Month: March 2012

30 Mar 2012

Frost by Marianna Baer

When I was about twelve years old, my parents invited me to watch my first scary movie. For two or three nights, I joined them after small-children bedtime and we watched the miniseries version of The Shining. I was old enough, mature enough, and it wasn’t the R-rated Stanley Kubrick version… but it still scared the crap out of me, and to this day, I am still heavily freaked out by “Haunted House” type books and movies.

This is probably why I couldn’t read Frost at my apartment, alone, after 9 p.m.

Leena is looking forward to her final year at boarding school – she’s a student leader, an overachiever, and she and her three best friends are going to live together in this cute little cottage by themselves called “Frost House.” But on the first day of school, Leena finds out that Celeste Lazar – weird, art-freak, loose-cannon girl on campus – is going to be her roommate – Leena and her roommates are miffed that their perfect bubble has been broken. What makes things worse is that Celeste hates Frost House – the windows freak her out, she thinks the closet smells, the creaky old house noises keep her awake at night. For Leena, though, everything in her life starts to go downhill EXCEPT for when she’s at Frost House. Leena can’t keep peace between her roommates and Celeste, she loses the trust of a valued teacher-mentor, and she finds more and more excuses to self-medicate from her stolen pill stash. Celeste’s complaints about the house become more and more bizarre, but Leena sees Frost House as a sanctuary; so maybe the house knows something that Leena doesn’t? Maybe Celeste just doesn’t belong and needs to leave?

This book is a mysterious-haunting book/psychological-who-is-crazy, who-is-not? book, which again, see: The Shining. Baer also does some freaky things here to just create a sense of Uncanny: Things Are Just Not Right about the book. Celeste’s brother David for example, is prominent throughout the book as Leena’s love interest and Celeste’s ultimate protector. But Celeste and David’s relationship is full of family secrets and their closeness becomes kind of… creepy.

On a lighter note, Baer’s writing feels very contemporary YA – she gets the language, the issues, the friendships between teens. But for me, that just made the creepiness even creepier, like whatever is going on in that house could possibly show up at any time in my favorite Sarah Dessen book or something. Urghhhh.

You might want to keep this book in the freezer when you aren’t reading it. Just sayin’.

29 Mar 2012

relief

The nice thing about being Really Very Busy is that when you are done being busy, it feels really very good.

It takes a little while to realize that you are done being Really Very Busy, but at some point you will find yourself sitting on a couch and saying to yourself “Hmm… I guess I don’t have anything in particular to do for the rest of the day.”

And then you will breathe a deep sigh of relief.

And then you will finally sweep the floor and fold all that laundry and watch that movie that needs to go back to the library and go to the gym and make a soup for dinner.

If you are me.

I have returned to normal amount of busy, which on this particular afternoon means I am revisiting a piece of fiction I have not touched for years in order to prepare to READ IT OUT LOUD IN FRONT OF PEOPLE IN A PUBLIC PLACE.

It’s not too bad. It’s a whole book. There are lots of 10-minute readings that I like, and nobody has to know the rest of the book exists!

So this afternoon, all I have to do is tinker and drink this coffee and try not to look like a sleepless hag,

then read,

then go read,

then go home.

Tomorrow I will wake up and do some other things, and then it will be the weekend.

If you are driving in the dark and can only see as far as your headlights shine, you will still make it home. Or something.

 

23 Mar 2012

susceptible to hype + a break

When news about the movie and the casting and the posters and the pictures and the trailers and everything else came out, I was indifferent. Books into movies are tricky. I don’t get disappointed, I don’t get invested.

But I have to say, I am having trouble thinking about much else other than my Hunger Games tickets, which will be waiting for me at the box office at 7:30 tomorrow night.

That was a lie, actually. I have a lot a lot A LOT of other things to think about. So much, in fact that, I am going to take my first ever official Blog Break.

First. Ever.

