But Call Me Betsy

That's the name of a book by Anne Lamott, I think, and also the name of Zach Braff play, according to Wikipedia.  I don't know if I quite have the energy required to do an end of the year recap--much has happened, mostly all in the last four months, and I haven't yet settled into the groove of this new life--it still feels like I'm just visiting this place. The other day, I said something to Dan like, Well, when we get back to your house...And he said, You mean, our house? Because, oh, yes, we both live here now, in this condo in Plainsboro with the three floors and giant bedroom with a master bath--that's new to me. As is the walk in closet, as is the fridge with the automatic water, as is the back patio and the trail behind it where people are constantly running or walking or whizzing by on their bikes. And then there's also my new job and all new people. It feels a little bit like I've been taken from my home and dropped into a foreign country where I...

Why did we have to set the clocks back? This time change has negatively impacted my life in the following ways (these are the same words that are used on the show Intervention when loved ones are trying to explain how their relatives addiction to Nyquil is a problem). Well, there's really only one thing. I don't like driving in the dark. I find myself trying to get out of work just a little bit earlier each day while there's still a tiny bit of light in the sky--mostly, it's twilight by 4:45 p.m.  I race to my car and quickly zoom out of the parking lot. As the minutes tick by, it gets darker and darker and my anxiety increase. I find myself clutching the steering wheel and glancing at the sky. My goal is to get home or even just to Scudder's Mill Road before full dark. It occurred to me the other day that I was acting like the vampires are coming, the vampires are coming! If I don't get home and board up the house before nightfall, they will surely land on my...

Remember back in the day when I used to take pictures of kitties in windows on my walk in to work? I no longer have a walk in to work. I now have to a drive (see previous post...) and though I'm getting better at it every day (until I die in a fiery and violent car crash), I don't have any windows to satisfy my voyeuristic impulses. Instead, I have windows in a condo. Here are four of them. This is the window in the dining room with the ornate curtains still intact. They remind of that scene in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett decides to make a fancy dress out of ruined velvet curtains. I may do the same and show up for work on Monday with gold fringe on my skirt. Another left-behind window treatment. We probably won't keep this one either. It has suede and two large tassels that could potentially be used as ponytail extensions. The view of the parking lot from my bedroom window. This is the best window view in the house--this is from the second bedroom...

I had a dream last night that I owned two polar bears and the one trick they could do was to drive a car in the snow. I believe like almost all of my dreams, this one is indicative of my fear of driving--a fear that I have to face now that I'm living in Jersey and commuting across highways to get to and from work every day. In defending my scaredy-catness to Dan, I realized that most of my fear comes from not having driven very much at all for the last 17+ years. I lived for 5 years in Chicago without a car, then 6 years in State College without a car until my last year, and then 6 more years in Philly only using the car to drive to Acme and Target, essentially stop and go city traffic where you never get up past 25 miles an hour. So, making this adjustment to one of the worst routes in the country (Route 1) in a place with many of the most aggressive drivers you'll never want to meet (Jerseyites) along a stretch of road that has numerous places where people merge...

How apolitical, to take a position on a hair style, but I keep seeing it everywhere in Philly, these girls with their hair on top of their heads in a purposefully messy top knot. I know it's purposeful, because achieving the top knot isn't easy--it's not like you just put it in a ponytail and then go; there's actually hardware required to make it look right. You need to use these doughnut shaped, sponge-like spheres to execute properly. Example: To me, unless you are a ballerina and required to wear this style because you're in The Nutcracker (the one ballet I can name easily), I feel like the top-knot is a waste of time, in part because I think it's hard to pull off. Like, unless you have sharp cheekbones and a delicate nose and big eyes, you end up looking like you've just rolled off a covered wagon. Only Ma Ingalls can pull this off. Or you might wear it another way, this super whimsical top knot where you look as though your IQ has plummet...

Even though I live in Philadelphia and New York is a 90 minute, cheap Bolt bus ride away (meaning that technically, I could do a day trip to Manhattan, returning in the evening), I've only been to the city maybe a little more than a handful of times in the nine-ish years that I've lived here. And I never seriously considered living in NY, even though I'm envious of people who do. Whenever I make a visit, I imagine a different life for myself, how I could have been more adventurous and moved there and lived in a roach infested studio apartment above Korean grocery store for $600 a month (or more now), but how that might have been braver or riskier and a more interesting choice. But then I remind myself that I lived in Chicago for five years. Chicago is like the country-bumpkin half sister of Manhattan--it barely counts by comparison, but it was an anonymous place and had a much more sophisticated El system than Philly does. New York just seems light years more cosmopolitan. ...

Devoured another Sara Gran book last night in one fell swoop-- Come Closer . It feels almost rude to the author to read her book in one evening--really in the span of maybe 90 minutes. It was obviously a page turner and the writing was crisp and fast-paced, but still--the writer labors over her work for months and months and then the reader eats it up like a Butterfinger candy bar in one sitting. This one was about a woman becoming possessed by a demon, all set in modern day, the tone very matter of fact, but again, dark, dark, dark, and again, it didn't end well. I didn't find it to be particularly scary, but it was upsetting overall and I will never trust this writer to give me a hopeful ending. It did kind of make sense on another level; like if you watch as much Dateline with Lesley Stahl as I do--in those shows, you always have this seemingly ordinary family (and they always have these Sears-generated family portrait photos of everyone hanging out by a fake tree in match...

Finished reading Dope by Sara Gran last night. It was definitely a page turner, but on the very last page, I wanted to throw the book across the room. The story is set in Manhattan in the 1950s and the female protagonist is a former junkie in her mid-thirties. The story is told in her sardonic and jaded voice, and the plot revolves around her trying to track down a missing girl, a blond Barnard College drop out who has started shooting up and gotten mixed up with a low life drug dealer/pimp. Searching for the woman takes the private eye back to her old haunts and temptations; she meets up with her ex-husband who got her hooked on drugs and he's still using, having shrunken down to a skeletal version of his younger, healthier self. Etc., etc., and I was relieved that the author didn't let the narrator give in and start using again, though she's thinking about it all the time. However...here's where I tell the ending, okay? Just skip forward to the Huffington Post blog ...

My mom is moving to Philadelphia at the end of the September. She's been here all along, at least in pictures. Here's a sampling from around my house. The last one is her and me on Christmas. I believe I have been just given a toy blender. I'm as mystified by kitchen items now as I was at age four.

My friend Liz lent me a library book that I devoured in two nights, Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran. It's a first person female detective novel sent in New Orleans shortly after hurricane Katrina. Funny, depressing, engaging. Go get it. My plan today is to hit the Penn library for Dope, an earlier novel. Here is the cover:

I saw one this morning on my way to work--an old terrier of some kind with arthritic back legs and white muzzle. The day before, it was a fuzzy golden retriever named Cooper (if I must talk to the owners to be allowed to pet the dog, I try to find out the animal's  name). Lisa Marie lived with an old dog at her last place and I had to ask her almost every day if the dogs was still alive. Luckily, she moved out before the dog died and I can now pretend that Sweetie lived forever--I never have to grieve for this dog I barely knew when she dies.

On my way to see Dan and Luke and to look at more apartments. This idea of moving again is becoming more and more real and a little freaky. Boxes. I will begin to obsess about boxes. Books. I am determined to be ruthless about giving away books. As much as I might like the idea of reading it, I will never crack the spine of The Collected Letters of E.B. White. Or that biography of Sylvia Plath. Knick-knacks? I will keep moving those small items of sentimental value, like the china doll my grandma gave me, my high school yearbooks, a little wooden block from my first boyfriend. We keep moving forward. Eddington next stop.

1. Yesterday, I spent $19 on a magic shampoo and about the same amount on hair-shine gel from Blue Sapphire or whatever it's called--this beauty product store near where I work. I do not care, because I am not the type of person who does this often. I don't get manis or pedis or massages or body waxes, so sometimes, I spend some money on hair care. And, if you must know, I have a trip planned to the MAC store at some point in the near future. 2. Ernesto still loves his perch and uses it to escape Emma Carol, who chases after him when she gets overstimulated (which happens at least three times a day). EC can't get him when he's up there, because she has a little bit of weight problem. 3. I recently learned how to sync up my phone with Dan's i-Tunes account and so have been able to listen to tons of Bruce Springsteen. I've also come to realize (somewhat late in the game) how easy it is to download single songs myself for a mere 99 cents or $1.29. Here...

