christina speaks

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Drained

Things I did today:

• had a very insane and hectic day at the office
• went to happy hour with a dear old friend from high school
• came home and wrote a chapter of my book

Therefore, I am tired.

But here’s a picture of one of my cats!

He’s cute, look at him! Don’t mind me, curled up in the corner here … with the comfy bed … and the pillows … and …

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Already?

I just had a “need help conceiving?” ad in my sidebar on Facebook. Guess they think this is gonna be a white wedding.

I believe Amy called it, just a few weeks ago. Although she thought (and I did too) that the pregnancy/kids stuff would start after my status changed to “married.”

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90s VOTW: “Ironic,” Alanis Morissette

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?

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GO PENS!

That is all I have to say today.

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Just as I suspected

Totally stealing this idea from Amy, if only to show myself that I am even less well-read than I thought.

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

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Note to CareerBuilder.com

You should really do a better job of vetting the companies who contact job applicants. Because when I receive an email laden with spelling and grammatical errors and telling me what my “job scheme” will comprise, I’m running the other way as fast as I can.

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That what I says

A woman who could be Lily Tomlin’s twin, if Lily were shorter and more shriveled, sits at the front of the bus. She’s wearing a tan suede jacket with fur lined trim and two knotted-rope ankle bracelets under white tights. Glancing across the aisle, she recognizes a friend. The friend is stout, her face buried in a book.

“Hey, Abby!” she says. Abby looks up. “What’s the past tense of ‘sneak?’”

Abby thinks for a minute, adjusts the sleeve of her hot pink jacket. “Snuck,” she declares.

A triumphant grin spreads across Lily’s face. “Nuh-uh!” she crows. “It’s ‘sneaked!’”

“No one ever says ‘sneaked,’” Abby grumbles, turning back to her book.

“I sneak, I sneaked, I have sneaked,” Lily intones. Abby looks up, a thoughtful expression on her face.

“You know, when I was growing up, I was always taught to use the word ‘a’ before a word that started with a consonant, and the word ‘an’ before a word that began with a vowel,” she says. “Now, people are using them any which way they want.”

“Someone in my department asked me to relate information to another person today,” Lily replies, her face very serious. “And I says, ‘You mean relay information? You can’t relate information to a person. You have to relay it, I says.’”

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Rabbit Rabbit Day

When I was a kid, I used to go to a neighbor’s house all the time. She was an only child, and I lived with eleven other people, so I loved escaping the noise and bustle and general insanity that was par for the course at my house. We’d play Barbies or two-person Clue (I know, sounds ridiculous, but somehow we managed to do it) or just watch TV. We watched a lot of the USA Network for some reason – I think they had really cheesy kids game shows on in the afternoons or something – but they also showed these short one minute segments called “In A Minute”:

(To this day, when I hear anyone say, “In a minute,” that helium-laced loop at the beginning of the clip plays in my mind.)

Anyway, one time they had a segment on Rabbit Rabbit Day. This is the first day of every month, and supposedly if you say the words “Rabbit rabbit” as soon as you wake up, before anything else, you’ll have good luck the rest of the month.

The first time I ever told my boyfriend about Rabbit Rabbit Day, he basically told me that I was crazy and superstitious. I considered this. Crazy? No, not anymore than the next person. Superstitious? Yes. If I’m watching a Steelers game with you, and you remark at how incredibly well the team is playing, I will kill you with my eyes. Seriously, I’ll cut you. Because you just don’t do things like that. Not even if the score is 532-0 and there’s ten seconds left to play and we have possession of the ball and God has come down from the heavens and decreed that the Steelers will emerge victorious from the game. To say the Steelers are playing well is jinxing it, and they’ll immediately fumble the ball and the other team will score 533 points in those ten seconds and God will just go back to that big stadium in the sky and then probably strike you with a lightning bolt because you jinxed the Steelers. And everyone knows God’s a Steelers fan.

Getting back to the point, since tonight is the last night of the month, that makes tomorrow Rabbit Rabbit Day. And I did some poking around on the Internets (read: Googled “rabbit rabbit day”) and found out that it’s actually a thing. With a history. At least 600 years of history, actually, and maybe even 800.

Is it still superstitious? Of course. Will I forget to say it in the morning? It’s quite possible. I’d say there’s a fifty percent chance. But do I feel just a bit validated and maybe even a tad smug that Wikipedia has given me a factual basis for these two little words I’ve known of since I was a kid? You bet your ass I do.

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That’s right, kids

See that fancy little NaBloPoMo badge to the left? That pretty green square with the flower stem-looking things inside it and the words “31 posts in 31 days?” I’m totally going to do it. I know I’ll hate it by the end of the month, and I’ll probably want to swear off blogging forever, but whatevs. I can totally handle it.

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.

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90s VOTW: “Virtual Insanity,” Jamiroquai

This video was super innovative when it came out, yo. Hell, it might still be considered innovative since MTV never shows any damn videos anymore and therefore there are no new videos to surpass its awesomeness. (Yes, I sound like an old fart. Oh well!) Like, dude, the floor’s moving. And then suddenly the furniture starts to bleed. And birds are flying around and cockroaches are rustling about. Craazay!

And check out Jamiroquai’s moves! I remember wishing that I could dance like he does … and then I remembered I’m a half-Irish, half-Polish girl from western Pennsylvania who will never look like that on a dance floor.

How much do I love the Dr. Seuss top hat thing that he’s wearing in this vid? For a fleeting moment in time, that hat was funky and cool and you wished you could pull it off but you knew you couldn’t. Then, afterwards, that godforsaken hat was ubiquitous. You could not escape it, especially not if you decided to go to the amusement park or county fair or some other place where teenagers would be congregating. And trust me, none of them could pull it off either. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t try.

I’m also loving that he’s wearing what appears to be an Old Navy performance fleece. (Admit it, you can still sing the jingles from those really hideously tacky commercials they showed in the 90s.)

What do you think the crow (raven? I’m not so up-to-speed on my birds) and the cockroach symbolize? If they symbolize anything at all, of course.