Man Meet

Now, I know many of my lady friends are currently attached. But for you single girls, Cosmo has once again saved the day. I offer you here some of the best tips from "Cosmo's Guide to Meeting More Guys!".


Fresh Meet Markets

• Local campaign headquarters: Thanks to Obamamania, political campaigns are suddenly sexy. Get involved in summer canvassing now for a fall candidate in your area. Because, you know, the only reason to be educated about politics is to look for a potential husband.

• Sneaker Boutiques: These shops--which feature pricey, hand-painted, and vintage shows--attract hordes of male hipsters and are popping up all over the country. Who DOESN'T want a boyfriend who spends more on shoes than you do?

• Behind the Scenes at a Big Event: Donating your time at a cool happening--like pulling beers at a rock festival--will have you floating in a sea of fun, laid-back guys. God forbid you volunteer somewhere useful, like a homeless shelter.

• Dude-Specific Book Signings: Pop-culture and humor authors bring out literary lads in droves. Chuck Klosterman and David Sedaris are two touring this summer. Maybe you'll get lucky and meet a guy who idolizes Tucker Max!

Great Icebreakers

• Ask to use his cell when a friend is running late. Say, "My battery is dead. Do you mind if I call my friend to find out when she'll be here?" Then invite him to keep you company while you wait. So not only will you have to have your friend's number memorized (be honest: how many people's cell numbers do you actually know by heart?) but a random stranger will then have your friend's number saved in his phone. Great!

• It's easy to get skittish about approaching a guy who's in the limelight, but if you're crushing on a srarving musician, artist, or writer, remember that under-the-radar creative types are desperate for praise. (Almost as desperate as you are for a date!) March right up to that gorgeous folk singer at the coffee shop and tell him you love his work. If he asks you which of his stuff you've read or heard, I'm sure you can make something up on the fly.

• Lean toward him, say, "Ha, check this out," and show him a Twitter tweet that cracked you up. SERIOUSLY, COSMO?

Surprising Items that Bring Boys to You

- Anything with wheels: A skateboard, a scooter, vintage roller skates--guys get turned on by mobile, adventurous chicks. Good news for you wheelchair-bound ladies!

- A Crossword Puzzle: Guys love to show off how smart they are. Look stumped and he'll jump at the change to help out. Nothing like dumbing yourself down! On the bright side, if he doesn't know it, guys ALSO love being mocked mercilessly for being too stupid to figure out a crossword clue!

- Tee Shirts That Show Your Sense of Humor: If your top reads "More Cowbell," he will assume you'll be fun. Reducing your personality into a tee shirt slogan makes that annoying smalltalk unnecessary; he'll already know whether or not he likes you based on a glance at your chest. For some guys, this is true no matter WHAT shirt you have on...

- A Weird-Ass Drink: How about asking the bartender to fix you a Diablo Hell Fire Cocktail or a Good Night Kiss? Or maybe just a Roofie Colada.

- A Kindle: Right now, it's the technological equivalent of a puppy: Guys will want to hold it and play with it. This also applies to your breast, which saves you $400.

Wow! Thanks again, Cosmo, for some flawless advice for landing that man!

Celebrity Names

I shouldn't be posting; I should be writing my Dickens paper (last one of the semester, due in two days). But in doing the reading for said paper, I discovered that Dickens named one of his sons Alfred Tennyson Dickens. This struck me as just plain awesome. I mean, celebrities have long named their children weird things:

• Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow -- Apple and Moses
• David and Victoria Beckham -- Cruz, Romeo, and Brooklyn
• Li'l Mo -- God'Iss Love Stone (I don't know who this is, but I had to include it. Mainly because of the apostrophe)
• Jermaine Jackson and Alejandra Genevieve Oaziaza -- Jermajesty
  
• Frank Zappa -- Moon Unit, Dweezil and Diva Muffin
• Bruce Willis and Demi Moore -- Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah
  
• Sylvester Styllone -- Sage Moonblood
• Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie -- Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt
  

Ok, so as wacky as those names are, I want to posit that what Dickens did was even crazier. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was one of Dickens's contemporaries. Can you imagine naming your kid after one of your colleagues? Even if they weren't in the same profession, it was still basically naming a child after a celebrity. Like if I named my kid, I dunno, Paris Hilton Whitmore or Justin Timberlake Whitmore. I'm probably going to go for J.K. Rowling Whitmore, myself. The kid can always change it when s/he's 18 to something more suitable.

