This weekend: beaucoup parties + a German-American couple and their one-year-old son = FUN TIMES.

See yinz later!

And why do you pop up in the most unexpected places, like the pasta salad I was eating as part of my lunch today? I was lucky enough to score a free lunch, and then you had to appear in my mouth with your gross taste and completely ruin those ten seconds of my life it took me to swig some Diet Pepsi and forget you had slipped past me in an attempt to – what? Make me like you? It’s been 24 years, Celery. I’m beyond a simple dislike or a “she’ll grow out of it” phase. I outright hate you. So if you don’t mind, quit appearing in my food and I’ll quit remembering that you exist.

XO,
Christina

Hey, isn’t it ironic how all the lines in this song aren’t really ironies, they’re just bummers? Ha ha! A little 90s humor for yinz…

Another Pop-Up video fav! From what I can recall from those informative little bubbles, the four Alanises are supposed to represent different parts of her personality – red sweater Alanis is the crazy one, yellow sweater Alanis is the childlike one, green sweater Alanis is the weird one (? am I remembering this correctly?), and driver Alanis is the supposedly shy, subdued one.

Let’s pause to simply appreciate Alanis Morissette for a second, can we? I mean, how awesome was she? I love that her hair was always kind of a mess and she looked like she didn’t wear much make-up and she just didn’t care. I love that her most popular song was a big, powerful “fuck you” to a man who had crossed her. (Cousin Joey from Full House! Maybe.) I love that she gave smart interviews and didn’t hide her intelligence and generally just rocked. Alanis, I love you.

This video was pretty cool, in a very low-key way. I like the idea of the different Alanises, I like the total beater car, and I like that fact that it looks like it takes place on some Canadian highway. Overall, thumbs up.

So … if you were cruising down the highway and three of your clones appeared in the car, what song would you sing? What parts of your personality would they represent?

Deets:

Backstory: What follows is a list of the top 100 books tagged “unread” on LibraryThing.

The rules: Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk [*] to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your “to be read” list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
The Odyssey by Homer
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ulysses by James Joyce
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Iliad by Homer
Emma by Jane Austen
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
American Gods : a novel by Neil Gaiman
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
* Wicked by Gregory Maguire
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Persuasion by Jane Austen
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Anansi Boys : a novel by Neil Gaiman
The Once and Future King by T. H. White
Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
Dubliners by James Joyce
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir by Frank McCourt
Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
Beowulf by Anonymous
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
The Aeneid by Virgil
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
The Personal History of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Possession : a romance by A.S. Byatt
The History of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

This month’s theme is “Voices.” Weird, and I’m not really sure what it means. But I’ll be exploring it, and I hope you stay tuned.