of black foam! As it is, I'm thinking of having them bronzed.

Thanks for the memories, flops.

And to the new kids in town, welcome. You've got some big shoes to...

Never mind.

12 of 12: July

2009-07-12T19:38:00.000-07:00

12 of 12! 12 of 12! 12 of 12!

For more on this photographic phenomenon (sorry about that; it's late)--origins story, more entries, etc.--see Chad Darnell's blog. Until then, here we are.

8:51 - Up.

8:52 - You know how they say pets and pet owners begin to look alike...?

9:17 - Writing in bed. I've got friends visiting this week--lazy mornings let them sleep and give me some down time. And now you know my anti-social pretending-to-be-accommodating secret.

10:52 - Big trucks, puffy clouds, and overwhelming greenery: I-95 to Baltimore.

12:50 - Camden Yards before the Baltimore-Toronto game, our third major-league game this week (following Washington-Atlanta and Philadelphia-Cincinnati).

12:53 - Meet Paul and Alison, good friends to myself and also to baseball.

3:00 - The world's largest ballpark soft-serve, slightly licked. (The day was hot; the walk from the ice cream stand was long.)

4:31 - Root root rooting for the home team. It worked. Score: Baltimore 4, Toronto 2.

7:13 - I was in this entirely for the pineapple-jalapeno salsa, but the rest of it turned out to be spectacular as well. Well done, Surfside! Your yellow rice and lime sour cream are delicious!

8:08 - Hanging out on the roof deck at Surfside, waiting for the temperature to drop. At all.

9:15 - Packing my favorite very wrinkly sundress for a quick overnight to New York, so as to see Jon Stewart tape and possibly have other adventures with the friends.

10:32 - We come full circle.

Take me out to the ball game

2009-07-12T06:03:00.000-07:00

I've been going to a lot of baseball games lately. My college roommate, Alison, is visiting, and one of Al's life goals is to attend at least one game in every major-league park in North America (awww, Toronto!). So far, this means that I may also be attending at least one game in every major-league park in North America. We visited my "hometown" Nationals on the Fourth of July and the Phillies last Wednesday, and we're hoping to work some magic, just by virtue of our presence, at the Orioles' game today. Also, to not exacerbate the sunburn situation.

One of my favorite things about major league baseball is the seventh-inning stretch. My muscles are a fan, of course, but mostly I just like that somebody took a look at baseball and said, "You know what this sport needs? More public singing!" And what do we do? Forty-five thousand, fifty thousand, sixty thousand people stand up in an enclosed space and sing a song about baseball. Loudly. In a not-very-convenient key.

I also approve of the 00s retro-modern trend in baseball: all these old-fashioned logos and fonts and multi-million-dollar (billion-dollar?) stadiums are killing me with how cute they are. To wit: Am I a Phillies fan? Not really. Do I see myself attending more Phillies games in the future? Barring some totally unexpected life change and my very own rowhouse in the Old City, the chances don't look good. Do I want one of those adorable, girly Phillies t-shirts with the little stars over the Is? LIKE YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE. (And any team that does not wish to inspire this kind of association should probably stop dotting their Is with tiny stars, don't you think? It makes me think the guys on the team also pass notes in class, braid each other's hair, and use the term "MFEO" a lot.)

On the other hand, I would like to offer a short PSA to baseball players and those who dress them. Are you ready? Here we go: The new(-ish) long pants in baseball are appalling. Do not wear them. So baggy! So messy-looking! So unflattering! Why look like Barry Bonds in long pants when you can look like Curtis Granderson, my Detroit Tigers baseball boyfriend, with your socks up? I will never understand the shift. Please redress.

And also I like the game. With all the hitting and catching and and throwing. For reals.

Wave of the hand

2009-06-23T06:23:00.001-07:00

You know, say what you will about the increasingly public nature of internet culture; sometimes, all that consolidation isn't such a bad thing. Like, say, when a crash on your subway line makes the national news? One announcement on Facebook, a little wave of the hand to say everything's okay, and voila. Concerned phone calls down 90%. (Not that I mind concerned phone calls. Thanks for checking in! You know who you are.)

So, no, I was not on the red line train that crashed. All is well, for me.

Also, some day (one hopes July 2), I will use my spare time in ways that do not involve writing a script for a July 1 deadline, or thinking about the ways in which my script for the July 1 deadline is not moving as quickly as it should. Some day!

12 of 12: June

2009-06-12T19:31:00.000-07:00

So, who has two thumbs and totally spaced on 12 of 12? This girl!

Except that--lucky you!--there are a good six hours between work and bedtime, i.e. plenty of time to carefully document...my Friday night in. You can't believe it, right? I know. It's like Bridget Jones's Diary, but only the spinsterish parts, and minus the choosing of vodka and Chaka Khan. (Or so you THINK!)

6:04 - Nothing like a good Friday-afternoon bed sprawl to celebrate the coming weekend goodness. Plus, you know. I have a theme going with the whole bed thing.

6:05 - I am, apparently, not the only one excited about this whole "coming home from work/undoing effects of uncomfortable office furniture" turn of events. I strive to be a good kitty pillow.

6:17 - My staple pizza dough, without which I would starve, all kneaded up and ready to sit. I use Deb's recipe, except that I use a full teaspoon of yeast and I'm not nearly patient enough to wait 20 minutes after punching down; the dough doesn't seem to mind much.

6:33 - Walking to Starbucks; talking bus tickets to New York for my friends' epic East Coast visit next month.

6:40 - Starbucks, the only coffee shop within walking distance and, recently, my favorite place to get out of my ~~head~~ apartment and write. PSA: Those new chocolate madeleines = the food of the gods, surprisingly chocolately, and v. good for inspiration (obviously).

7:50 - Much of DC is too flat and/or crowded to give good horizon, but way up here on the hill that is Northwest, there's at least an effort at a sunset. It's nice.

7:59 - Prepped ingredients for my standard pizza--sauceless, Arizmendi-style, because I can more or less handle keeping cheese, garlic, and bagged spinach in the house. Anything else is just icing, or gravy, or something else that doesn't go with pizza at all.

8:07 - Assembled. The dough went a bit heavy--something about the humidity, maybe?--but cheese and garlic cover a multitude of sins.

8:19 - Twelve minutes at 475. Perfect in a way that only perfect (well, perfect except for heavy dough) homemade pizza can be.

8:30 - If there's anything I need beside pizza from scratch, a sleepy cat, and John Hodgman on The Daily Show (segment title: "You're Welcome, America"), I don't want to think about it.

9:12 - Yes, I fold laundry to The Daily Show. Yes, this took me an episode and a half to finish. Yes, it had been sitting (clean) in the laundry basket since Monday. Stop looking at me like that.

10:11 - Spending more quality time with the script (for the Disney fellowship, if you must know); also checking out some music from Amanda's writing playlist, because sharing music makes us better writers. Or something. Maybe she's just really nice. (She is.)

So, wow. Aren't you glad you were here for the play-by-play on sauceless pizza and week-old laundry? You're welcome, America.

A funny thing happened...

2009-06-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

I'm watching the Tony Awards, and I can't help thinking that the world would be a much better place if we did more singing and dancing. Preferably at the same time.

Watching the ceremony on TV is a victory in itself, for me. I can't remember the last time--maybe never?--that I made a mental note to watch the Tonys and then actually remembered to sit down and watch them. So, good job there, self.

