Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
Public Service
A couple quick new product reviews:
1. Lubriderm Cocoa and Shea Butter Lotion smells like men's sweat. You may like that, if not, stick to unscented.
2. Ben and Jerry's has done a very good thing with their new flavor, Cinnamon Buns. I would highly recommend you try it. Indeed, it is something to call home about. It is likely my favorite non-chocolate flavored ice cream ever. I mean, I will always love From Russia with Buzz... but this shit is delicious.
You're welcome.
1. Lubriderm Cocoa and Shea Butter Lotion smells like men's sweat. You may like that, if not, stick to unscented.
2. Ben and Jerry's has done a very good thing with their new flavor, Cinnamon Buns. I would highly recommend you try it. Indeed, it is something to call home about. It is likely my favorite non-chocolate flavored ice cream ever. I mean, I will always love From Russia with Buzz... but this shit is delicious.
You're welcome.
It's nice
When we learn things in law school that answer questions I've had. This week's "Shockingly, this is Actually Useful" award is a tie between two readings for Property.
1. What's the difference between a Coop and a Condo? I've often wondered. Now I know.
2. The case I just read about someone being sued for trespassing when they entered a farmer's land to provide information and medical care to the farmer's migrant employees. The court said this is ok, it's for the public good and the farmer can't keep government and charity organizations from providing services. Would have liked to be able to whip that one out on the Gretna police when they had my work-buddy up against the squad car while we were circulating information to day laborers about organizing.
Ok, back to making slow progress through my reading and feeling self-satisfied about my choice of appropriate footwear through the 2 ft of snow.
1. What's the difference between a Coop and a Condo? I've often wondered. Now I know.
2. The case I just read about someone being sued for trespassing when they entered a farmer's land to provide information and medical care to the farmer's migrant employees. The court said this is ok, it's for the public good and the farmer can't keep government and charity organizations from providing services. Would have liked to be able to whip that one out on the Gretna police when they had my work-buddy up against the squad car while we were circulating information to day laborers about organizing.
Ok, back to making slow progress through my reading and feeling self-satisfied about my choice of appropriate footwear through the 2 ft of snow.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
This has nothing to do with Mardi Gras...
... but I thought it was funny. At the bank this afternoon, the woman opening our new SHN bank account was trying to induce us to also get credit cards. She said that someday we'd be 24 and trying to buy a car.... I told her I am almost 26, I have a car and a number of credit cards. And then she said we looked under 20. Twenty six is just barely old enough for that to be flattering. Then she also said they see a lot of undergrads who look way more haggard. Now that is definitely flattering... I think.
What's Old is New Again
After a 2-3 year stint of identifying and embracing expensive jeans... I bought a pair at Old Navy last weekend. And damn if my butt doesn't look at least 90% as good in them as it does in jeans that retail for 5 times the price. Sorry, I don't know what this recent obsession with math is... the point is that the ultra low-rise bootcut jeans priced at $29.99 are just fine. Good, even. And may put Jerome Dahan out of business. Then again, I was only buying his jeans on ebay... so I guess my new discovery won't impact him in any way.
Monday, February 19, 2007
For my public
Who may wish to follow me in the press, this is my second appearance in the Daily Cardinal. Which now ties with number of stories in which I was quoted in the Argus. Based on my calculations-- 2,700 people at Wesleyan and 4 years vs. 35,000 people at UW and .5 yrs... I am approximately 103 times more famous in Madison than I was in Middletown. My dad suggested that after 3.5 more years, I will be mayor. I am counting on your votes.
The Tax Code
Is working out quite well for me this year-- love the half year working, half year fulltime student. You get a lot of money back by borrowing huge sums of it. The nearly $2,000 coming my way from Uncle Sam (and Uncle... well, I guess now Uncle Spitzer) will nicely offset a summer's salary that just barely covers rent.
Friday, February 16, 2007
SushiBagel
I've been trying to get this picture off my phone for awhile. I wanted the internet to see how Bagels Forever wraps up your lox sandwich to look like sushi, because I think it is so clever. So, see? It also costs $3.25. Also clever.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Happy Valentine's Day
I meant to post a picture of the 30 cupcakes I made yesterday... but left the camera in the car and the shutter is frozen. Literally. And there are only 13 minutes left of Loveday anyway. Next year...
