But Call Me Betsy

I've been working on a story recently that centers around a waitress in Chicago and so have been thinking nostalgically of those days, though I have not gone so far as to revisit my journals from that time, because I'm certain they would be full of depressing anecdotes; probably me obsessing over some guy whose name I no longer remember. What I do recall about Chicago is that the winters were dastardly cold, Lake Michigan was beautiful, they had great thrift stores, I was incredibly lonely most of the time, and I had a lot of really funny and talented friends. Here's Hancock Tower (thanks, Emily!). I don't think I ever went up in it and there were also entire neighborhoods in Chicago that I never visited.   My first apartment was a garden apartment in the Belmont area--pretty close to Wrigley Field and Gingerman Tavern. The apartment itself was okay, though it had a mushroom-y smell and clanking radiators. Below is my cat on the left (Gretel) and my roomm...

It dawned on me the other day that I live in New Jersey. You think this would be obvious, but for the last few months, I've been  thinking of it like an extended stay--like how, in high school, I went to Einbeck, Germany for two months. In fact, it's a lot like moving to Germany--everyone talks with an accent, seems somewhat indifferent to hardships (like driving) and takes it for granted that there will be breweries/strip malls to your left at all times. But I've done this before--started over from scratch in another city--a bunch of other times as a kid, and three other times as an adult. When I was twenty-three-ish, I moved to Chicago, where I knew exactly one person who was moving away at the end of the summer. I transferred from a TGIFridays in Dunedin to a  TGIFridays on Erie Street, and instead of leaving when I was supposed to at the end of August, I found a roommate in The Reader and stayed for five years. After that, I applied to grad school and moved to a ...

I learned this lesson about soccer players in high school when I had a crush on a guy named Charlie D. who was a year older than me and had a gravelly voice and green eyes and worked as a janitor in McDonalds. That's a great job for a high school  kid living in Florida. I'm not saying I slept with him, because I am pure as a Sunday snow storm, but I did learn that you can't trust a guy who kisses you in the women's rest room and presses you up against the hand dryer while wearing coveralls and carrying a mop. More on that another time. Tonight is the non-shocking reveal of Andi leaving the show because JP sleeps with her in the fantasy suite and then tells her she' so-so as a contestant . We know about it all because of the endless previews and because of this cover of US Weekly . Dan asks, "Is this the fellatio suite episode?" He's been working on that line for a while. We start with Clare and what else? A yacht, of course! She's not sure if...

I wrote the above title and the show has not yet started. It's my guess that Juan will not really know how to best talk to mom and dad, but, depending on the family, mom and dad might not care all that much--they'll just be happy to be on TV. First home town date: Nikki in Kansas City Photo courtesy of my friend Kristine She wants to know how Juan feels about the other girls. Oh, I wish they  would make him to do a lot of the dumb shit they had to do on his dates--like making him ride a unicycle naked in a Shriner's parade wearing a clown hat. "What is this thing called bbq?" he says, feigning (?) idiocy. Oh, goodie, she's going to force him to ride a bull. He jumps right onto the fake bull and they have it on the kid speed. Turn it up, man! Finally, he falls off really just from leaning over too far. Nikkie wants to tell him that' she's in love with him.  She's hesitant, for some reason, perhaps because she's only spent about half an ho...

Downton Abbey will be a two hour extravaganza, and I don't think I have the stamina to blog through it, plus, as I've mentioned, it takes away from the pleasure of watching to some extent, because I'm looking more at the computer screen that at the TV and I'm also multi-tasking--uploading photos, correcting spelling errors, etc. So, for tonight, I'll just watch. And maybe have some tea and ginger cookies that my mom made and brought for us today. When we go to bed, both Dan and I read for a while, but I'm almost always reading a novel or short stories (just got The Best American Short Stories for 2013 , which has stories from many of my favorite writers--Lorrie Moore, Junoz Diaz, Charles Baxter, George Saunders) and Dan is almost always reading something related to yoga or meditation or Buddhism or some such crap like that. He uses what he reads to teach his yoga classes, and he will sometimes come across a phrase that strikes him as particularly meaningful an...

How many songs can a brain hold? It happens to me often where I'll hear just a chord from a song I haven't heard in a long time, and all of the lyrics rush back. That occurred to me driving to work the other day, where I heard a John Denver song--can't recall the title of it now, something about going home, and I was thinking how I hadn't heard that particular song in probably fifteen years. I'm certain there are songs that I will never hear again that I used to listen to all the time, and some that I don't ever want to hear again (the first one that comes to mind is "Cat's in the Cradle"). And then there are some songs that I thought I would never hear again but that I can't seem to shake, like "I Don't Want to Lose Your Love Tonight," by the Outfields, a song that always reminds me of this guy from high school, Jimmy Deputy, who was an actor and went to a different school, but who I had a huge crush on. He had a really deep v...

