i know. i'm blushing.

Dear Stupid Banner Ads,

I am so done with you. You completely gross me out. Please stop stalking me. It’s starting to creep me out that you’re at every website I go to. Seriously. EVERY ONE. You know who you are. I’m talking to ads like…

YOU (fyi, being “discovered by a mom” doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence in your periodontal procedure… plus that picture is sick):

YOU (moving graphics make you neither cool nor realistic… so just stop it):

and ESPECIALLY YOU (barf):

You’re gross, and I’m sick of looking at you. You need to hire some new marketers because your ads, when not nauseating, are simply laughable. Your nasty images don’t make me want to use your product. They make me want to plunge a butcher’s knife through my computer screen (that, or navigate away from the page). So kindly remove yourself from existence.

Much obliged,
Your most loyal boycotter

…

To the two people who read my blog,

I’m sorry I had to put you through that. I probably shouldn’t have posted those screen shots, but seriously, my rage overtook me and I lost control.

Hoping you can forgive me,
Your ever-blushing blogger

P.S. Happy Friday! Here’s hoping your weekend is completely banner-ad free.

This has been going around on Facebook.  I’ve been tagged multiple times now and figured the time has come to cave.  I’m posting it here as well because, well, why not?

So here you have it… 25 random things about me.

1. Before college, I had only ever lived in one state: Connecticut.
2. In fact, grew up in the same house.  Never moved once.
3. I still have frequent dreams about my old house and my old neighborhood.
4. When people find out I’m from Connecticut, I feel the need to clarify that I’m not from “the rich part.” I don’t really know why I do that, but I nearly always do.
5. I am irrationally obsessed with trees, probably because I grew up in New England. It’s a totally nondiscriminatory passion; if something has a tree on it, I’ll fall in love with it for no other reason.
6. Fall is my favorite season. We know I love trees, so you can imagine how I feel about glowing red, orange, and yellow trees with leaves that fall down on you like rain.  Heaven.
7. Actually, I pretty much just like it when any season changes into another. I like the hint of something new around the corner. Plus, at those times of year, it’s as if you can tangibly experience time passing. Very cool.
8. I hope I always live in a place with four distinct seasons.
9. But at the same time, I’ve come to know that I can be happy living pretty much anywhere. That wasn’t an easy lesson to learn. It took me a couple years in Utah and a semester in Europe to figure it out.
10. I never, ever thought that I would live in Utah for as long as I have.
11. But another good lesson I’ve learned is that life usually doesn’t bring you what you expect… which has been a very good thing for me.
12. I’m not a fan of the “supposed to be” mentality. You know… when people freak out because life’s not going how they imagined it would go? I’m not going to lie, unexpected twists in the road can definitely freak me out.  But ultimately I think that if we thought life was “supposed to be” some way, and it actually always WAS that way, life would be mundane and unexceptional. Plus, we’d never grow much.
13. I tend to get overly analytical and philosophical about life, the universe, and everything.
14. Sorry about that.  Let’s switch gears.
15. I’m picky about some really arbitrary things. For example…
16. I always put two spaces after a period. Always. What’s with the trend towards one space? It’s no good, I tell ya.  It irritates me that my blogging software automatically converts my two spaces to one.  Grr.
17. I always squeegee the glass doors in the shower. You would be anal about this, too, if you had to scrub off the hard water marks yourself. (Or maybe you just wouldn’t worry about the hard water marks in the first place…)
18. I live by the mantra: burp ziplocks as much as humanly possible before zipping shut. Just thinking about an unburped ziplock makes me shudder.  (Um, that’s not actually my life’s mantra.  Honest.)
19. When I notice something has a spelling typo (for example, something like “fantasric”), I always look to see if the misused letter (the “r” in “fantasRic”) is close to the letter on the keyboard that should’ve been used (in this case, “t”). And if the letters aren’t close I think, “Wow, how’d they do that?”
20. I know. I’m ridiculous. And quite possibly unbalanced. ;)
21. I can’t believe this list isn’t up to 25 yet.
22. I think everything would be a lot better if we all listened to Bob Marley every day. Who doesn’t feel better after hearing a little Bob Marley?
23. Actually, I don’t really think that.  But I do know that as I was driving today, the sun was shining, and my window was down, and I had Bob Marley singing to me about “takin’ it easy, takin’ it slow” …and I’m not sure it gets much better than that feeling I had right then.
24. Another one of my favorite feelings is having dried clay on my jeans.  I took a ceramics class my last year of college.  I wasn’t very great at it, and I haven’t made anything since then, but it felt so good to bury my hands in that cold, wet clay and spin something up on the wheel.  Even if it was a tad lopsided.  The clay on my jeans would remind me of that feeling for the rest of the day.
25. I wish I were more concise and am frequently embarrassed about how looong my posts are.  But then I go ahead and post them anyway. :)  So here you go.