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
My First Friend and the Internet
She was my best friend when I was four years old. She came into my life before the period in elementary school when I had one friend. I don’t really remember having more than one friend in preschool, but the fact that I liked to read didn’t seem to be as much of a problem then as it became.
Her parents had a lot of ideas of how to raise children. They enrolled them in art and language classes. My parents probably would have done the same for me, but about the time I became friends with her, they started a long and bitter divorce and custody battle. They spent tens of thousands of dollars and loaded me up with emotional baggage, all in the name of spending an extra day a week with me. Twenty years later, I know the whole thing had nothing to do with me, true concern for my well-being could have meant saving that money for college and making me learn an instrument. Then again, had anything about that been different, I wouldn't be who I am now. Someone who made it to first chair in the 7th grade orchestra faking the ability to read music and comfortable with wanderlust, since it was never a big deal to pack a toothbrush.
I did love to read. I remember her dad scolding my dad, saying she wasn’t allowed to read The Babysitter’s Club like I was, she was only allowed to read “the classics.” While I read and dreamed about being from New York, like Stacy, or wearing purple tights under yellow shorts like Claudia, her parents moved the family from St. Paul out to a third-ring suburb. The schools were better.
She and I fell out of touch, although our dads continued to talk, eventually email when technology caught up. My dad passed on a photo slideshow from her wedding last summer and I spent a long time looking at how similar she looked in it as she did when we were four.
Last summer she found me on myspace and sent me a message. “Oh my God, you were my best friend when I was four!” I looked at her profile. She’d been living on the west coast, graduated from college out there. Now she and her husband were living in Thailand. I wrote back, telling her I saw the pictures of her wedding, it was beautiful. I told her I graduated from college, lived in New York and was moving back to the Midwest to go to law school. She never wrote back. A couple of months later, I found her blog through myspace. I spent hours reading all of the back entries. I read about her four-year struggle with heroin addiction. I read about her stint as a call girl, to support the drug habit. I read her poetry and her ideas about the world. I felt so strange, because I was suddenly so sure she read my message over the summer and, well, thought I was totally lame. To her, I feared, she is a tortured artistic soul and I am run of the mill, condemned to living a small life within the system. Having never battled something like an IV-drug addiction… I don’t know… but something about it seemed romanticized. That through this dark history she was planning to take her place among The Greats. And what would I do? Toil away through a lifetime of small victories? From a distance, and totally within my own head, I resented her view of me. And also vaguely feared it was true.
I kept reading the blog, periodically. I read about her husband turning abusive, I read about her misery in Thailand, I read about her leaving her husband and returning home for Christmas. As I kept reading, I felt like I was getting to know her again. Her profile song on myspace now is one of my favorites. I don’t think we’d be friends now, but I also don’t think she would think I am totally lame. All of this is what is so strange about the internet, folks putting personal information up for anyone to read. The seeming inevitability that I would stumble across her corner of it and read that. That everything that’s lost is found again, here in the future. And at some point, she may stumble across my corner and read this… Hi.
Her parents had a lot of ideas of how to raise children. They enrolled them in art and language classes. My parents probably would have done the same for me, but about the time I became friends with her, they started a long and bitter divorce and custody battle. They spent tens of thousands of dollars and loaded me up with emotional baggage, all in the name of spending an extra day a week with me. Twenty years later, I know the whole thing had nothing to do with me, true concern for my well-being could have meant saving that money for college and making me learn an instrument. Then again, had anything about that been different, I wouldn't be who I am now. Someone who made it to first chair in the 7th grade orchestra faking the ability to read music and comfortable with wanderlust, since it was never a big deal to pack a toothbrush.
I did love to read. I remember her dad scolding my dad, saying she wasn’t allowed to read The Babysitter’s Club like I was, she was only allowed to read “the classics.” While I read and dreamed about being from New York, like Stacy, or wearing purple tights under yellow shorts like Claudia, her parents moved the family from St. Paul out to a third-ring suburb. The schools were better.
