three things guaranteed to make you laugh

Interesting weekend. I should probably start by staying that I’m an introvert mostly, except for when I’m being an extrovert. Basically I like to make people laugh, so I’m goofy and talkative and just a wee bit crazy when I’m in company. What that all means is that usually I GET ALONG WITH PEOPLE. There are hard cases, like the people who had their sense of humor removed at birth (happiness vampires), witchy/unhappy people (switch the ‘w’ for a ‘b’ and you’ll get what I mean), and the ignorant crowd. Typically I can get around that some which way…

Not on Saturday. Had a slightly miserable time at a party (I KNOW – how can that even happen?), but it ended up being okay because I had a book so hilarious and sassy and ridiculous with me that I chuckled aloud in my little abandoned corner a couple of times. Well, and the food ended up being delicious. But really…when the best part of a party is the book you brought with you? Hmm… (never, EVER leaving my own car at home – and thus cutting off my escape route – ever again)

That said, here are three things guaranteed to make you laugh:

1. Meeting Mr. Wrong (book mentioned above…guaranteed laughter and other healthy things included) by Stephanie Snowe. A true story of dating disasters and life gone awry told in an honest and hilarious and gosh-darn-awesome voice. The author is so authentic - I feel like I know her. If you don't see yourself getting the book anytime soon, check out her blog (just click on her name above). Same impish, feisty humor, in daily snippets. I want to be Ms. Snowe when I grow up. Well...at least when I'm older. How about tomorrow?

2. The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan. YA fantasy novel full of quotable sound bites and laugh-out-loud type moments, with an action-packed story and mystery to match. Also contains gorgeous bad boy with more ‘personality’ than Edward and Jacob *cough, cough* combined.

3. The INTERN’s blog. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth checking again, and especially if you’ve never read the publishing INTERN’s snarky, fabulous adventures in manuscript and surreal-apartment-living land.

[begin aside]

Today marks the start of Book Blogger Appreciation Week (which hereafter will be referred to as BBAW), a celebration for and by book bloggers. Though I don’t consider myself a full-fledged book blogger (mostly because I like to post about…oh…everything?), I am taking part because the community is awesome, and I’ve met some super-sweet people through the blogging experience.

[end aside]

There you have it. I nominated the INTERN for best publishing industry blog, and can only assume that she didn’t make the shortlist through miscarriage of justice (err…scratch that. perhaps simple procrastination? failure to enter? yeah…). She’s my ‘mention.’ Many others deserved to make the shortlist as well, and I voted for them (you’d better believe it!), but this is the post entitled THREE things, so I’ll leave it at that for now. Go off and have a lovely Monday, and look around my blog tomorrow for a book blogging interview swap and GIVEAWAY. Yes, I said it. Now, shoo!

college pranks and hijinks. or, this blog is not all about books (yet).

When I tell recent acquaintances that I used to pull elaborate pranks in college (undergrad, claro), the universal reaction is disbelief. Maybe I’ve cultivated too much of a ‘nice person’ image. They can’t imagine that I'm capable of plans nefarious and/or crazy schemes. But let me assure you, weird and wonderful adventures were plotted and enacted in my college days. With frightening regularity, too. I have witnesses.

Okay, so I was mostly a casual and occasional assistant in the mad plans, but I did take part when I wasn’t at swim or water polo practice. I had to! What else did we have to do with our spare time during freshman year? [That's a rhetorical question. I went to a small, religious college in a dry county in rural Western PA.] Or any year for that matter, but being young, impressionable things living together that first year, with clear targets in mind (freshmen boys!), was like an extra incentive.

Some of the stuff my girlfriends and I pulled off was truly inspirational. Like the time we took one shoe from every pair in every room on an entire boys’ hall and hid them all over that floor. Different rooms for every shoe. This was on a Saturday night, too, and we made extra sure to ‘misplace’ all of the dress shoes (in case their owners wanted to wear them to church the next day). Or when we lured another friend (an RA) out of his room, emptied his underwear drawer, and filled it back up with thongs from the Dollar Store. He got his boxers back days later. That was his birthday surprise. Did I mention the Kool-Aid in the showerhead yet? That worked for a while, and freaked the guys out (we used red raspberry, which looks surprisingly like watered-down blood). OHHH…and one year we got these Crayola ‘bath crayons.’ They’re for kids, and they’re supposed to turn the water pretty colors. Well, you ask to use a toilet in the men's dorm, and leave a RED pellet in the bowl along with some suspiciously wadded toilet paper, and I ask you, what do you think they assume? Completely harmless and scent-free prank, and proven to cause mass hysteria.

