rule for life #91

when you're hung over, the rules of a diet do not apply.

i feel that

word of the day

today at work i used the word MOXIE in a sentence. i think it may be my new favorite word (no offense, dapper).


and i couldn't have done it without Target. if not for those silly old Choxie commercials, i might never have heard my new favorite word and then had the moxie to use it in a professional discussion.


moxie.

nietzsche says...

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

but i miss you sometimes

And I thought of all the bad luck
and the struggles we went through,
how I lost me and you lost you.
What are all these voices outside love's open door
that make us throw off our contentment
and beg for something more?
I'm learning to live without you now,
but I miss you sometimes.

one of my absolute favorite songs for years, but it's back in heavy rotation on my playlist, in 2 versions, after a friend recently put india arie's cover on a mix tape for me. it's fantastic, though nothing will ever beat the original, preferably a live version.

don henley has some kind of magical gift; he can bring back torrents of emotion with just a few chords on his guitar.

philosophy

to some people, a career means spending your life working, except when you're not.

to me, a career just means spending my life not working, except when i have to.


maybe that's a problem.

yes

all things new

a christmas miracle

i did something right for a change.

moreover, she admitted i was right. first time ever?


...and just like that, i didn't hate my job.

well said, savage

dear dan savage,

your latest sassy rant has been the highlight of my day thus far. you're always entertaining, but i most enjoy when you start fuming and swearing and name-calling. mostly because a lot of nasty republicans/bigots/christianists read your site for fodder for their own arguments, culture war tactics, and Fox News programs. i can't wait 'til you crack and start screaming like this on CNN.

anyway, i just feel compelled to share:

Someday you're gonna realize that giving us everything we want is the only way to make this issue—marriage equality—go away. Seriously. Giving us what we want won't stop gay marriage (duh), but it's the only way to stop gay marriage from getting so much airtime and press. Oh, you fuckers can win one at the ballot box and slow the progress toward justice and equality for all families. But we're going to keep pressing for our rights regardless. We're not going anywhere and we're never going to give up. We're going to go on fighting you and fighting for our rights and we're going to wear you fuckers down and you're going to lose and we're going to win.

The only question is just how much of your time and money you're going to waste on your losing effort to stop us from achieving our full equality.

And our equality isn't going to deprive you of anything. The coming of legal same-sex marriage will not result in "traditional" marriage—opposite marriage—perishing from the face of the earth. That's seriously not our goal—heck, most of us are products of "opposite marriage." Once we've achieved full marriage equality you can go right on having your "traditional" marriages while we enjoy our "non-traditional" marriages. You can have your opposite genitalia, we can have our matched sets. You can have your vulgar church weddings, we can have our dignified civil ceremonies (and some of us will have church weddings too, of course, but only in churches that support marriage equality).

And you can go right on teaching your children that gay marriage is wrong and that gay people are sinful, while we teach our children—most of whom will be straight when they grow up—that love and marriage, gay or straight, are beautiful things and that it's too bad some hateful, clueless bigots out there can't see that. And we're going to live our lives openly and without shame to give hope to your gay children.

And we're going to keep suing and marching and organizing and electing homos and demanding our rights until we've got 'em. Prop 8 didn't end or settle anything. It ain't over until we say it's over. And we won't say it's over until we've won.

Have a nice day.

amen, dan.

xoxo

M

this song stopped me in my tracks

...don't you love it when that happens?

all those arrows you threw, you threw them away
you kept falling in love, then one day
when you fell, you fell towards me
when you crashed in the clouds, you found me

Please Don't Go - Barcelona

shameful crush

i know, i know.



i just...

my morning smile

rule for life #421

Some love stories aren’t epic novels, some are short stories… But that doesn’t make them any less filled with love.

-satc. carrie.

a beautiful day

nothing but thunderstorms and rain in the 5-day forecast?

sweet!


in all sincerity, that comports perfectly with my plan to spend my birthday supine, watching television and movies, drinking vodka, and ordering several different ethnic cuisines to be delivered to my door throughout the day.

that is my version of heaven.*


just gotta make it through 3 days of work first.

