Reading: Triangle and Love and Friendship

I have been reading a lot lately, just whipping through novels as fast as you'd suck the foam off your latte. Generally it's because I'm procrastinating. Whatever. At least I'm well read for someone who gets nothing done.

Yesterday I read Alison Lurie's Love and Friendship.



I really enjoyed it. Hit the spot, somehow, all that stuff about love and how marriage works (differently than a love affair, although no one tells you that at the start). Seeing as I'm currently in the entertaining (and expensive) position of simultaneously planning a wedding while trying to divorce Husband #1, marriages, and the friendship that successful marriages seem to engender, is much on my mind. Lurie is pretty realistic in her description of how it works, and she pulls a nice balancing act off - she doesn't quite break your heart but the ending is realistic enough so you almost do.

Plus I have a soft spot for anything set in the academic world. Lurie is less kind to her academics that Robertson Davies - all his professors are true seekers of knowledge, and endowed generously with wit and compassion, as well. Lurie's academics are of course much more like real people, ambitious and sometimes petty and fond of a joke with a little light bullying and some favoritism thrown in, for good measure. I've never worked in an office that didn't have all those elements.

It's set in the fifties, and Lurie's prose is pretty matter-of-fact and has a fifties flavour, which suits the chilly New England college town of the book.

Having polished off Love and Friendship, I picked up Triangle. I've had Triangle on my bookshelf for a while.



Triangle also has an academic, the unkindest (and funniest) portrayal yet; therefore last month's Robertson Davies binge to the Lurie to Triangle was a nice procession - put all of those academics together and you might have a credible English department.

The writer Katharine Weber is a good friend of mine (so I won't even pretend to be objective), and so far I've loved all her books (The Music Lesson - her first that I read and I was astonished at how her precise prose evoked Ireland so well. She can write (and speak with) a flawless Irish accent. (She's also a gifted and inventive cook, although you'd never know it from her books.)
By the time I read The Music Lesson, I'd already met and grown to like Katharine, so I was a little, um, nervous about reading the book. Some writers can be fabulous and witty and charming online and in person and then when you read their books it's like they couldn't sustain wit and charm and the books are earnest in the wrong places and full of heavy, lumpen prose. And that's depressing, because you can't really restore your original image of the person.

But! No problems like that with The Music Lesson, and also no problems with Objects In Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear, which was actually her first novel and reveals her penchant for clever wordplay. Not too clever, though - it never bogs down the story, which goes lickety split like all of her books do.

I liked The Little Women, too (although I don't think all the critics did.) I'll say that it was good that I'd already read two of her other books and trusted her, as an author: I found the beginning sections very clumsily written ... which was on purpose, since the narrator Jo is learning how to write as she goes, and gets much better as the book goes on, aided by the editorial comments from her sisters in the margins of Jo's narrative of their shared history. But I suppose if you didn't already know Katharine as a writer, or if you didn't read far enough in, it could be off-putting. It also helped that as a child, my sisters and I all read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women numerous times, so I was very familiar with the incidents in Alcott's Little Women which inspired Katharine's The Little Women. Technically I thought the novel was the best thing she'd done so far - the sustained trick of Jo's writing improving plus the extra-textual marginalia with the aforementioned good plotting.

But Triangle, I think, blew them all out of the water for skill and depth. It is about the Triangle ShirtWaist Factory Fire, and opens with a harrowing fire scene. The fire story is later on rewoven and resewn until the fabric of memories and stories seems to present quite a different garment than the orginal stories. It's also about marriage, a little bit, and there's a mystery that the reader (in possession of more information than the characters) guesses about 1/3 of the way through, but it doesn't matter because the characters piece things together differently than the reader and the joy of the story is watching them do it. It sounds like a ghastly topic and it was really quite difficult for me to read, the most moving of her books to date (for me). As a result, I put off reading it for about a year, because in general I don't like reading hard books. I get all caught up in the story and then, you know, I get bummed out. Only Anna Karenina does not make me feel this way, because by the time she goes under the train you are more than ready to say goodbye to Anna. Anyway. So it was the hardest book yet, for me - but all that emotional sad stuff is mixed in with humour and such smartness and terrific character voices and the quick plotting - and it's not actually a depressing read, just moving - which is tough for me. And apparently most of the time when I read, it's to escape to someplace a little more bland. (I don't know what that says about me. Parse it as you will.) And the book is also about September 11th, a little, and that strand is really perfectly woven it, almost so you don't notice. Even the book's cover, with one side of the shirt dark and burnt-looking and the other perfect, it's like the columns of smoke rising up from where the twin towers had been. [I realise on a re-read that this isn't particularly coherent, I don't think I've quite digested the book - you might want to check out the links at the bottom of the post for better synopses and a better idea of what the book is actually about.



There's lots of stuff about Triangle, if you're interested. It's on the shortlist for the the Connecticut Book Awards (I'm not totally sure that's the right website, I can't seem to find an official one). Anyway, Katharine has been active in the blogosphere talking about the book, and any of these links will probably give you a better idea of the book (plus most of 'em have excerpts up) than I can.

The Page 99 Test, which is apparently based on a quotation from Ford Maddox Ford (keep meaning to read him, never have), "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you". First you've got Katharine's analysis of page 99 as it fits into the rest of the book, then you've got the actual text of the page. It's a fun game, especially if you've read the book and remember that page.

There is also an interview in the LitBlog CoOp - apparently August 13 - 17 is Triangle Week at the LitBlog. And another interview about the book at the amusingly named Conversations With Famous Writers. I love reading about other people's writing process.


All afternoon after I finished the book, I couldn't quite shake it - I tried reading back issues of the New Yorker as a palate cleanser and still by the time Dave and I went for our walk, the characters from the book had stubbornly refused to leave my head and I kept thinking about them, about their lives and their choices, as if they were someone I'd met at a party and talked to for a while. That doesn't happen particularly often, but it's usually a sign of a book I'll keep thinking about for a long time after I've finished it.