Doing projects on the planets with Saturn being the hardest planet to draw. Christmas pageants after hours at school and how totally different school seemed at nighttime. Making clay vases in art class that tipped over under their own weight. Book reports done the night before and trying to make the illustrations really large to take up extra space. Playing Ghosts in the Graveyard in the dark in someone's yard. Slumber parties. Making long fingernails out of Scotch tape. Candy cigarettes (do they even still make those)? Spelling bees. Getting in trouble at school and feeling like it's going to go on your permanent record for the rest of your life: "Frankly, we'd hire you in a second if it weren't for that nasty business about your behavior at a certain spelling bee." Drawing princesses and trying to find ways to avoid drawing the hands and feet like perhaps having the hands clasped behind the back and the feet hidden by a giant hoop skirt. Making ...

I've moved about 10 to 12 times in my adult life and about three or four times as a kid. There's a part of me that loves the preparation for it--I like to get rid of things and so have satisfaction in saying good bye to random stuff like this stupid magazine rack from IKEA that I've been hauling around from place to place for too long. Like, I don't even have one magazine subscription, so what's the point? For the last 3 years, it's pretty much been a repository for yarn. Balls of yarn from my yarn-balling days, which are long gone, so we will bid farewell to those skeins too. Books...I have lots of books, including about 25 journals. I will part with books too, but that's the one area in life that I don't insist on cleaning house. If I have an emotional attachment to the book (such as my copy of A Girl of the Limberlost , which my grandma gave me when I was young. It has her slanted and neat handwriting in the cover), I keep it. However, I am starting...

My new routine includes me trying to do a few sit-ups and spaghetti-arm push ups every morning in the little tiny room/closet that houses my old journals. That's really all that it can fit--two bookshelves and a wooden Buddha statue. But it qualifies this house as a three bedroom, so that's fine with me. Better resale value. My reward for this physical toil is to read a few pages of one of the journals when I finish--usually, I find something funny that I'd forgotten, and on occasion, I find some writing that I like. This is what I found today. It's a list of ten things about being a kid that I got from reading Lynda Barry's The Greatsest of Marlys: 1. Brown paper lunch bags with your name written on them. 2. Orange marshmellow peanuts, usually given to you by old people who have had them around for decades. 3. Bangs cut too short from giving yourself a haircut with your mom's sewing scissors. 4. Ripley's Believe It or Not --how the stories were someti...

We drove to Longwood Beach this weekend, late in the day (after 2 PM) and so didn't get there until 3 or so, which was fine with all of us. Growing up in Florida made me in some ways beach-adverse. It was such a huge part of the culture and I never really liked what went along with it---like, I wasn't good at beach volleyball, I didn't have the proper attention to detail required to wear a bikini, and I found sitting in the sun boring. I do remember my favorite bathing suit though--it was an orange Hang Ten bikini with little white footprints across the backside as if a genie had traveled there while I was face down in the sand. So, we only stayed for a few hours in the coolest part of the day. I read my book (Rose Madder by Stephen King---I'm on a kick with him again), Luke made a fort in the sand, and Dan dozed for a while. Here is the evidence:

Dan and I have been looking at apartments together around the Princeton area--mostly condos, and they're pretty much all the same. The only variable seems to be whether or not they have a basement. Otherwise, they have the same general kitchen, same tiny porch, same recessed lighting that I don't like all that much, same modern fireplace that's supposed to give it an air of sophistication, and same overpriced rent. For what we will be paying to live within a five minute drive to Princeton in a condo association, we could get an amazing row home with window boxes and a stone dog out front in Rittenhouse. But that's the way it is, so let's just accept it and be happy that most of the condos also have his and hers closets, both of which I need. Last week, we looked at a home in Princeton for a not unreasonable price (under $2,000), and I knew as soon as we walked in that it was a no. I loved the house itself--it was an old home with wainscoting and glass doorknobs an...

Since I'm now obsessed with Inside Amy Schumer, I was watching her skits on YouTube last night, and saw one that was about two women on a game show. How it worked was that they would be shown a guy, he would say a few words about himself, and then both of the women would guess how the relationship would end. The one who got closest to the truth won. So, like one of them would say, "We'll go out for two  years and then one day, I'll discover that he has a secret folder on his desktop with nude photos of Daniel Radcliffe in them." This, of course, got me thinking about all of the guys I've dated and how often I had more than an inkling that it wasn't going to work out. And I don't just mean that it wasn't going to succeed because of my own issues or because statistically, it's highly probable that it would fail (though both these are are reasonable worries), but because there was something wrong with the guy, or if not with him in particular...

