Sorellina
Isn’t my sister pretty?
Uncategorized
only one of many things i’m weird about
Ok SO. The thing about my undergrad program at Unwashed Pinko University was that it was populated by some of the snottiest, more pretentious weinerdogs I have ever had the displeasure to know (also by some of the awesomest most hilarious champions of the world, but that’s not who we’re talking about today). Lit classes in particular were an orgy of sad sack boys from New Jersey in Malcolm X eyewear and Urban Outfitters cowboy shirts whining on about David Foster Wallace for an hour and forty-five minutes twice a week. Kill me.
So there I was in my polo shirt and flip-flops, and like, I’m not an idiot. I did the reading. I said semi-intelligent things every once in awhile. But MAN, there is nothing that makes a snotty pretentious weinerdog decide you are a moron faster than a Vera Bradley tote bag and a soft spot for YA lit. This one kid (we’ll call him Snotty Pretentious Weinerdog #1) in particular hated me so much that he made it his mission to loudly disagree with every point I made and write obnoxious writing-workshop cliches like “this ending doesn’t feel earned” on all the short stories I handed out.
Those endings were TOTALLY EARNED, OKAY?
Okay.
So anyway, SPW#1 worked in the library at Unwashed Pinko University, and one day he was behind the desk when I went to check out some books, among them Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. “Oh man, I love this book!” said SPW#1, with more enthusiasm than I’d heard from him all semester. Then he looked up and saw it was me. “I…don’t really think you’re going to like it.”
!!!!!
Jerk. Oh I was so pissed. “I think I’ll do just fine,” I said, as snarkily as I possibly could, and flounced out of the library.
But here’s the ball buster: I EFFING HATED THE CORRECTIONS. It sucked. It beyond sucked. It contained not one single likable character. It taught me not one truth. And it was like eleventy thousand miserable pages long, so the damn thing took me like two and a half wretched weeks to plow through. But none of that mattered: what mattered was that SPW#1 didn’t think I could do it, and I WAS GOING TO PROVE HIM WRONG.
So I did.
I finished it. I persevered. And when I returned it to SPW#1 at the library I smiled, looked him dead in the eye, and told him it was one of the best books I’d ever read.
The point of all this is that you’d think I’d be over that kind of absurd nonsense by now, but the fact of the matter is I have a complex about doing stuff, literary or otherwise, just to prove to other people that I can. And when I took on the Great Pulitzer Read-Through of 2009, I knew the final hurdle was going to be 2001’s winner, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I can’t tell you how many people whose opinions I trust and respect have told me I’m going to love this book, but in reality I’ve read the first hundred pages on three separate occasions, and not once have I felt compelled to keep going. It’s long. It’s dense. And frankly, it’s kind of boring.
I bet SPW#1 keeps it on his bedside table.
Still, the project is winding down, I said I was going to do it, and now that the time has come there’s no way in hell I’m not going to buckle down, soldier on, and make it through this book once and for all.
Just to prove that I can.
Lesson Plan: Week Four Already!
Jeez. I feel like real school never flew by this fast.
Let’s go!
Literature: Oscar Wao didn’t happen last week, although Blindness is officially conquered and I did fly through Richard Russo’s new book (in case you were wondering: it was a giant snooze. But I still love him). This week: Kavalier and Clay. More on that tomorrow.
Writing: I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS STORY IF IT MAKES ME DIE. I’ve been tinkering with it for toooooo long, including for three tortured hours this morning during which I drank an entire pot of coffee and peed about a thousand times. I want it to be send-out-able by the end of the week.
Management: This is a new elective, the objective of which is the opening of a (dun dun dun) small online business. Students will be expected unveil said business at the beginning of November. Timeline, cost projection, and business plan due by the end of the week.
YIKES.
Ok. Gotta go do my homework.
How was everybody’s weekend?
my life would suck without you
Jackie comes tonight! I’m off to enjoy her. See you back here on Monday.
Getaway
Oh, GUYS.
Look where Tom and I are going in November.
My family used to stay here every summer when I was a little girl, but I haven’t been since I was eight or nine.
To say I’m excited to experience this place as grownup would be an understatement.
I can’t wait to sip gimlets on the veranda like a giant Wasp.