I have been blogging since mid 2003.

I used to scoff at folk who “needed some time away.” Blogging, for me, is more of a sickness than a hobby. I don’t want to stop. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes I don’t post as much as I want to or think I should, but I never WANT to leave it. I want to keep trying. I know I will keep trying.

But this morning, I understood.

In the next week I have to…

  • finish an assignment and a paper
  • pull together a last minute, high-stakes job application with multiple written portions and a video
  • get another I Really Want This Job application together (with essay questions)
  • work on another assignment due a week from Monday
  • do something Really Emotionally Hard (Nothing major, but with my current stress levels? Ack…)

And do all that while maintaining my usual online class stuff, working 30 hours a week, interning, sleeping, feeding myself, etc

I have so much to do and so little time that my procrastination urges are in overdrive. This morning I was sitting around watching 30 Rock after eating breakfast – instead of working on something productive – and The Things I Need To Do were brewing around in my head and then I thought to myself, “Oh, but when will I have time to BLOG!? I need to BLOG!!”

It hit me that no, I actually should probably get a job rather than blogging this week. And that unless I actively step away, tell the universe SEE YOU NEXT THURSDAY, I will come back here and then I will not only be more stressed out, I will not get my shit done.

So, SEE YOU NEXT THURSDAY!

22 Mar 2012

The Big Crunch by Pete Hautman

I love YA romance, but I am extremely picky.

  • I don’t like a lot of gratuitous descriptions of the characters’ hotness.
  • I don’t like a lot of completely obvious foreshadowing – it’s a romance, we know you are gonna hook up no matter how star-crossed your love may be.
  • I don’t like love that comes on too quickly, or can be easily confused with that of an obsessive stalker (sorry, Twilight)

I like romance, but I’m a smart girl. I don’t fall for silly romantic ploys, in real life or in fiction.

Pete Hautman’s The Big Crunch is probably the smartest romance I’ve read in quite some time. Apparently I am not alone in this thinking, as it was given a Los Angeles Time Book Award nod a few weeks ago, standing up against former Printz winning author Libba Bray, critical darling Life: An Exploded Diagram, Printz Honor The Scorpio Races, and the immensely popular Patrick Ness. The Big Crunch doesn’t feel out of place in this bunch – he did win a freaking National Book Award – but it is of  certainly quieter than the LA time nominees. Contemporary realism that doesn’t scream LITERARY. Lots of pink on the cover. Romance.

It’s quiet, but yes: it’s smart. Very smart.

The Big Crunch is the story of two teens and their completely typical love affair. June and Wes remind me that teen romance is rarely of the Romeo & Juliet, the Edward & Bella, or even the Sarah Dessen variety. Teen romance is not often foreshadowed, not always quick to bloom, not always logical. Teen relationships are weird.

June is new at school, but she’s used to it. Her dad’s job has her at multiple schools every school year. She knows how to fit in enough to get what she needs – a group to sit with in the cafeteria and maybe someone to kiss, if she feels like it. Wes broke up with his long-term girlfriend over the summer and he’s not sure why he did it, especially now that she’s moved on and it’s stressing him out. It’s not love at first sight for Wes & June – their social circles occasionally collide, they meet by chance walking home, and eventually, these tiny moments add up to a love.

But even then, things are not easy. Some factors that challenge their relationship are beyond their control – parents, friends, timing – but Hautman also doesn’t hold back from exposing, through close third-person narration for both Wes and June, the many tiny ways that people in love can betray one another. The pettiness. The exhaustion of being together and the tendency to blame the other party.

People are not always nice. All endings are not happy. Love is awful sometimes, and this is the kind of love that can shapes our future relationships sometimes, shape who we become.

I find that much more compelling than anything perfect.

 

20 Mar 2012

social mediums

I didn’t think this would happen, but the iPad is certainly changing the way I waste time on the Internet.

