Kathleen: also — junior scrabble cheez-its are extremely satisfying and addictive

me: OOOO

Kathleen: http://www.cheez-it.com/cgi-bin/brandpages/product.pl?company=145&product=16253

only stocked at select publix stores! at least in my experience…

me: oh man

so what makes them junior?

Kathleen: no idea

i think it’s junior scrabble cheezits

not junior cheezits with scrabble

presumably it’s junior because it encourages one to play with one’s food

me: but why is it not regular scrabble cheezits

ah

Kathleen: because why would old people buy alphabet crackers? ;)

me: i dislike that cheezit thinks i don’t want to spell with my food.

obviously i want to spell with my food

Kathleen: me too

me: i’m glad we established that

we ought to write them a letter

Kathleen: indeed. don’t belittle me with your Junior labels

me: seriously

BARTLET [to Obama]: GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

But let’s put it this way. I have an ideal seat to the fine fine show at my own workplace tomorrow night, where we are presenting a musical I have loved as long as hard as I’ve loved Hair, and I just semi-accidentally put myself in the Public’s “virtual line” for Hair seats tomorrow night.

Also it has taken me like half an hour to type this because I can’t organize my thoughts yet.

Okay. I’m shutting up now. Flow it, show it, long as God can grow it.

It’s also been announced that Jonathan “The Sprinkler Hunk” Groff, he of sexually ambigious, Tony-nominated Spring Awakening fame, will star as Claude, just as he did at Joe’s Pub.

Given all of the above, you will easily understand the following messages I received when this link appeared in my Google Talk status message.

Allison: this is going to be a frickin’ awesome summer
i hope groff gets naked
that would make my day

Brian: groff is leaving spring awakening?
me: i guess
by july
WHO CARES, HAIR!!!
Brian: hahaha

Nicole: oh oh oh I wanna go too!me: eeeeee!
Nicole: so adorable

Erica: OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
JAW JUST DROPPED
me: I KNOW!
CAN’T WAIT!!
Erica: we need to like
camp out

Kathleen: hahahaha
wow. you might explode
me: I MIGHT EXPLODE

and then I sent an email to my parents with the subject line, “SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.” For real.

(Tribune photo by Charles Cherney)

I miss you, Chicagoans, but I haven’t worn my snow boots yet in NYC (which, granted, is a total fluke), my red down coat stays mainly in the closet, and I rarely accessorize beyond a light scarf.

Saturday afternoon. 2/3 uptown train Christmas season. Cold outside. Coats, bags,hats, scarves, shopping bags, strollers, wall-to-wall bodies, and THIS dude has to hug the pole from Park Place to 42nd Street. For real. The girl on the right was about 5’2″ and had to hold up above the d-bag’s shoulder to avoid falling over.  Sigh.

Other songs include “Bowie’s in Space,” “It’s Business Time” and “A Kiss is Not a Contract,” which features the sage lyric, “Just because I’m in a two-man novelty band doesn’t mean it’s all about poon tang.”

Eric Schlosser
Fast Food Nation
I mean, you might say this is the book that started it all for me, but I don’t think you would be telling the truth entirely. Not that I know what the book is that started it all, but I’m pretty sure this one came a little later.

Regardless, I could read this book over and over again. Even the boring parts. And yes, there are some boring parts. I want to memorize it and preach it to the masses. Fast Food Nation is more educational than anything else, and pretty spectacularly eye-opening. The damage that McDonald’s and its competition has done to this country is pretty painful, and painfully obvious when you drive across it or you know, look at its people. I actually thought of Fast Food Nation last night, in the final throes of White Teeth, when Josh Chalfen joins the animal rights group FATE. It made me want to read Fast Food Nation again to remind myself of the UK animal rights activists who’ve gone after Mickey-D’s in the past.

Anyway, it’s good, and I don’t eat fast food anymore unless it is an emergency or December in Atlanta and Chick-fil-A, because that is in my blood. One of these days I’ll actually be a vegetarian and I’ll actually avoid patronizing restaurants with bad supply lines (meaning I will have to eat at the 5 Seasons Brewery in Atlanta every meal for the rest of my life. DARN!), but that’s a slow process. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last three or four years, it’s that you can’t just up and change anything that falls in the Lifestyle Change file. You have to work it all in and make it part of your life.

And now I am totally off topic. Go read this book.

Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking
I am, ashamedly, not a learned Didion scholar. I know I’ve read things of hers, but none of them particularly stuck and they were a pretty long time ago, so I didn’t exactly know what to expect with The Year of Magical Thinking beyond what I’d been told: you’ll cry, it’s sad, nothing happens, you’ll cry, and the worst part is Quintana died anyway.

Uh, spoiler alert. Too late.

Anyway, it’s been a while since I finished this one off, but it was beautiful. The way to state it is really that I enjoyed being a part of Didion’s year. I enjoyed living with her and dealing with people with her, and that made the book fascinating. I guess I should get my Didion on now, for serious. More books!