How I stalk blogs and websites online, easily!

I heart RSS feeds. For a long time I just had a big list of bookmarks, and clicked on all my favorite sites to see if they'd posted anything new. (You can't tell from the blogroll on this site, as of writing this, but I've actually got a huge blogroll that I check every day.) This sometimes was exciting (a new post! from a blogger I really like!) but actually ended up yielding a lot of wasted clicks and open windows. Then I figured out about how the whole RSS thing worked. I signed up with Google Reader and transferred all my bookmarked sites into Google Reader, categorized appropropriately (work-related, being-a-girl, cooking, crafts). Now I can check that shit out on a category-by-category basis, and not have to click around to all of my friends who update their blogs sporadically. (Not that I'm in that category, or anything.)

I've also got a Google personalized home page, which sounds LAME, I know it does, but basically I sign into my Google account and then I've got a bunch of features, some third-party (i.e. not Google-written) and some not. One one page, I can see if I've got new Gmail, I can view my Google Reader blog updates - sorting by most recent or by category and then most recent - I have the weather forecast for my area, I've got a little stopwatch widget (for when I take a break and play Candystand games), I've got a Google calendar (which I should use more than I do), I've got news feeds from the Boston Globe, the New York Times and NPR, I've got a wee Digg box, and some other stuff I don't really look at. It used to have a myspace widget but it was unreliable so the creator took it down. I can sign into my iGoogle page from anywhere with an internet connection and see my stuff (mostly I glance at my Gmail and the FeedReader.)

Anyway. I wasn't meaning to write about the google home page, I wanted to write about the RSS reader thing, because it is so super useful. I just got sidetracked for a minute with the available anywhere thing (you can sign into Google Reader from anywhere, too, and I believe they recently updated it so you can download stories onto your laptop, say, when you're somewhere with a connection - in an airport - and then read them offline later (when you're flying two miles above any wireless networks.)

Below is a video that explains, quickly (under 4 minutes) and amusingly (with the patter! I loves teh patter) how RSS readers work (Google Reader is the example they use, but there are others) and tells you, in a non-technical sort of way, how to set one up for yourself.

Click To Play

Best tip from the video? "It's addictive, so be careful." Truer words were never.

Happiness v. Contentment: Cage Match TO THE DEATH!!!!

I have never even watched pro wrestling, let alone any type on cage match, so I should probably be forbidden from using that particular phrase again, let alone hyperbole involving death.

Rambling introductory preface aside, the difference between happiness and contentment is something I've been thinking about. Ever since Kaethe's comment on this cats and housekeeping post, actually. I started writing a comment to reply and then realised that it was too long for a comment and I should make it its own entry. (And then of course CrazyAuntPurl went and wrote about all that stuff way more eloquently than I ever could, but I guess I still have something to say.)

So. What do cats and housework have to do with anything, you ask? Well ... back when I wsa living in New Zealand with my first husband, I remember having a conversation (phone, email, IM? I no longer remember the medium) at a certain point with my friend Maya and I said that I was content, although not precisely happy.

I had a lot of reasons to be unhappy: I was working long hours, and very hard, at a job which I enjoyed but which could be pretty draining, my first husband was ... I'll just say Not Nice, and remind you all that they are exes for a reason. One of the particular forms his Not Nice-ness took was unreliability ... I could never know when he'd be home or what he'd want to do if he was home or if he'd spent the money for the rent on computer hardware for some customer who he'd eventually get around to billing six months later (meanwhile, rent was due). And I was far away from my family and most of the people who loved me, apart from a handful of really terrific friends I'd made in New Zealand. But a handful of people is not a support network. I was eating too little, I think, and probably drinking too much. You see where this is heading? To a crisis point, and since I'm writing this from Boston obviously something happened to change the New Zealand scenario.

But, while not particularly happy, I was content. I had a job myself, I had a few really excellent friends, I had two cats (Inty and her littermate, the still-much-missed Boris) and nice landlords who pretended not to mind when the rent was late (and pretended not to hear when Husband #1 and I had screaming fights), my job meant that at least I had some control over some money and therefore some say over whether or not the phone or electricity bill would get paid. (That was always stressful. My mom said something a couple of years later about how my phones in New Zealand were always breaking ... um, yeah, because the phone company cut the phone off. For non payment. That was always the first non-essential to go.)

I had a little house that I worked hard to keep clean (this was, ahhh, not really a priority for Husband #1 - or he was an asshole who thought women were born to clean up after men, take your pick) and, as I said, a little bit of money and a little bit of control and for the first time in my life with Husband #1 I wasn't ashamed to have someone come over unexpectedly (Husband #1 brought people by without advance notification a lot), because I could be assured that even if you couldn't quite lick your dinner off the floor, it was reasonably presentable and I wouldn't have to worry about people thinking we lived in a cave like animals with gnawed bones on the floor and bat droppings on the furniture, because there was none of that.

And it was these three things - the ability to work full-time (I had quite a while in the UK and then in New Zealand where I couldn't work, because of visa status stuff, but the marriage rights eventually meant I could work) and the housework, and the cats - who were reliable, and at home to greet me and love me up when I got home and didn't stay out late or work late nights - which were in their entirety responsible for my sanity. These things, these things which were mostly in my control - they made me content. They made life liveable.

Let me tell you, I didn't start off by loving housework. I was a fucking slob as a child, all the way through boarding school and sporadically into college, although the general trend was towards cleanliness. Then I met Husband #1, who didn't clean up after himself or anyone else, and I regressed somewhat. I stayed in my regressed state (tending towards slobbiness) for about three years, and then I finally gave up, I guess, and stopped trying to fight Husband #1 to do the dishes, pick up his clothes after he'd showered, help clean the bathroom (guess what, honey? those aren't MY pee dribbles down the front of the toilet!), take out the trash, cook, clean up after the cats, vaccuum, laundry, or anything. (Lest you think I am exaggerating ... I lived with H#1 for seven years. He did the dishes less than five times - I think it was three. That tally includes the 6 month period when we actually had a dishwasher.) I don't particlarly want to get into detail about the depths of squalor into which we descended, but let me tell you it was humiliating and probably a public health hazard.