Today's Accomplishments

In reverse order of importance.

5. Took out all garbage/cardboard to the dumpster/recycling area.

4. Earning over 1,000,000 points on a Peggle challenge that only needed 850,000 to win.

3. Caught up with Julia and reconnected with old friends via Facebook (it's like what it was designed for, or something!)

2. Finished a paper at 8:30 pm (instead of the usual 4 am).

1. Made the best grilled cheese sandwich ever.

Checklist for making me continue to doubt my ability to succeed in grad school

So this list is not of my own making, but instead the list my Contemporary American Women Writers professor sent out tonight re: the final paper that is due on Monday.

Final Essay Checklist

Essay 13 - 20 pages double spaced 12 or 14 font with standard margins

Pages numbered

Argumentative in format, with a clear focus throughout and careful transitions

When in doubt, use focused, analytical topic sentences that establish the unfolding logic of your argument

Be sure to think about what’s at stake in making your argument (Imagine someone asking, Why should I care about this? Why is it important?)

Ideas should be supported with both text and developed though your original analysis of that text (as a general rule, follow quotations with the equivalent amount of analysis – word choice, imagery, sentence structure, characterization, etc. -- or shorten the quotation)

Avoid plot summary, generalizations and broad commentary

Make reference to relevant criticism about this issue in this literary text

Engage with other critics by establishing the relationship between their argument and yours; differentiate yourself to show how your argument is original

Be wary of using other critics’ claims to support your argument; if you are doing so, do so in a footnote or very quickly in the text, and don’t rely upon others to prove your point (just because someone else makes a claim doesn’t make it valid)

Proofread for mechanics and read aloud to be sure that your essay flows

Submit your essay in hard copy format with clear print



I think I can handle the page numbers and size 12 font; the other stuff, not so sure. I was feeling pretty good about this paper (or at least I had convinced myself I was feeling good about it) and while none of these ideas are new (this is all stuff she's said in class before), seeing it all together at once in the form of a checklist is really intimidating. I'm going to try to hold on to the positive feelings I had, though, lock myself in the library tomorrow and produce something I'm proud of. I mean, it's about time, really.

Unrelated to final papers but related to past posts, I gave the guy whose car I hit a check today. He tried to be a dick about me writing it to the garage, something about how he's going to California after finals and doesn't want to be hanging on to the check? Whatever, asshole, I'm not just handing you $1455. Anyway, that chapter is closed now, but there may be an epilogue. That's just how I roll.

The best news I got today was from Curly Tail. Even though I'm still in the process of being approved for adoption (still have to have a home visit), I sent an email to the woman I thought I had had my phone interview with, Kristen. She had said to let her know if I saw any dogs on the website I'd be interested in, so I did. Well, turns out I had the wrong Kristin, but the Kristin I did email wrote me back to say that I'm being "highly considered" for Penelope, a pug I inquired after! She's six years old, and they rescued her from a puppy mill (very, very sad). If you want to read about her, you can go here and scroll down to see her bio. I really hope it works out; I got very upset when I was reading about the puppy mill rescues (ask Matt, he knows) and I would love, love, love to rescue one of these dogs who really needs a good forever home! Wish me luck!

P.S. I promise to do "Cosmo Sucks" again soon. Probably after finals. Give it another week.

A Classic List: Pros and Cons

Today had its good points and its bad points. Allow me to illustrate using one of the more classic list types, the pros and cons list.