For fifteen years, at least, I have thought that I would like--in a completely vague and unrealistic way--to be a professional chorus member. (Before that, I wanted to be an actor, with lines and possibly whole songs to myself, but that was before I realized that I may actually have negative stage presence, and a passable singing voice even on a good day.) I don't want a speaking part; I don't want to sing alone in front of anybody that doesn't answer to the name of Sherlock. I just want to dress up, learn complicated choreography, and belt it out with the rest of the group. And, yeah, I know: poverty and competition and years of training and endless drama of the non-staged variety. It can't be easy. But even when it isn't easy, it's got to be at least a little bit fun. They wouldn't be doing it if it weren't.

The opening number for the Tonys is a medley from all of the nominated musicals; this year's ended with "Let the Sun Shine In," first by the cast of Hair and then incorporating everybody else. It was amazing, and knowing as I do the sensation of choral singing, I know what they were thinking. They were thinking, "Dang. We sound good." Which they did, even through 300 miles and my TV set, enough to make me want to help them out with my own mad, imaginary chorus-member skillz. So I've decided to issue an invitation: Broadway, any time you would like me to join you--you know, just for the weekend--I believe I could clear my schedule. Until then, I will be over here in the corner with the Wicked soundtrack on repeat and practicing the three tap-dance steps I know (shuffle, ball-change, fuh-lap! fuh-lap!) over and over. And over. Call me!

Oh, oh, we're halfway there (maybe)

2009-05-16T19:53:00.000-07:00

In honor of my six-month anniversary with DC, a list--in no particular order--of things I like about this city:

- Superior hot sandwiches
- Music at the 9:30 Club
- Sarah
- Thunderstorms
- The Lincoln Memorial
- The Smithsonian
- Sherlock
- Being near New York
- Blooming dogwoods
- Adventures with/stalking famous people

Unfortunately, they still can't make a burrito save their lives.

A very long post about TV

2009-05-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

For me, this was the last week of the regulation TV season, in the sense that all of my regular shows are officially over until the fall (Mad Men and maybe Parks and Recreation, then, must be the playoffs?). The following thoughts on this week's finales (I'm skipping shows that are already done, like Chuck and Friday Night Lights) were originally written for a slightly different forum, but then I thought, hey. Some of you watch the same shows I do. Maybe you'd like to talk about them. If, you know, you like talking about TV with somebody who thinks about these things entirely too much.

Warning: All of these discussions include spoilers. Don't say I didn't warn you. See? It even says "warning."

Ready? Okay.

Lost: "The Incident"

So, it appears that I totally missed the entire plot and/or significance of this episode the first time around. This is why I need Jeff Jensen in my life: to explain everything to me.

Jack vs. Everybody Else vs. Jughead, I got. I are good with the linear storytelling.

Jacob and the Man in Black? Not so much. So let me get this straight: the Locke we've been hanging with all season...is not Locke. He's the Man in Black masquerading as Locke, as he has apparently masqueraded/manifested as others over the years, in an attempt to kill Jacob. Or, to be specific, to get somebody else to kill Jacob. See, I totally didn't catch ANY of that, and even now I'm not sure about Jacob and who he is, exactly, or what his exact nature is (or what happens when he--whatever he is--is stabbed in the chest by a cranky, deceitful non-leader), but I'm hoping that I'm not alone in that part? We're not supposed to know all of this. Correct?

Anyway.

So, holy catharsis, Sawyer! I've never been all that interested in examining the Jack/Sawyer rivalry--partly because I wasn't sure it would be kind to my former Jack/Kate fan (who, it must be said, died a sudden and unexplained death this season at the hands of my inner Sawyer/Juliet fangirl), and partly because I just didn't think it would be all that interesting--but I loved the contrast between Sawyer's sudden maturity and Jack's total lack of growth since...well, maybe ever, but certainly since he got off the island. All packaged as a good beating, of course. Also, Jack claiming that he came back because of Kate rings false to me, which may be because it IS false, or because it's mushy storytelling (file it along with "Kate loves Aaron!," which I also never bought). Hard to say at this point.

I also thought Juliet's break-up with Sawyer was weak, but that really WAS on purpose, apparently, so...fine. I'm bummed but not surprised by Juliet's death--I figured that, with all the effort they put into making us love her and Sawyer together, one of them had to go, and it sure wasn't going to be him. And he just loved her so much, and all that crying and shouting...man. That was SAD. I think I'm going to miss you and your unreadability, Elizabeth Mitchell, which is progress for us. (But I hear you're in the V TV show, along with Alan Tudyk and Morena Baccarin and some other folks, so good on you.)

And then, of course, the screen goes white, and we just don't know. Rebooted? What does this mean for next January (ack, JANUARY)? Jensen points out that Lost has a symmetrical structure: seasons three and four mirror each other; so do seasons two and five; therefore, season six should match up nicely with season one--which means...flashbacks? A relatively closed storyline? I also very much like one of Jensen's predictions for the final season (basically, everybody's rebooted back to the moment at which Jacob touched them--because he DID touch each of them, physically, in the flashbacks--but with their current consciousness, so that they have the option of changing the future), though it leaves quite a few things unaddressed (Hurley will have already crashed on the island; what about Desmond and Penny?; what about Charles and Ellie?; did Daniel's research serve any purpose for us beside informing the constant vs. variable question?). I don't even know. But I loved this season--I love the Dharmas!--and I'll be ready to come back for the final stretch.

Bones: "The End in the Beginning"

Okay, just to start out: if you have rage over the ending of this episode, I know. I KNOW. It was a cop-out. It was an abuse of an important moment. This should have been a mid-season episode. I get it.

But: I loved it, at least the first 40 minutes or so, and I'm not totally sure I have much of a problem with the last two, either. Does anybody truly think that we're going to spend all of season five with Amnesiac!Booth? First of all: We're not. I'm going with Glenna when I say, two episodes, tops. Second of all: This is Bones! After hiatus, will they even remember that they gave the guy amnesia? I'm calling odds of 50/50.

I think that, in a lot of ways, this was the Bonesiest episode of Bones ever. It was a lot of them doing what they do best: wacky ensemble crime-solving comedy, supplemented by, I believe, surprisingly astute meta on the individuals and dynamics of the Bones universe. The things it didn't do well--say, failing to embrace a key moment in the Booth/Brennan relationship in favor of a lame soap-opera-style plot twist--well, they were pure (Bones showrunner) Hart Hanson, too. Did it make a ton of sense (seriously: nightclub owners)? It did not. Was it pure crack? Only of the whitest, rockiest variety. But, again: Bones. Nonsensical is how they roll. (Which is not to say that we shouldn't have high expectations for our shows, or that showrunners shouldn't be accountable for crappy things they pull; heaven knows I support the smartifying of TV. But, really, we watch this show every week. We know how it is.)

(Also, I would like to point out the history of Bones's season finales, which is to say that season one's "The Woman in Limbo" is really the only truly non-infuriating one. "The Stargazer in a Puddle," from season two is the lamest finale EVER, in my opinion, and last season's "The Pain in the Heart"...well, I actually love it, but we all know how it ends. I'm just saying.)

