October 2007 Archives

There's a good article in the TV section of the NY Times about My So-Called Life. I remember that when I was 14, I hated the show, even though I probably saw every one of its 19 episodes a couple times over. I never felt good after watching it, and I just smirked when my high school friends would sing its praises. Looking back, I realize I hated it because I didn't want to be reminded of what it was like to be a teenager. An angsty teenager, that is. That's how real that show was, and I think I now love it in retrospect. Is that weird?

Yesterday I decided we should invest in a fire extinguisher for the kitchen. It's generally just a good idea -- but considering we have a gas stove, it's an excellent idea. Gas stoves are wonderful for cooking, but open flame + me = trouble. Yesterday afternoon I was making sauce and had a wooden spoon sitting in the center of the stove top. On its left was the pot of sauce, and on its right was the meatballs frying. Both burners were on. I flipped the meatballs with the wooden spoon and put it down again. Without seeing, as I turned toward the sink to clean up, my hand brushed against the wooden spoon and it swiveled towards the frying pan. As I took out a sponge for the counter, I had a sixth sense that I had just done something very stupid. I looked back at the stove and noticed the handle of the spoon had swiveled into the flame beneath the frying pan. The handle of the wooden spoon. I pulled it out and threw it in the sink. The handle (which was just starting to catch on fire as I grabbed it) is now a bit burnt. I guess there are a couple things to learn from this: 1) invest in a fire extinguisher in case stupid mistakes such as the above get out of hand, and 2) for God's sake, don't keep combustible items on the stove top. Sheesh. "What's going on in there?" Mike called over when he heard me shout, "Oh dear God" or whatever it was that I shouted. "Um... nothing!" I replied. I was ashamed. This weekend we went to see Toni and Allen get married in Vermont! More on that, and a couple of pictures, next post. Congratulations to them as well as Patrick and Jaren, who got hitched last week!

A couple days ago, it was roughly 80 degrees as I came to work. I don't generally venture outside the entire work day, so once 4 came around and I exited the building, I expected what we've been having for weeks now -- heat, humidity. I came out, and it was cool and dry. I needed a sweater. I didn't have one. So I cranked up the heat in the car on my drive back home. I love that first moment when you need to put the heat on in the car, probably because the smell reminds me of my childhood and my college days. It's a smell I used to describe as "burning dust," but I'm really not sure that's accurate. It reminds me of coming back to my dorm in November, shivering because I was a dumbass about wearing really thin coats in those days, and turning the dial on the rattly heater under the window in the Toaster (my dorm). Then, as the room warmed up and my nostrils were pleasantly assaulted with the smell of "burning dust," I would turn my computer on and, oh I dunno, play Escape Velocity. Things haven't changed too much. But my love of that smell goes a bit farther back, to when I would come home from middle school and immediately head for our kitchen and a certain kitchen cabinet. At first glance it looked like an extra pot cabinet, directly under the cabinet where we kept our plates and glasses and on the floor next to the door leading out to the porch. But I knew that within that cabinet lay a delightful row of heating... things. I don't even know what they were, but they looked like thin sheets of metal, all standing on their ends and close together like the teeth of a comb. I'd open up the doors of the cabinet, set a chair in front, and rest my stocking feet directly on the metal while the whole house made that delightful click-click-click sound. The heat's not on in our apartment building yet, and we don't generally need it yet, but I'm wondering if the same sounds we heard last winter will come back again. The place has generally quieted down -- no more constant sound of running water in the walls, for instance -- and I remember the boiler was fixed/replaced in the early spring, so it's possible we won't hear the same bangs and hisses. Last winter those sounds were a little frightening, but probably because we were sleeping on a futon in the living room, and there was nothing on the walls, and boxes were still pushed into a corner, still packed. Now that it's truly home, I'm hoping the sounds come back.

Yesterday I was in the middle of merging onto a parkway when a black thing caught my eye. I looked. It was about half an inch long, black, hairy, and on the inside of my window. Needless to say, I jerked over in my seat, gasped, and nearly swerved right off the ramp. The drivers around me must have thought I was crazy. Even as I attempted to calm myself down and stay in my lane (by this time I had merged), I couldn't keep my eyes off the spider and on the road. I rolled down the window, but the rushing air threatened to blow the thing right into my face. I tried to roll it down softly, until it was all the way down. The spider, feeling the torrent behind him (or her... even worse), started to crawl down towards the door handle. I knew I had to act. So I flicked it out the window, and the wind picked it up and probably splatted it into the car behind me. Good riddance. But this comes only a couple days after Mike found a tiny little spider wriggling under the sticker on my windshield telling me when to get an oil change. (The sticker was telling me, not the spider... though that's a hilarious image.) He squished it under the sticker. That was probably a baby. I hope to God there's not a nest under my dashboard. This morning, it's foggy and wet and exactly the kind of weather I suspect a spider would love. I checked out my car fairly thoroughly before getting in and going to work, but still had the itching feeling that something was going to crawl up over my headrest and plant itself in my hair. I thought I got away from spiders when I left Tivoli -- where huge spiders would hang down from my front door every evening. Maybe before I left they went and laid eggs in my car.... They're after me.

I'm generally pretty horribly-read. Saw this meme on a couple friends' livejournals, so thought I would see what's what. I'm slightly horrified by how many books on the list I have started and never finished. Guess I'm more ADD than I thought I was.... These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). Bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations*
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath*
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels*
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers