But Call Me Betsy

Addendum: We watched the second half of the film the next night and I liked it much more, even though it ended as I predicted below, with a kiss on a basketball court. Trainwreck should not to be confused with Trainspotting or Strangers on a Train or How to Train Your Dragon or Planes, Trains and Automobiles , or Titanic (though I did get a sinking feeling after the first five minutes of viewing). I love Amy Schumer. I've read lots of interviews with her where she's normal-sounding and modest and messed up and interesting. Inside Amy Schumer was always entertaining, even if the skits sometimes feel flat or were clever versus guffaw-inducing. And I knew from other people who have seen the movie that it wasn't going to stray too far from the rom-com genre. But I still am not loving the movie (we stopped watching it On Demand after the first hour because we had to go to beddy-bye). I'll finish watching it, even though I know how it ends based on the first hour. Rig...

Every other "how-to-be-happy" article recommends giving thanks. I know that would be the case around Thanksgiving, but I recall reading this advice prior to the holiday. I was also recently skimming part of Mary Karr's memoir, Lit , and she talks about trying to get sober and not believing in God and so not wanting to do the twelve step thing where you have to have faith in a higher power. And someone from AA kept telling her to do it anyway, to pray to the universe. So, she does, she prays and she also asks for things, and she ends up getting sober and winning this huge chunk of money for her writing. But still, she doubts. I've been trying to do this, every once in a while. It mostly happens at the end of the day, when I get out of the car and have to walk two blocks home in the dark, tired, in boots that pinch, hungry, cranky--I try to think for thirty seconds, okay, I'm glad I have most of my teeth. Thank you, universe, that I can walk. Thank you that I live...

Started reading The Girl on the Train last night and was caught by the totally familiar, depressing existence of the main girl, Rachel. She's in her early thirties, takes the train to London to work every day, and likes to imagine the lives of the people she passes as the train creeps by the apartments. She's mostly interested in one particular couple who seem to have an ideal life. She calls them Jess and Jason, and imagines that they are totally in love and problem free. She's also got a fairly serious drinking problem, brought on by her loneliness. Or maybe the loneliness is exacerbated by the drinking. In any case, the drinking has led her to lose her fiancé and she finds herself becoming more and more out of control with the her consumption, having moments where she blacks out and comes to with vomit on the floor and a cut on the back of her head with no recollection of what happened. Then, one day, she sees the woman kissing another man on her patio, and later the ...

Is it too early to concede that I've failed at National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? The goal with this annual challenge is to get you to write an entire novel or most of a novel or to write at least 50,000 words, whichever comes first, in the month of November. That breaks down to about 1,600 words per day. I try to write 750 words a day and so far this month, have done that twice. Intention must count for something. I have every intention of writing every day and I get to work at least a half an hour early each morning, but often, I end up checking email, checking the sheep on my virtual farm (this is a full time job) and leaving myself ten minutes to write. For this year's writing challenge, I did write over 1,600 words a day for five days in a row, but it was at I wanted to see what it felt like to try to produce that amount of content in one sitting. I found it wasn't too difficult. It took about 45 minutes. I started with what I thought would be a fun and easy...

I almost choked on a Corn Pop the other day and thought for a second, "Oh, is this how it ends? Death by Corn Pop." Could  anyone have predicted it? Possibly my college roommates since my taste in cereal and inability to create a meal for myself has remained unchanged since those days. And then, when I realized I was going to survive, I thought, "Oh, I have all of these extra days now, what will I do with them?" Days when I should've been dead, were it not for my coughing reflex. It seems like I should make some changes, travel to India, stop playing Hay Day, do something with my life so it will have had meaning. Today, I started that journey by ordering a large coffee with a shot of pumpkin spice in it. Taking risks, changing things for the better, getting out of my comfort zone. And then there was another moment of realization of my mortality last night. We were watching Dolores Claiborne with Kathy Bathes and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Have you seen it? It...

We watched the movie Frank , starring Michael Fassbender, though unfortunately, he is not nude in this film as he was in Shame . In fact, you don't see his face until near the end of the film, because he's wearing a giant paper mache head for most of the time. The head is cartoonish, with big blue eyes and painted on brown hair and a red-lipped mouth. Kind of like the Big Boy character except without the Brillo cream whoosh to his hair.  The film is about this wanna-be redheaded keyboard playing musician who works in an office and lives with his parents. By an accident of fate, he ends up being asked to perform with this odd band passing through town and then joins them in the woods to make an album. Frank is the main dude in the band and the others are hostile misfits, including Maggie Gyllenhall at her frown-iest. She wears her hair in a page boy with bangs and walks around in a silky robes as if she's just stepped out of Joan Crawford's dressing room. She doesn...

Just finished a book called Mayhem but Sarah Pinborough. It's a suspense novel set in Victorian England around the time that Jack the Riper and the Thames Torso Killer were at large, murdering and dismembering women. In real life, neither were ever caught, but this book focuses on Dr. Bond, a man who helped try to solve the murders. In the novel, he's plagued by an addiction to opium and laudanum, but you get the sense that his sleeplessness and need to numb are due to this evil force that has come to England and wrecked "mayhem" (see title) on the city. The book is interspersed with real newspaper articles from the time, describing the murders. I finished that book in about four days and then yesterday, I checked out the second book in the series, Murder , joking with the librarian that the other rewrote them out of order (mayhem and murder vs. murder and mayhem--she laughed politely but didn't teem to have a clue what I was saying). The second book also fea...