esprit de l'escalier

Frank and some apes

The internet changes your social life. Things like Facebook are great because you can find people you've lost touch with, but it's terrible because people can find you. My sister made me snort with laughter at my desk, quoting a favorite childhood movie in response to someone finding us. This is for her.

From wah-wah to rah-rah

So, how wah-wah was my last post? Geez. I apologize. Lately my feelings towards blogging oscillate between enthusiasm about something and apathy. Sorry for my wah-wah post. To make up for it I'm going to write about somethings I'm excited about.

First things first, this week is full of excellent friends. Monday night, I went to see the Gaslight Anthem (seen here) with a couple of the pink house ladies. It was a $5 show and we drank large beers (beer soup) and jumped up and down. It was a good time. Tomorrow night I'm having dinner with one of my old work friends/my ex-kickball captain. Yay!

But, no offense to my lovely aforementioned friends, but Friday is exciting. Friday means lunch with a very special blogger. I'm so freaking excited. I have a lunch place picked out - now I need to pick an outfit. Lunch with her Blueness!

Oh god, I went from a wah-wah post to a rah-rah post that's really just a list of things. I feel completely off my blogging game. I used to be better at this. I'm going to try and distract you with some photos of the beach. (Click to see larger.)

Odd bird behavior

There are 6-7 robins outside of my window right now - hopping from branch to branch trying to stay warm. I have no idea what their problem is. It's January. It's snowing. Why are they still in Ohio? Frank has been watching their trying-to-stay-warm dance with some interest. I wish I could invite them in for a cup of tea.

This website tells me that some robins stay north if they can find berries to eat.  I think the appearance of 7 robins in my snowy, blustery backyard has something to do with global warming.  Poor little things.

Oh, and here's a photo of Frank for you.

They've gone to plaid!

Okay, that title has nothing to do with anything, but when I was thinking of a title, it popped in my head.

I haven't gone to plaid, but I have gone digital. It happened sooner than I thought it would, partly because my beloved Nikon N80 film camera broke recently. I decided to use my broken camera as a reason to upgrade.  I will eventually replace my N80, but for now I will play around with my new D40.

I had a horrifying realization today

The radio station that plays Christmas music 24/7 has started up for the season. I don't know when it happened, but I'm pretty sure it was some time this week. I guess I should be happy they waited until after Halloween.

This foretells one thing - that the RoD Holiday Cookie Bake-Off is around the corner. Details to come soon.

Some random bits

These two bits of celebrity gossip make me sad. I know it's stupid to feel badly when celebrity relationships go belly up, but it's too bad all the same.

I'm also sad to hear of the passing of Pavarotti. Check Lance's place for a video.

For another music clip, check out Josh Ritter's video for his new song, "The Temptation of Adam." This song *kills* me, as does this video. Nothing like a pre-apocalyptic love song. It works on so many levels. "If this was the cold war, we could keep each other warm... I didn't have to learn to love her, like I learned to love the bomb, she just came along and started to ignore me..." His new album is good (and rocking), but is lost some where in the wilds of my storage unit. Boo.

I feel like I'm getting a little sluggish and lazy at my parents'. I keep saying I'm going to get up and go on a bike ride, but it just isn't happening.

Last night, I watched a sneak peek of Tim Gunn's newest show on Bravo and was very disappointed. It's basically a re-hash of What Not To Wear, but with bigger names and labels and expensive things. I just don't think it works as well as WNTW. Don't get me wrong, I love Tim Gunn, but don't think this is working. Maybe I'll be wrong, but it's dull so far. At least Stacey and Clinton know how to throw around quips and can make a woman feel better about herself without a lifestyle coach. But Tim has access to big designers and freebies from Coach. Maybe Tim just shouldn't mingle with the normal people.

For more not-so-great-tv-but-we-watch-it-anyway, check newcritics tonight, where MA Peel will be hosting the live blogging of Mad Men. I still think that the writers just make the characters do the worst thing possible in every situation. Which I find to be lazy and uninteresting. Where's the nuance to that?

Fun part about being home? All of the old photos to paw through. Check out how cute I was at two.

Quick Friday note

I've just set some potatoes to boil and I thought I'd jot a quick post. I'm making kielbasa, sauerkraut and mashed potatoes for dinner. This dinner makes me miss living with my brother. We had an eat-in kitchen and occassionally I'd make dinner for everyone and we'd sit, laughing, talking, eating, listening to good music. It was fun. Eating alone is no fun.

I'm pages from Wuthering Heights's end. Though the main characters have driven me mad through most of the book, it's rare that I sit forward on the L while reading, as if I'm trying to get as close as I can to the book. It kept me quite absorbed, though I doubt I'll read it again.

I'm planning on doing my Etsy recommendations next week. At least three days, touching on prints, jewelry and bags and other miscellaneous things. So tune in next week!

(Currently listening to my long-lost Motown Extravaganza mixtape I made circa end of high school. I love this tape and thought it was lost in the many moves I've had over the years. Before Elaine left for her travels through Asia, she asked if I had a cassette walkman to borrow. I did, in a box somewhere, from college. In it, forgotten, was my beloved mix! Happiness all around. Current song: "The Tracks of My Tears" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.)