She and I fell out of touch, although our dads continued to talk, eventually email when technology caught up. My dad passed on a photo slideshow from her wedding last summer and I spent a long time looking at how similar she looked in it as she did when we were four.
Last summer she found me on myspace and sent me a message. “Oh my God, you were my best friend when I was four!” I looked at her profile. She’d been living on the west coast, graduated from college out there. Now she and her husband were living in Thailand. I wrote back, telling her I saw the pictures of her wedding, it was beautiful. I told her I graduated from college, lived in New York and was moving back to the Midwest to go to law school. She never wrote back. A couple of months later, I found her blog through myspace. I spent hours reading all of the back entries. I read about her four-year struggle with heroin addiction. I read about her stint as a call girl, to support the drug habit. I read her poetry and her ideas about the world. I felt so strange, because I was suddenly so sure she read my message over the summer and, well, thought I was totally lame. To her, I feared, she is a tortured artistic soul and I am run of the mill, condemned to living a small life within the system. Having never battled something like an IV-drug addiction… I don’t know… but something about it seemed romanticized. That through this dark history she was planning to take her place among The Greats. And what would I do? Toil away through a lifetime of small victories? From a distance, and totally within my own head, I resented her view of me. And also vaguely feared it was true.
I kept reading the blog, periodically. I read about her husband turning abusive, I read about her misery in Thailand, I read about her leaving her husband and returning home for Christmas. As I kept reading, I felt like I was getting to know her again. Her profile song on myspace now is one of my favorites. I don’t think we’d be friends now, but I also don’t think she would think I am totally lame. All of this is what is so strange about the internet, folks putting personal information up for anyone to read. The seeming inevitability that I would stumble across her corner of it and read that. That everything that’s lost is found again, here in the future. And at some point, she may stumble across my corner and read this… Hi.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
iLife
Ok, I love apple. I love apple sooooo much. I instinctively trust whatever they do, much like Google. You may doubt it at first, then you see that what they've come up with is a better, sexier, cooler way to live your life. But. This seems a step too far. Let me get this straight-- you have itunes, you pay Apple to download tv shows (that would be free if you watched them on tv...) in mp4 format, which you can't burn onto a DVD to play in a DVD player. So, instead, now you pay Apple $300 to wirelessly synch your computer to your TV and play said iTV Shows through the television.
Sign me up??
Sign me up??
Heard on NPR this morning...
... that 1 out of 4 flights were delayed or canceled in 2006. Which is significant for two reasons:
1. It's nice when statistics confirm personal experience and 2. This was the worst year for delays/cancellations since 2000. Which means the airline industry is back to their pre-September 11 shitty performance. Thank goodness, does that mean this is over? Has evil been defeated? No word on that yet, at least on nytimes and cnn.com.
1. It's nice when statistics confirm personal experience and 2. This was the worst year for delays/cancellations since 2000. Which means the airline industry is back to their pre-September 11 shitty performance. Thank goodness, does that mean this is over? Has evil been defeated? No word on that yet, at least on nytimes and cnn.com.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Best Intro to a NY Times Article Yet?
"While a vast majority of Americans spent Sunday on a sofa watching men shaped like large appliances move a football up and down a 360-foot field, 15,000 New Yorkers, who probably wouldn't know a pump fake from a wishbone formation, spent the day ogling women shaped more or less like coat racks move dresses up and down 400 feet of runways in Bryant Park."
More here.
More here.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
gLife
I don't really understand how gchat works... I mean, in terms of who shows up and who doesn't (and since I run it through iChat, there's another level of mystery.) But I was thinking today how many of other peoples' exes show up. I have nothing against them, I like them, some of them may read the blog. Hi. It's just a little funny when I sign on and my friends' ex girl and boyfriends are the only people I could chat with, if I so wished. Which makes me wonder if they chat with each other. Which in terms makes me feel like I'm doing a bad job of staying in touch. Hmmm...