As far as the Booth/Bones relationship goes, the line that most stuck out for me in this episode wasn't even about Booth, but I think it sums up what they were trying to do: I think the key here is when Alternate Brennan says to Alternate Booth that their nightclub staff is lying to the police because they (the staff/squints) love them (Mr. and Mrs. B)--this is a summing-up of the lab dynamic that has, I think, never occurred to the real Brennan, though that doesn't make it less true. This season has been about Brennan considering love and its place in her life, and I think this episode--this whole novelization of her fake life--is her working out what it would mean for her to love and be loved unconditionally. So it's hyperstylized, and she's different, and it glosses over the many issues we know Brennan has over the idea of entanglement with other people--it's a thought experiment, I think, even more than a straight-up fantasy. And at the end, she's made her conclusion (though she erases the document, which is interesting). And yeah, amnesia; dumb move, etc. But the amnesia doesn't change her decision, or who she is, and so I don't know that it's such a huge setback. In short, if Brennan is indeed the struggler, as pointed out by Gordon Gordon Wyatt a few weeks back, the struggle is over.

(Incidentally, I know at least one person who thinks the love scene at the beginning is, in fact, real--that it's the future of Booth and Brennan, and that we'll see it again in the relatively near future. She has circumstantial evidence--the episode title, for one, but also a few details of the way that scene is filmed and narrated--but...I don't know. Food for thought.)

A few thoughts on the alternate universe itself:

- I buy Married Booth and Brennan, mostly. I thought their chemistry was spot-on: different than crush-y Booth/Brennan, but appropriate for who they might be if they shared a life 100% (as they did here--I loved the implicit trust between them). On the other hand, I'm not sure about the implication of who Alternate Brennan is--can Brennan only be happy, as Alternate Brennan is happy, if she's able to connect with people naturally? I do think that Brennan is capable of sharing her life with Booth, and of opening up to him in the way that a long-term relationship requires, but I'm not sure Alternate Brennan's generalized ease with people worked--unless it was Brennan's idea of who she would become, were she surrounded by people who love and get her. And, you know what, now I'm not even making sense anymore.

- So, somebody must be paying at least a modicum of attention, to get all of those supporting characters together at once. I didn't even catch that Clark's brother, the gang-banger was Angela's ex.

- Subpoint: CLARK! I love him. SO MUCH. Also, he's so cute.

- OH WENDELL. I laughed out loud (LOLed, as I believe the kids call it) when he wouldn't talk to the police. At all. I love that guy.

- I think that if I watched this season chronologically, Booth's relationship with Jared would make more sense. As it is, I have a hard time seeing it as an arc.

- That yellow pencil skirt on Brennan? KILLER. Also, I often object to Brennan's dress-up clothes, but I thought she looked fantastic in her black-with-green-accessories get-up. Cute, cute.

- Is it possible for John Francis Daley (Sweets) to be any more awesome, or to be more graceful about the ridiculous things they make him do on this show? I do not think it is. Also, nice voice, dude. (He really is like twelve, though. Or, maybe, 24. For boys, same thing.)

- Hee, Hodgins is a drunk pulp novelist with a fake Irish accent. OBVIOUSLY. That was awesome.

Okay. Until September, Bones.

The Office: "Company Picnic"

OH. OH. That was so good. I have permanent warm fuzzies on account of this episode.

(...which is probably not a good thing. My main complaint about this season is the loss of their grasp of the tiny heartbreaks of being human--I think the humor has suffered mainly because the little human dramas have suffered. But I'm going to forget that for now and just say !!!!)

Holly Flax, I love you, and I love what you do to Michael Scott, and I love who you are together. And I love it when you rap. And when you do impressions together and crack each other up. And when you are gently sad about each other, but also happy to see each other, and when you make Michael say awesome things like how he thinks you two have a long story (even though you are designing a house with your [very cute] boyfriend in New Hampshire). Holly Flax, please come back, someday, a long time from now, and finish that long story.

And then...well. Jim wore a baseball cap, and scooped Pam up like she weighs twelve pounds (which, of course, she probably does), and then he smiled and hugged and smiled and hugged some more, because: BABY! When the nurse said to Pam, "and there's no chance you could be pregnant?" I was all, "...did they just show us the gun AND have it go off, all in the same act? Sneaky!"

I think that, if any show on the entire planet can make a baby plot work, it's The Office. Also, this means Jim and Pam are sort of going to have a shotgun wedding, in the least shotgunny way possible, and they don't even need to write what Michael's going to say about it, because it's already happening in my head. Also, they were so, so happy, and that makes ME happy.

So: silence. We have not had this kind of silence since "Booze Cruise," back in season two, and it was brilliant, both between Holly and Michael and between Jim and Pam. Well played, Jennifer Celotta and Paul Lieberstein. Silence is hard, and I like you for using it so beautifully.

Um, where was Kelly? OH RIGHT. Off signing her seven-figure development deal with NBC, so that she can take over the world. Mindy, I have these really cute business cards now. Can I please send you one? They have typewriters on them, and they are, in fact, a Thing I've Bought That I Love.

I do not know what to do with the loveliness of this episode, except maybe watch it a lot over the summer.

So that's it. What did you all think?

12 of 12: May

2009-05-12T19:12:00.000-07:00

Ah, it's that time of the month...so to speak. Twelve pictures. For news, notes, and origins on 12 of 12, see the master, Chad Darnell.

Otherwise...

6:50 - Up, having followed my new resolution and gone to bed at a reasonable hour. Operation: Not Exhausted All The Time seems to be a go?

7:29 - True story: I recently ditched my eyeliner and blush for a day and went for the patented Rory Gilmore "a little mascara and a touch of Coppertone" look; no fewer than three people asked me if I felt okay. Viva la Sonia Kashuk for Target!

7:40 - I would like to shake the hand of the person who installed full mirrors in my lobby, ostensibly for the purpose of pre-bus last looks. Thanks, person!

7:48 - On the N4. Note to self: Please don't ever have to use these levers. If the window is pointing up, that's probably not great.

8:05 - My favorite Metro ad. Very Animal Planet of them, with the added benefit of actual shoes chewed by the escalators. I love how they're going for the scientific approach...or something.

9:20 - Books I'm considering for an anthology, and must read to determine levels of appropriateness. Working for the government is hard, you guys.

12:57 - Homemade spinach-garlic pizza, apple, generic Honey Nut Cheerios.

1:36 - You know, it's no Lincoln Memorial, but I really like the Capitol. And I really like being able to visit the Capitol on my lunch break.

6:03 - Walking home from the bus through my pretty, leafy neighborhood.

6:40 - At the Wisconsin Ave. Starbucks to get out of the house and work on my spec script for the Disney fellowship. Hazy-but-emerging A plot? Check. Equally hazy but opportunity-laden B plot? Double check. C plot? Um. About that.

9:50 - Meet Sherlock. He is both shy and modest, as you can see.

10:12 - Heaven! (I have low standards.)

Catch you all next month, if not before.

Ha, Universe. HA.

2009-05-07T07:41:00.000-07:00

So, apparently emo-ing publicly and at length about writing (or the lack thereof) is enough to get the universe to take notice. In the sense that, in the face of my moaning and fist-shaking, the universe is all, "Fine! You wanna write? LET'S WRITE." And then gives me extra homework. Yay?

Aside from the things I've figured out about the pilot I'm writing, I also discovered--in clicking around for yesterday's post--that it's now open season on the Disney fellowship. Final deadline: July 1. Existing shows only; no original pilots allowed. This means two, two, two scripts at once!

My mission for this weekend, should I choose to accept it: pick a show to spec, and get on it. This could mean Friday Night Lights (but is it too old, and do I have anything to add?) or Mad Men (terrifying to even attempt) or possibly Chuck (which may or may not play to my strengths); it could also mean catching up on something else really fast--Fringe? Do we have a decision on a second season of Dollhouse? What about something more obscure? Time for a hot date with Hulu, I think.

