Dear Kelly

Copy this and put it in the comments section. Fill in the blanks.


I _____ you. You have a nice _____. You make me ____. You

should _______. Someday I will _____. You + me = ______.

We should __________. If I saw you now I'd _______. I would

build a _______ just for you. If I could sing you any song it

would be _________. If I could I'd give you ___________. We

could __________ under the stars.


Love,
_______________

(P.S. ______________.)

Bad Books/Good TV

I've been having trouble finding a good book lately. The following books had pretty good first chapters but turned me off by chapter two. I might come back to The Queen's Fool when I'm on vacation or something. Funny in Farsi has some interesting cultural details, which I usually enjoy, but I don't like her writing style. It's written like, well... a blog.

I picked up Our Gang because I've recently discovered Philip Roth... the first chapter is really funny, and also eerily prescient re: today's administration (it's about double-speak and political manipulation during the Nixon years), but the joke gets old after about 100 pages.


This book Deafening is going nowhere, but I just read the summary at Powells and it looks like something might happen eventually. I don't know... it's well written, but it's boring. I picked up a copy of Middlemarch the other day so I think that's what I'll hit next. I did really enjoy Silas Marner.

Just finished watching season 2 of Veronica Mars - it wasn't as great as season 1, but it was quite enjoyable. The whole high school thing has really sunk into my brain because the last few nights I've been having these high school dreams - like in one, Mike was my boyfriend and he broke up with me, and it was this whole thing, you know. In one of the last episodes they played this great song called I Hear the Bells by Mike Doughty which I put on my MySpace page (notice my clever rouse to lure you to my page?) I've been listening to that over and over again and fantasizing about being kissed by Logan Echolls. Is that pervy?

Isn't it romantic?

As much as I love walks in the rain, I don't appreciate them after a long day, in heels, with my finest leather bag and a thin silk shirt. I came home to what I can only assume is my mold-infested apartment because when I took of my wet clothes my skin got all itchy again. I've been living the high life, or rather, I should say, the sleepy life, doped up on Benadryl.

I don't know how this happened, but I've gotten a little addicted to MySpace lately. So much that a friend came over the other day, and all we did was muck about on it. I looked up people who went to my high school, which was a kind of depressing but also hilarious, because a large majority of the headlines had to do with Nascar or Jesus. One girl wrote, "Celebrities walk on red carpet because they're famous, I walk on toilet paper cuz I'm the shit!!!" Did find a good friend from the old theater days, so that was nice. I thought it would be amusing if I tried to get a lot of famous people to be on my friend space. Notable additions today include Barack Obama and George Clinton. This can't go on.

Fashion Bitch Slap*

Oh. My. God. So many things were revealed on Project Runway last night. First of all, Kayne used to weight like 350 pounds. Also, Laura's pregnant. With like, her SIXTH kid. Which can only mean she is absolutely certifiably crazy. I mean, no one has that many kids these days. Also, whatshisname? Tattoo Neck? He used to be a junkie and lived on the street. I guess that's not such a huge revelation... The Mom/Sister challenge was totally awesome, although I could have done with a little less of the I-simply-don't-know-how-to-make-fashion-for-a-plus-sized-woman histrionics. So, it's auf wiedersehen, Robert - anyway, everything you've made except for that first dress has been an total snore. Anyway, for once I liked what Vincent made, although I don't think he really deserved to win. I really liked Uli's design.

These pics are from last week, when some of us dressed in the style of one of the designers. D is doing a very decent Tattoo Neck, and C looks great in a spot on imitation of Bradley's "Cher." My fave has got to be Mike's "Vincent hat."





* "Fashion bitch slap" is how Tim G. refers, on his podcast, to Tattoo Neck's design for Angela's mom.

MySpace

I just spent more time than I'd like to admit working on a MySpace page. So, uh, you should MySpace me, or whatever. I only have 1 friend, and I don't even know who he is.
my MySpace space.

Keep your hands off my ovaries!

Ugh, I just read a couple of gross articles. The first one was about Rabbi Shmuley (whose show I admit I have enjoyed but now boycott FOREVER!) in which he writes that a woman should not breastfeed her child in front of its father because it "de-eroticizes" the breast, which, you know, is apparently just there to scintillate the dude. Furthermore, he says, men shouldn't observe the birth itself from Down There, because then the vagina will be reduced to a "mere birth canal" rather than, you know, the greatest place on earth for his penis to hang out. Listen here, Rabbi Shmuley (if that IS your real name!) women's bodies aren't put on earth to provide a 24 hour fantasy for you. You can take your objectification and shove it up your functional body parts!