So, grudgingly, I began to do the housework. All of it. Some of it half-assed, and badly. I resented him bitterly. I made comments, sometimes snide and sometimes sincere, all the time. (His response bounced between, "I was going to do it" and "You're a neat freak and I don't care that much. It's you who wants the house clean, not me.")

Then we moved to New Zealand (and THAT decision is another story). And in Auckland, there are ants. Pretty much all of Auckland is on top of an anthill - it never really gets below freezing so the ants are year round. I am phobic about ants. In fact, it was an ant infestation (in the garbage ... in our sixth floor apartment) which triggered my first panic attack. Screaming and hyperventilating doesn't describe the half of it.

The ants were after some fruit cores in the trash (or something.) Once that problem had been dealt with (to give Husband #1 the credit he deserves, he drove me - I didn't have a car and couldn't drive on that side of the road - to buy ant poison. I put down the traps, though, and made sure the cats would be okay. I cleaned up all the little dead bodies. I sterilized everything in the house.)

The ants, I eventually realised, would come only if there was food for them. If you were relentlessly clean in the kitchen (dishes could not sit in the sink longer than 12 hours ... that is, overnight) and everything was sealed in airtight containers (this is where my love affair with rubber gasketed canning jars began), then ants would stay away.

From the kitchen, and from the space of always having a clean kitchen, I ventured further. I learned that laundry is a pretty easy, and not very dirty, chore - sort it, throw your shit in, dry it (if you have a dryer, which at some points I had and at some points I didn't ... just having a washing machine seems like a hug luxury to me, still.) Therefore, laundry is a good way to get started. I learned that while cleaning the bathroom is kind of gross and a pain in the ass, in winter, if you are cold, cleaning the bathroom will heat you up. In summer, it will help burn off the calories from the icecream you keep eating in a futile attempt to stay cool. Furthermore, if you clean the bathroom every week, it is much less arduous and disgusting.

I learned that proper cleaning products and tools (scrubby pads and Comet instead of using a regular sponge and dishwashing soap) are worth the money, since the bathtub ring is pretty stubborn if all you've got is a soft sponge.
This should tell you something about how poor we were: couldn't afford to buy all the household cleaning stuff at once, so for a really long time I had to make do with what I had. I will relieve your fears and say at once that I never skimped on the right tools for cleaning the inside of the toilet. I learned that if you've got a dustpan and wee broom, going over the bathroom with that before you wash the floors helps a lot with the human and cat hair which accumulates in bathrooms.

I also learned that when I wasn't able to stay on top of chores at home, it made me pretty unhappy not to have clean clothes. Ants in the kitchen were also bringers of misery.

And so I began, instead of grudingly doing chores and leaving them until last minute and procrastinating, to prioritize them. I blocked out time for them. I started with easy ones like laundry and moved onto harder ones like vaccuuming. Husband #1 started to complain about how I spent time cleaning instead of doing something with him. (I know. He could have helped. It never occurred to him to do anything besides tell me how stupid I was for wanting a clean house and to stop now. Hey, this is my blog. If I want to use it for grinding my fucking axes, I will.)

Eventually, two things happened, and they weren't really related but they worked out. Husband#1 started spending a lot less time at home (this happened over maybe the last two years in New Zealand) and I realised that with him gone, I could use that time to get my stuff done - writing or, you know, cleaning.

And so cleaning became time to myself. I would put my iPod (a gift from my mom) on - sometimes on Aretha's I Never Loved a Man or anything by Patsy Cline, sometimes the Pixies or Nirvana (which made me laugh, since I doubted Kurt Cobain ever imagined housewives scrubbing the tub listening to Smells Like Teen Spirit). I would get up and clean and know that it was exercise, that I was doing a good thing. It was like an active meditation.

I was taking care of myself. By taking care of the house, somehow I was caring for myself.

I still don't really understand how scrubbing someone else's pee off the floor or skid marks from a toilet or mold from a shower curtain (or the walls and ceiling, in Auckland, which is damp) or cleaning a catbox or anything else gross became invested with some kind of deep spiritual meaning ... but it did. Somehow I got over the petty, temporary humiliation of cleaning up (gloves helped here, I still use 'em for toilet-y work) and realised that ... hygiene precautions aside, the only thing that makes this work gross or humiliating is my perception of it. It is a thing that needs doing, that's all. Every single time, it worked - I always got a clean house at the end, whether I bitched and moaned about it or smiled and sang along to perky music.

I'm not saying cleaning the toilet is some kind of transcendant experience wherein I commune with god. I'm completely lacking in belief in any sort of higher power, for starters, and then for another I can't take myself that seriously when I'm on my hands and knees working on someone else's pee. I just can't.

But it's not the worst thing in the world, either. It's part of life and it's part of taking care of me like brushing my teeth (or flossing - now, hey, flossing is pretty gross if you haven't done it in a while) or showering or whatever. And, on a weekend or a day off when it's not too hot and there's no one else around, it's kind of enjoyable, getting shit all cleaned. I don't eat when I clean (even if I wanted to and didn't know better, the chemical smells mean you're not really hungry.) I'm not stressed or impatient; I don't think about work; I just focus on the job at hand, watching my fingers scrub away the accumulated grime, and not really thinking about anything much at all. This mental blank space might be the best gift of all.

Sometimes I feel that way after yoga class while lying still in shivasana, but more often I'm thinking about what to have for dinner, whether I'm cold, what my day was like, if Dave and I will fight in the car on the way home ... cleaning, though. Cleaning the house gives me that blank space, a break from the relentless pressure of my thoughts. Cooking is the same, actually.