So this is...exciting? A scary busy time crunch (says the girl who wrote last year's submission in six days), but a good scary busy time crunch, I think. After all, there's nothing like a deadline to light a fire under me, and I'm hoping that my two projects will ultimately make each other better--that writing an existing show will loosen me up for the pilot, and that the experience of creating the pilot will make me better at the existing show. Also, I should be more careful where and to whom I grump about my writing woes (thanks for that, by the way--truly, the only person who is less excited about my writers' block than you is...me). Heh.

Why I Write

2009-05-06T12:55:00.000-07:00

It has been, if you couldn't tell, a rough couple of weeks for me and writing. If you ever wonder why writers are, on the whole, superstitious about the writing headspace--"mood" isn't right; it really is more like a place--this is why: without devaluing the (hugely important) plowing-through that happens on any long writing project, inspiration is not to be trifled with. Inspiration is moody. It likes to be catered to. It likes routine, except when it prefers spontaneity. You get to know its patterns, and if you do what it wants, it'll make it worth your while.

The spirit comes...and it goes.

Recently, for me, it went.

The logistics are hazy--busy, out of town, blah blah blah etc.--but suddenly, I had a holey outline and a bunch of characters that I couldn't quite hear anymore. The deadline for Scriptapalooza came and went, and although I did submit a script--the 30 Rock spec I wrote for the Disney Fellowship last year, which is still eligible, if not exactly new news--the pilot I had hoped to submit hadn't seen the light of day. It still hasn't. It won't for a while yet. I've tried to be nice to myself about it, to wait it out, to fill up on other people's writers'-block stories. I've scheduled myself time to write, and shown up (and then packed it in early and played around on iTunes instead). There's something to be said for routine, but everybody knows that torture is bad.

And then, today, the whole thing came flooding back, half-new.

I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it again: as long as I live, I don't think I'll ever understand how this works. I don't want to understand. It happens when I'm doing laundry, or when I'm crossing the street, or when I'm doing the dishes: I don't know and then I know. Today in a meeting at work, my new colleague told a little story about herself as a child, and there it was--this new character, born twelve years old and mostly whole, who singlehandedly changes the entire tone of what I'm writing. Two possible pilots will, I think, now combine, because one was funny and one was dramatic, and life is like that. It's going to be much more fun (to write and to read) than what I've been hacking away at, and maybe that's the secret. Maybe I lost the fun in my story: a tragedy in every way. I still don't know exactly what's going to happen--some of what I've got will need to be reworked anyway, to make room for what's coming--but the smell of smoking brains seems to be gone. It's the best feeling ever.

Spring, DC

2009-04-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

Two lists

2009-04-24T16:43:00.000-07:00

Things I Have Not Done Lately:

- Written in this blog (obviously)
- Written anything else to speak of (alarmingly)
- Knitted
- Watched TV except for Chuck and Bones, neither of which will be denied
- Gone to bed on time
- Cleaned the bathroom or the floors

Things I Have Done Instead:

- I have no idea. Seriously. Wherefore art thou, April?
- Gone with church community group to Georgetown retirement home for hilarious conversation-and-singalong time, wherein musical age gap is revealed. All present can sing chorus and first verse of "America the Beautiful," and that's all.
- Attended and enjoyed This American Life Live ("live" in the sense of "at the same time at different theaters"); finally admitted vague crush on Ira Glass. (Ironically, Live re-runs at theaters nationwide on May 7. You should go.)
- Designed and built a website.
- Became hooked on easy and delicious Asian noodle salad; set personal record of finishing package of tofu in two days.
- Got head/chest cold; stopped running; felt like blob; ran anyway
- Replaced The New Pornographers' "The Laws Have Changed" with Bon Iver's "Skinny Love" at the top of iTunes most-played list.

That is all.

12 of 12: April

2009-04-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

Extra double bonus points for the twelfth falling not only on a weekend, but on a major religious holiday (...that I celebrate)! This is so much better than eight pictures of my desk, three of my meals, and one (invariably) of me watching Jon Stewart. I hope you agree. Also, I'm out of my photographic element, visiting family in Armonk, NY for the weekend.

For more 12 of 12 info and/or madness, check out Chad Darnell's blog.

7:55 - Happy Easter! He is risen! I, however, am not. Yet.

8:23 - The guest room (slash my cousin's old bedroom) at my aunt and uncle's house. I love staying here.

8:39 - Ready for church. Neither snow nor sleet nor 40-degree weather will keep me from wearing my new sundress, sans nylons, this morning. Little did you know that my feet have mysteriously disappeared.

8:56 - On the road to church with my aunt.

9:02 - Easter lilies. I've always liked how lilies are kind of a messy flower--their pollen gets everywhere.

11:15 - You will know the Presbyterians by the mostly-empty trays of goodies they leave in their wake. (Totally a good reason to go Presbyterian, by the way.)

11:30 - The upside to having church in a gym: after-service hockey! Pots of Easter flowers make excellent goalposts, as any church kid will tell you.

12:03 - It is a truth universally acknowledged that it must be freezing on Easter, but at least we got plenty of sunshine. (Note the complete lack of leaves on the tree, though. Spring is still half asleep up here.)

3:36 - Easter lunch detritus in the kitchen.

4:28 - Checking in on various Easters back home, and wondering whether they'd wait for me if I ran to the airport now. Triple-timing, bicoastal Easter would be awesome, don't you think? Oh, to have spring break again.

6:00 - My portable knitting, the Lace Ribbon Scarf. We're making up slowly after ~~I made a mistake~~ a tiny yarny fight. I may have been giving it the cold shoulder, a bit.

6:42 - After a major holiday, we do just what every red-blooded American family would: sit around with our leftover hors d'oeuvres and our BBC costume dramas and our yarn (well, that part's just me). Doesn't everybody?

Happy (day after) Easter, all. See you May 12 if not before.

Death and...

2009-04-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

I think that I need to clarify something for the U.S. government.

I don't mind taxes, in the grand Swedish pseudo-socialist universal-health-care sense. I think the government should provide services to its citizens, not for the 90% of us who are perfectly able to put roofs over our heads and medicine in our medicine cabinets, but for those of us who aren't able to do those things. I have enough, and even if the government isn't the most efficient machine for distributing the money, I don't mind sharing.

But when I say that I don't mind taxes, I do not mean that I don't mind DOING my taxes. That, I mind deeply. I spent all week calling financial institutions and collecting paperwork and checking form numbers and parsing through the exact wording of the tax form. I got them filed, but in response, I'd like to say: Shut up, IRS.

And I'll see you again next April.

I want to go to there

2009-04-05T17:52:00.000-07:00

Well, I had a good weekend. I went here.

The sister of a family friend lives on the York River--right on the York River, as you can see--and when she heard I was a writer, she called me up and offered me the use of her family's guest house as a writer's retreat. Wonderful! Sometimes people are just too nice to be believed.

It was a fabulous way to spend a day and a half away--I had the guest house to myself, but an open invitation to hang out with my hosts. I only stayed overnight, but together, we hiked around and played with my hosts' little great-niece and watched the sunset and messed around with the telescope, and then I got up this morning and watched the jellyfish (big red ones!) off the dock while I ate my breakfast.

I even got some writing done in between the wide-eyed exploring, if you can believe it. Laying the groundwork for the pilot I'm writing is proving really hard--I thought I'd be way into the dialogue by now, but I'm still pushing through what happens and when--but I got Acts I, II, and V plotted out over the weekend. It was good to have a place to sit down with this story in a place where my life isn't staring me in the face. I'm so grateful for the time and space, and you can bet I'll be taking them up on their invitation to come back--if I don't tell them and none of you tell them, do you think they'd notice if I slowly moved my entire apartment into the cottage? Shhhhh.