I usually resist acquiring new social network accounts. I have enough websites sucking my time. But the iPad! It doesn’t feel like wasting time on the Internet – using an app instead of a browser doesn’t feel like a time-suck, it feels like fun!

Urm. Yeah.

Anyway, these two apps/sites have me pretty enthralled lately.

1. Goodreads

It probably seems strange, but I haven’t really been that into social-reading-catalogs. I got excited about LibraryThing, but I found out the hard way that they had a cap on the number of books you can enter in. This was four years ago, so maybe now that they are bigger they’ve dropped it, but I felt pretty sour about the time I spent, only to find out I couldn’t finish the task or make any updates. I returned to my old method of… oh… keeping a list.

I’ve had a Goodreads account since then, I flirted with Shelfari for awhile, but neither stuck, UNTIL I GOT MY IPAD! The Goodreads app is easy and fun to use – I like seeing the “feed” of what my friends are reading, I like rating books when I’m done reading them, I like reading what other people thought about the books that I am currently reading, etc.

It’s possible that I waited long enough for lots of people to join, and now I’m back to hang out with them, but I log onto Goodreads most times I am using the iPad, just to check in on things.

I update a lot, so if you are into knowing what I am reading IN REAL TIME, feel free to add me as a friend! I also write tiny non-reviews sometimes… stuff like “WHAT WAS THAT BOOK’S PROBLEM?!” and other nuggets deeply critical analysis.

2. Dailymile

Occasionally I decide that my health would be much better if I could just keep track of how many glasses of water/pieces of fruit/calories I ingest and then track those figures against how many minutes I spend on an elliptical machine/times I run around a track/number of sit ups I can do without experiencing muscle collapse. It’s dieting common knowledge that people who keep a food log eat less, even if they don’t make any other deliberate changes. Why not cash in, especially if you are an anal retentive person who likes lists more than she likes people?

The process, though, goes like this:

Step One: I start writing things down on paper. 

Step Two: Get annoyed by carrying around an extra notebook/my poor handwriting/the lack of room on a single page. Begin to create some kind of new-fangled spreadsheet.

Step Three: Want to do more things that I know how to do using Excel. Think “Hey, aren’t there people who made websites for this crap?” Sign up.

Step Four: 2 days later, I don’t even remember my password and I’ve added half a meal or one workout or whatever. Return to stasis.

I started running again just around the time that we got the iPad. I wanted a place where I could keep track of how many miles I was running – I was trying to work up from 1 to 3 miles pretty quickly, but I didn’t want to go too fast and give myself some kind of stupid beginner’s injury. I went through the above process, but when I got to #3, I found Dailymile, and I’ve stuck with it.

Life tracking is much easier on a mobile device. I think I use the mobile site to update Dailymile – I don’t think they have an iPad app – and it’s easy, fast, and voila! Cool little charts! Weekly mile counts! Fun! Fun! Fun!

I also like to look at these lifetime stats when I log in.

I have run more than 75 miles this year!!! Holy crap! I have not, however, made it around the world yet. And I don’t even have to feel bad about eating those four dozen donuts this year – I burned them all RIGHT off!

I have all of 2 friends on here, so if anyone is a runner, we should be friends. Unless you are a crazy marathon runner and are going to make me feel bad about running a grand total of 6 miles last week. Just kidding, we can be friends! Motivation! Right?

Now that the gates are open, I am open to wasting more time doing other pointless things. Anyone have an app they are obsessed with, for iPad or iPhone  and have a time-suck recommendation? I’m all ears!

19 Mar 2012

2012: week eleven


March 11 – March 17

Hectic. Stressful. That about sums it up.

My schedule is so tightly packed that anytime something else gets tacked on to my schedule, I feel it immediately.

This week was a perfect storm of assignments for both classes, job interview that killed my free afternoon, asking people for references (urgh), lots of stuff going on at work, online class video-chat class meeting, etc, etc.