*in other news, if you Google image search "heaven," you'll see some really freaky ish.

for the unrefined palate

doesn't this fancy pasta entree look delicious?

it's taco bell.

or at least it used to be.

this blog is abso ridiculous, but it still made me incredibly hungry.

what was it you said about fish?

for all of you who told me i am crazy.

and laughed at me.

and asked if i was just making this stuff up.

and suggested i not bring up the topic again:

you

can

suck it.

but first, click here. and here. and here. and here. and here.

and don't even get me started on the pollution and toxicity issues.

it's nice

knowing

Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I’d been broken beyond repair.

you don't even wanna know the source.

nerdily funny

i'm not a history buff, but the blog Historical Tweets is quite entertaining... so long as you have some clue about historical events (its charm would be lost on today's teenagers).

the anne frank one went too far.

fitzgerald says...

re-post from 5/18.
because i finally feel it.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

not now, not ever

thanks for the reminder, T.

my morning smile

forgive me if you're offended by some light bathroom humor.

click to enlarge. it's worth the burden, lazy.

not to mention...

outta my, outta my head

and the streets were wet
and the gate was locked
so i jumped it and i let you in.
and you stood at your door with your hands on my waist
and you kissed me like you meant it.

and i knew that you meant it

a classic.

not without my books

in a recent discussion with an old friend (and by old, i mean OLD -- happy birthday, jacob!), it dawned on me that the Kindle might actually take off. until my buddy told me he wanted one for his birthday, i didn't think anyone was really buying into this crazy idea. sure, i saw a girl on the train using one of them, but she was fat. i thought the trend would die with her.


maybe just because i'm always reluctant to try new technology. it took me years to get an iPod, and i had trouble switching to Gmail. but when it comes to this silly little, horribly-overpriced contraption, my hesitation is about more than just my stubbornness.

as i told jacob, i love books. even here on my blog i've gone on and on about how i love re-reading my favorites. i think books are wonderful -- not just their contents, but also their physical form. their smells, their feel in my hands as i sit in the sun. i like to dog-ear pages, maybe even highlight, so that i can return to the book later and remember instantly why i loved it. i can't get that in electronic form.

even more important to me, i love sharing books: lending a good book to a good friend, taking one off of his or her bookshelf as well. if we all switch over to the Kindle, we can no longer share, can we? how horrible! and don't get me started on the ridiculously high price of this latest must-have electronic.

i hadn't even thought about the sociological importance we lend to the books we see in a person's hand. lucky for us all, this fantastic Vanity Fair article examines the cultural snobbery associated with our book, music, and other collections -- all of which are becoming hidden as we digitalize our albums, films, and now our favorite novels.

As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects—digitize and dematerialize—we approach a Star Trek future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles. Reading will forfeit the tactile dimension where memories insinuate themselves, reminding us of where and when D. H. Lawrence entered our lives that meaningful summer. “Darling, remember when we downloaded Sons and Lovers in Napa Valley?” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. The Barnes & Noble bookstore, with its coffee bar and authors’ readings, could go the way of Blockbuster as an iconic institution, depriving readers of the opportunity to mingle with their own kind and paw through magazines for free. Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

grumpy Andrew Sullivan calls out superficial snobs like me, who might be holding onto objects like these books for the sake of vanity. maybe he's right, and our use of books as decoration and status symbols and bases on which to judge complete strangers will be better off left in the dust of the 20th century.

i can't really fathom buying the Kindle right now, or ever getting rid of my terribly worn copy of El Principito. but maybe in time i'll want to simplify life. and maybe that effing "iPod for books" will become affordable in the near future. until then, i'm still buying real books.

3 new ones this week, and so excited to get into them. stay tuned.

lewis says...