James Frey
A Million Little Pieces
I don’t remember when I read this, but I was just wrapping up its sequel, My Friend Leonard, when the shit went down.

And yeah, I felt a little duped, but in the end I didn’t care. The plot was so far removed from anything I’ve ever known in my life that it might as well have been fiction to me. Call me sheltered, prissy, suburban, naive, whatever. Holes in his face, drug-free dentistry, clandestine love in rehab and beyond… it was all a little far-fetched for me to begin with. I didn’t approach it looking for answers or guidance or strength through my own trials, so when it came out that much of it was a lie, I didn’t demand a refund or flip my shit. It just became Some Novel that I’d read instead of Some Rehab Travelogue that I’d read.

I certainly understand that people who have lived through similar experiences with addiction and rehab themselves or with family members or friends would be livid with Frey. Those looking for a tale of strength and perseverance had every right to be disappointed. It just wasn’t ever relevant enough for me, personally, to care.

Michael Chabon
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Everyone I know who has read this book has enjoyed it, and everyone I know who has read this book had to start it once, give up, and start over many months later.

I thought it helped that I’d been to Prague between the first time I tried to read it and now, as that’s where the story somewhat darkly begins, but thinking back, I’m pretty sure I’d been to Prague before I tried it the first time, too.

Regardless, this time around, I liked it. I particularly enjoyed Sammy, who I didn’t feel was as uselessly romanticized as Joe and Rosa and basically everyone else–he was the only one who wasn’t a caricature for me. Meanwhile though, the details and the story and the themes are wonderful. Huzzah.

Truman Capote
In Cold Blood
This might be my favorite book. It also might be my mother’s favorite book. We are both pretty awesome, so you should probably give this a read if you have not already.

Gerald Clark
Capote
When I said In Cold Blood was my mom’s favorite book, I forgot that there was actually a raging battle on her shelf of favorites between In Cold Blood and Capote. Obviously she is someone who likes ol’ Truman a lot. Anyway, I agree with her. Capote is fascinating, but you still have to read In Cold Blood first and only see the movie AFTER. Seriously.

Lorrie Moore
Birds of America
Finding tragedy in the everyday is as valuable as finding joy in it, if you ask me (Hugo!), and I rather enjoy her writing. I agree, it is anything but juicy, but there is something tasty in the communion-wafer-dryness of it all. OMG I just said that.

Johnathan Franzen
The Corrections
I learned that this book will F up your ability to read other books for a short period of time because you become so aware of and attached to Alfred, Enid, Chip, Denise and Gary that in the event that the next book you read has even remotely similar characters anywhere in it (see: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay‘s Al somebody, one of the publishing guys) you are immediately thinking of the wrong people.

Which is a good thing. I read The Corrections in March and then I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay after it, and though K&C was great, I retained way more of The Corrections. And for me, that’s a sign of a darn good read.

TONIGHT

After inciting rage and jealousy in my pilates class over my upcoming trip to Canyon Ranch (speaking of which, HELLO BLOG, MEET WEEK WITH MOM AND A FEW HUNDRED HEALTH NUTS!), I came home with lofty plans of laundry and cleaning and showering. Instead I heated up a can of my new default dinner, Amy’s Vegetarian Chili (P.S. HELLO BLOG, WE EXPRESS OUR CONDOLENCES FOR THE LOSS OF YOUR COOKING PHASE, MAYBE ONE DAY IT WILL RISE FROM THE DEAD, THOUGH I DID MAKE BANANA BREAD ON SUNDAY SO THAT IS A START) and somehow located Four Weddings and a Funeral on Turner Classic Movies, where apparently you can cuss. Having never actually seen it, this was a great way to spend 8 PM – 11 PM, unless you are my laundry and/or hair and were expecting some attention.

BOOKS

But 11:00 isn’t so late! I could have gotten off the couch and made a go of it for an hour befor ebed, right? Heck no. Instead I checked my email, where I found a request from famed writer Johnathan Wilbur to be his friend on goodreads.com. I had not heard of goodreads.com an hour ago. Now I have three whole goodreads friends, and I have written the following book reviews. By “book reviews,” you must understand that I mean misplaced blog entries, which I quickly realized and vowed to copy and paste right here for your viewing pleasure. You may also wish to join goodreads.com in order to find out what your friends (like me, Johnathan, Tony and Briggs, my three thus-far friends) are reading or have read. Anyway, book reviews, sort of (oh, and there may be some spoilers):

The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffeneger

I started this book and then dumped my boyfriend. So then I put it down for 2 weeks before I picked it up again, because I was afraid it would be far too… lovey. And yeah, it kind of was, but it was still a good read, an easy February read like The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which I cracked out shortly after finishing The Time Traveler’s Wife.

It’s a good Chicago book, I guess. As a fake Chicagoan, I can only pretend to know so much, though, so I guess I can’t fairly make that assessment.