I fear my ears may become permanently glued to my shoulders. I might wire my jaw shut with stress-clenching alone. Everything I eat, I feel like I have eaten lead.

It’s not a downward spiral, though. It’s just a season. Things are not going to feel better until I have more time on my hands, which will happen in May. It sucks because things aren’t going to ease up – except incrementally and intermittently from day to day, week to week – in fact, they are likely to get worse before they get better.

But it’s 100% situational. This is comforting. Situations change, and in eight short weeks, I will have an entirely different life.

One in which I can read whatever I want, whenever I want, lest you forget.

Other notes of optimism:

  1. I can’t wear a pair of pants I bought last summer because even fresh out of the wash, they are huge-mongous.
  2. I got to eat a St. Patrick’s Day brunch cooked by actually Irish ladies. It was decadent and consisted mostly of Kerrygold cheese. Although I’m not sure if the green mimosa was all that traditional…
  3. It’s getting dangerously close to skirt & dress season! I love you, global warming!

 

Reading:

  • Frost by Marianna Baer. SCARIEST BOOK EVER. I couldn’t read this alone in my apartment at night. I don’t think that’s happened to me since I read the freaking Shining.
  • Purity by Jackson Pearce

Listening to:

Watching:

  • I officially ran through every How I Met Your Mother episode. Again. I tried to download Season 7 but realized that’s the season that’s still going on…
  • So now what do I watch when I want to watch a 30 minute comedy that I really don’t have to pay attention to while I eat/clean/live, etc? The winner: Scrubs.
  • My podcast habits are turning me on to stand-up, which I haven’t watched since I was like, 14. This week was Louis CK (excellent) and Patton Oswalt (not as excellent)
  • There was also a night with me, homework, a bottle of wine, and It’s Complicated. Ahem.

 

 

16 Mar 2012

Dystopian YA – 5 Essential Titles

While writing my review of Veronica Roth’s Divergent a few weeks ago, I was thinking about how I used to love dystopias, but now I hate them.

I am quick to whine about the post-Hunger Games overload – I am certainly sick to death of reading so many variations on the same theme.

But then I thought about it for awhile and decided that maybe I’m not mad that the world latched onto something I loved and saturated the market… maybe most of the newer dystopias just SUCK.

So if you are new to the genre of dystopian lit for teens, here is a primer, the must-reads. If you haven’t read least three of the following novels, I will not listen to any of your dystopian recommendations. Sorry.

 

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Dystopian Conceit? Life is great for a kid. You go to school and eat the meals brought to your door. Your parents care for you, and your siblings too. The elders make all hard decisions so you just don’t have to think about it. When you turn 12, they even choose your career, selected especially for you. Maybe horrible things have happened, are still happening in your Community, but no one needs to know!

The Protagonist is Jonah, a new twelve year old who is in a unique position in the community to begin learning about all that has been denied to him in his life.

My Two Cents: This book is polarizing in the children’s lit world, but I’m pretty sure Lois Did It All First (for kids anyway). And despite having read the book four times in the past three years and written three papers about it… I still like it okay. I mean, no, I do not want to write a fifth paper by any means, but I think it still holds up well.

 

Feed by M.T. Anderson

The Dystopian Conceit? There’s a computer in your brain – a Feed. You can IM your friends without talking. You can order the hottest new clothes with a single thought. You can upload information instead of doing homework. You can even upload a virus for kicks and giggles. Of course the advertisements don’t stop, and your brain-computer could maybe cause serious medical problems, but we’ll worry about that later.

The Protagonist is Titus, a teen who had a Feed implanted at birth, who falls for a girl whose Feed is no longer functional and is also probably going to kill her.

My Two Cents: I know some people who HATE this book because it’s written in this almost inaccessible, futuristic teen dialect – think “like” + “omg” to the nth power. But once you get past the language (the audio version, helps, I’ve heard) this book is SO genius. This is probably the YA book I have most often recommended to non-YA readers, and they all came back raving. I feel like this book set the bar for the YA dystopia – hardly any others published since have the nuance, the complexity, or the emotional impact that I find in Anderson’s text.