You don't have a soul.
You are a soul.
You have a body.

truth

i decided

one of the best jobs in the world has got to be delivering flowers.

regardless of the occasion -- birthday, anniversary, mother's day, please-forgive-me-soon -- everyone is happy to receive flowers. even under the worst circumstances, such as a funeral, the flowers provide a little comfort, some amount of beauty and distraction, if for only a few seconds.

and the man that carries these cheery arrangements, these comforting, wooing, even begging displays of affection to your door is nothing less than a HERO.

i could be that hero, baby.

also, i have the sneaking suspicion that when an anonymous delivery arrives (don't you LOVE anonymous flowers? just magical.), the recipient, simply due to the absence of certainty regarding the sender, for a brief second might just associate the anonymous delivery with the man standing in front of her. 'ya know?

so maybe i'll stop being a lawyer and just deliver flowers. walk around the city all day brightening people's lives. what could be better?

real love

You may not be his first, his last, or his only. He loved before, he may love again. But if he loves you now, what else matters?

He's not perfect -- you aren't either, and the two of you may never be perfect together, but if he can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto him and give him the most you can.

He may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but he will give you a part of him that he knows you can break: his heart. So don't hurt him, don't change him, don't analyze and don't expect more than he can give.

Smile when he makes you happy, let him know when he makes you mad, and miss him when he's not there.

editor's note: i wonder if bob marley would mind if he knew i was playing gender reassignment with his beautifully simple and quotable words? of course marley said "she," but i prefer my alternative version.


and so begins my series on real love, in all its glory and its gloom.

i'm dyin' here

i'm sick of all the photos of them filming. each one feels like a spoiler to me. it needs to stop.

except... um... the photos of humphrey.

forward

we never understood the words, we just sang

funny how a song comes back to you about a decade after the last time you heard it. i think that might have something to do with the importance of music during our formative teenage years, don't you?

this is an old favorite that popped into my head the other day.




also, i've decided this is what my summer will be like. how will i make that happen? i'm not yet sure.

i've just decided. and imagining is the first step on the road to realization.

and with every listen, my silly romantic heart, with its secret affinity for 90's country music, gets closer to the second step on that road to realization: expecting.

quote of the week, thus far

He will be living on a cloud forever...

spoken like a poet.

but by a most unlikely source.

you got me again, stars II

i've said it before, but it always weirds me out a bit when my horoscope is on point.

i know, when somebody is writing general predictions 365 days a year, at least a few of them are likely to line up.

The Moon's entry into your 7th House of Relationships today can shift the focus from what you are doing to observing everyone else in your life. Meanwhile, the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune superconjunction continues to place a distortion filter between you and your partners that makes everything seem larger than life. You cannot rely on anyone else to objectively tell you what's really happening now. Stop and listen to what's in your heart.

the big dipper is right, you know. i am going through a period of reflection and quiet.


in other news, did the stars just call me a slut? "partners?" bitches, you don't know my life!

buddha says...

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

where happiness lives.

just another reason i need to go back. and maybe even stay.

my morning smile

losing things

pstscrt.

be quiet together, and pretend

"What is it? My dear?"

"Ah, how can we bear it?"

"Bear what?"

"This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?

"We can be quiet together, and pretend -- since it is only the beginning -- that we have all the time in the world."

"And every day we shall have less. And then none."

"Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?"

"No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."


A.S. Byatt

outta my, outta my head

xoxo, Philly

thanks to shaunice for sharing this sign she saw at the airport. i like.

priceless

Bren: What is your job title exactly?

Technician: I'm an ultrasound technician, ma'am.

Bren: Well, I'm a nail technician, and I think we both ought to just stick to what we know.

Technician: Excuse me?

Bren: Oh, you think you're so special because you get to play Picture Pages up there? Well, my five year old daughter could do that, and let me tell you, she's not the brightest bulb in the tanning bed. So why don't you go back to night school in Manteno and learn a real trade.

the only part of Juno that i liked. it's almost worth it, though.

i heart Allison Janney.

so dangerous

every occupation has its hazards, including those seemingly safe "desk jobs."

you know what i think is the most dangerous part of a desk job like this?

no, not paper cuts. not weight gain. not MRSA.

i think the most dangerous part of a job like this is one-click shopping on Amazon.


so convenient. so easy. but maybe it shouldn't be that easy to spend hundreds of dollars. maybe it should take two clicks! three, even!

lord...

it could linger on

But you know: you know that if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every second: whatever it was, this death, you know that it came and took me, like a child carried away by goblins.

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.


I hate to think of you waiting. I know that you have been waiting for me all your life...

The Time Traveler's Wife.
must read.