But Call Me Betsy

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.