Observations

2009-03-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

There was a nun on the bus this morning, in a full habit and everything. She was young. People kept talking to her. I bet she gets that a lot.

I have been lurking around Etsy in search of business cards--because I keep scrawling my information on the backs of receipts and handing them out, and also because handmade paper products are like catnip--and instead I keep running across "mommy cards." Mom's name, "Mom of _____" (ugh), contact info, kid's allergies/fears. Is this a thing now?

Right now, everybody should be watching Chuck and Friday Night Lights. Chuck (Mondays, 8 p.m., NBC) because it is forty-two minutes of spy-hijink hilarity, and because it continues to get better and better every week; Friday Night Lights (Fridays, 9 p.m., NBC) because it is just perfect, all the time, and because you will fall in love with every single resident of Dillon, TX, even the ones that aren't very nice. You can totally catch up on both of these shows before they end for the season; the entire series of FNL is even streamable (legally!) on Hulu, which means you are officially out of excuses.

Also, last week's episode of 30 Rock was a small miracle.

I am thinking about making a professional website for myself--something to put on the cards, with links to my various web presences--but I'm pretty sure I don't really know what that means.

The National Cathedral is the new Lake Merritt: I try to run around the grounds and gardens three days a week, and have scoped out a variety of benches and shady places to stretch out with a book once it's warm enough. I recently went inside for the first time, and learned that they have evensong every day at 5:30. I'm never home from work by then, but if I hurry and then get off the bus one stop early, I think I could catch the second half.

"Orientated" is not a word. "Oriented" is a word. World, please learn this.

Tragedy strikes!

2009-03-20T19:06:00.001-07:00

I am so sad, you guys. One of my favorite places in Oakland--one of my favorite places in the whole world--closes on Sunday, and I won't even be there to say goodbye.

I first went to the Parkway Theater before I even lived in Oakland, and I think it was part of why I decided to move there later: any town where the theaters have ergonomic Ikea armchairs and serve food and wine and show old movies on the weekends must be close to heaven, I thought. I later moved just up the street, and went there all the time--with friends, for the late show, or by myself in the afternoon, or sometimes with my crew teammates on a stormy evening. My friend Helen described the Parkway as one of her first friends in California, and I knew just what she meant.

I'd always see people I knew at the Parkway, even before I knew a lot of people in the neighborhood. It was that kind of place. They showed second-run and almost-second-run movies, plus The Rocky Horror Picture Show every weekend night at midnight, and then they had this whole other schedule of events: benefits for local charities and Fright Night double features and weird film festivals and an ongoing series called African Diaspora Cinema. They made their own preview reels, with two of the owners sitting on the couch, talking trash and occasionally including lists of upcoming events. The owners knew everybody.

Also, the nachos were really good.

A few years back, the Parkway's owners opened a second (dare I say nicer?) theater called the Cerrito (conveniently located in El Cerrito, off the Central Ave. exit!); it appears that one's staying open, which is something. A lot of the Parkway traditions will likely migrate up there. But my old neighborhood--by the lake, just where pretty, safe Glenwood starts to unravel into International Blvd. and all that's implied therein--will miss that place. Huge, empty Art Deco theater space aside, the Parkway was an anchor of the community, a gathering place. Now they'll have to go across the street for 24-hour chicken and waffles at Merritt Bakery, or try to cram into the coffee shop that's never open, or maybe we'll hear about a major upsurge in business at the ancient family-owned Mexican restaurant in the next block. But it won't be the same. Those places don't even have raffles!

So, goodbye, Parkway. I loved you well, and I hope to see your spirit somewhere else, someday.

12 of 12: March

2009-03-12T18:20:00.000-07:00

Welcome to 12 of 12; for more 12-ish hijinks or more information, see Chad Darnell's blog.

On with the show:

6:50 - Up. In the dark. Ugh.

7:04 - Sherlock = Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.

7:41 - Not running for the bus, which is always a good sign.

10:30 - I worry that I'm getting into Rachael Ray territory when I say that homemade waffles reheat perfectly in the toaster. Before you know it, I'll be washing and cutting up my veggies right when I buy them, and then coating them in some EVOO and whipping up some sammies. Oy. (They do, though. Toast well, I mean.)

11:17 - Entering (my own) edits on a book of American idioms, while also re-writing the depressing and/or tawdry sentences included by the author.

5:15 - What is this "spring" of which you speak?

5:40 - Riding the escalator out of Dupont Circle metro. The quotation inscribed on the wall is (apparently) from the Walt Whitman poem "The Wound Dresser": "Thus in silence in dreams' projections....Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,..."

6:37 - Out for a run at the National Cathedral.

6:39 - The gate to the gardens at the cathedral, which I hereby adopt as my extended backyard, for all of my running, walking, basking, contemplating, nature-admiring, and reading needs.

7:40 - Chickpea and pasta soup, my current simple dinner of choice. The key here, as with basically everything else in life, is extra olive oil and double the garlic.

8:05 - Happy times: Hot soup, cuddly cat, Jon Stewart on my TV.

8:47 - Writing about 80's live-action Disney movies for Cinema Hype. I love me some Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson--who doesn't?--but Race to Witch Mountain, I cannot support.

See you next month.

I love it when this happens

2009-03-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

Part of my script just opened up. I was at work, entering edits and listening to Dark Was the Night, not really thinking about writing very much at all, and it spoke to me.

"Start with death," it said. "And a potluck."

UM, OBVIOUSLY.

Getting started

2009-03-08T16:24:00.000-07:00

It's (pretending to be) spring here--I just walked to the store in flip-flops and I still have all my toes--and so I guess it's sort of right that I'm starting things all over the place.

I'm writing a lot these days, and by "writing" I mean "staring into space with occasional frenzied bursts of typing." I'm working on an original television pilot--original pilots being what get young writers in the door these days, plus the story just had to come out--and coming up with a new TV show is, wouldn't you just know, a tremendous amount of work in terms of creating a universe and then paring down and parsing out what fits into a 42-minute episode. This project is the kind of thing that makes writers write, and also the kind that stops them from writing: the world of my show just comes to me, floods into my brain at the most inopportune times (at work, at the grocery store, anytime actual typing is not possible), and then just looks at me, all coy, when I sit down to wrangle it into five acts and three storylines. "Don't you just want to tell me all at once?" it says, and I do. I love it, and I believe in it, and I can't wait to see it all grown up and heading out into the world. It could give me a little help in this all-important outlining phase, but hey. We're not going to talk about that. It'll come.

So in the midst of my writerly highs and lows, it's a good thing I decided to do something really straightforward, right? Riiiiiight. This purplish thing is my fetal Lace Ribbon Scarf, which is really just a jumble of stitches on US-4 needles. All knitting projects start this way, like working blind, with the future hope of something pretty and springy to wear while I wait for the bus (...which will likely be finished just in time for, say, Halloween, but purple alpaca is timeless and seasonless, right?). But it's like the script: you just have to keep going, believe that the pattern's going to be there (the difference being that somebody else made up the scarf design; I have to make up the script). But, you know. I'm glad I picked that activity to break up the uncertainty of writing.

Welcome to March. Time to make something, don't you think?

Good news!

2009-03-07T20:01:00.000-08:00

...my wireless signal reaches to the roof deck!

What Was That?