I've been walking down Walnut Street from Broad Street most mornings to get to work--it's about a thirty minute walk and I listen to music and avoid the same two homeless white men with cardboard signs every day. I keep my eyes peeled for potential story ideas or oddities, and here are three I've seen in the last week or so. Not sure if I would ever really write about them, but I like the idea of getting writing prompts from what you're observing on a normal day. This one is my favorite. The "what if" of the ad is what if this were your boyfriend and he were plastered all over town in this suggestive ad? Also, what if he were a terrible boyfriend and so you especially hated the posters for being a misrepresentation of his personality? And what if that character made it her mission to go around defacing all of the ads she could find on subways and street corners and billboards? And just as an aside, what is this even an ad FOR? I took this on Wharton s...

I recognize that I've let almost two whole months go by without writing here, but I do think about writing a post pretty much every day, if that counts for anything. I will try to write three posts this week, but they will be short ones. For today, I'd like to share with you a video from Inside Amy Schumer , a show on Comedy Central that I just started watching (missed the entire season somehow). I like her stand-up, even though at first I was comparing her to Sarah Silverman--the blond version of Silverman, you know, the pretty girls who says outrageous things. But then I got past that because I think she's really funny and smart.  Here's one of the show's kits about a courtship with a man who might seems suspiciously preoccupied with her character's perm. My favorite part is when she runs into him and the contents of her purse spill out onto the sidewalk. I hope it makes you LOL.

Too much happened this week to detail here. Instead, please enjoy yet another response to the Dove ad campaign that I don't like. I like this parody better--it's all women who describe themselves as beautiful.

The newest Bachelorette started last night, and, you guessed it, the bachelorette is America's sweetheart, Desiree Holmes. I don't really know what her last name is, but she reminds me of Katie Holmes, post- Dawson's Creek, and pre-Tom Cruise brainwashing. When I say that she's America's sweetheart, I mean that she's the product chosen by NBC to be America's sweetheart; we don't really know her that well; she could be a total diva for all we know, but who cares, she lights up a room (when in candlelight) and she already has the script down ("here for the right reasons...Yes, I believe my husband is in this room...Will you accept this rose? Bounce is the quicker picker upper").  As usual, I only caught the last 45 minutes of the show, and so missed the hour of dudes getting out of the limos in evening gowns, trying to dazzle her, but that's okay. All of the guys look exactly alike and there are only 5 different names among them: Nick, D...

Ginger came in for a visit to work. She's Denise's shelter dog and she's a cross between something and a Pomeranian.  I usually prefer medium to large dogs, having developed a certain disdain for yappy little dogs, but Ginger proved not to be a barker and behaved well. She also has a foxy little face and is fluffy, so it's like Denise brought a stuffed animal to work and made it come to life. She let's you carry her around as an accessory as well. My cat has been dead for over six years now and I still miss her sometimes, like this mrning. I mean, I don't feel sad about it every day; I don't have a shrine to her. I don't keep her ashes next to my bed (though I do have them in this wooden box that's like a recipe box. The vet mailed it to me and I'm certain it contains many different lost cats, mixed together).  With cats, there are really only a handful of stories you can recall about things they did or things that happened to them---it...

NPR sponsors this writing contest every few weeks, Three-Minute Fiction , where they give you a themed writing prompt and you have a week to write 600 words on it. A famous author then picks the winner and the winner gets published in The Paris Review. I've tried this contest about three times now and have never had a story picked or even featured on their website where they post some of their favorite entries. But it's still a good daily exercise. What I've done the last few times around is to write a different one each day, and then pick the one I like best to work on to submit. I did four this time, and one was a definite dud; the other three were workable.  The prompt this time was this: Write a story in which a character finds an object that he or she has no intention of returning. I wrote one on finding a letter on the ground, another about finding a dog, and then this one below about finding a body. The one I submitted was okay--not 100% worked out though. Af...

I am having a hard time getting to this blog regularly to update it, though it's nagging at me in the back of my mind. My idea for now is to keep the posts simple, so this will be about 5 things of note that happened this week. Okay? No pressure! 1. I got my hair cut all the way off on Wednesday by the amazing Leslie at DiCarlo's hair salon on Sansom and 12th Street. I liked her a lot too; and we quickly discovered that we had some geographical things in common. Both lived in Chicago, then moved to Florida, and ended up in Philadelphia. She chopped off about six inches of dead hair (I knew I was in trouble when I started obsessively biting off split ends during Commencement like a crazy person). She straightened it after the cut, but promised me it would be cute too if I didn't straighten it, and she's right--I noticed today that the ends are flipping up in such a way that makes me feel like Daisy Buchanan. 2. Dan made a kitty perch for Ernesto on Sunday and the...

