Sunglasses
Friday, March 16, 2012
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
A Girl Who Reads
“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.
She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.
She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Friday, March 9, 2012
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012
24 Hours
The past 24 hours have been…I don't have a word for them. I'm wordless!
I spent yesterday with a close friend. We relaxed, we ate, we shopped, we relaxed some more, and ate again. It was good.
I came home wanting nothing more than to curl up with my Mac and the next episode of Revenge. I'm catching up. I was about 5 minutes into this when I heard my husband start yelling. He had gone to take a bath and I assumed he was soaking blissfully. As he yelled for me, I heard the sheer panic in his voice. Leaping off the couch, I flung my Mac to the side and sprinted around the corner to find my husband standing in our bedroom soaking wet.
"Towels, I need towels now" he hollered and went running back to the bathroom.
I'm a classic panicker. When something happens I blubber and balk. I managed to get my wits about me, and went running to my laundry room. No towels. Where the freak are all my towels? I found some hand towels and went flying into the bathroom. There stood my husband in a sea of water with the two towels that had been in the bathroom.
"I have no idea how this happened" he stammered. "It wasn't me I swear, one of the cats must have gotten up there."
Uh huh, I said. Well the cats were out there with me so now what?
"Maybe we have a poltergeist."
Oh lordy.
Apparently he had started filling the tub up with water, then walked away. Somehow in between walking off and coming back in and climbing in the tub the sink got turned on. Unfortunately it was the sink that has been running slow since we moved in.
All of our sinks ran slow when we moved in and I fixed all of them except this particular one. Fixing entailed completely taking apart the plumbing fixture under the sink, just so you know. I guess it was such a nasty job that they had to be spaced out just to deal with them. There, my pathetic excuse for not cleaning the sink drain.
So the water was running full force, and the drain couldn't keep up thus the massive spillage. He didn't notice because the light was off and the tub water was running. Once he turned the water off, he heard water still running so he jumped up, turned on the light and discovered the chaos.
So there we were at 10:30 at night, sopping up a water filled bathroom. When I say there was water everywhere, I mean everywhere. It was on the brink of flooding into our carpeted bedroom. The counter was a small ocean, and it had spilled over and down the cabinets. Our pull out drawers were full of water, as well as the cabinets underneath.
We cleaned off the counter and dried everything, then moved to the drawers, and on to the cabinets. As I was sitting on the wet floor pulling every last thing from my cabinets two revelations occurred to me.
One, I do not have nearly enough towels, and two I have far too many toiletries stuffed in my cabinets.
Two hours later we finally had all the water cleaned up. The towels were in the washer, and the cabinets were left empty to dry out.
You would think I would have slept great last night. Unfortunately I tossed and turned. I kept thinking I heard water running. Haha.
This morning dawned and we headed out to run some errands across town.
We stopped at Chili's for a late lunch, but didn't get very far. When we walked in the hostess asked if we would be okay with a table. We told her no, we preferred a booth.
She got a bit snippy and informed us we'd have to wait. Okay, we will wait.
This wouldn't have been out of the ordinary had it been during a lunch or dinner rush, but it was 3pm, the slowest time for a restaurant. There were only a handful of diners, and the section she was seating us in had plenty of booths open with other diners in the same section.
The hostess huffed off and went straight to a server. She was waving her arms, and shaking her head. It was obvious she was aggravated and that she was talking about us. She then walked over to yet another server and did the same thing. We stood there for a minute or two and watched, then decided to just head somewhere else. I'm always afraid of getting my food spit in. Don't be mean to your server. I'm just saying.
Not that we were mean, because we weren't. Had she taken us to a table we probably would have just sat, but she did ask for our preference. Umm, don't ask if you don't wanna hear the answer lady. Sheesh.
So we went to Panera instead.
We got our food and plopped down, only to have people sit down next to us and proceed to talk extremely loud and mess with some noisy game. I couldn't hear myself think so we migrated to the back of the restaurant. Ahh, peaceful quiet bliss.
I was halfway through my soup when I looked up and realized I was sitting across from someone I had not seen in years. And quite frankly I had wanted to keep it that way.
I'm not trying to be mean, I promise. I try to get along with everybody the best way I know how. I won't go into detail, but have you ever had someone just completely destroy your trust and confidence in the worst possible way? This person nearly destroyed me, and was now sitting just feet away from me.
I had long wondered how I would react to seeing her again. As time passes you begin to build confidence. I had thought many times that I would be okay, but the nauseous knot in my stomach was telling me otherwise.
The room literally reeled for a moment, and all my senses screamed at me to run out of that restaurant. I sat there, praying desperately that she would not notice us and would walk out without saying anything to us if she did happen to see us. I knew if she did stop that I would most definitely lose my lunch, and upchucking a beautiful broccoli cheddar soup just had to be a wasteful sin.
Hours seemed to pass, but she did finally get up and walk out. Not a word was spoken, nor look exchanged. For that I am grateful.
It left me shaken, and dredged up a past time full of painful memories. I needed a shortbread cookie.
I do wonder why. It was a discussion shared with my husband. Why today, why here, why this very specific time? In the whole of this big city with literally millions of people why did God choose to let our paths cross. Maybe I will always wonder.
On our way home we came across a beautiful Husky girl wandering the streets. She was obviously lost and wandering like a nomad. She ran up to the truck when we stopped, but backed away when Richard got out to see if she had any tags. She was terribly skittish and kept running from him. I tried coaxing her into coming to me, but she would only get so close. She was dirty, skinny, and scuffed up. It was apparent she had been abused. We offered her some cinnamon roll and she hesitantly got closer as he tossed her small pieces, but when he put his hand out for her to sniff she jumped and backed away.
She had such a sweet face and had so many of the same mannerisms that Phoenix has. She huffed at me just like he does, and her woo was just like his. Those big brown eyes of hers pleaded so desperately to be loved on, but a time of abuse had destroyed her trust in people. I understood her and it broke my heart.
So tonight I love on my fur boy a little more as he's curled up with me on the couch. I know he's happy he was rescued and now lives a life of luxury with every toy and treat imaginable. I just don't think he knows how much he's rescued me.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
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