2009-02-26T07:20:00.000-08:00

So, when it comes to music, I'm a lyrics girl. I mean, obviously, there has to be a beat and some kind of melody, and all that; I'm not really up for grooving to spoken-word on the bus, or whatever. But I've never gotten people who say they don't listen to, or never learn, the words of the music they listen to. The lyrics may not come first, but sooner or later...right?

But sometimes, I have to say, the lyrics ruin it all--I was listening to a song the other day, and it's a song of which I've recently become quite fond. It's cute, and funny, and it plays like a sweet little romantic comedy in my head. And then I heard this one line clearly for the first time and was all, "Wait, what did you just say? See, now, you are not nearly as cute as you were ten seconds ago."

(Notice that I'm not telling you which song by which band, so as to not spoil your own enjoyment. I am nice.)

This may happen to me a lot because I listen to a lot of bands fronted by mumbly boys, so that actually learning the words is a kind of continual journey of discovery. Apparently, bad diction covers a multitude of sins; this is, I guess, why we have "Inna Gadda da Vida" and "Louie, Louie." And maybe it's for the best--for all I know, all the cute boppy indie bands I like are singing about kicking puppies and stealing candy from small children, and all I can think is, "Awww, he really loves his girlfriend!"

Go back to your mumbling, boys.

Weekend in

2009-02-22T18:13:00.000-08:00

I spent most of this weekend at home. I mean, I did go out--I saw The Reader with a friend; I went for a run; I grocery shopped; I went to church--but mostly I've been indulging my inner homebody and hanging out with the cat. (Don't worry: Glenna visited last weekend to make me get out. Proof here and here!) Let's just say there's something to be said for the joys of a little at-home time, as follows:

This is not a cooking blog. I'm an avid consumer of other people's writing about food (Orangette and Smitten Kitchen keep me in recipes), but...trust me. From a girl who eats either sausage/onion/apple stir-fry or boiled kale as weekly standbys, you don't really need to know what I'm eating all the time.

But then there's this recipe, one I've been using forever, one which never lets me down. This is the kind of recipe you could make when, say, the entire population of a small country is coming to your home, or when you simply own more Tupperware than any normal human should. It's a little time-consuming--brown rice! From scratch!--but it's worth it, especially if you want to have lunch taken care of for the next two weeks, at least.

Curried Brown Rice with Chicken and Apples

1 TBS oil
2 lb. chicken, chopped
3 medium granny smith apples, chopped
2 onions, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 TBS curry powder
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 c raisins
5 c chicken broth
2 c brown rice
salt and pepper

In a large (no, really, LARGE) pan, heat oil. Salt and pepper chicken, and brown in oil. Remove from pan. Add apples, onions, garlic, curry, and cumin; saute five minutes. Add broth and raisins. Bring to a boil; add rice and chicken. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer until rice is tender, about 60 minutes.

Eat. FOREVER.

I started a new sweater, the February Lady Sweater, a couple of weeks ago, but I've been cruising through it this weekend with the help of Friday Night Lights, Dollhouse, season four of Doctor Who, and (and now for something completely different) Harvey. It turns out that this kind of bulky lace is really fun to knit, and zooms past--all those holes! I despair of the time when it will actually be warm enough to wear this, but others have assured me that the day will, in fact, come.

The victory here is that the in-progress version actually fits; this whole "trying things on" concept is the joy of the top-down sweater. I am not sure that my spatial brain really gets how top-down raglan sweaters work (starting with a single row and ending up with the three-dimensional shoulders of a sweater is clearly magic and has no basis in rational geometry), but I am all for it.

So...there's that. Health food and handknits.

And, in conclusion, a gratuitous shot of the cat:

He has no shame. Ah, well.

Why didn't I think of that?

2009-02-14T20:30:00.001-08:00

Things Dove Chocolate thinks I should do or know about love, gathered from the wrappers in one bag of milk chocolate hearts:

- Believe in those I love
- Celebrate family and friends
- Be a little mysterious
- Sleep under the stars tonight
- Listen with my heart
- A gentle touch speaks volumes
- Hold hands firmly, hearts gently
- Discover how much my heart can hold
- Remember my first crush
- Laugh until my heart overflows
- Share a sunset

And one thing I can't really dispute:

- Chocolate. Always my valentine.

Happy St. Valentine's Day to all. (See how I appreciated you just there? This TOTALLY WORKS.)

12 of 12: February

2009-02-12T19:05:00.000-08:00

February 12 of 12, wherein I post 12 pictures of my February 12, and lots of other people do the same. For more, see Chad Darnell's blog--it's his baby.

On with the photos!

6:51 - How I feel waking up in the morning when I know I'm off to work.

6:53 - How Sherlock feels waking up in the morning when he knows he's going back to sleep for 18 hours.

7:07 - Taking a minute with Hebrews and my trusty cinnamon-spice oatmeal. Sherlock supervises.

7:48 - I never get tired of the National Cathedral. It's always there, and it never gets any smaller, and that is amazing to me.

7:50 - A sunny morning on the N4. I like my bus commute.

12:15 - Yes, my cup of chocolate pudding is basically bigger than my cup of soup, which is...the proper order of the universe, right?

1:05 - Who has two thumbs, speaks limited French, and hasn't been rained on, snowed on, or frozen to the core once this week? (This girl!)

6:08 - Walking home from the bus in the last moments of daylight.

7:00 - Sherlock takes out the pink feather monster, which is probably very satisfying but also leaves him picking pink fuzz out of his teeth for like a week.

7:19 - Staring blankly at my Confessions of a Shopaholic review for Cinemahype.com.

7:45 - Assembling leftovers of my favorite winter dinner. It's a good thing this stuff's healthy, because I eat it constantly on account of its being totally delicious.

7:55 - For an upcoming writing project, I'm collecting all the jerk things Alex Trebek says to his Jeopardy! contestants. Part of me thinks the Trebek thing's been covered by SNL; the rest of me thinks his supply of smarmy condescension is simply endless. Oy, Trebek. OY.

That's it; thanks for stopping in. Next month: same bat time, same bat channel!

Today on This American Life...

2009-02-12T10:58:00.000-08:00

No, I haven't been kidnapped, taken to the Caribbean, and used as bait at a shark-themed amusement park. I haven't run away with the circus as the world's least flexible contortionist. I haven't disappeared from Rock Creek Park, assumed a secret identity, or joined a cult.

I've just been busy. Busy and boring: the supervillains of the blogging world. Did you really want to hear about how my new faux-Aveeno CVS-brand hand lotion smells oaty and yet kind of like barbecued snack foods? Or how I've decided that my true love is a Roomba (Happy Valentine's Day to you, too)? I didn't think so. Also, I've been struggling over my next What I'm Watching post for an embarrassing amount of time. You can blame that, if you want to.

I did go to Borders last night to hear Ira Glass speak. If you're not hip to Ira--and I do mean hip; the audience at this thing was hilarious--you clearly aren't listening to enough public radio. He's the host of This American Life on NPR: a reporter, a storyteller, and a hero to radio fiends with nerdy glasses everywhere.**

The strangest thing was hearing Ira and seeing him at the same time. You have to understand: I spend a lot of time with this guy's voice. I listen to his show all the time--at work, on my commute, in airports, in the car, sometimes when I'm cooking. It's a distinctive voice, a reedy voice, and not really what you'd expect to hear on professional radio in the first place, but it sort of sinks into your consciousness after awhile. And so there I was last night, and the man on the dais opened his mouth, and he sounded just like Ira Glass! I felt like he was lip-synching, and like I should shut my eyes.

