Liam Neeson, I love you!

I love Liam Neeson:

I'm not fully sure why, maybe it's because he was in one of my all time favorite movies Love Actually, maybe it's because he's half snuggly, and half bad-ass.  I can't justify it, I just adore him, he can totally be in my posse.

Thinking that Kelly Osborne might be a good candidate for my posse...

In the most shameful act since forming a staunch opinion on whose better for Bella, Edward or Jacob, I started watching Joan Rivers’ Fashion Police on E.  I caught it on TV one night when I was waiting for Chelsea Lately to come on and I’ve developed a love-hate fascination with it. 

I know that this may come as a shock but Joan Rivers is bat ass crazy.  Generally crazy with a battleship sized mouth wouldn't endear a person to me but I’ve discovered I am kinda a fan.  I won’t go so far as to include her in my posse because I’m not sure that I have the armadillo-like armour that would be necessary to have her in my imaginary crew, but so long as I remain nondescript and relatively unknown, I think we’ll be good.  


Guiliana Rancic now, needs to eat a stinkin’ cracker already because she’s starting to look like skeletor.  I know that it is unkind to judge a person based on weight but her skinniness has become plank-like and while pre-famous photographs indicate that she has fantastic genetics to start with, she’s also clearly exercising some seriously insane self-restraint at meal times, and I can’t help but drink the hater-ade a little.  Rachel Zoe always talked about how Guiliana’s body is like a clothes hanger” and how fabulous fashion looks on her.  Call me nuts but I just don’t think that we should aim to have our bodies look like wire hangers.  Needless to say Guilian will not be in my posse either because those who can’t appreciate a cupcake now and again need not apply. 


Then there’s Kelly Osborne who despite thinking that this fashion stuff is very very serious business and that celebrity stylists have “one of the toughest jobs out there” comes off as a genuinely kind person with a penchant for talking about “knickers” all the time.  She avoids the low blows and manages to be pretty darn funny all the same.  Oh what a sad, sad state of affairs we’ve fallen to when Kelly Osborne is the voice of reason and sanity.

Quote of the Day: Oscar's Edition

"I'm afraid that I have to warn you that I'm experiencing the stirrings of something in the upper abdominals which are threatening to form themselves into dance moves, which joyous as they may be for me, it'd be extremely problematic if they make it to my legs before I get off stage."

- Colin Firth after winning Best Actor at the Oscar's 

All politics aside

...this is stinkin' cute:

  
A temporary White House staffer brought his family to the Oval Office for a farewell photo with President Obama. The staffer’s son (pictured) told the President he had just gotten a haircut like President Obama, and asked if he could feel the President’s head to see if it felt the same as his.

Apparently President Obama and I have the same reaction to cute little kids who are dressed like adults: we turn into piles of goo. :) 


(Originally found at: http://www.buzzfeed.com)

and be one traveler, long I stood...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood...



First published December 1995; published July 1999 by Bartleby.com; © Copyright Bartleby.com, Inc.

Flowers make me smile

I may have drunk the hater-ade yesterday and pretended to be all cold and prickly towards Valentines Day, but drat if the flowers Wes sent don't make me smile. :)

The Project

I think that the course of this blog is going to change a bit in the coming months and sadly for you all I don’t anticipate it being for the more-exciting.  Lo siento amigos. I’d love to report that I’ve found a job rating five start tropical resorts and that in the coming months I’ll be regaling you with blow by blows of frozen drinks, complimentary spa treatments and long, long days of lounging on white sand beaches.  Sadly for all of us, this is not the case and instead I’ve decided to read more.  I know, you’re VERY excited. :)   

In all seriousness though, I want to talk like they do on The West Wing.  Not really because I know that it’s a scripted TV show and in real life nobody is quite that witty all the time, but I want to know more things and I want to be able to talk intelligently about them when the topics come up. I want to be not only well-informed but more importantly (at least to me) well-read.