The other huge gift? When I've finished, I finally feel like it's okay to stop for a while, and do whatever I want. (Blog, for instance. Or read. Or play on the internets. Whatever.) I'm not particularly good at figuring out when I've done enough to have earned a rest (my weekend to-do lists tend to be overly ambitious) and don't, by any means, get the idea that I don't sit around on weekends fucking around on the internet, eating icecream and petting the cats, while I procrastinate oh ... cleaning. But. I do it, or most of it, every week. And it works, or mostly works, every time. And that's good enough for me.

(Disclaimer: in case anyone gets the idea I'm STILL the one doing all the housework with Dave, it ain't so. He cleans too, and helps with chores - I think we split it about 50/50, although he thinks he does more his share, regularly, and I think I do more than my share, regularly. This leads me to think we're probably breaking even.)

Friday blether

Home from work - I took "flex time", also known as "summer hours", also known as "they let the animals out early on Fridays". (If, of course, you've previously arranged with your boss to leave early AND you've made up the time, which sort of destroys the spontenaity of it ... but I left early on a Friday, so I'm not really bitching.) Except I'll bitch about the heat. It is fucking hot. About 95 here in my un-air-conditioned apartment, and just the act of sitting up and typing is making sweat bead on my forehead.) The cats are all sprawled on the hardwood - they got briefly excited to see me home so early and Zoe actually wanted to be picked up and purred (I think she just wanted to lick the salt off my forehead, though.) That didn't last too long, since she's a Maine Coon and heavy and hot. Cuteness can only get you so far. The humidity is only about 40%, though, so that's not so bad.

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A quick technical note: not getting any more comment spam for a while, I removed the sign-in thingie. If spam gets to be a pain in the ass I'll put in a prove-you're-human validifier (that's the technical name for it) but for now I'd rather have anyone able to respond. (Plus that's how all the pro bloggers do it - manage comment spam manually - and if they can moderate eleven billion comments then I can manage a couple.)

Also technical, sort of: since the cell phone photo quality looked fine on my phone screen and AWFUL on my work monitor, I resized the pictures for the post below in Picnik - I fucking love Picnik, it's able to handle about 95% of what I'd like to do with image editing with no learning curve at all, and 4 of the other 5% is probably just making lolcats ... so really it may be best for the world that I don't, actually, have Photoshop.

My only current burning desire for Photoshop is because I'd like to design my own wedding invitations ... Dave called me this morning and said he wanted to make punk rock wedding invites, and maybe to make it look like a ransom note, the old-fangled kind with cut-out letter from the newspaper (from back in the day when mechanical word processing wasn't widely available and one's handwriting was recognizable.)

I love the punk rock idea; I think maybe it should inform the whole wedding theme (apart from the venue, the music and my dress, we haven't made any firm decisions.)

I'd totally use the newspaper cut out ransom note mock-up for the Save the Date notices (if we decide to go with those) ... or we could make those look like a band flyer advertising a show, which would also be cool. Or kind of like the sex pistols

But for the invitations themselves I think I'd like to go with distressed font.
Not anything too crazy like this nail scratch one or anything illegible (but hilarious!) like this Max Rhodes one, just something a little grungy-looking, like misproject or horse puke. (heh on the name.) Or even something fairly pretty, like this porcelain. I suppose the challenge would be making it obvious that you've done it intentionally and it's not all a horrible gaffe on the printer's part. (I really like all the collage-y stuff on that site, too. Funny and well-chosen.)

And maybe some blood spatters here and there, I really like the AngryBlue stuff. (Scroll down for it.) Okay, just kidding about the bloody fingerprints, I don't think they'd really say "wedding", or at least, I don't think I want to use that to say "my wedding". But! Some splattery stuff might be cool.

Now that I've taken hours writing this with my slow home internet connetion (I am spoiled by the blazingly fast one at work), Dave is home and I oughta go see him. (Even he, the King Of Hot Days, was a little wilted after his walk home and immediately retired to the bedroom - with Inty, who follows him around like Mary's lamb - and turned on the a/c. And brought the bong.)

Early Morning Routine

So Dave leaves for work at about 6 am, which is an hour before I even get up. This generally wakes Inty up, so she yells her little head off and that usually wakes me (sort of. She tries her best.) Apparently one morning he documented the process via cell phone camera and sent me this awesome series of pxts. Captions are his, too.


Momma wake up!


Dammit ...


Wuv.

Thursday Cat Update

because ... why not, really, fulfill all of the naval-gazing female blogger stereotypes?

Here is my formerly wee black baby; she's still black and she's still my baby, but she doesn't seem to be quite so wee any more ... must be the good food and happy environment; also the indoors-only regime is less active (but safer). She also seems to be a hell of a lot shoutier than I recall, too.


Yeah, she's sleeping right on the mattress pad. She likes to get right up there as soon as I've stripped the sheets so she can hair it up good-style.



Here's Zoe wearing a bow from one of Dave's birthday presents;
you can see she's been playing with the wrapping and is alert and ready for more crumpled! paper! to play with.


Yes, I am immoral for dressing up my cat. She looks so debonair, don't you think?

And, since they don't get along and rarely occupy the same piece of furniture at the same time, here's at picture of both of them, together, about as close as they'll ever get to one another, and it's only because they're both sacked out from the heat.



Yep, that's an old gallon milk container with a scrub brush in it, because Dave was cleaning the floor. See how it gleams?


And in conclusion ... yes, I spend my weekends taking pictures of my cats and cleaning the house. Then I document it here, in the most boring and stereotypical blog entry ever.

Harry Potter and the Craziness

So, just got Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - which I accidentally had delivered to the office on Saturday. Doh.
But actually it worked out fine; this way I got to have a leisurely re-read of books 5 and 6 over the weekend.



