All the pretty things that we could be.
In Louisville airport, where I started writing this, they kept wearily paging people who'd forgotten something somewhere in the airport. They also kept accidentally leaving the PA on while talking to each other. Kentucky is kind of adorable.
I was in Louisville because I just spent an awesome couple of days visiting annakovsky, talking every second and having a rad time. We managed to find the world's awesomest bridesmaid dress in under two hours (it has pockets! and a swingy skirt!) which freed us up to catch up on Portlandia and Daria and other important items. We also went into downtown Louisville, where I've never been, had lunch at a cafe with mason jars for glasses and then went to the Muhammad Ali Center, which was fantastic. I learned so much! I wanted to Wikipedia so much more! It was really well done. Plus we had brunch and hung out with her family and it was so relaxing and amazing.
The weekend before that in New York was also awesome. A and I spent Saturday afternoon and evening wandering all over the Village and lower Manhattan stumbling on things: the Housing Works Bookstore where I bought an Ursula K. LeGuin book (I am obsessed), an entire storefront dedicated to selling overpriced rice pudding, the MoMA store and Mango and an amazing dinner with an old friend from high school at a Croatian-Jewish restaurant. A perfect way to end and start a year. I'm going back to NYC for a school trip in a few weeks, but I want to go again for fun soon and spend the whole time in Brooklyn, I think. Brian Williams knows why.
And now I'm in Chapel Hill, where I've never been. A is here for a conference and I am here for the grits. And the sunshine oh god, the weather has been amazing this weekend. I think I may have actually gotten a sunburn. I've also managed to get my unprocessed emails (dating from July! augh) down from like 300 to 30 -- I'm racing against the clock to get caught up on everything before the new semester starts on Wednesday (oh god). I also just found one of those prohibitively expensive wool Icelandic sweaters for $11 in a thrift shop. Well played, North Carolina. I like college towns. I like Yelping my way through them and their used bookstores and fancy sandwiches and vintage stores. Although I do think I'm the only person in the whole town today not wearing that UNC blue, and that's not an exaggeration. It's like being the new-to-town outsider in a dystopic novel after the cult takeover.
And oh -- I haven't mentioned the best part of Christmas this year. I saw my brother at Thanksgiving, when he'd just finished reading Dune and was in the middle of On the Road (the Original Scroll version! "you get kind of anxious if you read it before bed because there are no breaks," he said), so I gave him Slaughterhouse Five, sine Vonnegut seemed to kind of straddle the divide between scifi and …. midcentury counterculture whatever. And he loved it so much he stayed up all night to finish it. The 100% best gift response possible. I remember being so impatient in elementary school for him to learn to read so we could talk about books together, and here we are now. (I also got him the first Octavian Nothing book, since he loved Johnny Tremain when we were kids, so we'll see how that goes over.)
Finally, speaking of books, a rec: The Reapers are the Angels was recced so wholeheartedly by so many awesome people (jolielaide, annakovsky, witling, care_says) that I started it on the plane and finished it in about a day. It's like a True Grit apocalypse: Mattie Ross fights zombies! Or as swmbo said, Buffy meets The Road. What was most delightful was the main character's worldview: if it's always been a zombie apocalypse for you, you spend much less time wringing your hands over it than everyone expects. (Tho' if you find grating the way people talk in True Grit or, say, O Brother Where Art Thou? or Firefly, it might irritate you similarly.) But man, I loved that awesome girl so much.
Anyway. I'm going to try posting more during January -- my lofty goal is once a week! -- inspired jointly by sailtonorway (Occupy LJ!), _swallow's January daily posting project, and a pact with annakovsky. If this entry's any indication, apparently I have a lot of unfocused things to say.
I was in Louisville because I just spent an awesome couple of days visiting annakovsky, talking every second and having a rad time. We managed to find the world's awesomest bridesmaid dress in under two hours (it has pockets! and a swingy skirt!) which freed us up to catch up on Portlandia and Daria and other important items. We also went into downtown Louisville, where I've never been, had lunch at a cafe with mason jars for glasses and then went to the Muhammad Ali Center, which was fantastic. I learned so much! I wanted to Wikipedia so much more! It was really well done. Plus we had brunch and hung out with her family and it was so relaxing and amazing.
The weekend before that in New York was also awesome. A and I spent Saturday afternoon and evening wandering all over the Village and lower Manhattan stumbling on things: the Housing Works Bookstore where I bought an Ursula K. LeGuin book (I am obsessed), an entire storefront dedicated to selling overpriced rice pudding, the MoMA store and Mango and an amazing dinner with an old friend from high school at a Croatian-Jewish restaurant. A perfect way to end and start a year. I'm going back to NYC for a school trip in a few weeks, but I want to go again for fun soon and spend the whole time in Brooklyn, I think. Brian Williams knows why.
And now I'm in Chapel Hill, where I've never been. A is here for a conference and I am here for the grits. And the sunshine oh god, the weather has been amazing this weekend. I think I may have actually gotten a sunburn. I've also managed to get my unprocessed emails (dating from July! augh) down from like 300 to 30 -- I'm racing against the clock to get caught up on everything before the new semester starts on Wednesday (oh god). I also just found one of those prohibitively expensive wool Icelandic sweaters for $11 in a thrift shop. Well played, North Carolina. I like college towns. I like Yelping my way through them and their used bookstores and fancy sandwiches and vintage stores. Although I do think I'm the only person in the whole town today not wearing that UNC blue, and that's not an exaggeration. It's like being the new-to-town outsider in a dystopic novel after the cult takeover.
And oh -- I haven't mentioned the best part of Christmas this year. I saw my brother at Thanksgiving, when he'd just finished reading Dune and was in the middle of On the Road (the Original Scroll version! "you get kind of anxious if you read it before bed because there are no breaks," he said), so I gave him Slaughterhouse Five, sine Vonnegut seemed to kind of straddle the divide between scifi and …. midcentury counterculture whatever. And he loved it so much he stayed up all night to finish it. The 100% best gift response possible. I remember being so impatient in elementary school for him to learn to read so we could talk about books together, and here we are now. (I also got him the first Octavian Nothing book, since he loved Johnny Tremain when we were kids, so we'll see how that goes over.)
Finally, speaking of books, a rec: The Reapers are the Angels was recced so wholeheartedly by so many awesome people (jolielaide, annakovsky, witling, care_says) that I started it on the plane and finished it in about a day. It's like a True Grit apocalypse: Mattie Ross fights zombies! Or as swmbo said, Buffy meets The Road. What was most delightful was the main character's worldview: if it's always been a zombie apocalypse for you, you spend much less time wringing your hands over it than everyone expects. (Tho' if you find grating the way people talk in True Grit or, say, O Brother Where Art Thou? or Firefly, it might irritate you similarly.) But man, I loved that awesome girl so much.
Anyway. I'm going to try posting more during January -- my lofty goal is once a week! -- inspired jointly by sailtonorway (Occupy LJ!), _swallow's January daily posting project, and a pact with annakovsky. If this entry's any indication, apparently I have a lot of unfocused things to say.