I think that I may have been this once, back when I was in graduate school, but that’s the beauty of school,  it can force even the most reluctant into awareness.  When you’re in school it’s your job to learn and if you perform at even the most mediocre of levels,  you inherently become reasonably well-read.  I majored in history and took American history classes but also classes on Native American nations, religion, European revolutions and British government.  I took Latin and translated Roman poetry and the Aeneid.  I’ve taken classes in Anthropology, Algebra, Literature, Astronomy, Biology and Education.  I’ve passed tests, written papers and given presentations on all manner of things.  Some of it I understood well and the rest of it I understood just well enough to fake it.  The problem is that all of these things are in my past and the act of being informed and being well-read only counts in the present tense.  I fear my present tense isn’t very impressive.

It occurs to me that in my post collegiate years I have become over-embroiled in pop culture and that the portion of my soul that likes to believe that it is well-read has become more than a little deluded.  I don’t like this.  Without the onus of exams and term papers my world has become...well...smaller.  In my defense, I’ve spent a lot of this time learning about blood cancers and clinical trials for work, but that’s about it.  It’s been incredibly interesting but it’s also a very small area.  In my free time I’ve  abandoned my three book reading system and instead I’ve read what is entertaining: mostly novels and a lot of pulp fiction.  I’ve found my comfort zone and I’ve been staying in it.  It’s comfy here in my little box but as much as I have enjoyed reading the whole Twilight series I don’t think that I’m doing myself any favors.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m going to do with my life.  I love the work that I currently do but for reasons that I’m not going to go into (in large part because I don’t want to pull a Dooce but also because it isn’t pertinent) I distinctly suspect that I won’t be doing this for the rest of my life.  Which leads to the question of what am I supposed to do with my life?  I have absolutely no answer to this question.  I was a Liberal Arts and Science’s major after all and in practice that’s just another way of saying I’m a pansy-ass-waffler with an above average understanding of English language mechanics.

I’ve done a few different things since I matriculated but am struck by a crazy desire to find something that I love, not just hope to tolerate for an extended period of time.  This is probably unrealistic in that no matter how strongly I enjoy my work, there’s always going to be a time when it feels like, well, work.  I’ve gotten a slew of advice in this area and while the honest encouragement to pick something that sounds good and then make it work makes sense to me, I honestly don’t even know which way to turn on this one.  How do you pick when you don’t even really know the options, or more accurately when the options are so vast and overwhelming that they all blend?  I’ve never been this at odds with the task of living my life or this uncomfortable with the unavoidable fact that I’m one hundred percent responsible for making all the decisions. I am not qualified for this level of responsibility.

In my experience the only way to combat rampant not knowing is to just start knowing things.  My world has shrunk significantly since I left school and it’s time of come out of the corner that I feel so backed into.

The task that I’ve set before myself is to read Modern Libraries Top 100 Nonfiction books.  I looked at a lot of different “top 100 books” lists and settled on this one for several reasons.  One, it was one of the few lists that didn’t have Bridgette Jone’s Diary on it.  Now I’m not trying to knock Helen Fielding because let’s face it, she’s had a least one more book published than I have but I am confident that it’s not the kind of reading I’m looking for.   I felt similarly to most other novel lists, there’s dozens of fiction books that I’d like to read  and the lists looked fun-ish but the nonfiction list looked, well, intimidating.  I know that I can read literature but Albert Einstein?  Richard Feynman?  I just don’t know about them because I’ve never tried.  If I’m really lucky I might find something intriguing that makes me sit up and think about running full steam ahead towards it.  If not, I’ll at least know more about 100 things that I didn’t know about before.

There are several books on the list that I am looking forward to and several that I want to run so far and so fast from (ahem Principia Mathematica) that I’d give Usain Bolt a run for his money.  To avoid any chicken pooping out on the harder texts I’ll be working methodically from number one, straight through to 100 and heralding you with the things that I learn along the way.  I know that this is vaguely Julie Julia Project-ish but since I’m very well aware that this will most likely not be my path to fame and riches, I’m okay with that.  As thrilling as it was to watch a neurotic girl cook her way through a 365 Julia Child's recipes, I’m pretty sure that watching a neurotic nerdy girl read would be even less so.  The blow by blow would be interminably painful and thus I’ll just be hitting the high points, and no worries - I’ll still be up to my usual shenanigans and writing about trivialities, besides, if it gets to dry around these parts I’ll just start drinking more and that should spice it up!