I don't have any elaborate theories worked out, but here are my best guesses for some of the revelations in store with Book 7:

1. Snape will be revealed to be a super duper double bubble agent and will be working for the Good Side. Dumbledore's pleading in Book 6 was for death - kind of a cop suicide thing.
2. None of the big three - Harry, Ron or Hermione - will die. Therefore, Voldemort will die. Although I'd expect her to leave some kind of back door open for other books set in that world.
3. Ron and Hermione will get together by the end of book 7, and Ginny and Harry are already together - well, I suppose they broke up for barfy noble reasons at the end of 6 but that won't last long, given Ginny's increasing prominence in 5 and 6. I'm not saying there won't be fights, but by the end of the book it'll be happy families.
4. The person or persons who are cannon fodder will be marked as such by 100 (or so) pages in - either a previously little-known character who gets sudden new prominence (Cedric), or a more familiar character who starts acting completely out of character (Sirius, Dumbledore
5. There's a throwaway line in Book 5 from Dumbledore about his brother, which made me wonder if Dumbeldore's brother will be making an appearance in book 7 (perhaps the RAB of the horcrux? But no - presumably Dumbledore's brother is also a Dumbledore.
6. She will have needed an editor just as badly as she did in books 4, 5 and 6, and won't have gotten one. I'm interested to see which of the red herrings are going to be red herrings (SPEW) and which will be important (the locket).

TimeWaster Friday

Advertising silliness:

Hilarious parody of the iPhone on a napkin. Hehehehe. Also, pretty graphics.
(via adrants)

more satirical goodness for you: puppet agency, an ad agency. I don't know if this is funny to me because I'm in marketing or because all account coordinators (and I've been one) are kind of douches. Or because the camera work on the puppets is just fucking genius. I'm going with the camera work.
(again, via adrants.)


a complete gallery of simpsons movie promo stuff. Cuh-razy. My favorite (even more than the Haarper's Bazaar spread) is the make-your-own simpsons avatar.

Here's mine:

(I had to use Otto's hair because his is the only one that's long and curly. I don't wear headphones as often as Otto does, though.)

You can also upload a photo and they'll do it for you, and you can then adjust. Here's mine:


(I liked the doctor's outfit best, okay?)

Caveat: the flash-heavy Simpsons sites are SLOW. But this is a timewaster post for Friday, so I suppose it doesn't matter.

Pet Moustache is sponsored by Burger King but doesn't make me want a Whopper (or a mustache) in the slightest. It is fun, though. My results:



(I was drunk and riding on a carousel for this picture. Does it show?)

Games (some of which include silly advertising ideas)

Awesome Blossom from CandyStand.
Ostensibly selling Lifesavers (same idea as the Burger King pet moustache thing) doesn't make me want a lifesaver but is mesmerizing and soothing. Remember Dr. Mario on the gameboy? It's like that. (The whole candystand idea is seems inane to me and unlikely to work, but what do I know?) I wish you could turn the sound off, that's my only caveat.

More logic puzzle games:

Blocky - oddly addictive although I can't make it past green.

Circlo My boss walked by while I was playing this and wanted me to send him the URL. heh.

Bloxorz. I am not very good at this - rotating objects in space is not my specialty.

They're all good games for work, since a game lasts 5 - 15 minutes, which is a perfect break.

Dirt Nap Merch

I also found this site for death-themed stuff you can buy. Oh man! skull cupcake molds, ribcage tshirts, guadalupe de los muertos ... bring it on, motherfucker! via popgadget.

Magically Delicious

So last night I was on my tod and was therefore free to make pasta (or anything else) for dinner without fear of complaint or criticism. (Although there wasn’t much else besides pasta in the house.)

By Thursday in our house, the perishables are sometimes getting a little low, and the few survivors are usually getting soft and starting to develop age spots. It was kind of hot and I’d walked the few miles home from work (Dave had the car) and I was tired and would have liked something crisp and fresh-tasting, preferably not made by me, but sometimes you need to suck it up and go with your available resources, which in my case was pasta and some kind of improvised sauce. (Plus yesterday was the end of a pay cycle, so there would be no takeout for me. Tonight, though, is another matter.)

Anyway. The pasta sauce? Turned out kind of amazing. (Maybe the amazingness was mostly because it was based on what I had around.) I had a teeny weeny onion and a can of petite cut diced tomatoes and garlic, which is usually a good starting point for a tomato-based pasta sauce. I also had a wrinkly bell pepper, some jalapenos, a nectarine, some heavy cream from about a month ago, a happy basil plant and butter. Oh, and some red wine. Heh.

While waiting for the water to boil, I chopped all of the above ingredients and sautéed them in their proper order (which really depends on what results you are looking for.) I wanted the onions and garlic to meld seamlessly into the sauce rather than striking individual notes of their own, I thought the sweetness of the bell pepper would complement the nectarine – not really a traditional ingredient – so I put the pepper in early on. And a good glug of wine followed the peppers. (In a different kind of sauce, with fresh tomatoes and firm, crisp peppers, I would probably have added the pepper close to the end, so it retained its crunch, and barely cooked the tomatoes at all, just let the heat of the cooked pasta warm them through. Or I might have cooked the garlic at a slightly higher heat, so it turned medium-brown and nutty-tasting.)

With the onions, garlic and pepper all taken care off, I added the other stuff: the jalapeno, the nectarine (I didn’t bother to skin it), and the canned chopped tomatoes. Then I put the pasta in and let that cook while the sauce reduced a bit. Once the pasta was done (I should have stopped it just before doneness so it could continue cooking and absorb some sauce, but I was drinking the red wine as well as cooking it, so I didn’t think of it and just cooked the pasta to al dente).