Of good and bad and indifferent quality. I'm still figuring out the process... First, Emma Carol. Click on the little audio button in the top left if you want sound. This is called "The Many Faces of Emma Carol," but there is really only one. The one with the constantly weepy eye. Then, we made a Vine at a local pizza restaurant showing bunnies multiplying. It's called, "What Bunnies Do." And finally, here's six yoga postures, done on the fly.

In case you haven't heard, there's this new Dove campaign that capitalizes on women's insecurities  about how they look while simultaneously pretending  to be trying to show women how beautiful they really are. The ad says, essentially, that most women don't see themselves as beautiful, aw, how sad, how awful that you should not believe your beautiful, because being beautiful is one of the most important attributes of a woman, Feeling beautiful (i.e. feeling desired by men) equals confidence. When really, why shouldn't feeling powerful equal being confident as it seems to be equated for men? Why should woman's confidence be based on the exterior and a man's worth on how important he is? Do straight men think about they appear to women all the time? Do they wonder what kind of face they have--what the shape it is? Does GQ magazine give them ways to classify their bodies as pear, hourglass, apple or tube or rectangle shaped? I don't think th...

When I was in Florida visiting my parents last month, my mom asked me to go through some of my things from long ago; take what I wanted to keep and get rid of what was garbage. I found some things that I still can't part with--a note my friend Jen wrote on an airline sickness bag, my baptismal candle, this tiny green ceramic frog that used to mean so much to me, and then some of my old writing, such as this palm-sized notepad from 6th grade that I kept. Mostly, I wrote stories based on characters I liked from books or TV shows such as Little Women and Remington Steele. My characters were almost always adults. The women were beautiful, and the men were handsome and sometimes dastardly and they were all very very rich I must run soon to work, but I leave you with an excerpt. This is a fan letter I wrote but never sent to Warren Beatty, probably after seeing Reds with my parents. Dear Mr. Beaty (sic), I got your address from my friend who knows this editor man. My third period...

I don't think I'll be moving out to LA. I think all of the things that they say about LA in movies is true. Everyone is full of it, everyone is trying to get noticed, egos are on the line every second of the day, every time you walk down the street. I'm thinking about this because I have a friend at work whose aunt used to date a recognizable musician, someone from a band you've heard of and they have that one song whose chorus you sort of know. Anyway, he was once normal looking--he has a movie star cleft chin and blue eyes, but recent photos of him show that he's been through the plastic surgery machine. He has that mask-like face and perfectly straight, gleaming white row of teeth. And I can just imagine all the b.s. he hears all the time around him--"no, you look great, you look great. That new album is going to go gold!" And I imagine that tons of people go out to LA thinking because they had the lead in their high school play in Clearwater, Flor...

Do you recognize the post title? Yes, that's right. It's from The World According to Garp. I haven't read it in a while but I think it's what the little boy thought everyone was saying when they really meant, Beware the undertow. Mishearing them, he had visions of this giant toad sitting at the bottom of the sea, looking up for little boy legs to gobble down. Dreamed last night that I was rooming with four undergraduate girls who were super young and cute and partying and I came home to find that they drank all of my Kahlua and filled it back up with water. They wanted to go out again and I said I would go with them, but I wasn't dressed appropriately--wore my raggedy looking sneakers next to their cute yellow and orange delicately strapped sandals. A guy friend of mine who was going with me had an embarrassingly large spaghetti sauce stain on the front of his white pleated shirt (the shirt was just as attention getting as the stain). Then later, I was trying...

As soon as my classes are over (at the end of April), I'll try to write posts more regularly. In the meantime, here's an essay I wrote for the latest issue of Philadelphia Stories. I include a recent picture of the cats outside, enjoying the stirrings of spring, as compensation. The Right Prompts Recently, I attended the joyous funeral of my 94 year old grandmother, Lurye LaBrie, mother of ten kids all raised in the Midwest on a small farm in a tiny rural town populated by grain elevators, a town hall, and a juke-boxless tavern (not a bar, it was always called a "tavern"). I use the word joyous to describe the event because she had lived a long and prosperous life and the funeral was evidence of that--all ten children and their spouses were there, along with the twenty-nine grandchildren, and ten great grandchildren. Rather than being solemn occasion, it felt more like a celebration. At the reception, I shared a piece of churc...