If you feel the urge to do it too, then I tag you.

Man, Radiohead really has a way of making everything feel so serious and dismal. I’m sitting here with “OK Computer” playing in the background and find myself slowly feeling increasingly pensive… angsty… empowered… insignificant… perceptive… misled… all at once. Weird. Especially because most of those feelings are contradictory. Maybe it’s time to switch to Spice Girls or something that doesn’t make me feel like Armageddon is upon us in t-minus-thirteen seconds. Crazy how my mood is so affected by music.

Anyway, I recently finished reading Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, and it’s been on my mind a lot. Overall, I really liked it. I was planning on writing something about my impressions of the book now, but Radiohead has sapped the life out of me, so that’s not going to happen. I’m a huge fan of good quotes, though, and while reading I tend to mark up the margins around passages I find particularly likable. So in that spirit, here are just a few of the quotes that got the lucky mark of my red pen next to them. (For the sake of your attention span, I pared it down to six quotes, but believe me, I started with a lot more than this.)

Note: I’m not giving away any huge plot lines here, but if you’re a purist like me and hate knowing anything about books/movies/plays before experiencing them for yourself, look away now!

Words of divine consciousness: …a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; …a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

But we should not cling! A plague upon fundamentalists and literalists!

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. …These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.

Why can’t reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there’s so little fish to catch?

I must say a word about fear. It’s life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy.

…Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation… nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

“If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?”
“Mr. Patel—”
“Don’t you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”

I feel like that’s a good question for me right now. What’s the problem with “hard to believe”? Life is hard to believe, really. It’s amazing that any of us are here. This question makes me realize that I take many leaps of faith every day without balking. Belief is at the base of everything, isn’t it? Maybe faith is only hard when I decide to trip over it.

It seems this was a good book for me right now. It was an easy read that managed to be soul-stirring without taking itself too seriously. Plus, I liked Martel’s narrative voice. Although the story seemed to drag in places, the dragging never lasted long, and his voice kept me engaged until the story piqued my attention again. I definitely give it a place on my “Recommendable Books” list.

P.S. Lest you be misled, I really do like Radiohead.

Hmm… What does it mean for the rest of my week when all day long I’m convinced it’s Friday… but it’s really only Monday?

I know that by the time February rolls around a lot of people are aching for summertime, but I’m loving this winter.  I’m hoping for a new, thick blanket of snow any time now.

There’s something magical about a snowy night to me. Maybe it’s because the the feeling of snow stuck to my eyelashes is fused in my memory to the hopeful anticipation of canceled school. All I know is there’s something simultaneously soothing and mysterious about the night sky being washed pink. I adore the quiet patter of flakes landing on the ground punctuated by the distant sound of snow plows grinding against the asphalt. Ah, is there anything better?

I did a quick perusal of Flickr and dug up these lovelies.  I love how a snowy night has a way of making the noisy places in our world quiet…

…and making the already-quiet places in our world positively silent.

It’s like the world is holds its breath.

Sometimes during the day, I add things to my to-do list that I’ve already completed.  That way, even though I may not have done the other stuff I had originally planned for myself, I still get the satisfaction of having a list with a bunch of tasks marked off.  Definitely not the most effective way to plan the day, but it sure is gratifying.

It’s that time again:

(Yes, that’s my empty bag… purchased two nights ago… and yes, I finished it off yesterday… don’t judge.)

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! ;)

Preface: I know I’m starting off this post talking about pregnancy and babies, but NO that does not mean I’m pregnant. …Because I’m not, nor am I trying to be.  So now that we’ve established that…

Ever notice how we measure pregnancies in weeks? “She’s 60 weeks along” (see, clearly, I know nothing about pregnancy). Then when the baby arrives, we measure its age in months. “Aw, what a cute kid. He must be, what, 6 months?” Then once the kid is old enough, we start using years. Younger kids are particularly attuned to years in fractions. “I’m not just 4! I’m 4 and a half!” Eventually, whole years do the trick, and a simple “I’m 24″ suffices.

This post started with me being annoyed at how we tell a young child’s age in months. Months mean nothing to me. I have to convert it to years before I understand what you’re saying to me. (15 months? Oh, you mean, just over a year. I get it.) But then I realized that we do this kind of grouping in a lot of areas of our lives. It’s not just doctors and mothers trying to annoy the childless people of the world. And what’s more, it may actually be useful.

In a new relationship, each month is a milestone. “We’ve been dating for 4 months,” stated in a giddy voice. And each passing month seems worthy of celebration, until many more months pass. The month milestones eventually fade away and are replaced with year markers instead.

Even in marriage, we started with the small markers. “A week ago today, we got married.” And I always used to notice when the 27th of each month passed. With each new month, we’d go out to eat or even give each other gifts. At our 9-month marker, we celebrated big time. (Woo hoo! No honeymoon babies!) But now that it’s been over a year, I lose track of how many months it’s been.