Anyway, when the pasta was done I drained it, turned the heat off the sauce, and added some heavy cream and a good handful of chiffoned basil o the sauce and stirred that up.
Mixed everything together in the pot the pasta had cooked in and oh my goodness. Sometimes musicians talk about sound being “fat”, having extra depth and oomph and complexity. The nectarine added sweetness and fragrance to the sauce without really being noticeably present on its own, or being cloyingly sweet, a little like the way adding some good aged balsamic vinegar to your tomato sauce works. The cream smoothed everything out, the jalapeno provided welcome bite and the basil was like a counterpoint melody, harmonizing with the rest but definitely going off and doing its own thing. The other best part? 40 minutes from start to plate, not that you'd know it from my excessive verbiage.

I’d planned to make enough for me, enough for Dave when he got in PLUS leftovers for our lunches today, but I was greedy and there ended up only being enough for a gluttonous solo dinner and lunches. (My jeans are a little tight, today.)

I will definitely be playing around with fruit in pasta sauces more in future. Seeing as I make pasta with some variant of tomato sauce all the time, it’s nice to have found another dimension to play around in. Quantities and suggestions below.

1 lb pasta (I used ziti with lines; anything not too small would do.)
Salt and pepper to taste
1 can (12 z) tomatoes
1 small onion (although you could use more), diced
2 fat cloves garlic, minced
½ c. heavy cream (doesn’t have to be heavy, or even present.)
½ c. red wine (I think … maybe ¾ c.)
1 jalapeno (adjust this according to your preference for heat and the hotness of your peppers. You could use ½ tsp. of flakes, too.)
1 tbl. butter (olive oil would be fine)
1 small overripe nectarine (you could use peach or apricot, too. Maybe even pitted cherries.)
1 large handful of basil, sliced fine.
1 sweet bell pepper, chopped

No photos because this is not a very special-looking dish.

Kitchen Hygiene Tip of the Day

Don't cut a chunk out of your motherfucking finger.

July, July!

Today I celebrate independence by not wearing a bra all day. Let freedom ring!

(or reign, as bushlet would say.)

I also plan celebrating independence by liberating myself from such things as showers, deodorant and toothpaste for much of the day. I'll probably take pity on Dave and make some ablutions before he gets home from work. Hopefully. Maybe we should cross our fingers on that one. I am totally taking pity on you guys by not posting pictures. Trust me, you don't want to see this.

It is gorgeous out - low eighties, dry and sunny. Perfect for spending much of the day alternating between getting-things-done-around-the-house and long stretches of reading time on the back porch in the new-to-us papasan chair with a cat.

I'm re-reading Robertson Davies's Deptford Trilogy. Some years ago I wrote a dissertation on him, and as a result earned the right to call myself a Master of English Literature. (Not that you'd know it from reading this; typos and sloppy writing abound! Since it's the 4th of July, let's just call that tendency my declaration of independence from grammatical rules, and not just bone-laziness.)

Anyway. Davies is an author whom every time I come to him again it's like I'm a new me, reading a new book. I'm still not very thrilled about my Master's thesis - mostly because it didn't do Davies's writing justice, also it was boring and added nothing to the scholarship in the field of Davis or Canadian identity or even identity politics in general. But re-reading The Deptford Trilogy (it's my marked-up copy that I worked with on the thesis) reminds me of what I was trying to do and say and why his work inspired me, and that's not a bad thing. I spent a year of my life with this man, and it's nice to know I wasn't wasting my time. It's charming and witty and clever and I am marveling anew at the creation of voice for the narrator's opinions. All his narrators sound a little similar but it's such a nice voice to listen to, dammit! Plus there's all that heady love for learning and cerebrality, I'm totally swooning.

I guess I'll have to try harder next time

Mingle² - Online Dating

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

fucking (10x) knife (2x) zombie (1x)

Zombie, heheheheheh.

Maybe if I work on it I can get up to X! That'd be sweet! Fucking sweet!

Internet round-up! some fun, some depressing

Fun stuff:

Animals cans teach us how to stay cool! okay, this article is fairly simplistic (take naps in the heat of the day ... wear protective clothing ... don't drink alcohol to quench your thirst ...) but whatever, I clicked anyway bnecause my second-floor apartment has apparently relocated itself to the eleventh circle of hell (I know Dante didn't know about that one. It's for enterprising sinners like me.) Whatever, even the cats are all panting on the couch and have lost their cat cool (probably all that fur.) Via Digg.

MizPee. Find the nearest clean toilet when you're out and about in an unfamiliar place - as long as you've got your cell phone, you're all set. No more crouching between parked cars while your friends gigglingly "stand guard". It works with text messages and phone with online browsing capabilities (so, anyone with an iPhone, then ...) via TechCrunch.


Seven brilliant free fonts from Smashing magazine. Check out their back articles, they are chocka with useful stuff and loads of free fonts.

some distressed free fonts. (Via HowAboutOrange, I think.) Man, do I wish I had photoshop so I could use all this stuff. I'd so love to design our wedding invitations using a distressed free font and maybe some of these free brushes ... I'm particularly fond of the misprinted type grunge brushes and the bloodspot brushes from angryblue. (Possibly not the bloodied fingerprints one on the wedding invitation ... unless I can incorporate it as some sort of (tasteful) nod to Sid Vicious.)

Since I don't have photoshop (can't afford, le sigh, also don't need in the course of day job wherein I massage the internets so that they yield money for my company) I use The GIMP (nope, not like the Pulp Fiction one at all, it stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and it's a free open-source alterbative to Photoshop. I just wish for photoshop since it's a lot more intuitive than GIMP.) Althuogh I did manage to use GIMP to make the lolZoe below:



And here are some free flower brushes for GIMP. Or, if you're really tech-y (or have more time on your hands than I) here's a tutorial on how to convert Photoshop Brushes to GIMP. (I haven't tried it yet, so I can't vouch for it.)