And I actually wasn’t in on plotting this one, but I was there to see the results: for another RA’s birthday they removed his mattress, lined the bed with plastic, filled it with water (a good 3 inches deep, mind you), and had pet store goldfish swimming in it by the time he got back. And this is not counting the run-of-the-mill type pranks, like completely filling dorm rooms with balloons, or stealing shower curtains while someone’s in the bath, or absconding with all towels and clothing during the roommate’s shower. And let’s just say that there were a couple of epic pranks that we pulled during sorority initiation, too.

Of course, my friends pulled the prank of all pranks on me, as well. Before you ask, I deserved it. Freshman year I bonded really fast with my girlfriends, and we were thick as thieves within the first few weeks. This was awesome, and also made for some weird episodes as you learned peoples’ quirks little by little. Set-up: I knew there was this guy my roommate had been eyeing for a week or two. I was on speaking terms with him (meaning I said ‘oh hi’ when we passed in the corridor). So I opened my big and ill-advised mouth one night after dinner and called him over to meet my blushing (tomato red, folks) friend. She stuttered out a super-awkward sentence or two, and I can’t explain to you how painful it was to see it unfold (not to mention excruciatingly embarrassing for my roommate and the guy). If I had had an ounce of sense in my head at that moment, I wouldn’t have done it. Unfortunately, I’m missing the filter between mind and mouth. Anyway, roomie wasn’t about to let me forget that fiasco anytime soon.

A day or two later, I came home from swim practice so tired that it was an effort to climb the two flights of stairs. I think I’m probably not a natural swimmer – I just worked so hard that I was good. Not amazing, but good. That being the case, unnatural tiredness was par for the course. I was still bright pink from the exertion, and ready to just pass out for the night and forget my Bio homework (oh, those short-lived Pre-Med major days…), when I opened my door, and found that

MY BED WAS MISSING.

The whole thing. Frame, mattress, pillow, covers, everything. Gone. I slowly turned to face my roommate, who was at her desk. Me: “Wha…Where’s my bed?” Thoughts started to filter in through the haze of exhaustion. Like, ‘What the heck is going on?’ And, ‘She must know what’s going on.’ Her: “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you should look in the hall.” Me: “Huh?” I turned around and walked back into the hall, on the off chance that I’d missed my bed on that first visual survey. Nothing.

CLICK.

The door was shut and locked behind me. I started to get that this was serious, that I was dead beat in the hall, that my roommate had something to do with it. I've never claimed to be quick, but this was a bit dense even for me, I know. As soon as I figured out the basics, though, I yelled questions (and maybe a little wrath) through the door. I was told to look on the little message whiteboard for “instructions.” I did this, after first going to the adjacent rooms and checking to see if my bed was hanging out at our neighbors’. The note was embellished with smiley faces and directed me to the third floor, such-and-such a room, and a promise for more info there.

They sent me on a flipping goose chase. I stumbled around, up and down stairs and halls (they had the mercy to keep it all in one dorm, thank the Lord!), getting madder and madder by the minute. I think it had as much to do with just wanting to sit down and cry from the exhaustion as anything (I was really, really tired). But I got quietly angry instead of tearing up. Finally, I got to a whiteboard that said, “Look in the luggage closet on your floor.” You have to know that the luggage closet was maybe a three second jaunt from my very own dorm door. I was starting to attract a crowd of curious freshmen girls and RAs by this point, all wanting to know what I was doing, why I was wandering about and asking for my bed at 11pm on a Tuesday night (All of them thinking thoughts like: Has the stress gotten to her? It's only the first month! Maybe we should take her to the infirmary. I wonder who her roommate is?). I made it back down to my floor, to the closet door a little ways down from mine, where there was only room for luggage cases really, and opened it to find…

an immaculately-made BED (it looked glorious!), turned-down covers and all, mint on the pillow, squeezed into that closet so tightly that I have never been able to comprehend then or since how they managed to fit it in.

Everyone shouted “Surprise!” as I opened the door, and the sight of all that effort, just the plain craziness of it, prompted a grudging smile from me. I had to acknowledge the genius of it, even as I tried not to lose the tenuous hold I had on my temper.