My parents will have been married for 38 years in March. That’s awesome, right? But when I looked at the calendar this morning I thought to myself, “We should do something big for them in 2 years; 40 years is an amazing milestone.” Not that 38 years isn’t equally wonderful. It’s just that we have this tendency to mark things off in larger increments as more time passes.

I do this with all sorts of things…

• How long I’ve lived in a place.
• How old a person is. (It’s hard for me to keep track of a person’s exact age once she’s old enough, but I definitely keep track of what decade she’s in. Being in your 80s seems much different from being in your 90s, even if being 86 doesn’t seem much different from being 89.)
• My progress in a long book. (It’s fantastic when I’m 20 or 50 pages in, or when I hit one third of the way. But once I’m there it’s like nothing counts until I finish the book… which, admittedly, tends to take a while.)
• My workout at the gym. (I think to myself, “Wow, it’s been 5 minutes already.” Or, “Sweet, it’s been 15 minutes—that’s a quarter of the way.” But once I’ve been at it for more than 30 minutes, I don’t notice each additional minute stacking up. Just tell me when I hit an hour, ok?)

Why do we do this?

I guess new things are measured in tiny increments because that’s all we’ve got of them so far. And maybe it’s also because they can change so much in such a short period of time. But older things have a lot of time packed in; we don’t need to measure them in small units. They’ve become steady and less likely to change in an instant.

So I like it. I’m no longer annoyed at “15-month-old babies” or “24-week pregnancies,” because it’s cool that they’re growing so fast. And I won’t feel bad when no one remembers my 49th wedding anniversary, because it just means that we’ve sure lasted a long time. And anyway, I’m sure we’ll have a doozy of a party for our 50th.

Because… why not?

*SIGHTS*

My favorite photo from last week

*SOUNDS*

(I got this idea here.) “Set your mp3 players to shuffle and post the first ten songs that come up. Go!”

…And not that you all are aching to know what randomness is on my iPod, but it sounded like something fun so I thought I’d entertain myself for a minute or two.

1. “Roll Out (My Business)” by Ludacris (Did you know I used to really like rap? [Although "really" might be a stretch.] I attribute that partially to the fact(s) that I grew up in Danbury, wanted to fit in, and I hadn’t yet taken my Women’s Lit class from Gloria Cronin.)
2. “The Hero Dies in This One” by The Ataris
3. “Carry This Picture” by Dashboard Confessional
4. “Freak A Leak” by Petey Pablo (I know… I know… and I’m sorry)
5. “Precious Things” by Tori Amos (Do you think my iPod is intentionally trying to be ironic?)
6. “Casino” from the Run Lola Run soundtrack (…A highly influential movie in my life, first introduced to me by Fara. We can talk about that another day.)
7. “Warning Sign” by Coldplay (This song will forever be tied in my mind to the click clack of a fast-moving train; the feel on my skin of a tired old sleeping bunk upholstered with rough, fake velvet; and anxious excitement keeping me awake in a dark a sleeping car headed west towards Italy. My first time.)
8. “No One Is Alone” from the Into the Woods soundrack (It’s always kind of weird when a musical comes on while I’m listening to music on shuffle. But even so, I adore this song.)
9. “Make this Go On Forever” by Snow Patrol
10. “It Passed” by Kalai

*SMELLS*

Faint sweat.   …Instead of showering when I got home from the gym a little bit ago, I got online.

Sorry.

Just being honest.

*THOUGHTS*

> What’s with the phrase “nip it in the bud”? What the does that really mean?

> It’d be cool if cars came equipped with some kind of monitoring system, and anytime a driver started doing something stupid (like, say, merge into your lane in the middle of a busy intersection, keep their right blinker on as they make a left turn, or creep lazily across the line towards your own car on the highway) a voice would blare out of the driver’s speakers informing him or her of whatever dumb thing they’re doing. The world would be a better place.

> This and this make me smile.  (I love the socks that keep slipping down past his toes.)

> Since yesterday, I’ve been trying to drive the speed limit everywhere I go. It’s quite hard. I’m not very good at it yet.  (It seems that car speaker thingy would be pretty helpful for me.)

What is it about a heaping spoonful of cookie dough that makes even the most stressful of days feel surmountable?

Maybe that sentiment is symptomatic of some unhealthy relationship with food festering in my subconscious.

But maybe it’s so good at relaxing me because it triggers fond memories of those carefree sleepover days, when Leigh and I would pack up all our worldly possessions, make a fort out of the the living room swivel chairs, and settle in for a night of unharnessed giggling, M.A.S.H. fortune-telling, and watching “Boy Meets World” or “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” (which actually did scare me). The night would of course be incomplete without a tube of Nestle cookie dough.

Or maybe I like it because it’s just so stinkin’ delicious.

Whatever. All I know is it does the trick.