In case your odd photo quota hasn't been met yet for this month, quick! go to the china daily and see images like this goat walking a tightrope while carrying a monkey on its back. Who knew?



Depressing stuff:

Only one topic here, but it's not good news. Anyone miss the coverage of Jessie Davis, the pregnant lady (by a married! black! man) who was murdered by her partner? If you missed that, surely you haven't forgotten Lacey Peterson? Turns out, as a matter of fact, that being pregnant is really really really likely to increase a pregnant woman's risk of death by violence. (Homicide, in fact.) In fact, if you're pregnant, you're statistically more likely to be murdered than to die of any pregnancy-related health issue. Why's that? Intimate partner violence. Being pregnant increases the likelihood and severity of abuse dramatically. Read this Salon article, Murder Most Foul, for some eye-opening (and horrifying) facts.

From the article:
"Why are pregnant women dying?" asks Rebecca Whiteman of the Family Violence Protection Fund in San Francisco. "Their partners are killing them."

Go read it.

Of course there are other issues at play - because it's her fault, right? For being a slut? Check out Jill's analysis (at Feministe) of the thinking behind some people who are indeed implying that she deserved it. And I'd also recommend Amanda Marcotte's take on some of the racial issues playing into the media coverage (from Pandagon)

Another angle

more post-op photoshop effects
Originally uploaded by cara_debeer

Playing with more photo effects.

At last

New tattoo isn't healed yet, but I got it finished last night. The shading around the waves will be more silvery grey, rather than the almost black it looks like now. I'll put up more pictures later (and maybe get Dave to help, since I apparently can't hold the camera steady) in a proper blog. In the meantime, I've been playing with other photo effects using picnik and snipshot as photo editing tools, in a vain attempt to make silk purses. I should really learn to sew (shoot) before I start attempting to tranform sows' ears into anything else, though.






Current, unsatisfactory camera is a Canon Powershot S230. Any recommendations?

I should note one thing, especially following up from my last post: I certainly didn't do anything to trim any width from my waist or change the shape of my nose, I just intensified colors and contrast and sharpened focus (where possible.) When I looked at the straight-out-of-the-camera pictures, anyway, I was all, what the hell am I worrying about, anyway? I think I look great. (Not perfect, although I won't enumerate here, but great.) Who gives a shit if I don't wear a size 0? I'd look horrible (I know because I did wear a size 2, anyway, and it was Not Flattering.)

Vanity, Insecurity

I know we all know celebrity photos get retouched, a whole lot, before they appear in magazines. (yes, even rags like InStyle retouch, I believe.) However, it's one thing to know that and quite another to see the befores and afters. (And then a whole 'nother thing to try to disassociate your own body issues from the images constantly being beamed at you in the media ... but anyway.) This site should help. http://iwanexstudio.com/. Click on the portfolios section. The whole site is flash but it's worth the aggro.

I suggest you take a close look at the work done on skin (very often in the afters it's lit up until it glows! It's not just the removal of lines, although there's plenty of that. Reddish people get yellower, freckled people become milky, lips and eyes get shine added until they sparkle. Cate Blanchett's picture has all of these things happening.) Look, also, at the work done on bodies (skinny girls are given more curves, curvy girls are airbrushed down a couple of sizes - Kelly Clarkson's picture is a great example). Halle Berry is one of the few pictures who looks just as flawless before and after, although it looks to me like the "before" has been de-flawed. Do I even need to tell you that both Halle Berry and Beyonce get lighter in the after photos? Sigh.

Scary. And also, this is a good explanation for why Britney Spears looks just fine in regular magazine photos and really horrible when you see candids of her in The Enquirer (read in line at the grocery store only, of course.)

social justice round up

Unfair Lending: The Effect of Race and Ethnicity on the Price of Subprime Mortgages Fucking awesome. Irresponsible (to say the least) lenders are doing racial profiling. Can you say, redlining? hey, isn't that illegal? (Never mind that it still happens.)

'Subprime' Aftermath:
Losing the Family Home
Mortgages Bolstered
Detroit's Middle Class --
Until Money Ran Out What happens when, oh, say, something unexpected (like life) occurs to upset the payment schedule on a subprime loan.


Subprime Lending is a Drain on Home Ownership Damn straight it is.

Banks or bloodsuckers? If you read the other articles above, you know where this one is going to come out. I love my little local bank (mostly becuase they don't bankrupt me with overdraft fees) but it's a total rarity and probably won't last forever.


I'm mad about this because we are getting gentrified out - our landlady is selling our house for condo conversions. FUCK. I'm just hoping that she's way overpriced and the somerville market won't sustain it. There seem to be a lot of foreclosures in process right now in somerville (according to the Google maps applet, anyway). Jesus. It's ironical (hee), though, that while Dave and I are totally the face of gentrification - white kids with heavy-framed dark glasses - I even own an iPod - we're actually the victims (no, we're not contributing to the problem by paying rent over the odds. Ha fucking ha, like I've got the money to do that.) No, we don't buy coffee at starbucks. No, we try not to shop at big box stores, instead spending the vast majority of our money locally - apart from my car payments and insurance (which are held by a small previously-local-to-me-non-chain bank)- Yes, we'd really really really like to buy but c'mon, the median - not average, median - price for a house in our area is 400K. Yes, that's a condo. You're probably lucky if it's more than 1200 sq feet - price per sq foot is between $300 and $400. Right now median housing prices in Boston exceed the median household income by 5.4 times ... while the rule of thumb for affordable housing is more like 3 - 3.5 times the yearly household income. That is fucked up, people. And here's the original study, which looks at the whole nation.)