Just lovely, darling.
Shut Up and Chive*
We got a bunch of chives in the CSA this week–perfect for mixing in with some hummus, or with sour cream on mashed potatoes. It’s still a lot of chives to get through, though, and I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of them when I remembered this totally delicious goat cheese and herb omelet I had at Gaslight not that long ago. Sadly (SADLY) I didn’t have any goat cheese, or enough eggs for an omelet, but I DID have some cream cheese and really excellent bakery bread. Thus, I give you: egg sandwich with herbed cream cheese on 8-Grain.
If you are Tom, right now you are saying, “KATIE THAT IS DISGUSTING,” but I am not lying when I say to you it was maybe the best egg sandwich I’ve ever made. So different than the normal egg’n American I usually throw in a frying pan, and kind of pretty and sophisticated-feeling to boot. I bet it would be super good with tomatoes, too, but we didn’t get any of those this week. Blight, you know.
ANYWAY. This sandwich is good and if you have random chives lying around you should make it. The end.
* Alternate titles for this post: “Chive-r’s Ed,” “Chive Wire,” “Chive In”. I’M SORRY OKAY.
Help Please.
Does anybody here have a good recipe for tuna salad?
Like tuna+pasta+something amazing?
Because I just ruined a whole batch of it like a giant tool.
And maybe right now you are saying to yourself, how the heck could she have ruined TUNA SALAD?
But oh, it can be done.
Maple Pecan Oatmeal Cookies
I made these cookies to send to my dad. They’re frankly more oatmeal-y than anything else, but still pretty tasty. I made a vanilla sugar glaze because I wanted them a little sweeter, and also I like how it makes them all shiny.
Recipe is here!
Moody
When I was fourteen years old I left my mood ring on the sink in the bathroom of an Italian restaurant in Universal City, California. I came back twenty minutes later and it was gone. I remember that panic so clearly–looking under the sink, searching my pockets and purse, the strip of pale skin on my finger. I came pretty close to tears.
For some reason I’ve been thinking about that ring–and that trip–a lot lately. I went with M, my best, most treasured girlfriend back then, and her parents, whom I loved like my own. We spent two weeks driving up and down the coast, hitting Yellowstone and the tar pits, the Getty Center and the Madonna Inn. M and I spent hours in the backseat of the rental, sleeping and watching the ocean roll by. We laughed a lot, I remember. We trafficked in Starbursts and CDs.
Still, I spent those West Coast weeks feeling weird the way you do when you’re fourteen–or always, if you’re me–jangly-limbed and nervous, always waiting on the tides. I was starting high school. I was far from home. I had the worst, most obsessive, most miserable crush of my life on a boy who–literally–did not know I was alive. I wrote stories in my notebook and looked down at that mood ring often, depending on it to decode my feelings like a five-dollar Rosetta Stone. Blue meant happy; amber was envious. Green denoted “intense”. I felt intense a lot, that summer, and it helped to put a name to things.
“What does it mean if it’s black?” I wondered aloud one morning, climbing out of the hotel pool and holding my hand aloft.
M looked at it carefully, squinting in the light. “I guess it means you’re dead.”
Ten years later and I’m thinking I’d like a grown up mood ring, a way to put a one-word name to all the things I’m feeling. And I’m thinking I’d like to head back to the ocean, to see if I can’t find the things that I’ve lost.
Five Good Things: Apple Pie Edition
1. Writing prompts! I love when you have no idea you want to write about something and then somebody suggests it and all of a sudden you really, really do.
2. Brunch at Sofra with the always-hilarious Summer Picnic, former college employer and longtime writing buddy. Mmm coffee.
3. Fiber One bars in Oats and Chocolate flavor. These are way yummier and less fake-tasting than Special K or All Bran bars, and BOY HOWDY THEY ARE FIBROUS. A big thanks to my little sister J for introducing me to both these AND Skinny Cows.
4. Mid-day ponytails and the Five O’Clock Pants Rule (whereby you put elastic pants on the minute the workday is over, courtesy of Jennie circa 2005).
5. This video. Have I talked about this here yet? It’s my favorite, favorite thing. I dare you not to snort your coffee.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqpTADycbyY]