It's official, folks. We're T-minus 26 days away from my birthday. While I'm beginning to reach birthdays that I don't necessarily want to celebrate (24? WTF! I'm old!) I do like the idea of eating chocolate cake and being lavished with presents (I wish this was a career, in fact. I'd be great at it). So without further ado, my birthday wish-list:
- Quantum of Solace on DVD (mmm, Daniel Craig)
- Subscription to Real Simple magazine (contact my Facebook page for my address)
- Peggle DS game (see my first post for more details about Peggle)
- Mojito cocktail set (or a mint muddler, at least, so I can start drinking in the evenings)
- Some type of karaoke singing game for Wii with good songs (while I generally abhor American Idol, it seems like it's the only brand with decent games out)
- Drood by Dan Simmons (a fictionalized version of Dickens' experience writing the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, narrated by Wilkie Collins. Need I explain more why I need this?)
- A puppy. Or puppy accoutrements, provided the dog plan is go. (I want a dog SO BAD!)
- Bananagrams game (like Scrabble, but better. Look it up!)
- Mad Men season 1 DVD (or, alternatively, a time machine that will allow me to travel back to the fifties to be a housewife. This will also require the aforementioned mint muddler, so I can have an appropriate cocktail ready for my imaginary husband when he returns from a hard day at the office)
- Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life by Neil Strauss (a how-to guide for becoming Jason Bourne)
- Fun and silly things like these stickers from thinkgeek.com: http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/supplies/9866/
- Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (lit crit books are too expensive for me to buy on my own!)
- Novel and the Police by D.A. Miller (see above)
- Giftcards to Target, Amazon, Trader Joe’s (more or less the only places I shop)
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Sorry to be absent from the Blogosphere for so long. Naturally, having written one entry, I felt the immediate lack of creative energy. Here's an easy one:
Things I Accomplished Today
Subtitle: A List Much Shorter Than Things I Hoped to Accomplish
1. Cleaned AND dusted the bedroom. This involved clearing off the huge pile of stuff on my dresser, organizing all my dresser drawers, tidying my bedside table, changing the sheets on the bed, putting away shoes, and DUSTING THE SHIT OUT OF ALL THE FURNITURE. I also cleaned the bathroom.
2. Finished a book (Toni Morrison's A Mercy) and two articles. Sadly, this still leaves two more articles and some Dickensian journalism to read before Monday.
3. Made cookies. I'm having guests over tomorrow, and I'm the hostess with the fuckin' mostest.
3a. Second-degree burned my thumb with carmelizing sugar while making cookies. It's blistering. Yikes.
4. FINALLY played Peggle to the end. This has been an accomplishment weeks in the making. It felt good, Bob. It really did. For good measure, I sent Graham a screenshot of my final score, because it was one million points higher than his.
5. Read Cosmo. I subscribed to Cosmo when Amazon was having a $5-for-a-year's-subscription event. As good a deal as that is (42 cents an issue!), actually reading the magazine reminds me how much women's magazines suck. For example, I offer you a few of "The 50 Best Relationship Tips Ever":
I guess that's all my accomplishments for today (now yesterday, as it is 12:36 am). Things that unfortunately did not make it onto this list are things like clean out my car, put away the Christmas tree (!), and organize the office (my desk is currently under about a foot of paper). I'm sure I'll get to those things eventually, though, right? Right.
Things I Accomplished Today
Subtitle: A List Much Shorter Than Things I Hoped to Accomplish
1. Cleaned AND dusted the bedroom. This involved clearing off the huge pile of stuff on my dresser, organizing all my dresser drawers, tidying my bedside table, changing the sheets on the bed, putting away shoes, and DUSTING THE SHIT OUT OF ALL THE FURNITURE. I also cleaned the bathroom.
2. Finished a book (Toni Morrison's A Mercy) and two articles. Sadly, this still leaves two more articles and some Dickensian journalism to read before Monday.
3. Made cookies. I'm having guests over tomorrow, and I'm the hostess with the fuckin' mostest.
3a. Second-degree burned my thumb with carmelizing sugar while making cookies. It's blistering. Yikes.
