Now that Annie's Shells n' Cheddar has gone up to $2.89 a box (sorry to have a spasm of showing my age here, but seriously, it was $1.39 when I switched from Kraft), I thought I'd give that new Rising Moon Organics Macaroni & Cheese a chance. Error. Rising Moon's cheese has an oddly plasticky taste and the sauce is salty as all hell. I love salt to the point where I have considered purchasing a deer lick, but even I can't handle this.

I just checked the box and it's got 26% of your RDA of sodium in a single serving. Twenty-six!

Now even the box copy is irritating me: "We believe that world peace begins in the kitchen, because there is no peace in the world without peace in our hearts." Shouldn't what comes after the "because" be logically connected to the phrase before it? Digestion does not take place in the heart. Furthermore, people with coronary problems shouldn't be downing entire shakers of salt.

That's all I've got for now. I forgot I had a blog for about a month; apologies for the lacuna de Livejournal.

Some days, I swear the only bright spot in my life is knowing that soon it will be warm enough outside to wear this shirt.

( Read more... )

I'm getting through Katharine Hepburn's autobiography gradually. Since it doesn't follow any strict timeline or narrative, it's easy to put it down, read an entire, different book, then return to Katharine. One page Hepburn will be at Bryn Mawr, on the next in Hollywood, then you hit page 32 and she's fourteen years old and cutting her eldest brother down from where she found him hanging dead from an attic rafter. The book reads like it was transcribed word-for-word from audiotapes, or jotted down on receipts and envelope-backs, then went directly to print untouched by an editor's blue pencil.

I know you think that's me saying the book's no good, what with me being an editor. I'm instead fond of its meandering garden-path narrative. It bittersweetly reminds me of talking to my Gran. (The syntax does grate at times--in the excerpt below, she ends her first interrogative sentence with a period, and oh do I want my blue pencil then.) It's a neo-Impressionist picture of Hepburn's years, thousands of strokes and daubs that each look carelessly dashed off but create a perfect whole.

I opened Me today and tucked my bookmark into the final pages, as is my wont. But this time my eye fell on the title of one of the final chapters, and that title caught my eye, drew me in, and I fell to reading it and wept the whole way through. So if you feel the need for a good cry this evening, or whenever you come across this, but the tears aren't coming unaided, continue:

( Read more... )

The 2006 documentary The Bridge: parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

Sunday I got a call from mrsloane asking if I'd like to accompany him on a hospital visit to his cousin Bonnie, recently out of surgery. Since there are few things I love more than being in the passenger seat of a car for a long drive on a sunny afternoon--my paternal grandfather was a Labrador retriever, which explains not only this proclivity, but also my penchant for bodies of water and frankfurters--I said yes.

Bonnie was in a pretty good mood for someone wearing pressurized shoes and sporting seven holes in her abdomen. I'd say she must've been getting some great pain meds, but in addition to being sanguine she was completely lucid. We chatted about burial plots, office temps, and some cheerier matters. Sloane played with her singing, illuminated stuffed chicken. Bonnie took an occasional shotglass of cranberry juice. (Cruelly, the hospital doles out nourishment in tiny plastic containers that look exactly like Jell-O shots.) I admired her sphygmomanometer.

Afterward, we took Pacific Highway South home. This was a kind indulgence on Sloane's part--he pulled up to Pac Highway with the apparent intention of driving right through it to get back on I-5, but I said, "Let's take this all the way home." Classless at this makes me, if I have a Memory Lane, it's Pacific Highway--the stretch between Kent's Five Corners and Sea-Tac, the very opposite of a Miracle Mile.

Five Corners is where I had my first real job: at Burger King, running the broiler (I can verify the flames firsthand) and later the front counter. Coincidentally, I was reminiscing about these days recently when I had a professional wrestler from North Carolina add me as a Facebook friend. He turned out to be a guy I'd dated briefly in 1986; I didn't recognize his name because his FB account is under his pro wrestling pseudonym. When he used his real name on FB, he explained, wrestling fans would track him down and make trouble. "I'm one of the Bad Guys," he explained genially. He ended this explanation with a compliment every woman should hear the year she enters middle age: You're just as pretty as you were the day we met at Burger King.

