But everyday I log on to Facebook and somebody’s bitching about Christmas music. AND granted I do think that Xmas tunes before thanksgiving is eff-ing obnoxious, but once black Friday hits and supposedly kicks off “the season” all bets are off! Pipe down or change the channel. Dissing on Christmas music is like calling someone’s baby ugly. Maybe it is, but keep that shit to yourself and maybe your best friend (unless it’s your best friend’s baby.) Simple as that.

There are a few songs that do drive me crazy when I hear them and that’s usually Wham’s “Last Christmas” and Boney M’s  ”Mary’s boy child Jesus Christ blahblahblahb song”.  But, man, when Bing Crosby comes on and starts crooning about Irish and Hawaiian Christmas’s or Elvis starts bawling about his blue, depressing-ass Christmas it transports me back… to a very weird childhood, but my childhood nonetheless and I think that’s what Christmas is all about: tapping into that Childhood where everything was magical, and viewed through a sparkly kaleidoscope of wonder and hope and where getting lied to by your parents was ok.

Well, I’m off to the Nutcracker.  Where I’m going to go listen to two hours of CLASSICAL Christmas music.  Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, Xmas music haters.

And they sort of did steal stupid Edward’s overall look from Twilight and gave it to the main character Stefan.  (Not to be confused with SNL’s Stefon, unfortunately.) The guy playing Stefan is a MEAT head.  There’s just something about him.  Something that is so familiar to me but I just can’t put my finger on it.

Anyway, all that wasn’t enough to keep me invested two years ago, but now it was on Netflix just BEGGING to be checked out.  I picked up right where I left off and HOLY SHIT: turns out this isn’t a half bad series.  It’s still chock full of compressed cheese in a can, but the plot totally thickened right up like gravy on Thanksgiving (happy Thanksgiving BTW, everyone). The characters fleshed out and the writing got better.  The actors seemed to finally hit a stride with the characters they were portraying, whereas in the beginning it seemed as though they weren’t really comfortable with anything they were doing. (Almost as if they knew how cheesy they were being.)  However something that really bugs me is the super, emo Dawson’s Creek soundtrack.  I can’t stand it when shows use Top 40 selections when they need to convey overwrought, teenage angst.  It drives me ca-razy and actually ruins whatever emotion it is they’re trying to sell me.  If I wanted to listen to the radio, I WOULD!  The High School setting also sucks (no pun intended) mostly because the actors are all like almost 30 and no amount of suspension of disbelief is going to convince me these kids are high schoolers. 

best line ever

I remember reading these books in middle school and being super, super obsessed with them.  Like I was convinced that if I never got to have a vampire for a boyfriend I would never be happy at all.  God reality has been such a bitch. I still have these books and since watching this show my curiosity got the better of me so I decided to re-read the first book and see what the fuss was all about and HOLY SHIT BALLS.  I almost feel like it’s necessary to apologize for calling Stephanie Meyer a hack. This book is TERRIBLE.  So so so so so so terrible that it’s actually really funny. Interestingly, when the show says it’s “based on the books” it should say “we borrowed the title of these books”.  The few things the show and the book share are the title, the names of the characters and the subject  of vampires.

your poetic license has been re-instated

The first VD book chronicles how this super, popular bitchy girl who cares about nothing else but her status wants to get with the super, hot new guy (vampire) but he really wants nothing to do with her which drives her crazy and only makes her want him more.  And she will stop at NOTHING to have him which means going out with other boys to make him “jealous”. She winds up partying down at the cemetery (after being crowned prom queen)where she gets almost raped by some drunk high schooler but Stefan (vampire) happens to be moping about the cemetery (as vampires are wont to do) and rescues her by kicking this dude’s ass.  They go back to his place to “clean up” but they end up in a fiery, hot, passionate, never-ending embrace where they confess their undying love to each other. WHAT????  Cue record scratch. This is their second or third encounter! They haven’t even gone to the malt shop for a date yet!  Sorry if I spoiled it for any of you wanting to read the book, but you can thank me now.  It’s crap.  And now it’s very clear as to why the tv show decided to take things in a… much different direction. (Thank you, God.)

Soooooooooooo…our neighbors upstairs totally sprung a leak in their bathroom.  I’m not sure the exact story surrounding this leak but our landlord came over last weekend to “fix it” and just ended up making it worse.  How typical, right?  It’s like an episode of Home Improvement playing our right before our very eyes. 