4. FINALLY played Peggle to the end. This has been an accomplishment weeks in the making. It felt good, Bob. It really did. For good measure, I sent Graham a screenshot of my final score, because it was one million points higher than his.
5. Read Cosmo. I subscribed to Cosmo when Amazon was having a $5-for-a-year's-subscription event. As good a deal as that is (42 cents an issue!), actually reading the magazine reminds me how much women's magazines suck. For example, I offer you a few of "The 50 Best Relationship Tips Ever":
- #14: Hang out with happy couples he knows and thinks are cool. When he sees commitment as a fun thing, he'll become more comfortable with it. (Translation: peer pressure him into dating you.)
- #15: If you think you want to marry a guy, wait to move in until you're engaged. Otherwise, he'll feel less incentive to take the next step. (His decision of whether or not to marry you depends on you playing hard to get.)
- #22: Get him to act by using humor. Point out a pile of wet towels by joking "nothing like coming him to the sweet smell of mildew!" (Note: This is also called being a huge, passive-aggressive bitch.)
- #48: If you do slip up and cheat, think very hard before you confess. Sometimes coming clean does more harm than good. (If you're already a cheater, why not be a liar, too?)
I guess that's all my accomplishments for today (now yesterday, as it is 12:36 am). Things that unfortunately did not make it onto this list are things like clean out my car, put away the Christmas tree (!), and organize the office (my desk is currently under about a foot of paper). I'm sure I'll get to those things eventually, though, right? Right.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Here we go again
Every few years I start a blog. And then I lose interest after a few entries. Or in the case of my last blog, one entry. I blame this on LiveJournal. Back when LiveJournal was cool, and all my friends read it, it was easy to keep a "weblog." But LiveJournal isn't cool anymore, and so I'm pretty much bereft. But I'm really going to try this time, for the following reasons:
1. I generally like writing in a journalistic format.
2. Several of my friends recently began blogs and I want to jump on the bandwagon (especially as I foresee a quid pro quo, or tit-for-tat, arrangement where they have to read mine since I read theirs).
3. I've decided, at least to start out, to write my entries in list format. This is not only a pretty straightforward format, but it's also something I do all the time anyway, so I might as well kill two eagles with one boulder, as my good friend Jenny might say. And look! I'm already doing it! (I honestly didn't notice until just now.)
I guess that could count as my list/entry for the day, but here is what I was already planning to write a list of:
Things I Do Instead of My Class Readings
Subtitle: Which I Should STOP Doing If I Intend to Succeed in Graduate School
1. Play Peggle. This is new, and it is Graham's fault. It's this game from the Interwebz, kind of like pinball, where you have to shoot a ball into different colored pegs, destroying all the orange ones. It has a unicorns and rainbows motif, and is generally addictive. This also represents a larger category of addictive games, including but not limited to: BrickBreaker on my Blackberry, Mahki on the DS, etc.
2. Read Harry Potter. Even though I have read all seven books collectively approximately 57 times, I will just pick one up, flip to a page at random, and begin reading. Then I finish it and naturally have to read the next one...
3. Bake bread. This is my new hobby, and it's a delicious one. It is a deceptive form of procrastination, because technically the actual work shouldn't take that long, and there's long periods while the bread is rising or baking that could be used to do reading. But instead, I dash back and forth to the kitchen to check that it is rising properly, or just ogle it in general, and don't really get much else done. Then when the bread is finished, one obviously must devote a hearty amount of time to buttering it and eating as many slices as possible.
4. Clean. This is one of my favorite ways to procrastinate. I like to convince myself that I will work better if my environment (it's more of a habitat, really) is tidy. The good thing about this is that it does result in cleaner dishes and a neater apartment, the bad thing is I don't do my work.
5. StumbleUpon. The bane of my existence, for those of you who have not heard of it, is a website you sign up for, which then offers you a "stumble" button toolbar. When you press "stumble," it finds you a site that it thinks, based on the preferences you've entered, you'll like. IT IS SO HARD TO STOP ONCE YOU'VE STARTED. I've found some pretty awesome things (including my bread recipe), but I don't know if that makes staying up literally all night to finish one of my seminar papers last semester worth it.