Then, I found this creepy business about a Father Daughter Purity Ball. "What we wanted to do was create an event where they could walk into everything that their femininity is about, their beauty, their dress, their makeup and give them a place to dwell on all of that," says one of the Focus on the Family organizers - you know, all those external things, like make-up, that are so important to the self-esteem of 10 year olds! I could easily spend the rest of the day complaining about how disgusting and ineffectual these father/daughter pledges are, and I certainly wouldn't be the only one, but I will point out this hilarious article on the 13% failure rate of an abstinence-only program in a high school in Ohio. That's 65 out of 490 students who ended up preggers because of our country's national standard of "sex ed." It doesn't mention how many ended up with STDs, but I'm pretty damn sure it's higher than 13% if the only mention of condoms had to do with their failure rate.

In other depressing news, Alison got the "auf" last night on PR, and Heidi referred to the model as a "fat Minny Mouse" and Tim Gunn called her a plus-sized model. Yeah, what an effing cow. The dress, by the way, is for sale on Bravo, and here's how it's described: This is the exact design from the Project Runway show tailored to fit the model, sized 0 to 2 and anywhere from 5'10" to 6'2".

High and low brow

I had a great weekend - M. and I saw Talladega Nights, which was hilarious. Will Farrell and the rest of the cast committed to their fairly ridiculous characters. Sacha Baron Chohen (Ali G) was awesome as the gay, French, Nascar driver (who else could strike more fear into the heart of a red-stater?). I didn't even realize it was him at first, the guy just disappears into his characters. Speaking of, I can't wait until his Borat movie comes out, although, as I was discussing with friends over brunch this weekend, that guy is seriously going to get killed for his act one day.

I've got a little Nascar humor of my own. The last time I was at my parent's house, my dad was pretty stirred up because he was going to a Nascar race. It was about a 100 degrees outside, and we had the following conversation:

Me: I can't believe you're going to go sit in this heat and watch cars go around and around.
DAD: Oh, don't sit. Mostly stand through the whole thing.
ME: What?!?
DAD: Sit, you end up looking at somebody's butt.
MOM: Butt CRACK.

Just finished The History of Love - it was a very good book, but it's no Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Krauss has got a great po-mo writing style, but, frankly I was a little confused about the narrative voice more than once. I think I'm going to flip back through it and see if I can't make more sense of it. This confusion is mostly my fault, I guess - I've been reading it when I'm really tired, right before I go to bed.

In other news, my sister and brother-in-law have officially announced that they're pregnant, so of course we're all very excited about that. Aforementioned sports-nut grandfather-to-be has made more than one disturbing reference to various ball throwing/catching that lies ahead.

Tim at Home

Surprising events unfolded on Project Runway the last few weeks - I've been having a good time enjoying the show with friends - last night M. and I dressed in the style of two designers - M. wore a fetching basket on his head a la Vincent, and I made a bubble skirt with a couple of crocheted-grandma-flowers on. Our guests underwhelmed us, in terms of costumes, but I'm sure next week they'll make it work. So, I'm listening to Tim Gunn's podcast right now and I've picked up two essential pieces of information. 1. He has a super and 2. He lives in an apartment. Also, I learned from some obsessive websearching, that he doesn't have a car (specifically, a Saturn Roadster.) Ah yes, this adds neatly up to the little fantasy I have of what Tim Gunn's home life is like - living, I imagine, in a chic Manhattan apartment overlooking the park. And Tim goes home and he announces, "Andre! I'm home!" and then they go out for a nice dinner. Or they order in. Anyway, it's all very sophisticated.

books, parties

I've just returned from a nice long weekend to visit my parents in Indiana. My grandma threw a big party in the Senior Center, which, truthfully, I thought would be awful, but we had a really good time. She hired an old-timey band and invited all of her old-timey friends and they danced all night. I did a Virginia Reel with my grandma, and something called The Butterfly, and had a generally great time. Although someone in the parking lot had an anti-abortion bumber sticker on their car, and I was vaguelly haunted by the fact that I could have been dancing with an anti-abortionist. (I tore off a little chunk of the sticker.)





I've been reading some great books recently - right now I'm finishing up Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, which was recommended to me by my friend LIz years ago, and I've only gotten around to reading now. It's terrific. And I read Kiffe, Kiffe Tomorrow, which apparently is all the rage in Paris. It's about a muslim girl who lives in those slums outside the city. Very interesting. Funny. Also I read The Bright Forever, which was not great... really rather dirivitive of The Lovely Bones, but he did capture Indiana summers very well. I tried to read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, but I have to admit I found it very boring, and I ended up skimming until the end, which was disappointing. Yes, yes, before you remind me that I might have missed the subtle denouement, I do understand that boredom was a part of the theme.

In other news, my good friend Kathy got us all hooked on Apples to Apples, which I entend to summarily hook my Chicago crew on.