Monday, February 05, 2007
Anniversaries
A year ago I really felt like my life was over. I got dumped and didn't know where I was going to be living in six months. I was preparing to leave the whole life I'd created over the previous seven years-- I was so sad and so scared about the future. But time kept going, the future came, the future is here and everything is ok. Good, even. I think it's kind of important to look back at those moments from time to time. Because it helps to remember when shit hits the fan again, that everything passes and in time, everything stops hurting, it works out, and usually for the best.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
It's cold
It is eleven degrees below zero in Madison right now, that's before wind chill. It's cold. And that's mostly what folks have been talking about. They also talked a lot today about the Packers and the Super Bowl. My heat was broken for awhile this afternoon, which was unfortunate but was thankfully fixed pretty quickly. I'd kind of forgotten what it's like, when the extreme cold comes and sets in for awhile. When you really can't be outside and your bones are always cold.
Changing topic, although it's cold, I am basically content. It's always funny when I realize something like that, because things always seem flawed in the present and much better in retrospect. I think that's a life-goal, being present and grateful in the moment. Right now, it's going well.
This is an interesting article about the murder rate in NOLA. Also eye-opening to learn what all the signs saying "ENOUGH!" were about. They were everywhere. A dead body was found in the backyard of the house we were working out of. Unrelated, but also strange and I'd kind of forgotten.
Changing topic, although it's cold, I am basically content. It's always funny when I realize something like that, because things always seem flawed in the present and much better in retrospect. I think that's a life-goal, being present and grateful in the moment. Right now, it's going well.
This is an interesting article about the murder rate in NOLA. Also eye-opening to learn what all the signs saying "ENOUGH!" were about. They were everywhere. A dead body was found in the backyard of the house we were working out of. Unrelated, but also strange and I'd kind of forgotten.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
2008. Or 2016, for that matter.
Lately has been a lot of forward-thinking. Al is running for Senate (guess I'll have to go back to absentee "voting" in Minnesota), Hill and Barack are vying for George's job. Also strange is that I, we, most of us, can run for president in 2016. Get ON IT, people!
And I am so excited about the summer. Not only because it is so cold and seems to be snowing every time I leave the house, but because summer is going to be awesome. Summer is going to be weekend trips and the farmer's market and pool parties and... lots of time at the prison. But... summer is why we put up with winter in the midwest.
I continue to be so pleased with the SHN work, things are going very well on all fronts. And I seem to have taken on a lot of fronts. Classes are good. I'm happy. And feel simultaneously lazy and like there are never enough hours in the day... which I think is a good thing.
Last weekend was fun, with a cajun dinner which segued into a guitar sing-along which segued into a Mardi Gras party (can you tell we're obsessed with NOLA?) where I severely injured my OTHER thumb although I am still not sure how. Chalk that up to fun. Also fun was leaving the party as a cop was arriving, proudly showing him my ID and telling him I am "twenty-five and a HALF" when he asked how old I am.... what a geek.
Also-- is an addiction something you know is bad for you but you just can't stop? If so, then I am addicted to dying my hair virtually indistinguishable shades of "light brown." May 2016 bring salvation...
And I am so excited about the summer. Not only because it is so cold and seems to be snowing every time I leave the house, but because summer is going to be awesome. Summer is going to be weekend trips and the farmer's market and pool parties and... lots of time at the prison. But... summer is why we put up with winter in the midwest.
I continue to be so pleased with the SHN work, things are going very well on all fronts. And I seem to have taken on a lot of fronts. Classes are good. I'm happy. And feel simultaneously lazy and like there are never enough hours in the day... which I think is a good thing.
Last weekend was fun, with a cajun dinner which segued into a guitar sing-along which segued into a Mardi Gras party (can you tell we're obsessed with NOLA?) where I severely injured my OTHER thumb although I am still not sure how. Chalk that up to fun. Also fun was leaving the party as a cop was arriving, proudly showing him my ID and telling him I am "twenty-five and a HALF" when he asked how old I am.... what a geek.
Also-- is an addiction something you know is bad for you but you just can't stop? If so, then I am addicted to dying my hair virtually indistinguishable shades of "light brown." May 2016 bring salvation...
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