On Monday I had left for work around 7am and all was quiet; then Sterling got up about 3 hours later to find water pouring from the ceiling in the kitchen and a mini lake on the floor.  Turns out when the landlord “fixed” the leak he put replaced whatever valve it was backwards which just made the leak 24934 times worse. Coming from a family of 3 generations of plumbers, I only have one piece of advice when it comes to do-it-yourself plumbing: Don’t.  Because he wound up calling in a pro to fix it anyway.  Skip the middle step, people.  Don’t believe the Home Depot commercials.

The waster damage was more or less extensive.  The upstairs bathroom floor, hallway and half a bedroom had to be torn out as well as half our kitchen ceiling and our entire kitchen floor!  An extraction company had to come and place industrial strength dryers and dehumidifiers in our kitchen to dry out the wood so things can eventually be repaired.

I learned one thing for sure and that is that turbo fans are FREAKING AWESOME.  It was pretty much impossible NOT to stick my head in them.  At night when I washed my face guess what did the drying.  Yep.  In the morning when I washed my hair guess what did the drying.  That’s right!!  And it wouldn’t be right not to take any pictures, so without further ado:

here is our kitchen

awesome sauce

Anyways I just wanted to share some awesome books I happened upon over the summer and these last few months because I know sometimes it’s hard to find a really good, juicy book that you just can’t stop reading and I really hit the lottery. If you’re looking for some good books trust me and check this shit out.  So first off:

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, yo.  I will be the first person to tell you I hate classical literature–you know old timey books that we were all forced to read in school and college  and are written so boringly that even the slightest bit of pretentiousness I try to hold onto can’t get me ten pages in. Those books.  But I picked this book up at a used book sale only because it was brandy new and pretty and I thought, meh I’ll give it a try at some point.  Well, I must say I can’t believe I hadn’t read this book, yet.  It was so fucking good.  Granted it took me all summer to read because I was working 70 hours a week, but that was ok because it was one of those books that you just don’t want to end because the writing is so TASTY and the characters are like your best friends; you want to savor it forever like the best filet mignon money can buy.  I will also say that despite the fact that the book was written in the 1940s about turn of the century life, the writing had a really modern and contemporary feel. In other words, it didn’t bore the fuck out of me and it probably helped that even though the themes were serious (love, struggling, poverty, alcoholism) it was damn funny and relatable.  Fucking read this shit!  It’s a real treat.

Next on the block was Straight Man by Richard Russo, and if you’re familiar with this author he’s the dude who won the Pulitzer prize for penning Empire Falls  a story about  a shitty Maine mill town and the people who live there.  I tried reading that but got half way in and totally lost interest in the story–probably because I found it too real and live in a shitty Maine town already.  I imagine I’ll pick it up again after reading Straight Man. I also read this while I read the other book up there (yeah I read books in tandem) but it read fast because the story takes place over a couple of days and you just HAVE to know how shit will go down.  Again another deliciously, well written book that plays out more like a movie in which I could totally see (a youngish) Jeff Bridges or William Hurt playing the main character.  It’s about a lit professor  at a shitty college in a shitty Pennsylvania town (Richard Russo loves writing about shitty towns) who’s having a total mid-life crisis, but the story and the writing is so freaking hilarious that I was seriously LOLing at my desk, in my bed, on the toilet.  It’s been a while since a book has done that.  We became great friends.

Switching gears here Ima gonna tell you what NOT to read. A few months ago I made the mistake of getting involved with a Nicholas Sparks book that was on my co-workers desk.  I used to be a big fan of Nick–back during his heyday of books like The Notebook and Message in a Bottle.  But after those it seems like all his shit got really formulaic.  Basically to write a Nicky Sparks book you need a guy who’s suffered some sort of traumatic experience–usually the death of his wife and then a girl who also probably lost her husband or the love of her life to some traumatic event like a fire or Alzheimer’s and you shove them in a quaint North Carolina town and try to make them fall in love with each other but throw in a little dramatic conflict like bitchy rich parents or someone else dying of cancer.  I read Safe Haven, while not consecutively, in about 3 hours.  The shit was shit, man.  The story, the characters, the dialogue was incredibly contrived and vapid (like all his other shit) that I had to wonder if he and Stephenie Meyer were maybe at the same writers conference and they got together to come up with a really shitty book.  The Sparksmeister loves to have a male character who is incredibly strong but sensitive and the way he shows that in Safe Haven is by having an ex army sniper dad who enjoys the occasional field frolic and butterfly hunt with his children.  WHUTTT?  Yeah, I’m gonna say it: That’s so gay.  Really?  Enough already.  I mean just the fact that he loves his kids shows enough sensitivity to soften even the most constipated of hearts that butterfly hunting is just over kill.  So yeah.  Don’t read this book.  I mean, unless you’re into all that.