I'm testing out the Blogger feature where you can take a picture with your phone and have it automatically upload to your blog post versus snapping the photo and then finding it and emailing it, downloading it, etc. I'm sure this feature has been available on the app for a while, but just this morning, I thought, wouldn't it be nice if you could take the picture and it would automatically be in your post? And voile, my wish came true. This photo is a result of something I said to Dan last night. We were getting ready for bed and he was still wearing the hat below, because every time he gets his hair cut, it's more like a massacre where the barber takes the electric clippers to it and leaves him with a millimeter of covering on his head. Consequently, he's always chilly in the winter. So, he sometimes wears a hat around the house. Anyway, we were going upstairs and I said, "Take off that dumb hat," and for some reason, this both struck us as really funn...

Luke would like me to write about the time the USA beat out the Russian in an ice hockey shoot out, and they played this song that goes, "Oh, say, O'Shea," but I don't even know what he's talking about.  I don't watch the Olympics, for a couple of reasons, but the main one is that I don't like competitions. I think this comes from being an only child. I never really played a lot of board games as a kid, and I remember being disappointed whenever anyone gave me one.  Because other than my pretend friend or my mom, who was I supposed to be playing Sorry with? Or Clue, for God's sake? I have never once played Monopoly and I don't think I missed anything. The game Operation made me nervous because of the buzzer and Shoots and Ladders seemed too babyish by the time I saw it. So, I never learned how to play board games, and I wasn't athletic at all growing up, so I also never competed in any sports. As a result, I'm not drawn to watching spor...

Wasn't that a movie starring Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichols? Remember her and remember that show Family where she played one of the daughters and wore knee-high athletic socks that are all the rage again? All I can recall from that show is that the actress who played the mom always had a pained look on her face, regardless of what was going on. And maybe that Kind of like how the actress who plays Cora on Downton Abbey perpetually has a simpering expression. I just looked it up and no, the movie I was thinking of was not Little Foxes, but Bad News Bears. I knew there was an animal in the title. In any case, it's interesting how certain animals can become faddish, like, a few years ago, it seemed like owls were the rage, and all you saw at Urban Outfitters were owl pillows and owl lamps and ironic owl sweaters. Now, and for the last several months, it's foxes. And I totally buy into it. Like, I love foxes now. I never didn 't love them, but I want fox things arou...

Perhaps this will be the episode where Sharlene realizes she's had enough air time to have her own reality TV show; one that follows around five aspiring opera singers as they make jokes about Puccini and arpeggios. Obviously, this would appear only on PBS. Or maybe she'll do that thing where she continues to pretend to be falling more in love with him, despite their stark differences in languages, common interests, IQ, maturity levels, cultural background, class, and personality traits. "I find myself being pulled closer and closer to his five o'clock shadow, in ways that I never imagined could ever have ever ever happened," she might say, staring off into the distance, hoping her high school choir teacher isn't watching. I finally figured out who that perpetually teenage-looking contestant Clare reminds me of.  Actress Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars fame   Actress Clare Someone who will after this, make her living at car shows in Vegas Uncanny...

Only two episodes worth, according to my mother. But it feels as though we have just begun! That's what happens when you wait for an entire year for a show that only goes for eight total episodes. I guess that's how the Brits do things. Dan has predicted that Mr. Bates will be killed or become a paraplegic and be left out in the garden in the rain. I predict that he will come up with a foolproof way to kill the rapist, but that Anna will leave him because of it. My prediction that Tom and Lady Mary will end up together seems to have come to naught, as she was flirting recklessly and throwing pig feces at that other guy last week. We begin with the pigs and Mr. Drew, not to be confused with the rapist, Mr. Green, which I have. Tom is there with Mary and Lady Edith is checking to see how the piglets nurse to get ready for her upcoming baby. Mrs. Crawley visits the Dowager who is especially bitchy because she's been ill and hasn't been out of house in ages. Mr. Mosle...

We watched the movie last night at my mom's house. I've read the book, but had very little recollection of the story line, other than that I didn't think it ended well and that I liked the name of the little girl (Briony--played in this case by a perfect little girl with a bobbed cut and bobby pin and round blue eyes). In a nutshell, the story is about a little girl who has a crush on an older boy who works on their estate.She witnesses a series of adult interactions between her sister and the boy, ending with catching them in the act in a scene that must have been titled, The Green Dress. Later in the night, another little girl is raped by a dastardly mustached visitor (the British guy who plays Sherlock Holmes in the current PBS series) and Briony lies and says that it was the boy she has a crush on who did it. "I saw him," she says, even though she didn't. Thus, she sets in motion a series of events the splits apart the lovers, sends an innocent man to ja...