I'll start with the cons, as they are easier to think of (and were numerous today):

CONS

• The worst con of the day is based on a con of another day, namely the day I accidentally hit someone's car in the BC garage. Not only do I feel stupid and not only have I now ruined my no-accident-ever streak, but the kid finally got back to me today with the estimate: $1400-$1500 worth of damage. See ya later, tax return and multiple weeks' paychecks!
• For tomorrow's Comp. Theory class, we had to submit our syllabi to our groups so we can critique each other. Mine is still in terrible shape, especially because I don't have the book I need to finish creating assignments, even though there should be copies in the Grad Lounge and the professor said he'd put one in my mailbox.
• I've eaten three cupcakes today.
• I have two papers due in the next week and a half that I've barely started.

PROS

• I got to hear Nicole Krauss give a reading today, and she signed my copy of The History of Love.
• Curly Tail Pug Rescue finally called me back (after no word for a week). I missed the call and won't be able to talk to them until tomorrow, but this is still a pro, because I'm really excited that there's been action at all.
• The cupcakes were delicious, and homemade. Another successful recipe from the Barefoot Contessa!
• House, M.D. was really good tonight (ok, I'm reaching here...)

All in all, it wasn't a terrible day, but the $1500 repair bill is pretty soul-crushing. Mainly because it was such a ridiculous, preventable accident. Whatever, it's probably fine.

Tune in next week (or sometime in the future) for the return of everyone's favorite feature, "Why Cosmo Sucks"!

Productive Procrastination: Impromptu Pregnancies

It is once again the part of the semester where huge projects are due in about two weeks. This means, of course, I've spent grueling hours in the library, painstakingly crafting clever and original sentences about Dickens and Jumpha Lahiri (not the same sentences).

Ha, ha, ha. I kid. What it DOES mean is that I'm procrastinating hard core, which generally means playing Peggle WHILE watching TLC. Tonight's fare is especially lively: "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant." This show, as you can imagine, follows the stories of women who...didn't...know...they were pregnant. It is simultaneously fascinating, hilarious, and terrifying. What follows are some of the highlights/my observations.

- I've noticed that most, if not all, these women are Southern. Now, I'm not suggesting anything like correlation = causation, but...well, you can see where I'm going with this.

- The show intersperses interviews with the real-life women featured with dramatizations of how they discovered they were pregnant (more often than not, it was giving birth that gave it away). The dramatizations are generally awesome and ridiculous and frequently feature the actress portraying the pregnant woman screeching "I DIDN'T KNOW I WAS PREGNANT!" (Hey, that's the name of the show!).

- The actress portraying the currently featured woman (Danille. Not Danielle. Danille) is, I'm pretty sure, wearing a Bump-It.

- Based on this show, I've determined that 90% of babies land in toilets. One woman gave birth in the bathroom of the fast food restaurant where she worked. It, naturally, landed in the toilet. The 911 dispatcher had to tell them to take the baby out of the toilet immediately. Um, duh?

- Speaking of toilets, one woman mistook giving birth for a large, but incredibly satisfying, bowel movement.

- The narrator offers useful hints like, "Debilitated with pain, Danille--and her newborn--needed immediate life-saving medical care." Oh, really? I thought it would be a good time to take in dinner and a show.

- How ridiculous would the phone calls you'd need to make be after something like that? "Oh, sorry, professor, I missed class yesterday because I was in the hospital giving birth to a baby I DIDN'T KNOW I WAS PREGNANT WITH." "Hi, Mom? So, um, I didn't know I was pregnant, but I just gave birth to a baby and I need a ride home from the hospital." "Hi, Dave? I know we broke up last week, but I just gave birth to your son. Yeah, I didn't know I was pregnant either. How 'bout that?"

- Almost none of these woman had any symptoms of pregnancy, and around half of them have been pregnant before. One young woman, whose regular weight was 99 pounds, only gained 10 pounds during her pregnancy, and was still wearing bikinis. NO ONE NOTICED. The few who did take pregnancy tests got negative results. This stimulates my "irrational fear" response. I have put on weight lately...

The moral of this entry is, even if you don't think you are, you are probably pregnant.

Obnoxious but easy to make list

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)

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":

• #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?)

So yeah, Cosmo kind of sucks. But I'll probably still read it.

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.

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."