It was great, though. This American Life is first and foremost a radio show, but Ira was there to promote the second season of the their recent foray into TV (also called This American Life). He talked about radio and television, and his genuine surprise at the usefulness of visual storytelling. He took questions and told crazy stories--his forte and his livelihood, after all--about the making of the show(s) and about the relationships he forms with his interviewees and about what it's like to look like Rachel Maddow and be a guy. The best thing was his obvious passion for what he’s doing; he clearly loves the stories and the people of This American Life, which is awesome, because I do, too. He was nice, and funny, and I like him even better now than I did before.

I am charmed.

I think I'll go listen to the radio now.

**If you're not familiar with This American Life, let me introduce you to its glory. TAL is an hour-long weekly radio show on NPR (find your local station here), and it tells stories about people. That's it. Crazy stories, funny stories, sad stories, everything stories. Each episode has a theme, and a varying number of stories on that theme--sometimes it's just one long story, if it's a really good one; usually they're in the range of three or four, though one episode is called "Twenty Acts in Sixty Minutes," for obvious reasons. If you've never heard TAL, check it out: you can download it for free on iTunes, stream it for free from the TAL website, or try to find it on the radio. AND! The most recent podcast (the podcast version runs a week behind the live version) is a rerun of one of my all-time favorite episodes, "The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar," which is one of those stories I will never forget. One warning: if you do listen, you may become one of those people who starts every other sentence with, "I was listening to NPR the other day, and..." but it'll be worth every pretentious second.

Are you ready for some football (and social wrangling)?

2009-02-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

I went to a Superbowl party last night.

It's funny, when you're far from home, the things that make you realize that you're alone--I didn't care so much about about the Superbowl itself, and have skipped it altogether in years past, but it was the principle of the thing. I didn't have anybody to watch it with, if I wanted to. Which is how I ended up in my ("my" in the sense that I have been there three times now) church basement at 6:00 Sunday night, surrounded by strangers and snack foods.

I think I'm glad I went--I met some people around my age, and a couple of the girls invited me to their Sunday night "alternative" service and to their Monday-night dinner group in Arlington. And there's something to be said for just going, for getting out of the house and making an effort, just to say I did. But man--there is also something about walking into a room and not knowing a single person, and having to make something of it or just stand there and be awkward, that is horrifying. I'd forgotten what that's like, and if I'd given it any thought beforehand, I frankly might not have gone. Which, of course, is totally the wrong tack to take--it's painful, but it's necessary if I want to get a handle on my life here and actually meet some people (so as to avoid this same situation in future). I am pleased with myself for going. I also left during at the beginning of the fourth quarter to go home and recover from the sheer social exhaustion I'd brought on myself (...and to watch The Office; who am I kidding?).

It'll get easier soon. Right? Right.

This is totally going to become a cat blog

2009-01-25T18:49:00.000-08:00

Sherlock says,

WAZZAAAAAAAAAAP!

It's only 2001 in kitty years.

Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter

2009-01-20T17:07:00.000-08:00

So, my motto lately has been, "Sometimes I just don't understand my life." I mean it in a good way--in the best way. I don't understand how I got to be in Washington for this moment in history, but it is (so far) full of surprises and sightings and moments where I just have to laugh at being in the right place at the right time, and that is exactly what I wanted--exactly what I needed?--from this move. I don't even know this city yet, but I am completely excited to be here.

Today was, simultaneously, utterly chaotic and remarkably smooth. My friend Grace and her friend Guy have been crashing in my living room this weekend, and we were up and stepping all over each other for the bathroom before the dawnzerly light (Ramona Quimby? Anybody?) even showed its face. We left the house at 7:00 and hopped on the bus (this after extensive Plan-B/Plan-C/Plan-D-ing, in case my peaceful corner bus stop suddenly turned crazy) and zipped down to Foggy Bottom, where Guy headed for the Metro--he had a standing ticket to the ceremony--and Grace and I followed the throngs towards the Mall. (Incidentally, I kept thinking of that scene in Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray asks some nameless redheaded woman where everybody's going, and she says, like he's a total moron, "To Gobbler's Knob!") There was plenty of space, and we grabbed seated spots on a piece of the WWII Memorial, and waited.

Just so you know: If it is 25 degrees outside and you think that your body heat will eventually warm up a granite wall--after all, it's only your butt-print that needs warming--YOU ARE WRONG. We sat on the wall for nearly five hours, unwilling to give up our spot, and I am not sure I have ever been so cold in my life, hand-warmer packets (in mittens and shoes) or no. Foot pain gave way to numbness, which gave way to the pain again, and I half-expected my toes to have snapped off by the time I took off my socks. But: sitting up high was cool, and ideal for photographing the ridiculous hugeness of the crowd, and we could see the Jumbotron just fine. It was worth every second, even though I was sure my underwear was freezing solid.

It was just as well that we'd missed the We Are One concert on Sunday (though it was a source of some distress at the time); they televised it on the Jumbotrons all morning to keep the earlybirds entertained. And then the San Francisco Boys' and Girls' Choruses sang, and Aretha performed looking fierce in that hat with the bow as big as her face, and Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman and some other people I didn't know performed the special John Williams piece (called, in my head, "What Spring Sounds Like, or People's Hearts Are Beginning to Thaw"), and it was so fabulous that I was totally okay with my blood freezing in my veins. And I continue to want to be BFFs with Michelle, Malia, and Sasha (Michelle = hardcore for her lack of bundling; Malia = Princess Composure; Sasha = hilarious and adorable just for showing up). And then our new President took his oath of office, and I cried a little, and he gave a really wonderful speech. Did you hear the fire in him? It was all on huge screens, of course, but there was this spot towards the middle, right around "all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness," where I thought, "preach it, brother."

After, Grace and I had planned to meet up with Guy and his friends, but meeting up with anybody was clearly out of the question--we couldn't walk (five hours straddling the wall, remember), and neither of us could stop shivering (scary!), and the tide of the crowd just bore us along. (What is it Barbara Kingsolver says about the stream of ants in The Poisonwood Bible? Stick out your elbows and raise up your feet? Not a bad philosophy in this situation; you could probably get halfway to Maryland that way.) We went back the way we'd come, stopping in at the Ritz-Carlton to thaw out and use the bathroom and check our phones, and ended up walking all the way home because we couldn't get a cab or a bus. So maybe there was a bit of a Bataan Death March vibe to the end of the day, but it was worth it. I'm so glad I went. I am so, so proud of President Barack Obama, and so, so thrilled for our nation, and now I can't wait to see what he actually does.

Welcome, Mr. President.

I was there.

2009-01-20T13:25:00.000-08:00

...and one more thing:

Why I don't believe in coincidences

2009-01-15T09:23:00.001-08:00

Since I moved to DC, I've been looking for a church. I'm spoiled in this area: I've known three churches in 28 years, each unique, but each full of people struggling together, with grace and extreme humanity, to live out the Gospel as they know it. I'm grateful that it's never been that hard, finding the right place to worship.

For awhile, I thought maybe I'd found my place here in DC--National Presbyterian, where the choir is spectacular and the teaching pastor comes from my church in California and I ran into Condi Rice (which I think I forgot to mention)--but it wasn't right. I'm back on the market, so to speak.