Uh, spoiler alert?

What struck me in particular about TTTW were the multiple, painful miscarriages Claire suffers. As a recent convert to relative adulthood and having even more recently surprised myself with a panic attack based on the thought, “Oh my God, what if I can’t have children?”, these scenes hit hard, fast, close and real. There are a lot of colors in this book, and nowhere are they as real as in these scenes. Though the future is made apparent midway through the miscarriages, they matter a great deal. With the explicit gimmick of ::poof! I’m off to 1973!:: having long worn off, the present is a painful place to stay, and Ms. Niffenwhatsit keeps you there. Snaps for that.

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Melissa Bank

I have been reading easy books of late. Sherri lent this to me, and it was over in a day or two. “Hunting and Fishing” is men, boys, &c. It is not clever, but I didn’t figure that out till it was made very explicit at the end of the book. Perhaps this is because I read this book far too late at night, and, just like what happens to my knitting when I try to do it too late at night, I fail.

The best part of this book is the chapter about the people who live below Jane’s aunt. It stands totally alone, and I am glad of that. That part is quite good.

The Namesake: A Novel, Jhumpa Lahiri
(for TvG)
Not as good as Interpreter of Maladies if you ask me, but The Namesake is a decent read. And that guy from Harold and Kumar go to White Castle is starring in the movie (this I learned when I saw the Queen at the artsy theater). Did you see the SVU he was on? Daaamn.

Food and Loathing, Betsy Lerner

For some reason, a random ledge in the laundry room of my apartment building has become a book exchange. Usually, the books are Danielle Steele, sci-fi paperbacks and westerns. And then one day in January, I saw this hot pink Food and Loathing, complete with a mirror on its cover, like that fancy TIME magazine about me!

Anyway it was a half decent read about a tubby poet with low self-esteem, her suicide attempts and fleeting sexual exploits. Oh, and her parents, which is probably what makes it the best. Anyway, worth reading, if you read stuff like this about people and food, which I, obviously, do.

Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell

I actually have no idea when I read this book. But I love Sarah Vowell and decidedly want to be her (or Liz Lemon, it’s a toss-up right now). Anyway, I also heard her read excerpts from this in February 2006, which made it even funnier.

And then this week’s This American Life featured a story about New Orleans by some correspondent who, though quite good, was sort of a poor woman’s S.V., which made me think of S.V., which is why I am typing this right now.

Newsflash: I should not write book reviews.

Adverbs: A Novel, Daniel Handler

Jenna once gave me the idea of buying books from Borders and then returning them within 31 days after having read them.

The problems with that practice in my life are not ethical; they are practical:

1) I read in two- to three-months fury spurts, just like how I knit, except the reading trend is unrelated to avoiding other things in my life. Said fury spurts cannot be fabricated or induced, they just happen. I forget this, however, with great frequency, and buy fury spurts’ worth of books sometimes without a fury spurt in sight.

2) I fold corners. If you know, you know.

3) Sometimes, at the end of a fury spurt, I get really ambitious and starting picking at the piles of New Yorkers all over my apartment. New Yorkers SUCK YOU IN and do not let you go until you are 13 pages into the article about the concrete industry in New York City and want to die and never read again. Behold: the end of the fury spurt.

4) Sometimes, to stave off the end of the fury spurt, I will try to “take a break,” from such heavy heavy reading by listening to podcasts while commuting. Also sometimes, this happens because I can’t always keep my eyes open on the bus, particularly when el Jeffo is on the bus and I need to pretend to not be there, or when it is very early in the morning AKA before 10 AM. This, ultimately, takes me away from the habit of the fury spurt and behold again: its end.

5) I am constantly overwhelmed by the volume of books in my apartment that I have not read or not finished. Sometimes this is so overwhelming that I stop reading.

Anyway, I bought Adverbs with the intention of running through it and returning it, but then I folded corners, slowed to a crawl, and realized a month had passed. That said, it was a good read: a little gimmicky but very earnest, if that is at all possible.

In case it wasn’t abundantly clear: I should not write book reviews.

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, Peter Singer & James Mason

I am obsessed with this book. I am obsessed with you, and me, and P-Sing and J-Mas, and all the things we do to ourselves through food that we don’t know about. Okay, that is a lie, because P-Sing and J-Mas actually know it all, and the rest of us quietly rot from the inside. Amazing.

Anyway, please read this book–because then when you ask me why I’m eating funny vegetarian food for lunch (no, I’m not one), I won’t have to tell you why. And I won’t have to tell you all the icky stuff I know, because you will know it too! For serious.

Anyway, those are this evening’s book “reviews,” a random smattering of useless information about how I feel about said books. I would like once again to point out that an hour ago I did not know what goodreads.com was, and now I have doubled my goodreads pleasure by turning it all into a blog post. I have always been really good at not going to bed.

THAT IS ALL, ENJOY!