Shortly thereafter someone finally noticed that I looked haggard. It only took a few seconds for it to sink in that I was really grumpy because I was on the edge of collapse, not that I hated them for all eternity. Okay, there was a smidgen of that too (which I got over pretty fast). They got my bed back into my room with minimal help from me, and I was asleep within the hour. And after a couple of months, I could really laugh with appreciation whenever the story was mentioned. I mean, it was good. My annoyance actually heightened the effect of the prank overall. But my “death stare [of exhaustion]” worked like a charm, so no one ever dared play a prank on me again. I don’t think I (or they) would have survived the experience!

This is the pranking bunch, circa 2002-3. I'm the one in blue in the middle. We're all sitting on top of my (infamous) bed. You see how this goes...

So there’s your proof. I had too much free time on my hands in college and did silly things. Life was good.

i'm afraid of the dark. and zombie movies.

I’m a wimp. A scaredy-cat. A pansy (although I technically don’t like that term—flowers are always getting a bad rap. Pansy, shrinking violet, bleeding heart, etc. Do you see what I mean?). I’m NOT dying to meet anything that goes bump in the night. No problem with the night itself, especially if there’s a nightlight, a full moon, or some other illumination source nearby. I can even do camping. But your run-of-the-mill night monsters? Not my thing. I won’t be fantasizing about vampires, werewolves or zombies anytime soon.

I’m probably the most easily startled in my circle of acquaintances. Example: I can’t watch horror movies. Can’t do a lot of drama or suspense, either. The weeks leading up to Halloween are the worst of the whole year as far as television programming goes, in my opinion. All those “I know what you did last summer”-type movies and dudes named Freddie and Jason on TV. **shudder** M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village is about as scary as I can stand (I know it’s not that scary. I’m the problem.). In fact, I had to walk out of the theater during Will Smith’s I Am Legend. This was due in part to the fact that I didn’t know it was a zombie flick until ten minutes before show time, but also in part to straight up cowardliness. A valiant Gryffindor I am not.

It therefore makes almost no sense that I can stomach dark, even scary, books. One of my favorite authors is Neil Gaiman. Description: Nice man who writes creepy and/or disturbing things. Another favorite writer: Robin McKinley. She’s penned an award-winning book with vampires in (called, ironically enough, Sunshine). Other recent reads: Pretty Monsters (win a copy here!) and The Forest of Hands and Teeth. Soon-to-be-read selections for the Everything Austen Challenge: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Mr. Darcy, Vampyre (contest to win a signed copy here). You can count on the fact that if either of them are made into movies, though, I will be far, far away.

[Note: I will grudgingly admit to having seen the movie version of Twilight. I was fairly sure it couldn’t be traumatic, as the book was heavy on teenage obsession and light on gore. I was right. Giggled in disbelief and incomprehension through the whole thing.]

Perhaps there’s something in the written word: a distance, or more nuanced and underlying humor in the sinister that renders it endurable to me rather than the film and television adaptations of those dark books. In any case, I think that a good collection and contrast of mediums (written, filmic, aural) is necessary to any full life. Perhaps one of these days I will let someone tie me to a chair to watch Silence of the Lambs. You never know. Pigs may start flying too.

But I digress. These recent reading choices inspired me to a) Petition my excessively talented and creative sister to make a ZOMBIE CARD (see lovely photos), and b) Hold another contest to give away a similar hand-made bookmark (inspired by the card) tucked inside a paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. My next post will share the details. In the meantime, check out this contest for the forthcoming YA book Never Slow Dance with a Zombie and another for a goodie bag (also including the book!). And be sure to look at September Zombie Week. Whatever your feelings about zombies (you’re afraid of them, laugh at them, or don’t care much either way), there’s a surprising amount of zombie-lit out there, and some of it can be truly entertaining. Err…yeah. Go celebrate undead monsters!?!

(Zombies were never so cute, if I do say so myself...)

bookrat

What is curious and cute and gray all over? Mellicent. My furry companion never tires of going over the same territory and finding a new way to climb over, through or under. To accompany the photo, a few things that we have in common:

- Ability to happily live on a diet of blueberries, cheerios and dark chocolate.

- Nesting and hibernating are acceptable activities.

- Book love (although to be honest, Melli only uses the bookshelves as a jungle gym).

- Appreciation of the air conditioner. I just like not dying of heat. She loves the breeze and always looks rapturous when nearby.