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collin

The Dystopian Conceit? Do I really need to recap this? Are you the one person on the planet who has not read this book?

The Protagonist is Katniss Everdeen, bad-ass scrappy kid who grew up defying authority and has to fight for her life against murderous children while also murdering children. Again, do I really need to recap this??

My Two Cents: I thought I would include this one on my list because it’s probably the most Culturally Relevant YA dystopian, and you’d be remiss not to read it. Although I am not sure how I feel about the series as a whole, the first two books were definitely riveting – Ms. Collins knows how to twist a plot – and there’s something so sinister about the power structures in this book that I just thought I might reiterate what popular culture is telling you: yeah, it’s pretty good.

 

House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

The Dystopian Conceit? Undisclosed political and socioeconomic factors have upset the world’s current organization. Governments have lost their power to large, multinational drug operations, poverty is rampant, and genetic advances have changed the definitions of humanity. Everything is basically turned on its ass, and nasty people have a lot of power.

The Protagonist is Matt, a clone. Because he is the clone of one of the most powerful drug lords, he is immensely powerful, but because clones are not considered human because they cannot possess their own souls, he is also not even human. He grows up in isolalternately praised and ostracized

My Two Cents: House of the Scorpion has so many medals on its cover for a reason: it’s about 10% dystopia and 90% complex, multicultural, literary family drama. Very different than the typical dystopia, which tends to favor action over interpersonal drama. But the beautiful, genius part of the book is that much of the family conflict here derives from the conflict between Past-Western-Society and Future-Western-Society. What values should we hold on to? Which ones should be replaced? Completely riveting and so thought-provoking.

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

The Dystopian Conceit? Life is good. Life is fine. Life actually might not be in the future it’s so close to what it is now. Okay, maybe it’s not in the future at all, but when something so simple as the moon is altered, the aftermath is nothing short of apocalyptic. And unlike every other dystopia, there’s nothing nothing NOTHING anyone can do to save the world.

The Protagonist is Miranda, a figure skater who is 100% average. She has no special powers, she’s not The Chosen One. She’s just normal and then everything her life goes completely nuts.

My Two Cents: No, dystopian is not the same as post-disaster. But because many dystopias take place after a society has recovered from some kind of vague, far-gone disaster situation, reading Life as We Knew It feels like it fits into the genre. I love this series. Pfeffer really captures the way that disasters unhinge us in a way that allows for those crazy dystopian situations to actually occur.

A warning: the book is written in diary-style, and the first few chapters are distinctly girly-YA-etc. Just hold on. And hold on tight.

 

And a bonus!!

Bumped by Megan McCafferty

The Dystopian Conceit? A mystery virus has sterilized all adults. Perpetuation of the species is now in the hands of teenagers… but adults have commodified and commercialized teen sex & pregnancy to hugely problematic proportions.

The Protagonist is Melody, who is of such excellent genetic stock that she is getting ready to make a big payout when she finally rents out her uterus as a surrogate. Her plans go a little berserk when her separated-at-birth twin, Harmony, shows up when she’s on the run from her secluded religious sect, where people believe that *gasp!* people should have sex for love/marriage and raise their own children.

My Two Cents: This book is too new and a little too silly to enter “the canon” of dystopian YA, in my opinion. HOWEVER, I though I would include it in this list because it somehow both exemplifies a well-drawn dystopian novel while also almost satirizing the dystopian genre…. which makes you think about how all dystopias are kind of not-funny satires of actual life… which makes you wonder why more dystopias can’t be funny. Why can’t more dystopias be funny? Can we work on this, authors at large? Maybe I’ll start investigating those trends and report back in a few years with another definitive, overly opinionated list…

 

 

14 Mar 2012

To Timbuktu by Casey Scieszka and Steven Weinberg

I can never quite decide if I like travel memoirs. I am not a world explorer. I have no grand designs to traipse across the world with nothing but a backpack and a passport. I’m not opposed to world traveling, but it just doesn’t call to me like I think it calls to others. Those Others tend to be the ones writing travel memoirs, so I think I am intrigued by the premise of many travelogues but then feel put-off because I don’t quite understand the kind of of unspoken zest that runs under the text.

However, a specific narrative voice sometimes sucks me in. Mock me if you will, but I adore Eat, Pray, Love. Maybe I’m more interested in the memoir than the travel?

I couldn’t quite decide if I liked To Timbuktu: Nine Countries, Two People, One Story, but ultimately, Scieska’s story and voice endeared me. Scieskza has the zest for travel – just out of college, she wants to teach in China, revisit her study abroad locale of Morocco, and has landed a Fulbright to spend a few months researching education systems in Mali. But she also has a zest for Steven, who she met while in Morocco. Since then, they’ve been maintaining a long-distance, nascent-romance, and what better way to start a Real Relationship than by traveling, working, and living together around the world?

What I ended up liking about this book was Scieska’s earnestness, her honesty. This is not about the romance of travel, but the excited optimism of being young and running around the world, taking it all in. This is not about the romance of two lovers shacking up overseas, but about the romance of getting to know each other when you share a dusty apartment with no appliances and the air conditioning stopped working and it’s 100+ degrees outside and you have some kind of traveling sickness.

Scieska writes the text here, so it’s mostly her story, but her partner, Steven, contributes charcoal-y illustrations.

I wonder where they are traveling to now?

13 Mar 2012

so you ran out of This American Life…

There comes a time in every girl’s life when your demand for This American Life podcasts outpaces a measly one-episode-a-week demand.

It’s understandable. Life throws you a lot of tedious tasks that simply can’t be accomplished without auditory assistance. Like cleaning. Folding laundry. Exercising. Opening boxes of books for hours (just me? huh…).

Or walking.

And sometimes your attention span just can’t handle an audio book, you know?

The last time I tried to listen to Non-This-American-Life podcasts, the whole concept of podcasts was fairly nascent. Which means: the podcasts available were pretty crappy. Luckily for me, there has been a boom in podcast quality during the past years! Yippee!

So here is what I have been listening to with relative obsession for the past few weeks. If you have found yourself in a This American Life drought, then these may fill that massive void in your life.

For a basic primer on quality comedy podcasts, I would recommend my friend Ashley’s post Podcasts for your Ears.

I will admit that I feel a bit of kismet has brought me to the world of podcasts. As soon as I started listening to some of the more popular comedy podcasts, I spotted references to them EVERYWHERE. It was like this bit of counterculture I was never aware of. Anyway, my introduction to these podcasts also began auspicously – as soon as I said “WAH I NEED MORE THIS AMERICAN LIFE WHAT SHOULD I DO??” I swear, the next day, Ashley made this post. MAGIC!

Ashley covers the big ones: Nerdist. WTF with Marc Maron. The Pod F. Tompkast. I’m not hooked on any of these yet, but they are certainly entertaining, and feature some quality guest stars. Head on over to Ashley’s blog for a more thorough recommendations – she’s been at it for much longer than I have!

Additional moments of kismet:

If you aren’t in the mood for comedy and you have two working ovaries, I would heartily recommend Hilary Frank’s The Longest Shortest Time. On this podcast, Frank interviews new moms and dads about the bizarre experience that is raising Very Tiny Babies. Think of this as a well-produced mommy blog for your ears. I was so sad when I listened all the way through this series.

Moment of kismet:

If you ARE in the mood for comedy, allow me to reveal my biggest obsession – You Had to Be There. I saw this article about the podcast in the NYTimes last week and was so intrigued. While I like comedy podcasts, what drew me to this one was the strange premise. The two hosts, comedians Nikki Glaser and Sara Schaefer met at a party and hit it off. They wanted to be friends. Instead of doing awkward lady-dates – or however it is you make friends when you aren’t in school I have no idea – the decided to start a podcast. So it’s part funny podcast, part two new friends getting to know each other. I am a big-time voyeur, so this was intriguing. And I was SO instantly hooked. In fact, I have not listened to anything else since discovering this one because GUESS WHAT! It’s a year old so there are 700 million episodes to listen to.

 

Moment of kismet:

  • I am about 10 episodes in and for some reason these episodes have been disproportionately MICHIGAN and KANSAS heavy! I believe my readership here is about 90% people from Michigan or Kansas, so this might excite you.

I will also add these notes:

  • The musical guests are all… strangely awesome.
  • It’s pretty raunchy. Actually, a lot of these podcasts are pretty raunchy. If you are adverse to the raunch, listen with care.
  • I love that this is two ladies. Lady humor ftw!

And in a final moment of kismet, just as I entered this Let’s Hunt for Podcasts stage of my life, another college friend of mine was like SO YEAH I STARTED A PODCAST!

 

And it is funny. Very funny. Recommend! J.D.’s Cocktail Lounge is available on my friend’s tumblr or on iTunes.

This last one has made me miss my college friends something fierce – I need more hilarious discourse in my life.

Additionally, this whole experience has made me want to start a podcast. Every time a funny exchange occurs between me and a friend in real life, I start to wonder “Hmmm… what kind of podcast could we make?” I feel like it may be a sickness, but it also makes for a fun conversation starter at parties.

But seriously. Anyone down?

 

 

12 Mar 2012

2012: week ten

March 4 – March 10

 I think the universe knew I was turning ancient at the end of the week and decided that I deserved a break. Everything was turning up roses for Professional Jessica:

 

+ I got a (part-time summer) job interview

+ My paper is on the wait list for a summer children’s lit conference (that is more than good enough news for me)

+ My first professional blog post went live for the old Internship

+ I finished my second professional blog post for the other old-Internship, which should be posted soon

+ I found out I get to write a REAL review for the print magazine at the old Internship

 

Non-professionally, I seem to have overcome some of my “I just feel like garbage”-ness that plagued me for a few weeks. I give credit to mainlining Kombucha. Additionally, I seem to have entered a small superhuman phase, during which I just don’t need to sleep. I’m not particularly tired when I go to bed, I kinda lay around, half-awake, half-asleep until well past midnight, and then when my alarm goes off I’m just… awake, like the minor league insomnia never happened.

Maybe (oh just maybe!) my life becomes more manageable when I’m not working 30+ hours/week and doing the late-night thing? Today marks my return to the grind, starting off with a lovely 12-hour day and a paper due at 6. Yay.

But the semester is half over. Whoa.

Reading:

Listening to:

  • I am obsessed with You Had To Be There and listen to nothing else, except for….
  • …. this song


which I have had on repeat thanks to Faryle. I like the original, too, but you know. A cappella.

Watching:

  • Kramer vs. Kramer. I read some random article that listed this movie as one of the biggest Best Picture upsets – that in the 70’s divorce was big news, but that the movie doesn’t hold up. I kind of agree, but not because the movie was bad. I just thought that watching Dustin Hoffman play A Single Father!!omg!! wasn’t exactly revolutionary, and Meryl Streep is in like 3 scenes. What’s the big deal?
  • I watched half of Black Swan before the player refused to cooperate. I won’t tell you exactly where it cut out… but it was pretty awkward.
  • The Boy and I were talking about the new Lorax movie, and I started singing a song about Barbaloots, and he was like “wtf is a Barbaloot.” So we have watched the 1972 TV special version like, 5 times in the past two days.

Thank you, Youtube, for allowing me to relive my childhood any time of day or night.