Random bits

Today was gray and I've been tired all week. I fell into a deep food coma après le déjeuner and convinced my friend Sharon we needed to take a quick walk to the Prairie Avenue Bookstore and B&N for magazines. To get more oxygen in our veins. Plus I wanted the new issue of Dwell, but they were out. (The fabulous Ashley G and her boyfriend Drew are apparently quoted in an article about Etsy. Plus it's my current favorite magazine.) I did pick up a Fast Company and a new (to me) Sara Paretsky. I'm heading to DC this weekend for my friend Ginny's birthday, and to see my old roommate Mary and my cousin and his wife. (I also get to meet the lovely e. of Stories About Wolves! Yay for bloggy friends!) I needed some reading material for the plane and the metro. My trips to DC always consist of me running around town with my backpack, jumping from person to person. It's always nice to visit, but I'm always a little tired when I return.

Yesterday I had an email from some discount travel service advertising $204 fares to Europe. Then today I read that the Tate Modern is doing an exhibit this summer on Salvador Dalí and film. I'd love to see that. I loved his trippy dream sequences in Hitchcock's Spellbound. Though, at this moment, I can't see me working out a trip to London this summer. As much as I might want to go.

My fortune cookie today said, "Call an old friend today." I should do that before the day ends.

Part of my soundtrack today:
"Concrete Sky" by Beth Orton
"Jackson" by Lucinda Williams
"Leavin'" by Shelby Lynne
"Good Woman" by Cat Power

The polaroid above is one I took at the end of July. After I bought my camera I took it downtown and took some test shots around work. This is one of the Indian statues that bookend Congress Parkway. I always loved them as a kid. I took some polaroids into the lab at school to scan. I'll probably continue posting my good ones.

A new blog to read and random bits

My life has been a little overly scheduled of late, and when I returned home last night at about 10 ’til 10 (just in time to see who got kicked off of Project Runway), my friend Elaine was there, watching PR with my roommate. She and I consulted our calendars to try and figure out a time when we could hang out next and realized a sad thing. Our class schedules were exactly opposite: she’s busy Mondays and Wednesdays and I’m busy on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I also realized that the next month or so is ridiculously hectic. Some of it is fun stuff, but it does not look like there’s enough time for downtime. I was hoping my life would slow down once summer was over. Anyhow, I'm sort of tired and apparently very whiny. Sorry!

In continuing with my shout-outs from yesterday, if anyone is interested, Sharon *has* been posting about her adventures around Lake Michigan. She’s got some pretty pictures up as well.

I also want to welcome Maryam at My Marrakesh to the blogosphere. She just started a blog about designing and building a guest house in Morocco, where she lives with her husband and two kids. She’s an American expat who’s been living abroad for 12 years. She and I met because we are swap partners in an international magazine swap organized by Holly at decor8. I think her blog is going to be really interesting, so check it out!

In other news, Plan B has *finally* been approved for OTC sales. It's about time. To say that I'm sick of the anti-thought, anti-science vision this administration has would be an understatement and probably not worth my time. I just started the newest Mother Jones, celebrating its 30th year in publication. I don't know if I can stomach it so soon after the nihilism that was Oryx and Crake. There's a timeline pointing out how awful this administration has been. I just don't have the energy to read it. Makes me to f-ing sad.

Tut and the Celestial Cow

My mother is in town for a training this week, but due to some miscommunications she ended up in town a couple of days early. She stayed the night with me Monday night and we got up early Tuesday morning to go see the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum. I had been looking forward to this exhibit for a while and was really happy to be able to visit it with my mom.

I've always been a little obsessed with ancient Egypt. This has everything to do with the fact that when I was about four, we visited the Field with our cousin Chenoa, who was my siblings' and my personal god for quite some time growing up. She was often with us when we were little, and we were her little devotees, the siblings she never had. Anyhow, we were in the Egyptian exhibit and Chenoa runs ahead and finds these two children mummies in a sarcophagus, side by side. "Look! Twin mummies!" My twin brother and I looked at each other and ran to see the little bodies, OUR size, wrapped in linens, dead for thousands of years. Our little minds were rocked. Anyhow, you can understand my fascination. (Does anyone else remember a Sesame Street special that dealt with the book of the dead and ancient Egypt?)

Anyhow, I enjoyed the exhibit. It did a good job of contextualizing Tut's life. A lot of the things you saw weren't actually from his tomb, though, but from the preceding pharoah's, Akhenaten, who may or may not have been his father. What I found really fascinating was that Nefertiti was the head wife of Akhenaten, and she was most likely Tut's step mother. Crazy. There was this *beautiful* carved stone head of Nefertiti. The level of detail was amazing. The perfect curve of her cheeks and the definition between her lips and cheek. I have no idea how this could be achieved in stone, but there it was in front of me. The coffin of Tjuya (see this photo gallery, it's the middle one in the top row) was also amazing. I loved the details in the hieroglyphics – all of the birds. I wished I had all the time in the world and a sketchpad (and some talent), because I would have liked to have traced and practiced those images. (Tjuya, by the way, was most likely Tut's grandmother.) It was also nice having Omar Sharif whisper to me about the mysteries of this boy king. As Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tut's tomb, said, "The mystery of his life still eludes us – the shadows move but the dark is never dispersed."

The best thing that I learned about was related to a perfectly maintained, carved wooden head of a cow. This particular item had Omar Sharif cooing in my ear about the myth of the Celestial Cow. At this point my mother and I looked at each other and giggled. The Myth of the Celestial Cow? How had this gone unnoticed by us to this point? (Another biographical side note: My brother’s first word was "cow." We were born in Wisconsin and spent a lot of time on a dairy farm and my brother would reverently point and say his one vocabulary word. My mother thought that he thought the bovines were magical. Apparently the boy’s been right all along.) My favorite quote, which I am butchering, was that when a pharaoh died they, "rose each day with the sun on the back of the Celestial Cow." How fricking fantastic.