6. Shop online. Amazon has unlimited recommendations just for me. DeepDiscount has DVD sales constantly. Target.com has been having clearance sales lately--I got a Converse dress for $8.53 (it looks awesome on me, by the way). This is bad for my schoolwork AND my bank account.
7. GoogleReader. Even for all the wonderful things Google has done, I still have to curse Google inventors for coming up with the Reader feature, which allows you to add all the blogs to which you subscribe to a master list so they're all in one place. I currently subscribe to no fewer than 23 blogs, all of which have varying frequencies of posts. Suffice it to say, there's something new to read approximately every 3 minutes.
Of course, by creating this blog, I'm just developing yet another way to procrastinate. But, weak-willed as I am, it's not stopping me from hitting "publish post."
1. I generally like writing in a journalistic format.
2. Several of my friends recently began blogs and I want to jump on the bandwagon (especially as I foresee a quid pro quo, or tit-for-tat, arrangement where they have to read mine since I read theirs).
3. I've decided, at least to start out, to write my entries in list format. This is not only a pretty straightforward format, but it's also something I do all the time anyway, so I might as well kill two eagles with one boulder, as my good friend Jenny might say. And look! I'm already doing it! (I honestly didn't notice until just now.)
I guess that could count as my list/entry for the day, but here is what I was already planning to write a list of:
Things I Do Instead of My Class Readings
Subtitle: Which I Should STOP Doing If I Intend to Succeed in Graduate School
1. Play Peggle. This is new, and it is Graham's fault. It's this game from the Interwebz, kind of like pinball, where you have to shoot a ball into different colored pegs, destroying all the orange ones. It has a unicorns and rainbows motif, and is generally addictive. This also represents a larger category of addictive games, including but not limited to: BrickBreaker on my Blackberry, Mahki on the DS, etc.
2. Read Harry Potter. Even though I have read all seven books collectively approximately 57 times, I will just pick one up, flip to a page at random, and begin reading. Then I finish it and naturally have to read the next one...
3. Bake bread. This is my new hobby, and it's a delicious one. It is a deceptive form of procrastination, because technically the actual work shouldn't take that long, and there's long periods while the bread is rising or baking that could be used to do reading. But instead, I dash back and forth to the kitchen to check that it is rising properly, or just ogle it in general, and don't really get much else done. Then when the bread is finished, one obviously must devote a hearty amount of time to buttering it and eating as many slices as possible.
4. Clean. This is one of my favorite ways to procrastinate. I like to convince myself that I will work better if my environment (it's more of a habitat, really) is tidy. The good thing about this is that it does result in cleaner dishes and a neater apartment, the bad thing is I don't do my work.
5. StumbleUpon. The bane of my existence, for those of you who have not heard of it, is a website you sign up for, which then offers you a "stumble" button toolbar. When you press "stumble," it finds you a site that it thinks, based on the preferences you've entered, you'll like. IT IS SO HARD TO STOP ONCE YOU'VE STARTED. I've found some pretty awesome things (including my bread recipe), but I don't know if that makes staying up literally all night to finish one of my seminar papers last semester worth it.
6. Shop online. Amazon has unlimited recommendations just for me. DeepDiscount has DVD sales constantly. Target.com has been having clearance sales lately--I got a Converse dress for $8.53 (it looks awesome on me, by the way). This is bad for my schoolwork AND my bank account.
7. GoogleReader. Even for all the wonderful things Google has done, I still have to curse Google inventors for coming up with the Reader feature, which allows you to add all the blogs to which you subscribe to a master list so they're all in one place. I currently subscribe to no fewer than 23 blogs, all of which have varying frequencies of posts. Suffice it to say, there's something new to read approximately every 3 minutes.
Of course, by creating this blog, I'm just developing yet another way to procrastinate. But, weak-willed as I am, it's not stopping me from hitting "publish post."
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