Wow with all the De-Lurking last entry! Sometimes the statistics number is just a number and the only people who seem real to me are the voices that talk back in e-mail or comments or in the lobby of a hotel in San Diego. I forget that there are also a lot of people who are like me, people who like to read and not say anything back.
Because I wouldn’t expect you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself, my own responses to the questions:
What’s the best movie you watched in 2005? Looking back at the list of movies that came out in 2005, probably Serenity, Harry Potter or Narnia. I really didn’t watch many movies last year. In fact, I still have Netflix movies from August and had to upgrade my account so that they’d send me another movie with a fresh envelope so that I could send some back (unwatched, sorry Henry & June). However, I know that I rewatched Lost In Translation last year and love it more than the aforementioned three movies.
The best book you read? I don’t keep a list of the books I read, even though I should. I tend to only remember the ones that I’ve read recently, so probably Dan Chaon’s badly titled “You Remind Me Of Me”, which I just finished a few weeks ago. I also went through a spurt of Amy Hempel short stories, which were also incredible, as well as Ann Cumming’s collection of stories titled “The Red Ant House”.
The best album? Death Cab For Cutie’s “Plans” or Coldplay’s “X&Y”. I also liked Green Day’s “American Idiot” but I can’t remember if that came out in 2005 or 2004.
Which song are you currently addicted to? Weezer’s “Perfect Situation” and James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful”. I just bought both CDs and I’m loving Weezer again (“Maladroit”, while a decent album, didn’t resonate with me as much as their early stuff, and I was left wondering if we needed to see other people) and sort of disappointed by Blunt. And yes, I’m ancient and they will always be called “albums” in my head.
What should I make for dinner tonight? On Friday night, for dinner, I made a declaration that we would be going out rather than cooking, so we did. We split an appetizer of chicken and goat cheese wantons and a green tomato and Peekytoe crab salad. For entrees, I had the butternut squash ravioli (somehow not realizing that it was in a cream sauce, which is just a big plate of allergic reaction, so I only ate about a third of it until I started feeling snorky) and Esteban had a New York Strip. For dessert, we split the bourbon apple bread pudding, which honestly, was burned or something and tasted really awful. Everything else was great, however, and I could have eaten another twenty of the goat cheese wantons.
Should I cut my hair off? Last night, I asked the stylist to take off about an inch and a half, which apparently translated into about three or four inches. It’s still technically long, but there’s enough gone where my head feels light and it doesn’t bunch up on my shoulders. As for the suggestions to color it, it will happen in about three weeks. However, right now, I’m not feeling too bold, so it will probably be another subtle change. I’ll probably go pink or something this summer. Meh, who am I kidding? But we’ll see what I feel like when I look at my reflection while wearing the stylist’s smock.
Next semester, I’m taking a Lit class. I think it will be my first official Lit class as a graduate student, although really, my first one under Professor O.Henry almost counted as a Lit class. Not only do I know nothing about this professor, from e-mail discussions with her, we’ll be reading a lot of Gertrude Stein. I think I’ve mentioned before that, considering I have a bachelor’s degree in English Lit, I have a very narrow background in traditional literature. Sure, I could pretty much teach a class on Native American authors and perhaps write a dissertation on gothic British fiction, but I somehow managed to graduate (with honors in the major) without having touched Stein, Woolf, Hemingway, Nabokov, Vonnegut, Murdoch, Austen, Waugh, Ford, Updike and just about any other book written before 1965. Except Shakespeare. I had lots of Shakespeare, as though he somehow would bring credibility to my reading oeuvre. Whatever.
So, I’m excited. New semester. New books. A class with people who are not necessarily in the creative writing program. Note to self: must endeavor to sound smart.
Esteban and I put together a bookshelf yesterday. It may have been a definitive moment in our marriage. We actually had two that needed to be assembled, but after we got one together (despite a failed start during which Esteban was using the wrong set of directions and couldn’t understand why the D piece, which should have been a brace, was actually one of five shelves), we decided to go to lunch and then, ah, wait until I had the new rug until putting the other one together. I then spent most of my holiday digging through the storage bedroom, looking for my books. I need to go through there with a bunch of large garbage bags, I think. Or maybe just open the window and pitch the stuff out onto the Clampett’s driveway.
Heh.
I did pull some of the boxes of books into my office, though, and start sorting them in my weird methodology. I’m toying with the idea of having one shelf devoted to women short story writers, but then I’d need to have a short story section devoted to male authors and I don’t know that I want that. And then I realized that I could now have a section written by people who started writing their stuff online, since I have tomes authored by Mimi, Pamie, Gwen and Mil. And that just makes me laugh, because here’s my sorting logic: non-fiction psychological stuff (e.g. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Shantung Compound, School Girls) writing and/or lit theory books (e.g. The Art of Fiction, things by Natalie Goldberg and her fruity artiste-opening cohorts), old dead white guys usually published by Penguin Books (e.g. Shakespeare, Marlowe), poetry (e.g. Harjo, Frost, Locklin, a bunch of random things from undergraduate work), essays (e.g. Rakoff, Sedaris, Vowell), lit journals (because apparently I can’t throw away anything), short fiction anthologies (e.g. Best American Short Stories collections, Pushcart Prize collections, O.Henry collections), children’s lit (e.g. my childhood Golden Book encyclopedias, Shel Silverstein) stuff I wish I would have written (e.g. Coupland, Atwood, Irving, Pahliniuk, Boyle) and the non-snobby fiction (e.g. Anne Rice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels, anything with a cover art derived from a movie still, especially those featuring Renee Zellweger). Really, an Internet Writer section really fits in rather nicely.
I’m sort of stuck right now, because the non-assembled bookshelf has to go on top of the rug which is being shipped, while the one that is assembled is next to Penny’s Late Husband’s Chair (she gave it to me, but I still think of it as Andy’s Chair) should hold mostly the books that are yet to be read, preferably at eye level, either sitting in the chair or standing. Therefore, I may delicately pluck a volume from the shelf and then snuggle into the chair for long bouts of uninterupted reading time. Or that’s how the theory goes, anyway.
And that, my friends, is way too much insight into my logical process. To impart more would ensure that I get ambushed for an intervention the next time I walk into The Container Store. My only excuse is that I’ve been waiting for this damned office for five years, and that’s a lot of time to develop complicated fantasies involving organization and leisure and also Colin Firth.
Well, the Colin Firth thing would have probably happened regardless.