One of the many reasons that he's fabulous:

Wondieful boyfriend has struck again.  After a stinkus day at work I come home to find this:

and this:

(not pictured is the dinner that I did not participate in the procurement of.)

By the end of it all I felt like this:

Quote of the Day

"Generosity and gratitude are indissolubly linked. They always have been and they always will be."

Miss Manners 

you keep using this word...

I love The Food Network.  I know that this reveals me to be about 80 years old at heart but I just can't help it.  I love food and while my ass doesn't seem to appreciate this 27 year love affair and has put a stop to food and I seeing each other on a regular basis, I see no problems with carrying on an emotional tryst each night on channel 759.

I keep seeing commercials for two Robert Irvine shows - Dinner Impossible and Restaurant Impossible.  I'm not a huge fan of Robert Irvine, he strikes me as a cross between a D-Bag and tool, not the most charming of combination's to say the least.  Watching one episode of each show has only further solidified that observation and I have to say, in the immortal words of Inigo Montoya in the Princess Bride: "you keep using this word [impossible], I do not think it means what you think it means."

Snowed in? HA!

Sometime around June-ish, it's going to be hot, humid, muggy and buggy down here in good ole swampy Florida. I know that I will be suffering hugely in a few months but I somehow feel compelled to further bastardize my weather karma by gloating about the insanely beautiful weekend I had last week while those up north were preparing to be buried in snow and sleet.

There was a Club Fun gathering this past weekend for what is becoming a traditional Susan G. Komen 5K.  Ashleigh and I ran it last year while El Senior was in class on his way to becoming El Senior, MBA. This year he ran also (albiet much faster than we) and several of Asheligh's fellow ISR instructors and friends joined us for the walk. 

Saturday marked the second time in our friendship that Matt drove questionably fast to get me somewhere that I need to be.  Thankfully this time did not involve a jellyfish OR a shot in the "heep," but rather the need to get to the starting line so that Ashleigh and I could rock out a solid 12 minute mile pace.  For this I nominate him to become the El Presidente of Club Fun. 

After the race / walk we came to my favorite part of the 5K tradition: lunch and cupcakes. The lunch portion is just part of a normal day, though on this day the lunch was spectacular and satisfying to the max at CG Burgers.

The only thing better than a cheeseburger and a beer is a cheeseburger and a beer that have been earned.  I now dream of CG Burgers and sadly live far far away from them. 

So while lunch is a fairly commonplace occurrence, the cupcakes...now those are just plain celebratory.  Last year we stumbled upon the cupcake store -- this year we sought it out and it was just as tasty as I remembered. 

Yum dark chocolate, chocolate cupcake with cream cheese frosting, yummmmmmmm.

Day two in SoFla was equally as beautiful, even more so since we didn't have to get up at 530 AM to go running.  The sun out shining and we made our way to a lovely little restaurant on the inter coastal where we lounged in the sun while we waited for a table.

 Please note the fruity drink in the corner of the picture above because that fruity, delicious and refreshing drink turned out to be nuclear strength.  Don't let the pinky-orange color fool you, it's tropical Long Island Iced Tea and once you are 2/3 of the way through it you will be drunk and slurring charmingly about your life plans.

It was a lovely weekend that was topped off by a visit to Monica and Ozzie in Tampa where, true to form, I was fed and pampered beyond all reason. There was sushi, tuna tartar and IKEA.  Sigh...it's a rough life. :)

Fluffing leads to jail time

I usually listen to NPR's Morning Edition on the way to work each morning as a daily nod to keeping myself reasonably well informed on the world around me.  (Ok so it's a small nod but a nod none the less.) Before 6 am though, there is no NPR but rather BBC broadcasting and the other day my early birding was rewarded by a delightful little tidbit from an unidentified BBC show: Malawi is considering a public decency law that would ban "passing wind" in public.

Clearly President Bingu wa Mutharika was not raised by those who do not fart but rather "fluff."

Fluffing or farting, I am intrigued by how they might go about enforcing this law

Quote(s) the Day: Office Asshole Edition

"An exclamation mark!?  Is she serious?   WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE!  It's like when people use ellipses all wrong.  Dot, dot, dot? Hello!?"

- John