This book was freaking fabulous.  It was also on my co-workers desk and I ate it up like it was the last bowl of Lucky Charms I’d ever eat.  It’s so damn good they refuse to even describe what the book is about because you just have to read it and be amazed.  And because I typically wouldn’t read a book like this, I took their word for it and they definitely weren’t lying their faces off.  I’m not sure how to even describe it; this book weaves the lives of two people in and out in a non-linear fashion and the writer captures the distinct voices of the two narrators as they come in and out of each other’s lives. When I finished reading it I wanted to read it again right then and there. Kind of how I felt after I saw Inception. Again! Again!  I’ll leave it at that because like it says on the book, “you just have to read it.”

Last but not freaking least is one of the greatest books I’ve read in a long ass time.  I totally scored this book at Goodwill for .99 cents. Man I love Goodwill. All I knew about the book was it was about Polish survivors of WWII nazism, and man I’m a sucker for anything about that.  I always have been.  (No hair, no lice!(sorry inside joke)). Like Little Bee this book is also non-linear and told from a myriad of character’s perspectives but all their lives intertwine.  I didn’t want this book to end.  This story is so good it makes me wonder why shit by the likes of Stephenie Meyer and Nick Sparks even make it into this world.  The world is a cruel, cold place that’s for sure, but thank god I stumbled across this little gem. I think it’s some kind of talent when a writer can write so many voices and make them so distinct.  When I finished it one slow afternoon at work I was sobbing uncontrollably at my desk because it was sad and beautiful and coming to an end.  If you have a soft spot for funny, geriatric Polish Jews who just can’t catch a break you’ll bawl your head off too while laughing your ass off at the same time.

You’re welcome.

Well let me explain the haitus. I’ve been busy working and working and working. I decided to grab a summer job to make some extra money and wow was that a time suck ever. But at least I got some credit cards paid off! I’m still working the summer job as the motel doesn’t shut down until October-ish.  But I’ll be totally pumped when it’s over becasue hello FREE TIME, or, well, free time in the evening to get back to my running regime and my hula hooping and my sitting around and doing NOTHING which I so very much love. And you know maybe some more writing and photography-ing and contemplating some of life’s greatest mysteries, like what do cats DO all day?

So stay tuned, unfortunate readers.

So in this movie he plays a college kid who is SERIOUSLY emotionally constipated–which totally works because as I have pointed out in other posts the expression he wears on his face all the time is that of one which he really looks like he could stand to drop a bus load of kids off at the pool. No joke–but it works this time in a big way! Way to work with what you got, kid. That and he had 1000% more on-screen chemistry with Emilie de Ravin than he’s ever had with K-Stew.

So yeah, where were we…so he’s a college kid who falls in love with the daughter of this cop who busts him for getting in a street fight (see above–severe emotional constipation leads to outbursts with strangers on the street). They totally fall in love and have a bunch of ups and downs and then the end is really a kicker. I went into it knowing nothing of the movie so the twist was actually a little heart wrenching. That and the little kid actress who plays his sister is worth it alone to watch the movie.

The only thing I had trouble believing was 1.)Pierce Brosnan’s Brooklyn accent. I don’t know a ton of people from Brooklyn so it’s not like I’m a good gauge for an authentic accent, but it didn’t sound right coming out of his mouth. It was about as bad as his attempt at singing in Mama Mia. I thought that maybe his character, at some point, had had a stroke and so he was having difficulties pronouncing his words.

2.)I had a hard time believing that Emilie de Ravin was 21ish years old. She’s like 30 and after watching  her in Lost for 2323 episodes I couldn’t really get her as a 21 year-old undergrad. Maybe as a 28 year-old PhD candidate, but no. Yet her acting chops are levels above her co-star’s. But I think he’s getting BETTER. I do…I don’t think Twilight has totally ruined him. Overall this movie was really good and not what I expected at all.

Side-effects of constipation can lead to severe introspection

Let the pictures do the talking:

proud fathers

 Yeah…creepy right?  Everyone in Hollywoodland looks the same!!! 

I think Queen Elizabeth is the cutest little old lady on the planet ever.  I kinda wish she was my grandma.  Not because she’s the queen, but because she’s so cute.