Some dude (okay, some dude named Edward Glaeser) has an idea: build more affordable housing!. Sounds good to me, although he says that regulatory issues in MA make building a tougher prospect than elsewhere - which, given the loathsome corruption of the Big Dig, I have no trouble believing (wanna build? better take out an extra loan for all those bribes you'll need to make), although I'd like to see some figures that tell me where and how regulation is stuffing things up. Still, it's a good idea. Because you know why I want to buy a house? because I'm ready to fucking settle down! I'd like to buy so I know my rent won't increase and my landlady won't decide the flip the place she inherited for a shitload of cash. I'd like to buy so I can decorate a house myself, and not have to leave in two years (unless we decide to). I'd like to buy so I can grow tomatoes in my backyard ... or at least make a big old container garden on a porch or something and, jesus, NOT HAVE TO MOVE AGAIN unless I want to. Hear that, people? I hate moving. I moved forty times (no, really) in my twenties (forty-one is looming, as soon as the landlady sells the place), and three of those moves were across continents. I'm good at moving and it doesn't scare me but I fucking hate it. I'd love to have the luxury of acquiring books and then, novelty, KEEPING them because no one will force me out of my house. (Can you tell I take this personally? I fucking well do.)

Okay, rant over, round-up continues.

Here's a great analysis from an online friend of mine The classic American Dream is about how anyone can become rich in the US through hard work and endurance, no matter how humble a background they come from...However, for each such tale, there are literately hundred of thousands of untold stories about those who didn't make it. Those that grew up in poverty, and stayed in poverty. Or those that sank into poverty either through bad decisions, or sheer ill luck.


Just for kicks - being mostly chronically late myself:


For the Chronically Late, It’s Not a Power Trip
(behind the wall now, it's still free but requires registration.) My first husband really was crazily, passive-aggressively late. I'm just a little too optimistic. I think I'm more in the overly optimistic wants-to-do-too-much category.

So some dude in Arizona hit a woman so hard he killed her fetus and, two days later, her (via brain damage.) How did his sentencing go down? "Gurrola was sentenced to 16 years in the death of Monica Sanchez and 20 years for the killing of her fetus." WTF? how come killing the fetus garnered more time than killing the woman? Check out punkassblog's pie chart for a sublimely sarcastic pie chart.

Greg and Erica's wedding

Me, Dave, a lobster

Not too drunk yet at the time of picture taking but you can see I'm on my way. Click here for all the pictures. Hopefully I caught all the most embarassing ones and didn't share them in that stream.

I fucking HATE my camera. I need to research a new one. Dave suggested I get a new one to celebrate his birthday - his gift would be me shutting up about how crappy the camera is.

OMFG, I hate summer hair

And this is why:


last night's hair, very dirty and after much exercise including walking in the rain. Often the worse I treat it, the better it looks. (Although FAR FAR too much like Sarah Jessica Parker in the eighties. Any amount is too much, really.)


Yeah, this is what I wake up to every morning. Fucking charming, right? It's the true reason I refuse to go camping - let me tell you, it doesn't improve as the day wears on without electronic intervention. Vain and shallow I may be, but I'm realistic.

Fucking stupid fine curly hair flat at the roots gets frizzy bullshit. Fucking stupid boston summers humidity. Motherfucker!

Turns out I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, or, a Friday time-waster for you

According to Lumosity, anyway. It's another of those brain training games which claims to be able to "improve your memory, attention [ed: do they mean attention span?] and processing speed." This involves playing games with which involve spacial memory (yes, like the child's matching game, Memory) and basic arithmetic.

Obviously I could be accused of sour grapes here since I seem to be in the sub-normal range. Hehehehehe, they don't seem to give any credit for smart aleckery or uneccesary new word formations. But - I don't know about you, but when someone asks me what 7 x 8 is, I will tell them it's 56 not because I've done the multiplication in my head but because I memorized it in third grade. I'd guess my score would be better if I tried to play the game a second time because this time I understand how it works (I probably should have read the instructions on the games) and also, it's easy to figure out ways to manipulate the system.

What it actually made me think about is how limited our standard ways to judge IQ are. Seriously. I've had a very thorough IQ evaluation (they wouldn't tell me my number, they just said, "You're very talented, don't worry about the number" Condescending fuckheads!) ... anyway, IQ tests are horribly limited in not having any way to assess the creative (don't give me your Rorschach tests - just because I saw identical twin circus monkeys in most of the blots doesn't mean I'm creative). Ya know, plus I think snappy wordplay is a totally valid skill (not to mention, really helpful with real life stuff like job interviews and email crafting and ass-covering exercises) and indicative of smartness, but there's nada in the standard IQ tests to look at that stuff. (Well, there wasn't - that I remember - in the ones I took. I did a lot of verbal and math stuff - it was like the SATs, but longer and more boring.) Why does it matter if you can do instant multiplication in your head but you can't maintain a relationship? It all seems so limiting.

To be fair, Lumosity doesn't claim to be an IQ evaluator, and to be honest, my short term memory is for shit, so I might actually benefit from playing the game some more. (Noooo, I'm not skivving. I'm smartening myself so I can work better!)

At bottom, though, are you really going to learn skills which are applicable to myriad aras of your life, or are you just going to learn how to play Lumosity better? I guess it would be great if I could remember a grocery list longer than 12 items (I used to be able to), but where's the real world application in this, since in the real world I tend to write lists? Because, you know, I have pens and paper. Tools. Isn't the extensive use of tools what is supposed to make humans so much smarter than animals anyway? Unless my job required memorizing a lot of things. In my experience, though, organized detail oriented people (like me ... I'm a fucking data analyst, for dog's sake) don't do it all from memory ... why would you, anyway? Not having to remember everything frees me up to do important things ... like blogging! No, seriously, like looking for patterns and discrepancies and results and changes and detectivating (o I am on a roll today) what might have caused changes.

That said, I might be completely wrong about the applicability of this little game (maybe it prevents alzheimer's! I swear I'd play for an hour a day. Anything to avoid becoming the drooling zombie that my grandmother (life-long crossword puzzler and wheel-of-fortune watcher) turned into in the last ten years of her life.) and am open to being corrected on this.