We didn't stop at Burger King, though.  We dined at a Wendy's further north. (Not the Wendy's in which I had my second real job, one which actually required me to dress like Wendy, complete with red wig and striped smock, and hells how I wish my mom wasn't in possession of the sole photographic evidence of this job because I would love to illustrate this post with that image.) This particular Wendy's, unlike the franchise I worked in, was across the street from a strip club.

"Let's go to Déjà Vu after this," I said, meditatively chewing a chicken nugget and staring out the window at that swath of pink neon. And, much as when I suggested we turn left earlier, Sloane kindly indulged me. Neither of us could've anticipated what happened next.( Read more... )

While searching for an unrelated file yesterday, I ran across an old post of mine that dates back to America's Next Top Model, Cycle 6. In it, I draw comparisons between ANTM and a short-lived competitive-reality show called Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Search that had aired a few months prior. I used to watch SISMS every week with my jaw on the floor, thinking that nothing like it had transpired before or since. Scant years later, its level of jaw-droppitude no longer even registers on the current competitive-reality scale-- but SISMS is the clear progenitor of ridiculously cruel/cruelly ridiculous fare such as The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency and Rock of Love Bus.

( Read more... )

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-- E. E. Cummings

Good for what ails you.

( Read more... )

"My sister Peg said that once she was sitting crying because our sister Marion and a friend wouldn't let her play with them. 'I don't blame them,' said Mother. 'You're a moaner.' Peg learned her lesson."

--Katharine Hepburn, Me: Stories of My Life

The leopard-print fleece throw is Oswald's favorite daytime hangout. Let's see what happens when the professional usurper decides he wants the best seat in the house.

Gus gains ground early on, but Oswald just sits there with a single paw extended, passively irritating Gus until the "fight" resumes. Their claws aren't even extended, hence the quotation marks. It's a "fight" as much as tossing a cotton ball at your brother is a "fight." Enjoy.

( Read more... )

In addition to pulling the plug on my laptop, Gus also steals pens for attention. (Once one has eliminated the contemporary writing implement, it's only natural to go after the traditional one.) Again, I know I feed this impulse by laughing at his antics and chasing him, but you try to resist pursuing a cat with saucer-big eyes who's brandishing a rollerball in his jaws like some jacked-up Labrador retriever.

Recently I bought a spiral-bound notebook, and after jotting something down in it I threaded the pen through the wire and went back to what I was doing. Caging pens in notebook wire used to prevent Gus from snagging them, until he figured out that he could free them by steadying the notebook with a paw and bending the pen clip outward with his mouth. This new notebook, though, has a wire spiral that's precisely the diameter of the caps on my current brand of pen. I was pretty sure an opposable thumb would be required to separate the two. Let's see what happens.

While I was helping Jake pack last week, Guns n' Roses' "Paradise City" came on his stereo. It reminded me of this little piece of my personal history I recorded last fall, and I'm reprinting it below (Even if anyone's reading my Tumblr now, I'm almost certain no one was reading it in November.)

( Read more... )

My book club read The Secret Life of Bees last month. For an all-female club we indulge in minimal chick lit, but after a few months of meaty texts, Katie suggested this lighter fare. It's not quite light in that there's copious racism and a heaping helping of child abuse, but it all turns out fine in the end, putting it on the Comedy side of the Comedy/Tragedy line.

My sole criticism of it was its overreliance on the formulaic "magical negro"--the supporting black character[s] whose only real role is to protect and enlighten the young white narrator. My fellow clubbers were quietly horrified at my use of the term "magical negro," and after a couple minutes of looking at their dropped jaws I realized that I needed to vigorously deny coining the term. I can only thank God AJ was there to recall whom it is original with--Spike Lee. I think Mr. Lee is entitled to employ the term "negro" if he wishes.

( Read more... )