- We make mistakes and fall down a lot. Me in life and grad school and crashing my scooter, she in falling off the coffee table (it’s a little like falling off the edge of the world…the floor is a dangerous place).

coffee obsession: the beginnings

I am a coffee addict. Not recovering, not proud, just…addicted. I established that fact in my very first blog post, actually. What I haven’t shared so far is the story of how I arrived at this state of affairs. It all began in my twelfth summer…

Actually, back that up. I’m fairly sure (although NO, I don’t have any DNA or genetic marker evidence in front of me at the moment) that my coffee obsession is inherited. I say this because every one of my mother’s siblings is a little obsessive about hot drinks. I know, it sounds bonkers. It probably is. But my theory is that there is a hot beverage addiction that runs on my mother’s side of the family. Coffee and tea, mostly, but after years of observing my own relations, I know that hot chocolate and hot water will do just as well in a pinch. I have an uncle who does NOT leave the house without at least one thermos of hot tea, and who orders it either hot or iced at every meal. My mother will not leave the house without a hot beverage, regardless of lateness or number of people waiting. And then there’s my own unhealthy obsession. So it all started with genetic predisposition, and watching my mother drink prurient amounts of coffee throughout my childhood. My dad, on the other hand, gave up coffee sometime before I can remember it clearly. And I remember my mother admonishing us kids several times when we were younger and telling us that we should never drink coffee, or we’d end up like her (and for a while, that was a very successful threat, let me tell you!).

But to get back to my twelfth summer: the long and the short of it is that I went to summer camp. Summer camp was glorious (just thought I’d put that in there as I’ve recently met people who had dismal experiences). I adored the early morning Reveille wake-up calls, the activities, crafts, Frisbee, water slide, inner-tubing on the lake, water balloon wars, evening speakers, singing by the campfire and enormous late-night games of kick-the-can, flashlight tag or pony express. It was FUN. It was also incredibly tiring. Even kids who normally careen off the walls can be over-scheduled at camp. So by the fifth night or so, I needed an infusion of something to keep up my energy levels. Wonder of wonders, the camp cafeteria had coffee. Coffee had mystical powers back then. Sure, it tasted gross (I’d sipped some from my mothers’ cup on previous occasions), but it smelled delicious, I knew that it helped keep you awake, and all of the counselors guzzled it as if it were ambrosia. Its merits were therefore several: it had a strange usefulness, popularity, and the allure of (possibly) conferring ‘maturity’ upon its drinker.

I downed a couple of cups at every breakfast thereafter, and went home to tell my astonished (and unhappy, I’m afraid) mother, fait accompli, that “I drink coffee now.” It was relatively easy to so pronounce it as an established fact. I knew my mind and what I wanted and thought I deserved, but looking back I might have also been in a ‘forceful’ stage (nicer than saying ‘bratty’ straight out). Of course that experience didn’t immediately morph into my present addiction, but it was the start. At the end of the same summer we went on a family vacation to a beach in Maine, and there were plans to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic. One morning at 6am, shivering in the cold and a little damp from sea spray, I was included in the 'adults-only' coffee-drinking group for the first time.

And I have been a coffee imbiber ever since. My mother is very thankful to report that none of her other children have taken up the habit (although Lincoln will drink a cup to be sociable).

To end with, the YouTube clip that inspired this post:

inspired baking gone wrong

My latest culinary experiment was inspired by an innocuous sentence on page 15 of my copy of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust: “Then he walked into the farm kitchen, and kissed his mother on the cheek, and helped himself to a cottage loaf and a large pat of fresh-churned butter.” No, I didn’t churn butter. I live in the midst of a city (Atlanta) and have no access to a cow, even if I did want to churn butter. Which I don’t. I tried it once (churning) at a pioneer reenactment farm, and it was both hard work and unsatisfying. But I digress. What inspired me in that very ordinary phrase above was the ‘cottage loaf’ part. I drink tea when literary characters drink tea…I suppose I really shouldn’t have been surprised that it seems to work along the same lines for food. Because all of a sudden, at 1:30am, I thought, “I would LOVE some fresh-baked bread. I wonder how long that takes to make?” And promptly got online and looked up this recipe. So I set all the ingredients out, mixed and kneaded as directed, and left the dough to rise for a bit while I surfed online.

My dough didn’t rise. It didn’t even TRY. Well, I don’t know that really, but the YEAST in the dough certainly didn’t try. I had two loaves worth of dud French bread dough. I’ve had faulty yeast before, so it’s not like this was a completely new situation, but when you invest 5+ cups of flour in a recipe, it’s nice if it turns out. I didn’t want to throw out all of that work, so I got online again and Google searched “What do I do if the dough doesn’t rise?” Not kidding. And the pages that answered the question had all sorts of helpful suggestions along the lines of ‘add more yeast’ (which I didn’t have handy and it was the middle of the night for heavens’ sake!) and ‘make focaccia!’ (which requires herbs, ditto on earlier problem of the not having them on hand and middle of the night scenario). BUT! Someone had also posted photos of using the dough for pizza. With suggestions for oven heat and time. I was saved!