This past Sunday, because I had an appointment in Alexandria around midday, I decided to try church in Virginia. The last time I tried this, at a church in Arlington, I got hopelessly lost, missed the service, and decided to go to the mall instead (God knew I needed work pants; He didn't seem to mind). This time, I gave myself plenty of time, printed out detailed directions...and proceeded to get EVEN MORE LOST than the last time. Seriously. It was a nice drive--trees, river, a really interesting program about Sesame Street playing on NPR--but it wasn't church, and I was lost and frustrated and teary anyway over the death of Mr. Hooper. The service had started at 10:30. At 11:05, I arrived (at last) in Alexandria, gave up on actually going to service, and decided to kill a few hours on King Street before my appointment. I was stopped at a red light. Guess what else was at that light? Fairlington Presbyterian Church. Service at 11:00.

Yeah.

I went. It may be my church for the future; it may also be my church just for this week. Either way, I had to laugh, and shake my head, and be grateful.

12 of 12: January

2009-01-12T18:03:00.000-08:00

Welcome to 12 of 12 (144 of 12 x 12?) 2009! For the method behind the madness, and other people's entries, check out Chad Darnell's blog. Otherwise, here we go.

6:50 - January Monday, pre-dawn. This is my "over the moon" face.

7:03 - I feel that some savvy marketing person could base an ad campaign on oatmeal as the poster food for people who a) don't go through milk fast enough, and therefore have fridge-door cheese factories, or b) can't be bothered to buy fresh things in the first place. "Oatmeal: For the Single Person in You!" or possibly "Oatmeal: Don't Be Such a Slob."

7:48 - I was running late, but so was the N4. Relief all around.

7:58 - This is the Colombian embassy at Dupont Circle, which somehow always makes me feel like I'm at Disneyland. Sorry, Colombia. Your embassy is just too cute.

9:20 - My two main reference books for today. Did I forget to tell you that I moved 3,000 miles to analyze the use of the American vernacular phrase "dreadful sorry" in the folk ditty "Clementine"? Soon--when the funding comes in--I will move on to the nature of redundancy in "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain When She Comes."

9:22 - Who had residual jalapeno oil on her fingers when she tried to put in her contacts this morning? You get three guesses.

11:40 - Brainstorming (male) kitty names. Suggestions welcome.

1:07 - An unsuccessful attempt at a discreet self-portrait taken in the mirrored ceiling of the elevator at work. A total stranger now ~~knows~~ thinks I am a crazy elevator self-portrait-taker.

4:45 - Leaving a tiny bit early to make a 5:15 movie. Note how it is not pitch-black outside. This gives me hope.

7:30 - Sarah and me on our shared quest to see all of the major award-winners/nominees/hopefuls during their season of actual relevance. Subpoint: More bhangra dancing! I need more moments of Bollywood-inspired musical-kinesthetic unity in my life.

8:28 - I am going to skip "too lazy to cook" and go straight to "look at all that whole-grain/high-calcium goodness," and hope nobody notices.

8:35 - I am exhausted from all that...sitting? This is sad. Perhaps cheese and crackers and Stephen Colbert will cheer me up.

Happy January, folks. Stay warm.

Totally worth the trip

2009-01-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

YOU GUYS I JUST SAW BARACK OBAMA.

BARACK OBAMA!

He came out of the building across the street, waved right, waved left, climbed up on the step on his Suburban and waved some more, and got in the car. But IT WAS SO FABULOUS. I almost cried. Also, if you want to see some hardcore government fangirl squee, this is the way to go about it--the shrieking in my office was impressive.

At this rate, we will be BFF by 2009, no? Call me, Barack!

True story: there is zero percent work being done in this building right now.

Things you don't want to know but I want to tell you

2009-01-06T20:28:00.001-08:00

1. I left my flowered (but thankfully cheap) umbrella on the Metro this morning. Now I have another one (hot pink; also cheap, because of the Metro-leaving-on), but I miss the old one. I really liked it.

2. My toenails are not great.

3. I understand that mushrooms are a fungus that tastes a little like dirt/feet/dirty feet. I like my dirty-feet fungi with garlic and parmesan on a Tuesday night.

A heartbreaking work of staggering genius

2009-01-06T20:03:00.000-08:00

I just finished a second read-through of my favorite book from 2008, Haven Kimmel's The Solace of Leaving Early. (Side note: Who has parents awesome enough to come up with the name "Haven"? Especially in 1965 in Indiana?) Actually, it was just the second half--I had finished The Flame Trees of Thika and needed a palate-cleanser before Cryptonomicon, and remembered that I'd wandered through the first half a few months back and gotten distracted. I picked it up again. This is the joy of comfort reading: come and go as you please.

I liked Leaving Early the first time around; I loved Langston Braverman (Ph.D. drop-out, impossible, lover of orphaned girls and her dog Germane, as in "germane to the conversation") and Amos Townsend (minister, doubter, constantly getting tangled in tree branches). But I don't think I saw it and I know I didn't get it. I'm not sure I have a proper grasp now, either, but it's starting to take shape, the mass of mothers and children and loss and gain and belief and backwardness, plus the Virgin Mary (Kimmel went to seminary; she's allowed). I almost want to pick it up again now, as it's fresh in my mind, and try to figure out exactly how it's made, how we get from A to B and end with a scene so unexpected and romantic I almost had to put it down this time around. I wonder if I could get it if I just read it one more time? If I could see the strings twisting together?

In the mean time, I continue to not read Cryptonomicon and have started The History of Love, of which I do not know what to make.

It all began on New Year's Day

2009-01-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

New Year's is, as far as I can tell, a Disappointment Holiday, the kind of thing where there's an immense amount of pressure to have the best night of your life (every year, which seems like faulty math to me) and a very few ways to actually have the best night of your life. So you've got to go all-or-nothing: aim very very high or very very low. There's the When Harry Met Sally Manhattan fancy party option, and there's the games-PJs-Dick-Clark option; anything in between seems like a lot of stress for, arguably, not a life-changing amount of fun.

This year, because I have clearly wandered into somebody else's life, I went with Door #1: I met Christine in Manhattan and went to a friend's friend's party. I dressed up like a grown-up, like so:

and ate sweet little hors d'oeuvres-y bits and made conversation with strangers (though we also watched Dick Clark, and Ryan Seacrest waiting for Dick Clark to keel over onscreen, which was sad). It was an aim-high New Year's, and I had a good time, and now I will always be able to say, "Remember the year we got dressed up and went to New York for New Year's Eve?"

I'm not gonna lie: I was ready to shove 2008 out the door. It was a strange year for me, a year of deepening roots and, in many ways, of refined focus, but also a year of discontent. I spent a lot of time and effort trying to rock my life forward, and trying not to lose my mind in the mean time. It worked in the end--in fact, I can barely see this year through the screen of the last few frantic months--but it was desperate and frustrating and generally not my favorite thing.

And so it was nice to wake up on January 1 and see this view from Brooke and Brian's apartment:

At this time last year, I could not have predicted being here--in New York, in Washington, disoriented but enjoying the swirl of everything. I love that I couldn't see the future, and that it's brought me somewhere unexpected--I hoped and prayed and cried out for a surprise, for some kind of rescue, for something to swoop in and pick me up and carry me away, and it happened. I love that I still can't see the future, that I'll never see it, that it'll keep receding like the horizon. I love that don't know where I'll be or what I'll be doing when we hit 2010 (2010!), but I am excited to feel my way through and find out.

Happy New Year, friends.

Strange Fruit, indeed

2008-12-20T17:51:00.000-08:00

Instant tears of hilarity, every time.

You can hear the whole essay, along with pieces by Anne Lamott and Sarah Vowell, here.