The Finish Line

So far, I've managed to read 47 books towards my 50-book goal for the year. The following list explains why I didn't quite make it.

Here are the top ten books I started in 2012, but failed to finish. This is a new bad habit I picked up this year (refer to "stress-induced illiteracy" re: the wedding). Some of them are still in running to be read, as they are clearly awesome. Some of them are going in the provebial dustbin, as they are not awesome remotely. If you have any compelling reasons why I should finish any of them please fill me in.

1. Anna Karenina

By Leo Tolstoy

Seriously though, I will finish this one. I'm on page 507 and I started it LAST New Years.

2. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

By Mark Kurlansky

I really tried.

3. As I Lay Dying

By William Faulkner

Wrong time.

4. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

By Stieg Larsson

Put this one down to re-read Harry Potter.

5. Interview With The Vampire

By Anne Rice

I may have seen the movie too many times.

6. The Dovekeepers

By Alice Hoffman

This probably isn't as badly written as I feel like it is.

7. The Age of Miracles

By Karen Thompson Walker

Best book premise ever. So boring.

8. The Magicians

By Lev Grossman

Don't start with me on this one. I know.

9. Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks and the Hidden Powers of the Mind

By Alex Stone

I don't care about this dude's problems. Just, no.

10. Dead Man Walking

By Sister Helen Prejean

Read the first 100 pages. Cried for two days.

Top Five Reasons Why I Can't Stop Watching GHOST WHISPERER

That's right. Jennifer Love Hewitt's crazy train wreck show about a lady who talks to spirits, and which can most often been viewed in syndication on networks like WE and Lady Problems. I'll admit it. I love this show. Here's why:

5. High-level emotional manipulation. Every single episode of the show is the same, and yet two out of three result in me ugly crying over a bag of donuts. Here's what happens: Melinda (J-Love) has some sort of gory but less-than-dangerous encounter with a a ghost who is a attached to a living person somehow. Ghost and person both need help, but they usually don't want it, against their best interest: ignorami. Some vague semblances of an on-going plot occurs. Melinda forces everyone to confront their issues and the ghost walks into the light. My brain explodes like a Lilith Faire next to a Midol factory.

4. D-list cameos. Every bit-part character on every show ever has been on it. Remember Frasier's agent Bebe? DEAD. The youngest daughter, Alex, from Modern Family? DEAD. The coroner, Lanie, from Castle? DEAD. Will Schuester and also Sugar, from Glee? DEAD. Jay Mohr, consummate d-list celebrity? He's a professor of uh, something. Jamie Kennedy and Camryn Manheim have regular spots and they are awesomely bad.

3. PDA. Seriously. This show features the healthiest marriage on television. Melinda and her husband Jim spend all their time making out, drinking wine, and resolving their minor arguments with tickle fights.

"Oh, I'm sorry I was kind of overbearing earlier because I'm so concerned about your well-being and it made you feel stifled, would you like me to run you a bath?"
"Yes, you know I love you for always supporting my need to help dead people reach closure. Let's make out."

Even after Jim dies and his soul enters the body of another person so that he can still be with Melinda (FOR REAL) their relationship is way more healthy than, frankly, um, 90% of all real-life relationships. If I died, I would totally do this for Tim.

2.  Flashbacks. Every so often they "flash back" to when Melinda was a teenager and J-Love dresses up like herself as a teenager, complete with braces and bad, bad hair. It's the perfect combination of sincerity ("I have to help the ghosts, y'all!") and insanity. I mean, look at this jumpsuit, for god's sake.  How can you not love a show where they take a woman with perfect skin and hair and make her look like she auditioned for Blossom and failed.

1. The Screaming. Ohhh the screaming. On at least every other episode, J-Love either "runs over" a ghost with her car, gets attacked by one in the shower, or has her hair pulled down the garbage disposal (FOR REAL). At some point, most people would be like, BITCH PLEASE, especially since nearly all of these incidents turn out to be totally non-threatening. However, I find it completely charming that Melinda still screams about everything, all the time. 

In case you were worried, a drinking game has evolved combining Melinda's frequent screams and her also not-infrequent cleavage shots.

This show is made of win.

The Shire

Taking pictures of the cat: it's what I do.

The wedding is exactly two months from today and I am a hobbit.

Ok well, actually I just live in a basement apartment that I pretty much don't come out of unless I have to go to work. My cat and I have tea parties on the floor and pick out wedding decorations and talk about books together. I've started drinking hard apple cider. I'm making a quilt. Fresh air makes me sneeze.

This is what the past month has been like, so it's safe to say that once I stop shaving my legs my transition to full-blown "Hobbit" will be complete.