Then I looked in my fridge.

It didn’t seem at all promising after that. I pottered around a bit, thinking, looking in the fridge again (for inspiration?), and checked my pantry. Well, I had spaghetti sauce in a jar, so that would work. And I had some grated Monterey Jack cheese, which while not mozzarella, would substitute in a pinch. So it was just down to toppings. No olives. No cooked meats. No peppers randomly sitting around. Really, my fridge runs to yogurt, applesauce, ginger ale, cheese, and lemons these days. None of which exactly scream, “Put me on a pizza, you fool!” But wait, what is this? Eureka (if you don’t know what that means, get snapping on your gold rush history)! I discovered half of a red onion and one of those little garlic condiment things they put in delivery pizza boxes. Pure gold, that stuff. So I spread some dud dough out flat (maybe ¼ inch thick), mixed the spaghetti sauce with garlic stuff and applied it over dough, and then added chopped red onion and cheese. Put in 400˚F oven for 15-20 minutes, and voilà! Pizza. Not what I intended when I embarked on this baking adventure, but tasty nonetheless. And I estimate that the bread/pizza dough will make at least three, if not four, personal sized pizzas. Now I just have to think of other imaginative/unusual topping ideas!

Lesson learned: don't start reading a Neil Gaiman book in the middle of the night. Or any book that mentions food at all. Ha!

the mystery of netflix and late-night cable movies

There are a couple of strange inconsistencies in my life.  (who am I kidding?  the whole thing is one big contradiction!)  This one is my Netflix mystery.  As a basic plan subscriber, I get one movie at a time, and they don't send the next until I've returned the first, etc.  So it makes absolutely no sense that the film 'The Chorus' (Les Choristes, in the original French) has been sitting on my TV stand since March 19th.  Best value for my money means I watch it quickly and send it back...pretty simple procedure, right?  Instead, that poor, beautiful little film sat in its paper sleeve, unwatched and unwanted for almost an entire month.  That's $8.99 worth of under-utilized movie right there.  I sopped my conscience with the fact that I watched a couple of films 'instantly,' and thus the money wasn't completely wasted...

But the best part was the conversations I'd hold with myself every time I walked by the TV:

"Hmm...the dvd's been patient, been around at least a week.  But! (sigh) I have no time.  Lots of work.  Things to do."

"Well, maybe I could just watch it really quick, like in the next two hours, and then put it straight in the mail and have another movie, one I'd be more...into.  It'd arrive in two days, max.  Ugh.  Let's see what's on cable."

"I know this film got awards.  It's supposed to be sweet and inspiring.  I'll check the running time.  Over one hour? Let me just scan the cable listings...oh look!  There's half of a Fred Astaire movie!  Perfect!"

"Okay, I have a ton of work...just put something on in the background...wait, no.  I want to pay attention to that film when I watch it, so I'd better just switch on the Travel Channel."

Before you know it, it had been three weeks, and the same, sad dvd was still sitting there.  So I finally put it in the player, and watched, oh, about 2/3 before I stopped.  For four days.  Four days that film was sitting in limbo while I went through the whole routine again, trying to convince myself to finish it, but not succeeding.

And then this morning while the weather acted up outside, I finally finished it.  Turns out that 'The Chorus' is lyrical, sweet, and just the tiniest bit haunting.  Actual weirdness factor comes in because this is not the first time I haven't been able to convince myself to watch a movie.  No, it's only the most extreme case.  My family will tell you that for years I've either refused to watch films, or I'll get up halfway through and walk out.  I know on the personality glitch scale it's a small thing, but it's worrisome.  Because I want to see these films.  I really, really do.  It's just that the only tried and true method for getting me to sit through a movie is to take me to a theater.  

Or, put it on cable (preferably the AMC or TCM channels) at 12am.  Example: I saw a lovely, classic French film called 'Children of Paradise' (Les Enfants du Paradis) from 1945 the other night, and had to follow the thing to the bitter end.  I even missed out on sleep to do so.  If there were an immunization for common sense, I'd request a double dose.

This story ended happily, however...'The Chorus' went into the blue bin at 10am, and I have every hope of getting my next selection (and actually watching it in a timely manner) within the week.  That and finishing my taxes were the triumphs of the day.  Saving the world will have to wait for tomorrow, or for when I'm granted superhero powers.  Mmm...superhero powers.  Hold that thought.