I have a wedding dress fitting next weekend though, so maybe I should head this off at the pass. Go get a haircut. Put on some shoes. Go for a jog. Design some fireworks in the shape of ships or fight a dragon or something.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Mugi: Master of the Sock Drawer

I've officially failed at my "resolution." Which is why I never make any in the first place.  I made it an entire month without buying any books for myself and I finished five of the unread books in my queue in the process.  But I broke down yesterday because I only worked a half day (freedom) and the used bookstore is precariously located between Metro Mutts and Eastern Market (temptation).  I bought:

• Drown, by Junot Diaz (does it matter that I've already read half the stories? NO.)
• Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami (Peer pressure)
• How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton (Elsa, I was stalking you one day...)
• Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn (It's true, I've never read this somehow.)

Don't be decieved. He will bite you if you're not petting him
first thing in the morning.

The problem is that today, Tim has left me unattended at the Barnes & Noble. He's taking the Foreign Service test today, which means we made the official life decision to join that elite few... if he gets in. In which case, the fact that I'm buying even more books is doubly troubling because that means I'm going to be like, stuffing paperbacks in my shirt just to get them from country to country.

I've only been alone here for 30 minutes and I've already purchased:

• Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger (it was on sale.)
• We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver (Longnutzer, I am SO excited!!! I don't know why I waited this long.)
• and a cup of peppermint tea, which isn't so bad, I guess.

Things have been a little crazy over the past two weeks, between the cleanse, the cat, and the new job. As you can see, I have taken nothing but pictures of the cat for the past two weeks. The cat is fine.

FOR REAL.

Today is day SEVENTEEN of the Clean program. I fell off the wagon one time and had about 1/4 cup of frozen yogurt with berries--it was the first time I'd eaten ANY dairy or refined sugar in two weeks. And ten minutes later I had a headache. Basically my body has gotten really excited about eating nothing but totally healthy food all the time. Which is going to be interesting when the cleanse is over because my brain wants mexican food like nobody's effing business.

Tim, amazingly, is doing much better than I am. He seems to be perfectly happy with two smoothies a day. I, on the other hand, have probably never wanted a Philly cheesesteak so bad in my life. But this is probably based more on my psychological need for things I can't have than anything else. Today I made grilled lamb chops for lunch. Grilled lamb chops for lunch. If you told me I couldn't have a smoothie, I would probably be really whiney and annoying about my sudden desire for one.

My job is also going well. I LOVE meeting a billion doggies everyday.  And if you'll give me ten minutes I'll tell you all about how to pick out the best dog food. Would you like that? I'll bet you would. It's only with the greatest restraint that I'm resisting telling you about it right now.

Delete, Delete, Delete

Sometime while I was in Uruguay I got addicted to playing The Sims Social on Facebook.  Before that, it was Gardens of Time.  Before that, I played Plants V. Zombies on my phone.  This trend can be traced back in an almost unbroken stream that includes Snood and Collapse pretty much alllll through Centenary until we got the Wii, and on back through Jill of the Jungle, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein, Rooms of Doom, and about a million other DOS games that I could play for HOURS on end without stopping. I think I played Klondike so much during my year off between high school and college that it's amazing everything didn't appear to float before my eyes on a green felt background.

Most of the time I don't feel like all that time I wasted really put too much of a dent in my life. I haven't developed any weird deformities at least, and I have to edit my resume down to one page instead of up.

But holy crap, it's sort of time for the madness to stop.

Today I deleted The Sims off my Facebook account, and the sure sign that it was definitely time to blow that sucker up: I felt a little pang of physical pain when I clicked "delete." Because the games on Facebook are designed to be more addictive than crack cocaine and reality television combined, my addled brain actually thought for just one moment, "I'm erasing all my hard work!!"

Bitch, please.

Unlike solitaire and Wolfenstein, which you could play in an infinite loop and never asked anything of you, the new games are exactly like what I imagine your corner pusher is like. A little flashier, a little more street wise, and WAY more withholding. You can't play The Sims or Bejeweled or what-have-you on an infinite loop until your brain melts and you feel better and then go about your life again. Instead, they give you a little taste, (Here, have 15 "energy" or "coins" or whatever) and when that runs out, in order to even make the game minimally functional, you have to either,

a) wait around for the game to "recharge"
b) pay actual legal tender for fake, non-legit "gold" or "bux"
c) beg your friends like a pathetic asshole for more "life juice" to get your fix or parts to build your spaceship, etc.

AWFUL.

If I wanted to play games and feel bad about it, I'd go to one of the three arcades left in the United States and beg unsupervised teenagers for quarters.

Anyway, I have a wedding to plan and a novel to write and like, anything else on earth to do. I'm not gonna lie; I miss it already. I had finally saved up enough "Simoleons" in-game to buy a grand piano for my Sim, which took me about a week of hardcore unemployed time-wasting.  And the fact that I even dedicated more than 25 seconds thinking about that--more time than I've spent practicing my ukulele, for sure--is why it totally had to end.